by Carrie Ryan
Instead I just grunt, and he stares back at me with wide, scared eyes.
We drive up and down the hills for a while, and I try to keep track of where we are. Mostly I’m listening for sounds indicating that we’re crossing one of the bridges. But I don’t get that. Nor do I get freeway-type noise. So I figure we’re probably still somewhere in the city, and then, at last, the van lurches to a stop.
Ms. Gill turns around, arm over her seat, and says, “Vice Principal Edgar’s stun gun can knock you out. Or it can merely … discipline you. So don’t do anything stupid.”
Ah, so it was a stun gun, not a gun gun. I can see that now.
They let us out. I guess right away that we’re somewhere on the Presidio. That’s a former army post in, like, the world’s most beautiful location in a park overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge.
The army moved out a long time ago, and some of the old officers’ quarters are rented out, and some of the other buildings, the headquarters and all. Now they’re offices for various things.
It’s kind of an empty place for the most part, not like the rest of the city. A weird place to do a kidnapping, I think.
The van’s parked on gravel in front of a low, tan stucco building that’s—inconveniently, I think—out of view of anything else. No view of the Golden Gate for us, we’re nestled in pine trees.
There’s a new brass plaque on the wall beside the only door on the building. It reads “Academy of Troubled Youth.”
I share a look with the Asian kid and I can tell by his expression he’s thinking the same thing I am. Shouts, cries, and loud prayers coming from a place with that kind of name would go unheard. Deliberately unheard. No one wants anything to do with “troubled youth.”
We march through the front door and down a narrow, gloomy hallway to a side door. Ms. Gill opens it with what I can only describe as an expression of smug satisfaction. By which I mean that she opens the door with her hand, while having on her face a look of smug satisfaction.
“Class,” she says in her brittle teacher voice, “we have two new students.” And with that, the guy pulls off our gags and we’re pushed into a room.
With a chalkboard at the front.
I … I can’t breathe. There’s a teacher’s desk in the corner.
My God, and bookshelves! Shelves double-stacked with every kind of horror, across all age groups: from Magic Tree House books to A Tale of Two Cities to biographies of people no one cares about.
And then, I see … desks! Student desks. In four rows.
And in half of those desks are … kids!
“Sweet Lord,” my co-kidnappee breathes. “It’s a classroom!”
It is indeed a classroom. It has the classroom look, the classroom clutter, the classroom smell of boredom and despair.
And no computer. Not even a Smart Board.
I can’t breathe. But I fight the panic. Freaking out will accomplish nothing. But my throat’s tight and my heart’s pounding and for a minute I think I might pass out from the sheer horror.
We’re shackled by our legs to desks and Ms. Gill says, “Introduce yourselves, children.”
There are five other kids in the room besides the two of us. All shackled. All hunched over actual books. Books inked up with other people’s notes and drawings.
The same books are in front of me. And on the board, written in chalk, are words that strike terror into me.
Reading: Chapters 9–12 on U.S. House of Representatives and its committees.
I jerk against the chain at my ankle.
Ms. Gill doesn’t even bother to look up.
“I’m Peter,” a sullen kid says.
“I’m Annette.”
My God, they’re actually doing it! They’re introducing themselves! Like this is an actual classroom and not some nightmare of Ms. Gill’s creation.
“Tomaso and Nguyen, since you haven’t had time to read the assignment, just try to keep up with the class discussion.”
Am I dreaming? Is that it?
“You’ll find college-ruled spiral notebooks and number two pencils in your desk. I’d advise you both to take careful notes. What we’re covering will be on the test.”
She looks right at me when she says that.
On the test.
On. The. Test.
No. Maybe Peter and Annette and Nguyen and that other girl, and that dude with the lazy eye, and Jennifer—who under other circumstances I might ask out—will sit quietly and read their paper books, and stare at the chalkboard and take notes with a pencil. On paper!
Not me.
I pick up the spiral notebook and throw it on the floor.
