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My grandma lives in a double-wide trailer on an acre of land her husband left her. My family lives a few hours south, but I don’t get along so well with my dad, so I’m spending time up here.

She bought the doublewide from a family whose father died of throat cancer. They had to sell the place because they couldn’t afford to rent the land they were on or to move the trailer. The widow and my grandma bonded over losing their husbands and when they sat down to figure out a price, they each argued for the other one’s side, worried what my grandma could afford and what the widowed woman needed.

My grandma moved the doublewide down the road to her acre of land, then had septic, water, and power hooked up, and a pond dug. She was the only one in the area to set her house perpendicular to the road, so the bay window faces the pond and only the window over the kitchen sink and the small one in the bathroom look toward the road. It isn’t the road so much that’s the problem— there isn’t a lot of traffic. And the house across the street is neat and well kept. It’s what lies a half mile beyond the house, just sticking out over the woods, quiet and calm: the top of the cooling tower for the Tom’s Bay nuclear reactor.

Day and night, the tower exhales a thick soft cloud of steam. On sunny days, it’s the only cloud in the sky, and on cloudy days, the strange vertical plume sticks out against the layers of natural clouds. But on a rare day, the steam rises until it touches a low cumulus cloud, making the tower look like it’s a cloud factory—as if without it, there wouldn’t be any clouds in the sky at all.

I sit outside sometimes in summer and watch the ducks my grandma named donna and Lydia swim around in the pond. They try to make friends with the Canadian geese that visit for a few weeks every year, but the geese aren’t friendly—they squawk, ruffle their wings, and chase the ducks away. Sometimes I get up and run after the geese, just to show them what it feels like to be chased and to remind them this isn’t their land.

Other days, like today, I turn my chair and look out across the road, at the thin rim of the tower poking up behind the trees. I’d never seen a cooling tower before coming up here, except on a page in a social studies book which compared different sources of energy. When I first saw the tower as a kid, I told my grandma that it looked like a giant coffee cup with steaming coffee. I’m older now—I just turned fourteen two weeks ago—and I think of it like the tip of a cigarette, filling the air with smoke.

My grandma said the family that had lived in the doublewide all smoked— even the three kids, because, as the mother said to her, ‘It’d be hypocrite to tell them no.” Grandma says they packed up quickly, leaving behind the greasy pans, mildewed rags and dirty socks, forgotten boxes of baking powder and rat poison, but worst was that the trailer smelled like it’d been scorched by fire. “The walls were sticky and yellow with nicotine,” Grandma said. “It was like walking through a smoker’s lung.” I don’t know why the kids in that trailer ended up smoking. In my house, you can’t see or smell what dad uses, but you can feel it in the air. That’s all I could think of when someone tried to hand me a cigarette in fourth grade. It’s enough to make me never want to take anything.

Sometimes when I see the cooling tower, I imagine it exploding, huge pillars of fire. I get lost thinking about what I’d do if that happened, how I’d grab my backpack and my picture of my sister Alice, yell for my grandma to get out, pick up donna and Lydia and stuff them in the car while yelling, “Goodbye suckers” to the geese. Then I’d drive the four of us west as fast as I could.

I imagine it happening like that, as though I’d be the one who’d get us out of there, who’d save us, though I’m not old enough to drive. I know enough to know we should drive west. I’ve watched the weather channel with grandma at night enough to see that all the winds come from the west—that we don’t want to be east of the fallout.

Of  course, deep down I know if an accident happened, we wouldn’t have time to gather things up, to grab the ducks, and drive away. If the thing exploded, there wouldn’t be time for any of it.

The other day, I asked my grandma about the reactor, if she was scared living so close.

“Not really,” she said.

“Then why’d you turn your house away from it?” I get angry sometimes when things don’t make sense to me.

“Well, it’s only scary when you think about it,” she said, “and I only think about it when I see it.”

I think about the reactor all the time, whether I see it or not. At home, in my locked room, I sometimes dream I’m at Grandma’s and the reactor’s exploding. In the dream, I see a fire over the trees and it’s so mesmerizing, I start walking toward it. I can’t turn away. I tell myself to get out, but I keep stepping closer. I want to see the whole building on fire.

It isn’t that I don’t have enough things to worry about already. My dad takes drugs I don’t even know the names of, and my mom lies to cover it up. She works extra jobs to bring in enough money for food, because dad’s addiction is always first. Mom is always telling my sister Alice and me that Dad’s sick and he needs his medicine, but taking his medicine makes him sick, so he’s trying to get off it, and we all have to be patient with him. But I’m the one who goes to bed hungry, who has to explain things to Alice, who locks my door at night like Mom tells me, in case things flare up. “There’s a fire inside your pop,” she told me once, “and it’s important you don’t add any fuel.”

