Promised (35 page)

Down the row, a man and a woman stood by one of the sleep shells. The lid was open, and their figures were dark in contrast to a soft light that shone on the student. I hadn't made friends with any of the girls, and this one, Janice, I knew only slightly. She was twitching in spasmodic, unnatural tremors, though from her silence, I guessed she was still unconscious. The man, an older, bearded guy with a potbelly, held a tablet and a pole with an IV bag. The translucent line glowed as it led down to the girl's arm.

“Too much, do you think?” he said.

“No, she'll be all right,” said the woman. “She'll settle. Just wait.”

She leaned over Janice's face, propping up her eyelids to shine a pen light in one eye, and then the next. A cushiony bar had been wedged between Janice's teeth. The man touched his finger to the tablet, indicating something.

“Just wait,” the woman said again.

When she set the back of her fingers tenderly against Janice's cheek, and then her forehead, the sleeve of the woman's red cardigan took on a garish, flickering hue. Together, she and the man peered at the tablet again. The woman's smooth dark hair slid forward, covering her earphone as she waited, and her expression stayed watchful.

After a few more moments, she said, “See?”

“Yes,” said the man.

Janice's trembling diminished, then stopped. She never once opened her eyes. The man straightened, relaxing. The woman reached to skim a finger over the tablet, tapped it, and nodded quietly.

“That was close. I'll admit it,” she said.

“I'll say. These new ones. You never know.” The man reached for the absorbent bar in Janice's teeth and gently worked it free.

The woman in the red sweater took out Janice's IV, handed it to the man, and pressed a cotton ball to Janice's arm. With her free hand, she touched her earphone. “There's no need. She's fine for now,” she said. And then, “Right. Of course.” She made a sign to the man, and then a circle with her finger that encompassed the room.

The man turned, and I closed my eyes.

“Yes. Of course. We will,” said the woman.

I held very still, feeling my heart pounding, as the sound of footsteps spread out around the room. Soon I inhaled a faint trace of perfume. I could feel the presence of the woman hovering at the end, near my feet, and I breathed as evenly as I could.

“This one?” It was the man's voice, very soft. “What's her blip rank?”

“Ninety-three.”

“A shame.”

There was a faint rubbing noise of fabric.

I waited for more, a touch or a sound. A reply. I listened inside myself, too, distrusting my own body. Would a seizure hit me soon? My ears stayed primed, but I heard no reply, only the continued pattering of the rain high above. It took forever before there was another faint sound, a clicking from far down the room near the door. I exhaled in relief. I didn't dare open my eyes again, didn't turn my head or shift even when I felt the gentle tickle of a hair against my cheek.

I'd forgotten my wet hair. They must have seen it. They knew what I'd done.

But they'd said nothing.

*   *   *

When the morning alarm awoke us at six, I sat up slowly. My hair was dry in thick, post-rain clumps, and my mouth felt fuzzy. Orly checked in for a minute to be sure we were all up, but she paid no special attention to me. As I headed toward the bathroom with my shower kit and fresh clothes, I looked over at Janice, who was talking to one of the other girls. She seemed fine. She pulled her blond hair high over her head in a ponytail, and when her sleeve shifted, I saw a scab mark on her forearm.

Do you tell someone she's had a seizure in the night? You don't, not if it would mean admitting your own crime of being awake. I passed her by without speaking, but I wondered how Janice could not instinctively know about her episode. She should at least notice the pinprick where the IV had gone into her skin. I pushed up my sleeve and glanced down at my own arm, and that's when I saw it: a faint, healing track mark in the crook of my left elbow.

They'd done it to me, too.

 

2

THE DISHWASHER

SHOCKED AS I
was, I knew not to show it. Cameras were following my every move from a dozen different angles. I headed straight into a bathroom stall for privacy, locked the bolt, and closely inspected both my arms. One mark was all I had, and I couldn't tell how old it was, but they must have given me an IV, too, sometime fairly recently.

