“I know, Mom, you don’t have to make a speech.” Asa looked down at his sneakers.
“Let your mother say what she wants to say,” Isaac cut in. “We’re both so proud of you, Asa.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
His parents exchanged a glance. “You’ll understand when you have children,” his mother said and handed him the box.
“Thanks,” Asa muttered, gauging its weight in his hand.
His parents’ cloying affection, for him and for each other, was stifling. He turned away and opened the box. Inside was what he knew he would find: a phone with a lightweight silver-colored casing and his name inscribed on the back.
He touched the button at the top. The screen lit up. He had seen at least a dozen others go through the process, so he quickly obeyed the instructions as they appeared onscreen, holding the device up so it could scan his face and confirm his identity. When he had provided enough confirmation that he was, in fact, Asa Isaac Rosewood, the screen went black for a moment, then lit up with a familiar face.
“Happy birthday, Asa,” said the Chancellor. He smiled warmly, little wrinkles appearing at the corners of his striking blue eyes.
Asa smiled back in spite of himself. It’s just a recording, he reminded himself. He can’t see you.
“I am so pleased to welcome you into adult society,” the Chancellor continued. “May you find contentment and be fulfilled. And remember to be careful of bridges, Asa!” He winked, and then he vanished, the screen abruptly black again.
Asa started. It might have been only a recording, but it had been recorded specially for him. The Chancellor knew each citizen—perhaps not well, but he knew a little about them all, enough to record a personal twenty-first birthday message for every single one.
“What did he say? I didn’t hear,” Hannah said, pushing up against Asa’s shoulder.
Asa put the phone carefully in the pocket of his jeans. “He said, ‘Be careful of bridges.’”
Hannah laughed. “He really does know you!”
“I guess so.” Asa smiled to himself.
Bridges were the obvious thing. When he was ten, he had attempted to climb the one spanning the South River, and he had failed. He fell into twenty feet of water and was completely submerged, even his head going under. He had managed to struggle out, somehow, as a few friends watched in horror from above. One ran for a grown-up as Asa lay gasping for breath on the bank; no one dared to go near him. The old doctor, Levi, sped up in one of the town’s cars, leaping out almost before he had come to a stop. As he bent over Asa, there was no spark of hope in his brown eyes.
“Did you go all the way under, son?” he asked gently, and Asa nodded, pushing himself up to a sitting position.
He coughed and spat out water, then looked up at the doctor’s grim face. “Am I going to die?”
Levi didn’t answer. The doctor had Asa take off all his clothes and sealed them in a case. He sprayed Asa down with a substance that burned his skin, and another that made it numb, then gave him a worn blue robe to put on. Levi drove him home in silence.
When Asa’s mother came to the door, Levi said, “Asa, go to your room.”
Sarah’s eyes widened. “Where are his clothes? What’s wrong with his skin?”
“Is Isaac here?” was the last thing Asa heard clearly before closing his bedroom door.
He could have held it open a crack and listened, but he didn’t need to. Kids knew as well as grown-ups what happened when you fell in the water.
It was an amoeba, but people called it the Bug. It got in through your mouth or your nose and crawled up in your brain, and you were dead from fever and madness within ten days. Some people didn’t even make it to three. There was no vaccine against it and no cure. And while there were always stories of someone who had survived, somebody who had fallen into a lake that had killed dozens yet managed to come out unscathed, those were only rumors of rumors. Someone knew someone two communities over who had heard it from someone else. Those stories were just legends.
Asa sat on his bed and looked out the window, pressing his forehead against the glass. The back garden was outside, lush and blooming with vegetables and fruit, but all he could see was the dirt.
I don’t want to die. He couldn’t even cry.
Asa didn’t leave his room after that. He heard people coming and going, heard sobs and whispered conversations in the living room, but he just leaned out the open window, breathing the air because it was his last chance.
Two days passed, then three, then four, and he had not yet run a fever. Levi came every day. He was the only person Asa saw besides his mother and father. Levi took vital signs and asked him questions, simple math problems and simpler questions still: How old was he? What was his sister’s name?
He’s trying to see if the Bug’s got my brain yet, Asa thought, but he just answered the doctor’s questions, then went back to the window. He memorized all the trees and their branches, all the plants in the garden. He noticed when new flowers appeared in the field or when rabbits had been eating the tops of the carrots. Six more days passed, and the whispers turned heated.
“No one … ten days …”
“Possible? …” His mother’s voice rose above the rest.
“Stories … legends …” said the doctor.
Twenty-five more days passed; the tomatoes grew overripe. His mother was neglecting the garden. Then one morning, his father came into his bedroom.
“Get dressed, Asa,” he said with uncharacteristic gruffness. “You’re going back to school.”
And that was how Asa became a legend.
“Asa!” called his Aunt Ruth, just arriving with some freshly baked bread, and he sighed, turned, and smiled, bracing himself for the rest of the party.
People came and went. Asa lost track of who had or hadn’t stopped by. His father’s two brothers showed up as the sun was setting, brandishing a fiddle and concertina, and began to play without prompting. Zeke produced a harmonica from his pocket and joined in as Seth grabbed his beloved Julia’s hand. Two of her friends pounced on Noah and Eli, dragging them out to dance.
It grew dark and the lamps came on, lighting up the square with a gentle glow. Asa looked up at the sky; the stars were dulled a little by the artificial light, but they were still strewn thick across the sky, ancient and enormous. Asa shivered. For an instant, the fiddle sounded thin, the square was tiny, the people fragile.
Suddenly, the drones scattered around the square all began to hum. Conversation halted, and the music stopped, the fiddle cutting off a second late with a high-pitched squeak. The drones swarmed toward the white wall at the center of the square and circled above it. Most of the people followed, gathering around as two drones dropped and positioned themselves on either side of the blank wall. Asa lagged behind a little.
The drones’ humming stopped abruptly. Both sides of the wall lit up with the same projected image of the Chancellor. Eli caught up to Asa and elbowed him.
“Hey, turn on your phone,” he whispered. “Let’s watch on it!”
“It’s bigger on the wall,” Asa objected, but he turned the phone on and held it out to Eli as the Chancellor began to speak.
“Good evening, everyone,” he said with a smile, spreading his arms in a gesture of welcome. He was in his office tonight, as he often was, but he was standing, leaning back casually against his desk.