She gathered me in her arms. “Where are we tonight in your universe?”
“Saturn,” I said. “Waltzing together on the rings.”
“You can’t waltz on Saturn’s rings, Arabella.” She sniffled. “They’re made of sand. You’d fall through.”
“I can waltz on them if I want,” I said.
“I wish I could do something,” she murmured, and I knew she wasn’t thinking of Saturn anymore. “I wish I could get you away from here.”
I buried my face in her lavender-scented hair. This wasn’t the only time she’d talked like this.
“Let’s run away,” she’d said when she returned the first year from camp.
“And where would we go?” I’d asked, wide-eyed.
“Anywhere far from here.”
But there was nowhere for us except my imaginary journeys, and those made her smile so seldom now. I feared she might never smile again.
“Don’t worry.” I squeezed her hand as the camera light burned a halo into my eyes. “We’ll be okay.”
Madeline swallowed a sob and turned her back to me, so that her body was silhouetted against the window, against the outline of the solemn chimney. Maybe she wanted to be alone, but I didn’t care. I nuzzled against the stiff fabric of her tunic and slipped into a dreamless sleep.
***
Day Three Itinerary
Breakfast
Morning Lecture
Afternoon Rest
Lights Out
***
In the next video, the serious-faced man and the little girl recited a lot of technical words and talked about flooding brains with things called neurotransmitters.
I tried to listen, but the half bowl of porridge from breakfast sloshed in my belly and doubled me over the bench.
“You okay?” Madeline asked, her worried eyes the color of sand dollars.
“I’m fine,” I wheezed.
On the screen, the little girl smiled like she knew a secret. “We’ve already told you how happy people are the most productive,” she said. “But even with the best treatments, there are sometimes momentary lapses.”
“This is known as spontaneous recovery,” the man said. “And it’s why we have Red Days. As a healthy outlet for unhealthy emotion.”
I rasped out a laugh. As if Red Days were so healthy. Last
year, our neighbor Mr. Georges lost his plate glass window when our father tossed him through it. And that wasn’t the first mishap. Since I was in kindergarten, we’d lost three houses on our street to Red Day fires. Accidents, the government called them.
“Most of you are good children,” the man in the video continued. “And good children will leave here smiling. But if your first visit doesn’t take, that’s okay. We’ll try again next year. And if you return for a third visit, we have a special treatment just for you.”
Madeline flinched next to me. I wanted to hold her hand and comfort her, but my fingers had gone numb. My entire body was numb.
“And if all three treatments don’t work,” the little girl said with a wide, toothy grin, “then we have a very special home for these very special people.”
“Liars!” Madeline shot to her feet. “You’re all liars!”
In the gloom, the shapes from the video flickered on her face like shadow puppets.
“Enjoy your treatment,” the man said. “And we’ll see you soon.”
The whole room went black, but even in the dark, my sister glowed with conviction. The men in peacoats closed in around her, but she flailed and spit and screamed.
I wanted to scream with her, but I couldn’t move. I could only watch, as one by one, the other kids slumped on the benches like dominoes in a line. I inhaled a ragged breath, and the world dissolved in a glimmering gray.
The last thing I heard was my sister calling my name.
***
Day Four Itinerary
Morning Exams
Afternoon Interviews
Lights Out
***
At dawn, I woke in my own bed and didn’t remember getting there. The others were in their beds as well, and on the undersides of all our left arms, we wore matching bruises—tiny marks, wide enough for a needle. A tattoo of our five days at camp.
Only my sister’s mattress was empty, the sheets clean and unruffled.
There was no breakfast for us. Our stomachs were too sick for food.
“This is normal,” the men in peacoats said when a blond girl with a wilted ponytail retched up yellow bile on the floor of the mess hall. “You’ll soon feel better.”
We nodded and mumbled and sagged on the benches, as the lights dimmed for Day 4’s video. This one was different—there was no pair of familiar narrators. Instead, there were images. Thousands of them. Pictures of torn flesh and mortar explosions and mushroom-shaped finales. Sprays of red as bright and beautiful as the topography of Mars, and bodies split open like cracked walnuts.
This was the test the men promised. Along the far wall, they observed us, taking notes if someone screamed or cried or broke in some way that showed the treatment wasn’t successful. And some of us did. Several kids my age begged for their parents, begged to know why, begged to be anywhere but in this room.
“That’s okay,” the men said, and escorted the sobbing children back to their beds. “You’ll always have next year.”
With my hands folded on my lap, I didn’t weep or shriek. I didn’t feel anything at all.
After the video ended, the men summoned us one at a time into the den. The other kids marched past me, in and out of the room. They all looked alike now, their posture erect, their faces blazing with an uncanny rosiness. They smiled as if the sentiment had always lived like a parasite inside their chests. This is what we were promised. We were happy, and would be happy forever.
When at last the men called my name, I stood with shoulders back and chin tipped up to face the world. My days of slouching were over. Our parents would be proud.
In the room with graying deer heads looming on the walls, the men in peacoats waited for me.
“Hello, Arabella.”
