Hardwired

by Trisha Leaver

  Tyler may have gone into the Bake Shop normal and well-adjusted, but something about the place changed him. Broke him. He quit the baseball team, quit school altogether the day he returned home. Refused to eat, refused to do anything but sit in his room and scribble notes in his journal. He’d sit on his bed and stare at his walls for day, not acknowledging anyone.

  His girlfriend, Olivia, begged him to talk, to cry, to scream, to do anything other than sit there completely trapped in his own mind. She spent every waking hour in his bedroom trying to get through to him.

  The one day she’d left him alone, the one time Olivia ventured home to shower and grab a change of clothes, everything changed. She’d asked me to watch him, said he was quieter than usual. I shrugged off Olivia’s concerns; as far as I could tell, he was same closed-off person he’d been for the past two weeks. I’d left him alone for fifteen minutes tops to get Suzie off the bus. When I came back, Tyler was in the backyard, sitting in an old lawn chair by the circle of rocks we used for fires. I was psyched to see him out of his room. I called out his name, but he didn’t answer, didn’t even turn his head in my direction. At first I thought he was sleeping, but the minute I laid my hand on his shoulder, I knew.

  His head rolled to the side, the bottle of pills he’d swallowed falling to the ground next to a bottle of whisky. I tried to revive him, slamming my fist into his chest and literally forcing my own breath into his lungs, but he just lay there, his eyes rolled back in his head, his arms hanging limply by his sides.

  Tyler had survived their tests, proved that he wasn’t some psychopath on the verge of exploding, and for what? Only to kill himself when he got home? It was so pointless. In a way, that was my biggest fear: that I’d survive this place only to crack at home. But I wouldn’t let Ms. Tremblay know that.

  I swore that day I’d make amends for what they did to Tyler. I’d beat their tests and survive, prove them wrong. This place wouldn’t break me. For my brother’s sake, I wouldn’t let them.

  “Lucas!” Ms. Tremblay’s words cut through my thoughts. “Did you hear anything I said?”

  “Every word,” I lied. “But I didn’t hear anything that warranted an answer.”

  She huffed her disappointment and started walking down the hall. I followed her, well aware of the two guards flanking me. They were always there, crowding my space. I toyed with making a move just to screw with them but quickly decided against it. I hadn’t gotten this far along only to piss it all away for my own sick satisfaction.

  Ms. Tremblay stopped abruptly, her curt nod sending me to the wall where I lined up with the other guys from our wing.

  Chris appeared next to me a second later and I scanned his forehead, breathing a sigh of relief. It actually looked pretty good, with virtually no sign of injury from me slamming him into the wall last night. Thank God, the last thing I needed was to be on the hook for losing my temper on the only friend I had in this place.

  “Thanks for the headache,” he whispered as we made our way toward the communal bathrooms.

  “Sorry,” I mumbled. I’d managed to get a solid four hours of sleep, thanks to his earplugs, and had woken up feeling physically great but still guilty as hell. “I meant what I said—bottom bunk is yours for the next week.”

  “Nope,” Chris said, shaking his head. “Not if it means you losing it.” He leaned closer, his voice so low that I could barely make out his words. “Besides, I made a new set of ear plugs last night after you went to sleep. What’s the point of having that magazine if you’re only going to hide it in your mattress and forget it’s even there?”

  I laughed. Chris was right. I hadn’t looked at that magazine since the day I’d smuggled it in. I’d brought it with me solely to annoy the guards when they went through my bag. Funny, it only pissed me off more when they laughed and handed it back to me with a warning not to let Ms. Tremblay find it.

  “What do you think they have planned for us today?” I asked, purposefully changing the subject.

  Chris shrugged his shoulders and let out a tired breath. “Beats me. Probably more head games designed to see which one of us is going to break first.”

  “Won’t be me,” I mumbled to myself. “It won’t be you either.”

