Project Paper Doll

by Stacey Kade

  He’d thought about kissing me then. I hadn’t heard it in his mind—hadn’t needed to. It was written on his face. Not that that would have been a good idea. And yet I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  Another shiver ran through me.

  I found the scissors under a half-empty package of printer paper and used them to snip the balloon free from my wrist, the cool metal moving smoothly against my skin. Another surgical cut at the base of the balloon and it deflated quickly and quietly.

  I knew I should cut it into little tiny pieces so it would be completely unrecognizable in the unlikely event that my father would catch of a glimpse of it.

  But I hesitated, scissors hovering above the remains. Something in me protested the destruction. It wasn’t as if I’d have many nights out like this in the future, fake or not.

  My father often talked about my life, post-Wingate. The kind of freedom I’d have, all the things I’d get to experience. But the wistful tone in his voice set off alarms in my head; his description of my future life seemed to have a fairy-tale quality to it rather than something he expected me to actually experience.

  And he was right. Because even in the best-case scenario, where I managed to escape Wingate without bringing GTX down on us, I’d have to set up a careful anonymous life somewhere. Always watchful that I didn’t get too involved, didn’t allow others to become attached. There was too much at stake.

  Aside from the difficulty of constantly staying on my guard, never being seen without my contact lenses in, and avoiding situations where the strange tattoo on my shoulder might be revealed (pool parties, summer days, and, um, more intimate moments), there were other complications.

  Caring about someone, or having them care about me, was too dangerous. It left vulnerabilities that GTX could manipulate; it opened up the possibility of being hurt or hurting others, even unintentionally. That final experiment in the lab—beyond its value in blocking off an ability I no longer wanted—had taught me that.

  The Rules, as much as I hated and railed against them, kept me—and everyone else—safe. So my father’s Rules were not just rules for living in Wingate. They were Rules for the rest of my life. Which included never falling in love or letting anyone fall in love with me.

  Not that that was what was happening here with Zane, but it was a reasonable facsimile. And with the safety of a built-in end date, it was the closest thing I could allow myself to have. I couldn’t destroy evidence of it.

  Right then, I knew where the balloon—and Reginald—should go.

  I put the scissors down and I went to my closet. I dragged out the stool and raised myself to my tiptoes and dug behind my stacked jeans until I felt the sharp edge of cardboard.

  I wrestled it free, doing my best to avoid a denim avalanche, and hopped down from the stool.

  It was an oversized shoe box labeled “Old School Papers,” and was possibly the world’s most obvious hiding spot. Fortunately, most of its contents didn’t look all that unusual and wouldn’t raise an alarm with anyone but GTX.

  With a cautious glance toward the dark and quiet hallway, I pulled the lid off. Memories immediately leapt to mind with the sight of everything inside.

  This box was what remained of my hoarding tendencies, only instead of little bits of everything I touched, it contained physical reminders of the things that had been important to me.

  A ticket stub from the first time my father had taken me to a movie.

  A carefully cleaned-out wrapper from my first taste of french fries (gloriously fried potatoes! GTX had been way more into giving me green vegetables and tofu, figuring “my people” were healthy vegetarians or advanced enough to pop pills for nutrition instead of eating anything).

  A photo of the original Ariane Tucker—a pale dark-haired girl with a huge smile and purplish shadows under her eyes—swiped from an old frame I’d found buried in a box in our basement.

  A magic coin trick from the first cereal box I’d finished in my father’s house.

  Scrunched up in the corner, the tiniest fragment of ripped white fabric, maybe only an inch by inch, with my GTX designation. GTX-F-107. The same mark that I bore on my back. They’d labeled all my clothes, and when I’d escaped, my father had destroyed the shapeless shirt and pants made of scratchy cotton. But I’d torn the designation out of the neck of the shirt before giving them to him. I didn’t want to forget where I came from.

  An important thing to remember, especially on a night like tonight.

