Redemption Prep

by Samuel Miller

  But my pattern will adjust. I’ve already begun preparation for my first day of classes. I’ve organized and cataloged my clothing. I’ve charted my walking route on days of class. I’ve made a list of foods available in the lunchroom.

  I should say, I met another person, earlier. A girl. Her name was Cara. She was also a Year One, and she lived two floors down from me. She was sitting on the grass outside as I measured the distance to my first class. “What are you doing?” she asked. Seeing no benefit to the conversation, I S5—Rationalized that I should lie and tell her “nothing.” She asked where I came from, and despite the fact that I had little interest, I asked as well. Cara is from Illinois. She was recruited to Redemption because she led an effort in Chicago to beautify the city through botany. I find pursuits of beauty to be as unnecessary as conversations filled with cursory personal information, but I chose not to tell her that. The S8—Consequence of the statement would not be worth the S6—Honesty. Instead, I continued measuring my walking distance between classes.

  I should introduce you to this thought pattern. S1–S8 are shorthand code for the eight steps of socialization, the key components of a program developed by my parents to assist me in conducting short-term conversations, for the purpose of building long-term, meaningful relationships. S1—Input, S2—Subtext, S3—Intention, S4—Emotion, S5—Rationale, S6—Honesty, S7—Response, S8—Consequence.

  I am not, nor have I ever been, a strong communicator. When I was in elementary school, other students found my behavior so abrasive they assigned me a special teacher, Mrs. Duckworth. When I continued to punch and hit my classmates, Mom was forced to create a more intentional solution to the problem of my inability to interact with other human beings.

  After intensive training and application, I have fully adopted the eight steps of socialization as a permanent pattern of thought. While many find this exhausting, I find it liberating. Every conversation follows this pattern, meaning the eight steps of socialization provide the backend code to all human communication; every miscommunication can be traced to a break in the code.

  The whole world is really a pattern, if you stand far enough away from it. It all makes sense, if you take the time to understand it.

  Here is an example. When Dr. Richardson says to me on the new student tour, “Evan, we really think you’re going to excel here,” S2—Subtext forces me to acknowledge that she is paid by the school to ensure that I have a good experience, so her S3—Intention is less sincere interest in my good ability, and more interest in doing her job, which involves making me feel comfortable and desired. This is an understandable behavior; everyone must first look out for their own self-interest. However, S5—Rationale tells me that there is no S4—Emotional investment to be made. Instead, I’ll simply respond, “Thank you.” I have developed no feelings of emotion or affection toward Dr. Richardson.

  I would be remiss to not mention that I have identified in myself a feeling of excitement that is approaching the level of irrationality. Finally, I can sense that I belong to a structure that deserves my intellect. The possibility for growth is apparent; the only question that remains to be answered is, how much will I grow? What will I accomplish? For what will I strive the hardest? To what will I devote myself?

  Evan.

  EVAN PUSHED HIS way through the Human Lounge and into the academic building.

  The number of routes that could be taken inward toward the GRC approached infinity. The five schools at Redemption were interconnected by a grid system of perfectly laid circuits, forming an outward-branching cell around the nucleus: the GRC. Tonight, the Human Lounge to the Human School to the P-School to the GRC was the most discreet.

  Redemption Prep opened in 1975, built on the bones of the Griou Research Center. The GRC was the creation of five science professors from Princeton University who shared a vision for their work: total seclusion, full immersion, rooted in the worship of Jesus Christ. With nearly unlimited resources from Princeton, each of them built their dream facility, in pursuit of their respective fields of study: Dr. Carl Yangborne, chemical science; Dr. Gerard Roux, brain science; Dr. Luc Simon, physical science; Dr. Lisle Bouchard, robotic science; and Dr. Cynthia Richardson, psychology and human science.

