Chapter Thirty-Eight
Sleeping bodies littered the hallways. They looked dead, to Jake.
If he looked closely enough he could see they were still breathing. The drool on their lips was still wet, and every once in a while one of them would blink, but they saw nothing, heard nothing. He tried shaking one or two of them awake but it didn’t work, and he felt creepy just touching them so he gave up trying.
At any moment, he supposed, the PA would crackle on and a weird voice would say “wake” and the school would come to life again, but for the moment he was alone. Utterly, devastatingly alone.
He searched the halls for Megan but couldn’t find her. Outside the biology lab he did find Cody, curled in a fetal ball in the middle of the hallway floor. Jake squatted down next to his friend and studied his face. Cody’s glasses had been disarranged when he fell down. It made him look like he’d had a fit or maybe even a stroke. It was disturbing to see him like that. Jake, careful not to touch Cody’s face, pushed them back into a more comfortable position.
Then he just waited. He didn’t know what was taking the Proctors so long to wake everybody up. Maybe they cleaning up the gym—Jake had left the ruins of his sporting good scale all over the wooden floor, left dodgeballs scattered everywhere.
He didn’t mind the wait so much. He had a lot to think about, and a few minutes’ peace was not unwelcome. When the command to wake did finally come, he sighed in regret. In a second the hallway would be full of noise and activity again, as students went about their normal, sane lives.
Cody sat up slowly as if waking from a pleasant dream and turned around, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. Then he saw Jake and squeaked in surprise. “You weren’t there a second ago,” he said, warily.
Jake nodded. “I just had a test.”
“Really? They’re coming more frequently now. I wonder what that means? What kind of test was it? How did you do?”
With a shrug, Jake expressed how little he cared. “I suppose I owe you an apology for getting so rough before,” he said. Trying to summon some remorse. “It was a pretty crappy thing you did to me, though.”
“It had to be done.” Cody watched his face carefully. Maybe he expected Jake to start hitting him at any moment. “It was in your best interest.”
“Really? Because it messed with my head so much I think I might have just got my second FAIL.” He told Cody briefly about the dodgeballs and the collapse of the scale.
“The Proctor didn’t tell you whether you passed or not?”
Jake shook his head. “I didn’t stick around long enough to find out. I was too distracted.”
Cody got to his feet. His bookbag was lying on the floor next to him and he picked it up while never letting his gaze stray from Jake’s face. “Your second fail, and you barely seem to care. I think if you needed any proof that Megan’s got you all messed up, there it is. She’s dangerous to you, Jake. You need to concentrate. Now more than ever. You need to not make any more mistakes.”
“I need to make my own mistakes,” Jake told him. “Don’t do anything like that again. I want you to promise.”
Cody lowered his head. “Alright. I promise I won’t mess with your love life anymore. Is that enough? Are we good?”
Jake was still righteously angry but he knew he needed his best friend. If he couldn’t have a girlfriend then he needed somebody, anybody he could trust. “We’re good. And I am sorry I grabbed you like that before.”
“It’s alright. What are you going to do now?” Cody asked.
“I’m going home. There’s a whole period left in the school day, but I don’t think anybody’ll say a word if I just walk out of here.”
They didn’t. He walked home and said hello to his mother. She was making meatloaf. Jake couldn’t imagine eating any. He climbed the stairs to his room and threw his knapsack in a corner before falling face-first onto his bed. He was tired. Exhausted. He also knew he wasn’t going to sleep for a long time.
He managed to choke down some dinner, and even make some small talk with his dad at the table. When he was done he asked to be excused and went back to his room. He had something he felt he needed to do. From his knapsack he took an X-acto knife and a black sharpie marker, and then he crawled under his bedside table.
The row of initials was still there. JM, repeated seven times. Below the seventh one he scratched in another set of the initials with the knife, then went over the cuts in marker to make them stand out.
