15
I TOLD JAMIE AND STELLA everything, from the Ouija board to the asylum, from Rachel to Jude and Claire. From Mabel’s shitty owner to Morales. Jamie’s brows drew together as the words left my mouth.
And then I told them about Noah. Why he couldn’t be dead.
“Because he can heal,” Jamie said.
“Himself or other people?” Stella asked.
“Both.” I told them about Joseph, and how he’d been taken by Jude and rescued by Noah, and about my father, and how he’d been shot because of me but had survived because of Noah. I didn’t mention the “love him to ruins” thing. That wouldn’t exactly help my case. And it felt too private to share.
“But you’re not saying he could survive a gun to his head, right?” Jamie asked.
Stella elbowed him sharply. “Jamie.”
“I’m not trying to be insensitive—”
“No, you’re not trying,” I said.
“I’m just saying—”
I leaned forward, elbows on the table, hands flat against it. “I know what you’re just saying. I know. But there’s too much we don’t know to just decide that he’s—” I didn’t want to say the word. “Have you guys even seen proof that Horizons collapsed?”
They shook their heads.
“But there was still the fire,” Jaime said.
I clenched my jaw. “He wasn’t there when it happened.”
“Then where is he?”
That was what I was going to find out.
Stella shared her tale of woe next. Once upon a time she was a gymnast and a swimmer. Then puberty hit, and her hips and breasts grew, and when she was sixteen, she stopped eating—because of her coach and her mother, her psychologists said. But they didn’t know about the voices.
To her they sounded like other people’s thoughts. But that was impossible, obviously. She grew more and more panicked, and the voices grew louder and louder in response—keeping her awake at night and distracted during the day. She couldn’t swim or train or eat, but then she noticed something curious. The longer she went without eating, the weaker the voices became. She was down to ninety pounds and losing her hair by the time her father finally overrode her mother (who had insisted Stella was just “watching calories”) and forced Stella to get help. And she got it. After months of therapy and several stints in rehab, her doctors finally seemed to settle on a wonder drug that helped her—until it was suddenly recalled by the FDA. She backslid fast, but Dr. Kells contacted her parents just in time.
“Lucky me.” Stella took a bite of pizza. “But I had a feeling there was something up with you guys the moment you walked into the program. Like when we were together for group stuff, I couldn’t hear either of you, even when I could hear everyone else—but my meds make it sort of confusing. They shut out most of the voices most of the time, but when I’m stressed or anxious, it gets worse.”
“Or angry?” Jamie said.
“Is that how it happens with you?” I asked him.
Jamie shrugged and avoided my eyes. “Before I was expelled and shipped off to Crazytown, I would notice sometimes that if I told people to do things, they would actually do them. But not like, ‘Hey, man, would you mind handing me the keys to your Maserati?’ It’s more like, ‘Tell me that secret’ or, ‘Drive me here.’ It seemed so random, and the stuff I was telling people to do wasn’t crazy. Like, it could have been a coincidence,” he said, “except that it didn’t always feel like a coincidence. Sometimes it felt real.” He met my eyes, and I knew he was thinking about Anna.
Anna, our former classmate, who had bullied him since fourth grade, and whom he had told to drive off a cliff. She drove drunk off an overpass after that.
“And I felt crazy for thinking it,” Jamie said.
I looked up at him. “We all have that in common.”
“What in common?” Stella asked.
Jamie got it. “That what’s wrong with us, the gene thing, G1821 or whatever—the symptoms make us look like we’re crazy.”
Or maybe it actually made us crazy. I thought about my reflection. About the way it talked back to me.
“That explains why no one’s discovered the gene,” Jamie said, refocusing my attention. “If someone appears to be hallucinating, or delusional, or is starving themselves, or hurting themselves, the most obvious explanation would be mental illness, not some bizarre genetic mutation—”
“Mutation?” I asked. “We’re mutants now?”
Jamie smirked. “Don’t tell Marvel. They’ll sue us. But listen, though. Genes don’t just appear in a few people. It just doesn’t happen. Genes change over centuries. They degrade, they alter—”
“They evolve,” I said.
“Exactly. So what we have—whatever we are, we’ve evolved into it.”
“Superman or Spider-Man,” I said quietly.
Stella looked back and forth between Jamie and me. “Explain?”
I remembered the conversation I’d had with my brother, when I’d told him I needed to fictionalize my problems for a fake Horizons assignment, so I could get him to help me without knowing he was helping me.
“So she could be a superhero or supervillain,” my brother had said. “Is it a Peter Parker or a Clark Kent situation?”
“What do you mean?”
“Like, was your character born with this thing à la Superman or did she acquire it like Spider-Man?”
I didn’t know the answer then, but I knew it now. “Spider-Man acquired his ability from a radioactive spider bite,” I said. “Superman was born with it—”
“Because he’s really Kal-El, an alien,” Jamie said.
I was Superman. Just like I’d thought.
But when I’d told Noah about Daniel’s theory, he’d been convinced that we had to have acquired what was wrong with us.
“How many times have you wished someone dead, Mara? Someone who cuts you off on the highway, et cetera?”
“I’ve probably wished a lot of people dead a lot of times,” I said now, and repeated Noah’s words.
“Everybody does that,” Stella assured me.
“And Noah’s parents would’ve noticed that he healed abnormally fast when they took him to the doctor for shots, right? So why is everything starting to happen now, if it’s something we were born with?”
Jamie slapped his palm on the table. “There’s a trigger. It’s like cancer. They can screen you genetically to see if you’re at risk for developing it, because there are markers. But just because you’re at risk—”
“Doesn’t mean you’ll actually get cancer,” I finished, as the missing puzzle piece clicked into place.
“Exactly. It just means that you’re more at risk than someone else—and the risk factors are biological and environmental.”
“Or chemical,” I said, my mother’s words coming back to me.
“You’ve been through so much, and I know we don’t understand. And I want you to know that this”—she had indicated the room—“isn’t you. It might be chemical or behavioral or even genetic—”