  But their research required help, and no qualified scientists wanted to live on a mountain in Utah, a hundred miles from civilization. So instead of hiring professionals, they recruited young, hungry minds with exceptional skills—fifteen- to twenty-year-olds—and trained them. When they realized the armies of young scientists they were training were much more valuable than the research, the five labs became the five schools: Chem (C-School), Brain (B-School), Physical (P-School), Robotics, and Human Sciences. Each school built its own facility, with classrooms, a lounge, a library, and a dormitory. On the back lawn, they built housing for the staff, housing for the maintenance workers, and a chapel, to ensure that the school’s mission stayed rooted firmly in Christianity.

  Other than the geography and the layout, Redemption was just like Spring Hill High School in Montpelier, where Evan had gone for two semesters. There were 940 students. There was a basketball team and a theater. There were bathrooms that always smelled terrible, and required classes nobody wanted to take. There was a lunchroom, surrounded by student lockers, right in the center of the GRC.

  Only one light was on in the Human School as Evan passed through, in the lobby of the school’s head instructor, Dr. Richardson. She had an office just off the lounge, with her own waiting room and phone booth. Eddy sat alone in the waiting area outside.

  Evan kept his head down and continued through the P-School gym, and waited at the entrance to the GRC, a ten-foot, vacuum-sealed door with an iron bar across the front, locking it in place. The GRC’s locking system was interconnected and exact. All five doors would open on staff-member request at one of the terminals, for five minutes exactly, before they relocked. They weren’t separate locks either. The same metal piping ran through the walls of the circular building, locking them simultaneously.

  Moments later, Dr. Simon and Aiden emerged on the other side of the lunchroom, and the metal bars over the doors released. Evan slipped inside behind them and set his watch.

  Taking the four-digit combination to a locker by watching someone wasn’t difficult. Most people’s hands block the combination numbers themselves, but that’s not really what you’re looking for. Instead, you set your eyes on one single, recognizable dial marking, and watch its movement with every turn. Then after they leave, you take the final number, where their combination ended, and you re-create the pattern backward from the final number. Emma’s final number was twenty-two, backward fifteen to thirty-seven, forward eight to twenty-nine, backward twenty-nine to fifty-eight.

  Fifty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty-seven, twenty-two. The locker clicked open effortlessly.

  Emma’s locker was still full.

  In the center, there was an uneven stack of textbooks, magazines, and lined notebooks. He picked them up, one by one. She drew in pencil in the margins, mostly abstract phrases stylized and dotted with illustration. You’re just a kid, she’d written on the first page of her The Art of Feeling textbook, the j’s and i’s and apostrophes replaced by stars. There was a single Holy Life magazine at the bottom, worn at its creases. The address printed on the back was to Cynthia Richardson—Dr. Richardson—at an address in Black Rock, Utah. He thumbed through it, watching the margins, and stopped on the second to last page. Emma had scribbled a Bible verse: Put on the full armor of God, so that you will be able to sit firm against the devil. —Matthew 7:20. Evan ripped it from the magazine and held it briefly to his chest.

  He traced the titles of the textbooks again. Into Feeling, her compassion training book; The Art of Understanding, the paperback they used in her Applications of Empathy class; and Richard Simmons’ Never Give Up: Inspirations, Reflections, Stories of Hope by Richard Simmons, for her Inspiration in the New Millennium elective.

  He stopped. If they’d bee
n set back in order, based on her classes that day, The Art of Feeling should have been on the bottom. He pulled it out again.

  When he gripped the book by its cover and shook the edges, a small page fell from the center, exactly what he’d been looking for. He recognized it before it even hit the floor. He’d seen Emma writing on this same crumpled piece of paper dozens of times. He’d tried a few times to get close enough to read it, but Emma was always more cautious when this paper was exposed. He picked it up carefully. Without unfolding it, he could read the name at the bottom. It was written hastily in black marker and underlined twice.

  Zaza Galbia.

  Aiden.

  “KEEP LOOKING FORWARD,” Dr. Simon said, his fingers pressed under Aiden’s jaw. “Let me know if you experience any pain.”

  “I swear to God,” Aiden said, resisting as the doctor’s thumbs worked their way up the back of his neck and scalp. “I’m fine.”

