Goodhouse (4 page)

“No,” I said.

“But that's just what a maniac would say.” And I must have looked worried, because she started to laugh. “You don't know when I'm joking,” she said. She took a step closer. A drop of condensation ran down the side of the root beer glass. It rolled over my finger and she reached out to collect the droplet before it fell.

A surge of laughter rose up from inside the house. Bethany stood so close to me now that I felt the heat radiating off her. My gaze darted to check the kitchen door to make sure no one was watching. My body language was guilty.
Only the appearance of sin is needed
, the school said.
Animals live moment to moment as they follow their desires. You must ask yourself: Am I an animal?

I stepped back, and an instant later the kitchen door squeaked open. Bethany darted away. “Don't tell,” she whispered.

The aunt had brought me a bottle of water, but paused, seeing a glass already in my hand. Her eyes narrowed. “Where is she?” she asked.

“Behind the shed,” I answered.

*   *   *

I was allowed to come inside and eat a piece of cake. Bethany was sent to her room. She marched upstairs with loud, angry-sounding footsteps.

“Walk, please,” called the aunt. I pulled on my jacket and tie, and then the aunt sat me in the living room and began bringing me plates of food. There were little sandwiches with cucumbers and puréed meat, bowls of berries and ice cream, fresh vegetables and white cheese flecked with herbs. The reward for my good behavior was so swift, so delicious, that for a moment the world felt ordered and right. I started smiling and couldn't stop. The food was incredible. I ate everything, and the ladies took notice. “All boys can eat at that age,” one said. “Mine were like that.”

“He has a hollow leg,” another said. “Isn't that right, honey?” She looked so expectant, so resolute, that I nodded. “That's right,” she said.

I'd never heard of hollow legs, but a boy at school had a plastic leg that looked like a hockey stick poking out of his pants.

“Wish I'd had a boy,” said the aunt. “They're so useful.”

“You have a son-in-law,” said Rachel. One hand was draped protectively over her belly while the other dipped a carrot stick into a glass of champagne.

“Of course,” said the aunt, “a charming young man.” She looked around the room, nodding and showing off a too-bright smile. Her stiff bill of hair vibrated slightly.

Balls of crumpled wrapping paper littered the floor. The balloons tied to the chairback had drooped, slackening their strings. “May I read a magazine?” I asked. There were some stacked on the coffee table, all quickpaper editions that looked and felt like old-fashioned paper but held rotating downloaded content.

The aunt told me to help myself, and I sank into my chair and went through them—page by beautiful page. I'd been told that the availability of real media was one of the biggest perks of Community Day. Regular citizens were able to consume media without needing a moral interpretation, and I was eager to read as they did.

I started with a newsmagazine. There were pictures of unsmiling men in elaborate military camouflage. Behind them was an arid landscape. Things burned in the distance, sending plumes of black smoke into a big white sky. Most of the articles were about how the war was being mismanaged and how the subsequent resignation of a certain general was just the sort of move that gave a false sense of progress. I thought I understood the article, but I'd been warned that I'd feel this way. The school said:
People are not aware of their limitations because those limitations prevent awareness
.

There was an editorial page in which people wrote letters debating the newly reinstituted draft. One man felt that his children shouldn't be asked to risk their lives for an unending, unethical war. Another man argued that the reason the war dragged on was that we refused to really commit. “Either we're one nation united or we're just a bunch of people that can't get anything done,” the man said. “If we don't implement a draft, we can't purchase the freedoms that people here take for granted.” I reread this page and tried to imagine each of these men as my father, one keeping me close and the other proudly sending me away.

I shut the magazine. Sometimes I'd seen parents at the fence, especially at my old school, where the security was light. They would be looking for their children, calling out a name. A proctor would intercept them. We knew better than to approach. Those people were dangerous. Goodhouse had drummed this idea into our heads: Contact with a genetically compromised parent meant certain failure. Our birth records were destroyed for this reason. The fastest way to become a criminal was to go home.

