Goodhouse (14 page)

I felt increasingly agitated at the thought of those smile lines on his face, at the thought of him nearby but out of sight. I opened my personal page on the wallscreen and clicked on the Maintenance Intensives. All the labs were still full, and I signed off. The screen went dark. My own dim reflection stared out of the black expanse, a featureless other self.

At lunch the next day, I waited with the other Level 3s until the 1s and 2s were finished eating. We stood in front of the cafeteria flagpoles. It was brutally hot, and sweat rolled down the inside of my shirt. It gathered under my arms in damp, spreading rings. I kept staring at the white-coated kitchen workers I glimpsed through the glass-paneled doors. I knew, of course, that these people in white coats were not the doctor, could not be the doctor himself, but they drew my gaze anyway. They made my heart tick faster. There were Zeros on campus. They were here.

I walked through the lunch line, passing buckets of plastic cutlery, spring-loaded tray holders, and giant napkin dispensers that looked like stainless-steel towers, each with a dangling paper flag at the bottom. I held out my tray at all the required stations—the vegetable station, the grain and the protein stations. Most of the windows in the cafeteria were on the second story, which made the ground floor feel subterranean. There was a catwalk up high where proctors paced; their shadows yawned across tables and students.

After I ate, I returned my tray and went to one of the smaller wallscreens in the cafeteria. I scrolled through a list of faculty members, searching under medical staff. A. J. Cleveland wasn't listed as a general practitioner, or even as a specialist. I finally did a general search for his name and found him listed as Director of Student Medicine. I wasn't even sure a student message to a director would be accepted by the system.

“Hurry up,” a boy said. He stood behind me waiting to use the screen. So I wrote:

I thought more about our conversation.

I'd like to take you up on your offer.

—James

To my surprise, the message was approved and sent. I stepped away. My palms were clammy, and I pressed them to the fabric of my pants. I didn't know what justice looked like, not really. I knew about beatings and demerits, but these were corrections—Tanner's right hand. I felt that justice had to be so much more—it had to be like music, beautiful and mathematical.

I closed my eyes. Behind my lids, I saw the late-summer light cutting through the thin blue water of the Deschutes. I saw my friends and the way we'd looked at ten and twelve and fourteen, wading in the shallows, our wet uniforms plastered to our bodies, the river cold enough to numb our legs. Everything about us had been unwritten and green. I could still hear the timbre of their voices. I knew the civilian names they had chosen for their lives after graduation—I knew the shapes of their hands, the rhythm of their laughter. In my memory they were safe. I was their stone marker. I was the sole repository of their history.

*   *   *

There was no reply from the doctor. A day passed and I grew more anxious. Dormitory 38, which was adjacent to our own, was abruptly evacuated and sealed. There were rumors that the students had been transferred to Protective Confinement, that they'd all been caught making and selling some kind of drug. I also heard that they'd been quarantined at the infirmary—that one of them had contracted an illness on Community Day. There were always rumors on campus. When Goodhouse didn't supply us with answers, we created our own.

And then on Thursday morning, one day before my Disciplinary Committee hearing, something unusual happened. I reported to the factory for my shift. I was alone in the suiting-up room, pulling on my protective jumpsuit. The room had a wall of metal lockers with the doors removed. They'd obviously come from somewhere else, because the paint didn't fully hide the old graffiti. Clean jumpsuits were heaped in a gigantic wheeled laundry bin, and piles of dirty suits were in a nearly identical bin. One was marked
CLEAN
and the other
DIRTY
, but I knew boys switched the signs. Beside the exit to the factory floor was a dish marked
SANITIZED EARPLUGS
. Someone had spit an especially colorful wad of mucus into the pile of orange foam pellets. The sound of machinery hummed on the other side of the wall. I hastily yanked on a jumpsuit and was just grabbing a hairnet from the “clean” basket when I heard a voice say my name.

