It was Parker who offered me the tiniest of smiles as the men led me away. He'd never shown me kindness before, unless ignoring me when it came time to dole out punishments toward his younger "siblings" could be considered compassion, but I would remember that smile fondly, until the men and women in white coats warped even that memory into something terrible.
The men were pleasant as they led me to their car, not forceful. They wouldn't answer questions: I suppose they didn't know much themselves. I discovered, much later, these men had found me because of the ringing, reported by dozens of households for several blocks around our foster home. For over a decade, they'd passed it off as electromagnetic hypersensitivity caused by the nearby power lines, but they never stopped watching, hoping to pinpoint it with an incident like what I'd done to Billy.
"The cause is you, Marigold," the man I knew only as Lex told me in my cold white room the following morning. The men and women in white coats became my new family, the white room my home and my prison for the next five years.
❚❚
THEY'RE GETTING CLOSER. Can you feel it?
The ringing in the ears is just the first sign. It's how you can tell one of them--one of us--is thinking about you. This is not a good thing, to be thought about by a Mental. Even a low-level Empath could scramble your emotions enough to give you a nervous breakdown.
Next comes a sensation of being very close to powerful electricity. You've probably felt it. Your hair might stand on end, like you've just rubbed it against a balloon. If you hear ringing and static electricity snaps your fingers when you touch something--doesn't matter what it is, metal, plastic, fabric, whatever. The best thing for you to do is run. Don't hesitate, don't pick a direction, just go, as fast as you can. If the ringing gets louder, that feeling of electricity so strong your teeth start to feel like you've just stuck a battery against an old silver filling, turn around and run faster.
Don't stop until the ringing goes away. Even then, keep running if you can.
Because it means we're thinking about you.
One of us. A Mental.
Please trust me when I tell you: you do not want to be in our thoughts.
❚❚
I WAS THIRTEEN when they brought me to The Eye, their secret compound. One of the White Coats, a woman with a long scar down the side of her face, told me abilities such as mine often presented themselves during puberty. I had my first period in that room, in the white pajamas they'd given me--as if getting my period in front of a bunch of strange adults watching me via closed-circuit cameras wasn't embarrassing enough in a room as white as a detergent commercial T-shirt. They must have had other girls there concurrent to me, since maxi-pads had been readily available. The scarred woman, whose name I never learned during my time at The Eye, taught me how to use them.
It was Lex who taught me how to harness my powers.
On the afternoon of the first day, he brought me Nineteen-Eighty Four, still marked where I'd hastily dog-eared the page when Billy stormed into my room. He was skinny and pale, shaved bald, with thick, wormy veins at his temples. "You're just about at my favorite part," Lex told me, grinning as he placed electrodes on my temples. "Room 101 terrified me when I was your age."
"It scared you?"
He nodded. "Will you raise your shirt for me, please?"
Dutifully, I pulled the back of my shirt up. I had no reason not to trust them at that point. They had been nothing but pleasant. In that first night, aside from the oddness of the accommodations, I felt as though I'd been treated to a stay at a luxury hotel. The food--chicken Kiev with scalloped potatoes and crunchy green string beans--was better than I'd had in all my years living under our foster mother's roof. They'd even rolled in a television and let me watch The Craft on the VCR, and made microwave popcorn for me to snack on. Ms. O'Shaughnessy never would have let us watch a movie like that, with curse words and witchcraft. She certainly never let us have treats like popcorn or candy, confiscating them if she'd caught us with them in our rooms.
Lex reached over my shoulder and stuck two electrodes already cold with lubricant to my skin under the shoulder blades.
"But you still like it?" I asked him, referring to the book.
"Mm-hmm," he said. When he stood before me again, he wore an earnest smile. "It's good to be scared, Marigold. Fear reminds us of the importance of life."
I thought about that as Lex left the room. A moment later, his voice boomed over the loudspeaker set up in a high corner of the room.
"Marigold, I want to ask you about William."
"William?" The question confused me.
"Billy," he clarified. "I want you to tell me what you did."
