by Tim Floreen
“I realized the only way I could keep the scientists from finding out what I’d done, the only way I could keep the game going, was if I turned the capsule back the way it had been before and erased any record of the switch in the system. But I didn’t want to do it because I liked being the way I was. No remorse. No fear. Just anger. The anger didn’t feel good exactly, but it was so easy. So familiar.
“I had a feeling your mom would turn the empathy back off eventually, though. All I had to do was wait. So I changed the capsule’s setting and became good Franklin again. And as soon as I did, this tidal wave of guilt crashed over me. I was so afraid you’d find out what I’d done. I hacked into the system one more time, disabled that auxiliary subroutine so the capsule wouldn’t get accidentally switched again, and started telling you all those lies. I wanted you to keep believing in me. After our kiss last night, I wanted you to kiss me like that again. I wanted you to feel that way about me for as long as possible.
“But once I got off the phone with you tonight, I realized you were right: I shouldn’t have been lying to you. And I shouldn’t have been putting you and other people in danger by keeping what I’d done a secret. I was being greedy, and I couldn’t do it anymore. That’s why I sent you the Dropbox link. Did you get it?”
I nodded. “But I haven’t looked at the files yet.”
“I wrote out a confession. And I copied all the surveillance footage and other files related to the project from the lab computer system. I figured whatever your mom and her team were really up to, you should know about it, and maybe the files would help you figure it out. Then I sent you the text message with the link, and I thought it would all be over.”
He dropped his head forward and touched the Band-Aid on the back of his skull.
“But then an hour later,” he said, “I felt another shift in my head. I guess that was when your mom changed the setting on the capsule again. I started thinking about what you’d done to me sophomore year in the locker room, and what you do down here with Tor, and that stuff you said on the phone about wanting to forget our kiss. The anger came back.” He dragged his fingers forward over his stubbly scalp. “The way I’ve been feeling about you these past few days, the way I’ve been feeling about everything, it reminds me of that optical illusion where you look at the picture one way and all you can see is a vase, and you look at it another way and all you can see is two profiles, but you can’t see it both ways at the same time. That’s how I’ve been seeing the whole world, and I don’t know which way is real. The vase or the profiles.”
Franklin glanced at the mask lying on the floor a few feet away, its mirrored goggles pointed toward him. With his sneaker he nudged it until it faced the wall. He tipped forward, burying his face in the space between my neck and shoulder, careful to choose the side I hadn’t injured. I put my arm around him.
“I know how confusing this must be,” I said. “My mom had no right to do what she did. But Franklin, we’ll find a way out of this.”
“That was your mom you were talking to on the phone before, right? She must know I escaped by now.”
“Probably.”
“If people know I could escape, they’ll realize I killed Callie. They’ll find out I tried to kill you.”
“I’ll make my mom tell people the truth. About the nanodrones. About the capsule. I’ll go to the press and tell them myself if I have to.”
“The end result will be the same. The project will get shut down. They’ll take the capsule out of my head. I’ll be like I was before all this happened. Back then, I guess it’s possible I wasn’t an actual killer, but I was close. Those nanodrones wouldn’t have had to give me much of a nudge.” He sat back so he could look at me. “I won’t care about you anymore, Rem. Not in the way I do now.”
I imagined Franklin’s dead eyes and tiny, cruel smile returning. The thought chilled me. “Run away, then. Just go, before they can take it out.”
He shook his head. His fingers went back to the hole in his head. “This was supposed to be a limited trial. The battery in the capsule only lasts ten days. They’d have to do another surgery to make the change permanent.”
“But that means you only have—”
“Three days left.”
I stood and paced back and forth down the narrow corridor. “So what if we lie? There has to be a way my mom and I can cover for you. She owes you that at least. She won’t tell anyone you escaped. I won’t say a word about what happened tonight.”
“What about . . .” Franklin nodded at Tor. He lay there in a sprawl against the concrete wall, still unconscious, his body slick with sweat and blood.
