Project Paper Doll Read online

Rachel abandoned any pretense of casual friendliness, or friendliness at all. “What? So now you’re on her side?” she demanded, folding her arms over her chest.

  I was, actually. I liked Ariane, what little I knew of her. Maybe even more now because she hadn’t fallen all over herself to get back at Rachel, though she clearly wanted to. I shrugged. “My point is, you’re not going to get what you want from her.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?” she asked.

  “It means she’s not stupid. I think she’s already accepted that you’re out to get her, and she’ll take whatever you’re going to dish out.” I had to admire that kind of resilience and determination. I might do better with my dad if I had half of that.

  Rachel, however, looked offended. It was the fear she thrived on, and Ariane had taken that away from her. My admiration of Ariane—strange quiet thing that she was—edged upward another notch.

  Rachel straightened up, her mouth thinning into a tight line. “We’ll see.” She spun away from me in a whirl of red fabric and expensive perfume.

  “Rachel. What are you doing?” I called after her, alarmed.

  But she ignored me, making a beeline for the doors to the hall.

  Shit. In trying to warn her off, I’d only pointed her straight to Ariane at full speed.

  “Rachel better hurry before they finish with the cameras,” Matty muttered.

  “What are you talking about?”

  Matty tipped his head toward the far wall, and I saw a guy in a black jumpsuit with a bright red GTX logo on a ladder, messing with some cables. “Didn’t you hear the announcement this morning?” he asked, loading up his fork again.

  I vaguely remembered hearing the loudspeaker going off when I was in the hall, tracking down Ariane.

  “GTX donated a new security system to the school. They’re installing it today.” He swallowed and then chugged from his Gatorade bottle. “Cameras everywhere, man. Gonna be harder than hell to get away with anything now.”

  Huh. Wouldn’t that be a nice piece of poetic justice if Rachel got busted by the same system the school had probably fawned all over her grandfather to get?

  I sat back in my chair, smiling at the idea.

  “Not that it matters for Rachel,” Matty continued with a sigh. “That girl could get away with murder.” He sounded envious, not angry about the injustice.

  And he was right. My smile faded. The cameras could catch Rachel doing just about anything, and the front office would find some way to excuse it or simply not see it. Especially if they wanted to keep her grandfather’s favor and any other expensive equipment he chose to send the school’s way.

  Damn. I really hoped Ariane Tucker knew what she was doing.

  “YOUR DAD MADE YOU STAY HOME this morning?” Jenna sounded skeptical.

  I’d managed to delay the inevitable until after fourth hour simply by profusely apologizing via text and saying I’d explain my absence later, in person. But now, walking to the cafeteria, I was out of time and excuses for, well, not providing my other excuse.

  “He didn’t make me stay home completely,” I said. “Obviously. I’m here. He just needed me to stay at home a little later.”

  I hated blaming my father for everything. But the best lies are the ones closest to the truth. And since telling her “I couldn’t meet you this morning because it might draw more attention to me and therefore eventually destroy my carefully calculated guise as a normal and completely human student” was out, this was the next best thing.

  Jenna hoisted her overstuffed bag up higher on her shoulder. She’d obviously been avoiding her locker between classes by the amount of books she was carrying. “Look, I don’t mean to pry or anything, but is everything okay at home? Your dad seems to want a lot of together time.” She wrinkled her nose.

  I sighed. Crap. I was straying too far from social norms again. She was worried my father had an unhealthy interest in my life.

  It was such a ridiculously fine line to walk between half-truths and arousing suspicion. Even if that suspicion was not, “Hey, you’re an escaped science project,” and more of the “Exactly how ‘special’ is Daddy’s special girl?” it didn’t matter. Getting adults involved—particularly those from some kind of governmental social services program—would be bad for my cover as a “normal” person.

  “My mom is dead, and in two years he’ll be alone,” I said.

  I’d discovered that bringing up a dead parent puts an end to almost any conversation. And since one of my “parents” was likely dead, it wasn’t far from the truth.