But I guess I did anyway. Last fall, dad told Alice and me that this was it—he was going to quit once and for all. For us, for his family. He stayed in bed for almost a week, Mom making him food and bringing it to their room. Alice and me were on our own, which meant I made lunch and dinner for the both of us. When Dad was finally up and out of bed, he sat on the couch in front of the tv and drank beer from cans all day. We were told we could help by not disturbing him, by giving up our tv shows so he could watch whatever he wanted. I was mad. He was turning into even less of a dad than he had been, and we were giving up more and more.

Then one day in November, he called me from the living room. “Jaycee!” he yelled it strong, like I’d done something terrible. I didn’t want to come out, but a part of me did. I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong, and I wanted to see him try and accuse me of something.

“What?” I yelled back, slamming my door and marching out into the hall.

He looked angry, but also scared. He was holding a sandwich bag with about twenty bright red pills in it. I wondered if he was going to accuse me, say that they were mine. He looked at me like he hated everything about his life, me included. “Take these and hide them,” he said. “Don’t throw ‘em away. They’re worth too much. But I can’t know where they are right now. Put them somewhere I can’t find.”

He handed the plastic bag to me and walked out of the house. I guess I should have done what he said. But I was tired of doing things for him, of giving up my life, of being the adult when I was only thirteen, and all my friends were able to be normal kids, worrying about themselves instead of their parents.

I held the bag stretched out in my hands there in the living room, trying to figure out what to do. And that’s when I sort of left my body, floated up and looked back down and saw myself in some clear way I never had before. I was a thirteen-year-old girl holding a plastic bag with drugs. They were illegal, for sure, and if the police walked in right then, I figured I’d be the one who’d go to jail. But I hadn’t done anything wrong. I only had them because my dad had given them to me. He was the one breaking the law, and he had dragged me into it, made me a criminal.

“A criminal in my own house,” I heard myself say aloud before I floated back into my body. And that’s when I knew what I had to do. I threw the bag of pills behind the sofa, grabbed my cell phone, and left the house. I ran in the opposite direction I’d seen my dad go and I didn’t stop until I was in the woods behind the shopping center. When I caught my breath, I called 911 and told them that my father had given me a bag of drugs to keep and I didn’t know what to do.

The police put dad in rehab and then in jail. My mother was so angry, she wouldn’t talk to me for a month. Everything she needed to say, she said to Alice instead. And in April, just before my dad was released, she told me I should go back up and live with Grandma for a while, because it wouldn’t be safe for me to stay in the house.

“I thought dad was sober now,” I said.

“Oh, he is,” she said, though I couldn’t tell if she was telling the truth. “He’s sober enough to know what his daughter did to him, just when he was trying to come clean.”

It was still a month before the school year ended, but my mother worked out something with my teachers. I had to e-mail them my homework on my phone since Grandma doesn’t have internet. I left without telling any of my friends, because I knew they’d ask why I was leaving, and I’d have to tell them or lie.

“We need you to be strong,” my mother said when she took me to the bus stop to come up here. “Okay,” I said, and got on the bus. Then I cried all the way up here, but cleared my eyes before I got in Grandma’s car.

Here at my grandma’s, things are quiet and safe. She doesn’t drink or smoke. She just works in her garden in the day and watches tv at night. We always have enough food, though sometimes, I get bored. I bike up and down her road looking for other kids, but all I see are men older than my dad cutting their grass on riding mowers and old women watering flowers or walking out to the post box to check the mail.

And always in the distance is the cooling tower puffing out its steam, a distant, quiet threat. To get to it, you have to go down the road a couple miles then turn left on a lane that doubles back to tom’s Bay. There’s nothing else on that lane, no reason to go down there, so I’ve never seen the power plant up close, though I want to. Only seeing the top of the tower, with its plumes of steam, makes it seem far away, not quite real. Like something that only lives in dreams.

Still, it’s better here than being at home. Grandma has fixed the doublewide up nice. She said she had to tear out the carpet and paint two coats of primer on the ceiling and walls, just to get rid of the cigarette smell. There’s a spare bedroom in the back, but I sleep on the sofa. I don’t like being stuck in a room with the door shut. “You don’t have to close it,” Grandma says, but I tell her I prefer the sofa. I like being near the front door, in case I have to get out.

Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night from a nightmare about my father. In one, he’s sitting beside me in my bed with a syringe in his hand. He’s already so high that when he goes to shoot up, he puts the needle in my arm instead of his. I’d begin to pass out and claw myself to stay awake. I try to tell him to stop, but my speech is slurred. “It’s okay,” he says. “This way I don’t feel the pain.”

Last month, I finished school and turned fourteen. My grandma baked me a strawberry cake. I even got a card a few days later from my parents, though I could tell it was just from Mom—she’d signed both their names.

Now it’s the fourth of July, and Grandma and I are sitting by the pond, watching the neighbor’s fireworks from across the street. The sound scares the ducks, who huddle in the middle of the pond, as if all that water will keep them safe. I think about my sister, Alice, and if anyone is taking care of her.

“I hate firecrackers,” Grandma says. “They scare the hell out of Donna and Lydia.”

“But you stay out here and watch them,” I say, angry at her for some reason. “I suppose there’s a little pyromaniac in us all.”

Not me, I think, but I keep watching them. She’s right, I can’t really turn away.

After they are done, Grandma goes in to watch tv in the living room, so I sleep in the bedroom because I’m tired and don’t want her to feel like she can’t stay up and watch because of me. I dream my mother calls and tells me, “Your father’s gone.” I can’t tell if she means left or died—and she wants me to come home. I end up biking to the bus station, but when I get there, the driver says my ticket was only one way, north, not round trip. And it’s expired.

I wake up in the room I don’t recognize and think I’m nowhere I know. Then I go out to the living room and see Grandma sleeping on the sofa, in my spot.

As I make her breakfast, she tells me about the shows she stayed up watching, as though it’s a sin she’s confessing. “It must have been almost midnight before I fell asleep,” she says. I don’t tell her about my dream. Instead, I do the dishes while she goes back to sleep in her bedroom.

I’m looking out the kitchen window, wondering how long I’ll live in this doublewide with Grandma, if I’ll I inherit the place when she dies. I wonder if I’ll end up here all alone, like her. I stare up above the trees then, at the bright blue sky for a few minutes before I realize there aren’t any clouds—in the sky or rising from the tower. Without them, the tower itself is hardly visible above the trees.

Something must be wrong, because reactors can’t just turn off like that. This is it, I think. Instead of flames, there’s just nothing.

My head grows fuzzy and I feel something race through my body. I drop the sponge and call out to Grandma. I scramble to think what I need to grab and if I should first wake her, and if there will be enough time to get Donna and Lydia.

No, I tell myself, there isn’t time for any of this.

But still, I have to try. Isn’t that what creatures do, even if it’s pointless?

I yell for my grandma again as I grab my bag in the living room and stuff it with my phone, a journal Alice got me for Christmas, and a few clothes. Then I rush into Grandma’s bedroom and tell her to wake up quick.

“What’s wrong?” she says, sitting up, drowsy.

“The reactor,” I say. “It just stopped.”

“Oh, honey.” She stares at me a moment. “You know, it does that sometimes. They turn it off to check the system. It’s called an outage.”

I look at her like she’s not making sense. Then I drop my bag and run outside. I have to see for myself that nothing’s wrong. The flowers in my grandma’s garden are in full bloom, vibrant in the morning sun. The ducks are gliding peacefully across the pond. They’d sense something was wrong, wouldn’t they?

I look at the tower sitting silently behind the trees, and I listen for an explosion, for anything. But the day is quiet. It’s late enough in summer that even the geese, with their angry squawking, are gone. There’s only the sound of a lawn mower, far off, like the hum of a bee.

I’m safe, I tell myself. I can just sit here and enjoy the day, which doesn’t have a cloud in the sky.

All the girls in our town are assigned a corpse to carry once they’re old enough. It stays with you nearly forever, slung around your neck, or held in your arms, or somehow fastened to your body if you’re clever enough, or lucky enough to get help to do so.

Boys don’t get corpses. They walk around unburdened, free to do whatever they want. You’re lucky, we girls are told when we’re young, to so intimately know the meaning of life. To stare death in the face. To deeply understand sacrifice. You’ll see. This corpse will make you better.

