Redemption Prep - Samuel Miller Page 0,14
the doctor for another moment, studying the way he moved. Everyone lied differently, but usually avoiding eye contact and offering short sentences was a strong clue.
The doctor handed him a small bottle. “Don’t you have homework?”
Aiden nearly sprinted through the hallways on his way back, strong-arming Year One plebes rather than waiting for the post-mass hordes to clear the hallway. Left and right, people offered him high fives. “Dude, Aiden, that was so sick!” one plebe shouted. One group of Year Twos broke out into applause. He burst through the P-School Lounge and out into the fog, not stopping until the school’s outdoor basketball court was in view.
It stood alone, surrounded by a cage of wrecked fence. There was one light on it, in the corner, so it cast hard shadows on the blacktop. This far from the school, the sweep sirens faded into the noise of the forest. Alone, pacing atop the bleachers, he saw her silhouette.
The school had forgotten this court existed when they built the indoor gym and removed the cameras years ago. On the first night that Emma convinced him to sneak out after curfew, they came here, with a quilted blanket and a water bottle of vodka she bought off a maintenance worker. They sat inches apart on the splintered stands, passing the bottle back and forth and talking about everything. She told him all of her favorites—her favorite stars, her favorite sounds, her favorite trees, her favorite people. He told her he didn’t have any, and she said it was okay, but he owed it to himself to pay better attention. Since that night, the stands had become their spot, the source of every good night they had. But it had been at least a month since the last time they were here.
“Emma?” he called out.
The pacing stopped. She leaned against the top bleacher.
“Emma?” he asked again, her silhouette disappearing as he reached the entrance. The fence gate fought back as he pushed, grinding against the concrete.
She leaned over the stands, staring blankly down at him, and his heart dropped.
It wasn’t her.
Testimonial: Neesha Shah.
Year 1995–1996. Day 21.
Emma just hung a photo of us on her wall.
She left the room thirty minutes ago, but I can’t stop staring at it. It’s a disgusting picture, really, up my nose on the bench near Human. We were walking there yesterday, on our way to class, when she stopped and sat, then patted the seat next to her like I should sit, too. She took her Polaroid camera out of her bag and before I knew what was happening, she was holding it out with her arm and snapping the photo.
She’s smiling. I look like I’m trying to stop the photo from happening. She looks like Julia Roberts. I look like I just saw Julia Roberts getting murdered.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a photo of myself on someone else’s wall. My family didn’t do pictures, and the only photos at Kimberley International were taken for the brochures, of the beautiful students reading under trees or testing fake compounds in plastic beakers. One time, my friend Aanya took a photo of everyone at her birthday party, but when I saw it on her dresser, she’d folded it so you couldn’t see me. She said there just wasn’t room in the frame.
Emma and I aren’t photo-on-the-wall friends, or waste-a-Polaroid friends. We’re not even walk-to-class-together friends, we were just leaving at the same time yesterday. She has a hundred other friends, better than me, and a boyfriend, Aiden. She gets invited to parties that happen after curfew and sits with the basketball team at lunch.
Still, there I am, one of the ten photos on the wall. You can see everything that’s different about us, starkly contrasted in those two square inches—Emma’s hair is straight and golden, mine’s curly and black; Emma’s teeth are perfect, mine have a few noticeable gaps; Emma’s smile is practiced, mine is forced—but we’re both in there.
I’ve only known Emma for twenty-one days, and already, she’s making me question the way I’ve lived for seventeen years. She asks simple questions, dumb questions, but questions that I can’t answer, like “Why?” and “What if you didn’t?”
Last night, she listened to me drone on for hours about how my project had failed to show any results, and how I’d never win the Discovery if I was only allowed to experiment on fucking rats, and then she asked, “Why do you let it have so much power over you?”
“Because