Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful

by Arwen Elys Dayton

  BOOKS BY ARWEN ELYS DAYTON

  Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful

  Resurrection

  THE SEEKER SERIES

  Seeker

  Traveler

  Disruptor

  The Young Dread (an original e-novella)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2018 by Arwen Elys Dayton

  Cover design by kid-ethic. Cover art used under license from Shutterstock.com

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! GetUnderlined.com

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Dayton, Arwen, author.

  Title: Stronger, faster, and more beautiful / Arwen Elys Dayton.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Delacorte Press, [2018] | Summary: “Six interconnected stories that ask how far we will go to remake ourselves into the perfect human specimens, and how hard that will push the definition of human”— Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018022928 (print) | LCCN 2018029058 (ebook) | ISBN 978-0-525-58097-3 (el) | ISBN 978-0-525-58095-9 (hardback) | ISBN 978-1-9848-3196-5 (intl. tr. pbk.)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Science fiction. | Human beings—Fiction. | Perfection—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.D338474 (ebook) | LCC PZ7.D338474 Str 2018 (print) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  Ebook ISBN 9780525580973

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

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  Contents

  Cover

  Books by Arwen Elys Dayton

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One: Matched Pair

  Part Two: St. Ludmilla

  Part Three: The Reverend Mr. Tad Tadd’s Love Story

  Part Four: Eight Waded

  Part Five: California

  Part Six: Curiosities

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  To the next generation and the next and the next (and hopefully the next)

  We have got to the point in human history where we simply do not have to accept what nature has given us.

  —Jay Keasling, professor of biochemical engineering, University of California, Berkeley, in Wired, 2009

  Human!

  Stop!

  …is what I’m thinking. As if I’ve already become something else, a different species, and I’m tired of hearing all of his worn-out, human-person logic.

  The man is reminding me that Julia’s heart will be combined with my own heart, so it’s not like I’m “taking” hers. It’s a synthesis. The new heart will fuse both in a way that’s better than either of the originals. A super-heart, I guess you could call it.

  He is reminding me of this, and every time I say “But—” he cuts me off by continuing his explanation, only more loudly. Now he’s almost yelling, though he’s just as cheerful as he always is.

  Did I mention that he’s my father? And he’s only repeating what my doctor has explained so many times. Although, let’s be honest, my doctor explains the same things very differently. She discusses recovery rates and reasonable percentages and acceptable outcomes. She tells me about other patients, though of course, my case and Julia’s case—the case of Evan and Julia Weary, semi-identical twins—is unique, so we are, as she likes to say, “medical pioneers.” I’ve come to think of us as the season-finale episode of a show about strange medical cases. Tune in for the outrageous conclusion!

  I’m in my hospital room, but I’m sitting in a chair in the corner, because it’s dangerous to stay in the hospital bed, which can be wheeled away for CAT scans or blood draws or surgery, or whatever, so easily. You have the illusion of control if you’re sitting in a chair.

  Julia is in the adjoining room. She’s on the bed, of course. And though I can hear our mother in there with her, she’s only saying a few quiet words to my sister, and my sister is not saying anything in reply.

  “This is fortune smiling on us, Evan,” my father says, using what has become one of his favorite phrases. He looms over me, because I’m sitting down while he’s standing and also because he’s six foot five. “Years from now, you’re going to look back on these weeks and wonder why you ever hesitated. Julia would want her heart and yours to be joined.”

  Whenever he senses me becoming skeptical about what we’re going to do, my father finds a new angle to convince me. This is the new angle for today: Julia’s fondest wish is for our twin hearts to become one.

  “But I’m the only one who will get to use the heart,” I tell him. “It’s not like we’re turning into one person and sharing it. I get the heart. She gets nothing.”

  He raises his voice another notch as he says, “Would you rather put hers in the ground? Alone and cold? To rot?” Even he can hear the hysteria that has snuck into his argument. He lowers the volume to something like normal conversational level and adds, “You know she wouldn’t want that. She does get something. She gets you, alive.”

  “I’m the one who gets that!”

  “She gets it too, Evan.”

  I hope that’s true.

  “You sound out of breath,” my father says. “How about we keep our voices calm?”

  This is an infuriating suggestion since he’s the one who’s not calm, but his observation is accurate; I’m having trouble catching my breath. I concentrate on forcing air in and out of my chest.

  I notice that we’re only talking about Julia’s heart, even though she’ll give me so much more—her liver, part of her large intestine, her kidneys, even her pancreas. It’s too depressing to keep mentioning all the pieces of both of us that aren’t working right, so my parents and I have begun using the heart as a stand-in for everything.

  I look up at him wearily. “Dad, why do we keep talking about it, anyway? You already decided.”