Your corpse is with you all the time. At breakfast. At school. At the mall. You only get a break when you’re almost one yourself—that is, when you’re very old. Those women, the retirees, are called future corpses. My mother still carries her assignment, but my grandmother’s tour of duty is done. My dad claps Grams on the back. You’re free! he says. Some grandmothers party when they’re finished, whooping and hollering, but not mine. My grandmother doesn’t smile, never has. She is stooped and bent from years of carrying the dead, has a glazed look in her eye. I’m tired, she moans from her easy chair. She doesn’t even wear her blue ribbon, her sole reward for decades of service. All she wants is to rest. We flick on the TV for her, and she watches, dazed. She is now a future corpse.

Mom tells me, Never mind your grandmother. She pops a pill surreptitiously, then smiles, reaching for the vacuum with one hand while adjusting her corpse with the other. She trips, smashes her knee on the corner of the coffee table, yelping in pain. I look up from my homework. My brother passes through the living room, headphones on, not noticing that my mother has taken a spill as he heads out the door. “I’m okay!” Mom winces out. “Nobody run over. I’ll be fine. Really.” She curses under her breath, readjusting her corpse, which has tumbled awkwardly to the wrong side of her body. She continues vacuuming. She left her job ages ago because juggling everything was too much. She still carries a business card though, one that says, Justine R. Helms, Career Mom & Corpse Carrier. Ask me about my great kids, Lana and Jason. I scribble a note in the journal I keep tucked in my three-ring binder, recording thoughts at a moment’s notice. To be a corpse carrier—is that all there is?

###

At school, after the latest Corpse Assigning Ceremony, my bestie Trina and I watch the older girls attempt to carry on with their newly assigned cadavers. Most of the corpses are bigger than they are, trailing awkwardly behind them. Some of the girls gather in the halls like they used to, attempting to flirt with boys. “Show me yours,” a boy says to one of the girls.

“Okay!” she chirps, snapping her gum.

She produces her assignment’s certificate, points out features.

Trina rolls her eyes, muttering. “Some girls will do anything to get a boy’s attention.”

“Mine’s a 65-year-old male,” the girl intones, breathless. “He died of natural causes.”

The boy shrugs. “Is yours preserved?”

The girl nods. “Yeah. I got lucky.”

“The truth is,” Trina hisses, “her mommy and daddy paid extra for that!”

I scan the hallway. I notice the girls from down-and-out families; their corpses aren’t preserved, and will start to stink soon. They will likely drop out of school, get menial jobs where no one minds your stench. Other girls seem to walk smaller, like their corpse is dragging them down.

“Our corpses are a gift!” a girl in tight yoga pants raves to a friend. “We’re soooo lucky to have this form of enlightenment. I mean, boys don’t know what they’re missing!” Her shirt has a cartoon dog on it, with the mantra, Nama-stay. Her corpse is blonde, thin, and lithe, and fastened to her body piggy-back style, obviously with some help.

“Let’s go to class,” Trina says, “and leave these hosers behind.”

In biology, I make a note in my journal when the teacher isn’t looking: Only 1 year left ‘til my corpse assignment. Is that what I really want? Do I even have a choice?

In the few remaining weeks of school, I notice that most of the girls with new corpses are quieter. Only a brave few carry on as if nothing’s changed, making out with boys in the hall, with a dead body slung over their shoulder.

“Gross,” Trina growls after we pass one such couple.

I have to agree.

On our walk home, I’m distracted as Trina carries on about the injustices of being female. But my mind’s on logistics, and spatial conundrums: how does one have sex while carrying a corpse? I mean, I imagine it can be done. It must be done all the time. If not, how would children ever be born? How would I have ever come into this world? But I wonder if there are unspoken and socially-sanctioned cheats, like, it’s okay for women to put down their corpses for a hot minute, just so they can fuck. I imagine my own parents, my mother’s soft white body under my dad’s, my mom’s assigned cadaver resting beside her in their king-sized bed as my parents grunt and moan. I shudder, wishing I’d chosen another image.

The next day at school, Trina points out something I hadn’t noticed before: All our teachers are men. She says: “There are no role models for us. At least, not here. How are we supposed to know how to be strong women if no one’s modeling how to go through life with your corpse?”

The girl is right, so right. And her life isn’t fair—her mom disappeared one day when Trina was a toddler. And her grandmother died young. Trina had no one, only her dad. At least I have my mom, and my grandmother, though Grams, a future corpse, has checked out and is only waiting for the end.

“You should come over more, and hang out with my mom. She’s strong,” I offer. Trina doesn’t seem convinced.

