by Schow, Ryan
Focus.
She forced her eyes to the yearbook, to the list. Seventeen names. Seventeen new kids in the tenth grade.
“The school is growing larger with each semester,” she said, speaking the same words in the same tone of voice the headmaster had spoken to her when Autumn applied for the position of assistant PE coach. “We need help, but we need good help, someone who understands girls, and our school spirit.” Autumn’s voice was a perfect copy of a memory.
She wondered, but who’s memory is this?
Focus, Autumn. Focus!
She stared unblinking at the yearbook so long her eyes began to water. Finally she picked it up and threw it at the wall. Her legs took her to the bed. She pushed herself through plush blankets and past fluffed pillows to the left corner of the bed, which was set into the corner of the room. With her bony back pressed into the adjoining, cold brick walls, she stared at the phone and waited.
“Ring,” she whispered. “Please ring.”
The phone didn’t ring. She put her hands to her head, her face a voiceless scream, her eyes watering from the pain, from the spinning in her head, from the others inside. Tears dripping on her cheeks, her nose running, she drew her knees to her chest and started rocking.
“Please, please, please ring,” she pleaded, over and over and over again between the crying.
Then, magically, it rang.
2
She scampered across the bed and snatched up the phone, not saying anything. Just eagerly listening.
“Autumn?” the voice said.
She felt her body sigh, all of it: her lungs, her heart, her very soul.
“Yes?”
“Sleep,” the voice said.
“Yes.”
“Sleep,” the voice said, lower, more soothing.
She felt her anxiousness slip away, felt herself pulling inward where it was warm and cozy and safe. “Yes.”
“Sleep,” the voice said for the third and final time.
The detachment was complete. Autumn felt herself sinking inside the body. The colors in the room, the phone, the voice…all gone. Sliding deeper and deeper inside herself. Autumn felt an unseen presence rising up in her place. It didn’t matter. What mattered was she was finally finding reprieve.
All around her she felt invisible walls, the pentagon shaped structure of the body’s mind. The edges of the system. Like falling backwards into the darkness, she felt an imaginary wind at her back. Her inner room was nearby. She could feel it.
The golden light. Yellow. Like a beacon in the darkness.
Her yellow brick road.
All she had to do was think of the road and she would be on it. All she had to do was think of her room and she would be in it. The room at the end of the road. She thought these things, and then she was there.
And then, finally, she slept.
3
“Gem?”
“Yes.”
“Report.”
“We haven’t found the girl yet,” the girl’s voice said into the phone.
“Possibilities?”
“Eleven.”
“Freshman through senior year?” the male voice said.
“We thought she was sixteen.”
“She can be anyone,” the voice said. “She can be fourteen or twenty.”
“Is she…like us?”
“You control one body with many personalities. She is one personality who has experienced different bodies. Do you understand the differences?”
“Yes. There are seventeen new girls this semester. Eleven in the junior class.”
“Work with the seventeen,” the male voice said. “Cross reference backgrounds, history, driver’s licenses, job history, everything. I want a paper trail on every single one of them.”
“We’re having a hard time bypassing the school’s firewall. We need access to internal records.”
“I have someone that can help you. It won’t be until next week, but if you haven’t gotten in by then, I’ll send him out.”
“And if I find her before then?”
“I’d be surprised if she’s there,” the voice admitted.
“And if she is?” she pressed.
“You call me and we’ll prepare for the extraction and elimination of her.” For a long moment there was only silence, then the voice said, “Gem?”
“We can’t go this long between contact. Our amnesic walls are weakening. And the alters are remembering. Autumn is struggling to hold the body. Others want it. Specifically Natalya.”
The voice on the other end of the line sighed. “I’ll try. If I can’t do it, I’ve got a local source, not that I want to use him.”
“Who?”
“Wolfgang Gerhard.”
“You said to monitor his activities. How can he be our handler? He doesn’t know our system.”
“Gem, he invented your system. He invented everyone’s system.”
“But that would make him—”
“Yes,” he said, “it’s unbelievable, I know.”
“If I could feel,” Gem said, “I would be impressed.”
“If you could feel, you wouldn’t be impressed. You’d be terrified.”
Eight Point Eight Million Volts
1
The reason I haven’t seen either Georgia, Victoria or Bridget is these people no longer exist. Most normal people have to die and be cremated to no longer inhabit this world. With Gerhard’s science, however, even dead, you can exist.
All week long I’ve been fighting. Fighting off dirty looks, insults and the posturing of what I now call The Bitch Brigade. They used to be Julie Satan and the Diabolical Two (three when I used to count Maggie in that mix, but she’s never been a bitch to me, so it was scaled down to the Diabolical Two), but since Julie no longer seems to run point, calling them The Bitch Brigade rolls off the tongue so much easier.
Then there are the boys.
My God, the way Caden and Brayden are ramping up their advances, and the way my hormones are freaking raging with no help from gosh damn Gerhard, it’s all I can do to keep my panties on, so to speak.
