I spent the week of my suspension in a sleepless daze. I’d gotten too soft at the Church of the Sacred Heart. In the lab coats’ facility, I’d been used to having my sleep disrupted all the time – by electrical shocks, by tests, by just plain terror and anxiety. We never saw natural days or nights, which made it even easier for the lab coats to mess with our sleeping.
At the Church of the Sacred Heart, most days I’d slept better, barely dreaming. It had been like a vacation. The vacation was over.
Having messed up my sleep schedule on the first night of my suspension, I couldn’t get back on track. My body was in emergency mode. A low-level trickle of adrenaline seeped through the back of my mind at all times. When I tried to sleep at the same time as the others, my pulse pounded in my ears. I shifted in my bed, increasingly uncomfortable, until I couldn’t stand it any more. I threw off my covers, found my shoes, and stalked off somewhere else in the church. Hiding from our chaperon.
Some nights I tried to look up more about mutants. I didn’t have much success. I’d trawled through everything I could find on old Usenet archives. Modern Internet talk about mutants just made me too angry to see straight. If there were secret enclaves of mutant discussion out there, I wasn’t Internet-savvy enough to find them.
But, most nights, I couldn’t risk using the PC. I heard our chaperon rattling around in the kitchen, or watching television at a low volume. I went to the corner of the orphanage farthest from them, sat in the darkness with my knees bunched to my chest, and waited for the blood in my ears to stop roaring.
When I slept, it was mostly during the day. The other girls had to rouse me for meals. They shook my mattress and stood back as if they’d just pulled the pin from a grenade. Their sour expressions said that they had been ordered to do this.
Father Boschelli was still looking out for me, at least.
He took his turns as a volunteer chaperon along with everyone else. Every Wednesday, he stayed up all night. On the Wednesday after my suspension, he surprised me. I stumbled into the kitchen looking for leftovers. He was already there, eating cereal under the dim glow of the sink lights. Those lights were always on anyway, which is why I’d thought nobody was here. And I hadn’t heard him.
His cereal was some horrific sugary meltdown, corn syrup and corn flour mixed with more sugar and cocoa. The kind of breakfast that other kids loved but that made me sick. It was like eating melted ice cream. After I’d gotten out of the facility, I’d loved just about every food I’d found out here, but not that.63 Certainly not that night, when my pulse was racing anyway. I think I would have started hallucinating.
I looked at the cereal and then at him, raising my eyebrow.
“Promise not to judge?” he asked.
“I don’t make promises I can’t keep,” I said, gravely.
He snorted. Then used his feet to push out a chair at the other end of the table, and nodded to it.
“You’re not going to tell me to get back to bed?” I asked.
“I’m not surprised to see you up. The other girls tell me you haven’t been sleeping well.”
“I’m surprised they noticed.” Or cared.
“They notice. More than you might think. You haven’t made it easy for them to do much with you.”
Good. I shrugged. “I don’t care.”
I sat, if only because, at that point, it would have been too awkward not to.
He said, “You care enough to get into fights about it. Were those boys really so bad that you felt you had to?”
I didn’t answer. Adults always thought there were simple answers to bullies. They ranged from just ignore them to hit them right back to show them who’s boss, and they’ll leave you alone. They didn’t realize that sometimes there were no simple answers to schoolyard problems. That sometimes nothing works. That sometimes things were just miserable. And that it would have been insane to expect them to get better. For all his virtues, Father Boschelli was not immune to platitudes.
But he didn’t press it. Instead he asked, “This isn’t the first time you’ve fought, is it?”
Maybe he was sharper than I gave him credit. I looked at him squarely. “Of course not.”
He nodded, unsurprised. I might have gotten up then, but I had nowhere else to go. If I just left, he’d certainly send me back to the dormitory.
After a silent minute letting his cereal get soggy, he said, “Some of the other girls told me stories. I think they might have been trying to get you in trouble.”
“Who?”
“What would you do if I told you?”
I considered. Carefully, I said, “I would thank them for looking out for my welfare. And let them know they didn’t have to.”
