“Fine. Be a bitch.”
His friends laugh and I tighten my notebook against my chest. It’s hard not to react, lash out, but I know that’s an impulse I have to control. Now that we are living without the constant rules and punishment of the academy, the girls and I have found that we can clearly see the bad behavior of men. It’s become intolerable to us, triggering in a way we don’t fully understand. We’ve untrained ourselves, deleted the complacent ideas in our programming.
Right now, this boy’s words in the hallway have made goosebumps rise on my arms and sickness swirl in my stomach. I want to at once fight and run from him. But that sort of reaction could jeopardize my larger purpose here.
And it’s only my first day, so I ignore him.
At the other end of the hall, I catch Sydney’s eye just before she walks into her class. We’d planned to arrive separately, hoping to avoid too much attention. Sydney lifts one eyebrow and I give her a quick nod to let her know I’m okay. Her mouth quirks with a smile, but it immediately drops when a boy steps in front of her to block her entrance into class.
I pause to watch them for a moment. Sydney is an anomaly here. Not just because she’s taller than most students, including the boys, or that she is inconceivably beautiful even in the bland uniform. She pointed out to me when we registered that she seems to be the only black girl at this high school.
“How is that even possible?” she asked later that evening. “I’veseen the other people in this town and they’re notallwhite.”
At the dinner table, Marcella turned the laptop screen in our direction. “Apparently, there was a write-up in the paper a few months ago,” she said. “Ridgeview Prep was accused of discrimination and had to be court-ordered to stop blocking applications.”
“We were discriminated against at the academy for being girls,” Brynn said.
Marcella clicked back to the newspaper article. “Well, that and the fact that we’re not …” She paused, uncomfortable. “We’re not human. But Ridgeview is specifically accused of racial discrimination, rejecting applications of students who weren’t whiteunlessthey had athletic promise.”
“Great,” Sydney said dryly. “Sounds like a wonderful place for me.”
“Yet another reason to take them all down,” Annalise murmured, stirring the now-cold potatoes on her plate. “At this point, I’m not sure how humans haven’t eradicated themselves yet.”
“They’re trying,” Marcella said, giving us a quick rundown on climate change.
The girls and I spent the rest of the evening looking up the demographics of the area, the minutes from school board meetings, and lawsuits that had been settled out of court, but the concept was new to us.
We had very little interaction with the outside world while at Innovations Academy. Our bodies were made in varying shades and types depending on what our sponsors requested, but wewere all grown in the same lab. It never occurred to us that we’d be treated differently based on our skin color.
Now the girls and I research everything with an insatiable thirst for information that the school denied us. But we still have so much to learn about ourselves and about the people who created us. We have so much to learn about society. About the kinds of people who could happily coexist in a world that creates teen girls to abuse.
We thought we were free from the terrible people of Innovations Academy, only to learn that their behavior was a symptom of a larger problem. And it’s complicated, difficult—even for a girl with a computer brain—to fully understand.
Across the hall, Sydney smiles at the guy blocking her path, a megawatt smile that has him catching his breath. She places her palm on his forearm and he steps aside, nearly tripping over his feet. She walks past him, but at the last second her eyes find mine again in a look of pure annoyance.
It seems that half the job of being a girl in public is placating every male we encounter. It’s an uncomfortable truth that exists even outside of Innovations.
I take the next left and walk into my history class.
The room itself is very different from the classrooms at the academy. Here there are posters plastered over all the available wall space, student papers with large As written in red. It’s all so busy, but … interesting. A few of the posters even make me smile at their excellent pun usage. I’m hoping this means the teacher has a sense of humor. It’d be a nice change from thesuffocating educational experience I’m accustomed to.
I’m not sure where to sit, so I walk up to the teacher’s desk and find a youngish man sitting behind the computer. He’s not what I expected. His chin is unshaven, his hair unruly. His sleeves are rolled up past the elbow and his tie is crooked. He glances up at me with a bored expression before taking a sharp gasp.
“Well, hello,” he says with a smile. “I’m Mr. Marsh, and you must be …” He struggles before looking down at a note on his desk. “Philomena Calla.”
“Yes. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
He stares at me and I know I’ve reacted too formally. I feign embarrassment.
“I’m really nervous,” I say.
He stands, smoothing down his wrinkled shirt. “Understandable.” He darts his gaze around the room. “You can sit right there next to Miss Goodwin.”
He motions to a chair in the front row. From everything I’ve gathered in online forums, the front row is the least coveted spot in the classroom. It doesn’t quite make sense to me, though. I wouldn’t be able to hear as well in the back.
“I’m sorry,” he adds, “but I forgot to run off a syllabus for you. I’ll have it for you tomorrow, okay?”
I nod that it’s fine, and Mr. Marsh takes out his phone. He presses a button on the side.
