Katie Williams: Tell the Machine Goodnight

“You were, though.” I decide I’m going to say the word this time. “Raped.” And when I do, Saff ’s breath hisses out. “Even if you weren’t actually. They made you do those things. They forced you. I know how it is.”

“Yeah. Well. Everyone knows how it is because of that damn video.”

“No. I mean I know how it feels. To be forced.”

“Oh, Rhett,” Saff whispers. “Oh no.” And she’s misunderstood me. She thinks I mean that I was raped. What I mean is that the doctors shoved a feeding tube down my throat when I was too weak to resist. That my parents told them it was okay. That it felt like I was drowning. I let Saff misunderstand, though. I let her clasp my hand and stare at me with her big, dark eyes. Because I know that when people comfort you, they’re really just comforting themselves.

CASE NOTES 3/27/35, LATE MORNING

Opportunity holds no clues for us. Everyone in the class had the opportunity to dose Saff. Zom is taken transdermally. It’s loaded on a see-through slip of paper, like a scrap of Scotch tape. You press the paper to your bare skin—your arm, your palm, your thigh, your anywhere—and it dissolves into you. You can take it on purpose for the side effects: slowed time, heightened sense of smell, euphoria. Even though you won’t remember much of any of it the next day. Or you can get dosed without knowing it. A stranger’s hand on your bare shoulder as you push through the crowd, on your cheek pretending to brush away a stray eyelash, on the back of your hand in a show of sympathy.

At the clubs, everyone stays covered up: full-length gloves, turtlenecks, pants, high boots, even veils and masks. In fact, the more covered you are, the more provocative, because you’re saying that you might let a stranger touch you anywhere there’s cloth. Some kids will let bits of skin show through, peeks of upper arm, ankle, and neck. Not too much skin, though, just enough to stay vigilant over. You have to protect what you show.

Saff wasn’t covered up when she left her house. She was wearing a T-shirt and jeans and had left her sneakers at the door: bare arms, bare hands, bare neck, bare feet. So many vulnerabilities. But Saff wouldn’t have thought she was vulnerable. This was a party at Ellie’s, just like a hundred other parties at Ellie’s going back to her platypus-themed fifth-birthday party, an event all the same kids had attended, add me. Seneca Day School is exclusive, meaning tiny, designed for kids with parents in big tech. There are only twelve students in each graduating class. (Eleven in mine, since I left.) We’ve all known each other forever. We all trust each other.

Except of course we don’t. After all, where is there more distrust than in a small group of people trapped together for eternity? Old grudges; buried feelings; past mistakes; all those former versions of you that you could, in a larger school, run away from. Trust? You’d be safer in a crowd of strangers.

I EXPLAIN TO SAFF that we’ll solve her mystery by looking for three things: means, motive, and opportunity. I tell her that everything everyone does can be predicted by this trinity of logic: Are they able to do it? Do they have a reason to do it? Do they have the chance to do it?

“Everything everyone does?” Saff repeats with a raised eyebrow, her real eyebrow. “What if I did something, like, totally spontaneous?”

Her hand whips out and knocks over the saltshaker. We’re meeting in the diner across from school in Pac Heights. Salt cascades across the table, over the edge, soundlessly to the floor. The waitress glares at us.

“You’ve just proved my point,” I tell her. “Your arm works. That’s means. You wanted to challenge my theory. That’s motive. The saltshaker was right there in front of you. That’s opportunity.”

Saff considers this. “You helping me then. How is that means … whatever?”

“Well. I have the means because I’ve read about a thousand detective novels and because I’m smart. Opportunity is that you asked me to help. Also, I’m in school online, which means I don’t have adults watching over me all day.”

“And motive?” she says.

Because they forced a feeding tube down my throat , I could tell her. Because when I saw you again, you didn’t say how healthy I looked , I could tell her. Because kid-you knew kid-me, before all of this shit.

Instead I say, “Because I feel like it.”

Saff screws her mouth to one side. “For it to be an actual motive doesn’t there have to be, like, a reason?”

In response, I reach out and knock over the pepper shaker.

She laughs.

There’s movement in the diner window. Ellie and Josiah are there across the street, beckoning to Saff. They’re both on our list. Ellie is an obvious suspect. Because she would. That there is a true sentence: Ellie would. Whatever your proposition, Ellie would do it without hesitation. But Josiah? Josiah wouldn’t hurt anyone. He might stand there with his hands in his pockets and say, Hey. Come on, guys. Stop it. (And that’s almost worse, isn’t it?) But he wouldn’t actually do anything to anyone.

I haven’t seen Josiah in almost a year. He looks the same. Taller. That stupid thing adults always say, You look taller , as if that’s an accomplishment, and not just something your body does on its own, without your permission.

“Gotta go.” Saff leans forward like she’s going to kiss me on the cheek.

Across the street, Josiah squints, trying to make out who it is Saff is sitting with. I slouch down in the booth, and so Saff ’s kiss is delivered to the empty space where I just was.

“Don’t tell them you saw me,” I say.

CASE NOTES 3/27/35, AFTERNOON

The Scapegoat Game started as a unit in Teacher Trask’s junior English. She assigned “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” “The Lottery,” The Hunger Games, Lord of the Flies, and other classics with a scapegoat theme. They even watched a Calla Pax movie, The Warm-Skinned Girl, where Calla Pax is sacrificed to a god living in an ice floe to stop planet heating and save the world. Saff says everyone got really into it, so much so that the class decided, without Trask’s knowledge, to test the scapegoat concept in real life. My former classmates charted out eleven weeks, for the eleven of them, each one signing up for a weeklong turn as scapegoat. Like in the stories, the scapegoat had to take everyone else’s abuse without comment or complaint. For that one week, ten were free to vent all their anger, frustration, pain, whatever, on the eleventh, knowing that the next week someone else—maybe you yourself—would become the scapegoat. They decided that made it fair.

SAFF COMES OVER AFTER SCHOOL to continue our conversation from the diner. When I swing open the door, she looks upset. Her eyes are pink. The inner edge of her penciled brow is smeared like she’s been rubbing at it. I have the impulse to reach up and touch it, that bare little arc of skin. I shove my hands in my pockets.

“Are your parents home?” she says.

I tell her no, that my mom is at work. And that my dad doesn’t live here anymore.

“Okay,” she says.

And I’m grateful she doesn’t say, I’m sorry , because then I don’t have to say, It’s okay. Or, I see him on weekends. Or, It’s better this way. Or any other of that divorce-kid bullshit.

“We have until six,” I say. “My mom usually gets home around then.”

Not that it’s against the rules to have Saff over. In fact, I’m pretty sure Mom would be delighted, which is precisely why I don’t want her to find Saff here. It’s too hard to have Mom hoping things about me. She got home before me yesterday, when I was at the park with Saff. Now she keeps looking at me, but she won’t ask where I was, and I won’t tell her. Not just out of stubbornness.