Project Paper Doll by Stacey Kade Read Free Book Online

them in my cultural training sessions, but I’d also seen talking dogs (Scooby-Doo), a man who rode a brontosaurus at work (Fred Flintstone), and countless women who woke up from long hospital stays to discover they were someone else entirely (soap operas).
    Consequently, my views of the “real” world were initially a little jumbled. I could find Earth in the solar system, identify the various countries on the planet, and pinpoint our location in Wingate. I could even tell you something about all of those things in any one of the five different languages I’d been taught (English, Chinese, Spanish, German, and Arabic).
    But none of it meant anything to me. I’d lived inside the same four white walls every day. The world of Little Red Riding Hood described in the book of fairy tales I’d memorized was as real to me as any map of Earth. Knowledge without context. That was my problem.
    It led to an obsession with Outside. That was how I’d thought of it then, a vast location that was as mysterious, exciting, and frightening as anything I could imagine. The logical part of my brain knew there were states and cities and countries and oceans. But the other part of me, the bit that was both fascinated and horrified when the wolf ate Grandma and she survived , thought of it as a wild and unruly place where anything was possible. And I wanted to experience it. I wanted to feel the grass beneath my feet, to see if it could really grow taller than I was. (I’d seen only part of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and misunderstood what was happening in the back half of the story.)
    I wanted to see where Dr. Jacobs and all the lab techs (save one or two on the night shift) went when I slept. I think I somehow had the idea that they were all getting together and doing something fun without me.
    I wanted to see the sun, feel the warmth against my skin. (You have no idea how often you all talk and think about the weather: what it is, what it will be tomorrow, what it should be.)
    Dr. Jacobs, who I thought of as my ally, my friend, at that point ( he wasn’t the one holding me down to stick me with needles or taking away my dessert when I bit someone), kept promising me that I would go Outside one day, but for now I was special and they were keeping me safe. And I believed him.
    I know, I know. But I think he believed it too. Or at least I never picked up any thoughts from him that indicated he was lying.
    No, that I got from Leo.
    The lab techs didn’t wear name tags or have their names embroidered on their white coats, the way Dr. Jacobs did. But when you can hear thoughts, even as sporadically as I could, it’s not hard to pick up names and make the connections.
    Leo was the short but strong tech they always sent in on bone-marrow days. Having your bone marrow taken is extremely painful, so whenever I saw Leo coming, I knew what was in store. And I did everything I could to stop it, which was more than your average human child of three or four.
    One of my most vivid memories—one of those pivotal moments that divided my existence into Before and After—is of Leo leaning over me in the corner of my room, where he’d trapped me. His mouth was bleeding. The sharp edge of a book had split his lip.
    He caught my wrists together in a single thick fist, grinding them together until I cried out. “They’re never going to let you go,” he whispered, his teeth stained a horrible pink. “They’re going to keep you in a jar just like all the other freaks.”
    I felt the truth in his words, along with the hate and fear bubbling out from him like his foul breath. Alien. Freak. Fucking Martian.
    I knew those words, knew what they meant—the Great Gazoo on The Flintstones was an alien—but I’d never heard them applied to me before.
    It didn’t make sense. But it also spoke to some distant feeling I’d felt flitting around inside me—that I was different from everyone else. Not special, as Dr. Jacobs had said, but different. Even as