After what I'd heard about Henry, my mind wouldn't stay still. I continued trying to blend in and keep to myself, talking only when I had to and looking at people only when they expected me to. In our room, we didn't mention Henry again, and in Dr. Scarpoli's class, I didn't hear anything else of interest from the two sitting behind me. I couldn't stop thinking about him, though. He was the one, Tobias had said, that people tried to escape through. That Mara girl, and others. And something else was in my mind. What Roxie had said that one night, when she'd thought I was sleeping. About getting out. Was it possible that she had been contacted by this Henry person? And what about the man who had been in rectangle head's office? What was his business with Henry? And, more importantly, what had that man known about me?

There was so much I wanted answered, but who could I ever expect to listen to me let alone satisfy my curiosity? There was nothing I could do. At least . . . not yet. Not while I was still trying to navigate my surroundings. Of course, that was getting more boring by the day. I hated Oliphant--the work they gave us and the stupid classes we had to attend. There was still the fact that I couldn't even remember what I'd done to deserve being there, and that bothered me more than anything else. Why was I labeled a criminal when no one could even tell me my crime?

I learned about Roxie. She told me what she'd done to get stuck in Oliphant. At her high school, she'd started up this sort of gang with some other girls. They sold cigarettes and pills she stole from her mother and other neighbors to classmates at games and dances. She swore she never touched the stuff, but getting caught selling them got her thrown in Oliphant. When I asked why the other girls hadn't gotten in so much trouble, Roxie said it was because she'd been the ringleader, and I could picture her that way. She was definitely a leader. No one could tell her what to do. Then there was Tobias, who'd helped rob a convenience store and a guy ended up dying. But Jason . . . well, he wouldn't tell me what he'd done. Not like I asked him; he just never brought up his story the way Tobias and Roxie had willingly spilled theirs. I got this feeling about Jason. I couldn't help sensing that he didn't like me. Not just a little bit of dislike, but a lot. Like he hated me, although I couldn't think of why. Whatever his problem was, he never talked to me. If there was something he wanted me to hear, he talked around me, to Roxie or Tobias, and I got the point.

I could never talk about my own story, though, and after a while, my roommates stopped trying to weed it out of me. They realized I honestly didn't know it.

Something weird happened to me about a month and a half after I'd first woken up at Oliphant. I hadn't been having strange dreams or visions of my past or anything of the sort. Nothing even remotely interesting had been going on in my head to help me remember, and then suddenly, totally out of nowhere, something happened at my Sunday therapy session that freaked me out more than I could've guessed. It actually made me wish I hadn't remembered whatever it was I'd seemed to remember.

I was lying on the brown leather couch in Miss Pinsky-Waters's office. She was our therapist. She was forty-two and had been divorced three times (she'd blabbed about herself a lot more than I had at our sessions), but she still liked to be called a Miss. Whatever. When you're in Oliphant, you don't go against rules. So Miss Pinsky-Waters it was. Anyway, I was on the sofa, even though I didn't feel like lying down. She always wanted us to lie down. Sitting up was for normal classes, she said, and therapy was supposed to be relaxing. I thought our sessions were anything but relaxing--all I ever felt was anxiety and frustration about all the things I couldn't remember. Still, Miss Pinsky-Waters wasn't a mean person. She was the only person there who actually tried to be nice to me, so I didn't want to do anything to upset her. I didn't exactly like her, you know, but I didn't want to give her a reason to dislike me. She was sort of flighty—like, she talked too much too fast sometimes. Her thin, short, wavy blond hair was always frazzled all around her face, always encroaching on her too-wide smile, and for as high-strung as she seemed to be, she seemed to think she was a soothing presence. She'd pat my shoulder and tell me to take deep breaths--stupid stuff like that. I often wondered if maybe she were the one who needed the therapy.