  “You decided too, Evan.”

  I sigh, and though I try to sound as angry as possible, he’s right. I did decide.

  * * *

  When the nurses show up to do tests, my father leaves. He doesn’t like to stick around for the nitty-gritty, which used to annoy me but now is a relief. If my father is present, he considers it an obligation to insert as many positive comments as possible into whatever uncomfortable hospital procedure is happening. It’s not ideal to have to make appreciative noises about the weather and baseball scores when a male nurse is putting a catheter into your penis, for example.

  With my father gone, I hardly have to say anything.

  Nurse: “Does that hurt?”

  Me: “A little.”

  Nurse: “Is this better?”

  Me: “A little.”

  Nurse: “Can you roll over onto your back now?”

  I don’t even have to answer that. I just have to do it.

&n
bsp; * * *

  Later, I’m left alone in my hospital room. This is the last day. It will happen in the morning. Julia and I have just barely made it to our fifteenth birthday. And now comes…whatever is next.

  I am not immune to daydreams. I imagine slipping on my clothes, walking out of the hospital, and asking my mother to bring me somewhere peaceful to die. My favorite fantasy locations are on a beach overlooking Lake Michigan, or on the moon base, while staring up at the small blue face of Earth. Yes, I know there isn’t any moon base, but I’m not sneaking out of the hospital either.

  The daydreams are tempting, but here’s the truth of it: death sucks more than life, almost no matter what. There. I’ve admitted it. I want to live. Blech. It feels wrong.

  I get off my hospital bed and go into the connecting room, Julia’s. My heart races as soon as I’m on my feet, but if I move slowly, I can keep it from getting out of hand. Julia’s room is kept nice and quiet and mostly dark, though it’s still daytime, so cloudy light comes in through the slatted blinds over the window. Her ventilator hisses and clicks. Her bed is surrounded by IV stands that are providing her food, her water, her drugs. Dripping, dripping, dripping away.

  “Hey,” I say, out of breath when I reach the edge of her bed.

  Hey, she says. Not out loud, of course. But I know she says it.

  Julia is gray and her cheeks are hollow, but she’s still beautiful. Her hair is red, like mine, but hers is much longer and it’s been fanned out across her pillow (by our mother, probably), as if she’s posing for an illustration in a book of fairy tales. Here is Snow White, awaiting the kiss of a prince to wake her. Here is Sleeping Beauty, for whom the rest of the world has been frozen. I slide myself onto the bed next to her and lie there as my heart and lungs slow down, listening to the sounds of the machine that is breathing for her.

  “Hey,” I say again.

  It’s so boring here, she tells me quite clearly, though, again, not out loud. The time when Julia can speak out loud is over.

  “I’ve realized that being a medical pioneer is mostly about surviving the boredom,” I tell her.

  Julia sighs, silently of course. Then she tells me, When the doctor calls us that, I imagine us in a covered wagon with one of those old-timey black doctor’s bags.

  “Why do people think being a pioneer is good?” I wonder aloud. “Isn’t it better to be waaay at the back of the line, after all the kinks have been worked out?”

  This is going to sound mean, Julia tells me, but I never even liked real pioneers. In those Little House books, I kept wondering why they didn’t stay in New York or Chicago, where all the fun stuff was happening.

  “You’re a snob,” I tell her. “They were brave.”

  Yeah, they probably were, she admits. Then: You’re going to be brave too, Evan.

  “Yuck. You sound like one of those greeting cards with the fancy cursive.”

  I got sappy there for a second. Sorry. It’s from being in the hospital. She changes the subject. Where have you been all afternoon?

  “Tests. Oh—this is exciting—they took a sample of my poop. New test. I guess it was to see what my large intestine is doing.”

  What were the results of this poop test?

  “It was poop. They confirmed that.”

  Well…that’s a huge load off my mind, she says.

  “After the test they plopped me back onto the bed.”

  I’m flushed with relief that everything’s okay.

  “It would have been so crappy otherwise.”

  We both laugh. Me out loud. Julia, you know, not out loud. Annoying puns are kind of our thing. I scoot over until my head is against hers.

  I forget what that’s like, she says.

  “What? Tests?”

  Moving.

  “Oh. Right.” Even though I’m here with her so much, sometimes I forget too.

  We’re both quiet for a while, but I know what Julia’s thinking about. She’s remembering that time when we were five years old, and she beat me twenty-four times in a row running down the street outside our house. I can feel her gloating.

  I tell her, “Look, you beat me that one time—”

  It was twenty-four times, Evan.

  This is an old argument.

  “Fine. You beat me on that one day. But I never let you beat me again,” I remind her.

