“Sorry,” she says, grabbing my arm. “Stay. I didn’t mean to bother you.” She looks so pitiful that I hesitate. She sees the opportunity. “Come on. What else do you have to do? I know you’re ditching class.” We both look toward the classroom. I lower myself back in my chair. “I won’t say a word,” she promises. “You go back to sleep.”
Convinced that I’ll never be able to sleep, even though my lids are heavy, I end up drifting back into that half-asleep state where the idea of getting up seems like more work than I could ever muster. Eventually, my eyelids flutter open, and I find the girl standing with her little round nose about three inches from my face. I jump. “What are you doing?” I exclaim, scrambling in my chair.
“Post-traumatic stress,” she says definitively. “You’ve got it.”
“What are you talking about?” I say loudly. The gray librarian looks up from her post at her desk and calls—far louder than I did—“Second warning, Missy. Keep it quiet.”
“What are you talking about?” I whisper.
“Post-traumatic stress,” she whispers back, leaning in closer to look at my eyes. I swat her away, catching one of her butterfly clips in the palm of my hand. “You are jumpy,” she says, “because of the shooting.”
“Maybe,” I say sarcastically, “I’m jumpy because you are in my face.”
She nods as if to say, Good point. “Did you know him?” she asks after a second.
The odd thing is that I don’t have to ask. I know immediately that she means the shooter. “No,” I say, realizing that for just a second, I hadn’t thought about him. “I didn’t even see him,” I tell her now. I don’t have any idea what he even looked like. I haven’t even seen a picture of him. And I never will. I don’t want to know. Giving him a face is more generous than I feel like being. I prefer to think of him as a blurred-out entity, like a mob witness.
She nods. “Lucky.”
“How about you?”
“I was outside. Cut class for a cigarette. I missed the whole thing.”
“Must be karma,” I say.
“Yeah,” she replies bitterly and tugs at a frizzy piece of hair, pursing her shiny pink lips. “You’re Daphne Wright, right?”
“How did you know?”
“I’m psychic,” she says, tossing the book on the table in front of us. A little orange construction-paper bookmark falls out.
For a split-second, I’m charmed by her. “Oh, really? What am I thinking right now?” I smile tentatively, half-friendly, half-making fun of her.
“Not that kind of psychic, silly.”
“I didn’t realize there were different kinds of psychics.”
The girl rolls her eyes. “I can tell you everything about you.”
“I already know everything about me.”
We are at an impasse. Do I like her, or do I want her to suddenly come down with a case of laryngitis? It’s always a toss-up with me. Melissa says I’m a misanthrope in training. The girl’s eyes move to the open double doors of the library room from where I’ve just escaped. The noise is louder, the sub looks even more harried. She’ll never make it through the day.
“How do you know my name?” I repeat.
She points at the freshly printed schedule clipped to the top of my notebook that is sticking out of my backpack. I’ve been carrying it around since the first day. Daphne Wright, it proclaims. “Oh,” I say.
The girl slinks down in her chair so low that she looks like a puddle of goo melting. Her earrings—hideous dangly things that look like blue peacock feathers—move violently as she whips her head, peering one way and then the other.
“What?” I ask, growing nervous. Is he back? How could that be?
She’s staring at Dizzy and her friends. They’ve come out of the classroom and are standing a few feet from the paperbacks, just out of our earshot.
“Them?” I ask. “I just had the pleasure of meeting them. Mean girls, huh?” I’ve already written them off. I’ve been to enough schools to spot these kind of girls a mile away. It’s best to be polite but distant. Never get too close, or they’ll figure out how to torture you.
Dizzy sees me in the chair and waves. She gives some sort of hand signal to the others, and they all began walking toward us. Great, I think.
“Shit,” the butterfly girl says as she sits up quickly. “I’m outta here.” She grabs her bag and makes a run for it, a skinny flash scampering out the library doors.
“Nice to meet you,” I call in spite of these facts: (1) the librarian is practically apoplectic over the noise we are making; (2) we technically didn’t meet; and (3) I’m not sure it was nice meeting her at all. She’s definitely weird, like the trying-too-hard weird type.
