Variant Lost (The Evelyn Maynard Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  Once again, grief threatened to pull me under. I choked down a mouthful of pancakes, eyes stinging as I stared down at the countertop.

  Marty chatted about pointless things while I ate and tried really hard to stop myself from crying, then she left for work. Once I was alone, I took a few deep breaths, unable to finish the food.

  I put the dishes in the dishwasher, slung my bag over my shoulder, and walked to school. It was the same route I had taken every day for the last year. The same boring suburban streets, the same cars, the same trees.

  It took me a lazy twenty minutes to walk to Nampa High School. Students were milling about, trying to squeeze in every last second of free time before the first class. As I approached the low brick building, a brown-haired boy wearing a bomber jacket jogged over the grass to me.

  “Hey, Eve!” He smiled. I had a feeling he was on the football team, but I couldn’t remember his name. “Happy birthday.”

  How did he know? I wasn’t exactly friends with anyone.

  I didn’t reply to his birthday wish. I simply stood there with a confused look on my face, so he filled the silence with his own voice. “Can I take you out for your birthday tonight? Or maybe tomorrow? Whenever you’re free, really. I have the game next week, but other than that . . .” He looked at me expectantly.

  Nameless football guy didn’t actually want to take me out. He just wanted to get lucky.

  When I’d first arrived in Nampa, I went through a brief promiscuous phase. I was doing whatever I could to ignore that my mother had died, so I fully embraced everything about high school life I couldn’t have embraced with her around. I dated a lot, no one exclusively, and gained a bit of a reputation. On top of that, I could make really good fake IDs, and I suddenly had a whole crowd of people to distract myself with.

  My sudden popularity didn’t last long. Just as I couldn’t settle into my new “home,” I also couldn’t find it in me to try to make friends. I had attempted to embrace my new freedom, but that was just it—this so-called freedom existed because my mother wasn’t around anymore. I couldn’t make myself give a shit about any of the trivial things I’d so desperately cared about before she died. Who cares about making friends when you’ve lost the only family you ever had?

  I became a loner and only made time for my science and my mysterious stranger. Every once in a while, one of the boys would try to ask me out on another date. I always said no.

  Football guy was still waiting for my response, but thinking about my rebellious months made me think about how my mother would have lost her shit if she’d known how careless I’d been. I didn’t know what was more distracting or unwanted—the unbidden emotion or the persistent itchiness on my arms. I needed to get away from the linebacker before I had a very public emotional meltdown.

  “My mother died one year ago today,” I deadpanned.

  I hadn’t intended to say that, but the boy’s reaction was proving enough of a distraction. He looked equal parts horrified and uncomfortable. As he opened his mouth to say something, I blinked once and walked past him into the school building. I preferred to let him think I was rude and odd than to have him see me cry.

  The rest of the day passed without incident. With my mother’s face constantly at the forefront of my mind, the sensation of her hand sliding out of mine achingly present on my skin, I went through the motions. I went to classes, ate lunch, aced the chemistry quiz, and did my best to avoid the other students. Word of my strange declaration to football guy spread, and before second period was over, I started getting weird looks. Thankfully, everyone gave me a wide berth.

  By the end of the day, I was sick of all the passive attention, tired from constantly being on the lookout for the overwhelming grief that was becoming impossible to ignore. I just wanted to get back to Marty and Baz’s and lose myself in an article or a school assignment.

  The day had turned out to be beautiful, the afternoon sun warm enough that I could take my sweater off and walk home in just a tank top, but my foul mood wouldn’t allow me to appreciate it. The itchy, tingly sensation had spread up my arms to my chest and was making itself infuriatingly known nearly all the way up my legs too. With a grunt of frustration, I picked up my pace and scratched at my arms, hoping I could stop myself from ripping the tank top off or sticking my hand down my pants in public.

