by Ryan Schow
“You,” I hear myself say, breathless.
“Me.”
Her hair looks flat-ironed and colored a white so brilliant, it’s got to be a color-stripped version of platinum blonde. It seems alive with something…energy inside it maybe, or some sort of energy field around it. Her hair is behind her back, but I can’t see how long it truly is until a light breeze reveals its actual length. It’s halfway down her back.
“Who made you?” I ask. For a second, I’m not sure if I’m mad at her or if I’m glad she finally showed her face.
“Many,” she says.
“Holland?”
“He is the father of genetics, where I’m from.”
“Yes, well he’s the father of supreme douchebaggery where I come from. Which is right freaking here.”
She laughs, and it’s like a song, like something out of a Disney movie. Totally hypnotic. Like her voice is everything in the world and nothing exists but this enchanting sound. I can’t stop looking at her lips, how they’re so full and pink, and brushed ever so lightly with something matte but not in a dull way. All the sudden, I have to know what lipstick she’s wearing.
It’s the girl in me, but worse…
I see myself kissing her, and it isn’t my idea. It’s like the thought was put in my head, but not by me, and not by her.
What is this?
Forcing myself to break eye contact, my gaze drifts down to her clothes. Even they have a different, otherworldly feel. My hand reaches out to touch her blouse, which is an eggplant color, and almost metallic looking. Or leathery. My hand comes to rest on the upper half of a very small breast and she just looks at it. I didn’t put my hand there, did I?
“It’s not me,” I hear my voice say. I can’t stop marveling over the texture of the fabric. It holds her body like leather, but it isn’t leather. Even her skin-tight pants wrap her legs like cellophane, and it’s sexy.
“You’re more beautiful than I imagined,” she says.
“I am?”
“I only know the broken, destroyed, nearly dead version of you,” she says, smiling. “To meet you like this is…a welcomed delight.”
What is she talking about? I wonder. My mind crawls into hers, involuntarily, but in her head, there is only space—an endless amount of space—like a warehouse that goes on forever. It’s washed in a brilliant, bluish-white glow, and it’s cold.
Freezing.
With everyone else, I have full access to their thoughts, their emotions, their past. But not her. I want to know why.
“What is this place?” I hear myself ask through telepathic channels.
“Turn around,” the disembodied voice says, hers but not hers. In her head, I turn around. There is no Astor Academy, no trees, no sky, no birds, and no physical body. There is only this boundless space, a voice, and a door—a brilliant, blood red door with nothing to hold it in place. It just hovers in this vast emptiness. I reach for the handle, try to turn it but it’s locked.
“You can’t come in,” the girl’s voice says, less airy than before. “Not yet.”
My phantom eyes blink, my mind retreats back into its rightful place, and there I am, standing on campus, looking at no one, but everyone glancing at me as they wander by. Still making a wide berth. Where the hell did the girl go? How long have I been…gone?
Was I out?
What did she do to me, besides lock me out of her thoughts?
All these questions, they’re like ten thousand butterflies startled into flight, and I can’t seem to catch a single one.
“What are you doing?” another voice says, a boy’s voice.
I spin around and it’s Damien. He’s looking at me, half concerned, half ready to fight. If I know anything, it’s that face, that expression. Like he can’t let go. It was the same way when his step-sister was pronounced dead but he was convinced she was alive. Eventually we learned the truth, uncovered Astor’s dirty little secret, and he prevailed. Things didn’t change though; he is still a dog with a bone. Still a boy after a mystery.
“Minding my own business,” I say, the fight in me gone, “just like you should be doing.” The last thing I need is him interrogating me while I’m all but freaking out about this vanishing blonde girl and my uncertain life.
“I want to know why you seem to hate me so much,” he says. I want to say he doesn’t know me like I know him, but I can’t. To him I’m just a stranger.
In fact, I’m a stranger to everyone in the world but Holland.
“I dated a boy once,” I hear myself say. “You remind me of him. I wanted him so badly, and then I came to hate him because he immersed himself in someone else.” Memories of me as Savannah and Abby longing for him—they take hold of softer, weaker parts of me. Memories of me pouring myself out to him and getting leveled with his harsh judgments sour my already toxic mood. At this point, I just feel drained.
And why do I feel like fat Savannah right now?
“Well that wasn’t me,” he reasons, saying it as if the statement alone should close the matter and they should all the sudden be besties.
Yes, I’m thinking, it was you.
“I’m sorry, you just have the kind of face I can’t stand. Now leave me alone before I say or do something mostly you’ll regret.”
He looks at me like he can’t believe the things coming out of my mouth, like he wants to leave, but he can’t figure out how to take me, or how to let this conversation go. I want to punch him in the stomach; I want to kiss him.
I take a step toward him, not sure what I’m going to do, and he stays put. We’re now in very close proximity. He’s mine, I think. Not Abby’s.
I hate him. He’s so f*cking hot.
His eyes are trying to take in the whole of me all at once, and I can feel him wanting to back up, but he doesn’t. He takes me as I am. I smell him, and beneath the subtle layer of his Versace cologne is the clean scent of his skin. Oh how I’ve dreamt of that skin being mine.