“What do you read in school?” My head snapped up. I found one of the guests, a woman with large, rabbity teeth, sitting beside me. Her name, she told me, was Gayle. While I'd been reading, most of the women had left.

“I read whatever they tell me to,” I said.

“But what do you read in your spare time?” Gayle asked.

“We have pamphlets and videos,” I said. “Everything has a purpose, of course.”

I didn't want her to think I was reading for fun. We'd had a library at La Pine, but Ione was different. Reading for pleasure wasn't allowed, and I was afraid that hers was a trick question. I picked up the newsmagazine. “For example, you have an article about troop withdrawal and the possible outcomes of different decisions. I guess the magazine wants you to learn about the difficulty of choices when both appear to be right-thinking. But for us—we only read about the war so we can discuss how fortunate we are to be living in a stable society.”

“You must be kidding,” Gayle said.

“I don't think so,” Rachel said. “They don't know how to do that.” She bit into her carrot stick and looked at me with such malice, I felt she was imagining that the carrot was my finger.

Bethany walked out of the kitchen eating a slice of cake off a paper plate. I hadn't heard her come down the stairs, and judging from her aunt's annoyed expression, neither had anyone else. “You said I could come down after the party.” She took huge, mouth-bulging bites and glared at her aunt. “You said.” She wore a long green T-shirt pulled over her sundress.

“You know,” Rachel said, “if you weren't taking Uncle A.J.'s money, then we wouldn't have to let these people into our home.”

“Rachel!” the aunt interjected. “Be polite.”

“You think A.J. can work at a sewage treatment plant and not smell like shit afterward?” Rachel said.

“Enough!” The aunt clapped her hands as if to make a noise loud enough to cover her embarrassment.

“Ignore her, James,” Bethany said. “She's mean to everyone. Can I ask a personal question?”

“No,” said the aunt. “You cannot ask him anything of the sort.”

“What do you really think about Ephram Goodhouse?” she asked. She was perched on a chair arm, licking chocolate off her fingers. “You've heard the story, right?”

I nodded. I felt the cold, creeping fear return, and I realized that I had let myself relax here. I had been bought off with food and magazines.

“Very sad,” said Gayle. “The whole affair was utterly tragic.”

Rachel snorted in disbelief. “That's not what you said earlier.”

“I don't condone vigilante behavior of any sort,” said Gayle.

“I want to hear what James thinks,” said Bethany. “How often do we get a chance to ask a primary source?”

“I'm not Ephram,” I said.

“But you know what I mean,” she said.

“That man was protecting his family,” said Rachel. “The boy was deranged—and there was a consequence.”

“Out of all proportion,” Bethany said.

“It had to be out of proportion,” said Rachel. She leaned forward, and the balloons jerked and shuddered as the chair moved. She pointed at me. “You're thinking that just because he looks normal and talks like us, we can appeal to some higher nature. It's not there. I get so sick of this thinking. We can't treat these people like we treat each other.”

“One boy's crime should not define us all,” I said. The words were out before I could stop them.

Rachel bit into another carrot. “You poor, dumb animal,” she said. “You really don't understand.”

I sat very still. The room seemed to shrink around me.

“I'm sorry, James. It's the hormones.” The aunt gave me a tight smile. “She's just not herself.”

“Don't apologize to him,” Rachel said. “I'm not the only one who thinks this way. Why did you rush to grab that beacon bracelet as soon as he got here?” The aunt wrapped her hand around her wrist, covering whatever she was wearing. “Because you might only have a few seconds to call for help. Security is waiting out there, waiting for something bad to happen. But do you know why I feel better? Not because they're there. I feel better because that Ephram boy is dead.”

I shivered inside my jacket. I didn't know if anything she said was true. It could all be true.

Rachel clutched her belly. “You're lucky my mother is so softhearted. You should all be sent somewhere else, away from us, some island where you can rob and kill each other all you want and leave us alone.”

“Shut up,” Bethany said. “You hateful cow.”

“I am so sorry,” the aunt said, and at first I thought she was apologizing to me. But she reached over and touched her friend's arm. “This is so embarrassing, Gayle. They're not usually this bad.”

