Nought Forever

by Malorie Blackman

  ‘They’re fine. How’s Troy?’ said Tobey.

  I shrugged. ‘Same as ever. He manages to work my last nerve every time we meet.’

  Tobey smiled. ‘Isn’t that what all brothers are meant to do to their sisters?’

  ‘Troy works extra hard at it. He’s seventeen, so he’s at the age when he knows everything. God knows I love my brother, but he’s hard work.’

  ‘And your mum? Sephy?’

  ‘She’s fine. Still running the club,’ I replied.

  Tobey nodded. ‘I was sorry to hear about what happened to Nathan.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I mean it. I meant to get in touch, but … you know how it is.’

  Yeah, I knew exactly how it was. We were old friends who shared painful memories – and hurt. How much easier to let our friendship simmer at a distance rather than boil away to nothing or, worse still, turn to ice between us.

  ‘Is it worth me apologizing again for what happened?’ asked Tobey, not looking at me but at the people milling about in the gallery.

  ‘Tobey, let it go. I have.’ Which wasn’t quite true, but it would do. ‘Is that why you asked me to meet you here? To rehash old times?’

  ‘No. That’s the last thing I want,’ Tobey replied, looking directly at me.

  As we regarded each other, I felt yet another crack ripple through my heart for what might have been. So many wasted years, so much wasted time.

  ‘Why did you want to meet here of all places?’ I had to ask as I took another look around.

  ‘Restaurant tables can be bugged. Outdoor listening devices have a range of a hundred metres and more; some can hear through walls. Museums and art galleries tend to have scanner jammers and disruptors built into the building’s fabric so that no one can bypass their security and steal the contents. When I want a truly private conversation, this is where I come as it’s close to my office.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  Nothing to do with the current exhibition then, I realized.

  ‘I’m surprised to see you alone. Don’t you have minders?’ I couldn’t quite believe that Tobey wandered the streets and went where he liked without bodyguards and backup. God knows there’d been enough threats against his life by the headbangers who believed being the mayor of anything and being a Nought should be mutually exclusive. There were even some Nought nutjobs who considered Tobey a traitor for engaging in what they considered ‘Cross politics’.

  ‘They’re here, don’t worry.’ Tobey gave a faint smile.

  Ah! I should’ve known. There had to be upwards of fifty people in the gallery, but Tobey didn’t seem concerned. That meant his close-protection detail had to be top drawer. So good, in fact, that, as I looked around the room, I had to work at guessing who they might be – there had to be more than one. There was a woman studiously regarding the painting to my right. I’d put money on her being one of Tobey’s bodyguards – or close-protection officers, as they preferred to be known. I continued to look around. A suited man by one of the middle installations kept throwing careless glances in our direction. He was definitely another. I had a nose for them, like I had a nose for undercover cops and guilty clients.

  And the nose didn’t lie or steer me wrong. Well, not usually!

  Tobey and I were getting some curious glances – Tobey more than me. He was instantly recognizable. Famous and powerful – a killer combination. In the years since school, any doors that hadn’t opened for him automatically Tobey had kicked in. Hard.

  ‘So why did you want to see me after all this time?’ I asked. ‘On today of all days I’d have thought you had better things to do. Shouldn’t you be off being interviewed to within a centimetre of your sanity?’

  ‘I should, but I need you, Callie. Look, I’d love to play catch-up and then honey-coat this, but I don’t have time.’ Tobey sighed. He took a deep breath, looking into my eyes. ‘The thing is … I … Well, I need your help.’

  I bit the inside of my cheek to suppress a grin. ‘Wow. Those are obviously some rusty words.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘You’re not used to asking for help, are you?’ I teased.

  Tobey’s smile faded as quickly as it had arrived. ‘You’re right, but I really do need you. The thing is – in the next week or so I’m going to be arrested for murder and I need a good lawyer. The best. And that’s you.’

  What?

  Well, damn! Whatever I’d been expecting, that wasn’t it.

  I stared. ‘Who are you supposed to have killed?’

  Tobey didn’t flinch, didn’t look away. He didn’t even blink. ‘Daniel Jeavons.’

