The Predicteds (24 page)

January Morrison tried to ruin my life. She got what she deserved.

—Josh Heller

“Are you all right?” Jesse helps me roll over and pulls me to a sitting position. He puts a stale towel around my shoulders and then hugs me so tightly that I can't breathe. I stare wildly around the room past his shoulder. I can't speak. “Are you all right?” he asks over and over again, and all I can do is nod my head woodenly. He sits down on the bed, pulling me in his lap. He rocks me back and forth for a long time.

“I'm sorry,” I tell him. And I mean for everything.

“I'm sorry I left,” he says. “I never should've left you. I knew what he was capable of.”

“Josh,” I say, moving my head from Jesse's chest and looking around the room. “Where is he?” Suddenly, everything comes back to me.

Jesse grabs my face and turns me back toward him. “Don't look, Daphne.” But he's too late. Josh is sprawled across the rose-patterned carpet, blood seeping from his chest. “He had a knife,” Jesse says. “We fought. I got a hold of it. And then—”

I start to laugh until I see Josh's lifeless body sprawled on the carpet again. “He's dead?” I ask, sucking my breath in.

“Don't look,” Jesse repeats. He's crying now. “I had to do it! He was going to kill you!”

We're still sitting on the bed, rocking gently, when the police arrive.

Not being with her is harder than I thought it would be.

—Jesse Kable

“I've got a surprise!” Dizzy doesn't bother to knock. As far as she's concerned, my room is her room.

I open my eyes and try to see the clock. It's midafternoon. I've been napping for over an hour. It seems like I do a lot of that these days.

Dizzy plops herself on the bed next to me. She's wearing some kind of blue cape. She sees me staring at it. “Vintage,” she explains. “Hot as ice, isn't it?”

“Isn't it a little warm for a cape?” I peer through the blinds. The sun is so bright that it hurts my eyes.

“Did you hear me? I brought you a surprise,” Dizzy says again. Her eyes are gleaming. She tugs at the two French braids hanging at her shoulders.

“Please,” I say, throwing myself back on the pillows, “not another makeover.” She's been over here at least a dozen times bearing creamy eye shadow or fake eyelashes or an electric eyebrow plucker.

“Better than that,” Dizzy says. She pats my forehead. “I've brought someone who wants to see you.” She looks at my half-open bedroom door. I don't see anybody, but I smooth my hair anyway. “I'm really not in the mood for company,” I say.

“Don't be silly, Daph.” She acts as if I've just announced that I want to join a convent and take a vow of silence. “Come in,” she calls to the door.

Sam steps through it. His hands are stuffed in his cargo shorts pockets, his baseball cap pulled low over his eyes. “Hey,” he says.

I give Dizzy an
I'm-going-to-kill-you
look, but she can't parse it. “Surprise!” she calls.

“Look, Dizz, I'm glad you came to visit. And Sam, it's nice to see you, but I'm not exactly up to…” I can't think of the right words. “I'm not exactly up to thinking about dating or whatever.”

Sam and Dizzy laugh together. They laugh hard enough that I feel stupid. “What?” I ask. “What's going on?”

“Silly, Daphie. I didn't bring Sam here for
you
, like some kind of male offering. Jeez.” She chuckles again. “I came here to tell you the news.” She grabs for Sam's hand. “We're an official couple!”

Sam turns red, but Dizzy is clearly over the moon. She likes him. That's obvious. I've never seen her look at anyone the way she does at Sam. It's not so much adoration as just general joyfulness. Frankly, she looks at Sam the way I remember looking at Jesse.

“We've kinda been hiberdating. You know, just holing up together. And here we are. Together.” She beams. Sam gives me an
aw, shucks
look from behind those long eyelashes.

“I'm really happy for you.” I'm sincere, because they're obviously so smitten with each other. She fits in the crook of his arm perfectly—they are like a matched salt and pepper shaker set. “I'm really glad things are going well.”

It's something of a surprise to me that the world is going on without me. The weeks I've spent in bed or on the porch reading or watching TV while I listen to Melissa's critical analysis have felt like an eternity. The night of Josh's party seems so long ago. Some days it's hard to believe it even happened.

“Have you seen him?” Dizzy asks tentatively, her mood shifting slightly.

I shake my head. She asks me every time I see her. I haven't seen Jesse. “I don't even know if he's in Quiet.” Dizzy opens her mouth, but I cut her off. “And I don't
want
to know. If he wants to call me, he can.”

