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“Goodnight,” he said, and she thought she heard him add, “Moff.” Then he was gone; again, the sound of his bedroom door. Pearl stared at the unfinished trilobite, imagined it swimming through the dark oceans without the benefit of its antennae to guide it, a compact little shell, deadened and blind. Surely he hadn’t said “Moff.”
Pearl stayed up late again, pretending to work on the wasp, but really making unguided twists in the wire, ending up with an improbable creature, one that had never existed, could never exist; evolution would never allow it. She imagined that the creature existed anyway, imagined it covered with fur, with feathers, with scales, with cilia that reacted to the slightest sensation. When the light to Rhett’s room finally shut off, she went down the hall and got a cotton swab from her bag.
Rhett slept on his back with his lips slightly parted, the effect of the sleeping pill she’d crushed into his shake when fixing his dinner. It was easy to slip the swab into his mouth, to run it against his cheek without causing a murmur or stir. Easier than perhaps it should have been, this act that Rhett and the company, both, would consider a violation. The Apricity 480 sat on the kitchen table, small and knowing. Pearl approached it, the cotton swab in her grip. She unwrapped a new chip, the little slip of plastic that would deliver her son’s DNA to the machine.
You will take a long trip and you will be very happy, though alone.
She loaded the chip, fit it into the port, and tapped the command. The Apricity made a slight whirring as it gathered and tabulated its data. Pearl leaned forward. She unfolded her screen and peered into its blank surface, looking to find her answer there, now, in this last moment before it began to glow.
(#ulink_e62117f0-444c-59ef-9924-b1f110c3c42f)
Means, Motive, Opportunity (#ulink_e62117f0-444c-59ef-9924-b1f110c3c42f)
CASE NOTES 3/25/35
Saff says it’s funny to think of someone hating her enough to do what they did. She says it’s funnier to think that she herself was there while they were doing it, that she already knows the solution to this mystery; she just can’t remember what it is. She says that her body must remember—that the person’s fingers are printed on her skin, their voice in her eardrums, their reflection on the backs of her eyes—and maybe her body could tell her, if only she could get her brain to shut up and let it. She lifts her bracelets to her elbow and lets them drop back down to her wrist, where they fall against each other, chiming. “You think I’m crazy, don’t you, Rhett?” she says, adding, “Tell me the truth.”
“I don’t think you’re crazy,” I say. “But then most people wouldn’t consider my sense of what’s crazy to be particularly reliable.”
Saff crinkles her nose. Does she think we’re flirting? If she does, I let her go on thinking it because it’s less trouble that way.
And I don’t tell Saff the truth: that my body knows more than my brain does, too, that that’s why I starve it. Instead, I tell her a lie. I tell her that I can help her.
CASE NOTES 3/26/35
THECRIME
On the night of 2/14/35, Saffron Jones (age 17) was dosed with “zom,” short for “zombie,” so named for the drug’s effects of short-term memory loss paired with extreme suggestibility. Basically, if you’re on zom, you’ll do whatever anyone tells you to and you won’t remember any of it afterward, won’t remember much of what came before it either, which is the nastiest part because you won’t remember who dosed you. While on zom, Saff was told to strip naked and recite conjugations of the French verbs dormir, manger, and baiser (respectively, “to sleep,” “to eat,” and “to fuck”). She was told to shave off her left eyebrow and to ingest half a bar of lemon soap. These events occurred in the basement of Ellie Bergstrom (age 18) during a party at Ellie’s house and were recorded on Saff’s screen. No one besides Saff is visible or audible in the video. As is typical with zom, Saff woke up the next morning with no memory of the previous night. She remembered leaving her house for Ellie’s party, that’s it. She thought she’d gotten drunk. She didn’t realize anything more had happened until she accessed Facebook and discovered the video posted to her account. It had 114 dislikes, 585 likes.
“IT COULD HAVE BEEN A LOT WORSE,” Saff tells me.
