“I haven’t dismissed you yet, Harlowe,” Maude says coolly.

Harlowe flounces back down in her seat but doesn’t get up again until Maude officially ends the meeting at ten o’clock. I don’t know if the DAAM meeting happened without Harlowe there, or if she’ll simply reschedule it. Still, Maude made her point already in the dining hall, in front of the whole school. She won’t tolerate Harlowe’s bigotry. She’s the leader of this group. Not Harlowe.

The next morning, Pru wakes me up after a fitful night of tossing and turning. “Emma,” she says, tapping me on the shoulder. “Emma! Wake up!”

I turn over and see her peering down at me. She’s still in her pajamas, and when I glance at the clock, it says it’s 7:00 a.m. It’s Sunday morning, so I can’t imagine why she’d wake me up so early.

“Pru, I love you tremendously, so I say this with all due respect,” I mumble. “WTF?”

“Look at this.” She shoves her tablet at me. It’s opened to the school blog, The Daily Darkwood, a site where students can post essays and articles and opinion pieces. I take the tablet in hand and scan the headline she’s pointing to.

CLONES AT DARKWOOD, DUBBED “SIMILARS,” MAY NOT BE HUMAN

I pause on those inflammatory words, large and in all caps.

“Read it.” Pru sighs, directing me to the article below it. I look to see who the author is. The byline reads Harlowe Shaw. My eyes narrow. I begin to read.

Fellow Darkwoodians, it is with shock and despair that I write this blog post, a public service announcement of sorts, to inform you of something troubling I’ve discovered in the past few weeks at our beloved school.

First, some context. At the beginning of last year, we welcomed the Similars into our school and into our lives. Since then, we’ve gone above and beyond to be tolerant. We’ve given them the benefit of the doubt and every consideration. We’ve allowed them to join our clubs. We even accepted one of them as leader of this year’s prestigious Ten—sorry, Nine. We’ve broken bread with them and trusted them in our sacred spaces—our classrooms, our sports teams. But perhaps that trust was misguided.