Jesse 2.0 Read online

  “I write, if that’s what you mean.”

  I mocked hitting myself on the head with my palm. “Duh. I knew there had to be a reason you liked reading so much.”

  “I would like reading anyway,” he corrected me.

  “Sure you would.”

  We would have continued that way, fake (or at least I hoped it was fake) arguing, if we hadn’t reached the other side right then. The crowd flowed down a flight of steps to the next elevator, and voila, fifty stories down we were home.

  Inside, the house smelled like my grandmother, who always smelled like the traditional Mexican mixture of chilies, cumin, and oregano she used to cook with before she passed away. My mom used to complain about the constant cooking, her nosiness, her scent, which permeated all our clothes, Grandma’s refusal to eat at any restaurant that didn’t serve chiles en nogada, which she called the “most patriotic of foods.” Then she died, and it was like mom became her overnight.

  “Principito?”

  Shit. Shit, shit, shit.

  My mom emerged from the kitchen at the end of the hall. She was wearing one of my grandmother’s old huipils, which had probably been given to my grandmother by her own mother a billion years ago, considering how faded the red patterns were. It went to her midthigh, revealing tan legs fit from long days at the factory. The only other thing she had on was a pair of red flip-flops, which meant she’d probably had a good day; when my dad got home, she would let my dad twirl her around and call her amada.

  “Who’s this?” she asked in English as she turned on the polite smile she reserved for my teachers and our landlord.

  “Madison,” Maddy answered before I could. “I took the wrong bus, and Jesse said he would drive me home if you said it was okay.”

  “I’m going to show him my room real quick,” I said before my mom could interfere. “I’ll take him home after that, if it’s okay?”

  “Okay.” My mom tilted her head, and I felt like she could see right through me. “But keep the door open.”

  Maddy flushed an adorable pink and then headed toward the room he probably assumed was mine. I mean, it was the only door covered in black paper and white chalk drawings, so it obviously wasn’t anyone else’s. Inside, he stopped a few feet in and just stared.

  “Like it?” I asked, and he didn’t answer.

  I tried to see the room through his eyes. Red paint on black. Lines of poetry spinning in the gray clouds above LA, which was decorated in colorful calaveras. White scratch marks. Handprints.

  “That’s a lot of skulls,” he said finally.

  “I like mixing Mexican stuff into my work. Besides, it convinced my mom to let me draw on the walls.”

  Luckily, I’d made the bed. Maddy sat on the edge, about as far as he could go without falling off, and I sat down next to him. From that angle, we were looking straight at the only happy thing in the room: a giant burning sun that took up about five feet of wall space. I was suddenly conscious of where my hands were, clasped and resting on my lap in the least holdable position possible. Not that I expected him to take my hand, but I didn’t want to rule it out.

  For a while no one spoke. On the way there, I’d been so sure of myself, but now that he had seen my art, I felt weirdly shy.

  “What’s with the sun?” Maddy asked finally, breaking the silence.

  “Oh, you know, it’s a star. The largest object in our solar system. It has—”

  “No, not the sun,” he interrupted. “I mean that sun. There. On the wall.”

  “Oh, right.” That sun. The one I’d drawn at the end of my last episode, when I thought nothing could pull me out of bed. “It’s a reminder.”

  “Of what?”

  “That eventually, the sun always comes out.”

  Chapter Three

  Maddy

  WHAT THE hell is going on? I asked myself over and over as I paced outside of Room 20. A thousand times I raised my hand to knock, then thought better of it. What if I’d just seen Jesse’s face plastered onto someone else’s, the way I’d thought I’d recognized him in the street, or on the cover of a book, or through a foggy window? What if I hadn’t?

  No. It couldn’t be him. I had been the one to find him, after all—I’d been the one to barge into his room after he missed third period and find him on the floor surrounded by all the pill bottles his parents kept locked away for just this reason. I’d been the one to lift his hand and let it drop, lift and drop, lift and drop. I’d been the one to throw a lamp through the wall and that stupid sun painting.

