Prodigy
Page 29
After a few months of this strategy, she felt as if she were making progress. The problem students she confronted tended not to turn into repeat offenders, and even the most aggressive, violent specimens seemed to soften during peer reviews. Her presence around the tower and in progressions did not strike fear into the hearts of others, and, although she was regarded with a wary eye, the general sentiment was that she was a kind young woman merely putting in her time, paying her dues, not angling for prestige or the administration’s favor at the expense of her peers.
The responses of the adults who ran Stansbury were varied. Due to her unconventional approach, Stella’s questioning sessions lasted longer than any in recent memory, averaging more than sixty minutes per specimen. Members of the security detail believed she was letting offenders off easily and suspected that, while the occurrence of repeat offenders was going down, the general frequency of policy violations was rising because no one feared the consequences. Captain Gibson concurred, making the case (both to Stella herself and to his colleagues) that the most effective kind of policing was deterring misbehavior through the threat of uncomfortable punishment with severe consequences. President Lang remained silent on the issue. The headmaster insisted that Miss Saltzman be given a free hand to perform her tasks as she saw fit. He did not believe the school’s top specimen should be deprived of the freedom of tailoring the valedictorian’s duties to his or her own outlook on life, so long as they were effective in prosecuting wrongdoing.
And Stella was effective. In fact, following the winter holiday she took an unconventional step without the knowledge of the administration. She started to schedule unofficial, off-the-record sessions with unbalanced specimens that did not take place on the infamous disciplinary level. She offered to meet with various problem children and simply talk to them about anything they wanted—school, life, family, fears, or hopes. To her surprise, those invitations were accepted almost immediately by all to whom they were extended. After a few hours spent talking with unhappy delinquent specimens of all ages, she started to see more and more specimens on a one-on-one basis—not merely policy violators, but also children who were simply in need of an understanding ear and a good mind to provide them insight. Insight, Stella started to realize, that did not have to be especially profound, but merely sensible and human. It was something they were not receiving from anyone else.
Soon, she saw there were certain topics that kept coming up, the most frequent of which was a skepticism about life inside Stansbury, about having to give up one’s freedom and childhood without their consent in order to become part of America’s top 1 percent. Stella herself often debated this topic in her own mind, but she was shocked to find that it was a sentiment common to almost every specimen she met with, whether they were honor roll candidates or the latest suspects to be run down by the security detail. Word of mouth always spread very quickly in the tower, and soon she was spending so much time providing her makeshift advice and therapy sessions to specimens in need that her grades started to slip. She found herself increasingly uninterested by her progression work and uninspired by the four years of college (Georgetown University accepted her for their prestigious political affairs program) that awaited her after commencement day. And then she met Mr. Wayne Edward Haddon.
The first time they spoke was on the disciplinary level, in Examination Room #3. Mr. Haddon was there because, in addition to being tardy to progressions many times over, he had allowed a friend to cheat off him during a quantum physics exam. The security detail summary report billed him as an unbalanced case with a chronic disregard for authority, but Stella questioned him and saw a typical seventeen-year-old boy who didn’t always do what he was supposed to do, but more often than not made the right decisions. Soon after their session, she ran into him in the cafeteria during dinner and they shared a table. Stella expected it to be just another hour of playing resident psychiatrist for a peer in need, but to her surprise they ended up talking about the theatre, in particular their shared love for a cult play of the late twentieth century called This is Our Youth, by Kenneth Lonergan. Of all the academics around the tower, Haddon was the only specimen she’d met who had read the play and loved it as much as she had: his older brother had given him a dog-eared copy a few years before on summer holiday, while she discovered it in a used bookstore the last time she was home in Cleveland over Christmas.
They fell in love. Consistent with her unorthodox approach toward being valedictorian, Stella wisely decided they should keep their relationship a secret from the administration and their fellow specimens. After a few weeks, Wayne revealed that he had stopped taking his meds months ago. He gave her vivid descriptions of feelings, surges of raw emotions that dragged him up and down without warning, daydreams of ideas, places, and marvelous, impractical goals, of which he previously had never dared to think. It was this new, unrestrained way of seeing life that allowed him to open up enough to Stella so that he was capable of truly loving her with all his heart. She was enthralled by the way he described his new world. The spontaneity and passion of it sounded foreign and irresistible to her. By the time Wayne summoned up the courage to ask if she would abstain from the med cycle with him, she had already decided that she would never take the school’s pills again.
The weeks that followed were the most unusual and happy of Stella’s young life. Her mind felt light without the burden of duty and restraint that she had grown up on. To be able to leave her textbooks and Tabula in her bedroom suite the night before a test and stroll hand in hand with Wayne through their favorite secluded, tree-lined path in the atrium seemed outrageous and yet completely natural. It felt as if they had begun constructing a home of their own inside the tower, one that was invisible but had sturdy, sheltering walls that could move along with them, protecting them inside their own personal world as long as they were together. Granted, it wasn’t a completely idyllic life: often she found herself jealous for no good reason; he was concerned about her commitment to him after graduation; they would argue about the taste of intravenous chocolate soufflé after dinner, or the merits (or lack thereof, as far as Wayne was concerned) of Franny and Zooey. But these absurd, heated conflicts were what brought them closer. Soon Stella and Wayne found it hard to believe that their lives were ever governed by the med cycle, or much less, that they’d lived without each other.
