“I saw the news this morning,” I tell him.
“I know you’re scared, and you have every right to be.” He takes off his glasses and holds my hand gently, his other hand placed over it. He looks harmless, so I have to remind myself that he may be a liar. And worse.
“I can’t talk to you, Jesse. I’m really sorry. I’m just really confused.”
“You have a right to be confused,” he says.
“Don’t patronize me.” I raise my voice. I know that I have to be strong.
Melissa warned me that he would probably come looking for me. “Be careful,” she whispered to me, even though we were alone in our living room. “He’s going to want talk to you again. He’s going to need you. And you have to remember that people are far more complex than science can ever predict.” Hearing Melissa suggest that science has shortcomings was a lot like seeing my grandmother, a devout Catholic, stomp on rosary beads while wearing combat boots.
“Don’t patronize me,” I say to Jesse again, but quieter now, almost a whisper. “I know I have the right to be afraid and confused and everything else. And I am.” I realize that I am clutching his hand.
“Right,” he agrees, and he drops my hand, which suddenly feels very cold. Then he puts his hands in his jeans pockets, and we stand there facing each other for a few seconds before he finally says, “Will you get out of here with me? Just for a little while? I want to talk to you, but I have to leave. I’m not even supposed to be here at school. But there are things I want to tell you. Things I have to say.”
He reaches out, as if to touch my face, and I look down. His hand hovers near my cheek for a second before I feel his skin against mine, his smooth palm cupped against my hot cheek. I move away quickly, but we both know I am coming with him.
***
In his car, on the way to the lake, I worry that maybe he’s taking me someplace to do something…bad. And everyone will think I am an idiot for trusting him.
But he doesn’t seem to be dangerous. He turns on the stereo and sings along to an old Nickelback song. He messes up the words but forges on anyway. Do killers listen to Nickelback on the way to a crime site? It seems unlikely.
When we get there, we walk to the end of the dock. Jesse takes off his sweatshirt, puts it down on the weather-worn wooden slats, and pats it before I sit down. We let our feet dangle for a minute, and I lean over to roll my pant legs up higher. As I’m bent over, I feel Jesse’s hand on my back, and for a second, I think he’s going to push me. I think of Roberta and Clyde in An American Tragedy. I immediately sit up. “What are you doing?” As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I realize that he is simply holding onto the back of my shirt.
“You look so precarious,” he tells me. “I didn’t want you to fall over.” I think about the last time we sat on the dock, when I dropped my purse into the water.
“Oh, sorry,” I say, an apology for snapping at him.
With pant legs rolled up, sunglasses perched on my nose, both of us leaning back on the dock, watching the ducks cluster around a dropped hamburger bun, things feel almost normal.
I am the first to break the silence. “Jesse, I already know.”
“Let me say it. I have to say it to you myself, Daphne.” He takes a deep breath. “January was a friend. A close friend. I never lied to you about that. I know I wasn’t honest with you about Brit Gormley. But I am being honest about January.” I pull my legs up, hugging them close to my chest. “January started seeing someone. Hooking up with someone who was bad for her. What you might not know is that she was pregnant. And she—”
“I know,” I interrupt. “Dizzy told me.”
“Dizzy?” he says. “How does she know?” Then he bangs his hand against his forehead. “I forgot. Dizzy knows everything.”
“Cuteny is feeding her information. Josh too.”
He turns to me and says with an urgency I haven’t heard from him before, “What else did Josh say?” The sentence rings familiarly in my head. It takes me a second to sort through the data. And then there it is. Josh in that frat boy’s room, the night of January’s attack. What has she told you? he had demanded of me.
“I don’t—”
“What else did he say?” Jesse insists, and for the second time ever, I feel uneasy with him.
“Nothing,” I say.
“Daphne, they say I’m predicted, but there has to be a mistake. That’s not who I am.”
“I’m hearing a lot about who you are.”
“And you’re saying that you believe it all?”
