When time is called, put down any and all writing implements. If you do not, ten points will be automatically deducted from your score.
Further along, when I get to the meat of the monthly exams, everything is different. The math essay questions demand knowledge of at least five instances of false proofs of Fermat’s last theorem; the chemistry tests want in-depth information on Nobel Prize–winning research from a century ago. And the anatomy and bio I couldn’t ace if I had a year to study. It’s doctoral-level subject matter, and it was given to kids.
No one could pass this, I think. No one.
I keep the Word documents up and start moving through spreadsheets. My fingers are icy, not always registering on the trackpad. In a folder within a folder within a folder, I find an Excel sheet called SpecPop, very un-Malcolm-like in its snappiness, but then I remember a phrase Bonita Hamilton used. Special Populations.
A list of names and addresses and Q scores fills the small screen. They’re all off the charts, these numbers, all Qs anyone would be thrilled to have.
Each one is color coded, including Freddie’s.
From the spreadsheets, Malcolm’s preferences are clear. He hates immigrants and minorities; Catholics, Muslims, and Jews; anyone with a middle-class income or lower; the entire LGBTQIA crowd; and about thirty-seven flavors of differently abled human beings.
He doesn’t seem to have any negative feelings where Madeleine Sinclair is concerned, though.
I scan another batch of emails. Madeleine became “Maddie” sometime last year. And, this past summer, “Maddie” became “Darling.”
Motherfucker.
It isn’t hard to see why. Madeleine is six feet tall in heels, blond, and gorgeous. And, according to the Wikipedia bio I read a few weeks ago, she’s thirty-six years old. Not what I’d call a spring chicken, but the woman has eight years on me—eight years of better skin and better ovaries. A hot flash of fever rolls through me, a reminder that as of yesterday, Madeleine Sinclair has more than better plumbing. She’s still functional. She’s still cool and smooth. I feel a furnace starting up inside me and go back to Malcolm’s emails, looking for hard evidence of what I know he’s done.
It’s probably nothing. Just some Fitter Family–Genics Institute–Department of Education bureaucratic bullshit. I run the back of my hand over my forehead, wiping away a trickle of sweat, and I click the email open.
Very little of it is bureaucratic.
Malc,
She’s in Kansas. Showed up yesterday. I’ll see what I can do, and you shouldn’t have any problems with the divorce.
Cheers,
A
Bastard. I don’t know which of them I mean, and I don’t care. But I get it. I can wrap my head around a man who doesn’t want me for a wife. I can understand Malcolm ditching me for Madeleine Sinclair. The numbers, though. The numbers I read in the SpecPop table and in all the other files, these are the workings of a sick mind, a monster.
You should know, Elena.
SEVENTY
THEN:
Two weeks after the new ID card system went through, I was sitting in the cafeteria with the same old group—Malcolm, Roy, Candice, and the others. We were still pariahs, but we were pariahs who got first dibs on lunch, discounts at the bookstore, and free tickets to football games. Not that any of us gave a shit about football, but we went anyway, piling into whichever car could be borrowed from a parent, flashing our gold cards at the gate on Friday afternoons. It was worth the boredom just to see the looks on the faces of kids who had to stand in the white card line and fork over their allowance money.
I’d stopped buying up the last salads. Margie Miller never got her first choice anyway, and that was good enough for me.
“There she is,” Malcolm said. “Little Miss Brainless.”
He said it in a stage whisper, loud enough for most of the tables near ours to hear. Margie flushed, shook herself out of it, and pushed her chair back. She was on her way over to us.