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hollow-cheeked kids trudging into the school, keeping mydistance from the Followers. When I reached the cement stairs, I saw that someone had tagged them in white spray paint. One word on each step.
    W HICH
    SIDE
    W ILL
    YOU
    CHOOSE?
    My head pounded as I climbed past the question.
    I was heading through the door when a girl with long black hair veered in front of me, knocking me aside and sloshing half of her to-go cup of coffee onto my turtleneck.
    “Hey! Watch it!” I stood there with my arms spread, dripping.
    The girl stopped and turned slowly to face me. A line from some kid’s show I used to watch played through my head. One of these things is not like the others …
    The girl didn’t fit. Where nearly everyone else here looked like they’d been through a war, this girl seemed to think she was in line at a nightclub. She wore a tight black dress and tall black boots. Her lips were painted a shade of red that made me think of stop signs. I didn’t remember ever seeing her at school before the quake, and she was the kind of person you remembered. If she wasn’t registered at Skyline, she wouldn’t be eligible for aid. Maybe she thought she could seduce some food off the aid workers. The way she looked, it would probably work.
    I glanced around and saw the crowd had thinned. Now it was just me and the girl in black.
    “You could say you’re sorry,” I told her when she only stood there, saying nothing. The smell of her coffee soaking into my turtleneck made me salivate. I hadn’t tasted coffee in weeks.
    “Sorry,” the girl said perfunctorily, staring straight into my eyes in a way that was too direct; smiling the way people smiled when they had a secret they couldn’t wait to tell. “I didn’t see you,” she added. “What a klutz, huh?”
    She didn’t seem like a klutz. She seemed like the kind of person who could walk on ice in her spike-heeled boots and never slip.
    “Which side will you choose?” she asked.
    “Huh?”
    “The question on the steps. Which side will you choose?”
    “What are my options?”
    “Us,” she said, putting a hand to her chest. “Or them.” She nodded at the Follower still talking to the boy near the flagpole.
    “How about neither.”
    She laughed. “But you haven’t even heard my sales pitch. It’s a good one. I think you’ll like it.”
    The second bell warbled then. Perfect. I was officially late for my first day back at school. The girl in black better hope that didn’t disqualify me from getting what I came for.
    “Not interested,” I told the girl. Her mysterious smile dropped, and she opened her mouth to say something else, but I didn’t give her the chance. I weaved around her and into the school.
    And stopped.
    My mouth fell open. I heard a sound in my throat like air leaking from a punctured tire.
    The whole length of the entryway, about thirty feet, was completely wallpapered in photographs and flyers from floor to ceiling, and the tile along one side of the floor was littered with bouquets and stray flowers. The air was heavy with their mingled perfumes. I resisted the urge to cover my nose and mouth like I’d caught a whiff of garbage. The whole place reeked of funeral.
    I stepped to one wall and examined a collage of photographs. Faces. So many faces. Adults. Children. Elderly men and women. Babies. Dogs. Cats. And captions, most of them handwritten on scraps of paper, pinned beneath the photos.
    We miss you so much .
    I will love you always .
    We’ll never forget you .
    I know you’re in a better place .
    There were poems, and longer notes, and obituaries, and I felt my eyes burning.
    “This wall is for the dead.”
    I jerked in surprise. I hadn’t noticed the girl in black come up beside me.
    I blinked the tears out of my eyes before looking at her. “Yeah, I figured that out.”
    She turned around and faced the opposite wall. Her sharp heel speared a white rose petal. “That wall is for the missing, people who disappeared after the