The Predicteds

by Christine Seifert

  Nate stops tapping and shaking. “Hey, are you talking about me?” He has a smirk on his face. “Because I can take it. Anything you want to say about me, you can say to my face.”

  “No, we have nothing to say,” Dizzy says primly, sliding out of the booth and then grabbing my arm. “We’re leaving.” In the process of pulling me, she runs smack-dab into Kelly, who is carrying a tray of food. The food lands down the front of Kelly’s pale sweatshirt and white capris. “Watch it,” Dizzy says coldly.

  We’re almost out the door—our trays of half-eaten food still sitting at our table—when I hear Nate call out, “Hey, hey! Come back here! You owe her an apology! You owe me a burger!” We keep moving, Dizzy dragging me by the wrist.

  By the time we get to Dizzy’s cute little yellow Volkswagen bug, which she calls Bug-a-boo, she’s in tears. “I’ve never been so scared in my life,” she weeps. “Think about what could’ve happened to us! We were in danger!”

  “Dizzy,” I say calmly, “I don’t think we were in danger. This is kind of ridiculous, don’t you think? I mean, you weren’t scared of them before all this predicted stuff, were you? How is it any different?”

  “Because now I know enough to be scared. And you should be scared too, Daph. They take advantage of people like us, people who are trusting and decent human beings!”

  Her hands are still shaking, but she’s pulled out of the parking lot, and we are going back to school. The sun shines brightly, and I’ve forgotten my sunglasses, so I pull down the visor. “I don’t know, Dizz. I think maybe this whole thing has been blown out of proportion.”

  “So, what, you want to hang out with them or something?”

  “No. I don’t know. I’m just saying that I don’t think that freaking out around them is necessarily the—”

  “Think whatever you want, Daphne. But I’m warning you—you’ll be sorry if you don’t take this predicted thing more seriously. Not to mention that you’re going to be the social outcast of the century if you now want to, like, be all chummy with that loser Nate and skeevy Kelly Payne.”

  “Come on, Dizz. He’s not that bad. Besides—”

  “Listen.” She holds up her hand. “I’m saying that unless you want to end up like January, you better decide who you’re going to hang around with, and you better decide quickly.”

  chapter 21

  Love the predicted, hate the prediction.

  —Sign outside of Quiet Main Street Baptist Church

  I spend my time during my morning classes tweaking my presentation notes and messing around with my PowerPoint slides. By the time fourth period rolls around, I’m completely exhausted, but Josh looks refreshed, like he’s just had a nap. When I come into English class and sit down next to him, he says seriously, “You look like death, Daph. You should really get more sleep.”

  It took me until four in the morning to finish the presentation for English—without Josh’s help. I crashed until Melissa poked her head in my room at seven and asked me if I was planning to go to school. I tamed my hair and put on under-eye concealer, mascara, and a coat of pale pink lip gloss. My goal was modest: to try not to look like a cadaver with clothes on.

  I ignore Josh, turning my back on him, and wait for Ms. Kaplan to walk in and give her disappointed sigh before we begin. She opens by telling everyone, “Remember, sounding recondite doesn’t make you smart—it just shows how much you don’t know.” Too bad nobody taught her that.

  Josh and I are first. He stands next to me at the front of the room with his hands in his pockets, head up, shoulders back, as if he’s been waiting his whole life to talk to Ms. Kaplan’s fourth period English class about Theodore Dreiser’s magnum opus. While I talk, Josh looks at the printout that I gave him. Then he picks at a freckle on his forehead. Talk about dead weight.

  My first slide is a picture of the author, Theodore Dreiser. I talk about his background as a journalist and his desire to use fiction to talk about social problems, just as a journalist chronicles human events. The novelist, however, seeks to explain why people act as they do, rather than merely reporting events. Then I start talking about the book, about how it was based on a true story of a man who killed his pregnant girlfriend, and Dreiser used that true incident as the basis of his novel because he believed it typified the kind of crime that could only happen in America—a crime fueled by greed, desire, sex, and the American dream.

  Brock Martin—the guy who everyone calls B. M., because he has diarrhea of the mouth—raises his hand. “So what is this book actually about? Can you provide more detail?”

