“Got it,” Gemma said. They’d agreed on Saturday, March 19, eight a.m. weeks ago, but reconfirmed almost every day. Why not? This was the first adventurous thing either of them had ever done in their lives, unless you counted microwaving Peeps at Easter to watch them explode.
Gemma wished she only felt excited. She wished, more than anything, that her parents’ words and warnings hadn’t over time worked their way like a virus into her cells, replicating there.
She wished she wasn’t also just the littlest, tiniest bit scared.
But she told herself nothing would happen. After all, nothing ever did.
Turn the page to continue reading Gemma’s story. Click here to read Chapter 2 of Lyra’s story.
THREE
A LIST OF ALL THE medical conditions Gemma had had since she was born:
1. two broken tibias
2. one collapsed lung
3. congenital heart failure
4. pneumonia
5. poison ivy (on her butt, of all places)
6. pneumonia again
7. a fractured wrist
8. hypothyroidism
9. pneumonia, a third time
A list of some of the medical conditions she had not had:
1. the bubonic plague
2. that disease where you stay really skinny, no matter how much you eat
Every so often, when Gemma approached the massive iron gates that encircled her property, she got a flash of something—not memory, exactly, but something close to it, like the sudden recollection of a song you heard someone sing only once. There was a high fence lost somewhere in the wild tangle of fever-dreams that had so often been hers as a very young child—a high fence, a giant statue of a man kneeling in the dirt, reaching, it seemed, simultaneously for heaven and hell.
The driveway was exactly one-quarter of a mile long. Gemma knew because one time she had asked her mom to measure it in the car. It bisected an enormous lawn spotted with ancient spruce trees and flowering dogwood. On days when April had chorus, taking the bus and walking the quarter mile up the driveway was infinitely preferable to having her dad’s driver pick her up, which would require that she wait at the student drop-off area, in full view of the senior playing fields, and would be a tacit admission that she had only one friend to drive her.
Besides, it was practically the only exercise Gemma got. On nice days she walked deliberately slowly, making it last, enjoying the smell of freesia and honeysuckle and listening to the faint whine of the mosquitoes clustered in the shade.
Today, she walked quickly, too preoccupied by the plans for Saturday (the day after tomorrow!)—a ten-hour road trip, a real adventure, with her best friend—to care about the prettiness of the day. Because of the landscaping and the angle of the drive, she was practically on the front porch before she noticed two cop cars, one of which had its doors swinging open, as if the officers had been in too much of a hurry to bother closing them. Her mother was speaking to one of them, holding her throat with one hand.
Dad, Gemma thought immediately, and, without realizing it, broke into a run, her backpack jogging against her back.
“Gemma!” Kristina turned to stare as Gemma arrived in front of her, already panting, sweat gathering beneath the waistband of her jeans and trickling down her spine. She reached out and seized Gemma’s shoulders. “What’s the matter? Is everything okay?”
Gemma stared. “What do you mean, is everything okay?” She gestured to the cop cars, and the cop who stood a little ways apart from mother and daughter, hands on his hips, sunglasses on, staring up at the sky as though debating whether he might still get a tan at this angle. “What’s going on?”
“Oh.” Kristina exhaled long and loud, releasing Gemma’s shoulder. “This? It’s nothing. Something stupid. A prank.”
By then, Gemma had noticed that one of the large glass panes of the French doors was shattered, as if something heavy had been hurled through it. She could see a second cop moving through the living room, placing his weight delicately, his footsteps making a crunch-crunch sound on the glass. As she watched, a third cop emerged, a woman, holding what at first appeared to be a lumpy rock in an improbable shade of green between two gloved hands. But as she shifted it to show her colleague, Gemma’s whole body went cold. It wasn’t a rock, but a Halloween Frankenstein mask stapled at the neck. From the way the cop was handling it, Gemma knew it must be heavy. It had obviously been filled with something to help it maintain its shape.
