Chapter Seven
Harper Bachmann. It was so easy to remember back when she was the girl every single female shifter so desperately wanted to be. We all drooled at the thought of the food she ate every day. We sighed over the quality of her clothes. We groaned at thought of how soft her bed must have been, how plush the carpets under it would have felt on her feet. We grew up pretending to be her, posing for our little imaginary press conferences.
“I got a red ribbon just like Harper.”
“So, what? I got a pair of black shoes, and she wears black shoes every day. And when I swing my legs, I look just like her.”
“You don’t look like her. You have curly hair.”
We went around and around, each one insisting that she loved Harper more than the next one. We never agreed on anything, never reached any consensus on what her clothes were made of. When she appeared with a new piece of jewelry or an adorable, little umbrella to keep the sun off her skin, we scoured the streets for anything that resembled her things even remotely.
“Mom,” I asked one day as we picked through the scraps, “can I have a dress like Harper Bachmann’s? I promise I won’t get it dirty.”
She bent down to look at me and chuckled to herself. “Of course, my darling. One day, I’ll get you a dress just like Harper’s, all right?” She smiled and made her little gesture of promise: two crossed fingers. The sight of it made my little legs hop up and down in place. That meant she was serious.
Of course, I had already been close to Harper. She’d made an appearance at a shifter party the night of the big earthquake. I heard rumors that she’d actually hidden herself on our compound, but I never believed them. Why did we never see her? Where did she stay? It wasn’t possible. I had briefly seen her dancing with Black Feather the night of the party, but I never got a chance to speak with her. I’d always regretted that.
And now, there she was, sitting next to me and scowling at an old TV set. She had something in her hand, a kind of rectangular device that she pointed at the screen and jabbed with her thumb. I watched her do it with what must have been a highly-confused expression, and Blue cleared her throat and gestured with her head to the screen. After a moment, I caught on. Something about the thing in Harper’s hand made the images on the TV change. However, she didn’t seem too happy about anything she saw. All of it appeared to make her endlessly angry.
“What are you looking for?”
She didn’t look at me or stop punching the buttons on her hunk of plastic. “Don’t talk to me, shifter.”
I shrugged and stood up to look around the little house, but the big guy who had been so rough with me earlier was standing right in the doorway and shook his head at me. Nope. Stay right here.
I sighed and plopped back down. Blue was visible over Harper’s head, and I shot her a look to ask, ‘What is this? Why are we watching her watch TV? Is this why they kidnapped us?’
Blue just gave me an ‘I-don’t-know’ expression. The both of us slid down into the couch cushions to wait. Who knew captivity was so dull?
A long, dreadful moment went by, and then Blue stirred a bit. “I hate to be a bother, but I’m certain there’s a bathroom around here. I could really use one.”
Again, Harper maintained her concentration on the screen. “Are you the one my dad seduced?”
“I’m sorry?”
Finally, Harper put the rectangle down and turned to Blue. “I said,” she angled her shoulders so as to turn completely, one hand up on the sofa so her arm was up and bent at a threatening angle, “are you the idiot who actually thought my dad gave a crap about anyone or anything?”
Blue let out a little “Ha!” and crossed her arms. She actually moved a bit closer to her opponent and stared her down directly. “If you’re asking if I really thought your father was in love with me, the answer is no. I’m no idiot. I did, however, think he was a man who was going through some kind of identity crisis and no longer knew how he felt about creatures such as myself. I took pity. I’m nice that way.”
She went silent and started to sit back, then snapped back up to her position. “I could have easily killed him, you know? I’m a boa constrictor. I can crush bones.”
“Then I would have eaten him,” I put in.
They both turned to me with shocked expressions.
“What?” I crossed my arms. “I don’t want to eat a human, but I will if they’re evil and they deserve it.” I grabbed the rectangle and tried to control the TV the way Harper had, but it didn’t do anything. Frustrated, I plonked the thing down between the cushions.
Harper looked at me, then at Blue. She stood and regarded the two of us.
“You two ever seen a movie?”
We shook our heads ‘no.’
Together, the three of us walked to the back of the house. Harper’s bodyguard followed us but at a distance once she made a dismissive gesture–a little flick of her hand as if he were just an annoying bug. She opened the door to what looked to be an extra little room, but what was inside made me gasp.
