“And your gift seems to be scaling them,” he said with a small grin.
I shrugged.
“Have you ended correspondence with your friends?” he asked, and I nodded. “And they won’t be contacting you?”
“I think they’re pretty mad at me right now.”
“And Justin—you’ve ended that as well?”
I swallowed and nodded. Not exactly “ended,” I thought. If he comes looking for me, I can’t really help it. Clare still lived in town, and Scott and Molly. Gabe was moving here as well. My dad couldn’t keep track of my movements if they weren’t online. I just had to believe my friends would come after me. It was part of my gamble.
“I am willing to work with you, Maddie, but first I need to see that you’re serious about this. You’re on a one-week trial.”
I opened my mouth to argue, but my dad was already shaking his head.
“If you pass, we’ll talk.”
I narrowed my eyes and smiled, a fake smile, no teeth. “I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I wasn’t on some kind of probation,” I said, but my dad wasn’t amused. There was too much truth to my words to make it a joke.
“I’m serious, Maddie. No leaving the house unless you’re escorted by me or your mother. No sneaking off.”
My eyes instinctively moved to the kitchen window, and I visually estimated other windows around the house that I could crawl out of. There was a tree outside my bedroom window. I mentally imagined the branches and tried to remember if they formed a ladder. Then I realized I’d never actually climbed a tree. I wondered how bad a fall from a two-story window would be. I wondered if turf grass provided any kind of padding.
My dad read my mind. “Our screens have security latches, so don’t think about crawling out of a window in the middle of the night.”
I started biting my nails. I could turn the sensors off; that wouldn’t be hard.
He smiled again. “And don’t think you can hack your way around the sensors. I just installed a new house security system. Its signal is sent straight to the police. I wouldn’t tamper with it.”
“Is it meant to keep people out, or in?”
A call buzzed on our wall screen, and my dad looked at the incoming number.
“I’ll take that in my office,” he said.
I watched him stand up and leave the room and felt like he had become more distant than ever.
“I have some good news,” my mom broke in. I raised my eyebrows at the wide grin on her face. It gave me hope. They would let me out one night a week?
“You made it home just in time to order a dress.”
My face scrunched. “A dress?”
“For the National Education Benefit. It’s on Friday.”
My eyes widened. The dreaded formal event. The Thompsons. Damon Thompson, who had willingly fed me into the teeth of the detention center, and his arrogant, chauvinistic son, Paul, who was even happier to see me locked up. I shook my head decisively.
“No way,” I said.
“Madeline—” My mom’s tone shifted into her guidance voice, and I cut her off.
“Mom, do you honestly expect me to sit through a benefit parading the gifts of digital school, after what I just experienced?”
She looked down, her face guilty. “I think your father would want you to be there. Believe it or not, he is proud of you.”
I smirked. “Are you sure?” I asked. “I’m not exactly a spokesperson for his program.”
“Well, I’d like you to be there. It would mean a lot to me.”
I thought about this. I considered who else might make an appearance, and the idea of seeing Justin was all the encouragement I needed.
“Fine, but I get to pick out my dress,” I warned her.
I sat in my room and unpacked my duffel bag, but nothing I owned fit with my new life. Tennis shoes for running, flip-flops for the beach, sunglasses, a raincoat, tank tops so I could feel the sun on my skin. A paper journal stuffed with pencils and pens. None of these things were necessary in the digital world. I looked at my empty desktop. I thought of Elaine’s desk in Eden, full of mugs crammed with pens, baskets of letters and papers and magazines, spiral notebooks and markers. I set the leather journal on my desk. It looked strange there, the faded red leather juxtaposed against the hard glass desktop that served as a digital keypad.
I already felt lonely. I thought it would take weeks, but it had only taken minutes. I felt the urge to escape pulling at my arms and my legs and my heart.