“Hello,” I said in a clear, bright timbre. This was the first time I had spoken today, and in a way, it was the first time I had ever spoken, at least with my real voice.
The men took my blood pressure and jotted down my pulse and they asked me dozens of questions, but I was a good child, and did well every time.
“We were concerned you might be like your sister,” they said. I smiled. “She and I aren’t the same.”
“Congratulations,” they said, and stamped my file.
My lips parted to ask them where Madeline was, what they had done to her last night. But that wouldn’t be appropriate. Good children answered questions. We never asked them.
With the sun setting on the camp, I retreated alone to my bed. All around me, the failed students curled like aborted infants, and over their mournful cries, I strained to hear my sister’s voice. But this time, no one was calling to me.
***
Day Five Itinerary
Celebratory Breakfast
Exit Lecture
Graduation
***
Our final breakfast was a fine meal. Stacked pancakes and boats of syrup and little pats of yellow butter, none of it bland or metallic. We gulped freshly squeezed orange juice and prattled to one another and grinned until our faces ached. This meal was special, because this was our graduation day, the first day of our new lives.
Afterwards, I returned once more to the sleeping quarters. The blanket on my bed was tangled, and my sister’s was not. The world was inverted, just the way the men liked it.
Through the window, the lone cabin was a silent phantom against the horizon. The nearby chimney was not yet smoldering, and no ash lilted like charred rose petals in the air. There was still time for one last request.
The men in peacoats assembled like tin soldiers in the mess hall, and I saluted them.
“Yes?” they asked.<
br />
“I would like to see my sister.”
“Why?” Their dark voices thrummed like air bubbles in my blood.
I smiled. “To say goodbye, of course.”
At once, their faces softened. This was the reply of a good child, and you couldn’t deny a good child, especially on her graduation day.
One of the men escorted me the hundred steps to the cabin, his hand on my spine to push me along. On our way, we passed the metal behemoth with the skinny chimney. Up close, it looked smaller. More person-sized. Madeline-sized.
The man unlocked the door. Inside, the walls were sterile white, and the room stank of bleach and urine.
“Be quick,” he said to me, and we stepped through the doorway.
My sister was crumpled in the corner, her hair glued to her cheeks with sweat, and needle marks along her arms in a constellation of deep blue bruises.
There was no special treatment. Just the same treatment, the same shot ten times over.
I knelt to the cold tile, and the infinite weight of my sister’s body drooped against me.
Her eyes webbed with red, she gazed at me, and a warm shock of electricity shot through my body. She was stronger than they ever realized. What they did to her should have left a void where my sister was, but not one iota of her had changed. The men exhausted their options, and here she was, my Madeline.
“I love you, Arabella,” she said, her voice hoarse and hushed and meant only for me. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t worry,” I whispered. “I’ll protect you.”
I reached for her hand, but the man grabbed my arm and wrenched me to my feet. The searing pain surprised me. After all, you were only permitted to manhandle a woman on Red Days. But wearing a peacoat must have exempted him from the usual rules.
“What did she say to you?” he demanded.
“That it worked,” I said, smiling. “She told me the procedure worked.”
There was a long, agonizing moment when the whole world threatened to shatter.
The man looked from me to my sister and back again. He inspected me from top to bottom. My posture was correct. My voice, clear and bright and obedient, was correct. Everything about me was perfectly correct. I couldn’t be lying, because good children didn’t lie. And didn’t yesterday’s tests confirm I was a good child?
From the floor, Madeline peered up at me, not understanding at first. I was almost afraid she wouldn’t understand at all, that she might ruin it for us both.
With a gentle hand, I guided her up to meet me. “Reexamine her if you don’t believe me.”
Madeline was too weak to walk on her own, so I joined her in the den for the tests. The heinous images flashed again and again, and the men grilled her with questions, but with me at her side, she was flawless. I wrapped my fingers around hers and squeezed her hand every time she shouldn’t flinch, and I stroked her wrist to calm her as they measured blood pressure and heart rate.
I was always good at make-believe. Now Madeline was good at make-believe too.
“Congratulations,” the men said, their eyes black as cancer, as they stamped her file.
In the mess hall with the other kids, we watched one last video.
“Thank you for joining us,” the serious-faced man said.
The little girl saluted goodbye. “We wish you the best with your wonderful new life!”
Parents swarmed the camp like ants around road kill, and with no ash in the air, graduation was a joyous occasion. Our own mother and father beamed while Madeline and I collected our diplomas and posed for a hundred pictures in our white tunics.
The new students arrived on bright yellow school buses, and I smiled at them and saluted and memorized their faces, trying to pick out the ones like us, the good children who were skilled at make-believe. Someday, Madeline and I might find them again. We might meet them in a smoke-filled room where we’d need a special password just to get through the door. We might reminisce and laugh at these men in their peacoats, by then gray and faded and past their prime, and we might laugh at this camp and laugh at what we’ll be planning, what we’ll do when we’re older and stronger and ready.
And in the meantime, if a chattering neighbor thought they saw something and should say something, that would be okay too. Madeline and I would simply wait for a Red Day. Because everybody knew accidents sometimes happened on Red Days.
