I really didn't want to go to dinner that evening. I wanted only to stay in bed and keep hoping that I would be shaken out of my confusion. I even tried to pray, but it felt foreign to me, and in any case, even if I had been praying properly, no god seemed to take interest in my begging.

Tobias tried to get me up and moving. He said that they would make me go to dinner or else not let me have it for a week. I didn't care. It just didn't make a difference. The world had fallen apart around me, and it was trying to put itself back together in all the wrong ways. If I got punished for not going to dinner, what did it matter? I had no reason to want to leave. Where would I go? Did I have a home? Did I have parents? I got a headache thinking about everything I didn't know.

So maybe it was good when the other people in the room came back. They pried my brain off its cycling thoughts. Tobias had tried to get me to talk some more, but I hadn't been up to it. When Roxie entered the room, though, I didn't have any choice but to listen to her. I met her before she even entered the room, actually, because she was practically yelling all the way down the hall about someone violating her free speech or something. The lock ground aside and some black-coated nobody pushed the door open and shoved the girl in. I was still lying on my bed with my face to the wall, but she was loud and coarse and impossible not to listen to.

"You'd better watch it, lady!" I heard her barking angrily. "You'll get yours! We'll all be out of here, someday, and we'll know where to find you!" There was the sound of the door locking into place again, and Roxie's voice dropped. "Shut up, Tobes," she said in a pouty sort of tone. I could hear Tobias snickering from where he sat in the room. "I said shut up! They just really infuriated me today."

"They play you every day, girl," said Tobias.

"Yeah, well this time it was worse than before. They think they can solve our problems and make us see the light. I'll show her some lights, estupido."

There was some silence, and then a third voice—a boy's voice—said, "New one's here, huh?"

Then I knew they were talking about me. I could feel their eyes boring into my back, but I kept my face to the wall. Roxie concerned me. She sounded rough. And the other boy's tone made me pretty sure he was laughing at me when he talked. A weird mixture of apprehension and irritation ran through me. Should I turn and satisfy their rude curiosity? But what could I even tell them? I couldn't feign sleep forever . . .

"Well," said Roxie, "who are you?"

Tobias answered, saving me for another moment. "She doesn't know," he said. "She--she's one of . . ." His words went soft, but I had the awful feeling he was making some sort of motion to explain what I was while sparing me the sound: a no name.

One of them gasped. I didn't know which. Then Roxie said, "No me importa. She still needs a name, or what will I call her when I yell at her?"

Suddenly there was pressure on the bed right about where my knees were. It took me a moment before I realized someone had sat down on the edge of the mattress. I didn't want her there--I was certain it was that girl. I just wanted to be left alone.

"Come on, sit up," said Roxie's voice, and not in a soothing way but commanding, telling me to sit, not asking me. Her authority was preferable to her sympathy, though; the last thing I wanted was someone coddling me, stroking my hair, lying to me about everything being okay.

Still, I remained passive aggressive. I just couldn't bring myself to talk to them.

But then there were hands on my shoulders and I felt myself being turned over and pulled up into a sitting position. It was humiliating, but in my weakened condition, I didn't have much say in the matter.

"Here you go. Now let's have a look at you."

I was sure my eyes were red and my breath smelled like vomit, but that didn't seem to bother anybody, including me. I got a good look at Roxie, and I was kind of surprised to see her. From the way she'd talked and the sound of her voice, I'd pictured some tough, bulky kind of girl. But Roxie wasn't any of those things. She was actually slender and petite, with dark brown hair pulled back in a ponytail and a face like a valentine heart. I was startled; she was so . . . pretty. What in the world was she doing in a juvenile facility? Then again, I didn't know what I was doing there either.

"Escuchame," said Roxie, giving me a bit of a shake and sort of pouting. "Listen. We have to give you a name, okay? Is there anything you'd like to have? Any name you think is just kind of interesting . . . something you've always wanted to have but couldn't because you were born with some other name?"

I thought, but I had a difficult time of it. Not only had I forgotten anything I might have wanted, but I also was so taken aback by Roxie's contradictory appearance that I couldn't think about anything but her. She was smiling at me like one of those baby dolls with rolling eyes, and I felt like this definitely was not the same girl that had just been swearing like a truck-driver. I couldn't say anything. They must've thought I was mute. And I felt stupid because suddenly, I felt it would've been better to appear confident.