I didn't understand. Was I sick without knowing it? I felt okay. I also didn't get why I wasn't in trouble for breaking the rules during the night. Possibly they were waiting to call me in for discipline at a time that would be optimal for the show. I had no idea when that might be. In the meantime, the only thing to do was pretend everything was normal.

I flushed my sleeping pill down the toilet, unlocked the door, and headed into the one other place we also had privacy: the showers.

This was the day of the fifty cuts, a Monday when my life would be decided.
The Forge Show
posted minute-to-minute blip ranks for every student at the school, with the most popular in each grade ranked #1, for first place. We had one hundred first-year, tenth-grade students who had been on campus for ten days, but today, half of us were getting cut, which meant anyone scoring worse than 50 at 5:00 p.m. would be gone. The eleventh- and twelfth-grade classes, each with fifty students already, were safe. If I stayed at the Forge School, on
The Forge Show,
I'd have a shot at a dream life of fame and art. If I was cut, I'd be lost to the dead-end boxcars of Doli. Not to put too bleak a spin on it.

Considering that my blip rank was 93, my chances didn't look good.

I toweled off, threw on my favorite skirt, boots, and a tee shirt, and headed to the dining hall for breakfast.

*   *   *

A crash behind the serving line of the cafeteria made me look up just as the cook pummeled his fist into a guy's face. The guy staggered back, out of my line of vision.

“I wouldn't do that,” the cook said, lifting his big hands in warning.

“It was an accident,” came the guy's voice.

“That knife's no accident,” said the cook. “No way am I getting attacked in my own kitchen. Put it down.”

Others in the kitchen moved warily nearer, but I still couldn't see the guy who had been hit. A clatter came as something dropped on metal. The cook stepped out of my sight. I heard another smacking punch.

“Clean it up, you royal bastard,” the cook said. “You hear me?”

A shuffling clank and a stream of indecipherable words came next.

“What's that?” the cook demanded.

“I wasn't going to use it,” came the guy's voice, clearly.

Smack again.

The girl beside me gave my tray a nudge. “You're holding up the line,” she said. “Let's go.”

“The cook just hit somebody,” I said, edging farther along.

“You're kidding. Really? Where?” she said.

I craned to look back in the kitchen, and when I caught a brief glimpse of a brown-haired guy crouching near to the floor, cleaning something, I stopped again.

“Back there. He just hit him, hard,” I said. I had the tense, flayed feeling that I was supposed to do something about it, even though it was none of my business.

Other students went around us and kept picking out food.

“I don't see anything,” the girl said, bumping my tray with hers again. “They have banana pancakes. Sweet.”

I slid my tray down the poles and peered through the next counter slot, trying to see the guy once more, but instead, the cook's sweaty face blocked my view. He looked casually across at me through wafty sizzles of sausage smoke, and I felt the same vicarious burn of anger that came whenever my stepfather clocked me.

I ducked my head and moved down the cafeteria line, but I hardly noticed the food anymore. First Janice, then my own track mark, and now this flash of violence in the kitchen. They were like cracks at the edges of
The Forge Show,
cracks that made me question the appearance of everything on the stage around me. I paused by one of the wooden pillars with my tray.

Morning light dropped in the big windows, glinting on saltshakers, and the dining hall buzzed of coffee and sugar. In a corner beneath an abstract wall sculpture, Janice was eating with a couple of guys. She smoothed her long blond hair from one side of her neck to the other, like an angel spreading its glittery wings, and with my mental lens, I saw how naturally she projected a photogenic presence. She wasn't the only one, either.

We were the show. I got that. I knew that coming in, just like everybody else, but accepting the constant cameras wasn't the same as liking them, let alone performing for them. The Forge School was an elite arts academy, while
The Forge Show
was the reality show that tracked and broadcasted the activity of each individual student at the school. It was a smart, interactive system. Viewers at home controlled who they watched by selecting their favorite students' feeds. The feedback of their viewing choices, in turn, determined student blip ranks.

To sweeten the value of popularity, banner ads linked to each blip rank were incrementally more expensive as the ranks rose toward #1, and students banked a fraction of what the advertisers paid, receiving the funds at graduation. For the most popular students with the highest blip ranks, their banner ad funds after three years of high school could top a million dollars.

