Regulators, p.20
Regulators, page 20
Oh my god.
How long had he been there? Had he heard what I said, what I’d relayed from my com? Could he have heard it even if he hadn’t been standing there?
Why had I said it‽ Why had I said it when I knew Gens could hear exceptionally well? I should’ve kept my mouth shut.
Paige was making noises similar to that of the noises I’d made in the kitchen earlier with Garret, and then just before she’d arrived at my room. She was really crying for, presumably, the first time. I supposed people wanted to touch other people sometimes when they cried, because she turned around, walked up to Seb, and wrapped her arms around him. His right arm went part of the way around her, somewhat at a distance, and he patted her back as awkwardly as Garret had patted mine earlier. If not more so.
“Don’t worry, Jaycee,” he told me. “I already got the message. Why do you think I went for a swim?”
So he could remove his com, presumably because he’d gotten pissed off. I doubted he was as disturbed about it as I was, but I could’ve been wrong about that. I could imagine the message he got, after mine.
“Why do they think they can treat us like this?” Paige asked, more to his stomach than his chest, where her face was pressed against. She was very short. “I know she doesn’t believe that. We’re people. Why?”
“Because they can,” Seb said to her. “No matter what we know, or feel, or what we’re doing . . . we’re just an experiment to them.” And for the second time today, he said, “They will never care. Not about any of that, and definitely not about us.”
Seb’s arm did not buzz, but I saw two red letters appear on his com for such a short time where it was against Paige’s back in front of me. The letters were there for two seconds, possibly, before they disappeared.
He grinned at me. “What did it say?”
“TR,” I answered, feeling very confused.
He laughed, seeming more genuinely amused than I’d ever heard him sound when laughing. “If I’m shit at comforting females, whose fault is that?”
“I don’t . . .” I trailed off. I didn’t see how either of those things fit together.
“It means you’re not doing whatever it is you’re doing when the message appears well enough, generally.” Both his eyebrows rose. “Training Required.”
I saw Paige puff herself up in some strange way before Seb’s right arm shot behind his back. He took a step away from her and reached a finger from his left hand out, putting it over her mouth.
“Let’s keep yelling at wrists to the ones attached to our own bodies.” He brought his hand back to himself. “Deal?”
“Deal,” she muttered under her breath, deflating.
“Now, how about the two of you do . . . whatever it is you’re going to have to do,” he suggested. “Hopefully they’ll leave you alone and give you some peace for a little while. Maybe . . . maybe it’ll make both of you feel better. And maybe they’ll let you figure out a bit of being normal.” He almost immediately looked down at his wrist, smiled again and shook his head. “A for acceptable.” He laughed once more, but it was a much smaller one than what he’d done before.
“How do you know when that goes off?” I asked in confusion. “Without it buzzing you.”
“It does vibrate,” he said, “just not as fast or as hard as yours.”
“How often does your com go off?” Paige asked him.
“I can’t answer that,” he told her with an either amused or apologetic smile. “I’ll leave you to it.”
Paige stood there for a moment, watching him go, frowning. She was no longer crying and seemed mostly all right. Strange, how fast it could come and go. Then she looked at me and sighed. “This is going to take a while.”
“What is?” I asked. “Learning how to walk in different shoes?” How would that take long? The flip flops really hadn’t been so bad, not anywhere near as bad as I’d been sure they would be. They were strange, but nowhere near as bad as I’d been sure about. I didn’t know if heels could be any stranger than those.
“Not just that,” she said warily. “I watched a lot of instructional videos on how to do things to prepare us for later.”
“What else is there?” I shook my head. “I mean, I’m assuming you mean physically prepare, like with the shoes.”
“You don’t want to know.” Her eyes were rather wide. “And you assumed correctly. You’d best go take another shower.”
“I just took one,” I told her.
“And then went into the gym,” she added.
“I didn’t even break a sweat!”
“That’s true. You weren’t in there long.” She seemed to spend a moment thinking on whether it would be acceptable. “Maybe you can get by with it, but I can’t. Do you want to come and sit in my room?”
My brow furrowed. “Why would I want to do that?” How would sitting in her room while she wasn’t in there be any different from staying right where I was?
“I guess so I can explain all the nonsense we’ll have to do to get ready for tonight.” She shrugged. “It’s quite a lot.”
“How are you supposed to talk to me while you’re in the shower?”
That was how I ended up sitting in the doorway to Paige’s bathroom with my back to the space she was occupying. She said a lot of words that I didn’t understand, and when I realized that her telling me these things was absolutely pointless, I tuned her out. I didn’t understand hardly any of what she was saying. I figured my best bet was to go into it with the mindset that it was going to be a lot and wait until things were actually in front of me to try figuring out what they were. Listening to her without knowing what she was talking about only made me more confused than I already had been, which was a feat.
Everything was a lot. I didn’t know how to potentially make it better when being in a constant state of overloaded and clueless.
