A high school kid could’ve done a better job, he mumbles, thinking of his anatomy class during his senior year. There he’d dissected a cat, and he and his partner, William Flaten, a curly-haired mouth-breathing white boy, had, after cutting away all the yellow, sopping fat, revealed a beautiful, intricate network that until then had been alive only in his textbook.
This is nuts, he’d told William. All these connected pieces.
Look at its butt, William had said.
20 min, 44 sec.
Bryan eviscerates six corpses, finds no envelopes. Victor finds one, Jaidee none, and Jane is out of commission, sitting on the sidelines, holding her knees, rocking back and forth. Bryan glances over: she looks so distraught and small. Victor runs to her, kneels down, puts his arm around her, returns to his cutting. Once Victor’s back to his corpse, Bryan goes to her. He kneels down.
Too intense, huh, he says.
She smiles noncommittally.
Jane, we need you. We need your help.
Her smile fades. She shakes her head. The smell, she says.
You’ll forget it someday, Bryan says. But you can’t quit now. We’re close. We’re very close.
17 min, 12 sec.
I wanted to be here, Jane says, her eyes pleading. Overhead, the green light races across her scalp, turning her, for a second, into a monster. I made Victor do it.
Get up, Bryan says. He extends his hand. Now, Jane.
But—
You wanna tell people we failed because you couldn’t cut up some dolls? Is that what you want?
No, but—
Then get up. He stands, stares down at her, thinks how dumb the dolls’ insides look, how uniformly unreal. That anyone should actually be scared of them seems ridiculous.
Bryan, she says. I can’t.
You don’t have a choice.
But I can’t!
Get up or I’ll yell the word, Bryan says, feeling heat steam from behind his back. We’re a team. Remember? That’s how the Four got through this. Always a team.
But—
No more excuses. We’re wasting time.
She stares up at him, her eyes vicious and cold, and he thinks this is the end, that it’s all over, but then her hand is in his, and she’s on her feet.
There ya go, Bryan says, smiling through cracked blood.
Fuck off, Jane says.
Sure, he says, and goes back to his corpse.
13 min, 8 sec.
Bryan stabs a man in a suit.
What’s the count? he shouts. He has yet to get an envelope. He rips, pulls.
I have four! Jaidee says.
Jaidee’s on fire! Bryan says.
Three here! says Victor.
Only three left? Bryan says. Jane, whaddya say? You and me? Two and one? One and two?
Jane doesn’t respond.
11 min, 35 sec.
Bryan feels electric. He feels unyielding energy. The malaise that’d shot through him in the last cell has evaporated. In its place: vibrant, colorful anticipation. He designs a dance around each fake corpse: knife back, elbow out, wrist flicked, shoulders back, hip turned, arm extended—pirouette, switch hands—knife deeper, downward cut, grab skin, pull. The dance becomes meditative, incantatory, and even during the last few minutes, when the ghouls with shock wands once again enter the room, he finds himself immune to their assaults. With five minutes left, he has eviscerated ten dolls, and he wants more. Because:
Yes, he’ll buy his mother that car. He’ll finance something nice, something with power-everything, red and sleek and shiny, a car that she’ll be proud to drive around town. Every time someone comments on it, she’ll sigh, smile sideways, and say, My son got me this, can you believe it? She deserves it, he thinks. Because: Look at him! He’s getting good grades! In college, no less. There’s a future for him now. A future devoid of smoky bus fumes and crowding vagrants and drunk college kids telling him he’s one of the coolest Black bus drivers they’ve ever met. There’s real hope at real betterment now: a tangible, buoyant, luminous beyond. And:
Yes, he’ll make up with Simone. He’ll beg and plead if he needs to. He’ll confess that what happened happened and say there’s no going back, but that if she’ll have him, if she’ll take one more chance, she’ll see that the past is always the past, written without possible modification, but the future contains infinite possibility, and that he wants more than anything to experience those possibilities with her.
Who knows? He might even propose.
