That’s how he ended up back in the cell beside me. He wanted to be there.
And I left him.
I’ve been sitting here, trapped in time, in a kind of shock until now. My eyes fill with tears.
I take out his notebooks, feeling guilty but determined to know what’s inside, and I let out a whimper when I see the first page.
I find young, childish writing, and I realize they’re his institution diaries, the ones he admitted to writing for all those years and then hiding from his teachers.
Today we did a smell and taste test. They wanted to know what the smells reminded us of. Paul Cott started crying when he smelled lemon. He had to tell them why and when he did the teachers told him that that is a memory he needs to forget, that his parents were bad people.
Baby powder reminded me of baths. I think I had baths with Mommy. I must have because there’s only showers here. I remember the bubbles that I could hide under. I remember that they tickled my skin. I remember putting them on my chin and pretending to have a beard like Granddad. Then I remembered Granddad and Grandma and I remembered so many other things. I remember Mommy laughing. I remember her wrapping me in a huge towel like a baby and carrying me to her bed. I remember kicking and shouting and pretending I didn’t like it, but really I did. I remember a glass of chocolate milk while she dried my hair.
It must have been when I was five. Three years ago. But I remember.
She’s not a good mom, they say. Unfit. Dad, too. They tell me I’m here for my own good, that Mommy and Daddy want me here, but I don’t think that part is right. I remember them crying when the men took me. Screaming and crying. If she is so bad then why do I smile when I smell her perfume on Ms. Harris, who I will never tell wears the same as Mommy, and why does my tummy feel sick when I think of them?
The teachers are right. One smell leads to another. It helps to remember things and now I can’t stop thinking and remembering. They are the ones who made me start remembering, it’s not my fault. I’m not going to be like the others and tell them what I remember. Not the real things. Because I don’t want them to take them away from me.
As tears fall from my eyes I skip toward the end of the last notebook. I don’t have time to read it all; I need to find him and give them back to him.
We’ve been told we can come up with our own surname on our sixteenth birthday. They make them legal and we get a passport and then we can travel. We’re not allowed to keep our mom and dad’s names, but they took that from us a long time ago. I would have been Carrick Brightman. I still use it in my head. I never say it out loud, though. Here we just have a first name and a number for our surname.
I’ve finally decided my name and they’ve approved it. I had to sit before the board and explain why. I didn’t tell them the truth, but I haven’t been telling them the truth since I started writing this thing. I think writing this makes it easier to lie to them because I know that somewhere I’m telling the truth. If they ever find this, I’ll be branded and I won’t care.
I remember being out late at night with Dad. I was on his shoulders. It was pitch-black and we were running. I thought it was a game, but now I think we were running from the Whistleblowers and they were trying to pretend it was a game.
I think we were lost, or I thought we were lost, and that’s when Dad taught me about the stars. He showed me the North Star and everything that leads from that.
He told me if I’m ever lost, to find that star. I know that when I leave here in 1,095 days that I will try to find them. Finding them is the worst thing we could do; we’re told this every day. But I want to find the woman who wrapped me in the towel that smelled of baby powder and the man who taught me about the stars. The two people who made me feel safer and happier in the smallest memories that I have than anyone has ever done in here.
I don’t know where they are, but I know one thing: I’ll look north. The answers are north, and I’ll let the wind take me.
And that is why my new surname is Vane.
Carrick Vane.
* * *
I close the diary, hot tears dripping down my cheeks, with a sense of urgency within me. I quickly change my clothes into anything I can find, I no longer care. I can wear the clothes of yesterday and still move forward. My sock catches on my anklet and I sit down and take it off.
I leave it by Art’s bedside.
“You’ll always be with me,” I whisper, kissing his lips. “Good-bye, Art.”
I leave the hospital room expecting to be stopped when I get outside. Instead, the nurses and doctors part for me. There are Whistleblowers at the door at the end of the corridor, and my heart sinks. I’m being taken again. The kind nurse urges me on. I frown. Then one of the Whistleblowers sees me. He reaches for the door, and he opens it.
I start walking, and the hospital staff starts clapping, smiles on their faces, some of them crying. I keep walking, expecting for somebody to grab me at any moment, but nobody does. I walk straight through those open doors, into the unknown.