After school, we go to Trina’s house, and watch television when we’re done with our homework. None of the women on TV carry corpses, and we begin to wonder what’s real. We look it up on the internet. It appears that corpse carrying is a regional custom turned into law, something only we local women do, or are forced to. “If we leave this town,” Trina says, “we can break this cycle. We can be whoever or whatever we want, without those awful things literally hanging around our necks.”

Together, we dream about our futures. Trina wants to go to art school, move to the big city, and be a painter, a famous one. My dreams aren’t as exciting or flashy. I think about my talents, and they are quiet ones: research and writing. “But still,” Trina says, “so what if your dream is to live a quiet life? You should be able to do that without hauling around a corpse your whole life, for fuck’s sake.”

Plus, I tell her, it would get in the way of, well, you know.

Trina nods knowingly. “Yeah, girl. Preach.”

We imagine our future boyfriends, or maybe girlfriends, and think about how beautiful our lives together could be if we weren’t carrying corpses. I close my eyes and dream about the perfect boy, imagining what it would be like to kiss him, how warm and soft and sweet.

“Promise me one thing, girl,” Trina says, resting her curly head on my shoulder. “That no matter where life takes us, somehow we’ll stay friends ‘til the end.”

I envision us old and white-haired, sitting in side-by-side rocking chairs after both our spouses have died, watching the ocean in peace at the last of our living days, after we’ve had the lives we’ve always dreamed of, Trina the world-renowned artist, and me, a bestselling novelist.

That night, I make a note in my journal: Future plans—run away with Trina.

###

Over the summer, things get weird. The news blares that more and more towns and states have passed laws requiring that young women are assigned a corpse. “We have to get outta here, Lana,” Trina says. “Run away with me. We have to get somewhere safe, as far away as possible, before this thing spreads like a disease.”

I nod. Running away was only ever a fantasy; what did I really know about living on my own? I had no job, and didn’t know if I could get one, at least one that could pay for an apartment.

“We’ll figure it out,” Trina says. “We could crash at my cousin’s out of state. He’d be okay with that. We could waitress in his restaurant, get tips.”

I ask her for some time to think, to prepare.

“Tick tock,” she says. “We’re not getting any younger.”

At home, Mom seems different, like the smiles are fewer and far between. Her face seems more worn, ravaged by worry and struggle. I try to cheer her up, gifting ideas like buoyant balloons. “Mom, Trina needs a role model. Someone who can show her how to be strong and live a satisfying life while carrying a corpse.”

Mom finally smiles, but it’s a bitter one. “I don’t think I’m up for that, honey.”

“But Mom! Trina’s thinking about running away.”

She doesn’t answer, only pours herself a glass of wine and goes back to stir-frying vegetables, steam glistening on her forehead as her corpse appears to sleep peacefully on her shoulder.

I don’t tell her that Trina wants me to come, and that there’s a part of me that wants to go. But there’s a part of me that can’t leave the others behind. Least of all, my mother. If she can be strong, and live her whole life carrying a corpse, why can’t I?

Weeks later, Trina and I fight. She tells me that I’m weak and calls me a baby, and that I’ll regret it forever if I don’t come. She leaves that night on a bus. I tear up my journal, burying it in a hole in the yard with my dreams. I never see Trina again.

###

The next year at school, I’m dreadfully lonely. I throw myself into writing weird stories, though I have no one to share them with, and I neglect my homework. First semester, I manage to get Cs across the board. Not bad enough to cause my family heartbreak, but not great enough to ensure a college scholarship and a scintillating career.

As Corpse Assigning Ceremony approaches, there’s an epidemic of broken arms, broken legs, and broken spines—girls hurting themselves to get out of corpse-carrying. But that doesn’t relieve their duty, the law says. Only decrepit old age does, or death. Then there’s a flood of disappearances of girls in my grade—a rash of run-aways. Then, finally, the suicides.

Our town is ripped apart.

At candlelight vigils, mothers carrying corpses scream at each other. We carried corpses all our lives, some howl, and we never once complained. The others scream back: What we wouldn’t give to relieve ourselves of this burden.

At home, Mom no longer gets out of bed. My father refuses to talk about it. He has moved into Jason’s old room since Jason left for college. At night I help cobble together supper with my sad cooking skills, with dad ruining meat on the grill, if we don’t get takeout. Tonight I chop some random limp veggies from the fridge, broccoli and carrots past their prime, and make a salad, then I bring a bowl to Mom’s room.

I open the door slightly. The curtains are drawn, the room is dark. Mom’s whimpering in her sleep. She shares the bed with her corpse, whom I’ve never taken a good look at. I’ve always avoided wanting to know about it, or the process of corpse carrying; I just naively assumed it was something normal, something women have always done, never mind the person whose body it once was. I took for granted that someday, it would be my destiny.