He imagines his mother’s face. My baby! she’ll say. He imagines Aunt Lynette, crying. He imagines Kendra with her spiderweb earrings saying, I did this. I made this happen, you know. She’ll grin so wide he’ll see her molars.
Bryan! Victor shouts. Bryan, how many do you have?
Bryan looks at Victor, breathes deep. He stuffs his hands in his pockets, brings out five red envelopes. He hadn’t even known he’d collected them.
Holy shit, Victor says. We have all of them!
But we still have time, Bryan says, looking at the doll he’s half carved.
It doesn’t matter! We’re done!
But—
We’re done! You get that? Only one fucking cell left! Only one fucking cell left!
Indeed, for below the clock are these words: YOU MAY PROCEED.
Part III
Cell Five
Kendra
Kendra spent her first week of school in a fog. Lincoln High, while not as white as she’d imagined, was still pretty white, and she felt entirely conspicuous: suspicious eyes judged her wherever she went, and in class, it seemed that everyone already had solid, impenetrable friend groups. So she roamed the halls alone, head down, shuffling from room to room, sitting in the back, focusing on her feet. In her American history class, when the teacher—a stocky, balding man named Mr. Swenson—called her name, she vomited in her mouth and swallowed, the hot, acidic gruel burning her throat.
“It’s customary,” the teacher said, “for students to say ‘here’ when called for roll.”
Kendra slunk in her seat.
At lunch, instead of eating by herself, she used her mom’s calling card to call Camille, who started school a week later than her. Her friend picked up on the second ring.
“You’re calling from school?” Camille said. “Like, a pay phone?”
“Yeah,” Kendra said.
“But you should be making friends,” Camille said. “Like, white Nebraska friends, or, I don’t know—can you? Is it possible? Like, what do people think of you?”
“There are some Black kids—”
“So, D and I were at the library because he’s thinking of going back to school, you know? He wanted to look up some books on colleges and stuff, like which ones had high rates of success for psychology, because that’s what he’s interested in. Anyway. We were looking at this thing called microfiche and he found this article that said that people who are minorities in their towns have higher rates of depression and mental things like that. So do you have depression now? Like, do you feel upset? Sad? Angry? Confused? This study said that people in your situation feel that way, and I got mad and I said, ‘D! We can’t let her get depressed! We’ve gotta help somehow!’ But he was like, ‘What the fuck can we do?’ so we left it at that because we can’t do shit being out here, you know?”
Kendra sat on the floor, held the phone tight to her ear. An ant scurried by. She squashed it. “My history teacher eats cheese at his desk,” she said, wiping her hand on the floor. “Like, that string-cheese shit.”
“I told D that you’d be just fine and that you only have, like, two years left and then you’ll be done anyway, and you can come back here. We could be roommates, Kendra! You’ll get into Georgetown, I’m sure of it. You’re so smart and you read all those books so I know you can do it.”
A boy cleared his throat a few feet away. Kendra looked up at him. His face was pudgy and stern and covered in acne. He stared down at her. She rolled her eyes.
; “I guess someone else needs to use the phone,” Kendra said.
“What?” Camille said. “You just got on. Fuck ’em.”
“I start my job this week,” Kendra said. “Thursday night. My first shift.”
“You talk to Shawn about that?” Camille said. “I’m sure he’s having wet dreams thinking of you at that haunted whatever. I’m sure he’s—”
“He’s excited.”
“You two are so weird,” she said. “I mean, you’ve always been weird, but you two together are like Elvira and Fester. He’s Uncle Fester, of course. You’re Elvira ’cause your boobs are nice.”
“Thanks.”
“So you’re Elvira and he’s Fester but what am I? What am I? And what is D? We’re definitely not freaky like you and Shawn but we’re something, right? We’re something. I’ll have to think. I’ll have to—”
The boy cleared his throat again. Kendra said, “Hey, I gotta go. This kid keeps clearing his throat like I can’t fuckin’ see him standing right in front of me.”
“Is he cute?” Camille said. “If not, don’t bother.”
“I gotta go anyway,” Kendra said, feeling her chest sink into her stomach. “But I’ll call you this week. Like, after my first shift, tell you all about it.”