“We could ask Tor to keep the secret too,” I said.
“Why would he do that? I just shot him, Rem. Plus, even if he did go along with it, how would we explain his bullet wounds?” He let out a small, joyless laugh. “Too bad we can’t just say he did it.”
I stopped pacing. “Franklin, no.”
“A little while ago you really thought he had. Remember how it all fit so perfectly? We could make that the truth. We could tell about the steam tunnels. How he came down here with you but wanted it kept a secret. We could say he found the stuff I hid. Used one of the guns to kill Callie, thinking he’d pin the murder on me. After that he tried to kill Lydia but failed. Lydia can back up that part herself. Then he came to your house when I’d snuck out to visit you, and he took us back here. His plan was to kill us both and make it look like I’d done it.” His eyes inched toward one of the two matte black Berettas lying on the concrete. “But we managed to get the gun away from him. And kill him instead.”
My throat squeezed as I tried to swallow again. I couldn’t even tell if he was serious or not. “I’ve been angry at Tor too, Franklin. I think it almost made me happy to believe he was a killer. Like it justified all the rage I’d been feeling. He treated me like shit. He treated Lydia like shit. And what he did to you must’ve been much, much worse. But we can’t kill him.”
Franklin’s eyes stayed on the Beretta another second. He licked his lips. The fingers of his right hand fidgeted, like they longed to pick up the weapon. Then he looked away. “I know.” He shook his head. “What he did to me down here . . . it wasn’t even that bad, Rem. I mean, it was bad, but not what you were probably imagining.”
“So what did he do?”
Franklin’s eyes darted toward me. “He kept me away from you.” He shrugged out of his bulky coat, which puddled on the floor around him. He looked even skinnier in just his orange hoodie. “It happened sophomore year. About a month after everybody laughed at me in the locker room, I got to math class early one day, and so did Tor. We were the only ones there. I had my notebook out, and he started goofing around, saying, ‘What do you write in that thing anyway?’ He grabbed it before I could stop him and opened up to the first page. He saw a picture I’d drawn there. Of you.”
I nodded. “I saw it.”
“He turned some more pages and saw some more drawings I’d done of the two of us. Stupid corny things I’d written about you. I tried to grab it back, but he held it up over his head, and by then other people had started arriving for class. I was afraid he’d show them what he’d found, so I got quiet and went back to my desk.
“At the end of class Tor came up to me and said if I wanted to get the notebook back, I’d have to meet him outside the back entrance of the school at midnight that night. I didn’t know what else to do, so I met him there, and he took me to the tunnels.
“When we got down there, he turned on a light, and I saw he’d covered all the walls in photocopies of my corny drawings of me and you. That made me lose it. I ran at him from behind, howling like a crazy person, but he just turned around and gave me one little pop, and my whole face exploded. That’s how I got this.” He flicked a finger at the mountain range twisting down the center of his face. “He said the walls upstairs would look just like the walls down here unless I promised to stay away from you. I guess he wanted you all to himself.<
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“ ‘Don’t talk to him,’ he said. ‘Don’t look at him. Don’t go near him. If you think anything could happen between the two of you, you’re kidding yourself. He already thinks you’re a freak. How could he possibly care about you? How could anyone? When you die, no one will give a shit, and no one will remember you.’ ”
Franklin’s hands had squeezed into fists, just like they had back in my garage.
“I don’t think I’d ever felt so angry before. And the funny thing was, I knew he wasn’t really keeping you from me. You already thought I was a freak, just like he said. But it didn’t matter. I hated him so much anyway. With every muscle in my body, I hated him. One of the main objectives of my mission was to prove him wrong about no one remembering me.”
He noticed his clenched fingers and, with effort, unclenched them.
“But it wasn’t like he deserved to die for something like that,” he said. “And he still doesn’t. I understand that, Rem.”
“It’s okay. We’ll think of something else.”
“I already have.”
