Middle Ground (6 page)

“There’s something I wanted to talk to you about,” he said. “That’s why I stopped by. I don’t want to drag out this distance thing any longer than necessary.”

I nodded but I couldn’t look at him. My face burned hot with anger and humiliation and went cold at the same time. It was all starting to make sense. That’s why he hadn’t called the past few weeks. He’d realized this could never work. He never told me he loved me because he didn’t. Maybe he was right; he wasn’t capable of feeling it. But he’d wanted to put some distance between us first. And he had the decency to break things off in person even though I wished he’d just done it over a message.

I took longer strides. There had to be a train stop coming up. I focused on signs ahead of me, not on my thoughts, not on something tightening inside of me. I focused on the fastest way to escape.

“I’m looking for an apartment down here,” he said, and the words didn’t make sense. “What do you think about that?” he asked.

I looked up at a digital billboard advertising a diet plan. It showed a couple sitting on a beige couch sharing vitamins instead of eating a meal together. They watched a wall screen instead of each other. Their kids played on the white carpeting with electric learning pads. It made me feel lonely. I stared back at Justin, so confused I could barely think straight. Hadn’t he just told me this wasn’t going to work?

“Why would you look for an apartment?” I asked with annoyance. “You’ve never had your own place before.”

My tone made him hesitate. He ran his hands through his hair. “You’re right,” he said. “I never felt the need to, until now. I always thought having a home would be like dropping an anchor. And my life doesn’t settle down very often, so what’s the point?”

“Exactly,” I agreed. “What’s the point?”

He looked bemused. “I want to be here,” he said.

“You want to live in
Los Angeles?
” I sighed. What a lovely idea. First he tells me he wants to break things off, then he says he’s moving to the city I live in. And he’s hoping it won’t be awkward if we run into each other. That’s just great.
A
for
awesome.

“I think you’re nuts,” I said.

His eyes widened. “Why’s that?”

I stopped walking and pointed out the endless trail of advertisements around us, built so high up they practically covered the sky. “This place is everything you despise. It’s completely plugged in. There’s noise everywhere. They don’t have trees here. They don’t even have fake ones. They’d get in the way of all the digital billboards.”

“Yeah, but—”

“You’d hate it here,” I said, and glared at him. This slow-motion breakup was grating on my heart. I just wanted him to say it and get it over with. He stared back at me with surprise, like I’d tried to slap him. Then a thought entered my head, like a quiet knocking, like a reserve parachute opening and snatching me up seconds before my body would have collided with the ground.

I held up my hand. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Rewind. Start over. You’re in town to look for an apartment?”

“I was just considering it, forget it,” he said quickly, like he’d already dismissed the idea.

“Why were you considering it?” I asked.

He looked at me then, really looked at me, with the same intense stare he gave me at the club. It was a stare that, I realized, wasn’t trying to mess with my mind; he was just trying to make sense of his own.

“Because you’re here,” he said. He paused for a second and then spoke his next words slowly, like he was getting used to the idea. “I’ve been thinking a lot about you, and me, the past few weeks.” He stopped because he was tripping over his words. I started to smile. It seemed like I was the only person who could make his smooth confidence waver.

“You want to live here to be close to me?” I said for him.

“Yes,” he said without hesitating. He watched me carefully. “This isn’t a fling, Maddie. What’s happening here—I don’t do crushes. I want to make this work. Because you’re worth it.” He took a few steps closer to me. “I figured since you told me you loved me a few weeks ago, you’d be okay with the idea.”

I inhaled a breath of relief. “I’m sorry. I thought you were breaking up with me,” I confided. Justin walked up to me and we were both smiling. He ran his fingers under my chin and lifted my face.

“
You’re
the one who’s nuts,” he informed me.

He leaned down and kissed me, and I realized Justin’s decision would change everything. This move wouldn’t be temporary. He was moving more than his life. He was moving his heart. Putting it closer than down the road from me. He was putting it right in my hands. Right where I’d wanted it since the first day I met him.

