by Allen Zadoff
“Or—where do you live?” she says.
“98th Street,” I say.
“School’s closer.”
“It is,” I say as the drops become a steady drizzle. “But we’re going to get wet either way.”
“Are you inviting me to your place?”
“Sounds like it,” I say, and I take off running.
For a second I worry that she won’t follow me. But then I hear her footsteps splashing behind me. She catches up to me a second later.
“You’re not going to get away this time,” she says.
“I wasn’t trying to get away,” I say.
We run together through the rain, leaping across puddles and dodging traffic as we make our way uptown.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
SAM TOWELS OFF HER HAIR IN MY LIVING ROOM.
“I’m soaked through,” she says. “Do you have a robe or something?”
I look at her standing there, wet clothes pasted to her body.
“Hello?” she says.
“Sorry. Let me grab something.”
I don’t know if I have a robe, but I check the closet in the bedroom, and I find one hanging on a hook on the wall. The Program thinks of everything.
Not everything. They weren’t thinking about this when they left me a robe.
I go back into the living room to find the gas fireplace lit. Sam is drying off in front of it.
“I’m freezing,” she says.
She grabs the robe from me.
“Turn around,” she says.
“The bathroom is right—”
“I don’t need the bathroom,” she says.
She gestures with her finger for me to turn around.
I turn toward the wall as Sam gets undressed behind me.
“I’ve been thinking about the first day in AP European,” I say over my shoulder.
“That was a long time ago.”
“Only three days.”
“It seems like ten years.”
I hear wet clothes hitting the floor.
“What were you thinking?” Sam says.
“I was wondering why you spoke to me after class that day.”
“There was something about you. I wanted to know who you were.”
“Do you want to know who every new student is?”
“Only the cute ones,” she says. “You can turn around now.”
I turn and Sam strikes a pose. She is wearing the robe cinched tightly in the middle, her hair slicked back, her legs bare.
“What do you think?” she says.
“I think you should wear more robes.”
She laughs. The flames flicker at her feet.
She walks around the living room. She touches one of the photos on the end table.
“You said you didn’t have a lot of photos,” she says.
“I have a few.”
“Are these your parents?” she says.
“Supposedly. I never see them.”
“Lucky you.”
“I thought you were pro-parent.”
“I fooled you.”
“But you have a great relationship with your father.”
“I do. In public.”
“In private, too. I’ve seen you.”
“If you saw us, it wasn’t private, was it? You think that just because you’re in a politician’s house, you’re seeing the real person? Pretty naive, Ben.”
“You sound angry.”
“Yeah, well. I have my reasons.”
She puts a smile on her face, but it’s like she’s putting on a mask. I’ve seen this before with people in the public eye. Real emotions, quickly covered by fake ones.
And I’ve seen it in myself. It’s what I’ve been trained to do.
She touches the photo of my parents one last time, then continues around the apartment.
“Your place barely looks lived in,” she says.
“We have a great cleaning service. And I’m not home much.”
“Poor Benjamin. It must be hard being trapped all alone in a big apartment.”
“I’m not trapped,” I say.
“We’re both trapped in lives we didn’t choose.”
“Speak for yourself.”
I watch her moving around the room, examining things.
I don’t like how much focus she’s giving the place, almost like she’s investigating. Is this what it feels like when a girl is in your space for the first time?
“I know all about your life,” she says.
“What do you know?”
I watch her face in the flickering firelight, monitoring it for signs of dangerous intent.
“I know you’re trapped by the system,” she says. “You’re trapped by this country and the way you think about it. You’re trapped by being a teenager, and—I haven’t met your parents, but if they’re sending you to a school like ours, you’re trapped in their expectations of you.”
“It’s not true,” I say.
“Tell me one thing you’ve ever done, one decision you’ve ever made on your own.”
Unlike a normal teenager, I make all my own decisions. Nobody tells me what to eat, when to go to bed, what I can or can’t do on the weekend. I don’t have family to answer to, kid brothers to take care of, relatives to call on their birthdays. I don’t have to worry about grades or getting into college or what I’m going to do when I get older. I am completely free day to day.
But on a larger scale, everything I do is an assignment. My life is dictated by The Program.
The more I think about it, what looks like freedom is really the opposite. My life has never been my own, not since the day Mike arrived at school.
“I see you thinking about it, and you know I’m right, don’t you?” Sam says. “You’ve never made a decision for yourself.”
That’s when it hits me.
“There’s one decision I’ve made on my own,” I say.
“Tell me.”
“My decision to kiss you.”
That stops her. But only for a second.
“When did you decide that?” she says.
“Just now.”
“Oh really? Do I get a vote in the matter?”
