Middle Ground

by Katie Kacvinsky

  “Don’t worry,” I assured him. “I’m not going to pass out this time. Although I’m sure you’ve had that effect on women before.”

  He smirked. “Glad to see your sarcasm is still intact.”

  He looked down at my hand and laced his fingers with mine. His skin was so warm. I let my mind fixate on the energy of his touch. He leaned closer and lifted my hand to examine it in the dim glow of his flashlight. I really saw him now, his hair sticking out from under the cap and around his ears, his eyes that were aware of everything, his solid hand. I was starting to wake up. The rough skin on his fingers traced over my knuckles and he kissed each of my fingertips, one at a time. All the panic I’d felt since I’d been in the detention center evaporated like steam off my skin. He dropped my hand from his lips and his eyes relaxed.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you out of here for a little while.”

  I asked him where we were going.

  He nodded ahead of us. “You’ll see.”

  My thoughts traveled to Kristin Locke. Her story felt like footsteps following behind us. I couldn’t ignore her presence. I hated that Justin held it back from me, that he would keep something so pivotal buried inside. I knew I’d have to bring Kristin up eventually. But not tonight. Tonight I just wanted to feel light again. I wanted to float.

  The tunnel slowly rose and gave way to ground and the ceiling gave way to sky. The air moved and I lifted my hand to feel it brushing my fingertips. It felt like a curtain, like soft petals, like time. It was alive. My lungs kicked in like a car engine revving to life. The air was my ignition. The sky was my fuel. I took a deep breath and looked up.

  A single streetlight lit the entrance around the tunnel, but beyond that, blackness stretched in the sky. Black is my favorite color. It’s limitless. It’s indefinable. It keeps you guessing. When there’s nothing to see, you’re forced to imagine. It makes every shape, every person more mysterious because you can’t see all the details.

  I forgot who I was in the detention center. I didn’t have to ask Justin why he pressed to meet with me alone. He’d brought me out here to help me get reacquainted. Darkness opened her arms and wrapped them tightly around me to welcome me home. It felt good to be in her strong embrace. Darkness doesn’t judge. Darkness can’t even see. She only feels. She flies and flows through the night like an angel with giant wings.

  Justin led me down to the beach. We heard the wave generators churning water for energy. They occupied parts of the coast from Santa Barbara all the way to San Diego to power the cities packed in between. White lights illuminated huge propellers cutting through the water to create some of the city’s energy. They were all in sync and cartwheeled through the waves like a tumbling performance.

  We sat down in the soft sand, just at the edge of the tide. The waves ran up to greet us, narrowly missing our feet, only to skitter shyly away. I grinned at the water, like it was playing with me, like it was going out of its way to make me smile.

  “I’m surprised you didn’t fight me about staying in the DC,” I told Justin. It was getting strange to hear my voice out loud. Gabe and I talked like we were tiptoeing around in the dark, afraid of getting caught. The DC forced us to think that talking face-to-face was unhealthy and subversive. I used my voice less and less every day. Sometimes, I wondered why I even had one.

  He admitted he almost had. “It makes me sick to think you’re going through with this.” His eyes met mine and silver light cut across them.

  “Then why did you let me?” I asked. I was starting to wish he hadn’t. I was tired of trying to be brave.

  He sighed as if he regretted it too. “Because if I were in your shoes, I would have done the same thing. And I know you can handle it.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked, because I needed to be reminded that I was strong. I was starting to forget.

  “Because I think you’re right. You can make a difference.” He told me experiences were kind of like fate, and fate usually came in the form of a test. He told me fate liked to be worshiped. It liked to see us fall on our knees before it offered to help us up. I wondered if he was referring to what happened to Kristin.

  He stretched his long legs out and sat back on his hands. “I think what you’re doing is the fastest way to motivate a change. If we can free all these detention centers, people will have to start listening.”

  I pressed my hand into the cold sand and felt as small as the grains that stuck to my fingers.

  “I’m starting to doubt if I can do this,” I admitted.

  “You have to block it. Doubt just corners you. It steers you into a dead end if you follow it. Don’t doubt what you’re doing, Maddie. It’s the right thing, I promise.”

  He turned so he was facing me and he reached out slowly and turned my body so our legs were entwined. He held both of my hands in his. “I know you’ll be fine. You will be fine.”

  I frowned at him. “I don’t know anymore,” I said.

  “I won’t let anything happen to you. I’m not leaving this city without you. And I’ve always believed that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”

  I looked in his dark eyes. I heard my dad say that line all the time but I never trusted it. I dropped his hands and leaned back.

  “Why do people say that? What does that expression mean anyway?”

  “I think it’s true. The most difficult experiences define us.”

  I shook my head. “I think the opposite’s true.”

  He studied me curiously. I didn’t expect Justin to understand. Our ideas of survival were black and white.

  “When your time is up, what are your last thoughts going to be?” I asked. “All of your miserable memories? When you were lonely or scared or heartbroken? The things that almost kill you don’t make you stronger. If anything, they make you bitter and closed off and broken.”

  Justin considered this. “I’ve never looked at it that way.”

