by B. E. Scully
Emma wanted to ignore him, but Evil Em had other plans. “It’s called The Nightmare Before Christmas and it’s hardly a cartoon.”
“Whatever. My point is, when you get in these moods it’s like your head spins around and nice, normal Emma becomes Evil Em. It’s like your villain alter ego or something.”
After that, Evil Em became the family code-word whenever Emma was “in a mood.” Emma came to hate her doppelganger even more than being dismissed as “in a mood.” And she hated her all the more because Evil Em was such a dead-on accurate description.
Evil Em hated a lot of things. She hated that everyone thought Justin was so smart and funny and charming. Sometimes she even hated Justin. She hated the teachers in school who thought being smart meant parroting back the same ideas and opinions everyone else had. She hated that no one cared about her ideas and opinions no matter how original or intelligent they were. She hated the kids in school who got better grades than she did or won debate tournaments or did any of the things she was sure she could do if she cared one bit about the stupid, shallow stuff everyone else cared about. She hated her mom and dad for being so concerned with “getting the parenting thing right” that she wanted to go wrong just to relieve them of the burden one way or the other.
Evil Em was spiteful and selfish. She was petty and jealous. Emma hated her as much as everyone else did, maybe more. And most of all, she hated herself for hating so much.
“You know, that’s funny,” Senz had said when she’d told him about Evil Em—the only person outside of her family who knew about Emma’s dark twin. “Most scholars think of our man Seneca in terms of the ‘two Senecas.’ In one version, he’s this noble, virtuous philosopher doing his best to help out all the crazy-ass political bullshit he couldn’t help but get wrapped up in. In the other version, he’s this shrewd, wily manipulator who used his brains to connive his way into power. He even wrote two different ways. There’s all this sober, high-minded philosophy stuff, then there’s these off the hook plays where all this crazy, dramatic shit goes down. There’s even two different images of him out there, one lean and ascetic-looking, the other all slack-jawed and self-satisfied.”
“So which version is the real one?”
“Who knows. Maybe neither. Maybe both.”
Emma could definitely relate to that. But with Senz and Seneca on her side, she was determined to get control of herself once and for all, which included getting rid of Evil Em. She’d started copying down quotes from her Seneca books and posting them on notecards all around her room. Two of her favorites were, “There’s nothing great that is not at the same time at peace,” and, “All things deserve either our laughter or our tears.”
The best one, though, she wrote in all capitals and taped to the upper right corner of her dresser mirror: “THE HUMAN RACE SHOULD BE GRANTED A PARDON.”
But those were just words written on a piece of paper. Now, standing in an alleyway behind a laundromat staring down at a tiny life form in a dumpster, Emma wondered who should be pardoned for throwing a baby away.
But Senz still wasn’t convinced the baby was alive. “You askin’ me why I say that baby’s dead? Look at it! It’s not cryin’ or fussin’ or nothin’ like a live baby does. Gotta be dead. Prob’ly why it’s thrown here in the first place.”
“It’s too clean to have been just thrown away.”
“What, you think people who keep their babies nice and clean can’t still throw them away? All kinds of reasons people throw their babies away. All kinds.”
Emma wondered if Senz’s parents had thrown him away. She tried to picture him lying on a pile of trash in a dumpster and couldn’t. Then the baby decided to end the question once and for all by opening its eyes.
Emma picked it up and cradled it in her arms. It was heavier than she expected. “Aw, look, Senz, she likes me.”
“Why you say ‘she’ when baby’s all dressed up in blue?”
“Doesn’t mean it has to be a ‘he.’ Maybe her parents are open-minded, like mine.”
“And maybe her parents are psychopaths who threw their baby away, like mine.”
“You just said all kinds of people throw their babies away, not just psychopaths.”
“Wrong. I said people got all kinds of reasons to throw a baby away. Don’t mean they ain’t still psychopaths.”
Emma held the baby out to Senz. “Here, take her from me while I climb down.”
