Tell the Machine Goodnight

by Katie Williams

  * * *

  —

  SAFF COMES OVER AFTER SCHOOL to continue our conversation from the diner. When I swing open the door, she looks upset. Her eyes are pink. The inner edge of her penciled brow is smeared like she’s been rubbing at it. I have the impulse to reach up and touch it, that bare little arc of skin. I shove my hands in my pockets.

  “Are your parents home?” she says.

  I tell her no, that my mom is at work. And that my dad doesn’t live here anymore.

  “Okay,” she says.

  And I’m grateful she doesn’t say, I’m sorry, because then I don’t have to say, It’s okay. Or, I see him on weekends. Or, It’s better this way. Or any other of that divorce-kid bullshit.

  “We have until six,” I say. “My mom usually gets home around then.”

  Not that it’s against the rules to have Saff over. In fact, I’m pretty sure Mom would be delighted, which is precisely why I don’t want her to find Saff here. It’s too hard to have Mom hoping things about me. She got home before me yesterday, when I was at the park with Saff. Now she keeps looking at me, but she won’t ask where I was, and I won’t tell her. Not just out of stubbornness.

  I’ve bought a tube of cookies and a couple sodas from the corner store in case Saff is hungry. There’s plenty of food in the kitchen, of course, but Mom will notice if any of it is missing, and she’ll think (hope) that I’m the one who’s eaten it. I offer the snacks to Saff like I haven’t bought them special. I even left them in the kitchen so that I can pretend to go in and get them from the cupboard. We take the food into my room.

  Saff turns in a slow circle. I picture my room through her eyes: twin bed, rag rug, desk-chair-screen setup. No bullshit band posters or Japanese mech figurines to announce my unique store-bought personality. I threw all that stuff in a box last year. Now the room is simple (bare, Mom says), pure (monkish, Mom says). The walls are its only distinction. Today they’re set to Victorian wallpaper, an exact replica of the wallpaper in the old BBC show Sherlock. On one wall there’s even the image of a fireplace, complete with ashtray and curling pipe.

  I wait to see if Saff gets the joke, but she sinks down on the floor by my bed without comment. She slides out a couple cookies, then shakes the tube at me. When I say, “No thanks,” she doesn’t push it, doesn’t study me with meaningful eyes, doesn’t say, Are you sure? So I return the favor and don’t ask why she’s been crying.

  Instead, I say, “Tell me more about the game.”

  “Game?”

  “The Scapegoat Game.”

  She rolls her eyes and bites off half a cookie in one go. “Oh. That fucking thing.”

  “Whose idea was it?”

  “Whose do you think?”

  “Ellie’s.”

  She nods.

  Popularity—who’s cool, who’s not, jocks, nerds, whatever—is, for Saff and me, something that exists only in movies about high school. When you have a class of twelve people, there really aren’t enough of you to divide up into cliques. Sure, there are some best friends, like Ellie and Saff, or like Josiah and me (used to be). There’re some couples, Ellie and Linus for a while, then Brynn and Linus, basically every girl and Linus. Except Saff. She’s never been with Linus. Though maybe she has this past year; I wouldn’t know, I’ve been gone. My point is, mostly everyone hangs out with everyone else.

  There is one role, though, one rule: Ellie is always the leader. It’s been that way from our first year, back when Ellie would whip the dodgeball at you and then, when you cried over the burn it’d left on your leg, explain how that was just part of the game, explain it so calmly and confidently that you found yourself nodding, even though the tears were still rolling down your cheeks. That makes it sound like I think Ellie is a bad person. I don’t. In fact, the older I get, the more I think that Ellie’s got it right, that she knew at five what the rest of us wouldn’t figure out until our teens: the world is tough, so you’d better be tough right back.

  “And so?” I say to Saff, because there’s always more to the story when Ellie is involved.

