Page 82 of Johnny

“So then I should be the one to disappear. Not her.” I was eight when this conversation took place.

My father put his giant, gentle hand on the top of my head and smiled down at me. “You’re much

more important than some working girl past her prime, Megan. You would have to do or say a lot of

very bad things to make the Way hurt you.”

That shocked me. Not the part about me being more important than Lena. I knew that already. But

the words ‘hurt you.’

They could hurt me.

If I passed some predetermined threshold for disobedience they would hurt me.

I never once asked about my mother again. No one ever compared us again, either.

Time passed, I learned things, I got a job at the other island doing intake. I worked in my father’s

lab. I started working on the 3-D protein modeling. I even had one breakthrough.

When I was fourteen I was going about my business in my father’s lab, running software

simulations on the protein called AA9A. I was his assistant in this important rat trial.

My breakthrough happened during the rat trial. It was a very complicated trial that involved AA9A

and recombinant DNA and even though I wasn’t supposed to change the experimental protocol, I did.

And it worked.

Even now, after everything that’s happened, I still smile when I think about that trial.

I saved the rats.

I saved them. They lived. They lived a very long time. In fact, they lived longer than any other rats

in recorded history. Most reached the age of seven years, four months. Depending on your sources,

that’s about three times the expected lifespan. But one is still alive. Eleven years and counting.

That’s an outright miracle.

This is what it means to be me.

That rat. That experiment. That outcome.

It’s the only thing I have. It’s the only thing I’ve done that was all mine.

And it was because of my success in that rat trial that my father started telling me what he was really trying to do in his private lab.

He told me secrets.

He let me in.

And now I’m paying for that secret just like Lena did.

I turn the shower off, wrap a towel around myself, and wipe a hand across the fogged-up mirror.