“Oh my God.” Gemma could feel the blood pounding in her temples. Chloe. That fucking bitch. She focused on thinking logically so that she wouldn’t start to cry. How had it happened? How had Chloe arrived so much quicker than the bus? Could she have cut last period? No. Gemma had seen her getting into Aubrey’s car. And how had they gotten past the gates? The whole property was fenced in. But she was sure Chloe and Aubrey were to blame, would have staked her life on it.
Frankenstein. The misshapen monster.
“It’s all right, Gem. It’s all right,” Kristina said, in a shrill voice, as if she didn’t quite believe it. “No one was hurt.”
That only made Gemma feel worse. No one was hurt meant someone could have been hurt. What if her mom had been in the living room? Unlikely, of course. Even though the house—Château Ives, as April called it, only half-jokingly—could have fit an army during wartime, her mom never went anywhere except her bedroom, the kitchen, the downstairs yoga studio, and the bathroom, as if she were controlled by a centrifugal force that kept her rotating between those four places. But what if Ender and Bean, their cats, had been curled up on the sofa? What if Rufus had been sunning himself on the rug?
“If you want us to file a report, we’ll need you down at the station,” said the cop with sunglasses, the one who looked bored. But he was doing his best to be polite. The Ives family, he’d obviously been told, was important.
Kristina shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “If only Geoff . . .” She trailed off. “My husband is in a meeting,” she said, by way of explanation. Gemma’s dad was always in a meeting, or in a car, or on a plane.
“How’d they get in?” Gemma blurted. The front gates could only be opened by a code. Guests had to be buzzed in. Château Ives meets Fort Knox.
Kristina blushed. Even when she blushed, she looked pretty. Gemma had tried for years to find herself in her mother’s model-pretty face, in her high cheekbones and slender wrists. The most she could detect was a similar way of frowning. “There were vendors in and out for Sunday’s horse show,” she explained, half to Gemma, half to the police. “Florists, the planner . . . I left the gates open so they wouldn’t have to keep buzzing.”
Which no doubt meant: I popped a Klonopin, had a glass of wine, and took a nap. Since her parents never said exactly what they meant, Gemma had become adept at translating for them.
“Finke, look at this.” Yet another cop came jogging out of the front door. He, too, was wearing nylon gloves, and holding a note written on a scrap of paper between his pointer and middle fingers. “This came with the special delivery.”
The bored-looking cop flipped his sunglasses to the top of his head and read without reaching for it. The message was short, but Gemma felt the anger roil inside of her, pulling her heart down to her toes.
your sick your a monster you deserve to die
Kristina gasped as though she’d been physically slapped. Finke nodded, and the other cop withdrew, bagging the note carefully in plastic. Gemma imagined seeing Chloe arrested, her hands wrenched behind her back, her face squashed against the top of a cop car. She imagined her thrown into jail for the rest of her life, bunking with a murderous boulder with a name like Princess.
She imagined wrapping her hands around Chloe’s neck and watching it snap.
“I—I think I’d better come with you,” Kristina said. Now the blush was gone. She just looked pale, and confused. “Who would do something like this? Who would be so awful?”
“Have you or you
r husband been having any problems lately?” Finke asked. “Disputes? Legal issues?” Kristina shook her head.
“No other threatening messages, or phone calls?”
She again shook her head. “I just can’t imagine—”
“Mom, wait.” Gemma felt the words like nausea. It’s my fault. It’s because everyone thinks I’m a freak. Her mom knew that Gemma had a rough time in school, but Kristina’s sympathy always made Gemma feel worse. The only thing more painful than being unpopular was being the unpopular daughter of a former popular girl. She took a deep breath. “I know.”
“What?”
“I know who did it.” Now all the cops were watching her—pityingly, she thought. She felt her cheeks heating up and was absolutely positive she did not look pretty like her mom. When Gemma blushed, she looked as if two pigments were trying to throttle each other beneath her skin. “It’s just some stupid girl at school. She probably thought it’d be funny.”