  I set the box on my desk, tucked the deflated balloon and string inside, and retrieved Reginald from the grocery bag.

  I put him on top, remembering Zane spinning that story about bogs and dears, and how he’d grinned, so pleased with himself when I laughed.

  Stupidly, my eyes welled with tears.

  Enough, I told myself. I put the lid on the box, shutting away Reginald’s malformed ears and cheap black button eyes.

  I returned the box to its hiding spot behind my jeans, shoved the stool back into place, closed my closet, and headed to the bathroom.

  Snapping the light on made me blink, temporarily rejecting the additional brightness as well as the glimpse of myself in the mirror with reddened eyes.

  I busied myself with my contact case and solution.

  Remove my lenses, wash my face, brush my teeth, put on pajamas, and get into bed. That was all I had to do. Then everything would be as if I’d never gone out at all tonight—except for the guilt of lying to my father and the empty space I could feel growing in my chest.

  I should never have agreed to any of this with Zane, no matter what the benefits. Pretending made things too real.

  I carefully took my contacts out and closed the case. Then, steeling myself, I looked in the mirror.

  I usually avoided my reflection unless I had my lenses in. My eyes were so dark—so wrong, no distinguishable pupil—seeing them in their natural state always sent a shock through me. With normalish-looking eyes, my unusual features were softened. But with my distinctly nonhuman eyes uncovered, the point of my chin seemed so obvious, and the too-severe slant of my cheekbones, the faint grayish hue to my skin…it all screamed ALIEN.

  I flinched and glanced away. I’d gotten used to not seeing myself this way.

  I finished in the bathroom and returned to my room to put my necklace away and change into my pajamas—yoga pants and a T-shirt made of the softest cotton I’d ever felt.

  I was climbing into bed when my phone, in the pocket of my jeans which were now slung over my desk chair, chirped with a text message.

  “Jenna.” I breathed with relief and scrambled out from under the covers.

  But it wasn’t Jenna. It was Zane.

  7:30 ok? See you tomorrow am.

  I couldn’t help but notice that he didn’t give me a chance to decline, only the opportunity to change the time. He was right. We’d committed to this path and now we were stuck.

  I fought a smile. I should not have felt quite so pleased about that fact. Definitely not.

  I went to put my phone in my bag so I wouldn’t be scrambling to find it in the morning, and realized it was flashing one unread message.

  I frowned. It must have come in while we were at the activities fair, where it had been too noisy for me to hear the chime.

  Still hoping to see Jenna’s name—I didn’t text anyone else, ever—it took a second for the “DAD” designation to sink in.

  Dad. My father never texted.

  My heart rate skyrocketed, and my hands shook as I pressed the button to read the message.

  Pulling a double. Will be home tomorrow after you leave for school. Don’t forget to feed the fish.

  I relaxed. Nothing about the activities fair. But a double shift? Normally he knew about those weeks in advance. I frowned.

  I bit my lip, thinking it through. The reference to feeding the fish was our signal that everything was okay. So I had to assume that it was either a normal work scheduling hiccup—which had never happened in my m
emory—or he’d chosen to stay after for some reason. He’d done that occasionally in the past when he needed to talk to someone who worked a different shift. But it was usually only a few hours, staying in late or going in early, never a whole second shift.

  It clicked in my head. The cameras. The ones GTX had installed today. I’d bet anything he was checking into it further. Trying to find out what had happened, how he’d not known anything about it.

  I felt a little sick. He was really worried.

  I forced myself to take a breath, and let it out slowly. He’d told me to feed the fish (which, by the way, we didn’t actually own). He wouldn’t have done that if he was concerned about my safety.

  But something was keeping him at GTX, away from home and out of routine. And even without specific details about what that something was, I knew it wasn’t good.

  I texted back. Fish fed. See you tomorrow afternoon?

  And though he normally didn’t respond to messages or phone calls at work unless I indicated it was urgent, the silence following the chirp of my text felt ominous.

  It was going to be a long night.

