by Ryan Schow
“I don’t know,” Georgia says, “I guess it would be nice to look different. To feel unique again, and not be called a clone or a synthetic all the time.”
Victoria says, “Well Jesus Christ, hold the press, Georgia’s finally seen the light!”
She and Bridget laugh, but Georgia and I are still residing in different worlds. Our own inner worlds.
Finally Georgia says, “If you’re worried about looking like us, you can always stop the treatments now. I mean, you’re already so much better looking than all these people, than most anyone you’ll ever see. You don’t have to keep going.”
“What if I love the pain?” I say, trying to break the ice. No one laughs. “Okay, the pain sucks. I want to be beautiful. Maybe that makes me vain, or insecure, or just desperate for my mother’s love. I guess the truth is, I don’t want to stop.”
Victoria says, “You just referred to Margaret as ‘my mother.’ Did you realize that?”
“Better dial the shrink,” Brayden says, knowing my extensive history with psychologists. “Better call them all.”
Is this progress? Am I actually prepared to forgive Margaret for her conditional love, for her vanity, for being such a train wreck? Is that why I called her mother? Something inside me squirms at the idea of forgiveness. I don’t want to forgive her. She needs to suffer, the same as me. But I want to be loved, too. Is such a thing even possible?
3
The more I think about what everyone has gone through to be a part of Gerhard’s Master Race, the more I become enraged. Now that I’ve got a gun, I’m really thinking it needs to be used. As a threat?—sure. But not to kill anyone. Or hurt them. I just want to jam it in Gerhard’s face and say, “Were you the one who had Kaitlyn Whitaker killed? Were you the one who sent that blood sucking behemoth into my bathroom to threaten me?”
Dammit, I want answers!
Maybe I’m just bold enough, or stupid enough to demand them. For that reason alone, I try to remain calm. To breathe.
My treatments have resumed and though I spend time with Dr. Gerhard five days a week, I usually speak only when spoken to. That’s about to end.
So I’m in his office and he’s administering the shot when the words fly out of my mouth. I say, “You need to tell me about Kaitlyn.”
He falls silent.
He usually presses the needle’s plunger in right about now, but the question gives him pause. The air around him, once still, now throbs with tension. He presses the plunger a little too fast, then pulls the needle from my skin so abruptly I wince.
“As I said before, I’m bound by patient confidentiality laws, therefore I refuse to discuss her. Just like you. How many times must you drive your head into this same brick wall?”
“The scope of the law expires when your patient is dead. Kaitlyn Whitaker is dead. Or isn’t she?”
Gerhard sits down behind his desk, and I feel the full force of his eyes upon me. Boring into me. He smiles an uneasy smile that doesn’t reach his lifeless eyes. “You know what killed the cat, don’t you, Savannah?”
“Whose cat?” I say. The new me is fast returning to the art of sarcasm.
“Curiosity killed the cat.”
“Are you threatening me?”
Gerhard’s smile deepens. The gap in his teeth, it’s eerily reminiscent of the late Nazi war criminal, Josef Mengele. He even wears his hair the same. How did I miss these details earlier? The creepy factor on Gerhard now rips right through the roof.
“Is the pain any worse, or are you managing okay?”
“It hurts and you know it,” I answer.
“That means it’s working.”
“Did you have her killed?” I say, pressing him. “Did your scab eating henchman bleed her out in her car?”
His smile falls flat once more, his eyes radiating hatred. “You can leave now. I will see you for your treatment tomorrow.”
“You didn’t—”
“NOW!” he screams, slapping the desk with the palm of his hand. The skin on his face is loose enough to show tremors. The loathing he must possess for me right now is oozing off him, infecting me with fear, with a rage of my own, with the chilled hatred of being dismissed without answers yet again. I spring from my chair and scurry out of his office, not even looking at Nurse Arabelle on my way out.
Out in the courtyard, sitting on a bench near the fountain, Damien stands up. Seeing me flustered, he says, “What happened?”
