“I’m sure you know that from the zero fights that you’ve been in.”
“I think it might be broken.” He sat up against the wall, tissues stuck from both nostrils like tusks. “Why are you hitting me?”
Neesha cleared her throat. “First, I want my money back, now.”
His eyebrows bent. “Your money? The . . . wait, what do you mean back?”
“You know exactly what I mean.”
“I don’t.” The tissues shook with his head. “I don’t at all.”
She stared at him for a long moment.
“You think I took it?” he asked. “Are you forgetting the part where I gave it to you—”
“I know you took it. I saw you busting ass out of the chapel.”
“Everyone was busting ass out of the chapel—”
“Convenient, huh.”
Zaza shifted on Emma’s bed, some blood from his sleeves spilling over onto the mattress. “You think I took your money, then came over here three hours after curfew, so I could what . . . gloat about it?” Zaza ran his hand over his barely existent hair. “What else do you want?”
“What?”
“You said first. What do you want second?”
Neesha felt her fists clench again. “I want to know what Emma told you to do tonight.”
Zaza’s face collapsed to the center in confusion, his eyes almost crossing. “She . . . told me to meet her at the well? Ten minutes before mass? Then you showed up. That’s it.”
“Where is she now?”
He shook his head. “I have no idea. I don’t even—I barely know her.”
Neesha sat on her own bed across from him. She could taste her saliva, heavy and acidic. “Then what are you doing here?”
His eyes glanced back and forth. “I wanted to warn you about something. This kid came to my dorm during the sweep, Evan Andrews. Do you know who he is?”
She shook her head.
“Okay, well. He’s very creepy. He knew she was missing before the sweep, and he knew she came to my dorm tonight.”
“Why are you telling me?”
“Because he asked about you, too.”
Neesha shrugged. “I’m a popular person.”
“You’re not taking this seriously. I think he was following her for a long time, and he definitely knows more than he was telling me.” Zaza dropped his voice. “She was in a hurry earlier, when she stopped by. That’s when she was asking for half the money.”
“Why didn’t you give it to her?”
“I didn’t have it from Aiden yet. But something was weird about tonight. Don’t you think?”
Neesha rocked on the bed, staring at the spot where earlier that night, Emma had come gliding into the room, faster than usual. “Can you please handle this one?” she’d said. “I need you tonight, Neesha.” The more times she heard it in her head, the more it sounded like bullshit. Something was wrong, she’d felt it the whole time, the rains coming at sunset to bring the flood, she should have listened.
Neesha exhaled. “Yeah. Something was weird.”
“Do you think it has something to do with Apex?”
Neesha winced at the mention of the project, then nodded again.
“Okay. If you have any more, you should probably hide it. Or dump it.”
“Yeah, right, and let someone else walk off with the Discovery—”
“Just until Emma’s back.”
The wind outside picked up, and she heard her mom again: We’re all with you now. She pulled her shoes from under her bed, and a black hoodie from her closet.
“Where are you going?” Zaza asked.
“Take your shiny-ass coat off,” she said, tossing him a second hoodie. “And follow me.”
The only lights in the hallway this late at night were the exit signs at the ends of the halls. They ran quietly around the wide edge of the dormitories with their hoods up—Human to P-School to C-School—and turned inward to the academic building. She pulled a key from her back pocket.
“You got a key?”
“I’m an exceptional student,” Neesha whispered, and they slipped inside.
The Chemical Sciences building was one of the only sites of disorder on Redemption’s otherwise geometric campus. There were so many small offices, miniature laboratories, special packaging rooms, freezers, and holding spaces made out of converted storage pods that the hallways had to be built with sharp corners and random turns. There were overhead fluorescents, but they were hung so high that their light barely reached the ground. Instead, various shades of neon lights poked out of different classrooms and labs, occasionally staining the hallway red or blue. Creepiest of all, the school had adorned the hallways and laboratories with statues of dead-white-guy genius types throughout, by far the scariest-looking genre of human. Albert Einstein smiled at the entrance; René Descartes beckoned outside the bathroom, and Isaac Newton glared down with fury upon Dr. Yangborne’s chemistry classroom.
Neesha wheeled an old cart from the very back of the closet, covered with a thick white cloth. She peeled back the cloth to reveal a harmless-looking setup of a few vacuum flasks, cardboard boxes, and an ancient hot plate. She took two Redemption Prep water bottles from the bottom of the cart and tossed them to Zaza. “We’re bringing those back.”
He popped the lid off one of them. “Whoa.” It was full to the brim with tiny silver beads.
“That’s a five-thousand-dollar water bottle.”
Zaza examined the inside of the bottle, astonished. “What is it, even?”
“What’s what?”
“This. Apex?”
Neesha’s constant motion slowed. “We’ve been in class together for four years. You just bought five hundred of them. You don’t know what it is?”
Zaza shrugged. “I do O-Chem, not drugs. And my nana didn’t believe in medicine.”
Neesha went back to work, unscrewing a vacuum flask from its stand and placing both softly in a cardboard box. “It’s not anything, technically. It’s a central nervous system stimulant. I borrowed the recipe from a drug that went to consumer trials a few years ago. It’s like Ritalin, but more effective, targeted, and extended-release. . . .”