  “And so, after Ellie comes up with the scapegoat idea, she even volunteers to go first. Which, if you think about it, is pretty smart because at first everyone is, you know, gentle. Warming up to it. Also, if you go first, you haven’t scapegoated anyone else yet, so they don’t have anything to pay you back for.” Saff pauses. “Do you think she actually plans this stuff out ahead of time?”

  “I think Ellie has an instinct for weakness.”

  “Well, that first week we didn’t do much—tugged Ellie’s hair, kicked the back of her chair in class, made her carry our lunch trays. Nothing really. I think she had fun. Actually, I know she did. The last day, she dressed up as Calla Pax, from that sacrifice-on-the-ice movie we watched. In, like, a sexy white robe. She looked great. Of course. Then, the next week, Linus went. The guys were rougher on him, but not in a mean way, if that makes sense? And you know how Linus is. Easy with it all. It felt like a game. Fun even. Like free. When you have permission to . . . if you can do whatever . . . sometimes it’s like . . .” She taps a thumb against her chest, then gives up trying to explain and takes another cookie. Her third. (I can’t help counting other people’s food.)

  “But then it got bad. Each week, each new person. We kept upping it. Meaner. Rougher.”

  “When did you go?”

  “Last,” she says, smiling bitterly. “Like a fucking fool.”

  She looks like she’s going to start crying again. I type some notes into my screen to give her a chance to get ahold of herself.

  “‘An instinct for weakness,’” she mutters.

  I look up from my screen. “I didn’t mean that you’re weak.”

  “I don’t know. I feel pretty weak.”

  “You’re not, though. That’s why they gave you zom. They had to make you weak. Which proves you’re not. See?”

  She bites on her lip. “I haven’t told you about Astrid yet.”

  “Astrid is weak.”

  “Yeah, I know. She was scapegoat just before me.”

  Astrid’s parents both work as lawyers for big tech, her mom for Google, her dad for Swink. For them, arguing is sport, which maybe partway explains the way Astrid is. If you’re someone who needs to explain why people are the way they are. In second grade Astrid used to brush her hair over her face. Right over the front of it until it covered everything right down to her chin. The teachers were constantly giving her hair bands and brushes and telling her how nice she looked in a ponytail. At Seneca Day, there’s a certain style the teachers are all supposed to use, “suggesting instead of correcting.” But finally one day, Teacher Hawley lost it and shouted, “Astrid, why do you keep doing that!” And all the rest of us looked to the back row where Astrid sat and here comes this little voice, out from behind all that hair: “Because I like it better in here.”

  I still think about that. Because I like it better in here.

  “We got carried away,” Saff says. “We thought because we’re such good friends that we could say anything, do anything, and it was safe.”

  She goes quiet, so I prompt her: “Astrid.”

  “I just rode her, Rhett. All week. I didn’t let up.” As she talks, she pushes up her sleeves like she’s preparing for hard work. “I knew it was bad, too. I knew she was going into the bathroom to cry during break. And that made me even harder on her. Talk about an instinct for weakness.”

  “You’re saying Ellie put you up to it?”

  “That’s the thing. She didn’t. It was me. All of it. I was way worse than the rest of them. Even Ellie probably thought I was going too far. Not that she’d ever stop anyone from going too far.” Saff shakes her head. “I didn’t know I could be like that.”

  “And you think Astrid wanted to get back at you?”

  Saff shrugs. “I’m the one crying in the bathroom
these days, aren’t I?”

  She looks so beyond sad. Which is maybe why I make the mistake of saying, “It’s been pretty bad, huh?”

  And Saff starts crying right there in my room.

  “It’s not the soap,” she says, through sobs, “though I still gag every time I have to wash my hands. It’s not the stupid eyebrow.” She touches it, rubbing away more of the pencil. “It’s not even that I was naked. It’s that everyone saw me. All the seniors. All the middle graders. The teachers. My friends’ parents. My parents’ friends. When they look at me now . . . well, mostly they won’t look at me. That, or they look at me really intensely, and I can practically hear them thinking to themselves, I’m looking her in the eye. I’m looking her in the eye.”