Hours passed. The first thing we did after Paige was out of the shower was put something called aloe on our sunburned skin. The second thing we—she—did was pick out suitable clothing. It didn’t look very suitable to me, but at least it wasn’t as bad as the bathing suits. But in a sense, I understood about the bathing suits after a bit more time thinking on it. They were what people wore during water-based activities. That was normal. I’d been out in public the previous day and hadn’t seen a single person dressed in outfits even remotely similar to what she’d picked out.
I held up what she’d chosen for me. “Do people actually wear stuff like this?”
“Yep.”
That had been that where clothing was concerned, if it could even be called such a thing. It kind of reminded me of the nutrition label on the bag of potato chips. I supposed people were just too lazy to come up with better words to call things.
Either way, we changed into the clothing and Paige put this stuff on both our faces called makeup. She said it was like the push-up bra, accentuating attributes.
I did a lot of cursing once she’d finished mine and was doing her own while I analyzed my face in the mirror. I didn’t feel like it was accentuating anything, at least not positively. And I also thought . . . it was misleading. My eyes definitely weren’t as big as they currently looked. Was being normal actually people attempting to mislead one another? Why would they do that, and how could they want to? Why would I have taken so many classes on it if it was such a normal thing?
After a while of thinking on it while continuing to curse, I decided Paige must’ve been wrong. It was possible she hadn’t watched the right sort of instructional video. It was possible. It really was. She didn’t and couldn’t know everything.
“There is no way people go anywhere like this,” I told her firmly.
“I promise they do,” she said. “You’ll see later. I’m actually really proud of myself for that.”
So I looked at myself in her bathroom mirror for the hour or so that she was doing her own. It might’ve taken her longer than an hour. I wasn’t sure.
At first I thought my eyes looked too big, and too dark, but then I realized . . . The brown of them actually looked lighter than it usually did. There was something about the colors on my eyelids, and something about my eyelashes. And I could swear my mouth was not the shape it appeared to be with the slightly colored stuff covering it.
Was it really misleading?
“It’s weird,” I said eventually. “I can make the way I look change, but . . . I’m still myself under this. It’s so different though with makeup.” I could change the way I looked with time rather than the unpleasantness it typically required. “It’s so weird.”
“I bet.” She laughed. “Ouch! Dammit!”
She must’ve poked herself in the eye with something. There was blackness around the entirety of her left eye. Copious amounts of cursing ensued from her while she removed everything from her left eye and started on it again. More time passed, with her doing that.
She did something to my hair after she was done with her makeup. It was still down, but she did something, holding bits of it back with . . . something. It looked very strange. It being down at all looked . . . very strange. During, she said something about us looking through pictures of different styles and maybe getting ours done.
We had to sit for a very long time, doing what she called painting our nails. After an hour of painting and waiting, my fingernails and toenails were red, and dry. It seemed kind of disgusting to me, but it was apparently normal. Paige’s were a light shade of pink. I supposed she liked that color very much, in all its varying shades.
She grabbed her own pair of what I assumed were heels and stuck her head out into the hallway, appearing to be listening. When she seemed to be satisfied that no one was coming—which only reinforced the fact that we looked ridiculous, given that she didn’t want anyone to see us—she pulled me from her room, closed the door, and literally dragged me up the stairs into my own room, locking us inside.
After disappearing into the closet for some time, she came back out with four shoes in her hands. “Which pair?”
“Neither,” I answered. I still couldn’t even see shoe there. They’d looked like weapons of some sort when I’d seen them before.
“You’re going to have to wear one of them,” she told me firmly. “Now . . . these are all right. But these will make you much taller. Meaning you’ll be closer to Seb’s height. A lot of females can’t wear heels this high because it’s emasculating for women to be larger than the men they’re with. At least for some men, it is.”
“Are you serious?” My face scrunched. “That’s stupid.”
“Apparently men are stupid.” She shrugged. “That’s just what I heard a girl saying in a video. She was really tall. Taller than you, even. These will be more difficult to walk in, but you’ll almost be as tall as the boys in them, which I think will be funny. And as I said, you’ll be closer to Seb’s level, if you get what I’m saying.”
“Height,” I said humorlessly. It really wasn’t that difficult. The shoes would make me taller.
“You don’t get it.” She frowned. “No big deal. You’re actually already there or past anyway, so it wasn’t a good joke.” She sighed. “Try them on. We should probably . . . sit down on the bed to do this. I have a feeling if we sat on the floor, we’d be showing our underwear to each other.”
“How is that any different from those bathing suits earlier?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know, but it is.”
There seemed to be so many ridiculous rules and contradictions to being normal. It made no sense. None of it did.
Half an hour or so after that point of sitting down to put on the shoes, Paige and I were standing in front of the full-length mirror in my room, staring at ourselves. We’d been doing just that for at least twenty of those thirty or thirty minutes. Or what felt like twenty minutes. My feet already hurt quite badly from standing in the heels. It was just so strange and uncomfortable all around.
“I think . . .” She started and then stopped, frowning deeply. “I think we look like prostitutes.”
“What are those?” I asked.
“People who sell sex for money,” she said, which made absolutely all my insides feel funny.
