Perfect

by Cecelia Ahern

  The guards stay with him for some time, blocking my view. Then, when they leave, he stays where he is, and I stand at the glass willing him to look at me, but he doesn’t.

  I smile and shake my head. It’s not going to work. He can’t make me hate him.

  And there is nothing he can do to stop what is about to happen.

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  THE GUARDS RETURN with our food and deliver a tray to each of us. As they do that, they remove the pen and paper from my cell and dump the Highland Castle uniform down on my bed, red scrub pants and a red T-shirt.

  Raphael picks up a fork and pokes through the food with a look of disgust. Granddad leaps in, heaping the forkfuls into his mouth. Carrick keeps his back to me, ignoring the guards, ignoring the food, ignoring everybody and everything. He wants me to hate him, but it’s not working.

  I go to the small toilet in the holding cell to change out of the slip and into the uniform. When I return I smell the food and my stomach rumbles. There’s soup, a beige color that could be anything from vegetable to chicken. For the main course there is meat and two vegetables. I try the smell and taste test that Carrick taught me as I try to figure out just what exactly this food is. There is a distinct smell of mint. Or the antiseptic. Perhaps the mint is coming from the meat, which maybe is lamb, but it looks more like dried beef than lamb. I lift the soup bowl to my nose and close my eyes and breathe in. That slight smell of mint. What could it be?

  I can’t figure it out, and I decide I’m not eating this food. That would be a kind of victory on their part. Crevan was right about one thing: My chief feature is definitely stubbornness.

  I long to be back in the kitchen with Carrick, sitting before the open fridge, blindfolded, feeling the tips of his fingers on my lips as he feeds me.

  Pea and mint soup, I wonder, but then it would be green, not beige.

  To think that this dry, overcooked, bad cafeteria food was the last thing I tasted before I became Flawed. Maybe it’s a good thing I can’t taste it now, though it hasn’t stopped Granddad from shoveling it into him and Raphael from picking at it. Granddad has worked his way through it and is even lying down for a snooze.

  Carrick gets up from his bed and makes his way to the table, his hunger taking over, too. He sits down and dives into the soup, tasting it straightaway, unlike me, who has to figure it out.

  My stomach rumbles and I sigh. Fine. Just get on with it.

  But it’s as I’m spooning it to my mouth, as the spoon rests on my bottom lip, that I stall. My memory flashes to Crevan on the summit, that antiseptic smell that I thought was chewing gum. It reminds me of the hospital I woke up in after he stuck the needle in my thigh. It reminds me of how I felt when dragging myself along the floor.

  I open my eyes.

  They’ve drugged our food.

  Granddad is lying down on his bed, eyes closed.

  Raphael is slumped in his chair, head on his chest.

  Carrick has his back to me and is dunking crusty bread in his soup. I jump up and start banging on the window, screaming.

  He can’t hear me, of course, but I can’t think of anything else and so I continue, crying as I watch him eat more and more of it, my voice hoarse and my throat burning, my hands and fists throbbing as I pound on the glass.

  I look around for the pen and paper but they’re gone, removed by the guards when they delivered the food.

  Then I think of something. I need to cause a distraction. Make a scene. I pick up a chair and throw it. I pull the blankets from the bed and throw them on the floor. I topple the table of food. Anything I can pick up, I throw. I trash the room. Carrick must eventually feel vibrations or see the reflections in the glass because he turns suddenly and his eyes widen when he sees the state of my room. The guards open the door to the holding cells and grab their keys.

  I run to the glass and mouth, “The food.” I shake my head. “Don’t eat the food.” I wrap my hands around my neck in a strangling way.

  His eyes widen, he looks to his food and then back to me, understanding. He stands up to make his way to me but he goes in a diagonal direction. He wobbles on his feet. He looks to Granddad, then Raphael, and teeters some more. He looks back at me and his eyes have glazed over.

  He looks over my shoulder and I see the pain in his expression as the guards open the door and come for me. It’s the last thing he sees before reaching out for a chair for support and falling to the floor.

  “Carrick!” I yell.

  My cell door opens and I fire whatever I can at the guards, over and over again.

  “Grab her,” a guard directs another, and two of them come after me, batons in hand.

  “Leave her! Stop!” a voice shouts.

  It’s Art.

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  ART IS WEARING his Whistleblower uniform.

  “Don’t touch her,” he says.

  “You disgust me,” I say, kicking a chair toward him.

  “Whoa, whoa, Celestine, stop!” His voice is like thunder.

  “You drugged them!” I yelled.

  He looks around the cells and sees the others.

  I pick up my bowl of soup and throw it at his feet. “I wasn’t hungry.”

  They all run at me, but it’s Art who reaches me first. He wraps his arms around me, and even though he’s not Carrick, even though he’s smaller, he’s still bigger and stronger than me. He wraps his arms around me and squeezes, to stop me from lifting my arms. It’s not so much his strength that stops me, it’s his scent, and the familiar feel of his body so close to mine, and his arms wrapped around me. It feels wrong to struggle against him. Unnatural. It’s Art. My Art.

  I start to wriggle again.

  “Celestine,” he whispers in my ear. “If you stop, they will go away.”

