Taken (3 page)

• A chauffeur (named something practical, like James or John)

For small families, the
Estate Plan
provides two full-time servants:

• A maid/cook (ours is named Victoria)

• A butler/chauffeur (ours is named Albert)

For individuals, the
Townhouse Plan
provides one full-time servant:

• A maid/cook (see above for name choices)

For the
Estate Plan
(my family’s plan), the brochure went on to explain:

An RDS maid is not a cleaning woman, and an RDS butler is not a gardener. The maid cooks meals and attends to the children and to the lady of the house. The butler serves meals and attends to cars and to the gentleman of the house. The maid hires and supervises all other services for the interior, and the butler hires and supervises all other services for the exterior. In addition, RDS servants are rigorously trained to serve as paramedics and as bodyguards, and to serve a truly authentic English tea.

What they didn’t put in the brochure, but what everyone knew, was that RDS servants were expected to protect the lives of their employers at all costs. That included, if necessary, dying in the line of duty.

Dying in the line of duty. That was another unhelpful, un-calming thought, and I kicked myself for having it. No dying. No. And no teenage soldier rapists. Get out of my mind!

I heard footsteps outside, so I turned from the vidscreen to watch the door. The dark boy entered, presumably relieved. He sure didn’t look any happier, though. After a quick, cold glance at me, he resumed his silent screen-watching. I observed him for a minute. I even considered speaking to him, but his face was so hard-set that I decided against it.

Instead, I went back to my safety zone: to the minute details of my real life. I concentrated once more on the events of December 21.

I remembered that Mickie Meyers’s airplane (which she piloted herself) landed at The Highlands’ airstrip while Albert was driving me to satschool. You didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to deduce when my stepmother was arriving. Her plane, a twenty-seat Gulfstream 50, had (and still has)
MICKIE MEYERS
painted on the side.

She and her crew always “hit the ground running,” as she put it. They’d have their equipment set up shortly after Albert and I had rolled up to the row of townhouse office buildings on the Square. Albert dropped me off and watched attentively, Glock in hand, as I walked into the building that housed my satschool.

In theory, I attended the prestigious Amsterdam Academy, located on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. In actual fact, I went to school in a room with a mahogany conference table, eight executive chairs on rollers, and a large vidscreen connected by satellite to the real school in New York. And I was not alone in doing this. Other kids, clumped around other tables in other parts of the U.S., also attended this same satschool.

Our teacher, Mrs. Veck, had retired from the Chicago school system in order to move with her husband to The Highlands. She taught a combined seventh-and-eighth-grade class. In addition to her, we had a series of vidteachers in New York. Throughout the day, the scene on the vidscreen changed, from classroom to classroom and from teacher to teacher, but we never moved from our adjustable, ergonomic leather-match chairs.

As a result, I felt no more connected to the Amsterdam Academy than I would have to a school in a movie. Basically, I sat there with Patience and we gossiped all day about the boys we saw on the life-size screen. We tried to ignore everybody in our real classroom as best we could. We only semi-listened to the teachers on the screen, although we usually listened attentively to Mrs. Veck.

Mrs. Veck had agreed to take part in Mickie Meyers’s latest bogus holiday program, titled “An Edwardian Christmas Celebration.” She stood at the front of the room next to the smartboard and waited for us all to arrive. She had already placed a pile of calligraphy pens, markers, scissors, and card stock in the middle of the table.

To begin class, she held up a colorful Christmas card and rotated it so that we could all see. “Good morning, everyone. I am holding up a Christmas card from the Edwardian era in England, approximately from 1901 to 1910. Those were the years of the reign of King Edward the Seventh, the eldest son of Queen Victoria. Notice the use of red and green on the cards.”

She picked up a second one. “Notice the red berries and the green holly, the red presents and the green Christmas trees. Our task is to create our own Christmas cards honoring the traditions of the Edwardian era. Who can tell me what some of those might have been?”

A lengthy pause followed. Mrs. Veck placed herself in this awkward position over and over again, several times a day, like a dog with an electric fence collar that keeps zapping itself. No one ever volunteered to answer. Ever. Then Mrs. Veck would begin at her right with Maureen Dugan and work her way around the table, attempting to elicit some intelligent remark from someone.