And do you know what I learn from that? I learn that stun guns really hurt. (It’s actually better when they’re set to knock you out.)
Here’s what you want to imagine. Ever see one of those old-fashioned marionettes? (If not, just do an image search.) They’re basically puppets with too many joints, dangling from strings.
So, the Taser hits, and for about twenty seconds I am one of those marionettes and an ADHD three-year-old is yanking me around by the strings. Legs, arms, head, all twitching away like a crazy person.
“That was the lowest setting, Tomaso,” Ms. Gill says. “Next time I’ll ask Vice Principal Edgar to raise the voltage a little.” She comes toward my desk, doing the teacher strut, leans down, and says, “Not so smart now, are you? Now pick up the book. And the notebook. And …” She pauses for extra relish. “… the number two pencil.”
We spend the night shivering in narrow bunk beds. Our ankles are chained to the metal frames.
I don’t sleep well. For one thing, Nguyen has an impressive snoring thing going on.
For another, I’m seething with a range of unfamiliar emotions: white-hot fury alternating with cold, dark despair.
My normal emotions range from cool beige amusement to somewhat warm taupe irritation.
See what I did there with the color and emotion thing?
The point is, I’m not happy in a way that I’ve never been not happy before. I’ve been abused. Parts of my brain are probably permanently damaged from reading about the permanent committees of the U.S. House of Representatives—a political body included in the Constitution with an eye toward causing future kids to weep with boredom.
“They’ll never find us, will they?” Nguyen whispers. I should have known he was awake: the snoring had stopped.
“Of course they’ll find us,” I say. “The whole city is looking. You can’t just ‘disappear’ seven kids without people noticing. Not even in San Francisco.”
“We’re hidden in plain sight,” Nguyen moans. “They’ll figure we were taken to the East Bay or something. Over the bridge.”
“Over the bridge,” I muse. “Listen to me, Noo—you don’t mind if I call you that, right? Were you carrying a Link when they grabbed you?”
“Well, duh,” he says. “But they broke it.”
“Yeah, mine too, I imagine. But there will be a GPS record of where we both were when we were picked up. Suddenly, bam, we go off-grid, right? So if we’re the cops, what do we do? We check those areas for witnesses. And better yet, we check for any kind of security camera.”
“It’s probably a stolen van. They won’t be able to trace it.”
“They don’t have to trace it by the license plate, Noo, they can check bridge cams—they’ll see that it never left the city. They’ll know we’re still here.”
“But we’re in the Presidio. This is the one part of the city where no one ever goes!”
He’s right, and I have no clever answer for that. Why hadn’t they taken us to the Castro—an old woman with a bunch of kids would have been spotted in a heartbeat.
Ms. Gill had obviously set this up carefully. She would have had to rent the building, set up her bogus “Troubled Youth” organization, bring in desks and so on.
And who would ever suspect a teacher of being a kidnapper?
“They’ll find us,” I say bravely.
I don’t want to be a victim of forced hierarchical learning.
There has to be a way out.
If only I could have two minutes online …
If only …
But it’s not going to happen. I’m de-Linked. I fall asleep eventually, thinking of Crystal. And Magnum bars.
A day passes.
And another.
On the third day I get a B-minus on a test.
On the fourth day I lose it. Four days without any sort of Link-age. I go a little crazy, thrashing against the chain that holds me to my desk, throwing things, cursing.
The so-called vice principal—who I think may just be a hobo—is about to Tase me, but Ms. Gill holds up a hand and stops him. I see the look on her face. A look of triumph. Victory!
On the fifth day I have a paper due. I stay up late and study. With a book. It’s full of dated references. It stinks of mildew. It’s utterly linear. And whoever owned it before me has highlighted, like, every word, in yellow.
There’s no way to turn off the highlighting.
No way to stop the cursed yellow that permeates the unchanging, static page.
I stare at the page and cry.