Dizzy leads her troops over. “Hi,” she says kindly. “You’re obviously new here, so we don’t expect you to know this, but you really should avoid talking to people like her.” She points in the direction that the butterfly girl scurried off.
“At least, don’t do it in public,” Brooklyn amends.
Dizzy elbows Brooklyn in the shoulder. “Shut it, Brook. You’re going to make her think we’re horrible bitches. What she’s saying,” Dizzy continues with a smile, “is that certain people at Quiet High are better left alone. It’s not worth the hit you’re going to take to your rep, you know?”
I don’t smile back. “Well, thanks for the information regarding my rep,” I say coldly, “but I’ll probably take my chances.” I’m not a big fan of being told what to do.
Lexus flips her shiny hair out of her eyes. The hair flip is obviously her signature move. “January is a total nonentity at QH. She’s persona au gratin.”
“I think you mean persona non grata,” I correct.
“Whatev. Point is, I’m pretty sure you don’t want to associate with someone like her. Not after what happened.”
I say nothing, because I know she wants me to ask.
“The shooter,” Brooklyn tells me. “Don’t you know who that was?”
“Do you want to know who you were talking to just now?” Dizzy asks gently. “January. January Morrison. Sound familiar?”
“It was her brother who did it,” Lexus supplies. “Genetics,” she says, shaking her head, as if she has spent much time wrestling with the topic. “You never know what people are going to do.”
“And if he was such a psycho, January will be too. These things run in the family, you know,” Brooklyn ends with a quick pageant smile, like she’s just told me that she wishes for world peace.
I don’t know what to say.
“Come on, Brook,” Dizzy says quickly. “She’s new here. Let’s give her a chance to get acquainted.” She flops herself down beside me just as I stand up. “So,” she says, “the only question now is who you’re going to be. One of us? Or one of them? We’re going to need to see your PROFILE score,” she laughs then.
“My what?”
“PROFILE,” she says. “You know...PROFILE.”
“Not helpful,” I tell her.
“Where did you come from? Another planet? How can you not know what PROFILE is? Can you believe it?” she asks the others. They shake their heads solemnly.
“Obviously, I don’t know what it is,” I say with exasperation. “Maybe you can tell me.”
“You’re serious,” Dizzy says, her eyes wide.
“Yes, of course I’m serious. Why wouldn’t I be? What are you talking about?”
“What do you think I’m talking about?”
“Oh, forget it,” I tell her, planning to go back to the classroom. Maybe the sub will have figured out what she’s doing by now.
“Wait,” Dizzy hisses. “I’ll tell you.” I turn around and she looks conspiratorially around us, as if she’s going to leak top-secret information. “You swear to God you really don’t know what PROFILE is?”
“Either tell me or don’t, but stop asking me that,” I say.
She breathes heavily through her nostrils. “Well,” she says to Lexus and Brooklyn, “I guess these
tests are as secret as they promised.” She turns back to me, plainly dying to dump the secret. “PROFILE will tell you everything you need to know about anyone. PROFILE is what is going to save us all, what is going to keep us from ever having to go through what happened last week again. We’ve all been tested—we’re a test school.” She says this proudly. “PROFILE,” she continues, her voice now growing louder and stronger, like a televangelist gearing up for the hard sell, “can tell us who we’re going to be.” She looks at me triumphantly, as if waiting for my jaw to drop, my head to spin, my legs to give out. None of that happens, because I turn on my heels and walk out, the same way January did moments ago.
I need to talk to Melissa.
chapter 5
Utopia Laboratories is striving to make your life better, one future at a time.
—Cover of a brochure explaining Utopia’s mission mailed to every student at Quiet High
“Whoa,” he says. “What’s the rush?”
I haven’t talked to Jesse since the day of the shooting. Seeing him right here, right now, is weird and unsettling—like running into teachers outside of school, irrefutable proof that they exist off of school grounds.
Or maybe it’s like seeing deer graze in the parking lot of the Quiet Walmart, something that absolutely floored me the first time I saw it. Deer and Walmart seem like two things that exist in different planes of reality. Jesse exists in that cramped closet, not here in the hallway, not right next to the giant cross that the Warriors of the Lord club erected to “remember our humanity.”
