Crazy House Read online

  52

  BECCA

  “EXPECTATIONS.” STREPP LOOKED DOWN AT us from the steps leading to the chapel’s altar. “‘When one’s expectations are reduced to zero, one really does appreciate everything one does have.’”

  Jesus, here we go again. I was still trying to suck up my crying over poor Little Bit. I’d seen three executions now, and they’d been so much worse than getting beat up by Tim. Some kids here had seen ten. Twenty. More. It was a wonder they were still mostly human.

  “A man named Stephen Hawking said that,” Strepp told us. “And it’s the key to everything. If your expectations are zero, then anything you have is gravy.” She paced back and forth, sometimes putting her fist to her mouth as if it helped her think. “You may believe,” she said, facing us, “that you have nothing right now. You may believe that everything you had has been taken from you.”

  Pretty much, yep.

  “You would be wrong!” she said, jabbing her finger at us. Her eyes seemed to pick me out from the hundreds of prisoners. “You still have food. You have a roof over your head. You have companions. You have clothes and indoor plumbing.” Her eyes narrowed. “Picture what your life would be like if you had none of that!”

  Oh, my God—was that the next stage of this horror show? I tried not to show fear, kept my face blank. Knowing Strepp, if she thought I was afraid of something, you could bet that I would end up with it.

  “Expectations,” she repeated, continuing her pacing. “Expectations and discipline. A man named George Washington said, ‘Discipline is the soul of an army. It makes small numbers formidable; procures success to the weak, and esteem to all.’”

  Where this woman got all these dumb quotes was a mystery. She seemed to have a million of them tucked up her sleeve.

  “What did Mr. Washington mean by those words?”

  It was weird, but her pacing and droning voice were helping me calm down. I’d been so upset about Little Bit, but ten minutes of pointless yapping and my brain waves were smoothing right out.

  “He meant—” she began but was interrupted by the comm system crackling to life.

  “Guards, prepare for incoming!” a voice said, and everyone looked surprised except Strepp. Instead she seemed—almost victorious. Again she met my eyes, or maybe I was imagining it. But she seemed to look at me with that weird, triumphant expression. As if she knew something I didn’t.

  Which of course she did.

  53

  CASSIE

  I WAS SURPRISED WHEN I realized I wasn’t dead.

  Turns out, getting shot with a plastic bullet hurts so, so bad, and can definitely make your consciousness yell uncle for a while. Afterward, you have a bruise that goes from your front straight through to your back, and then continues down the road for a while. Right now it hurt so bad that I was sure in five years if someone touched me there, I would scream.

  I’d drifted back into consciousness some time ago—maybe half an hour? Maybe ten minutes? It was hard to tell. I was in a vehicle, but not the all-wheeler, because this had a roof and doors. My hands were tied painfully behind my back and I had a black cloth hood over my head. At first I’d asked a bunch of questions, but they’d slapped a piece of duct tape over my mouth, so that was that.

  Now that I wasn’t talking, no one else was, either. I’d made out two different voices at first, and I thought the hands that had pushed up my hood just enough for the tape were maybe a woman’s hands. Or a boy’s. I could be surrounded by twenty armed guards, or I could be in the back of someone’s ma’s car with a couple of assholes who didn’t know there’s no one to pay ransom for me.

  Not that there had ever been a kidnapping in the cell. Of course, I had left the cell.

  Finally the vehicle slowed and I heard a rusty, metallic scraping sound: gates opening. Someone yelled for us to go through. We took a bunch of turns, lefts and rights, before we came to a stop.

  My heart was pounding so loud I knew they could hear it. People outside this car or truck or whatever could probably hear it.

  I tried to inhale calmly through my nose. When they’d first taped my mouth I’d panicked, trying to breathe so fast that I almost passed out. Now all I was trying to do was stay upright, stay conscious, and not wet my pants from terror.

  The vehicle stopped. The door opened. Rough hands grabbed my arms and hauled me out. My legs were wobbly but they held. Someone shoved me forward, so I almost fell, then shoved me again. I started walking, hesitantly, blind, hoping they weren’t sending me straight into a brick wall for laughs.