  The urge to faint had passed, but I now felt sick to my stomach. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to scream. My hands shook uncontrollably, so I stuck them in my pockets, where I found the mace my parents had bought me after Jesse and I got jumped coming home from school. Just in case, they’d said, as though one spray could save me from getting robbed or worse.

  Before I could chicken out, I used my key card to unlock the door and slipped in. Jesse, or the boy who looked like Jesse, was sitting on the bed with his back to me, but when I entered, he turned to face me.

  Yes. Him. No question about it.

  Neither of us said anything for a while. I didn’t get any closer—I wasn’t sure I wanted to—and he didn’t either. He just stared at me with his mismatched eyes, as though he could communicate everything I wanted to know in just a look, and I stared back at him as though he was about to go full Frankenstein’s monster and attack me.

  “What are you?” Those weren’t the words I’d meant to say, but they came out anyway.

  “I’m Jesse,” Not-Jesse told me.

  “Jesse is dead.”

  “Yet here I am. I missed you, Maddy.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  This, whatever this was, hadn’t changed. He’d always been vague, infuriatingly vague, especially when he knew I wanted the facts.

  “Tell me what you are or I’ll call your parents,” I threatened. Honestly, I didn’t know if I meant it or not—Jesse’s parents had been distant going on downright cold since he’d passed away, and then they’d disappeared without a word—but all that mattered was that he believed me.

  “Fine. But sit down, Maddy—you look like you’re going to have a heart attack.”

  “Isn’t that what you wanted?” I fired back, but I leaned against the wall anyway. “To scare me? It’s not enough I had to watch Jesse die once, but now you want me to witness it all over again?”

  “I didn’t know you were here.” He had his hands clasped in his lap, that nervous, adorable thing he did when he wanted to touch me. How could whatever this thing was know to do that?

  “Oh really?” I asked, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “I promise. I mean, I came to LA to see you, but I couldn’t find you. Turns out I probably did see you when I waited after school, but I didn’t recognize you. You look so… different.”

  I couldn’t tell what Not-Jesse meant by that, and I wasn’t sure I cared… yet I found myself brushing my hand through my now-blond hair anyway.

  “Are you a robot?” I asked to change the subject.

  “No.”

  “AI of some kind?”

  “God, no.”

  “Then what are you?”

  “I’m a repro.”

  Repro. The word was foreign, and yet it sounded oddly familiar, as though I’d heard it before.

  “What is that, exactly?” I wanted to know, and yet something in the back of my mind was telling me I didn’t.

  “Repro is short for reproduction. An exact copy. A clone, for lack of a better word.”

  “That’s impossible. You can’t be.” My knees were giving in again, and the hand-shaking had increased its speed. “Human cloning is illegal.”

  “Of course it is. But no one grew me in a lab, if that’s what you’re thinking. I was copied using the same technology that scientists use to make prototypes for transporters.”

  None of this made any sense. Whatever this thing was
didn’t even sound like Jesse anymore; Jesse never used words like prototypes or transporters or clones. All he ever talked about were art pieces, bands, and his parents… normal teen stuff. And his depression, of course, when he felt like it.

  “Think of it this way.” He held up his two pointer fingers. “This is your Jesse”—he shook his left finger—“and this is me. Now, the way a transporter normally works is it takes this Jesse”—he shook his left finger again—“and transports him over here, to some other place where a transporter is set up.”

  “So where do you come into this equation?” I said, trying hard to keep my voice level. “Because as far as I can tell, you’re still not answering my question.”

  “Just stay with me. People think transporters carry atoms from one location to another, but really, they just copy the original and reproduce an exact match on the other side. So, if they really wanted to, scientists could—”

  “Transport a dead body.” Everything clicked in an instant. “Only the body wouldn’t be dead on the other side.”

