Hardwired Read Free

home to your friends and family, proving that you can become a valuable and constructive member of society.”
    I nodded rather than argued. I absolutely was excited about going home, but the idea that there was a life or friends waiting for my back in Foster, Rhode Island, was absurd. IGT’s testing program had physically destroyed one-half of my family. And as for friends, they’d pretty much written me off the day my brother had tested positive for what I liked to call the “psychotically crazy gene.” I could join the priesthood, fund a world charity, dedicate my life to saving the wombat population in Australia, and it wouldn’t matter. This facility and their stupid genetic test had sealed my fate, and there was nothing that I could do or say to ever change that.
    â€œSo long as all goes well in these last two weeks of testing, Lucas, we can move you out to the reintegration facility and then back home,” Ms. Tremblay continued. “You have your entire life in front of you. A clean slate.”
    This woman was either the dumbest person I’d ever met or the best liar. After passing the six-week “testing phase,” I’d have two weeks of confinement at what they lovingly referred to as the “reintegration” facility—a fourteen-day-long study hall where they monitored us for delayed signs of stress. What Ms. Tremblay saw as a light at the end of the tunnel, I saw as fourteen more days for me to potentially screw up.
    â€œAre you excited about returning home, Lucas?” she asked.
    â€œNothing worth going home to, ma’am,” I said, refusing to give into her delusional optimism a second longer.
    Ms. Tremblay paused, her normally stoic facade faltering. “Nobody? No friends? Sports? Girlfriend?”
    I chuckled to myself. She knew exactly what was waiting for me back home, probably had my entire life history committed to memory. Ms. Tremblay was fishing, trying to gauge my tolerance level outside these walls and wondering if there was a trigger at home she’d overlooked. That was her job, after all—determining if my genetic makeup predisposed me to criminal behavior. Not as a common criminal, but the violent, psychotic type that randomly opens fire in minimarts and crowded malls.
    â€œNone of the above,” I replied, knowing full well what ever friends I had wrote me off the day I tested positive. And as for family, I had Tyler’s grave as a constant reminder of what this place cost families like mine. They’d taken my brother two years ago, dragged him out of our house with nothing but the clothes on his back. Didn’t seem right to me, even then—a star athlete who’d never done much more than TP a couple of houses on Halloween being hauled away like some kind of farm animal.
    Tyler may have gone into the Bake Shop normal and well-adjusted, but something about the place changed him. Broke him. He quit the baseball team, quit school altogether the day he returned home. Refused to eat, refused to do anything but sit in his room and scribble notes in his journal. He’d sit on his bed and stare at his walls for day, not acknowledging anyone.
    His girlfriend, Olivia, begged him to talk, to cry, to scream, to do anything other than sit there completely trapped in his own mind. She spent every waking hour in his bedroom trying to get through to him.
    The one day she’d left him alone, the one time Olivia ventured home to shower and grab a change of clothes, everything changed. She’d asked me to watch him, said he was quieter than usual. I shrugged off Olivia’s concerns; as far as I could tell, he was same closed-off person he’d been for the past two weeks. I’d left him alone for fifteen minutes tops to get Suzie off the bus. When I came back, Tyler was in the backyard, sitting in an old lawn chair by the circle of rocks we used for fires. I was psyched to see him out of his room. I called out