It's been over a month since Jesse and I have spoken. After the police arrived that night, they arrested Jesse for the attempted murder of Josh Heller, his own stepbrother. It was twelve long hours before they sorted out the whole story. I was so tired by that time, I felt delirious. But I wouldn't let myself rest until I knew that Jesse was going to be okay. I spent a day in the hospital. I didn't have any physical injuries, but I was pretty shaken up. That time is blurry now. I really only remember Melissa standing over me, handing me a giant plastic cup with a straw, telling me not to talk. “You can talk later,” she told me.

But later, I didn't feel like it.

Dizzy filled me in on the details later, when I got home, tender and bruised. Josh's stabbing was ruled self-defense. I was just lucky, the police told me, that Jesse found me in time. Josh might've killed me. I didn't mention what else he planned to do. I can barely think the words, let alone speak them. He was going to rape me.

Josh wasn't dead. He spent three weeks in the hospital. He's now in jail, awaiting trial as an adult. I will eventually have to testify. I try not to think about it, though Dizzy loves to talk about him. If only she had known he was predicted, she likes to say, she would never have gotten near him. Dizzy isn't bothered by PROFILE—she's delighted to be part of a world where everything is determined. Or so they say.

“Have you heard all the news?” Dizzy asks now. She brings me gossip like fruit in a basket. It's a peace offering, a token of her affection for me. She tells me she saw January at the grocery store, but she avoided her. She doesn't know that I see January often. We have become friends. I wonder how things will change when school starts again in a month or so. Right now, she's a different girl, more like a clone of her mom, but there are times when I see flashes of the old January—not the one who hated herself, but the one who was wonderfully bizarre and full of life.

“Did you hear about school?” she asks. She's too excited to let me respond. “We're all going to the new private school.”

I already knew that. Melissa told me, but I pretend to be surprised. Dizzy's so excited to tell me, and I don't want to ruin it for her.

“My parents don't want me at QH. In fact, hardly anybody is going there except the predicted. And people who are poor, of course.” Dizzy adds that last part as an afterthought.

“It's going to be weird,” Sam says. “It's our senior year, and we'll be starting over again.”

The new school will be open in record time. A group of concerned citizens, led by Brooklyn's mom, started the ball rolling. They remodeled an old Big Lots in a strip mall. That'll be the new school. They won't accept the predicted. Because it's a private school, that's legal. The Bass School, it will be called—named after Brooklyn's parents, because they donated a ton of money to get the thing going.

“You'll be going to Bass too, right?” Dizzy asks. It's not so much a question as a pleading wish.

“Of course,” I say.

I feel guilty about lying, but I just don't want to argue with her. She'll never understand. I'm going to QH in the fall, because I don't feel right about going to a school designed to keep people out. Even Melissa thinks I'm nuts. “I know that what they are doing at the Bass School is wrong,” she told me, “but I can't send you to QH, not when I know I might be putting you in danger.”

I haven't told Melissa yet. I
will
be going to QH. And she can't stop me.

“Sammy,” Dizzy says suddenly, “will you run to the kitchen and get us some Diet Cokes?” He smiles at her, happy to do her a favor.

When he's gone, she grabs hold of my hand. “I know you still love him,” she says.

“It's not fair,” I respond.

“Fair doesn't matter much. We have to be safe. This is the only way things can be,” Dizzy says gently. “It's us against them, and that's the way it will always be. I don't care if Jesse is confirmed. There will always be a question mark.”

Confirmed. She's speaking the new language of PROFILE. While the test can predict for an extremely violent personal crime, it doesn't necessarily know the difference between self-defense and premeditated murder—a glitch in the system, I guess. Jesse is confirmed, which means he's already committed a crime—a crime of defense. In this crazy new world of PROFILE, that makes him slightly less dangerous than a predicted. He might have committed all the violent crimes he'll ever commit. Or he might not have done so. That makes him a different kind of social pariah—more like an ex-convict than a ticking bomb.

“I'm really sorry about that night,” she says.

“I know.” And I do know she's sorry. Dizzy has apologized about a million times for leaving without me that night. But she couldn't have known what Josh had planned. She'd been fooled by him. When she went back to the pool that night to get her clothes, she ran into Cuteny and Brooklyn and chatted for a long time about what an asshole Josh was being. By the time she came back inside to change, I was already unconscious in the pink-flowered room. Josh told her that I'd gotten tired of waiting and left. Brooklyn gave her a ride home later that night because Dizzy had been too drunk to drive. How was she to know that Josh had hit me over the head with a heavy stone statue of Buddha, taken from Richard's office, when we were walking up those stairs? “It's not your fault,” I say for the hundredth time.