  “Exactly. They could use their program to adjust a few synapses here, restart a few organs there… and a new Jesse would be born. Exactly the same as the old Jesse, in exactly the same body, with exactly the same memories. Every cell in exactly the right place. Every genetic code perfectly copied.”

  I already knew all of this. I had seen it played out on the smart board in my dad’s basement office a million times, when he’d fallen asleep at his desk again and I needed to cover him with a blanket Mom sent me down with. The mad scientist, she always teased. He would stop sleeping if he could, just to give himself more time to figure this out. This being a new machine. A transporter, to be precise.

  Dad had been doing a whole lot more sleeping lately. I should have realized what that meant.

  “I didn’t have a choice,” Jesse said, breaking in to my thoughts. His voice was low, lacking all of its teasing tone. “No one asked me if I wanted to come back. Honestly, they probably wouldn’t have liked the answer. I killed myself for a reason, and I’d do it again, if I could.”

  “Why can’t you?”

  Jesse tapped his temple. “Just one little adjustment. Oh, don’t worry, the same old tortured soul is there, but whenever I go to actually do anything about it, my whole body shuts down. Falls asleep, basically. Other than that, nothing’s changed—adjustments are expensive, and you know the position my folks are in.”

  “So the pool thing was a ruse?”

  “More like a last-ditch attempt, I guess. It’s the longest I’ve managed to hold off passing out, and I figured once I was drowning, shutting down would only help.”

  I needed time to think, but I also needed more time with Jesse. Knowing Dr. Hemman, he had already called Jesse’s parents, and they were driving there as we spoke. Any minute the nurse would come finish his paperwork, and then he’d be locked up for the night—not even my pass could get me back in then.

  “We need to get you out of here.” The words sounded much more confident than I felt. “We’ll have to go out through the window and then around the side to the main road to catch a cab. There are usually a few driving around here this time of day.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Those sincere eyes of his… for a second, I forgot all about the repro stuff and just stared at them. To distract myself, I went over to the window.

  “But you lost me at ‘window.’ This baby has a standard key card lock,” he said as he tapped the glass, “and I don’t think there’s any way you can—”

  I ripped off the hatch on the side of the panel, found the number panel, and keyed in the emergency code: 9119. I’d seen Dr. Hemman do it once, when a patient had hyperventilated and needed some air, and stored it away in my brain. Jesse, the original one, had nicknamed me encyclopedia for just that reason, as well as my uncanny ability to quote any story or poem I’d ever read.

  “Good old encyclopedia,” Not-Jesse said, as if he could read my mind, and I shivered.

  The ground was level with the floor, so Jesse simply stepped over the ledge onto the perfectly green grass and then put out a hand to help me. Instead of touching him, I grabbed the window frame and pulled myself through, accidentally trampling part of a flower bed in the process. Then we skirted the facility, passing the gardener’s toolshed and automatic mower, avoiding the guards and patients who walked back and forth along the path, until we reached the brick archway with the cast-iron gate meant to put new patients at ease, as Dr. Hemman liked to say. One more card swipe and beep, we were through.

  “Now what?” Jesse asked as he trailed down the road after me. In the distance the tall LA skyscrapers blocked the setting sun.

  “Now?” I put my hand out to flag down the next cab as it made its zombie circle through the neighborhood. “Now we run.”

  Chapter Four

  Jesse

  WE COULDN’T go home. One, because my home was now in Boise, and two, because Maddy had figured out what I hadn’t told him: his father had invented the very machine that had brought me back. Which meant he knew about me. Which meant he’d lied.

  Maddy didn’t need to tell me he’d figured it out—he always figured everything out, from every birthday gift to every ending of a movie, and this was no exception. The author in him seemed to scream for plot analysis, symbolism, characterization; it screamed for a tearing up into parts and a piecing back together of every incident that happened around him, even when he didn’t want to. The author in him could listen to a song I’d heard for ten years and find something, some word choice or thematic shift that changed the meaning of the whole song. Beautiful, and yet very, very tiring.

