"You still talking to us, Natalie Anne? 'Cause you know we stopped listening about two hundred miles back." I look past her, out the window, and she sighs. Again.

Hopper grunts, pulling the strings of his sweatshirt even tighter. Only in this conversation is Hopper suddenly Maynard Hopper Wilson, and me Wren Lola Lafayette. Natalie Anne Rutledge never calls a person by just one name. She's called us plenty of other names, Hopper and me, but none of them are worth repeating. Hopper because he's Hopper, poor as church dirt and dumb enough not to care. Me because all I got is a name, and that's the most part of what you need to know about my no-good Breather parents, according to my Grandma Hoban. She's not one for what she calls "reachin'." Especially not when it comes to a stray like me, left behind on her doorstep seventeen years ago. Might as well be an empty bottle of O-Pos, from way back when the bloodmobile still came around.

She didn't want me to go visiting colleges in the first place, not up North. "Bloom where you're planted. That's what my momma used to say." Her momma also used to say things like "A woman's work is not to work" and "Get U.S. out of the U.N.," but I didn't think pointing that out was going to change my Grandma Hoban's mind anytime soon. So I did what any college-bound, twelfth-grade Drinker would do. Lied to the teacher. Forged my grandma's name on my papers. Went out the back screen door while she was watching her shows and got on the bus with the rest of my class from Just Keep On Drivin', There Ain't Nothin' to Look At 'Round Here High School. That's what our sign says-at least, the graffiti on our sign by the freeway exit to our craphole little town. The one at the other end of town says no tresspassin will shoot. Tresspassin's the closest thing we have to a name anymore, now that there aren't any Breathers left in town to do things like clean graffiti off the road signs. Nobody comes, nobody goes. We got nothing.

Which means, nothing to eat. Nothing like they got around here.

We did it to ourselves. We wanted Tresspassin to fall off the map; at least, the folks before us did. No matter what kind of Drinker you were-whether you were a Dirt or a Viral-you agreed to that. Breathers barely even knew we existed, except in the movies. They had no idea we weren't all the same, not that it mattered. The less Breathers knew, the better. Soon as we figured out about the Blackouts, that Breathers couldn't recall a thing we'd done to them after we'd done it-well, we just kept doing it. Things were better that way, at first. Better for them, better for us. Now, it's just how things are, and that's powerfully hard to change. Mainstreaming. I hear my Grandma Hoban snort every time Mr. Skrumbett, Tresspassin's principal and mayor and owner of the gas station and, in a way, my college counselor says the word.

Not me. I think of Mainstreaming as living in a supermarket. The answer to my problems, all wrapped up nice in a college sweatshirt, like plastic wrap in the freezer section. Dinner on aisle seventeen, come back tomorrow now, y'all . . .

My stomach rumbles. Hopper answers back, digging his elbow into my side. "Shut up."

But I know he's as hungry as I am, and I guess that's why the school approved this trip in the first place. It's time. Mr. Skrumbett himself let us use the computer center, showed us how to fill out the online Common App, which Hopper calls the Common Slap, since the whole process makes you feel about that low. It's not as easy for us as it is for the Breathers. There isn't much to do in the way of extracurricular activities in Tresspassin, unless you count cow-tipping or maybe cow-sipping. I probably could have learned how to play a sport or something, but there's no other school for us to play against, not within about two hundred miles. Hopper and I looked around on the Breathernet for something you could do with just two people, until we found an actual sport called woodcutting once. They have it at Dartmouth or somewhere. It's where you cut wood with a big saw, one person on each end, like something you'd see in an old cartoon. We may not have woodcutting in Trespassin, but at least we have cartoons.

The SAT, that's a whole other problem. It's made for rich white Breathers, who live in cities and talk right and don't worry about things like Drinker extinction. Some of the kids in my class, Dirts from old families who'd been alive for like, centuries, they did all right. Natalie Anne Rutledge says she was actually in the French Revolution, so she completely nailed that passage in the Reading Comprehension section. I didn't think it was fair, but Hopper pointed out that she'd also had to live with herself for going on two hundred and fifty years, so things had a way of evening out in the wash. The rest of us Virals who hadn't dug our way up out of the grave like the Dirts had, those of us who still had things like growing up to do, we weren't so lucky. At least when it came to standardized testing.

