Middle Ground

by Katie Kacvinsky

  “I just want to help you,” I said, mirroring what he’d said to me minutes before.

  “I don’t want anyone to help me.” His eyes were burning. “You want to know how I deal? I take the shit that happens in life and I use it as a catalyst for change.”

  The tears spilled down my face. I wanted to reach out to Justin but his eyes were scorched.

  “Most of what I do today all stems from that experience. That’s how I use tragedy. It’s a wake-up call. It reminds me to make the most of my life. To never waste a second of it. It reminds me why this world has to change. That’s how I deal with the shitty things life hands you. I don’t sit around and talk about it and dwell on it. I don’t feel sorry for myself and ask why things happen. You’ll go crazy if you sit around dwelling on why. Because there are no answers. You can’t change the past.” He took a deep breath. “I’d like to think Kristin’s death was a wake-up call. And I take steps every day to make sure it doesn’t happen to someone else’s daughter or best friend or girlfriend.”

  He turned and headed down the beach.

  “I’m sorry,” I yelled after him. “I love you. That’s all. And I hate that I love you, you know that? I really hate it.”

  He stopped walking and stood there, his head down.

  “You’re a hypocrite,” I said. “You’re the one saying everyone needs a middle ground. You need to learn to accept that. You let the system break you too.”

  I didn’t know what else to say. Dark energy passed between us, something I had never felt before, and it scared me. Beating down Justin only beat me down lower. I couldn’t handle his presence, angry and hurt and turned away from me like it was all my fault.

  I didn’t want to make the moment any worse so I backed up, but before I could turn away Justin was right there. He grabbed my face in his hands and leaned his head down.

  My mind told me to scream but something made me stop. My muscles flexed and jumped under my skin, urging me to run. But something else was stronger inside of me. Something kept my feet standing in place.

  His lips touched mine and it melted a layer of ice that had formed around my heart. I grabbed his jacket and pulled him closer and I wrapped my arms around him because I realized this was what I needed more than anything. He folded me inside his arms and pressed his lips harder against mine.

  He let me drain him.

  It was selfish because I was taking every piece of happiness he could give me. I sucked the lightness out of him and I felt hopelessness drift out of my soul like a black cloud of ash. I was going to suck him dry—I emptied all the light out of him. There was more in that kiss than love; it was necessity, it was pain and fear that I was pushing into him so I could steal his strength. I needed to store it away so I could live off it. I could feel Justin’s heart hammering against mine and I slowly felt a hole inside me start to fill with something real. Something warm.

  I finally let go and Justin looked down at me. He took a deep breath, something like relief, and pressed his forehead against mine. Neither of us spoke. He let go of my eyes and dropped his hands. He turned and walked away.

  January 2061

  Mother whispered, “Jump.

  And don’t be afraid to fall.

  Your wings will catch you.”

  It’s a haiku I memorized when I was young, from a picture book my mom handed down to me. I remember tracing my fingers over the bird’s wings on the page. Every time I read it, it means something different to me, depending on where I’m at in my life. I try to live by these words, to have courage and faith, but it’s so hard to use my wings in this life.

  Maybe it’s about being happy.

  The real world is becoming warped and dirty and there’s lead in my feet. I’m not getting any lucky breaks in here. I don’t want to be here. I want to be there. Sometimes there is no bright side so it forces your eyes to adjust to the dark.

  Where is happy?

  Will I one day be able to put my feet up and toast to the sun? Will I be happy? Or is happiness just this fleeting moment you spend your life chasing after only to feel it slip through your fingers and leave you wanting more? Is happiness just bait used to move us through life?

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “Okay, Maddie,” Molly said. “I have a test for you.” She held a MindReader in one hand and the Cure in the other. It wasn’t a full dose of the drug, just a quarter piece. Gabe had gotten us a sample, as promised. She motioned to a flipscreen in front of me and explained she’d play the video at the same time it was downloaded through the reader.

  “I’ll study how you react,” she said. Clare, Gabe, Justin, and Pat sat around us in a half circle. I picked up the MindReader and hesitated.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s not a nightmare. You’ll enjoy this dream, I promise.”

  I was intrigued. I dropped the tablet in my mouth and slid on the MindReader. The fog was already setting in.

  I closed my eyes and when I opened them I was standing on the summit of a sandy hill, looking down over the edge. The hill rippled below and around me like it was moving and its brown slope flowed all the way down to a wide river below.

  “You ready?” Justin asked. I turned and he was standing a few feet away, wearing a hooded sweatshirt and jeans and this enormous smile I’d seen on him only a few times, when he was at his best, when he was about to fly. Clare and Gabe stood on the other side of him. The sun beat down on us and the air was dry; the wind was a hot gust.

  Soft, sandy hills stretched out beneath me, spread out for miles. Gabe dropped down and the steep incline swallowed him. I watched him propel a board underneath his feet down the sand dune, like he was snowboarding. Clare followed behind him. They slalomed down the hill, cutting switchbacks through the slope and leaving shallow ridges in the soft ground. They kicked up waves of sand behind them.