Is this why the first humans invented masturbation? To keep them on the straight and narrow with a little guilt induced pleasure? I’m fighting that, too. Lately, my only sanity comes from burying myself in my homework and finding out where my friends are. Plus there’s Maggie who struggles not to go backwards. I fight to quell her self-mastication. I fight to let her know she shouldn’t hate herself, or call herself damaged goods because of what one unchecked pedophile did.
I said to her, “If you’re damaged goods, then we’re all damaged goods.”
She said, “We are all damaged goods. How many identities do you have now?”
After telling her about the corporation, me being poisoned and almost dying, my melted-wax body and my loss of my dark skin (not that I’m prejudice against my new body, or my new race), she just looked at me and said, “You’re as messed up as me. Except you still get to be a virgin.”
I don’t tell her how badly I want to be deflowered, or how many boys I’d let do it to me in my current state, or that one of my ferociously mad crushes is on Professor Teller. Jake. I don’t want to be selfish like that, so this secret exists with only me, the purple-eyed Russian and the mad scientist.
After leaving Maggie, I head home, do my homework, then crawl into bed. With a week gone, I’m no closer to finding my friends. And I’m so tired. Laying in bed, my eyes burning from staring at my Psychology textbook for too long, I can’t hardly stay awake.
This week, OMG, talk about riding the struggle bus! It’s short and yellow and I’m just dying to get off. I mean, really, can I ever get a break? Just fall into the groove of normalcy?—whatever that is?
My eyes close, then bob open enough for me to realize Friday’s gone and it is time to call it a night. I get up, flip off the light, make sure the door’s locked then return to bed. Being in this room, it’s hard not to be haunted by the past. I still think about Ger
hard’s war machine and how lucky I am to still be alive. I think about how that bitten off pinkie rolled around in my mouth and I can’t help but gag at the memory.
When I told my father about Gerhard’s beast, how he broke into my room twice and attacked me, he about came unglued. He relaxed when I told him how I bit the monster’s pinkie finger off and gave it gift-wrapped in tissue to Gerhard. And he cringed when I admitted to killing the thing.
“He wasn’t human, daddy,” I said. “I had to do it.”
He wanted to buy me a gun (I didn’t tell him I still have the one Brayden helped me acquire now hidden in my room back in Palo Alto), but when I said how I didn’t need to be branded a terrorist by the ignorant masses if it was ever found, he bought me a tazer and a stun gun instead. Both of the units are charged by the bed. It’s how I sleep at night.
Who knew I would have to use them so soon?
2
The seamlessness and meaninglessness of my dreams begin unraveling to the strangest sounds. In my dream, it’s dark and I’m walking through a fluorescent tinted hallway and though a lot is happening—people brushing by me, a purring cat rubbing its silky soft fur against my leg, a boy bent on one knee working on a flat tire on his bicycle—everything exists in a vacuum of silence. Except for a few new sounds. The flickering of light and the cold, almost sterile look of a hallway laid in small, filthy white tiles, makes me want out of here.
It’s the clicking sounds that draw me from the depths of my dream into the real world, almost like a string guiding me out of the darkness into the light. It is the opposite, though. When I wake into the real world, it’s into darkness that I emerge.
My eyes open, blinking the sleep away, but half my mind feels anchored in pieces of the dream. Then I hear it again, the sounds from my dream.
WTF?
I sit up. Is that…? It is. The noise from my dream is really noise coming from somewhere deeper in my room.
There it is again…in my walk-in closet?
Crap!
My heart is officially throwing a tantrum in my chest. Panic roots in. Panic then the stir of anger. In the old days, when the whole fight or flight thing would have me locked up in cowardice, I didn’t have an ounce of fight in me. Now, it’s the opposite.
I quietly reach for the tazer, but just in case, I grab the eight point eight million volt Terminator stun gun, too. The guy who sold me and my father this particular model said people who get hit with this thing will literally “shit their pants, guaranteed.”
When the guy told us this, I was like we’ll absofreakinglutely take it.
With both weapons in hand, I work my legs out from underneath the covers, careful to not make a peep. My feet meet the cold, hardwood floor; my eyes are adjusting to the darkness. I tip-toe toward the closet. Down the very short hallway leading into the bathroom, where the opening to my closet is, I see flashes of light: someone trying to mask the glow of a flashlight.
Then giggling.
Girls.
Oh, thank God. My last break-in had me fighting off a genetically modified hulk with the help of my teeth and a black market pistol. I took a beating, but in the end, I lived and the big guy ran out of here with nine fingers and bullet fragments in his skull. Eventually, that son of a bitch took a dirt nap, courtesy of yours truly.
When I am exactly three steps from my closet door, a shadow emerges. I hit the dark figure with the tazer. The two darts thump into her chest. I light her up. The tazer’s charge crackling down the wires into the intruder’s rigid body is music to my ears. The flashlight hits the floor and winks out on impact. A second later, the girl’s body crashes to the floor.
The room is pitch black. The intruder is down. I refuse to let off the juice until another voice screams, “Stop or you’ll kill her!”
I wait a beat, then stop.
Taking two steps backwards, I slide around the corner into the darkness where my desk and computer sit. The tazer spent, I wait with the stun gun.
Savannah version 1.0—the flawed version of me—was a terrified victim. This new me, version 4.0 is empowered. Version 4.0 won’t be harassed.