  I sigh and go over what I just said. Nobody seems at all disturbed by the fact that I’m merely repeating myself, only using simpler language. “It’s the story of a boy with no money who meets a girl with no money who he gets pregnant. Then he meets a rich girl and falls in love. But in order to marry this rich girl, he has to get rid of the other girl. So he murders his pregnant girlfriend by pushing her out of a boat. Naturally, he gets caught.” It’s about as much as I can simplify an eight-hundred-page book.

  “Makes sense,” Josh says, suddenly coming alive as if I’ve just explained how cold fronts move rather than told a chilling story about a man who murders his pregnant girlfriend.

  “It’s just like that one guy,” Brooklyn says.

  “Yeah,” a few others say, apparently knowing exactly who she is talking about. She clarifies for me. “That guy in California who murdered his wife. Same exact thing.”

  “Yes,” Ms. Kaplan interrupts, “but I think the important thing about the book isn’t so much the plot but the themes Dreiser is presenting. Right, Daphne?”

  “Yes,” I say, glancing at my notes and then looking at Sam, who is now perched on the edge of the front table, drumming his fingers against the top of it.

  B. M. raises his hand again. “B. M.,” I say, knowing that I’m being mean.

  The name doesn’t seem to bother him, but everyone else snickers. “So you think this guy’s behavior was justified—killing the pregnant girl so he could be with the rich girl, the one that he truly loved?”

  “Yeah, money is super-important,” Brooklyn notes.

  “Well,” I start, realizing that my notes aren’t really going to be any help. I drop them on the podium. “It’s obviously wrong to murder someone, and I think everybody agrees with that, but in the context of the book and what the author was trying to illustrate, Clyde’s actions are somewhat understandable. To end up with Roberta, the pregnant girl, is to end any hope he ever had of living the kind of life he’d dreamed of. He dreamed he would have money, power, and prestige. That’s what he thought the American dream was. That’s what everybody thinks. And then if you don’t get that stuff—the money and the power—what do you do? Maybe our culture kind of sets us up for disappointment.”

  Josh picks this time to actually participate. “So you’re saying this chick traps this dude by getting pregnant and forces him into staying with her because of that? ’Cause that seems pretty messed up to me.”

  “I don’t think that’s exactly what happened. She just got pregnant, and in those days, she didn’t have a lot of other options. She needed Clyde in order to survive. Literally.”

  “I don’t know,” Josh says. “She sounds like a whore.” Everyone laughs. Ms. Kaplan rolls her eyes but doesn’t say anything. It’s patently obvious that Josh hasn’t read the book, but Kaplan probably doesn’t even notice.

  Brooklyn raises her hand again. I look to Ms. Kaplan for help. Am I going to get to give my presentation or what? Monday’s presentation on The Great Gatsby ended in ten minutes without a single question. “Brooklyn,” Ms. Kaplan says. “What would you like to add?”

  “So,” Brooklyn says from the back, throwing her hair back in pageant pose, “what would you have done if you were Roberta?” Ms. Kaplan is looking at me like I am supposed to answer the question. I really just want to get back to the presentation. I look to Josh, who has now lost interest in the discussion and wandered over to
the windows, where he is staring longingly outside at one of the custodians who is making wide loops on the riding mower. “I don’t know. This isn’t exactly part of my presentation.” Ms. Kaplan waves her hand at me, a gesture to go on. I sigh. “I guess I probably wouldn’t wind up pregnant like Roberta, and I certainly wouldn’t trust somebody like Clyde, who seems pretty shifty throughout the book. The novel just proves why women need to be responsible for their own futures. Roberta never should have been with somebody like him. She should’ve believed in herself and demanded a guy who would treat her with respect.”

  Brooklyn smiles at me, a wide, lipsticked smile. Ever since that night at the diner, when she tried to hit me with her purse, she’s been very cold to me, a blocky gust of wind at waist level. She clears her throat. “Kinda like a girl who’s going out with a guy who is predicted?” She winks at me then.

  I blink once. Then twice. “Excuse me?”