Noo hears me. He has the top bunk. He leans over the side and says, “Dude, it’s not that hard. It’s just biology. I could help you—”
“Damn your help!” I shout. “What good is your help? All you have is the same stupid book I have. What if it’s wrong, Noo? What if the science has changed since they wrote this in—” I pause to check the front of the book and I’m shocked. “No! It’s older than I am! It’s as old as my mom!”
Noo checks his. “Not mine,” he says. “Mine is only ten years old.”
“Only?” I shrill sarcastically. “Only ten …” And then I freeze. Okay, then I unfreeze, leap as far as my chain will allow me, and snatch the book from Noo’s hand.
Oh, it’s Life: Elements of Biology, all right. But it’s the tenth edition. And my Life: Elements of Biology is the eighth edition.
The next day is Day Five.
I’m going to study for it like I’ve never studied before.
“Tomaso, why don’t you tell us what you learned about mitochondrial DNA,” Ms. Gill demands.
“I’m afraid I can’t, Ms. Gill.”
She stares pretty hard. I smirk hard back at her.
She’s seen this smirk before. She knows I’m up to something. But her natural teacherly arrogance won’t let her back down.
I’m counting on that.
“Did you do the assigned reading?”
“Yes indeed, Ms. Gill.”
“Then you know the answer, Tomaso.”
“On the contrary, Ms. Gill. I am unable to find the answer. Not … the … answer.”
She gets up from her desk.
She walks toward me. Heels click click click.
I can hear the vice principal–slash–hobo unholstering his stun gun.
“Open your book to the appropriate page.” She sucks in a breath and spits out, “Tomaso.”
I open my book.
She stabs at the paragraph with her finger. Is that finger trembling just a bit? Oh, yes, it is.
“There,” she says triumphantly. “There is where it says that except in very rare cases each individual has only one type of mitochondrial DNA. There! If you had read the assignment!”
I stand up, too. Toe to toe. Nose to nose. Marshall’s blouse to Target T-shirt.
“Oh, I read it, Ms. Gill. Then I read it again.” I grab Noo’s book and hold it up so she can get a good look at it. “I read it again, in the tenth edition. And guess what, Ms. Gill?”
She takes a small step back, faced with the rage of my knowledge.
“It seems they originally believed heteroplasmic mitochondrial DNA to be quite rare, but we now know—as of this, the tenth edition, Ms. Gill—we now know that heteroplasmic DNA is present to some degree in almost all tissues!”
She swallows hard.
“In … almost … all … tissues!” I repeat.
I lean in for the kill. “The facts, Ms. Gill, cannot be ascertained from the reading assignment you gave me. And who knows what further details have emerged about mitochondrial DNA in the decade since the tenth edition, let alone the thirty-seven years since the eighth edition?”
“No,” she gasps.
Then, almost pleading, “No.”
“Well, Ms. Gill.” And I totally spit out the words Ms. Gill with the same sharp-edged tones she uses to say my name. They are some cutting syllables. “Who knows? Who knows? I’ll tell you who knows, Ms. Gill: the Internet knows, Ms. Gill.”
I let the book drop from my hand.
She flinches at the sound of it hitting the floor.
“The. Internet. Knows,” I say with grim finality.
Well. I wish I could say that her head explodes. Because that would be cool.
But instead what happens is that the FBI and the SFPD burst into the room. They grab Vice Principal Edgar after a brief struggle.
And they handcuff Ms. Gill.
She doesn’t struggle.
She doesn’t say a word.
She just stares at me with a look of terrible loss. I’ve crushed her world. And compared to the defeat I’ve inflicted on Ms. Gill, her arrest, trial, and subsequent plea-bargained sentence of twenty years in the minimum-security women’s prison in Chino will be nothing.
The FBI and the SFPD may have rescued me.
But I have already defeated Ms. Gill.
It’s been fifteen years. Wow. Time flies.
I got married. Not to Crystal. This is real life, not a romance novel. Anyway, Crystal wasn’t right for me. A fact I came to realize shortly after she dumped me.
If by “shortly after” you mean “following three weeks spent sobbing into my pillow.”
