The Adoration of Jenna Fox

by Mary E. Pearson

  ‘You’ve had enough,’ she says.

  And I suppose I have.

  I look at Mother. Her eyes dart from Father to me and back again, jumping, caught like a hooked fish. Caught between two worlds again. ‘It’s for you, Jenna.’ And now we’ve come full circle. As we always do.

  ‘Everyone has to die eventually,’ I say.

  Father lifts the bottle of wine. He holds it in front of the candle to judge its remaining contents. He empties half into Mother’s glass and half into his own. He takes a leisurely sip.

  ‘No more,’ he says.

  Tossing

  I don’t sleep.

  I hold on to my bed.

  The backups must go.

  My fingers dig into my sheets.

  I want sleep. Forget. Melt into night.

  But.

  What if something goes wrong?

  I may need them.

  It is only information.

  Limbo.

  Dreamland.

  That’s all.

  And if I try hard enough

  maybe I can forget the dark place where

  they

  we

  are.

  Viewpoint

  It is a rare day. Rae is teaching a lesson.

  In her own way.

  I am tired. But fidgety. My lack of sleep did not merit my staying home from school. Mother and Father have a distorted sense of normalcy. ‘You wanted to go. You will go. It will be good for you.’

  We watch Net News covering a session of Congress. A senator talks. And talks. It is the longest filibuster in history. Senator Harris is breaking the record of Senator Strom Thurmond set back in 1957. No one has been so long-winded—or driven—until now. He has been droning on now for twenty-five hours and thirty-two minutes, one hour and fourteen minutes past Thurmond’s record. For this, Rae has commandeered the floor. For this, even Mitch has joined us in the classroom. Mitch mimics Rae’s nods, and then sighs so there is no doubt. This is historic.

  I sit between Ethan and Allys, focused on their presence beside me. I want to lean over and whisper in Ethan’s ear in one breath and weave my fingers into Allys’s hand in the next, and I don’t want to listen to the senator at all. I want to define my place in their worlds and not try to understand the definitions the senator spews forth about his own. Right now I feel the overload—like I could burst in two with needing friendship on one side of me and love on the other. These are the definitions I need to refine.

  Dane sits behind me. I feel his tap on my chair. Tap. Tap. I am here. I am here. I am everything. Pay attention. And the senator drones on. And Rae beams. Glows. Historic. Pay attention. Tap. Tap. Allys. Ethan. I do.

  My world is too complicated. People. Politics. Self. The rules of it all. And trying to understand. It feels like a fugue and my drunken fingers are tangled trying to play it. Play, Jenna. Listen. The senator glistens. I notice his beads of sweat and handkerchief more than his words. Now, my fellow citizens. Now. Before it is too late. I watch Allys more than the senator. She leans forward in her seat. Her head nods. Yes. I turn my head to the right. To Ethan. He slinks back. No. No.

  And Dane taps.

  Taps.

  Does she like me? Would she if she knew?

  The senator swipes his forehead. ‘For God’s sake,’ he cries. ‘Do we dare go down that path? My fellow lawmakers. My esteemed senators. Can we take that chance?’

  He breathes. A sigh. A period.

  There is a roar. An applause. Only a few claps from the senators who are still present and awake. The roar is from Allys. And I am not sure what it is even about because for the last hour I have been consumed with a need that is different from Rae’s or Allys’s or the senator’s, and I am alone in my need, and there is no one who can understand. Being a ‘first’ doesn’t feel so groundbreaking.

  ‘Magnificent!’

  ‘Historic!’

  ‘Boring.’ The last, predictably, from Dane.

  ‘Twenty-five hours, forty-six minutes!’

  I should have paid attention. When someone speaks for over twenty-five hours, it must be important. It must matter. It matters to Allys.

  ‘Will it make a difference?’ Allys asks Rae.

  ‘Of course,’ Rae says. ‘Maybe not in ways any of us expect. But it will not be forgotten. Every voice leaves an imprint.’

  ‘Especially one that has talked for so long,’ Mitch adds.

  ‘But how will they vote?’ Allys asks.

  ‘We’ll have to wait and see,’ Rae answers.