Together, we climbed into the backseat of our parents’ car, and soon, the camp vanished in the rearview mirror. With my sister beside me, I smiled my widest smile and squeezed her hand until my veins ached. Our parents were right.
Oh, what fun we’ll have!
SKIN LIKE HONEY AND LACE
I’m making espresso for a man in an ill-fitting business suit when Emily shimmies up to the cash register, arrayed in a body made of other people’s skins.
“Hello, Clare,” she says and smiles.
The frothing pitcher steams in my hand, and I pretend to look surprised to see her. We both know I’m not. Even before the front door swung open, and the rush of the street seeped into the coffeehouse—the backfires of clunker cars and cat-calls from the drug dealers on the sidewalk—I could feel her coming. My skin prickles whenever she’s near.
I say nothing as she drums her fingers on the counter and inspects the list of overpriced drinks affixed to the wall. Her face, molded with layer atop layer of new flesh, is different every time we meet. But I always recognize her. The curves of her bones peek through. The same silken bones beneath my flesh.
“Figured it was you when I turned the corner,” she says. “Your skin sings differently than the others. Like famine and lullabies.”
And your skin sings like a dog in heat, I want to say.
I gnaw my bottom lip. “How’s Genevieve?”
“Better than you,” Emily says. “You look terrible.”
She laughs, her subtle way of reminding me there are people here in this coffeehouse, just waiting to be peeled like hardboiled eggs.
Why not steal a piece, Clare? that cut-glass voice of hers murmurs through our skins. You know you’re overdue.
I scratch a flaky patch on my arm. “I get by.”
Emily leans closer. “Why don’t I take you out tonight?” Her eyes flash, and the pity she feels for me thrums through my body. “The girls and I are meeting in the Strip at seven.”
I slide the mug of espresso down to the end of the bar and turn back to her. “Sure, I guess.”
I play it off as if I don’t care, as if I haven’t spent the last ten months inventing one-sided conversations with Emily, pretending I could convince her to stay.
“Perfect,” she says. “See you then.”
She leaves without ordering, her long ponytail swinging like a whip behind her.
After she’s gone, I glance at my hand that held the frothing pitcher. The skin is red and angry. While Emily was here, I burned myself. I never felt a thing.
***
I don’t remember my first layer of skin. I don’t remember meeting Emily either. These came before. Too long ago to matter.
What I do remember: I didn’t want this body.
My bones were beautiful. Exquisite and bare, the color of pewter, encasing me like a shell. Back then, I required no skin. None of us did, not Emily or the few others like us. This husk is only for blending in.
“Makes life easier if nobody knows about the bones,” Emily used to say.
But nothing about this is easy.
***
I meet Emily at the last bar in the Strip District. The rest of the businesses here—the trendy restaurants and the dress boutiques and the dive clubs—closed down years ago. The whole city is practically closed down. For decades, this place was something straight out of P.T. Barnum’s wet dream. A year-round circus and sideshow and a cut-rate amusement park with bumper cars and shell games and a carousel. Now the once-bustling boardwalk along the pier is abandoned. Nothing left there except empty buildings and one sleazy watering hole that could
outlast cockroaches.
Emily’s at a high-top table in the corner with a gaggle of girls. I recognize them—we share some of the same skin—but I don’t remember their names. They probably don’t remember mine either. We’re no better than strangers.
When she sees me, Emily gives me that sweetheart smile. “Glad you could make it, darling.”
I reach out for her hand, but she drifts away from me as Genevieve arrives at the table, carrying a round of drinks for everyone but me.
I tuck myself into the corner, and dig at the dry patch on my arm.
Techno music blares over the speakers, and the dance floor overflows with young men and women, communing like red ants, their sweat heavy on the air. The girls and I stand back and inspect their skins. We only need one for the night, but even one is hard to find. Especially for me. When drunk boys with glistening flesh thrust their nicotine-smudged hands at my body and offer me free drinks, I always draw up my nose and shake my head, and they call me “bitch” or “tease” before they stomp off.
That’s why my flesh is slowly rotting off my bones. Because I won’t say yes.
I should be better at this. When we were young, Emily taught me how to hunt. Who taught her, I’ll never know, but she gave me what I need to survive. A flask of sun-yellow oil, and a sheathed knife. It doesn’t take much to get what we want.
After her third drink, Emily makes our choice—a guy in a ratty sports jersey with a logo of a hockey stick and a penguin emblazoned on the back. We have no team like that around here. He’s a tourist, and he’s alone. A perfect mark.
She whispers to him, and he leads her down the block to his seedy beachfront motel. The girls and I follow a few steps behind, and wait outside the room.
“Come on in,” Emily calls to us after a moment.
Inside, it stinks of the oil, nauseating as turpentine. On the bed, the boy’s undressed and dozing, his chest a sallow, jaundiced color. Emily probably told him the oil was foreplay. In a way, it is. A couple drops on the skin is all it takes to put him into a dream.
“You do the cutting, Clare,” Emily says as she slips out of her silk dress. “You’ve always been the best at that part.”
I shed my clothes and kneel before the bed.
And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe Page 10
