Revived

nineteen

I wave my hand to activate the computer, then touch the monitor so it recognizes my fingerprints. It prompts me for a password and I say the first three-syllable word I think of: xenophobe. Matt chuckles because he probably thinks the password is real when, really, the computer just needs me to speak more than two syllables so that it can use voice-recognition software to verify my identity.

“Duck for a second,” I say to Matt. He looks at me funny but crouches down a bit, enough for the computer’s “eye” to scan just me. When it’s satisfied that I’m Daisy and not some imposter, the computer lets me into the directory for Program F-339145.

The God Project.

“They let all the kids in the program mess around in the files?” Matt asks.

“No,” I murmur as I navigate the welcome screens with my hands instead of a mouse. “Like I said, I’m the only one who lives with agents. Mason in particular is really open. He says that I’m almost an agent myself, and that I should be able to access information if I want to. He trusts me.”

“That’s so cool,” Matt says, mesmerized. I don’t answer, choking on the irony of my words.

I motion open the folder with the archived newspaper clippings from the Iowa crash. I choose the longest, most informative story, then scoot my chair aside so Matt can read.

I watch his chocolate eyes float back and forth across the screen. At first, they’re wide and bright: He’s engrossed in the story. Then they narrow, making him look pensive. Finally, when he winces and his face freezes in a pained, uncomfortable expression, I force myself to look away. With nothing else to look at, I read the story again myself.

“Whoa,” Matt says after he finishes reading. “That’s heavy.”

“I know, but look at how it turned out. Nearly everyone was fine.”

“How many weren’t fine?” he asks.

“Uh,” I say, swiping aside the newspaper file and opening the document that contains the list of people who were on the school bus. “Six kids died for real. And the driver. So, seven people.”

Matt scans the names of the kids and I do, too.

Tia Abernathy, Michael Dekas(X), Andrew Evans(X), Timothy Evans(X), Nathan Francis(X), Cody Frost, Marissa Frost, Joshua Hill, Tyler Hill, David Katz, Daisy McDaniel, Elizabeth Monroe, Anne Marie Patterson(X), Marcus Pitts, Chase Rogers, David Salazar, Wade Sergeant, Gavin Silva, Kelsey Stroud(X), Nicole Yang.

I look at Matt and see that he’s still scrutinizing the names.

“Your real last name is McDaniel?”

“Yes,” I say.

“We would have sat near each other at graduation if you didn’t change your name,” he says, dreamlike. I can tell he’s fascinated by the list so I don’t wipe it off the screen just yet.

“You’re a year older than me,” I say. “We won’t graduate together.”

“Oh, that’s right. I forget because you’re in English.”

“And if I didn’t change my name—if I didn’t die—I wouldn’t be in Omaha.”

There’s a pause in the conversation when I really want to ask Matt what he’s thinking despite it being probably the most cliché thing to ask a guy. When Matt still doesn’t take his eyes off the names, I open my mouth to ask if he has any questions. He beats me to it.

“Where’s Megan?” he asks.

“Oh, she was Marcus Pitts then,” I say. “She was born a boy. Her dad took the accident as an opportunity to leave them, mostly because he couldn’t take the transgender thing. After they moved, Megan’s mom let her wear whatever—be whoever—she wanted. She dressed in girl clothes from then on out.”

“But she was only, what, like five?”

“I guess when you know, you know,” I say with a shrug.

“Oh,” Matt says. “So are the X’s—”

“The ones who died,” I say, nodding.

“Were those kids brothers?” Matt asks. “The Evanses?”

“Yes.”

“And they both died?” Matt says, horrified.

“Yes.”

“That’s so rough. Their parents must have been devastated.”

“I’m sure they were.”

“I’m sure they still are.”

I glance at Matt: He’s holding his jaw in his right hand, and his forehead is distorted and distressed. His dark eyes are clouded over like a rainstorm. He’s affected by these people he’s never met. Maybe it’s because of Audrey, or maybe he’s just empathetic in general, but Matt’s reaction makes me question my own. I have to be honest: For all the times I’ve logged on and researched the program, I haven’t often dwelled on the ones who died for real. In this moment I realize that I haven’t thought of them much at all.

Have I taken on some of Cassie’s robotic tendencies after living with her all these years? Or is it just my developing scientific mind that makes me look at the program so coolly? Or is it the program itself? By teaching me that death is optional, has the program desensitized me to real death?

