Goodhouse

 

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FOR MY PARENTS

 

CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright Notice

Dedication

Epigraph

PART ONE:
THE MASTER'S HOUSE

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

PART TWO:
THE SAFEST PLACE TO BE

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

PART THREE:
EXPERT CARE

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

PART FOUR:
AMONG THE TRUE BELIEVERS

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Copyright

 

The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.

—Audre Lorde

 

PART ONE

THE MASTER'S HOUSE

 

ONE

The day I committed my first crime I was dressed in civilian clothes—a wool suit and a wide, brightly patterned necktie. Many boys before me had worn these clothes. Goodhouse kept hundreds of donated items at the ready so that its students might feel comfortable going into the world without their uniforms. They wanted us to feel like everybody else, but I'd never seen civilian boys in suits. I flexed against the fabric of my coat. It was too small.

“I'm losing feeling in my hands,” I whispered.

“Stand still,” said Owen. He was my roommate, a stocky kid with black hair and a birthmark on his right cheek that looked like a cluster of freckles. He'd been out on a number of these and I considered him the expert, though today we would be separated. He was headed somewhere alone. He said it was an interview. “Nothing bad will happen as long as you act right,” he said. “Do what you're told and don't make eye contact.”

We were in the gymnasium waiting for permission to board buses and spend an afternoon with a host family in town. In principle, these Community Days were meant to prepare us for our eventual integration into society. I was seventeen and I'd never been inside a civilian home—I'd never eaten in a restaurant, never owned anything that didn't first belong to the school. But soon I would graduate. In a year I'd pick one of the professions available to me and I would step into a wider world. I had to be ready.

“I feel like I'm going to be sick,” I said. “You think I could stay behind if I puked?”

“I'd report you,” Owen said.

I unbuttoned my wool jacket. We all stood at attention, shoulder to shoulder. It was unusually warm for May and the room smelled strongly of sweat and moth repellant. The polished floor was full of colored lines for different games that I'd never played and couldn't name. Originally the gymnasium was part of a series of buildings that made up the Preston School of Industry. It had been founded in Ione, California, in 1894—just under two hundred years ago—and it had been a reformatory for regular boys. The gym was a beautiful remnant. Tall wooden windows lined its longest walls. They were rounded at the top, their uppermost panes of glass splayed like fans.

Over our heads the footsteps of proctors rang on the metal balconies. The proctors left dark silhouettes against the windows as they passed. Only our class leaders actually stood on the floor with us, circulating among us, keeping order. Unlike the proctors, who were forbidden to touch us, class leaders were free to use their fists.

“Just keep your mouth shut,” Owen said, “and look really grateful, no matter what they say. And don't touch anything,” he said. “They hate that, and it's hard to do when they have candy dishes and little glass elephants, and once, this kid had a plastic box full of ants that he said he was farming.”

I stared at Owen. “Farming?” I asked. “For food?”

“Who knows.” He shrugged. “It's always a freak show, and they write detailed reports about you afterward, and staff pays a lot of attention to them.”

I felt a jolt of nervous energy. I still had nightmares about what had happened at my last school. I took thirty milligrams of monofacine every evening. It was supposed to help me sleep, help me forget.

“And don't talk to the women,” Owen said. “Nobody likes that.”

“I wasn't going to,” I said. I pulled off my jacket and plucked at my shirt, trying to circulate some air. Years ago, a Goodhouse boy named Ephram had attacked a civilian girl on a Community Day. He'd been strangled to death by her father. Even I—a recent transfer to Ione—knew the story. “I'm not going to end up like that Ephram kid,” I said.

“Then don't look all sweaty and bug-eyed,” Owen said.

More boys were pulling off their jackets. One student a few yards from where we stood actually fainted in the heat. Some boys cheered and one called him a pussy. Proctors shouted at us to stand still.

“You want to know the real reason they strangled that Ephram kid?” Owen whispered, but I could tell his tone was playful.

“Never mind,” I said. “Forget it.”

“Because he touched their ant farm,” he said.

“Shut up,” I said, and Owen punched my arm to warn me that our class leaders were passing. We both went silent and still.

Class leaders had special uniforms. They wore the same denim pants we did, but their blue button-down shirts were a darker hue and the school crest on the front pocket was embroidered in gold. Headmaster Tanner called these boys his right hand—the hand of correction. At my last school they had been different, more constrained. Here, it seemed, there were no limits.