So I was there in her office, waiting for her to stop scribbling the date and my name (I mean, number) in her notepad, eyeing all the obnoxious knick-knacks on her shelves. She had so many weird and yet terribly ugly things: miniature sombreros with little feet so they appeared to be dancing, a snow-globe with an ugly polar bear forever trapped inside, some scorpion in a paperweight with the word Arizona stickered onto it--and those were few of many. She was always going on about some vacation she'd taken with whatever ex and how the food had or hadn't met her expectations. Miss Pinsky-Waters had also told me that I frustrated her more than any other student, because she couldn't break into my mind. I hadn't been able to respond to that, not only because the phrase had sounded awkward to me but also because if anyone broke into my head, it was going to be me. Why should she be able to do it first?

"All right, F-13. What did you say your roommates called you again? Oh wait. Let me see if I can recall . . ." She tapped the end of her pen against her tortoise-shell glasses. She looked like a mouse alert to the sound of the cat returning any moment. "Nadine, isn't that right? No!" she hurried, seeing my expression. "Natalie? Nancy? Natalya . . . Nadia! That's it, now. Isn't it? Nadia." She nodded in satisfaction. "I like to use your given names. It makes things feel more personal, doesn't it? Well, Nadia, let's get started, shall we?"

I wanted to tell her that it wasn't actually my given name. She saw so many of us that she forgot who I was each time I came into the room. It wouldn't take long for her to remember me, though. She always remembered, and then she got exasperated because there was nothing she could talk about with me.

"I want you to just shut your eyes, dear," she said. "No falling asleep, mind you." As I closed the lids of my eyes, I heard her shuffling through my charts, and I felt a sudden urge to jump up, snatch them, and see what they said. A sigh came from her direction, and I could tell she'd just refreshed her memory on my hopeless case. Suddenly, she changed things up, and with an obvious little thrill in her voice, said, "Actually, Nadia, I don't mind if you drift off a bit. I'll get you a blanket, and you get nice and warm. Why don't you try to relax?" She was draping a fleece across me. "You have a lot of hard work here at Oliphant, and I know it's been tougher because you can't remember things. Amnesia is hard to deal with. Believe me, I know. I went through a short period of it after my second husband left. It was self-induced. I think I forced myself to forget things, you know? And you might have done that. Forced yourself to do it. Sometimes things are meant to be forgotten, best if they're forgotten. Like tragedies. You've got to strengthen your mind against invasion, against concern for the past; focusing on the future, on your abilities right now, that might actually benefit you more. I had a friend once, whose daughter . . ."

Miss Pinsky-Waters's voice began to sound very far away. The more she talked, the more I felt as though she were standing on the ground while I was moving up slowly, weightlessly, into the clouds. I was warm and tired and everything felt so . . . soft. I was slipping. Or my mind was, anyway. Nice, dark, peaceful sleep was coming out of nowhere, and I was happy for it. It was a blanket enveloping me, erasing everything from beyond, soothing me with its love, its lack of judgment, its total acceptance. I knew only the warmth and quiet of that blanket for some wonderful, timeless moments, but then something strange happened. I couldn't remember ever dreaming, but before I could tell whether I was actually asleep or not, I found that the darkness around me had changed from that hugging blanket to an all but suffocating atmosphere of blue and black and heavy air. My calm dissolved into the dark; fear replaced it. I didn't want to be there anymore. Everything was colder and my skin prickled. I was so alone—like I had been forever, it seemed—but alone in a different sort of way. Like maybe someone else was there, but I was alone because that other thing wasn't on my side. It was watching me from somewhere, even though I couldn't see it, and I kept trying to narrow my eyes so I could cut through the darkness. There was a film blurring my vision so everything around me was a mass of milky shadow with patches of lighter blue teasing me into thinking my sight was getting clearer. And I knew something was there. I could feel it. I could almost hear it breathing. I couldn't tell what or who it was but I'd never felt so afraid. Something flashed metallic to my right. I spun but saw nothing. A sound started. A low whooshing, like a fan with heavy blades spinning . . . spinning . . . spinning. It was far away but still too close. I was so lost. I was in the wrong parts of a maze and whatever had been after me for all the while was now here, and there was nothing I could do. I didn't know where to go. My heart was beating faster but slowing at the same time and then . . . low and hoarse . . . words touched the rim of my left ear. When you wake up tomorrow . . .

