Ringer

by Lauren Oliver

  “Don’t worry about the Browns,” the girl said. Her eyes were always moving—around and around, taking in Gemma’s hair, and stud earrings, and fingernails, which were painted yellow and green, alternating—as if trying to generate some centrifugal force that would pull Gemma closer. “They’re all soft in the head.”

  Gemma went from feeling angry to feeling sick. She turned around again and saw the girl had resumed her play, pulling up wool fibers from a patch of dirty carpet. Another girl, identical to the first, had scuttled closer to watch. Looking at them side by side made Gemma dizzy.

  “You’re not one of us,” the girl said. Her breath reeked, and Gemma felt sorry about being disgusted. “You were made somewhere else. There were only five genotypes at Haven. Numbers six through ten. And number six is dead.”

  “I know,” Gemma said automatically. “I saw her.” It made a twisted kind of sense that this girl could see what the people in charge couldn’t, or wouldn’t. To them, the replicas weren’t people. They were lab rats. Or they were things, manufactured shells, like so many plastic parts cut from the same mold. It must be hard to keep track.

  The girl leaned closer, and Gemma had to stop herself from flinching. At the same time, she was seized by an impulse to dig her fingers into the girl’s eyes, to pull them out, to tear off her skin. She wanted her face back.

  “Number six was named. We called her Cassiopeia. Dr. O’Donnell named me, too. My name is Calliope. Are you named?” Calliope’s eyes were huge. Hopeful. April called it Gemma’s sad kitten face.

  Gemma nodded. “Gemma,” she said.

  Calliope smiled. Two of her teeth overlapped. She hadn’t had braces, obviously, like Gemma had. “Gemma,” she repeated. “Where were you made?”

  Gemma was exhausted again, though it couldn’t be much past noon. She wondered whether the girl had ever met anyone new, at least anyone who would talk to her. “I was made at Haven, like you, but then I went somewhere else.”

  “Outside,” Calliope said, exhaling the word as if it were the final piece of a powerful magic spell.

  After that, Calliope wouldn’t leave Gemma alone. She followed Gemma when she walked the 282 paces she could walk, between the curtained-off wing where the sickest replicas lay mangled, tethered weakly to life by grim-faced nurses working a dozen machines; to the two bathrooms, men’s and women’s, in the no-man’s-land between the gendered sides.

  When Gemma sat, Calliope sat a few feet away, watching her. At one point Gemma lay down and pretended to sleep. Still, she felt Calliope watching, and she sat up, finally, relieved to realize that she was angry, that there was another feeling elbowing in besides fear.

  “What?” Gemma said. Looking at Calliope still gave her a terrible sense of vertigo, like being spun around blindfolded and then discovering, with the blindfold off, that the world was still spinning. “What do you want?”

  She’d meant to scare her, or startle her away, but Calliope kept staring. Gemma couldn’t shake the feeling that Calliope had crawled into Gemma’s body, that she wasn’t another person but a shadow, a squatter. That would explain the tight, airless feeling Gemma had, as if when she breathed it had to be for both of them.

  “I’m looking at you,” she said, “to see what the outside looks like. You have hair like the nurses. And you’re fatter,” she added, but not meanly at all. Of course, Gemma realized, she didn’t know that this was mean, like she didn’t know it was rude to stare.

  This made Gemma feel sorry for hating her face, for hating to see her, for wishing she would disappear.

  Calliope tipped onto her knees and pulled herself closer, then rocked back on her heels again. She might have been Gemma’s age, but she seemed younger. “Do you know Dr. O’Donnell?” she asked. “She’s the one who named me. Then she left. A lot of them leave but most of them not for good. She’s outside, too,” Calliope clarified, as if Gemma might not have understood.

  Gemma tried to swallow and couldn’t. How to begin to explain? “I don’t know Dr. O’Donnell,” she said at last.

  “What about Pinocchio?” Calliope asked. “Do you know Pinocchio?”

  “Pinocchio?” Gemma thought Calliope must be joking. But she was completely serious. Her eyes were moon-bright, huge in that thin face—familiar and also totally foreign. It occurred to Gemma that she’d never heard Lyra make a joke. She’d never even heard her be sarcastic.