  “Put those on,” Justin reminded me, and nudged my arm. I reached up and touched thick plastic goggles wrapped around my head. I pulled them over my face, and the hillsides and water were tinted orange. I looked down and realized my feet were strapped to a board. Justin didn’t need to encourage me to go. It all came naturally. I leaned forward, shifted my weight, and gravity did the rest. My knees bent into a squat and my arms were held out for balance but my legs and hips felt like they’d done this before. I rode down the giant sand dune like I was surfing a wave.

  The gradient steepened and I picked up speed, turning easily by pushing on one foot or the other. The ground was so smooth I felt like I was riding on water. The wind pushed against my face and my hands and roared in my ears as if I were flying through it. I squatted lower to the ground so I could go faster. Gabe was fifty yards in front of me and I watched him catch a jump, flying off a rock ledge through the air and landing gracefully on the padded ground. I turned my board and headed for the same ledge. I reached my arms out wide to keep steady and flew off the jump and felt weightless. The water moved and glistened below in the sun and I screamed down at the valley as I landed perfectly in the soft, smooth sand. I dug my board in, cutting through the ground and sending sand up in a long spray.

  The golden hillside was starting to fade to darker brown and then black. The water turned blurry. I realized I wasn’t standing, I was lying down. I opened my eyes, and the scene disappeared, replaced by ceiling lights. My heart was pounding, and I could still feel the adrenaline shooting through my legs. I blinked at Molly and she was holding the MindReader, staring down at me. I frowned at her for cutting the dream short. Justin, Clare, Gabe, and Pat stared at me, fascinated. Justin bit his nails like he was trying to hide a smile.

  “Whatever that was, give me more of it,” I said with a grin.

  “You were laughing the entire time,” Justin informed me.

  I pressed my hands on my stomach and it was tight and sore from working muscles I hadn’t used in months.

  “Do you remember anything?” Molly asked.

  I opened my mouth to answer her, but I was already forgetting. I co
uld remember a rush, I told her, this feeling of flying. “I remember sun, and people were there. Justin and Gabe, I think.”

  Molly nodded.

  “That’s all?” she asked, and I nodded. She looked down at the flipscreen that had recorded the descriptions I was telling her during the dream: the people, the wide river, the endless miles of rolling dunes, and the last jump I took off the rock ledge. I read over the descriptions and I couldn’t remember a single detail.

  “I said all that?” I asked.

  “When you weren’t laughing,” she told me. She played the video back for me again, on the flipscreen. It was a roughly edited documentary of a single guy sandboarding.

  “Scott watched this a few weeks ago and now sandboarding is all he talks about,” Molly said. We all watched the documentary. The man filming it had a camera strapped to his head, so the viewers felt like they were surfing the dune with him. But the dune he was on had a gentle gradient and he was by himself. There wasn’t any water visible anywhere, and no endless miles of dunes like I described in my experience.

  “It’s interesting,” Molly said. “We played the video for ten minutes, but you’ve been out for an hour. My guess is if you take the full dose, it knocks you out for about six to eight hours.”

  “So what is the drug doing?” I asked her.

  “It makes you hallucinate, obviously,” she said. “It actually shocks your mind and encourages your brain to create proteins that are necessary for memory building. At the same time, it acts as a relaxant. So while it slows down some neural pathways, it opens up others. It takes what you see and what’s being downloaded and mixes it with your own memories. That’s how it’s personalized. You cast the roles and change the scenery. Have you been to the Columbia River Gorge?” she asked me.

  I nodded. I told her my father grew up in The Dalles, in northern Oregon, and we used to take trips up there as a family in the summer.

  “The steep, rolling hills and that river you described, it sounds like the program mixed with your memory of the gorge to make it authentic.”

  “But when I wake up, why can’t I remember anything?”

  “It’s called an amnesia blackout,” she told me. “It’s similar to a blackout people get from drinking too much. Your salient short-term memories don’t make it into your long-term memory so you can never remember specific details. The drug lets you hang on to just the smallest details and emotions, until something triggers the memory. But it gets buried so deep in your subconscious you don’t even realize it’s a memory. Instead, it just becomes a reaction.”

  “So, let me get this straight,” Justin said. “The DC’s planting memories disguised as nightmares in people’s minds?”

  Molly nodded. “Once the memories are downloaded, your mind can’t help but run off of those files. You’re taught to fear society. You’re taught to think being around people is just a tragedy waiting to happen, like in the real world violence is lurking around every corner. Anything can trigger it. They can condition you to fear hallways, door handles, windows. Anything leading to the outside world. So you go out of your way to avoid those feelings. You live in digital school. The system becomes a cure. They’re trapping you with your own mind. You’re mentally building your own walls.”

  “That’s why they don’t need much security in here,” Gabe added. “Kids are too afraid to leave their rooms, let alone to try to escape the building.”

  “What’s in the drug, exactly?” I asked.

  “I’m still running some tests on it,” she said. She used her flipscreen to diagram a barrage of charts and graphs while she explained. “One of the ingredients is salvia. It’s a natural herb that stays in the bloodstream for only a few hours, which is why I couldn’t detect it. The drug activates your prefrontal cortex.”