  ‘Vote on what?’ I ask.

  Allys frowns. I have not paid attention, and she is hurt that something that matters so much to her has slipped past me. I try to make up for it by focusing on Rae’s explanation.

  ‘A bill is before Congress,’ Rae explains, ‘and Senator Harris has been trying to persuade his fellow senators to vote against it. By talking for so long, he has hoped that it will give some chance for the opposition to make a stronger case, sway others to their point of view.’

  ‘What is the bill?’ I ask.

  Ethan lays his head down on his desk and closes his eyes as Rae explains.

  ‘The bill is the Medical Access Act, which will put all medical decisions and choices back into the hands of physician and patient. It will cut the FSEB entirely out of the process.’

  ‘And he thinks that is bad?’

  ‘Weren’t you listening, Jenna? Of course it’s bad!’ Allys doesn’t try to hide her disappointment in me. ‘If the FSEB had been in existence fifty years ago, I might not be stuck with all this hardware. My toes might actually feel like toes and not numbed-up sausages! And this isn’t just all about me. Look at the Aureus epidemic and the millions who might not have died. And now Congress is trying to limit its power? Next, they’ll want them out of all the research labs! God help us if that happens!’

  ‘But,’ Mitch says, ‘the counterargument is that the FSEB is a bureaucratic financial drain that often impedes lifesaving measures.’

  ‘It’s the tech and pharmaceutical companies who are behind it,’ Allys says, ignoring Mitch’s comment. ‘They’ve been lobbying like crazy. The big ones like Scribtech, MedWay, and especially Fox BioSystems—’ Click. Allys hesitates for the briefest second, her eyes flickering over me, before she finishes her sentence. Probably a millisecond no one else notices. ‘They’ve poured billions into getting this bill passed.’

  And with that last sentence, she sits down. She is suddenly done talking about the bill. Rae continues with the lesson, trying to prod us to share our opinions, but an unexpected blanket has come down on us. Mitch leaves. Rae turns off the Net and says we will talk more after lunch. Maybe food will perk us up.

  We walk to the market across the street and sit at our usual corner table. I notice Allys’s face is damp, with a dull yellow pallor, while her hands remain a cool, creamy prosthetic peach. When she swallows her pills, they seem to crawl down her throat. She takes another sip of water, trying to coax them down, then another. She stares at me. I stare back. She nibbles at her food, then pushes it away. Ethan looks back and forth between us, his leg jiggling and shaking the table.

  ‘You’re Jenna Fox, aren’t you?’ she finally says.

  ‘Brilliant.’ Ethan jumps in much too quickly. ‘How’d you figure that out? Maybe from her telling you the first day she met you?’

  ‘Don’t smooth things over for me, Ethan,’ I say. His leg stops jiggling, and he draws in a deep pleading breath.

  Allys shakes her head. ‘It’s all coming together. Most people don’t pay attention to that kind of news, but working in the ethics office, I hear it all. I remember something about a daughter,’ she says. ‘I should have put it together when you told me you were in an accident. You’re the daughter of Matthew Fox.’

  ‘Would that make me the enemy?’ I ask.

  ‘No …’

  ‘But?’

  Ethan shakes his head ever so slightly. ‘Jenna,’ he whispers.

  ‘They
said his daughter was in an accident. One that most professionals believed was not survivable.’

  ‘At least with the FSEB’s current point system in place, right?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Well, then maybe I’m not her, after all. Jenna Fox is a common name.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ she says. ‘Because if you were her, that would mean …’ She trails off, deliberately leaving a space for us to fall into. I see it. Ethan doesn’t.

  ‘What?’ he blurts out. ‘You’d have to run to your little squadron of FSEB bureaucrats and report her?’

  Allys sits back. Her eyes narrowing on me, then Ethan. She pulls off her prosthetic arm and rubs the stump. It is red and scarred and ugly. ‘You give me too much credit, Ethan. I can’t run anywhere. I can only hobble. Obvious, isn’t it?’