  “Pinocchio’s made out of wood just like a doll,” Calliope said. She slid fluidly and without warning through different ideas, through fiction and reality, the past and present. “Wayne calls me Pinocchio, and I don’t say how Dr. O’Donnell named me first. Names are like that. You have to be careful—once someone names you, you belong to them for life. Pinocchio wanted to go to the outside and be a real boy.” Once again, she leapt to a new stream of thought: she had no meaning, no system to unwind them, to decide what was important and what wasn’t. “He got ate by a whale but then he made a fire in the whale’s stomach.” She laughed and Gemma flinched. It wasn’t exactly a laugh, more like the sound of a hammer against metal. “He made a fire just like the one at Haven. He lit it right in the whale’s belly, right here.” She pointed to her own stomach. She seemed to find this hilarious. “Wayne told me how he did it. And so the whale had to spit him up. I seen fire at Haven and I wasn’t scared, not like some of thems.”

  Untangling Calliope’s speech took almost physical effort. She nearly explained that Pinocchio was only a story, but stopped herself.

  “Outside is huge,” she said instead. “Much bigger than you can imagine.”

  Calliope hugged her knees, shrugging. “I know. I seen it through the fence and on TV, too. Who cares, anyway? It dies, it dies, it dies.” She turned and pointed casually to three replicas. “It dies.” She pointed to herself. Before Gemma could say anything, before she could deny it, Calliope was talking again.

  “Haven is much bigger than where here is. Here is only the size of how A-Wing is at Haven. But there’s more doors at Haven, and more nurses, too. I don’t like the nurses, except for some of them are okay, because they feed us greens and blues for sleeping. One of the guards let me touch her gun.” She spoke quickly, hardly pausing for air, as if the words were a kind of sickness she had one chance to get out. “At Haven we can’t go in with the males because of their penises and how a normal baby gets made. So we have to stay away, except at Christmas for the Choosing.”

  Something touched Gemma’s spine and neck, and made the fine blond hair April had always called her goose down lift on her arms, just like that, like bird feathers ruffled by a bad wind.

  “What do you mean, the Choosing?” she asked, but Calliope wasn’t listening. She was pinballing between stories and ideas, feeding Gemma all the words she’d had to carry alone.

  “Have you ever used a penis to make a baby?” she asked, and Gemma, stunned, couldn’t answer. “The doctors still don’t know if they can, I mean if we can, the its. Pepper got a baby in her stomach, but then she cut her wrists so afterward they all got more careful.”

  Gemma could hardly follow the story—Calliope combined pronouns or used them indiscriminately. She’d heard Lyra and Caelum refer to themselves as it at different times. All the replicas confused phrases like want and ask, make and own.

  I owned it, one of the replicas insisted, when a nurse tried to take away a mold-fuzzed cup of old food remnants she’d been concealing beneath a panel of loose floor tile. I owned it. It’s me. And some of the replicas couldn’t speak at all—they could only growl and keen, like animals.

  “So the doctors don’t know.” Calliope was still talking, working a fingernail into a scab on her knee; when the blood flowed she didn’t even wipe it, just watched it make a small path down her shin, as if it was someone else’s blood entirely. “Some of the its are too skinny for the monthly bleeding, but I have mine. Wayne said that means I’m a woman now.”

  Nausea came like movement, like the rolling of a boat beneath her. “Who’s Wayne?
”

  “He’s the one who told me about Pinocchio.” Her eyes weren’t like eyes at all: they were more like fingers, grasping for something. “I always wanted a baby,” she said in a whisper. “Sometimes I used to go to Postnatal and hold them and say nice things to them, like I made them instead of the doctors.”

  Blood was rushing so hard in Gemma’s head she could hardly hear. Infants. Babies. She hadn’t seen any since she’d been here. What had happened to all of them?

  But she didn’t have to ask. Calliope leaned forward, all big eyes, all hot little breath, all need. “Postnatal burned fast,” she said. “The roof caved in and all my babies got smashed.” Gemma turned away from her. But there was nowhere to go.

  Nobody belongs here, child. Not even the devil himself.

