Project Paper Doll Read online

  I patted Jenna’s back awkwardly, which met her requirements for a response most of the time, and she released me.

  “I have the best news,” she said, her eyes sparkling. She turned to the strangers, who were watching all of this like a reality show playing out in front of them. “Do you mind moving down for my friend here?” she asked without a hint of sarcasm.

  The three of them, two girls and a boy—freshmen probably, judging from how young they looked and the overwhelmed and slightly terrified expressions on their faces—squished together to make room for me.

  Jenna sat and pulled me down next to her. “Why didn’t you answer my texts?”

  Because answering would have led only to more texts and the demand for me to come over eventually. Jenna’s house was classified as strictly forbidden.

  “My dad. You know that,” I said, using the too-familiar term that I never applied to him in person. Well, I had once. It had just slipped out over breakfast one morning about a year after I’d been living with him. Can I have more toast, Dad?

  I hadn’t intentionally been testing my boundaries with him (for once), but I’d found one nonetheless. He’d winced like it physically hurt him to hear the word.

  He’d recovered quickly, handing over the plate and asking me if I wanted more peanut butter, as if nothing was wrong. But it was too late. I’d seen his reaction, and I knew what it meant. I might have his daughter’s name, but I would never be her.

  So I called him Father, when I had to call him anything, and that seemed to be okay with him. But every time I thought or said that, it reminded me of the moment with the toast. Reminded me that even though he loved me and had risked his life for me, I would never be quite enough.

  “Summer is family time,” I said to Jenna, reciting the excuse my father had given me to use when Jenna first started asking to me to come over—the summer after our freshman year.

  Jenna rolled her eyes. “God, he is so strict.” She impatiently brushed her blond hair away from her too-pink cheeks. “Which means you spent another summer in virtual reality.”

  My face grew hot. I looked around for anyone who might have been listening. Last year, I had, in a moment of weakness, confessed a secret to Jenna. Not the big one, of course. But still one I’d rather not have spread around.

  She nudged me with her elbow gently. “And how is life in Dreamville? Perfectly perfect, as usual?” she asked, with a grin.

  I cleared my throat. “It’s fine,” I said, resisting the urge to shush her. Not that this secret was anything bad, just embarrassing. “What’s going on with you? What’s your big news?” I asked quickly, hoping she’d take the bait and change the subject. For Jenna, most of the fun came from sharing. And it could be just about anything—a sale on lip gloss with glitter, a new guy in school, or a diet that she was convinced would help her lose five pounds, the last obstacle to popularity, in her mind.

  She brightened immediately. “So, last week, I’m coming home from dropping off Bradley at the pool, right?”

  Bradley was Jenna’s younger brother. I nodded.

  “And you’ll never guess who I bumped into at the mailbox.” She bounced excitedly in her seat.

  A very bad feeling started in my stomach.

  “Rachel Jacobs!” she crowed, squeezing my forearm in excitement. This time, I practically heard my bones creaking and had to pull away.

  “Carpal tunnel,” I managed weakly, in answer to her frown. But my mind was spinning too quickly for words. Rachel Jacobs? Rachel was behind this too-happy glow of Jenna’s? This story could not end well.

  Jenna’s goal since moving to Wingate our freshman year had been to break through her middle-of-the-road status—not popular, not unpopular—and become one of the revered ones, a member of Rachel’s inner circle. At her old school, she’d told me, she’d been too shy, too sensitive, too easily dissuaded from getting what she wanted. But she was determined to change all of that here at Ashe.

  That alone might have made it impossible for us to be friends, except Jenna wasn’t having a lot of luck with her mission. She wasn’t an athlete. She was cute but not heartstoppingly beautiful. Her family was rich—her mom’s an orthodontist and her dad’s a senior partner at some big law firm in Milwaukee—but they didn’t shower her with cash and ridiculous leniency. Her curfew was earlier than mine on weeknights, believe it or not.

  But more important, she wanted it too badly. That was an automatic disqualification, as far as I could tell.

