by Ryan Schow
There’re blood drips and stains on my light green tank top and light pink underwear. It’s spotting the clean, white bedsheets. My chest is a panting, heaving thing. Would he have killed me? Given me an aneurism? Or would the pain continue to get worse and worse, until I slipped into a state of insanity? If I can’t die, would I go mental? Just crack?
I hate this man; I hate this thing.
“Why?” I ask, holding invisible shields up, all his torturous energy shoved from my body and held at bay.
“I was curious to see if you could stop me.”
“You did that on purpose?” I ask. Who would do such a thing on purpose?
“Yes.”
I pull the blankets to my neck, glaring at him. “Thanks, asshole.”
He laughs and it’s a gnashing, hypnotic sound.
“You called me,” he says. “You didn’t mean to, but you did.”
“This is news to me,” I say as tides of nausea wash from me completely.
For a second, I see him as the human being he is. Then his outer façade flickers and I see something else entirely. He’s the holographic image of a man, but he blinks out for a fraction of a second only to reveal what’s hiding on the other side of that human illusion. He is a scaly, slit-eyed monster. Not alien. Not human.
Is that what I am? I wonder. Am I…part of that?
No, not me.
“These dreams,” he says. “You want to know why you’re having them.”
“I didn’t ask you about them. I didn’t call for you.”
“Distress is like a signal beacon. It’s how we protect our own, even though you are not really part of us. Because of our connection, I chose to come anyway.”
“What am I?”
He smiles, the human-looking part of him, and it has a genuine feel to it. Which could be more illusion. More trickery.
“Special,” he says. “Cursed and blessed. A mutation. An anomaly. You have so many words to describe you, but not a single one to define you.”
“Gee, thanks for the clarification.”
“This dream you’re having, your brain is not the origin of such magic. This is someone else’s idea for you, planted deep inside you.”
“What do you mean?” I ask. “Like I’ve been hacked, or something?”
“So much of your delicate little minds are wasted, leaving you with undiscovered worlds. Your human brain is so much more than you know. But since you know so very little about it, or how to safeguard it, anyone with the proper skillset can sneak their ideas or instructions inside of you without you knowing. It’s done to your species all the time. It’s what makes you so useful.”
“Useful because…we’re what?” I challenge. “Weak and uneducated about our brains?”
“Precisely,” he says with a wolfish grin.
“And who stuck this dream in my head?” Again, he gives me this irritating smile which says everything and nothing. “That’s for you to figure out, not me. You only need to know this is not your dream, and it is not meant to serve you.”
“But…I feel. In the dream, I feel so much. It’s the only place I really feel anything good at all.”
“Everything bad is always disguised as something good. Remember that. Opposites.”
“Like karate,” I say.
Fake high, punch low; sweep low, strike high. Opposites.
“Yes.”
“How did you get in here?” I ask him.
He raises his hand and my shields vanish. No, they are yanked free. Now my connection to him has a rich, spongy feel to it. No pain, only vulnerability. Before him, I lie naked against his will. Fear rattles me. He turns his hand from a flat palm to a fist, then says, “Sleep,” and my body is dragged under so mightily and so swiftly, it feels like dying. When I wake, he’s gone.
It’s day.
For a long time I sit and contemplate our meeting. Someone planted these dreams inside my head? Left them there for me? But why?
Instead of getting up and preparing for Astor, I use what Sensei Naygel taught me about transcendental meditation and move into a vast, empty space where not even thought is meant to exist. When I reach this void—only when I stabilize myself inside it—do I slip deeper into this manufactured landscape of my own mind. What I discover, my God, it’s so much different than I could have imagined.
There is an artificial construct in the shape of a cube. We’re talking about a thirteen by thirteen by thirteen cube where all the blocks look like vacant rooms with open doors. All the doors are open but one. Deep down, I try to open this closed door, but it won’t open. I kick and curse and strategize to unlock this tiny door inside my brain, but it’s no use.