  At least I hoped he or she was dead. That sounds terrible until you consider the alternative. The source of the “foreign” material used in my creation—a nonterrestrial being who’d been minding his/her/its own business until it had been shot down, here on Earth, outside of Roswell in 1947, according to a variety of Internet conspiracy theorists—was surely out there somewhere, locked away in some secret facility, no doubt. I’d seen enough alien autopsy specials on television to know that.

  But the thought of him or her alive and contained in some bright white room, alone except for when someone came in with oversized needles to remove samples for further cloning/hybridization, made me ill. The image of that same being dead and floating in an oversized jar of formaldehyde was equally horrific. But at least he or she would no longer be within reach of human harm. Lesser of two evils, and all of that.

  I used to wonder if there was a family out there in a galaxy far, far away wondering what had happened when they lost contact with the one who’d been sent here. That same family would be mine, too, indirectly. But since I would never know, I couldn’t allow myself to dwell on it.

  My mother, a human surrogate, might be dead as well, for all I knew. GTX did not take project security lightly. It was only from information obtained through my father’s GTX sources that I even knew I’d had a mother instead of donated human stem cells and an obliging petri dish or something.

  I used to think about her, the surrogate, sometimes. Had they told her what I was? Had she been afraid? Maybe she’d hated me before I was even born. I’d seen enough TV and movies to know that the idea of hosting an alien or alien/human hybrid was often seen as terrifying and/or life-ending. (V, Alien, Aliens, etc., and the entire Stargate franchise.)

  Or maybe she’d loved this creation that was some percentage of her own DNA and wished she hadn’t had to leave me with GTX.

  I had no way of knowing what was a realistic possibility and what was simply my human side, longing for a connection. So I tried not to think about her anymore, whoever she was.

  But Mark Tucker was within my realm of knowledge, and I was genuinely worried about what my adoptive father would do after I was gone. Who would look out for him? Who would make sure he took his pills? Or call 911 if necessary? He didn’t have anyone but me. He could have married again, started a new family. But instead he’d chosen to save me and given up the possibility of rebuilding his life. Once I was gone—and likely not ever able to return—he’d be alone. Lonely, perhaps. I knew what it was to be alone, truly alone, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

  Jenna grimaced. “I know. I’m sorry about your mom.” She hesitated. “But I think maybe you need to branch out. Try to have your own life and not—”

  She would have pressed further, but a group of freshmen girls leaving A-lunch passed us. They, who should have been looking scared, hassled, or overwhelmed on their second day, had the audacity to giggle and whisper behind their hands while staring at Jenna.

  Jenna’s face turned bright red. “We’re just going to go in, get our food, and get out, right?” she asked. “I’ve got passes to the library.” She dug out a slip of paper from her bag and handed it to me.

  I glanced at it. Signed by Mrs. Jurs, the guidance counselor. She was hopelessly ineffective at anything resembling guidance or counseling, from what I’d heard, but valuable, it seemed, in her generous distribution of hall and library passes.

  “Fine.”
It had taken several text messages to convince Jenna to agree to this instead of skipping lunch entirely, which I could not do. I have to have food every few hours or risk fainting, which might mean the nurse’s office—or worse, an ambulance.

  But it wouldn’t be a hardship for me to eat somewhere other than the crowded cafeteria. The audible noise was deafening; the mental noise was worse. It was a pit of anxiety and thinly veiled panic that began fifty feet down the corridor from the lunchroom doors, especially this early in the school year, when friendships and lunch table alliances were being formed and broken. I’d walked past SAT testing rooms that were calmer.

  But I was concerned that hiding from everyone might send the wrong message. If Jenna wanted everything to return to normal, she was only putting off an inevitable period of awkwardness. The longer she delayed, the worse it would be, the more people would speculate and anticipate her return. The best way to reestablish the “normal” pattern was to resume it as soon as possible. I was something of an expert on this topic.

