His father loves to lecture, and the angrier he is, the longer the lecture goes. Only once did he become physically violent with Jasper. Jasper had gotten suspended for cursing at a math teacher who deserved it, and that night his father blew like a volcano, throwing Jasper hard enough to crack the drywall. Then his father cried and begged forgiveness. Jasper knew this type of thing is rarely a one-time occurrence. In most cases it becomes a pattern—as it is for several of his friends, whose high-stress parents see their kids as the only available pressure valve. But it won’t become a pattern if Jasper never gives his father a reason to hit him again. Or at least not until he’s escaped to a place of safety. Where kids protect each other.
At dinner his father will often complain about the state of the world or the morons in his office. He still goes off on diatribes about the teen “terror march” on Washington, long after it ended. Maybe because Jasper once commented that he would have liked to have seen it. But tonight his father doesn’t voice any opinions at dinner. He doesn’t complain about work or about traffic or about anything. Jasper noticed he seemed tired, but it’s more than that. He’s quiet, distracted, and noticeably pale.
His mother doesn’t say anything. Instead she leaves his father’s medication on the counter, just in case he might forget to take it. Jasper can’t stand a dinner table where the only sounds are the scraping of silverware on china. Even a lecture would be better than that. If no one will say anything, he has to.
“Is it your heart, Dad?” he asks. There are times he wishes his father would just keel over and die, but when that actually seems like a possibility, Jasper hates himself for thinking that and gets terrified that it might actually happen.
“I’m fine,” his father says, as Jasper knew he would—but now the door’s been opened for discussion, and his mom takes over.
“Maybe you should get in to see the doctor.”
“It’s indigestion,” his father says, a bit louder. “I’m not an idiot; I can tell the difference.”
Jasper scrapes himself a forkful of peas and speaks without looking up at him. “Indigestion doesn’t make your lips turn blue.”
His father puts down his silverware with a clatter. “What is this, the Inquisition?”
No one says anything for a few moments. Jasper counts peas on his plate. He ponders how to dissect his steak to get the most meat off the bone. He waits to see which direction his father’s mind will go. His father does get cyanotic from time to time. Low blood oxygen. He’s already had two heart attacks. He’s slimmed down and exercises more but refuses to change his eating habits. The doctors say he’ll need a new heart eventually. Which, to his father, is like saying he’ll eventually have to clean the garage.
“Fine,” he finally says. “I’ll go in tomorrow and get checked out if that will make you both happy.”
Jasper silently sighs with relief. He knows before the end of the week he’ll be hoping his father drops dead again—but not until he comes home with a clean bill of health.
• • •
They change the dosage of his father’s meds, tell him he has to stop eating red meat, and put him on some nebulous transplant waiting list. His lips aren’t cyanotic anymore, and for the Nelson family, out of sight is out of mind, so Jasper’s attention returns to Alph and his band of ferals.
The trick to impressing Alph is magnitude and audacity. He didn’t lay claim to an old theater for nothing; Alph likes drama and spectacle. Jasper can give him that. All he has to do is keep his eyes open for an opportunity to present itself, which it does a week later. It is the confluence of three random events that sets Jasper’s stage. One: His parents have a Friday night dinner party—the kind that will keep them out at least until midnight. Two: Jasper’s being paid to feed the cats at the neighbors’ house while they’re on vacation. Three: That particular neighbor has a new sports car parked on the driveway. Candy-apple red. It’s what his father calls a midlife-crisis coupe, all muscle and curves. The kind of car that sleazy salesmen call “sexy” and charge more for than it’s actually worth. But for a car like that, its parts are more valuable than the car is whole.
And so while his parents are off at their party, Jasper feeds the cats and hot-wires the car. He doesn’t have his license yet, but he has a learner’s permit and can drive as well as any other kid his age. The trick will be crossing into the wild zone and getting to Alph’s hangout without getting jacked by other ferals on the way. He keeps a crowbar on the passenger seat in case he’s forced to defend himself.