I'd certainly watched the show before, from home, back when my dream to come here had seemed impossible, but until I'd arrived on campus, I hadn't fully understood how the stage aspect of the school pervaded everything. The other new students like Janice were perpetually projecting extra-watt versions of themselves for the cameras. For them, it seemed effortless. They even thrived on it. But to me, who preferred the other end of a camera, the super-visibility was exhausting.

A big, old-fashioned tally board on the wall made a flipping noise while it updated the blip ranks of every student in the school, and I watched as my name settled in at 95th place. Great. My oatmeal was skimming over as it cooled. It was no use. My appetite was shot, and food wouldn't settle my restlessness, anyway. I left my tray at the counter and stepped outside to the terrace.

Breathing was immediately easier. The rain had stopped, leaving a layer of moisture in the air and an overcast sky. Far off, between the buildings, the Kansas plains turned blue as they approached the horizon. Nearer, the sheep pasture was a deep, soggy green, as if the mud beneath carried its lifeblood up each blade of grass.

On impulse, I walked between the dining hall and the art building, toward the pasture. A clattering came through the sieve of the kitchen window screens, and I smelled coffee cake more distinctly than I had when I was inside. A Forge Farms Ice Cream delivery truck was parked by the loading dock, tucked up close so the driver could load the big cardboard tubs onto his dolly.

Ahead, half a dozen sheep made a constellation of white against the green of the pasture, and I mentally framed them up in a bucolic shot. Artsy me. Farther east, beyond the short stone wall that edged campus, a sky-blue water tower labeled “Forgetown” overlooked a rambling assortment of small homes. Just inside the campus wall, on a knoll of its own, stood an old observatory with a gray dome. To my left, a wood and stone lookout tower rose dark against the gray sky. At the top, big camera lenses gleamed like black, mismatched eyes. The semisphere of a microphone dish with its lacework grid of metal could be aimed to pick up sound from any direction, including mine.

Just then, one of the cameras swiveled to aim directly at me, and I swear, it tempted me to do something asinine. It really did. You'd never believe how annoying it was to be watched
all the time,
even when you were doing
absolutely nothing.
It put me at war with myself all the time: behave. Don't behave. Behave. Don't.

The toe of my boot bumped against a rock. I picked it up and hurled it. The rock soared, shrank to a speck, and plummeted into the grass far from the sheep.
Face it,
I thought.
You're getting cut.
No matter how ideal it seemed, I shouldn't want to stay at a place where students had secret seizures at night, but stupid me, I did anyway. I wanted to stay at Forge so badly I could gnaw it in my teeth. I just couldn't see that anything I could do would make a difference. I backed around, searching for one last rock to throw before I went to class, and then I paused.

Behind the art building, leaning against a giant, paint-spattered wooden spool, a guy was pressing an ice pack to his face. He was all Adam's apple with his head tipped back, and a white bib apron protected his shirt and jeans. I picked up another rock and ambled slowly across the gravel lot.

“Hey,” I said. “I saw, in the kitchen before. Are you okay?”

He lowered the ice. His bruise was a defined crescent, and the skin near his eye was ruddy and shiny from the cold. He might have been my age, fifteen, or a little older. His dark hair partially hid a row of three rings in his ear, and after one measuring glance, he hefted the ice pack and put it back on his bruise, closing his eyes.

“I'm not interested,” he said. An accent gave his words an extra clip. “Go find someone else.”

“For what?” I asked. When he didn't explain, I went on. “If you want to report the cook, I'll back you up. I saw what he did. He shouldn't have hit you like that.”

“That's cute,” he said.

“I mean it. Is he always like that?”

“I don't need you to make a report,” he said. “Fortunately, no one gives a crap about what happens in the kitchen.”

“What did you do, anyway?” I said.

He shifted the ice pack and opened his good eye. “Spilled his precious eggs. Pulled a knife on him. It was instinct. Stupid.” He gave me a little wave. “Okay, enough. You can go now. You've got your spike.”