Franklin picked up one of the Berettas, touched the barrel to his temple, and put a second hole in his head.
The blood that splashed across the concrete wall looked different from the blood I’d seen splashed across the whiteboard in Ms. Utter’s classroom. Instead of bringing brilliant color to the surface, it soaked into the gray concrete, turning it black.
Franklin pitched to the side. More blood pooled on the floor around his head like a black halo. His glasses, knocked off by the gun blast, lay next to him. I lunged forward, ignoring the flare of pain in my shoulder, dropping to my knees, searching for something to do, but I felt as useless as if I’d still had my hands tied behind me. I couldn’t see the back of his head, couldn’t tell how much of it he’d blown away, but I didn’t want to.
“Franklin, can you hear me?” I sputtered like an idiot.
But he did hear me. His eyes blinked open. They were crossed at first, the two of them wandering around on their own like lost animals. Little by little, they straightened themselves out and focused on me.
“Why the hell did you have to do that?” I said. “Why—”
He lifted a finger as if to put it over my mouth, but he only managed to raise it a few inches. “Don’t worry,” he whispered. “It doesn’t hurt.” His eyes lost focus and looped around some more. “I feel amazing, actually. Remember that guy who tried to kill himself with a crossbow? I think I hit the same spot.” He let out a weak laugh. “I always knew I was a good shot.”
Something warm touched my fingers. The puddle of blood had reached my hands. It nudged outward rhythmically, lapping like gentle ocean waves—in time with his heartbeat, I realized.
“We could’ve figured something out,” I said. “Maybe there’s still time. I’m going to find a phone—”
He grabbed my forearm and gripped it hard. “Don’t leave me.”
“Okay. I won’t leave.” I swallowed, glancing at all the pieces of Franklin scattered across the wall and floor. Then I forced myself to block out the rest of him and just focus on his eyes. He’d brought them back under his control again. “What can I do?”
“The iPod. It’s in here.” His fingers brushed one of his coat pockets. “Let’s listen to that song.”
I nestled one of the earbuds in his ear, ignoring the black spray of blood on his earlobe and the bloody chaos that lay just a few inches farther back. The other earbud I put in my own ear. The Philip Glass song was already queued up. I started it playing, then touched Franklin’s cheek and traced my fingertips down toward his chin. As usual, they left a smear behind. Not of paint this time, though.
“I’m not mad at your mom, you know,” Franklin said. “I’m still glad she put the capsule in my head. When you kissed me last night, that made it all worth it. Except for Pete and Callie dying. Nothing was worth that. But all the rest. Maybe you should draw a tattoo about that kiss, Rem. That would be something.”
In my ear, the high notes started in, the delicate thread of melody unspooling.
“This is incredible,” he said. “My brain feels . . . wider than the sky.” He let out another laugh, fainter this time. “I feel . . . connected to everything. There’s no anger. I forgive all of us.” His fingers, still tight on my arm, squeezed as another wave of euphoria passed over him. The way he looked made me think of that Tattoo Atlas picture I’d drawn of my brother and the birds flying out of his head. “You know what would make this even better?” he said. “If you kissed me one more time.”
I pressed my mouth against Franklin’s. He released a quiet, happy sigh. As we kissed, the shard of tooth drifted from my mouth to his. A fragment of Rem Braithwaite to mix with all the fragments of Franklin Kettle.
When his lips stopped gripping mine, I knew he was dead.
A week later the snow still lay several feet thick on the ground. The gazebo in our backyard had buckled under the load and blown over. It lay there now like a snowbound carcass, with riblike planks sticking up here and there and the roof collapsed like a bashed-in skull.
I found Lydia on the rear porch staring at the wreckage and smoking. It was night, about ten o’clock. I’d just pulled my Saab into the driveway when she sent a text asking me to meet her back here. When she saw me, she stood and moved to give me a hug, but I held up a warning hand. Her eyes went to the sling supporting my left arm. “You don’t look so good.”