  “Please, refrain from language.” The doctor was wearing the same black suit that most instructors wore every day. “By your own account, you’ve likely experienced a contusion of some sort, and may very well be concussed. If there is internal bleeding here, we will need to stop it right away.”

  “It was a bump on the head. That’s it.”

  “Always in such a rush, all of you students.”

  Aiden pictured Emma, seated alone on the stands of the school’s outdoor basketball court, waiting for him in her oversized yellow raincoat. Tonight, she’d promised.

  “I have homework,” he told the doctor.

  “Sure, sure, sure.” Like several members of the administration, Dr. Simon had traces of a French accent buried under American pronunciations. “And for Mr. Napoléon, it was just a little stomach ulcer. And for Mr. Caesar, it was just a little flesh wound, nothing more. What’s that behind you in the theater, Mr. Lincoln? Just a little bump on the head?”

  “What are you even talking about? Lincoln was shot—fuck!”

  The doctor’s thumbs reached a pressure point on the top of his head. Aiden could feel the pain in his toes.

  “Profanity,” he barked, and lifted a finger to Aiden’s face. “Look. Blood. From the top of your head.”

  “One time I bled from my eyeball in a basketball game.”

  “Your blood is surprisingly thin.” Behind him, it looked like Dr. Simon might have raised his glove to his mouth and smelled it. “Your file doesn’t list any condition—”

  “Can you just put a Band-Aid on it or something?”

  “Yes.” The doctor resumed his position over Aiden’s scalp. “But we will need to shave your hair—”

  “No!”

  “Stitches it is, then.”

  For twenty minutes, the doctor worked, prodding and pulling at the top of his scalp. Aiden could feel the pressure at the edges of the wound as Dr. Simon cleaned it, but he hid the pain, smiling and reminding the doctor he was fine to leave.

  The knot in his chest was getting tighter every minute. A maintenance sweep was about to start, probably because of the chapel, and the school would enter lockdown mode. If the staff was moving dorm to dorm, checking on every student, Emma wouldn’t wait long for him.

  But it wasn’t just about tonight. There was more to the knot than that. He had felt it when they talked before mass, too, painfully tight. She was so distracted. She barely looked him in the eye, even when he told her point-blank he didn’t feel like she cared about him anymore. She’d been like this for two weeks now, avoiding him, shorting their time together, falling asleep early on nights he was supposed to come over. Tonight, he could feel himself racing to cut her off in the middle of sentences, afraid that if she reached the end, she would get all the way to breaking up with him.

  “We’ll have to sit about an hour as the stitching settles,” the doctor announced.

  “I’m not sitting for an hour.” Aiden stood, pulling his head out of Dr. Simon’s reach.

  “Sit down! I’m not finished—it’s still bleeding!”

  He looked in the mirror. A section of his hair had been pulled away for the wound, and the small scissors were hanging from a string. He took them himself and cut the string at its source. “There.” He handed them back to Dr. Simon. “Can I go?”

  “At least let me wrap it,” the doctor said, exasperated. Aiden nodded, and he went to work, pulling a thick, tan cloth around Aiden’s head and knotting it at the top. As soon as the doctor removed his hands, Aiden was headed out the door.

  “Mr. Mallet,” the doctor called. “You’ll need medication.”

  Quickly, Aiden returned to the room and watched as the doctor opened a cabinet that covered the full width of the wall. Inside, hundreds of tiny, colorful drawers were labeled with words he didn’t recognize—hydrocodone, oxycodone, amoxicillin. As Dr. Simon bounced between them, Aiden noticed a file sitting next to his own on the counter.

  “Can I ask something?”

  “If you must.”

  Aiden gestured to the folder. “What happened to Eddy?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Eddy.”

  “Ah, that’s right. Hit his head. Same as you. He will be fine.”