Senz looked as if she’d just asked him to take hold of a live bomb. Then finally he took the baby and leaped from the dumpster in one smooth swoop.
Emma made her far less graceful descent and reached out for the baby. But Senz now seemed as reluctant to give it up as he had been to take it. He was looking down at it as if he’d just realized that today’s diving had turned up something interesting after all. Something way better than even a suit of armor.
Emma started picking at her nails like she always did when she got nervous. One more bad habit for her mother to nag about. “We should take it to the police. Somebody’s probably looking for it.”
Senz snorted and clutched the baby even tighter. “Ain’t nobody looking for it! It’s thrown away, Emma, get it? Thrown away like trash. Ain’t nobody looking for babies like this.”
“It’s probably so quiet because it’s sick or something. It might even be dying. We at least have to take it to a hospital. Or maybe an adoption agency or something?”
“Noooo…” Senz drew the word out long and slow, like he was thinking over something very important. In the silence, Emma could hear the baby start making little gurgling noises. Then Senz flashed the croc-smile. “We’re gonna give this here baby to someone who really wants it! To someone who wants babies more than anything in the world! Millions and millions and billions of babies, even ones nobody else wants!”
“Senz, what are you talking about?”
“Here, take the baby and give me your phone.”
Emma made the trade and watched as Senz poked around on the phone, his face creased in concentration. The baby was getting heavy and Emma thought it might have pooped. Or maybe the smell was just the alleyway. Either way, she was about ready to complain when Senz looked up and said, “Got it!”
“Got what?”
“Her name. That politician woman I’ve been hearing about lately. Michelle Maynard.”
“Who’s that?”
“Don’t you ever read the news? How you gonna have a say in this world if you don’t even know what’s going on in it? Michelle Maynard wants to be a senator for the fine state of Oregon. Among other things, she believes every life is sacred. She even said so herself: ‘Every life is sacred and should be protected at all costs.’ That’s word for word I’m readin’. At all costs.”
“So?”
Senz started poking around on the phone again. “So, it says here that she’s against givin’ out birth control and she’s against abortion. So she obviously loves babies a whole lot. Though she’s also against public assistance programs to help feed and educate those babies, so I don’t know how that all adds itself up.”
“Senz, this baby is getting really heavy and I think it might have shit itself—”
“What I’m sayin’ is that a woman like that should have no problem wantin’ to take care of this here baby! In fact, she should be beggin’ to take this baby that nobody else wants!”
“Senz—”
“And look, right here is her exact address! And just a ten minute bus ride from right here! Ain’t the Information Age just grand?” Senz handed back her phone and slung his backpack off his shoulders. “Here, you grab that plastic crate over there and give me the baby.”
“You can’t put the baby in a backpack! It’ll suffocate!”
“Baby didn’t die bein’ in no hot, smelly dumpster all day. It can live a little longer in a backpack. ‘Sides, I’ll leave the top unzipped and its head can stick out.”
On the bus, Emma was convinced the baby was going to start wailing and they’d
both end up arrested for kidnapping. But the baby stayed quiet, and ten minutes later they were crouched behind a thick row of rhododendrons on the edge of a perfectly landscaped lawn leading up to its perfectly well-kept house. Senz took the baby out of his backpack and nestled it in the plastic crate. Next he pulled out a notebook and started scribbling something. He tore out the page and handed it to Emma to read: “To Michelle Maynard, a Woman Who Protects Life at all Costs. Here is One Life Happy to Have Finally Found a Loving Home.”
Senz took the paper back and reread it. “Well, what do you think?”
“I think it makes the point.”
He tucked the note into the baby’s blanket and then snatched it back up again. “Wait a minute.” He took out his pen and added, “With Love from Nostri.”
Emma knew the word from her reading: “Our people.” Or as Senz had further explained it, “Our people as in us—the citizens of the universe. The ones who get it.”
