Project Paper Doll

by Stacey Kade

  I had to.

  Rachel needed to see what it felt like to hurt, to lose for once. She and her grandfather had taken everything from me. Yes, it might save my life if I could regain control over the barrier in my brain and keep GTX from finding me. And maybe by keeping Rachel’s attention focused on me, I could protect Jenna. But those were justifications, excuses for doing what I wanted—no, craved—with a frightening urgency.

  See, this was the problem with creating a freak like me. I had the drive to win, to crush competitors who had no idea what they were up against, combined with an advanced ability to predict, plan, and manipulate. And you could bury all of that under layers of civility and rules, but it wouldn’t go away.

  It might have been my human side clamoring for blood, or my alien side looking for a chance to exercise strategic dominance over a lesser life-form. Either way, I was going to win.

  MY WHOLE BODY ACHED by the time last bell rang. The hallway around my locker had emptied out already—everyone dashing for the door as soon as they could—but I was moving slowly. The ibuprofen I’d snagged from Cami had worn off hours ago.

  But it wasn’t just the remnants of the hangover dragging me down. All afternoon I’d had to watch Trey mooning over Rachel; Rachel gloating at having coasted through the lunch trouble with nothing more than a stern warning from Mr. Kohler; and Cami, Cassi, Jonas, and Matty talking about the same things, the same people, as last year. I was so tired of all of this claustrophobic inner-circle crap.

  And yet I stuck around. What did that say about me? But what was I supposed to do, cut them off ? Join the goth crowd smoking behind the gym? Where else was I going to go?

  “I’m in.”

  Startled, I turned to see Ariane behind me.

  I slammed my locker shut and pulled my backpack up over my shoulders. “You’re in what?”

  “Your plan. The one you described this morning.” She looked fierce, ready to spit nails. I couldn’t blame her. But I couldn’t help her either. Not anymore.

  “It’s too late for that,” I said. “You saw what happened at lunch.”

  Her mouth tightened. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “Zane, you coming, man?” Trey shouted from the other end of the hall, where he was waiting impatiently near the glass doors to the parking lot, car keys in hand.

  “I’ll meet you at the car,” I shouted back. I turned to Ariane. “She’ll never believe it. She already knows you said no. Forget it.” There was no point in trying to fight. Just ride it out. Only another seven-hundred-odd days, right?

  I started to walk away, but Ariane followed. “She’ll believe it because she wants to believe it. She wants the opportunity to crush me more than she wants to think it through.” I could hear the bitterness and disdain curling the edges of her words.

  I stopped and looked at her. She wasn’t pleading; she was too angry for that. Her eyes, that strange muddled blue, held barely restrained fury. I’d never seen or heard Ariane this emotional about anything, except in telling me off this morning. She was half my size but looked ready to break someone’s arm off.

  A flicker of interest in my original plan—and in this strange girl who made no sense—flared up again. “All right,” I said. “What did you have in mind?”

  She didn’t sigh in relief or smile or say thank you, but the tension in her shoulders eased. “The same thing you proposed this morning. Bonfire Week.”

  I frowned. “The activities fair starts in three hours.” Even from here I could hear distant echoing voices from the gym and the loud whine of what might have been a power saw as the various clubs set up their booths.

  “I can be ready.” She raised her eyebrows, her gaze taking me in from head to toe. A small but mocking smile played on her lips. “Can you?”

  I grimaced. I must have looked pretty rough. No more drinking on weeknights. “Fine. Yes. Then what?”

  Her brows drew together, crinkling her forehead. “What do you mean?”

  I felt the tiniest bit vindicated at having figured out something before her. “I mean, we can’t just show up at this stuff, the fair, the game, the bonfire, and that’s it. If it’s supposed to look legit, like we’re into each other for real—and trust me, Rachel would expect that of any scheme of hers—then we’ve got to take it an extra step.”

  Ariane eyed me warily. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  “Do you walk to school?” I asked, ignoring the doubt in her voice. I waited for her to nod, though I already knew the answer. Trey and I had passed her often enough last year when we were coming in early for one thing or another.