There’s plenty of activity tonight. Bonfires and jam sessions and drunken brawls. Life bleeds like a wound everywhere in the wild zone. Ever since the teen march on Washington, ferals have been celebrating like it was a victory—and perhaps it was. Sure, they were subdued with tear gas and tranqs and batons, but they still proved what a formidable force they can be.
Jasper drives down the darker streets, where there’s less activity and fewer chances of getting surrounded by covetous ferals. The ones he passes eye him, though. They stare at the red beast he drives. One kid steps in front of him, trying to make him stop—even smiling to put Jasper’s worries at ease, but Jasper doesn’t fall for it. He keeps on driving, and the kid has to leap out of the way to avoid being roadkill. If he hadn’t jumped, would Jasper have hit him? He’s not sure. Probably. Because if he didn’t, he might be dead himself. That’s the way of things in the wild zone.
When he finally arrives at the old theater, a few of Alph’s street lookouts spot him and are flabbergasted.
“Is that the schoolie?”
“Nah, it can’t be the schoolie.”
“Yeah, it is the schoolie!”
Jasper hops out, strutting proudly. “Go get Alph,” Jasper tells them, feeling like he’s earned the right to give them an order.
One of them disappears inside and comes back a minute later with Alph.
“It was my neighbor’s, but now it’s all yours,” Jasper tells him, grinning wider than the crescent moon. “A gift from me to you. I don’t need anything in return.” Which isn’t entirely true. What he needs in return can’t be quantified in dollar signs. What Jasper wants is the key to Alph’s kingdom. Or if not the key, then at least an open door. A luxury car for the right to join. Jasper thinks that’s more than fair. And once he disappears into the wild zone, he can say good-bye to his corporate high school and his parents’ expectations and his dull, lackluster life forever. Like Alph said, ferals are the future, and Jasper’s ready to be a part of that future, wherever it takes him.
“You steal this?”
“Easiest thing I ever did,” Jasper says proudly.
Alph keeps a poker face. He inspects the car. Jasper impatiently waits for his pat on the back, but it never comes.
“A car like this, every part’s got a molecular signature. If I try to chop it, it’ll point to me from every freaking direction.” Then, to Jasper’s horror, he tells another kid to take it and drive it into the river. The kid seems excited by the prospect and peels out in the stolen car.
“Alph, I’m sorry,” Jasper says, trying to salvage something out of this. “I just thought you’d want . . . I mean, I just wanted to show you . . . I mean, I can do better. I swear I can! Just tell me how. Tell me what you need me to do!”
Alph appraises him, then says calmly, “Come inside.”
Once they’re in, Alph, with a couple of the others, leads Jasper to an area separate from the rest of the theater. A broken display case. Rusted popcorn maker. It was once the theater’s concession stand.
“You want to be one of us?” Alph asks.
Jasper nods.
“You think it’s fun to scrounge for food and fight just to stay alive?” Then Alph lifts his shirt, showing half a dozen healed scars even worse than the one on his face. “Do you know how many knife fights I’ve been in? How many flash riots? Do you think I was in them for fun? Do you, for one minute, think I wouldn’t change places with your lousy stinking schoolie ass?”
“You’re free, Alph!” Jasper shouts. “You get to do what you want when you want.”
Then Alph pushes him so hard, he hits the wall behind him. “Can’t you see? I don’t get to do ANYTHING I want! Because I’m too busy just trying to stay alive. And you come here with your fancy school uniform and your mother’s jewelry and your neighbor’s freaking car, and you think you can buy your way in? What kind of idiot buys his way into the bottom?”
Now Jasper finds himself stammering. “But—but it’s not like that. I wanna—I wanna help. I wanna help all of you. I can be important to you!”
“What you need, Nelson, is to see what you have for what it is. You won life’s lottery, and you want to throw it away? Why would I ever want to associate with anyone that stupid?”