But Emma still didn’t get what they were going to do with a baby in a plastic crate. “Now what?”
“Now we go on up the driveway and leave it on the doorstep just like in those old-time fairy tales. Then we ring the doorbell and run like hell.”
“And what if nobody’s home?”
“And what if the Big Bad Wolf opens the door? Let’s just take it one step at a time, all right?” Senz handed her the crate. “Now go on.”
“Wait a minute, I thought ‘we’ were both in on this?”
“We both are! We both sittin’ here, right? But if someone does happen by, it’s gonna look a whole lot less suspicious for a lone white girl to be leavin’ somethin’ on the doorstep of this here fine-lookin’ house than if she’s got a black boy by her side, don’t you think?”
He had a point. Emma looked up and down both sides of the street. It was as quiet and empty as a cemetery.
She took the crate and lugged it up to the front door. It was an elaborate paneled number with a thick steel security screen. She set the baby down on the top step, fully expecting some alarm to start screaming at any minute. Instead, the baby finally did, letting out the kind of soul-piercing wail that only a baby can produce. Emma had to clench her legs shut to keep from peeing herself right there, and she almost ran away before remembering to ring the bell. But as she stumbled down the stairs, Senz appeared at her side. Without a word he ran up the stairs and pressed the bell two quick times in a row. Then he pressed it one last time and kept his finger on the bell, letting it ring.
“Senz, we’ve got to get out of here!”
They raced back behind the rhododendron bush where Emma tore down her pants and let out a stream of urine just in time. Before she could stop to consider that Senz had just seen her butt and who knows what else in the bargain, they heard voices.
Senz pulled open a spy-hole in the thick bushes. Emma squeezed in next to him and saw a man and woman standing looking down at the crate. They were too far away to hear clearly, but the man had pulled out his phone and was making one phone call after the other. The woman knelt down and reached into the box, then drew away to go and stand by the man.
Within five minutes, a cop car showed up, and soon after that an ambulance. Next, a white S.U.V. came cruising to a stop halfway down the drive. A very unhappy-looking woman got out and marched toward the growing crowd.
Senz turned to Emma and whispered, “Michelle Maynard.”
“Senz, now’s the part of the fairy tale where the hero and heroine get the hell out of here.”
“Not yet! No way am I leavin’ just yet!”
The paramedics went over to take a look at the baby. The cops were writing things down in a notebook while Michelle Maynard talked and waved her arms around in the air. Then a news van showed up.
Senz dropped his voice so low that Emma had to strain to hear it. But there was no mistaking the triumph in it. “Now things about to get really goin’. Now things about to blow all the way up.
2
The media dubbed it the “Baby On Your Doorstep Test.”
Less than an hour after the news crews arrived in Michelle Maynard’s driveway, the story started showing up on social media. By evening, it was the top story on local news stations. The next day, it went worldwide viral. #Nostri was the top-trending Twitter hashtag for over a week.
It didn’t take long for some blogger to make the Seneca connection. Articles outlining Stoic philosophy began popping up all over the Internet. The picture of the creepy marble statue with the all-white eyes appeared on talk shows and news features next to eager philosophy professors making the most of their fifteen minutes.
Michelle Maynard did not adopt the baby, who turned out to be a boy after all. He was traced back to a teenage runaway who had since returned to her family in San Francisco. She admitted to putting the baby in the dumpster, but had no idea how it had ended up at a local politician’s house. She didn’t know anyone with an interest in Roman philosophy.
The police decided not to press charges against the teen, and the baby ended up with social services. Because of the press from the case, the baby received dozens of adoption requests before his paperwork had even been processed.
Less than two weeks after the Baby On Her Doorstep, Michelle Maynard decided to put her political career on hold.
On talk shows across the country, pundits debated the issue.
“People are fed up with these politicians and special interest groups who don’t have to face up to the real-life consequences of the policies they push.”
