The Adoration of Jenna Fox (17 page)

"Good morning, Father," I answer.

Mother has turned and noticed the necklace of
plates. I put my finger on the edge of the first plate. They both watch,
confused, and before they can say anything, I press down on the lip and the
plate flips and crashes to the floor.

"Jenna!" Mother says, jumping up from
her chair.

"Do you have something you want to say,
Mother?" I put my finger to the next plate and send it shattering to the
floor as well. Father jumps in, yelling my name, and a string of other warnings
that are drowned out by the third plate crashing to the floor.

"What is the matter with you?
Stop that!"
Mother
yells. Father echoes similar warnings.

"Isn't there something else you want to
say?" My finger is poised over the fourth plate.

I begin to bring it down, and Mother yells out,
"Go to your room, Jenna!"

I close my eyes. I struggle. I concentrate on
every twitch within me. Every joint that wants to sweep me up the stairs. I
concentrate on every word I have practiced since yesterday.

Don't go, Jenna.

Don't go.

Don't go.

I open my eyes. I remain in place. I have not
gone anywhere. I am drained from the effort.

I glare at them both. "How dare you!"
I say. "How dare you play with my brain! How dare you pretend with me that
I'm normal! How dare you program me!"

The word sends a shockwave through the room. For
a moment neither one speaks, stunned by the outing of their dirty secret.

"Jenna, come here," Father finally
says. "Come closer to the screen. Sit, so we can talk."

"Do I have a choice? Or is that another
thing that is programmed into me.
Sit down, Jenna. Sit down! Sit down!"

"Jenna, please," Mother pleads.

"Jenna Angeline Fox!" Father says.
"Look at you. Are you in your room right now? No. You're obviously not
programmed. Let me explain!" I don't move. "Angel," he adds.

I step forward and sit in the kitchen chair
Mother has pulled up to the
Netbook
. Am I doing this
of my own free will? I'm not sure.

"It was a suggestion, Jenna. We only
planted a strong suggestion. Like a subliminal message. It wasn't programming,
And it was for your own protection. You've been through a terrible trauma, not
unlike any patient who has had a severe brain injury. Erratic behavior can
sometimes be a side effect of such an injury. Usually medication is used to
lessen adverse effects. But medicine won't work with you, Jenna. You don't have
the same circulatory system or nervous system of other brain injury patients.
So a very simple thing we did was plant something that is no more controlling
than a subliminal message in case you started behaving out of control."

Who is really out of control here?

"I don't want you to control me," I
say.

"We don't," Mother says firmly.
"Like your father said, you're here and not in your room. Right? But until
you could understand everything that has happened, we also had to have a way to
get you out of sight fast if we had to. For your own protection, and others',
too. We've already told you that a lot of people have put their lives and
careers on the line for you. If someone should show up here unexpectedly,
someone asking questions
—"

"We've taken a lot of precautions,
Jenna," Father interrupts. "But if someone were to see you right now,
it would be difficult to explain. Your organ failures, severe burns, limb
losses
—it was all on hospital records. We've
managed to make changes to a lot of those records, and we're still trying to
make more. But we can't change what people saw. There are a lot of medical
staff who would remember. A lot who knew you were beyond the limits of what the
FSEB legally allows. For now, the official story we've given everyone is that
you're stabilized and receiving private nursing care at an undisclosed
location. That alone has been a source of questions and rumor because no one
expected
you to live, much less recover. If they were to see you as you are now, it would
certainly lead to an investigation, or worse. Let's face it, I'm news, and with
my background with Bio Gel and the high profile of Fox
BioSystems
,
red flags would go flying. The media would have a field day and the FSEB would
be out to make an example of us. Everyone involved would be facing jail time.
And I'm not sure what would happen
—"

He doesn't finish. He doesn't need to. I can
fill in the unspeakable blank. Me. What would they do to the uploaded thing
that is me?

"That's why we didn't want you to go to
school, but we knew that eventually we had to let you have your life back, too,
or what would be the point of it all? But no one knows where you and your
mother are. The house was bought under Lily's name, and I keep my travels there
to a bare minimum to avoid anyone tracking us down.

"And as I said," he continues,
"we've been making adjustments to hospital records and eventually as time
passes, if someone sees you and questions anything, we can attribute
discrepancies to faulty memories. So it was for your protection, too. Since you
didn't understand the whole scope of what is going on, we had to have a way to
remove you from a potentially harmful situation. You have to see that we felt
we had to plant this suggestion."

"And just how did you 'plant' this
suggestion?" I ask.

Father opens his mouth to answer, but Mother
intervenes. "It was uploaded," she says plainly.

I close my eyes. This or the dark place? It is
a draw. I open my eyes and look first at Mother, then at Father. "Is there
anything else you thought it
necessary
to upload? We may as well get it
all out right now."

There is a prolonged pause, each waiting to see
how forthcoming the other is. My question is answered. There is something else.

I sigh and lean back in the chair.

"You were missing so much school,"
Mother says. "You were so sick. We knew you would have enough challenges
as it was, and we honestly didn't think you'd ever be able to go to school
again."

"It was a mistake. We realize that
now," Father says. "But we uploaded the tenth-through-twelfth-grade
curriculum of the Boston Unified School District. It was probably too much
information
—not what you would have absorbed
naturally— but we can't take it back. It doesn't work that way. Not without
starting from scratch."

