The Predicteds (2 page)

Bullied? Are you kidding me? He wasn't bullied. He was the bully.

He was a weird kid, kinda scary sometimes. He liked guns. Obsessed with death. Hated most people because he thought they were all dumb. I could kinda see where he was coming from.

We worked at Pizza Heaven together. He was pretty cool. I think he worried a lot about being such a failure with women. He talked about that a lot.

I didn't even know him. Was he new here?

I heard he had a hit list.

His parents are responsible for this mess. They should be in jail right now.

—Interviews with Quiet High students and teachers

“Are you sure?”

“Of course,” I say, annoyed. “I'm totally ready to go back to school,
Mother
.” I emphasize the last word because I know it will get on her nerves. Long ago, she insisted we move to a first-name basis. “It's much more mature,” she'd told me. I was five at the time.

Melissa just gives me a sympathetic look now, the kind she reserves for when she feels sorriest for me, like the time I broke my toe or the time I came in third in the science fair. It's always a sign she's way more freaked out than I am.

It's been a week since that day, and I'm sick of sitting around the house. Quiet High has been closed for seven long days while the staff and community volunteers have worked to repair the broken fixtures and windows, clean the hallways and classrooms, and fill in the bullet holes with plaster. “A good coat of paint, and it'll be just like new,” the school board president insisted in a news interview.

“I don't know,” Melissa says skeptically. “You've had a terrible trauma.”

Trauma
. If I hear that word one more time, I'm going to scream. Melissa sounds like the woman with the frizzy feathered hair who has been here twice to compel me to talk about what happened. “You are experiencing a flashback, aren't you?” she asked when I stared past her flipping hair wings and tried to tune out her high-pitched voice. I don't feel much of anything, and I don't want to talk about it. But Melissa has been expecting me to fall apart ever since Jesse led me out of the school that morning, my legs so numb I could barely walk. Jesse had to hold me up, and I leaned against his chest, feeling his heart beating hard and sure.

Jesse truly was the school hero that day. When the shooter burst through the closet door, breaking the lock with ease, Jesse whacked him over the head with a metal shelf that he'd pried from the wall. The shooter collapsed in a daze, the gun pointed at the floor. This is how I imagined it, at least. The rest I heard about from Melissa, who watched the news religiously for days. They recreated the whole thing using cute animated diagrams, a clip-art boy stalking the hallway with scattered X's meant to represent the rest of us. I didn't watch much of that, but Melissa told me how it all went down. In the very end, it was Jesse standing over the shooter when he raised his gun, his arm shaking violently, Jesse stepping backward toward the cupboard under the sink, Jesse standing in front of me. That's when the shooter pulled the trigger.

But he didn't shoot Jesse. The shooter killed himself. After all of that, all of that swagger and destruction and fear, he just killed himself. I was pissed when I found out. There was something not right about that. Now I'll never get to say to him,
Why?

For the first few days, the local and the national news camped outside our house, but I never came out. They had only one picture of me, taken right after Jesse pulled me out of the cupboard. In the photo, I am under one of his arms, the metal shelf is under the other. There I was on the front page of the
Quiet Daily News
with a red, sweaty face, looking baffled and tired, like I'd just run a marathon I didn't know I was in.

“What's the latest report?” I ask Melissa now as I reluctantly shovel a spoonful of lukewarm oatmeal in my mouth. I wipe the edge of my lips, and stamp my right foot, which now has a tendency to go numb with no provocation. Melissa says it will go away soon.

“Three more released from the hospital. It's really amazing.” Melissa is referring to the death toll: a grand total of one. And that is the shooter himself. Lucky for us, he was either a terrible shot or he just preferred to aim at things rather than people. Bullets smashed trophy cases, battered lockers, tore through banners, and decimated the stuffed armadillo mascot's head hanging above the main office. Of the twenty-five people injured, all of them were hit indirectly, either by debris or ricocheting bullets. So far, only two remain in the hospital: a sophomore who broke his leg when he slipped on water from a leaking water fountain, and a secretary who had a mild stroke during the shooting. She was actually at home, sick with a cold, watching the coverage on television.

The news is calling the whole thing a miracle, like it's some stroke of luck that a psycho with the hand-eye coordination of a street monkey brought a gun to school and terrorized everyone. “Just think what damage he
could
have done.” It's a constant refrain that confuses me. Why would I want to think about that?

