The Boy in the Gray Hoodie

37...

37...

Everything had suddenly stopped making sense.

My whole life—every minute that I had existed was made up of a lie. I wasn't Lisa. I was a part of Geist. I was a subject, an experiment, a rat in a cage.

"How could I have not known? How could I have not seen it?" I wondered, too shocked to be angry just yet. "I mean, it was everywhere. The way my parents always seemed distant. The way that mom would look at me when she was angry, almost like I—like I wasn't even hers, and she didn't love me. She was just playing a role."

"Well...maybe it wasn't like that." Pam tried. "It's possible that she loved you just as much as anyone can love their child."

I held up the paper with my number at the top and stared at it. "No," I replied. "Because I wasn't her child."

"Lisa—"

"I'm not Lisa, I'm AE003174!" I read the numbers aloud and then shoved the paper in her face. She leaned away from me, pity filling her gaze.

I couldn't think, and I couldn't breathe, and I knew all Pam was trying to do was calm me down, but the more she talked the angrier I became. When suddenly it occurred to me that my parents weren't the only ones involved in Geist.

I felt my eyes widen until they stung. "You knew about this!" I tossed the paper at her. She flinched, silently staring at me. "You had to know about this!" I cried, kicking against the papers and sending them flying as I scrambled away from her.

"No I didn't!" her pity was suddenly replaced with anger.

"How could you not know?" I demanded. I didn't believe her. What I had just found out—that I was part of some sick experiment—was impossible. But what was even more impossible was that Pam hadn't known about it all along.

"I swear to you," she tried, holding out her hands in a gesture of sincerity. "I had no idea that you were part of this. James never told me who the other hosts were. I had no idea that your mom—"

"Meredith. She's not my mom. And James is not my father." I pressed my hands into my hair, fighting the urge to tear it all out.

"Lisa," Pam tried again, but fell silent at my glare.

"I-I have no idea who I am," the words were like needles in my throat. I had to say them, even though they hurt. I couldn't swallow them, or I'd bleed inside.

"Stop it, Lisa!" Pam reached out and grabbed my shoulders, giving me a forceful shake. "You are no different now than you were five minutes ago! You're freaking out because you were lied to? The only lie that is a danger to you now is the lie you're telling yourself—that you are somehow different because of this," she grabbed a handful of records, the paper crinkling loudly as she creased it in her grip. "What you know doesn't change who you are! There is freedom in truth, Lisa! Don't let it chain you up instead," she pleaded, desperately trying to hold it together as tightly as she held me.

"They lied to me," I cried angrily.

"I know!"

"Why?" I demanded. "What good has any of this ever done?"

She just shook her head.

The experiments, the research, the contracts—what had they even accomplished? Nothing. A big, stinking pile of nothing. No one was made better because of this. It had only ever brought misery.