There, lined up along the shelves and from floor to ceiling was a strange gallery of slim rectangles, each with a different design and its own sensibility. Harper pulled one down, and I saw that it was about the size of the books in the palace library, but it was just a hunk of plastic, no pages.
“These are called videotapes,” Harper explained. “For a long time, people used them for entertainment. The doctor collects them all over the city. I usually have to watch them alone, but we can watch one together if you want.”
Blue and I exchanged a look. “Who’s the doctor?” she asked. Harper didn’t respond, she just started pulling one videotape after another down from the shelves.
“This one is called Can I Kiss You? It’s a love story, but it’s actually pretty funny. Then this one is a true story; it’s about a family of criminals and how the dad went to jail. This one is a scary story; it’s about a woman who moves into a new house that’s full of evil spirits…” On and on she went, never tiring of describing the videos to us, showing us the covers.
Again, I shot Blue a look, trying to communicate that we needed to get out of there and fast, but neither of us knew what to do. Harper seemed determined to show us every movie she could, and her bodyguard was right outside the door. Even if we attacked him together, he would still outweigh and overpower us easily. So, we chose a stack of movies. What else could we do?
We returned to the brown, sagging sofa and settled in. Harper showed us the device that swallowed up the hunks of plastic and how to control it with the same thing she used for the TV. The first movie started, and Blue and I panicked when we saw that it was only words across the screen. We hadn’t known there would be reading involved.
“What’s wrong with you two?” Harper looked at each of us like we had gone truly crazy. “Something happen?”
“No, nothing,” I assured her. “It’s just that we didn’t know the movie would be something to read. We thought it would be something different.”
Harper laughed a little. “Don’t worry,” she said, snuggling into the cushions. “These are just the credits. The actors will show up soon, and then the plot gets going. You’ll see.”
“Oh. Sure.” Once again, I exchanged nervous looks with Blue. Credits? Plot? What did any of these words mean?
She just gave me a head shake of despair. She was as lost as I was. We stared at the screen and waited for this thing called the plot to appear. I wondered what it would look like. I felt certain it would be more than I could handle.
But it was just two male humans driving in a car and arguing. I couldn’t understand what it was they were arguing about – some type of music. Why would music inspire any kind of argument? I told myself not to worry about it and refocused. This was important to Harper. I needed to participate.
Soon, I didn’t have to focus so hard. I hadn’t known there was a way to forget where I was, to completely immerse myself into a fictional place called ‘America,’ full of happy, wealthy humans who all had jobs, pretty houses, and places to go. There wasn’t a single shifter in the story, but I found that I didn’t care; I was able to relate to the humans. Me! Relating to humans! It was amazing.
The movie ended with the two friends getting together with the women they loved and kissing them passionately while they high-fived each other. They all laughed as a group, and the picture froze. Then more words appeared. I loved it so much I jumped to my feet and applauded.
“Wow! That was so great. Really, just…I can’t believe how wonderful that was.”
I turned to see Blue and Emily staring at me. Blue was just as thrilled as I was, but Emily was unimpressed.
“Oh, my God,” she said, smirking. “You need to calm down. It was just a dumb comedy from the old days. And the actors can’t hear you clapping.”
My excitement turned to horror, and I felt the blood rush into my ears. “Yeah. I know. I was just kidding.” I quickly sat and put my hands in my lap.
“What was that you called her?” Blue nodded over at me. “God? What does that mean?”
Harper tossed her hair over her shoulder coolly. I hated how much I still wanted to be her. “It’s an expression I learned from these old videotapes. People used to say it all the time.”
“But,” I interrupted, “what does it mean?”
She sighed and rolled her eyes. “It means I’m stuck entertaining two uneducated shifters who don’t know anything. Seriously, why don’t you shifters stay in school? Maybe then the whole world wouldn’t shock you so much.”
“Huh?” I tilted my head at her. “What are you talking about?”
“Okay, this is insane.” She stood and faced us. “School? The place where teachers teach you things? The place you left waaaaay too soon? That place.”
“We know what a school is,” Blue said. She leaned her head on one hand and raised her delicate eyebrows. “You don’t actually think us shifters are welcome there, do you?”