Was it her imagination, or did her mom, just for the tiniest second, look relieved? “Oh, honey,” she said, and started to put her arms around Gemma. Gemma sidestepped her.
“It’s fine,” she said. “I’m fine.”
“You still want to file the report?” Finke asked, but Gemma could tell he no longer thought it was a good idea. The whole vibe had changed. No one was looking at her. The cops were loading up, restless, eager to get back to more important things than some high school girl’s social humiliation. Maybe they were annoyed they’d been dragged out here in the first place.
“It’s up to you, sweet pea.” Kristina reached out and threaded her hand through Gemma’s hair. “What do you think?”
Gemma shook her head. As tempting as it was to imagine Chloe in a prison-orange jumpsuit—surely, surely, even Chloe wouldn’t look good in prison orange—she knew that if she made a big deal out of it, things would only get worse. Then she’d be Frankenstein-the-Crybaby. The Alien Snitch.
Still, she felt the sudden, overwhelming desire to scream. Chloe and her little pack of wolverines had been doing their best to make Gemma miserable for years. But they had never done anything this bad. They’d come to her house. They’d taken the time to fill a Halloween mask with rocks or concrete rubble or metal shrapnel from their mechanical hearts. They had said that she deserved to die. Why? What had she ever done to them?
She was an alien, adrift on an unfriendly planet. Hopeless and lost.
“Are you sure?” Kristina said, smoothing Gemma’s face with a thumb. Gemma was scowling.
She took a step backward. “Positive,” she said.
“Okay.” Kristina exhaled a big breath and gave Finke a weak smile. “Sorry for all the trouble. You know how girls are.”
“Mm-hmm,” he said, in a tone that he made it clear he didn’t and had no desire to, either.
Gemma felt like going straight to her room, possibly forever, but Kristina managed to get an arm around her shoulders. For a thin woman, she was surprisingly strong, and she held Gemma there in a death grip.
“I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me you were having problems at school?”
She shrugged. “It’s no big deal.”
Kristina smelled, as always, like rose water and very expensive perfume. So expensive that it actually smelled like new-printed money. “I don’t want your father to worry, do you?” She smiled, but Gemma read anxiety in her mother’s eyes, decoded the words her mother would never say: I don’t want him to think you’re more of a disappointment than he already does. “Let’s just tell him there was an accident. A kid and a baseball. Something like that.”
To hit a baseball from the street through the living room window, the kid would have to be a first-draft pick for the major leagues. Usually her parents’ willingness to lie about things big and small bothered Gemma. If her parents were so good at making up stories, how could she ever be sure they were telling the truth?
Today, however, she could only be grateful.
“Baseball,” she said. “Sure.”
Gemma woke up in the middle of the night from a nightmare that, thankfully, released her almost as soon as she opened her eyes, leaving only the vague impression of rough hands and the taste of metal. In the hall, Rufus was whimpering.
“What’s the matter?” she said, easing out of bed to open the door for him. As soon as she did, she heard it: the sudden swell of overlapping voices, the angry punctuation of silence. Her parents were fighting.
“It’s okay, boy,” she whispered to Rufus, threading a hand through the scruff of fur on his neck. He was a baby about fights. Immediately, he darted past her and leapt onto the bed, burying his head in her heap of pillows, as if to block out the sound from downstairs.
She would have gone back to bed, but at exactly that moment, her father’s voice crested, and she very clearly heard him say, “Frankenstein. For Christ’s sake. Why didn’t you tell me?”
Gemma eased out into the hall, grateful for the plush rug that absorbed the sound of her footsteps. Quickly, she moved past paneled squares of moonlight, past guest rooms always empty of guests and marble-tiled bathrooms no one ever used, until she reached the main staircase. Downstairs, a rectangle of light yawned across the hallway. Her father’s study door was open, and Gemma got a shock. Her mother was perched on the leather ottoman, her face pale and exhausted-looking, her arms crossed at the waist to keep her bathrobe closed. Gemma had never, ever seen anyone besides her father in the study. She had always assumed no one else was allowed to enter.
