by Schow, Ryan
“The right thing is boring.”
“I know.”
“What are you worried about?” I ask him. But I already know. Teachers shouldn’t sleep with their students. It’s the oldest cliché in the book. Plus, it’s illegal if said student is underage, which I am.
“I’m worried about more things than you can fathom.”
“I know, you’re my teacher and all, and that I’m still only seventeen—”
“I’m not your teacher anymore,” he says. “I’ll be transferring to Freeman Private University up the road from Astor Academy next semester.”
“Freeman Private University?” I hear myself say. “I’ve never heard of it.”
“Construction is set to finish later this month. It’s where kids from Astor Academy will go to college, if they choose.”
“What kind of college is it?”
“Freeman will be where you go if you want to have a place in the upper echelons of power. It’s the same as Astor, except it’s college.”
“So what’s your point in telling me this and still refusing to be with me? This will never be more than a flirtationship, will it?”
“A what?”
“A flirtationship.”
He laughs and I try not to take offense.
“It’s like I told you last semester, when you’re eighteen—”
I walk up to him and I kiss him, hard on the mouth. He starts to pull back, but I grab a handful of hair on the back of his head and keep his mouth on mine. He stops fighting me, starts kissing me.
Next thing I know Jake is all over me and I’m all the way on the bed and he’s pulling at my shirt, unbuttoning it. My breasts are suddenly out and he’s kissing them and then, just like last time, he’s stopping. God, don’t stop!
“What?” I ask.
He scoots away from me, like I’ve got herpes or hairy nipples or something and I’m like, WTF?
“This is too easy,” he says.
“So now I’m a slut?”
“No, no, no. It’s too easy to fall for you, to do something wrong.”
“You’re doing something wrong right now. You’re stopping. Jesus Jake, have some balls. Take what you want! I’m practically giving myself to you!”
“Are you a virgin?” he asks. He stops breathing, waits for me to answer.
“Of course I am.”
“Then…it can’t be…you can’t make this your first time. In a hotel room, underage and with your teacher.”
“You said you’re not my teacher.”
“Yes, but you’re still—”
“I know. But those are laws made by men who could never get a girl like me so they looked to spoil it for those guys who could.”
He looks at me for a long time, then he looks at my nipples and traces a line down my chest with his finger. My body responds to his touch. He traces his finger in a circle around my nipple and it pulls tight, lengthens. Then that awful thing that’s sitting inside of him—responsibility, guilt, hesitation—it slides through his eyes and the room grows cold. He moves the fabric of my shirt over my breasts and once more I’m left feeling unwanted, unappreciated.
“You asshole,” I say, but I don’t mean it and he doesn’t take offense. I lean in and kiss him, then fix my bra, button up my shirt and leave.
The road home is long and dark, and still I cannot cry.
Impossible Like Me
1
Gerhard watched Georgia watch the little girl. A dark satisfaction unfolded over and over again inside his remade heart.
“Georgia, my most beautiful creation, this is Alice, your sister.”
“I don’t have a sister,” Georgia replied. Her eyes wandered restlessly over the five year old. Damp hair, dark eyes, pale skin. She wore a green felt dress with white slippers, making her look like something out of a vampire film. Gerhard glanced down at Alice. The girl was so still and perfect she could be a statue.
“Genetically, yes you do.”
Alice turned her palms up and, like a lion to its prey, Georgia’s eyes intensified. They zeroed in on the place where markings like hers should’ve been. Alice’s palms were perfect, unblemished. For a second, Georgia relaxed. Then a barely visible heat started to radiate off them, the kind of thickening of the air that comes with dangerously high temperatures. Gerhard removed his wallet. Alice didn’t move. Her kind of focus was an impossibility in girls her age. In anyone her age. This is what made her so special. Her humanity simply took a back seat to her dark gift.
From his wallet, Gerhard pulled out and unfolded a long paper receipt. Three inches in length at least. He lifted the receipt into the air two feet above Alice’s palm and the receipt caught fire. The flesh of his hand sizzled for a moment, but he stilled himself against the pain. And he did not overreact. The skin would blister, but it was nothing he couldn’t handle.
Georgia opened her palm, watched the skin prickle in the circular pattern, tried to build her own flame. Her eyes darkened with concentration; even the color of her skin went deeper by two shades of grey. The air around her cooled. Oxygen grew thin. Nothing happened, however.
Not for an entire minute.
Gerhard watched the concentration and the surety drain from Georgia’s face. She looked at Alice with frustrated curiosity, or perhaps insecurity. Alice bore no expression at all.
“Not sisters,” Georgia finally said.
Alice turned her palm to face the dead boy on the floor and her focus deepened even further. A smile crept onto Gerhard’s face. Georgia’s eyes followed the trajectory of the energy and watched as, moments later, the unscathed flesh of the boy’s corpse blackened and then finally burst into flames.
Gerhard felt himself clap ever so lightly. He felt giddy inside. Like a child. Not only could she liquefy someone from the inside out, she could set them on fire with nothing but her mind.