An open ZipShuttle came to a stop next to us and Justin pulled me inside. We scanned our fingerprints and fell onto the car seat. I broke away from his mouth long enough to mumble the address to Pat and Noah’s apartment, where I was crashing tonight, and then I was pulling at Justin’s jacket because it wouldn’t let me close enough to his skin. He pushed me back against the plastic seats and started to climb on top of me when a high-pitched ring interrupted us. Justin peeled his lips away from mine. We looked at the wall screen in the front of the car and a yellow light informed us we had a message waiting.

“Are you on call tonight?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No, but we should take it.”

He reluctantly slid off me and I sat up and adjusted my dress, which was nearly stretched off one shoulder. Justin touched the screen to accept the message. I froze when an image of my dad stared back at me. He sat behind his desk in his office, a place I knew too well. I swallowed and met his eyes. Even through the wall screen, he could use them like weapons.

“Hello, Madeline,” he said, his voice steely and formal. The screen lit up the dark space around us in a white glow, exposing everything. I hadn’t spoken to my father in months. During that time, I convinced myself I was brave enough to stand up to him. Now I wasn’t so sure.

“Dad,” I said, trying to compose myself after the shock of seeing him.

He looked at his hands, clasped calmly in front of him. “Interesting prank you pulled tonight,” he said with a small smile.

I looked at the clock on the corner of the wall screen. It was almost 1:00 a.m. “Do you ever sleep?” I asked him.

He sighed. “I might sleep a little better if my daughter’s behavior weren’t lethal to my career.”

“Dad—”

He held up a hand to silence me. “What you did tonight was very foolish, especially considering your situation.”

“No one can prove it was me,” I said. “I didn’t use my real identity on the computer. I’m not stupid.”

He laughed at this. “No, you certainly are not stupid. That isn’t the problem. It would just please me if you’d focus your intellect on more law-abiding goals.” His eyes passed over me and concentrated on Justin for a few seconds. Disdain crossed my father’s face, like Justin was a kidnapper holding me hostage. Justin stared back at him with indifference. He could repel emotions as easily as my father could.

“I’m not trying to fight
you,
” I told him.

“Encouraging kids to drop out of digital school isn’t fighting me?”

“DS is corrupt,” I said. “It’s gone too far. It trains people to be so plugged in, they’re addicted. By the time kids are done with school, they can’t unplug. Ever. You started a disease.”

“You don’t understand what I’m trying to do.”

“You’re blindfolding people,” I said.

My dad took a deep breath. “People need to be controlled, Madeline. There need to be rules to maintain any kind of order in this world. I’m trying to make this country a peaceful place. I want you and Joe and everyone else’s children to be safe. That’s all I’m trying to do. I wish you could accept that.”

“And while you’re so busy rescuing people you forget to listen to them. You forget they want choices, that they’re human.”

“And you forget that you’re crushing your mother’s happiness. Do you forget that she’s worried sick about you? That you’re tearing your family apart?”

“That’s not fair,” I said. “This isn’t all my fault.”

My dad’s eyes fell on Justin again. “It’s interesting how trouble always finds you when you’re with certain people.” Justin’s hand squeezed mine tighter. He had never spoken a word to my father and he seemed determined to keep it that way. “I’m getting tired of bailing you out after you make mistakes, especially when you associate with people who drag you down to their level.”

I tightened my lips. “If you’re so disgusted with my life, then just stay out of it,” I said, but I regretted the words as soon as they left my mouth. I didn’t want distance from my father. I wanted acceptance.

My dad stared back at me. “I can’t do that. You’re my daughter.”

His words stung because I didn’t feel like his daughter. I felt like he saw me as something he needed to fix, something that had come loose but with the right winding and tightening would lock safely into place again.

“That doesn’t mean you own me.”

“No, it means I love you,” he stated, but with no emotion. It made my jaw clench. He was using love to make me feel guilty. Love was just a chess piece to him.

“This isn’t a rebellious streak I’m going through, Dad. You can’t fix me with threats and counseling and grounding me. This is who I am. Maybe we need to work together, not against each other all the time.”

He stared at me. “Sometimes I think you don’t even regret what you did when you were fifteen,” he told me.

