Her section is carefully released from the restraints. There will be no book reading today, no quiet time, no threats from green men cowering in cages. The children are steered, at gunpoint, to little school desks, with the chair built in. They’re set indiscriminately throughout, Research 06, which is at least, three times larger than the library.
The others take a seat without being prompted as if their places were predetermined. Rose, however, requires a nudge from a rifle barrel to her scapula. She staggers slowly to a desk. Soon they are all joined by three adults, Dr. Valentine, Dr. Shaw, and another woman, Rose has only seen one time before, but the woman has never spoken to her.
Each of the three adults carries cardboard boxes with faux woodgrain paper on the outside. The boxes are stuffed to the brim with papers and file folders that stick out haphazardly from the tops. There are two children per adult. Rose can’t help herself. She gasps as the Man-In-The-White-Coat sits across from her and Ivy.
“Hello again, R – Zero – Five – E, and, R – Zero – Six – E, shall we get started?” His voice is flat.
He’s as unfriendly as Rose remembers him to be. If the Man-In-The-White-Coat is silently pleased with her unsettled reaction to him sitting across from her, he doesn’t show it outwardly.
Ivy is not impressed and displays her boredom by sneering. Her eyes cut right through the Man-In-The-White-Coat.
He carefully chooses several pieces of paper from inside the box that he brought with him, he then places the box onto the floor, nudging it under the small table with his toe, so that is bumps against Rose’s feet.
Rose pays no attention to his greeting, or the way he intentionally pushed the box against her, or his question, even though she heard it plainly, and replays on a continuous loop in her mind. She must focus to make it stop repeating.
This man is too full of questions for her liking. She can’t help but look at his face, and the unwelcoming beauty of it. Smooth and perfect, but his smile is dangerous.
Some might think Dr. Shaw is a nice-looking man. Some might even say he’s handsome in many ways, but it’s only on the outside though, because on the inside, he is a horrid thing, with jagged-razor teeth, and sharp spikes, and poisonous venom, waiting to eat the children at Camp Able, all up.
She’s distracted by the presence of Dr. Valentine when the woman passes behind her and Ivy. Dr. Valentine’s going to the next desk over. Hawthorne and Cane are there, waiting for Dr. Valentine to arrive.
Dr. Valentine’s sweet smell floats through the room, settling deeply in Rose’s nares. The scent of peaches intoxicates her. Dr. Valentine smiles and nods to her, comfortingly, before starting her work with the two boys, but it doesn’t do anything to ease her unease. The question is repeated once more, this time much louder.
“Shall we get started, R – Zero – Five – E? R – Zero – Six – E?” repeats the Man-In-The-White-Coat.
Ivy says nothing and continues to sneer. Rose turns to him, looks deep into his eyes and says, “My name is Rose, Dr. Shaw. I’m not a thing, I’m a person.”
Dr. Shaw freezes, before returning to the stack of pages he was arranging in order a moment before. He takes a pencil from his pocket and jots a note on a notepad. The pad is already so crammed with writing that it must be written vertically in the left-hand margin of the page.
Rose lifts her head and leans forward a little to see what’s he’s writing, but she can’t see it.
He says nothing and continues to rearrange the pages before saying, “You are – a research subject and are assigned a number. You do not have a name, a real one at any rate. And you most certainly are not a person.”
Rose is confused by this information. The back of her neck heats with anger and embarrassment. She fights an overwhelming feeling of wanting to cry, but her eyes tear up against her will, anyhow.
She slides down in the little desk not knowing how to react to what was said to her. She can hear Ivy snickering, but she chooses to ignore it. The other children are pointing at pages with photos and diagrams on them. Some are talking to Dr. Valentine and to the other woman, about what they see and questions they are being asked. Some are demonstrating little tricks they can do, but only under the strictest supervision, and under the watchful eyes of green men patrolling in the back of the room.
During all of this, Ivy says very little, giving only one-word answers, if bothering to answer at all when Dr. Shaw asks questions and holds up page after page.
Hawthorne sulks just like his sister. He refuses to answer any of the questions that Dr. Valentine poses. Cane is more than eager to show off how smart he thinks he is.
Someone’s whistling what Rose has come to know as Hawthorne’s tune, but it’s not the boy this time, it’s the same green man, the one from before, the one in the library cage. Curious.
Dr. Shaw snaps his fingers, redirecting her focus. “What is it you think you are, exactly?” he asks Rose, clearing his throat he waits.
“I’m a girl. Anyone with a brain can see that.”
“Okay,” he says, mocking her. He writes on his notepad. The yellow papers make crisp crinkling sounds beneath the weight of the lead pencil tip scrawling across the paper.
“How was the book?” says Shaw.
She’s about to ask which book, but she puts two and two together quickly enough. Dr. Shaw was watching her when she selected A History of Man, from Prehistory to Present Day, from the library shelf. “It was disappointing.”
“You think it was disappointing? Tell me why.”
“All that men can do… but instead of doing good things, they mostly do bad things. Horrible things, and usually it’s to each other.”
He notates her answer and shows her the first of many pictures. “What do you see here, R – Zero – Five – E?” He taps the photo with the end of his pen.
“A puppy,” she tells him. The picture cause her to smile, but she intentionally forces that emotion from her face.
He writes. The next photo is a solid blue octagon. “How many sides?”
“Eight,” says, Rose, tilting her head, feeling proud at her own intellect.
He flips a page of his notepad, looking for an empty place to make a notation of her response. He finds a little spot and writes it down.
He’s about to go to the next item in the stack when she asks him if he wants her to tell him the color of the octagon too.
“Colors are easy you know, but I’d love to know anyway, if you’d like to tell me.” But he seems more interested in making further notes, rather than wanting to hear about the color of the shape.
She’s curious about how much he knows of her, and how much more he wants to know. She wonders if his observations of her has taught him that everything she sees and hears is classified, and categorized, and remembered. But, no, that’s the whole point of all this, isn’t it? To learn about her and the others.
“It’s blue,” mumbles Rose, already growing tired of this exercise. As she expected, his response to her answer is anticlimactic. Her nose wrinkles. He’s right, colors are easy. Even kids younger than her know their colors.
The little things Dr. Shaw does continuously remind her of exactly why she doesn’t like him. Plus, it makes her feel uncomfortable knowing he watches everything she and the rest of the children do.
The next photograph is of a vehicle. Shaw passes it in front of Ivy first. Ivy turns her head away from it, as if someone had ran a rotten fish under her nose, and chooses to stare at a wall, instead of giving him what he wants.