My life here was one room. It was an extreme cutoff, like running through a wide, open field and then suddenly walking a balance beam. And I’ve never had very good balance. At least now the balance beam didn’t intimidate me. My steps were as solid as ever, like walking in shoes with metal tips. I guess that’s what confidence is, not worrying so much about the steps you take.
May 21, 2061
I’m thinking about myself this week. Feeling sorry for myself. I’m heavy with me. What’s the point of thinking about me, really? Where will it get me, other than stuck, alone, centered on myself, which only makes me feel too huge to handle?
So instead of sitting around dwelling on this tiny island of me, I’m going to spread myself larger and concentrate on things around me, and then I’ll become smaller. I become irrelevant and then I stop suffocating.
I remember, when I was young, my mom gave me a book called About Me. It’s a two-hundred-page interview of yourself. But what’s the point? Why be so self-indulgent? Why not interview someone else? Why not learn two hundred pages about something other than yourself? Why do we get so fixated on ourselves? Where does that lead us, other than in circles? The happiest people aren’t necessarily the most successful, or the most popular, or the most talented. They’re the ones who are interested in the people around them.
I miss him right now.
I realize I don’t need him to feel whole. I’ve found that place now. I don’t need him to feel complete or confident or self-assured. I’ve found that person already. But I still need him in another way. In the same way water needs a shoreline—even if it recedes, it still needs a place to come back to. In the same way migrating animals still need a destination, and dust always needs a place to settle. It’s the same way things are pulled to other things, instinctively. I still need him in that way. I would still be receding, still be unsettled, still be wandering a little in the sky, without him.
Chapter Two
It was cloudy outside and the air was balmy and humid, carried in on an east wind. I went outside to our backyard with Baley for the first time since I’d been home and that’s when I noticed rosebushes had been planted along a gravel path that snaked in a loop around our yard. Their colorful blooms bordered both sides of the trail, like a rainbow fence full of blossoms. I inhaled a deep breath through my nose, and I could smell the sweet perfume and the soapy aroma of the petals. My mom stood on the deck, next to a green umbrella shading a patio dining table we had never used.
“You planted flowers?” I asked, as if I might have dreamed up the image.
“It was your father’s idea,” she said.
I nearly tripped over my feet when she said this. I looked back at her.
“Dad wanted to plant these?”
“Well, I was complaining to him about how much I missed gardening.” She walked down the patio stairs onto the path. “When you and Joe were little, I spent hours outside planting while the two of you played. It’s how we spent most of our afternoons, before M28. Your father surprised me with these on my birthday,” she said, and smiled slowly, like she had to force the gesture. I walked over to the rosebush closest to the porch steps and leaned over to examine the salmon-pink blossoms. They were strangely perfect.
“Don’t touch that one,” my dad’s voice rang out. “Not that one, Madeline. It hasn’t been stapled down yet.”
My hand stopped a few inches short of the petals. My fingers turned in. My smile died.
I looked up and saw my dad standing in the
doorway. “Stapled?” I asked.
“They’re fake, Maddie, obviously,” my mom said, as if there were no other options. “Nothing natural looks this perfect.”
I looked back at the flowers. I was so sick of fake. I wanted to unfake everyone and everything.
“Do you like them?” I asked her. I needed her to say no.
She shrugged, and glanced at my father. “At first I was a little disappointed,” she admitted, “but it’s so easy to get used to. You don’t have to prune them or fertilize them. You don’t have to cut off their blossoms after they die. You just spray them every month with the scent can, and they smell like this year-round.” She cupped a plastic flower in her hand. “Now I can’t imagine all the work it would take to actually maintain real roses. The planting part is easy, but it’s having to take care of them every day that becomes a nuisance,” she said.
I looked at her and wondered if these were her honest words, or my father’s, or maybe from the instructional setup video that came with the plastic plants. But that was our culture. We wanted to plant things, but we didn’t want to maintain them. We wanted the beauty but didn’t want to put time and effort into things. I wondered how we had come to look at joy as a chore. I wondered why using our hands and our time to create things had become such an inconvenience.
