by Tim Floreen
I went out through the sliding back door. The outdoors always seemed so much quieter in winter, with the snow sucking up all the sound. I crunched down the narrow path I’d shoveled last weekend to Ethan’s gazebo and climbed the icy wood steps. Three simple benches stood in a U shape inside. I set the folded-up blanket on one of them and sat. Between the edge of the gazebo roof and the tops of the trees that separated our yard from the Agnarsons’, a strip of night sky showed through, dusted with stars.
I opened my Tattoo Atlas and paged through it, hunting for one image in particular.
“Rem?”
Fright went through me like an electric shock. Before I could even think, I was on my feet, whirling around, hunting for the person who’d spoken. Near the back of our yard stood a figure in a bright-orange hoodie. Under the hood, a pair of glasses glinted in the low light.
I gave a shout, stumbled back, grabbed one of the gazebo’s wood posts for support.
“It’s just me,” Franklin said.
As if that was supposed to make me feel any less terrified. “What the hell are you doing here?” I gasped, the words riding out of my mouth on a cloud of vapor.
He dug into his hoodie pocket. I dove behind the gazebo railing, covered my head with my arms, and waited for gunfire to rip through the wood.
Nothing happened.
I peeked through the railing’s wood supports, my pulse throbbing in my throat.
Franklin held up an iPod touch and earbuds, a small grin on his face. My freak-out appeared to be amusing him. “I wanted you to hear that music I was telling you about. Remember I said I’d play it for you sometime?” He started toward me, holding the earbuds up as if he wanted to stick them in my ears right then.
“But now?” I panted. “Jesus, Franklin, how did you get out?”
He’d circled around to the steps leading up to the gazebo. I faced him, still in a crouch behind one of the benches, ready to jump the railing if I needed to. My eyes went to the house. If I yelled, would Mom hear me?
“Please don’t call her,” Franklin said.
I’d never told Mom about the messages Franklin had sent me. In my anger, I’d completely forgotten. Maybe if I’d remembered, Franklin wouldn’t be standing here now.
“Please,” he repeated.
Even if I did yell to her, how would she help? By calling the police? If Franklin wanted me dead, and if he still had a weapon hidden away somewhere, I’d already be a corpse by the time they got here.
He placed his foot on the bottom step.
“Don’t come any closer,” I told him, trying to sound commanding but probably failing miserably. “I won’t call my mom. For now. But just stay where you are.”
His eyebrows furrowed. “I’m not going to hurt you, Rem.” He said it like that should’ve been obvious.
I stayed in my huddle at the back of the gazebo. “How did you escape from the lab?”
“My iPod.” He held it up. “I used it to get on the lab’s Wi-Fi network and hack into the security system. When the guard outside my room went to take a pee, I disarmed the door locks and put the security cameras on a loop, and then I just walked out.”
“You’re kidding. You did all that on an iPod?”
“Sure.” He waggled the device in his hand. “What’s an iPod? Just a little computer. You can do almost anything with this you can do on a laptop, as long as you have a Wi-Fi connection and the right software. I modded this one a long time ago, loaded it up with password-breaking and hacking programs and then buried them deep so no one would find them.” The grin returned, wider this time. “Impressed?”
I was, I had to admit. That must’ve been how he’d made those portraits and messaged them to me.
“I told you computers are one of my interests,” he said. “And I also have tons of experience breaking out of prisons.”
“You mean you broke out of the detention center, too?”
“No. But I escaped from prisons all the time in Son of War.”
“Oh. Right.”
He must’ve heard skepticism in my voice, because he said, “You don’t think virtual prisons count?”
“I wouldn’t know. I’ve never been virtually incarcerated.” I patted my sweats, pretending to wipe some snow off my hands while really checking my pockets for my phone. Maybe I could call for help that way. But no. I’d left it up in my room. I could picture it in its regular spot, propped on the nightstand next to my bed.
“What’s that?”
He pointed at my Tattoo Atlas. It lay on the snow-dusted floor a few feet away from me. I grabbed it. “Nothing. What are you doing here, Franklin? You really just came here to play me some music?”
“No.” He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his hoodie. “I wanted to find out why you looked so sad today. When I asked you at the lab, I saw you glance at the camera. I figured whatever the reason was, you probably didn’t want to say it in front of your mom and the other scientists, but maybe you’d tell me in private.”
“Well, you figured wrong. It’s none of your business.”
Down the block, Mrs. Kettle’s chimes sounded, more softly now that the wind had died down.
“But thanks,” I added. “For being concerned.”
He nodded. I noticed his chin had started shaking. Only then did it register: in this insane bitter cold, he had on nothing but a thin orange hoodie. Not even Tor would come outside dressed like that in weather this frigid.
“Jesus, aren’t you freezing?”
“I ran most of the way here, so that kept my body temperature up, but now that I’ve stopped—”
“Wait. You ran here? All the way from the lab?”
“Uh-huh.”
“But you just had brain surgery yesterday! That can’t be good for you.”
He shrugged. “I’m young. My system’s resilient. I feel okay.”