  Another door opened. I stumbled across the threshold. It smelled different in here, like stale air and the industrial cleaner we used at the All-Ways. Someone yanked off my hood and I squeezed my eyes almost shut—the bright light was painful.

  I was in a… prison. Not like the little jail we had downtown that hardly ever got used. This was a prison, like I’d seen in books. So they hadn’t taken me back to the cell. Which meant I’d disappeared.

  Just like Becca. And the other kids.

  And no one would know where I was. Not Steph. Not Nathaniel.

  A woman was there, big and broad with odd yellow hair and a very red face. She came up and pulled the duct tape off me—not fast, but not nearly slowly enough.

  As soon as I could breathe I gulped in air, my chest rising and falling and my bullet-bruise hurting with each movement.

  “Where am I?” I gasped.

  A guy in a uniform stepped forward and gave me a smart rap on my arm with a billy club.

  “Ow!” I said, then shut up quickly as he raised it again.

  I was led down a cement-block hallway with peeling vomit-green paint. Bare lightbulbs flickered overhead, and several times we had to walk through puddles.

  Oh, God, where am I? What’s happening?

  In a small room, two guards took my clothes, cutting the zip ties on my wrists so they could get my hoodie off. I was shaking with cold as well as hysterical, razor-wire fear, but all they did was throw a yellow jumpsuit at me. I leaped into it as fast as I could.

  Down another hall. Through a heavy metal door. Its tiny glass window had wire fused into it. This door opened into a wide hallway with a tall ceiling four stories high. Each story had a walkway around the outside, bordered with a line of barred cages, little jail rooms, one after another.

  Each room held kids. Kids who looked like Outsiders, all colors, all types.

  The guards shoved me up concrete steps and down one of the walkways. They put me into an empty, barred room, and just then a horrible alarm sounded. The din of hundreds of marching feet filled my ears. Pressing my face against the bars, I saw more kids, all in yellow jumpsuits, filing in and heading to their cages.

  Then… one head out of the entire crowd. One face that was like looking into a mirror.

  “Becca!” I screamed as loudly as I could. “Becca!”

  54

  BECCA’S HEAD SNAPPED UP AT my voice, and she met my eyes instantly. In a flash she put a finger against her lips, telling me to be quiet. I was shocked at how different she looked; she was thinner and moved stiffly and slowly. Her hair was a rat’s nest, and any skin I could see was either dirty or discolored with bruises or scrapes.

  Kids in jumpsuits began to file past my barred door. No one seemed surprised or curious about my being there. A hulking, uniformed guard stopped in front of me to unlock the door. The bars slid open, and he pushed in a small girl with mouse-colored hair, a light-tan boy, a taller, dark-tan boy… and Becca.

  “Get inside!” he shouted as Becca lingered, looking at me like I was an icy soda on a haying day.

  The guard pushed her in roughly, then slammed the door shut and locked it. Becca suddenly spun and looked at him in shock. “Tim?”

  The guard didn’t answer—just marched away.

  “Oh, God, Becca!” I exclaimed, and grabbed her in a hug. After a moment, she brought her arms up and hugged me back. She felt bony, and it was like hugging a stranger. “I miss
ed you so much!” I said. “I looked for you everywhere! I never stopped looking.”

  When we pulled back, the other kids were staring at us.

  “There’s two of you,” the small girl whispered.

  “Yeah. The before and the after,” one of the guys said wryly.

  “This is my twin sister, Cassie,” Becca said quietly. “Cass, this is Merry. And this is Vijay, and this is Diego.”

  I didn’t know what to say. We were just kids, locked in a prison together. This was a nightmare I could never have predicted, and I had no idea how to act. But I nodded at them, and they nodded back.

  “Why are we here?” I asked Becca. “What happened to you?”

  She shrugged and sat down on a narrow bunk. “Got taken,” she said. “Like everyone else.”