“Jesse, I don’t know.” I throw my hands up as I say this, almost losing my balance, which would have meant toppling sideways into the water. Jesse looks angry and confused. I stand up, wiping the seat of my jeans with my hands. “I want to go back,” I tell him and turn to walk back to the parking lot. Jesse grabs my ankle hard—hard enough to hurt. I stumble and fall face first on the wooden dock. Fortunately, I land on my hands, rather than my face, so I’m left with scraped palms—palms that had just healed from my jogging fall—rather than a broken nose.
Jesse scrambles to a standing position and runs toward me. “Daph! Daph! Are you okay? I didn’t mean to make you fall.”
“I want to go back to school,” I tell him, getting up and holding my scraped palms toward my chest. I turn to walk away.
Jesse paces quickly in front of me and blocks my path.
“I’m leaving Quiet,” he says.
I pause. “You can’t. They police said that—”
“They’ll never be able to hold me. My lawyer is sure of it. They don’t have any real evidence.”
“Where are you going?”
“Somewhere else. Someplace that’s not Quiet. Maybe to live with my mom out West. I don’t know.”
I say nothing, although I want to scream, Don’t go! Something holds me back—maybe it’s the way he blinks nervously, those eyelashes batting so quickly. He looks…guilty. I gasp when I think it.
“What?” Jesse says worriedly.
“Nothing.” I squeeze the tears back into my eyes. “I just want to go.” Suddenly, I feel the urge to be away from him, while another part of me can’t bear to see him go. “I’ll walk back,” I announce.
I take off walking, but somewhere along the way I break into a run. The wind is so strong that I feel like I’m pushing against a heavy wall. Still, I keep running. I can hear Jesse in the distance. “Wait!” he’s yelling. I stop when I feel like I can’t breathe anymore. I put my scraped hands on my knees and bend over, dry heaving. I look at my palms, which are oozing blood and sand.
Then there is Jesse. He reaches for my hands, but I flinch—against my own will—and he drops his hands to his sides.
“Did you do it?” I ask him. I’m so confused—my mind running back and forth, like a tennis match against itself. One side is he did it, the other side is he would never.
“If you are actually asking me if I had anything to do with January’s attack, I have nothing left to say to you, Daphne.”
Once, years ago, Melissa slapped me when we’d had a fight about something. The skin on my cheek stung for long after her hand connected. This feels the same. I begin to explain. “I just mean—”
He interrupts me. “I know what you mean.”
I want to say something, but words can’t escape from my mouth. The tennis ball in my head moves from one side of the court to the other. The ball lingers on one side. January’s prediction was right on. And all of those people at the school seem so sure that the tests are our best hope for preventing bad things. Even Melissa never came out and said the tests are wrong—she just said it’s dangerous to tell everyone what the test results are. But isn’t it just as risky to not tell people? I ask myself. Don’t we have the right to know who’s a threat to our safety?
“Jesse,” I say, holding back tears and clutching my arms with both hands. “I’m just not sure what to say.” All I know is that I feel like I need to get away—get away from him and all of this
. I want to go home. Back to Saint Paul. Back to a time before I knew anything about PROFILE.
I walk away, and he lets me go.
chapter 23
I’m charming. That’s how I got away with it. Girls like me. They fall in love with me. Have you noticed a pattern? It’s easy to get them to do exactly what I want them to do.
—Quote from a suspect in a police report
When I fall asleep, I dream of him hitting January, beating her until she is almost unconscious, and then leaving her alone in that abandoned train car. But in the dream, it’s not Jesse after all. It’s someone else—someone I can’t see through the shadows.
I wake up with my heart beating a thousand beats per second.
I skip school for the rest of the week. Melissa doesn’t make me go—instead, she brings me bowls of Lucky Charms in bed every morning, and at night she brings me McDonalds. If I didn’t know better, I would think the apocalypse was upon us. I spend most of my time in bed, pretending to be sick. I amaze myself at my ability to sleep for so long. Even when I’m not tired, I can drift into deep sleep that lasts for hour after blissful hour.