Then thoughts of the platinum blonde mystery girl slip uninvited into my mind and the moment between us threatens to unravel. I lean forward, kiss him fast on the lips, then turn and walk away. For some reason, I start crying. Later I realize it’s because he’s everything I wanted, and—even looking perfect, even having a supernatural mutation that gives me untold powers—I still can’t have him. I can’t. Because his attention will always be elsewhere.
On something else. On someone else.
3
My feet carry me to Headmistress Sylvia Klein’s office. The woman has a stiff, no nonsense air about her with sensible brown hair, a rushed makeup job and dog-tired eyes. You would think a summer off would revive a woman of her sort, but she has had that look since the first day I met her. Bursting in her office while she’s on the phone is the worst thing I can do to her, so I do just that. Her eyes simmer. She is listening to the person on the other end of the phone, but her body language is all dark skies and thunderheads.
I take my time planting my sweet, genetically modified tush in the chair across from her and I don’t blink once. She less-than-politely wraps up her call, sets the cordless phone back on its cradle and says, “I beg your pardon!”
Her face is incredulity.
Her face is horror.
“My name is Raven and you both know me and don’t know me.”
“I don’t know you at all!” she says, picking up the phone to call security. I rip the phone from her hands and launch it at the back wall where it explodes into a half-dozen broken, plastic pieces. This temper of mine, it’s getting the best of me.
Is it mine, though? Or is this my new DNA?
No, it’s me.
I am me, with no one to blame. Not Holland. Not my genetics.
“I want a dorm room,” my mouth says. “And not just any dorm room.” I give the dorm’s floor and room number and she says it’s already occupied. Even if it wasn’t occupied, she would have given me the same answer. “There is a room available, upstairs,” I tell her. “It
was Maggie Jaynes’s room. And the room I want, it belongs to her step-sister, Blake, as I’m sure you know.”
Blake’s room is next door to Abby’s Swann’s room. My old room. Besides, I’m so tired of shacking up at Holland’s place. I need some space! But I have no ID and no money. So until I choose my last name and cash Holland’s million dollar check, this is me improvising.
“I’m not moving her to her dead sister’s room,” Headmistress Klein says. I can hardly believe she phrases it that way. So rude!
“Blake will have no problem moving upstairs. It will make her feel closer to her sister,” I assert, planting the words so deep inside Headmistress Klein’s head she might one day think this was her suggestion and hers alone.
“I’m not doing this for you, whomever you are,” she says. “And you are not allowed on campus.”
“This campus?” I say, throwing my hands around theatrically.
“Yes, this campus,” she barks, not sure what to do with her own hands. They’re making little angry fists, opening back up, palms sweating.
“This campus where half the kids are genetically modified?” I ask, my entire being now breathing to life some of the darkness that churns like a mammoth hurricane inside me.
Her hands stop moving. She fights breathlessly to rebuff my accusation. “I’m not sure I know what you—”
“How long have you been looking the other direction? And for how much money? It must be an impressive sum, is it not, Ms. Klein?”
“You say I know you,” she replies. “I don’t.”
“I know many things, Sylvia. One of which is that your mind is awash with lies, lies you have invented to answer questions you don’t want asked. But I can tell you, the only person who will ever ask you about the horrors going on at your school under your tenure will be me. And I won’t ask you questions you already have lies prepared for.”
“Who are you then?” she asks.
Her hand picks up a silver letter opener, slides it smoothly off the desk, then down at her side for protection. I watch her do this. She knows she isn’t fooling me, yet she moves it to her side anyway. The stink of fear is practically oozing from her pores.
No, the voice in my head warns. Don’t do it. Yes.
Tell her…
At this point, I’m not really making any good decisions, I reason, so why not make yet another catastrophic one?
“I came to this school as an ugly, emotionally sick child. To say I hated myself would be a gross understatement of the truth. But I did. My mother despised my unfortunate looks, but it was my father who brought me here to change. And everything changed, Sylvia. Everything.”
For a second, I think I hear the pound, pound, pounding of Headmistress Klein’s beating heart, a steadfast contradiction to the perfect stillness of the woman. She doesn’t even bother to breathe because every single word leaving my mouth strikes some chord of absolute horror deep inside her. I am her greatest fear personified.
“It was supposed to be a shot to cure my social anxiety disorder,” I say. “Dr. Gerhard, he told me, ‘Why use chemicals to offset the effects of DNA when you can change the DNA itself?’ So I let him do what he does. Slowly but surely I changed over the semester. In addition to the rapid disappearance of my social anxiety disorder, my weight dropped, my body reshaped itself and my face became someone else’s face. A beautiful, unfamiliar face. But not this face.”
“So you’re saying you were someone else entirely?” she says with laughter in her voice. “Do you know how preposterous that sounds?”
I keep going, undeterred, my memories shackled to the past, to my very first, nightmarish transformation. “The pain was like nothing you’ve ever experienced in your life.”
Her entire demeanor shifts. “I know pain,” she says, low, accusatory.
Climbing into her brain, I zero in on her pain centers, to the memory she’s holding onto because she can’t let it go.