Justin was right. The detention center had given me new eyes. I was seeing the world in a completely different way, seeing how technological and artificial we had become. I had always sensed it, my whole life, but it’s hard to know if something is off when that’s all you know. It’s like living in a constant winter—you never understand the comfort of shedding your layers, of living light. But now I understood.
I wasn’t rebellious. Maybe I was just more human than the average person.
I remembered planting flowers with Elaine, how wonderful it felt to use my hands. It eased my mind. It made negative thoughts slip away and more sunlight filter in. It made me feel awake, mindful, and in the moment. You need to put love into something in order for it to grow. Maybe that’s why this house felt so sad to me.
“Be careful out here, Maddie,” my dad said. He was talking about the garden, but I knew his warning was about life in general. I had a habit of tearing up anything that was too constricting.
“I need to start getting ready for the benefit,” I said, and headed for the door. I brushed my hands against the roses’ thorns as I passed. They were plastic and soft and weakly grazed my skin.
I opened the door of my bedroom with a wide smile and carefully maneuvered down the plush-carpeted hallway, four inches taller in my black, clunky platform heels. My long, leopard-print dress nearly grazed the floor. It was fitted, showing off the curves I was finally getting back. Black lace and sequins trimmed the chest, connected to thin spaghetti straps. A black leather cuff clung to one of my wrists.
Usually my hair was tied up for this event, in a conservative braid or twist. But tonight it was loose. It fell long down my back. That’s what caught my parents’ attention as they waited for me at the bottom of the stairs.
“Madeline Rose Freeman!” my mom exclaimed. “What did you do to your hair?”
I ran my hands through pink streaks of highlights and smiled.
“I hope that’s a wig!” she gasped.
I pretended to be hurt. “You said pink is my best color.”
She raised her hands above her head like she was praying for a new daughter. “Pink? You dyed your hair pink? I told you that you couldn’t dye your hair,” she said.
“Until I was eighteen,” I corrected her.
My dad didn’t look angry, which was surprising. He was fighting a grin. My parents stood in their usual formal outfits for the event: my father in a black tuxedo and my mom in a long-sleeved cream-colored dress that cinched at the waist and flared out at her ankles.
“Couldn’t you have done that after the benefit?” Mom asked.
I pointed out it wasn’t completely pink, just pink highlights. I had ordered the ten-minute dye kit online, and it had arrived today, just in time. Rebellion brought to me in twenty-four hours by glamordye.com. High-five technology.
“What on earth are you wearing?” she asked.
I looked down at my dress and smiled. I think the design is called Suck It, Digital School.
“Leopard print,” I said.
“Well, you can turn right around and change,” my mom insisted, and spun her finger in a circle. I held my ground.
“I don’t have anything else to wear,” I said. “I’m still a size smaller than all my clothes.”
“Never mind, we’re already late,” my dad said. “Just put this on.” He handed me a long black dress coat, which I accepted. It covered most of my outfit, but it only made my bright hair stand out like a fire at night. Tonight, that was my plan. It had taken me eighteen years to understand I wasn’t invisible.
I followed my parents outside, and my mom critiqued my feet.
“Madeline, those shoes are not appropriate either. Too loud.”
Water adhered to the black driveway pavement and shined under the streetlights like silver puddles. Two men dressed in black suits waited at the open limo doors to escort us to the event. My shoes thudded hard against the ground and made me so tall I had to fold my body in half to get inside the limo.
We headed downtown to the annual National Education Benefit. When we arrived at the front of the colonial Stratford House, we were met by an usher. I noticed there were fewer paparazzi than usual. Normally a trail of reporters lined the red carpet on either side, a living wall five people deep. This year there was just a smattering of reporters roaming around the open area, which was encased in a fence of gold ribbon for the event. The two escorts opened the limo doors, and my father was the first one out of the car. The cameras immediately caught him. I ducked out of the limo and kept my eyes on the white marble steps ahead.