“I tried calling. . . .” Her mother’s voice was weak and a little bit slurred, as if all the edges were lopped off. It must be after midnight. He must have woken her up from a sleeping-pill slumber.
“Feeding me some bullshit story. I had to hear it from Frank at the department. Thank God someone respects me.”
Gemma’s heart sank. It had been stupid to believe that they could conceal the truth from her father. He had contacts everywhere—in the police department and even in the government, although he kept his most important contacts secret. He’d cofounded the sixth-largest pharmaceutical company in the country, Fine & Ives, which made everything from shampoo to heart medication to drugs for soldiers suffering from PTSD. Although he’d been kicked off the board of his own company after a brutal three-year legal battle when Gemma was a toddler—Gemma had never found out the details, but she knew her dad had disapproved of where the company was putting its resources—he still traveled with a personal security guard and went to Washington, DC, every quarter to meet with politicians and lobbyists and top brass.
Often Gemma feared she would never, ever get truly away from her parents—not even when she went to college, not even when she moved out and moved as far away from Chapel Hill as possible and had her own family. They would always be able to find her. They would always be able to see her, wherever she was.
“I respect you,” Kristina protested, and Gemma got a sudden strangled feeling, as if a hand were closing around her throat. Her father was twelve years older than Kristina. He and his twin brother, Ted, had both been to West Point, like their father before them. Geoffrey had gone on to become a military strategist, and he never let anyone—least of all Gemma and her mom—forget it. Respect. That was the drumbeat of their lives. Respect. He could write a book, she thought, about respect, and discipline, and order, and work. He could probably write a whole series.
On the other hand, what he knew about acceptance and tolerance and his own daughter would barely fill up a tweet.
Sometimes Gemma wondered how it was possible they were made from the same genetic material. Her father was angular and cold everywhere she was warm and soft and sensitive. But the proof was there. She would have so much rather looked like her mother. Instead she had her father’s hazel eyes, his square chin, his way of smiling with the corners of his mouth turned down, as if neither of them had ever quite learned to do it correctly.
“I didn’t want to worry you,” Gemma’s mom went on.
“Gemma said it was just a prank. Some girls have been giving her a hard time at school, and—”
“A prank, Kristina? Are you blind? This wasn’t a prank. This was a message. Do you know who Frankenstein is?”
“Of course I know—”
“Frankenstein is the doctor. In the original story, in the real version, he’s the one who made the monster.” There was a long moment of silence. Gemma could feel her heart beating painfully, swollen like a bruise. “This was a message for me.”
He’s the one who made the monster.
This was a message for me.
She tried to love her father. She tried to believe he loved her, as Kristina insisted that he did. She had made excuses, the same ones her mom always parroted back to her. He’s bad at expressing feelings. He’s stressed at work. He didn’t get a lot of love from his father.
But deep, deep down, Gemma had always suspected that the reason her father avoided her, the reason he could barely look her in the eye, the reason he kept all her baby pictures locked up in drawers and desks instead of proudly on display in frames, the reason he could hardly speak to her without losing his temper, as if she were always paying for a crime she didn’t know she had committed, was much simpler.
He couldn’t stand her.
He thought she was a disappointment. A defective model, but one, sadly, that couldn’t be exchanged or returned.
Her mother said something else, something Gemma didn’t hear. There was a high whining in her ears, as if they were filled with bees. She wanted to turn around and run, to flee back to her bedroom, to wake and realize this had all been a dream. But she couldn’t move.
“There was a breach at Haven,” her father said.
“What do you mean, breach?”
“Apparently, one of them escaped,” Geoff said.
A long pause. “Well, it won’t live. No way can it live. The currents on that island . . .”
“But what if it does? Jesus Christ, Kristina. Can you imagine? Can you imagine the absolute shitstorm if the story gets out? We’ll be persecuted. We’ll be executed.”