Another town, another home for Liz and I.
She didn't go to school and applied for whatever part-time job that was available nearby. As for my part, I only needed my laptop to get work done from home. It'd always be better to be able to come on-site and inspect the construction, but as long as the measurements were accurate and the instructions were clear, my business shouldn't suffer too much, meaning I shouldn't be completely out of a job.
What kind of a client would want their house built by someone who could barely walk, let alone meet them in person?
Whatever the case, we hadn't encountered spiders for the last fifteen hours, and we were making preparations for what was coming.
I was slowly coming to terms with the fact that this might be a way of life now.
Our previous encounters with these things had been bloody, to say the least. We had to figure out ways to protect ourselves instead of constantly being forced to run from every incident with a cracked rib and punctured stomach.
But on the day we moved in, she told me how we didn't have to run anymore, that she could fight and deal with these spiders. Some of her memory had come back. She said she knew how to fight, that she had been up against them in the past, even if she didn't know when or how.
I was thinking we could leave the house at night and be constantly on the move so if they appeared they wouldn't be able to keep up with us. But this could get bystanders involved if anyone was nearby and these spiders could always decide to drop down right on our heads. We were the only ones who could see them.
She said she remembered that her injuries could heal at an exceptional rate—virtually overnight. I had seen the hole on her stomach disappear with my own eyes, so I supposed there was some truth in what she was telling me.
I said that if she ever got hurt and the situation got out of hand, we would run. This was why the foggers should always be ready around the house in case of an encounter.
"Pass me the salt." I pointed at the jar with my chopsticks.
"Please," she corrected.
"... Please."
"Do you think they'll jump us while we eat?" She passed me the pepper.
"That would be a terrible way to go." I reached out for the salt myself.
Then she asked, "So how's your work going? (Pass me the salt.) "
"It's okay. My leg has been a real pain but I manage. (It's literally sitting right there in front of you, just reach out and grab it.)"
"Today I learned about a guy who achieved enlightenment by massacring an entire martial arts school. (Pass me the salt!)"
"This is why homeschooling is not a real thing. What are you even reading?? (No.)"
"I'm studying. And it's art. (I'm gonna get you for this.)"
"Do you feel smarter after reading something like that? I'm guessing it only has pictures and speech bubbles. (What are you gonna do?)"
"You've read it?" Her eyes lit up as she leaned in for the salt and the fries on my dish.
"I've seen all of them." She was probably talking some comic book. I managed to save the fries. "In the end, they're all just flashy colors and line art."
"It's in black and white."
"In the end, they're all just black and white. Sometimes black and sometimes white. Different shapes and textures. That's it." I was able to save two pieces of fries.
"What is real art, then?"
"Art is a pretentious word that doesn't mean anything. If something is pretty or inspiring, then it's art? Please. The light spectrum is art, noise frequencies can become art, a view of the countryside is art. It's a scam."
"So beauty doesn't exist?" she asked, sounding genuinely curious. "Everything is hideous and meaningless?"
"Tell me something you actually learned."
"A little boy was forced to crawl inside his mother and had a psychotic breakdown."
"???"
"He then used his mother to fight colossal aliens that were sent down by God."
"What did you learn from that??"
She then tried to justify her dilly-dallying by lecturing me on the human condition. "That we're all just biological machines. If you think about it, you're not your body. The body is just a tool controlled by the brain. If you move your hand, you're not actually moving it; the brain is telling the hand to move on its own, like a robot." She'd been swinging her hands around as she explained.
"If you put it that way, it sounds pretty cool. But how are you going to use this information for anything at all?"
"You think they're useless but they're valuable to me. Technically, if you're putting all your attention to something, you're studying. This is why people remember the plots of their favorite movies but not the lessons in their school books, because they're actually something they care about."
"Many years from now, you're going to regret throwing away all those hours watching them."
"Depends. A concert pianist can still regret spending years learning his instrument because he always wanted to learn the saxophone, instead."
Touché.
"Have you ever thought about going into a different profession?" she asked. "Why did you choose architecture?"
"Because it makes a lot of money."
"Did your parents make you study architecture?"
"They were very supportive, regardless of whatever choices I made." As long as I made a lot of money for myself, they didn't care.
"Do you have fun, you know, doing what you do?"
"No job is ever fun. Jobs are supposed to be unpleasant. That's how you earn your check."
"Hard truths. And you said that your parents were supportive no matter what you did, even though all jobs kind of suck, anyway."
"My work has its ups and downs. The measurements take hours to get right, but every time I finish a project, it fills me with this sense of satisfaction. I can't describe it. Not to blow my own trumpet, but it feels good to see when a decent drawing gets done. It's like you're looking at something bigger than yourself."
"Ninety-nine percent pain for that one percent pay-off."
"Sometimes that one percent can feel like a hundred. It also feels great when I get to do something good for someone else." Saying that made me cringe a little. Whatever, I should at least try to keep things positive.
"I bet those designs are great," she said. "Some might even consider it art."
"Real art," I said. "With utility. The houses look—well they don't look the best, they look all right, but the true value lies in the fact that you can live in it and have a roof over your head. Not to mention that the prices also appreciate over time."
"I wish somebody would build me a beautiful home," she said. "Nothing fancy. I just think it'd be nice to have a place to live and call your own."
I wasn't sure how to respond after that. The chopsticks in my hand meekly scraped along the dish.
"I'll give you a good price," I eventually said.
"Do you think your clients ever think about you whenever they're having sex inside the house you built?"
"Great question! I'd rather not think about it!"
"They've gotta be thinking about you. At least for the first couple of nights after they moved in."
