by Ryan Schow
Across the table, Julie’s father, Barclay, sat next to her step-mother, Gabriella Sanderson. Julie liked the woman, but she hated that Gabriella took her father’s last name. Although Emery was her own child, Constance bore no blood relation to any of them. She was a leftover from the last marriage: Gabriella’s second of three.
Constance’s blood mother became addicted to heroine then went missing years ago; three years later, her dad hung himself after a failed business deal, thereby signifying for Gabriella the end of marriage number two. Constance was with Emery and Gabriella back then, and Gabriella didn’t have the heart to abandon her when both her natural parents had done exactly that to her.
So she was with Julie and her father as well. One happy little dysfunctional family.
If Julie was a lesbian, which she wasn’t, she would be crushing hard on the extremely bi-sexual, righteously flirtatious Constance. As it happened, Julie was straight, and doing her best not to yield to the less-than-subtle, almost manipulative advances of Emery.
He had no OFF button.
They say rich kids are fucked up. Then again, they say the same of psychologist’s kids. Barclay Sanderson was worth well over a hundred and sixty million, and Emery’s mother was a flourishing psychologist with two deviant kids—Emery and Constance. How Gabriella was a professional woman but couldn’t see the depths of depravity going on right under her nose was far beyond Julie’s understanding.
At dinner, Julie wore a white cotton skirt, sheer black button up blouse with a decorative bra underneath and her sexiest pair of bejeweled sandals. She could slay the world in that outfit. It was something she would wear out clubbin’ if she could only get a fake ID. She wore it to the mall instead. Until she could get into the twenty-one scene, the mall was her lifeline. It was sort of a drag, if she thought about it, because all the boys there…they were just that: boys.
Not like Emery. He was nineteen and so beautiful it actually hurt to look at him. Lying in bed that night, the hours passing in favor of the morning, she fought to shove her step-brother from her mind. She tried to wipe away her thoughts of Constance’s image.
But tonight, oh God, tonight…
Julie clamped a pillow between her legs, squeezed it tight to ward off impure thoughts. “I will not get pregnant again this summer,” she whispered into her pillow repeatedly. But God, the idea of carrying Emery’s baby in her again, it was sick and twisted, but a wickedly delicious thought, too. Her lips curled in the darkness, her body collapsing in a sigh.
The absolute wrongness of her thinking clashed with how they were such a natural fit together. If only they weren’t step-siblings…
At the table earlier that evening, as her father was reciting the prayer, she felt Emery’s fingers sliding from the outside of her thigh to the inner parts of her leg. Her heart practically raced with need. Then on the other side of her, while secretly holding her hand, Constance’s ankle brushed hers, and her pulse nearly doubled.
I’m not a bisexual, she was thinking.
Constance had a gentleness about her Emery did not possess. He was greedy with her. Spellbound and hungry. Not Constance. Constance was more interested in being adored, which made perfect sense when you consider how badly her natural parents messed her up. Still, Julie knew the things the three of them did were neither moral nor right.
With the midnight hour gone, and the night behind them, Julie was deep in her memories. Steeped in guilt and lust. Wracked by an insatiable craving for sex. Then she heard it: those feet padding down the hallway toward her bedroom. Against her ferociously beating heart, she had a difficult time breathing. Her eyes flashing wide in the darkness, she tucked a corner of her lower lip into teeth that wanted to bite flesh.
Someone was coming. A hand on the door knob, twist, twist, twisting…
I will not get pregnant this summer.
The door opened and it was Constance. A relieved sigh fell from her lips, almost all the tension in her body draining. Or was that disappointment? Part of her wished it had been Emery instead. The faint silhouette revealed Constance to be wearing nothing at all, which wasn’t unusual. The eighteen year old once said she’d been sleeping naked since before she got tits.
She crawled into bed next to Julie, snuggled tight against her. It was strange, the first time she felt another girl’s body against hers like that. She had come to appreciate the feel of Constance. They were near the same age, but Constance seemed so much smarter, way more easy going, and completely untethered when it came to all matters of sex.
They didn’t speak at times like this. This is what sisters do, Julie sometimes thought, but she knew it wasn’t what normal sisters did.
Julie didn’t hear the door open the second time, but she did feel Emery slide into her bed on the other side of Constance, and he too was naked. Emery didn’t snuggle up next to her like Constance did. He touched her, caressed her, kissed her.
She felt powerless against Emery. Gave herself over to him. But only to be interrupted by other kisses from a different mouth: Constance’s mouth. It was always the same push and pull for attention between them. Constance didn’t like competing with Emery, that’s why she got to Julie first. Emery, however, always said, “As beautiful as you are, Constance, and you’re devastatingly attractive, you’ll always be a girl and I’ll always be able to have real sex with her.”
Last summer, Emery got her pregnant. She aborted just before the school year at Astor started. Two and a half years before that, during winter break, he got her pregnant and she took the baby to term, much to her parent’s distaste. She was going to a different school then. When her father pressed her for information about the baby’s father, she lied and told him it was a boy from school. They had that boy expelled for being a liar, and eventually had him convicted as a registered sex offender for something he didn’t do. Julie felt bad.
Almost.
