Still Point (3 page)

“You planted flowers?” I asked, as if I might have dreamed up the image.

“It was your father's idea,” she said.

I nearly tripped over my feet when she said this. I looked back at her.

“
Dad
wanted to plant these?”

“Well, I was complaining to him about how much I missed gardening.” She walked down the patio stairs onto the path. “When you and Joe were little, I spent hours outside planting while the two of you played. It's how we spent most of our afternoons, before M28. Your father surprised me with these on my birthday,” she said, and smiled slowly, like she had to force the gesture. I walked over to the rosebush closest to the porch steps and leaned over to examine the salmon-pink blossoms. They were strangely perfect.

“Don't touch that one,” my dad's voice rang out. “Not that one, Madeline. It hasn't been stapled down yet.”

My hand stopped a few inches short of the petals. My fingers turned in. My smile died.

I looked up and saw my dad standing in the doorway. “Stapled?” I asked.

“They're fake, Maddie, obviously,” my mom said, as if there were no other options. “Nothing natural looks this perfect.”

I looked back at the flowers. I was so sick of fake. I wanted to unfake everyone and everything.

“Do you like them?” I asked her. I needed her to say no.

She shrugged, and glanced at my father. “At first I was a little disappointed,” she admitted, “but it's so easy to get used to. You don't have to prune them or fertilize them. You don't have to cut off their blossoms after they die. You just spray them every month with the scent can, and they smell like this year-round.” She cupped a plastic flower in her hand. “Now I can't imagine all the work it would take to actually maintain real roses. The planting part is easy, but it's having to take care of them every day that becomes a nuisance,” she said.

I looked at her and wondered if these were her honest words, or my father's, or maybe from the instructional setup video that came with the plastic plants. But that was our culture. We wanted to plant things, but we didn't want to maintain them. We wanted the beauty but didn't want to put time and effort into things. I wondered how we had come to look at joy as a chore. I wondered why using our hands and our time to create things had become such an inconvenience.

Justin was right. The detention center had given me new eyes. I was seeing the world in a completely different way, seeing how technological and artificial we had become. I had always sensed it, my whole life, but it's hard to know if something is off when that's all you know. It's like living in a constant winter—you never understand the comfort of shedding your layers, of living light. But now I understood.

I wasn't rebellious. Maybe I was just more human than the average person.

I remembered planting flowers with Elaine, how wonderful it felt to use my hands. It eased my mind. It made negative thoughts slip away and more sunlight filter in. It made me feel awake, mindful, and in the moment. You need to put love into something in order for it to grow. Maybe that's why this house felt so sad to me.

“Be careful out here, Maddie,” my dad said. He was talking about the garden, but I knew his warning was about life in general. I had a habit of tearing up anything that was too constricting.

“I need to start getting ready for the benefit,” I said, and headed for the door. I brushed my hands against the roses' thorns as I passed. They were plastic and soft and weakly grazed my skin.

 

I opened the door of my bedroom with a wide smile and carefully maneuvered down the plush-carpeted hallway, four inches taller in my black, clunky platform heels. My long, leopard-print dress nearly grazed the floor. It was fitted, showing off the curves I was finally getting back. Black lace and sequins trimmed the chest, connected to thin spaghetti straps. A black leather cuff clung to one of my wrists.

Usually my hair was tied up for this event, in a conservative braid or twist. But tonight it was loose. It fell long down my back. That's what caught my parents' attention as they waited for me at the bottom of the stairs.

“Madeline Rose Freeman!” my mom exclaimed. “What did you do to your
hair?
”

I ran my hands through pink streaks of highlights and smiled.

“I hope that's a wig!” she gasped.

I pretended to be hurt. “You said pink is my best color.”

She raised her hands above her head like she was praying for a new daughter. “Pink? You dyed your hair pink? I told you that you couldn't dye your hair,” she said.

“Until I was eighteen,” I corrected her.