Patience and I would have had no trouble answering the question, but we didn’t want to give the evil Dugans any ammunition. Mrs. Veck finally gave up and said, “How about tannenbaums, cherubs, Yule logs, stars, mistletoe, snow, sleighs? You can use any of these images as you create your cards. I will pass out several cards now for you to use as models.”

She left her position and walked around the table, handing a card to each of us. My card showed a little girl in a red dress. She was lugging a snow-covered Christmas tree over her shoulder.

“Let’s all get to work! We’ll want to show Ms. Meyers eight lovely Edwardian Christmas cards when she arrives.” Mrs. Veck then stepped out of the room, leaving us to our work. We all knew she hadn’t gone far. The entire back wall was a two-way mirror behind which Mrs. Veck, or any parent observers, could sit and watch us. So we bent our heads and got to work.

The evil Dugan sisters sat right across from me. They were new to The Highlands. Some people thought they were twins because they looked so much alike, but they were actually born twelve months apart, to the day. (I always thought that was creepy. So did Patience.) Anyway, Maureen was the older one. She had been kept back because she couldn’t read very well. Pauline was the younger one. She couldn’t read, either. She sat next to Maureen, directly across from Patience. Both Dugan girls had dark fake tans penetrating their top two layers of derma. They both had fake blond hair, fake white smiles, and fake red nails. Could fake boobs be far behind?

The girl next to Pauline was Sierra Vasquez. Although she never exerted herself in any way, Sierra always had dark circles beneath her eyes and drooping lids above them. Her hobbies included sneering and muttering mean things to the Dugans about Patience and me. She was bony, with joints that actually showed through her skin at the knees and elbows, like the ends of broomsticks. Her short black hair was so intensely sprayed in place that she looked like she was wearing a bicycle helmet.

Whitney Rice was at the end of that side of the table. Whitney had very dry brown hair that she brushed straight out and sprayed in place so that it looked like lacquered straw. She had extremely broad shoulders, but skinny legs. She also had shifty eyes and a tendency to wear gingham, giving her the overall appearance of an untrustworthy scarecrow.

Sterling Johnston was the first person on our side of the table, one of the two boys. He was being treated for attention deficit disorder, as Mrs. Veck explained to us all in one of her “teachable moments.” He was taking a drug called methylphenidate, which supposedly kept him focused, but which had an unfortunate side effect. Ever since the onset of puberty, Sterling had been relegated to the back of all class photos because of his tendency to be in a perpetual state of sexual excitement. This was evident whenever he was called on to go to the smartboard to write something. Patience and I avoided him, but the girls across the table sometimes pretended to drop things in order to look at him.

Hopewell Patterson, Patience’s brother, was next. He was a tall boy with a uniform layer of excess body fat extending from his neck down to his ankles, giving him a sausage-like appearance (just like his father). His terrible posture and his low self-esteem made him appear to be spineless. I was always surprised when I saw him stand up, or walk, or do other common vertebrate things. Like everyone else, even I had succumbed to the obvious temptation to refer to him as “Hopeless.”

Hopewell had been taken three years ago, right before the Pattersons moved to The Highlands. The kidnappers had cut off his left ear, and he had never really recovered from the experience, physically or psychologically. That area of his head was always covered by a clump of thick brown hair. There was a rumor in The Highlands that Patience had also been taken and that they had cut off her little toe. I knew that was not true, because Patience was my best friend and we had gone together for pedicures. Patience, fortunately, had inherited her mother’s genetic traits. She was shorter and thinner than her brother (and three years younger—he had been kept back twice, due to poor grades). Patience had naturally blond hair, which she wore in cute, curly ringlets. Unlike her brother, she had excellent posture and a very feisty spirit. She also possessed the other hortatory name in the class.

Mrs. Veck had begun school last year with one of her teachable moments, an improvised lesson on hortatory names. I guess she meant well, but she basically ruined our lives. Mrs. Veck announced cheerfully that “a hortatory name is a name that embodies a virtue, such as Patience, or Charity, or Faith. Such names were very popular among the first Europeans who settled here, the Pilgrims.”