  This is Becca, I told myself. This really is Becca. It’s just… a completely different Becca. I didn’t know what she’d been through to make her like this; she was serious, calmer, and just so… not Ridiculous.

  “You’ve been here since you disappeared?” I asked.

  She nodded. “What about you? Where did they get you? At home?”

  “No.” I had to gather my thoughts for a minute. “You disappeared, so I went all over looking for you. I talked to Taylor, that guy you played chicken with, out on the boundary road.”

  Becca looked surprised.

  “Then Nathaniel showed me the Outsider hangout. I didn’t know you were an Outsider,” I said wryly. “And then one night he cut the wire on the boundary fence and we went down the road till we found the truck—my truck.” I couldn’t seem to work up any anger about that now. “Then someone killed Mr. Harrison. I mean, first I hit him with my backpack and knocked him out, and then someone shot him.”

  Becca’s eyebrows rose farther on her forehead. “You… hit him…”

  I nodded and took a breath. “Yeah. Then today—today?—maybe today I got kicked out of school. I’m expelled. Plus they took away my vocation. So I got the moped and Pa’s rifle, and drove through the gates down the boundary road to the truck—to where you had been last.”

  Becca’s mouth was hanging open and her eyes were wide.

  “Suddenly I was surrounded, don’t know by who. I took off across the brush and drove down into a gully. Then I was in a ditch, and one of the cars crashed right over me, and then the second one was chasing me, and it was dark, and I hit a tree trunk head-on. ’Fraid the moped is totaled,” I admitted. “I flew up out of the ditch and almost got run over by an all-wheeler. Anyway, I still had Pa’s rifle, so I aimed at them, but then in the end I couldn’t shoot ’em, so I fired over their heads. But then they shot me with a plastic bullet and knocked me out. And that’s gonna hurt until I die. When I woke up I had a black hood over my head, and they brought me here, and now here I am.”

  Four pairs of eyes stared at me like I was a two-headed calf.

  “You…” Becca began, shaking her head in wonder. “You hit Harrison, and you found Taylor, cut the fence, and met the Outsiders, and you got expelled, and you left the cell and got chased and fired at them…”

  “Over their heads,” I pointed out.

  “I thought you said she was the good one,” the guy named Diego said.

  55

  BECCA

  “SHE IS,” I SAID, STARING at my sister. “She’s the good one, the careful one. Careful Cassie.”

  Cassie looked surprised. “Well, you’re the ridiculous one!” she said. “Ridiculous Rebecca! Only now, you’re…”

  “Sounds like you’re not so careful anymore,” I told her. “Like, rob any banks while you were at it?”

  “No! Of course not.” Cassie looked embarrassed.

  “Someone shot Harrison?”

  She nodded, her expression darkening. “Yeah.”

  “Do they know who?” I asked. I couldn’t believe that he was dead. That I never had to dread him again.

  Cassie shook her head.

  I had to tell her. As if sensing it, Merry came and sat next to me on the bunk. “Uh… you know, Harrison… anyway. I got pregnant.”

  My sister looked appropriately horrified, then did the sweetest thing. She came and knelt before me and took my hands. “Oh, honey. I’m so sorry. That… that asshole.”

  I’d never heard her use bad language before, even at her maddest. “Yeah. But a couple days ago I had a miscarriage. I got kicked really hard. And they operated on me to make sure it was all gone.”

  “Someone kicked you?” My sister looked outraged.

  I sighed. While that had been really, really bad, it was barely registering on my current list of awful life events.

  “Cass. I’m really glad to see you, but trust me when I say that I would give anything for you not to be here.”

  “I want to be where you are,” she said stubbornly.

  “This is a prison,” I said carefully. “Full of kids from hundreds of different cells, including ours. Kathy Hobhouse is here, and I guess Livvie Clayhill used to be. But in here there are tests and training and fights.”

  Cassie frowned. “What? Why?”

  “How well you do at any of them decides how long you’ll stay,” I said, still pussyfooting around.

  “So people get out?”

  I hated seeing the spark of hope in her eyes. Slowly I shook my head. “No. This is… death row. The only way out is… to get executed.”