  Calliope pulled away again, smiling to show her teeth. “I like Haven better for most things. But here’s better because of the males and how you can talk to them if you want.” She said it so casually that Gemma nearly missed it.

  “Wait. Wait a second.” She took a deep breath. “What do you mean, you can talk to them?”

  Calliope smiled with only the very corners of her mouth, as if it was something rare she had to hoard. “You can come with me,” she said. “You can see for yourself.”

  Calliope came for her in the middle of the night. It could have been midnight, or four a.m.; there were no clocks in the holding center, and since arriving Gemma had truly been aware of the rubbery nature of time, when there were no watches, phones, or activities to pin it down to.

  “Follow me,” she said, and took Gemma’s wrist. Gemma had seen staff members guide the replicas this way, and imagined this was where she’d learned it.

  They moved through the maze of sleeping replicas, most of them drugged up on sleeping aids distributed by the nurses before lights-out: pills for the replicas whose pain was greatest, and, when these ran out, simply plastic mouthwash cups full of NyQuil. Gemma had thrown hers out, as she assumed Calliope must have, too.

  As they passed through the darkness, Gemma again had a strange doubling feeling, as if she and Calliope were two shadows, two watermarks identically imprinted. Or maybe she was the shadow, and Calliope the real thing.

  Only one nurse, nodding to sleep in a swivel desk chair despite the lack of desk, jerked awake to ask where they were going. Calliope whispered, “Bathroom,” and the nurse waved them on.

  “Be quick,” she said.

  No-man’s-land: the makeshift kitchen, the bathrooms, a plastic card table covered with scattered magazines and phone chargers, what passed for a break room for the staff during the day. A light in the kitchen was on, and as always the coffee machine was burbling and letting off a burned-rubber stink. There was always coffee brewing, at every hour, although so far Gemma hadn’t actually seen anyone drink from the machine.

  Only a single soldier was on duty, the same red-haired guy with a pimply jawbone. He couldn’t have been older than nineteen.

  “That one never plays,” Calliope whispered to Gemma.

  “Plays what?” Gemma whispered.

  But Calliope just shook her head. “He thinks it’s bad luck.”

  Gemma saw a quick look of pain tighten the soldier’s features, as if seeing them together hurt. He turned away again as soon as they veered right, toward the bathrooms.

  At the last second, instead of going into the girls’ bathroom, they simply went left, into the boys’. Unbelievably simple. Gemma doubted the soldier had even noticed. He probably thought the replicas were all dumb, anyway. It was reasonable to expect they’d make mistakes.

  The bathroom was only half-lit. Most of the bulbs had burned out in the ceiling, and a sink filled with paper towels had overflowed, leaving puddles of water on the floor. The tiles seemed to pick up her voice and hurl it in a thousand directions. But the boys’ bathroom had stalls, at least, as well as two puddly urinals.

  “What now?” Gemma asked.

  “We wait,” Calliope said. “Come.” She took Gemma’s hand and pulled her into one of the toilet stalls. She closed the door behind them and sat down on the toilet seat.

  Less than a minute later the bathroom door opened again. Calliope held up a hand, gesturing for Gemma to be quiet. For a long second there was nothing but the drip, drip, drip of water from the faucet.

  Then a boy: “Hello.”

  Calliope stood up then. “In here,” she said, and opened the door.

  He was younger—maybe twelve, thirteen. It was difficult to tell, since all the replicas, skinny as they were, with no concept of words they hadn’t experienced directly, like snow and cross-country, seemed younger than their true age. But Calliope looked pleased anyway.

  “A male,” she said, as if Gemma might not be able to tell. The boy had very dark skin and perfect features and the kind of lips Gemma’s mom’s friends paid money for. He would grow up to be beautiful. If he grew up.

  “What crop are you?” Calliope asked.

  “Fourteen,” he said. “A White.”

  This made her smile. “Like me,” she said. “The Whites are the most important.” She turned back to Gemma again. “Well? What do you want him for?”

  “I need you to give someone a message for me,” she said. He showed no signs of having understood. “Another male. Like me, from the outside. His name is Pete. Can you ask him to come? Can you bring him?”

  The boy looked at Calliope. She nodded, barely. “What’s for me?”

