Aiden stood again and spun to face the crowd. “Come on! Let somebody through!” A few staff members had fought their way to the front of the crowd, Dr. Richardson and three men in maintenance uniforms. “Does anyone know what’s wrong with—”
He heard it before he felt it, the crowd screaming, a second before Eddy’s shoulder snapped into his spine, pile-driving him forward into the holy water basin in the center aisle. He felt his forehead smack against stone, and his world went cold.
The last thing he heard were the bells of the church, ringing out forever across the empty, warm, black space into which he was falling.
Neesha.
SHE FELT A pair of hands pull her from the ground and she swayed in small circles, blinking to find her vision. She must have rolled several feet, because she was behind the pews now. It had been such a violent moment, with no light and a hundred students trying to push past the bottleneck of the center aisle. She was pretty sure she’d been thrown to the ground but it was hard to know who was doing what on purpose; people were falling over each other.
“Are you okay?” It was Leia, one of her Chem School classmates, dragging Neesha to her feet. “We’re over here, come on.”
Cold air hit her face; someone had opened the back doors of the chapel and students were streaming out. She followed Leia to a pillar in the back of the chapel. A few of the other C-School kids were milling in the corner, trying to get a look at the front of the church.
“What the fuck?” someone asked. “Did Aiden just kill Eddy?”
“I think Eddy almost killed Aiden,” Leia said.
“Why was he freaking out?”
“Something about lights.”
“The lights?”
Neesha could barely hear them. There was a muffled ringing in her ears; her face was flushed with blood. Flashlights at the front of the sanctuary started flickering on, swirling light through the abstract shapes and colors of the room.
“Students, return to your dorms immediately,” Father Farke announced from the pulpit. “There will be no open campus this evening. Return to your dorms, immediately.”
Neesha looked to the front of the church, expecting to see Emma rushing in with concern. It was her boyfriend, after all. But Emma wasn’t there.
“Are you okay?” Leia had been watching her sway back and forth.
“I think I got kicked in the face.”
“Let’s have a cigarette, it’ll balance you out,” she said, and started leading them toward the door.
Neesha felt for them in her pocket, removed them, and then felt the pocket again. It was empty. She froze. The crowd continued to push them forward as she slapped at her pockets.
“What are you doing?” Leia asked. Several arms against her back prodded her forward, but instead she dropped to the floor.
“Get up!” Someone nudged her with their knee.
“What happened?” Leia crouched next to her.
“My envelope,” Neesha choked.
“Envelope?”
Neesha crawled out of the path of the students and felt blindly. “It’s gone.”
“What was in it?”
She didn’t respond.
“Neesha, what was in the envelope?” Leia grabbed her by the wrist and squeezed.
Systems crashed in her brain. Neesha went crawling back toward the center aisle, toward where she’d first hit the ground, but there were still students plowing toward the rear exit. “What the fuck are you doing?” disembodied voices shouted down at her; “Holy shit, get off the floor!” and “Are you okay?” from faces that she didn’t have time to notice. She went row by row, but the light from the candles didn’t reach the aisles so the floor beneath the pews was pitch-black shadow. The center aisle cleared out, and Neesha slumped against one of the pews.
“Would someone . . . take it?” Leia asked from the ground behind her.
Neesha swallowed. Yes, someone would take it, but only two people knew about it. Emma, but it was her money anyway. Which left—
She stood up abruptly. As the last few students left the church, she thought she might have seen a dark-purple-and-yellow hood go up as it disappeared into the fog.
Evan.
OF ALL EMMA’S patterns, the most important was the ten minutes she spent at the base of the school’s wooden cross, alone after mass.
The cross was forty-five feet tall. Its arms were so high that the constant wind and rain of the mountain had battered them into drooping downward in the middle. When you sat on the metal platform below, the cross appeared to stretch upward into the clouds, the light at its peak shining straight into heaven. Emma sat there alone every Thursday night, collapsed to her knees in front of it, transforming from the Emma of this world to the Emma of the next. When he pictured Emma in his head, this was how he saw her. This was where his mission had to begin.
He set his watch. He had thirty minutes to get back before the end of mass.
Inside the dorm, everything was quiet. The Goosebumps book was still hanging where he’d left it. He didn’t hesitate, standing tall for the cameras and sliding inside.
Emma’s room was heavy with the smell of her, a thick, fruity department store perfume, and dimly lit by bedside lamps. There was a split down the center, between Neesha’s perfectly organized bed and desk, and Emma’s side. Half of her clothes were strewn across the floor. Two of her textbooks were buried in the mess. Her sheets were tangled at the base of the bed.
There were photos taped all along the wall, but a few obvious gaps suggested some had been torn down. Most of the photos weren’t taken at Redemption, but what Evan assumed was her family home in Kansas. Young Emma was undeveloped but perfectly recognizable. The same thin blonde hair, but cut just below her ears. The same hundred-watt smile, but missing a few teeth. She had photos smiling with her mom, smiling with her dad, smiling at her church confirmation, smiling at what looked like a birthday pool party.