  That doesn’t surprise me, I wanted to say. But I needed to be careful with this conversation.

  “I think what you have to live for makes you stronger,” I said. “When I have these nightmares, when I feel like I’m about to break, I focus on you. I focus on the memories I have with the people I love. The places I love. The memories that make this life worth it in the first place. If I was about to die, I wouldn’t dwell on the things that didn’t kill me. I’d think about the people I’d want to see one last time so I could tell them how much they mean to me. Love makes you stronger. It’s our strongest weapon. It’s the only weapon the DC hasn’t taken from me. It’s the only reason they haven’t broken me yet.”

  He was quiet next to me. Our time was slowly winding down. I wanted to hold the time, to widen it, to lengthen it. I wanted to wade in slow movements of time.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Over the next few weeks, life limped and crawled by. The DC fought to take over my mind, and I worked to preserve it. They tried to smash down my hope and my confidence, so I gave myself daily exercises to focus on things that lifted me up, things that I loved. I tried to marinate in those thoughts, to put them on and wear them around. I meditated on people and places and experiences that inspired me. I made daily lists of ten things I loved. I listed them in my journal, or sometimes in the privacy of my mind. It was my own secret therapy. My ten favorite foods. Ten most influential people. Ten greatest moments. Ten strengths. Each list made me think and reflect. It exercised a side of my brain the DC wanted to paralyze. It was a small way to fight back.

  I hadn’t gone out of my room except to use the bathroom. Every time I looked at my door handle I felt nauseated. I couldn’t place what was triggering the panic—it was just a reaction, like a reflex. Outside of my walls was a world I couldn’t control and that idea was immobilizing.

  Every week I met with Molly so she could study me like I was a medical experiment. She gave me a physical exam and took blood, which I needed to be sedated for since I couldn’t handle contact with anyone except J
ustin. I started to panic if someone was within ten feet of me. Even Justin could only hold my hand, and he touched it as delicately as paper. Molly attached electrodes to my forehead so she could study my brain activity while we went through countless questionnaires and examinations. She took pages of notes. Usually Pat and Clare were there, sometimes Scott, and always Justin.

  After a month of meetings, Molly was still struggling to pinpoint the reason for my nightmares and subsequent amnesia. My physical exams and bloodwork came up clean every time. Other than my loss of weight, the only serious ailment I suffered from was fatigue. Unfortunately, the lack of sleep would make it harder to fight the DC. Sleep deprivation can cause depression, a loss of appetite, stress, anxiety—even hallucinations. The DC could claim that was the reason for the inmates’ paranoia.

  Pat sat on a chair in the basement and sighed when Molly announced, once again, that my bloodwork didn’t show a trace of drugs. I sat on a cot and chewed at my nails. I knew what Pat was thinking. These meetings were draining everyone and so far we had nothing to show for them. But we were all too stubborn to admit defeat.

  “So,” Pat said. “Let’s go over what we know. She’s being psychologically tortured. She’s losing weight. They’re frying her brain with drugs we can’t detect. We knew this since day one. Are we making any progress here? Or is this a waste of all our time and Maddie’s health?”

  Molly shifted in her seat. “This isn’t a waste, Pat,” she said. “And a defeatist attitude isn’t going to help anyone.”

  “You mean a realistic attitude,” he argued.

  Molly looked back at her flipscreen that held charts of my brain activity. “What we need is evidence. We’re trying to shut down a correctional facility, not a chatroom. We can’t go on a hunch. We need hard facts.”

  “Why don’t we discuss how we’re going to get Maddie out of here,” Pat said angrily.

  I smiled at Pat to try to calm him down. I appreciated he was looking out for me. But I knew Molly was right. We couldn’t stop now. I hid the fact that these group meetings were getting harder for me to sit through. Being around so many people was giving me anxiety. People carried energy, like batteries, and it was starting to feel like radiation pressing on me.

  We were all quiet for a few minutes. I thought about what happened at Club Nino and the attention it generated.

  “What if we caused a mass exit?” I spoke up. “Let the whole school loose and get national news coverage. Expose what Vaughn’s doing. I bet the government doesn’t have an explanation ready for why hundreds of drugged teenagers in hospital scrubs are running loose on the streets of L.A.”

  Molly shook her head. “If all these kids are drugged, who knows how they’ll react. If we try to break them out now, they could all have nervous breakdowns. Remember how you reacted the first time you saw us,” she said. She took a MindReader out of her bag and started to explain why she was using it, but I cut her off.

  “I’m used to these,” I told her quickly and slipped it on.

  “What?” Molly asked. “You never told me they use MindReaders in here. You just mentioned imagery screens.” She raised her hands in the air. “How did you forget to tell me this?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s not like I’m very detail oriented these days.”

  “What’s the big deal?” Gabe asked.

  “They could be downloading memories into your brain,” Molly told me.

  “They can do that?” Clare asked.

  “It’s illegal, but technically, yes, they’ve been able to do it for years. Doctors used to try it with Alzheimer’s and amnesia cases. They used MindReaders to install memories. But it was risky, and the memories were never completely accurate. And it was too easy to brainwash people. Way too many ethical issues.”