  I WHISTLED ON MY WAY DOWN THE HALL from my room to the kitchen. I’d slept better than I had in a while. Yeah, it was a messed-up situation, so maybe it was a little wrong to be having so much fun. But to be honest, I wasn’t interested in inspecting it. When good things happening were in such short supply, I was going to take them any way I could.

  Ariane hadn’t texted back last night to tell me a different time or not to pick her up, and I knew her well enough now to be sure she’d speak up if she had a problem with either. I was counting that as a win and looking forward to seeing her again with an anticipation that might have scared me if I looked at it closely.

  But as I said, I was firmly anti-inspecting today.

  I pushed open the door to the kitchen and nodded a greeting at my dad, who was once again at the island with his coffee and his paper. He scowled at me, and the last tuneless note—I wasn’t whistling a song so much as making a cheerful-sounding noise—died on my lips.

  “Sorry.” I wasn’t about to tangle with him this morning. Last night we’d almost been getting along—by our standards, anyway. I didn’t want to push my luck.

  I moved past him, giving him plenty of room, and grabbed the bread bag, only to remember that I’d choked down the last of it yesterday.

  Oh, well. I crumpled up the bag and tossed it into the garbage. The Blazer needed gas; I could grab something at the store on my way to pick up Ariane.

  I started across the kitchen, heading toward my backpack and keys on the counter near the back door.

  “You’re certainly looking pleased with yourself this morning,” my dad said in that all-too-casual tone that signaled danger.

  My heart sank. Clearly the temporary near-peace we’d enjoyed last night was over. I calculated my odds of grabbing my stuff and getting the hell out before he blew up. They weren’t good. And even if I made it out now, I needed the car for tonight and tomorrow. He’d have no problem taking it away from me if he decided I was being disrespectful. And since I had to live here…

  I let out a slow breath that I hoped he wouldn’t hear and braced myself for what was coming. “Yeah,” I said, forcing an easy tone. “Guess I had a good time at the fair last night.”

  “I heard I missed some excitement,” he said, still sounding fake mellow as he studied the newspaper.

  Oh. Okay. I let out a silent breath of relief. This I could handle. He was cranky because he thought he’d missed out on an opportunity to herd people to safety.

  “It wasn’t much,” I said. “Just the lights flickering. Too much stuff running at once, I guess.” And maybe the presence of the mystery kid who my dad was convinced had been injected with GTX’s missing research. Who might possibly be Rachel Jacobs herself.

  I thought about bringing it up, in the hope of distracting/placating him, but I wasn’t sure I could manage it without letting skepticism leak into my tone.

  “Yes, Mrs. Vanderhoff mentioned in her voice mail that it was interesting there for a few minutes.” He looked up, his mouth pinched.

  Oh, fuuuuu—

  “Mrs. Vanderhoff’s very long message on my cell phone at six this morning also included how pleased she was to have seen you last night, and so disappointed that my son would speak disrespectfully to her.”

  I winced. There it was. The key word: disrespectfully. I wouldn’t be getting out of this so easily. That was my dad’s major hot button. Respect, or lack thereof.

  Even though, technically, I hadn’t said much of anything at all, and Mrs. Vanderhoff deserved the shock she’d gotten from Ariane.

  I waited for him to demand the identity of my “date”—that would be the only thing that could make this worse, learning I’d been out with the daughter of his mortal enemy—but apparently, Mrs. Vanderhoff’s “concerned” diatribe had focused on me as the perpetrator.

  “Do you have any idea how hard it is to do what I do? No, of course not,” he answered for me, snapping the paper closed and standing up to jab a finger at me. “The last thing I need is you making it more difficult by smarting off to important people in this community.”

  Delores Vanderhoff was the organist at our church and the biggest gossip in town. She was important mostly because of her ability to disguise malicious conjecture as truth and rev the rumor mill into high gear.