Then came the Polaroids from Redemption. A picnic with some instructors, a photo on a bench with Neesha, a Bible study with Father Farke. All of them were sterile and detached.
Emma didn’t smile in photos anymore; she hardly ever took them. She’d stopped going for walks to take her journal into the forest. Her conversations with friends were less than a minute long. She’d stopped doing her homework. Two days ago, she slept all day, instead of going to class. Emma was broken. She was crying out, but no one was listening.
Except him. He was listening.
By the foot of the bed, there was a photo with Aiden, his arms wrapped around her, suffocating her. Evan ripped it down.
There was one surface on Emma’s side of the room that wasn’t in disarray. The only item on her desk, a small, leather-bound notebook, sat perfectly centered, waiting for him to discover it.
Emmalynn Donahue / Testimonial Journal / Year Four.
Below the title was Redemption’s crest, a half oval with crescent moons and a book, shining upward into the school’s credo: You are the light of the world.
Evan sat in her chair for a few moments without moving, his heartbeat rising as he stared into the cover, its jacket cracked from use, unsure where to start. With two fingers, he pulled back a single page.
Day 1. Sigh. Another new year, another opportunity to get this right. I see myself in the face of every new student, their eyes wide enough to reflect my own, smooth skin where my creases have formed—
He retreated, pulling his hands off the surface quickly like it was hot to the touch, his temples pounding. The front cover fell on top of the journal again.
This was it. Ever since May fourteenth, he knew the pattern of Emma was fragmented. Everyone else was so directional and readable, but Emma curved, cut, and folded into herself. Everyone else could be predicted by patterns of desire and familiar endgames, stepping on others to get the things that they wanted. But Emma submitted herself to them, swam with their currents, felt their pain. Emma’s mysteries grew out of her subconscious. Poetry was her translation an
d her salvation. The testimonial journal was full of her poetry. This was the key to the pattern, the key to the mission, the answer to every riddle.
He flipped through the journal, scanning each page, trying to find the poem she’d read for him five months earlier. On Day 9, he found it, decorated with the same doodles that brought the rest of Emma’s writing to life. His heart beat faster, twice its normal speed.
I’ll hold your place next to me, eternally, endlessly.
This world was never big enough, but you still tried to make a place for me—
There was a knock on the door behind him.
He almost fell backward out of the chair, grabbing for the desk to stabilize himself. He held his breath and squeezed to prevent his muscles from vibrating. No one knew he was here; no one had any reason to think that the room wasn’t empty.
There was another knock. “Open, open.” It was a man’s voice, not one he recognized, with what sounded like a Russian accent. “We know you’re in this room.”
Evan’s pulse accelerated as he searched for options. He could try the window, but it was a three-story drop to the rocks below. There were places to hide, but the man’s S2—Subtext told him he wasn’t going anywhere, and if the S3—Intention was to punish him, the best he could do was lie. Often, a half-truth could reduce the S8—Consequence.
“We can hear you stomping around,” the voice said, knocking louder. “Not very subtle.”
His throat closed. He tried to breathe through his nose like Mom had taught him, but it wasn’t working. He couldn’t think about his safe place. All he could focus on was the punishment that was coming for him. Missing mass was inexcusable. Being in her dorm would make Emma mad. The mission would be over before it could even start. The handle shook like someone outside was using a key. He reached quickly for it and slammed it open.
There were three maintenance workers in the doorway, wearing dark gray plastic suits and black vests full of supplies. The man at the center was massive; at least six foot five, because his head nearly touched the fluorescent ceiling light above him.
“Ah.” The one in the center, the owner of the accent, cocked his head. “You are not Emmalynn Donahue.”
Evan stared blankly back, giving him no S2—Subtext. “No.”
He checked a clipboard in front of him. “And . . . you are also not Neesha Shah?”
“No.”
“So then . . . who are you?”
“I’m Evan.”
“Huh. Okay.” He didn’t look upset. But he did look serious. “Where is Emmalynn?”
“It’s just Emma. She doesn’t like Emmalynn.”
“Okay then, where’s Emma?”
Through the walls of the building, the church bells began to ring. The notes they played were discordant, too close in pitch to be pleasing to the ear. Instead, they hung in the air, unresolved and tense. “She’s at mass. Like everybody else.”
The maintenance man stared for a moment, then walked around him into the room. His arms were almost as wide as Evan’s chest. Evan noticed he was breathing heavy, unfamiliar lungs reacting to thin mountain air.
“So what are you, then?” the man asked. “Her boyfriend or something?”
“No,” Evan answered quickly. “Not her boyfriend.”
“Then why are you here?”
“She asked me to grab her homework for her before mass. I’m just running a little late.”
The two men outside the room stood at attention. Their reason for being there wasn’t clear, but the S2—Subtext was obvious: intimidation.
“Did you get it?” the man asked, starting to thumb through her books.
“Get what?”
The man looked up. “Her homework?”
“Uh, yeah.” He patted his backpack. “Got it in here.”
“Good. Such good friends. Everybody here, such good friends.” He tapped the center of her desk. “Where’s her . . . the progress journal?”
“Testimonial journal,” one of the men outside said.
“Yes, that.”
