Millennium Babies Read online

  “That's it?” someone asked.

  “That's it,” Franke said. “Enjoy yourselves.”

  “I have a bad feeling about this, Tre,” De said.

  “Me, too,” Brooke said. “It can't be this simple.”

  “I don't think it will be.”

  She sighed. “Well, we signed on for this, so we may as well enjoy it.”

  He looked at her sideways, his blue eyes bright. “Want to be my date for the day, darlin'?”

  “It's always nice to have one friendly face,” she said, surprised at how easily she was flirting with him. She never flirted with anyone.

  “That it is.” He offered her his arm. “Let's see how many of these nice folks are interested in conversation.”

  “Mingle, huh?” she asked, as she put her hand in the crook of his arm.

  “I think that's what we're meant to do.” He frowned. “Only god knows, I 'spect it'll all backfire 'fore the weekend's done.”

  It didn't backfire that night. Brooke had a marvelous dinner in one of the small restaurants with De, a woman from Boston, and two men from California. They shared stories about their lives and their jobs, and only touched in passing on the thing that they had in common. In fact, the only time they discussed it was when De brought it up over dessert.

  “What made y'all sign up for this foolishness?” he asked.

  “The money,” said the man from Los Gatos. He was slender to the point of gauntness, with dark eyes and thinning hair. His shirt had wear marks around the collar and was fraying slightly on the cuffs. “I thought it'd be an easy buck. I didn't expect all the tests.”

  “Me, either,” the woman from Boston said. She was tall and broadshouldered, with muscular arms. During the conversation, she mentioned that she had played professional basketball until she was sidelined with a knee injury. “I haven't had so many tests since I got out of school.”

  The man from Santa Barbara said nothing, which surprised Brooke. He was a short stubby man with more charm than he had originally appeared to have. He had been the most talkative during dinner—regaling them with stories about his various jobs, and his two children.

  “How about you, Tre?” De asked Brooke.

  “I wouldn't have done it if I wasn't part of the university,” she said, and realized that was true. Professor Franke probably wouldn't have had the time to convince her, and she would have dismissed him out of hand.

  “Me,” De said, “I jumped at it. Never been asked to do something like this before. Felt it was sort of important, you know. Anything to help the human condition.”

  “You don't really believe that,” Santa Barbara said.

  “If you don't believe it,” Los Gatos said to Santa Barbara, “why'd you sign up?”

  “Free flight to Madison, vacationer's paradise,” Santa Barbara said, and they all laughed. But he never did answer the question.

  When Brooke got home, she sat on her porch and looked at the stars. The night was warm. The crickets were chirping and she thought she heard a frog answer them from a nearby ditch.

  The evening had disturbed her in its simplicity. Like everyone else, she wanted to know what Franke was looking for. The rest of the study had been so directed, and this had been so free form.

  Dinner had been nice. Drinks afterward with a different group had been nice as well. But the conversation rarely got deeper than anecdotes and current history. No one discussed the study, and no one discussed the past.

  She lost De after dinner, which gave her a chance to meet several other people: a woman from Chicago, twins from Akron, and three friends from Salt Lake City. She'd had a good time, and found people she could converse with—one historian, two history buffs, and a librarian who seemed to know a little bit about everything.

  De joined her later in the evening, and walked her to the rail stop. He'd leaned against the plastic shelter and smiled at her. She hadn't met a man as attractive as he was in a long time. Not since college.

  “I'd ask you to my hotel,” he said, “but I have a feelin' anything we do this weekend, in or out of that strange building, is going to be fodder for scientists.”

  She smiled. She'd had that feeling too.

  “Still,” he said, “I got to do one thing.”

  He leaned in and kissed her. She froze for a moment; she hadn't been kissed in nearly ten years. Then she eased into it, putting her arms around his neck and kissing him back, not wanting to stop, even when he pulled away.

  “Hmm,” he said. His eyes were closed. He opened them slowly. “I think that's titillatin' enough for the scientists, don't you?”

  She almost said no. But she knew better. She didn't want to read about her sex life in Franke's next book.

  The rail came down the tracks, gliding silently toward them. “See you tomorrow?” she asked.

  “You can bet on it,” De said. And there had been promise in his words, promise she wasn't sure she wanted to hear.

  She brought her knees onto her lawn chair, and wrapped her arms around them. Part of her wished he was here, and part of her was glad he wasn't. She never let anyone come to her house. She didn't want to share it. She had had enough invasions of privacy in her life to prevent this one.

  But she had nearly invited De, a man she didn't really know. Maybe De really wasn't a Millennium Baby. Perhaps a bunch of people weren't. Perhaps that was what the numbers and the letters meant. She had spent much of the evening staring at them, wondering. They appeared to be randomly generated, but that couldn't be. They had to have some purpose.

  She shook her head and rested her cheek on her knees. She was taking this much too seriously, the way she always took things. And soon she would be done with it. She would have bits of information she hadn't had before, and she would store them into a file in her mind, never to be examined again.

  Somehow that thought made her sad. The night was beginning to get chilly. She stood, stretched, and made her way to bed.