I enter, put the bowl down on her dresser, and open the curtains just enough. A slice of light cuts across the bed, illuminating the face of my mother’s assignment. He’s young, or was, when he died, about sixteen years old. He was perfectly preserved, no lines in his face. He looks a lot like my mom, like a young male version of her. High cheekbones and dark brown hair, pale skin, with an eerie sheen, artificially heightened by makeup to look fresh forever. It takes my breath away to see him lying so peacefully beside Mom, and to see her so ill, unable to cope with life. I hunt through her nightstand for clues, for her assignment’s certificate of origin. Way at the bottom, beneath packets of tissues, tubes of lotion, pill bottles, and candy wrappers, I find it. It reads:

Martin J. Helms
Twin brother of Justine R. Helms
Aged 16
Died of aneurysm
Assigned to Justine R. Helms to the fullest term of the law
Under no circumstances may this corpse be abandoned

My mother’s assignment is her twin. My mouth goes hot and dry, and I feel sick. I’d heard that most girls are assigned randos, people they don’t know, but my mother has been carrying her brother all these years.

From here, my life could go one of three ways. I could go on as usual, accepting the rules, and receive a corpse when I’m old enough. I could pretend like it doesn’t bother me, like it’s not crippling. I could go about my schoolwork, and go off to college. I could fall for the first boy that shows me some sympathy, the first boy that tells me, You’re so brave for accepting your assignment with so much grace. We could make tender love, me putting my corpse aside for a brief moment behind closed doors. We could move back home so I’m closer to Mom, and get married, dancing our first dance with a cadaver slung over my shoulder, its weight straining my beautiful lace gown. We could have kids, born a few years apart, a corpse nestled beside me in the hospital bed as I scream in labor, then again as I nurse my newborns. When the kids are old enough, I could ignore the encumbrance strapped to my body as I attempt to hold down a job, one that helps with our finances while I write a novel in the evening, after the kids have gone to bed. I could try so hard, but could keep quiet as I struggle—let everyone think that I’m strong. I could put on a brave face until I can’t anymore, watching the boys and men move around me unfettered, while my daughter inherits my burden. After so many years, I could get tired, so tired, and the light in my eyes would go dim. I’d quit my job, and stop writing. I’d begin to drag my feet, and fade, living even smaller because I have no energy to carry on. My mother will die, and my husband and children might drift off, and I’d be numb, all alone with my corpse until I’m old, too old for anything else. Then I’d become a future corpse, sitting catatonic with nothing left to give.

Or I could lift my mom’s credit cards from her purse, and buy us some bus tickets to a place where the law hasn’t caught up, where we can walk away free and live without being weighed down. I could sit Mom by the window, and we could watch the road spill out before us, through miles and miles of open prairies, past blue-tinged mountains, past small towns with white picket fences. I could feed Mom little by little, rebuild her strength, and tell her stories of all the things we’ll do when we get to our new home. I’d tell her about the modest house we’ll have, with a garden, and the feeling of being able to breathe. We’ll make up new names for ourselves, start fresh. I’ll get us three rocking chairs, one for her, one for me, and one for Trina, whom I swear I will find. I wouldn’t tell Mom that we’d be fugitives, outlaws, and our faces would glare from posters at rest stops on the way. But something tells me she’d already know that, and would make her peace with it.

Or I could go back to school and whisper in the ears of the girls who are still left, and tell them, We don’t have to do this anymore. And they’d whisper in the ear of the next girl, and the next girl, and the next, that no matter what, we won’t take what they’re giving—we reject our assigned corpses. Outside the ceremony, we’d stretch our arms, linking up tight, forming a chain of girls blocking the door. The chain would stretch across town, into the hills, and beyond, girls linked as far as the eye can see.

Perhaps there’ll be flashing sirens, the wail of alarms.

Whatever. Let them come for us.

Dad calls out from somewhere in the house, piercing my daydream. He announces that he ruined the meat on the grill because he wasn’t paying attention, now he’s running to town for takeout. He tells me he’s sorry, asks me to keep an eye on my mother.

Once his car’s out of sight, I drag Mom’s dead twin brother out of bed, hauling him over carpet, tile, and grass to the furthest corner of the backyard—Mom’s abandoned garden—a spot that’s overgrown with weeds, a place everyone forgets.

Then I get a shovel, and I dig.