Then Rachel twisted in pain and threw up a nasty, orange-tinted slurry. It dropped to the beige carpet with an awful wet sound.

“Oh my God!” Gayle leapt to her feet.

“I'm fine,” Rachel groaned. “I'm fine.” Then she vomited again.

As the women hustled Rachel from the room, Bethany stood up, pulling at the end of her T-shirt. “Flush,” she said, “there it goes.”

 

THREE

They all left for the hospital. I was told to wait outside for the bus, but in the confusion they'd forgotten to close the front door. I sat on the stoop for ten minutes, then wandered back into the house. I was still shaking. I wasn't getting less angry as time went by—the way I usually did—but the opposite. I stood in the hall and practiced the school's deep-breathing techniques, bending at the waist and letting my arms dangle. I counted—
one, two, three
—then exhaled in a loud burst of breath. But the anger remained like soda bubbles inside me, rising out of nowhere, effervescing, filling me with a directionless urgency.

I tried to practice empathy for myself, for Rachel.
Empathy.
The word that we used so often at Goodhouse. Our greatest aspiration. Could we feel it? the school would ask, as if we were listening for a far-off sound, a small bell ringing in the distance. Could we hear it from where we lived?

I walked back into the living room. There was a stain on Rachel's chair, a smear of dark blood on the yellow upholstery. The vomit had been cleaned up with a dish towel, but I could still smell the sour stench of bile. It might be the end of her child—her normal civilian child—but I felt no empathy, just a dull sense of horror. There was so much wealth here, so much half-eaten food, so many textiles and pictures and brightly tinted paint, that even the stench didn't seem real, like it must be coming from these borrowed clothes, from the regulation haircut—from somewhere inside me.

I began to roam the house, opening closet doors, touching their coats, their things. In a kitchen drawer I found an envelope of fifty-dollar bills. The paper was thick and substantial. A serious, bewigged man was featured on the front. He was green like a goblin. I selected two bills and took them to the bathroom, where I tore them into tiny pieces and flushed them away. But this wasn't enough. I wanted to know what a hundred dollars was worth, so I rooted through the kitchen cabinets looking at the little ornate food boxes, searching for their price tags. I wanted to think about the money in terms of food destroyed—this was something I could understand. But there were no numbers, no indication of value.

I went upstairs. I found Bethany's bedroom at the end of the hallway. Most of her things appeared to be packed, but her desk was still cluttered. It had several small, incomplete electronic devices lying in a heap on its surface—handhelds, perhaps, broken apart. A screwdriver and a soldering iron lay beside them, next to paper blueprints and diagrams of some kind. And there, sitting atop the papers, was one of Bethany's blue barrettes. A few strands of her hair were tangled in its clasp. I picked it up and then I pressed the metal setting between my fingers until the sharp edges gave me a tiny flash of pain. I don't remember putting it in my pocket, but of course I did. It was habit.

*   *   *

The bus ride back was relatively raucous. The proctors were preoccupied, clustered at the front, not issuing demerits, even when boys were blatantly talking. I was so relieved to see Owen, to be getting
away
, that I didn't think much about it.

“How'd it go?” I whispered. Owen shrugged. He was peeling paint off his hands. It was green and brown. The yellow from the morning was gone. “Did you get in?” I asked, but I realized that this was unrealistic and things probably didn't move so quickly. “When do you hear?” I'd expected him to have good news—but he was sullen and angry. He glanced at the nearest proctor.

“Come on,” I whispered. “He's not paying attention.”

But Owen wouldn't risk it. He stared pointedly out the window as we circled through the neighborhood, collecting the rest of the students. Some boys appeared grim or resolved, others electrified. Regardless of what had happened, every dorm would be full of conversation tonight.

The guards waved us through the Meadowlands gate, and the bus accelerated into the countryside. More billboards—advertising laser-therapy clinics, turbocharged vitamins—lined the roadway. Our true velocity was only apparent in the moment we passed the billboard itself, in the astonishing way it flashed and disappeared behind us.