The others back away, sensing what’s about to happen. Jasper has no idea what to do now, what to say, other than “Kevin, I’m sorry!”
“And I told you to NEVER call me that!”
Then Alph takes a deep breath, calming himself down. Jasper thinks it’s over, until Alph rolls up his sleeves.
“Clearly your skull is so dense, there’s only one way to get through to you.”
And then he begins pounding on Jasper. Not fighting him, but hitting him, kicking him, beating him to a bloody pulp. And what makes it all the worse is that Alph does it with such emotional detachment. He’s not angry. He hasn’t lost control. He’s simply doing his job.
When it’s over, and Jasper lies on the ground sobbing, Alph has Raf haul him to his feet. Then Alph gets in his face, speaking gently, but with a threat beneath his words as deadly as an undertow.
“You’ll tell your parents you were beaten up on the other side of town. You’ll say it wasn’t ferals. You’ll make them believe it. And then you’ll go back to your lucky little life that the rest of us wish we could have, and you will make something of yourself. Outta respect for the rest of us who can’t. And if you ever think about spitting out that silver spoon again, remember what happened here today. Because the next time you show up here, I’ll kill you.”
And then they hurl Jasper out into the street.
• • •
Jasper’s parents come back early from their dinner party. Their car is in the driveway when he gets home. He knows he’ll be in trouble, but his battered face will buy him clemency if he plays it right. He stumbles in the front door, wishing he could just slip into bed and pretend he’d been there all night, but he knows it’s not possible.
His mother gasps then bursts into tears when she sees him. His father’s anger at him being AWOL for the evening quickly fades when Jasper tells them the horrible, terrible thing that happened to him. That while he was feeding the neighbor’s pets, two men broke in and kidnapped him. They stole the neighbor’s car, beat Jasper real good, and were going to hold him for ransom, but Jasper slipped out of his bonds and jumped out of the moving car, and the kidnappers were so freaked, they took off. He ran all the way home.
He’s taken to the hospital and treated for his wounds. He makes an official statement for the police. He looks at mug shots but can’t identify either of his kidnappers. His parents idly talk about moving to an electrified-gated community—but all those communities are run by either Lifers or Choicers, and since his parents are notoriously nonpolitical, they don’t want to associate with either side of the war. The incident fades. Jasper goes back to school. Life goes on. It’s forgotten.
But not by Jasper.
• • •
“Unwinding,” not “unwiring.” It should be all over the news, but it isn’t. People whisper about it, though. Jasper hears kids talk about it in school. He hears adults mumbling about it in the street.
And then there’s the war. There are rumors that the war isn’t coming to an end, but that it’s already over. Yet an official statement is never made by either side. Usually the end of a war is a big deal. Parades, and strangers kissing in the street. But this war was different. This time both sides just slipped shamefully into the shadows when no one was looking. It’s as if part of the armistice was to not talk about it. The armies just stopped fighting. The rhetoric stopped flying. Out of nowhere sanity now appears to prevail.
And bad kids are disappearing.
• • •
On a warm afternoon, less than a month after the Unwind Accord is signed, Jasper T. Nelson, looking sharp in his school uniform, shows up at a house just a few blocks away from his own. He knows who lives there. Kids always remember the homes of their childhood friends.
The woman who opens the door looks slightly hunched, as if the weight of her life is simply too much for her. She couldn’t be any older than Jasper’s mother, and yet she seems much worse for the wear.
“Can I help you?” she asks. “If you’re selling something, I’m not buying. Sorry.”
“No, I’m not selling anything,” Jasper says. “It’s about your son. It’s about Kevin. Can I come in?”
At the mention of her son’s name, the very skin on her face seems to sag. She takes a moment. Jasper can see her weighing in her mind whether to invite him in or slam the door in his face. The latter is not a possibility, however, because Jasper has surreptitiously slipped his foot over the corner of the threshold, so she couldn’t slam the door on him if she tried. And if she does try, he’ll scream so that all the neighbors will hear how the nasty neighbor woman just slammed a poor schoolboy’s foot in her door.