He snorted. “Heaven help you if that’s what you think adults sound like.”
“It was worth a shot.”
“Was it? What kind of person do you want to be?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Do you want to go around threatening people? Beating them up?”
I didn’t understand what want had to do with it. It was all self-defense.
But no. I didn’t want it. I couldn’t help the smallness in my voice when I told him so.
“Neena,” he said, “the times when we feel most trapped in life, when we don’t see any other choice but the one we’re making, are when we’re at our worst. Because we always have choices. Even, or especially, when we can’t make ourselves see them.”
I shrugged. “If you say so.”
“I know so. I used to be under… there’s no good way to describe it except to say under the power of someone. A woman. I wasn’t as young as you, but I was young.”
Somehow I kept a straight face. “A woman,” I repeated.
“Not like that,” he said, hastily. “Think of her as… like a politician. Or a teacher. Or someone high up in the church. Someone you’re supposed to be able to trust. She abused that trust.” His hand, sitting on the table, curled. It seemed like an unconscious motion. “She had me and a few others leave our friends behind, abandon careers, to follow her. Once we’d gone that far, and found out how bad things could really get, she convinced us that we didn’t have any choice but to keep going. That we’d burned all our bridges behind us and were trapped with what we’d done.”
The dim lighting and my sleep-deprived mental fog only made this weirder and more dreamlike. I felt like his confessor.
“Did you run away from home or something?” I asked.
“In a manner of speaking. I served in an army.”
I could not have lived a life like mine without learning to pay attention to small details, slight twists of phrasing. Father Boschelli hadn’t misspoken. Not the Army. An army.
“What?” I said, feigning surprise. “You?”
“Don’t I seem like the type?”
“No.” Yes. Now that he’d said it, I could see it. There had always been a certain… unflappability to his tolerant attitudes toward us. He seemed like he couldn’t have been shaken by anything we could do to him. Like he’d seen a lot worse in his life, and we weren’t even close to it.
“Well, believe it. Give me an M4 carbine and I’ll disassemble and reassemble right in front of you.”
“Blindfolded?”
“No,” he said, with a brief smile. “I was never that good. But good enough to get recruited into some agencies that you’ll never hear about on the nightly news.64 She brought me into it. And before I knew it, she’d brought me into a conspiracy inside it. We were going to take over the project… change the world, she said.”
I was getting an increasingly bad feeling about this. I stayed silent. Just another little defense mechanism I learned from living with the lab coats: avoid saying anything provocative, look like you’re listening, and you might just escape without punishment.
It was the first time in a long while that I’d thought about Father Boschelli in the same way I had the lab coats.
“She was very persuasive,” he said, with another little smile. It faded quickly. “Charismatic. For a while, I really did think we were going to change the world. But her… little conspiracy wasn’t really about changing the world. It was all about her. She was a narcissist. Do you know what that means, Neena?” Of course I did, but I didn’t feel like answering. “Her world revolved around her. She needed to have other people believe in her. She fed off them. And she used a variety of tricks to keep us with her. All of them abusive. Separating us from our families. From all outside contact. Taking all of our savings and pay to ‘support the cause.’ Keeping us up in ‘planning meetings’ all night so we didn’t have the time or energy to do anything else. Everything she could do to get us in deeper, to keep us feeling like we had no way to get out.”
I stayed absolutely still – the surest sign, Inez would tell me later in life, that I was deeply uncomfortable. I’m a squirmer. I twitch. When I sit like I’m playing dead, something’s wrong.
Father Boschelli didn’t say anything else. At last, I couldn’t stand the silence. “You felt trapped.”
He said, “That was her goal. Getting out was the hardest thing I’d ever done. Because of her, and because of the nature of the project we both worked on, when I got out, I had nothing. No money. No ‘official’ service record. I couldn’t even go to the VA. But it was still the right thing to do. If I’d stayed, I’m sure it would have gotten worse. In fact, I know it has.”
“How?” I asked, in spite of myself. “You didn’t stay in touch?”