His name was Jake McCartney. They had all been named Jake McCartney. He wondered if the rest of them had put their initials there after failed tests, or when they knew the end was coming. He understood the urge that drove them, now. The initials weren’t a clue in a mystery you were supposed to solve. They were memorials. You wanted to leave something behind. Some evidence you’d been there at all.
When Jake was gone—when MCCARTNEY, JAKE H was gone—Mr. Zuraw would go around the town finding any evidence of his existence and he would wipe it out, scrub away any messages he tried to leave, hypnotize people into thinking they’d never met him before, take his name off all the permanent records and files and roll books. The initials would be all that remained.
Eventually, that night, he fell asleep.
Not for long, though. Voices woke him. At first he thought he was dreaming of Proctors. Then when his eyes opened on the darkened room he realized that it wasn’t a dream at all. He was hearing a conversation—there were two distinct voices, one of them a Proctor’s distorted buzz, the other a normal human voice that sounded familiar, though not enough for him to recognize it. The voices were faint, coming up through the air conditioning vent in his floor. He could only make out a little of what they were saying but he could tell they were talking about him.
“—disordered thinking. Emotional complications—”
“H is exhibiting all the classic signs. It always happens like—”
“—you have the envelope?”
“Here.”
“It won’t be long now, until—”
“And then we’ll have a long and pleasant break. Before the next round of tests begins.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Just after five o’clock in the morning, a Proctor in a blue serge suit, black leather gloves, and a reflective mask climbed the stairs and entered the short hallway leading to Jake’s room. It had a pale blue envelope in one hand, and it didn’t make the slightest sound as it walked, didn’t even make the steps creak.
The Proctor stopped outside Jake’s bedroom door. Perhaps remembering the last time it had delivered a pale blue envelope, the Proctor paused then and tilted its head to one side. Perhaps it was listening for the sound of him breathing on the other side of the door. A moment passed and then the Proctor knelt down and placed the envelope in the crack under the door. With a gentle motion it quietly pushed the envelope under the door. Then it turned and, still keeping silent, started walking back towards the stairs.
It was at that point that Jake threw open the bathroom door and jumped into the hall. He’d been watching the whole thing, staying perfectly silent himself. He had even held his breath as the Proctor walked by.
“I’ve been waiting in there since four,” he told the Proctor, taking a step closer. “Waiting for you.”
The Proctor stood very still. Then it glanced from side to side. There was a linen closet to its left. Jake’s room lay behind it, with the door still closed. The Proctor seemed to be evaluating its options.
In the same second that the Proctor started turning to run for Jake’s room, Jake jumped forward and grabbed its arm. He yanked backwards and up in a way he hoped caused the Proctor some pain, and then with his free hand pushed its masked head into the wall.
The Proctor didn’t struggle. It stayed very still as Jake held it in that position, unsure of what to do next. Then, very slowly, it lifted its free hand and started reaching for the inside pocket of its jacket.
Thinking it might be going for a gun, Jake knocke
d the hand away and then reached inside its jacket and grabbed what he found there. It wasn’t a gun. It was a mobile telephone. It buzzed in his hand like a beetle and he nearly dropped it, thinking it might bite him—thinking it might explode.
He spared a glance down at the thing, intending to throw it behind him as hard as he could. What he saw made him stop. There was a tiny television screen set into the outer shell of the phone, and on it was the message: SILENT MODE. VIBRATE ONLY. INCOMING CALL FROM CODENAME Z.
If he opened the phone and put it to his ear, Jake knew, he would hear Mr. Zuraw’s voice. Codename Z—that must be what the Proctors called him. Just like they must call Jake Codename H, or just H for short.
“What does he want? Can he see me right now? Can he hear us, does he know how much trouble you’re in?” Jake pulled on the Proctor’s arm again.
“No,” the Proctor buzzed.
Jake shoved the telephone in his own pocket. He was fully dressed, and even wearing a jacket against the morning’s chill. He wasn’t sure what was going to happen next but he wanted to be ready.