“Sure.” She flips through a book on my desk. “You know I want you to be happy, right?” Dizzy's face is inches from mine. She has that look she gets when she's ready to beg forgiveness, whether you want to give it or not. It's not a fight I want to have today.

“I'm happy,” I say, grateful that Dizzy can't tell when I'm lying.

***

“I didn't think a pizza buffet was your thing.”

“I'm expanding my horizons,” Melissa says, turning her nose up at the vat of gravy in the buffet line. “Pizza and gravy?” she asks.

We're at Pizza Heaven, my first foray into the outside world since the Incident. That's how I think of it—the Incident. That phrase is nonthreatening. It could suggest anything: a flat tire, an unfortunate belch let loose in polite company, a conveyor belt gone wild with too many pies on it. It allows me to think of that night without thinking about Josh—or Jesse.

Melissa selects a seat under a stuffed moose. “I have some news.” We haven't talked about PROFILE in ages. “Nate Gormley has been arrested and is awaiting trial.”

We've all been watching for his twitching little face. After the night at Josh's, he simply disappeared. But he left behind the bat he'd used on January. The police found it in his bedroom with January's blood all over it.

I gnaw on a slice of chicken wing pizza while Melissa talks: “They found him in Oklahoma City. He confessed everything. He'll probably spend most of his adult life in jail.”

I chew slower. The buffalo sauce turns acidic on my tongue.

“His sister Brit admitted that she lied about Jesse. They went out a few times, but he never stalked her, and he certainly never hit her. But Josh convinced her to spread the rumors because he thought it would put even more negative attention on Jesse. Everything Josh did was calculated. It's scary, especially when you think about how many people he was controlling like marionettes.”

“Why would Brit lie? That doesn't even make sense.”

Melissa chews loudly on a celery stick. “I guess you're too young to realize that there are certain kinds of people out there who can convince anyone of anything. That's what sociopaths are.”

“I always hated Josh,” I say, trying to convince myself. “He didn't fool me.”

“Josh's mom is probably going to get jail time for paying the school district to keep Josh off the predicted list. Utopia, in fact, had the correct list, but nobody bothered to check it against the school's list, not even me. I feel responsible for that. I should've been more careful. I guess I was duped along with everyone else.”

I give her a sympathetic look. This isn't Melissa's fault, but I still don't feel like talking. Plus, it's no big surprise to me that Melissa can be a scientific genius and still not understand the first thing about people. She was truly surprised when the news articles started pouring in.

Nate Gormley is completely without a conscience, the reports said. Josh, the armchair psychiatrists told us, is a classic narcissist. The whole story came rolling out piecemeal, an article a day. Josh couldn't stand the thought of looking bad, of having everyone know that he was with January. He had to get rid of her. When January didn't die, Josh was temporarily relieved when he discovered that she didn't remember a thing. By that time, he'd also found out that she'd lost the baby before the attack. No baby. He was safe and didn't need to get rid of her anymore. I feel weird even saying that—
get rid of her
, like she was a bag of garbage or something—but that's how Josh saw her.

“The gravy isn't bad,” I note.

Melissa gamely tries dipping a carrot into it. “The superintendent is in some hot water himself, because he accepted the large
donation
that Josh's mom gave him in exchange for losing Josh's PROFILE scores. She'll probably finagle her way out of the mess. She's got a lot of resources and great connections. Nevertheless, Jesse's dad has filed for divorce. I've heard the gossip.” It must be big gossip if Melissa has heard it. She once asked me if the Jonas Brothers was a fast-food chain.

I stop chewing at the mention of Jesse's name. I drop the slice. “All I want to know is if things are going to go back to normal now.”

Melissa stares at her salad—a pile of bean sprouts on iceberg lettuce. “Once things are set in motion, it's sometimes hard to stop the downward spiral.”

“Translation?”

“I couldn't in good conscience work on that project. It's just not right. And it's all bunk, Daphne. The data is there, but we're still a long ways away from ever applying it. If I had any idea what Utopia was going to do with that information, I never would've agreed to be part of this. This data they have—it's useless. We don't know enough yet.”

I look up in surprise. I've never heard Melissa say that. “So it doesn't matter? The predicted are just like everybody else?”