The Predicteds

by Christine Seifert

  Dear Dr. Wright,

  We have reviewed your request, and it is with regret that we report we will be unable to halt upcoming research trials any longer. Regular PROFILE testing will resume at the designated test location. We ask for your cooperation during the testing process.

  While there is no question that you are architect of this program, you cannot halt progress simply because you suddenly feel “ethically reluctant.” You may be the “mother” of PROFILE, as you say, but your “child” is now ours.

  Any further disturbance or hindrance of PROFILE testing will result in your immediate termination. Consider this a first warning.

  Best wishes,

  Gordon Davidson

  CEO of Utopia Laboratories

  I’d asked her about it later, in a roundabout way, after we’d settled in the house in Quiet, casually leaving out the part about stealing her personal mail. Instead, I posed a direct question: “Did you get fired at Utopia?”

  “Of course not,” she’d said—no twitching, no difficulty meeting my eyes, no catch in her voice.

  “What were you working on at Utopia? What was your big brainchild?” I’d asked after that, pretending to be conversational, fooling no one.

  That’s when she’d looked a little alarmed, a tiny bit rattled. The last time I’d seen Melissa like that was when I was in the sixth grade and I told her I might be a Republican.

  “Nothing,” she’d said. “Nothing that’s any of your concern.” Her voice was cold, even a little bit mean. Very unlike Melissa.

  I didn’t ask about it again.

  ***

  “I’m home!” Melissa yells.

  I wake up with a start, my face smashed against the side of the brown couch, NPR droning in the background. I stretch my legs and feel a charley horse gallop up my calf. “Ohhhhh,” I moan, limping pitifully to the kitchen, where Melissa is pushing the door shut with her foot, chattering loudly.

  “I went to a lecture on campus and got stuck at a pointless faculty reception afterward. I ended up having to listen to a history professor rhapsodize about his research on medieval cooking pots. Ugh.” She flops across a kitchen chair and then looks at me suspiciously. “Wait, what are you doing here?” She looks at her watch. “It’s Monday, isn’t it? Why aren’t you in school? Are you sick?”

  “Something like that,” I say. I use both hands to smooth my messy hair, which I can tell has dried in an odd-shaped horn on the side while I was sleeping.

  Melissa sticks her head in the fridge. “The lecture was so awful,” she tells the empty egg trays. “An entire forty-five minute speech on thirteenth-century cookery without a single reference to Ibn Razin at-Tugibi.” She shakes her head in disgust. “I swear, some people don’t even bother with primary research anymore. It’s sad, really.”

  I make a face at her back. She can be so pretentious sometimes. I know better than to just come out and ask her about PROFILE. When Melissa doesn’t want to talk, she doesn’t talk.

  “Are you hungry?” she asks me now. She’s been worried about what I eat (or don’t eat) lately—ever since the shooting, I just haven’t been interested in food. Eating seems too ordinary, something we did before the incident. B.I. Now it just doesn’t seem important. “Eat this.” Melissa tosses a pear at me that I catch and then drop on the avocado-green kitchen linoleum. I pick it up and run my finger over the bruised skin.

  “I need to work,” she tells me. “I’ll be in the garage.” Only Melissa would fail to ask me what I’m doing home in the middle of the day.

  “What exactly are you doing out there?” It’s a question designed to get her talking, to lead into my larger question: What is PROFILE?

  “Nothing big.”

  “Hey,” I say, feigning that I’ve just thought of it, “tell me something. Why’d we really leave Saint Paul?”

  It’s obvious that it has something to do with that letter, something to do with PROFILE, but she doesn’t take the bait. She yanks open the door and sighs louder than she needs to. “Things happened. I promise, Daph, if it was something you needed to know, I would tell you. Right now, I just need a little bit of time to sort things out.”

  “Does this have something to do with your work? Maybe something to do with—what’s it called?—PROFILE?” I play dumb, like I’m pulling the name out of the far recesses of my brain.