  But I knew Jenna wouldn’t want to hear it.

  I wrestled with the decision as we approached the cafeteria doors, while Jenna remained uncharacteristically silent, no doubt gearing herself up for her entrance. Was it my responsibility to warn her of the flaw in her plan? Or would it be abnormal to have this kind of insight and share it?

  The problem with overthinking everything in order to appear normal and mundane is that you sort of lose track of what insights a regular person would or would not have. Therefore, figuring out the right (a.k.a. the average, human, normal) thing to do was something I struggled with daily. Sometimes it was easy. If it was information I’d learned only by hearing someone’s thoughts, no problem—pretend I’d never heard it and act accordingly.

  But if it was something more subtle than that, a conclusion I should have reached by observation or years of experience, a conclusion or thought a full-blooded human might share if he or she was observant and/or moderately intelligent…then I had to decide what to do. What was the likelihood that Ariane Tucker, the version of me that I presented to others, would know something like this and be inclined to speak up about it?

  God, it was so complicated, so many variables.

  As we rounded the final corner, the noise increased and I winced at the blast of emotions and thoughts, all at a fever pitch. It was what I imagined the Colosseum must have sounded like in the days when religious persecution and entertainment were one and the same.

  My stomach clenched, knowing Jenna wouldn’t be the only one stared at. The two of us together would be twice the spectacle. I didn’t want to go in there any more than Jenna did, but I was accustomed to looking past the emotion of the moment to find the logic.

  “I’m going straight for the salad bar, and I’ll meet you back out here,” she said, digging into her bag for her wallet. She pulled her money free and tucked the bills into her pocket for faster removal.

  Except the far more strategic move would have been to stay and suffer today in the hopes that tomorrow or next week would be better.

  In the end, I had only my instincts, and they were screaming at me to speak up.

  I hesitated, then said, “Jenna, maybe we should—”

  A man in a GTX uniform crossed into the hall from the cafeteria, carrying a ladder, and my voice dried up in my throat.

  Paying no attention to me, he leaned the ladder against the wall and climbed up to adjust a video camera on the wall, one that had not been there before.

  Cold washed over me, and I couldn’t move. It was like one of my nightmares, where the faceless men appeared in my bedroom to take me back to GTX and I couldn’t run or hide. I let them drag me out the door, where a version of Dr. Jacobs, so much taller than everything around him, including my house, waited with that false expression of paternal fondness.

  Jenna stopped outside the cafeteria when she noticed I wasn’t with her, and turned around. “What’s wrong?” she asked with a frown.

  The tech on the ladder glanced down at us and then promptly returned to his work.

  “Nothing,” I managed to say through numb lips, barely able to breathe. “I need to make a call.”

  Jenna’s bright blue eyes widened. “What? Now? Are you kidding me?”

  I ignored her, fumbling in my pocket for my phone.

  Jenna hurried toward me. “Wait until we get our lunch, please. We’re almost there, and the rest of A-lunch is going to empty out soon.” She sounded panicked. She wanted to try to sneak in during the five to ten minutes of transition between A- and B-lunch, while most everyone else was finishing eating or at their locker.

  I shook my head, my neck so tight it felt as if it might snap. “I have to check in with my dad. I’m sorry.” That was protocol for anything unexpected like this. Why hadn’t he warned me?

  I hit speed dial for my father’s cell, ignoring Jenna’s loud sound of disbelief, and turned my back on her and the GTX tech.

  While the phone rang on the other end, I forced myself to focus and put the pieces together. The cameras meant surveillance. No doubt about that. My father had said they were ramping up the search for me. The fact that they were putting up cameras here, in my school…that had to mean they’d zeroed in on this location. That was bad. Unspeakably bad. I could almost feel Dr. Jacobs staring down at me. But they didn’t know who they were watching for; they couldn’t, or else they wouldn’t have bothered with cameras. They would have just sent in a team to get me.

