I’m afraid to look into his eyes now. There’s something wrong inside his head, something horribly wrong, something that made him capable of doing what he did.
Would he do it to me?
Max glances at the guard, who’s still talking into his phone by the door, watching us, but not listening. “I was about your age, you know,” he says, his tone low. “When I first started wondering. You’ve got my eyes, my hair. We’re so much alike. You’ll start wondering too. Then you’ll understand, baby brother. You’ll understand.”
“Max!” Mom chokes on his name. “Stop it . . . ,” she whispers, and tears are leaking down her cheeks.
“I’m not like you,” I force the words out, not because I need to tell Max, but because I need to tell myself.
Max doesn’t take his eyes off me. He laughs. “You’re more like me than you can imagine. You don’t even want to look at me. Do you know why?” He leans across the table, toward me, but I still don’t look. “It’s because you’re afraid you’ll see yourself. We’re the same. I look into your eyes, and it’s like looking into a time-warped mirror. They made you for me, remember?” He tilts his head to the side. “You know, maybe they didn’t even need for you to be born. They could have ripped the embryo apart to get the cells I needed. There was no need for a whole person. You’re a by-product, little brother. Nothing more. I wouldn’t still be alive without you, but you would never have existed at all if it weren’t for me!”
He’s yelling now. I feel dizzy. Mom puts her hand on my shoulder, pushing me back against the chair, away from Max. “Shut up!” she shouts. “Don’t talk to your brother like that!”
The guard’s heavy steps approach the table. Max looks up at him, leans back, raises his shackled hands in defeat. “Never mind. Peace.”
Mom stands up. Pulls my arm until I’m standing. “Wait outside,” she tells me, almost sobbing. “Wait outside, honey. I’ll be right there.”
I can’t speak, so I nod.
“Sure. Leave. You can do that. Coward. Traitor. Look at me, Josh!”
I do. I look into his eyes, and I hold them. He stares at me without flinching. He doesn’t look evil. He doesn’t even look guilty. He looks angry and upset. He really does think I’m the one who did something wrong.
“I’ll come after you,” he says quietly. “Sooner or later. If I don’t get you in this life, I will in the next. Because, you know, they may kill me, and it will be all your fault.”
“Max!” Mom hisses. “How can you say those things? How could you . . .”
The guard walks closer. Puts his hand on my shoulder, turns me, pushing me toward the door. “That’s enough, Mr. Seville,” he says, and I look around for my father before realizing he’s talking to Max.
Max looks up at the ceiling, shakes his head, ignores me as the guard pushes me out of the room.
I stand in the corridor, waiting for Mom. It seems dim and I feel alone, but in reality the fluorescent lights are bright and harsh, and there are uniformed people everywhere.
If I don’t get you in this life, I will in the next.
I don’t believe in ghosts anymore, but nevertheless, fear flutters inside me. An old fear of the dark resurrected, flashbacks to childhood terrors of skeletons rattling inside closets. Max laughed at me when I was five years old, when I wet the bed because I was afraid to leave it in the dark, terrified that if I put my feet on the floor, something would reach out and grab my bare ankles. His response embarrassed me, but it helped kill the fear too. Max made my fears seem childish and silly.
Max knows me. He knows everything about me.
I know nothing about him.
When I was little, I liked to dress like Max, talk like Max. I wanted to watch his movies, listen to his music, do everything just like him. Mom and Dad didn’t approve. They wanted me to be independent, my own person, not a copy of my big brother.
But I worshipped him. I wanted to be just like him.
Now I want to be as different from him as I can. I tug on my hair and wish it would grow faster. That’s what will help me the most. Long, shaggy hair, covering the face that looks too much like Max’s face.
Of course you’re different from me, I imagine Max saying. Like he’s there in my head, answering my thoughts. I bet you don’t have the guts to kill someone even if you wanted to. Even in the computer games you always have to be the good guy. Hell, you always make me play the good guy!