  “What are you talking about?” she says innocently, her eyes wide and guiltless. I study her carefully. Usually when she lies—like when she told me that Grandpa was going to be okay, even when he was dying of cancer—she rubs her palms together, making a loud swooshing noise. Her hands are on her hips now, planted firmly.

  “PROFILE?” I repeat, quietly this time.

  “Never heard of it,” she says, then smiles and walks out the door. Just like she wasn’t lying through her perfect white teeth.

  chapter 6

  I’ve always thought of Daphne and me as a team—partners. But I’ve also made a practice of separating my work from my relationship with her. There are some things she just doesn’t need to know. I don’t want her to look at everyone around her and think she knows who’s inherently “good” and who’s inherently “bad.” I just want her to see people. And I never want her to look in the mirror and think that who she is has already been determined. That’s why I didn’t tell her about PROFILE. I don’t want her anywhere near that stuff.

  —Dr. Melissa Wright, from her research journal

  I leave for school super-early, barely after seven. Melissa is sound asleep in her bedroom, which I tiptoe past. I didn’t hear her come in from the garage last night. In fact, after our conversation yesterday, I didn’t see her for the rest of the day, not even for dinner. I stewed in my room, finally falling asleep after midnight.

  The sun is just rising as I walk toward school dressed in one of my favorite spring outfits: baggy white capris and a soft, yellow, patterned, three-quarter-length-sleeved shirt with a vintage knitted brown cardigan. I pull my hair back in an antique hair clip, a yellow dragonfly set in gaudy rhinestones.

  When I slam my freshly painted and barely dry locker shut, with my chemistry books tucked under my arm and my laptop bag strung across my shoulder, Jesse is standing there.

  “You’re early,” he says.

  “So are you.”

  “Tennis practice.” He holds up a racquet. “Walk with me.” He grabs my laptop before I can protest and throws the bag over his shoulder. I’d planned to go to the library before chem lab to think and surf the Internet in privacy, away from Melissa.

  We walk toward the new gym, where there are two indoor tennis courts—practice courts for when it’s too dark or cold or wet to play outside. The gym is part of New QH, a large addition that opened just this past year that everyone is thrilled about. It’s gorgeous, largely because it looks nothing like a school—the blond wood, the thick carpeting, and the abstract murals on the walls make it feel like some kind of futuristic doctor’s office. The whole contemporary feel takes me back to the wide hallway that ran past Melissa’s corner office at Utopia. I can almost hear the elevator music. The air here in New QH isn’t yet filled with the smell of depression—chalk dust, sweat, and red Oklahoma dirt, which is what I smell every time I walk in the front doors of Old QH.

  We stand at the edge of the gym, inside of which the gym teacher, Mr. A., is yelling military commands at whoever is unlucky enough to be in there with him. “About face!” he yells, his voice more dictator than public educator.

  “I keep thinking about that day,” I tell Jesse. It pops out of my mouth before I realize what I’m saying. When he doesn’t respond, I keep going. “I close my eyes, and that’s what I see.” I slide down to the floor and sit with my back against the cold brick wall, my feet stretched in front of me and my chemistry books resting by my side. I wiggle my blue toenails in my sandals. Jesse sets my laptop messenger bag beside me and then slides down to the floor too. He’s wearing QH shorts—purple nylon things with a picture of an armadi
llo on the lower part of the right leg. His legs are thick and tan, like he’s been at the beach for a week.

  “I think about it too,” he says. “You have nightmares?”

  “Do you?”

  He nods. “Only when I go to sleep. But I’m not sleeping much.”

  I bend over and adjust the strap of one woven sandal, kick the wedge heel against the floor. “I can’t dream,” I say. “I sleep like I’m dead. Even when I’m awake, I feel nothing—less than nothing. I just feel like, What’s the point, you know? What’s the point of anything if you’re just going to end up in a closet waiting for some psycho to kill you?” As soon as I say the words, they are true, even though I haven’t thought about any of this before. Saying it makes me feel better. Much better, actually.