The rest of us were going to have to rely on our grades. I have great grades; Hopper and I worked really hard on our transcripts. We had to make them up based on Wikipedia, which is helpful like that. Once we figured out what an AP was, I put that I'd taken a million of them. My favorite class was AP Human Geography. I still don't know what that means, but the words are really beautiful together. Hopper says it's a map of the human body. I think it means all the human bodies on the map. Either way, as soon as I get into a real school, I'm going to take it just to find out.

The Common Slap hurts. It's like they speak a whole different language, the Admissions Breathers. Normally, I'm okay with Breathers, but I feel sick to my stomach when I think or talk about the Admissions kind. Sort of like how my Grandma Hoban used to sound when she talked about the people who came around collecting taxes. I did the best I could. Mr. Skrumbett says my teacher recommendations are really strong. I couldn't find any good ones on the Breathernet, so I pretended to myself that Atticus Finch was writing it. He's a character from a movie in the old Breather library and everything he says sounds pretty smart, especially when he's talking to his daughter. Sometimes I like to imagine I'm her. I stole my second letter from this other messed-up Breather movie, where an old guy named George Clooney plays some kind of big jerk who flies around the world firing people until he feels so bad he writes a letter to help some other super-annoying girl get a job. I keep a copy of both letters in my backpack, single-spaced, folded up all small inside my wallet where the money's supposed to go. I don't know why, but I sort of like knowing Atticus Clooney and George Finch have my back. That was Hopper's idea, to switch the last names in case anyone besides me had seen the movies. Then he signed them.

I signed Hopper's. All he wrote was M. Hopper Wilson is the smartist kid in the hole school. Respectibly, Lola Lafayette. The way I signed, you couldn't read the signature. Just in case. Seeing as he's not all that smart and I'm not all that respectable.

The essays were harder. Mr. Skrumbett passed around a book that was supposed to help you write them. It wasn't that helpful, though, because the book mostly told you what you weren't supposed to do. Like, you're not supposed to write about the time you scored the winning touchdown in the big game, but I never did that anyway. I didn't even know what kind of game we were talking about, to tell you the truth. I also never had a dog that died, took a trip that changed me, fed the homeless, or built a latrine. Which was sort of sad, because the bad essay examples were still better than anything that ever happened to me. Eventually I gave up and wrote about being the first person in my family to go to college. I didn't tell the truth.

I didn't say it was because most of my family was dead or gone, or at least my Grandma Hoban talked about them same as if they were. That I fell asleep hungry and woke up that way in the morning. That if I didn't get out of Tresspassin soon, folks were going to find Natalie Anne Rutledge lying in her bed with an ax handle whittled to a point and sticking straight up out of her chest. That Hopper and me, we'd been making plans to leave since we were old enough to walk as far as the highway.

This trip, it's the last thing.

Four days.

Four days and twelve universities, and I'm starting to think Grandma Hoban was right. If I can't manage four days, how will I spend four whole years around here? I haven't had a decent night of sleep, or what passes for sleep. Haven't had myself a decent meal. Haven't even talked to one. Mr. Skrumbett says we can't draw attention to ourselves, but I don't know how much longer I can hold out.

In fact, I'm starving.

Now the engine sighs louder than Natalie Anne Rutledge, and the whole bus jerks forward and back. My backpack falls off the seat, and a week's worth of college brochures go sliding and skidding across the floor. UNC and SC State. Tufts and Georgetown and Penn and Penn State-blue skies and fall leaves and a fat-faced, warm-blooded freshman on the front of each one. The bus is still shuddering, bad as if it has some kind of whooping cough, and I don't try to pick them up. Probably going to stall out again, like it has only about three times a day since we left Tresspassin. I look down through the high window I cracked open somewhere between BC and BU-I forget which is which.

Breather schools. They all look the same.

A tour group of chubby children tumbles past, an uneven line centipeding down the brick pavement beneath me. I can smell them baking in the late fall afternoon, sort of like a pie resting and sweating in my Grandma Hoban's kitchen window. My stomach turns over, and now all I can think about is a plate piled high with pudgy-sweet little arms, arms like spaghetti, arms laced with salty veins. My grandma always says my eyes are ten times bigger than my stomach, which makes no sense at all. Right about now I feel like my stomach is ten times bigger than this bus.