“That’s one of the things that makes her persuasive. She’s very energetic. Even after I thought I’d severed all my ties with her, dug up all the roads behind me, she still found ways to contact me. It’s important to her that she’s at the center of everyone else’s life.”
The bad feeling in the pit of my stomach got worse.
“She keeps finding ways to get me involved,” he said. His eyes were on the wall. He couldn’t seem to look at me. “Makes offers I can’t refuse. Sending me someone to take care of.”
Though a lot of this conversation was not landing at the time, I could not miss that.
“Separating from her was the hardest thing I’d ever done, but it was still the right thing to do,” he said. “It’s still something I struggle with every day. But it made me a better person. Making us feel trapped is a weapon that other people use against us, and sometimes it’s a weapon we use against ourselves. Are you following me?”
Both more than I wanted to, and less than I needed to.
Terror squeezed my heart. If Father Boschelli knew where I came from, he also might know what I was. Or, worse – was about to piece it together. I couldn’t let it show.
He didn’t speak again either. Behind him, the sink was dripping, steady as clockwork.
I don’t know how many minutes passed before I said, “I think your cereal’s ruined.” It was just sludge in the bowl.
He ran a hand across his face, through his mustache. If he was waiting for me to say something specific, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t absolve him, agree with him, or anything else he wanted.
“Can I go now?” I asked.
“Go to bed, Neena,” he said.
Getting out of the kitchen was like taking a weight off my chest. I went back to the dormitory, which meant another sleepless night staring at the ceiling. But that was better than what I’d just been through.
It was not until years later, shaking off the after-effects of brain burnout in a cell buried underneath the Everglades, that I figured out who he must have been talking about.
Her. My mother. The face I’d chased into the Everglades.
The one who, for no reason my memory would allow me to access, had always had power over me.
• • •
On my first day back at school, Jason and Luis were waiting for me when I got off the bus.
It was no mystery how they found me. All of us from the Church of the Sacred Heart took the same bus. We had a reputation at the school: the charity cases, the kids who didn’t really belong there. All the other students got in through family money, and, though they were too grown-up to say so in words, most of them were proud of it.
The only warning I had when I stepped off the bus was the overpowering smell of Jason’s cologne.
Luis’s meaty hands shoved me hard into the side of the bus. The roles had reversed. Luis had taken the initiative while Jason hovered behind him. Luis wasn’t laughing any more.
“I know what you did,” Luis raged. “You did it on purpose. You wanted to knock out my eye? You think I’m going to be scared of you now because you know how to throw a pen?”
Jason said, “Surprised her eye didn’t boil and pop when she got that burn over it.”
“It’s not a burn,” I said.
Luis said, “Yeah? Black eye? You get hit around a lot? Bet it could hide a black eye really well.”
It could. I’d learned that long before I’d come to the Church of the Sacred Heart.
The other kids from the church were still filing past me. One or two looked, but most just kept going. They didn’t want to mess with me, but neither did any of them want to help me. Fruits of my reputation. And, I suppose, of the way I’d treated them.
I could’ve pushed past, tried to move on. But, even if I got away now, I would just be postponing the inevitable. The only way I was going to get out of this was to give Luis and Jason what they were hoping for. To act afraid. To let them beat me up and go away believing, in some significant way, that they were better than me.
I would have been like all those other mutants who slipped between the waves during the storm, trying to escape notice. Acting like they really were the dregs of the world everybody thought they were. The extras in somebody else’s play.
Luis shoved me again, though my back was already against the bus. Pain spiked through my ribs. “You want to try that a second time? See if you can get lucky again?”
This was a crossroads. I knew it. I didn’t have the excuse of the heat of the moment. My head was a lot cooler and clearer than, when I’d rehearsed this moment, I’d expected.
After my suspension, the adults would be keeping a keen eye on me. There were not any around to stop Luis and Jason now, but I knew that if I turned this into a fuss the adults couldn’t ignore, I’d get the worst of their wrath.
I knew what I was doing. I wasn’t ready, but I knew.
I swung my fist, and cracked it into Luis’s jaw.