  “I know,” he says, tapping his racquet against the carpeted floor.

  Mr. A.’s voice floats out to us. “Fall in!” it says.

  Jesse looks at the mural across from us. I keep talking, because he’s listening. “So there’s this journalist who spent years embedded with soldiers, reporting on the war he was in. Nearly every day, there were explosions and bullets flying and land mines. Death and mayhem everywhere. And when people weren’t dying, they were waiting for it to happen. When he got back to the United States, to his normal life, he couldn’t live—not the way he did before the war. The stakes were too low. How can you ever sit through a movie or take a nap or play tennis”—I point at the racquet—“after something that big? Nothing matters anymore.” Is it too dramatic to say this? I pull my legs up to my chest. “Do you feel like that?”

  He breathes in heavily, lets the air out slowly. I look at him, his hair falling over his eyebrows. “No,” he says definitively. “I want to live. I don’t want this to be my defining moment.” He touches my thigh briefly, accidentally, and when I jump, he moves his hand quickly to my laptop bag.

  “Thanks,” I tell him after a while.

  “You would’ve done the same thing. I just did what I had to do when he showed up at the door.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” I clarify, stretching my legs out again, turning my eyes from him. “I mean for this. For listening.”

  He nods. We sit quietly for a long time, listening to Mr. A. yell his dumb commands. Eventually, we can hear tennis balls thwapping against the court—tennis practice has officially started.

  Jesse finally says, “You know, it’s better this way, actually. We won’t ever have to not know. We’ll never be surprised like that again.”

  “What do you mean?” I turn my head. “What do you mean, we’ll never be surprised again?”

  When Jesse moves suddenly, I assume he’s getting up to go play tennis. But he’s not. He grabs my cute, brown and pink flowered messenger bag and pulls out my computer. He flips the thing on without even asking. “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “I want to show you something.” He moves the bag to his right side, scooting closer to me. He sets the laptop on one of my legs and one of his. His warm thigh rubs against mine. I debate scooting away an inch, but I don’t. We both stare at the screen while the computer boots and finds a wireless connection. “You don’t know about PROFILE, do you?” he asks.

  “How did you know that?”

  “You’re the only person at QH who doesn’t talk about it nonstop. Also,” he adds self-consciously, “Dizzy told everyone.”

  When the browser appears, Jesse types PROFILE into the Google search bar. He types perfectly, his index fingers expertly hovering over the F and J keys. I lean closer to the screen. Two and a half million hits: instructions for getting financial aid; a tool for “pimping” my MySpace profile; a blog about profile racing; an invitation to join a professional network; companies; and a Wikipedia definition that appears like magic. Jesse clicks on it and then hands the computer to me.

  PROFILE (an acronym for Predictive Readout of Foreseen and Illustrative Life Effects) is a software application designed by scientists at Utopia Laboratories in order to identify the likelihood of criminal and antisocial behavior in tested subjects.

  PROFILE synthesizes the results of various established tests, including personality inventories, IQ tests, and psychopathological exams. PROFILE compiles those results and compares them with detailed analyses of cognitive and neurocognitive systems of the brain.

  PROFILE then examines the results of this information using a complex mathematical formula that yields a predictive score. That score indicates how likely an individual is to commit a crime, engage in addictive behaviors, and/or behave in socially problematic ways in the future.

  Testing of subjects must occur between the ages of approximately fourteen and fifteen. This is the optimum age when enough neuropsychological data exist, but the subject hasn’t been overly impacted by his or her environment and…

  I stop reading to give myself a second to think. “So PROFILE predicts people’s future behaviors? How is that possible?”

  “Welcome to twenty-first-century science. No more waiting and wondering,” Jesse says. “We know. We can predict exactly who is fated for a life of crime, a life of drugs—everything.”

  “So how come nobody stopped the shooter?” I ask skeptically, although I already know the answer. I think about that letter from Utopia, about what I overheard when Melissa was on the phone.