The yellow wall phone rings, and Melissa grabs it with her free hand—she's holding a wooden spoon with the other, trying to scrape a layer of oatmeal off the side of the saucepan.

“Yes,” she says patiently into the phone. The oatmeal tastes like paste. I appreciate Melissa's efforts to be more motherly, but her cooking skills suck. She looks over from the phone and smiles at me. She points at my spoon.
Good, huh?
her eyes say. She's so proud of herself that I take an enormous bite to give her an extra thrill. She probably needs it. This week has been hard on her too.

Melissa's used to being immersed in her research, not making pasty oatmeal and worrying about me. She lets the spoon clatter in the sink and tries to put on a faded corduroy jacket while she's holding the phone with her shoulder. A fake poppy sticking from the buttonhole pokes her in the eye. She is one of those rare people who can pull off hippie chic. On her, a vintage T-shirt with her ugly flowery skirt looks secondhand and classy at the same time. I've definitely borrowed her style sensibility, but I never look half as good as she does. Plus, she looks a tiny bit like Julia Roberts, only Melissa never wears makeup and she's short—a lot shorter than I am. Still, she has that same Julia Roberts chestnut-brown hair and mile-wide smile. She's also the smartest person I've ever met. She graduated from high school when she was sixteen, had two Master's degrees before she was twenty-one, and was the youngest person to ever get a PhD from MIT. I've often thought that if I had somebody else for a parent—say, some other brilliant scientist who also happens to be morbidly obese or plagued by an unfortunate skin rash—I'd be a lot better adjusted.

She's still muttering, “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh,” in the receiver with no inflection, but now she stretches the long cord to the living room and her voice gets lower. I can't hear her at all anymore, which, of course, intrigues me. Melissa usually isn't so secretive—in fact, she's the kind of person who has no filter. I cringe just thinking about the time she told the Walgreens cashier that I had “begun menstruating” while she waved a box of pads in front of his nose.

“Call me back in a minute,” I hear her say in a normal volume. She clunks the heavy phone—a remnant from the previous owners—back on the wall. “You sure you don't want me to walk with you?” she asks.

“I'm pretty sure that I'm capable of making it to school by myself.”

“Well…” she says skeptically, but she's already thinking about other things, I can tell. She grabs a bruised pear from the counter. “I'm going to take a few calls from my office, okay?” I know she means the space she's converted out in the garage, not her office at Quiet State College. She hardly bothers to go there—she hasn't even removed the former occupant's nameplate from the door. For all who pass by, Melissa is Dr. R. K. Phillip Rathbine. (R. K. is, apparently, in a nursing home now and hasn't the slightest idea who he is. Melissa was his mid-semester replacement.) “You know where I'll be,” she says, heading for the side door.

The first thing Melissa did when we moved into this house was set up her office. It's what she does every time we move, only this time, she got the bright idea that the garage would be a good place to
spread out
and
get some privacy
, like I've ever shown the least bit of interest in whatever boring scientific thing she does out there.

“Who was on the phone?” I ask, eyeing the Lucky Charms. Once she leaves, I can dump the sodden clump of oats.

“Nobody,” she says. Then she adds, “It was just the school.”

“What do they want?”

“They have questions.”

“For me? Because I've already told everything I know.” I sigh loudly. I've been through the story a zillion times. At least.

“For me,” Melissa says. “They have questions for me.”

“Why you? What are they asking you?” Melissa's not a grief counselor, like that frizzy-haired creature. She's a neuroscientist with subspecialties in computer science and genetics—stuff that requires zero people skills. Before we moved to Quiet, she worked at Utopia Laboratories in Saint Paul, Minnesota, developing some boring computer program that models brains. “Why would the school want to talk to you?”

“No reason,” she says, and I glance at her with suspicion. Melissa couldn't be deceptive if her life depended on it.

“What's going on?” I ask her.

She adjusts her fake poppy. “Nothing. Let me worry about it.” Then she practically runs out the door.

Worry? What's she worried about?

The phone rings again, and I let it go for three loud rings. Melissa will pick up the extension in the garage. On the third ring, I get annoyed. Why can't we use cell phones like normal people? Melissa seems to think
old-fashioned
means
morally superior
. I push my chair back and grab the stupid phone. But before I can say hello, I realize that Melissa has already picked it up. Instead of hanging up my end, though, I listen, mostly because I hear my name: “Daphne doesn't know about any of this,” Melissa is saying.

