Goodhouse (19 page)

“Is this a good idea?” I asked.

“We'll be more careful,” she said.

She pulled me down to kiss her, and I resisted, planting my hands on the table. “I don't want anything to happen,” I said.

She moved forward, lifted herself up slightly until her lips just grazed mine. “Too late,” she said. And this time I was cautious. I was more in control. “You're supposed to open your mouth,” she said. “I mean, not right away, but like on the third kiss.”

“Third kiss,” I repeated.

“Like this,” she said. “I'll show you. But you can't do the slobber thing. Girls hate that.”

She tasted like mint, as if she'd recently brushed her teeth, and her face was incredibly soft. “Better,” she said. “Much better.” She made little sighing noises, and I pressed closer until her legs tightened around me.

We never did eat the food. Somehow we ended up crawling onto the chilly stainless-steel countertop, leaving vanishing handprints on its surface. Bethany pushed me away long enough to tug her shirt over her head. Her bra had tiny flowers stitched on top. And then she had unsnapped it. Soon I was aware only of her. Time slowed and stopped. It became an endless drugging now. I felt that being with her, pressing into her, I was somehow closer to being a real person.

*   *   *

At some point Bethany took my face between her hands and pulled us apart. “James,” she said. It took a moment for my eyes to focus. “James, you there?”

“Think so,” I said.

“I only checked you out until four,” she said. “I don't mean to make you sound like a library book, but we have to get you back on the shelf soon.” I was lying beside her. My brain was so quiet it barely registered these words. I ran a hand over her shoulder, the scar on her chest, the slight mounds of her breasts.

I felt strangely incautious. That was something they didn't tell you. Because, of course, they told us about sex, about the types of women to avoid, about the basics of it all. But for a moment I didn't care about the chip in my belly, or her father, the Zeros, the bleak tomorrow. This was trouble. This was power.

“James,” she said again, “focus.” And we both sat up, tugging at our clothes.

“You know, they're going to cook our breakfast on this table,” I said, and for some reason this struck us both as hilarious. I slid off and started to back away.

“Don't go that far,” she said. “We have to say goodbye.” And then we were back where we started, on top of the table. I started to press down on her again, but she stopped me.

“Right,” I said. “Sorry.”

“It's the ticker,” she said. “I didn't cook up right when I was a baby.”

“Me neither,” I said.

“What's wrong with you?” She looked so concerned that I almost laughed. “Oh, right,” she said. “But genetic markers aren't really a deformity.”

“Aren't they?”

“They're going to learn how to turn certain genes off and on soon. I really think so. It's the next step for epigenetics, and then it won't matter what you're born with. They'll just give you some cellular software and make you like new. Some of the problematic genes, most of the ones you have, scientists can already turn them off, or they think they can. They did some experiment on cows, but there was a problem. The cows lost the will to eat.”

I stared at her. “You read my file,” I said.

She froze. “I didn't say that.”

“If you know what markers I have, then you read my file. Of course you did.”

“I meant markers in general,” she said. But she wouldn't meet my gaze and I just waited, letting the silence call attention to her lie.

“What happened to me on the night of Community Day?”

“You got in a fight,” she said.

“That's what my record says. But you know I'm not guilty.” I paused. “Otherwise you wouldn't agree to meet me, right?”

“Well, you're guilty of theft,” she said. “And I still met with you. And anyway, it's not really assault if you fight a class leader and win, so why is it assault when you lose?”

“It wasn't class leaders,” I said. “It was Mule Creek inmates.”

She pushed at my shoulders. “Let me up,” she said. I got to my feet. I backed away from the table. She seemed suddenly nervous.

“Look it up,” I said. “I was off campus in a building in the Exclusion Zone.”

“That's impossible.”

“I'll give you a clue,” I said. “It's not just a leafy mound they forgot to clear. It's an old basement, and they still use it.”

