Deviant

by Helen FitzGerald

  “First things first,” she said. “Let’s find out what happened to Stick.”

  IT WAS A TWO-HOUR drive back to Los Angeles. They were low on gasoline, so Craig stopped at the first service station en route.

  “You need anything?” Bren asked.

  She shook her head.

  When the others left the Winnebago, Abigail picked up Becky’s iPhone, keyed in the pin, and opened the video montage. Her sister’s face filled the screen. Becky was wearing the same plain white T-shirt Abigail was wearing now. As much as it pained Abigail to watch, a weight had been lifted. Becky hadn’t killed herself. She hadn’t orchestrated the fast-forward bonding day because she knew it was going to be her last. She simply wanted Abigail to become a part of her life as quickly as possible. Abigail wasn’t to blame. Of course, the truth was far darker than that initial suspicion. Becky had been murdered—either by Grahame or by his colleagues.

  Abigail switched off the phone and shoved it in her pocket. She glanced out the window. Bren’s parents were standing in line at the counter. Gracie wrapped her arm around her husband’s shoulder. The gesture was thoughtless, familiar, and loving all at once. It occurred to Abigail that she’d never actually seen a committed couple in real life, a lifelong couple. Gracie and Craig didn’t get along all the time; the dynamic was hardly perfect, but their devotion was solid and unspoken. It just was. As was their love for their son. The couples at the commune preached love, but that love was fragile and overdramatic, the devotion fleeting.

  The door flew open.

  “Bren, when did your parents meet?” Abigail asked.

  It wasn’t Bren. It was a man in a dark suit. Abigail tried to scream, but he clamped a cloth over her mouth and nose before she could move. An overpowering stench filled her nostrils, a combination at odds with itself: disinfectant and rotten garbage. Another man appeared behind him and darted for her legs. Her last thought as they dragged her from the Winnebago was I’m either being killed or knocked unconscious. Then there was only darkness.

  Abigail first noticed the pain in her arms. She couldn’t move them. Everything else seemed like television interference. She tried to speak. Is there someone there? Where am I? Her mouth was dry, stretched, stuffed. If only she could make a sound. And the thirst. She needed water.

  “Don’t be scared.” A wobbly figure appeared through the fuzz.

  It was a man.

  Her arms tensed. She tried to kick. She couldn’t move her legs, either. Her limbs were bound. Jesus Christ. She was gagged and tied to a chair. Her underside ached. What had happened? What was her last clear memory? Two men had taken her. Suffocated her with a smelly cloth. She’d been kidnapped. And now a man was standing over her. Abigail tried to scream through the gag. A muted growl was all she managed. She bit at it, gnawed. There was no getting through the thick cotton material.

  “I mean it, Abigail,” the man continued.

  Grahame. Of course. Who else?

  “There really is nothing to worry about.” The fuzziness cleared. He turned to someone across the room. “Go on, tell her …”

  “There really is nothing to worry about,” another voice confirmed.

  Her heart pounded, filling her ears with a rapid thump-thump-thump. She looked to her right: nothing but a closed door. Ahead, past her father: a desk, with a small box on it. To the left: Dennis Howard, Stick’s father, who nodded sadly. His eyes were bloodshot, his features drawn, haggard, and pained. She searched that terrible face for an answer and got it.

  “I don’t blame you for Matthew’s death,” he said and sniffed. “But I am heartbroken.”

  Liar! She wanted to scream. She moaned, tears on her cheeks, soaking the gag. So Stick was dead. She knew that for certain now. She also knew that he wasn’t heartbroken that he’d lost his son; he was heartbroken that his son wasn’t the perfect little boy he’d demanded him to be.

  “We’re both devastated,” Grahame added. “But we are here to help you.”

  By now, everything had sharpened into stark focus: the dark wood, the desk, the filing cabinet, the locked door. This was her father’s den. Her pulse raced even faster. What about Bren and his parents? Were they safe? Had Grahame and Dennis Howard killed them too?

  “The family with the Winnebago, the McDowells … do you know where they live?” Stick’s father asked. Grahame shot him an unreadable look, then turned back toward Abigail and kneeled in front of her, resting his hand on her shoulder.