  Cassie cocked her head to one side like a retriever. “What are you talking about?”

  “Welcome to the crazy house,” I said.

  56

  CASSIE

  BECCA HAS ALWAYS BEEN A big exaggerator. If we had a strong breeze, it was a tornado. If we caught a little trout, it gained ten pounds by the time Becca told someone about it. If Pa spoke to her sternly, then he had “taken her head off” or “skinned her alive.”

  So at first I thought “executed” was an extreme description of something yucky, like having to mop these halls or whatever. Then Diego, Vijay, and Merry started backing her up, all of them speaking in low voices.

  I still wasn’t convinced. Fighting until someone was knocked out? That was crazy. Push-ups over a board of nails? Who would come up with such an insane idea? Then Becca unzipped her jumpsuit and I gasped: her chest was covered with rows of unhealed dots of blood. She pulled her lip to one side and showed me the gap where her tooth had been. I stared at her, stunned.

  They told me about their friend Robin. And a boy named Tomás. A girl named Little Bit. Becca blamed herself for that one.

  By the time they were finished, tears were streaming down my cheeks. They were telling the truth. My sister had actually endured all this, and worse. Horror filled me—all this time I’d been searching desperately for Becca. Now that I’d found her, I’d never been so afraid in my whole life. I sat down on the cold concrete, unable to move, terrifying images spinning through my brain.

  The lights went out at 10:00, just like back home. I curled up on the floor next to Becca’s bunk. She gave me her thin, ratty blanket. I pulled it over me and shut my eyes, then lay there shaking from cold and fear.

  But I must have finally slept because a few hours later, the barred door slid open with a scraping sound.

  “Cassandra Greenfield!” They were different guards than last night. “Get up!”

  I saw Diego and Vijay were in their bunks, but Becca and Merry were already gone.

  The guards handcuffed me and prodded me with their billy clubs. I tried to memorize the route, but soon gave up. All these hallways looked—and smelled—alike. When they undid my hands and shoved me through a doorway, I was only a little surprised to see a classroom. And the woman inside, staring at me with narrowed eyes, must be the legendary Ms. Strepp.

  57

  HOW WELL WE DID DETERMINED how long we lived. Becca told me that.

  “Take a seat. I’m Ms. Strepp. I’m glad to finally meet you, Cassandra Greenfield.”

  I sat down at a desk. Why would she care about meeting me?

  Writ
ten on the whiteboard at the front of the room was: “Appearances are often deceiving” - Aesop. I’d heard of Aesop—we’d read some of his stories in school. His morals were always good lessons for the cell.

  “First you’ll be tested on the basics,” Ms. Strepp went on briskly.

  “Okay,” I said, and she strode over and whacked my desk with her wooden ruler.

  “You speak when I tell you!” she snapped, and I pressed my lips together because I’d heard that same expression just… maybe yesterday?

  It began. I was hungry and cold and exhausted, but I concentrated, thinking each question through carefully. It was all stuff I’d seen before, so if I didn’t make any sloppy mistakes, I would be all right.

  Ms. Strepp paced back and forth all night and all day long, staring at me, glancing at her watch. A couple of times she left the room, but a guard immediately came in each time.

  In the middle of an essay about the history of our cell (a cinch because we were all required to memorize it anyway) a few hot tears filled my eyes. I brushed them away.

  This was ridiculous. Surreal. I’d only wanted to find my sister. I hadn’t been a bad citizen. I hadn’t even been an Outsider.

  It was dark again when Ms. Strepp finished looking at all my test results. I was so hungry I felt almost sick—that horrible, hollow feeling you get when you’ve gone too long without refueling.

  Finally Ms. Strepp looked up. “You did extremely well. I guess you’re used to being a star pupil, eh?”

  I nodded cautiously.

  Ms. Strepp threw my tests into the trash can. “I’m not impressed, star pupil!” she snarled. “Every kid in here gets scores like this!”

  The words came out of my mouth before I could stop them. “Not Becca.”