  “If I can get the truck for school, I’ll pick you up tomorrow morning.” My dad usually drove his work car, an SUV emblazoned with WINGATE CHIEF OF POLICE. If he could have had it personalized with his name, he probably would have. That meant the battered Blazer that Quinn drove was sitting unused in the garage. I could have argued for the right to take it to school, but since Trey had a car, it wasn’t worth the fight unless I had a date.

  “What? Why do you need to pick me up?” Ariane looked alarmed.

  “The extra step,” I reminded her patiently. “School pickup, drop-off, lunch probably…”

  Ariane made a face, whether in memory of today’s incident or the idea in general.

  “But not at my house,” she insisted. “You can’t pick me up at my house.”

  In spite of myself, I felt the first tendrils of intrigue uncurling. She didn’t want me at her house. Was it only me? Or everyone? “Okay,” I said slowly. “Then how do you expect me to pick you up for the fair tonight?”

  “We could meet in the parking lot and—” she began.

  “Because no one would notice that and call us on it?” I asked. “Try again.”

  She scowled at me. “Fine. Two blocks from my house. Pine and Rushmore. But don’t wait on Pine, go around the corner.”

  Uh-oh. I cocked my head to one side, staring at her curiously. “Are you sneaking out?” Come to think of it, I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen her at anything outside of school, even regular extracurriculars like the fair tonight.

  “No,” she said, too quickly.

  Great. “Look, I don’t know what your life is like right now, but mine kind of sucks and I don’t need more heat from my dad if your dad decides to get pissed about—”

  “It’s fine,” she said. “He won’t even be home. I just…I just don’t want to answer a bunch of questions about what I’m doing if someone sees the truck in the driveway and mentions it to him.” She shifted uncomfortably, avoiding my gaze.

  Oh, she was so lying. Maybe not about her dad being gone, but about the sneaking out? Most definitely. But Wingate was a small town; no way we would stay a secret for long, which meant all of this would come raining down on my head at some point.

  I hesitated, then shrugged. Oh, what the hell. My dad already hated me, what was one more reason for it? Hey, if her dad was Mark Tucker and this ended up making him cranky, maybe my dad would be pleased at having struck a blow at his mortal enemy.

  “Fair starts at seven,” I said. “What time do you want me to—”

  “Quarter to. And don’t be late,” she added.

  I resisted the urge to salute, figuring she might not take it well. I pulled my phone from my pocket. “What’s your number?”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “Why?”

  She was going to fight me every step of the way, even though this was her idea. This time, anyway. “How else do you want me contact you?” I asked slowly, as if to a child.

  She frowned and made no move for her cell.

  “Second thoughts already?” I asked, fighting disappointment. This was maybe the most interesting thing that had happened in months. I’d proposed my plan to her this morning out of anger and spite. I thought she’d go for it, and when she didn’t, I thought better of her for it. And now…now she was coming back to me. I hadn’t counted on that, and found I liked her even more for surprising me yet again.r />
  She stuck her chin out. “No.” She dug into her pocket and handed me her phone. I typed in my number.

  “Here.” I handed it back. “Call me.”

  She nodded and started to turn away.

  “No.” I snagged the edge of her bag to stop her, careful not to touch her directly. She’d been ready to bolt this morning whenever she thought I might make direct contact. “Now. So I have your number.” You’d have thought she’d never exchanged numbers with someone before.

  Her cheeks turned a pale pink. “Fine,” she muttered.

  She hit SEND on her phone, and as soon as mine rang, she hung up.

  I typed her name in and saved it. “You know this could all blow up in our faces if Rachel catches on,” I said, tucking my phone into my pocket. I found there was a part of me, bent on self-destruction, that was more than a little eager at the prospect, but I felt I had to warn Ariane. “If you think she’s bad now…”

  “She won’t like it, but she’ll believe.” Ariane sounded absurdly confident.