  “You know we’ll find your friends eventually, Abigail,” her father murmured. “In a few minutes I’ll ask you where they might be. They’re not at your friend Brendan’s house. You’ll tell me because you’ll want to tell me. You’ll tell because you’d know I’d never hurt you.”

  So they don’t know where Bren and his parents are, she thought, blinking rapidly. Somehow they must have escaped. Craig and Gracie are smart and have connections.

  “Abigail?” Grahame asked.

  “Kill me, you shit—see if I care!” she shouted. But muffled in her gag it came out gibberish: “Kmyoushseeffcrr!” Her eyes blazed, defiant.

  Grahame sighed. He walked over to the table, opened the box with the coded lock, and took out a pre-prepared syringe. PA23.

  He moved toward her. The thudding in her ears drowned out every other sound. She fought desperately to move. Couldn’t. Panic took over. She realized now that she’d prefer to die. Better dead than like Joe: a robot. Of all the ironies! Snapping into “robot mode” to avoid reality … now that the gift of an eternal robot mode was staring her in the face at the end of a moist needle, she knew what a bloody fool she’d been.

  Her thoughts raced down a series of blind alleys, anything to escape. Becky had said something else about the den. No, not said; she’d texted. What? Floaty letters moved around before her eyes —T h i n k. She tried to imagine the page in her Book of Remembrance where she’d written it down. She tried to will the letters to form words. What was written in the text? Something about taffy and changing something … right?

  But she couldn’t quite remember or cling to the words. They’d read like nonsense.

  Focus!

  “I want to explain this to you, Abigail.” Grahame sat on a chair beside her and touched her cheek. “The only thing this does is help you solve your problems. Look at Melanie. Life of hard knocks. She begged me for this after we got together. Now she’s perfect.” He tapped the end of the needle and dabbed Abigail’s arm with an antiseptic wipe. “The whole mess could have been so easily avoided. But life gives us second chances. Becky’s in the ground and Matthew’s body is lost at the bottom of a canal. If they’d had this, they’d both be alive and happy. Sophie, too. But I have Melanie. I have you. And Dennis has his wife.”

  Abigail wriggled. Her shoulders tensed; her legs kicked at the ties. She could no longer think. She was a trapped animal.

  “Becky was just like her mother,” her father said. “So inquisitive and fiery. Oh, dear Becky. She got herself into so much trouble.”

  Abigail growled.

  “But you should know, too, I had nothing to do with her death, or Matthew’s. It wasn’t right. We are furious. So many ideas in our group. Some people, well they’re straying, taking a wrong path. It’s not about hurting people. It’s about making things better. We’ll find a way to deal with what they did. But you have to believe me: I’ll never let anyone harm you. You’re my long-lost little girl. My only child now.”

  He pressed the needle against her skin. She struggled against the ties.

  “Listen to your father,” Mr. Howard said. “He’s luckier than I am. He has a second chance. With Matthew gone, I have no future.”

  “This really is the best thing that could happen to you,” Grahame said. “In less than a minute, you’ll feel relieved. We can’t just let kids kill themselves and each other and go nowhere, can we? You know that I’m right. Becky knew it, too. You agree with me. Your upbringing nearly destroyed you, and you long for peace. Now close your eyes
for me.” He paused and kissed her on the forehead. “I love you.”

  Abigail closed her eyes—not because he’d ordered her to, but because she was terrified.

  She shuddered as her skin was pierced.

  So this was it. Abigail Thom, once 50837, was about to disappear. She was as dead as Becky and Stick. Robust, closed-off, intelligent Abigail Thom—who loved Nieve, who hated Glasgow and the rain and social workers and children’s homes and hostels and Billy and heroin and the monarchy, who wanted to go to University, who craved a new life and a family and adventures and opportunities, who mourned a sister called Becky and a boy called Stick, who was overwhelmed by the discovery that her mother wasn’t a crazy bitch from hell but someone who loved her—LOVED her—and was also loved by some blond sculptor from the borders, and who had made three lifelong friends called Bren, Gracie, and Craig …

  That Abigail Thom was about to disappear.