“I want to do that,” Georgia said.
“You will,” Gerhard replied. “Your sister will teach you.”
2
Weeks passed and things burned, but Georgia’s talent failed to develop the way Alice’s had. To transfer her destructive force from one thing to another, Georgia needed direct contact with her target. The angry, microscopic whiskers on her palms needed to release, to purge, to bristle against something else.
Gerhard’s disappointment weighed on him. He knew he hadn’t failed with Georgia, he had just hoped for a different outcome. After many contemplative hours, however, he realized he had succeeded. There was no way of knowing what was going to happen to Georgia once he infused her with Alice’s DNA. She could have melted down. Like Savannah. Her cells could have simply roasted.
But they didn’t. She survived. And she became something beautiful.
He finally went to her and said, “Georgia, my sweet, you are perfect the way you are, just as Alice is perfect the way she is. No two sisters are alike, not even twins.”
“I know,” she said. “But her gift is better.”
“It’s just different. This is new to you, and to me, and we have no idea the depth of your talents, only that Alice’s is different than yours.”
“I am talented, though,” she said. It came out sounding like a statement, but it was in fact a question.
“Yes,” he heard himself say. “Yes, my dear, you are.”
3
When Gerhard finally accepted Georgia’s talents were not like those of Alice’s, despite them sharing genetic material, he felt the final vestiges of hope slide from him. She was not a disappointment, he continued to remind himself. She was simply Phase I of a much more complicated plan he had yet to develop.
He had to study Alice’s DNA more thoroughly. Alice was now his patient, inherited by default from the late Dr. Cameron. He required other subjects. Other people like Alice. Were there any more genetic gifts of this nature to be found? He didn’t know. He only knew his time with Georgia was over. It was time for her to go home.
He called to her. She came the same as she always did,
with quiet obedience. She was dressed in the torn jean shorts and white button up blouse he bought her. She wore designer cowboy boots and clear lip gloss because that was the look these days.
He marveled at how different she was. How beautiful, and how…detached. Like the warmth in her was being saved not for humility or kindness or love, but for fuel to feed the circular fields of lethal spikes now residing in her palms. She was not the old Georgia.
“You have to learn to be human again,” he said. It’s what he said to many of his patients back when he worked in the camps in Poland. With them he never really meant it. With them, the push and pull of emotions enhanced the torture. But with Georgia, he meant every single word of it.
“But I am human,” Georgia said. Her face didn’t look so human when she said this. His worry deepened. He had bestowed upon her a gift, but perhaps she had too much of Alice’s DNA in her to ever fully resemble the Georgia he once knew. Alice almost never smiled. Her focus was unending. Would Georgia always be so stiff? So rigid?
“You must relax your muscles, soften your eyes and smile more. Try thinking of your friends.” Nothing happened. Georgia didn’t even blink. “Do you think about them anymore?”
“I saw them in a dream.”
“You can see them again, you know.”
Her face shifted expression, but only slightly. “I can?”
“Aren’t you anxious to see them?”
She seemed to consider this, and the more she thought about her friends, the lighter and healthier her skin appeared. Jesus Christ, he thought, she’s a human mood ring.
“Yes.”
“And your parents?”
“Parents?” she said.
“Your mother and father,” he replied, his German accent weighted with concern.
“Yes,” she said, something brighter and more alive passing through her once vacant features. “I mean, yes.” He smiled and she said, “Do you think of your parents?”
“My parents are dead,” he replied.
“Dead?”
Gerhard hadn’t thought of his parents in decades. His mother’s cruelty mixed with his father’s more disciplined practice of endurance left him well equipped for survival. And he had survived. He survived several wars, imprisonment, deportation, the CIA, even death.
Technically he no longer existed. Not at his age. Not the way he lived his life. Wolfgang Gerhard was like Georgia. And Alice. He was something more than human, yet he was entirely human, capable of curiosity and lust and greed, consumed by a need to create, to destroy, to control. He loved and he hated. He conspired and he killed. He did these things because he was human, still the product of a mother and a father, still a boy once born of flesh and blood.
But he did not think of his mother and his father. Instead he thought only of his subjects.
“My parents died back in the 1960’s,” he lied.
He watched Georgia do the math. Watched the answer effect her. It was the same as putting someone in a round room and watching them search for a corner.
“They died over fifty years ago?” she asked.
With a keen eye, he watched her study him. Her eyes drifted across the landscape of Gerhard’s face, taking in the faint lines, the hint of an age spot on his right cheek just under his eye, his lightly thinning hair, the slight receding hairline. Science had him looking forty, but he hadn’t seen forty in a very, very long time. Georgia had no way of knowing his true age or origins, but she knew something didn’t fit. He shouldn’t have parents who died in the sixties when he looked like he was born in the seventies.
“If this is true,” she said, “then your life is impossible.”
“I agree.”
“You are impossible.”
“Impossible like you,” he said.