The person on the other end talks quietly, with phlegm stuck in every word. I recognize the voice immediately: Mrs. Temple, the principal at QH. I met her the day Melissa registered me for school, just a week before the shooting. Mrs. Temple had wanted me to skip to my senior year, because I was
so far ahead of my classmates
, but Melissa insisted that I needed to remain a junior for my
social development
—this coming from someone who would suggest to total strangers that they
might consider investing in a treadmill to combat corpulence
.

“We are going to have to announce these results. Publicly. We have no choice,” Temple is saying. “I thought you should know.”

“Give it some time,” Melissa says, a faint hint of pleading in her voice.

“Please note that I'm not asking for your permission. I'm aware that this is no longer your project; your company made that quite clear. I'm simply being courteous by telling you what's going to happen. Whether you like it or not, I will be making some changes at Quiet High. I simply must do so for the safety of everyone here, including your own daughter.”

I hang up the phone after Melissa does.

I get a weird feeling—a feeling I haven't had since I heard the first shots fired that day. What is going on here?

PROFILE is the name of a computer program so revolutionary that you won't believe it until you see it. It will change the way we think, the way we live. And that's a promise we can keep.

—Utopia Laboratories marketing copy

One day, scientists will be able to predict everything about every individual. We'll know what an individual is going to do before she even thinks of it herself! It'll be a new world where everything is predicted before it ever happens!

—Dr. Melissa Wright, quoted in
Minneapolis-St.Paul Magazine

“Hi,” the one with the curly hair says. She sticks her hand out. “Desdemona, but everyone calls me Dizzy, because I kind of am. It's really supposed to be Desi, because, you know—short for Desdemona. But Dizzy fits. Don't you think?” She smiles and wavers back and forth, like she's about to fall over. Her curly hair is in neat ringlets held back by a thick, black leather headband, like a girl whose mother did her hair for picture day. Only sexy. The others follow suit, sticking out their hands toward me.

We are back in chemistry class, although Mrs. McClain is out indefinitely, because her
nerves are frayed
, and we're also in a new classroom, a meeting room in the library, formerly used for school board meetings. Crammed around a tiny, rectangular metal table, I feel like a sardine. And it isn't helping that Dizzy and her brood of followers are crowded around me, fighting to introduce themselves. It seems that being
the girl from the cupboard
has made me a kind of celebrity.

“Let me introduce you,” Dizzy says, slapping her hand against the table. The substitute teacher is wandering around the room, trying to find a dry-erase marker. Nobody is paying any attention to her pleas for help. “This is Brooklyn Bass.” I look at the tiny little girl called Brooklyn. She is one of those pinch-faced girls who probably irons her socks and alphabetizes her panties by color. “Brooklyn,” Dizzy tells me, “is the star pitcher on the girls' softball team. And,” she adds proudly, “she's a professional pageant girl.”

“Oh,” I say to Brooklyn.

“I'm Miss Calf Fry,” Brooklyn reports.

I obviously look confused.

“Calf fry is an Oklahoma delicacy: deep-fried bull testicles,” Dizzy explains.

“Oh, how nice,” I say, making a face.

I try not stare at Brooklyn's sparkling tiara, but I obviously fail, because she reaches up to her head and says, “It's just for show,” in case I was under the impression that she was the reigning queen of the library.

“Shhhh!” the substitute teacher says, trying to get us all to shut up. Dizzy just talks louder. “And this is Lexus Flores.” Lexus waves and scoots her skinny butt into the tiny space next to me in my chair. “Hey, girl,” she says.

“We've met,” I say, thinking about that first day of school.

“Lexus has a golden retriever, loves the color purple, and just got a brand-new car for her birthday—a Lexus, of course!”

“How wonderful for you,” I say without meaning it. It seems clear that Dizzy is going to continue with this party chatter until she's properly introduced each girl at the table. I count five more besides Brooklyn, Lexus, and the current girl she is introducing, a ditzy, giggling thing named Cuteny.

“You know, I really have some things to do,” I say suddenly, interrupting Cuteny's introduction. “It was nice to meet all of you,” I lie. I scoot my chair back, grab my coat and my backpack—we still don't have lockers until the new paint dries—and walk toward the door. The sub doesn't even notice. The girls watch me leave.