  The next morning, they met in a different room—the Rose Room—named after the character in the twentieth century movie Titanic. Brooke hoped that the name wasn't a sign.

  There were pastries and coffee against the wall, along with every kind of juice imaginable and lots of fresh fruit, but again, there were no chairs. Brooke's feet hurt from the day before—she usually stood to lecture, but not for several hours—and she hoped she'd get a chance to sit before the day was out.

  She was nearly late again, and hurried inside as they closed the doors. The room smelled of fresh air mixed with coffee and sweat. The group had gathered again, the faces vaguely familiar now, even the faces of people she hadn't yet met. The people toward the back who saw her enter smiled at her or nodded in recognition. It felt like they had all bonded simply by spending an evening in the same room. An evening and the promise of a long weekend.

  She shivered. The air-conditioning was on high, and the room was cold. It would warm up before the day was out; the sheer number of bodies guaranteed that. But she still wondered if she was dressed warmly enough in her casual lilac blouse and her khaki pants.

  “Strange how these places look the same, day or night.”

  She turned. De was half a step behind her, his long hair loose about his face. He still wore jeans and his fancy boots, but instead of the denim shirt and bolo tie, he wore an understated white open collar shirt that accented his tan. Somehow, she suspected, he seemed more comfortable in this. Had he worn the other as a way of identifying himself or a way of putting others off? She would probably never know.

  “The people look different,” she said.

  “Just a little.” He smiled at her. “You look nice.”

  “And you're flirting.”

  He shrugged. “I always believe in using my time wisely.”

  She smiled, and turned as a hush fell over the crowd. Franke had mounted the stage in front. He seemed very small in this place. A few of his assistants stood on either side of him.

  “Here it comes,” De said.

/>   “What?”

  “Whatever it is that's going to make this cocktail party stop.” He was staring at Franke too, and his clear blue eyes seemed wary. “I've half a mind to leave now. Want to join me?”

  “And do what?”

  “Dunno. See the sights?”

  It sounded like a good idea. But, as she had said the day before, she had signed up for this, and she didn't break her commitments. And, she had to admit, she was curious.

  She bit her lower lip, trying to think of a good way to respond. Apparently she didn't have to.

  De sighed. “Didn't think so.”

  The silence in the room was growing. Franke stared at all of them, rocking slightly on his feet. If Brooke had to guess, she would have thought him very nervous.

  “All right,” he said. “I have a few announcements. First, we will be serving lunch at one p.m. in the main restaurant. Dinner will be at seven in the same place. You will not have assigned seating. Secondly, after I'm through, you're free to tell each other your names. We've had enough of secrets.”

  He paused, and this time Brooke felt it, that dread she had seen in De's eyes.

  “Finally, I would like everyone with a letter on your name badge to go to the right side of the room, and everyone with a number to go to the left.”

  People stood for a moment, looking around, waiting for someone to go first. De put a hand on her shoulder. “Here goes nothing,” he said. He ran his finger along her collarbone and then walked to the right.

  “Come on, folks,” Franke said. “It's not hard. Letters to the right. Numbers to the left.”

  Brooke could still feel De's hand on her skin. She looked in his direction, seeing his blond head towering over the small group of letters who had gathered near the pastries on the far right wall.

  She took a deep breath and headed left.

  The numbers had gathered near the pastries too, only on the left. She wondered what Franke's researchers would make of that. Los Gatos was there, his hand hovering between the cinnamon rolls and the donuts as if he couldn't decide. So was one of the twins from Akron, and the woman from Boston. Brooke joined them.

  “What do you think this is?” Brooke asked.

  “A way of identifying us as we run through the maze.”

  Brooke recognized that voice. She turned and saw Santa Barbara. He shrugged and smiled at her.

  She picked up a donut hole and ate it, then made herself a cup of tea while she waited for the room to settle.

  It finally did. There was an empty space in the center of the carpet, a space so wide it seemed like an ocean to her.

  “Good,” Franke said. “Now I'm going to tell you what the badges mean.”

  There was a slight murmuring as the groups took that in. Boston, Santa Barbara, and Los Gatos flanked Brooke. Her dinner group, minus De.

  “Those of you with letters are real Millennium Babies.”

  Brooke felt a protest rise in her throat. She was born on January 1, 2000. She was a Millennium Baby.

  “You were all chosen as such by your state or your country or your city. Your parents received endorsements or awards or newspaper coverage. Those of you with numbers…”

  “Are fucking losers,” Los Gatos mumbled under his breath.

  “…were born near midnight on January 1, but were too late to receive any prizes. You're here because your parents also received publicity or gave interviews before you were born stating that the purpose behind the pregnancy wasn't to conceive a child, but to conceive a child born a few seconds after midnight on January 1 of 2000. You were created to be official Millennium Babies, and failed to receive that title.”

  Franke paused briefly.

  “So, feel free to make real introductions, and mingle. The facility is yours for the day. All we ask is that you do not leave until we tell you to.”

  “That's it?” Boston asked.

  “That's enough,” Santa Barbara said. “He's just turned us into the haves and the have-nots.”