We had two leaders for our year. The first was named Creighton. He had ruddy skin, white-blond hair, and white eyebrows like albino caterpillars. He wasn't very tall, but he was thick in the chest. No one had been able to depose him. Our second class leader was Davis, a lanky black kid who always had a sweet expression on his face. Owen had nicknamed him Diablo since he was friendly and solicitous, right until he punched you in the gut.

The only way to become a class leader was to beat one of them senseless. But there was always the danger that you would fail and end up like Lowell, who was currently mopping the floor of the gymnasium, running into boys as if he didn't see them. There was a small but important dent in Lowell's forehead, and he often sang to himself—his voice flat and meandering, like he was speaking a different language.

*   *   *

I'd been at this school since January, but I'd been in the Goodhouse system since I was three years old. The first thing they did when you entered the system was change the name you were given at birth. I once believed that I'd recognize my original name, that I'd know when another boy was called by it—that it would sound some bell inside me, trigger some alarm. The school had called me James after St. James the Greater, an apostle who'd found God around the time he was run through with a sword. They'd said it was a name to grow into.

Goodhouse had come out of an idea—a program meant to map the genetic profile of prison populations. What the researchers had found was this: The worst inmates, the most impulsive, the most violent, the least empathetic, all shared certain biometric markers. But these were prisoners. They cost the state millions of dollars to warehouse every year. And they'd been children once. They had not always been beyond help. It was too late for adults, but young boys were different. They could be molded, instructed, taught. If intervention occurred at an early age, they could be salvaged.

And so, for the past four decades in America, genetic testing had been mandatory for the family of anyone who committed a violent felony. More and more people were being tested each year. More and more families were brought to the courthouse for a cheek swab—to be released if they were normal, to be registered if they were outside the age limit, to be immediately surrendered if they were positive and male and under the age of six. That had been me.

I understood that I was part of a lucky percentile—the ones who were given a new life, the ones who could be remade from the inside out. And so I'd grown up reading only Goodhouse-approved books, practicing Goodhouse-approved meditations. I'd watched endless instructional videos showing us the lives we could potentially lead—orderly, right-thinking lives. Imagine busy, happy citizens taking great joy in painting houses, cleaning windows, installing water reclamation systems. “The wrong-thinking boy will seek to take advantage of your better self,” the videos told us. “Vigilance is the only defense.” Goodhouse encouraged us to think of ourselves as two people in one body. One person was fine and ordinary, while the other was filled with bad impulses. “Always question your motives,” the school taught us. “Double-check an impulse. Know which boy you are talking to.”

Owen said that Goodhouse treated all its students like budding schizophrenics. And though we joked about it, I was sincerely worried that I'd never experienced this duality. I knew myself to be only one person—and how good or how evil this person was, I didn't really know.

*   *   *

Overhead, the speakers crackled and Headmaster Robert Tanner walked out onto one of the balconies. He stopped in front of the safety railing and frowned at us. The microphone in his collar activated and I heard the faint suck of his breath. He wore his customary black suit. His skin was prematurely wrinkled, as if his body were sheathed in crumpled brown paper bags. His entourage stood behind him, his secretary and his personal security guard.

Tanner looked grim. His hair was graying at the temples, and it seemed to have worsened overnight.

“Good morning,” he said, his voice booming around us. The proctors stopped pacing. The whispering subsided.

“We find ourselves on the threshold of yet another Community Day,” he said. “I don't have to remind you that it is a great honor to represent the school—to act as ambassadors, if you will. Please remember that these families are the building blocks of a society that has nurtured you—fed, clothed, and educated you with its tax dollars. You will greet them with humility and gratitude. They are your champions, and I expect every boy here to make us proud. That said”—he cleared his throat, a growling bark that was worse for the amplification—“some of you will be staying behind.”

I felt a surge of hope. As curious as I was about regular people, I didn't want to go to their houses and be their guest. I'd been having nightmares all week and I was seeing things again—just little flashes of red out of the corner of my eye, or else I'd glimpse a friend from my old school standing in a group of boys. Then, when I looked again, he'd be gone. Sometimes I smelled phantom smoke, but the worst was the breath on the back of my neck, like someone was standing only an inch behind me, lingering until I was weak with fear, afraid to move, afraid it was the man I'd seen, the one with white hair, the one who'd taken off his mask. Not a mask. A balaclava
.
That's what the police had called it. The word had been previously unknown to me, but now it stayed in my head. It conjured images of boys with blazing bodies and always—always—this man with his composed, almost bored expression. He was a civilian. He was one of them.