“You voted yes,” I say, and I step in and kiss her, a long, slow first kiss that makes my skin tingle.
“Wow,” she says. “If that’s your idea of democracy, I’m a believer.”
She pulls me back in for a second kiss, more passionate than the first.
We come up for air, our bodies still pressed together.
I look into Sam’s eyes, and suddenly I’m thinking about the first girl, the girl from the convenience store. The one with blue eyes.
You’re going to think you love me after this, she said. But you’ll be wrong.
“Benjamin.”
Sam whispers a name. For a moment I don’t know who she’s talking to, and then I remember.
My name. My assignment.
Sam is in my arms now, her body warm against mine, her lips so close that we share a breath.
“You went away for a second,” she says.
“I’m afraid to get close to you,” I say.
It pops out of me, a thought I would never share with anyone.
Sam runs her fingers through my hair.
“I’m glad you told me that,” she says. “I’m afraid, too.”
“Why are you afraid?”
“You first,” she says.
“There’s a lot about me you don’t know,” I say. “Who I am. The reasons I’m in New York.”
“I know more than you think,” she says.
“What do you know?”
She touches my chest.
“I know what’s in here,” she says. “Maybe nothing else matters.”
I think about that for a second. I wish it were true, but I don’t think it is.
“What about you?” I say. “Why are you afraid?”
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“How could you hurt me?”
&nb
sp; “It’s happened before.”
I think of the Daily News headline that Howard showed me.
“Did you hurt someone?” I say.
She nods.
“Intentionally?”
“No,” she says.
“Then maybe it doesn’t matter.”
“Nothing matters tonight. Is that what we’re saying?”
“I think it is.”
She touches my face, gently tracing my lips with her finger.
“When are your parents coming back?” she says.
“They’re out of town.”
“That’s convenient.”
“Isn’t it?”
She opens the robe, and in an instant my doubts about her are forgotten, along with my concerns about the mayor, the assignment, The Program.
Sam’s right. Nothing matters tonight.
Only us.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
THE STORM HAS ALMOST PASSED.
A light drizzle falls, reflecting lights up and down the avenue.
Sam and I walk hand in hand. We stay close, tucked under the same umbrella.
Along the avenue, a horn honks, followed by the squeal of brakes. A doorman pops out of a building, an unlit cigarette already in his mouth.
A cab splashes through a puddle and we jump back. On the cab roof:
Home is where the is.
I think of home.
Not a faraway home. Not the home of my past, or the home of some imagined future.
Not the home I had with The Program.
Here. Now. With Sam.
Sam feels like home.
A flash of light in my eyes snaps me back to reality.
Sam is holding a camera phone. She’s just taken a picture of me.
“What are you doing?” I say.
I try to keep my voice controlled, but I hear my volume increase.
“Do you hate cameras that much?” she says.
“I’m not photogenic,” I say.
She looks at her phone screen.
“Yeah, you look like crap,” she says. “Bedhead.”
I could grab the phone away from her. I could demand that she delete it. I could tell her it really bothers me, that I’ve been burned by an ex-girlfriend and I don’t want it to happen again.
I could raise a host of objections, but that might seem strange.
“Why do you want a picture of me?” I say.
“I’m going to be thinking about you all night. I wanted something to look at while I do. Is that okay?”
“I guess so.”
“Do you want to take a picture of me? Reciprocity and all that?”
“No.”
“You don’t want a picture?” she says, getting upset.
“I have a picture,” I say. I point to my head. “In here. No delete button.”
“That is uncharacteristically romantic of you.”
“I have my moments.”
She puts her phone away.
“I saw your scar,” she says. “Before, when you took your shirt off.”
My hand automatically goes to my chest.
The knife wound. I think of Mike, and it makes me angry, his face intruding at this moment, his mark forever branded on my skin.
“It’s no big deal,” I say.
“How did it happen?”
A flicker of fear crosses her face. Is she simply curious, or is there something else? I sense her back away slightly.
“I had a car accident when I was a kid,” I say. “They did some surgery.”
“On your heart?”
“It missed the heart. Just barely.”
“Is it painful?”
“Not anymore,” I say.
She puts a hand on my chest where the scar is, but I don’t feel it. The skin is dead there.
“Poor Benjamin,” she says, and she moves closer.
We kiss in the shadows beneath a building overhang a few blocks from the mayor’s residence.
Her phone vibrates in her purse. She breaks off the kiss.
“I have to check this real quick.”
She looks at her phone, and her expression changes. She suddenly looks serious.
“It’s getting late,” she says. “I’d better get home.”
The assignment comes rushing back.
One day. That’s all I have left.
“What are you doing tomorrow?” I say.