  “Son of a bitch,” Los Gatos said.

  “We knew that the winners were here,” Boston said.

  “Yeah, but I assumed there'd be only a few of them,” Los Gatos said. “Not half the group.”

  “It makes sense though,” Santa Barbara said. “This is a study of success and failure.”

  Brooke listened to them idly. She was staring at the right side of the room. All her life, she had been programmed to hate those people. She even studied a few of them, looking them up on the net, seeing how many articles were written about them.

  She had stopped when she was ten. Her mother had caught her, and told her what happened to the others didn't matter. Brooke and her mother would have made more of the opportunity, if they had just been given their due.

  Their due.

  De was staring at her from across the empty carpet. That look of dread was still on his face.

  “So,” Santa Barbara said. “I guess we can use real names now.”

  “I guess,” said Los Gatos. He hitched up his pants, and glanced at Boston.

  She shrugged. “I'm Julie Hunt. I was born at 12:15 Eastern Standard Time in…”

  Brooke stopped listening. She didn't want to know about the failures. She knew how it felt to be part of their group. But she didn't know what it was like to be with the winners.

  She wiped her damp hands on her pants and crossed the empty carpet. De watched her come. In fact the entire room watched her passage as if she were Moses parting the Red Sea.

  The successes weren't talking to each other. They were staring at her.

  When she was a few feet away from him, he reached out and pulled her to his side, as if she were in some sort of danger and he needed to rescue her.

  “Comin' to the enemy?” he asked, and there was some amusement in his tone. “Or'd they give you a number when you shoulda had a letter?”

  The lie would have been so easy. But then she would have had to lie about everything, and that wouldn't work. “No,” she said. “I was born at 12:05 a.m. in Detroit, Michigan.”

  One of the women toward the back looked at her sharply. Anyone from Michigan might recognize that time. Her mother's lawsuits created more than enough publicity. Out of the corner of her eye, Brooke saw Franke. She could feel his intensity meters away.

  “Then how come you made the crossin', darlin'?” De's accent got thicker when he was nervous. She had never noticed that before.

  She could have given him the easy answer, that she wanted to be beside him, but it wasn't right. The way the entire group was staring at her, eyes wide, lips slightly parted, breathing shallow. It was as if they were afraid she was going to do something to them. But what could she do? Yell at them for something that was no fault of their own? They were the lucky ones. They'd been born at the right time in the right place.

  But because they hadn't earned that luck, they were afraid of her. After all, she had been part of the same contest. Only she had been a few minutes late.

  No one had moved. They were waiting for her to respond.

  “I guess I came,” she said, “because I wanted to know what it was like to be a winner.”

  “Standing over here won't make you a winner,” one of the men said.

  She flushed. “I know that. I came to listen to you. To see how you've lived. If that's all right.”

  “I'm not sure I understand you, darlin',” De said. Only his name wasn't De. She didn't know his name. Maybe she never would.

  “You were all born winners. From the first moment. Just like we were losers.”

  Her voice carried in the large room. She hadn't expected the acoustics to be so good.

  “I don't know about everyone else in my group, but my birthtime has affected my entire life. My mother—” Brooke paused. She hadn't meant to discuss her mother “—never let me forget who I was. And I was wondering if any of you experienced that. Or if you felt special because you'd won. Or if you even knew.”

  Her voice trailed off at the end. She
couldn't imagine not knowing. A life of blissful ignorance. If she hadn't known, she might have gone on to great things. She might have reached farther, tried harder. She might have expected success with every endeavor, instead of being surprised at it.

  They were staring at her as if she were speaking Greek.

  Maybe she was.

  “I don't know why it matters,” a man said beside her. “It was just a silly little contest.”

  “I hadn't even remembered it,” a woman said, “until Dr. Franke's people contacted me.”

  Brooke felt something catch in her throat. “Was it like that for all of you?”

  “Of course not,” De said. “I got interviewed every New Year's like clockwork. What's it like five years into the millennium? en? Twenty? That's one of the reasons I moved to L'siana. I'm not much for attention, 'specially the kind I don't deserve.”

  “Money was nice,” one of the women said. “It got me to college.”

  Another woman shook her head. “My folks spent it all.”

  More people from the left were moving across the divide, as if they were drawn to the conversation.

  “So'd mine,” said one of the men.

  “There wasn't any money with mine. Just got my picture in the newspaper. Still have that on my wall,” another man said.

  Brooke felt someone bump her from behind. Los Gatos had joined her. So had Santa Barbara and Boston—um, Julie.

  “Why'd this contest make such a difference to you?” one of the letter women asked. She was staring at Brooke.

  “It didn't,” Brooke said after a moment. “It mattered to my mother. She lost.”

  “Hell,” De said. “People lose. That's part of living.”

  Brooke looked at him. There was a slight frown mark between his eyes. He didn't understand either. He didn't know what it was like being outside, with his face pressed against the glass.

  “Three weeks after I was born,” Los Gatos said, “My parents dumped me with a friend of theirs, saying they weren't ready for a baby. I never saw them. I don't even know what they look like.”