8 Students Remaining
Back in my room, I hug my arms around my chest and force myself to breathe, but it’s no use. Ashlyn’s words chase themselves around my head:
The only students admitted to Luminary are the ones who need to be here…
The tests are never wrong.
I groan and push the palms of my hands into my eyes, as if that might stop the dark thoughts pounding through my head. But it’s no use. They come anyway.
My birth parents are a scary story I’ve been told my whole life.
Eli and Cynthia Michaels. The tragic grad school lovers.
According to every article I’ve read, they were so smart, had so much potential.
They met in high school, got married young, were studying to be professors at Blackwood University.
Cynthia was eight months pregnant with me when Eli set those bombs off.
I’ve spent my entire life terrified of what sharing that man’s DNA might mean about me. He was my father. My blood. I can’t remember a time I wasn’t worried about turning out like him.
That’s why Ashlyn’s words hit me so hard. She said the tests we took were never wrong. If that’s true, doesn’t it mean that I deserve to be here? That I’m just like Eli Michaels, after all?
I haven’t turned the lights on in my room, but my tablet sits on my desk, lit-up screen casting an eerie glow over my bed and dresser. I slide into my chair, the cold wood sending goosebumps prickling down the backs of my legs.
I’ve only ever read the story of what Eli did once, back in junior high.
I scanned a single article, but I couldn’t even bring myself to finish it.
It was too horrible. But if I’m destined to relive my father’s worst sin, I want to know everything I can about it.
It’s not like spending my whole life being too scared to read about what he did has done me any favors.
So, holding my breath, I jab the name “Eli Michaels” into the search bar with my pointer finger.
I don’t expect the search to work. If Luminary’s firewall prevents us from sending emails or looking up porn, surely it won’t let me research a horrific bombing. But to my surprise, a page of results loads the second I hit enter.
I swallow, and for the first time in my life, I force myself to read everything I can about my father’s crime.
I scan article after article, absorbing all the lurid details.
Michaels made the bombs out of Drano and tinfoil…
Two students were killed instantly, and another student, a close friend of Cynthia Michaels named Evelyn Greer, was badly injured…
Michaels was screaming about the corruptive nature of schools as he was placed inside a police cruiser…
I feel a chill as I scan those words. Eli’s manifesto is online.
I read it once, around the same time I looked up the rest of his crimes, but this is the first time I’ve realized how similar his beliefs are to the thinking behind this place.
I wonder if Wyatt Sullivan came across my father’s manifesto? It would explain a lot.
The sound of insects grows loud outside my window, the buzz creating a soft white noise that makes me want to drift off to sleep. My eyelids begin to droop.
The latter pages of search results are more about the aftermath of the bombing, the weeks when my mother was in a coma, being kept alive by machines, my birth.
I click through one article, then another.
“With no other family to take the child in, Michaels’s infant was surrendered to Lutheran Family Services Foster Care, where he awaits placement with a new family. ”
I’m about to click out of that story and on to the next one when something catches my eye, something I have to have read wrong. I go over the line again.
Michaels’s infant was surrendered to Lutheran Family Services Foster Care, where he awaits placement with a new family.
I freeze, the hair on the back of my neck suddenly standing up. The inside of my mouth feels very hot and very dry. I force myself to read the line again, and then another time after that.
Where he awaits placement with a new family.
He.
Wait a minute.
Was Eli Michaels’s baby a boy?