Page 72 of Our Last Resort
Simon looked up from his soup.
“Yes?”
“Not here.”
Maybe he understood.
“Under the elm,” he said. “As soon as you can.”
I nodded.
That night, I slipped out of bed. My feet took me to the spiky old elm as if on autopilot. It was too cold for anyone else to be out. Simon and I had the tree to ourselves.
“The thing,” I said. “The thing you wanted to tell us about Émile.”
Simon pinched his lips.
“What was it?” I asked.
He sighed and looked in the distance.
“You really want to know?”
I think I already do,I wanted to say, but the words wouldn’t come out.
Simon took a breath in.
“Émile,” he said. “He…he sleeps with the girls.”
Yes.
It had made an intuitive sort of sense, that whatever Émile had done to me, he’d done to others. He had a process. A system. He and Edwina had both moved with such confidence.
“Since when?” I asked.
Simon shrugged.
“Since forever.”
Of course.
What had happened in Émile’s building wasn’t an anomaly, something that ran parallel to an otherwise healthy world. It was the point. It was why he’d created this world in the first place.
I thought about them. The other girls. Girls on a conveyor belt, like the slaughtered chicks on the video from the test.
Émile taught us that we were the menace, and the world had to be protected from us. But this whole time, we were the chicks. Soft little beings, raised and groomed with a purpose in mind. Until hands would pluck us from our blind little world and deliver us to our fate.
I had more questions. Simon had answers.
Who knew? Everyone knew. All the adults. All the mothers.No one did anything about it. Wasn’t that wrong? It was. But Émile waited until the girls were eighteen, and apparently that made it less wrong—at least according to Simon’s vague understanding. How often did it happen? That was unclear, but Émile rotated through the available girls. Once it started, it happened with some regularity.
There was one question I wasn’t sure how to ask.
Did all this mean that Émile was…a father? Everyone’s father? Some people’s father?
Simon shook his head. The fathers were the fathers. Émile was something else.
(It would be years and so many developments until a meticulously reported magazine profile mentioned Émile’s vasectomy. It was also, as it happened, the profile that taught me the test was rigged.)