“Who would do that?” I asked abashedly. I could even imagine doing it, let alone doing it for some reason other than feelings. Wasn’t that enough? Too much?
“Sex isn’t such a big deal out in the real world.” She shrugged. “And people do all sorts of crazy things.” She brought her wrist up near her mouth. “Hey. Do we look like prostitutes? Or do we look like we should?”
There was no buzzing.
“Figures.” She shook her head then looked away from her com, to my face. “What do you think the boys will think?”
“I don’t have a clue,” I admitted. I looked again at my reflection, turning around carefully to the side in the heels. The dress I had on was apparently not a sundress and was generally worn at night. It was not called a nightdress though because you didn’t sleep in it. It only went a few inches past my butt and the black material clung to my skin in very strange ways.
“I wish my boobs were as big as yours.”
“Why?” I asked, aghast. I was almost entirely sure that word did pertain to my chest.
“Apparently men like them.” She frowned. “I heard that in a video too, but don’t tell Seb. Apparently men either like boobs or butts.”
“That’s disgusting.” My face scrunched and I looked at her reflection rather than mine, analyzing. “And besides, your body wouldn’t look right if yours were any bigger than they are. You’re tiny. It would make you look . . . uneven. You look great, I think.”
“Thanks.” It sounded like she really meant it.
I turned around several times, analyzing myself further, in a different way. When my eyes met themselves again in the mirror, they were very wide.
“Oh my god,” I breathed. “I’m uneven.”
“No you’re not!” She laughed loudly. “Your body is awesome. Honestly, I don’t have a clue how your chest is so big with all the training they have us do, and with the diet and all. It must be in your blood.”
My voice was very quiet when I said, “He’s going to think I look disgusting.” I thought I looked disgusting. No matter what Paige had said, I was most assuredly uneven, especially when thinking back to the other females I’d seen since getting out into the world.
“If he does, there’s something wrong with him,” she told me. “If he does . . . we can blame it on the receptors not being fully . . . whatever, yet.”
“Or we could just blame it on reality.”
“God, your legs are awesome,” she said, clearly looking at them. Apparently she was very easily distracted. “I guess that’s one great thing about being so tall.”
I shook my head. “If you say so.” I wasn’t really that tall. In comparison to her, yes, but that wasn’t saying much.
“Come on, Jaycee.” She sighed, taking my arm and leading me away from the mirror. “Let’s go see what their reactions are. If they’re as bad as they could be . . .” She took in a deep breath. “Well, maybe we should contemplate changing our clothes.”
Even though I wanted to change clothes, I didn’t want him to think I was disgusting. I thought . . . Seb thinking I was disgusting would somehow be worse than wearing what I currently was. I might’ve been wrong about that. I didn’t know, and I didn’t think I wanted to find out.
We were very careful in walking down the stairs, but as soon as we came into view of the last floor, Paige’s demeanor changed entirely. What she did could only be described as storming into the space. I ensured she released my arm before she did. I’d been taught about storms, and that was what it seemed like.
We found the three of them standing around, like they’d been in the middle of having a discussion about something and they just . . . stopped.
Garret had a sandwich in his hand and it fell out of his hand, landing on the floor. Two sets of eyes were wide, and one set had turned away.
Oh my god, we looked horrible. We must’ve looked like prostitutes, whatever they looked like. How could they all look the same? Everyone seemed to look so different out here.
I heard two buzzing sounds. I looked down at my wrist and saw two words on it, catching Paige do the same in my peripherals.
DESIRED RESPONSE
I turned my back to all of them and brought my wrist up to my mouth to whisper, “Do you think I care?”
It buzzed again almost immediately after.
DESIRED RESPONSE FROM THE GEN
“Not hardly,” I mumbled.
When I turned back around, Seb was at the door that led to the back, staring outside.
I shook my head. “Not anywhere near.”
FACT, it read after buzzing again.
“Stop,” I said to my wrist through my teeth.
Chapter 16
Feeling
“Come on, boys,” Paige said, walking over to the two of them. She grabbed one of Brent’s arms and one of Garret’s with each hand and began dragging them away like it was somehow the appropriate thing to do. I didn’t know how it could be all right to drag people around, but she would know better and she sure did do it a lot. I wasn’t entirely sure that either of them cared what she was doing in the slightest or whether it was all right or not.
Seb turned to her from where he was still standing at the door that led outdoors to the pool and beyond. “Paige, what are you doing?”
She stopped moving and looked over her shoulder at him. “I’ve got to show them what to wear.” It sounded like she expected him to already know as much, somehow. “I’ll get you when I’m done with these two.”
“I know what to wear,” Seb shot at her.
“I’m not so sure you do,” she told him slowly.
I couldn’t think of any reason why he wouldn’t. He seemed to know quite a bit, even stuff she didn’t.
“I’m not arguing with you,” he said. “Hurry up in their rooms. I’m serious.”
I was sure Seb noticed his com buzzing him, but he didn’t uncross his arms to look at the message. I could just barely make out the tiny letters from across the room.