  She tilted her head to look at him. Once again, Gemma had the uncanny doubling sensation of watching herself in a fun-house mirror, the kind that elongated and thinned.

  “Observation,” she said, and held up one hand. “Five seconds.”

  He frowned. “I want to stethoscope,” he said.

  She shook her head. “Observation.”

  He looked away.

  “Ten seconds,” he said finally. “Five now, five when I bring him.”

  Finally, Calliope shrugged. Before Gemma could stop her, she lifted her shirt, exposing her chest: ribs visible, small pale nipples identical in shape to Gemma’s, breasts stiff and small and hard, like little knots. Gemma was so horrified, she froze, and by the time she thought to grab Calliope’s arm, to haul her shirt down, Calliope was already finished.

  “Five seconds,” she said. She didn’t seem bothered at all, and the boy didn’t seem all that interested. “Now go.”

  He turned and left the bathroom. As soon as he was gone, Gemma said, “You shouldn’t have done that.” She felt sick. They hadn’t even cared that she was there, that she was watching. It hadn’t occurred to them to care. She supposed observation, for them, happened in front of lots of people. She wondered if they even knew what privacy meant. “You didn’t have to.”

  Calliope looked puzzled. “It’s only observation,” she said. She smiled and showed her crowded teeth. “I’ve observed with twelve males so far. Only number forty-four is ahead of me. She’s observed with fourteen. Plus, she lets anyone stethoscope with her, even the guards if they want.”

  She spoke matter-of-factly. There was no playfulness to it. It wasn’t pleasure, just something to do. It wasn’t at all like the party games people had played in middle school, Seven Minutes in Heaven, the stoplight game, all of them excuses to squeeze a nipple in a dark room and knock braces for a bit. All night, Gemma imagined, the bathroom would fill and empty with replicas meeting to touch and bargain and barter and stare.

  Gemma leaned up against the counter, not even caring it was wet. The half-light made strange looping shadows on the walls and ceiling. “Stethoscope?”

  “Like how the doctors and nurses do it,” Calliope said. She placed a hand on her own chest to demonstrate, inhaling deep. Then she shifted her hand again, and again. Stethoscope: they’d invented their own term for second base. She dropped her hand. “Have you ever done stethoscope?” she asked.

  “No,” Gemma lied. She thought of being with Pete in her parents’ basement, next to the rows of canned goods and
bottled water, and how he’d traced the long scar between her chest and navel. It could have been a memory from someone else’s life.

  She had the crazy idea that maybe Calliope and her other replicas would take not just her skin and hair and freckles, but her past, her life, her memory. The longer she stayed here, the less she would have that would belong to her and to her alone.

  She was losing it. She opened her eyes and fumbled to turn on the faucet, drinking from a cupped palm. Behind her, Calliope’s face was a narrow shadow of hers.

  “Then there’s the full examining,” Calliope was saying. Gemma didn’t have to ask what that was. She could imagine well enough. “But I never done that yet. I tried one time with a Green, but he got sick right in the middle. Then one of the guards came in and yelled.”

  Gemma seized on this. “Didn’t you get in trouble?” she asked. She didn’t want to talk about examining and stethoscope and observation anymore. She didn’t want to think about these broken kids playing doctor.

  Calliope looked puzzled. “Lots of the guards play too,” she said.

  Gemma understood, now, what Calliope had said to her outside the bathroom, and why the red-haired soldier had looked at them the way he did. He must know what went on at night, and what the other soldiers did with the replicas when they thought they could get away with it.

  The door opened again. The boy, the White, had returned, alone.

  Gemma’s heart broke, actually broke—she felt it crumble in her chest, like a nub of chalk—but before she could ask what had happened to Pete, the door opened a second time and there he was.

  Pete. He looked as if he’d been shocked into aging a hundred years. Feathery white eyelashes, hollows beneath his eyes, skin leached of color.

  And yet, when he saw her, he smiled, and everything changed. Her whole world tilted, and slid her toward him, into his arms.

  “Fancy meeting you here,” he said. His voice was the same—he might have been teasing her during a long car ride, and she tasted salt before she realized she was crying.