I haul myself out of bed and slouch to the living room every night at ten to watch the evening news. I don’t like the anchor, a woman with a varnished hairdo. Next to her is a man with white hair whose droopy eyelids twitch when he’s feeling sympathetic. Friday night’s lead story is about a two-year-old who went missing during a game of hide-and-seek. She fell asleep in the dryer, and a police dog had to sniff her out. The next story is about foreign arms dealers. Then a man named Consumer Detective Dick interviews a woman about her washing machine. It doesn’t spin right, but the company won’t give her a new one or fix the one she has. Detective Dick recommends that we avoid that brand of washer.
After a commercial, but before the weather QuickCast, they talk about Jesse. I turn the volume up as loud as my head will allow. “Jesse Kable,” Droopy Eyelids says, “the local teen accused of savagely attacking a teen girl last week, is no longer the prime suspect in the case. Kable was under suspicion because he was the last person to see the girl at a Quiet State College fraternity party before the incident. He has also been identified by the controversial test PROFILE as a future violent criminal.” His droopy eyelids remain steady, as if propped up by invisible toothpicks. He goes on to say that Jesse’s fingerprints didn’t match the ones found at the crime scene. I breathe a sigh of relief. I feel like I’ve been holding my breath for an eternity.
***
Dizzy calls at least fifteen times from Tuesday to Saturday. Melissa tells her I am sleeping, which is hardly ever a lie. On Sunday, Dizzy rests.
Late Sunday night, I get an email from Jesse: I’m leaving town for awhile. Please don’t call me or contact me. I wish you the best.
On Monday morning, Melissa turns on my lights at six a.m. She opens my closet and throws jeans, a pink short-sleeved shirt that I hate, and flip-flops at me. “You’re going,” she says. There is no room for argument, so I don’t bother.
***
“Everybody up,” Mrs. McClain says. “Orderly lines.”
Hannah Wet/Dry clutches her test paper in her hand as she makes her way to the door. I leave mine on my desk. Let it burn.
We were in the middle of chemistry lab when the fire alarm went off, the bleating beep rousing all of us from our silence. I am not the only who jumped. Even though we are in our new classroom—and Mrs. McClain is back with a full prescription of antianxiety meds—any loud noise or sudden disturbance reminds us all of that day. We jumped, and then we all pretended that we didn’t. Nobody wants to talk about that anymore. It’s so one month ago.
We are supposed to be taking a test, but I get the feeling that most everyone is just pretending to be conscious. The beep of the alarm has made me draw a jagged line across my paper—the first mark on it. I’m going to fail this exam—another failure.
Mrs. McClain waits for us to line up, patting her tightly permed gray hair. It doesn’t move at all. I worry about how flammable she is right now. She waits for everyone to go completely silent before she leads us out the door, reminding us to mind our manners. I feel like a kindergartner.
We leave New QH by the library doors. That means we don’t have to go anywhere near Old QH—or what everyone now calls the Zoo, because that’s where all the predicteds are locked up, like animals in cages. Dizzy knows people who have been over there to observe the animals. “The predicteds are like a sideshow,” she told me plainly this morning, no hint of disapproval in her voice. And the predicted themselves are known as Lifers, as in lifelong convicts, imprisoned in their own biology. Already, the halls echo with discussions of Lifers, and a couple of nights ago, the school was tagged—Lifers for Life drips across the gym door in spray paint. Obviously the Lifers themselves did it, everyone is saying, because we—the good guys, the normal people—would never deface public property.
Once outside, in the already blistering heat of a mid-May day, Dizzy leaves her group and finds me. Mrs. McClain is standing next to me, having a coughing fit—one of those old-lady coughs that starts in her feet and rattles her whole body. “Did you hear?” Dizzy whispers, her eyes gleaming. I squint at her through the sunlight. “It’s not a fire. We’re being evacuated. There’s a predicted in the Zoo with a gun.”