  “No, I mean . . . why did he do . . . that?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  Aiden balanced himself. “He started screaming in church—”

  Dr. Simon’s hand landed on the table, covering the file. “There is something wrong with his central nervous system,” he said. “Stress-induced. We will figure it out, and we will fix it.”

  Aiden watched the doctor for another moment, studying the way he moved. Everyone lied differently, but usually avoiding eye contact and offering short sentences was a strong clue.

  The doctor handed him a small bottle. “Don’t you have homework?”

  Aiden nearly sprinted through the hallways on his way back, strong-arming Year One plebes rather than waiting for the post-mass hordes to clear the hallway. Left and right, people offered him high fives. “Dude, Aiden, that was so sick!” one plebe shouted. One group of Year Twos broke out into applause. He burst through the P-School Lounge and out into the fog, not stopping until the school’s outdoor basketball court was in view.

  It stood alone, surrounded by a cage of wrecked fence. There was one light on it, in the corner, so it cast hard shadows on the blacktop. This far from the school, the sweep sirens faded into the noise of the forest. Alone, pacing atop the bleachers, he saw her silhouette.

  The school had forgotten this court existed when they built the indoor gym and removed the cameras years ago. On the first night that Emma convinced him to sneak out after curfew, they came here, with a quilted blanket and a water bottle of vodka she bought off a maintenance worker. They sat inches apart on the splintered stands, passing the bottle back and forth and talking about everything. She told him all of her favorites—her favorite stars, her favorite sounds, her favorite trees, her favorite people. He told her he didn’t have any, and she said it was okay, but he owed it to himself to pay better attention. Since that night, the stands had become their spot, the source of every good night they had. But it had been at least a month since the last time they were here.

  “Emma?” he called out.

  The pacing stopped. She leaned against the top bleacher.

  “Emma?” he asked again, her silhouette disappearing as he reached the entrance. The fence gate fought back as he pushed, grinding against the concrete.

  She leaned over the stands, staring blankly down at him, and his heart dropped.

  It wasn’t her.

  Testimonial: Neesha Shah.

  Year 1995–1996. Day 21.

  Emma just hung a photo of us on her wall.

  She left the room thirty minutes ago, but I can’t stop staring at it. It’s a disgusting picture, really, up my nose on the bench near Human. We were walking there yesterday, on our way to class, when she stopped and sat, then patted the seat next to her like I should sit, too. She took her Polaroid camera out of her bag and before I knew w
hat was happening, she was holding it out with her arm and snapping the photo.

  She’s smiling. I look like I’m trying to stop the photo from happening. She looks like Julia Roberts. I look like I just saw Julia Roberts getting murdered.

  I don’t think I’ve ever seen a photo of myself on someone else’s wall. My family didn’t do pictures, and the only photos at Kimberley International were taken for the brochures, of the beautiful students reading under trees or testing fake compounds in plastic beakers. One time, my friend Aanya took a photo of everyone at her birthday party, but when I saw it on her dresser, she’d folded it so you couldn’t see me. She said there just wasn’t room in the frame.

  Emma and I aren’t photo-on-the-wall friends, or waste-a-Polaroid friends. We’re not even walk-to-class-together friends, we were just leaving at the same time yesterday. She has a hundred other friends, better than me, and a boyfriend, Aiden. She gets invited to parties that happen after curfew and sits with the basketball team at lunch.

  Still, there I am, one of the ten photos on the wall. You can see everything that’s different about us, starkly contrasted in those two square inches—Emma’s hair is straight and golden, mine’s curly and black; Emma’s teeth are perfect, mine have a few noticeable gaps; Emma’s smile is practiced, mine is forced—but we’re both in there.

  I’ve only known Emma for twenty-one days, and already, she’s making me question the way I’ve lived for seventeen years. She asks simple questions, dumb questions, but questions that I can’t answer, like “Why?” and “What if you didn’t?”

  Last night, she listened to me drone on for hours about how my project had failed to show any results, and how I’d never win the Discovery if I was only allowed to experiment on fucking rats, and then she asked, “Why do you let it have so much power over you?”