“We cannot let individuals go around deciding what’s justice and what isn’t. That’s vigilante anarchy you’re talking about, not American democracy!”
“The message seems simple enough—if you say you support babies, and you want women to have them come hell or high-water, then when one turns up on your doorstep needing a home, you take it. That’s the true test—are you willing to take on the responsibility? If not, then why do you expect someone else to do it?”
In Missouri, one man took a different approach to the test. He was arrested pointing a hunting rifle at the front door of a doctor who performed abortions at a local clinic. The doctor’s terrified, two-months pregnant wife was inside the house. In a follow-up interview, the man said he was trying to prove his own “Nostri” point: “If you’re willing to kill someone else’s unborn child, then maybe you shouldn’t be so surprised if someone is willing to kill yours. And if that idea is horrifying to you, then maybe you need to re-examine your own stance.”
In the Kaster household, Emma’s parents followed the news as the Nostri trend spread, replicating and morphing across the country like a virus.
For the most part, her mother was against it. “The last thing we need right now is people putting their ideologies into some extreme, symbolic action. I mean, what does it prove? Whose mind is it going to change?”
Her father, typically, found the whole thing amusing. “Well, it’ll probably change the mind of the person who goes to get the morning paper and finds a baby on their doorstep instead. Or some guy with a rifle instead, as the case may be.”
One night while all three of them were watching a news feature about “the Nostri phenomenon,” Emma’s mom suddenly turned to her and said, “Seneca—isn’t that the philosopher your new friend is so impressed with? The one whose quotes are hanging all over your room?”
Emma’s parents rarely pried into their kids’ lives. It was all a part of the good parenting “trust issue” thing. But they did want to know who they spent their time with. Since that didn’t include anyone but Senz these days, Emma told them she’d met a new friend at the bowling alley and that’s where they hung out most of the time, which was mostly true. Every time her mom got the chance, though, she tried to work the conversation around to get Emma to reveal more information about this mysterious new “friend.” Just to get her off the subject, Emma had told her mom that Senz went to Franklin High, even though she suspected he’d dropped out of school long ago. Other than that
piece of misinformation, so far Emma had avoided telling her mom anything too specific.
But with Seneca suddenly all over the news, it wasn’t going to stay that way if Emma didn’t come up with a good answer for the coincidence. Her mom was still peering at her with narrow little rat-eyes, waiting for an answer to her question. “Oh, yeah, Seneca’s been all over the place even before this whole baby thing. There’s this really weird video on YouTube where someone put all these quotes from these philosophers together with all kinds of crazy music. It went totally huge and everyone started watching it. So it probably came from that.”
“Is that where your friend Darrell got interested in philosophy? From this video?”
She couldn’t get used to hearing Senz called “Darrell,” but she couldn’t exactly tell her mom she was hanging around with a kid who hadn’t even told her his real name. “Probably. Tons of kids started reading all this philosophy stuff after the video got popular. It’s totally hysterical. Our teachers are probably wishing someone would do a video like that about literature or science or whatever.”
When her mom didn’t answer, Emma made sure to keep eating popcorn and watching T.V. as if the subject didn’t warrant another minute of her attention. Emma knew that the rat eyes were still staring her down, trying to decide whether or not she was lying. Emma knew that if she looked over at her now, her mom would see right through her with that creepy umbilical cord connected psychic superpower that all moms seemed to have.
Her father finally broke the stand-off. “Well, anything that gets kids reading, let alone reading obscure ancient philosophy, then I’m all for it.”
People couldn’t stop talking about the Baby On Your Doorstep Test—arguing, debating, defending, denouncing. In fact, the only people who weren’t talking about it were the two people responsible for it. That day at Michelle Maynard’s house, Senz and Emma had stayed crouched in the bushes until the last of the news vans and police cars had left. Senz had said, “Well, I guess that’s it’s,” and Emma had said, “Yeah, catch ya later,” and they’d gone their separate ways just like always.