  I sighed. “Your funeral.”

  “Yes, it will be,” she said solemnly.

  Okaaaay. Before I could respond to that—I wasn’t even sure what I would say—she turned and walked away. Her backpack—a plain green canvas rather than the pink sparkly or shiny black bags I was used to seeing from Rachel and her lot—pulled at her shoulders, and on the right side, where the neck of her shirt was bunched under the strap, I caught a glimpse of a square white edge. The bandage I’d seen last year.

  My curiosity sparked to life again. Maybe tonight I’d start getting some of the answers I wanted. The missing pieces that would make her make sense.

  When Trey dropped me off at home, I didn’t retreat to my room as usual. Instead I cleared a space on the kitchen table and set the stage with my laptop open and books around it. I loaded and ran the dishwasher, but I didn’t empty it. That would have been pushing it.

  The trick to managing my dad was doing so without letting him catch on. There was an art to it. I’d watched my mom do it on my behalf for years. It meant choosing your words carefully, picking the right time, and positioning the situation and the desired action in a way that would make sense to him, right or wrong.

  But after everything that happened last year, I’d been too pissed and confused to bother putting what I knew into practice. But now I wanted the truck, wanted to be able to pick up Ariane, enough to play his ridiculous game.

  I was out of practice, though. I just hoped it would be enough.

  If he kept to pattern, he’d show up between five thirty and six, and one of us would dig into the freezer for a casserole that some woman—either grandmotherly or looking to date my dad, it varied—had dropped off for us. Since my mom had left, my dad made a point of being home for dinner. Couldn’t have people whispering about the poor neglected son left at home alone all the time, even if he was the “other Bradshaw boy.” Appearances were everything to my dad.

  I played at working on my homework—there was never very much in the first week anyway—while I waited and watched the clock. I’d be cutting it close for picking up Ariane, but it was a calculated gamble. If my dad had had a bad day, calling and interrupting him at work would trash my chances.

  Killing time, I Googled Ariane. Yeah, it was a little stalker-y, but mostly I was just trying to find out what everyone else knew about her that I’d ignored or completely missed in the haze of last year.

  Except it turned out Ariane Tucker was a ghost. Well, not really. But maybe as close to it as you can get and still be alive. In more ways than one.

  There were lots of Ariane Tuckers in the United States, but they were the wrong age and/or living in the wrong place. This Ariane, the sixteen- or seventeen-year-old one in Wingate, Wisconsin, didn’t show up at all. She didn’t have a Facebook page or a Tumblr. No Twitter or Formspring either, as far as I could tell.

  Then I tried searching her name in combination with the man I was guessing to be her dad, the infamous Mark Tucker.

  Two listings came up. The first was an obituary from the archives of a newspaper in a small town in central Ohio. Dated from about ten years ago, it was for an Abigail Tucker, thirty-eight. She’d died in a single-car accident, a collision with a concrete bridge abutment on an icy night.

  So Cami had been right. Ariane had come here after her mother’s death. And Ariane was definitely related to the hated Mark Tucker. Interesting.

  Then the second-to-last paragraph, right above the details for Abigail Tucker’s funeral, caught my attention.

  Mrs. Tucker is survived by her former husband, Mark Tucker. Ariane, the couple’s six-year-old daughter, struggled valiantly in experimental treatment for a rare form of cancer, until several weeks ago when…

  I clicked for the next page, but got a 404 error, PAGE NOT FOUND. I tried again and got the same result.

  I sat back in my chair. Cami said Ariane had been sick, but no one had ever mentioned that it was this bad. It sounded like she’d almost died. And then after surviving all of that, she’d had to deal with the fact that her mom was never coming back.

  My mind immediately summoned up an image of the note on the kitchen table—a lone square of white paper on the polished wood—that Sunday morning. I’d stumbled in to find the kitchen empty and pristine. All the mess from Quinn’s graduation party the night before had been cleaned up and put away. Not so much as a streamer remained on the wall. My mom must have been up for hours to get everything restored to normal in time for the next day, my birthday.

