Trace does his laps. We eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner to the soundtrack of our impending death. Everyone drifts around the auditorium looking hollowed out. There are dark circles under their eyes. They pace the room stiffly, like they’re hundreds of years old. Cary sits against the wall facing the doors and just stares at them. I think the thudding might drive us insane before the doors actually give. Trace thinks we should move to the library—it’s quiet there, after all—but no one is willing to do it and that’s when he and Cary have the only exchange of the day: Cary says a watched pot never boils. Trace reminds him there are three other doors in here no one is watching. That’s when I leave. I circle the first floor for a while, listening as the noise outside the front entrance gets louder and fainter the closer and farther I am from it.

The light wanes.

I walk the same path over and over until I need to stop. I’m not ready to go back to the auditorium, so I end up in the administration office. I push buttons on Mrs. Ramos’s computer and watch nothing happen.

I e-mailed Lily after she left, every day for the first two weeks. How could you do this to me? Who are you? I know she got them because eventually, they started bouncing back. Account closed. I push the power buttons on the monitor and the tower again. Turn on, turn on. They don’t. Carrier pigeons will come back in vogue. My eyes travel over the photos lining the desk. In them, Mrs. Ramos looks happy.

Nothing matters anymore.

The ferocity of this thought makes me want to run back to the gym and shake everyone until their necks snap. Nothing matters anymore. Nothing. My blood goes white-hot and I give the monitor a push without thinking. Not off the desk, just into the wall. It’s unsatisfying.

Cary knew she was leaving.

Not thinking about it. I am not thinking about it. I leave the office, closing the door behind me. It clicks shut. The hall is empty, looks kind of burned out in the dark. My gaze moves from the path back to the auditorium, which I’m not ready to go back to, and the stairwell. I climb the stairs to the second floor. When I reach the top of the landing my body feels impossibly heavy like the weight of the sky is on top of me. I make it halfway down the hall before I’m sitting, resting my head against my knees because Cary knew.

He knew.

This is how I imagined it over and over: it’s my eighteenth birthday. I wake up before I have to be awake. My bags are next to the door. Seeing them makes my palms tingle, I’m so nervous/excited/scared/excited/nervous/excited. I hear Lily in the hall and all I can think is how lucky I am, how she’s the best sister ever. She stayed two extra years just for me so we could leave at the same time, so I wouldn’t have to be alone with him. I wouldn’t have to be alone. You’d die without me. She said it all the time. She said it because it was true. It wasn’t a secret.