I grabbed the blanket from the bench and threw it at him. “Well, at least take this.”
Franklin wrapped the blanket around his shoulders, sank to the floor of the gazebo, and leaned his back against one of the posts. I still hadn’t left my crouch behind the bench. Only ten feet or so separated us. I shifted to a more comfortable position but stayed down.
“What happens now, Franklin?”
He shrugged again.
“I still don’t think you’re telling the truth about why you’re here.”
“Both of those reasons I told you are true.”
“Maybe so, but I don’t think they’re the only reasons. I’m going to ask you one more time. Why did you come here?”
Franklin stared at the snowy floor.
“Well?”
He exploded to his feet and launched himself at me. The blanket went flying. My body lurched backward, my back slamming into the wood railing. My feet flew out in front of me. I landed hard on my ass. Franklin grabbed me by my shoulders and, once again, looked me straight in the eyes. My pulse drummed so strong this time, I could feel it in every single part of my body. I knew for certain this was it. I’d lived on borrowed time ever since Ms. Utter had tackled him on the day of the Big Bang, but now I was about to die.
Franklin pressed his lips against mine. His fingers dug into my arms, holding me tight, but I didn’t even try to push him away. Maybe I was too surprised. At first his lips felt hard, but then they softened, and I suppose mine did too. Our mouths melted together. Where they met felt so warm. The warmth spread through my body like a tranquilizer, making my limbs go heavy and loose.
Then he let go of me. I fell against the side of the gazebo. He staggered back and thunked down on the bench. His shoulders heaved up and down.
“I also wanted to do that,” he panted.
When I finally recovered my ability to speak—and it took a while—I gasped out, “But why?”
He managed a smirk in spite of his breathlessness. “Why do you think?”
I threw my hands up. My lips still felt hot, and so did the whole rest of my face. “I don’t know. So you’
re gay?”
“True.”
“Since when?”
“Since always. Nobody ever asked.”
I wiped the back of my hand across my forehead. I was pretty sure I felt actual beads of sweat forming there, which should’ve been pretty much impossible in weather like this. “And you have, like, feelings for me or something?”
“True again.”
I pushed myself up to a seated position, my back leaning against the railing supports. My butt still felt sore where I’d landed on it, but apart from that, his attack, or whatever you’d call it, hadn’t hurt me. I touched my mouth, as if his lips might’ve left some trace there, some tactile proof that what I thought had just happened had actually just happened.
I’d finally had my first kiss.
And it had been a good one. True, I didn’t have anything to compare it to, but even so, I felt pretty confident this one had been really good.
And it had been with Franklin Kettle, the freak sociopath who’d shot one of my best friends. That was . . . I didn’t even know. “Fucked up” didn’t begin to cover it.
Franklin’s hood had fallen back when he’d jumped me. He pulled it over his head again, picked up the blanket from the floor, and wrapped it around his shoulders.
“You can’t have feelings for me, Franklin,” I said.
“Why not?”
I tossed my hands in the air again while I fumbled for an answer. “Because you barely know me. You’re just experiencing all these new emotions because of the capsule, and you’ve been seeing a lot of me lately, so you’re probably connecting some of those emotions with me.”
“That’s not it. I had feelings for you before the procedure too.”
“Really?” I got that crawly feeling on the back of my neck. “How long before?”
“Middle school maybe. Not in the same way I do now, but I did.”
“What do you mean, ‘not in the same way’?”
“The feelings I had for you before were different. More complicated.”
“More complicated how?”
Franklin didn’t answer. The smirk had left his face. He turned away, and I saw a flash of the white bandage on the back of his shaved head.
My fingers, moving on their own, fussed with the tail of my blue scarf. “Franklin? When you arrived at the lab, why did you tell my mom you wanted to talk to me? You did it before the operation. Why did you want me to come there?”
He shrugged.
“You said I was nice to you at school. We both know that isn’t true.”
“I don’t remember why I wanted you to come.”
“I think you’re lying, Franklin.”
He turned back around to face me, the moonlight flashing in his glasses. “Just leave it, okay?” he hissed through his teeth. “Right now I’m trying to be a good person. I’m really trying. You have to believe that.”
“I do, Franklin. It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me.”
He nodded. His breathing slowed. He scratched his twisty nose. “So do you still want to hear that music?”
“Are you serious?” Our conversation was doing that zigzagging thing that made my head spin again. I dragged my palm down my face and wondered when I was going to wake up. This was slightly less terrifying than my usual nightmares, but definitely much weirder. “Look, Franklin, it’s incredibly cold, and you’re really not supposed to be here. Why don’t you just go back to the lab and play it for me the next time I see you there?”
“They won’t let me. It has to be now.” He pulled out the iPod and earbuds again. “Please.”
I dropped my head back and peered at the roof of the gazebo, the rafters extending outward from the center like an asterisk. I sent a long breath up toward it. “Fine. One song. That’s it.” I pushed myself up and sat on the bench next to him while he tapped on the iPod’s screen. “Hand them over.”
He hesitated before placing the earbuds in my palm, like he felt shy all of a sudden.
