Tanya hung up.
“Rude,” Lena said into her phone, but knew she was talking about the both of them.
Lena reached up, stroked the ends of her hair, rubbed and lightly scratched her scalp. When she was a child and upset or unable to sleep, her grandmother would lightly scratch her scalp until everything in the world was gone. It helped a little.
She turned back to her phone. Searched government experiments for the third time since she got the job offer. So many forums and web pages devoted to discussing declassified experiments. The San Quentin prison experiments, Tuskegee, Operation Sea-Spray, Project Artichoke. How could all these things that sounded like well-meaning after-school programs for kids be so awful? Lena read again about the rumors that in different countries—all ones she noted that coincidentally had bad relationships with the United States—people were being taken against their will and experimented upon. A beach sprayed with a substance that made all the jellyfish spawn and all the kids who rolled around in the sand have severe sinus infections. There was no way that was a simple accident.
Another forum where people posted about a part of the FBI whose focus is ESP testing. They incorporate questions into ordinary things. Standardized testing in the schools, SATs, driving tests, customer satisfaction surveys. They read college applications that ask about the future and see what people say. If someone’s answers hit a threshold in an algorithm, they’re investigated. All social media is consistently monitored for this, one post read. They (the US government) are rounding all these people up because of the war on fucking terror.
Lena laughed a little at that line, unable to repress the part of her brain that liked to make dumb dad jokes: What would it be like to fuck terror? There are psychics living beneath the White House and being deployed to military zones. Ones that will not corporate are being killed.
A text message from Tanya appeared at the top of her screen: I’m sorry. I know you’re going through a lot. Lena ignored it.
She reread the line she had just been reading. Corporate? Oh, cooperate. When they die, their brains are taken for study. Sometime soon, our DNA will be modified to make this the next step of human evolution.
A little grain of this must be true. The psychic stuff had to have been why the man had been testing. Maybe, Lena supposed, it could all be true. I’m lucky enough to be absolutely terrible at mind reading. Right now, I could be packing my things and getting ready to live beneath the White House. My summer spent telling the president who hates him and when the next big earthquake will hit.
She lowered the brightness on her phone’s screen. There was something about conspiracy theories that she’d always liked. How a person’s brain could find the smallest threads to reaffirm a creative, false truth about the world. Most of her favorites were about celebrities. A child beauty queen who everyone thought was murdered had been kidnapped, brainwashed, and turned into a very religious pop star. Secret romances between teen drama stars who were now hiding their secret babies. Some of this stuff couldn’t be considered conspiracy theories, though. There were people on these boards who believed that all people had to do to stop climate change was to learn how to speak to the weather respectfully and just explain the situation.
Lena typed back to Tanya: I wish you could just support me. She deleted it.
She typed: I wish everything didn’t have to be about you. Deleted.
You’re the only person in the world I feel like I can be completely honest with and I’m sorry, but things have to be different right now. Deleted.
Sent: Everything sucks, but I have to do this.
A different website. White text on a black background: TV shows us the lies we want to distract us from what’s real.
You need to take care of yourself too, Tanya replied.
Lena put her phone down. Everything on it was upsetting her. Instead, she focused on her room.
Everything she took would be the foundation of her new adult life. The problem wasn’t the being an adult part. She looked at the textbooks, the nail polishes, the art supplies, the clothes—it was figuring out what kind of adult she wanted to become. Lena texted Tanya three red hearts. Then packed her most be-patterned, brightest clothes to wear on the weekends. Gathered all her favorite pictures of her family. A painting Tanya gave her for Christmas.
Then she tried to sleep. Couldn’t.
Lena went into the living room. There was nothing to clean. She touched the doorknob to her grandmother’s bedroom. Brushed aside the urge to knock, to ask if she was still awake. She pushed open the door, shut it softly behind her so Deziree wouldn’t hear. Lena got into her grandmother’s bed. The pillow still smelled of roses. Rolling onto her side, she pressed her nose into it, allowing herself to do this until her nose got used to the smell, until there was nothing. Lena pulled the silk pillowcase off the pillow, went to her grandmother’s vanity, took out the rose hip oil. Sprinkled it on the cloth and didn’t care about the greasy blot of it. Now she had everything she needed.
8
At five a.m. there was no one but Lena on the road. The air was chilly, the weather refusing to admit that in six weeks it would be summer. Lena was tired enough to feel dulled, but that was good. It gave her enough brain space to focus on driving safely and sipping the extra-strong coffee Deziree made for her. No tears, no anticipation of what was to come.
After the first hour of driving, it was all country highways. The sun rose as she passed the beginnings of rows of cornfields. Houses grew farther and farther away from each other—the only clusters popping up when Lena drove through villages. These were named either for parts of the landscape or Native American tribes, which deserved better than being immortalized as a place with one stoplight, a bar, a gas station, and some squat white ranch houses. Deer scampered across the cracked and potholed highway. No wonder she had never heard of Lakewood. There were more animals here than people.
She made a turn, another. The dirt in the roads changed from dull brown to tinged with red. Houses popped up again. Lakewood had a downtown: a small courthouse, a bar, some restaurants, a surprisingly big library, two different donut shops. An old man on a bench alternating between puffs of his cigarette and bites of a pastry. Cars were on the roads, people were walking dogs. Seeing people was reassuring. Lena drove on, following the main drag to a chain supermarket, a gas station, following the curve that narrowed into a long gravel road that became a driveway.
And then she was there.
The black security gate was open, no guard at the post. A large blue-and-white sign was next to the building, clean except for a small smear of grayish bird poop: GREAT LAKES SHIPPING COMPANY.
The conference room was small and packed with people. Dr. Lisa was standing at the head of the table, her skin freshly tanned, a watch tan line on her left wrist. The man next to Lena was chewing on a bagel in a loud, enthusiastic way. She was sure she could hear every drip of spit being produced in his mouth, the pull, the tear, the tooth grind of every bite. The woman to her left had a tattoo of the moon’s phases on her forearm. Her hair was thick and black, her skin brown in a way that made Lena assume wherever this woman went, some white person asked her, “What are you?”
“These first two weeks we’re going to be baselining you again,” Dr. Lisa said. “You’ll also learn some of the skills—if you don’t have them—of your cover jobs here, so you can talk convincingly about them.” Dr. Lisa’s eyes were focused more on the people standing around the table, all of them wearing gray hospital scrubs. “There will be several observers watching you while you’re here. Please don’t try to be friendly with them. The crew is trained not to get attached.”