“Hey,” I say breezily, not quite friendly. I feel uncomfortable with him, like I revealed too much of myself that day. “I’m okay,” I say, realizing too late that he didn’t ask me how I am. I tug on the end of my hair and stare blankly over his shoulder, pretending I didn’t just say that.
He smiles. “Well, that’s good to hear.”
I half-smile, a trick I do easily and often: I move one side of my mouth into a garish grin while keeping the other half perfectly straight. Melissa tells me I look like a crazed clown when I do it. It’s my way of dismissing people without having to say so. “Well, see you,” I say, moving toward the front double doors.
“Where are you going? Don’t you have geometry?”
“Are you stalking me? Because stalking is hardly funny.” It’s a line I’ve heard Melissa use before. When tongue-tied, I quote the weirdest, most socially inept person I know. That’s just great.
The obnoxious, bleating bell signals the end of the period. We ignore it.
“Actually,” he says, “we’re in the same class.”
“Oh,” I say, slightly embarrassed. I shake my head and stick my pink beret, a remnant from Saint Paul, over my unruly hair. We stand there staring at each other, even though people are pushing around us, trying to get past. They are like aisle salmon, pushing the wrong way against the crowd. The silence gives me time to stare, to really take him in for the first time. I’m surprised when my brain processes him as a cross between Angel on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a Greek god: dark-haired, heavy lashes, and a perpetually creased forehead. Probably full of himself, I think. The kind of guy who doesn’t have to bother with a decent personality. Probably.
Yet there’s something soft in his eyes, in the way he bites his lower lip while he’s thinking, that makes me think he is kind. Fundamentally kind. An image of his face, shadowy and vague in the supply closet, flashes in front of me. I think of the way he led me to the cupboard, the way he insisted I stay inside while he faced the shooter. “Well,” I say abruptly, “I’m actually cutting class today. I’m going home.”
“Are you sick?” he asks with a hint of worry.
“I just want to…” For one ill-considered second, I contemplate telling him the truth. You see, there were these bitchy girls in the library, and they were talking about this thing called PROFILE, which got me thinking about something. Melissa—my mom—created that computer program. She wrote PROFILE’s program. But when I asked her about it, the day we left Saint Paul, in fact, she denied it. So what’s up with that? Instead, I take the easy way out: “I’m just going home.”
“You walked here this morning.”
What the hell? Is this guy recording my every move?
“I saw you. I drove past you on my way in,” he says sheepishly. “Let me drive you home.” It’s raining. He points toward the window, where the gray sky has lowered itself like a big parachute. “If you’re sick, you shouldn’t go out in the rain.”
“I’ll be fine,” I tell him. “I just really need to get out of here.” I flip up the hood of my red raincoat, a vintage find that makes me want it to rain indefinitely, just so I can wear the thigh-length shiny coat with the belt knotted tightly at my waist. I slip on my sunglasses, just because I don’t feel like looking into those soft eyes of his anymore.
“Hey,” he calls after I walk away. I stop and turn just a few feet from him. “I’m glad you…” He trails off. “I’m glad you’re okay.”
“Me too.” I look over the tops of my sunglasses. “Me too,” I repeat.
***
I walk home, taking every shortcut I can find, cutting through the Walmart parking lot, the busiest place in Quiet at any given time. When it starts to really pour, I speed up to a jog on the shoulder of McElroy Street, a busy road with two lanes and an almost nonexistent shoulder, until I find a side street that goes through to the Quiet State College campus. From there, I’m just a block or so from home.
Panting for breath, I slow to a walk as I maneuver precariously on the edge of a ditch, dodging sodden litter and mud-filled potholes. The whole town of Quiet is brown and ugly—murky and saturated now. Everyone warns me that it will turn scorching and gritty when summer arrives. Great. Something to look forward to.
