Burn (3 page)

“I don't understand. You're saying that you need Lona Sixteen Always to help you achieve the goals they set for you.”

“Seventeen. She just turned seventeen, Anders. But yes. I'm saying that.”

“But you're also saying you don't want me to bring her to you. I could. They put me here to help you.”

“They put you here to watch me. They never wanted to help me, or anyone else from—”

“They put me here to ascertain you're doing what's expected. Sir.”

“Haven't I always done what's expected of me?”

“I'm just saying I could get her for you. Last time a group of kids got her from a government facility. This time we're the government and she's staying with a bunch of kids.”

“It's more effective to wait until she comes to me. If you go get her, I'll have to put her to a bunch of tests you haven't even finished developing, to make sure she has what we need.”

“You make it sound worse than it is.”

“I think I'm the better judge of how bad the tests are.”

“So you'll wait for her?”

“If she comes here, we won't need those tests. The proof that she has what we're looking for will be in the fact that she found us at all.”

“Speaking of that. How is the prisoner?”

The desk drawer made a startled grunt when it pulled off its sliders, the sound of an old man being woken from a nap. The tacks were on the floor. His plastic name badge banged against his knee. It hung from his neck on a strand of metal balls, like a soldier's dog tags, like the worry beads carried by old women on the bus. He pushed it aside.

The voices were getting closer. The footsteps, too. Where would they have hidden it? Once they'd taken it from him – stolen it, no matter what they said – where would they hide it so he couldn't get it back?

He should hide. Under the desk. Between the filing cabinet and the potted plant. This was absurd. He wasn't a child playing hide and seek, and they weren't children, counting to thirty and chasing him to home base.

They were coming. They were coming. There was nowhere to hide.

“Lona.” The hand on her shoulder wouldn't stop jostling her. “Lona, wake up.”

She gasped for air, clawing blindly in front of her until her hand closed on fabric. Her heart thudded against her ribcage; she felt a scream fighting to come out of her throat.

“It's nice to see you, too,” Fenn said. She looked at where she'd grabbed his shirt – at the buttons by his chest, as if her intention had been to kiss him, not to strangle him.

“Good morning,” she said shakily, trying to laugh at herself, or at least make him think she was. She unclenched her fist, laying her palm flat against his chest, feeling the steadiness of his heartbeat and trying to slow hers to match.

It wouldn't slow. Why had she had that dream again? The dream that didn't belong to her, like she'd accidentally taken someone else's shopping cart. And this time it had gone further. This time the door had opened. This time she was seconds away from learning who was coming inside.
Big belly. Chapped hands. Short hair
that brushed against his collar as he sorted through the drawer. Who was he?

“It's almost afternoon, actually,” Fenn apologized. “That's why I had to wake you. We'll be there soon. I was shaking you for almost a minute. Exhausted?”

Ex-hau-sted. She heard the words as a rhythm, and it took her a moment to realize why. The train. They were on a train; his voice matched the rattle of the cars going over the track. They were visiting a college. She wasn't searching through a messy desk; she was on a train, visiting a college. “I guess so,” she said. “I must just be really tired. How soon will we be there?”

“Ten minutes. The stop after this one.”

Ten minutes. She couldn't help but feel annoyed. If Fenn had let her sleep for two more minutes, she could have figured out who was coming to get the man, and why, and what he was trying to find. She felt sure this dream had a definitive end, one she just couldn't get to.

“Do you have your transcripts?” he asked.

She groped for the vinyl bag beneath her seat. The hard plastic folder was in the outside pocket. She'd known it would be there – checking was unnecessary. But it was reassuring to have something tangible to moor her, even if the tangible thing was just a sheath of her grades.

“Next stop, Thirtieth Street Station,” the conductor's voice blared over the tinny speakers. “Thirtieth Street Station, next stop.”

“Hey.” Fenn took his hand in hers, drawing circles in her palm with his thumb. “Hey. Are you nervous? It's just an informal interview. We don't have to go to this school. We don't even have to go on this tour if you don't want to. We can just go home.”

She was being ridiculous. About all of it – wanting to get off the train, and about her dream.
Dream,
she repeated to herself. That's all it was. A dream. Not a message. Not a program. Not a Path. It was just her own mind, trying to make sense of everything that had happened to her in the past six months.

“I'm just jumpy,” she assured him. “I want to be here. Of course I want to be here.”

It was a beautiful campus. Lona could tell, even in the brown cold of December. It had archways made of stone, classrooms with old wood floors and unworking fireplaces. The tour guide, Jessa, told them the architectural style was called “American Gothic”, modeled after the oldest universities in Britain. The buildings surrounded a green, which, Jessa giggled, might be dead and brown now, but really was green in the spring, with grass that students spread blankets on. Today was the last day of finals, and most of the campus had already emptied out.

