What's Left of Me #1 by Kat Zhang

Author:Kat Zhang [Zhang, Kat]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062114891
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-09-18T07:00:00+00:00

Seventeen

Lunch was at twelve thirty exactly. At twelve fifteen, Mr. Conivent told us to put away our things and line up by the door. The nurse led us back to the breakfast room, and we ended up sitting across from the dark-haired fairy girl, who had her head bowed. Lissa grabbed the seat to our left, and I felt a pang of relief when Bridget chose one near the other end of the table.

The nurse set down our trays one by one, sliding them from her silver cart. Mashed potatoes. A pool of thin, yellow-brown gravy. Something that was probably a fried chicken cutlet, but who could tell under all that soggy breading?

Like at breakfast, a murmur of conversation started up when the nurse retreated to her corner.

“Jaime didn’t go home,” Addie whispered in Lissa’s ear, our voice so low I wasn’t sure Lissa would understand. But she went still. “I saw him. In a gurney. With a bandage around his head.”

“Devon,” Lissa said too loudly, and people turned to stare. She hardly seemed to notice, looking at us with wild eyes. “Devon. They took Devon—”

“They only took him for a test,” the fairy girl said. She was poking at her cutlet, her eyes flickering to the nurse before settling back on us and Lissa. “They do a lot of those when you first get here. He’ll be back.”

Lissa looked too stricken to speak, and Addie said quickly, “Are you sure—?” She hesitated.

“Kitty,” the girl said.

The name didn’t fit her. It was too ordinary, too sweet. This girl deserved a name from a fairy tale. Kitty stopped chewing and stared at us. She flushed, glancing at the kids on either side of her before mumbling, “Yes. I think so.” She tugged on a lock of hair, which was held away from her face by two wedge-shaped clips. They still bore traces of color, a deep red, but most of the paint had been chipped off to reveal the metal skeleton.

“Is that what they do here?” Addie said. “Tests and things? All the time?”

The little girl swirled her gravy into her mashed potatoes. “Not all the time. We do school. And we play board games. Sometimes they let us watch a movie.”

“They ask us questions,” the blond boy on our right said quietly, looking at the nurse while he spoke. Addie jumped, but he kept talking as if he’d been a part of our conversation the entire time. “They make us talk to them about the things we did that day, or that week or whatever. We have to tell them about things that happened when we were little.”

Kitty nodded. “Sometimes they make you take pills, too, like Cal—” She blanched, her voice faltering, then continued so quickly her words were garbled. “Like Eli. Like Jaime did.”

“What kind of pills?” Lissa said. “What do they do?”

“They make us better,” Kitty said.

Lissa’s face twisted, and Addie interjected before she could speak. “What did that boy mean this morning? In the Study room. He said .

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