Middle Ground

by Katie Kacvinsky

I stood up and Damon grabbed my biceps tightly with his hand. “You’re about a month late for your registration at the LADC.”

  I mumbled that I preferred to be fashionably late wherever I went. I tried to play confident even though my hands were shaking. Damon’s eyes pierced mine. His patience was gone.

  “You don’t speak unless I give you the privilege. You understand me, young lady?”

  He squeezed my arm so tight I flinched and forced myself to nod. If there were two words together that made my skin crawl, they were young lady. Only adults used that expression and it was just to be condescending.

  “Let’s try this again,” Damon said.

  I glared at Joe before they hauled me out the front door. I wondered if it was a curse in our family to let one another down. I could feel tears brimming behind my eyes but I refused to let these men see me buckle.

  I concentrated on one image. One face. I held that picture in my mind and it reminded me who was on my side. It gave me the courage to hold my head high as they dragged me down the empty hall to the elevator.

  Chapter Eight

  I looked out the tinted car window and watched the scenery pass but I couldn’t make out a single detail in the landscape. It was too hard to focus when my thoughts were spinning. The confined space in the car made it an effort to breathe. Panic always had this effect on me.

  Just when I thought my life was falling into place, it was all pulled out from under me, like somebody yanking a tablecloth from beneath perfectly set dishes, toppling everything and leaving a disarray of chipped plates and broken glass.

  The sound of voices raging in my head was the worst. Regret screamed at me for screwing up. Why is it my destiny to be a perpetual screwup? Why can’t I be a nice, easy, simple, obedient teenager who is content to wake up and go to school every day? Why can’t I be satisfied with good grades and a clean bedroom and my own flipscreen and wall screen and social dates and movie nights and online friends? Why can’t I be content with a structured, predictable life? Why do I have to take the risks? Why do I have to mess everything up that is neat and easy and laid out for me? There are so many clean paths trimmed and paved and I always have to run through the middle, where there is no path; there are vines and brambles and rocks and holes and I fall down and scrape the hell out of my life. For what? Kicks?

  I watched my world narrow in on all sides until it became so small I was trapped. I knew no one was coming for me this time. My arrest wouldn’t be in the police listings for Scott to hack into.

  I closed my eyes and imagined Justin waiting for me downtown. He had an even sharper intuition than I did. Maybe he would sense something was wrong. But by the time he figured it out, it would be too late. And I knew one thing: no one had ever escaped from a DC. No one had ever broken in. My future was officially carved in stone. That was the most unsettling idea of all.

  Skyscrapers gave way to a warehouse district, and the car slowed down in front of an old abandoned shipping yard. A railroad track used to run through the area, but it was bent and uprooted in the Big Quake. Pieces of iron twisted and poked out of the ground like a giant fossilized reptile. Damon pulled the car up to the entrance of the detention center. He opened the back door and grabbed my arm to lift me out. I looked up and down the sidewalk, searching the area for anywhere I could run, just as Damon attached a second handcuff to connect his wrist to mine.

  “Don’t even think about it,” he said.

  I stared around at my new existence. A white sign read LADC in black letters and evoked all the warmth of a snarl. A tall electric fence encircled the deserted lot, and a low hum emitted from the charged lines. Behind the fence stood two buildings at opposite ends of an open, dusty lot. The one in the far corner was a small, single-story office building. Looming across from it was a modest sky-rise, about ten stories high. There were no windows, and I assumed, judging from the grainy, beige exterior, that it was made out of suber, like all of the modern skyscrapers built after the Big Quake.

  Paul waited in the car while Damon pulled me toward a kiosk. We were greeted by a bored-looking security guard. He wore a black vest that said LADC across the chest pocket, and silver-coated sunglasses blocked his eyes. Damon shoved a registration card through an open window in the gate.

  The guard uploaded the file and furrowed his thick black eyebrows as he skimmed the information. He told me to hold still and reached through the window to scan my eyes using a white laser that slowly measured each iris. It was for additional security; an eye scan was impossible to cheat. He examined his computer again and mumbled something into his headset. A few seconds later, he looked at Damon with a frown.