  I’d been stupidly pleased. It was hard enough to have your birthday in the shadow of another big event, especially something for Quinn, but it would have been even worse if we’d been eating birthday cake on graduation plates, beneath balloons and banners that had been put up to celebrate him. Talk about proof that you’re second best…

  My mom, though, of all people, knew how it worked in our house. We were on the same side (or so I’d thought). She’d always done what she could to soften the blow of my father’s disapproval.

  I’d heard her moving around the house in the middle of the night—her footsteps much lighter than those of my dad or my brother—and thought nothing of it until I walked into the cleaned-up kitchen.

  Smiling, I picked up the note. That was the last normal-ish moment I’d have for years. Maybe forever.

  At first I thought it was a standard Mom note. Running errands. DON’T eat Dad’s leftovers from last night. Or, Picking up your cake at the bakery. Call and let me know if you’ve decided what you want for your birthday dinner tonight.

  But instead it was something entirely different, completely unexpected.

  I just can’t anymore.

  —M

  I’d failed so badly that even my mom, my one ally, couldn’t stand to stay any longer. My dad had made her life miserable for years, and she’d probably thought about bailing a thousand times, but she’d hung in there long enough to get Quinn out the door and on his way to college. But I…I wasn’t worth sticking around for. And she was right; I wasn’t. Or at least I hadn’t been back then. I was trying to be different now.

  I forced my attention back to the screen in front of me and the information about Ariane. Despite the ominous tone of the article, she’d survived and was tougher than she looked. Maybe that was why she was so unrelenting and seemed a bit removed from all the high school idiocy going on around her. She knew there was more to life than what everyone else concerned themselves with.

  That only increased my respect for her.

  Her former illness might explain why she was excused from gym, as Cassi had pointed out last night. And considering it now, I wondered if the bandage on her shoulder was somehow related. Her treatment had been experimental, whatever that meant. It was possible she bore scars from her ordeal. Maybe that was what she was hiding beneath that bandage, not a tattoo at all.

  The second listing for Ariane was from that same newspaper, published several weeks after the first
article. I clicked on it, expecting an update on her condition, maybe an announcement about her triumphant return home. Instead it was a retraction, two terse and seemingly hurried lines.

  In the February 28 issue, Ariane Tucker, daughter of Mark and Abigail Tucker, was reported to have died.

  We regret the error.

  I read it twice to make sure I wasn’t missing something, but the meaning didn’t change. How bizarre was that? How can you get somebody’s death wrong? I mean, it happened all the time with celebrities—some famous person was forever announcing that he or she was still alive—but with a random little girl in Ohio? That seemed odd.

  The back door banged open, startling me. My dad walked in, carrying a pizza box in one hand and a stack of mail in the other. He dropped them both on the island with a heavy sigh and then paused to rub the back of his neck, like the muscles were kinking up. His jacket was hanging open in the front, and he looked tired.

  I froze. Uh-oh. This could go either way.

  “Dinner,” he shouted toward the back of the house, before noticing my presence at the table with a double take.

  “Sausage?” I ventured, shutting down my browser and pretending I hadn’t seen the surprise on his face.

  He grunted an affirmative, shrugging out of his jacket and hanging it on the back of a chair. Judging by the size of the box, the pizza was a medium, barely enough to feed both of us for one meal. When I ordered I always got the extra large, enough for multiple meals.

  But I kept my mouth firmly clamped shut. He’d taken the initiative to bring food home; that was unusual and a good sign. He’d done that occasionally when my mom was still around, surprising us with takeout or telling us to load up into the car for a meal at Morelli’s. It was sort of his way of apologizing without actually saying the words “I’m” or “sorry.”

  I was cautiously optimistic.

  Watching him as he flipped through the mail, I pushed away from the table to get a plate from the dishwasher.

  A moment later, my dad followed suit, saying nothing about the fact that there were clean dishes finally. Then again, the absence of screaming was usually the best I could hope for. So far, so good.