“Yes! Kendra! I’m really fucking sorry that you called me instead of eating lunch with friends but this job will probably introduce you to some of your kind, you know, freaks, so . . . and you don’t need to make friends at school anyway, you know? You don’t need that shit.”
“Talk to you later,” Kendra said, glaring at the boy.
“Hey, do you want me to—”
Kendra hung up.
She spent the rest of the day floating through her afternoon classes, a sea of khaki and chalkboards and textbooks and paper, and when it was over, when the final bell rang, she thought: I did it. I made it through okay. But then: at her locker, a brown-haired, mouse-faced girl. She knocked on the metal as if Kendra were behind an actual door. Kendra looked at her, then turned around, expecting that this girl in floral-print jean shorts had mistaken her for someone else.
“You’re Kendra?” the girl said.
“Yeah?” Kendra said.
“I’m Sarah!” she said, extending her hand. “So happy to meet you.”
“Okay?” Kendra said, frustrated, thinking that she wasn’t done, that she’d somehow missed something—but what? A meeting? An orientation? An actual class?
“I’m your coworker? I work at Quigley?” She smiled, leaned against the locker next to Kendra’s.
“Oh,” Kendra said, relaxing.
“We’re gonna have a great season!” Sarah said. She giggled, covered her mouth, turned, looked down the hall, then back at Kendra, lowered her voice, widened her eyes. “Hey, John said you don’t have a car?”
“I can find a way,” Kendra said. “Is it, like, a secret?”
“I’ll give you a ride, of course!” Sarah said, slapping Kendra’s shoulder. “It’s really no problem.”
Kendra grabbed where she’d been slapped. “We start at eight?” she said, kneading her shoulder.
“What? No. I mean, yeah, that’s when we have to be in the lot, but there’s a bunch of stuff before, you know, costumes, makeup, all that. I usually get there at seven. I can’t believe nobody told you any of this.” She paused. “John said you live way out past Seventieth? Sort of weird that you’re going to school here, but that’s really no big deal for me. I can still come and get you.”
Kendra slung her backpack over her shoulder, closed her locker, walked toward the front door. Sarah followed her. “John is completely in love with you and your cousin, you know that?” Sarah said, matching Kendra’s steps. “Like, he told us all about you two and he was seriously glowing. Like, he thinks you guys are gonna change things up.”
“Huh?” Kendra said. “Bryan’s not working there.”
“You never know! Maybe John’ll hire him for something else.”
Kendra shook her head. “He’s definitely not interested.”
“But you!” Sarah said. “John adores you too! Couldn’t stop smiling when he talked about you. I swear.”
“That’s weird.”
“John’s got a sense about these things. He only hires the best, you know?”
“Didn’t Cory hire me?” Kendra said.
“No way,” Sarah said. “John is the only person who hires. Cory can refer people, but John always has the last say.”
“Hmm,” Kendra said. They opened the doors to blazing sun and near-suffocating humidity. Kendra pulled her backpack tighter on her shoulder, squinted against the heat.
“I’m serious,” Sarah said, brushing her hair off her shoulder. “He loves you.” They walked down the steps, paused. Blue sky pressed down overhead. Students whizzed by, yelling at one another, free. Kendra thought about the day she’d rushed out of her geometry class at Dunbar. It seemed like ages ago.
“It’s gonna be great,” Sarah said. “You’ll have a blast.” A breeze pushed Sarah’s hair into her face. She grabbed it, wrapped it up, reached into a pocket, and pulled out a red scrunchie. Toward the top of her neck, right underneath her chin, Kendra noticed a fading hickey. “I haven’t heard him talk about anyone like that,” Sarah said, tying her hair.
“He talks to you about new employees?” Kendra said.
“We had a meeting. Your paperwork hadn’t gone through yet, that’s why you weren’t there. But you’ll be at all of them from now on.”
“Okay,” Kendra said, grabbing her backpack strap. “Hey, I gotta catch the bus,” she said.