I didn’t stop to have my picture taken with my parents, which I had obediently done every year. I walked away, unbuttoned my coat, and shrugged it off. Instantly the cameras started to turn. People ignored my dad, and a curtain of blinking lights followed me down the red carpet. I smiled for the cameras. I waved. I even stopped once and blew a kiss for a photographer, a sultry kiss where I puckered my lips together and paused with my hand held out toward him. People whistled and the digital billboards broadcasting the event switched from my father to me. I was on national television. I turned and waved to the audience before I headed for the stairs. Two tall men in elegant white suits held the front doors open for me, and their eyes took in my hair and outfit with stunned surprise. The wind blew my hair back, and I strutted through the door—the first time I’d ever walked inside this building smiling.
I checked my coat in the lobby, raised my shoulders, and tossed my hair back. Guests loitered on velvet seats and couches in the spacious entry room, staring into handheld screens. It reminded me of old-fashioned smoking parlors in movies, where people would flee to spend time with their addictions. My parents found me, and my dad’s hand pressed against my back as if he thought he needed to push me into the ballroom. When we walked in, people stared at my hair, my lipstick that was too bright, the heavy liner that outlined my green eyes like a cat’s. I could hear people leaning in to criticize me, to judge me. Fingers pointed. I tried not to let it bother me. The moment you open yourself up is the moment you’re scrutinized. Humans love to judge one another. No wonder so many of us preferred being behind a screen.
All of the negative attention made my steps shaky. Annoying my dad was one thing; taking on the world was another.
The party was smaller this year. I could remember when thousands of people turned out for this event. Now the benefit was lucky to pull in a few hundred. I knew it wasn’t because the supporters of DS were dwindling; it was because face-to-face interaction was becoming so rare, it made people uncomfortable. This year the giant wall screens were set to mirrors and reflected the room to make it look like more people were in att
endance. Tables were larger than normal to try to hide the lower numbers, but they still took up barely half of the room. The rest was empty space. So much of our world was turning into empty space. I watched people sit stiffly, a little robotic, not touching, not knowing how to use their senses, not understanding how to be in the moment. I looked around the room for a couple who were touching each other, who were engaged with each other. I couldn’t locate a single one. Everyone was staring into a screen attached to android hands.
I looked into the back corner of the ballroom, where I had seen Justin a year earlier. I knew he could get in tonight, if he wanted to. He knew I would be here. I looked for Riley, Jake, or Scott and Molly, for any person in the room I could connect with, for anyone who dared to make eye contact with me. So far, everyone looked away, as if meeting my glance would spread a virus.
During the benefit dinner with the Thompsons, I kept my head down and my eyes locked on my plate. I pretended to be fascinated by the thread count of the white cotton tablecloth. Damon discussed a train accident that took him two weeks to clean up, and Paul talked about police academy training, and Becky, guess what, played with her phone the entire time. It lit up on the table every time she had a message, which was constant, like a strobe light. It was distracting.
Paul didn’t tell me I looked pretty this year, because I didn’t. I looked like I was ready to start a riot. I looked like I could tame lions in my sleep. I passed the time by listening, mostly to the strange silence that shouldn’t exist in a room full of people.
I eavesdropped on conversations around the table. Mrs. Thompson was telling my mom how Paul moved out to live at the police station during his training. She let Becky join a movie club that meets face-to-face. My head perked up at this, and I looked at Becky. I saw red flags. And potential. I glanced at my mom, and she looked equally surprised.
“You let Becky go out?” my mom asked.
“There’s an old cinema in town,” Mrs. Thompson said. “It’s the only one open, a single screen that plays old classics. I’m efriends with all the mothers. It’s a nice group of girls.” My mom and I glanced at each other while Mrs. Thompson continued. “I want Becky to get a little bit of interaction, now that Paul’s never home. I read a study that you should expose your child to face-to-face communication once a week. It’s good for social behavior.”
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