After a routine physical exam, however, things became more complicated. The school medics discovered that Stella was two months pregnant. She was shocked and terrified. The administration was informed, but otherwise the incident was cloaked under a veil of the strictest secrecy. Even under normal circumstances Stansbury gossip tended to spread quickly, but in the case of arguably the most high-profile of all specimens, it would not only flood the halls but would irreparably damage Stella’s image, permanently taint the office of the valedictorian, and, perhaps most destructively, set an exceedingly negative example for the thousands of young, impressionable minds in the tower (not to mention raise the ire of their tuition-paying parents, if and when they heard about the administration’s failure to keep the children in line).
Stella immediately found Wayne and told him the news. Naturally, they were scared, but they were not naïve about the possible consequences when they began sleeping together. They were both well aware that their abstention from the med cycle was probably responsible for the sexual impulses they found impossible to repress, but once they had a chance to talk it over, neither of them viewed this unexpected pregnancy as the disaster the school seemed to think it was. From the start, the issue for Stella and Wayne was not whether she would bear the child, but whether they would raise it themselves or put it up to be adopted by parents who were more capable of providing it with the stable lifestyle it deserved. After much soul-searching and debate, they decided on the latter option.
“They didn’t say whether it’s a boy or girl?” asked Wayne.
“No.”
“Well, I want to think of a name anyway.”
“Like a name that will work for either one?” Stella asked.
“Right.” They looked at each other for a few moments. Her top-notch brain was coming up with blanks, but Wayne got a peaceful look in his eye. “Evan,” he said. “I like Evan. Makes for a cool girl or like, a really honorable guy. Like the kind of person I could trust, you know?”
“I like it, too,” she said. Suddenly the news didn’t feel as bad.
Later that same evening, Stella received a summons to President Lang’s office. This much she expected. Headmaster Latimer, as universally loved as he was, knew better than to offer advice on a topic so sensitive to a young woman. What Stella did not expect was what the president had to say. From the moment she sat down, President Lang’s point of view was obvious. She asserted that bearing the child was simply not a viable option. The president explained (“from one strong woman to another,” was how she prefaced it) that she was once in a position very similar to Stella’s. She started out as an ambitious young lady who had all the tools to succeed, if only those who could provide her with opportunities—men—would take her seriously as an equal. She asserted that the process of bearing a child out of wedlock would take its toll on her fledgling college career and leave irreparable psychological scars that could cripple her for the rest of her life. Lang finished by letting Stella know that she was committed to assisting her through this trauma, and had even taken the initiative of flying one of San Angeles’s top surgeons to the tower to perform the abortion procedure as quickly and painlessly as possible. That was when Stella realized the president was not offering advice. She was dispensing orders. She politely declined Lang’s assistance and promptly left her office without another word.
That night, the security detail came for Stella while she slept. They sedated her and brought her to the infirmary without the knowledge of any of the specimens. When she woke up the following morning, she was informed that the surgery had been completed. Stella tried to weep, out of sadness, anger, anything, but found she could not. She was numb. She also had yet to learn about another incident that happened the night before.
Another group of security detail officers came for Wayne. They took him to the disciplinary level and left him in an examination room with Captain Gibson. She had no conclusive evidence about what happened next, but Stella was familiar enough with Stansbury intricacies to put it together. Gibson had a conversation with Wayne, in which he probably told him about what had happened to unborn Evan and, she knew it deep in her heart even then, he must have lied to him about Stella’s condition, which in reality was healthy, given the circumstances. The Captain left him in the room alone with two bottles: one of water, one of sedative pills. When he returned an hour later, Mr. Wayne Edward Haddon was lying on the room’s cold concrete floor, dead from an overdose.
Stella, still bed-ridden when she heard, was shattered by the news. But when the president and the headmaster came to visit her she held it all in, feeding on the numbness that the doctor left inside of her in the place of her child. They brought their condolences, the gentle, kind, but ultimately clueless headmaster, and President Judith Lang, Stansbury’s dissembling Machiavelli in a designer suit. There were countless things Stella wanted to shout out at her, innumerable accusations and threats, but she understood the dynamics of her situation very well: as a specimen she was at Lang’s mercy, playing by her rules inside a castle over which she presided. The only thing Stella told them was that her valedictorian’s career was over. She was retiring. The headmaster said he understood her position and was ready to relent. Lang said it wasn’t an option, that it would destroy the stability upon which the entire school was based. That much Stella understood. She was dismayed to see that the president was shrewd enough to calculate the effects as well as she did. But the time would come, Stella vowed, that she would get her vengeance, and not just on Lang or Captain Gibson. She swore she would bring down the tower and, along with it, anyone who dared try to profit by associating themselves with the obscenity of the word “Stansbury.”