The kid at school she fingered as the father of her bastard child, he was doing it with all the girls, just not her. He deserved what he got for being a boy-whore. But she got taken out of that school and sent to Astor. Her punishment. Secretly, she kind of liked Astor Academy, even though she was just another face in that ridiculously gorgeous crowd. She barely even stood out. Which was why maybe she had become so mean.
Four hands and two mouths. The two of them, Constance and Emery, they were all over her, peeling off her tank top and Pink brand boxers, pressing themselves into her, into each other. Long before Julie, they only had each other. Constance once said three was so much better, even though Constance hated sharing.
The truth was, Julie hated sharing, too.
Emery moved on top of her, while Constance moved closer into proximity, her mouth mixing with Emery’s mixing with Julie’s. Emery said he loved Julie, and he loved Constance, but deep down she knew this wasn’t love, this was the thing that would forever screw her up.
I will not get pregnant this summer, she breathlessly thought to herself.
3
I am but a spark on the fiery surface of the sun. Then suddenly, I’m the sun. Whatever was done to me, to my genetic coding, the idea of me being a normal teenage girl now seems preposterous. Holland made sure of that. The creepy doctor from Dulce made sure of that.
So who am I now?
I’m the righteous in between. The everything and nothing. The immortal stranger conceived inside the mind of a madman and thrust into creation through the perversion of science and genetics and something more than human.
Savannah is gone; Abby is dead.
And me? I’m beyond the point of no return. What I am is Frankenstein’s monster, only worse. I am paranormal, lethal—an untested, unkillable weapon. Yet I am still human, still just a girl. And I’m still broken hearted by Jake and his unbearable rejection.
Or perhaps I’m still reeling from rejecting myself.
Things change, though. People change. I’m changing, too, evolving. I used to fret over things like my identity, my friendships, my parents,
my reputation. Not now. That all seems so trivial after what I’ve been through, after what I’ve survived.
So what I’m wondering, what really has my brain doing backflips in its shell, is this singular question: am I truly the only one of my kind, as the doctor from Dulce suggested? More and more, I’m thinking not. That someone like me even exists makes it conceivable for others like me to exist, too.
So only two questions remain: are there others like me, and if not, what the hell am I going to do with this new life of mine and these new powers?
Since Holland put me in the pink goop, right after I said good-bye to Abby Swann, my every waking second in here seems dedicated to suffering. Where before I had Gerhard’s pills, and Georgia’s care, and at least a break in between the torturous waves of pain, now all I do in this pink jelly vat is quietly wish for death.
I just want it to end!
Which officially means this transformation sucks big buckets of stinky ass. As in, this transformation is way worse than the first!
Think of this changeover as one of those TV shows where the operating table patient is supposed to be anesthetized into unconsciousness, but instead they are paralyzed yet awake and feeling the brutality of every cut, the draining of every pint of blood, the pricking sting of every single suture. Now take a seven hour operation and turn it into a weeklong foray of the breaking down and rebuilding of an entire body and what you have is something worse than Hell.
Now consider this…
When you’re trapped in a tank filled with breathable pink liquid, and one hour feels like an entire day, and all you know is suffering, you start to rethink your definition of a nightmare. Whatever your nightmares are, my waking life in the pink goop is infinitely worse.
The anesthesia in the tank’s pinkish liquid was supposed to lull me into unconsciousness. With my new, not-all-the-way human DNA, all it did was give me that look of peaceful stillness. But inside my head, entire wars have been fought, won and lost.
If I could have died, I would have. Then Quentin Russell came to my rescue, his shotgun in hand.
He presses the button to release the chemicals meant to wake me up. The canister swings from vertical to horizontal; the drain pump starts. As I lay here stolid, coming into a richer, more physical awareness, the draining of the liquid is like lying in the bathtub long after you pulled the plug. And then it’s practically empty.
The moment my eyes open, they narrow to the sight of Quentin Russell. My focus is immediate. Abrupt. Of course he would be there. I felt him. Because I am as much inside his head as I am my own. A gift from Dulce. A punishment.
But that’s how I know he intends to kill me.
With my awakening comes both my relief, and my knowledge that I am about to lose my entire head to a shotgun blast. It is a bittersweet reentry into the real world. My most conflicted awakening. I almost let him do it.
Then time slows, and my paralysis breaks.
As the canister’s curved glass partition slides open to reveal me, as Quentin Russell slips his index finger over the shotgun’s trigger, I’m an omniscient presence in his brain. I see all the things he sees. I feel everything he’s feeling.
Fear is his most corrosive force. Uncertainty infects his every emotion. I’m in his brain and I feel reservation and resolution and the wavering notion that he must kill me.
But I can’t, he thinks. Yet I must! No…yes. Yes, yes, yes, just do it!
All this in micro-seconds.
Then he’s thinking about the woman who broke into his house, the former model turned Astor Academy PE teacher turned Monarch assassin who shot and killed Quentin’s blonde, big breasted poolside guests. He shot-gunned her to death in his bedroom to save his own life, and he’s wondering if he can kill again.
That was justified, he was thinking. But this?