We’re sitting in her car in Golden Gate Park, pulled over on one of the access roads behind the flower conservatory. I can almost see the white spires of the conservatory through the treetops, but my clearest view is of the dumpster in the back where they throw out the flowers that have wilted and gone to rot.
“Saff. They made you eat soap.”
Saff showed me the video. (I don’t go on Facebook anymore.) In it, she took bite after bite of the thick bar of soap like it was a tea cake. Her pupils were huge and lavender in the dim basement light. (So were her nipples.) Her eyes weren’t dead, though, not zombified like you’d think. She has big, dark eyes, Saff does. And in the video, they glittered. Also, she smiled as she chewed. We think she must have been told not just to eat the soap, but to like eating it. I stared at her mouth so I wouldn’t look at her breasts, all too aware that the clothed Saff was sitting across from me, watching me as I watched her. In the video, the tip of her tongue darted out to collect a stray flake of soap from her bottom lip. Her lips parted, and a bubble formed between them, quivering like a word you can’t speak. Then she threw it all up, a foamy yellow torrent. After that, the video cut out.
Saff shrugs. “At least my eyebrow is growing back. Can you tell?” She’s penciled in the missing brow with care, but I can tell because it’s a slightly different shade of brown from the real one. “It could have been worse.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t? Are you sure you weren’t …?” Raped is what I’m not going to say.
“I think I could tell. It would have been … new.” I’m a virgin is what she’s not going to say.
Saff is sneaking looks at me, but this time it’s not because she’s trying to flirt. She’s embarrassed, either to tell me she’s a virgin or maybe just to be one. I want to tell her not to bother being embarrassed, not around me. When I left school last year, all the kids in our class had started declaring themselves straight, gay, bi, whatever. Me, I had nothing to declare. Because I was nothing. I am nothing. I’m not interested in any of it. The doctors say I would be if only I ate more, but they think every true part of me is just another symptom of my condition. What they don’t understand is that my condition is a symptom of me. That I am a stone buried deep in the ground, something that will never grow, no matter how good the dirt.
“You were, though.” I decide I’m going to say the word this time. “Raped.” And when I do, Saff ’s breath hisses out. “Even if you weren’t actually. They made you do those things. They forced you. I know how it is.”
“Yeah. Well. Everyone knows how it is because of that damn video.”
“No. I mean I know how it feels. To be forced.”
“Oh, Rhett,” Saff whispers. “Oh no.” And she’s misunderstood me. She thinks I mean that I was raped. What I mean is that the doctors shoved a feeding tube down my throat when I was too weak to resist. That my parents told them it was okay. That it felt like I was drowning. I let Saff misunderstand, though. I let her clasp my hand and stare at me with her big, dark eyes. Because I know that when people comfort you, they’re really just comforting themselves.
CASE NOTES 3/27/35, LATE MORNING
OPPORTUNITY
Opportunity holds no clues for us. Everyone in the class had the opportunity to dose Saff. Zom is taken transdermally. It’s loaded on a see-through slip of paper, like a scrap of Scotch tape. You press the paper to your bare skin—your arm, your palm, your thigh, your anywhere—and it dissolves into you. You can take it on purpose for the side effects: slowed time, heightened sense of smell, euphoria. Even though you won’t remember much of any of it the next day. Or you can get dosed without knowing it. A stranger’s hand on your bare shoulder as you push through the crowd, on your cheek pretending to brush away a stray eyelash, on the back of your hand in a show of sympathy.
At the clubs, everyone stays covered up: full-length gloves, turtlenecks, pants, high boots, even veils and masks. In fact, the more covered you are, the more provocative, because you’re saying that you might let a stranger touch you anywhere there’s cloth. Some kids will let bits of skin show through, peeks of upper arm, ankle, and neck. Not too much skin, though, just enough to stay vigilant over. You have to protect what you show.