  Grahame withdrew the needle and dabbed her arm again. He quickly covered the injection site with a Band-Aid. She counted back from sixty in horror. It would only take a minute, he said. 59. 58. 57. 56. 55. 54. 53. 52. 51. 50. 49 … What was she supposed to feel again? 48. 47. 46 … 43 … Happy. Calm. She kept counting, on and on and on. Her raging heartbeat provided the rhythm, never slowing.

  9. 8. 7. 6. 5. 4 …

  Calm happy content glad numb right good perfect …

  3.

  2.

  1.

  Gone.

  She opened her eyes and inhaled through her nose. Or tried. She was hyperventilating, but maybe that was because she’d held her breath. She didn’t feel any of the above. She still wanted to kick and scream and howl. She didn’t though, because she was frozen in fear, waiting to be extinguished.

  Maybe she’d counted too fast.

  She waited.

  Was the hot anger in her chest diminishing? The fury? The sadness?

  No.

  A few more minutes, perhaps.

  She waited, the two men standing over her, watching.

  But no, the rage and the pain only seemed to grow. She would kill these creepy screw-up excuses for men if she could. She would grab something sharp and heavy and smash them over their heads. She would kick, scream, hit, bite—destroy. It wasn’t peace and calm that she felt. It was the exact opposite.

  “You’re feeling better, yes?” her father said. So she was right, it should have worked by now. “It’s a warm feeling, isn’t it? Everything just seems right.”

  The men stood back and studied her expression. She didn’t move. She eyed them back, surreptitiously taking her surroundings. The paperweight. That’d smash a skull in. When they untied her, that’s what she’d use. But why was she thinking such thoughts? Shouldn’t those thoughts have been extinguished? She glanced at the lockbox, the one with the vials. The words from Becky’s text came back to her, clear as if she were reading them fresh.

  he has a box full of it in his den. i think he’s going to do me. he thinks it’ll help. i changed it. like the taffy.

  Becky had changed it. The drug, she had changed the drug. Like the taffy. There was no PA23 in her bloodstream. Saltwater … like the taffy. The very last words her sister had spoken to her: the bowl of saltwater taffy that wasn’t in her room. It was code. She’d known Abigail was in danger. And so she’d replaced the vials with saline, a placebo: a dose of nothingness. Oh, Becky. Oh beautiful, determined, vibrant, cool, inquisitive, wonderful, clever Becky. She’d saved her own sister, but couldn’t save herself.

  “Do you feel the warmth?” Her father smiled at her.

  “Does everything feel good?” Mr. Howard smiled at her.

  Abigail smiled back. She forced her breathing to an even in-and-out. She relaxed her shoulders. She deadened her eyes.

  And she nodded.

  For seven years, Abigail Thom had practiced being a robot. It was hard at first. Like when she’d made the mistake of getting close to that first social worker, Jason McVeigh. But after a while, it became automatic. Don’t let anyone in. Don’t let anyone know what you’re thinking, or how you’re feeling. Do what you’ve got to do to survive.

  As they removed her gag, curious, Abigail steeled herself in “robot mode” and multiplied it by a million. She shape-shifted into the expressionless, past-less, personality-less zombie they wanted her to be. And above all, she told the truth. It was so much easier that way, especially now that she had nothing to hide. She told them all she knew about the McDowell family: that they might be at the hairdresser’s or travelling around in the Winnebago. She told Grahame and Dennis these things because she knew Bren’s family wouldn’t be stupid enough to let themselves get caught.

  “Good girl,” her father said. “You’re a good girl.”

  So she was. She would be—for as long as it took to escape.

  That night, she sank into the bath Melanie poured for her. She went to the bed Melanie made for her. And she said: “Goodnight, Dad. Goodnight, Melanie.”

  “Why don’t you call me Mom?” Melanie said, holding her hand.

  Abigail smiled. A robot wouldn’t feel flesh crawling at the touch of an alien lizard. A robot would feel nothing. “Goodnight, Mom.”

  AT 3:30 A.M.—CONFIDENT MELANIE and Grahame were asleep—Abigail snuck downstairs to the den and turned on the computer. Bren’s hairdressing salon in LA came up in her Google search, but there was surprisingly little online about Brendan McDowell. She created a fake Facebook account, searched until she found two people who might possibly be matches, and composed a careful message.

  From: Stuffthemonarchy

  To: @brenmcdowell @graciemcdowell

  Message: Hey! Argyll is beautiful this time of year. Much healthier than LA.

