The Adoration of Jenna Fox (23 page)

"You've had enough," she says.

And I suppose I have.

I look at Mother. Her eyes dart from Father to
me and back again, jumping, caught like a hooked fish. Caught between two
worlds again. "It's for you, Jenna." And now we've come full circle.
As we always do.

"Everyone has to die eventually," I
say.

Father lifts the bottle of wine. He holds it in
front of the candle to judge its remaining contents. He empties half into
Mother's glass and half into his own. He takes a leisurely sip.

"No more," he says.

Tossing

I don't sleep.

I hold on to my bed.

The backups must go.

My fingers dig into my sheets.

I want sleep. Forget. Melt into
night.

But.

What if something goes wrong?

I may need them.

It is only information.

Limbo.

Dreamland.

That's all.

And if I try hard enough

maybe I can forget the dark place
where

they

we

are.

Viewpoint

It is a rare day. Rae is teaching a lesson.

In her own way.

I am tired. But fidgety. My lack of sleep did
not merit my staying home from school. Mother and Father have a distorted sense
of normalcy. "You wanted to go. You will go. It will be good for
you."

We watch Net News covering a session of
Congress. A senator talks. And talks. It is the longest filibuster in history.
Senator Harris is breaking the record of Senator Strom Thurmond set back in
1957. No one has been so long-winded
—or driven—
until now. He has been droning on now for twenty-five hours and thirty-two
minutes, one hour and fourteen minutes past Thurmond's record. For this, Rae
has commandeered the floor. For this, even Mitch has joined us in the
classroom. Mitch mimics Rae's nods and sighs so there is no doubt. This
is
historic.

I sit between Ethan and
Allys
,
focused on their presence beside me. I want to lean over and whisper in Ethan's
ear in one breath and weave my fingers into
Allys's
hand in the next, and I don't want to listen to the senator at all. I want to
define my place in their worlds and not try to understand the definitions the
senator spews forth about his own. Right now I feel the overload
—like I could burst in two with needing friendship on one side
of me and love on the other. These are the definitions I need to refine.

Dane sits behind me. I feel his tap on my
chair. Tap. Tap. I am here. I am here. I am everything. Pay attention. And the
senator drones on. And Rae beams. Glows. Historic. Pay
atten-tion
.
Tap. Tap.
Allys
. Ethan. I do.

My world is too complicated. People. Politics.
Self. The rules of it all. And trying to understand. It feels like a fugue and
my drunken fingers are tangled trying to play it. Play, Jenna. Listen. The
senator glistens. I notice his beads of sweat and handkerchief more than his
words. Now, my fellow citizens. Now. Before it is too late. I watch
Allys
more than the senator. She leans forward in her seat.
Her head nods. Yes. I turn my head to the right. To Ethan. He slinks back. No.
No.

And Dane taps.

Taps.

Does she like me? Would she if she knew?

The senator swipes his forehead. "For
God's sake," he cries. Do we dare go down that path? My fellow lawmakers.
My esteemed senators. Can we take that chance?"

He breathes. A sigh. A period.

There is a roar. An applause. Only a few claps
from the senators who are still present and awake. The roar is from
Allys
. And I am not sure what it is even about because for
the last hour I have been consumed with a need that is different from Rae's or
Allys's
or the senator's, and I am alone in my need, and
there is no one who can understand. Being a "first" doesn't feel so
groundbreaking.

"Magnificent!"

"Historic!"

"Boring." The last, predictably, from
Dane.

"Twenty-five hours, forty-six
minutes!"

I should have paid attention. When
someone speaks for over twenty-five hours, it must be important. It must
matter. It matters to
Allys
.

 
"Will it make a
difference?"
Allys
asks Rae.

 "Of course," Rae says.
"Maybe not in ways any of us expect. But it will not be forgotten. Every
voice leaves an imprint."

"Especially one that has talked for so
long," Mitch adds.

"But how will they vote?"
Allys
asks.

"We'll have to wait and see," Rae
answers.

"Vote on what?" I ask.

Allys
frowns. I have not paid attention,
and she is hurt that something that matters so much to her has slipped past me.
I try to make up for it by focusing on Rae's explanation.

"A bill is before Congress," Rae
explains, "and Senator Harris has been trying to persuade his fellow
senators to vote against it. By talking for so long, he has hoped that it will
give some chance for the opposition to make a stronger case, sway others to
their point of view."

"What is the bill?" I ask.

Ethan lays his head down on his desk and closes
his eyes as Rae explains.

"The bill is the Medical Access Act, which
will put all medical decisions and choices back into the hands of physician and
patient. It will cut the FSEB entirely out of the process."

"And he thinks that is bad?"

"Weren't you listening, Jenna? Of course
it's bad!"
Allys
doesn't try to hide her
disappointment in me. "If the FSEB had been in existence fifty years ago,
I might not be stuck with all this hardware. My toes might actually feel like
toes and not numbed-up sausages! And this isn't just all about me. Look at the
Aureus
epidemic and the millions who might not have died.
And now Congress is trying to limit its power? Next, they'll want them out of
all the research labs! God help us if that happens!"

"But," Mitch says, "the
counterargument is that the FSEB is a bureaucratic financial drain that often
impedes lifesaving measures."

