Robison Wells: Variant

Her smile was plastered on like a tour guide’s. That’s what she was: a tour guide, all smiles and scripts.

“No offense,” I said, “but can you show me where the real Becky is?”

“What do you mean?” She let her hand slip off the door, and it swung slowly shut.

“I mean that I don’t believe a word you’ve said. This is all some stupid game.”

“I’m the real Becky,” she said, concern growing in her eyes.

“You’re not, and you’re not even a good liar. You said that your birthday is coming up at the end of October. It’s already November second.”

She opened her mouth but didn’t say anything. She took a step back and looked out at the forest. The two runners had just reemerged from the trees, their sweaters glowing a vibrant cherry red in the afternoon sun.

“So,” I continued, “enough of the crap.” I grabbed the door handle, but it was locked again.

“I am Becky,” she said, her arms folded across her chest.

“Why’s the door locked?”

“I am Becky,” she repeated.

“I don’t care,” I said. “How do we unlock the door? I want to see the principal.”

She turned to look at me, her eyes fierce. “I am Becky Allred. And I’m telling the truth.”

“I don’t care who you are. I want to see the principal.”

Her smile was gone now, replaced by a grim stare. “We don’t have one.”

What?

“We don’t have a principal,” she said. “We don’t have teachers, and we don’t have counselors. That’s why I do the orientations.”

“There’s no—I mean, you don’t have…”

She tried to put her smile back on, but it was weak and forced. “This school is different from other schools.”

“So who teaches the classes?”

“We do,” she said. “The students. We get lesson plans.”

“I don’t believe it,” I said. “That doesn’t explain your birthday. Why did you lie about that?”

Her grin seemed to be back in full strength. “It’s not a lie. I know it seems weird, and it’ll be easier to understand when we go through the full orientation. But…” She paused, mulling over her words. “We don’t have any calendars.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope.”

“Can’t you just look on your computers? Every computer has the date.”

“Not ours. But you do get your very own laptop. Did you know that?”

I couldn’t believe it—in spite of everything she’d just said, she was still trying to sell me on how great the school was.

“But can’t you just email someone? Get on the internet?”

Her nose wrinkled again. “Our computers don’t get on the internet.”

This was ridiculous. “Well, didn’t your family call you on your birthday?”

“No phones, either.”

“Let me get this straight. There are no adults in the school. And we can’t talk to anyone on the outside.”

She bobbed her head in embarrassed agreement.

I pointed at the two runners, who were standing on the lawn now, holding hands and looking back at the forest. I could see little puffs of breath rising from them as they talked.

“He said we can’t get out of here,” I said. “Is that true, too?”

“Yes.”

This could all still be a joke. It had to be a joke.

“I shouldn’t have taken the scholarship.”

“That depends on how you look at it,” she said. Her voice was warm and happy, but detached and distant, like she wasn’t really directing her words at me. Another script. “There are some great people in this school. We learn a lot of interesting things, and it can really be a lot of fun.”

I bet. I wanted a good school and I got this. Ms. Vaughn had been right about one thing—she’d said this place would be different from what I was used to. I thought she’d meant that we’d actually learn something, and that kids wouldn’t get beat up in the parking lot. Instead, she meant that it was a prison.

“What’s the point of this place, then? Is it for screwed-up kids?”

Becky laughed. “No, it’s just a school. We go to class and we have dances and play sports.” She gave me a mischievous grin. “You’re not screwed up, are you?”

I pulled away from her, my confusion suddenly erupting into anger. “Why are you calm about this? How long has it been since anyone here has talked to anyone”—I gestured vaguely at the world beyond the forest—“out there?”

Becky glanced quickly at the horizon. The school sat in a low spot in the forest and we couldn’t see much more than the rolling, wooded hills and, in the far distance, a faded gray mountain range.

“I’ve been here for about a year and a half,” she said simply. “I don’t miss it. Like I said, things are good here.”

“Do people graduate?”

“Not yet,” Becky said. “But I don’t think anyone is old enough.” She took my arm again and turned me back toward the door. “How old are you?”

“Almost eighteen,” I lied, and then remembered that she had my records. “Well, I’ll be eighteen in about nine months. Happy birthday, by the way. You’re seventeen, too.”

Becky laughed and then stepped to the door. It unlocked again with a buzz, and she pulled it open. “I like you, Benson. You’ll do well here.”

The foyer of the school looked like the natural history museum I’d visited back in elementary school. The floor was marble, and dark wood covered the lower half of the stone walls. It was the kind of place that my optimistic twenty-minutes-ago self would have loved and referred to as a beautiful, awe-inspiring palace of education. My current self thought it was an ugly, poorly lit haunted house. And now it was home.

Not for long. Maybe some of the other kids didn’t mind being locked in, but I did.

A massive staircase led up to the right, but Becky directed me forward, under a stone archway and down a long corridor. The front doors closed behind us with a soft thud, and despite the tall ceilings, I felt claustrophobic.

“So what were the rules the two runners broke? I mean, for real.” I had already decided that I had little intention of obeying the rules here—I wasn’t going to stay long enough for it to matter—but I wanted to know what they were. Just the fact that Becky seemed to be in a position of authority worried me. Anyone who had been an unwilling captive for a year and a half and yet seemed as unconcerned as she was didn’t deserve a lot of obedience.

Or was she a willing captive?

“No one is supposed to talk to the new students. Like I said, it makes more sense if I can explain what the school is like in a prepared presentation.”

Right.

“Also, they don’t want us to chase after the car. That’s against the rules.”

“Who are ‘they’?”

Becky turned to me and winked. “Ah, that’s the real question, isn’t it?”

She was starting to drive me crazy. Or maybe she was crazy. “And what’s the answer?”

The corridor branched, and Becky directed me to the left. I hadn’t realized how big the building was from the outside.

She shrugged. “They’re the Maxfield Academy. The woman who drove you in and her corporate office.”

“You don’t know? Don’t you want to?”

Becky opened a door and motioned me through. “Of course I want to know, silly. But I don’t know, so I’m trying to make the most of it.”

Inside the small room was a desk surrounded on three sides by tight, cupboard-lined walls. In front of the desk was a small leather sofa. She motioned for me to sit, and then moved to the desk, fiddling with some papers and jotting down a note for herself. The office was immaculately organized. The papers on the desk were in perfect stacks, not a single sheet out of place. There were two pens and a pencil, each one exactly parallel to the others.