  What neither of us says is that we didn’t have many races after that day when we were five. Running became too difficult for either of us, and the following year, it was apparent that very few of our organs were growing at the proper rate.

  Relax, Evan, she says. You’ve won forever now.

  I don’t answer her because that’s a horrible thing to say. If we were having one of our competitions to see who could say the most despicable thing, she would totally win.

  Oh shit, are you crying? I didn’t mean it. I was only joking!

  I put my hand over Julia’s heart, and then I put Julia’s cool, limp hand over mine. It’s possible that I am crying, but there’s no reason to dwell on it.

  In that calm way of hers, Julia tells me, We shared a womb, Evan, and a crib, and a room for the first six years of our lives. Now we’ll share more things. It will be okay.

  * * *

  Possibly you have never heard of semi-identical twins, so let me explain. Semi-identicals happen when two sperm fertilize the same egg. (I really hope you already know what sperm and eggs are, because I don’t want to be the one who has to tell you.) At some point after this cellular three-way, Mother Nature realizes that something is not right, and the egg splits into two, which in our case meant that it split into me, Evan, and her, Julia. But it’s not quite as simple as that. There are some mixed-up DNA signals with semi-identicals. Some become intersex (boy parts and girl parts), and some have other glitches in the embryo-formation process. We had none of those issues—our problem is that our hearts and livers and several other organs never learned how to grow to full size, even though the rest of us made a go of it.

  I’m taller than you are, Julia helpfully points out as I float toward sleep.

  She’s taller by about an eighth of an inch, by the way. Fifty percent of our DNA is identical—from the egg we both shared. And the other fifty percent, from the sperm, is not identical, but it comes from the same person (our father, unless our mom has really been hiding stuff from us). So we’re as closely matched as any boy and girl can be.

  But around our thirteenth birthday, Julia’s organs started lagging behind worse than mine did. At first, for months and months, she was just tired. Then she was just asleep. Then it wasn’t really sleep anymore, and she was in the hospital and the machines were brought in to keep her alive. And now she is on this bed, silent to everyone but me. Vegetative is what they call it, as if she is a stalk of wheat or a spear of asparagus. This sucks so deeply that there aren’t really words. This is as close as I can come:

  ————>o/<————

  That’s me in the middle, drowning.

  * * *

  I fall asleep next to Julia and I wake up when I hear voices in my own room. At first I think it’s nurses who’ve come to give me a second rectal exam—just to make sure—but that’s not who it is. It’s my mother, and a man—not my father. This man has a different voice entirely, smooth and deep and sort of…stirring, I guess you could say. Except that he’s using it to argue with my mother, and almost immediately I know exactly who the voice belongs to.

  Don’t keep me in suspense! Julia says, startling me. I didn’t think she was awake. Who is it?

  “It’s that weird minister Mom’s been talking to all month. I’ve heard his voice when she’s talking to him on the phone.”

  Oh, yeah. She keeps mentioning things “the Reverend” says. I didn’t even know we were Christian until Mom started having all these Jesus feelings
.

  “I’m not sure Reverend Tadd even is Christian,” I whisper to her, still trying to hear what they’re arguing about.

  His name is Reverend Tadd? Julia asks skeptically. Is that his first name or his last name?

  “I don’t know. But I do know that he’s an asshole. The way he speaks—it’s like Jesus was his roommate at summer camp and if you’re lucky he’ll introduce you.”

  How does Mom even know him?

  “She wanted someone to ‘guide her to the right choices’—about us, I guess. I heard her tell Dad. They argued and Dad won, but Mom said she still needed to talk to someone. And talking people out of medical procedures is, like, Reverend Tadd’s thing.”

  “Wait! You look angry.” Our mother’s voice rises suddenly on the other side of the door. “We’ve had beautiful discussions, and I said you could come bless them, but I don’t want you to argue—”

  The door from my room to Julia’s room flies open a moment later, and the man is in the room with us, trailing our mother. He approaches the hospital bed, one hand raised, with a finger directed upward, as if he has a personal, finger-pointing connection straight to heaven and he’s calling in a favor.

  “You!” he says, his eyes locking onto me where I lie next to my sister. I’m not ashamed to say he’s scary, because he is scary; his eyes are wild and his face is screwed up with outrage, but he’s also…

  Much younger and better-looking than I thought he would be, Julia says calmly.

  That’s exactly what I was thinking. The Reverend is young, perhaps only in his late twenties. He has thick, wavy black hair that falls over his forehead, and piercing dark eyes that are alight with passion.

  Before our mother can stop him (which, to be honest, she is making only a very feeble attempt at) he’s on his knees at the side of the bed, his eyes beseeching me. I’m startled by his sudden presence, but it’s hard to be too startled when Julia is with me.