Joey already knew he disliked her. Adults were always forgetting how good his hearing was. He had teachers who punished the nonhumans in class when they got distracted by voices from adjacent classrooms. And though he’d told his teachers there was only so much he could do to turn down his inner volume, they always forgot. It was as if they couldn’t be bothered to learn about his specifications. Everyone just pretended to treat him like another human kid, and by doing so they made him feel even more like a robot. Amid the clacking of the secretary’s laptop keys, Joey closed his eyes, and listened to Ms. Jones through the wall. She was telling his parents that Lacy was at the nurse’s, but he could see his sister’s location blinking in his inner GPS. Her small light flashed blue in an empty classroom near the principal’s office, letting him know she’d been put in sleep mode.

“Your daughter’s in a lot of trouble,” Ms. Jones told his parents. “We found her off campus in a car with three older kids smoking fluff.”

“Fluff?” his mother asked. She admitted that Lacy had seemed out of sorts since tenth grade, but they’d figured it was a faulty emotion card and bought her a new one. They didn’t know you could smoke them.

“It was explained in the email we sent at the beginning of the semester.”

“I’m sorry,” his father said. “We’ve been working a lot, we haven’t been keeping the best track of emails.”

“Well, I suggest you read them now. I know this is a surprise to you both, but I need you to understand what your daughter’s involved in. Take a look at this.”

Then there was silence, and though Joey listened carefully, he couldn’t hear anything until his mother began to sob. “Would you like a tissue?” Ms. Jones asked.

“Why’d you show us that?” His father sounded scared.

“Because this addiction’s brutal. It’s not just their emotion cards, it’s the glue in their bodies. The kids are scraping themselves to get high. The only sure way to get rid of the addiction is to buy a new model and start over.”

“She’s our daughter,” his mother said.

“You can have the same daughter programmed, she’ll look the same, talk the same, she just won’t be addicted to—”

“We’re not replacing her,” his mother said.

“If you prefer, there’s a program called Western Recovery in Colorado for kids like your daughter. The children are all emotion card free. She’ll get to ride horses by Redstone cliffs. It’s not cheap—room and board run about forty thousand—but she can have a second chance, hopefully clear the residues, and be able to return home one day.”

“We can’t afford that.”