Standing ready, my heart galloping beneath my breast, I wait, listening. Less than a minute later, I have my breathing under control. That’s when I hear the other person’s feet creeping through the darkness toward me. Is she armed?
Who is she?
She’s only a foot from me when I step toward her, jam the stun gun’s two prongs into her side and squeeze the trigger. Eight point eight million volts electrify her. Her feet and legs stiffen, holding her to the charge longer than I thought possible. Finally I release the trigger. The girl topples over, her plank-like body clunking into the wall, then dropping rigid and rough on the floor.
3
Two girls are down; is there a third? I wait. Then I move down the hallway—my stun gun out and primed for action—into the bathroom (I turn the lights on; no one here), then back into the closet (I turn the lights on; no one here either). Beneath my hanging clothes, I check for feet. The small space sits empty. My body expels the breath it’s been holding. My mouth then inhales a calming breath.
In the hallway, I snap on the light, still ready to zap the life out of whomever is waiting for me. No one is waiting. Unless you count Theresa and Blake. Both girls are dressed in black. Like they bought their clothes from Gap’s Teen Burglar Collection. Theresa has drool bubbling out of her mouth. Looking at Blake, her spine is still bowed, her fingers curled into arthritic claws.
Theresa is coming to.
I light her up with the stun gun long enough to see a wet stain bloom in the crotch of her pants. They say you can kill a person with this thing. Cops have killed old people and people in wheelchairs already, so I know it’s possible. My finger lets off the trigger.
What now? I wonder. Dang, I haven’t thought this far ahead.
My eyes study the two girls, my mouth closed and my brain in overdrive. Their helplessness should feel much more victorious than this, but it doesn’t. The bitterness in my mouth is sorrow. I hate that it’s come to this. In the midst of all this…violence, and their intrusion…I know tomorrow will be worse. Worse for me, worse for Maggie. That is what bullies do: you push back, so they push harder, with increased frequency. Basically, they look for every opportunity to make your life a living hell.
Blake starts moaning. I walk over to where she’s laid out like the possessed version of Emily Rose, kneel beside her and say, “You’ll be fine, just let your body relax.”
Back to Theresa, who is now crying.
“You’re a bully, Theresa. You and your little gang of turds. I freaking hate bullies.” Except I don’t say freaking. “But it’s going to stop. Right now. You know how I know that?”
Slowly curling into a ball on her side, the slimy line of drool fresh on her cheek and puddled on the hardwood floor, her eyes see me, try to focus. They flick over to Blake, then back to me with an unspoken question: what are you going to do to us?
“I’ll tell you how I know you’re going to stop,” I say. “Tonight’s not over for you. It’s going to be a lot more painful before it ends. You’ll be humiliated. Even worse, you’ll be powerless to do anything about it. Tonight I’m going to play the role of the bully and you’re going to play the role of the victim.” Looking at Blake, I say, “Both of you. This way you have perspective. This way you’ll know to fear me, and fear the lengths I’ll go to make sure you steer clear of me and my friends this semester.”
For the next hour, I hit them with the stun gun, running the charge out on their skinny, sweat soaked bodies. Several times along the way, I wonder, what am I doing? But then I remind myself they are bullies. They’re relentless. And they’re never going to stop until someone stops them first.
Deep down, where the truth of things lies bare to my soul, I know that reasoning with bullies like them has proven useless. Kids like me, they suffer, they switch schools, they pop social anxiety meds or antidepressants, or they kill th
emselves or their classmates. The thing about bullies is they ruin you for life if you let them. And the teachers? They have to prove you’re being bullied, but they usually find out only when you defend yourself, or kill yourself or a bunch of other people, and by then it’s too late. The damage is already done.
Today’s protocol simply does not work.
This anti-bullying guy on the internet, this one I used to look at last semester, he wrote: “It’s only when a bully gets his ass kicked, when he absolutely gets his shit pulverized into ground beef that he stops being a bully. He then becomes the victim. Bullies only stop being the bully when someone new bullies them.”
Almost no one who has never been bullied will agree with him, but that is what has to happen here. To stop the bully, I’ve become the bully.
Whatever repercussions I must face for my behavior, I’ll face. In fact, the more aggressive parts of me, the alpha male genes Gerhard and my father bred into version 4.0 of me, they’ll swallow the consequences with a smile.
After I’m done with the abuse, I drag the stiff, electrified girls into the hallway and leave them there in their own piss, feces and puke. I leave them in a heap with nothing but their humiliation, their tears, their terror. I leave them with the firm understanding that they will not f*ck with Abigail Swann or her friends.
Just to be clear, when I said this to them, there was no asterisk in my f-bomb. It was just the raw, potent word and it contained all my hatred for girls like them, for everyone who ever hurt me and those like me.
When I head back into my room, I shut and lock my door, then peel out of my clothes and stand in the burning hot shower for a good half an hour, crying, vomiting, wondering who I am and what I’ve become. Then, when I’m finally able to clear my head, I remind myself to reign in my more aggressive self, lest one day I become just like them.
It would be too easy. But not for me. I’m the girl who stands up for those who can’t stand up for themselves.