  I lowered my guard and focused on the thoughts of the tech only fifteen feet behind me. He hadn’t seemed remotely interested in me…and he wasn’t.

  God, that food stinks. Wonder what Mariella packed. A flash of a smiling dark-haired woman with a brown lunch bag in her hand. Not that I’ll get to eat anytime soon. So behind. A second flash, this one a piece of paper with the words URGENT, PRIORITY stamped across it. Ten more after this. They never should have scheduled us for this one today. I don’t care who signed the order.

  “Ariane?” My father’s voice on the phone pulled me from the tech’s thoughts.

  “Hey, Dad.” The words sounded so stiff and stilted. “Checking in, like you asked.” That was a fabrication, but better than letting anyone who might be monitoring think I had another reason for calling.

  Behind me, I heard Jenna huff in exasperation, and when I looked, she had disappeared through the double doors of the cafeteria. Evidently, going alone was better than going in late.

  “Is everything okay?” He sounded alarmed but cautious.

  “Sure, everything is great. Oh, hey, it looks like we’re getting a new security system here, cameras everywhere. Did you know about that?”

  Silence held on the other end of the phone, and my stomach plummeted. He hadn’t known.

  “Do I have a dentist appointment today?” I persisted. Dentist appointment was code for Leave immediately. Cell phone conversations were all too easily intercepted.

  “No,” he said finally. “I don’t think so. Unless…your teeth are bothering you.”

  It took me a second to extrapolate his meaning. Run if I felt threatened. Well, easier said than done. I always felt some level of threat, and GTX in my immediate environment absolutely did not help.

  “Not right now,” I said.

  “Let me check in about the dentist, and I’ll get back to you. If you don’t hear from me, proceed normally.”

  I winced. Even I knew that didn’t sound like something a “regular” dad would say.

  He paused. “I mean, come home and do your homework.”

  “Right, okay.”

  He hung up before I could say good-bye, and though talking to him usually reassured me, there were too many gaps, too many pauses this time.

  He should have known this was happening. He had sources in GTX for this exact sort of situation. Unless GTX was keeping things quieter than normal. That might mean they thought they were closing in on me. And/or maybe someone had finally figured out that we had a mole on the i
nside. My father might be under suspicion.

  I couldn’t shake the feeling of dread creeping up in me. GTX was nipping at my heels. The only question was how long would it take them to pin me down.

  Glancing at the camera behind me and the tech fussing with it, I had to guess it wouldn’t be long.

  Urgency pulsed through me. I had to find a way to stop my little power outbursts and regain control. Immediately. My father had theorized that time, patience, and practice would eventually work. But I couldn’t wait anymore.

  I had to do something else. Now. But what? If I’d had other ideas to try, I would have tried them already.

  I could feel desperation swelling in my chest, threatening to cut off my breath.

  The bell signaling the official end of A-lunch rang, startling me. I forced myself to slowly draw in air.

  Think, just think. But the noise from the cafeteria—both in my ears and my head—made that impossible. And standing here in the hall, pondering it all, right in the flow of traffic and ten feet from a GTX employee wasn’t smart. Better to catch up with Jenna, get my food, and hide out with her in the library, where I could hear myself think.

  I tucked my phone into my pocket and started toward the cafeteria, but before I’d covered half the distance, a loud crash came from inside, followed by a piercing shriek.

  Jenna.

  I ran for the doors. Her distress was coming through loud and clear, but her thoughts were too muddled with the others for me to get a clear picture of what had happened.

  I stopped at the threshold, the scene frozen in front of me like some kind of tableau or diorama entitled Trauma in the Lunch Line.

  Jenna was on the floor in front of the salad bar, lettuce from a plastic container spread around her. A broken bottle glittered in an orangish-pink puddle of juice. Jenna’s face was flushed, and her hands were up as if to defend herself from an invisible force.

  A big shiny metal dog collar hung loosely around her neck, the prongs tangled in her blond hair. A box of Milk-Bones lay on its side, its contents pouring out of the open top.