“The bus?” Sarah said. “No, I’ll give you a ride. We’re coworkers now!”
“Coworkers,” Kendra said.
“And I’d be honored to have the newest, most prized employee in my car.” She grinned, touched Kendra’s shoulder, led her to the parking lot. Kendra hesitated. She wanted badly to get away from this chirpy, creepy girl, but Sarah’s touch was insistent, and Kendra hated the bus, so she relented. She eased into Sarah’s Pontiac, which smelled like old coffee, and hugged her backpack close to her lap. Once on the road, to calm herself down, she pictured Shawn’s face, his large eyes tapered slightly at the ends, the mole by the right side of his nose, his sharp chin, his soft lip fuzz, and of course his forehead, that long, beautiful expanse that would undoubtedly happy-crease the moment she told him how much of an impression she’d made with just one appearance.
She turned to Sarah and said, “So how long are the shifts?”
On Thursday, before Sarah picked her up, Kendra told her aunt and mother that she was going out, that she’d made a friend. In the living room, Lynette and Rae stared down at her, their brows furrowed.
“A boy?” Rae said.
“No,” Kendra said. “Her name is Sarah.”
“Sarah who?” Lynette said.
“Sarah Luchs,” Kendra said. “Why, do you know her or something?”
“Luchs,” Lynette said. “What kind of name is that?”
“I think it’s wonderful,” Rae said. “Best to be moving on from D.C.”
“She doesn’t need to move on from D.C.,” Lynette said, staring hard at her daughter. “She’s hardly been gone a few months.”
“I suppose she can just be alone and mopey,” Rae said.
“Please,” Lynette said.
“Just saying,” Rae said.
“You don’t just move on from these types of things,” Lynette said.
“This is what people do,” Rae said.
Her mother shook her head.
As it happened, Rae and Lynette had been embroiled in a personal conflict for the last month. Rae thought it best, a year after Greg’s death, that Lynette try dating again, go back on the market. “You have so much more life to live,” Rae said. “And you’re not getting any younger.”
Lynette lashed back by pointing out that Rae certainly hadn’t “gone back on the market,” that it’d been way more than a year since Bryan’s father
had left.
“There’s a difference, Lynette,” Rae said. “I don’t want a man. I don’t need a man. But you—you’re not like me. You know this.”
“Please,” Lynette said, shaking her head. “I don’t need anything.”
“Hmm,” Rae said. “If that’s what you say.”
Rae persisted, widening an increasingly hostile chasm, sending the sisters into a maelstrom of back-and-forth until finally, one day they stopped speaking directly to each other. At dinner, when they all sat down together, Rae and Lynette talked through Kendra, making comments like “Kendra, I know you use your aunt’s bathroom sometimes, and I’m sorry it’s so filthy, but what can you do?” and “Kendra, you might be wondering why the refrigerator is so empty. Maybe you should ask your mother about that?” When Bryan came to visit—which was often—lines were drawn: Kendra and Lynette versus Bryan and Rae, and though Bryan clearly wanted nothing to do with the escalations, he told Kendra that family required him to side with his mother.
“Family?” Kendra said. “But we’re all family.”
“Yeah,” he said. “But you know what I mean.”
In Sarah’s passenger seat, thinking about her mother with another man, trying to fathom the idea of a stepfather, Kendra sat rigid while her new colleague weaved through O Street traffic. Hootie & the Blowfish—a band Kendra had sworn was fake until Camille had shown her the CD cover in CD Warehouse (Wait, he’s Black? she’d said)—blared from the speakers. Just let her cryyyyyy . . .
“So you’re from Washington, D.C., huh?” Sarah said, turning onto the freeway, adjusting the radio volume.
“Yeah,” Kendra said.
“That’s so cool! I’ve never left Nebraska, unless you count the time I went to Disney World when I was, like, eight.”
“Mmm,” Kendra said.
Sarah exited the freeway, took a few turns, and suddenly, impossibly, they were surrounded by cornfields.
“So did you leave a boyfriend or anything?” Sarah said. “You don’t have to tell me. Just wondering.”
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