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eating something you were allergic to. The only time I had to be cautious about it was in confined spaces with no network access. In other words, on planes. I slipped in the earbuds and turned up the volume.
    A few minutes later Hershey flung off her seat belt and stood up. “I have to pee,” she announced, dropping her tablet on my lap and stepping over me into the aisle. As soon as she was gone, I yanked out my earbuds and pulled the envelope from my bag. Careful not to rip the paper, I slid my nail under the flap and gently tugged it open.
    The card inside was made of soft cotton paper, the kind they didn’t make anymore. My brain registered the number of handwritten lines before my heart did, and when my heart caught up, it sunk. There were only three.
     
    I formed them free, and free they must remain
    Till they enthrall themselves;
    I else must change their nature.
     
    I turned the card over, but the other side was blank. So much for answering my questions. This had raised a hundred more.
    “What’s that?” Hershey was back. I hadn’t seen her walk up.
    “Nothing,” I said quickly, and tried to slip the card back into my bag. But Hershey snatched it. Her eyes skimmed over the words. “Weird,” she declared, handing it back to me as she settled into her seat. “What’s it a quote from?”
    “I dunno. It’s from my mom.” As soon as I said it, I regretted it. I did not want to talk about my mom with Hershey.
    “Did it come with a note?”
    I shook my head. This was the note. Instinctively, I reached for the pendant around my neck. It was surprisingly heavy on my collarbone.
    I saw Hershey open her browser to GoSearch. “Read it to me again,” she said.
    “‘I formed them free, and free they must remain—’” I said, and paused, puzzling over the words I’d just read as Hershey typed them. Who formed who free? “‘Till they enthrall them—’”
    Hershey interrupted me. “It’s from Paradise Lost ,” she said. “Book Three, lines one twenty-four to one twenty-six.”
    “Is that a play?” I’d heard of Paradise Lost but knew nothing about it.
    “A poem,” Hershey replied. “A super long and super boring poem published in 1667.” Her eyes skimmed the text on her screen. “Oh my god, shoot me now. Is this even English?”
    “Who wrote it?”
    “John Milton,” she said, tapping the thumbnail of his photo to enlarge it. She zoomed in on his eyelids. “A man in desperate need of blepharoplasty.”
    Hershey clicked back to her magazines, bored already. I pulled up the Panopticon entry for Paradise Lost on my own tablet and began to read. The poem, considered one of the greatest literary works in the English language, retells the Biblical story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. I tapped a link for a full text version of the poem and my eyes glazed over almost as quickly as Hershey’s had. None of the books we’d read in class were anything like this. Public school curriculum focused on contemporary lit, novels that had been written in the last twenty years. Was this the kind of stuff they read at Theden? Panic fluttered behind my ribs. What if I couldn’t keep up?
    I closed my eyes and leaned back against the headrest. Please, God, don’t let me fail, I said silently.
    You won’t fail.
    My head jerked. I hadn’t heard the Doubt since the summer before seventh grade. I remembered the effect it’d had on me back then, the peaceful feeling that settled over me after it spoke. This was the opposite experience. I was rattled and unsettled and all those other words that mean not at all okay. The Doubt was for unstable people and artists and little kids. Not, as the application packet had made explicitly clear, for Theden students. The psychologist who’d conducted my psych eval asked at least three times when I’d last heard the voice, relenting only when she was satisfied that it’d been more than three years. If the members of the admissions committee knew what