“Are you waiting for me?”
I don’t stop walking; he falls into stride beside me. “Yes,” he says. “I’ve been thinking about the files. About what you’re doing, investigating this and all.”
“Good,” I say, thinking I just flubbed big time with Gerhard. I’m wondering if he’ll even see me tomorrow. And dammit, I’m so pissed off I can’t even think straight! “What can I do for you, Damien? I’m pissed off right now.” I stop walking and turn to face him, no longer seeing him as a boy-God. “What do you want? Speak!”
“If you’ll slow down a second, I want to talk to you.”
“I’ve come to complete stop for you,” I say, sarcastic. “Stop wanting and start doing.”
He takes a breath, his eyes flicking to the ebb and flow of students around us. “When me and Kaitlyn started school, we were happy. No, ecstatic. But then Kaitlyn started going through the same kind of changes you’re going through. She called me, crying all the time. Telling me about the pain. I called my dad, but he said this was the cure we were looking for. He said once she completed her regimen she’d never get leukemia again. I tried to tell him she was losing her mind from the pain, but he assured me Dr. Gerhard knew what he was doing. It didn’t get better. She had bad spells with her vision, suffered constant headaches, dizziness and vomiting, and she would sometimes spend entire days in bed, depressed, groaning, begging me to do something. I went and saw Gerhard myself. My thinly veiled threats got me nowhere.”
Standing in the middle of the courtyard, students buzzing all around us, we can’t be more in our own world. No one else matters but us. The beauty of the day, how the sky is a cloudless blue, how the light breeze washing over us is as soft as butterfly kisses. None of this registers. It’s just me and him, and the ghost of Kaitlyn.
“She was changing,” he continues, his eyes reading blank, the distant look of a memory tearing at his fragile psyche. “Like you, but not as fast. Gerhard promised her pills for the pain, but they took too long to kick in and they wore off a few hours later. The hallucinations were the worst. She was freaking out in class, bleeding at night from her eyes, her ears and nose, from her vagina and rectum. It was horrible to witness. Then she was gone. They found her car in a ditch a couple miles up the road. There were entire pints of blood in it, too much for officials to think she could survive. In the blood was a torn half of a fingernail and some of her hair. This was all the evidence they needed to rule it a homicide.”
“That’s horrible,” I say, his blank stare not lost on those walking past us, staring at us.
“My father and I, we fought for months. About what happened, how he let her suffer. It was too much for me. And Kaitlyn’s mom—my step-mother—she never fully recovered. Even now she’s on strong sedatives. When you and Georgia showed up there the other day, this undid all her therapy. Everything me and my dad have been trying to do for her these last couple years. She’s a wreck. Sobbing uncontrollable, refusing to eat, unable to sleep. Even my dad seems lost after your guys’ visit.”
Inside I’m dying. To think of what that one visit did to the poor woman. To that family. Seeing it unfolding again, piece by piece, I realize the very moment Kaitlyn’s mother had come undone. It was awful, and it was my fault.
I should’ve called first.
“My dad almost divorced her last year, but then she turned a corner. But now…”
“I’m really sorry. I didn’t know…any of this. Now I know why you seem so angry with me all of the time. I couldn’t figure it out until now. My friends, they
’re a constant reminder of Kaitlyn.”
“You have no idea.”
“Why are you still going to this school?” I ask.
“Because that was the agreement. An arrangement my dad worked out with Gerhard and Astor Academy. The education here, aside from the horror Kaitlyn went through, is a once in a lifetime opportunity. A chance for me to put my family’s name on the map.”
“How come you didn’t tell your parents about Georgia, Bridget and Victoria?”
“My mother, well you saw how that played out. And my dad…I didn’t want to do this to him. He already feels bad enough.”
“He should feel bad. You tried to help Kaitlyn, but he just stood by and let it happen.”