  This new development—bursts of itching—had started not long after I was settled with Marty and Baz, and it came with insane amounts of energy. Every week or two I would have more physical energy and more mental energy for study and reading. Occasionally I would stay awake all night, not feeling tired at all the next day. I took up running to try to manage it, pushing myself until I struggled to breathe. It was never painful, more like a persistent hum. A harmless kind of vibration throughout my body that made me insanely itchy and feel as if I were on cocaine. No biggie.

  It always started out faint, as it had that morning—a tickle at my wrists and ankles—but if I ignored it for too long, the infuriating itchiness all over my body would have me removing layers of clothing, which would begin to feel like burlap.

  I never mentioned this to Marty or Baz. I didn’t want further inconvenience them, and I really couldn’t complain about the extra study time. I read up on the symptoms, learning many new, very long words, and did my best to self-diagnose, monitoring my symptoms and vital signs closely. My extensive research suggested the extra energy was neither a symptom nor a cause of anything of concern.

  Across the street, a girl in jogging gear was walking her Labradoodle, her face in her phone, reminding me that I was outside where anyone could see me scratching like a maniac. I extracted my hand from the waistband of my pants, where it was dangerously close to reaching a particularly itchy spot on my ass, and picked up my pace.

  It made sense that the odd humming energy would rear its unpleasant head today. It wasn’t as if anything good ever happened on my birthdays.

  I used to think birthdays were special. Like any child, I used to look forward to the presents, the fuss, the cake. My mom had done her best to make it special, even if it was just the two of us celebrating. No matter what day of the week it fell on, she would call in sick for both of us, and we would spend the morning in bed watching TV and eating birthday pancakes. In the afternoon, we always went out and did something fun.

  We used to pick up and move just before or after my birthdays too.

  When I turned eight, we had just moved to Tokyo. We were in high spirits that afternoon. It was a new place, new streets to explore, exciting new food to try.

  As we wandered around Shibuya intersection, the world exploded into chaos. People screaming and running, a loud boom, the smell of burning—something acrid with a harsh chemical smell to it. Mostly I remember the shared terror of everyone out on the street that day, so clear it was almost palpable.

  Many people died. It made the news all over the world. My mother and I got away unscathed, but we left Tokyo that same afternoon. We didn’t leave the country, but we went to another part of Japan—a smaller, quieter part. News of the tragedy in Tokyo made it there before we did.

  That must have been the record. We were in Tokyo for five days before my mother decided it was time to leave. On my birthday.

  That was one of the worst birthday incidents, last year notwithstanding, but there were other things.

  Like the flood two days before my ninth birthday, when we were living in Vietnam, destroying most of our possessions. Or my mother getting mugged on the way to her night shift on my twelfth birthday, when we were living in Turkey. Or when we were living on the coast of Croatia and my mother woke me in the middle of the night, three days after my fourteenth birthday, whispering frantically to me that “they found us,” sending a jolt of terror down my spine and spurring me into action.

  It was after that birthday that I started paying more attention to the things she’d been teaching me, like digital footprints and falsifying documents.

  I managed to make it t
o Marty and Baz’s without scratching too much out in public, but I knew I was in for a sleepless night. When I walked into the house and shut the door, I breathed a big sigh of relief, scratching indulgently at my forearms, but I stopped quickly at the sound of movement in the living room. I’d been hoping to head straight to my room so I could change and go for a run, but I’d forgotten that Baz would be home.

  “Hey, kiddo!” he boomed as I came around the corner. I didn’t know why they both liked calling me “kiddo.” It was as if they’d huddled together, deciding that a nickname would bring us closer, and chose “kiddo.”

  My real full name was Evelyn Maynard. That much, at least, my mother made sure I always knew. But I couldn’t use that name. What would be the point of disappearing constantly if you kept popping up with the exact same name? Every time we had moved, we’d created documentation with new names. The last name would be completely new, but my first name was always some variation of a name beginning with E—Emma, Elle, Ebony, sometimes even Evelyn. That way, I could just tell kids my nickname was E, and it would be less confusing for me, easier to remember.