  We all blinked back at her and Gabe raised his hand and asked Molly to speak in English.

  She sighed and projected an image of the brain. “It’s the part of the brain that controls emotions,” she said. “Think of your mind as a computer. This is my theory: the detention center is downloading memories, like the school bombings that happened on M-Twenty-Eight, school shootings, and terrorist attacks, and they use your memories to cast the roles—all the people closest to you, your friends and family. That’s why it’s believable. It becomes personal.”

  “But it feels real,” I told Molly. “How do you explain that? I can feel pain. I can smell smoke. I can feel my leg getting shot off.”

  “The drug makes it real,” Molly said. “It blurs the line between the conscious and subconscious.”

  “Okay,” Pat said. “Now we know what the DC’s trying to do. What’s the next step?”

  Molly sighed and sat back in her seat. “First, we need to find a counter-drug. Something to separate the dreams from the reality so the students realize those nightmares aren’t real memories. And now we have the evidence we need to prove what’s going on.”

  “Hopefully you can find a counter-drug before they completely fry my brain,” I said, and took a sip of water.

  Pat suddenly stood up and pushed his chair back with a screech. “That’s it,” he said. “She’s not going back in there.” He glared around the room and his eyes stopped on Justin. “Haven’t you all seen enough?” he asked him, as if this entire detention center were his creation. Justin’s eyes stayed on Pat’s but he didn’t argue.

  “Madeline will be fine,” Molly assured us. “I really think this is temporary—”

  “You don’t know that,” Pat interrupted. “You don’t know the long-term effects this place has. You said it yourself—you have your evidence. So let’s get her out of here. Now.”

  Pat glared at Justin, daring him to disagree.

  “I can’t tell her what to do,” Justin said calmly.

  “Tell her what’s best for her. Do you think you’re the only person in this room who cares about her?”

  Justin raised his eyebrows. “Are we really going to get into this right now?”

  Pat took a step closer to Justin. “Since you’ve met her, all you’ve done is mess with her life.”

  “You mean save her life,” Clare argued.

  “What is wrong with you people?” Pat said. “Don’t you care about anything other than your precious mission?” He looked from Molly to Justin. “You guys don’t even see people. You just use them for your own purpose, for your own experiments and connections. But I’m not going to let you use Maddie.”

  “They’re not using me, Pat,” I cut in.

  “Oh yeah?” He glared back at Justin. “Where were you when she moved to L.A.? I know you never called her. You’re not involved in her life. You’re only down here now because you see her as a way to fight DS.”

  “That’s not true—” I began but Pat interrupted me.

  “You’re too blind to see anything but your job. You don’t care about anyone except yourself.”

  I widened my eyes at Pat. Did he honestly believe that? I’d never heard anyone cut Justin down before, especially by calling him selfish. He never thought about himself.

  “I care more than you think,” Justin said, his mouth tight. He was losing his cool and his eyes bore into Pat’s.

  “What classes is she taking? What color did she paint her bedroom? What’s her favorite TV show? You don’t know the day-to-day things.”

  “Don’t ever assume what I know,” Justin answered him, his voice fighting to stay calm. Pat’s hands balled up into fists and the muscles in his arms flexed. I stood up before a fight broke out.

  “Would you guys stop talking about me like I’m not in the room? I’m staying. I’m not giving up and I don’t care what any of you think. It’s my decision. No one’s making it for me.” I turned to face Pat. “Justin doesn’t want me in here any more than you do. But I made a commitment. I’m not leaving until we know how to get everyone in this building out, until we have a plan in place. I’m your eyes and ears right now. You guys need me in here.”

  “You’ve
been through enough,” Pat said. He glared at Molly. “Take your tests. Do your little psychological experiments. But I’m not going to sit here and watch you do it anymore,” he said, and he opened the basement door and stalked out. We were all quiet for a few moments. Justin’s face was flushed. He refused to meet my eyes.

  “You’re right, Maddie,” Molly said. “I think we need to let you carry this out.”

  “Maybe we should listen to Pat,” Clare grumbled. She slumped into her seat and rested her head in her hands. “We’re your friends. We need to keep you out of harm’s way, not throw you in it. We’ll figure out something else.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest. “I’m staying in here until my sentence is up or until we find a way to break every kid out of here. I have less than two months left.” I forced my voice to steady. “Besides, I’ve survived the worst part. They haven’t broken me yet.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “Her funeral was online,” he said.

  Justin and I sat on a rock, perched above the beach. There was a soft wind blowing. The air was humid and it smelled like rain was close. No stars were visible. The sky was stained black.

  He pulled his baseball cap low so the brim shaded his eyes. I stared straight ahead because I didn’t want him to stop. You can puncture a moment with the wrong words. So I stayed silent.

  “Kristin’s funeral,” he said. “It was a virtual service.” He spoke slowly, and for the first time I realized he struggled with words only when they were ones he’d never said before.

  “I’d never been to a funeral before. I didn’t know what to expect. They set up a website to host the memorial service. You could log on and add comments and feedback and post pictures and share stories. There was a slide show and a forum. There were advertisements. They turned her life into a commercialized website.”