Maybe I really picked the wrong job.
She could see the bigger picture and was asking the important questions.
Liz continued, "'What a nice house.' They won't say it outright but they definitely think about it. Like both of them. 'Oh man, I love the awning window over here. Thank you, Robert! The ceiling is so nice. And the paint job. Robert. Robert.' They'll be calling your name."
Was the money really worth it?
"Aww don't feel bad," she said, ever magnanimous as the victor, after smashing my entire identity to little pieces. With the tiny pink plastic two-pronged fork, she handed back the pieces of fries that had now gone cold. How'd she manage to eat the steak with that thing, anyway?
Then I realized I was getting along with her a little bit too much.
Maybe this wasn't a bad thing.
Margaret had her suspicion because from the outside, I looked like a victim and Liz—nothing ever happened to her, or at least it seemed that way since all of her injuries had vaporized into thin air. With anything that ever happened to her, I'd had it worse.
After we had dinner, I washed the dishes while she went off to her studies.
The stories she told me were completely bogus. The comics were probably real, but I never saw her reading one. For some reason, she didn't feel like sharing the content of the school books she was reading. The fact that I said they were useless might play a small part in it so I was also the one to blame.
From what she'd told me, those first few days after her "birth"—when she'd woken up in her new body—were pretty rough.
Her "parents"—or former guardians—told her off because of her "memory lapse". It took a while for her to find her bearing and get adjusted to the life and responsibilities of a fourteen-year-old.
All the kids sitting next to her must have been thrown off quite a bit when they learned that their classmate suddenly lost her memories.
Not only did she forget all her friends and teachers, her personality and tastes no doubt also changed drastically.
She told me that eventually she was able to fit in and got along with everyone, or at least most of them. Some kids really liked this new version of Liz they'd never seen before; few others, not so much.
Regardless of whether she was liked to or despised by her peers, it was for the same reason—she wasn't afraid of anything or anyone.
She'd been told that the old Liz had been different. She was always anxious about something, mostly people. The old version of Liz was "nice" to others but it wasn't for the right reasons.
She was doing it to compensate for something else. They said they weren't sure what it was but most guessed that it was to make up for the fact that she was "slower" than other girls.
Her hair was always an oily mess; she only trimmed her nails once a month, when they would finally chip from being too long; she never reached out to anyone and only spoke when she was talked to; she couldn't even say hi to her classmates whenever she would run into one of them in the hallway.
The old Liz was aware of how different she was from her peers, of how she wasn't fitting in, and she felt guilt to some degree as a result.
To compensate for her shortcomings, she decided to do nice things for her friends.
She was "nice" to others because she thought it was her way of making up for her "weirdness". She was willing to go the extra mile just so she could earn some of that respect and validation from her peers.
Always leaving last to clean the classroom, always lending money to other kids and never getting it back, always having to share her food with others at the lunch table. Things like that.
A morbid curiosity was brewing in the classroom.
Some of the kids wanted to test the waters to gauge her tolerance, to see how far she was willing to go along with everything. They wanted to see just how "nice" she could be.
Things started out as these harmless, childish pranks. They would hide her chair in the classroom whenever she went to the toilet during breaks; or they would put bricks in her bag when she left it alone in the classroom—as if that actually meant anything. From what Liz told me, these sounded like clay blocks, not too distorted but still pretty heavy so most likely class B. Did the act of putting bricks in other people's bags carry some kind of symbolic meaning for these kids? I didn't get it.
A year went by and things took a turn for the worse. What had started out as innocent mean-spiritedness grew into something more sinister.
Instead of bricks, they put frogs and dead rats in her bag.
Sometimes the girls would just gang up on her and try to tear off the hair on her head.
Some kid even mixed laxatives into the water bottle. Apparently, it took an entire afternoon to mop up all the diarrhea in the classroom along with the halls and staircases.
And that was only the beginning. It was nothing compared to some of the other things they did to her.
They didn't like the girl for who she was. Her very existence repulsed them and they didn't know how to deal with all these negative emotions they were feeling inside. Pretending somebody didn't exist would only work out for so long. Indifference over time would fester into animosity.
They hated her for simply existing.
She failed to adapt and was severely punished for it.
The bullying stopped completely the day Liz "lost her memories". Those kids couldn't pick on her anymore because for the first time ever, they'd learned that she could fight back.
Not only was she engaged in fistfights with her classmates, she was also putting bricks and roadkill in their bags, shaving the girls' heads with electric razors, and force-feeding these unknown, unpackaged, colored tablets to some of the students. She told me they were only some placebo pills that she'd found in her drug cabinet.
The kids quickly changed tack. They started talking to her, being all chummy with her, even inviting her to hang out after school.
But even then, she never thought of them as her friends—most of them.
She told me she wished she could kill them all, the ones who had treated her badly and those who had stood watching from the sidelines.
If the strong had the right to torment the weak, then she should also have the right to do the same thing they had done to her.
Everyone was scared of the new Liz.
After moving out to find a place to rent, she never heard from her guardians again.
Then, she was home-schooled. She couldn't afford the tuition, and wasn't smart enough to earn a spot on the honor roll for scholarships.
All the crazy things she'd done to her classmates. Of course she said she'd done it to scare them off so they'd stop trying to mess with her, but it was obvious she also was doing it for her.
Considering what she was doing with her school books now, that assumption wouldn't be too far off the mark.
Maybe she didn't have to feel bad. In a way, it wasn't her fault. There was always a chance that the old Liz might still be out there somewhere.
I sat in a corner and waited for the spiders.