“I hate your friends for what they are. I know it’s not their fault. That’s just how I feel. And you…I started to hate you, too. For being their friend, but you didn’t know. Then, when I started to see your changes, I became afraid for you.”
What do you say to that?
“You know your dad’s doing this to you, don’t you?” he says. “That he signed off on it, right?”
“It’s not his fault,” I tell him. “I hate being ugly. Hated it. All my life I swore I’d give anything to be beautiful, and if that makes you hate me, then it’s a meager price to pay.”
He doesn’t say anything and I don’t say anything. We both stand there looking at our feet, not watching people walk by. Finally he says, “I have to know what happened to her.”
“What are you willing to risk?” I say.
He looks up at me, never more serious than now. “Everything.”
“What about Maggie?”
“You don’t understand about her, she’s—”
“What about the rest of your time here?” I interrupt. “What about your life? Are you willing to risk that, too?”
“Yes.”
“Okay then. This is what we need to do.” And then I fill him in on the plan.
4
That night Brayden and Damien come together in my room and at first, I can see Brayden’s hairs are bristled by Damien’s presence. I cut to the chase, “We’ve done a bunch of reconnaissance on Gerhard.”
“We don’t need him,” Brayden says about Damien. “We can’t trust him.”
I glare at him. “Really? Are you freaking serious right now?”
“Why is he even here?”
“Because Kaitlyn was his step-sister, dummy.”
“What’s on the line for you, Brayden?” Damien asks. “For her it’s her looks and her safety, for me it’s my missing step-sister. What about you?”
“I care about Savannah,” Brayden says. “Like, a lot.”
He tilts his head, pauses, then looks back and forth between us and says, “Oh, now I get it. You’re in love.”
Brayden blushes and Savannah says, “Oh for crap’s sake you two, give it a rest.”
With one more person, we can work in shifts, but then Brayden asks if Gerhard will even agree to see me again. He says, “We need to get that key. We need eyes in that office.”
“He’ll see her again,” Damien says. “There are twenty-five million reasons to finish the treatments.” Looking at me, he says, “Just try not to piss him off again.”
“Yeah, got that. As for me, I’ll join you guys on reconnaissance. I want to sit in on the shifts. And I’ll have my pills with me. If something goes wrong, the one not with me can take me home.”
“I don’t have a car,” Brayden says.
I roll my eyes. “You’ve been using mine, Brayden.”
“Look, we’ll figure it out,” Damien says. “What’s first?”
I say, “We’ve been watching Gerhard at school this last week. He seems to keep regular hours, except on Tuesdays when he stays until almost midnight.”
“Have you tailed him home?” Damien asks. I tell him we haven’t. “Well we should. It’s Tuesday, so I’ll take the first watch.”
“I’ll go with you,” I say, far too quickly. Brayden fires me a look. I can’t help it—he’s a cute boy and I’m a stupid girl. Do the freaking math.
5
After dinner Damien sits in his Honda Accord keeping watch on Gerhard’s Porsche Cayenne. At six-thirty, after dinner with Brayden and the girls, I bring Damien dinner. He says, “Sit with me for awhile.”
The invitation sparks my curiosity. I’m a bit suspicious. All day long I’ve been suffering grief in gigantic doses. Everyone has grown comfy calling me “Number Four,” but it’s a hell of a lot better than being called the blow-hound’s baby girl. Not by much, but better. Back then all I heard were insults about Margaret. Now they’re insulting me.
“I suppose I could use a friend,” I tell him. The girls say good-bye, and me?—all I want at this point is to not fight.
We talk about Kaitlyn mostly, and though I need a friend, someone who won’t make me feel worse about myself or my situation, he clearly needs me more than I need him. It’s like I’m not even here. He’s just talking and talking, and I can tell from his preoccupation with his step-sister that he loves her very much and inside, those parts of him that died are trying to return to life, to make sense of things. He has a huge hole inside. It can’t be filled with anything but her. This must be what Margaret once referred to as “emotionally unavailable.”