  Three

  The room we entered was larger than the testing rooms and lined with couches and overstuffed chairs. The floor was carpeted, not tiled, and the walls were painted a soft yellow, not the crusty old gray that seemed to cover every surface of the facility. Even the security guard posted inside the door was dressed in plain clothes, with a friendly looking name-tag that read Murphy. But his casual appearance didn’t fool me. Jeans and button-down shirt aside, he was armed.

  I sank down into one of the chairs and stretched out, suddenly realizing how much I missed real furniture and longing for my own bed. Chris swatted my legs off the couch and sat down next to me, his glare telling me not to look so relaxed. He was right; that’s what they wanted, that’s what this room was—a comfortable place where they could trick you into letting your guard down. That wasn’t going to happen.

  “This is where the real fun starts,” I said to Chris. “Where they try to get you to tell them all your deep, dark secrets.”

  “Says who?”

  “Tyler,” I replied. I’d slept in his room the night he died, foolishly trying to hang on to some tiny piece of him. It suddenly got cold, the old drafty window above his bed sending a chill through the room that had me shivering and searching for a blanket. When I shook out an old blanket I found on the top shelf of his closet, a composition book fell to the floor by my feet. The instant I picked it up, I knew what it was—his journal, tiny fragments of the time he’d spent in the Bake Shop. I read it from cover to cover that night; he gave me enough information to figure this place out. Enough information to scare me.

  “You boys will be moving on to the reintegration phase shortly,” Ms. Tremblay announced, her gaze sweeping across the ten of us sitting in the room. “No doubt you have some questions about what to expect, both there and at home. This is the time to discuss those issues, along with anything else you have on your minds.”

  I nudged Chris’s arm, warning him to say nothing. He nodded, a half-smile parting his lips. He had no intention of giving them any information.

  “Be assured,” Ms. Tremblay continued when we all remained silent, “what is said in this room stays in this room. Nothing you confide in me or your peers will be mentioned in your discharge notes.”

  “Ha.” The sharp remark was out of my mouth before I had a chance to stop it. All eyes, even those of the security guard, turned to me.

  “Perhaps you would like to start, Lucas,” Ms. Tremblay said.

  Oh, I wanted to start all right. I wanted to curse Ms. Tremblay and this entire facility for what they’d done to my brother. I wanted to warn all the genetically flawed guys in here with me, Chris especially, that being sent home equated to nothing more than an isolated hell. Most of all, I wanted to tell Ms. Tremblay to take her fake smile and circle-of-trust crap and shove it. But I wasn’t that dumb.

  “Nope, I’m good,” I lied. “Couldn’t be better. Happy to be going home. Can’t wait to see my family and friends, ma’am.”

  “You have the benefit of experience here, Lucas. Perhaps you’d like to share some of that with the others, maybe dispel some myths and rumors they may have heard.”

  “And how do you figure that? I’ve been locked up in this Bake Shop for the exact same amount of time they have,” I said, and she rolled her eyes at my pet name for the facility. “I’ve suffered through the same tests and heard all the same excuses about how the entire gene-testing protocol is for the greater good.”

  She shook her head, aggravated that I wasn’t coughing up my feelings. “You had a brother who came through this program two years ago, isn’t that right?”

  I nodded. That wasn’t exactly earth-s
hattering information. It was in my intake file, along with my address and date of birth. “I have a dog named Brady and a sister named Suzie, too, but I don’t see how any of that is their business,” I said, fanning my hand out to encompass the other nine guys sitting in the room with me.

  “I knew your brother,” Ms. Tremblay replied, ignoring my sarcasm. “You remind me a bit of him. Strong-willed and determined.”

  I bit back my response. What she meant was stubborn and defiant. They’d really tried to break Tyler, spent a little more time on him than the others, or so I’d gathered from his journal. But he wouldn’t crack. Not until he got home, anyway. Once he was back in his own bedroom, safe from their reach, he let go.