"It's the tech and pharmaceutical
companies who are behind it,"
Allys
says,
ignoring Mitch's comment. "They've been lobbying like crazy. The big ones
like
Scribtech
,
MedWay
, and
especially Fox
BioSystems
—"
Click.
Allys
hesitates for the briefest
second, her eyes flickering over me, before she finishes her sentence. Probably
a millisecond no one else notices. "They've poured billions into getting
this bill passed."

And with that last sentence, she sits down. She
is suddenly done talking about the bill. Rae continues with the lesson, trying
to prod us to share our opinions, but an unexpected blanket has come down on
us. Mitch leaves. Rae turns off the Net and says we will talk more after lunch.
Maybe food will perk us up.

We walk to the market across the street and sit
at our usual corner table. I notice
Allys's
face is
damp, with a dull yellow pallor, while her hands remain a cool, creamy
prosthetic peach. When she swallows her pills, they seem to crawl down her
throat. She takes another sip of water, trying to coax them down, then another.
She stares at me. I stare back. She nibbles at her food, then pushes it away.
Ethan looks back and forth between us, his leg jiggling and shaking the table.

"You're Jenna Fox, aren't you?" she
finally says.

"Brilliant." Ethan jumps in much too
quickly. "How'd you figure that out? Maybe from her
telling you
the
first day she met you?"

"Don't smooth things over for me,
Ethan," I say. His leg stops jiggling, and he draws in a deep pleading
breath.

Allys
shakes her head. "It's all
coming together. Most people don't pay attention to that kind of news, but
working in the ethics office, I hear it all. I remember something about a
daughter," she says. "I should have put it together when you told me
you were in an accident. You're the daughter of Matthew Fox."

"Would that make me the enemy?" I
ask.

"No____"

"But?"

Ethan shakes his head ever so slightly.
"Jenna," he whispers.

"They said his daughter was in an
accident. One that most professionals believed was not survivable."

"At least with the
FSEB's
current point system in place, right?"

"That's right."

"Well, then maybe I'm not her, after all.
Jenna Fox is a common name."

"Maybe not," she says. "Because
if you were her, that would mean ..." She trails off, deliberately leaving
a space for us to fall into. I see it. Ethan doesn't.

"What?" he blurts out. "You'd
have to run to your little squadron of FSEB bureaucrats and report her?"

Allys
sits back. Her eyes narrowing on
me, then Ethan. She pulls off her prosthetic arm and rubs the stump. It is red
and scarred and ugly. "You give me too much credit, Ethan. I can't run
anywhere. I can only hobble. Obvious, isn't it?"

She returns her prosthetic arm to her stump,
wincing at the momentary pinch of the magnetic fields that hold it tight. She
tests her fingers, one by one. "I'm beginning to forget, I think. 
What they ever felt like. It scares me, what science can do." She pushes
away her sandwich. "I guess, right along with my fingers, I've lost my
appetite." She stands. Neither Ethan nor I stop her, and she leaves.

I lift my fingers until they are silhouetted
against the sunlit window. I test them just as
Allys
did. One by one. Packaging.

Maybe

"She's going to tell."

Ethan pulls me close. We are behind the market,
knee deep in overgrown grass, sandwiched between forgotten picnic tables and
trash bins. He pulled me away when I began to cry, leaving his lunch and
curious stares from other customers behind.

I feel his arms stroke my back, his hands
tighten around my waist, his breath, and his smell, my tongue warm against his,
a stirring inside of me that makes my tongue press farther. Did I ever feel
these things before? Do I care? Our kisses are desperate.

My sobs return. Wild. Like an animal. Ethan
holds tighter, like he can squeeze away my demons. I push away. "Why do
you care, Ethan? You don't know me."

His hands drop from my sides. He closes his
eyes and shakes, his head.

 "Ethan," I whisper.

"I don't know, Jenna." His eyes are
wide again. Glassy.

"I
—I feel
something. Every time I look at you. Don't ask me to explain it all. Does
everything have to have a tidy explanation?"

"I'm not like other girls."

"I know."

"Ethan." I cup his face in my hands.
"You don't know. I'm beyond different. I'm
—"

"Maybe that's what I see when I look at
you, Jenna. Someone who will never fit in again in quite the same way. Someone
like me. Someone with a past that's changed their future forever."

"Or maybe it's just that you see me as a
second chance. You couldn't save your brother, but maybe you can save Jenna.
Justice. Is that what you're looking for?"

He steps away and kicks the loose leg of a
picnic table so it tumbles to one side, then he swings around. "Or maybe
I'm a masochist and I like girls who are as annoying as hell! Don't try to
analyze me, Jenna. I am what I am."

And I am what I am. I just need a definition
for what that is.

Jenna n.
1.
Coward. 2. Possibly
human. 3. Maybe not. 4. Definitely illegal.

"Let's not argue." Ethan comes up
behind me and places his hands on my shoulders. "Why did you cry back in
the market? Are you afraid? We'll talk to
Allys
.
Change her mind."

"I'm not afraid, Ethan." At least not
of
Allys
. I'm afraid of my thoughts, my feelings. I'm
afraid of my fingers against a sunlit window and the shocking relief that comes
with it, when I should feel shame. I'm afraid that I feel wildly alive and
grateful and like the Special Entitled Miracle Child Jenna Fox, while boxes sit
in a closet trapping minds that will never see fingers or sunlight again, and I
am too afraid to let them go because I might need them. I'm afraid of a hundred
things, including you, Ethan, because everything in the universe says it's not
right, but that doesn't keep me from wanting it.