  She returns her prosthetic arm to her stump, wincing at the momentary pinch of the magnetic fields that hold it tight. She tests her fingers, one by one. ‘I’m beginning to forget, I think. What they ever felt like. It scares me, what science can do.’ She pushes away her sandwich. ‘I guess, right along with my fingers, I’ve lost my appetite.’ She stands. Neither Ethan nor I stop her, and she leaves.

  I lift my fingers until they are silhouetted against the sunlit window. I test them just as Allys did. One by one. Packaging.

  Maybe

  ‘She’s going to tell.’

  Ethan pulls me close. We are behind the market, knee deep in overgrown grass, sandwiched between forgotten picnic tables and trash bins. He pulled me away when I began to cry, leaving his lunch and curious stares from other customers behind.

  I feel his arms stroke my back, his hands tighten around my waist, his breath, and his smell, my tongue warm against his, a stirring inside of me that makes my tongue press farther. Did I ever feel these things before? Do I care? Our kisses are desperate.

  My sobs return. Wild. Like an animal. Ethan holds tighter, like he can squeeze away my demons. I push away. ‘Why do you care, Ethan? You don’t know me.’

  His hands drop from my sides. He closes his eyes and shakes his head.

  ‘Ethan,’ I whisper.

  ‘I don’t know, Jenna.’ His eyes are wide again. Glassy. ‘I—I feel something. Every time I look at you. Don’t ask me to explain it all. Does everything have to have a tidy explanation?’

  ‘I’m not like other girls.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Ethan.’ I cup his face in my hands. ‘You don’t know. I’m beyond different. I’m—’

  ‘Maybe that’s what I see when I look at you, Jenna. Someone who will never fit in again in quite the same way. Someone like me. Someone with a past that’s changed their future forever.’

  ‘Or maybe it’s just that you see me as a second chance. You couldn’t save your brother, but maybe you can save Jenna. Justice. Is that what you’re looking for?’

  He steps away and kicks the loose leg of a picnic table so it tumbles to one side, then he swings around. ‘Or maybe I’m a masochist and I like girls who are as annoying as hell! Don’t try to analyze me, Jenna. I am what I am.’

  And I am what I am. I just need a definition for what that is.

  Jenna n. 1. Coward. 2. Possibly human. 3. Maybe not. 4. Definitely illegal.

  ‘Let’s not argue.’ Ethan comes up behind me and places his hands on my shoulders. ‘Why did you cry back in the market? Are you afraid? We’ll talk to Allys. Change her mind.’

  ‘I’m not afraid, Ethan.’ At least not of Allys. I’m afraid of my thoughts, my feelings. I’m afraid of my fingers against a sunlit window and the shocking relief that comes with it, when I should feel shame. I’m afraid that I feel wildly alive and grateful and like the Special Entitled Miracle Child Jenna Fox, while boxes sit in a closet trapping minds that will never see fingers or sunlight again, and I am too afraid to let them go because I might need them. I’m afraid of a hundred things, including you, Ethan, because everything in the universe says it’s not right, but that doesn’t keep me from wanting it.

  And I’m afraid I am becoming something that the old Jenna Fox never was and maybe ten percent isn’t enough after all. I am afraid of Dane and that the something that everyone says he is missing is the same thing Father may have left out of me, too, and that Senator Harris is perfectly right about it all and Father is perfectly wrong. I’m afraid I will never have friends like Kara and Locke again and it will all be my fault. I’m afraid that for the rest of my two or two hundred years I will still have all these questions and I will never fit in.

  And I’m afraid that Claire and Matthew Fox will discover that the new, improved Jenna doesn’t add up to three babies at all and never did and everything they risked was for nothing. Because when all is said and done, I am not special at all. Those are the kind of things I am afraid of.

  But I am not afraid of Allys.

  ‘She said she liked me,’ I say to him. ‘She wouldn’t tell.’

  ‘I saw her eyes.’

  I turn around and lay my head against his chest. I listen to his heartbeat. A real heartbeat.

  ‘We need to talk to her. Soon,’ he says.

  Sliding

  Allys is not at school the next day. Or the next. Should I worry?

  I listen for sounds. Knocks on the door. Footsteps.

  Sirens tracking me down.