Fenn squeezed her wrist. She could see him imagining them there, sprawled on the grass with a Frisbee and their textbooks and a bag of potato chips.

“What should we see next?” Jessa asked. She was from a town called Jessup. That's how she introduced herself. Jessa from Jessup, Maryland. She wore a puffy coat with the crest of the university on it, and a black outline of the dead president it was named after. Her cheeks were round and pinchable; Lona bet you could look at pictures of Jessa as a baby and know exactly what she looked like now. She liked to smile a lot. Especially at Fenn, Lona noticed – she smiled and looked for excuses to grab him by the sleeve as she pointed out campus landmarks. She didn't notice the barely perceptible way he recoiled – Pathers generally didn't like to be touched.

“Let's see.” Jessa counted off the tour stops on her fingers. “We saw a dorm. We saw the green. We saw the student union, and the duck pond with the running trail. We saw a lecture hall. We saw the humanities library – did you want to see the science library? It's in a different architectural style – really modern. Some people like it better.”

“I'm concerned about safety,” one of the mothers asked. “You said the libraries are open until midnight, but I don't want my daughter walking through an empty campus that late at night.”

“
Mom
,” the daughter protested out of the side of her mouth. They looked alike. Both had the same thin noses, pale hair, long torsos, running shoes.

“What? I'm your
mother
. It's my job.”

“No, no, it's a great question,” Jessa said. “Campus is very safe. But if you're ever nervous about walking somewhere alone, that's why we have these yellow emergency call boxes all over the green. Pressing the red button immediately sends a public safety officer to your location. Or, if you call ahead, one of them will come and escort you back to your dorm.”

The mother opened her notebook to make a satisfied check mark next to one of the questions on her list. This was her fourth on the tour. Check, check, check, check.

What would it be like to go through this tour with a parent?
She and Fenn were the only ones without them in the group. She wouldn't know what to do with that level of protectiveness. It would drive her crazy. But at the same time, she wondered what it would feel like to have the genetic closeness. To not only know where you'd come from, but to see it every day.

“What are you two interested in?” Jessa asked, turning to Lona and Fenn.

They'd been mostly silent, hanging back while the other prospective students asked about “social life” and “dorm curfews” – coded language that made it clear they were really just asking about parties. Lona hadn't had a curfew for six months. “I could show you the athletic center,” she continued. “Did either of you play any sports in high school?”

Lona hesitated; so did Fenn. This was the type of question she never knew how to answer. Julian had swum in high school, but was that really what Jessa was asking? She decided on “Not really” at the same time Fenn said, “We swam.”

“Me too.” Jessa clapped her hands. “And you're from Maryland, too, right? What high school? I wonder if we swam each other.”

Another question that should have been easy, but wasn't. Lona and Fenn's bodies had grown up in Maryland. Their brains went to school in Illinois, where Julian lived with his family.

For a few months after Path shut down, when everything was messy and there was no protocol, Lona had been sent to a therapist for coping skills on assimilating to the outside world. “Just tell them it's complicated,” the therapist advised. “You're not under any obligation to share your whole life story with anyone. Tell them it's complicated, smile and move on.”

“It's complicated,” she tried now, and Jessa looked confused.

“We both grew up in several different places,” Fenn filled in.

“Are you military brats or missionary kids, or … ?” The question mark dangled as she waited for Lona to fill in the blanks. “Child actors?” she laughed. “Witness protection program?”

Lona should have lied and agreed to the military option. Now her silence was getting obvious – she could see Jessa getting embarrassed.

“You know what?” Jessa fumbled in her bag for her phone, checking the time. “Lona has her interview in fifteen minutes. Why don't we just go to the dining hall, and we'll all grab some hot chocolate and chat until then? That's what everyone's interested in anyway – how the food is. Ours is pretty good. There's always a kosher option, and the east dining hall has vegan—”

As Jessa rattled off more statistics about the dining hall, Fenn grabbed Lona's hand. “What does this campus taste like?”

“Besides kosher vegan hot chocolate?”

“I was thinking apples. Green ones, almost too tart.” His nose was red in the cold. This – this college, this green, these American Gothic buildings – they all represented a fresh start to Fenn. Clean blackboards, clean slates, new apples. She loved the way he saw the future stretching out in front of them in wide expanses.

“If this campus were a fabric, what would it feel like?” she asked.

“The inside of a sweatshirt,” he said. “Before you've washed it, when it's still really soft.”