He grabbed the Proctor’s shoulders and pulled it backwards, then kicked the back of its left knee. Not hard enough to do any damage, but enough to make the Proctor fall down on the floor. Jake had never been much of a fighter but his body was singing with adrenaline and some things just come naturally when you’re desperate.
He dropped down on top of the Proctor. “So who are you?” he asked, his face only inches from the mirror-surfaced mask. “Are you Mr. Schneider? Maybe Ms. Holman?”
From downstairs Jake heard the sound of someone getting out of bed and turning on a light. His dad, probably, wondering what was going on upstairs. Jake had only a few seconds before he was interrupted.
“Who are you?” he demanded again, staring into his own reflection.
“Jake,” the Proctor buzzed, like a fly trapped between two window panes, “it’s me.”
Jake reached down and pulled the mask off the Proctor’s face.
“It’s me, honey. It’s Mom.”
Jake’s face felt like it wanted to crawl off his skull. He was looking down at his mother, alright. He had just knocked his mother down and threatened her.
“Let me up, sweetie. I’ll go change and we’ll pretend this never happened. We’ll tell dad you had a bad dream. Alright? This doesn’t have to end badly.”
Jake sat back, aghast, and studied the mask in his hands. How was it possible? His own mother? How long—how long had she been working for the Youth Steering Committee? For Mr. Zuraw? How had they gotten her to—
Then something clicked in his head.
They’d had her all along.
“Get up,” he told her.
He was so not ready for this. He’d been operating on autopilot, setting his trap for her simply because he wanted to find out more, to understand what was happening to him. But he was barely able to think, barely able to plan beyond demanding answers to his questions. But maybe—maybe this was an opportunity. A real chance, and one he couldn’t afford to pass up.
He knew what he needed to do.
He handed her the mask. “You carry that, because I need my hands free. But don’t put it on. Right now we’re going downstairs. If we see dad don’t even look at him. I’ll do all the talking. We’re going to get into the station wagon and we’re going to drive to the township offices. That’s right, isn’t it? That’s where I want to go?”
“To the police station, to turn yourself in? I don’t think you want to go to the library right now.”
“I want to go where the Youth Steering Committee meets,” he told her. “Wherever that is, you take me there. They need to know that Mr. Zuraw has lost his mind. They need to stop the Curriculum.”
She didn’t say anything about that.
Jake picked up the envelope that was shoved halfway under his door. Then they headed downstairs together, Jake behind her, ready to grab her if she cried out or tried to run. They didn’t see Jake’s dad on the way. When they got to the car she turned around and raised her gloved hands. “Jake,” she said, “this really isn’t necessary. You don’t have to go there. I can take a message to them for you, if you like, but—”
“I don’t trust you at all,” Jake told her.
She looked hurt. It was hard to look at that face, her face, and not feel guilt crawling all over his bones, but Jake kept his face hard.
“Please, Jake. Don’t hurt me. I’m your mother.”
Jake grimaced. “No,” he said, “I don’t think you are.”
Chapter Forty
“What should I even call you?” Jake asked, when they were in the car.
“‘Mom’ always worked before,” she said.
He shook his head and watched the road. “You’re not my mother. I don’t think I even had a mother. I wasn’t born. I was grown in a vat, or—”
“It doesn’t work that way,” she told him. “It’s true I didn’t give birth to you. But I’ve cooked your meals. Done your laundry. Kissed your finger when you got a boo-boo. If that doesn’t make me your mother, what would it take? Jake, I want you to understand—regardless of anything else, I do love you.”
Jake clamped his eyes shut. “The way a scientist loves his favorite lab rat, maybe. It doesn’t stop him from dissecting it when the experiment is done.”