My dad didn't look angry, which was surprising. He was fighting a grin. My parents stood in their usual formal outfits for the event: my father in a black tuxedo and my mom in a long-sleeved cream-colored dress that cinched at the waist and flared out at her ankles.

“Couldn't you have done that after the benefit?” Mom asked.

I pointed out it wasn't completely pink, just pink highlights. I had ordered the ten-minute dye kit online, and it had arrived today, just in time. Rebellion brought to me in twenty-four hours by glamordye.com. High-five technology.

“What on earth are you wearing?” she asked.

I looked down at my dress and smiled. I think the design is called Suck It, Digital School.

“Leopard print,” I said.

“Well, you can turn right around and change,” my mom insisted, and spun her finger in a circle. I held my ground.

“I don't have anything else to wear,” I said. “I'm still a size smaller than all my clothes.”

“Never mind, we're already late,” my dad said. “Just put this on.” He handed me a long black dress coat, which I accepted. It covered most of my outfit, but it only made my bright hair stand out like a fire at night. Tonight, that was my plan. It had taken me eighteen years to understand I wasn't invisible.

I followed my parents outside, and my mom critiqued my feet.

“Madeline, those shoes are not appropriate either. Too loud.”

Water adhered to the black driveway pavement and shined under the streetlights like silver puddles. Two men dressed in black suits waited at the open limo doors to escort us to the event. My shoes thudded hard against the ground and made me so tall I had to fold my body in half to get inside the limo.

We headed downtown to the annual National Education Benefit. When we arrived at the front of the colonial Stratford House, we were met by an usher. I noticed there were fewer paparazzi than usual. Normally a trail of reporters lined the red carpet on either side, a living wall five people deep. This year there was just a smattering of reporters roaming around the open area, which was encased in a fence of gold ribbon for the event. The two escorts opened the limo doors, and my father was the first one out of the car. The cameras immediately caught him. I ducked out of the limo and kept my eyes on the white marble steps ahead.

I didn't stop to have my picture taken with my parents, which I had obediently done every year. I walked away, unbuttoned my coat, and shrugged it off. Instantly the cameras started to turn. People ignored my dad, and a curtain of blinking lights followed me down the red carpet. I smiled for the cameras. I waved. I even stopped once and blew a kiss for a photographer, a sultry kiss where I puckered my lips together and paused with my hand held out toward him. People whistled and the digital billboards broadcasting the event switched from my father to me. I was on national television. I turned and waved to the audience before I headed for the stairs. Two tall men in elegant white suits held the front doors open for me, and their eyes took in my hair and outfit with stunned surprise. The wind blew my hair back, and I strutted through the door—the first time I'd ever walked inside this building smiling.

I checked my coat in the lobby, raised my shoulders, and tossed my hair back. Guests loitered on velvet seats and couches in the spacious entry room, staring into handheld screens. It reminded me of old-fashioned smoking parlors in movies, where people would flee to spend time with their addictions. My parents found me, and my dad's hand pressed against my back as if he thought he needed to push me into the ballroom. When we walked in, people stared at my hair, my lipstick that was too bright, the heavy liner that outlined my green eyes like a cat's. I could hear people leaning in to criticize me, to judge me. Fingers pointed. I tried not to let it bother me. The moment you open yourself up is the moment you're scrutinized. Humans love to judge one another. No wonder so many of us preferred being behind a screen.

All of the negative attention made my steps shaky. Annoying my dad was one thing; taking on the world was another.

The party was smaller this year. I could remember when thousands of people turned out for this event. Now the benefit was lucky to pull in a few hundred. I knew it wasn't because the supporters of DS were dwindling; it was because face-to-face interaction was becoming so rare, it made people uncomfortable. This year the giant wall screens were set to mirrors and reflected the room to make it look like more people were in attendance. Tables were larger than normal to try to hide the lower numbers, but they still took up barely half of the room. The rest was empty space. So much of our world was turning into empty space. I watched people sit stiffly, a little robotic, not touching, not knowing how to use their senses, not understanding how to be in the moment. I looked around the room for a couple who were touching each other, who were engaged with each other. I couldn't locate a single one. Everyone was staring into a screen attached to android hands.