"Get up!" shouted a very real voice right in front of my face.

I was jerked awake to find myself looking directly at Miss Pinsky-Waters. She was shaking me hard; her long fingers dug into my shoulders. For a second I choked on what I guessed was going to be a scream, but I managed to contain myself. Once my eyes were open and I had pretty much remembered where I was, Miss Pinsky-Waters, pale and with one hand clutching her clipboard against her chest as if in self-defense, fell back against her chair in relief.

"Oh thank God, Nadine! I thought you were gone for a moment!"

"Gone where?" I gasped, sitting up, still reeling from my dream. "Where could I have gone?"

"Somewhere scary."

The two of us sat across from one another, our confused, frightened faces mirror images. Then Miss Pinsky-Waters lowered her clipboard and scribbled something on it, much to my irritation. "You're just so fragile," she said, voice wavering. "I'm not sure these sessions are good for you. We'll end early today."

For once, I didn't want to end early. I wanted to try to figure out what had happened--wasn't that her job? To talk things out with me? But Pinsky-Waters was done. I couldn't change her mind, and she called my unit supervisor to come get me.

By the time I'd been pulled back to my room I was pretty sure Ms. Benjamin was blaming me for what had happened. She yelled at me the whole way back to the room, clinging to my wrist with her vice grip and jerking me around the corners. My head was swimming with the feelings and words from my hazy dream, so I was too preoccupied to resist Ms. Benjamin. I tried to remember what Miss Pinsky-Waters had been saying to me, or even if she'd been saying anything at all, when I'd drifted off, but I couldn't. I knew only the darkness and the fear . . . the fan and the words: When you wake up tomorrow . . .

Where had they come from? The more I wondered, the more I realized it probably hadn't been a dream at all. No, it had felt different. Raw, familiar. It'd been real, the flash of light, the terror, and if they had anything to do with my past, then I wasn't sure I wanted to know more about it.

Ms. Benjamin called Roxie out for her therapy session, so I was alone in our room. I went to my bed and sat down. I wasn't thinking about the boys on the other side of the wall. On Sundays, the wall cut our room in half all day. Roxie and I saw Tobias and Jason only during the weekdays for a short time, usually between lunch and dinner; it was a weird schedule, but it had something to do with necessary social stimulation (or so I'd been told). So which of the two boys might have been over there or what they might have been doing wasn't really on my radar. Stretching out on my bed, I stared at the ceiling; I didn't dare close my eyes. Not while whatever I'd just remembered might still be haunting my mind. A part of me knew that I should be trying to remember, to re-enter that darkness. And maybe I would have, eventually, after the worry dulled, except that something unexpected monopolized my attention.

From the corner of my eye, I suddenly saw a white square of paper shoot across the floor. For a minute, I just stared at the thing, my mind not quite registering what it was. Then it clicked: one of the guys had slipped it under the wall. There was about a quarter-inch of space between the bottom and top half of the dividing wall. I'd realized it was there because once Roxie had slipped some Kleenex to Tobias through it. It was nothing big; you couldn't look through it or talk through it, but it was wide enough to put a piece of paper through. I figured it was probably for Roxie—that they hadn't realized she'd left yet. But then my eyes took in the big bold print on the front of it, and it didn't say ROXIE. It spelled something nobody besides rectangle head had called me since the first day I'd woken up. Something I'd come to hate more than anything: NO NAME.

My stomach turned at the sight of it. I slid off my bed onto the floor. Kneeling down, I picked up the paper and unfolded the square as if it were a dirty tissue. The note was no bigger than three inches, and across it in purposely sloppy handwriting was a message which read,

I know what you've done. You're a killer. You'd better watch your back.