Stella recovered and made it through the final months of her senior year. At commencement, she gave an uninspired speech plagiarized almost directly from some hackneyed book of toasts and bon mots she found in the school library. Everything passed without incident. On that huge platform in the center of the coliseum, she accepted her diploma and a firm handshake from President Lang in front of her beaming family and peers. Her move to Washington, D.C., followed, where Stella squeezed Georgetown’s four-year political affairs program into three and immediately got a job as an aide to Senator Arthur Milford Bloom of California, a seventy-two-year-old curmudgeon who had a soft spot for bright young women who reminded him of his own daughter. More important, the distinguished Senator was known for his conservative skepticism regarding trendy new developments in education, in particular the increasing use of medical supplements. Because of its high profile—and because several of Bloom’s rivals in the Senate were former specimens—Stansbury School was a particular point of interest for him. He immediately took a liking to Miss Saltzman. What began as long dinner conversations about her insider’s criticisms of Stansbury—during which she drew upon the hundreds of hours of her conversations with unbalanced specimens (never bringing up the story of Wayne and Evan)—evolved into briefings to Senator Bloom’s staff and then talking points for the Senate Select Committee on Education, of which he was a member.
Roughly twelve months ago, President Lang began her own lobbying effort on Capitol Hill. Her goal was to facilitate the passing of a bill that would allocate $1 trillion annually to Stansbury, based on the importance of the school’s contributions to American culture. But the benefits the school would receive were not solely financial. It would also effectively receive the imprimatur of the United States Government. The debate around Stansbury’s methods and ethics would, for all intents and purposes, be rendered moot. The tower outside San Angeles might only be the beginning: Lang and her considerable number of backers in Congress envisioned towers all across the country, each serving as a factory of genius and progress that would eventually push the nation’s already considerable achievements well past those of any rival.
Almost simultaneously, Senator Bloom began to organize an opposition to Lang’s plans. He received support from a wide-ranging cast of civil rights groups and other nongovernmental organizations, but lacked the answer to the most convincing arguments in Stansbury’s favor: the AIDS and cancer vaccines, the Nobel prizes, the college admissions numbers—the prestigious ends that justified their means. As he had already been doing with increasing frequency, the senator went to Stella for her insight and she confided to him an audacious plan. While the American public would undoubtedly support the school when confronted with its accomplishments, it might hesitate if shown the human cost involved. Literally, the faces and stories of those children whose freedom and lives were subjugated to both the med cycle and isolation from the outside world, in order to breed an engineered race to produce some miracle drug or masterpiece once every few years. Stella suggested what no outsider had the experience or knowledge to accomplish: she would locate and recruit a group of former specimens—a selection of the unbalanced misfits she came to know and love (and who loved her back) during her time as valedictorian—and convince them to testify before the committee. They could potentially kill the bill before it even got to the Senate floor for a vote. Senator Bloom deemed her stratagem brilliant. He gave her the full authority of his office to move forward.
Unfortunately for Stella, Stansbury’s network was wide-ranging. By the time she had received her first dozen or so negative responses from the former specimens she was relying on, she understood that the school had gotten to them first. Through research and tracking, she discovered Stansbury was offering unemployed, underachieving alumni like Mr. Daniel Ford Smith jobs in a tight labor market. The ones who didn’t accept them were intimidated with threatening visits to their homes. When she finally tracked down five who unde
rstood her vision and were willing to risk their lives by testifying about their shattered childhoods, one by one they paid the highest price. President Lang and her supporters manufactured their own convoluted murder mystery, complete with not-so-random victims who met apparently brutal ends, and a current, notoriously unbalanced orphaned specimen on whom to pin the blame, the school’s calculated explanation being that one very bad apple in four thousand was the exception rather than the rule.
And now, with the committee’s vote roughly one hour away, Stella knew that President Lang could feel the victory within her grasp. And yet, despite the somewhat daunting circumstances, the ghosts of sweet Wayne and little Evan would not allow her to fold her hand just yet.
* * *
Stella’s story left in its wake a stunned silence. Cooley’s first instinct was to question its veracity, but he understood that it was simply too incredible, the circumstances were too grave, and the look on Goldsmith’s face was too horrified for it to be anything but the truth.
“But what about all the good the school’s done for—,” Goldsmith began.
“Is the cure for cancer worth a thousand childhoods?” Stella demanded. “It’s a world where human connections are replaced by performance-enhancing pills. Criticism is silenced by peer reviews and shock therapy. And we were all locked up in the tower whether we agreed to be or not. An annual tuition payment of five hundred thousand dollars represented our consent. But not for me, Mr. Goldsmith. Not for any of us.”
“What are you gonna do, now that everyone else is dead?” asked Cooley.