I shut my mouth tight. My lower lip quivered as the image of blood dripping into his vacant, unblinking eyes flashed in my mind.
"Marigold...?"
A tear tracked an itchy trail down my cheek.
"I know it's difficult to talk about, Marigold. But the reason we've brought you here to stay with us is to find out a little bit about why you are what you are."
The word stung me, calling me a what as opposed to a who. I suppose I must have flinched, because I heard a bassy rattle followed by a flurry of muffled, hollow-sounding voices, like listening through the inside of a shell, and I guessed that Lex had cupped the microphone with his hand. After a moment, the voices ceased, and the rattle of Lex removing his hand brought crispness back to his voice.
"Marigold... you are not like other children. You are special. Your parents saw that in you, but they lacked the strength to raise someone as special as you. Your siblings at Ms. O'Shaughnessy's home saw it, but it made them scared, and jealous. We see it, too. We want to help you live up to your potential, Marigold. We only want what's best for you.
"Nobody here will judge you for what happened. You may think what happened to Billy was your fault, but it wasn't. It wasn't. If Superman tried to open a jar and he didn't know his own strength, no one could blame him if the jar broke. What happened to Billy..." He paused briefly. "What happened to Billy is the same thing. You didn't know what would happen, and you broke the jar. But it was an accident, Marigold. We forgive you."
Tears had been streaming throughout his monologue, but something in his words reached me. I suppose I must have been seeking forgiveness. Or maybe it was what he'd said about my parents. Whatever the reason, I told them everything then: the fear, the spider, the egg sac, the fall. They asked me about my relationship with the other children, and I unburdened myself. I'd had no one to talk to for so long, aside from Ms. O'Shaughnessy, who mostly just lectured, it felt good to be able to talk to a sympathetic ear. I told them about my loneliness, how I somehow both loved my parents and hated them for abandoning me, how I escaped into books, how the only one who'd ever shown me kindness was my older "brother" Parker.
I had no idea I had offered up every little detail they required to shape me into a killer.
The following week, they brought in two gerbils and told me they were to be my new friends. I asked Lex why they hadn't brought me rats, and he grinned slyly. He nodded at the book on my nightstand. "Did you like the part in Room 101?"
"Uh-huh. Only..."
"Only what?"
"Well, I didn't so much like it when he told them to torture Julia instead. He loved her, so why would he want her to get hurt? It really wasn't very nice."
Lex thought about it. "I don't think Winston wanted her to get hurt. He only knew he didn't want to be hurt himself. Do you remember, earlier in the book, how they say Room 101 is 'the worst thing in the world'?"
I nodded.
"Well, the way I see it, the worst thing in the world wasn't the rats chewing off his face," Lex said. "The worst thing in the world was that Big Brother made him betray the only person he ever loved."
I nodded again, thinking I understood it. "You were right, though. The scary parts made me glad I wasn't in Room 101, too."
His smile was halfhearted. Changing the subject quickly, he pointed t
o the little tawny gerbil. "This is Nibbles. And this is Chewie," he said of the dark brown one. "You can do whatever you like with them."
Hesitantly, I asked, "I can take them out of the cage?"
"Uh-huh. If you want to."
"I can feed them?"
His eyes flashed with an emotion I couldn't make out, but something about it disturbed me. I understood later that he must have known the outcome of their little experiment long before they even knew who I was. I supposed they must have gone through many gerbils with silly names from the other boys and girls living at The Eye before they'd found me.
"Yes, you can feed them, too," he said, and left the room.
I stood over the gerbil cage as soon as the door closed behind Lex. It smelled like sawdust and the slightly acidic tang of urine. Aside from the wood shavings covering the floor, the dish filled with little greenish brown food pellets and a bottle of water attached to the metal bars, it looked like a child's playground, with colored plastic tubes to run through, a slide, and a translucent blue den where Nibbles cowered, chewing his paws. Chewie got into the wheel and started it spinning. It rattled lightly as he scurried up and down, up and down.