Zaza was staring back, his face blank.
“How did you get here?”
“I followed you.”
“No, here here. Redemption. Everybody did some crazy thing, what did you do?”
“Oh.” He smiled, clearly proud of himself. “I created a neutral taste agent that makes milk taste like Pepsi.”
“Ew, why?”
“People hate milk, but it’s good for you. And they love Pepsi.”
“That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. But okay. Remember how you felt when you first tried it, your milk-Pepsi thing—”
“Lacto-Cola.”
“Yuck, but okay. Do you remember the breakthrough moment? Where you thought, Oh my God, I can do this, I’m going to be able to do this for my entire life, every beverage combination I ever try will be this successful because I’m just that good at it?”
“I guess.”
“Okay, it’s like that feeling, but for eight hours, about anything in the world. It’s a focus drug and a mood booster. Math kids take it to do math, basketball players take it to play basketball. Emma called it Apex because it takes you straight to your peak, and it holds you there.”
She held out a pill in front of him, and he recoiled.
“Anyway, a bunch of companies are trying to figure out a legal way to sell amphetamines as a drug to help kids who can’t focus in school, and I cracked it.”
“Amphetamines, like meth?”
She shrugged. “You say potato, I say extended-release.”
Her hands flew expertly around the cart, breaking down the last few structures and disassembling the hot plate.
“Did Emma take it?” he asked quietly.
“Yes,” Neesha said, plugging the hot plate into the wall. “Emma took it every day.”
“Who else?”
/> She snorted.
“What?”
“Who else?” Neesha rolled her eyes. “There are nine hundred students at Redemption. We sold two thousand pills in our first week. Who else? Everyone else. Everyone is taking it.”
“Why are you doing this?” Zaza’s voice wavered.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, you’re basically guaranteed to get into Berkeley already, you know money’s not going to be a problem for you . . . is it really worth making all this for three thousand dollars?”
She shrugged.
“Then why? What could possibly make this worth it?”
She tried to ignore the question, but he waited for an answer. “Because,” she finally said. “With a drug this general, you need a pretty large sample size to prove its efficacy—”
“Wait—”
“—and I’m not going to get that kind of data from just feeding the drug to rats all the time, so I needed a way to prove to the judges that it can actually work, large-scale.”
“Oh my God.” Zaza looked like he was going to be sick. “You’re running human trials.”
“I mean—”
“We’re your rats.”
“I guess.”
“Just for a trophy? Is it really worth the risk, just to win?”
Yes, she wanted to scream at him, and the fact that he couldn’t understand that was exactly the reason he’d never win it. But instead she just said, “Sure.”
He was quiet for a while, as she finished with the cart. She snuck a glance at him. He’d moved farther away and set the bottles on the table. He looked like he was going to hurl.
“Is it working?” he asked, still keeping a safe distance from the silver powder. “Your trials. Are they showing results?”
She smiled and pulled a manila folder from the bottom of the cart. “See for yourself.”
She watched proudly as his eyes lit up with wonder. A half-point rise over the C-School’s test average. A spike in neural activity above the B-School’s baseline. The Robo kids had made incredible progress on their fiber-optic network; the basketball team was shaving seconds off their reaction times. “This is insane,” Zaza muttered to himself. “This is everybody. You’ve caused an uptick for the entire school. In a week.”
She smiled. “Might as well give me the trophy now.”
“Yeah,” Zaza mumbled into the folder. “Unless you go to jail first.”
Her smile disappeared. She yanked the joint of the final stand so hard that its top metal piece went flying across the room, clattering across the ground.
“Does Yangborne know about it?”
“The trials? Of course not. The drug? Kind of. He loves the idea. His only suggestion is that I should call it adderall.”
“What’s this part?” Zaza pointed to the page. “‘Overexposure,’ what does that mean?”
Neesha slowed down. “Yeah, I mean, like any trial, it’s had a couple of unintended consequences.”
“Like . . .”
“Well, there’s the shakes. Muscle hyperactivity. Twitchy fingers, clenching jaw, shaking.”
Zaza waited. “And?”
“And some other types of concerns. When you start doing anything all the time, your body starts to count on it, and in the case of a drug this effective, people have gotten . . . kind of serious about it.” She finished and returned the cardboard boxes to their place on the shelves. The only thing that remained of her Apex lab build were the water bottles on the desk.
Zaza was still staring intently at her. “What do you mean, serious?”
Neesha took the bottles and toyed with the caps. “I mean . . . there was a kid in the music school who played guitar until his hands were bleeding. Some of the basketball kids have gotten a little violent. A few people have stopped sleeping altogether.”
“And you’re comfortable with that? Making a kid bleed from playing the guitar?”
Neesha sighed. “That’s a very authoritarian view of personal responsibility. I don’t think it’s fair to tell people what they’re capable of or not capable of. We don’t do that with other shit. Plus, that’s not a part of the drug, that’s just the way people are reacting to it. Most people are fine. It is possible to be too focused on something, you know.
“It makes you the most extreme version of yourself. And some people’s most extreme versions don’t work out very well.”
Part III.