“I hope you like it.”
I fitted the earbuds into my ears. He pressed the play button.
“This is Philip Glass?”
He nodded. “The song I told you about before. ‘Orphée’s Return.’ ”
A piano had started to play. I didn’t know anything about this kind of music. It sounded . . . nice, I supposed. Repetitive, like he’d said.
“How’s the volume?” he asked, his eyes locked on the space on the bench right next to me.
“Fine.”
Then it started: a sequence of high notes like an unspooling thread. While the lower part continued to play, that thread seemed to tie itself to something deep inside my chest and pull. An ache—that was what it felt like. The kind that hurt but felt good, too.
I glanced at Franklin, wondering if my reaction to the music showed. He was still staring at the bench, and I realized what he’d fastened his eyes on: my Tattoo Atlas. I’d set it next to me when I’d sat, the side with the imp drawing facing up.
He lowered the volume a little. “I used to have a notebook like that.”
“I remember,” I said. “It had a Son of War sticker on the cover, and you’d written your name down the side in red ink. It was always so mysterious the way you used to carry that thing around. What did you write in it?”
“What do you write in yours?”
I almost said, I asked you first, but then I changed my mind. My palm pressed flat against my Tattoo Atlas’s black cover. I’d never shown it to anyone before. Not even Callie. “I don’t write,” I answered. “I draw.”
I picked up the book and set it in his hands. He flipped through the pages, studying each image with care. When he reached one of the drawings I’d done of the Big Bang, with him in his Son of War mask wielding his Beretta, my stomach flipped, and I silently swore at myself for giving him my sketchbook without thinking about that. But he just paused for a second, peering at the picture the same way he’d peered at the others, and then kept on turning pages.
The music continued playing in my ears, the thread of sound still pulling at that place deep in my chest. I took out one of the earbuds and handed it to him. Without glancing up, without saying a word, he stopped his flipping long enough to take it from me and place it in his own ear.
I’d never known Franklin well. Like he’d said, we’d never even had a real conversation prior to the Big Bang. I wondered what he’d been like before Mom started tinkering with his brain. More like the Franklin who’d mocked my brother’s death a couple days ago? Or more like this?
“What are these anyway?” he asked after a while. “They look sort of like designs for tattoos.”
“Exactly. I call that book my Tattoo Atlas.”
“So they’re tattoos you’re planning on getting?”
“Not really. It’s sort of a long story. See, when I was in middle school, I decided I wanted to keep a journal, but I wasn’t much of a words person, so I did one in drawings instead. Whenever something important happened to me, I’d draw in a series of sketchbooks I kept. I guess it was my way of processing my life. Then when Ethan died, the pictures started getting weirder and weirder. I was sad. Thinking about death a lot.”
“Yes, these are strange.” He said it with approval. “I always had a feeling you were secretly an oddball like me.” He’d paused on a self-portrait I’d made in which my face had a smile so wide it literally split my head open. Mr. Nice Guy, a banner below my face read.
“At about the same time,” I continued, “I got interested in tattoo art, and I incorporated a lot of that imagery into the drawings. I started imagining I was turning all the events and people that had left marks on me inside into tattoos for my outside. But I wasn’t about to get actual tattoos, so I just kept them in the book. It was sort of like The Picture of Dorian Gray, but with body art.”
“What’s The Picture of Dorian Gray?”
“It’s a book about this twisted guy who does all this stuff, like going to prostitutes and taking drugs and even killing a ma
n, but none of his experiences leave a trace on his body. He doesn’t even age, because he has this magical portrait someone made of him, and the image of him in the painting gets old and damaged and diseased instead of him. I think of this book the same way. My experiences go into the book instead of onto my skin. Except my experiences aren’t as exciting as Dorian Gray’s.”
He scrunched his eyebrows behind his glasses, dubious. “Why couldn’t you put these tattoos on your body, though?”
“Well, it’s against the law, for one thing.”
“Sure, but what about that place on West First Street? All you have to do is show a fake ID. They don’t care. Nil and I went there once, and it was no big deal.” He shrugged the blanket off his shoulders and hiked up his hoodie and T-shirt to show me his back, the skin pearly in the moonlight. On one side, just above the sharp corner of his shoulder blade, the Son of War mask glared at me. Franklin must have noticed the look on my face when I saw the image, because he let his T-shirt drop and tugged the blanket around his shoulders again. He resettled the earbud in his ear.
I’d heard about that place on West First Street. Abigail Lansing had gone there a few months after the Big Bang to get Pete’s name tattooed on her wrist, along with a rose to represent the corsage he’d given her for that one dance he’d taken her to.
“Yeah,” I admitted, “I know technically it’s possible to get one. But if my mom saw—”
“Wear a shirt. My grandma never saw mine. She still doesn’t know about it.”
I shrugged. “Maybe I’m just too straitlaced or something. Plus I like being able to move the tattoos around and switch them out. There’s no way I could fit all the designs in this book on my body.”
“But isn’t that sort of the whole point with tattoos? That you can’t change them? That they’re permanent? That you have to commit?”