Goodhouse by Peyton Marshall

Author:Peyton Marshall
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780374710156
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

TWELVE

I could smell Bethany on my skin at breakfast. It was a faint lemony odor and I kept turning my head to pick up the scent. The cafeteria was serving oatmeal with some kind of protein-substitute sausage. I watched the boys around me shoveling food into their mouths, chewing and swallowing. I thought of the way Bethany had felt underneath me, the way the heat of our bodies had left vanishing shapes on the stainless steel. My brain was disordered from lack of sleep, and Owen was in a particularly bad mood. He’d received a message on his personal page that morning. It had been sent on some sort of letterhead. When I asked him what it was, he’d immediately closed the screen.

When a fight broke out at a nearby table, Owen didn’t bother to look up from his tray. Even when one student shoved another to the floor and jammed his fingers into his opponent’s eye sockets, Owen was oblivious. Proctors arrived with their Lewistons out, but it was Creighton and Davis who pulled the boys apart. One boy clutched his face, screaming, and the other was struggling, still fighting, so Davis slammed his head into the table to quiet him. Afterward, there was a red puddle on the concrete floor and—in the middle—a white, gleaming fragment of bone, probably part of a tooth. A student arrived to mop up the blood. Two minutes later, all trace of the disturbance had disappeared.

As my appointment with Dr. Cleveland drew closer, I found myself watching the wallscreen clock. In less than a half hour, I would walk to the infirmary. I would have an AJT to compel me. There was no question that I would go. The rest of breakfast passed as if it were some outsize hallucination. Proctors overhead circulated like clouds in front of the sun, filtering and altering the light. The insect thrum of the cafeteria sounds permeated everything. I felt as if I were watching myself from a great distance, watching myself perform all the usual tasks—carrying my plate to the sand tray, waiting for clearance at the exit. And then I walked down the familiar path to the infirmary. I began to take smaller and smaller steps, slowing my pace, but never stopping. James, I thought. I am James. And the name calmed me. It could not be unlearned. It could not be confiscated.

When I arrived at the infirmary’s waiting room, proctors choked the entrance. “James,” the computer said, “please report to the basement level. Room 101.” I tried to cross to the main hallway, but a proctor stopped me. “You’ll have to go around,” he said. “This area is closed.” Beyond him I glimpsed a man in a military uniform. He looked like one of the men from the magazines I’d read on Community Day. I didn’t know what sort of officer he was, but I recognized rank when I saw it—the colorful bars on his jacket, a gold band on his hat. As I watched, another officer in a similar uniform stepped out of a side room.

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