"Can't you think of anything?" asked Roxie. I had a hard time telling whether the sound in her voice was pleading or annoyance. Still, I couldn't answer. I looked down at my interlaced fingers in my lap and shrugged.

The other boy, whom I'd hardly glanced at, hiked up his pants casually, shook off his tennis shoes, and flopped down onto his bed, though for as indifferent as he tried to appear, he kept staring in my direction. I lifted my eyes to get a look at him, but I kept my head down. His wavy hair was a dark orange, and though he looked healthy enough, his cheeks were pink like somebody had slapped him a few times to give him some color. I tried to get a good look at his eyes, remembering what Tobias had said about them getting crazy at times. I couldn't see anything special about them, though, except that they were really dark, which sort of contrasted with his otherwise fair coloring. Jason--as I assumed his name was, appeared less intimidating than Tobias had led me to believe, and I felt weirdly disappointed in that.

"She can't think of a name," said Jason, chewing at his fingernail. "She's a no name. Nobody. Nothing."

"Callate," Roxie demanded.

"Nada," insisted Jason.

Jumping up and off my bed, Roxie stamped both her feet on the ground. She shook her fist violently at Jason. "I said shut up!" Then, as quickly as she'd exploded, she calmed. Her shoulders and legs relaxed. She sat back down next to me, her eyes glowing with stars, and she said as if nothing had happened, "I know! We'll call you Nadia." She beamed with pride—more for herself than for me. All I could do was shrug, and she took that as acceptance. "All right, then, Nadia. Soy Roxie, and there's Jason and Tobes. We're roommates now, the four of us. But more you and me. We'll have all night to whisper in the dark. Just as long as you keep your face to the wall, they can't hear us."

I had no idea what she meant by any of that, but she got up off the bed and went to talk to Tobias, obviously done with me whether I had questions or not. I felt a flurry of discouragement, but I covered it up, not feeling comfortable enough to show emotion or join in my roommates' conversations, which centered on other young people in the facility as well as teachers or officers. I was pretty quiet, saying something only if someone looked in my direction like they wanted me to talk. Really I just listened. The traded information in their conversations soaked into me; I kept hoping that some word or name would kindle any kind of memory. The more I listened, the more I realized that if I was going to get back to whatever life I'd lost, I'd have to learn everything I could about the place I was in. And even if nothing came from my roommates' talk, it occupied my brain for a little while. Otherwise, I think I might have gone insane.

I moved through the next few days in a complete stupor. I didn't really know how I got through them. Real quickly I learned what Roxie meant about me and her being more like roommates than all four of us together. The first night, and the following nights, just about seven-thirty, a painfully loud siren would go off in the halls. It was like a fire alarm times five. And then a voice would come over an intercom and warn us that the walls were coming down. The first time I heard that, I had no idea what to expect. I almost thought it was some sort of prank, like maybe a kid had gotten into the office where the intercom system was. But then Roxie pulled me away toward our beds, and I understood. There was a wall coming down from the ceiling, right through the middle of the room, and when it was all the way down, it split our dormitory right in half. Roxie and I were totally separated from Tobias and Jason. We had our own room and bathroom. Small desks flipped out of the new wall, too, so we could do any homework we needed to do.

So that was the wall. And I began to learn about other things as well. The more I discovered about Oliphant Juvenile, the less I liked it (not that there'd been a high bar). There were so many rules. Don't talk in the halls. Don't enter within an arm's length of any other student unless given permission. Don't leave any remaining food on your plate. Don't leave your light on after nine o'clock. Don't sleep past the five-thirty alarm. Don't enter any area without permission. Don't speak in class unless called on. Don't look at another student strangely (I still hadn't figured out what that one meant). Don't do this. Don't do that. Don't, don't, don't. And as for the do's, I hadn't seen too many of those posted on the walls. In fact, the only one I came across was above the desks that came out of our room-dividing wall. It said: Do your work.

There were so many commands that I was starting to feel like I was in a military academy, and getting up so early didn't help to shake that idea. The only way I could tell that I wasn't in boot-camp was the class line-up I'd been given. I had six classes. Each was three-and-a-half hours long, and they switched off so that I did only two a day. On Monday I'd have classes one and two. On Tuesday, three and four. Wednesday, five and six. Thursday, back to the beginning. That's how it was. But it wasn't the time allotment I hated, it was the sorts of classes they were: a mix of normal stuff like math and English and character development (good citizenship, interpersonal skills--and so on).