He’s not wrong. I sometimes do evil stuff, but I prefer to rescue the good people and kill the bad people. It seems the way it’s supposed to be. But it still means killing. Just killing the bad guys. And maybe that’s no better. Maybe that’s how Max did it. Maybe he labeled Rachel and the other girls “bad guys.” It’s subjective, like Dad says. Even good and evil are a matter of definition.
I feel guilty. I feel guilty about turning Max in. I feel guilty about saving his life when I was born. I’d feel guilty, too, if I’d been born to save him and had failed. Mom and Dad feel guilty because they raised a monster and they think it’s somehow their fault. Rachel feels guilty for not having saved her sister.
The only one who doesn’t feel guilty is Max.
And he’s the only one who did something really wrong.
Mom emerges from the visiting room, crying, and drags me off before they lead Max out of there. We run along the corridors like there’s not enough air to breathe inside. When we’re outside, Mom calls Dad, asks him to meet us at the car right away.
“What happened?” Dad says when he opens the car door and sees us huddled together, both of us still shivering. “Laura? Josh?”
Mom tells him, in jerky, incomplete sentences. “Why didn’t you tell me, Jack? Why didn’t you tell me Josh had found the evidence?”
Dad’s gaze slides to me. “I guess I wanted to protect him. I told the police I’d discovered this . . .”
“You should have seen him.” Mom’s shivering even harder now. “You should have heard what he said to Josh, the way he said it, how he looked at him.” Her lips are trembling. “It’s not your fault, Josh. You did the right thing. You know that. Don’t you?”
I don’t answer. I don’t know. I don’t know anything.
Mom and Dad tiptoe around me the next morning, patting my shoulders, carefully asking if I feel like talking yet, but I shake my head and hunch over my breakfast.
“We’ll be home early,” Mom says. “Just a few morning meetings. Then we’ll be home. We’ll talk. Sort things out.”
After they leave, I mope around for most of the morning. I play Genesis Alpha for a while, but it doesn’t feel the way it normally does. Finally I find myself putting my boots and jacket on, although I don’t know why I keep going out there.
There’s a strange smell when I open the door to the shed. I pause before I open the screen door, sniffing cautiously and assuming the worst. But then I recognize it. I rush inside.
Rachel is sitting on the mattress, her back against the wall and a large cardboard box wedged between her knees. She looks up wide-eyed when she hears me rush in.
“Where have you been?” she snarls at me. She pushes herself into a kneeling position, holding on to the edges of the cardboard box.
I sink down on my knees on the mattress opposite her and bend over the box so our heads almost touch. “I was busy,” I mutter, and can’t help smiling when I look into the box. It’s probably the first time I’ve smiled since Max’s arrest.
They’re tiny, blind, helpless. Five kittens on a bed of soft blue material. I wonder where Rachel got that blanket, but then I realize it’s her sweater. Cleopatra purrs as her kittens suckle, but looks at us warily.
Rachel gestures at the kittens. “You left me to deal with this. Alone. Like I’m some kind of a cat midwife!”
“When did it happen?”
“It started early this morning. She lay down in that corner, in the pile of old newspapers, and started whining, woke me up. The first one just popped out. In a pool of slime and blood. Gross.
Then they came one after another.”
“Are they all out?”
“How the hell should I know?”
I stroke Cleo, prod her belly gently like Max taught me a long time ago. “Yeah. They’re all here. It’s a big litter for this queen.”
“Queen?”
I remember the white queen she buried in Karen’s grave and wish I hadn’t used that word. “A mother cat in a breeding program is called a queen.”
Rachel strokes a kitten with one finger, from the top of the head to the tip of the tiny tail. “I see. Does that mean the kittens are princes and princesses?”
The kittens have relaxed me. I laugh before I realize she isn’t making a joke. Rachel doesn’t make jokes. “No. Did the birth go okay?”
“How should I know? Nobody died, if that’s what you’re asking. One of the kittens was kind of stuck. Inside the bag they’re born in. She tried to bite the bag, but she couldn’t get it out. So I helped.” She points. “That one.”