That’s when in the distance I hear a scream. The distance isn’t far, but it isn’t inside me either. Involuntarily I eject myself from this cube. As I spring into consciousness, I realize the scream is coming not from me but from across the room. At the hotel room’s doorway. When I open my eyes, I find everything around me, including my bed, hovering four feet off the floor. Everything. Gym socks, a ball of underwear in the corner, shopping bags, the bedside table and the lamp. The moment I realize I’m doing this, something in my mind unhinges and everything crashes boisterously to the floor.
In the open doorway, a maid has dropped her cleaning supplies and is standing paralyzed, her hand stifling the cry that blew out of her mouth earlier.
“What…how?” she asks.
Floored, dazed, half stuck in the cloud of meditation, I say, “I don’t know.”
More and more, this has become my standard answer. It also happens to be the truth.
“You are unholy,” she says in a condemning, harried whisper.
If I want, I can enter her mind and wipe it clean, but I choose not to. Instead, I pack my things and check out as quickly as possible. The way members of the staff are looking at me, I know the woman has talked. About me, about what happened. It has me wanting to get out of there as fast as possible. It has me wanting to run.
When I’m gone, when the embarrassment no longer has my cheeks burning bright, I think about the man in my dreams. I’m certain it’s Jake. I’ve got to see him. I really need to know if it’s over, and if so why we seem to have this otherworldly connection. Is he the one who did this to me? Is that even possible?
I have to know who put these things in my head.
3
The drive to Astor is shorter than I expect, but that’s because I can’t seem to keep my Audi under ninety. It’s a car that begs to be driven hard.
When I pull on campus, the RS5 draws an incredible amount of attention. Beamers don’t stand a chance next to this beauty. Neither does a Benz, a Lexus, an Acura or anything else that isn’t the least bit exotic. There’s a kid here that drives a Lamborghini, but other than that, my car rolls into Astor like a barely tamed lion hunting for prey.
I park and some girl says, “Your car is so sexy,” to which I reply, “I know, right?” It’s the first friendly person I’ve met since coming here as Raven.
When I walk from the parking lot to my dorm room, I open a telepathic connection with Abby, not to talk to her but to feel for her. A quick look through her eyes tells me she’s at lunch.
Good, I think. I’m famished.
In the cafeteria, after laying eyes on Abby and her friends—my friends—I throw together my lunch, making myself invisible to everyone. It’s how, when I want, I can move through this life unnoticed. And it’s how I can break so many rules without being questioned or discovered.
“Hey,” someone says, startling me.
Dammit! I’m supposed to be invisible.
Behind me stands the gorgeous boy I kissed before returning to the city. The same boy who took my breath so thoroughly before I wiped his mind and blew town. Tavares Baldridge.
“You, you can see me?”
He laughs and says, “Of course, I can see you, ding dong. You’re like, right in front of me.”
“Oh.” I truly don’t know what to say to this. When I throw up m
y shields, I’m supposed to be invisible. Like that shadow that pops up for a second in your peripheral vision but is gone the moment you try to look right at it. The way I think about it, the way I want to be thought of is like this: you see me, then I don’t matter so much that your mind forgets ever having seen me in the first place. It’s genius, really. Except for when it doesn’t work and I look like a retard.
“You’re new,” he says.
“I…I guess I am.” Apparently I wiped his mind so thoroughly he doesn’t remember me at all. I remember him though. He’s a hard face to forget. Way too handsome for his own good.
“Come sit with us,” he says.
I should say no. I’m going to say no because the way I’m looking at this kid, the way he cannot be this perfect looking without being genetically modified, I so want to devour him right now. It’s not healthy to obsess, but I can see myself obsessing about him, so the answer is no.
“Sure,” I say, and my shields drape down around me.
“What’s your name?” he says. I tell him. He says he’s Tavares Baldridge and we shake hands. The very act of touching him awakens something deeply feminine in me. Our connection feels familiar. Preordained.
Interesting, I think to myself.
