Deadly Design (9780698173613) (5 page)

I
'm sitting on the stage with the principal, vice principal, and the school board members. They're wearing black robes with various colored ropes draped around their necks. Before me is a sea of green robes and caps dotted with eager faces. I'd watched them file in through the gymnasium doors. Some looked nervous. Others were flashing smiles at their parents or their friends. A few students, fellow members of the basketball team Connor led to State, looked up at the black scoreboard like it was a symbol of Connor's passing. Like the buzzers and the referees' whistles and the screaming coaches had all been silenced forever, because two weeks ago, Connor had been silenced and now nothing would ever be the same.

I'm not shrouded in the uniform of graduation. I'm wearing black dress slacks and a white button-down shirt. I was wearing a thin black tie about fifteen minutes ago, but I swear it was constricting my throat like a damn snake, so I took it off and chucked it behind the makeshift stage.

I hear a deep, rattling cough and know immediately that our neighbor, an aircraft worker forced to retire early because of emphysema, is in the audience. A few days before Connor died, Connor came up to me while I was taking the garbage out, and we'd had a conversation about him. Connor asked me if I'd seen Dick Barber lately. I did what I always do when I hear our neighbor's name: I laughed. Then he asked me if Dick had wished me good luck at the state meet because he thought I was Connor.

“He did,” I answered, causing Connor to grimace even though he already knew what I'd done. He had to, or he wouldn't be asking me.

“So that's why he called Dad and asked if I was okay.” He shook his head. “You know you don't have to flip off
every
person who accidentally calls you by my name.”

I told him I did. I absolutely did. But I didn't tell him that while gesturing “fuck you” was my standard response, there was a part of me that meant it as a thank-you because it felt like a compliment. If somebody wished me good luck at the meet or told me what a good job I'd done at the forensic tournament, or if someone simply waved and smiled because they thought I was Connor, it made me feel good. Made me feel like shit too, because I'm not Connor, but just knowing that somebody thought I could be . . . it felt good. But I didn't tell him that. I wish I had.

• • •

There is silence, real silence. There are hundreds of people surrounding me. Hundreds of people breathing and fidgeting and thinking. And staring. The principal has said something. She's introduced me, and the gymnasium has filled with the silence of waiting.

I stand, then walk, taking a second to look at my parents. They're sitting in the first row behind the graduating students, and while I know they want to give me encouraging smiles, smiles to settle my nerves, they can't. I reach the podium, look down, and start reading. It's typical stuff, at least what filters through the haze in my brain. Motivational, fortune-cookie shit. “Work hard and you can accomplish anything. Don't let the difficulties of life dissuade you from your dreams, blah, blah, blah.” And then there's a space between paragraphs and a handwritten note. It reads
Find Kyle in the audience. Look at him. Don't say another word until he sees you.

I glance back at the principal. She nods her head knowingly at me and smiles with trembling lips. I look up at the crowd of faces staring down at me. I'm searching through them, but for a second, I'm not sure if I'm looking for Connor or looking for me. I go back to the words.

“Kyle,” I read, “I don't believe in regrets, at least most of the time I don't. I don't regret that we were born separately, because the truth is, if Mom had tried to carry us both at the same time, we might both be dead now.”

Everyone is quiet, breath-held kind of quiet. No one fidgets against the hard chairs; no one fans themselves with their programs or turns through the pages to see how much longer this will take. Even the quivering cries of a discontented infant stop. All anyone can hear are the electric fans moving back and forth to aid the school's ancient air-conditioning system.

“I guess I do regret a few things. I regret that I didn't wait for you. I arrived on the path first, and I ran ahead, so far ahead that you couldn't catch up. I shouldn't have done that. To make it worse, being twins, I should have figured that people would always be comparing us. It was up to me to set the bar, and I set it too high—for both of us. There's always been this thing inside me, pushing me to be perfect. And once it started, it was like running down a hill, and you can't stop, because if you try, you'll fall, and the hill is so steep you know you won't survive.

“I'll never forget when you were in first grade. We were walking home, and you wouldn't talk to me because the teacher made you miss recess when you didn't get a perfect score on your spelling test. She thought that because we have the same DNA, we'd have the same brain, the same likes and dislikes, the same drives. But the truth is I
had
to learn those words. Maybe it's that oldest child syndrome or something. I had to get them right, but you didn't. You could have if you'd wanted to, but you didn't, and that's okay. Hell, that's great, as long as you know you could have.