Anyway, forget Crystal. My wife’s name is Gala. She’s nice. I mean, more than nice, obviously; I love her.
I got a job designing multisense orbital advertising. If you’ve seen, heard, and smelled the orbital logo for GebEx, you’ve seen, heard, and smelled my work.
I wouldn’t say I’m rich, but I have a hoverhouse in Marin, and yes, a flying car. (I know: finally, am I right?)
And we have two kids, Jake and Julia.
We had a big decision to make a few years ago when Chipster first came out. I mean, obviously I’m the last guy to get hung up on traditions, but it seems weird to me that kids today don’t have to even speak a search term, let alone actually type on a keyboard.
It seems incredible and maybe a little wrong that a five-year-old should be able to think about the U.S. House of Representatives or Alexander Hamilton and then, boom, there it all is inside their brain, thanks to an implant the size of a grain of rice.
The last I heard, Ms. Gill had been let out of prison after doing three years, and had gotten a job at the Museum of the School, in Fresno.
I flew over there one day. Did I expect to run into Ms. Gill? I don’t know. Maybe.
Maybe I wanted to say, “See, I turned out okay.”
And maybe I wanted her to say, “You know, I was wrong about you, Tomaso. You turned out to be a fine young man.”
That would have been nice. Because the one thing a Link never really does is look you up and down and say, “You turned out to be a fine young man.”
Yeah, that would have been nice.
Really nice.
Instead, I did run into Ms. Gill, and when I smiled at her and said, “Hey, it’s me, Tomaso!” she Tased me and tried to shackle me to one of the desks in the life-sized holographic diorama of the Ancient Schoolroom.
Don’t worry about Ms. Gill, though—she didn’t get sent back to prison. Only the worst cases get sent to prison. In Ms. Gill’s case, for this second k
idnapping they just performed minor surgery.
Yep. She has a nice fresh Chipster in her head now. It warns her when she’s having crazy thoughts. And if she does something crazy, it messages the police.
And as a bonus, with just a thought she can instantly access whatever there is to know about mitochondrial DNA.
Misery
HEATHER BREWER
Misery was a strange name for a town, and Alek wasn’t at all certain that it was fitting. He had, in the three years that he’d called Misery home, experienced nothing worse than a strange sense of loss. An odd, unexplainable grief wafted through its windows and doors at every hour, as if the town’s inhabitants had been glazed in a thin film of sorrow and, perhaps, regret. But even with that strange, ever-present gloom, the town’s name had never made much sense to Alek. No one who lived here was miserable, exactly. They simply were. Nothing more. Nothing less.
And just as Misery simply was, so too were its citizens. Alek could not recall, no matter how terribly he strained to do so, his life before Misery. Nor could he remember having moved here. Not exactly. One day, he wasn’t here. He was somewhere else—somewhere with many colors. And the next, he was.
He supposed he should be grateful for remembering the colors of his past. The only colors in Misery were black, white, and a palette of grays. Apart, of course, from the eyes of everyone who lived here. Alek’s eyes were a vibrant green. His best friend, Sara’s, were bright blue. He loved looking at his neighbors’ eyes. They were a brief reminder of something before Misery. Something that Alek could not recall, and could not identify with any measure of certainty.
Not that he minded being here. Not really. After all, it wasn’t exactly a miserable kind of place.
“Morning, Alek.” Mr. Whirly passed by on the street, tipping his bowler hat in Alek’s direction. He didn’t have a smile on his face, but no one ever seemed to smile in Misery. It was, Alek thought, strange that he recalled what smiling was at all.
Mr. Whirly was dressed in a three-piece suit of varying grays, his silver cuff links gleaming in the morning sun. He always looked so dapper, and made a point of greeting everyone he passed. Except, of course, for Sara, whom he still hadn’t forgiven for running over his freshly sprouted daisies with a lawn mower last spring. Alek smiled and nodded his hello. “Morning, Mr. Whirly.”