  Plus, Rachel Jacobs was evil. Well, not evil as in demonic-possession or hell-spawn-wandering-the-earth evil; though occasionally she made me wonder. No, just plain old enjoy-the-pain-you-bring-other-people-because-it-makesyou-feel-better-about-yourself evil. And she came by it honestly: her grandfather, Arthur, was the head of GTX. The CEO, in fact, and the man responsible for my very existence. If you think that should make me grateful to him, let me remind you that existing is not the same as living. And in the six years I’d existed at GTX, he’d done enough to make me regret even that.

  I’d done my best to steer Jenna away from Rachel whenever possible. But they were neighbors, and there was nothing I could do about that. It was the primary reason why Jenna’s house was off-limits for me.

  The real trouble was, Jenna had no survival skills. As much as I cared about her—she was probably the only human besides my father that I would fight to protect—she was a little like a brain-damaged rabbit that kept hopping too near the snake, convinced that they could be BFFs if they took the time to get to know each other. She really thought that friendliness would win out over everything else.

  “We’ve been hanging out every day since,” Jenna said triumphantly.

  I stared at her, baffled. That made absolutely no sense. Jenna wanted to be Rachel’s friend so bad that it gave Rachel a perverse pleasure in denying her the opportunity. I’d watched it play out in front of me last year. And Rachel hadn’t even attempted to justify it in her thoughts. (In spite of my thought-reading limitations, I could almost always hear Rachel, except in the most crowded of rooms. She was a loud thinker, operating at a higher decibel than most everyone else. As though even her thoughts suffered from too much self-importance, wanting to be proclamations instead of random scatterings in her brain.)

  “Really?” I asked, trying not to sound too skeptical. “Did she say—”

  The bell rang, and suddenly the crowd moved as one, a lumbering giant made up of a thousand tiny parts. Thoughts and emotions reached a fevered pitch and spiked through my brain like an ice pick to the skull.

  Jenna picked her way down the bleacher stairs, talking to me the whole time; but between the noise echoing in the gym and the chaos inside my head, I missed most of what she was saying.

  “…at the pool because Cami and Cassi were in Paris…”

  Okay, that could be one piece of the puzzle. Rachel was probably insecure enough to require an adoring audience at all times. With the twins gone, she might have been forced to desperate measures.

  “…and Zane was there!” Jenna reached the floor and turned to face me, her hands clutched over her heart as if it might bump right out of her chest, cartoon-style. (FYI, cartoons are terrifying when your grasp on how the real world works is tenuous, at best. I had nightmares about Wile E. Coyote and safes falling from the sky for weeks after first watching that show.)

  “We talked,” she said dreamily. “It was amazing.”

  I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. Zane Bradshaw. Thanks to Jenna’s crush, I could recite every known fact about him. Lacrosse player, son of the Wingate Police Chief, favorer of nineties rock and those preppy button-down shirts. He was good-looking and almost freakishly tall, but built with enough muscle to keep from appearing strange. He was everything I would have found attractive—tall, broad shoulders, dark hair, and blue-gray eyes. (What can I say? I have a type. In the lab, as part of my “cultural training,” I’d seen the original Superman movies from the seventies and early eighties, and they’d ma
de a huge impression on me. At the time I’d wanted Superman to rescue me. But then when I got older and watched the newer versions, with Brandon Routh and Tom Welling, I may have, um, slightly altered that fantasy.)

  But Zane Bradshaw—resemblance to my all-time crush aside—was one of the mindless flock. He followed Rachel Jacobs around, participating in all her mean reindeer games like he was missing the portion of his brain that allowed for independent thought. The only exception had been last year in Algebra II when he’d noticed I was using pen on my homework and thought it was strange. That had been a mistake on my part. I hadn’t thought about the math being difficult for other people, which meant it probably should have been difficult for me, too. Hiding in plain sight means questioning every choice I make, thinking it through twenty different ways—all without looking like that’s what I’m doing—and sometimes I screw up.

  Fortunately, Zane didn’t strike me as interested in much other than himself.