  My eyes were starting to hurt from staring so hard. A super-surreal conversation in an unconventional setting. Come to think of it, there was no better place for this revelation.

  ‘Dan? Dan is dead?’

  Tobey nodded.

  Daniel Jeavons, ‘ex’ criminal and shady AF kingmaker, was dead. Stunned, I tried to process what I’d just heard.

  Dan was dead.

  ‘Did you do it?’ I asked, the words falling out of nowhere.

  The art gallery, the capital, the country, the whole world fell away until there was just Tobey and me watching each other – and the question pushing, pulsing between us.

  Read more

  Read on for a breathtaking extract from

  ‘Funny, heartbreaking, and beautifully rendered … a new classic’ Curtis Sittenfeld

  ‘A tremendous achievement’ Sarah Waters

  ‘An important book – one that can change lives’ Jacqueline Woodson

  A story of love, desire, pain, loss – and, above all, finding the courage to live life according to your own rules.

  The night Cameron Post’s parents died, her first emotion was relief. Relief they would never know that hours earlier she’d been kissing a girl.

  Desperate to ‘save’ her niece, Cameron’s aunt takes drastic action, and sends her to a religious ‘correctional’ facility. Now Cameron must battle with the cost of being her true self, even if she’s not completely sure who that is.

  Read more

  emily m. danforth

  THE MISEDUCATION OF CAMERON POST

  By an hour outside of Miles City, Ruth had already given up on lecturing me on appreciating God’s gift of a facility like this right in my own state. I think she had given up on instilling in me a positive attitude before we even got on the road, but she quoted some scripture and walked through her lines as though she had written her little speech out beforehand. And knowing Ruth, she probably had—maybe in her daily prayer journal, maybe on the back of a grocery list. Ruth’s words were so stale by that point that I didn’t even hear most of them. I looked out my window with my nose tucked into my shoulder and smelled Coley. I was wearing one of her sweatshirts even though it was too hot for it. Ruth thought it was mine or she would have piled it into the cardboard box with the other things of Coley’s, of ours, that she and Crawford had confiscated, many of those things items from our friendship and not necessarily from whatever it was that we’d become those last few weeks: snapshots, lots of them prom-night pictures; notes written on lined paper and folded to the size of fifty-cent pieces; the thick wad of rubber-banded movie tickets, of course those; and also a couple of pressed thistles, once huge and thorny and boldly purple, now dried and feathery and the ghost of their original color, dust in your hand if you squeezed too hard, and Ruth did. The thistles I’d picked at Coley’s ranch, hauled back into town, and tacked upside down to the wall above my desk. But the sweatshirt, buried at the bottom of my laundry basket beneath clean but not-yet-folded beach towels and tank tops, had escaped. It still smelled like the kegger campfire at which she’d last worn it and something else I couldn’t place, but something unmistakably Coley.

  For miles and miles I just let Ruth drone. I let her words crumble away between us, drop like those thistles into dusty bits on the seats and the console. All the while I smelled Coley, and thought Coley, and wondered when I would
start hating Coley Taylor, just how long it would take for that to happen, because I wasn’t anywhere near that place yet, but I thought that maybe I should be. Or that maybe I would be one day. Eventually Ruth stopped talking to me and twisted the dial until she found Paul Harvey and laughed like she was drunk and had never heard mild radio humor before.

  Those whole six hours, the only other snips of dialogue between us, other than the Pringles incident, were:

  RUTH: Please roll up your window; I have the AC on.

  ME: And this affects me how?

  RUTH: I wish you would stop slumping like that. You’re rounding your shoulders and you’ll end up an old lady with a hump.

  ME: Good. It will go nicely with the horns I’m working on.

  RUTH: I know that you read your manual, Cammie; I saw you. It says you have to enter Promise with a teachable heart if you want this to work.

  ME: Maybe I don’t have a heart, teachable or otherwise.

  RUTH: Don’t you want this to work? I just can’t understand why anyone would want to stay like this if they knew they could change.

  ME: Stay like what?

  RUTH: You know exactly what.

  ME: No I don’t. Say it.

  RUTH: Stay in a life of sinful desire.

  ME: Is that the same category for premarital sex?