  I freeze. It was the they. The hint that it’s us against them. Is that what I’m supposed to think, is that what he wants me to think, or is that what I want to think?

  “We’re fine,” Art says firmly. “Thank you, I’ll take it from here.”

  They begrudgingly close the door.

  “Christ, they don’t trust me, you don’t trust me—when can I get a break?” He keeps his arms wrapped around me.

  They don’t trust him? I don’t blame them.

  “I’m not going to throw anything,” I snap. “You can let me go.”

  He looks at me, deep into my eyes. I have to look away, just seeing them confuses me too much. His grip weakens and I push away from him. I move to the far side of the cell, the farthest I can get from him.

  “What did you do to them?” I say, gesturing to Carrick, Raphael, and Granddad.

  “I didn’t do anything,” he replies, studying them. Carrick is lying on the floor, passed out.

  “Tell me the truth.”

  “I am. He was throwing furniture around, maybe they needed to calm him down.”

  “They didn’t, he was already calm,” I say. “And my granddad wasn’t doing anything, nor Raphael. Neither was I. I’m the only one who didn’t eat it.”

  Art looks at Carrick, a look of hate, and then he looks at Granddad and I see his resolve weaken. Art liked that Granddad never watched what he said in front of him, in fact his conspiracy theories seemed to grow whenever he was in Art’s company. It amused Art; he was always fond of Granddad. “The spawn of Satan,” Granddad used to call him, which bizarrely made Art laugh. I think he found Granddad refreshing, when he felt everybody else around him was always nice to him because of who his dad is.

  “How did you know Carrick threw a chair? Were you watching us?”

  “Celestine, the room is covered in CCTV cameras.”

  I wonder if he saw the meeting with the judges. I doubt it. “Spying on me for Daddy, Art?”

  “Shut up.” He stands. “I’m trying to figure out what the hell is going on here.”

  “You know what’s going—”

  “With him,” he shouts, pointing at Carrick. “Did it happen in here? While I was out of my mind wi
th worry, you were in here, cozy with him? Did it happen then?”

  “Cozy?” I ask, then laugh. “Yes, because you can see how cozy this is, how much human contact is completely possible in here,” I say sarcastically. “And what exactly do you think could have happened between me and him when I was scared out of my wits after your dad locked me up?”

  He paces back and forth.

  I take a deep breath. Try to calm down. “It was after,” I say quietly. “After I got out. You weren’t there for me. I had to run away. He was the only person who would help me, the only person who understood—”

  “I would have understood. I was your boyfriend!”

  “You went into hiding, Art. I had no one.”

  “I needed to figure things out.”

  “You obviously did. Now that you’re wearing that uniform, I can see you decided what and who was right and wrong.”

  “When I came back you were gone,” he says, trying to make me understand.

  “I had to go.”

  “To him?”

  “Art, stop it. It’s not just about Carrick. I had to get away from your dad. He was hunting me down.”

  “He wouldn’t have if you hadn’t run. Why do you keep making everything worse? And that speech today, why don’t you just stop? Just do what you’re told. Every time you do something it just makes it harder for…”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Harder for us to be together.”

  I’m stunned. For a long time I don’t know what to say. I can tell he’s hugely embarrassed and maybe even close to tears.

  “You still want us to be together?”

  He doesn’t reply.

  “You’re a Whistleblower, I’m Flawed, and you still want me?”

  No response.

  “Art, you know that regardless of these brands, I’m still the same person. Whatever I do, whatever I say, I’m still me.”

  “No, you’re not.” He shakes his head.

  “Just like when you put that uniform on, you completely change?”

  His head snaps up so fast. “I don’t.”

  I leave the silence. Same thing.

  “I need some air,” I say, putting my head in my hands, feeling faint, unable to deal with this bombshell. Art still wants me?

  “Good idea,” he says. “We can talk more openly outside in the courtyard.”

  He opens the cell using his key card and we walk down the corridor. It’s the same walk I took for the first time when Funar pretended he was taking me and Carrick to get some air but then forced us to sit on the bench and witness the screams of the Flawed man being branded.

  The second time I took this walk, Carrick was sitting on the bench in support of me as I was branded. I’ll find you. His words comforted me for so long when I got home.

  The bench sits empty now. My head whirls with everything that has happened and all that Art has said.

  Suddenly I break away from Art. He just misses me as he tries to grab me. I run into the Branding Chamber and lock the door. He appears in the viewing room, angry. I can’t hear what he’s saying but he can hear me. He’s going to have to listen to me now—he has no choice.

  “The last time I was in here, do you know what your dad did to me?”

  He covers his face with his hands.

  “They put me in this chair. They tied me down. Five brands, Art. For trying to help that old man. And in the end the brands weren’t for helping him, they were for lying to the court about it, for embarrassing your dad, for making him look stupid. You might be wearing that uniform, but I know you don’t believe that’s right.”

  I open the drawers filled with tools. So many F’s of different sizes, for different parts of the body, depending on the size of the person. I hadn’t realized that, I’d thought one size fit all.

  “I kept my anklet on during it all. You’d just given it to me and I wanted to believe that you were still with me and that you still believed I was perfect. Bark let me keep it. It was him who made it, wasn’t it?”

