Liv picked up the first aid kit and knelt so her body blocked Doug’s view of the skinner. Instantly, its arm, that three-fingered, bone-knuckled deformity, strained toward her. She sensed nothing of menace in the move. In fact, if the thing’s wrists weren’t tied, she felt that its hand would be pawing her like John’s when he’d been a scared puppy, as if to beg, Please, please, please never leave me again.
Liv’s emotions splashed into one another: moved, repelled, dejected, alarmed. She swept them away and got down to the business of pretending to conduct a typical nurse’s survey. She knew she should wait until Doug left before slipping the skinner painkillers. But its big, scared eyes bulged at her, pleading, and anxiety screwed into her gut. She tilted her head slightly to listen. The scritch-scritch of Doug’s pencil was a knifepoint along her skin, but she couldn’t let that stop her.
She slid the water bowl closer in case the skinner choked on the pills. She finned her hand and forced it into her pants pocket, a difficult maneuver while squatting. She shifted a bit, hoping it looked natural, until her fingertips touched the curved plastic of the Vicodin bottle.
Blackness enveloped them.
“What are you doing?”
It was Doug, blotting out the fluorescents, and Liv screamed, though somehow she kept it inside, her ribs shaking painfully from the gulped decibels. Her instinct was to fling herself over the skinner and cry for Doug to get the fuck out of the shed and off her property, but it wasn’t an instinct she had time to evaluate or understand. She slipped her hand out of her pocket with what she hoped looked like nonchalance and resisted the urge to turn.
“What does it look like?” She tried to sound affronted. “If you’re going to sit there reading, I’m going to see how its mouth is healing.”
“I’m only reading because I was waiting for you.”
“You didn’t wait yesterday before cutting its tongue out.”
Doug sighed. “I’m sorry. But caring about its stupid sounds wasn’t going to help, you know? It was just going to trick us into feeling sorry for it.” His voice became gentler. “I just thought we could work on A together. Like we did at the start.”
Now Liv did turn, pivoting on a sneaker.
“Did you just call it ‘A’?”
“Huh? Oh. I’ve been”—he gestured vaguely—“taking notes. It’s just shorthand.”
“Shorthand for what?”
Doug shrugged. “Subject A.”
“What’s the point of A,” she asked slowly, “if there’s no B?”
Doug grunted with exasperation, turned away, and swiped up Resurrection Update.
“I’m doing everything this book tells me to do.”
“The poems? My dad’s notes on poems?”
But for the first time since she forced Doug to take the book by the fateful electric fence, Liv wanted to know what her father had written in it, not to mention what Doug was adding. She looked hard. From here, she could see her dad’s handwriting, but also Doug’s, along with Doug’s sketches—the kind of tidy designs he used to make for the Monk Block Corn Maze.
Liv flinched when Doug slapped the book against his opposite palm.
“You’re supposed to be behind me in this. We’re supposed to be together.”
“We are together.” She said it but couldn’t make herself believe it.
“Then you shouldn’t have to ask why I call it Subject A, Liv! Of course I call it Subject A. We have to be ready for that possibility. We have to know what works on Subject A to know what’ll work on Subject B and Subject C and Subject D and Subject E.”
“This isn’t a prison, Doug.”
“Yeah, Liv, it is. Some places have always been prisons and always will be. Like high school? Like Bloughton? But right here, this shed, is where we rearrange all of it. This is a prison we run. This is where we’re in control. I read you those military memos! Weren’t you listening?”
The Armory was silent but for a bug suiciding against a bulb. Liv did not speak, did not move. This boy looked like Doug. The long black hair, thick as carpet. The vulpine cheeks, the bulging arms. But was he still the Doug Monk she knew? And her, down here on the floor, was she still Liv Fleming? Or had the things that had gone on in this shed changed them as deeply as if on a molecular level?
“I just want to stay on track,” Doug said. “There’s a lot coming up to look forward to. I’m just barely into the army manuals. I’m going to try Fear Up Mild this week and then Fear Up Harsh next week. I can’t do them alone. It takes two agents to play the roles. We’ll get all the way to Shock and Awe, I promise, but I can’t do it alone. Okay?”
“What,” she asked, her voice trembling, “are you trying to accomplish?”
The appalled, betrayed look Doug gave her was like the forward-slanted blades of Hard Passage, digging into her flesh the second she tried to back her way out of the trap. She could feel her skin pull and tear. Her next words came out from a voice not only trembling, but falling apart, a crumble of octaves and inflections.
“Why don’t you just…” She swallowed and it hurt. “Doug, why don’t you just kill it?”
His eyes flooded red with anger, but also tears.
“That’s not what Lee meant when he said, You know what to do,” he said in quiet disbelief. “That’s not justice. That’s not revenge.”
Liv turned away and dug into the first aid kit. She pulled on the gardening gloves with shaking hands and reached into the skinner’s mouth to extract the blood-hardened gauze. She saw Doug’s shadow slip away, heard the scuffle of his shoes, listened to the purr of paper as he readjusted his grip on Resurrection Update. His steps to the entrance were slow, as if the book’s 280 pages weighed a pound each. The door creaked open. Liv pressed her eyes shut.
“You know what I think?” His voice was as soft as the misting rain. “I think you’ve been right all along. Maybe there’s other skinners out there. Maybe there’s not. But what A can do, what A can definitely do, is change everyone’s minds about Lee. You’re right—that’s what we owe your dad. And I don’t think it’s too late to make that happen, you know? And in a way where someone can’t just see A and suddenly haul it away like it never existed.”
Liv opened her eyes. The skinner’s blinkless orbs were fixed upon Doug, and so she looked that way, too; it seemed important to see what A saw. Doug was paused at the threshold, his face tilted into the drizzle. The shed’s blazing bulbs slid like liquid fire from his back as he exited. A silver sheet of rain rippled, and a gust of wind began to close the shed door behind him. Liv was frightened by his silent exit, yet did not pause. She stuffed her hand into her pocket and yanked out the bottle of pills.
20.
Being at school with kids whose biggest problems were sorting through crushes and achieving arbitrary academic objectives was difficult to comprehend. When Liv got to school Friday morning, she got out of her car and stared at her warped reflection in the door for twenty minutes to avoid going inside. But when the day’s final bell rang, she found herself equally reluctant to go home and confront Doug. She tried wandering the halls, but they were a minefield: Monica over here, Coach Carney over there.