“I don’t know if I should regret it,” I told him. “Maybe I did the
right
thing. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to prove.”

My dad rubbed his forehead between his fingers. “I thought sending you to L.A. would give you a fresh start. I thought it would keep you away from the people who are trying to take advantage of you. I hoped you wouldn’t take your liberty for granted this time.”

He said goodbye and switched off his connection. The wall screen turned a blank gray. I looked at Justin and his face was sympathetic. He leaned his forehead close to mine and pulled my hair back behind my shoulders.

“It’s nice to know the family accepts me,” he said.

“They’re not too accepting of me these days either,” I reminded him.

“Your dad has a point,” he said.

I frowned and asked him what he meant.

“Maybe he’d agree to listen if you weren’t associating with me.” He grinned but it stopped before it got to his eyes. “You realize I’m number one on his shit list.”

“You’re number two; I’m number one,” I said, and he smirked.

“Sorry I tried to steal your number-one status,” he told me and the next thing I knew my body was shoved against Justin’s chest as the ZipShuttle brakes scraped against the tracks and the car screeched to a stop. Justin grabbed a handrail at the edge of the seat to keep us from slamming into the wall. In the beam of headlights we saw someone in a black hooded sweatshirt standing in front of the car. Every ZipShuttle had a heat sensor to detect animals or pedestrians on the tracks in order to stop the car, but I’d never seen it happen before.

The hooded figure jumped off the tracks and ran to the side of the shuttle and banged on the door.

Justin slid the door open and a boy fell through and yelled for us to go. The door beeped closed and Justin ordered another address while the boy collapsed into the seat across from us. I instinctively tightened up and pulled my legs away from him.

His hood slid back far enough to reveal a kid, younger than me and Justin. He was breathing so hard his eyes were pinched, and sweat dripped off his chin. He reached up and used his arm to wipe sweat off his forehead and that’s when I noticed a handcuff dangling around his left wrist, although his right hand was free.

Justin leaned closer to him while the shuttle picked up speed and asked him what happened, but the boy was still panting for air and couldn’t speak. Justin took his phone out of his pocket and used it to scan the kid’s fingerprint. Once the boy realized what Justin was doing he jerked his hand away and tried to elbow Justin in the head. Justin grabbed his arms and pinned them down against the seat.

“Nice swing,” he complimented him.

“Go to hell,” the boy managed to say through his gasps.

I raised my eyebrows and quietly watched him, impressed he had the nerve to be so defiant. But staring at him, I understood how he felt, because I’d been in his shoes—running, handcuffed, trusting no one but the space inside my own skin. When you’re helpless it forces you to be callous. It’s a natural shield. His hard eyes looked back at me and I could see a mixture of desperation and anger. I noticed the gold emblem of the LAPD on his handcuffs.

Within seconds, Scott’s face appeared on the ZipShuttle screen. While Justin was better at hands-on work, Scott handled the technical side of fighting digital school. Computer systems have dozens of languages and Scott was fluent in all of them. He was surrounded by a row of computer monitors and he yawned lazily at our image. His feet, clad in white socks, were propped up on the desk.

“Background check?” he asked, and Justin nodded. He threw a few potato chips in his mouth and mumbled, “I thought you were off tonight?” Scott’s eyes trailed down a long list on one of his monitors. “His name’s Jeremy Stevens.”

Jeremy looked up.

“He was arrested in Ventura two hours ago for committing, uh-oh, code two twenty-seven.”

“What is that?” I asked. Assault? Attempted murder? Rape?

“He was trying to break into the DS grading system,” Scott said.

Jeremy stared at Scott with surprise. The hood slid all the way off his head and sweat dripped from his short blond hair down the side of his face. He creased his eyebrows and surveyed my dress and heels, Justin’s casual clothes, and Scott’s face on the wall screen.

“Who are you guys?” he asked as his breathing settled.

Scott chuckled at something else on his screen. “Looks like he was trying to alter some test scores. Most of the classes he was failing were in computer science,” Scott said. “Go figure. You usually have to understand the system in order to break into it.” He laughed again.