He’s looking at me. Having second, third and fourth thoughts. The man surrendered his fortune, steamrolled the reputation of his former self. He became Quentin Russell as opposed to Tate Russell to escape the inevitable scrutiny and, quite possibly, murder charges. Now, here he was once more at the crossroads of a most critical decision. The question was, could he squeeze the trigger and obliterate something human, something beautiful? I don’t think he can.
The minute the glass lid pulls open, he pulls the trigger. To my surprise, he just does this with no hesitation at all.
4
“Abby brought the gun for protection,” Brayden told Detective Bateman, knowing Abby’s memory was wiped clean and she wouldn’t be able to recall any such details. At least he hoped she wouldn’t be able to remember the black market purchase of the weapon since he was the one who facilitated the transaction.
“So she went there with a gun, and you were both upset—”
“Detective Bateman,” he said is his most contained voice, even though he was quaking inside, “what is it you’re not so subtly withholding?”
The detective gave a knowing laugh. “You know what I’m withholding, Mr. James.” He said it like he was amused, as if the game was up and it was time to come clean. For seeing right through him and calling his bluff, Brayden despised the man already.
“Pretend for a moment,” Brayden replied with the onset of a temper tantrum, “that I think the news people like you watch on network TV is blue collar bullshit, and pretend you know that I was arrested by the FBI for cyber crimes and have no legal access to the internet. Then, when you’re finished acting like I’m twelve years old and dumb and you can back me into…whatever the hell corner it is you’re trying to back me into…I’d appreciate it if you would just grow some big boy nuts and tell me why in Jesus’s name you’re really calling.”
The detective laughed, a deep belly laugh that Brayden didn’t know how to take. He took it, however, stewing in silence. He took it and swallowed it the way a snared animal stopped the fight and finally accepted its fate.
“Bryn and Demetrius Giardino are dead. And your friend Abby…she brought the murder weapon to the scene, which—from a legal point of view—has you both eating shit sandwiches, if that’s straightforward enough for you.”
Brayden let an offended huff of air leave his mouth. Inside, he was poop-poop-pooping his pants. Inside, his subconscious was screaming for him to lawyer up, to slam down the phone and not say another word without an attorney present.
“Wait a minute,” Brayden feigned, as if the words just sunk in, “they’re both dead?” The surprise in his voice, he made it as authentic as he could, and dammit if it wasn’t spot on! What he wouldn’t be able to contain much longer, however, were the nerves making their way into his voice. It was bound to crack sooner or later.
“Both dead as doornails. But you already know that.”
“First of all, good. About Demetrius, not his wife. And second, you can’t possibly think Abby did this. Or I did this. I mean, is that what you’re suggesting?”
“I’ll ask the questions,” he said in a more take-charge tone.
“You will only ask the questions as long as I remain on the line. Should I call my lawyer, Detective Bateman? Because I can simply hang up and have him finish this conversation for me if that’s what you’d prefer. I’m not exactly awake, and I am a minor, which I’m sure you know.”
“Do what you want, Mr. James.”
“That’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? You’re trying to pin this shit on us?” His voice was horrified. He was the embodiment of injustice.
“If the shoe fits.”
“It doesn’t.”
“Look, Brayden, the truth is, I’m just trying to piece together the events of that day.”
“What day?”
“The day they were murdered. Which was the same day you fled their home with your fake ID and your rented Dodge Charger with stolen license plates. You know, the plates you swapped off another Charger the night you drove into town? You were at the Best Western, I believe?”
Shit.
Pre-meditation.
The roa
r of blood in his ears was deafening. He collapsed into a chair, his eyes dilating instantly. He was a drug addict with no drug, strung out on his lies, stupid enough to believe he could beat the system.
This is where you go to jail for the rest of your life, his subconscious warned. No, he thought. Yes, it said. It said, hang up the phone. No.
Not yet.
The voice inside him, it was no longer panicked. Resignation would better characterize the tenor. A sort of, you’ve-been-caught, type of feeling.
Just do it, the voice of reason prompted. Call your father. He will call the family lawyer and then this will all be over. Chiming in, his subconscious was like, um, hey dickface, you need to not be talking to the detective right now!
“Are you recording this call?” Brayden asked, a sheen of sweat glazing his underarms as well as the back of his neck. The lackadaisical tone of his voice was gone.
“I’m not recording this call, no, but I can if you’d like.”
“You don’t have my permission if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I’m not asking.”
He rapid-scratched the back of his head out of annoyance, or agitation, or perhaps fear. Then he stilled himself, drew a calming breath and said, “This is what happened. Mrs. Giardino watched the video Abby showed her, of her husband and Maggie…well, you know…of the rape. I wasn’t there for it, but that’s what Abby told me. Demetrius came home—this was a little after five—and all hell broke loose. I was outside like, freaking out. I got out of the car and…I heard screaming. Lots of it. Scared as I was, I rushed inside and found Demetrius kicking the absolute crap out of Abby. She was unconscious and he was still kicking her in the head and ribs. That’s when his wife picked up Abby’s gun, pointed it at her husband and told me to get Abby out. The look in her eyes, Detective, that look still haunts me.”
“So there were no shots fired prior to you entering the premises?” the detective asked.