Uppers.
Testimonial: Emmalynn Donahue
Year 1995–1996. Day 28.
THE FIRST MORNING of summer, when the sun is bright enough to cut through the fog and it just hangs in the air like it’s waiting for me.
The first day of class, when everybody has a reason to introduce themselves.
The first sixty seconds of a high, the way it rushes up and reintroduces itself, the familiar feeling that everything is different, the unshakable certainty that everything is possible.
The way somebody smiles in the middle of something difficult, the nod to acknowledge that they see you next to them.
The smell of the mountain, the smell of the wild grass, the smell of the mud, the smell of the farm, the smell of the kitchen and the back porch and the barn, the smell of my room.
Dr. Richardson told me to make a list of all the things that I loved in the world, and that’s the best that I can come up with.
She told me that my ability to see was the source of my poetry, and that I felt things other people couldn’t feel because I took the time to notice them.
But reading the list now, I can’t feel any of those things. Lately, I can only feel the thoughts of those things, the ink meant to represent those things. I’ve stared so long at the letters that they’ve lost their meaning, and I’m stuck writing the idea of someone else’s poetry.
The only thing I learned from writing them down is that all the things that I love point in one direction—away—and occur at one time—not now.
When I was a little girl and I felt this way, my mother told me to find my faith. She told me that I could give myself to God, when I couldn’t hold the world on my own. When I was a little girl, I didn’t know where to look for him.
Dr. Richardson says religion was my mom’s way of dealing with things that she couldn’t understand, like pain and sadness. She says everybody in the world does that, creates ways of dealing with things they don’t understand, because once you’ve seen enough of this life, you realize it’s easier to mute the world than it is to listen to it. But she said I didn’t have to. I had the ability to be better. I wouldn’t need to invest in systems to realize my life’s meaning, because I realized the meaning of my life every time I looked around me. She says that ignoring the pain and sadness of the world, or wrapping them in the cellophane cover of religion, took me further from the world. Instead, I should let them have me. I should allow myself to feel the world.
And I want to feel the world. But the thing is—I’ve seen God. He’s already speaking to me. And his voice isn’t coming from the forests.
emma donahue investigation.
aiden mallet—year 4.
transcription by MONKEY voice-to-text software.
YANIS (School Administration) _ Please speak your full name aloud.
AIDEN MALLET (Student) _ Aiden Mallet.
Y _ Aiden Mallet the basketball star. So I hear.
AM _ I guess.
Y _ And friend of Emma.
AM _ Boyfriend of Emma.
Y _ Her file doesn’t say anything about a boyfriend.
AM _ Yeah they probably don’t put that stuff in our files.
Y _ They do.
AM _ Well it’s probably not updated.
Y _ I have a long list of her friends. I’ve even got a list of your friends. Nico Ty On Peter Durk.
AM _ Those guys aren’t my friends.
Y _ In whatever case. You’re not in her file.
AM _ Then how did you know to talk to me?
Y _ I’m very smart. Also the school has
cameras everywhere.
AM _ I always thought those were just for show.
Y _ Turns out they’re not. So help me understand. What are you talking to her about before church.
AM _ Just about our relationship. I had some questions and . . . she always wants to be early for church so we didn’t get to talk for very long. What do you guys think happened to her.
Y _ If you were leaving the school where would you go.
AM _ What. Is that . . . why are you asking me.
Y _ I just want to know.
AM _ Back to my parents house probably. Like anybody else.
Y _ Did Emma talk about her parents.
AM _ I don’t know.
Y _ Did she have family nearby.
AM _ I don’t know.
Y _ Did she have friends outside the school.
AM _ I . . . I don’t know.
Y _ I thought you were her boyfriend . . . Did she talk about leaving.
AM _ The school.
Y _ Yes. In any capacity. Any description of what life might be like if she wasn’t at the school.
AM _ We . . . yeah.
Y _ Aiden.
AM _ We used to talk about going to stay at my uncle’s cabin. He had a place in Tahoe. We hadn’t talked about it in a long time but . . . we did talk about that.
Y _ What was the plan.
AM _ We were . . . I don’t really feel like I should be telling you this.
Y _ If she talked about transport. Or perhaps places she might go. It could help.
AM _ Um . . . I was gonna call my parents and tell them I needed them to send me a suit. Or something. Something that a driver would have to come all the way up to Redemption for. And then when he came in to bring it to me we were gonna offer him money. Not to do anything illegal but just to leave his trunk unlocked and use the bathroom for a few minutes. That was her idea. So he wouldn’t have to do anything shady but we could still escape. Then . . . we were gonna get out wherever he stopped. Probably salt lake. And go to the Alamo car spot. She heard that sometimes they let you rent a car if you were seventeen as long as you had a credit card. And we were gonna rent a convertible. Or the nicest car they had. And drive all the way across Utah and Nevada. Just me and her. All the way to Tahoe. We were gonna live there except when my uncle and his family were using it we would get a motel. And she was gonna go to the grocery store every day to get new foods so she could make stuff. And write poetry. And I would just go to movies sometimes. And we wouldn’t need any friends or anything. It could just be the two of us.
Redemption Prep Page 7