The lesson went on from there, but the evil Dugans weren’t listening. They had heard enough. From that day on, they referred to Patience and me as “the hors.” We minded it at first, but then we kind of embraced the title.

I lay on my ambulance stretcher and thought about how they all looked, and how colorful the table looked, and how thin my own hands looked as I labored silently among them. I was the smallest member of the group, due to the fact that my mother had been only 1.5 meters tall and my father was 1.7. I had mousy brown hair, from my father’s side, that I wore shoulder length. I had bright blue eyes that I kept cast down on my work. I had skinny legs, a freckled nose, and a tight mouth that would not smile, owing to the presence of braces.

After a while, a commotion behind the classroom mirror caused us all to stop coloring and cutting. I knew what it had to be, and I whispered to Patience, “It’s Mickie.”

Patience raised the right side of her lip. “Gross.”

“Yeah. She’ll be in and out for the next ten days.”

“Is she going to make us be on her vidshow?”

I shook my head fatalistically. “Is the sun going to set in the west?”

Mickie Meyers threw open the classroom door and strode in. She was followed by her producer, a fierce-looking woman named Lena; then by her burly cameraman, Kurt; and finally by Mrs. Veck.

Most people get excited when they see Mickie Meyers in person. Her red rectangular glasses, her big white teeth, the prominent mole to the left of her mouth, have become fixtures on vidscreens across the U.S. Honestly, I can’t understand what people see in her.

My relationship with Mickie hadn’t changed much since the divorce. Very little had changed since then. Mickie had kept our last name. She explained to me that it was “for brand identity.” I think she liked the alliteration, too. Victoria and Albert started calling her “Ms. Meyers” instead of “Mrs. Meyers.” My dad started bad-mouthing her openly. That was about it.

Mickie used the kids in our class shamelessly for her education segments and her holiday segments and her family segments, and this day would be no exception. She shouted, “Hello, children! How is everybody?” Mickie didn’t wait for a reply, but continued, “And a happy Christmas! A happy Edwardian Christmas. Right, Mrs. Veck?”

Mrs. Veck responded promptly, “That’s right. The children have been working on cards—”

“So they have! Lovely. Charity, honey, let me see yours.”

I held up my red-berry-and-green-holly creation for her to admire.

“Lovely. A lovely work in progress. And I see the rest of you are still hard at work on your works in progress, too. So here’s what I’d like to do. Lena has a box of finished cards that she’ll spread out on the table here. Go ahead, Lena. And Kurt will get some shots of all of you with your finished cards and your works in progress.”

Lena and the cameraman quickly followed those instructions as my ex-stepmother continued, “Now, while you are finishing up, I’d like to record a comment or two about how an Edwardian Christmas is different from a modern Christmas. Mrs. Veck, maybe you could lead a discussion of that.”

Mrs. Veck smiled bravely. “Certainly. We were just discussing how the Edwardian era got its name. Who remembers that?”

After three seconds of dead airtime, Mickie filled in. “It was from King Edward. Right, Patience?”

Patience gulped. “Right.”

“And which King Edward was it, honey? Was he the seventh?”

“Yes.”

“Now why don’t you put that all together for me into an answer for Mrs. Veck.”

“It was King Edward the Seventh.”

Mrs. Veck nodded gratefully as Kurt the cameraman squeezed around her and continued to shoot. “Now, who can tell us how these cards differ from our modern cards?”

During the silence that followed, Mickie Meyers directed the cameraman to vid certain specific cards. Then she looked right at me and raised her penciled eyebrows high, indicating that I should provide the answer.

At that moment, Sierra mumbled something to Pauline.

Patience seized the opportunity to suggest, “I think Sierra knows.”

“Really? Okay, Sierra. You go ahead, honey.”

Sierra pulled her lips back in an enormous sneer, like a cornered raccoon. “I didn’t say anything.”

“You didn’t? Well, how about saying a line for the segment, like ‘Have a happy Edwardian Christmas’?”

“I’m not gonna say that.”

“No? What would you like to say?”