  RUTH: (Long pause.) What is that supposed to mean?

  ME: I wonder.

  Only a few miles before the turnoff to Promise we passed the sign for Quake Lake. It was battered and the metal was crunched in the middle, as though it had fallen down and been driven over by a semi and then put back up. I think Ruth and I noticed it at right the same time, and she turned to me, actually took her eyes from the road to look at me, for just a few seconds. But Ruth somehow managed not to say anything. And I didn’t say anything. And then we turned a corner and it was just trees and road in the rearview and that sign wasn’t some big signifier at all, but just one more place marker we’d driven by on our way. At least that’s what we both pretended right then.

  The girl who met us in the Promise parking lot had an orange clipboard, a Polaroid camera, and a prosthetic right leg (from the knee down). She seemed about my age, high school for sure, and she waved that clipboard while walking toward the FM with surprising speed. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised: She was wearing running shorts.

  Ruth didn’t even have the chance to say something like “Oh, lookit this poor thing” before the poor thing herself was at Ruth’s door, throwing it open and flashing a picture, all in what seemed to me the same moment.

  Ruth made a gaspy-squeaky sort of noise and shook her head back and forth and blinked her eyes the way one of the Looney Tunes did after smacking into a brick wall.

  “Sorry about the shock. I like to get one right away,” the girl told us, letting the big black camera hang around her neck, pulling her head down some. The photo slid forward like a tongue, but she didn’t pull it free. “Just as soon as folks get here I snap one. It has to be the very first moment; it’s the best.”

  “Why’s it the best?” I asked her, walking around the Fetus Mobile to see that leg up close. Her real one was bony and pasty white, but the fake one had some girth, some plasticky definition, and was Beach Barbie tanned.

  “You can’t use words to describe it—that’s why the photos. I think it’s because it’s the purest moment. The most undiluted.” Ruth did a weird kind of chuckle after she’d said that. I could tell she was uncomfortable with this girl as our greeter. The girl finally plucked free the picture and held it up so only she and I could see it. The shot was mostly Ruth’s head too close to the lens and her mouth a line of displeasure, with me seeming far behind her, almost smiling.

  “I’m Cameron,” I said. I knew that if I didn’t speak, Ruth would, and for some reason I wanted this girl to like me right away. Maybe because whoever it was I had been expecting to meet us, this girl wasn’t her.

  “I know. We’ve all been talking about you coming. I’m Jane Fonda.” She was smiling and rocking a little on that leg. It squeaked like a bath toy.

  “Serious? Jane Fonda?” I smiled back.

  “I’m always serious,” she said. “Ask anybody. So the deal is that Rick’s in Bozeman at Sam’s Club buying food and stuff. I’ll give you the grand tour and then he’ll be back before too long.” She leaned toward me. “Sam’s Club and Walmart give us a big discount, and free food, sometimes. Mostly chicken breasts and bananas. He does a decent barbecue chicken, but he gets the cheap toilet paper—the scratchy kind you have to double up on.”

  “There are worse things,” Ruth said. “Shall we bring the luggage now?”

  “Indubitably,” Jane said.

  “I can’t believe your name is actually Jane Fonda,” I said. “That’s crazy.”

  She tapped her clipboard against her leg two times and it sounded sorta like when I was little and would tap my plastic drumsticks against my Mr. Potato Head. “Talk about the tip of the iceberg,” she said. “We swim in crazy here.”

  • • •

  The grounds at Promise had a little of everything that western Montana is famous for, things that the state tourism board makes sure show up on postcards and in guidebooks: golden-green fields for archery or horseback riding, densely wooded trails dotted with Indian paintbrush and lupine, two streams that, according to Jane, were just aching with trout, and a so-blue-it-looked-fake mountain lake only a mile and a half’s hike away from the main building. Both sides of the campus (the compound) were bordered by the grazing land of cattle ranchers sympathetic to the holy cause of saving our souls from a lifetime of sexual deviance. Even that hot August afternoon, the wind down from the mountains was crisp, and on it rode the sweet scent of hay, the good spice of pine and cedar.