She pulled on her shirt, taking a little longer than necessary to straighten the fabric. She looked perplexed, but also wary, and I was suddenly afraid that this would be like the hearing. My history would discredit me. “There's something else,” I said. “I have an appointment with your father tomorrow.”

“An appointment? What do you mean?” She looked alarmed. “Get out of it.”

“Civilians
get out of
things,” I said. “We don't.”

“James,” she said, “find a way.”

“He's a Zero,” I said.

“He's a scientist,” she said. “It's so much worse.”

“This isn't a joke,” I said. “I saw him at the La Pine attack. He was there. He killed people.”

Bethany shook her head. “Think about what you're saying,” she said. “You might think you saw him—”

“Don't.” I cut her off. “Don't disbelieve me.”

“Look,” she said. “I read his email. I read his diary. I'm practically his biographer. I would know.”

“You have access to everything?” I asked.

“It's a point of pride,” she said.

“Then find out what's going on,” I said. We were running out of time, and there was something else I needed to know, something I was almost afraid to ask. “Bethany,” I said, “what's my name?”

“I didn't see your last name. I don't think they even keep that information.”

“I want the name my parents gave me,” I said. “Please.”

She fiddled with the metal zipper on her jacket, meshing the teeth together and then pulling them apart. “It's James,” she said finally. “The school didn't change it.”

“No,” I said. “They did. They named me for some deathbed conversion.”

“Maybe,” she said. “But your name was James at intake. It's definitely rare, but it happens.”

I paused, absorbing the information. “It's my real name?” I asked.

I'd been hoping for some revelation, some secret other person—something to hold on to; something bestowed by my family. Instead, I felt cheated, as if the school had taken even this, even my name. I thought of the thousands of Goodhouse boys who had passed through the system over the past fifty years—all of them possessed of a second identity, a true and original self that was beyond the boundaries of what the school could control. And I didn't even have that.

“What else did you read?” I asked.

“You were born in Idaho,” she said, “near Porthill, at the northern tip of the state.” I waited, hoping for recognition, for some pang of memory, but there was none.

“My race?”

“Your mother was white and your father was mixed.”

“Mixed what?” I said. This was an adjective that would apply to almost anyone at Goodhouse. We were, most of us, an assortment of races and ethnicities. Even so, the word had a certain power. “What else did the file say?”

“That's everything,” she said. She checked her watch. “We're out of time. When do you want to meet again?”

“I don't know,” I said. I kept thinking the words
mixed
,
all mixed
,
very mixed
. I looked at my arm. I was a toasty brown color wherever the sun touched me, but under my shirt I was pale.

“James,” she whispered, “did I do the right thing?”

*   *   *

I tried to return the way I came, but there was a proctor standing in the shadow of Schoolhouse 2. He was talking into his handheld and saying, “Sure, sure.” I waited a minute or so for him to finish, and then I couldn't wait any longer. I took the fastest route back, dashing along the fence that bordered the Exclusion Zone. The floodlights trained on Mule Creek left plenty of light to spill over onto me. I felt overexposed, and my drugged complacency of only a few minutes earlier was gone.

I rounded the corner to the dormitories and saw a T-4 parked a few buildings away, almost directly in front of my own. One of the proctors was asleep in the passenger seat, and the driver was reading a magazine. I stepped back into the shadows, pressing against the nearest wall. I was being careless. It was only luck that had the proctors looking the other way. I didn't know how much time was left on my clock—maybe four minutes, maybe none.

To make things worse, an overnight work detail was returning home. I heard their shuffling march. They were about to pass within a few feet of where I was hiding. I squatted low in the shadows, trying to will myself invisible.
I am a wall
, I thought.
I am nothing.

The work detail walked single file. Most of the boys were looking at their feet, already nodding into a half-sleep, hands at their sides, still curled slightly in the memory of whatever tool they'd just returned. I knew they were peeling off one by one to their various dormitories. No one looked my way, and I willed them to hurry, feeling increasingly desperate as the line stretched on.