Saff wasn’t covered up when she left her house. She was wearing a T-shirt and jeans and had left her sneakers at the door: bare arms, bare hands, bare neck, bare feet. So many vulnerabilities. But Saff wouldn’t have thought she was vulnerable. This was a party at Ellie’s, just like a hundred other parties at Ellie’s going back to her platypus-themed fifth-birthday party, an event all the same kids had attended, add me. Seneca Day School is exclusive, meaning tiny, designed for kids with parents in big tech. There are only twelve students in each graduating class. (Eleven in mine, since I left.) We’ve all known each other forever. We all trust each other.
Except of course we don’t. After all, where is there more distrust than in a small group of people trapped together for eternity? Old grudges; buried feelings; past mistakes; all those former versions of you that you could, in a larger school, run away from. Trust? You’d be safer in a crowd of strangers.
I EXPLAIN TO SAFF that we’ll solve her mystery by looking for three things: means, motive, and opportunity. I tell her that everything everyone does can be predicted by this trinity of logic: Are they able to do it? Do they have a reason to do it? Do they have the chance to do it?
“Everything everyone does?” Saff repeats with a raised eyebrow, her real eyebrow. “What if I did something, like, totally spontaneous?”
Her hand whips out and knocks over the saltshaker. We’re meeting in the diner across from school in Pac Heights. Salt cascades across the table, over the edge, soundlessly to the floor. The waitress glares at us.
“You’ve just proved my point,” I tell her. “Your arm works. That’s means. You wanted to challenge my theory. That’s motive. The saltshaker was right there in front of you. That’s opportunity.”
Saff considers this. “You helping me then. How is that means … whatever?”
“Well. I have the means because I’ve read about a thousand detective novels and because I’m smart. Opportunity is that you asked me to help. Also, I’m in school online, which means I don’t have adults watching over me all day.”
“And motive?” she says.
Because they forced a feeding tube down my throat, I could tell her. Because when I saw you again, you didn’t say how healthy I looked, I could tell her. Because kid-you knew kid-me, before all of this shit.
Instead I say, “Because I feel like it.”
Saff screws her mouth to one side. “For it to be an actual motive doesn’t there have to be, like, a reason?”
In response, I reach out and knock over the pepper shaker.
She laughs.
There’s movement in the diner window. Ellie and Josiah are there across the street, beckoning to Saff. They’re both on our list. Ellie is an obvious suspect. Because she would. That there is a true sentence: Ellie would. Whatever your proposition, Ellie would do it without hesitation. But Josiah? Josiah wouldn’t hurt anyone. He might stand there with his hands in his pockets and say, Hey. Come on, guys. Stop it. (And that’s almost worse, isn’t it?) But he wouldn’t actually do anything to anyone.
I haven’t seen Josiah in almost a year. He looks the same. Taller. That stupid thing adults always say, You look taller, as if that’s an accomplishment, and not just something your body does on its own, without your permission.
“Gotta go.” Saff leans forward like she’s going to kiss me on the cheek.
Across the street, Josiah squints, trying to make out who it is Saff is sitting with. I slouch down in the booth, and so Saff ’s kiss is delivered to the empty space where I just was.
“Don’t tell them you saw me,” I say.
CASE NOTES 3/27/35, AFTERNOON
MOTIVE
The Scapegoat Game started as a unit in Teacher Trask’s junior English. She assigned “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” “The Lottery,” The Hunger Games, Lord of the Flies, and other classics with a scapegoat theme. They even watched a Calla Pax movie, The Warm-Skinned Girl, where Calla Pax is sacrificed to a god living in an ice floe to stop planet heating and save the world. Saff says everyone got really into it, so much so that the class decided, without Trask’s knowledge, to test the scapegoat concept in real life. My former classmates charted out eleven weeks, for the eleven of them, each one signing up for a weeklong turn as scapegoat. Like in the stories, the scapegoat had to take everyone else’s abuse without comment or complaint. For that one week, ten were free to vent all their anger, frustration, pain, whatever, on the eleventh, knowing that the next week someone else—maybe you yourself—would become the scapegoat. They decided that made it fair.
