Bad Love

Chapter 12

Jasmine spent the next hour reading and then rereading the twenty page galley that Andrew had entrusted her with. The world he was describing was an abstruse one, cut off from society and governed by its own unique laws and principles. The story took place in a village called Prospera, located between a mountain and the ocean, its location unknown.

The apple test was one of the various tests we were administered as small children. When we were five we were seated at a table by ourselves and had a bowl of four apples placed before us. The test was administered by a member of the Education Committee, who told us to imagine three other children sitting around the table with us and to decide what we wanted to do with our apples. After we'd made our decision about what we wanted to do with our apples we were told that one of the children at the table hadn't eaten for a day and were asked to make a new decision about what we wanted to do with our apples. After that we were told that one of the children at the table had grabbed all of the apples for themselves and we were asked to say what we intended to do about it. There were other tests as well, tests that when we were older we realized were intended to evaluate certain elements of our personalities: selfishness, compassion, aggression, laziness, intelligence, leadership, inventiveness, curiosity, sociability, perceptiveness, sagacity; the list was extensive.

At the age of seven we still had no way of knowing the depth of seriousness behind the tests to which we had been subjected. This didn't mean that the strangeness of them had not succeeded in piquing our interest. For Kevin what was behind the tests that we were being administered was a subject of insatiable fascination. He had to know what the reason was for those tests, and formulated a plan for acquiring the answers he was desperate to know. He befriended a boy named Tom, who, at four years old, would soon be beginning his testing. Kevin thought that he had developed a good enough understanding about what the Education Committee was using the tests to determine and planned to use Tom to test his theory. He told him that for the apple test he should first take all the apples for himself, then refuse to share any of them with the child that hadn't eaten for a day and then to fight the child that grabbed all of the apples to get them back. Not knowing if the boy had followed through with what Kevin had told him to do we couldn't be sure that his sudden death—said to have been from an aggressive infection he'd contracted—was related to his answers on his tests being the antithesis of what the Education Committee was looking for. There were no such doubts for Kevin. He was unshakeable in his conviction that the boy had been killed, and that he'd been killed because he'd failed all of his tests.

The incident with Tom changed Kevin in ways from which he would never recover. The guilt, fear and paranoia that the incident instilled in him dictated his every thought and action. He became odd. He had conspiracy theories about everything; about whether there really were sharks that would eat you if you swam beyond the end of the sea cliffs, about whether there really were bears and wolves the size of houses in the forest on the other side of Guardian Mountain, about whether there had really been a nuclear world war that had wiped out most of humanity and turned the world into a barren wasteland where chaos reigned.

There were five of us in our group: Kevin, Miranda, Lisa, Darren, and me, Hannah. Our friendship was the product of the close working relationships that our parents shared, for example my mother was a member of the Education Committee and Miranda's father was the Head Librarian. Believing that it was essential to his survival Kevin had learned to exercise the utmost discretion with his suspicions; we four were the only ones Kevin trusted with his conspiracy theories and we took our responsibility as the repositories for them very seriously. The secrecy that being trusted by him required of us made our strong bonds of friendship even stronger. When we started school an effort was made by the school to widen our social circles. In class our teachers placed us in groups with children from different groups to encourage new friendships. This method took time to produce results; during lunch breaks and after school we'd all regroup in our original cliques and spend our time telling each other about the children with whom we'd been thrown together. Almost all of the other children responded to the program positively by making new friends and breaking away from their close knit circles. The five of us were different. The closeness of our group was such that no amount of contact with any new children could make us break away from our group or admit any new members into it.