I joined the end of the line, walking behind the last boy. I passed the proctors in the T-4. They were both awake now, supervising the return. And then I was alongside Dormitory 35. I had to squint at the yellow number painted on the door to make sure I had the right one. I walked up the stairs, trying not to sprint.

“Keep the line,” a proctor called, and I froze momentarily, thinking he was referring to me. But he was looking at a different boy. I crossed the threshold and quickly removed my shoes. I crept to my room. The clock on the wall showed 4:13:03. I had less than two minutes left. I made sure to change clothes, to give every appearance of routine. Owen was still asleep, making a light wheezing noise with every breath. When I lay on my bed, I was so tired I felt as though I were falling through it, into blackness. Something was happening to me. As I broke the rules I felt less certain that I believed in them. And there was a recklessness in that, a momentum that frightened me. If the school had taken my name, had made it their own, then I could take it back. There was no rule to stop me—no reason not to.

I was James from Idaho. This knowledge reverberated through me. I was James from Porthill. I was James.

 

TWELVE

I could smell Bethany on my skin at breakfast. It was a faint lemony odor and I kept turning my head to pick up the scent. The cafeteria was serving oatmeal with some kind of protein-substitute sausage. I watched the boys around me shoveling food into their mouths, chewing and swallowing. I thought of the way Bethany had felt underneath me, the way the heat of our bodies had left vanishing shapes on the stainless steel. My brain was disordered from lack of sleep, and Owen was in a particularly bad mood. He'd received a message on his personal page that morning. It had been sent on some sort of letterhead. When I asked him what it was, he'd immediately closed the screen.

When a fight broke out at a nearby table, Owen didn't bother to look up from his tray. Even when one student shoved another to the floor and jammed his fingers into his opponent's eye sockets, Owen was oblivious. Proctors arrived with their Lewistons out, but it was Creighton and Davis who pulled the boys apart. One boy clutched his face, screaming, and the other was struggling, still fighting, so Davis slammed his head into the table to quiet him. Afterward, there was a red puddle on the concrete floor and—in the middle—a white, gleaming fragment of bone, probably part of a tooth. A student arrived to mop up the blood. Two minutes later, all trace of the disturbance had disappeared.

As my appointment with Dr. Cleveland drew closer, I found myself watching the wallscreen clock. In less than a half hour, I would walk to the infirmary. I would have an AJT to compel me. There was no question that I would go. The rest of breakfast passed as if it were some outsize hallucination. Proctors overhead circulated like clouds in front of the sun, filtering and altering the light. The insect thrum of the cafeteria sounds permeated everything. I felt as if I were watching myself from a great distance, watching myself perform all the usual tasks—carrying my plate to the sand tray, waiting for clearance at the exit. And then I walked down the familiar path to the infirmary. I began to take smaller and smaller steps, slowing my pace, but never stopping.
James
, I thought.
I am James
. And the name calmed me. It could not be unlearned. It could not be confiscated.

When I arrived at the infirmary's waiting room, proctors choked the entrance. “James,” the computer said, “please report to the basement level. Room 101.” I tried to cross to the main hallway, but a proctor stopped me. “You'll have to go around,” he said. “This area is closed.” Beyond him I glimpsed a man in a military uniform. He looked like one of the men from the magazines I'd read on Community Day. I didn't know what sort of officer he was, but I recognized rank when I saw it—the colorful bars on his jacket, a gold band on his hat. As I watched, another officer in a similar uniform stepped out of a side room. The two men fell into a conversation, each nodding at what the other was saying.

“North hallway to the east staircase,” the proctor told me. “Do you understand?”

The system that usually lighted a path in the floor was off-line, so he gave me directions.

“Yes, sir,” I said. But I was soon lost. The east staircase was locked, and I found myself moving more deeply into the building, where there were fewer students and even fewer staff. I tried to double back, to return to the lobby, but everything was taking too long, and when I found an open staircase, I just descended. My feet scraped lightly on the treads, the sound amplified by silence.
James
, I thought.
I am James
. And then, at the bottom of the stairwell, something caught my attention.