  “We don’t have her scheduled to check in,” he said.

  “She should be in your system,” Damon said. The guard nodded but stated that a scheduled drop-off time was mandatory.

  “It’s a last-minute registration,” Damon persisted.

  “This isn’t a hotel,” the guard said. “We don’t do walk-ins, you know that.”

  I perked up at this. If I could stall for an hour, that might be enough time. I knew Justin would be suspicious by now. He was probably at Joe’s apartment, following my trail. He’d have Scott check the routes of every police car in Los Angeles. An hour was all I needed. Time could save me.

  Damon glared at the security guard and guessed my thoughts. “I’m not going to sit around here and give somebody the chance to intercept this girl. You’ll have to book her now and talk to Richard later.”

  The guard chuckled. “I’d love to, but the boss doesn’t make exceptions.”

  “Get me your superior,” Damon grumbled. “This girl isn’t moving unless she’s inside those gates.”

  The guard sighed and slammed the window shut.

  Paul impatiently got out of the car and stalked over to see what was holding us up. He looked more determined than everybody to see me impounded. Maybe he was still bitter over my date rejection six months ago. I was tempted to tell him that holding a grudge was really unattractive.

  We silently stood in the warm, dry air. I listened for noise inside the gates, for voices or movement or life of any kind. If DCs were rehabilitation clinics, surely they let students move around outside? Maybe visitors were allowed.

  A few minutes later we heard footsteps approaching. A woman walked briskly through the courtyard. She was middle-aged, and her sandy blond hair was pulled back in a tight ponytail. She wore a simple white polo shirt that said LADC in the corner tucked into brown slacks. She had a collection of keycards on a lanyard around her neck and she carried a scanner in one hand.

  “What’s the problem here?” she asked, and eyed me through the gates. She didn’t look a bit happy to be interrupted. She pressed her hands on her hips and narrowed her small blue eyes, which gathered wrinkles at the corners. I held her gaze and she raised her eyebrows as if she recognized me.

  “She’s in our system,” the security guard said. “But we didn’t have a check-in time scheduled for today.”

  She looked at Damon. “This is against company protocol.”

  Paul took a step forward. “You can take your protocol and shove it—”

  Damon put a hand on Paul’s chest and pushed him back. “Look, this is Madeline Freeman,” he stated.

  The woman nodded. “I thought I recognized you,” she said to me.

  I raised my shoulders in response. Great. I was a celebrity convict. Dreams do come true.

  “She was scheduled to be dropped off a month ago,” the guard continued. “According to her file, she’s been meeting with a psychiatrist in L.A. for evaluations. Her violation is still under investigation and charges are pending.”

  I raised an eyebrow at this information. My dad must have written the file. He had obviously been trying to keep me out of the detention center. But then why put me in now?

  She huffed. “So, Mr. Freeman just assumes his daughter gets VIP treatment? Well, he isn’t involved with the DC regulations. This is Richard Vaughn’s area.
”

  “Fine,” Damon said. “If you have a problem with it you can contact Richard personally and he can call Kevin and you can waste all of our time. We’ll wait right here.”

  She narrowed her eyes at this. Technically Richard was my father’s boss. He was the one that funded digital school. But she knew as well as the rest of us that my dad always got his way. She backed up and told the security guard to open the gate. Damon unfastened my handcuffs and when the gate slid open, he waved me forward. I walked through and the entrance gates closed behind me with a metal clang. I could feel Paul and Damon watching me, but I refused to look back at them. Meeting their eyes would just seal their victory, and I refused to give them the satisfaction.

  “Follow me,” the woman said roughly, and turned toward the sandy courtyard. She took impatient strides and I tried to keep up with her while I searched the open area. There wasn’t a single tree or blade of grass, just a dusty, concrete washout. When I pictured detention centers, I imagined a scene out of a prison movie: kids shuffling their feet, smoking, hanging their heads; people walking around in orange jumpsuits sharing a communal silence of regret. Instead, there wasn’t a single sign of movement. There wasn’t one footprint imprinted in the gravel.