I reach into the box and get Cleo’s permission before lifting each kitten up. I never get used to how small they are. Each time, I watch them grow bigger, and by the time the next litter comes around, I’ve forgotten how tiny they are in the beginning.
“You have to name them,” I say, tucking the last kitten in by his mother. “The first person to see the kittens gives them names. It’s a tradition.”
Rachel has backed away from me. “What kind of names do kittens get?”
“Whatever you like.”
“Do you sell them?”
“Yeah. To good homes. Mom’s very picky about homes.”
“Was she picky about Rook’s home?”
I sigh. “Are you going to name the kittens?”
She looks at them contemplatively. “Yes. I think I will. Are they boys or girls?”
“The one you saved, the little blue one, is a girl. This sorrel one is a boy. The other three are girls.”
“Why the weird names for the colors? Why don’t you just call them gray and brown and orange?”
“I don’t know. It’s just the way it is.”
“Where were you yesterday?”
“I visited Max.”
Rachel doesn’t say anything. She starts picking at the skin on the back of her hands, pinching the skin, twisting, digging her nails in until the small crescent-shape bruises start bleeding. Her fingernails are dirty. Probably from handling the newborn kittens.
“He knows,” I say. “He wasn’t supposed to find out, but he knows I turned him in.”
“How?”
“He guessed. He’s good at things like that.” It’s like he can read my mind, I almost say.
“What does he want from you?”
She doesn’t ask what he said or what he did. It’s a weird question. But an answer comes to mind immediately. My life. Max wants my life. After all, his life was the reason I was created. I’m the reason he’s alive. I’m the reason he’s confessed. In a way, everything’s my fault. But I don’t say any of that out loud. Instead I just shrug. “He thinks I’m a traitor. You know. Brothers aren’t supposed to rat each other out.”
“Like all he did was smoke a joint or steal a twenty?”
“Yeah. Like that.”
Rachel looks into the box. “Is she okay?”
The blue kitten is having trouble suckling. Her brother and sisters are bigger and stronger, and she has been pushed into a corner. Her paws claw at the cardboard and her tiny blind face is scrunched up, her mouth gaping open, but she’s so small I can’t even hear the mewling sound she’s trying to make.
I nudge her brother a bit to the side and place the blue kitten next to him, help her get the teat into her mouth. She calms under my hand, the tense body relaxing as she starts to drink.
“We have to watch out for her,” I say. “For all of them. Make sure they all get plenty to drink.”
“Rook said cats were the smartest creatures in the universe,” Rachel says. “He said they get anything they want from their owners and never have to do anything in return except look cute.”
“Did he talk about our cats?”
“Not that you bred them. Just that there were always cats around.”
“Yeah. We got the first one when I was a baby. Moritz. He was Max’s pet. A couple of years later Mom started to breed them.”
“Rook has been in here,” Rachel says. “I can feel it. I can feel evil has been inside here. He has been here, hasn’t he?”
“Of course he has. He lived with us. Before he left for college, cleaning the litter boxes was his job. He was in this shed every day.”
“Will your brother see when spring comes? Will he see the trees bloom and the grass get green?”
“Prisoners have the right to go outside. But I don’t think there are a lot of trees there.”
“My sister won’t see anything,” she snaps back. “She’s rotting in her coffin. Why does he have the right to see anything?”
I don’t know the answers to her questions, and I know that makes her mad. I wish I could answer them. I wish I could make everything right. I wish I could undo the terrible things my brother did. I almost wish I could take back the cells that cured him. It’s a safe wish. It doesn’t make me feel guilty, because it’s impossible.
“When they made you, they made many fetuses. You were just one of many.”
“Not fetuses,” I correct. “Just a few cells at that stage. No brain, no organs, no body parts. Just a few identical cells.”
“They were your brothers and sisters,” Rachel continues mercilessly. “You were chosen—because you were the one most like Rook. The others were thrown away. Do you ever think about them? Your brothers and sisters, the ones who were not enough like Rook?”