“Oh, dear lord,” Mrs. McClain croaks. It’s not clear if she has overheard Dizzy or if she is choking to death. We ignore her. The police and fire trucks have arrived, and they are pushing everyone to the farthest ends of the parking lot. Dizzy and I move to the bleachers by the baseball diamonds.
“Now, what’s going on?” I ask her.
She juts her chin out proudly. Dizzy loves having information before anyone else does. “I just saw Josh. He was at the Zoo this morning.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Slumming, I guess.” She laughs and then gets serious. “That’s when it happened. Nate Gormley—you know that kid, right?”
“Yeah, the kid from Whataburger. My tutoring project.”
She whips around to face me. “You were in a room alone with that kid? You’re lucky he didn’t try something.”
“He’s harmless, Dizzy.” I try to sound less annoyed than I am. Lately, everything that comes out of Dizzy’s mouth makes me want to slap her and tell her to grow up. Melissa tells me I’m projecting my anger.
“Nate pulled a gun on Josh. He wouldn’t let Josh go.”
“Shut up!” I say. “But that doesn’t make sense. How’d you talk to Josh if Nate held him?”
“Well, he eventually let Josh go, I guess.”
“So how’d Nate get into the Zoo with a gun?” Even before the predicted list, the school had metal detectors. The only difference now is that nobody at New QH has to go through them. We have our name badges instead.
“I don’t know,” Dizzy says with exasperation.
“Dizzy, did Josh actually see a gun?”
“Well, yeah. I mean, I’m pretty sure he did. I’m almost positive. Josh told Mrs. Temple. Temple called the cops. That’s why they’re all here.” She waves her hand at the fire trucks and police cars in the parking lot—all of Quiet’s force, probably.
“So Nate is still in there?”
“Oh, no. Temple pulled him out right away. The first cop car left with him.”
“Then why are the cops here?”
“To find the gun!” Dizzy is just plain huffy now.
“So let me get this straight,” I say. “Josh was in the Zoo this morning. He saw Nate. He thought Nate had a gun. He told Temple. Temple called the cops. The cops are now looking for a gun that may or may not exist.” It’s not like I think Nate is a pillar of society. I just don’t think Josh is the world’s most reliable person.
“Well, when you put it that way, it’s not much of a story, is it? I’m just telling you what Josh told me.” She pulls a lock of hair over her lower lip, a habit I’ve noticed that she seems to have recently acquired. It makes her l
ook like she has a black mustache. “I’m just glad Josh is okay.”
I exhale loudly.
“God, Daphne. At least try to pretend you like my boyfriend.”
The bleating alarm is off now, and if the parking lot weren’t full of cops with guns, it might feel like a normal day—back when we all went to the same school, with no Zoo, no Lifers. I take a deep breath. “There’s something you should know, Dizzy. I’m not sure that Josh is necessarily the most honest person in the world.”
“Are you saying that he lies? Because he doesn’t. He’s not predicted.”
“Well, you should know that Josh and January, um—” I try to think how to phrase it. What do I really know? That three weeks ago, Jesse and I went to pick up January at the train car, and I saw Josh there? And he doesn’t want her to know about it? As Dizzy would say, when you put it that way, it doesn’t make a very good story. But she has a right to know. “Josh was with January one night. I saw them.”
“So?” Dizzy drops her lock of hair and puts her hands on her hips. “You and I are together right now. Does that mean we’re sleeping together?” She says the last words in a heavy, breathy way.
“I’m not saying anything bad about Josh except that I saw him with January one night, and he really didn’t want you to know. He told me not to tell you. That’s all. That’s all I wanted to tell you, and I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before.”
“Well, so what if he was with January? She’s a slut. Everybody knows that. She’s, um—biologically predicted to be a whore. Of course she was probably after my boyfriend. That’s who she is. It’s not like I get mad at my dog when he pees on a tree. It’s kinda what dogs do.” She smiles a half-smile, but I feel like we are on the verge of a fight. I want to back down, to agree with her, but something inside me feels out of control. I think it’s guilt—this big, blocky weight sitting on top of my chest. It feels like heartburn. Or maybe heartbreak.
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