“I'd like to see another dorm first.” The mom in the running shoes was asking another question. “The one we saw was all boys – can't you show us a girls' dorm?”

“No problem,” Jessa said. “I'll take you to my room; it's on the way to the dining hall. Just ignore my roommate's messy desk. She's a total slob.”

Lona's skin went colder than the weather should have allowed
. Messy desks. Thumbtacks. Footsteps. Coming.

A dream,
she told herself.
Just a dream.

“If you just want to come with me.” The assistant appeared in front of the couch where Lona sat. “The dean will be back any minute.”

She followed the boy past the front desk, through a maze of corridors, and to a door at the end of an alcove. “Do you want anything?” the boy asked. “Some water?” He'd introduced himself but Lona had already forgotten his name. Something with a P. Lona did want a drink, but the water cooler was all the way back by the reception desk. She wished he'd asked sooner; now she'd feel rude making him retrace his steps to the front of the building.

“I'm fine.”

“Cool,” the boy said. “You can just wait in his office, then. And don't worry. He's not as weird as some people say he is.”

He winked and Lona nodded like she got the joke. Did people say the dean was weird? She didn't know anything about the man who was going to conduct her admissions interview. Talia said he'd been made aware of her and Fenn's unique circumstances, and that he didn't mind them. That was all she knew.

It seemed warmer in the dean's office than in the reception area. She wondered if it was possible that books gave off heat. The office was stacked with them – dense textbooks, chunky readers, slim philosophical treatises, dog-eared paperbacks with cracked spines. On the shelves, but also on the floor and on the windowsill.

Lona shrugged off her coat and moved to sit on the only visitor's chair, but it, too, was covered in books. One, sticking out from the middle of the pile, had a bright blue cover of a little bird perched on the head of an exasperated dog. A children's book. She started to slide it out, wondering if it was something she'd read to Warren.

“That's one of the greatest sociological explorations of our time,” a voice said. Lona dropped the book. It splayed open on the floor, one of its pages sticking out like a broken limb.

“I'm so sorry.” She knelt quickly to pick it up.

“Don't worry. It's my great-grandson's. He's as likely to eat it as read it at this point in his life; I don't think he'll mind a couple scars.”

The man who had entered the room had dark skin and white hair, shaved close to his head. Thick glasses draped from a chain around his neck. He was slightly built – she could see the way his layers of sweaters and tweed hung on his frame.

“Dean Greene.” She extended her hand in the greeting she and Fenn had practiced. “I'm Lona. Your one o'clock admissions interview.”

Dr. Greene waved his hand, unconcerned with her formalities. He navigated the path to his desk, easing himself into his chair, gesturing to Lona to remove the books and sit. “I haven't been a dean since I retired ten years ago. Just call me Quincy. Or ‘professor', if a first-name basis makes you uncomfortable.”

“You're  …  retired now?” At least she could tell Fenn not to stress about the interview. Their applications couldn't be taken seriously if the admissions interview was conducted by someone who didn't even work at the university.

“I wasn't joking when I said that book was an interesting sociological study. Have you read it?” She looked down at the book still in her hand and scanned the cover.
Are You My Mother?
it said. The title was familiar, but Lona couldn't remember the plot.

“It's about a baby bird – a generic kind of bird, although it looks somewhat like a duck – who hatches when his mother is away from the nest,” Quincy continued. “So he sets out to find her, and of everything he encounters – a cat, a cow, a boat, a plane – he asks the same thing.”

“Are you my mother?” Lona guessed.

“Self-explanatory, yes. It's for three year olds. You can probably surmise what happens.”

“He eventually finds his mother and they're happy.” A plot Gabriel would have been able to predict.

“Exactly so.” Dr. Greene pounded the desk with his fist. She could see how he would have been a likable professor. Animated, encouraging, irascible. “On its surface, it's a quest about a bird looking for his mother. A tried and true, potentially overused, trope of storytelling. But if you think about it a little more closely, other strains of inquiry emerge. Why
can't
the cat be the bird's mother? What defines the intrinsic birdness of a bird? What message are we sending, saying birds can only be happy with other birds – rather than exploring what might happen if birds were taught other things? Maybe they would become more interesting birds.”

“Maybe the cats would eat them,” Lona said.

Dr. Greene chuckled. “If you're saying I'm being foolish, you're right. As a professor, my field of study focused on issues of nature and nurture, and how both come into play in questions of happiness. How much memory – even the memories we don't remember – can shape who we are. Forgive me, though. Professors – the old, saggy ones like me, at least – tend to see their work in everything they look at. Including children's books.”

Dr. Greene might have been rambling, but the ramblings were the themes of Lona's own life. Should she look for her mother (that tried and true, potentially overused trope)? Should she let herself be distracted by a dream that felt like a memory? Even if the memory wasn't hers?