For a second I thought it might be the intercom, but then the wallscreen blinked on and Bethany's face was squinting into a camera, on the other side of some digital connection. Little dangling clusters of metallic stars hung from her earlobes. Behind her was a shelf for paper books and a bulbous cactus in a terra-cotta pot.

“There you are,” she said. “You stood me up. Care to grovel?”

I was so stunned that I could only stare. “How did you find me?” I stammered.

“And people tell
me
I need to work on my bedside manner.” She smiled. “Aren't you going to say hello?”

“Someone could walk in here at any minute,” I said. I glanced at the camera.

“Relax,” she said. “I've got a proximity program running and a few others.” She patted a handheld on the desk. “We'll have plenty of notice. So, this is where you work?” She looked around. “It's nice,” she said.

“I hate it,” I said.

“Well, yes. I only said it was nice to be polite.” She paused. “Your face is better.”

“Yeah.” I nodded. It was hard to look at her, to see an echo of Dr. Cleveland in her features.

“I've been trying to catch you alone,” she said. “I had to be quite the corsair. You know, their wallscreen security is actually pretty good compared to their chip protocol. I think they're more afraid to let you go online than let you wander around unauthorized. That says something.” She nodded. “It really does. The brain is more dangerous than the body, don't you agree?”

“The brain is the body,” I said.

“God, I want to know everything about you.” She leaned forward to adjust her screen, and the lab coat fell open to reveal a tight blue T-shirt. The red, puffed scar on her chest rose out of the low neckline. “And don't worry, I intercepted your message.” She winked. “Clever.” It took me a moment to realize she was referring to the note I'd sent her father. She thought it had been meant for her. I scrambled to remember the exact wording. “I've been watching your outgoing messages,” she said. “I knew you'd figure it out.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Glad you got it.”

Bethany frowned at me. “What were you thinking, by the way? You had a green light last week. I had you cleared to go almost anywhere in the school and you just sat in your dorm room doing God-knows-what.”

“Sleeping,” I said.

“Which is a total waste of time,” she said. “So we need to try again. And I want to remind you that this is likely to be your last chance to meet up with someone of the opposite sex. At least for a while, and also, that I am actually very mature despite the fact that sometimes people think I look younger and sillier than I am. It reflects very poorly on them and has nothing to do with me. Please don't say no—not right away.”

And then I succumbed to some curiosity of my own. “Why are you doing this?”

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Why me?” I said. “Why did you pick me? There's a whole school of us.”

Bethany frowned. “Because,” she said, faltering, “you're convenient.”

“No, I'm not,” I said. “Not if you have to override wallscreen protocol and all of that. I'm not convenient.”

“Okay,” she said. “I like you.” And she seemed faintly subdued after saying this—these words that I'd wanted to hear, this confirmation that she'd been waiting for me on Sunday—not her but that other girl, the one who was not the daughter, not the extension of
him
.

“I like you,” she said again. “And if you keep asking why, I'm going to run out of good answers, because at some point there really isn't a why.”

“There's always motive,” I said.

“I can accept that you're a cynic, or else you're doing that boy thing where you have to be a little bit macho, and anyway, why are you so determined to prove me wrong?”

“I turned you in to your aunt,” I said. “You didn't like that.”

“That
was
rather annoying,” she said. “But I might have done the same.”

Somehow I had wandered close to the screen without realizing it. We were face-to-face now, and I was suddenly filled with a light, expansive feeling that I didn't immediately recognize as pleasure. I'd forgotten myself for just a moment.

“Your aunt handed me an ax,” I said. “A real ax. And then she ran back into the house and locked the door. I think I was more upset than she was.”

“She actually poured herself a drink afterward,” Bethany said. “I thought she was having a hot flash or something.”

“And you brought me a real glass,” I said. “Didn't they tell you not to do that?”

Bethany smiled. “I'm sorry we armed you so extravagantly. That must have been confusing.”

I didn't know what to do with my hands, and I thought,
That's why civilians have so many pockets in their clothes, so they can tuck their hands away, keep them still.
“Look,” I said, trying to impose a limit, to prepare her. “I don't want to sound ungrateful, but—it's too much of a risk. And really, what's the point? It's not like this is going anywhere.”