  “This isn’t a sightseeing tour,” she scolded, and I quickened my pace to catch up with her. We walked to the taller building, which she called the dormitory. I stopped and squinted up at the soulless sky-rise. She typed in a code and swiped a card, and the doors buzzed open. Her voice turned flat as an automated recording.

  “Each floor is separated by gender. You stay on your assigned floor at all times.”

  I nodded and followed her into an elevator.

  “The electric gates around the DC are live twenty-four-seven. I wouldn’t recommend getting too close. The charge won’t kill you. It damages the nerves in your spinal cord, but it leaves your brain intact. So you can think, you just can’t move.”

  I stared at her. Friendly welcome speech. I wasn’t sure what bothered me more: that the gates could paralyze me or that she was smiling as she told me. Scare tactics had been used on me for so long I was learning how to trap them and block them before they ever penetrated.

  I just nodded my head solemnly. The elevator arrived at the fourth floor and we stepped out next to a utility closet. She opened the door and there were shelves full of clothes inside, neatly folded and stacked and arranged by size. She handed me dark green scrubs; my uniform, she explained. She also handed me a blue towel and some generic black underwear and sandals.

  We continued down the hallway and she pointed out the bathrooms, two single units. She opened one of the doors and a light snapped on. It was an open space with a toilet in one corner and a sink built into the wall. A metal showerhead stood in the far end. There were no curtains; there wasn’t even a mirror.

  “Shower, change, and when you’re done, hand me your civilian clothes,” she told me.

  She shut the door behind me. Before I let the silence loom and allowed more panic to set in, I hurriedly stripped off my T-shirt and shorts. I realized quickly that I had to live in this place from second to second. If I tried to think even a minute into the future, the fear would kick in and they would win. I had to stay in the moment. It was the only time I could count on.

  I took off my underwear, folded everything, and set my clothes on the edge of the sink, next to a toothbrush holder. There was a metal hook over the door, and I hung up my scrubs and towel. I stood naked in the confined space and looked at the showerhead. My thoughts turned to documentaries I’d seen about concentration camps. I felt like I was standing in a gas chamber.

  My teeth started to chatter. The linoleum floor was cold on my bare feet. But it was more than the cold space that felt menacing. It was the energy of this place; it felt like I’d stumbled into a void, as if the air were a vacuum that sucked out any hope inside of me.

  I reminded myself to move. I turned on the shower and a heavy spray pelted my skin. There were three clear cylinders welded to the wall, labeled as soap, shampoo, and conditioner. I turned up the temperature until the water was scalding hot. I wanted to feel something warm, something that made my skin almost burn, but my feet refused to warm up. Air seeped out of the vent in the ceiling and blew a cool breeze, like icy breath, through the water. I was shivering by the time I was done, and the scrubs were so thin they felt like tissue paper over my skin; putting them on barely made a difference in the chill.

  I came out of the bathroom and handed the supervisor my regular clothes. She wasn’t wearing a nametag and I assumed she wasn’t on a first-name basis with the students, but certainly someone had to be. Wouldn’t someone have to interact with us? She stuffed my clothes in a yellow canvas bag with the number 415 printed on it in red letters and shoved the bag down a chute in the hallway labeled LAUNDRY. The space was so small, she had to push to get the clothes through.

  I followed her down a narrow corridor, lit by one single ribbon of fluorescent lights that cut down the middle of the ceiling like an electric vein. Every door we walked past was shut. I tried to feel the energy of people but all I felt were walls. She told me all the rooms were soundproof so the students wouldn’t be disturbed. Or acknowledged, I wanted to add.

  I lumbered behind her; my sandals were a size too big so I had to drag them along the floor to keep my feet from sliding out. In my green scrubs I felt like a patient admitted to a mental hospital. Maybe that’s what they wanted us to think. They wanted us to feel like we were sick, like we all needed to be healed. In our identical uniforms we were no longer individuals. The DCs disconnected us from our old lives in order to start us new again. They turned us off to restart us.

  She pointed to a lens in the ceiling, a circular black bulb protruding in the middle of the hallway.