  “Test results weren’t released. Nobody knew—nobody but the researchers, those people from Utopia Laboratories who did the testing here.”

  “Melissa,” I say out loud.

  “Melissa?”

  “Never mind.” I go back to the screen again and click through the rest of the entry. I read some of it out loud. Jesse sits with his hands on his legs, watching me closely.

  Approximately three thousand high school students have been PROFILEd thus far at an undisclosed test location. The test results in the first nine rounds of testing were kept strictly confidential. Not even test subjects or their parents were aware of the results.

  While PROFILE is still being tested, researchers have made every effort to keep the test and the results as top-secret as possible. Many argue that keeping the results private is a mistake.

  “Wow,” I say out loud to myself, but the word doesn’t seem to do justice to what I am thinking. The shooter. They knew. Nobody told us.

  And that kid who opened fire at a crowded mall somewhere a couple of years ago—he might’ve been stopped. All those school shooters could have been stopped—a new one every year, it seemed like. PROFILE could have told everyone before all those bad things happened.

  Everything with Melissa made more sense now. She developed PROFILE—it was her baby. And then she backed out, didn’t want to do the testing anymore. That’s what the letter I stole had said.

  Now? That was part of what I still didn’t know. What was she doing in the garage? Why did she want to stop the testing? She could’ve changed things. And she didn’t. Why not?

  “He could’ve been stopped.” I say it softly. What I really mean is, Melissa could’ve stopped him. She knew. I feel a weird sensation in my stomach.

  Betrayal.

  “The next one will be stopped,” Jesse replies. “I promise you.”

  ***

  She’s in the garage office.

  I jog around the house and slink up the driveway. The stealth is probably unnecessary since Melissa can’t see me unless I’m standing right in front of the window at the little side door. I crouch underneath the window and slowly rise to sneak a peek through it. She’s sitting at her computer at the edge of the garage, staring into space. The room itself is Spartan: just her desk, an office chair, a safe, a filing cabinet, a small fridge, and a bookcase almost empty of books. I’ve never, ever gone into the garage before. I’ve never really been interested before, so I take a deep breath and turn the doorknob. “What the hell is going on?” I demand as soon as I enter.

  Melissa jumps and then reaches over to casually close the window on her computer. “What are you doing here? Have you quit school a
ltogether?” she asks lightly. It’s meant to be a joke.

  I stomp over to her, accidentally kicking the metal trash can in the process. “Damn it,” I mutter, my toe smarting.

  “Daphne,” she says, growing alarmed, “what is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Why do you always treat me like a baby?” It’s not what I intend to say, it’s just what comes out of my mouth. It’s my bad habit to think after I speak.

  She sighs. “Is this about your car?” She’s referring to the one I had in Saint Paul, the one she sold before we moved. “I told you that I’m sorry we sold it. I didn’t think we needed two cars, what with all that gas guzzling, and the Honda gets better gas mileage, so I just thought—”

  “This isn’t about the stupid car!” I practically scream at her. “Damn it, Melissa! What aren’t you telling me? Why won’t you explain to me why we left Saint Paul? What are you working on all of the time out here? Why are people at school—people I hardly know—telling me about PROFILE instead of you?”

  Melissa leans over and rests her elbows on her knees. She sighs with resignation. Her eyes are sort of puffy, and I notice for the first time that she looks very tired. “We’ve been over this—”

  “Yes, I know! I’ve heard it all before!” I pick up a binder sitting on the edge of her desk and hurl it at the wall. Canary yellow sheets of paper fly out and rain down on us. I stand in front of her, my hands on my hips, the first time that I’ve truly had a tantrum. Not even when I was a child did I act like this. I’m feeling wild, almost scared of myself. “It’s what you always say—you’ll tell me what I need to know!” I mimic her. “When are you going to start treating me like an adult? You can’t keep bad things from me forever. It isn’t fair, and I don’t think—”