How will I react if Audrey dies?

Or should I say when?

Thrusting that morbid thought from my brain, I wave away the list. I hear Matt inhale next to me like he’s been holding his breath for a while. I consider logging off but decide to keep going since Matt seems so sucked in. I open the folder where they keep the files on all the victims: one for each, living or dead. They’re not numbered—they all start with F-339145, and then have a random letter after the program identifier—so it’s hard to tell which folder belongs to which person. Matt watches as I play a silent game of eeny, meeny, miny, moe.

When I open “moe,” I immediately recognize Mason’s handwriting. The page is dated December 5, 2001: the day of the bus crash.

Back when the program started, apparently God was paranoid about the Internet and made agents take notes on paper. Eventually, he got over his technophobia and had all of the paper files scanned in and then destroyed. But the handwritten notes are the most real. As I look at Mason’s harried scrawl, I actually feel how dire the situation was, much more than if I was reading a typed report.

“Wow,” I murmur.

“What?” Matt asks.

“Nothing, it’s just the handwriting,” I say. “It’s Mason’s, and it looks so… crazy.”

Matt nods, but he still looks confused. I point at the date.

“This was the day of the crash,” I explain. “The agents had to take quick notes between patients. I’m sure it was chaotic. And it had to be so frustrating for them. Mason and the others were supposed to bring twenty-one people back to life with only a syringe, and that’s it.”

Matt lets my words sink in for a few seconds. “But if the drug didn’t work, they tried other ways to save you guys, too, right?” he asks.

“No, that’s the point,” I say. “To truly test the drug, they could only use Revive. Like, they couldn’t even do CPR.”

“But…” Matt’s words fade.

“Can you imagine being a doctor and knowing all these lifesaving techniques and not being able to use them?” I ask.

“Kind of like having a sister with cancer and knowing about a lifesaving drug that she can’t have,” Matt says, staring right at me.

“I guess so,” I say quietly.

“Sorry,” Matt says.

“Don’t apologize. You’re right.”

Matt steers the conversation back to the screen. Or rather, he looks at the notes and starts reading. Not really knowing what else to say, I read, too.

“Damn,” Matt says quietly, shaking his head.

“Sorry,” I say again. “I wanted to find one for someone who made it. I can’t really tell which file is for which kid.”

“What happened to her parents?” Matt asks, ignoring my apology. I swipe away the notes and open another file in Kelsey’s folder. It’s a signed oath. I close that and find the relo detail sheet: Mr. and Mrs. Stroud, who had no reason to go through a name change, now live in North Dakota. At last contact, in 2011, they were “functioning normally.”

Except that their daughter’s dead.

Matt doesn’t say anything more, so I open another folder. The first file is similar to the page of notes on Kelsey, but it’s for another bus kid, written by another agent.

“Damn,” Matt says again, more forcefully this time.

“I know,” I say, quickly closing the file, then tapping the air to open another. Thankfully, it’s for someone who responded to Revive: Gavin Silva, now Gavin Villarreal. I exhale loudly as I move my hands to page through details of his Revival and relocation to New York.

“I know him,” I say. “He’s super cool.”

“Oh, yeah?” Matt says weakly. I can tell he needs to hear some good news as much as, if not more than, I do.

“Yeah,” I say. “Revive worked for a lot of us. It gave us life.”

I feel like I just walked out of a haunted house: My nerves are frayed and I’m post-stress tired. I pause to regroup. Then I try to explain to Matt the pros of the Revive program.

“So, this guy, Gavin, is twenty-two now,” I say in a measured tone. “You’d like him; he’s really funny. He’s in art school and he does these insane drawings. He sent me one for my birthday last year…. It’s that one of the face, in my room?”

“Yeah, I saw it.”

“Anyway, Gavin’s life is way better now. Mason told me a few years ago that back in Bern, Gavin’s dad was physically abusing him. Like hitting him, but also putting out cigarettes on him.” I pause, shivering.

“That’s sick,” Matt says with a flash of anger in his eyes.

“It is,” I agree. “It’s terrible. He had it really rough. But the Revive program saved him from that.”

Matt’s eyebrows go up like he wants to hear more, so I keep talking.

“So, Gavin’s best friend was one of the ones who died. His name was Michael Dekas. Anyway, before the crash, I guess Michael’s parents started to suspect something was going on at Gavin’s house, but they could never get Gavin to fess up. Mason said they asked Gavin’s mom about it but she denied it, then didn’t let Gavin come to their house for a while.