EIGHTY-THREE
2 MONTHS LATER
I’M ON GRANDDAD’S FARM. It’s July. The sun is beating down on my skin. I’m wearing a sundress, with spaghetti straps tied on my shoulders, a pretty floral design that’s confusing the bees.
I’m alone in the strawberry beds, eyes closed, face lifted to the sun. I am free, but even better than that, I feel free. I was free before, but I never knew it, now I feel it.
I hear laughter and the flow of conversation in the distance, the smell of burning wood as the food is lifted from the cooking pit for all of us to share. The farmworkers, my family, Pia Wang and her family, Raphael Angelo and his wife and their seven children, Carrick’s family, too. My new friends, Mona, Lennox, Fergus, Lorcan, Lizzie, and Leonard, are here. Cordelia and Evelyn are traveling; Cordelia is showing her daughter, the big wide world that she’d been forced to hide her from since her birth. Lennox has been hovering exceptionally close to Juniper ever since he laid eyes on her. I think the feeling is mutual; Juniper hasn’t stopped smiling.
Mr. Berry and Tina decided not to come. It’s not as easy for everyone. It’s not easy for anyone.
It has been one month since the Guild press conference that was to announce Sanchez’s replacement of Crevan. Instead, that press conference announced something quite different: the dissolution of the Guild.
Appointed by the state, the Truth Commission will write up a report of their findings on the Guild. This while the private inquiry into Crevan’s personal behavior still continues, alongside the legal investigation by police into his criminal activities. Everybody wants to be seen to be doing something, but there are no solutions and no punishments as of yet.
Enya Sleepwell, on the back of her dramatic broadcast on the eve of polling day, was voted into power and is our new prime minister. The Reduction of the Flawed proposal has very much been scrapped, no possibility of it ever coming to light, and Enya has commissioned a study, titled the Sleepwell Report, separate from the Truth Commission, into the Guild’s proceedings, examining the roles of every politician, businessperson, and legal eagle who passed through its halls. How exactly they are to be held accountable, I don’t know. The findings from the reports are eagerly anticipated.
Enya said that nothing could happen overnight, but it did. After weeks of debate, the government voted against the Flawed court and anti-Flawed decrees, and the Flawed system was abolished at midnight on the day of the vote. In a matter of hours, Flawed were declared to have the same rights as everybody else in the country, no longer second-class citizens. The people, Flawed and un-Flawed, gathered in Highland Castle courtyard to celebrate. I was among them.
The aftereffects of this decision have been enormous. Raphael Angelo’s office grows steadily by the minute as he takes on case after case against the government for compensation for the damage done to the lives of people who were branded Flawed. A government compensation scheme totaling one hundred million has been set up, the Clayton Byrne f
und, named after the old man who died on the bus, the man I tried to protect but failed to save. His death will not be in vain.
But the most valuable compensation of all was Enya Sleepwell’s well-meaning public apology to all the victims of the Guild for the government’s failure to intervene. An apology is perhaps all that many people will receive, but Raphael won’t rest until every single branded person receives at least a personal apology, until their reputations are redressed, until the suffering of anyone who was ever hurt as a result of the Guild has been acknowledged.
The government announced that never again will this country allow such “a lapse in humanity to poison us and strip people of their basic human rights.” Everybody looks back and wonders how we allowed it to happen in the first place. It all seems so simple now.
As for F.A.B. children, all those children who had been taken from their homes or torn from their mothers at birth, have the right to return to their rightful homes if they so wish. And as for those who grew up without their parents, those who are no longer children, whose parents are aged or no longer living, who were told and believed all their lives that their parents were monsters, or that they weren’t loved or wanted, they face having to come to terms with the reality that their parents went to their graves without justice or apology for their suffering. Enya Sleepwell has appointed Alpha to the F.A.B. Rights Alliance to help assist with this enormous mess.
So what does all that really mean for any of us?
For Crevan, he still walks the streets a free man, awaiting trial for his part in my sixth branding, for which he will receive a short prison sentence, no doubt. His reputation has been tarnished: He will not lead a life of power as he did before. People recognize him on the streets: They stare; they shout abuse; they judge. I know what he faces on a daily basis, I’ve been there. Thousands of us have been there.