Sylvia Klein gave birth to a stillborn child eleven years ago. Childbirth nearly cost the woman her life. The man who was to stay by her side, the car salesman who fathered her child, he left before she even healed.
A black, choking fog moves through me. It’s hers. This tide of hopelessness and despair that draws tears from her eyes, it’s draining. I suffer what she suffers. For a second, I stay inside her, but then this soul-sucking fog makes me want the hell out of her head.
“Samuel Bartholomew Klein,” my mouth heralds, like it’s the answer to a question never asked. I don’t want this name in my head. But I certainly don’t want it falling out of my mouth either. Headmistress Klein reels.
“Bartholomew was your father’s name,” my mouth says.
“You can’t know that,” she asks, stricken. “No one knows that.”
“And yet I do.”
“But how?” she asks, her face now a jumble of unwanted, uncontrolled emotion.
“The thing about the genetics program here at Astor is the children Dr. Gerhard changed, these children Dr. Holland will continue to change, they aren’t just completed projects. We are works in progress. Let me see if I can break this all down for you. Give you the long and short of it. After threatening to publically disclose evidence of the inhumane activity of the company funding my genetic transformation—the Virginia Company—their members voted to have me killed. They triggered latent Caesium-137 isotopes Gerhard initially injected into me as a safety measure. Half my body became a hot soft-serve, but I blackmailed Gerhard into creating a fix. I nearly died in the process. The members of the Virginia Company discovered this, so they hired an assassin from a company called Monarch Enterprises to complete the job. He did. But that’s another story you couldn’t possibly fathom. That’s been my last year and a half, Ms. Klein, and it all started here, at this school, with Dr. Gerhard.”
“How do you know about my Samuel?” she asks, voice shaky, eyes glossy with her tears. She is stuck in that place, wasting away in the lightless pit of desolation. “No one ever heard me say his name. It was in my head.”
“That’s where I found it.”
“What happened to you that’s worse than losing a child?” she argues. It’s like she hasn’t heard a word I’ve said since mentioning her dead child’s name. I’m sitting here, revealing to her my knowledge of the horrors going on under her watch and all she can think about is Samuel.
Her question gives me pause, forces me to stop my own rant of sorrow and think of her. The true answer is nothing has happened to me that’s worse than losing a child. Maybe one day, if I ever have children, I’ll fully understand. For now, just knowing I don’t understand, that it’s most likely worse than I think, that’s enough.
“To answer your question, Headmistress Klein, I’ve lost myself. Lost my life. Lost my family and friends and even my way. I’ve had my heart completely destroyed, and I have had it electrocuted black several times. What I’ve lost, Silvia, is my humanity. As in, I died and came back, and now I am no longer human. No longer part of anything. Respectfully, I’m not sure if that’s worse than losing your child, but it’s damn close.”
She wipes her eyes, smearing her minimal eyeliner, and says, “Who are you that I know you?”
“My name is Raven,” I say, slowly. “Before that it was Abigail Swann. And before that, Savannah Van Duyn.” With each damning admission, I watch her move further away from me. I’m not done though. “The Abby Swann currently in attendance, her name was Janice Millworth and Dr. Holland will kill her the second she even thinks that name because he was not born with the name Enzo Holland, or even Wolfgang Gerhard. The man you know as Dr. Enzo Holland is a monster, a horrifying creature born with the name Josef.”
“Dr. Holland is…Dr. Gerhard?”
She’s suddenly sitting upright. Like she can’t believe it.
“Dr. Holland was originally born with the name Josef Mengele on March 16, 1911 in the town of Günzburg, Bavaria,” I say, the revelation dripping off my tongue like poison. “He is the very same Josef Menge
le who sent over four hundred thousand people to their deaths in the gas chambers of Auschwitz near the end of the second World War. He is the Angel of Death, and a truly terrifying individual with a horror show for a past.”
Her head starts shaking back and forth. This is all too much for her to consider, so she claps her hands over her ears. She’s still holding the gleaming silver letter opener like a knife.
When my mouth stops moving, she takes her hands away. “You have to leave,” she is saying. “I can’t be hearing this. I can’t.” Now she’s pulling away from reality, looking at me like I’m nuts, which I probably am in her world, even though she is the one acting insane right now.
“Pull yourself together,” I say. She stops, looks at me with wild, bloodshot eyes. The hand with the letter opener, it sets down on the desk between us. Her other hand is shaking in front of her, like a Parkinson’s jump, but suspended in mid-air for no purpose at all.
“You say you died, that you’re Savannah, that there’s another girl who looks like Abby that isn’t you, but that was you? You’re that girl, right? You’re Savannah, and Abby?”
I nod my head, slowly, letting it sink in.
Her Parkinson’s hand, it becomes a fist that pounds into the desk with force. “What an outrageous lie!” she roars, manic, clearly falling apart. In her head, she’s at Defcon Level 3.
Instead of speaking, because words alone won’t penetrate the walls she’s erecting, I slip the letter opener from her hand with the invisible fingers of my mind. She startles, jolting back into her chair as the opener floats before her eyes. I slowly turn the knife in the air and aim it at my face.
“I told you, my humanity is gone. Replaced by something else. Something…inhuman.”