  When Mother and Father are gone and Lily is out in the greenhouse, I listen, waiting for the silence of the house to crumble.

  I wait for creaks on the stairs, and I wonder what it would be like to be imprisoned again. And then when the silence is long and sustained and I am beginning to believe it will always be there, when a tiny doorway is opened and I am trying to slide through to that place called normal, the silence is broken again.

  Not by footsteps. But by a voice.

  Hurry, Jenna.

  A voice crisp and clear. Not the voice of my past. Not the voice of a dream. The voice of now.

  There are no keys flying through the air. No hot glimpses of a night that still escapes me but has changed me forever. No memories of words said in haste. But fresh words that somehow crawl through my scalp until I feel I may be mad.

  We need you. Now.

  Match

  I stomp through our eucalyptus forest, letting my feet come down hard on twisted pieces of bark and twigs, listening to the snap, the crunch, and the sounds I can control. I kick up the woven mat of leaves at my feet and release months and years of decay and send beetles scurrying for cover. The voices are quiet. I slow my pace. Is it guilt speaking to me? Or did Father not understand everything his tampering might lead to? I hear the rush of the creek at the bottom of the incline and the rustle of something else nearby. Birds?

  The forest is foreign, an import, Lily tells me. At the turn of the last century, someone thought he could make his fortune raising the timber for railroad ties. As it turned out, the wood was too hard for cutting once it dried, and the groves were abandoned. They spread on their own, sometimes wiping out native species of plants. Lily is not pleased. Original, native, pure—these are the words that matter to Lily. And Allys.

  I look at the trees that don’t belong, brought here through no fault of their own. Their bark is soft velvet, mottled and creamy, and their scent is pungent. The leaves, smooth slices of silvery green, create a thick, lacy carpet on the forest floor. Beautiful but unwanted. What have they crowded out that was more beautiful or more important?

  I reach out between two trees, pressing a hand against each, breathing in slowly, closing my eyes, searching for something beyond their bark and branches and second-class status on these hills, searching for something like their souls.

  Snap!

  Crunch!

  My eyes shoot open.

  Pain grips my wrist.

  ‘Dane!’ I try to pull away, but he holds tight, squeezing harder, watching my face for my response.

  ‘Let go,’ I tell him.

  His face is no longer empty but instead crackling with something else.
It is the only time I have seen his eyes bright and engaged, like he has been plugged in. He doesn’t smile.

  ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ he says.

  ‘I’m not walking anywhere with you, Dane.’

  ‘Why? You prefer boys like Ethan who are dangerous? I could be dangerous.’ He pulls me closer, his breathing labored.

  I feel his fingers dig into my skin, his blue eyes, pulled to sharp pinpoints, like an animal’s, adrenaline-driven, hungry for nothing else but destruction, empty of self and others. Dane, fully flesh and blood, but one hundred percent of nothing.

  ‘Not nearly as dangerous as me. I’m leaving.’ I try to pull away.

  ‘I said we’re going for a walk,’ he says, jerking me closer.

  ‘Let’s not,’ I answer, and my free hand juts forward to his groin. My aim is on the mark, my grip as tight as his. His eyes widen. His fingers tighten on my wrist. My fingers tighten, too. His eyelids flutter, his face reddens.

  ‘I may walk funny, Dane, but Ethan says I have the endurance of a horse. I can stand here all day long. Can you?’

  He makes a last effort by twisting my wrist. Pain rips up my arm. In return, my other hand squeezes beyond his limits. He screams out, releasing my wrist. I let go of him, and he falls to his knees, moaning. Besides the revulsion running through me, I feel something unexpected—gratitude. He’s shown me how empty a one hundred percent human being can be. Percentages can be deceptive.

  His face trembles, and his eyes are sharp and cold looking up at me. He is still trying to catch his breath, and I know I have only a few seconds before he comes at me again.

  ‘Jenna, there you are! Shall we finish our walk?’

  Mr Bender comes through the woods, making a show of his golf club, swinging it more than he is using it for balance on the hillside.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, leaving Dane to contemplate how much worse a golf club in his skull might feel than my hand in his groin.