  While living in Melbourne, we had created some new identification (we always had fresh identities ready to go), and I’d given myself the name Eve Blackburn. Harvey and I hadn’t started dating yet, but I had a pretty big crush on him, so I created an identity with his last name.

  It was the name I boarded the plane with, the name that was on the passenger manifest, the name that everyone in Nampa knew me by. It was the name that had followed me into my current life. That was Eve Blackburn’s bed, Eve’s room, Eve’s house, her school and her life. No wonder Evelyn Maynard felt out of place there.

  “Hey, Baz.” I tried to smile at him, but even I could feel that it didn’t reach my eyes.

  “Happy birthday.” Baz’s smile was genuine, unlike mine, as he got out of his favorite chair. Baz was as gray as Marty and had sported an impressive handlebar mustache the entire time I’d known him.

  “Thank you,” I said to his back as he made his way into the kitchen.

  “Want a snack?”

  “No thanks. I’m just going to go for a run.”

  “Okie dokie.”

  I’d made it past the kitchen and into the hallway, dying to have another scratch, when he called out again. “Oh, by the way, you got a letter. Left it on your bed. Looks fancy.” He smiled at me before his head disappeared behind the fridge door.

  “OK. Thanks,” I mumbled, confused. I never got mail. Who would be sending me letters? Who would be sending me fancy letters?

  I softly closed the bedroom door. I couldn’t help but be suspicious as I stared at the envelope. The fact that it had arrived on my birthday was enough to make me wary. Was this it? Was this the awful thing that would happen this year? What horrible news was within? Maybe there was anthrax inside?

  I lowered myself to my knees, facing the bed, and dragged the envelope to the edge of the mattress, pinching one corner. It was A4 size, and the pale gray paper was thick under my fingers. It felt expensive. My current name, Eve Blackburn, and the address were printed in the middle, and there was a logo in the top corner, BHI in a distinctive font. I flipped it, but there was no return address.

  Having gleaned all I could from examining the outside, I had no choice but to open it. Taking the Band-Aid approach, I tore it open as fast as I could. Inside were several booklets printed on glossy paper, and on top a letter addressed to me. The letterhead had the same logo and an elaboration of what the letters stood for—Bradford Hills Institute.

  I read through the letter twice, reading slowly the second time to make sure I didn’t miss anything or misconstrue the meaning. Bradford Hills Institute—the most exclusive educational facility in the country—was offering me a full scholarship to study any scientific field of my choosing at a tertiary level. The school year was not finished yet—I still had a few months of high school to go—but because of their unique approach to learning, they weren’t concerned with a high school diploma and wanted me to start classes as soon as possible. A spot had recently opened up, and they were offering it to me.

  Apparently they had been keeping an eye on me and were impressed with my grades and my approach to study. I had no idea they had even been speaking to my teachers.

  I sat on the floor and stared at the letter for several minutes. Less than half an hour ago, I’d been walking back from school thinking about how awful things always happened around my birthday, yet there I was—holding in my hands something that made me so excited I almost forgot what day it was. It was an opportunity to start yet another new life. In New York, no less!

  Maybe it was my own morbid curiosity, a need to see what the universe had in store for my birthday this year, or maybe I’d simply gotten used to moving, and some subconscious, impatient part of me was nudging me to move on, but I knew I wanted to go.

  After the shock wore off, I called the number at the bottom of the letter and said yes to Bradford Hills.

  I spoke for about an hour to Stacey from admissions, and she explained how it would all work, answered the few questions my frazzled mind remembered to ask, and told me she could book my plane ticket the very next day if I was ready. I said yes. I was saying yes to everything, and it had my heart hammering a million miles an hour.