The classes moved around during the week, and on Saturdays, we each had individual sessions with a therapist. Those times were terrible. My first was just a mess, because the therapist had asked me so many things I didn't know the answer to. Apparently, she hadn't been given any information on me, and so I'd had to sit there for two hours while she tried to think of what to talk about. I was relieved when she had me escorted to my room and it was Roxie's turn.

Sundays we actually had to ourselves. There was a designated time when Ms. Benjamin would come to our door and see if any of us would like to go to the library or computer lab (for research or homework) or to the laundry room. It was the only time we had all week to go to either one of those places, unless we'd been given special permission and an escort. Escort escort escort. Nobody trusted any of us to go anywhere by ourselves. Maybe that was a good thing, though, seeing as I didn't have any idea what sort of criminals I'd been put in a building with.

Overall, I didn't know how to feel. Not just because I couldn't remember anything, but also because I wasn't sure how I should look at everyone else. There was something in me that kept saying I hadn't done anything to deserve this. After all, if I couldn't remember what I'd done, then how could I know if I'd even done it? So I kept switching back and forth in my opinions of my roommates and the other people who were at Oliphant. Were they all just criminals, wandering around miserably? Should I be scared of them? Or were they just like me—people who were probably more innocent than they thought and who had been forced into a terrible place like Oliphant? I just couldn't tell. I couldn't think enough about any of it without my thoughts furring over.

For the first week, I kind of stumbled around from class to class. If he could, Tobias would help me. He'd motion to a class to point out where I needed to go or he'd eat the excess food on my plate. He had to be sneaky about all of it, but he hardly helped anyway. It was only two or three times in the first couple of days. Roxie, for as nice as she'd pretended to be, was no help whatsoever. Once she got out in the halls, she cared only about herself. She wouldn't even glance in my direction. And Jason, well, he never talked to me at all, which was all right by me because I never had anything to say to him either. All of my roommates minded their own business when they were out of the room, and I could tell that they expected me to mind mine.

When they were in our shared room, though, in the evening, before the school put the wall up, Jason, Tobias, and Roxie would talk about things. They mostly went on about other students and the stupid things the teachers had told them to do that day. None of them took any of the work seriously. Roxie was always complaining about someone or something, and Jason tended to get irritated with her quickly. Tobias constantly broke up arguments between them. I just watched and listened, learning more about them that way. Otherwise, I concentrated on getting the hang of things. For as angry as I was at my inability to recall, at the fact that I was being forced to go to such stupid classes, at the way they called me Nadia or F-13, I was positive that I'd never be able to do anything if I stayed flopping around in the routines like a fish on dry land. I had to get the process down. I needed to know the course. I had to put my brain to work on something, anyway.

One week after I'd woken up, after I'd passed seven days in Hell, Roxie said something strange to me. We were both lying in our beds. The lights were turned out, and we were supposed to be sleeping. As long as we kept our faces to the walls and spoke quietly, no one could tell if we talked to each other, but for the past nights, neither of us had felt like talking anyway.

This night, though, Roxie wanted to get something off her mind. I could tell because of the way she just blurted it out: "I'm going for it, Nadia," she said against the black.

It was so dark I could hardly see the wall in front of my face. Not even the moon was out that night. I'd heard Roxie, but I didn't have any idea what to say.

"Dios mio! I just can't stand this place. The stupid teachers and the stupid therapy. All that educacion fisica, like you'd think they want us to get big and squeeze their necks. Lo estan pidiendo, you know? And the teachers always yelling and us getting written up just for sneezing in class. This place is torture. It's got to be unconstitutional—having us in here. And the way they keep trying to bloat our heads with all the crap we've done wrong . . . No lo soporto! I'm going for it. I've made the decision."

Once again, there was nothing I could say. If Roxie seemed like a nicer person, I might have felt obligated to ask her what she was talking about. But she was nice only when she wanted to be, and so I was going to answer only when I wanted to. If it bothered her, I'd probably feel her wrath somehow. But I didn't care.

"I've just decided. It's going to work out. I'm getting out of here. Now that I've made up my mind, I can get started. No le digas a nadie, me escuchas?"

Now I knew she expected me to answer. But I wasn't going to. Instead, I just made my breathing a little heavier, a bit louder, and she guessed what I wanted her to.

"You asleep, Nadia? Maldita sea, girl. Good. You shouldn't know, anyway."

And with that, she stopped, and I was able to go to sleep for real.