At first, I honestly didn't know what to think. Only Tobias or Jason could've written it, and while I hadn't thought either particularly liked me, I was taken aback at one of them actually threatening me.

Something told me it was Jason who had written it. Tobias was far too congenial, and Jason was weird; he was just the sort to do something bizarre like write me an anonymous hate note knowing that it wouldn't really be anonymous. But I was still shocked. I wasn't bothered that he'd told me to watch my back--that was an empty threat in this place. What got me was his accusation that I was a killer, that he knew what I was when I didn't even know what I was. And yet, could I actually trust that he might know something about me? No, I doubted it. He was so weird . . . he was probably just trying to mess with me.

It's what I told myself, anyway, because there was no way I'd actually killed anyone. Even so, as I went to throw the scrap away in the bathroom, I couldn't deny the seed of fear that had been planted in my gut.

The next afternoon, right before dinner, they raised the wall and we had a few hours together so we could socialize. I made sure to fake sleep when the wall went up, although I didn't have to; Jason wasn't there.

Tobias was working on a paper, and Roxie was practicing some sort of basketball positions. Her shoes squeaked on the floor. She'd been exercising a lot recently, I'd noticed. As long as Jason wasn't there, I had no reason to sleep, so I stretched my arms and sat up. Neither of my roommates took notice of me. Both were too busy doing their own thing. I didn't have homework, and I definitely didn't feel like running around the room doing stops and jumps. There was hardly enough space for Roxie to do that by herself. So I just sat on my bed, watching Roxie's ponytail swat around her head and her cheeks turn pink with her efforts. My eyes went over to Tobias, who was working hard on his paper. He was so absorbed in it, sitting cross-legged on his bed with a textbook and notebook in his lap and a pencil in his hand (at Oliphant, we weren't allowed near computers). He was reading and tapping the pencil against the lenses of his glasses. It definitely couldn't have been him who'd written the note.

"What're you looking at?" puffed Roxie, glancing at me out of the corners of her eyes as she jogged in place.

I shrugged. I wasn't really looking at much of anything. That was the truth.

Roxie huffed in exhaustion, stopped moving, and collapsed onto her bed, where she wiped the sweat off her forehead. "Nina, that is a serious workout. You should try it. You might need to get in shape."

"Why would I?" I asked dully.

She just widened her eyes and smiled like it was some little secret, but I didn't pay her much attention. Then I found myself emboldened, and I said to Roxie, "Do you know why Jason's in here? I mean . . . I know about you and Tobias, and you know there's nothing I can tell about me. But what about him? He's never said anything."

Roxie sat up. She recognized that it was unlike me to ask questions about them. She narrowed her eyes like she was trying to think of whether it would be a good idea to tell me and then went ahead and talked anyway, keeping her voice low so Tobias wouldn't really listen. "Jason es raro. I don't know a lot about him either, to be honest. He won't talk about himself, but Tobes said that Jason was involved in a fight. Nearly killed a guy, he beat him up so bad."

"If he's violent, why is he in here with us?"

"I don't know. Tobes said he thought Jason had reason to go after the kid. Like, he didn't just do it for nothing. He did it in defense, maybe. I don't know." She turned away and got back on her feet, starting into a round of jumping jacks.

I wondered. If someone had swung back in an act of self defense, he wouldn't be at Oliphant. Self defense isn't a crime. So I doubted that was Jason's story. Something else had to have happened. What that was, I couldn't begin to guess, but if Jason had beaten someone as badly as Roxie had implied, then maybe I should be a little more worried about his threat. I doubted he actually knew anything about me, but for whatever reason, he didn't like me, and his note just added to my million anxieties. First my therapy session, and then the note . . . things were happening in and around me and yet I felt I couldn't quite understand them. Nothing made sense, and nobody was on my side.