  Marty got home from water aerobics as I was finishing my phone call, and I sat her and Baz down to tell them the news. They were both very excited for me and very impressed. Bradford Hills Institute was exclusive, but it was well-known. Apart from being an educational institute, they did research in many fields, especially around Variants, and they specialized in teaching young Variants to control and manage their abilities. As a result, Bradford Hills had a higher population of students with Variant DNA. For a human to be accepted, their academic performance had to be exceptional. I had no idea what they had seen in me, but I wasn’t about to question them on it.

  After an intense run, I spent the rest of the night packing and researching Bradford Hills on the Internet. I barely noticed the itchiness as I crawled into bed around three in the morning, hoping the excitement had allowed me to expel enough energy to get a few hours’ sleep before my flight.

  What I didn’t count on was the overwhelming wave of emotions I’d been avoiding all day hitting me as soon as I turned the light out. The grief and pain I had worked so hard to push down finally washed over me as I lay in the bed that, come tomorrow, I would no longer need to pretend was mine.

  Nothing could remind me of my mother as much as packing up and starting over. There were no fake passports or rushed dashes to the airport, but I was moving on nonetheless. I was about to do something we had been doing together my whole life, and for the first time, I would be doing it without her.

  Tears rushed down my cheeks and into my hair as I struggled to take a breath against the crushing pressure on my chest. With a broken sob, I rolled onto my side and buried my face in the pillow, letting the emotion course through me as violently as it had that day in the hospital. Only this time, I didn’t have a mysterious stranger with intense eyes to curl around me and comfort me.

  I didn’t have my mother by my side as I prepared to start yet another new life, and I didn’t have him to comfort me through the knowledge that I didn’t have her.

  I was all alone. Again.

  Three

  I checked my seatbelt one last time as the distinctively mechanical clicks and hums started up beneath my seat. While the pretty flight attendant delivered her practiced instructions, I swallowed around the lump in my throat and murmured along.

  My mom and I had taken so many flights that we didn’t even bother listening to the safety information. While most of the other passengers learned how to inflate the life jacket, my mom would be absorbed in some novel as I devoured a journal article. Sometimes we would whisper along with them, reciting the instructions word for word, making each other giggle like schoolgirls.

  Halfway through, I gave up and stared out the w
indow, watching Nampa, Idaho, disappear below me. I knew I would never go back. My meager possessions were stuffed into a duffel bag in the overhead compartment, not even enough to fill a bag that needed to be checked.

  Bradford Hills Institute paid for my ticket to New York. Within two hours of my phone call with Stacey from admissions, I’d received an email with a ridiculous number of attachments, flight details.

  It was the first flight I’d taken since the one that literally crashed and burned. I should have been scared, traumatized, upset.

  I wasn’t.

  I had cried it all into my pillow the night before, and the statistics hadn’t changed. A car accident was still more likely.

  When I landed at LaGuardia, Bradford Hills had a car waiting for me, complete with a smartly dressed driver holding a sign with my name on it.

  I was driven past Manhattan into Upstate New York, the concrete and steel giving way to tall trees and wide roads. The Institute was in the town of Bradford Hills and took up half its surface area. Its reputation as a hub of Variant research, education, and training preceded it. Bradford Hills Institute was to Variant studies what Harvard was to law—internationally renowned and notoriously exclusive.

  I tried not to dwell on it too much as I took in the campus. We drove through the main gates and up a wide, curving, tree-lined avenue. Signs posted at regular intervals had arrows pointing in various directions, toward this building or that. We seemed to be following the ones that said “Administration and Reception Building.”

  Vast green lawns, dotted with people strolling around or sitting in groups, rolled out beyond the trees. The layout and buildings were not designed to be utilitarian—not harshly jutting out of the earth or bunched together. Rather, buildings throughout the massive campus blended seamlessly into their natural surroundings, hugging the gentle slopes of the hills and nestling between ancient oak trees, some of them covered in vines, none of them obnoxiously tall. They were old red-and-black brick structures, with ornate windows and wide doorways, oozing history and tradition.