Evan shook his head. His hand clutched the top of his bag. “I don’t know.”
The man stared at Evan now. He could feel his body reacting to the pressure, his testicles migrating north at accelerating speeds.
“Well,” he said. “Were you going to mass, or . . . ?”
Without a word, Evan backed out of the room, avoiding the men outside the door, and started away from them.
“Hey.” The man inside the room leaned out. “If you see Emma, let her know Yanis is looking for her.”
Evan walked quickly down the hallway and stairs, trying to get far enough away to make sense out of the interaction. He was certain his life at Redemption was over. Everything he’d done demanded a punishment hearing or at least a write-up. But none of that had happened. Yanis didn’t care.
The seizing in his chest and throat returned, ten steps out the back door. S5—Rationale. He’d broken major rules, and Yanis didn’t care. Which meant whatever Emma had done, it was much, much worse than that.
Why was a maintenance worker trying to find her during mass? She was sitting in the third row of the chapel twenty minutes ago; why were they looking for her now? What had happened to Emma?
He heard noise from the chapel as he approached, not one voice but dozens, moving toward him through the fog. It was too early for mass to be over; someone was outside the chapel. Before he knew it, the entire student population was moving against him, plugging the walkways to the chapel. He jumped to a rock in the wild grass to avoid being run over.
“What happened?” he tried to ask the mob of students.
“They let us out early!” someone responded. “Eddy had a panic attack!”
His eyes fled to the back of the chapel, where the light at the top of the wooden cross was flickering. He leapt forward from the rock, launching himself into the crowd and starting to fight his way through. In between waves of passing students, he could catch only half glimpses of the metal platform at the base. He thought he saw a shadow pass over it, standing at the bottom of the cross, kneeling, but by the time he fought his way out of the crowd, it was gone. The yellow light on the top of the cross went out.
There was a roar from the students around him as they were plunged into darkness. Behind them, the exit signs of the school shot red light across the campus, and from tinny speakers on poles above their heads, a siren began to blare. The school’s intercom system ripped across the grounds, Dr. Richardson’s voice.
“Students, please return to your dorms. The maintenance sweep is beginning.”
Evan sprinted toward the cross, faster. He threw his elbows into passing plebes, ducking under their arms. The crowd thinned as he got to the back, sprinting over the chapel steps, along the side of the church, through the red-tinted darkness. He landed on the platform and sank to his knees before the cross.
He was alone. Emma wasn’t there.
Part II.
Maintenance Sweep.
Testimonial: Evan Andrews.
Year 1994–1995. Day 1.
First and foremost, I do not fully understand the purpose of the testimonial journal. Dr. Richardson says it’s to “keep a constantly updating record of how our minds and bodies are responding to the challenges of Redemption Preparatory” so that we can “create emotional awareness and have an open relationship with our progress.” But it seems as though the entire school is designed as a metric to test progress; self-assessment hardly feels necessary. Also, I feel my self-assessment may be subjectively unbalanced in my favor. I guess that’s the point. S6—Honesty.
Dr. Richardson said the best way to establish a natural rhythm with the journal was to treat it as a person, as though a trusted confidant asked at the end of every day what I’ve been doing and how I’ve been feeling. This is silly. I see no need to recall past events, as I have already experienced them, making the practice of emotional deconstruction both irrelevant and unnecessary (S6—Honesty), particularly to an uncons
cious conversational partner. However, I’d like to be successful at Redemption—
So hello, inanimate journal.
I woke up at 4:00 a.m. to take two flights, from Burlington to Newark, and from Newark to Salt Lake City, with my mother and my father, and then they rented a Ford Escort and drove me to the Redemption pickup station. The bus ride took four hours, straight into the mountains. After an hour, most of the buildings and houses from Salt Lake City were gone. By two hours, we stopped seeing even small towns and fuel stations. By three hours, we had to drive slowly because there was too much fog to see far in front of the bus. By four hours, we arrived at Redemption.
It doesn’t look like the photographs. Not in a way that’s misleading, but the photographs failed to capture the full context. The GRC, the central school building, is state of the art, but you don’t see the age of its stone walls or feel the impenetrable strength of its physical structure. You can see that there’s a network of hallways connecting the academic buildings and dormitories, but until you’re walking through them, you can’t appreciate just how complicated their construction must have been. In the overhead map, it looks perfectly geometrical, like a chessboard, but in person, it feels like a maze.
My father helped me onto the bus, loading my three boxes one by one, then turned the car around immediately. He said goodbye quickly and reoffered his parenting creed: “It all makes sense if you take the time to understand it.” My mother sat in the passenger side with a blanket over her legs. She had to stay in the car, instead of getting out to hug me. She told me that she understood why I was going to school, and if I ever wanted to come home, I should.
It occurs to me as I write this that seeing her seated there is the last full sensory experience that I will have of her for nearly nine months. Only sitting at my desk now am I noticing how irregular this is. For a machine pattern, it would be categorically dysfunctional. I notice the breaks. I can hear silence that is usually her reaction to the television. I can smell the unaffected air of her not being seated in a reclining chair next to me.
Redemption Prep Page 3