I looked into the back corner of the ballroom, where I had seen Justin a year earlier. I knew he could get in tonight, if he wanted to. He knew I would be here. I looked for Riley, Jake, or Scott and Molly, for any person in the room I could connect with, for anyone who dared to make eye contact with me. So far, everyone looked away, as if meeting my glance would spread a virus.

During the benefit dinner with the Thompsons, I kept my head down and my eyes locked on my plate. I pretended to be fascinated by the thread count of the white cotton tablecloth. Damon discussed a train accident that took him two weeks to clean up, and Paul talked about police academy training, and Becky, guess what, played with her phone the entire time. It lit up on the table every time she had a message, which was constant, like a strobe light. It was distracting.

Paul didn't tell me I looked pretty this year, because I didn't. I looked like I was ready to start a riot. I looked like I could tame lions in my sleep. I passed the time by listening, mostly to the strange silence that shouldn't exist in a room full of people.

I eavesdropped on conversations around the table. Mrs. Thompson was telling my mom how Paul moved out to live at the police station during his training. She let Becky join a movie club that meets face-to-face. My head perked up at this, and I looked at Becky. I saw red flags. And potential. I glanced at my mom, and she looked equally surprised.

“You let Becky go out?” my mom asked.

“There's an old cinema in town,” Mrs. Thompson said. “It's the only one open, a single screen that plays old classics. I'm efriends with all the mothers. It's a nice group of girls.” My mom and I glanced at each other while Mrs. Thompson continued. “I want Becky to get a little bit of interaction, now that Paul's never home. I read a study that you should expose your child to face-to-face communication once a week. It's good for social behavior.”

“Statistics show that kids who socialize face-to-face three to six hours a week have higher self-esteem,” Damon reported. “And even healthier immune systems.”

I smiled to myself. Imagine what interacting every day would do.

Mrs. Thompson's eyes cut quickly to mine. “I'd invite Maddie to join, but . . .”

“I'm not exactly a teen role model,” I finished for her, and moved my glass to the side so a waiter could set down my dinner entrée. Everyone at the table turned to look at me.

“Grounded, as usual, aren't you?” Mrs. Thompson asked.

I smiled politely and asked my mom to pass the water pitcher. “Actually, I'm not. I came home willingly.”

“After you broke out of jail?” Paul snapped.

I lightly bit my tongue to force myself to pause. “Detention centers aren't jails, Paul,” I corrected him. “One of these days you'll find out what's really going on inside them.” I calmly poured water into my glass and offered to fill up glasses around me. “I can leave here any time I want,” I stated. “I'm choosing to be here.”

That ended the conversation. My mom's eyes flickered toward mine across the table, her way of saying she was on my side. I concentrated on eating my dinner.

“How was the detention center?” Paul asked a couple of minutes later, with the nerve to smile.

“A blast,” I said, and tugged a piece of bread apart, pretending it was Paul's head detaching from his body. I pulled my napkin over my lap and didn't meet his eyes. I looked at his forehead instead, into that small little programmed brain of his. “I met some really amazing people who changed my life, and then we set it free, as you may have heard. So, thank you for the philanthropic opportunity.” I smiled widely.

“You didn't free anybody,” he said. “It's just on a lockdown, and the majority of people support those centers. The kids will all have to go back. You think you're all a bunch of saints changing the world. All you do is cause a little trouble. You get a two-second mention in the news, and you think it's going to make a difference. But you don't change anything. You just make a mess for us to clean up.”

I glared at Paul, and his eyes trailed down my outfit.

“You look like a hooker. Where did you get that dress?”

I gritted my teeth. “Your mom loaned it to me.”

I looked away but I heard Paul shift in his seat. I winced, afraid he was going to pull a gun on me.