I wanted to take them out and pet them, but I didn't find the courage to do so for a few hours. The only rodents I'd known were the rats and mice that chewed our cereal boxes and left turds on the counters and next to our beds. After lunch, I removed the lid and reached out to Nibbles.
His sharp little teeth snagged onto the end of my finger, and he hung on tight as I pulled my finger from the cage. Nibbles plopped down onto the floor, and I managed to grab him before he could scurry under the bed. I held him cupped in my palms, and sat cross-legged on the floor.
"No wonder they call you Nibbles." The gerbil had curled into itself, chewing on its paws, peering up at me with little black dewdrop eyes. "Aw, you're just scared, aren't you? You didn't mean to hurt--"
Suddenly, I understood why they'd given me the gerbils, or at least thought I did. They wanted me to know that even innocent little animals will fight back anyway they knew how when frightened enough.
I stroked his soft fur, and put him back into the cage. Immediately he scurried over to his den, and dug a pit into the wood shavings. Chewie had grown bored with the wheel and was eating from the dish. I watched them a while longer, then picked up a book Lex had left for me, We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. The book had a sort of hypnotic hold on me. I felt bad for the girl, Merricat, because she was ostracized like I was, but also because she was so strange and seemed to have no idea how odd her behavior was.
Over the next two days, I read and ate and watched my new pets play. In the afternoon of the second day, after waiting patiently with a kibble between my thumb and forefinger for several minutes, I got Nibbles to finally scurry out of his den and approach my hand to take the food. His little claws pawed delicately on my fingertips. He didn't even bite me. It made me smile. We'd become friends.
I'd almost finished the whole book by the time I noticed supper had gone by without a visit from Lex. My stomach growled. Nibbles had emerged from his den again to gnaw on a kibble. I assumed they must have just been late with it, and I read the end of the book. I remember taking away a lot from it, but mostly the idea that change is a good thing. Merricat and her sister had always lived in the castle, and they would always live there, in its crumbling, dirty, waterlogged rooms, because they refused to change. The castle was a ruin, and they were its ghosts.
I'm still not sure if Lex was trying to tell me something by giving me the book, but I suppose he must have been. He'd always been subtly manipulating me, even though I didn't know it at the time. I would find out soon enough.
There was no clock in my room, no windows to judge whether it was day or night. I knew it was late because my stomach hurt from hunger, and the nocturnal gerbils skittered restlessly around their cage. I flicked off the light, pulled the covers over myself, and tried to sleep. I woke up sometime later, shivering from hunger. I flicked on the light, padded barefoot to the camera in the upper corner near the door, and waved my hands at it.
"Hello! I'm hungry!"
Nothing. Not even the telltale rattle of Lex's microphone.
"Hey! Hey! I'm starving in here!"
I felt a bit like when I used to pray for my parents to come and rescue me from Ms. O'Shaughnessy's house. Just like God, the White Coats ignored my appeals.
I returned to my bed. I watched Chewie eat a kibble, feeling a twinge of jealousy as sharp as the pangs in my stomach. Finally, I drifted off to sleep again. When I awoke, I was drenched in sweat and felt feverish. The tip of my finger where Nibbles had bit me two days prior had swelled to an angry white welt surrounded by red. I was convinced he'd given me rabies.
I spent the next several hours alternately shivering under the covers, and pacing my cage. I shouted to my captors that I needed food, that I was sick, but they didn't respond. I cursed them. Begged for Lex to save me. For the first time in my life, I swore aloud, calling them every rotten thing I'd ever heard the boys call each other.
I was lucky to have a bathroom attached to my little cell, where I could at least satisfy my thirst and cool my sweltering head under the tap. I considered eating the soap, trying to decide if filling my gut would be worth suffering through its awful taste. Eventually I settled down on my bed again, and tried to sleep. The pain in my stomach was too much to bear.
The hollow clatter of hard pellets against ceramic and tinny rattle of ceramic against metal wire drew my attention to the gerbil cage. Nibbles was eating from the overstuff dish. I wondered what gerbil food tasted like.
