Lakewood - Megan Giddings Page 0,24

their brains are taken for study. Sometime soon, our DNA will be modified to make this the next step of human evolution.

A little grain of this must be true. The psychic stuff had to have been why the man had been testing. Maybe, Lena supposed, it could all be true. I’m lucky enough to be absolutely terrible at mind reading. Right now, I could be packing my things and getting ready to live beneath the White House. My summer spent telling the president who hates him and when the next big earthquake will hit.

She lowered the brightness on her phone’s screen. There was something about conspiracy theories that she’d always liked. How a person’s brain could find the smallest threads to reaffirm a creative, false truth about the world. Most of her favorites were about celebrities. A child beauty queen who everyone thought was murdered had been kidnapped, brainwashed, and turned into a very religious pop star. Secret romances between teen drama stars who were now hiding their secret babies. Some of this stuff couldn’t be considered conspiracy theories, though. There were people on these boards who believed that all people had to do to stop climate change was to learn how to speak to the weather respectfully and just explain the situation.

Lena typed back to Tanya: I wish you could just support me. She deleted it.

She typed: I wish everything didn’t have to be about you. Deleted.

You’re the only person in the world I feel like I can be completely honest with and I’m sorry, but things have to be different right now. Deleted.

Sent: Everything sucks, but I have to do this.

A different website. White text on a black background: TV shows us the lies we want to distract us from what’s real.

You need to take care of yourself too, Tanya replied.

Lena put her phone down. Everything on it was upsetting her. Instead, she focused on her room.

Everything she took would be the foundation of her new adult life. The problem wasn’t the being an adult part. She looked at the textbooks, the nail polishes, the art supplies, the clothes—it was figuring out what kind of adult she wanted to become. Lena texted Tanya three red hearts. Then packed her most be-patterned, brightest clothes to wear on the weekends. Gathered all her favorite pictures of her family. A painting Tanya gave her for Christmas.

Then she tried to sleep. Couldn’t.

Lena went into the living room. There was nothing to clean. She touched the doorknob to her grandmother’s bedroom. Brushed aside the urge to knock, to ask if she was still awake. She pushed open the door, shut it softly behind her so Deziree wouldn’t hear. Lena got into her grandmother’s bed. The pillow still smelled of roses. Rolling onto her side, she pressed her nose into it, allowing herself to do this until her nose got used to the smell, until there was nothing. Lena pulled the silk pillowcase off the pillow, went to her grandmother’s vanity, took out the rose hip oil. Sprinkled it on the cloth and didn’t care about the greasy blot of it. Now she had everything she needed.

8

At five a.m. there was no one but Lena on the road. The air was chilly, the weather refusing to admit that in six weeks it would be summer. Lena was tired enough to feel dulled, but that was good. It gave her enough brain space to focus on driving safely and sipping the extra-strong coffee Deziree made for her. No tears, no anticipation of what was to come.

After the first hour of driving, it was all country highways. The sun rose as she passed the beginnings of rows of cornfields. Houses grew farther and farther away from each other—the only clusters popping up when Lena drove through villages. These were named either for parts of the landscape or Native American tribes, which deserved better than being immortalized as a place with one stoplight, a bar, a gas station, and some squat white ranch houses. Deer scampered across the cracked and potholed highway. No wonder she had never heard of Lakewood. There were more animals here than people.

She made a turn, another. The dirt in the roads changed from dull brown to tinged with red. Houses popped up again. Lakewood had a downtown: a small courthouse, a bar, some restaurants, a surprisingly big library, two different donut shops. An old man on a bench alternating between puffs of his cigarette and bites of a pastry. Cars were on