The Variables

She couldn’t help but think that he had written her a thinly veiled goodbye. Permission to seek a life outside of Grant and Lucy?

There was no life outside of Grant and Lucy.

Her parents had lied to her, Ethan blamed her for the death of Teddy’s mother, and Cass betrayed their friendship by keeping secrets. Her younger siblings looked to this life as an adventure, unable to conceptualize the evil that built it. And the people her own age reveled in this false feeling of specialness that Kymberlin was breeding within them. Fools. All of them.

Grant was the only one who saw through it all. He was the only one who knew how dangerous Huck’s world was. And now even he had stamped her with irrevocable aloneness. Without thinking, she tore his letter in half. It felt liberating to hear the paper tearing. Then she held it and looked at the two halves, and she felt so misunderstood. It wasn’t like she could get him on the phone to discuss his wayward thinking—with the heaviest of hearts she had to endure a communication blackout.

Feeling a tightening in her chest, she took the letter and tore it systematically into forty little pieces, careful that no words of import were visible on each tiny strip. Then she wandered around the entire library, from one end to the other, and scattered his note within the pages of the great novels: leaving say. It’s among a copy of Moby Dick and normal life in a collection of Plutarch’s essays. She put owe me anything right in the middle of Little Women where Amy threw Jo’s novel on the fire. She took cost you and pushed it into a Nancy Drew Mystery. And then she took the three final I love yous and put one in a romance novel in the paperback section, one in a copy of the Bible—smack dab in the Psalms—and one she tucked into a cushion on a chair stolen from the White House.

It took an hour to thoroughly displace Grant’s letter from one end of the library to the other—leaving pieces of his words in Ellison, Asimov, Cleary, Seuss, Twain, Brontë, Angelou, and Borges—and when she left the low light and ventured back out into the open and airy tower of Kymberlin, she made a beeline to the elevator and pushed the down button. When the elevator arrived, she pushed the button to the LL and then turned to look around at the people wandering the verandas. Many of them were smiling: families milled around; people laughed and soaked up the sun that beamed down onto them from the glass ceilings.

Huck had been successful.

He’d created a place where everyone wanted to be.

Everyone except Lucy.

The Remembering Room was empty.

The circular room had a large imbedded television against one side, and every other square inch of wall space had built-in bookshelves. On the bookshelves were binders. White binders along one wall. Blue in another section. Purple and green. Black.

Lucy took a binder down off the bookshelf and flipped through its pages. They were filled with laminated news stories. It didn’t take long to figure out the details of this room and the system of the binders: white binders were filled with stories of war and famine. Blue binders were filled with the devastations and aftermath of natural disasters. Purple was abuse against the elderly, children, and animals. Green was filled with stories of greed. Black was murder.

Some of the main stories were familiar to her—she remembered hearing about these miscarriages of justice in the news or about the children locked in the basement and left to starve. Drunk drivers who killed whole families, and kids who got into their parents’ guns, and school shootings and collapsed mine shafts. Whole collections of articles gave way to decades of horrors; old stories of death and destruction that she had never even known about. A little girl had been kidnapped from her front yard in 1952, her body discovered a year later in the underbrush of a park. A cold case, never solved; no one ever brought to justice. Her heart ached for the people whose stories were told in this room. It was a sick memorial of the worst of the world.

“You came back,” Gordy said behind her, unsurprised. Lucy jumped and shut a binder. She slid it back on the shelf and turned to him.

“This is an awful room,” she whispered.

“A necessary room,” Gordy said. “The Islands will be our home for at least 500 years. Generations will come and go here, and my father’s legacy must remain strong in his absence. We must remind people of why...so they don’t question how. That’s always the way it’s been...”

“Propaganda to support your genocide?” Lucy asked, taking a step backward.

“Truth to support a new start.” He looked straight at her. “That’s how we choose to look at it.”

He walked to the center of the room and ran his hand over a glass case. Inside was a collection of news articles on a specific murder. The murder of a girl named Kymberlin Truman. Daughter of wealthy businessman Huck Truman, and his socialite wife, Josephine. Murdered on her college campus by a man suspected of murdering other co-eds over a period of ten years. However, it was nothing but circumstantial evidence to co

“Your sister?” Lucy asked, pointing to the case. She had read the story minutes earlier when she first arrived—walking straight to the shrine of a girl’s life cut short.

Gordy nodded.

“I’m sorry.”

He smiled sadly. “She altered the course of our lives with her rebellion. It started many summers before her murder. Not rebellion like you think…she didn’t rebel against us. She rebelled against the world, against hate, against people who are doomed to repeat the awfulness of the past.”

Lucy stared blankly ahead. “I don’t understand.”

“Kymberlin was not fit for this world. She was too good for it. She was a big thinker and she would have done amazing things with her life if someone hadn’t decided to end it. Losing her opened up a hole in my life that could never be filled. She was my best friend. Our siblings are often our first friends and, if we’re lucky, our closest friends. You’d be wise to remember that, Lucy.”

She wondered how much Gordy knew about her relationship with Ethan. She let her eyes wander across the spines of the binders. Hundreds of binders. Maybe a thousand.

“Your dad did all this for her?” Lucy asked.

Gordy shook his head. “No. He did all of this for him.”

“But because of her?”

“No,” Gordy said softly. “When you are consumed by grief, if you’re not doing something, anything to try to move forward, then you’ve let the grief win. This was not just for Kymberlin, my sister. It was for the world...a world that needed to heal. You are young, so I ca

“This place won’t fix humanity,” Lucy said. “Didn’t your Systems already show that?”

“You’re wrong,” he said. He tapped a single finger on the glass display. “People here will be happy. And you will, too, if you give it time. I understand adolescent discontent, Lucy, trust me. But everything about the Islands is scientific and adjusted perfectly to the people who inhabit them. You will want for nothing, yet you will learn the value of hard work and perseverance.” He rubbed his fingers along his thin beard. “I still owe you a dress, I see.”

“I’m fine,” she answered.

“We want you to be happy here. Part of the reason my father was so concerned about the variables, as he calls them, was because he knew that once you saw how this new world was built, it would be hard to understand why.”

“I’m old-fashioned, I guess,” she answered him. “Murder is wrong.”

“We agree.”

Lucy paused. She turned her head and looked at Gordy as he patiently watched her. Raising an eyebrow, she picked up her bag near the front and started to leave the room. “Thanks for the chat,” she said as she made her way to the exit.