This question has been there all my life. There are no right answers, but I’ve been placed on one side of the fence and there’s no room for me on the other side. “They weren’t my brothers and sisters. No more than the other billion eggs inside my mother were.”
“They were cells, dividing to make a person. Like you were. That’s what we are, aren’t we? Even now, we’re nothing but a bunch of multiplying cells. What’s the difference between us and them?”
“We have minds. We think. We feel. We’re human.”
“We kill. We torture. We rape. We’re human.”
Rachel mimics my voice. I sound tired, unconvincing, like I’m spouting lines someone taught me a long time ago. I see the challenge in Rachel’s eyes. She wants to fight. She doesn’t care what we fight about, as long as we fight.
“Tell me about Karen,” I say.
“Why?”
“Because I’m sick of talking about Max or myself all the time.”
She looks down at the kittens between us. Her grasp on the edge of the cardboard box tightens. “It’s like everybody died,” she says. “When Karen died. My parents are different people now. My old parents are gone, just like Karen is gone. I’m gone too. Everything’s different. The whole world is a different color.”
I nod, because I know what she means. My parents have also changed in the last few days. It’s not just that they’re sad and angry and afraid, it’s more like everything about them is different. I guess that’s what they mean by life-changing events.
“Karen was missing for nine days,” Rachel says. “Her roommate called when she hadn’t seen her for two days. Mom started calling everyone. Everyone. After that, she called the police. But it was still seven more days until they found her.” She starts chewing on her finger, but spits and grimaces when she realizes how dirty it is. “I thought about Rook while she was missing. I thought about Rook a lot. I wanted to log on and ask him. I wanted to make sure I was just being paranoid. But I didn’t. And I never saw my sister again. They couldn’t have an open casket at her funeral. Her face was too damaged. All of her was too damaged.”
I shut my eyes, but open them quickly again because the images are stronger behind closed lids. Rachel’s voice isn’t even quivering. It’s li
ke she’s said this a hundred times before.
“I was glad the casket was closed. I’d never seen a dead body. Only Dad saw her. Three months ago now. Since then, he’s been drinking every night. Not that he’s a drunk or anything. He just needs it so he can sleep. He doesn’t go to bed anymore. He sits in front of the television and falls asleep there. We never turn it off. But it doesn’t help much. He still wakes up screaming. Or crying. I didn’t know my dad could cry like that.
“He sees Karen in the morgue when he dreams. I do too. I don’t know what she looked like, but I see her. Sometimes it’s not her on that slab. Sometimes it’s me. Sometimes I feel the cuts all over me, feel the blood on my face, pain everywhere from what he did to me, and I can’t move because I’m dead. And I’m glad. Relieved. In the dream I think about Karen, and I’m glad it was all a nightmare and she isn’t dead, after all. Instead I’m the one who’s dead and everything happened the way it was supposed to happen.”
Rachel picks up one of the kittens, lies back on the mattress, the tiny animal sprawled on her chest. She stares up at the ceiling. “Mom didn’t see her. Dad asked her not to. He thought it would be for the best. But I think it would have been better, you know? Because Mom wakes up screaming too.”
Her breath, when she inhales deeply, trembles, but her voice does not. “What you imagine is always worse than the truth.” She lifts her head and her gaze fastens on mine. Green. Blue. I’m never sure. “Isn’t it?”
“Maybe Max is sick,” I tell Rachel later on, after we’ve spoiled Cleopatra with tuna and Rachel has given the kittens names. They’re all royalty. The little blue one, Rachel’s favorite, is Princess. I have no idea how I’ll explain their names to Mom and Dad. “Maybe there’s something wrong with his brain so that he’s not able to feel guilty.”
“You feel guilty after you do something. Or don’t do something. Not before. It doesn’t stop you from doing horrible things.”
“Maybe you stop because you know it will make you feel guilty.”
Rachel shakes her head. “It doesn’t make sense. Maybe that’s a part of it, but it can’t be all there is to it.”
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