  Jenna looped her arm through mine, more gently this time, as we waited for the crowd to move forward. “It was a good conversation, you know, and with it being Bonfire Week…” She bounced up on her toes in excitement.

  Ugh. Bonfire Week. Ashe High had a stupid tradition that was supposed to help make freshmen feel welcome and rev everyone up for the coming year. They called it Bonfire Week even though it was only four days and the bonfire was the last night. There’d be an activities fair/carnival thing tomorrow night in the gym; a varsity vs. junior varsity exhibition football game on Thursday, where the cheerleaders, poms, and band would show off everything they’d learned in their various summer camps; and on Friday there’d be a bonfire, followed by a dance in the gym, which only the freshmen actually attended. Everyone else with a shred of social standing would be going to the unofficial bonfire party. Or so I’d heard. I’d never gone to any of it. Too risky. I didn’t need that kind of exposure. The entire freaking town showed up for parts of it, and the parade on Saturday morning was sponsored by GTX. Uh, no.

  “So, I think Zane might invite me to go with him. Not as his date, but just, you know, to hang out. Maybe. I don’t know. What do you think?” Jenna looked at me, her face hopeful.

  Oh. I scrambled to find an answer that would not completely crush her and yet be semi-truthful. Rumors had circulated for the last year or so that Rachel and Zane had hooked up, off and on, unofficially. Scandalicious, as Jenna would say. If those rumors were accurate, it seemed unlikely that Rachel would allow anyone to interfere with that; but if she truly was being friendly to Jenna…

  “Anything is possible,” I said finally, feeling the lameness of my response. Possible was definitely not the same as probable.

  But Jenna didn’t seem to notice. She brightened and gave my arm a painful squeeze. “I knew it.” She let out a squeal, and I winced.

  Then she took a deep breath. “Okay, so with all these new developments, I know you’re probably worried about what’s going to happen with you and me this year,” she said as we walked through the gym doors and into the front hall.

  Actually, no. I hadn’t yet gotten past my confusion about Rachel’s new inconsistent behavior to think about anything like that.

  “But I want you to know, I don’t abandon my friends. I’m not like that.”

  And she wasn’t. If she, by some chance, ended up on the periphery of Rachel’s circle—Rachel might very well have recognized the wisdom of keeping a follower who would eat shredded glass to keep her happy—then Jenna would drag me kicking and screaming with her.

  Terrific. Then I’d be the one leaving Jenna. I really didn’t want to have to do that. We’d only become friends because Jenna kind of hadn’t given me a choice, sensing in me the same kind of loneliness that she’d felt as the new girl. But now it was more than that. I would miss her.

  Jenna continued chattering away as we climbed the steps, but it wasn’t until we reached the second-floor hallway that I started picking up on something strange in the air, a vibe I couldn’t place. It was a strong thread of excitement, anticipation, and dread—but from more than one person and loud enough to catch my attention, which was unusual.

  I kept nodding at Jenna and tried to hone in on what I was sensing.

  Hearing thoughts is never like what you see on television or read in books. People don’t walk around thinking in complete sentences, let alone entire paragraphs of exposition.

  If GTX’s experiment had continued after me, there would have been whole teams of people like me—all of us able to communicate silently with one another as we spied on the enemy or moved in for a kill.

  But with untrained human minds, it was a mess. Everybody shouting scattered words and phrases at the top of their lungs, essentially. And sometimes I only got pictures or feelings. It was hard to tell what was going on in someone’s head—on the rare occasions when I wanted to—especially when there were lots of people around, jostling and shoving, their minds as jumbled and out of sorts as their bodies.

  …not me. Thank God.

  …just so mean…

  …makes me look fat. I know it.

  This is going to be awesome!

  If Mrs. McCafferty puts me in the front row again, I’m going to…

  “Don’t you think?” Jenna asked, nudging me.

  “Uh-huh,” I said, distracted. I wasn’t getting enough to piece it together. We were on the move, and so was everyone else, which made it impossible to isolate one mind. The best I could determine was that the people buzzing about whatever was going on were coming from the opposite direction. The people around us, slowly moving upstream in the hall, were still caught up in their mundane worries about homeroom and what they were wearing.