How can these girls act like what happened that day was no big deal? Sure, everybody is talking about it, but it's like something that happened to other people, not to us. Nobody says
his
name. He's just
the shooter
or
that psycho
, or sometimes, just
him
. That part is fine with me, because I don't think he deserves a name. But I can't just forget about what happened. How is it that they can?

A safe distance outside the classroom, I flop into a chair between two racks of paperbacks. Surprisingly, it doesn't take long before I feel myself drifting off, sleep coming faster than it has in days, a welcome relief. Curled up with my red raincoat as a blanket and my backpack as a pillow, I kick my plaid Rocket Dog shoes to the floor and use the small table in front of me as a footstool. The chair is old and squishy, broken in by hundreds of lazy students before me—a chair meant for napping. But the library itself feels like whoever designed it wanted to ward off any restful thoughts or happiness. Everything is gray—including the librarian's face. The high shelves are loaded at the tops and bottoms, with the middles mostly bare, as if someone wants students to have to really stretch or crouch for books.

I jump when I feel my backpack moving under my head. My coat falls to my feet. “Hey!” I exclaim loudly, sitting up and stomping my bare feet on the ground. “What's going on?” The librarian sends me a warning shush.

“It's okay,” a gentle voice behind me says. I twist around. Standing there is a girl with blond, matted hair that she's braided into small pieces and haphazardly arranged on her head with tiny, hot pink butterfly clips. Her face is pale, and her eyes are kind of sunken, the way eyes are on people who are too skinny with their bodies shriveling away. Her nose seems to be the only thing that sticks out of her form. She may be the saddest-looking human being I've seen in recent memory.

“Sorry,” she says. “I didn't mean to wake you. I was just going to put this under your head.” She holds up a folded sweatshirt.

“Why?” I ask.

“I like to hang out here.”

What?
How was that an answer to my question? Who is this girl? Does she patrol the library looking for people who need pillows? She smiles wanly at me as she throws the sweatshirt over my shoulder, tosses my backpack to the floor, and then throws her own bag on top of it. She comes around the side of my chair, shoving my legs out of the way with her own, and flops on the chair next to me. I pull the sweatshirt off my shoulder and hand it back to her. “Thanks,” I say, “but I'm just leaving.”

“Mind if I hang out with you?”

I do mind, but I don't know how to tell her without being totally rude, so I just don't answer. I stifle a yawn and taste that horrible taste you only get when you've been napping. I snap my mouth shut and wish that I had a Tic Tac. I gather my coat and my backpack and scout out another empty chair, but the girl leans across me and pulls a thick book from the shelf nearest me. I pause and strain to see the title. I can't help myself. If someone else is reading a book, I need to know what it is.
Outlander
, the cover says.

The girl spots me peering over at her, and she lowers the book. “A romance novel about time travel,” she says. “It's pretty predictable, and the sex scenes are boring, but I like the idea of disappearing and ending up in some other time, far away from here. Did you know that in the world of time travel, you can never stop what's going to happen? The universe is a cruel master.” She says this very seriously. “In case you were wondering,” she adds in a tone that suggests I've been wondering for ages, “I leave the book on the shelf and read some of it every day. Did you know that in over a year, nobody has checked it out?” She turns back to the book before I can respond, so I assume she's done talking. She drums her fingers militantly on the wooden arm of her chair.

“Well, enjoy your book,” I tell her, stepping over her feet, which are covered by strange blue and yellow polka-dotted peep-toe heels.

“Sorry,” she says, grabbing my arm. “Stay. I didn't mean to bother you.” She looks so pitiful that I hesitate. She sees the opportunity. “Come on. What else do you have to do? I know you're ditching class.” We both look toward the classroom. I lower myself back in my chair. “I won't say a word,” she promises. “You go back to sleep.”

Convinced that I'll never be able to sleep, even though my lids are heavy, I end up drifting back into that half-asleep state where the idea of getting up seems like more work than I could ever muster. Eventually, my eyelids flutter open, and I find the girl standing with her little round nose about three inches from my face. I jump. “What are you doing?” I exclaim, scrambling in my chair.

“Post-traumatic stress,” she says definitively. “You've got it.”

“What are you talking about?” I say loudly. The gray librarian looks up from her post at her desk and calls—far louder than I did—“Second warning, Missy. Keep it quiet.”

“What are you talking about?” I whisper.

“Post-traumatic stress,” she whispers back, leaning in closer to look at my eyes. I swat her away, catching one of her butterfly clips in the palm of my hand. “You are jumpy,” she says, “because of the shooting.”