  “Well, everybody here knows, right?” She looks around her.

  Ms. Kaplan looks interested—an unusual look for her. “Brooklyn,” she says, “I’m intrigued. Are you finding parallels between real life and the novel? Class, this is called a mimetic reading.” She hurries to the board and scrawls the words in yellow chalk, forming big, bubbly letters. “Go on, Brooklyn.” She seems to forget that I’m supposed to be giving a presentation.

  Brooklyn smiles, because all eyes are on her. “Everybody knows what happened to January.” A couple of girls in the corner begin whispering to each other. “And everybody knows that Jesse is a suspect, and he’s predicted. So this is pretty much a closed case.”

  “I don’t think this has anything to do my presentation,” I tell Ms. Kaplan.

  “Mimetic readings can be multi-layered,” Ms. Kaplan tells me and turns back to Brooklyn. It becomes clear that she’s enjoying being part of the gossip. I bet she has a Facebook profile and tries to friend all of the cool students.

  “And everybody knows that January and Jesse were together.” Brooklyn emphasizes the word together, making it feel like more than just an adverb. “And January was pregnant—some of us knew that. You do the math.”

  The room goes silent. Even the lawn mower outside comes to a grinding halt. I get that nervous feeling—the feeling that comes over you right before you puke all over the floor in gym class or get a horrible gas pain as soon as you’re alone in a room with a guy.

  “Well, Brooklyn,” Ms. Kaplan says, walking to the board, “this may not be the most appropriate time to have this conversation.” Finally. “Daphne, why don’t you finish your presentation.” It’s not a question. Brooklyn doesn’t meet my eyes. She looks guilty, because even she knows she’s gone too far.

  I can hardly find the words to talk. They all stick in the very back of my brain, where I’ve been storing all my fears about Jesse.

  ***

  It doesn’t take long to gather gossip and figure out what Brooklyn was talking about in class. According to Cuteny’s dad, Dizzy’s constant source of information, January was pregnant. As in, she is not currently pregnant. She had a miscarriage a couple of months before the attack; Dizzy doesn’t think she told anyone.

  It’s impossible not to speculate about who the father was, which is exactly why Brooklyn decided to throw January under a bus and announce this “secret” to me in front of everyone.

  Dizzy shows up at my house the night after the presentation. She hands me a mint chocolate chip ice cream sandwich. “Let’s not fight,” she says, plopping down on the steps off the sun porch.

  “We aren’t,” I say.

  “I know, but yesterday, after we left Whataburger, I just felt like you were mad at me. Because of what I said.”

  I take the ice cream. I don’t have the energy to argue with Dizzy. Besides, she’s probably right—if I want to be accepted at QH, I need to accept that predicteds and nonpredicteds are not going to be best friends with the rest of us. We sit on the porch, listening to the crickets chirp. Dizzy’s wild hair is wound up in a tight bun on the top of her head—she has two brightly colored chopsticks (or maybe pencils—I can’t quite tell) stuck through the curls. She’s wearing some kind of a denim jumpsuit—the kind of thing that a famous person would wear to a private club at three a.m. Dizzy somehow manages to pull it off. “I’ve got a date tonight,” she finally says.

  “Josh?” I ask.

  “Josh,” she repeats. “I think I’ve made him wait for me long enough. He’s dying to officially get back together with me.” Any other girl would sound arrogant saying this, but Dizzy sounds as if she’s just reporting the facts, like a disinterested ten o’clock news anchor.

  I debate telling her what a complete jerk Josh is and decide against it. One time, when I was in sixth grade, I desperately wanted Melissa to buy me this red dress with white buttons down the front. I coveted that dress, but Melissa wouldn’t hear of buying it. It was eighty-three dollars, which Melissa announced was exactly four times—plus three dollars—more than what any reasonable person should pay for a dress.

  I begged for that dress, promising to do extra chores, to babysit, to forego Christmas and birthday gifts forever, if necessary. The thing was, I could see myself in that dress, and the more she told me how wrong it was—how cheap the material, how unflattering the style, how overpriced—the more I couldn’t be dissuaded.