  She noticed there was next to nothing on both profiles: no personal info, no photo, no posts. Either they rarely used Facebook, or they’d deleted everything. Please let it be the latter. She pressed SEND, deleted the browsing history, and wiped the keyboard with a cloth. Then she crept back upstairs, and prayed. Please let them get the message. Please let them get away.

  THE FOLLOWING AFTERNOON, HER dad informed her that she would be going to boarding school in England, and quite soon. He’d decided it was probably the best idea to return to a more familiar environment. As if a posh London boarding school and the Glasgow streets were remotely similar, other than being part of the United Kingdom. Abigail smiled and nodded. She smiled and nodded at everything.

  Later, she heard her dad on the phone in the den. “Well, keep looking!” he barked angrily. “People don’t just disappear! This isn’t just a loose end!”

  She stifled a squeal of joy. Grahame hadn’t found the McDowells yet.

  Dennis Howard came for dinner that night. He sat at the table, pontificating with her father about the positive changes they’d noticed, encouraging her to chime in.

  “People are already noticing the improved behavior in the country’s Juvenile Halls,” he said. “We’ve had to be discreet. But it’ll be no time before we can bring our research out in the open. They’ll vote for this! It will become as common as the Rubella vaccine. All that we’ve ever been missing is a control.”

  Melanie gazed at him through dull eyes. “A control?”

  “We’ve never conducted a clinical test, where we’ve given a group of subjects a placebo. To prove PA23: to prove that the control group’s behavior doesn’t change, whereas those who have received the drug do change. And for the better.”

  What about me, you glorious idiots? Abigail felt like screaming.

  “Don’t you agree, Abigail?” Grahame prodded.

  “Oh yes,” she said.

  “Oh yes,” Melanie echoed.

  “Dessert, anyone?” Grahame asked.

  Abigail kept smiling and dabbed her lips with a napkin. One day I’m going to plunge a knife into your twisted black heart. “Dessert sounds lovely,” she said.

  OVER THE NEXT SEVEN days she pretended to like poached eggs. She listened to Melanie go on and on a
nd on about how to tackle the redecoration of the dining room. She nodded as her father wrote off Becky as an “inevitable sacrifice for a greater cause.”

  For seven days, she snuck down to her father’s den in the middle of the night to check if there were any messages for stuffthemonarchy (none); she smiled and nodded; she sat in the sun and kicked her feet in the pool, alone with Melanie.

  For seven days, she went mad.

  But tomorrow it would all be over. Tomorrow, she was off to boarding school. Not just any boarding school: Rodean. The very boarding school Becky couldn’t hack.

  After breakfast, Melanie asked Abigail to collect the mail.

  “Sure, Mom,” Abigail said.

  As she removed the pile of letters from the mailbox, her heart jumped. The top letter was addressed to her. She quickly slipped it down her jeans and walked back inside.

  “I’m going up to finish packing,” she called to the kitchen. She placed the letters on the kitchen bench, fighting every impulse to run up the stairs. A robot doesn’t run. She walked slowly instead, shut the bedroom door, shut the bathroom door—and, once she was sitting on the toilet with the overhead fan at full blast—she opened the envelope as quietly as she could.

  Dearest Abigail,

  You are a difficult person to find! God willing this letter reaches you. I am writing to say thank you from the bottom of my heart. Your money enabled me to bring my family to Edinburgh. My mum is on a dialysis machine now and is coping much better. I am studying for beauty school! Because of you my mother is alive and I am happy.

  I would love to see you. If you are ever in Edinburgh, please come and stay with us. My address is 78 Kitchler Street, Edinburgh and my telephone number is 0131 555 9835.

  With love and with eternal gratitude,

  Camelia

  ABIGAIL CHECKED OVER THE contents of her new Louis Vuitton suitcase. Three sets of school uniforms, twelve sets of matching underwear, twenty pairs of socks, ten pairs of tights, school shoes, sports gear, swimsuit, four pairs of pajamas, one dressing gown, and seven after-school/weekend outfits (three skirts, three blouses, one pair of trousers, one pair of flat shoes). And, yes, a raincoat. She was about to close it when she remembered something.