In his pocket, her telephone kept vibrating. He ignored it. Every fiber of his being was telling him how wrong this was. He had taken his own mom captive and was forcing her to lead him to the meeting place of the Youth Steering Committee. Yet he was right, when he said she wasn’t his mother. No real mother would stand idly by and watch her son be executed, would she? Much less watch it seven times. “How many times have you done this?” he asked. “Were you there for all eight of us?”
“Yes,” she admitted.
“And when they—died—didn’t you feel anything?”
“Of course I did. You can’t begin to understand how hard that is. But we have a, a way of thinking about it that makes it a little easier. We tell ourselves that no matter how many times you die, Jake McCartney lives on. He gets another chance.”
Jake closed his eyes. He was shaking. Then he realized it might just be the telephone in his pocket. He tapped it through the fabric of his windbreaker. “Is there any way to turn this off?” he asked.
“You could answer it.”
The last person he wanted to talk to was Mr. Zuraw.
“He’s crazy, isn’t he? Zuraw, I mean. Mr. Irwin told me that the stress of running this program has warped his mind. I can believe it. The stress of taking the tests has certainly warped mine. But he can’t be allowed to keep doing this. Is it true that the tests have changed? Gotten more dangerous?”
She shrugged. She didn’t look at him as she said, “They’ve certainly changed. In the first series, they were all logic puzzles. Like the one with the Proctor who only tells lies and the Proctor who only tells the truth, or the one where you have to find the heavy dodgeball. Have you had that one yet?”
He was surprised she didn’t know. He touched his pants pocket where his latest pale blue envelope sat, still unopened. He was afraid to look.
“There were no automatic failure conditions, back then,” she confessed. “And the original candidates were allowed to fail five tests, not three. But there are good reasons for those changes. Z has been very clear on that—the data we got originally wasn’t useful. The Pass/Fail candidates didn’t take the tests seriously. They thought of them as silly games. They couldn’t understand that they were working toward something special. It was Z’s great innovation to turn that around. There needed to be disincentives, he said. It’s part of modern educational theory. The student has to have a compelling reason to learn, or he won’t apply himself to his full potential.”
“It never occurred to any of you that I might learn better if nobody was shooting at me?” he asked.
“You’re wasting your time, Jake. The Youth Steering Committee has total faith
in Z. They know he’s the right man for the job.”
Jake would have to see about that. He thought that if he explained to the YSC about some of the tests—about the galvanometer test, for one, which Mr. Irwin had called punitive—then they would have no choice but to fire Mr. Zuraw. And maybe, just maybe, let Jake go. Call off the Curriculum and let him just live his life.
More likely, he thought, they would kill him. He knew too much, now. But maybe it would be enough, Jake thought, to make things a little better for the next Jake. The one who hadn’t been grown yet.
Maybe he had an option, though. Was it to late to turn back? What if he told his “mom” to stop the car? What if he promised to be good, to keep passing tests? What if he was the one, the first one, to pass the Curriculum?
He turned to look at her. “What is this all about?” he asked. “Maybe if I knew that, what I was working toward, I might feel differently about it.”
“I can’t tell you the details,” she told him. “But it’s a great destiny.”
He took the pocket out of his envelope. She glanced at it curiously. Maybe she didn’t know what it contained. Maybe, as she had suggested, she was just a messenger. Jake tore the envelope open with trembling hands. He’d had a fifty-fifty chance at passing the dodgeball test. No, better than that—he’d almost had it. Maybe this was a—
Inside was a FAIL.
His second. His last, if he wanted to live. A disincentive, to make him take the tests more seriously. Well, it certainly had that effect.
He was considering his next move, still, when the car stopped and she said, “We’re here.”
Jake looked up and saw they were parked in front of the high school. “No, this isn’t what I asked for—”
“You said you wanted to meet the YSC. This is the way. Come on.” She switched off the car and led him inside the school. It was early in the morning and not even the custodial staff had arrived yet. The corridors were eerily dark and the silence in the classrooms gave him the creeps. Some of the hallways were closed off with thick metal grates he had never seen before.
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