  “Is there any way to test your theory?” Justin asked. Molly nodded.

  “I can run a simulation. But without knowing what the drug’s doing, it won’t be a hundred percent accurate.”

  “I can try and get you the drug.” Gabe suddenly spoke up. “Pat’s right, you’ll never find anything in Maddie’s blood. The DC sees to that. I’d like to know what’s in it myself,” he said.

  Molly asked how he could get it.

  “Some of the doctors leave extras out on their desks. They used to keep documented records of each tablet, but it’s gotten lax the last few years. Since I clean out their offices . . .” He didn’t have to finish the sentence for all of us to understand.

  “What if they notice it’s gone?” I asked. “What if you get caught?”

  “Hopefully you’ll figure out a way to free this place so it won’t matter,” he said.

  “Why are you helping us?” Clare suddenly asked. Her voice wasn’t accusing; Clare couldn’t sound threatening if she tried. She sounded grateful. Everyone watched Gabe, all equally interested in his answer. His cheeks flushed with embarrassment at the attention.

  “It’s no big deal,” he mumbled, and sat back in his seat.

  Clare pressed him. “Out of almost a thousand kids you decided to help Maddie. Why?”

  He lifted his hands in the air like it was obvious. “Because out of all the kids locked up in here, only three have ever made eye contact with me after the first counseling session. Maddie’s one of them. You guys don’t understand how rare it is to have people look at you in here, let alone have the nerve to talk.” He pointed at me. “Usually that drug works so fast, people go into hibernation. One hit, and they’re brain-dead. Some kids don’t even leave their rooms to use the bathroom. It’s that bad.”

  We all winced at his last detail.

  “Everybody who comes through this place vanishes. It’s like they surrender the second they walk in the gate. They have no fight at all. But you acted like it was just an inconvenience,” he said to me. “Not many people announce they plan to break out of a detention center to a staff member.”

  “You said that?” Molly asked.

  I glanced at Justin and he just rolled his eyes. “What did I have to lose? I’ve been censoring myself for seventeen years. I didn’t feel like I was living until six months ago, when I stopped caring what people thought. When you hold back you don’t do this world any favors. You don’t make any impression.”

  “You definitely made an impression,” Gabe said. “I almost reported you.”

  Justin asked Gabe how long he had been working at the DC. He paused for a second, considering whether or not to open up, but he gave in. He realized we were all on the same side.

  “Six years,” he said. “I’ve been here since I was eleven. I’m what people like to call a purebred.”

  “Nice,” Justin said with admiration.

  “What’s a purebred?” I asked.

  “People that grow up without computers,” Justin answered for him.

  Gabe nodded and said his parents were farmers. He grew up in northern California, east of the Cascades, in a small town made up of families living on sustainable farms. They grew just enough food to support themselves.

  “We didn’t use money,” he said. “We lived without technology as much as we could. We used solar power for electricity; that’s it. We didn’t have phones or computers or televisions. There was only one computer in my town, at our community building, but I never used it.”

  “That’s impossible. How can you live like that?” Pat asked. “You were completely cut off.”

  “I never felt like I was cut off,” Gabe said. “It’s all I knew. I grew up working outside, using my hands, getting exercise, living off the land. We listened to the news on the radio sometimes, but it was like listening to a sci-fi movie. Everything was about being digital or virtual or plugging in or tuning in. I couldn’t understand it. It sounded like they were talking about machines, not humans.”

  Justin and I shared a smile. Gabe wasn’t far off.

  Clare asked Gabe how he ended up in the detention center and he explained the government had discovered their community and broke it up. “It’s
illegal to deny your kids access to digital school,” he told us. “We didn’t even have the option to attend DS. So they relocated us.

  “My parents were arrested,” he continued, “and so were half the people in my town. I doubt it exists anymore.” His words came out slower as he recalled the memory. “Younger kids were sent to live with other relatives. I didn’t have any living relatives so I stayed with a foster family in San Francisco, but I ran away after a few months. When the police caught me, they sent me here.”

  “Did the DC even know what to do with you?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I can read, I can write, but I’ve never touched a computer. No one bothered to teach me. So they started putting me to work. They realized I could fix anything. I’ve done every job in this place, from maintenance to laundry. Even security. They handed me a staff shirt three years ago and gave me a room in the employee suites.” Gabe smiled to himself. “I don’t care if I live my whole life without touching a computer. It’s my goal not to.”

  “Can’t you just leave?” Molly asked him.

  “I thought about it,” Gabe said. “But my foster parents signed a contract that I’d work here until I was eighteen, for room and board. I have less than a year left. I figure I can hold out.” He checked the time and looked over at me.

  “We need to head back,” he said.

  When we stood up to go, I said I needed to talk to Clare. Alone. Everyone nodded and they all said goodbye as they filtered out.

  When Gabe shut the door, Clare turned to me, her face worried. “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  I picked at a piece of loose thread on my scrubs. I didn’t know how to transition, so I decided to be blunt.

  “Why didn’t anyone tell me about Kristin Locke?”

  Her mouth fell open when the name left my lips. A flush of regret traveled over her face. “Maddie—”