“I regret now that I studied for those stupid tests. I mean, really, who cares if a seven-year-old can spell
umbrella
or a ten-year-old can recite the fifty state capitals? It doesn't say anything about who we are. Not really. If I had to do it over again, I wouldn't have taken Calc 2 or Spanish 4. I don't think I would have even gone out for track or football. Not because I don't think education is important or because I don't love sports, but because there's no achievement in my life that means as much as being able to walk the path with you. You are my brother . . . and I love you.” I say these words slowly because they are for me. They are mine. “Nothing means more than that. And to all of you out there who have ever called Kyle ‘Connor,' and especially to all of you who ever judged my brother for not learning his spelling words or his state capitals or his quadratic equations, this is for you.”

It doesn't say anything else, but I know exactly what Connor intended to do. I look out at the young and old and middle-aged faces. I take a deep breath and, with tears burning in my eyes, extend my middle finger to the crowd.

I
hate doctors and doctors' offices. I hate needles, X-rays, and nurses who say this will only hurt a little as they jab giant syringes filled with radioactive isotopes into your veins. I hate being injected with something called radioactive isotopes. It just sounds like a bad idea. The dentist puts that lead jacket over you so your organs won't absorb the radiation from your annual bicuspid photo, and the cardiologist thinks it's a good idea to put nuclear waste right into my veins. Of course I'm reassured that it's not harmful; I just have to avoid using public restrooms for the next twelve hours lest I spray someone with my radioactive pee. Peter Parker gets bitten by a radioactive spider, and he can scale buildings. I get injected with the stuff, and I have twelve hours to stop bad guys with my
stream of death.

The autopsy report, which took almost three weeks to get back, confirmed that Connor died of a heart attack. The report also showed that his arteries were clear. It was like his heart stopped for no reason. So now a machine is taking continuous pictures of my heart. It's just a precaution; Mom and Dad both said so. Just a precaution to make certain everything inside me is working fine. But according to the autopsy, everything inside of Connor had been working fine, until it suddenly wasn't.

This last test is supposed to take forty-five minutes.

The walls are a dingy green. The molding has been stripped from around the doors and the floor, and there are signs everywhere apologizing for the mess while they remodel.
IT'S ALL FOR YOUR COMFORT
the signs read. Do they think a new paint job will make people comfortable
here
? I feel like I'm in some sci-fi movie. Or worse, one of the docudramas Mom likes to watch where some beautiful woman finally meets the man of her dreams, only to discover he has a rare disease. I don't have a rare disease. I'm fine. At least, I'm pretty sure I'm fine. Connor was fine.

But there had been something.

Maybe if the skinny nurse with smoker's breath had pumped shit into his veins, he'd be alive now. Maybe if he'd been told to stay still, with his left arm bent over his head, for a mere forty-five minutes while a giant machine inched its way around him, they would have found something. A doctor could have fixed it, and Connor could have given his own speech at graduation, and we'd have made it to level forty by now and saved the Pentagon and the world from the zombies I can't stand to look at anymore.

But he didn't get the chance to have someone look under his hood to make sure his engine was fine. I may hate this room and this machine and the radioactive shit in my veins, but I don't hate them that much.

“H
ey,” Mom greets me when I get back from picking up an application from the Sak & Save. Since my tests came back all right, I get the pleasure of finding a summer job, and what could be better than sacking groceries?

I show her the two-page application. She glances at it, then puts it on the kitchen counter.

“I'm not sure I like the idea of you pushing carts all day out in the hot sun,” she says, more to herself than to me.

“It's cool in the store. I'll be inside as much as I am out. It'll be fine.”

“Of course.” She smiles, then wraps her arms around me and hugs me tightly, starts to let go, then tightens her arms again. At night, I hear her crying. It's been a month, and she still cries herself to sleep every night. She has a job as a receptionist in an insurance office, but she hasn't gone back yet. I'm not sure she ever will.