Uh, yeah…check please?
Finally, in a desperate attempt to change the subject, I say, “What do you want most in your life?”
“To know what happened to Kaitlyn. To stop thinking about it, or wondering. I need closure or…I just…I just need to know.”
I look at him, baffled, dying for him to at least look at me and pretend we’re in the same car together. Finally he turns sideways, lays those glistening eyes on me and says, “What about you? What do you want most in your life?”
“I’ve always wanted to be beautiful, so that Margaret—my mother—would love me and accept me. And now that I’m beautiful, I just want to be in love.”
“And are you?”
I snort out a laugh. “No.”
“What about Brayden?”
I shake my head and say, “He doesn’t look like you.”
“Me?”
“Yeah, retard. He doesn’t look like you. If he did, I would totally be in love with him.”
“What’s wrong with being in love with me?” he says.
“Are you serious?”
“Yes, I’m serious,” he says. “What’s wrong with me?”
Again I laugh.
“You’re a major downer, Damien. Like, all the time. Being near you is the same as being invisible. Or not mattering. You’re a gosh damn narcissist if ever I’ve met one.”
He runs his hand through his hair, turns away from me. “Wow. Why don’t you tell me how you really feel.”
“Don’t act so naïve,” I say, hearing Margaret’s words coming through me. “You only care about Kaitlyn and yourself. Not because you’re all-the-way selfish, but because you can’t get over her enough to let someone else in. The truth is I don’t even know you enough to know if I will like you. That you, the one who existed before Kaitlyn disappeared, or died, or whatever, that’s the boy I wish I would’ve met.”
“That boy is gone.”
“I know. I believe you. The truth is, I would easily fall in love with someone who looks like you but has all of Brayden’s characteristics. His personality, his wit, his sense of humor, his brains and willingness to risk everything for his friends, his loyalty—that’s what I like. I’m not sure if you even possess these same qualities, but I would have to assume not, at least with what I’ve seen so far.”
“God, could you be more disappointed?”
“No. Trust me. When it comes to you, I’ve been really, really disappointed.”
We don’t say anything for awhile, and I’m feeling the heat rolling like molten lava up my spine, which has me feeling agitated, so I say it’s time for me to leave. That I’ve got to take my pills. He just nods. He’s still not looking at me!
Completely uncharacteristic of the old me, perhaps even the new me, I lean over and kiss him on the cheek, so close to his mouth I wonder if my lips touched his, then say, “I know you’re a good person inside, and I know this is painful for you. That’s half the reason I’m risking this. For you. So you can have closure.”
He smiles and thanks me, and I see the gesture means a lot to him, but that it’s not a large enough gesture to open him up. His eyes are still lost looking, but empty. He’s ten million miles away, his soul so vacant it’s amazing he even manages a pulse.
6
On my way back to my room, I have an idea. I get online, spend about two hours being creative, snickering to myself here and there, really feeling triumphant about the thing I’m about to do. I click “overnight shipping,” which takes two days, then pay a small fortune for what should cost less than sixteen dollars in the real world.
Two days later, after I finish with dinner, my package arrives. It’s the only memorable thing to happen to me in the previous two days—no, the only good thing. Everything else that has happened, I chock it up to massive personal humiliation.
Julie, Cameron and Theresa called my bluff with the FBI and Homeland Security threat, so there are more pictures than ever online. The way cameras are snapping all around me, it’s like I’m going to school with the next generation of paparazzi. I try to smile, but my face hurts from the effort. I can barely even lift my middle finger anymore it’s so worn out from the use. Now I just think about a happy place in my mind and pretend this is all make-believe and it will end sooner than later.
I open the delivery box, pull out the shirt I bought. It looks perfect. Better than perfect. I try it on. It fits great around my now perky boobs. For the first time in days, my smile weighs nothing. It’s textbook. Like God is making amends and He just might like me for a moment.