“My dad needs my help with something,” she says. “It’s going to be a busy weekend, actually. I probably can’t see you until Monday.”
I’ll think about this moment in the days to come, the way she looks over my shoulder as she says it when she should be looking in my eyes.
I’ll wonder whether I should have challenged her, forced the issue in some way.
But in the moment, I don’t do any of those things.
“I understand,” I say.
“I’ll call if I can,” she says.
I stroke her hair once, then feel it pass through my fingers as she turns and heads for home.
She’s ten yards away when my phone vibrates.
A double vibration, repeated twice.
The Poker app. I’ve been dealt a hand.
It’s Mother.
I play the hand and the line connects.
“Go home,” Mother says.
The line cuts off.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
MOTHER DOES NOT CALL DURING AN ASSIGNMENT.
Never before this.
I’ve made a terrible mistake.
Sleeping with Sam, opening up my life to her. Revealing myself on any level.
I’ve made a terrible mistake, and now I’m caught.
The thought chases me as I rush toward home. Along with another thought:
How much does Mother know?
A case could be made for sleeping with Sam in order to get closer to the mayor. As a means of acquiring my target. I can explain that to Mother. I can make her understand.
Maybe I will tell Mother everything that’s been going on. I will talk to her about my hesitations. I’ll tell her about the Presence, and the men who speak Arabic. We will reason things out together, find the best way to finish the assignment.
The moment I walk through the door of my apartment, a Game Center notification pops up.
Mother has challenged me.
There is nothing more secure than a secure line. But there is a problem. The source and the destination are single points. No matter how much scrambling or how many servers the digital signals pass through in between, each one is still originating from a single point.
This is why communication with my superiors is always playacting.
But there is an alternate protocol. Kids all over the world use it every day.
MMORPG. Massively multiplayer online role-playing game.
Tens of thousands of voices at the same time. We can speak more freely there, but only in case of emergency.
A Game Center notification is Mother’s version of the panic button, and she has pressed it.
I put away my iPhone.
I sit in front of the flat-screen television in the living room and power up the game box I find there.
Headset on. Controller at the ready.
I open Zombie Crushed Dead!, a first-person shooter.
Level six. Map four. “Hunter becomes the hunted.”
Character selection: Marine Corporal.
Weapon selection: M4 Carbine Assault Rifle.
Begin.
Mother’s voice.
“What the hell are you doing?” she says.
Angry.
I’ve never heard Mother lose her temper, and it’s doubtful she’s losing it now. It’s more likely something of an opening gambit, meant to shock.
It does the trick. My breath turns ragged in my chest, and my palms begin to sweat around the controller.
In the game I am a zombie hunter. I walk through a town in flames, buildings empty of life, the undead stalking around me.
“A
nswer me,” Mother says.
Voice only. No character.
The god voice.
“I did not finish my assignment,” I say. As I speak, the mouth of my character moves. “I did not finish yet, I meant to say.”
“You’ve been at the mayor’s residence twice,” Mother says.
“I haven’t been alone with him,” I say. “The scenario hasn’t been right.”
A pause.
“You’re making excuses?” Mother says.
“Realities.”
“Nothing has ever stopped you before.”
“This time is different.”
I turn a corner, empty a clip into a horde of zombies coming toward me. One of them screams in agony. “Why? Why?” it begs me.
“This is not a normal assignment,” I say. “You said so yourself. You passed me a message to be careful, that there were new factors this time.”
Other voices, other players surround me. Players from all over the world. They taunt one another. They boast. They bluff. They look for zombie sex.
“So you’re saying it’s my fault,” Mother says. “I’ve given you more than you can handle?”
“Absolutely not,” I say.
“Then what’s stopping you from finishing your assignment?”
I don’t answer.
“Your behavior is questionable,” Mother says.
Questionable. The word sends a shiver through me.
A zombie moans, the sound echoing off the surrounding hillside.
“We knew this was going to happen sooner or later,” Mother says.
“This?”
“A girlfriend.”
“I don’t have a girlfriend,” I say.
A zombie horde runs at me. I dodge left, trip over a tree trunk. I’m nearly overcome by the mob.
I make it to my feet at the last second.
“We expected it,” Mother says. “We even tried to prepare you for it. Do you remember?”
The first girl.
We slept together that night at her house. It was my first time away from The Program. I thought we’d fallen for each other. I thought I was normal, even if just for a night.
I didn’t know that Mother had arranged the whole thing.
“I remember,” I say.
“But it’s happened now, on this assignment. You have good taste, but lousy timing.”
“I don’t have taste.”
“You think you don’t, but you do. I’m the one who trained you. I know you better than you know yourself.”