  Jenna laughed. “You spaced on me again, didn’t you?”

  I grimaced. “Sorry. Just thinking things through.” Normally I would have let it go. The last time I’d sensed so many minds in an uproar, the cafeteria had been serving french fries on a Tater Tot day. Who cares?

  But this…this was different. It felt more personal, and I didn’t know why.

  “Zane!” Jenna chirped, and bolted ahead of me.

  Bradshaw was leaning against a wall, head and shoulders above everyone else, right at the intersection by our lockers.

  A quick flash of weary patience crossed his face when he saw Jenna, but he hid it quickly enough that she didn’t catch it, thankfully. He greeted her civilly enough, and paid attention to whatever she was describing with great animation—lots of big hand motions, exaggerated expressions, and giggling.

  Oh God, Jenna… No matter what had happened over the last week, one thing I could guarantee had not occurred was Zane Bradshaw developing a sudden interest in a girl he’d never acknowledged as alive before.

  I cringed in expectation of some humiliating putdown, but Zane just smiled down at Jenna with that same mildly exasperated benevolence humans usually reserve for adorable puppies trying to chew their shoelaces.

  We shouldn’t have done it.

  The clarity of that single thought and the punch of accompanying shame from Zane blasted through the rest of the noise.

  That’s when I got one image from Zane Bradshaw’s head loud and clear, no distortion.

  A locker smeared with some kind of white paste, the words “Pain In My Ass” scrawled in flowing cursive at the top, flattened tubes of Preparation H dangling from the ventilation slats where the contents had been squeezed inside…and Rachel’s smiling face.

  Oh no. I knew her friendship with Jenna was too good to be true. Rachel had simply traded in the immediate pleasure of crushing Jenna for something a little more long-term and hateful.

  “Jenna!” I shoved through people to get to her, ignoring the verbal and mental protests as my elbows connected with unprotected sides. “Jenna!”

  “What?” She looked around at me, startled. Her cheeks were pink, and her eyes were sparkling.

  “We need to go…uh…” I fumbled to find words, trying to push past my desire to grab her arm and haul her a
way without explanation. Without meaning to, I glanced up at Zane, who looked away. Coward. All he would have had to do was lead her off or ask her to go with him anywhere, and she wouldn’t have thought twice about it. She wouldn’t have thought once about it.

  “I need juice,” I blurted. Jenna was always on me about what I ate, or didn’t eat. To say that I had food issues would be putting it mildly. Fortunately, that helped me blend right in with about every other girl at Ashe. “The nurse’s office. I forgot to eat breakfast again, and now I’m feeling kind of out of it, like I’m going to faint.…” I kept babbling until Jenna nodded, her forehead crinkled with concern.

  “I think I’ve got breakfast bars in my bag. Let me drop off my stuff and dig them out. Stay here with Zane.”

  Before I could stop her, she darted around Zane and the corner to her locker.

  Crap, crap, CRAP.

  I followed her, praying that the crowd of spectators would be too large for her to see her locker before I could get to her again.

  But as always happens in situations like this—people parted like a set of automatic doors on her approach.

  I saw it at the same time she did. She froze midstep, her shoulders stiff and her head cocked to one side, as if she wasn’t sure of what she was seeing.

  The wisest thing for me to do would have been to walk away. Pretend I didn’t see it. I couldn’t afford to get involved, not with so many people watching. They’d notice. They’d talk. Both were too dangerous to contemplate, especially after I’d spent years cultivating a status just this side of invisible.

  Jenna’s shoulders started to shake.

  I couldn’t just stand there and watch her fall apart.

  I rushed to her side. “Listen to me,” I said in a hurried whisper. “We are going to walk right past like we don’t even see it. We’re going straight to the bathroom and—this is the important part—you cannot cry until you’re inside.”

  She didn’t respond.

  I gave her arm a shake. “Do you hear me?”