Dad's boss offered him time off, but he didn't take it. He seems okay. He gets up, goes to work making airplane parts, calls home a couple of times a day to check on Mom, and spends every night holding her while she sobs. He cries too, but he's sneakier about it. He cries when he's mowing the backyard. He'll walk back and forth, his shoulders shaking, his hand wiping his face every once in a while. I'm sure he cries other places, too. Sometimes when he comes home from work, his eyes are red and puffy. Allergies, he says. But I know better.

I cry, mostly when I'm driving Connor's Jeep. Mom and Dad gave it to me, hence the need for a job to pay for the insurance. But sometimes when I'm driving, I look into the rearview mirror and see Connor. I think about how his hands should be on the steering wheel, how he should be the one picking music from his iPod to listen to. I keep mine on shuffle, and sometimes a song will play that reminds me of him, and the waterworks will start.

Mom turns her attention back to dinner, and I head for the living room, where Dad's watching the local news.

Another “Hey, how was your day?”

I don't answer, because the news is starting, and I know Dad wants to hear the leading stories. I'll tell him about my boring day during the commercial break.

Two guys in a dark pickup truck tried to abduct a ten-year-old who was walking home from the park with her babysitter. Another politician is being pressured to resign after having relations with prostitutes; he claims he was trying to reach a new class of constituents. Dad scoffs at that one.

“A girl collapsed during a youth soccer game. Seventeen-year-old Alexis Warren, a recent graduate of Bishop Carroll High School, was helping coach a team of twelve-year-olds when she collapsed and was later pronounced dead at the scene. Heat is not considered to be a factor. Apparently Warren, who would have been eighteen tomorrow, died of cardiac arrest, but the cause of death will not be certain until an autopsy is performed.”

Dad and I are silent, then we notice Mom standing in the doorway. Her naturally pale face is bleached white; her mouth hangs open. She's still holding the wooden spoon in her hand.

“Honey?” Dad stands. “Are you all right?”

“Did they say Alexis Warren?”

Dad looks at me and nods as if I can confirm that he's right. “I'm pretty sure that's what they said. You know her?”

Mom leans her back against the wall and slides toward the floor. Dad rushes forward, catching her and helping her to the sofa. “Connor's baby book. Get his baby book,” she says, waving her hand at the built-in bookshelves.

Dad gets the book and hands it to Mom, and she frantically looks through the pages of handwritten notes and snapshots.

“Here,” she says, taking out a photograph. It's her and another woman, sitting on the edge of a hospital bed. Mom is holding Connor, and the other woman, still in her hospital gown, is holding a baby wrapped in a pink blanket. She turns the picture over and looks at what's written on the back:
Bethany Warren and baby Alexis.

“How did you know her?” I ask.

“Bethany and her husband were carriers of cystic fibrosis. They already had one child who was very ill. Like us, they'd heard that Dr. Mueller at this new fertility clinic, Genesis Innovations, had a way of removing certain genes. That's where we met. We were both having our eggs harvested, and we were so nervous, so hopeful.” Mom stares at the picture, at the two beaming mothers with their healthy babies. And now both babies are dead.

“Is that the doctor who ‘tweaked' us?” I ask, seeing another photograph taken in the same hospital room, on the same day, only now there is a man in a gray suit standing beside them. He's medium height with broad shoulders and a long, narrow face. His beaming grin makes him appear to be as happy as the new mothers, maybe even happier.

“Yeah,” Mom says. “That's Dr. Mueller. He made sure you'd be healthy. And then you, the fertilized egg, split.” She looks up at the television screen, a new sort of horror on her face. “What did they say about her birthday?”

“She would have been eighteen tomorrow,” Dad says.

“That's so weird,” I say. “What are the odds that those two babies would both die within a day of their eighteenth birthdays?”

“A weird coincidence,” Dad says, but there's something in his eyes—his slight, dismissive smile doesn't match the darkness gathering in them. “It's just a coincidence.”

“Yeah,” I agree, wanting desperately for the color to come back into Mom's skin. “Stuff happens sometimes. She was a soccer player. It was hot outside. She probably got dehydrated.”

Mom looks at me, and I know what she's thinking. She's thinking that she loves video games. That she loves that she's never sat on hard wooden bleachers and yelled because the refs said I traveled or double dribbled when I hadn't. She's glad that I always came right home after school, instead of going to football practice or running laps around the track. And more than anything, she's glad that I'm sixteen.