  “My brother is dead,” I said, purposely checking my emotions. He’d killed himself sixteen short days after he got home, choked down a fistful of pills right there in our own backyard.

  “He’s dead,” I repeated. “And the way I see it, it’s your fault.”

  Ms. Tremblay’s breath shuddered to a stop, and I briefly wondered if she’d ever been told what happened to Tyler, if the flow of information coming into this place was as tightly controlled as the information going out.

  “Dead,” she whispered. “How? When?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “He’s gone, and talking about it in this little group session of yours isn’t going to bring him back.”

  “No, but it may help you.”

  I shook my head. As far as I could tell, she was the one in charge of our testing, the one who decided which of us to ease up on and which to push harder. And now, what? Simply because the testing phase was two-thirds over, she figured she could just change hats, come at me like some kind, generous, social-worker-type person who wanted to make sure I was properly dealing with my brother’s death? Screw that.

  “I don’t want your kind of help,” I said. “I don’t need it.”

  She sat there, silently staring at me as if trying to figure out what to say next. “All right, Lucas,” she finally said. “If you don’t want to talk about Tyler, then how about we talk about you?”

  My mind circled back to the day I was taken from home, the day Sheriff Watts showed up, a warrant in hand for me to report to the intake facility that would process me for the Bake Shop. I wasn’t so much worried about Mom; she’d known the odds of me testing positive were insanely high the second they’d taken Tyler. It was my baby sister Suzie I was worried about. She was three years old when Tyler died, barely even remembered him, but I’d been looking out for her since she was two, since the day Dad left and Mom had to go back to work to keep us fed and the mortgage paid.

  “Be good, for Mom,” I’d said to Suzie as I stood up.

  “Where are you going?” she asked, her eyes darting toward the window and the three police cruisers waiting in our driveway.

  I searched my brain for something to say, an explanation, a lie about where I would be. What I came up with was an overly stupid: “Camp.”

  Mom started crying, her small frame shaking as she clung to me. I didn’t know what to say to make her feel better. The truth was, this sucked for her as much as me. I hadn’t seen my father in three years, my brother was dead, and now they were taking me. And in eleven years they’d test Suzie.

  I felt a sharp pain in my leg and looked down. Chris’s foot was lodged in my shin as he painfully tried to coax me out of my thoughts and back to the room full of guys staring at me. Their bodies were tilted forward, elbows resting on their knees, waiting for me to deliver them some piece of wisdom. Unfortunately, I had nothing. Nothing they’d want to hear anyway.

  “You know what, I do have something to say,” I started, my eyes landing on every one of those guys as I spoke. “You no longer have a home. Everyone you thought you knew—your friends, your teachers, the girl you slept with for the past two years—they’ll all turn on you. You’ll see fear in their eyes and hear the words they whisper behind your back. Home, a normal life, a future … yeah, that’s never going to happen. For any of us.”

  Their faces paled as the truth of my words settled in. I’d frightened them, taken away what little hope they were clinging to.

  “If you have nothing useful to contribute, Lucas, perhaps I should move on to your roommate,” Ms. Tremblay said, her forced smile back in place.

  “Go right ahead,” I said. I doubted Chris would tell her anything about his personal life, but if she needed to test that theory for herself, then I certainly wasn’t going to stop her.

  “Your father owns a security company, isn’t that right, Chris?” Ms. Tremblay began, and Chris nodded, giving her nothing.

  “And you’re an avid hunter?” she continued.

  The air in the room went from heavy to suffocating with that question. Everyone shifted uncomfortably in their seats, their eyes darting between the door and the plain-clothes security guard still watching over us.

  “You are aware that one of the stipulations of your release is that you can never own a firearm,” the guard said from his position by the door.

  “So I’ve been told,” Chris muttered, and I couldn’t help but smile. If either of them was trying to get a rise out of him, it wasn’t working.