“Maybe,” I say sarcastically, “I'm jumpy because you are in my face.”

She nods as if to say,
Good point
. “Did you know him?” she asks after a second.

The odd thing is that I don't have to ask. I know immediately that she means the shooter. “No,” I say, realizing that for just a second, I hadn't thought about him. “I didn't even see him,” I tell her now. I don't have any idea what he even looked like. I haven't even seen a picture of him. And I never will. I don't want to know. Giving him a face is more generous than I feel like being. I prefer to think of him as a blurred-out entity, like a mob witness.

She nods. “Lucky.”

“How about you?”

“I was outside. Cut class for a cigarette. I missed the whole thing.”

“Must be karma,” I say.

“Yeah,” she replies bitterly and tugs at a frizzy piece of hair, pursing her shiny pink lips. “You're Daphne Wright, right?”

“How did you know?”

“I'm psychic,” she says, tossing the book on the table in front of us. A little orange construction-paper bookmark falls out.

For a split-second, I'm charmed by her. “Oh, really? What am I thinking right now?” I smile tentatively, half-friendly, half-making fun of her.

“Not that kind of psychic, silly.”

“I didn't realize there were different kinds of psychics.”

The girl rolls her eyes. “I can tell you everything about you.”

“I already know everything about me.”

We are at an impasse. Do I like her, or do I want her to suddenly come down with a case of laryngitis? It's always a toss-up with me. Melissa says I'm a misanthrope in training. The girl's eyes move to the open double doors of the library room from where I've just escaped. The noise is louder, the sub looks even more harried. She'll never make it through the day.

“How do you know my name?” I repeat.

She points at the freshly printed schedule clipped to the top of my notebook that is sticking out of my backpack. I've been carrying it around since the first day.
Daphne Wright
, it proclaims. “Oh,” I say.

The girl slinks down in her chair so low that she looks like a puddle of goo melting. Her earrings—hideous dangly things that look like blue peacock feathers—move violently as she whips her head, peering one way and then the other.

“What?” I ask, growing nervous.
Is he back? How could that be?

She's staring at Dizzy and her friends. They've come out of the classroom and are standing a few feet from the paperbacks, just out of our earshot.

“Them?” I ask. “I just had the pleasure of meeting them. Mean girls, huh?” I've already written them off. I've been to enough schools to spot these kind of girls a mile away. It's best to be polite but distant. Never get too close, or they'll figure out how to torture you.

Dizzy sees me in the chair and waves. She gives some sort of hand signal to the others, and they all began walking toward us.
Great
, I think.

“Shit,” the butterfly girl says as she sits up quickly. “I'm outta here.” She grabs her bag and makes a run for it, a skinny flash scampering out the library doors.

“Nice to meet you,” I call in spite of these facts: (1) the librarian is practically apoplectic over the noise we are making; (2) we technically didn't meet; and (3) I'm not sure it was nice meeting her at all. She's definitely weird, like the trying-too-hard weird type.

Dizzy leads her troops over. “Hi,” she says kindly. “You're obviously new here, so we don't expect you to know this, but you really should avoid talking to people like her.” She points in the direction that the butterfly girl scurried off.

“At least, don't do it in public,” Brooklyn amends.

Dizzy elbows Brooklyn in the shoulder. “Shut it, Brook. You're going to make her think we're horrible bitches. What she's saying,” Dizzy continues with a smile, “is that certain people at Quiet High are better left alone. It's not worth the hit you're going to take to your rep, you know?”

I don't smile back. “Well, thanks for the information regarding my rep,” I say coldly, “but I'll probably take my chances.” I'm not a big fan of being told what to do.

Lexus flips her shiny hair out of her eyes. The hair flip is obviously her signature move. “January is a total nonentity at QH. She's
persona au gratin
.”

“I think you mean
persona non grata
,” I correct.

“Whatev. Point is, I'm pretty sure you don't want to associate with someone like her. Not after what happened.”

I say nothing, because I know she wants me to ask.

“The shooter,” Brooklyn tells me. “Don't you know who that was?”

“Do you want to know who you were talking to just now?” Dizzy asks gently. “January. January Morrison. Sound familiar?”

“It was her brother who did it,” Lexus supplies. “Genetics,” she says, shaking her head, as if she has spent much time wrestling with the topic. “You never know what people are going to do.”