  “We call it the Eye,” she told me. “There’s one on every floor, in every hallway, and in every stairwell. It provides better security than humans do because the Eye doesn’t even need to blink. It watches your every move in this place.”

  She stopped in front of room 415.

  “The rules here are simple,” she said. “No talking to other students. No loitering. Keep your movements outside of your room to a minimum.”

  “What happens if I don’t?” I wondered out loud.

  She raised an eyebrow. “The Eye watches. People will be informed. Let’s just say, you never make the same mistake twice in here.”

  She opened the door and I followed her inside.

  “Your room doors are locked from ten p.m. to six a.m. If you need to get out at night for an emergency, you’ll have to call security. And it better be a good reason. We run on routine in this place and we don’t like interruptions.”

  The room looked like what I imagined a college dorm would: small, functional, with a metal cot in one corner and a desk in the other. Just enough sterilization to make you homesick. There was an open closet in the corner of the room with a clothes hamper in it. Every wall was covered in a digital screen, as was the ceiling and the floor. They weren’t going to deny us technology—that much was obvious. It felt stuffy inside, since there were no windows, but the air was cool, circulating through a small vent in the ceiling.

  She raised a scanner in her hand and told me to spread my arms and legs. I did as I was told and she passed the scanner along my body to make sure I wasn’t hiding any kind of bug or tracker. When she was satisfied I was no longer contaminated with any ties to the outside world, she dropped the scanner and punched some numbers into the device.

  I looked around the room and felt isolation wrap its cold arms around me. We had to be allowed some kind of human interaction. People will go insane if they’re completely isolated. Humans are social; the administrators couldn’t deny us some contact. Could they?

  “Where do we eat?” I asked, hopeful there was a cafeteria or a commons.

  “You eat in your room,” she said, and pointed to a narrow metal window, inches above the desk. She told me there was a
menu on my computer and whatever I ordered would be delivered through the slot. I stared at the rectangular space, a flat metal mouth, and nodded. Of course, the point of a DC is to keep you separated. Encourage distance. Reinstall you into the digital life.

  She pointed to the keypad on my desk. “Your computer’s programmed to answer any of your questions,” she told me. “You’ll be spending a lot of time together.”

  I stared at the keypad and felt a chill crawl over my skin. I could feel the confident shell around my chest start to crack.

  She informed me my first counseling session was tonight.

  “Counseling session?” I asked.

  She nodded. “It’s mandatory. You’ll meet with a counselor routinely to help you adjust to the DC and discuss what brought you here in the first place so it doesn’t happen again. We’ve never had anyone return to a DC once they’re released,” she added proudly. “We have a one hundred percent success rate. Not many correctional facilities can claim that.”

  The statistic reminded me of something my father often said, and it gave me one more reason not to trust her.

  “Someone will be by tonight to escort you to your first session. After that, the elevator will be programmed to let you go there on your own when you have appointments. The counseling rooms are on the first floor of this building. The elevators are programmed to take you there.”

  She pointed to the pajamas on my bed: a dark green T-shirt, sweatshirt, and sweatpants.

  “Throw your dirty clothes in there.” She motioned behind me to the tall, square hamper in the closet. “We’ll empty it out during your counseling sessions. You’ll get a stack of clean uniforms and enough bedding to change your sheets every day. Any questions?”

  I looked down at the bed. “I don’t think I’ll need new bedding every single day,” I pointed out. It seemed a little luxurious for a detention center.

  She was quiet for a few seconds before she answered. “Why don’t you wait a day or two before you decide that?” she offered. “You might change your mind.” I heard a noise down the hall and I turned my head in that direction. “Oh, one more thing,” she added, and raised a finger, gesturing for me to follow her. We walked down the hall and I heard someone around the corner. The hall widened at the end, and we turned and entered a small corner room that had a food machine set up against the back wall. A boy was stocking the counter with clean mugs. He looked young enough to be in digital school, but he was wearing a staff uniform. He was tall and gangly, with dark hair cut close to his head. Silver-wire-rimmed glasses slipped down his nose. He pushed them up and grinned when he saw us.