The Naturals

We found Dean in the garage. He was lying on a black bench, facing away from the door. Dark blond hair was plastered to his face with sweat, his jaw clenched as he executed a series of slow and methodical bench presses. Each time his elbows locked, I wondered if he’d stop. Each time, he kept going.

He was muscular but lean, and my first impression was that this wasn’t a workout. This was punishment.

Michael rolled his eyes and then strolled up behind Dean. “Ninety-eight,” he said, his tone full of mock pain. “Ninety-nine. One hundred!”

Dean closed his eyes for a brief moment, then pushed the barbell up again. His arms shook slightly as he went to set the weight down. Michael clearly had no intention of spotting him. To my surprise, Sloane pushed past Michael, wrapped dainty little hands around the barbell, and rocked back on her heels, angling it into place.

Dean wiped his hands on his jeans, grabbed a nearby towel, and sat up. “Thanks,” he told Sloane.

“Torque,” she said, instead of you’re welcome. “The role of the lever was played by my arms.”

Dean stood up, his lips angling slightly upward, but the moment he saw me, the fledgling smile froze on his face.

“Dean Redding,” Michael said, enjoying Dean’s sudden obvious discomfort a little too much, “meet Cassie Hobbes.”

“Nice to meet you,” Dean said, pulling dark eyes from mine and directing those words at the floor.

Lia, who’d been remarkably quiet up to this point, raised an eyebrow at Dean. “Well,” she said, “that’s not strictly—”

“Lia.” Dean’s voice wasn’t loud or hard, but the second he said her name, Lia stopped.

“That’s not strictly what?” I asked, even though I knew that the next word out of her mouth would have been true.

“Never mind,” Lia said in a singsong tone.

I looked back at Dean: Light hair. Dark eyes. Open posture. Clenched fists.

I cataloged the way he was standing, the lines of his face, the dingy white T-shirt and ratty blue jeans. His hair needed to be cut, and he stood with his back to the wall, his face cast in shadows, like that was where he belonged.

Why wasn’t it nice to meet me?

“Dean,” Michael said, with the air of someone imparting a fascinating bit of useless trivia, “is a Natural profiler. Just like you.”

Those last three words seemed more aimed at Dean than me, and as they hit their target, Dean lifted his eyes to meet Michael’s. There was no emotion on Dean’s face, but there was something in his eyes, and I found myself expecting Michael to look away first.

“Dean,” Michael continued, staring at Dean and talking to me, “knows more about the way that killers think than just about anyone.”

Dean threw down the towel in his hand. Muscles taut, he brushed by Michael and Sloane, by Lia, by me. A few seconds later, he was gone.

“Dean has a temper,” Michael told me, leaning back against the workout bench.

Lia snorted. “Michael, if Dean had a temper, you’d be dead.”

“Dean’s not going to kill anyone,” Sloane said, her voice almost comically serious.

Michael dug a quarter out of his pocket and flipped it in the air. “Wanna bet?”

— — —

That night, I didn’t dream. I also didn’t sleep much, courtesy of the fact that Sloane, who had a dainty little build, also apparently had the nasal passages of an overweight trucker. Instead, as I tried to block out the sound of her snoring, I closed my eyes and pictured each of the Naturals who lived in this house. Michael. Dean. Lia. Sloane. None of them was what I’d expected. None of them fit a familiar mold. As I drifted into that half-awake, half-asleep state that was as close as I was going to get to a real night’s rest, I played a game I’d invented when I was little. I mentally peeled off my own skin and put on someone else’s.

Lia’s.

I started with the physical things. She was taller than I was, and lithe. Her hair was longer, and instead of sleeping with it tucked under her head, she would spread it out on the pillow. Her fingernails were painted, and when she had energy to burn, she rubbed the thumbnail on her left hand with the thumb on her right. In my mind, I turned my head—Lia’s head—to the side, peering into her closet.

If Michael had leveraged a car out of Briggs, Lia would have gone for clothes. I could almost see the closet, full to overflowing. As the room came more into focus, I could feel my subconscious taking over, feel myself losing the real world in favor of this imaginary one I’d built in my head.

I let go of my bed and my closet, my physical sensations. I let myself be Lia, and a rush of information came at me from all sides. Like a writer getting lost in a book, I let the simulation run its course. Where Sloane and I were neat, the Lia in my head was messy, her room a multisensory archive of the past few months. There was no rhyme or reason to the organization of the closet. Dresses hung half on and half off the hangers. There were clothes—dirty, clean, new, and everything in between—on the floor.

I pictured getting out of bed. In my own body, I had a tendency to sit up first, but Lia wouldn’t take the time. She’d roll out of bed, ready for action. Ready to attack. Long hair fell on my shoulders, and I twirled a strand of it around my index finger: another of Lia’s nervous habits, designed to look like it wasn’t nervous at all.

I glanced over at the door to the room. Closed, of course. Probably also locked. Who was I keeping out? What was I afraid of?

Afraid? I scoffed silently, my mind-voice sounding more and more like Lia’s. I’m not afraid of anything.

I walked over to the closet—light on my toes, hips swaying gently—and pulled out the first shirt I touched. The selection was completely random, but what came next wasn’t. I built the outfit up around me. I dressed myself up like a doll, and with each passing moment, I put that much more space between the surface and everything underneath.

I did my hair, my eyes, my nails.

But there was still that little voice in my head. The same one that had insisted I wasn’t scared. Only this time, the one thing it kept saying, over and over again, was that I was here—behind this locked door with who knows what waiting outside—because I had nowhere else to go.