I couldn't read. I couldn't think. I was angry. Frightened. I wondered what would happen to me if they'd all just gone home, and left me in my room. If they'd forgotten about me, I knew I would die.
I tore the blankets off my bed. I threw my pillow at the camera. I began to shred the sheet in strips, desperately hoping that if I acted out they could no longer ignore me.
The gerbil wheel rattled. Chewie ran, up and down, up and down, while Nibbles stuffed his furry fat face with food.
I was a parasite living in the kibble. Nibbles chewed up my home and swallowed me, unaware of my presence in his food. I sat in his guts, gestating, then burrowed into his bloodstream, like a gerbil in a plastic tunnel. I swam the tight canals of his veins, passing through into his little gerbil head and gnawing into his pea-sized brain.
A high-pitched whine in my ears built in intensity during all this until Nibbles squeaked. He dropped his food and tumbled into the wood shavings. His back legs twitched, his tail squirmed. Then he stopped moving altogether, and the whine in my ears stopped.
When I broke down in tears, it wasn't for Nibbles and it certainly wasn't for Billy. I cried for myself. For everything I'd been neglected throughout my worthless life, for all the pain and suffering at the hands of bullies and careless social workers. For all the times people threw me away, my parents especially.
Exhausted, I collapsed on the bare mattress.
The door came open with a heavy clunk, waking me. I had no idea how long I'd been passed out. It could have been minutes or hours. Lex stepped in with a tray of food in Styrofoam dishes. I smelled chicken noodle soup and sweet tea. My stomach churned with hunger, but for a moment, I thought I'd dreamed the whole thing. That I hadn't torn up the bed and poor innocent Nibbles was still alive.
I sat up groggily. Nibbles remained in the wood shavings beside the bowl, stiffened. Chewie spun the wheel, oblivious. My bedding lay on the floor, scattered and torn.
Lex smiled at me as he laid my food on the nightstand.
"What the heck are you smiling about?" I snapped at him.
"You passed your first test, Marigold. You got an A."
Ignoring him, I dove for the food before he could take it away from me. Lex paid me no mind, just removed the gerbil cage from my room and locked the door behind him. I ate until my stomach began to hurt again, then soothed
it with tea.
I slept again. When I woke it must have been morning, because Lex had left breakfast for me where the gerbil cage had been. I ate the scrambled eggs and buttered toast, the cantaloupe wedge and grapes. I guzzled down the carton of milk, and the plastic cup of orange juice. When I finished I burped pleasingly.
"Good morning, Marigold," Lex said over the loudspeaker. "Did you enjoy your breakfast?"
I sat down on my bed, crossed my legs, and folded my arms across my chest.
"I'm sorry about Nibbles. You understand I have superiors. If it were up to me, none of that unpleasant business would have happened."
I picked up my book and pretended to read.
"So... what did you think of Merricat? Did you feel sorry for her?"
I flipped a page, trying my best to ignore him, though it was getting difficult, his voice penetrating my thoughts.
"If you like that book, I could bring you more. You're old enough for a real scary book, I think."
I glanced up at the speaker and became electricity, surging through the wires and out the other end. As Lex reached out to touch the microphone, I jolted him with a shock. The thousand-watt charge traveled up his arm to his heart, cooking it like a frog in a pot.
"I think you'd like that, wouldn't you?" Lex said, his voice unwavering, seemingly impervious to the murderous effects of my imagination. I gave him nothing back, though his books were all I had. Without them, I was alone.
"I don't have to bring you books, you know," he whined. "Maybe I'll just take them all back to the library."
"No," I blurted out, my voice very small. "Please. I want you to."
"Mm, nah. It doesn't sound like you really want them."
I got up out of bed and stood under the camera, looking up. Wearing my biggest pout. I clasped my hands tightly against my chest like some kid beseeching the angels to bring her father back safe from the war. "Please, Lex? I'm really sorry. I didn't mean to get mad. It was just... it was dumb. I was dumb. Please, bring me more books."
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