  She puts her face in her hands. I watch her cry. I know I’m not going to hug her, know I’m not even going to pat her arm. But I feel like I should do something. So I take a cookie from the tube. So I bite it. It’s the first solid food I’ve had in over a year, and chewing feels funny. Saff looks up at the crunch. Her eyes are wide, like it’s some big deal, which makes me want to spit out the bite. Instead I take another bite. Then I pass it to her. She takes a bite and passes it back to me. We finish the whole cookie that way, bite by bite.

  CASE NOTES 3/27/35, EVENING

  MEANS

  Any of our suspects could have found the means to dose Saffron Jones.

  Linus Walz (age 17) deals recreational drugs, primarily LSD, X, and hoppit, but it wouldn’t be difficult for Linus to get zom, either for his own use or for a classmate. Ellie never confessed where she got the zom she was caught with last year, but it’s common knowledge that Linus got it for her.

  Josiah Halu (age 16) is Linus’s close friend, and like Ellie, he could’ve asked Linus to get him the zom or even stolen it from Linus’s stash.

  Of the four suspects, Astrid Lowenstein (age 17) seems the least likely to have been able to secure the drug, though she shouldn’t be ruled out on these grounds.

  At this point, none of them can be ruled out. Any of them could have done it, even if it’s difficult to imagine any of them having done it. It’s difficult because they used to be my friends. I can’t allow my bias to blind me. One of them did do it. Sentimentality must be starved.

  * * *

  —

  THAT WHOLE NIGHT, I keep thinking about Saff crying in my bedroom. For the first time since I left school, I almost wish I could be back at Seneca Day so that Saff would have someone there to, I don’t know, trust. Except, if I’d stayed at Seneca, I would’ve played the Scapegoat Game with the rest of them, I would’ve gone to Ellie’s party that night, and then I would’ve been just another one of Saff’s suspects. I’m only able to help her because I’m here, on the outside.

  I ask myself why I even care about helping Saff. Ask myself why I keep picturing her blotchy one-eyebrowed face. I mean it’s not like Saff cared about me. None of them did. After I left, a few emails, a handful of texts, a “get well” card some teacher undoubtedly bought and made them all sign. Linus and Josiah came by the apartment a few times, then just Josiah, then no one. Not that I wanted anyone to visit. Not that I answered any of their emails or texts. Then just last week, almost a year to the day that I’d left school, Saff texted me: I think you’re maybe the only person who hasn’t seen it yet. I need you to tell me you haven’t seen it yet. Please don’t have seen it.

  It was the video. And, no, I hadn’t seen it yet. Saff and I met at the bus stop outside my building. We sat in the plastic rain shelter, even though it was sunny, and let bus after bus go by. She looked the same, Saff did, short crinkly hair; round face; sleeve of metal bracelets, like her own personal wind chimes. I’d never thought much about Saff; she was always Ellie’s friend, daffy and harmless, a sidekick, a tagalong. Ellie wasn’t here now, though. Saff had come to meet me by herself. And maybe she looked different after all. Maybe she looked harder. Braver.

  She sat on the bench next to me and said, “Hey, Rhett.”

  She didn’t say, You look better, or You’ve gained weight.

  Which meant that I didn’t have to say, Yeah, I got fat again.

  Which meant that I was able to say, “Hey, Saff.” Like we were just two normal people waiting for the bus.

  I told Saff that she didn’t have to show me the video if she wanted there to be one person who hadn’t seen it. She said it was different because she was choosing to show it to me. She unfolded her screen and told me to check that the projection wasn’t on, then she watched me while I watched it. When I handed her screen back, I made sure not to glance at her body, made sure not to not glance at her body. What Saff said about the way everyone looks at her, I know about that. People do it to me, too.