  Carrick had told me somebody at the Castle had made it, and I remember the flicker of recognition in Bark’s face as his eyes clamped on the ankle of the person he was about to brand as Flawed, as he battled with the hypocrisy, the irony, the fragility of life.

  Art nods, tears welling in his eyes as I relive it.

  “At the time I was glad you weren’t in the chamber, but now I wish you had been.” I run my finger along the pokers, which become hot branding tools for the Flawed.

  I look at him. “The guards were worried about me. Five brands was a lot to take at once. They wanted to stop, but they needed permission. Somebody called for your dad. He came in here. Instead of stopping it, your dad took the iron and branded me for a sixth time. On my spine, without anesthetic.”

  He’s shaking his head. No, no, no. He doesn’t want to believe it.

  “He’ll probably tell you that I’ve made it up. That I’m spreading lies about him. They’re not lies, Art. He told me to repent and I wouldn’t, so he did this to me.”

  I turn around and lift my T-shirt to reveal my lower spine. “He told a doctor that I did it to myself, but how could I have?”

  I hear Dr. Greene’s voice in my head. How could a girl do this to herself?

  Art is shaking his head, tears rolling down his cheeks.

  I run my hand over the rods again, trying to find the right one, wondering if I could reach around my back, if I could have actually done it to myself, is that what they will try to prove? Will they make me stand up in court and show them that I could do it myself? My hand stops. It hovers over a shape that stands out from the others. The three interconnecting circles of the geometric harmony anklet that Bark made for me, the symbol of perfection, is filed alongside the Flawed F’s. I pick it up and click it into place on the rod.

  “What kind of person could do this to herself?” I repeat the words of the doctor, to myself.

  I fire up the flame on the burner.

  Art bangs on the glass over and over.

  I place the poker over the flame.

  “If everyone thinks you are something, why not become it? Isn’t that what you did, Art? Become a Whistleblower because everyone thought you were like your dad? You didn’t want to fight it anymore, you wanted to see what it was like. You didn’t have anything else to lose.”

  He’s crying and banging on the window, trying to get me to stop.

  “Judge Sanchez wants to make a deal with me, did you know that?”

  He shakes his head, confused.

  “Your dad is out. Sanchez is in. On further review, the Guild thinks they’ve made a mistake. They say they’re going to take my brands away from me.”

  It’s clear Art isn’t aware of any of this.

  “But I don’t want them to take my brands away. These brands have given me more strength than I’ve ever had, and I can’t pretend that none of this happened. But there needs to be a balance. I still wear the anklet for balance,” I say, realizing it now. “You gave me the greatest gift, Art. You told me I was perfect and I’ve worn it every day since, like it had a special power that beat the brands. But it wasn’t the anklet, it was because you told me, because you believed in me.”

  He smiles sadly at me.

  “No one will ever be able to take your gift away from me, you understand, don’t you?”

  He nods.

  I roll up the bottom of my T-shirt, revealing my stomach.

  “Transversus abdominis,” I say. “Remember we learned about this?”

  He lays his hands flat against the window, his forehead against the pane, giving up the fight to stop me.

  “It’s located under the obliques; it is the deepest of the abdominal muscles and wraps around the spine for protection and stability. It’s our center of gravity.”

  I hold the poker in the flame, my heart pounding. I’m not seeking perfection; I’m not seeking justice. I’m seeking balance.


  I push the branding iron against my stomach. Branded Perfect forever.

  Perfect and Flawed on the same body.

  Now I’m balanced.

  SIXTY-NINE

  THE PAIN IS almost unbearable. I drop the branding stick and reach out to the chair in agony, dizzy, seeing black spots before my eyes. I try to catch my breath. I feel nauseous and breathe deeply. There’s banging on the door and I unlock it. Art bursts in and I collapse into his arms.

  We both slide to the floor.

  “What did you do?” he asks between sobs, panicking. “What the hell did you do? We have to get you to the hospital.”

  “No,” I protest, and cling to him tighter.

  “Oh, Celestine,” he cries out to me, but it’s soft and gentle and I feel his warm breath on my neck as he buries his head into me.

  “Now there’s a part of you with me forever, no matter what you think of me.”

  He lifts my chin with his finger so that we’re looking right at each other, inches apart. “I think you’re the strongest, bravest, most courageous, stupidest person I’ve ever met.”

  I smile. “You do?”

  “I was jealous,” he admits, loosening his grip on me slightly, as if remembering we’re not together. “Of you and him. I should have done what you and he did. Instead of running away on my own, I should have just taken you and run.”

  He looks at me with that familiar look that used to make me go all weak at the knees, and I await the stir within me, but it doesn’t come. Nothing but fondness, affection … but nothing more. I can’t help thinking of Carrick, Carrick holding me, Carrick watching me, how Carrick smells and tastes. Carrick, who is lying on the floor of his cell.

  “So even though you two going on the run angered me more than you’ll ever understand, I’m glad he was there for you, like I should have been.”

  “Thank you,” I whisper. “And I do understand. I felt the same way when I saw you with Juniper.…”