Right now, Quiet looks like it’s just taken a beating by a big, mean bully. Evidence of the last tornado, which hit over three years ago, is everywhere, especially on the outskirts of town, where piles of broken fence and other debris make up a giant garbage heap. If you drive out of town a ways, which I did recently when I was daydreaming about what it would be like to just leave this place, there are rolling hills and acres of farmland. Everyone says it’s beautiful in the summer. Green Country, they call it. But right now, it just looks like a vast expanse of nothing—a prison with no walls.
Once I get to the house, my hair is soaking wet, but my red raincoat has kept at least part of me dry. Regardless, I change into faded jeans and a dry T-shirt—a washed-out, threadbare thing that I’ve had forever. I wrap my hair in a worn bath towel and peer out the front window to see if Melissa’s car is parked in its usual spot, half on the curb directly in front of the house. It’s not.
It’s almost silent in the house, save for the sound of rain pounding against the roof. I try to remember Melissa’s teaching schedule. In the kitchen, I find the bright orange index card attached to the fridge with a Papa John’s magnet. She wrote out her schedule, supposedly so that I will always know where she is. Personally, I think it’s the only way that she can remember where she’s supposed to be. I scan the card. She doesn’t have class on Mondays. Where is she? The gym? Recycling club? A save-the-feral-cats meeting? In the Monday column on the orange card, she’s simply written Intellectual Development. I roll my eyes. That’s so Melissa.
Digging through my backpack, I find my soggy class schedule. On the bottom is the number of the school office. I pick up the scruffy yellow phone and dial the number using the old rotary dial. When the secretary answers, I use my Melissa voice, a slightly higher pitch than my own with a hard edge on the vowels, and explain, “Daphne is ill and won’t be returning for the day.”
“Oh,” the secretary says sympathetically, “we do hope she’s not feeling too badly.” I contemplate correcting her incorrect use of an adverb, as Melissa undoubtedly would, but end up simply saying thank you and hanging up the receiver.
I flop on the scratchy plaid couch, a junk store find, and stare at the b
rown water mark just to the right of the light fixture. I flip on the old radio Melissa keeps on the end table—it’s already tuned to National Public Radio. I’m a total junkie. There’s something soothing about all that news delivered in intellectual monotones, sort of like Melissa reading me a bedtime story. I’m probably the only sixteen-year-old on the planet who has a favorite NPR foreign correspondent.
I let the dull drone of the radio take over while I think about PROFILE, the word rolling through my brain like ocean waves. PROFILE.
The day we left Saint Paul was so cold it couldn’t snow, but you could tell the snow was out there. Waiting. On our second day on the road, while Melissa was checking out of our quaint motel room—the kind of place that made the Bates Motel seem all right—I rummaged through the trunk of the Accord and found Melissa’s locked, fireproof box, one of the few things we took with us. Melissa had everything else shipped directly to our new house in Quiet.
Melissa is a total space case and would lose her eyeballs if they weren’t tight in their sockets, so I had no trouble finding the key—taped to the box itself. A quick turn, a swift riffle of papers, and there it was: The letter from Utopia, the one that arrived in the mail three days before we left. The one that I pulled from the mailbox myself and handed to her with my very own hands. And it was I who watched her open the letter, read it, and then put her hand on the side of her head. “Well, screw you too!” she said to the letter. “Just try running PROFILE without me!” And that was it. The next thing I knew, we were in the Accord, heading down tornado alley. I stuffed the letter in my coat pocket and read it in a smelly rest stop bathroom someplace between Iowa and Kansas.
I roll off the couch now and go to the coat closet by the front door. When I open the door, books and papers, winter scarves, a Frisbee, a single snow boot, and various other detritus falls at my feet. Melissa is the most unorganized person I know. All of this stuff arrived in boxes in the mail. Melissa opened each box and dumped the contents into whatever space she could find. “We’ll worry about it later,” she’d said dismissively. I dig through the junk. At the bottom of the pile is my Columbia ski jacket, the coat I wore when we left Saint Paul. I haven’t worn it since the day we arrived. Stuffed in the pocket is the letter, exactly where I put it that day. It’s folded into a tiny square and curled up at the edges. I unwrap it carefully and read it again.
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