  Not me, though. I saw the world in big splashes. Colors. Still life setups. Shadows. Black and white. All that other stuff just faded into the background, a whole lot of details I didn’t need. Maybe it was the fact that I was always getting by, or maybe it was the reason why I could.

  Until I couldn’t anymore.

  “How about the BB?” he asked.

  “No way. My mom has her tendrils in that place like an octopus around its prey.”

  “I think you mean tentacles,” Maddy corrected, “and I see your point. Well, what about the suburbs? Rancho Palos Verdes or Calabasas?”

  “The tentacles,” I reminded him. “And anyway, your parents must know people there too.”

  “Then what do you suggest?” Maddy was still waving his arm vigorously despite there being no cabs in sight. “What was the plan back when you were going to find me at school?”

  “I didn’t get that far.”

  He didn’t have to say Of course you didn’t for me to know he’d thought it. Typical Jesse, barging into a situation without thinking through the consequences, like the time I turned the words FUCK YOU graffitied on our classroom door into a black and white drawing of a forest. My English teacher smelled the fumes from my markers, and bam, I was in detention with the delinquent who wrote the words in the first place.

  “How about the forest?” I said, the memory triggering a seed of an idea in my mind.

  “What forest?” Maddy asked. He waved his hands around. “In case you don’t remember, this is California. Home of the ‘forty-year fire’ which killed whatever natural trees we had left around here. This is not exactly Walden, you know?”

  “Not really,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t launch into one of his extremely long book lectures, “but I get the gist. No trees. No forest. No problem.”

  Maddy rolled his eyes.

  “Seriously. Let’s get a car, hit the road, and get as far away from this place as we can.”

  “A cab? My parents will see the bill.”

  But I didn’t answer. A cab came around the corner, and when we got in and swiped Maddy’s card, I gave the GPS system the address of one of the few people in LA who still owned a car. Uncle Ric, full name Ricardo Francisco Hernandez, owner of Classic Car World.

  “HOLY SHIT.” Uncle Ric stood on his porch in just his boxers and a grun
gy white undershirt, a towel wrapped around his neck to catch the sweat that ran down his back when he worked on his babies. He just kept saying, “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit,” as he stared me down.

  “Guess they didn’t tell him either,” Maddy muttered. Then he said, “Hey, Uncle Ric.”

  “Hey, Maddy. Holy shit. Long time no see. Shit, shit, shit.”

  “It’s okay, Uncle Ric.” I took a step toward the porch, and he stepped back—people had been doing that a lot today—but then thought better of it and came down the stairs to hug me. His chest was even wetter than it looked, and touching him was like hugging a giant slimy fish.

  “What the shit are you doing here, sobrino? I thought you were dead.” Uncle Ric shook his head like a confused dog. We all loved him to death, but Uncle Ric was a little slow on the upload. “No, I know you were dead. I saw your body and everything. You were, like, super pale and crazy-looking.”

  “Yeah… well, I’m alive again.”

  “I can see that. Shit. What happened?”

  I explained the whole repro thing in the simplest terms I could think of. Me. Copied. Not dead anymore.

  “Las obras del diablo,” he said when I finished, but I didn’t take offense. Uncle Ric had a thing for blaming everything bad that happened on el diablo, just like he had a thing for cursing incessantly when he was upset. Usually he did both at once.

  “I can’t believe your mom didn’t tell me,” he said as he sat down on the porch step. “Me, her own brother.”

  “That was part of the deal,” I said, and this part was addressed to Maddy as well. “No contact. No one could ever find out. Why else would my parents move us to a small town outside of Boise?”

  “True.” Uncle Ric wiped the profuse sweat from his forehead. “But then why are you here now?”

  I motioned toward Maddy with my head.

  “Ah. True love and all that stuff.”

  Maddy blushed, moving beyond his usual pink to a deep red.