  Eventually, she caved and bought it for me, and not for Christmas or my birthday or any other special occasion. She just put it in my closet one day, and it was mine. Naturally, I wore it once and realized the white buttons were tacky, the red a funny tomato color, the hem too short for my long legs. I never wore it again. In fact, I felt guilty for years every time I saw it in my closet. I only got rid of it when we moved to Quiet, and when I threw it in the donation pile, I said to Melissa, “Why didn’t you try harder to talk me out of that dress?”

  And she said, “I did. And that just made you want it more. It was an eighty-three-dollar lesson for me: Never try to talk someone out of something that’s bad for them.”

  I imagine that Josh is Dizzy’s tomato-red dress with obnoxiously large white buttons.

  “What do you have planned?”

  She shrugs. “We’re going to hang out at the tracks, I guess.” She says this as though it’s perfectly obvious that’s what they will do. I think of the night I saw Josh there, the night of the thunderstorm, when Jesse rushed to find January.

  “It’s not a surprise, you know,” Dizzy says, adjusting one of her chopsticks. “January is predicted for alcoholism and out-of-wedlock teenage birth.” The words come out like names for conditions: measles, smallpox, the mumps. “Getting pregnant and all was obviously, like, destiny or something. Just one of those things you can’t stop.”

  “Like an oncoming bus,” I say.

  She leans over and links her arm through mine. “I’m sorry. I know you really liked Jesse.”

  The mention of his name makes my stomach lurch—it’s fear and grief rolling around inside of there, mixing up a toxic cocktail for me to carry around in my duodenum.

  Dizzy touches my back. “How do you feel?”

  I stare glassily across the street, watching a fluffy white dog scratching at a tree. “Harold!” a woman in too-short shorts screams at him. “Not on the magnolia!”

  “I don’t know.” I can’t put how I feel into words.

  Dizzy pats my hand, her fingers just a tiny bit sticky from her ice cream sandwich. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’re just a trusting person, Daphne. Anybody could’ve been fooled by a sociopath like him. I mean, it seemed like he had it all—rich, smart, super-hot. I’m not surprised you fell for him,” she says soberly. “The best thing you can do now is just forget about him. He’s a loser. He was stringing you along, making you look like an idiot while he was plotting to kill January. That’s so messed up! What you need to do now is…”

  She keeps talking, but I stop listening.

  chapter 22

  What surprised me the most is the way thos
e kids accepted the predicted results without even a second’s worth of hesitation. Not a single one of them, not one, publicly protested what was happening. Here they were, being rounded up like common criminals, segregated in their own school, and they said nothing. And their classmates watched it happen. They accepted it all.

  —Melissa Wright, quoted in the book, The Future of the Predicted, publication forthcoming

  The cheery voice of the newscaster hits me in the face: “Jesse Kable, son of Richard Kable, CEO of FauxFuel, is the prime suspect in a local high school girl’s brutal attack. Police expect to make an arrest later today. This is the first criminal case in history where police are using controversial PROFILE results as primary evidence. Mr. Kable’s lawyer expects that his client, if arrested, will be released immediately. He states, ‘There’s no precedent for using a person’s predicted status as viable evidence. In this case, the police have absolutely nothing to link my client to the crime.’” I turn off the television.

  ***

  “Daphne,” he yells, loud enough to rise above the clatter of lockers opening and closing and voices shouting through the hallways. I am on my way to geometry class when I see him, wearing a baseball cap and dark glasses. He’s coming in the main doors, heading right for me.

  I take off, walking in the other direction, toward the circular hallway that leads to the metal shop, wood shop, and music rooms. I look at the clock: I have two minutes to get to class on the other side of the building. I continue walking through the dark hallway, which rings the gym, peeking into rooms I’ve never seen before. It’s beyond my reasoning abilities to figure out why shop classes are so popular. Who could possibly want to make a bird feeder or a wind chime? Isn’t that what Home Depot is for?

  I run into him when I pass the third classroom—he’s entered the hallway from the other side. The bell rings, and doors shut. The hallway grows quiet, save for the distant sounds of violins playing in the larger music rooms further down the hall.