“A fall down two flights of stairs will do that to you.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.”
We sat down on the bench. “I heard the Saab pull up,” she said. “Are you sure you should be driving with your arm like that?”
“I’m not supposed to, but I had something important to do.”
She didn’t ask what the something was, and I didn’t volunteer the information. Her eyes bounced off my Tattoo Atlas, which I’d wedged under my arm, but I didn’t explain that either. A few flakes of snow drifted down and settled on the gazebo, adding to the pile slowly burying it.
“When did you get back?” I asked.
“Yesterday.”
“Have you seen Tor yet? Talked to him?”
She shook her head, her brow furrowing. “What’s going on with him, Rem?”
“You mean the ‘For Sale’ sign?” It had gone up in front of the Agnarsons’ house that morning.
“Well, yes, but I’ve also tried calling and he won’t answer.”
“He just got home from the hospital a couple days ago. Give him time.”
“I don’t think it’s just that. After my first few calls, he sent me this weird text saying he cares about me a lot but can’t see me for a while. Why would he do that? Does it have to do with the abduction? Or is it something else?”
I glanced up at Tor’s bedroom window. It was dark, with the blinds drawn. It had been like that for the past week.
“Listen,” I said. “I should tell you something. I should’ve told you a long time ago.”
“Okay.”
Before I went on, I turned my palms up on my lap and stared at them like I could see through my gloves to the skin underneath, decorated with watercolor smudges of all different shades. Blue. Green. Red. Earlier I’d been laboring over a new design in my Tattoo Atlas.
Without looking up I said, “Tor and I, we used to mess around.”
Lydia didn’t act surprised. She tapped on her cigarette. A piece of ash wafted down like a gray snowflake. “When?”
“It started sophomore year. The last time was a couple weeks ago.”
She studied the cigarette’s glowing tip while she digested what I’d said. “So he’s gay. And you didn’t tell me. Not even when I showed up in tears on your doorstep.”
“If he’s gay or not, that isn’t for me to say. I should’ve told you what we were doing, though. You deserved to know. I just didn’t want to hurt you.”
“Mr. Nice Guy.”
“Exactly. That’s n
o excuse. I’m sorry, Lydia.”
“Uh-huh.” She took a drag and exhaled. We both watched the cloud of smoke hang in the chilly air between us. Then, with sudden violence, she hurled her cigarette into the yard. It landed in the snow with a quiet hiss. “I just feel so effing stupid.”
She got quiet again and stared at the wrecked gazebo. I watched for tears, but this time none ran down her freckly cheeks.
“It’s okay,” she said finally. “I’ll deal. I think a part of me might’ve known all along.” She rooted around in her purse for her box of cigarettes. “Anyway, it’s probably selfish of me to get upset after what you two just went through.” She looked up at me, the box clutched in her hand. “What happened, Rem? Can you talk about it? The news reports are so sketchy. Something about Franklin Kettle’s capsule going haywire?”
That had become the official version of events: the capsule had malfunctioned, and the glitch had caused Franklin to kill Callie and try to kill Tor and me.
I’d struggled with how to feel about the cover-up. Knowing Mom was still lying knotted me up inside, and I hadn’t even come to terms with the lying she’d already done. I understood it had all been for Ethan, but Ethan was dead. I was her son too, and I was alive, and her mad scientist recklessness had almost gotten me killed. How did that make any sense?
It didn’t. But Mom had convinced herself her project was a means of saving American soldiers, and not just an incredibly dangerous way for her to work through her own grief. She’d bent her perception of reality to justify her actions to herself. It was a trick of the brain, something we all did, just like she’d said herself.
Hadn’t I done it too?
With Tor, for example. For years I’d made excuses for him. Then when he’d broken things off with me and all my anger toward him had come to the surface, I’d gone to the other extreme and turned him into a killer.
And with Franklin. After the Big Bang, in my mind, I’d made him a monster. And later I’d made him innocent. When really he’d been neither.