SAFF COMES OVER AFTER SCHOOL to continue our conversation from the diner. When I swing open the door, she looks upset. Her eyes are pink. The inner edge of her penciled brow is smeared like she’s been rubbing at it. I have the impulse to reach up and touch it, that bare little arc of skin. I shove my hands in my pockets.
“Are your parents home?” she says.
I tell her no, that my mom is at work. And that my dad doesn’t live here anymore.
“Okay,” she says.
And I’m grateful she doesn’t say, I’m sorry, because then I don’t have to say, It’s okay. Or, I see him on weekends. Or, It’s better this way. Or any other of that divorce-kid bullshit.
“We have until six,” I say. “My mom usually gets home around then.”
Not that it’s against the rules to have Saff over. In fact, I’m pretty sure Mom would be delighted, which is precisely why I don’t want her to find Saff here. It’s too hard to have Mom hoping things about me. She got home before me yesterday, when I was at the park with Saff. Now she keeps looking at me, but she won’t ask where I was, and I won’t tell her. Not just out of stubbornness.
I’ve bought a tube of cookies and a couple sodas from the corner store in case Saff is hungry. There’s plenty of food in the kitchen, of course, but Mom will notice if any of it is missing, and she’ll think (hope) that I’m the one who’s eaten it. I offer the snacks to Saff like I haven’t bought them special. I even left them in the kitchen so that I can pretend to go in and get them from the cupboard. We take the food into my room.
Saff turns in a slow circle. I picture my room through her eyes: twin bed, rag rug, desk-chair-screen setup. No bullshit band posters or Japanese mech figurines to announce my unique storebought personality. I threw all that stuff in a box last year. Now the room is simple (bare, Mom says), pure (monkish, Mom says). The walls are its only distinction. Today they’re set to Victorian wallpaper, an exact replica of the wallpaper in the old BBC show Sherlock. On one wall there’s even the image of a fireplace, complete with ashtray and curling pipe.
I wait to see if Saff gets the joke, but she sinks down on the floor by my bed without comment. She slides out a couple cookies, then shakes the tube at me. When I say, “No thanks,” she doesn’t push it, doesn’t study me with meaningful eyes, doesn’t say, Are you sure? So I return the favor and don’t ask why she’s been crying.
Instead, I say, “Tell me more about the game.”
“Game?”
“The Scapegoat Game.”
She rolls her eyes and bites off half a cookie in one go. “Oh. That fucking thing.”
“Whose idea was it?”
“Whose do you think?”
“Ellie’s.”
She nods.
Popularity—who’s cool, who’s not, jocks, nerds, whatever—is, for Saff and me, something that exists only in movies about high school. When you have a class of twelve people, there really aren’t enough of you to divide up into cliques. Sure, there are some best friends, like Ellie and Saff, or like Josiah and me (used to be). There’re some couples, Ellie and Linus for a while, then Brynn and Linus, basically every girl and Linus. Except Saff. She’s never been with Linus. Though maybe she has this past year; I wouldn’t know, I’ve been gone. My point is, mostly everyone hangs out with everyone else.
There is one role, though, one rule: Ellie is always the leader. It’s been that way from our first year, back when Ellie would whip the dodgeball at you and then, when you cried over the burn it’d left on your leg, explain how that was just part of the game, explain it so calmly and confidently that you found yourself nodding, even though the tears were still rolling down your cheeks. That makes it sound like I think Ellie is a bad person. I don’t. In fact, the older I get, the more I think that Ellie’s got it right, that she knew at five what the rest of us wouldn’t figure out until our teens: the world is tough, so you’d better be tough right back.
“And so?” I say to Saff, because there’s always more to the story when Ellie is involved.