We join Tavares’s three friends at a table next to a group of seniors I don’t know. They are loud and chatty. One of them is the kid who drives the grey Lamborghini Huracán. I have got serious car envy, but whatever. I paid eighty thousand for my car. He paid two-fifty for his. If I am to justify him having a beefier ride, it’s that mine is still badass, but I have an extra one hundred and seventy thousand to do other things with while he’s got a car.
Inhale, exhale.
It’s an extraordinary car, though.
I pull my attention away from the table of seniors and focus on Tavares’s friends. One of them, he’s not a dork or anything, but he looks like it the way he’s going on about online gaming. I wouldn’t even know how to play a video game these days.
“Hey guys,” Tavares says, to the gamer, a skinny Asian girl who is pretty but built like a twig and another boy who will barely look at me, “this is Raven. She’s new.”
Tavares’s friends are all polite, and talkative. But my eyes keep drifting back to my old group of friends. Then these amethyst eyes wander to another table where I see a new group of people: a girl who looks like a different version of Sunshine Cranston, Brayden and—WTF?!—Julie Satan.
Holy crap, Julie?
“You okay?” the Asian girl says. She’s small sounding. Like she’s afraid to not whisper. I look at her and say, “Who’s that boy over there with that good looking girl?”
“That’s Brayden James,” she says, speaking in dreamy tones. “He’s so cute. Not like the rest of us. Real, you know?”
“Real?” I ask.
“Yeah. No gen-mods. Strictly organic. Unless you’re counting the hard-mods he’s got. You know, the nose job and chin implant.”
My mouth says, “Oh,” but my mind just became the world’s most speed-loaded hamster. That hyper-active junkie vermin sprinting in every different direction like Death itself is chasing it down. God, I can’t even think straight! Have I been so sheltered in my own group of friends that I neglected to realize other people know about the genetic modification here, too?
And if that’s Sunshine Cranston and she’s getting upgrades…then what the actual f*ck?
Just then, with my own eyes I see Julie Satan slip her hand into Brayden’s hand like it’s the most natural thing in the world. Brayden leans in and gives her a kiss on the mouth and all the sudden I’m no longer on planet Earth. I have to blink twice to make sure I’m seeing this. I am. My eyes say one thing but my brain’s screaming another. It would be like walking into the bathroom and seeing Marilyn Monroe doing her make up like she hadn’t died, or been killed, at all.
“Are they, you know, together?” I hear myself ask, unable to tear my eyes from them.
“They’re the two who shouldn’t be, but they are.”
“The what?” I stammer.
“That’s what everyone’s calling them now: the two who shouldn’t be. Like in the Harry Potter series of books. How they never called Voldemort by his real name. He was so evil they called him ‘he-who-must-not-be-named.’ Julie’s that evil, and it’s crazy Brayden’s with her. It is what it is though, right?”
4
“How do Julie’s friends feel about that?” I ask. The way Cameron, Blake and Theresa are such venemous scabs, there’s no way in hell they would approve of her and Brayden.
“They absolutely hate it. And they hate her. She’s gone from queen bee to…I don’t know…the lowest animal on the food chain? They won’t even look at her anymore, and the things thy say about her on Facebook?—it’s like they want to end her end her.”
I’m starting to like this chatty little Asian girl.
“That’s Cameron,” I say. Right now I’m so desperate to crawl the minds of this group, if anything to see how they feel about me. If I should leave, or say more, or less. But I won’t. I’m trying like crazy to reign my mind in. Glancing over at Tavares, I can’t stop wondering how he was able to bypass my shields. And why. But I won’t get in his brain anymore.
“You know her?” the gamer kid asks. “Cameron?”
“I know her shitty reputation.”
“As a succubus? Or as an online suicide temptress?”
“Both,” I say with an amused, knowing look. “Is she trying for three?” As in three cyber kills. Or three social network suicides.
To Tavares, the Asian girl says, “I like this one,” like she’s anointing me with her seal of approval. Or casting her vote in my favor. Us girls got to stick together, is what I’m thinking.