4
Gerhard finally made the call. He had put if off for weeks while he assessed Georgia’s talents, but it was time. Her parents cried with relief when he said she was okay. It almost moved him.
Almost, but not.
People’s pain only interested him if it bore the promise of more pain. The return of a daughter brought tears of joy. Gerhard liked the opposite.
He craved the opposite.
When Alice asked where they were going, Gerhard told her. “First we have to return young Georgia to her parents. Then I have a shipment of subjects arriving at my office in San Francisco.”
“Subjects?”
“Men.”
“Are they going to be my brothers?” she asked. The manner in which she asked the question—so genuine, so innocent—touched him in ways he didn’t understand. He almost felt again.
She was like him, but without the help of genetics. She was a pure anomaly. Not of science, but of nature. Unless there was something he didn’t know, young Alice existed because of a mutation, not manipulation.
All too often these days, he wondered, what happened to make her the way she was? By what miracle was this lovely child given this life, these powers, such insight?
His scientific mind ached to unfold the mysteries of her. To know everything. Studying her to the point of perfect understanding, however, would be impossible. He’d need DNA sampling from both parents, but they gave their daughter up. Took payment in return for their little baby girl. Their lovely, homicidal mutant child.
He let himself forget about studying her the way doctors study cancerous rats—she was off the books now. Technically stolen from Cameron, who was now dead and dissolved. Gerhard’s tact would be completely different. Having someone as special as Alice, she was the key ingredient in a future that excited him to the point of insomnia. Mixing her DNA with the DNA of others could very well force an untold amount of genetic anomalies! Georgia proved that. He could be successful.
A living God.
And so when the time came to take Georgia home, they packed their personal belongings and the more vital pieces of Dr. Cameron’s lab equipment into the rented Chevy Tahoe and a companion trailer. After an unhealthy fast-food breakfast, they hit the road heading out of Canada and back into America.
It was almost like he was part of a family. Like these were his two beautiful daughters. Which, to some degree, they were.
Unspeakable Things
1
The morning after the funeral, the first thing I get is a call from Netty. The caller ID shows her name. I decide it’s time to tell her about Maggie. Then it occurs to me: I haven’t called to see how things went with Chloe. God I suck as a friend!
I feel two feet tall, answering the phone. Of course, her being Russian and outspoken, she says, “Thanks for not being there when I needed you most,” to which I say, “Some bad things have happened, Netty, and I’m sorry for not calling.”
“I got fired,” she says. “And I’m pretty sure Chloe made it happen.”
“I take it the break up didn’t go so well?”
The morning sun cutting through the drapes sizzles the surface of my eyeballs. I drag myself out of bed, pull the drapes shut. I slide back in bed with Rebecca, who is now as much a part of my sleeping experience as my sheets, blankets and pillows. Without her, I would feel horribly alone.
“A clitoral circumcision would’ve been easier,” Netty says, though we both know it wouldn’t be.
“I’m sorry. It’s just, I feel terrible that I wasn’t a better friend.”
“You should feel terrible.”
I don’t say anything because, in light of God basically shitting on my little spot in the universe, I really don’t think I should feel as terrible as she wants me to feel.
She says, “So what happened that’s so bad?”
“Maggie killed herself. She sliced open her wrist and we found her dead in the bathtub. The funeral was a couple of days ago.”
The silence gets so thick you can almost imagine the entire world getting sucked into its vacuum. I watch dust motes float in the air. I wait for her to speak. For a second, I even have a chance to look at Rebecca, her strawberry red hair spread out
on the pillow, her face at perfect peace, the steady sounds of her breathing, the deep rise and fall of her chest. I swear, the girl could sleep through an earthquake.
“Abby, I’m so sorry,” she says. Never has she sounded more sincere. “We need to get together later on today. I mean it.”
“I agree. I miss you so much.”
“I miss you, too,” she says.
“I need to pull myself together, get a few cups of coffee in me, then I’ll call you and we can make plans.”
“Okay.”
“Oh and Netty?”
“Yes?”
“I’m really sorry about what happened to you, at that party. I’ve been thinking of it ever since you told me. That’s why Maggie killed herself. She was raped. She was forced to have sex with this freaking pig music executive who signed her, and the piece of shit filmed it and sent it to her in a text message. A text message!”
“Son of a bitch,” Netty mutters low under her breath, her Russian accent choked with disgust. “What is wrong with people these days?”
“So many things,” I say, looking at the still sleeping Rebecca. “But I’m going to make a few of them right.”
“What do you mean?” she asks.
Lowering my voice, I say, “That motherf*cker’s going to pay for what he’s done.” So long as Brayden gets me that gun, I think to myself.
“You sound really mean right now,” Netty says, quietly. “I’ve never heard you like this.”
“It’s the boy DNA in me, I think.”
“There is no boy DNA in you. It’s just you, and you sound mean, and vulgar.”
“I know.”
“I’m concerned,” she says.
“Are you telling me I should just do nothing?”