“And so, after Ellie comes up with the scapegoat idea, she even volunteers to go first. Which, if you think about it, is pretty smart because at first everyone is, you know, gentle. Warming up to it. Also, if you go first, you haven’t scapegoated anyone else yet, so they don’t have anything to pay you back for.” Saff pauses. “Do you think she actually plans this stuff out ahead of time?”
“I think Ellie has an instinct for weakness.”
“Well, that first week we didn’t do much—tugged Ellie’s hair, kicked the back of her chair in class, made her carry our lunch trays. Nothing really. I think she had fun. Actually, I know she did. The last day, she dressed up as Calla Pax, from that sacrifice-on-the-ice movie we watched. In, like, a sexy white robe. She looked great. Of course. Then, the next week, Linus went. The guys were rougher on him, but not in a mean way, if that makes sense? And you know how Linus is. Easy with it all. It felt like a game. Fun even. Like free. When you have permission to … if you can do whatever … sometimes it’s like …” She taps a thumb against her chest, then gives up trying to explain and takes another cookie. Her third. (I can’t help counting other people’s food.)
“But then it got bad. Each week, each new person. We kept upping it. Meaner. Rougher.”
“When did you go?”
“Last,” she says, smiling bitterly. “Like a fucking fool.”
She looks like she’s going to start crying again. I type some notes into my screen to give her a chance to get ahold of herself.
“‘An instinct for weakness,’” she mutters.
I look up from my screen. “I didn’t mean that you’re weak.”
“I don’t know. I feel pretty weak.”
“You’re not, though. That’s why they gave you zom. They had to make you weak. Which proves you’re not. See?”
She bites on her lip. “I haven’t told you about Astrid yet.”
“Astrid is weak.”
“Yeah, I know. She was scapegoat just before me.”
Astrid’s parents both work as lawyers for big tech, her mom for Google, her dad for Swink. For them, arguing is sport, which maybe partway explains the way Astrid is. If you’re someone who needs to explain why people are the way they are. In second grade Astrid used to brush her hair over her face. Right over the front of it until it covered everything right down to her chin. The teachers were constantly giving her hair bands and brushes and telling her how nice she looked in a ponytail. At Seneca Day, there’s a certain style the teachers are all supposed to use, “suggesting instead of correcting.” But finally one day, Teacher Hawley lost it and shouted, “Astrid, why do you keep doing that!” And all the rest of us looked to the back row where Astrid sat and here comes this little voice, out from behind all that hair: “Because I like it better in here.”
I still think about that. Because I like it better in here.
“We got carried away,” Saff says. “We thought because we’re such good friends that we could say anything, do anything, and it was safe.”
She goes quiet, so I prompt her: “Astrid.”
“I just rode her, Rhett. All week. I didn’t let up.” As she talks, she pushes up her sleeves like she’s preparing for hard work. “I knew it was bad, too. I knew she was going into the bathroom to cry during break. And that made me even harder on her. Talk about an instinct for weakness.”
“You’re saying Ellie put you up to it?”
“That’s the thing. She didn’t. It was me. All of it. I was way worse than the rest of them. Even Ellie probably thought I was going too far. Not that she’d ever stop anyone from going too far.” Saff shakes her head. “I didn’t know I could be like that.”
“And you think Astrid wanted to get back at you?”
Saff shrugs. “I’m the one crying in the bathroom these days, aren’t I?”
She looks so beyond sad. Which is maybe why I make the mistake of saying, “It’s been pretty bad, huh?”
And Saff starts crying right there in my room.
“It’s not the soap,” she says, through sobs, “though I still gag every time I have to wash my hands. It’s not the stupid eyebrow.” She touches it, rubbing away more of the pencil. “It’s not even that I was naked. It’s that everyone saw me. All the seniors. All the middle graders. The teachers. My friends’ parents. My parents’ friends. When they look at me now … well, mostly they won’t look at me. That, or they look at me really intensely, and I can practically hear them thinking to themselves, I’m looking her in the eye. I’m looking her in the eye.”