She opened her mouth to make a retort, but instead, she just closed it again. She looked at Blue who looked right back at her. I realized then that Harper must not have had a lot of people in her life who weren’t afraid of her. She was practically royalty, but Blue didn’t care. She’d snatch the crown right off of Harper’s head and put it on her own if given the chance.
“They didn’t let you go to school?”
“I got to go for a couple years,” I explained. “I loved it. But then, out of nowhere, my brother and I were pulled into the office and told to walk home and never come back. They never even told us why.”
“My mother wouldn’t let me go,” Blue offered. “She just told me I’d be killed if I ever set a single toe in a school. So,” she shrugged, “I stayed out. I became a performer instead.”
Harper needed a moment to take all of this in. “Hmm. I didn’t know that.”
We all grew quiet for a long time after that. No one wanted to say too much, we were busy processing our thoughts, maintaining our anger so it wouldn’t get out of hand. I was angry that anyone anywhere thought a shifter would willingly pass up an education. All the shifters I knew desperately wanted to learn, took every opportunity to find out how things worked and how to alter them. If any teacher had ever waved us into her classroom, we would have run in at top speed, sat in the front row, and drank it all in.
The awkward moment passed, and we moved on to the next movie. It was a lot less shocking the second time around. The new film was meant to be scary, but I found myself laughing every time a human was murdered.
“What are you doing? Stop.” Harper elbowed me to shut me up, but the effort to hold in all of my giggles just made it all worse. A woman on the screen shrieked as she was shot by a small gun, and the laughs just burst out of me again.
“Okay, I am serious.”
Her intense tone made Blue start chuckling, and then my laughing grew even worse. The screen was now a complete blood bath, and I couldn’t take it. Humans killing each other. It was the funniest thing I’d ever seen.
“What are you…Okay, we all have to stop laughing.” Harper started to giggle with us. “I mean it! This movie isn’t funny. It’s scary.” But she was already holding her sides. Another gruesome murder was carried out, and we shrieked in unison as we rolled on the floor. We could hardly catch our breath it was so hilarious.
Our laughter got our oversized bodyguard annoyed to the point that he turned and walked out of the room. He only went a few feet away, but as soon as I saw him drift into the kitchen, I grabbed Harper’s arm.
“You have to get us out of here,” I blurted out. “I don’t know why we’re here but we have to go.”
She took a moment to catch her breath, then shook me off. “I can’t help you.”
Blue watched the door and signaled for me to keep talking. I did. “Harper, come on. You know this is wrong. Your father kidnapped us. We’ve got to escape, and fast.”
“No, you don’t understand.” She stood and looked down at us. “He only kidnapped you because the doctor and I asked him to. You’re here for me.”
The cool, placid expression on Harper’s face made my blood turn to ice water. “Harper,” I said, my mouth completely dry, “what are you talking about?”
Instead of answering, she watched me closely. In front of me, she sprouted pointed cat ears. A slim tail sprouted from her back, and she grew whiskers on her face. Her teeth extended and shone in the dying light from the window. My heart stopped. Her body didn’t fully shift but rather took on specific animal elements. She even grew a little taller and seemed stronger, more frightening.
“I can’t live like this,” she stated. Her voice had become a low purr. It made the hairs on my arms stand straight up. “The two of you are here for the doctor to study so that he can cure me. So,” she lowered down to her hands, arched her back, and stared into my eyes with her yellow, oval cat-like orbs, “you will not be escaping anytime soon. Not if I have anything to say about it.”
She rose and shifted back to a fully human form, took the video tape out of the VCR, and popped in a new one. She sat silently and pointed her weird, plastic tool at the screen and started a new movie as if no one else was anywhere near her.
A movement outside the window made me look up. Who was that? I checked to see if either of the other two girls had seen it, but they didn’t seem to be paying attention. Blue was looking at her hands, and Harper was starting a new movie. The form moved outside my window again. There! I’d been right.
It was Tina. Tina in her wolf form. She stood outside the window for a moment and stared right at me. I wanted to scream, “Save me! Tina, they want to do something to us, and we don’t know what it is. Please! You have to get us out of here!”
But I didn’t say anything. I just watched her watch me. Then she ran off and left me there to sit on a musty couch and pretend nothing had happened.