None of it is really mine.

My synapses fire like a fireworks display.

Thoreau.

The French Revolution.

The earthquake, the second Great
Depression, current events. Word by word.

The invisible boundary.

Ten percent.

The most important part.

Who shall say what prospect life
offers to another?

To live deep and suck out all the
marrow.

All of it.

I look at my hands. Clasp them and unclasp
them. Perfect. Monster. Hands.

A thousand points. A thousand illegal points.

Clasping. Unclasping.

The butterfly.

Suck out the marrow.

The marrow of Jenna Fox.

My feet fidget. They tap. The way they always
did. The nervous gesture of my childhood. My borrowed feet remember. Something
that is still mine. I calm them.

"Then I should have the key to the closet,"
I finally say.

Mother looks at Father. She is not the
deferring type. But in all these uncertain matters she defers to him. I see
this is not her world. She is feeling her way through something foreign. She
only wanted her daughter back. Would pay any price for it. But the price is
navigating uncertainty and secrets that seem to keep spinning faster than she
is. She's wide-eyed, staring at the
Netbook
and
Father. He remains steady, his eyes faltering for only a microsecond. But it's
a faltering microsecond that is a lifetime for me. I can see. He is afraid.
Maybe terrified. He calculates his reply. "What do you mean, Jenna?"
he asks calmly.

What are they afraid of? What do they think
—

I feel a ping, chilling and alert.
The key.

Their eyes are riveted on me, invested, waiting
for an answer. "The key to the small door at the back of my closet,"
I tell them
.
I see the visible relief on both their faces. "If I
need to really get out of sight one day, it would be logical to go there."

"Yes, of course," Father agrees.

"I have it somewhere. I'll find it,"
Mother says. She is too eager. She rummages through a drawer and produces two
keys. "I think it's one of these."

"I'll go try them both."

I hurry upstairs to my closet, pocketing the
keys Mother handed me. I rush, afraid she may follow. I overturn my hamper
and
riffle through dirty clothes and sheets, looking for the pants I wore four
days ago. I find them and search the pocket. The key to Mother's closet is
still there. This is the key that made Father falter, the one he thought I was
talking about.

I scan my closet for a hiding place. I kneel in
the corner and pull back the carpet, tuck the key there, and carefully push the
carpet back down on the tack strip. I place my hand over the patch of carpeting,
like some truth will filter through. Some-thing that is all, one hundred
percent, mine.

My hand hovers, but no truth comes, only the
knowledge that maybe this is my way of balancing the power.

Trust

It's
midnight. The house is dark. Quiet. Mother and
Lily have been in bed for an hour.

I watch Year Seven / Jenna Fox. It's the only
disc I have watched more than once. This is my fourth time.

Seven-year-old Jenna leads Father through the
house. He has a blindfold on. Lily must be filming. Glimpses of Mother smiling
and following along, giggles from Jenna, and hollow protests from Father
punctuate the journey.

"Where are you taking me, Jenna?"

"You can't ask, Daddy!" Jenna wails.

"The moon?"

"Daddy!"

"The
Mayflower?"

I watch Father being pulled, pushed, and
turned. He trusts me as I lead him from room to room and down hallways. Step
up. Step down. He exaggerates his movements, lifting his feet like he is
stepping onto a stage. But he trusts me. He trusts seven-year-old Jenna. What
did I do to make that change?

They reach the kitchen doorway. A large,
lopsided blue cake is on the kitchen table, candles already burned halfway down
during the long, blindfolded walk. The icing sags and bunches out on one side
like a slow-moving glacier, bringing tipping candles along with it.

"Stop!" Jenna says. "Turn. No,
this way, Daddy! Bend down. Ready?"

I remove the blindfold. "Surprise!"
Mother and I yell and clap our hands. Father throws his hands in the air. He
gasps. Jenna beams. Her gap-toothed smile is nearly angelic.

"It's beautiful! It's perfect! It's the
best cake I've ever had!"

"She made it herself," Mother says
proudly. "We doubled the batch because she wanted it big."

Mother and Father share a glance, a brief look
that flies over Jenna's bouncing head. It is a full look just between them. A
look of love, satisfaction, fulfillment. Easiness. Completeness. Everything
they want and need is right in that room.

"It's big, all right! And
blue!"
He
continues to praise and adore it. Just as he adores Jenna.

I watch them dig in with forks and no plates.
More laughter. More squeals. More looks.

It makes me feel all the ways I've wanted to
feel ever since I woke up.

Trusted.

Happy.

Enough.

Father takes a
fingerful
of blue icing and decorates Jenna's nose, and she squeals.

And now, in the quiet of my room, I laugh, too.
I laugh out loud.

Just as I have done every time I've watched it.

Sanctuary

The church is empty. No priests. No Lily. Not
even sweet singing voices to stir the air. The sanctuary is in the shape of a
cross. I stand in the crosshairs, feeling like an imposter, waiting to be found
at any moment and ushered out.

Sanctuary.

I weigh the meanings. A holy place. Refuge.

A place of forgiveness.

Rows of candles flicker on either side of me in
the smaller arms of the church. I step forward, my clumsy feet scuffing the
floor, echoing across the stillness. Souls, if there is such a thing, are
nourished and mended here. In case of error they can't be uploaded like the
whole Boston curriculum
—there are no spares in
case one is lost. Souls are given only once.