  The idea for how to help Saff comes to me that night in the middle of a calculus exam, and I’m so excited about it that I get the last question wrong on purpose because it’s taking too long to work out the numbers. I hit Submit on my screen and jump out of my seat. Mom is due back from work any minute, and if I don’t get it now, then I’ll have to wait until morning. Mom’s work just upgraded her machine a few weeks ago, and so if I’m lucky, the old model will still be in the hall closet waiting to be returned to the office. And it turns out that I am lucky because there it is sitting next to her rain boots: the Apricity 470. I pick it up and weigh it in my hand, that little silver box. And I forget that I hate it, hate Mom’s belief in it and its so-called answers. I ditch all my moral qualms. Because this is how I’m going to do it. This is how I’m going to figure out who dosed Saff.

  CASE NOTES 3/28/35, AFTERNOON

  FROM GROVER VS. THE STATE OF ILLINOIS CONCURRING OPINION

  “Whether or not the Apricity technology can truly predict our deepest desires is a matter still under debate. What is certain, however, is that this device does not have the power to bear witness to our past actions. Apricity may be able to tell us what we want, but it cannot tell us what we have done or what we will do. In short, it cannot tell us who we are. It, therefore, has no place in a court of law.”

  * * *

  —

  SAFF AND I DECIDE TO SPRING IT ON THEM, spring me on them. There’s a class meeting after school to come up with a proposal for the end-of-the-year trip. The only adult there will be Teacher Smith, a.k.a. “Smitty,” the junior class adviser, and Smitty insists on “student autonomy,” which means that during class meetings he sits across the hall in the teachers’ lounge grading papers. We can sneak in, me and Apricity, with no one the wiser.

  “Let’s go through it again,” I say. We’re sitting in Saff’s car at the far edge of the parking lot waiting for the meeting to start. “We’re focusing on four people: Linus.”

  “Because he has access to zom,” Saff fills in.

  “Ellie.”

  “Because she could get zom and because she would do it.”

  “Astrid.”

  “Because I was a monster to her,” Saff says.

  “And Josiah?” I phrase it like a question.

  “Yeah. Josiah,” she agrees, but nothing else. She won’t tell me why she suspects him.

  Is it because you two were together? I want to ask. The thought has been in my head all week. But I can’t ask, because then Saff might think that I care. Though maybe that’s why she’s not telling me. I should tell her not to worry about it, me caring. I should tell her that I don’t care. About her and Josiah. About her. About anything. I should tell her that.

  Instead I say, “Have you ever thought it could be all of them? I mean, the whole class together?”

  Saff turns to the window, blows on it, then erases the mark her breath has left. “Sure. But I don’t think about it for long. It’s too shitty to contemplate.”

  “Sorry.”

  She looks over, surprised. “Why are you sorry?”

  “I don’t know. For saying it could be all of them.”

&n
bsp; “But you’re right. It could be.”

  “It won’t be all of them,” I say, though of course I don’t know that this is true.

  “The only thing I’m sure of is it wasn’t you,” Saff says, holding my eye.

  “Yeah. It wasn’t me.”

  She flashes a smile, fleeting as the jangle of her bracelets. There and gone.

  The meeting is about to start, so we go in.

  Smitty does us one better than the teachers’ lounge. He actually goes out to sit in his car and (not-so-) secretly smoke. Saff enters the classroom first, while I wait in the hall. It turns out that I’m nervous. My heart is going at about a million. A few months ago, I would’ve had to sit down and put my head between my knees, but now I’m strong enough to keep standing. I guess that’s something anyway. The doctors would say that’s something. To stand when you need to stand. Strength. I count to thirty, then step into the room.

  “Rhett!” Linus shouts, and suddenly, it’s a year ago, and I never left them. “My man!” He’s smiling big, his arms stretched wide in welcome. A couple of the girls, Brynn and Lyda, rush over to fuss at me. (“You look so good, so much better.” “Yeah, there’s, like, color in your cheeks.”) These two would make a project out of me if they could. Astrid gives a half wave, and Ellie calls out, “Hey, skinny,” causing a couple of the others to shoot her looks, which she ignores. Josiah doesn’t say anything until I catch his eye. As usual, his bangs are in dire need of a cutting. “Hey, man,” he says so softly I only know what the words are because I can read them on his lips.