The Darkest Minds

“I remember watching the drops trace frantic paths down the length of the school bus window. If I had been at home, inside one of my parents’ cars, I would have followed the drops’ swerving routes across the cold glass with my fingertips. Now, my hands were tied together behind my back, and the men in the black uniforms had packed four of us to a seat.”

This passage describes Ruby’s thought process as she is taken to Thurmond when she is 10 years old. Bracken describes Ruby’s memory of the raindrops in order to set up a contrast between where Ruby is (with her hands tied behind her, on a school bus full of other kids, headed to an unknown destination) with where she wishes she were (with her loving parents at home). The imagery here also mirrors Ruby’s emotions. The raindrops' paths are “frantic,” suggesting how Ruby is reacting to being restrained for reasons she doesn’t understand, and the rain itself creates a sad, hopeless mood.

“I felt a fire start at the ends of my hair and burn its way through my skull. The fever I thought I had kicked suddenly painted the world a fuzzy shade of gray. I was seeing Sam’s blank face, and she was gone, replaced by white-hot memories that didn’t belong to me—a whiteboard at school filled with math problems, a golden retriever digging in a garden, the world rising and falling from the perspective of a swing, the roots of the vegetables in the Garden being pulled free, the brick wall at the back of the Mess Hall against my face as another fist swung down towards me—a quick assault from every side, like a series of camera flashes.”

Here, Ruby describes what the experience of accidentally erasing Sam’s memories appears like from her vantage point. When this occurs, Ruby and Sam have fought, and Ruby is trying to make her friend understand her. This moment is meant to be disorienting to Ruby, as she realizes her powers are out of her control, and it will ultimately mean she has lost her only friendship. Bracken uses sensory language here, taking the reader through a fast, jarring series of evocative visual images that suggest that Ruby is seeing random glimpses of Sam’s memories from different times in her life.