  “And does that bother you?” Ms. Tremblay leaned forward in her seat, her gray eyes peeking over the rim of her glasses. “The idea that because you are an MAOA-L carrier, you can no longer engage in one of your favorite hobbies?”

  Chris looked at me. The message he was silently communicating clear: How far can I push them?

  “As far as you want,” I mouthed back. As long as he stayed in his seat and didn’t threaten anyone in this room, then he was safe. Besides, wasn’t it just last week that Ms. Tremblay had made us sit through that hour-long video on the importance of expressing oneself with words rather than fists?

  Well, she’d asked, and we’d deliver. “Words over fists,” I said, loud enough for Ms. Tremblay to hear.

  Chris smiled that same sarcastic grin I’d seen three nights before when he’d told me about how he’d hacked into his high school’s computer system to change the grades of a few under-performing members of his baseball team. For a not-so-small fee, of course. I shook my head and settled back into my seat, quite sure this was going to be the most fun I’d had since being hauled into this place.

  “There’s more than one way to skin a cat,” Chris said. “And in all that material you made us read our first day here, I didn’t see anything forbidding me from owning a crossbow.”

  “Or an axe, for that matter,” I piped up.

  “Good thinking, roomie. I mean, just think about all the damage I could do with an axe. But you know what I was wondering, seeing that Ms. Tremblay assured us we were free to speak our minds and all?”

  “No, what?” I asked, playing along.

  “I was wondering about BB guns.” Chris paused and slowly turned his head toward the security guard as if seeking his opinion. “Can I own a BB gun? Because there’s this pesky raccoon that keeps tipping over the garbage cans on my street, and I’d sure like to take a shot at him every once in a while.”

  “That’s a good question,” I replied, looking to Ms. Tremblay for an answer. “The way I see it, Chris would be doing the neighborhood a favor.”

  “Not to mention the environment. Plus—”

  “Are you two done?” Ms. Tremblay interrupted, smoothing out a non-existent wrinkle in her skirt.

  “Not even close,” I spit out. “You’ve put us through how many tests? The least we can do is have a little fun with this one.”

  “Is that what you think this is? Another test?”

  “That’s exactly what this is.” I’d be stupid to think otherwise. Everything in the Bake Shop—this group session included—was designed to push us past our breaking point.

  Ms. Tremblay leaned forward, her gaze fixing on me. “I assure you, Lucas, this isn�
�t a test. Look around—do you see any cameras?”

  I did as she asked and searched the corners of the room, the ceiling, even under my chair for some sort of recording device. There was a red emergency call button next to the door, but other than that, the room looked clean.

  “This truly is a chance to talk about any fears or concerns you have about returning home, Lucas.”

  I shook my head. She may have sounded genuine, but that didn’t matter. Ms. Tremblay worked for them. “I still don’t trust you,” I said. “And if the rest of these guys are half as smart as me, they’ll do the same and tell you nothing.”

  She waved the guard over, and I stood up, fully willing to leave on my own. He reached out and grabbed me, his hand circling my upper arm as he spun me around to face the wall.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Chris move to get up. I shook my head, motioning him to back off. There was no need for both of us to suffer because of my big mouth. Chris ignored me and took a step in my direction, his stride slow and determined, his hands balled into fists at his sides. Idiot was going to throw a punch and risk any chance he had at freedom, all to help me.

  “No,” I yelled as I tried to jerk free of the guard’s hold. But he dug his hip into my back, warning for me to stay still. He kept one hand pressed up against the back of my head, holding me in place; the other he slammed into Chris’s chest, forcefully telling him to back off.

  “Let me go, I’m—”

  My words were cut off by the low drone of the emergency siren sounding in the hall. The security guard yanked me around by my shirt and grunted for me to sit before he pressed the tiny receiver lodged in his ear. His response to whatever he heard was curt; nothing more than a coded sequence of numbers and letters that had Ms. Tremblay jumping out of her chair and moving toward the door.