The truth is, I’m not so sure of myself here. I feel comfortable in their group, just not in this place as someone else. Someone fake. I can’t help but find this situation strange. Finding comfort in new situations isn’t exactly my strong suit, though. I would rather put my life on the line. Or punch someone.
Looking at Tavares, watching him watch me, I feel something between us. Not love at first sight, but an attraction of similar magnitude. There’s no way it could have been that way between Brayden and Julie. No way.
“I’m in love with your eyes,” Tavares tells me.
“Me, too,” says the Asian girl. “Where do I get a pair?”
“We’re all in love with her eyes,” says the shy boy who, until this point, will barely even look at me. “Are they real, or are they contacts?”
“Real,” I say.
“Gen-mods, for sure,” the Asian girl says.
The four of them look at me. They stare at me waiting for the truth. If I say I’ve got gen-mods, it’s like giving away Gerhard’s secret. Gerhard said he’d kill me for telling anyone about his science. Will Holland try following through where his former self left off? Would he try to kill me if he knows I told people about me? Will I be forced to kill him first?
“Gen-mods,” I admit. “And not cheap.”
Tavares says, “How’d they do it?”
So many answers cross my mind. Holland entered it in the genetic coding, but Tavares’s friends, they don’t have that genetically perfect look like I do. Tavares does. But not his friends.
“Needles in my eyes,” I lie. “It’s done without anesthesia because anesthesia interferes with the amethyst-colored dye. You have to grab your balls before you get something like this done, it’s that unsettling.”
The way the four of them are wincing, my lie is deeply satisfying. The boy who found his voice and managed to look at me, a better than average looking boy with pearly white teeth that aren’t perfect but aren’t crooked either, he says, “What color were they originally?”
“Brown.” The color of bullshit.
Perfectly deadpan, the Asian girl, she says, “I used to be white.”
“You did?” I ask, floored.
“No,” the gamer kid says, laughing low.
“Something you have to know about Jen is she’s compulsive.”
“About what?” I ask.
“Lying, stealing, cheating. Everything. She’s just compulsive.” Saying this, Jen nods her head, not like she’s embarrassed, but like she’s proud. Like it’s her thing.
Tavares says, “We’ve all had gen-mods to some degree. No one here is bashful about it.”
“You, too?” I ask. He’s too perfect to not be organic, as they put it.
“Full makeover. Me and my sister, although she’ll only admit it to certain people.”
I’m about to say something when Brayden sees me, walks over, and stands over the top of me. “Where the hell have you been?” he asks.
“Away,” I reply, offended. Not by him or his direct line of questioning, but by the fact that he’s got a baby in Netty and he’s hooking up with one of my mortal enemies. Julie motherfreaking Satan. And Netty. God, Netty? The thought of him doing that to her still burns me.
“So now you’re back,” he says, “but you don’t say ‘hi?’”
“Now I’m back, and I’m not saying hi. Don’t you have a girlfriend to get back to?”
“Wait a minute,” Tavares says, “you’ve been here before?”
“She’s not a student,” Brayden says. “She works with Holland.”
“Go back to your bitch,” I say a little too abruptly.
He looks back at Julie, who’s making awkward conversation with the new and improved Sunshine Cranston. Pretty soon it will be Janine’s ugly three and a half. Brayden being the half, even though, if I’m honest, he’s pretty cute with his new nose and chin. The new nose and chin I paid for with my trust fund money.
“She’s completely secure with our relationship,” he says. “I can talk to you all I want.”
“What if I don’t want to talk to you?” I say. The fight in me is climbing. For a second, I find Julie’s mind and crawl it. Before I really let Brayden have it, I want to see if they’re really an item. To my utter distress, they are. And it works between them. Then it hits me: the other truth about Julie. The disgusting reality behind that pretty face.
“If you don’t want to talk to me,” he says, “just say so and I’ll leave.” He looks up at the group I’m with and doesn’t say anything. They look back at him and they’re tight lipped, every single one of them. It’s dreadfully uncomfortable.