For Art, he moved away from this country to study, to set up a new life where he can escape the shadow of his father. He will study science at college in September as he planned. He promises to stay in touch, and even though our bond has dissolved, it doesn’t mean it has disappeared, it is still there somewhere, probably for the rest of our lives, just not visible to the human eye, not in the same form as it was.
As for me, my future is more uncertain. I have been invited back to my school to complete the exams they would not let me sit for in their halls only months ago. I won’t return, but I will study, I will finish my exams. Enya Sleepwell calls continuously for my involvement in the Vital Party, as do various media outlets for my opinion on every daily occurrence. Professor Lambert has a job with my name on it, he says.
For once, I won’t plan, I won’t have any expectations. I will take things step by step, save the leaps for the times of necessity. I will enjoy the sun on my skin, the wind on my face, the feel of Carrick against my body, the sound of my family’s voices, and the effects of their love, and value the loyalty of my new friends. The simple things, some say, but that depends on where you live and what laws control you, because there was nothing simple about any of us achieving this.
I pick a strawberry and drop it into the pot, feeling like a child again. As I look down, I see a weed growing in the beds and automatically bend to pull it out. But I stop myself. I leave it there and smile conspiratorially. Just our little secret.
I scream, a high-pitched shriek. The talking and laughter stop immediately. I run from the strawberry beds.
When I reach my family and friends, they’re all standing, watching out for me, alert, worried, ready to attack, looking for predators and intruders because we’ve had our fair share of them.
Carrick drops his shovel and marches away from the cooking pit that he’s working on with Granddad, Dad, and Adam, and hurries toward me, eyes black.
“What’s wrong?”
I drop the tin bucket of strawberries and run to him. I leap up and he catches me, my legs wrapped around his body, clinging to him, my hands on his stunned face.
I ignore the fact that everyone is looking, that Kelly is looking at us dreamily, that Juniper is whooping, that Dad is uncomfortable and Mom is laughing at him, that Ewan is pretending to vomit, that Raphael Angelo’s kids have replicated the very same move and are now swinging out of one another, making smoochy kissing sounds, that Mona, Lennox, Fergus, and Lorcan are cheering us on. Granddad cheers, which annoys my dad even more, and Pia Wang giggles, with her husband and two children beside her.
Or at least I pretend to ignore them, but I feel them with me, every single molecule of their energy, with happiness.
I gaze into Carrick’s eyes. Green as can be. I press my lips to his, and I finally taste his kiss.
EIGHTY-FOUR
THERE’S THE PERSON you think you should be and there’s the person you really are. I’m not sure who I should be, but I now know who I am.
And that, I say, is the perfect place to start again.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ENORMOUS THANKS TO Jean Feiwel, Anna Roberto, and Will Schwalbe. To Molly Brouillette and the epic Fierce Reads team who were a joy to travel with. Thanks to my agent Marianne Gunn O’Connor, my beautiful supportive family, and, most important of all, my dream team David, Robin, and Sonny.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cecelia Ahern is the award-winning and bestselling author of many adult novels including P.S. I Love You and Love, Rosie—both of which were major motion pictures. She is also the author of Flawed, the prequel to Perfect. She resides in Ireland. Visit her online at cecelia-ahern.com, or sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Part Two
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Part Three
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 by Cecelia Ahern.
A Feiwel and Friends Book
An imprint of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10010
fiercereads.com
All rights reserved.
Feiwel and Friends logo designed by Filomena Tuosto
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Ahern, Cecelia, 1981– author.
Title: Perfect / Cecelia Ahern.
Description: First edition. | New York: Feiwel and Friends, 2017. | Sequel to: Flawed. | Summary: Since Celestine, eighteen, was declared a public menace, she has been on the run with Carrick, the one person she can trust, but she has a secret that may save all of those branded Flawed.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016024481 | ISBN 9781250074126 (hardcover)
Subjects: | CYAC: Science fiction. | Prejudices—Fiction. | Fugitives from justice—Fiction. | Government, Resistance to—Fiction.