“Anyway, then the crash happened. Michael didn’t respond at all to the drug; his parents were obviously devastated. But then when the agents went to try to Revive Gavin, they found all these burns on his body. There was no one there to claim him—his parents were in Canada, I guess—and the agents asked if any of the families there knew Gavin. The Dekases came forward, and when they saw the burns, they made a snap decision to volunteer to relocate with Gavin… as their son.”

“No way,” Matt says.

“It’s true,” I say. “The program saved Gavin’s life twice, in a way.”

“Yeah,” Matt agrees. “But you know, that’s also sort of kidnapping. It might be worse than the nun thing.”

“I guess,” I say, never having thought about it like that.

“But I still think it was the right thing to do,” Matt clarifies quickly. “I mean, how could they send a kid back to a guy who was using him as an ashtray?”

“Exactly,” I say, but it lacks conviction. Matt and I both get lost in our thoughts for a few minutes. On my mind are shades of gray. Many times, I’ve pondered the ways in which Gavin’s life is so much better now, but the one thing I haven’t considered before is his real mom, and what her circumstances were like then and now. It strikes me for the first time that the situation might not have been as morally black and white as I’ve always thought.

Maybe they should have found her and offered her a way out, too.

There’s a gnawing inside me that feels like guilt: guilt for second-guessing the program that gave me a life and a home. I move on from Gavin’s story, at least on the outside.

“There were others who really benefited from Revive, too,” I say to Matt. “I already told you how Megan’s life got better. And Tyler and Joshua Hill—they’re identical twins. Both were Revived. They live in Utah. It would have been so terrible if just one didn’t make it, but they both did. Oh, and Elizabeth Monroe’s younger sister was supposed to have been on the bus that day but wasn’t; she stayed home sick. But Elizabeth was Revived, so her sister will never have the guilt of being the lucky one. I mean, can you imagine having to live each day knowing that your sibling won’t get to…”

I’m so concerned with running from moral dilemmas and trying to defend the program that I don’t realize what I’m saying until it’s out of my mouth. But then it hits me like a sledgehammer to the heart. Shocked by my own words, I look quickly, wide-eyed, at Matt.

He’s the lucky one; Audrey isn’t.

“Oh my god, Matt,” I say. “I can’t believe I said that.”

“It’s okay,” he says quietly before moving his eyes from me to the ceiling. There’s nothing of interest up there, but he stares anyway.

“No, it isn’t.”

The room is so still, it’s frozen.

“Actually, Daisy, you’re right,” Matt says finally, sighing loudly. He pulls his gaze from the ceiling and looks at me with fire in his dark eyes. “It’s not okay that a drug like this exists and it can’t help my sister. It’s not okay at all.”

I’m not sure what to do. Anxiously, I turn back to the screen and start closing files. I hear a clock chime downstairs; my breath sounds like a windstorm.

“We can never tell Aud about this,” Matt says flatly.

“You can never tell anyone about this,” I say.

“I said I wouldn’t,” Matt snaps. “But I guess you’ll have to trust me on that.”

“I do trust you,” I say softly. “It’s just that I’ve never told anyone this stuff before. I’ve never felt close enough to anyone to even consider telling them. And it would be a huge deal if it got out. I mean, there would be riots. Everyone would want it. But not everyone could benefit from it.”

“Like Audrey,” Matt says dismally. The anger is gone as quickly as it came, and I realize that I almost prefer it to sadness. Anger is manageable; sadness is heartbreaking.

“Like Audrey,” I echo.

Even though Audrey will never be in the Revive program, I think of reading her name in a case file. Of failed attempts at bringing her back scrawled in rough handwriting. Of her time of death noted like it’s nothing.

I can’t ignore the sick feeling in my stomach right now.

This little venture of mine into the world of Revive was meant as a gesture for Matt, but all it’s done is make me question my life. Revive brought me back, but the program stole a child from his mother and didn’t try other methods of saving seven people. Who knows what else might have worked on Michael Dekas or Kelsey Stroud? Maybe they needed surgery, not injections.

And beyond that, though I knew that telling Matt about Revive would be rough on him because of Audrey, I didn’t consider that it would also be rough on me. But as I sit here, that’s what weighs me down most.

Revive gave me life—it is my life—but it won’t give Audrey a second chance at hers. And for that, Matt has a right to be mad.

And so do I.