"Don't do it. You'll be sorry." Hopper barely angles his head toward me. I can see the spread of blue veins underneath his Hopper-white skin. His voice is a pin in a balloon; it always is. Soon as he starts talking, the spaghetti-arms disappear and the kids become kids again.

"What I won't be is hungry."

"You talk big, but you know you got a bigger heart for Breathers than the rest of us." His voice is quiet, for only me to hear, so I don't punch him. It's an insult, but he doesn't mean it that way.

"You're one to talk, Maynard." He hasn't said anything, but we all know Hop has a problem. He's soft as a boiled egg, which is one reason I keep him around all the time. Somebody has to. I wonder how skinny he actually is these days, under that hood of his. He never takes it off, not even for me.

"Get your eatin' disorder under control, Wrennie. Skrumbett'll kill you himself if you step outta line up here."

"Just thinking about some Tater Tots." I keep my eyes on the youngest stragglers, the strays at the end of the class. Safety in numbers, I think. Catch up. Or don't. I'm hungry.

We lurch to a stop, and I hear Mr. Skrumbett's voice up front. "We're here. Off the bus. Try not to make a scene. You know, blend."

Right.

II.

So there's this statue of a guy sitting in some kind of chair in front of a building where the grass is. He's got a shoe, well two, actually, but only one is shiny and brass-colored. You're supposed to rub it; it gives you some kind of luck. It smells like pee.

"Where do they come up with this garbage? Every school has some old dead Breather statue to rub."

"Shut it, Hopper. Just rub the stupid shoe already."

"I'm not rubbing it. I don't want Breather luck. Good Breather luck is bad Drinker luck. They've been lucky enough already."

He's got a point.

III.

I'm late. I'm lost. I can't read the small print on the campus map. And here's the funny thing-I'm afraid to talk to any of them. Me, Wren Lola Lafayette. Afraid of Breathers.

I'd kill them before I'd talk to them.

That's what I think, anyway. I wonder if Hop would say it was true.

So I walk in the nearest brick building, which looks like Independence Hall from my old history book. I guess I'm in some kind of dorm, which is not where I want to be, but I could be wrong. It's hard to tell. It could be the head janitor's office, for all I know. All the buildings here look equally strange to me.

I knock on the first door inside the hallway. No answer.

I push the handle, and it opens.

The Chinese Breather at the desk doesn't look up from his computer.

"Excuse me, but I'm looking for the Admissions office." No answer. I try again, holding up my campus map.

"Uh, hello? You know someone named . . ."

"No."

I'm not surprised.

My stomach growls and I let the door close in my face.

IV.

"His name is Sherlock. Like the detective."

It takes me a second but I put it together. She's talking about the enormous dog curled on the soft carpet between us. It's the first time the admissions officer has spoken to me, now that her office door has closed behind me. After all this time-the Common Slap and the Wiki transcripts and the Breathernet recommendations-I feel like I have stepped into a boxing ring and the match has begun. Then I try to remember if stepping into the boxing ring was on the list of bad college essay topics, the one Mr. Skrumbett gave us. Banned essay metaphors. Stepping into the ring. Running the race. Going the distance. Leaving the nest. I can't remember.

I give up.

I can't think of anything, not a single thing, to say.

The woman is speaking but I'm not listening. Her lipstick is so red it makes me uncomfortable. I pat the dog's head. He growls. It's not my fault, or his. Breather dogs like Breathers, and this is a Breather dog. Though when he growls, I can't help but notice he'd make a great Drinker dog. His teeth are even bigger than mine.

"Ms. La-fay-ette?"

I look up. Seems like we're not talking about the dog anymore.

"Ma'am?"

"I read your application. You're the first applicant we've ever had from . . ." She squints, looks more closely at the screen in front of her. "Tresspassaunt." She gives the word an extra little twirl, like it was French or something. Tress-pass-aunt. Har-vard Yard. Gyll-en-haal. Fer-arr-i.

"You're a first generation college applicant?"

"Ma'am?" I'm still trying to figure out the right answer to that question when she says it again.

"You're the first person in your family to attend a university?" She speaks more slowly, as if I am deaf, smoothing out the hard words so that I will understand. I understand even less than she realizes.

"Yes, ma'am. Well, my Grandma Hoban says my mom went to beauty school, but I didn't put it down, I wasn't sure that counted." Her look tells me it didn't. "My Bre-my parents left when I was . . . little."