She realized the room had gone silent as she mulled these questions. “I'm sorry. I got lost thinking about what you'd said.”

“A student stunned speechless by my brilliance!” he exclaimed. “Maybe we ought to admit you right now.”

Yes. The interview. That's what she was here for. Not to debate the sociological implications of a children's book. “You said you retired?” she asked. “Do you still do work for the admissions office?”

“Oh, I come in from time to time when a project particularly interests me,” Dr. Greene said. “I requested this interview. Actually, if you want to be precise about it – and we might as well, mightn't we? – I requested your application.”

“Mine?” she blurted out. “Why?”

Dr. Greene leaned back in his chair and raised his eyes toward the ceiling. “‘I own that I have been sly, thievish, mean, a prevaricator, greedy, derelict. And I own that I remain so yet'.”

It sounded like a quote from something, but Lona knew she hadn't read whatever it was. Dr. Greene smiled. “It's from Walt Whitman. A poem about atonement. Not one of his better-known works, but if you're ever asked to memorize something, this one is only seven lines long.”

“It's—” Was this part of the interview? Was he quoting poetry to see if she could analyze it? “It's funny. You expect him to say he'll never sin again, but instead he says he's still sinning.”

“He still is sinning. But he's acknowledging it this time, which – at least he believes – makes it less evil.” Dr. Greene paused. “Lona, I requested your application to atone for my sins.” He leaned in. “I was on the committee that reviewed the Julian Path. I helped choose Julian.”

Lona froze. She had been told that her interviewer would be made aware of her special circumstances. She hadn't realized quite how aware he would be.

“I was young then,” he continued. His eyes were serious. “I thought I was old, but you always think you're old at the time and then look back and realize you were young. I registered my complaints, but they were more like grumbles. I could have done more.”

She felt a surge of anger, the way she always did when something reminded her of the Julian Path. Here was a man who had helped to decide her fate, getting to decide her fate yet again with this interview.

“I wasn't going to tell you. But when you came in and I saw you – forgive me, for this in itself is selfish – I thought you deserved to have all of the information.” Dr. Greene was silent then, waiting to see how she handled the news. Lona was sure if she stood and walked out now, he wouldn't try to stop her.

“This is your atonement? Giving me a chance to interview for a spot at your college?”

“The slot is already yours if you want it,” he said. “Or slots, rather. Obviously, I've reserved one for Fenn Beginning as well.”

“Don't we need to complete the interview?”

He raised his eyebrows. “Do we? I already know that you attended – virtually, at least – an excellent school with a strenuous curriculum. And I can't say that you lack an interesting personal history. I think I know all I need to know. Unless, of course, you have some questions for me.”

Did she? Fenn had bought a book about preparing for college interviews. She was supposed to ask about classroom sizes and student–professor ratios. That seemed inconsequential now.

“Did you ever come to a decision?” she asked. “About how even the memories we don't remember can shape who we are?”

He brightened at the question – obviously not one he'd expected. “Not officially,” he said.

“Not officially?”

“My disciplines were sociology and anthropology,” he said. “We conduct studies. We're not philosophers – we can't just make something up and call it a finding. And I never could figure out how to conclusively learn whether the things that we don't even remember impact who we are. Because – problematically – we don't remember them.” He shrugged ruefully at the paradox.

“Unofficially, though, you have thoughts.”

He tapped his nose. “You're very perceptive. Unofficially, I think that the things we don't remember are the things that most define us. Because they are the things we'll go looking for – the holes we don't know exist but are always trying to fill.” Dr. Greene produced a soft cloth from his desk, using it to clean his glasses. “Are you asking for yourself? Or someone else?”

She didn't know. She didn't know if she was talking about her, or Warren, or Gabriel, or anyone else. The dream she'd had had been so lifelike.
It's just a dream
, she kept telling herself. But it felt so much like a memory. “I'm asking – I think I'm just asking because I'm curious.”

“Curiosity is a wonderful trait.”

“I'm not sure.” She thought back to Talia's question the other night. “If you could be curious or you could be happy, wouldn't you rather just be happy?”

“You say it like they're mutually exclusive. Some people are only happy if they're searching.” He tilted his head. “You like big questions, don't you?”

“Do you know anything about dreams?” she pressed on.

Dr. Greene laughed, and, without answering her question, stood from his chair. She sensed the conversation was over, so she picked up the binder of transcripts that had gone unmentioned during the whole interview.

“My dear.” Dr. Greene opened the door, patting her gently on the sleeve. “If we're not philosophers, we're certainly not Freudians.”