But instead she chooses wisely and lets him in.
He sits in the living room. She sits across from him.
“Is he dead?” the woman asks. “Is that why you’re here? To tell me he’s dead?”
“No,” Jasper tells her. “He’s not dead.”
She seems both relieved and disappointed—and miserable about both of those feelings. “He went feral almost two years ago,” the woman tells him. “He’s only been back once. Didn’t even say why. He had something to eat, left without saying good-bye, and never came back again.” Then she looks Jasper over. “You don’t look like the kind of boy Kevin would hang out with.”
Jasper smiles. “I’m not, but even so, I do want to help him.”
She looks at him, guarded. “How?”
Then he spreads out a document in front of her, all written in legalese. In triplicate. White, yellow, and pink. “There’s this new program to help ferals,” Jasper explains. “It allows them to contribute to society in a meaningful way. I joined a club at my school, and we’re going around talking to the parents of feral kids because we can’t help those kids without permission.”
“Permission,” she repeats. She takes the document and starts to look it over. “What is this thing ‘unwinding’? I hear people talking about it, but I don’t know what it is.”
Now Jasper gets to the point. “I understand the courts found you and your husband liable for the things that Kevin stole.”
She leans back in her chair, suddenly seeing Jasper through a much darker lens. “How do you know that?”
“It’s all public record—I looked it up on my phone. I could show you the app.” He holds up his phone to her, but she doesn’t take it. “Isn’t there also a family that’s suing you for another kid’s medical expenses, because Alph—uh, I mean Kevin—broke the kid’s jaw? You’ll probably be paying damages for years.”
Now she doesn’t say anything. Good. Stunned into silence. Now to go in for the kill. Jasper smiles. “I’m sorry; I don’t mean to upset you or anything. In fact, I’m here with good news. You can make all that go away! Paragraph Nine-B of the unwind order states that the liability for any offenses made by your son from seven days postconception until now falls upon the state. You won’t owe anyone anything!”
She looks at the order again. Jasper can see her eyes darting over it, but he knows she’s not reading. She’s thinking. Weighing. Pitting her conscience against what’s practical. So Jasper adds another weight on the scale.
“The court will even remove the lien they’ve placed o
n your house.”
Now she stares at him as if she hasn’t heard him right. “What lien?”
“You mean your husband didn’t tell you? That kid with the broken jaw’s got sharks for lawyers. They’re trying to take away your house.”
She holds eye contact with him for a moment longer. Of all the things he’s said, this is the only one that isn’t true, but a white lie can be justified if it leads to the proper end. The woman looks over the unwind order again, this time actually reading it. Then she looks up at Jasper with those eyes so old before their time.
“You got a pen?”
• • •
The raid happens two days later. Jasper’s in a Juvey-cop car, on a ride-along. It’s a perk of being part of his school’s SDS club: Students for a Divisional Solution. So far Jasper is the only member, but he expects his club’s popularity will grow.
Juvies descend on the old theater like a SWAT team. Kids scatter like rats. Some get away, but more are captured. Once Jasper hears the squad captain give the all clear over the police radio, he gets out of the cruiser and slips inside. He was told to wait in the car, and said that he would, but of course he was lying.
Inside, the Juvies have about a dozen kids cuffed and seated. About a dozen others are being laid out in a neat row as if they’re dead, but Jasper knows they’re just tranq’d.
The captain spots Jasper and frowns. “What the hell are you doing in here? Didn’t I tell you to wait in the car?”
“It was my lead that made this happen, Officer,” Jasper says respectfully. “The least you could do is let me see how it went down.”
“It’s still not safe, kid.”
“Looks safe to me. Where’s the leader?”
The cop glares at him a bit more, then gives up, shaking his head. “Over there.”
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