  Jane Fonda took us cross-country, that squeaky leg surprisingly springy, and Ruth determined not to lose step with a cripple, even if not losing step meant bouncing the battered, green, Winner’s-Airlines-issued wheelie suitcase now packed with my stuff over prairie-dog holes and sagebrush. I lugged a pink Sally-Q case, one that Ruth had told me she would be taking back with her, but I could keep the Winner’s one. Out with the old, in with the new.

  Jane sort of motioned to the chicken coop (eggs were collected each morning by students on a rotating schedule); to an empty horse stable (they were planning to get some horses, though); to a cluster of metal-roofed cabins used only during the summer, for camp; to two small cabins where Reverend Rick and the school’s assistant director, Lydia March, lived. But Jane wasn’t so much a tour guide as someone we might have happened upon in a foreign town, someone who felt obligated to show us around a little. As we walked, I stared at the back of her T-shirt. On it was a black-and-white print of a female athlete, maybe a volleyball player, judging by her shorts and tank top, stretching after an exhausting match—her ponytail limp, her brow dewy. Next to the image were the purple words SEEK GOD IN ALL THAT YOU DO.

  The main building was built, I think, to resemble an aspen lodge, with log siding and a grand entrance; but once we were inside, it felt just like Gates of Praise back in Miles City, but bigger, and with dorm rooms. The floors were all that industrial laminate poorly imitating hardwood. The windows were too few, fluorescent lighting everywhere. Someone had made an attempt with the main room—a fireplace, cheap Navajo-style woven rugs, a moose head over the mantel—but even that room smelled like disinfectant and floor cleaner.

  “Where is everybody?” I asked, and was first answered by a cavernous echo of my own voice.

  “Most everybody’s in Bozeman with Pastor Rick. Lydia’s somewhere in England—that’s where she’s from. She visits a couple times a year. But I think some disciples are at the lake, maybe. Summer camp just ended last week, so this is like transition time before the regular school session starts. Freedom time.” She flicked on a light switch and started down a hallway.

  “So you kids just do whatever you want this week?” Aunt Ruth trot-trotted a little to catch her, the su
itcase wheels spinning sprays of dirt and grass on those shiny floors.

  “I mean not really. We just don’t have as many group activities, but we still do our Bible study and one-on-one sessions.” She stopped at a closed door, which had two things taped to it: a poster of the Christian rock band Audio Adrenaline and a Xerox copy of the Serenity Prayer, the purple ink so faded and the paper so yellowed and curled that it somehow had gained an air of history, almost of authenticity.

  Jane tapped the door with her clipboard. “This is you. And Erin. She’s in Bozeman with Rick.”

  Aunt Ruth tsk-tsked her head some. She still hadn’t come to terms with the roommate thing. Who could blame her? I hadn’t either. I’d been given her name earlier in the week and I’d been regularly picturing my new roommate, Erin, as a bespectacled, chubby girl with unruly curls and a smattering of acne across her perpetually flushed cheeks. Erin would be a pleaser. I just knew it. She would be working hard, asking God to help her so that the grungy but holy men in that poster on our door might actually do it for her—goose bumps on her neck, a prickle across her chest. Praying to Jesus to help her want them the way she had that girl from her study hall, from her science lab. He’s a tall drink of water she would tell me about some male movie star, some action hero, and then she would giggle. Erin would most definitely be a giggler.

  We were still waiting outside the door. Jane nodded at the handle. “You can go in,” she said. “We don’t lock anything here. The doors aren’t usually even shut, but since no one’s in there, it’s fine, I guess.” She must’ve seen my face because she added, “You’ll get used to it.”

  I couldn’t quite believe her.

  Erin’s half of the room was done up in lots of yellows and purples: a yellow bedspread with purple pillows, a purple lamp with a yellow shade, a massive bulletin board with a yellow-and-purple-striped frame, the whole thing collaged with snapshots and Christian concert tickets and handwritten Bible quotes.

  “Erin’s from Minnesota. Big Vikings fan,” Jane said. “Plus she’s a second year, and she’s earned some privileges you don’t have, I mean with the posters and whatever.” She looked at me, shrugged her shoulders. “Yet. You’ll get them eventually. Probably, anyway.”