I can't believe I almost said it. My Breather parents left me behind, a baby with a blood-bruise. One little purplish spot inside my elbow and they were good as gone.

"I see." I guess it was the right answer, because now her red lips stretch across her yellow teeth. "What a wonderful opportunity you're giving yourself." She sighs, and I can't help but flash on the face of Natalie Anne Rutledge. I grab the carved mahogany fists of my chair arms to keep from punching her. My hands are shaking, but I don't know if it's from hunger or fear.

What are you doing, Wren Lola Lafayette?

You have to be more careful.

Your whole future-four years of fat-faced undergraduates- depends on this Breather woman.

You could be one of them.

More meals than you can count. More anonymity. More opportunity.

They'll never track you here, and if they do, they'll never be able to do anything. Not at the oldest school in the country. You're right in the heart of Breather territory now. Breathers take care of their own.

"You haven't had any trouble in your area, have you? We've been hearing some of the schools around you have fallen on . . . harder times." She sounded hesitant.

"No, ma'am. Just stories, I guess. I've heard them too." I don't look at her.

"Well. It's the South, right? We'll have to thank Anne Rice for that." She laughs, and I laugh, but I have no idea what we're laughing about or what she's talking about.

I mean, not about the Anne person. The trouble, that I'm pretty clear on.

She seems relieved, and gives the mouse on her computer a few extra clicks. "All right, then. I'll be honest with you." I wish she wouldn't. In my experience, when folks are honest, it's never a good thing. But I nod anyway.

"Like many of our first-generation applicants, your scores aren't the strongest." I hold my breath.

"Though your transcript is amazing." I breathe.

"And your teachers truly seem to care about you, which is a good thing."

"Yes they do, ma'am." I think of Hop's face as he signs the letters. "Thank you, ma'am."

I start to feel better. I let my eyes drift over to the picture of the Charles River behind her desk. Mr. Skrumbett pointed it out when our bus drove over the bridge. I read the caption. I am wondering what a regatta is and what it has to do with all those little boats in the photograph when I hear the break in her voice.

"But . . ."

She pauses, like a cobra about to strike. My heart thumps and almost as if on cue, the boats and the river and her red smile fade away.

"But, I have to say, from your application, I didn't get a good sense of who you are as a person. I felt like you were being less than forthcoming with me."

Who I am is a Drinker. I want to bite your head off at your neck, right above the pearls. . . .

I force my eyes back up to her face. "I don't understand." My voice sounds strange in this dark little room, and I am startled to realize that I am actually here. I must be, because I've imagined this one room so many times, and this isn't at all how I imagined it.

She is still talking, as if I haven't said a word. "You know, who are you? What's your hook?"

"My what?"

"Your hook. The one thing that sets you apart from the thirty thousand other applicants. Musical instrument? Scientific research? Internships? You're not letting us see who you are. What have you been doing all this time, Ms. La-fay-ette, aside from studying? What can you bring to our school community?"

I close my eyes, but it's too late. I know my hook. The memories come, a thousand flashing squares of Breather skin stretch in front of me, a checkerboard of pale, naked necks and wrists and ankles. It is as if I am looking down from the window of a plane, taking in a vast expanse of some kind of sea-to-shining-sea farmland. The sun reflects, glinting from rivers that turn to streams that turn to tiny creeks, though I know they aren't rivers at all, but a web of spreading veins. . . .

"I keep busy."

"Yes. I imagine you do." She clears her throat. "Ms. La-fayette, let me be perfectly clear. On a scale from one to five, which is how we score these interviews, I would have to give you a one. And that would be generous."

I'm not feeling her generosity. I'm too busy feeling like a one. I swallow. "So you're saying . . . ?"

"I'm saying I think you should be prepared to look elsewhere." She stands up, keeping the desk between us. "You, and your kind." She lets her eyes rest on my mouth.

I freeze. My kind?

She knows.

Still, I say nothing, nothing I am thinking. I feel my hands curl up around nothing. "What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means we don't want you here. That's why we have these interviews. I can spot you a mile away. Spot you, screen you. Stop you. People like you." She smiles but there's nothing friendly about it. I don't smile back.

"Like me?"

" . . . It's fallen to us to keep out the wrong sort for hundreds of years before you came along. We've got the general safety of the entire student body to consider. . . ."

That's not the body I'm thinking of at the moment.