For some reason, this made her laugh. “James,” she said, “I'm the girl. That's
my
line.”

“And my roommate will report me. He'll wake up. He's a light sleeper.”

“Wait,” she said. “Is that a yes? Did you just say yes?”

“No,” I said. “I'm listing the reasons why it's impossible.”

“So, it's more of a soft yes.” She nodded. “You're worried about keeping up your end of things. I understand.”

“No,” I said again. “That's not what I'm saying.”

“Promise me you'll find a way,” she said. “It's important.” And her sudden sincerity brought me up short.

“Any particular reason?” I asked. But she didn't answer this. She just hurried to detail the plan, and seeing her so excited, so animated, I kept having to remind myself of who she was—and how little I knew about her.

Bethany suggested that we meet tomorrow night in the school kitchens. It was the only night she could do it. “It might be out of my hands,” I said, actually feeling regret. “I have a hearing that day. I don't know where I'll end up.”

“You'll end up with me,” she said. “I have a feeling.”

There was a little beeping sound and Bethany glanced at the handheld on her desk. “Proctor coming,” she said, and by the time the door to the changing room slid open, the wallscreen was blank and I'd stepped through the exit onto the factory floor.

*   *   *

It wasn't that I forgot about my Disciplinary Committee hearing, it's just that it seemed pointless to prepare. Owen, on the other hand, was convinced that our future depended on my performance. He was full of advice. “You've got time to practice,” he told me. It was Thursday afternoon, just hours since I'd spoken with Bethany in the factory. “Say you don't remember what happened with Creighton. That you blacked out after the bus attack.” He frowned, and then waved his hands in the air as if erasing something. “No, you can't say that. That makes you sound crazy. You remember,” he said, “but you're really sorry.”

“Are you asking me to lie?”

“Be serious,” he said. “You're sorry, right?”

“Sorry I didn't hit him harder.”

“No,” he said. “That's worse. Definitely don't say that. Just be sorry.”

And I did feel sorry—sorry for Tuck, and mostly sorry for Owen. I couldn't stop thinking about Dr. Cleveland; I couldn't stop searching for him on the campus. I put myself on several long wait-lists for Maintenance Intensives under his supervision. I was hoping he'd see my name and remember me, remember his promise. I'd stopped taking my monofacine at night. I wanted the nightmares to return. I wanted to see my friends again, to smell the smoke and feel the past coursing through my body, making me tremble. But, ironically, nothing happened—and to complicate matters, Owen and I were starting to talk, to become allies of a sort. It depressed me to feel as if one part of me could be made whole only by destroying another. Understanding had arrived too late. I'd put down roots here without even knowing it, without really meaning to.

“Practice what you're going to say,” Owen urged. “I'll tell you if you get the face right.”

“I don't need to practice,” I said. “I'm not a complete moron.”

Owen paused in a meaningful manner that implied he was unconvinced. I studied his earnest expression. “I'm sorry,” I said.

“You have to look down,” he said. “They hate eye contact.”

I apologized again. And this time I meant it.

*   *   *

Neither of us liked our new dormitory. As the newest additions, Owen and I got the usual hassle. We showered last, when the hot water was scarce. We picked our bedsheets last, so there were often holes and unappetizing stains. I was learning that 3s and 4s were very different from high-status students. Creighton and Davis regularly left their mark on the faces and bodies of those around us. Some had already had their sterilization procedures. Most didn't bother to finish the logic games that we were supposed to complete each day, the ones that demonstrated proper brain function. I saw their desks lit during class and the problems unsolved as they palmed with each other almost continuously. I sensed there was a deep bond between these boys, but I couldn't pinpoint it. The feeling moved around Owen and me like a stream bending around a rock. At first I thought their avoidance of us was because we'd lost status so quickly—I thought that they were protecting themselves from a dangerous connection. But that wasn't it. They all seemed to be trading in some currency that we didn't possess.