Think of something else. I closed my eyes and imagined that I was in the back of the pickup truck. It was slowing, and soon they were lifting me onto the concrete slab where I would be disintegrated. I was glad to have it over with, to move to some other plane. I was glad, but in the stillness of my room, I was crying.

One bed, one dresser, one built-in closet, one chair, one lamp, a table where my computer sat, one basin, one sink, one small microwave oven. In the tiny bathroom there was another sink, a john, a medicine cabinet where I kept my toothbrush, baking soda, soap, and flash …

The window was open slightly, and the coolness of the night air felt delicious as it made the tiny hairs on my ankle stand up. Delicious because it was a feeling. It told me that I was still alive. Barely.

My name is Dahlia Grillo. I am sixteen. There was a time when I looked forward to being seventeen. My mother had me at seventeen, and I thought I would go past that age and become something great even though I didn’t know what something great could be. Perhaps a math teacher. I liked to imagine myself teaching little kids geometry and watching them discover things about triangles and the relationships between angles. When I was thirteen, and fourteen, and just getting comfortable with my period, I knew I had to be serious about life. But being serious about your life meant getting real with your dreams. Some of my friends wanted to be singers, or actresses, and I didn’t say much about that but I knew it wasn’t going anywhere.

All that changed in a friggin’ heartbeat. It was like there was a plan to have a surprise party for everybody—how weird does that sound?—and then, at the last minute, they decided to kick the crap out of everybody instead.

We had all known about the Central Eight companies. C-8 controlled everything, and some people were worried about just how much influence they had, but it was the way they screwed with your head that got to me. Like when one of the companies claimed that they could end world hunger within ten years and announced a quadrillion-dollar investment. The Internet was all over that saying that it would bring an end to war and an end to dictators and an end to everything bad except dandruff. The company brought out a whole new range of seeds that could grow anywhere and bugs couldn’t mess with them. But then they got a patent on the seeds, and before anyone knew it, they controlled all the food production in the world. And people were starving everywhere.

It was bad, but it wasn’t so bad if it didn’t reach you personally.

“The sun is always warm if your belly is full!” my mother used to say. Poor mama. After my father died, she worked so hard to find a better life. When things began to fall apart, when people started noticing which category they fell into, she even worked harder to keep us out of the lowest rank. That’s how we got to Fox Street in the Bronx.