  My mom would have known how to defuse the situation, to point out that Delores was “talking to hear herself make noise” without making my dad even angrier. Unfortunately, she had not passed that skill on to me. “Dad, Mrs. Vanderhoff is freaking out over nothing, as usual,” I argued. “You know what she’s like. It was just—”

  “Zane, I don’t care if she was shouting that the sky was falling because it’s raining. You nod politely and duck when she tells you to.”

  I wanted to scream. I’d been hearing a version of this lecture for as long as I could remember. It’s called “Everyone else is always right even when they’re wrong.” Everyone’s opinion of us mattered more than the actual truth. Quinn had mastered this lesson by lying and listening to lies with a polite smile. That was my brother—the politician.

  But the injustice of it rubbed me raw.

  “My ability to serve this town depends on people trusting me, respecting my ability to control difficult situations. What do you think it says to them if I don’t have control over my own kid?” He was in my face now, his coffee breath sour. “What you say and do reflects on me, and I won’t have you representing my name poorly.”

  Again. Even more. He meant those things even if he wasn’t saying them.

  My dad made a disgusted noise. “You know, I’m the one who stuck around. Your mom left you high and dry. I’m the good guy here.”

  I was pretty sure if you have to argue that you’re the good guy, you’re defeating your own argument. But I kept my mouth firmly shut against those words, though my jaw ached from holding everything in.

  “The least you could do is show some gratitude,” he said.

  Resentment burned deep in my gut. Gratitude for his sticking around and being a parent so grudgingly? Gratitude for hating me and everything I reminded him of ?

  He thrust his hand toward me. “Keys.”

  I gaped at him and his open hand. “What?”

  He snapped his fingers. “Keys. You don’t think you’ve got car privileges after all that, do you?”

  A haze of fury clouded my vision. He could have taken the keys before I got down here, but no, he had to rub my face in it like I was a puppy making a mess.

  I clenched my fists, and Dad shifted his weight, eyeing me closely as if expecting—or challenging—me to rush at him.

  A single clear thought penetrated. Stop. A warning whisper that sounded like my mother’s voice: Think about this. Be careful. Play the game and play it right.

  If I let things get physical, I might win, but I’d still lose. My car privileges would be go
ne forever, and my life in this house would be about ten degrees warmer than hell.

  So…the question was, what did my dad hate more than his family being imperfect in front of others?

  It took me a second, but then it clicked. Like one of those little-kid jokes. What was worse than one instance? Several instances of his family being proven imperfect. Which gave me an idea.

  “Fine,” I said, barely managing to force the word out. I stepped to the side, snagged the keys from the counter, and held them out to him. “I need you to call some parents, then.”

  He grabbed the keys and then paused, his hand out. “What?” he demanded with a frown.

  “Well, the girl I’m driving to school, for one. I told her parents I’d be picking her up and dropping her off this week. She doesn’t have a ride, otherwise.”

  My dad opened his mouth—whether to protest or to ask her name, I wasn’t sure—but I didn’t wait.

  “And Rachel Jacobs’s dad,” I said quickly.

  His mouth snapped shut.

  Of course that would work. I forced myself to keep a neutral expression. “I promised Rachel I’d be a DD for her party tomorrow night. I guess some people drink at the bonfire before they come over.” As he well knew, just as he knew there would be drinking at Rachel’s party afterward; though I wasn’t dumb enough to wave that flag in his face. “Her dad insisted that there be sober people with cars on call, in case.” In reality, he’d requested no such thing (though he should have). I doubted he even knew about the party.

  My dad narrowed his eyes. “I should make you call them and explain why you’re inconveniencing so many people because of your disrespect.”

  I felt the first flicker of possible triumph. He’d said “should.” In his mind, the only thing worse than his having to call to explain would be my doing it when he couldn’t control what I would say. “Okay,” I said, trying to sound neutral.

  He gave a loud huff of frustration and chucked the keys at me.

  I managed to catch them before they hit my face.

  “Saturday morning. The Blazer’s back in the garage and you are grounded.” He pointed a censorious finger at me.