The Famoux Read online

  Contents

  PART ONE PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  PART TWO CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  PART THREE CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  About the Author

  Kassandra Tate has been writing stories for as long as she can remember. Her work on Wattpad has accumulated over five million reads and a Watty Award for Science Fiction. She was featured in the anthology Imagines: Celebrity Encounters Starring You (Simon and Schuster), and worked alongside Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jonny Sun as curator for their New York Times best-selling novel Gmorning, Gnight! (Penguin Random House). She graduated from Chapman University in 2020 with a BFA in screenwriting and currently lives in Los Angeles with her sisters and—most importantly—her cats, Purrsephone and [Good] Will Hunting. The Famoux is her debut novel.

  For Kalina, my best friend in every world,

  even dystopian ones

  Content Warning: bullying, stalking, brief mention

  of violence, brief mention of alcohol

  Part One

  * * *

  FISSAREX

  Prologue

  When I was younger and more susceptible to liars, my mother let me in on a little secret that took me years to outgrow. If I really wanted something, she told me, all I had to do was think about it, and hope for it, and my requests would always be heard.

  “Thoughts are powerful,” she said. “Good or bad, they have their way of coming true.”

  Poor advice to give to a child, much less one as vulnerable as I was. I took her wisdom as fact and accepted no other opinions. As children do, I thought only of ways to make my singular life easier. I thought about acing my tests instead of studying for them. I thought about making good and lasting friends instead of being one in kind. I thought about standing up to Westin van Horne one day instead of ever becoming brave enough to actually do it.

  But thoughts without action, as I’d later learn, are meaningless. My grades, my loneliness, and my torment persisted, because I didn’t do a thing to change them. Yet, as I walked home, I kept my mother’s promise in mind. I thought new thoughts of a better life, sure that these would be the ones to come true. And when I came home crying, she was there to wipe the tears from my eyes and feed me more honey-tasting lies. She’d tell me how my differences weren’t flaws, and that I wasn’t worth anything less than Westin or the other kids. She’d tell me I was beautiful, that unique was good, and a whole menagerie of other little myths long since proven untrue. I’m sure even then I knew they were lies, but oh, were they wonderful lies to live. I grew to depend on them—on knowing that no matter how bad the day was, my mother would always be there to comfort me with tall tales of a better future.

  Which turned out to be yet another lie.

  The morning in question wasn’t inherently different than any before it. She insisted I wear her jacket to school, a blue corduroy thing lined with fleece, since mine was getting small in the arms. She told me as always to think positive thoughts that day while she fastened the buttons. I was fourteen at the time, so the sentiment was met with rolling eyes, a swat at her hands, and an assertion I could fasten a coat just fine on my own, thank you. At school, Westin and his group gave me their worst, and I fought tears the whole way home. It was the usual routine. It was expected. So when I creaked open the door and sulked inside with my usual, miserable flair, the last thing I expected was to find the house empty.

  Sure, the furniture was still in place. The cabinets in the kitchen were still stocked. But the smell of peonies in her perfume was faint, as if she’d been out of the house all day. I didn’t think much of it until I went to her closet to return the jacket and discovered her things were gone.

  A thought tried to enter my head at that moment, but I wouldn’t let it. Thoughts had power, after all, and this was one I couldn’t bear to let come true. But as I checked her empty drawers and noted the missing duffle bags in the hall closet, I realized it already had.

  My mother was gone. She had run away.

  I was the only one in the house for a long time that day. I tried calling all three of my other family members, but none answered. Too busy with their own things. My older brother was probably out stirring up trouble with his friends. My sister, the eldest of us three, was likely in the library, studying relentlessly in the hope of getting a good job after graduation—one over the ocean in Betnedoor, where things ran smoother and better than here in Eldae. My father was still at work, in that desk with the spinning chair I’d loved so much that day I got to visit. He’d been working overtime lately anticipating a promotion, so I knew he wouldn’t be home until much later. None of them would.

  But this was expected. My mother and I often had the afternoons to ourselves, and we’d spend them either talking on the patio or exploring the old-world ruins around the city. Eldae never cleaned up the rubble from the End, instead building cheap structures around it, which meant the neighborhood next to ours was full of ancient, decrepit houses that had somehow survived the bombs. Her favorite was this old yellow one with no roof, which I found to be quite frightening, but she loved it. I thought about checking it, to see if maybe she’d run there, but I knew there was no use. That house wasn’t livable, and if she’d wanted to take her things and run, she wouldn’t have moved practically next door. I stood by the phone, frozen, for hours and hours until the door clicking open prompted me to move.

  It was Dalton. He wouldn’t let me finish my sentence before he trailed off to his room, claiming I was being dramatic—that she was out running errands. Brandyce followed in a similar fashion, but I showed her the drawers and the missing duffle bags, and her denial grew louder and louder until she finally fell to her knees and shrieked. By the time our father came home, I was petrified to tell him.

  But it turns out, he would do nothing. My father is a talkative man, the life of most dinner parties, but he had nothing to say as Brandyce and I presented the evidence. A blank stare deepened in the creases of his face, and slowly, he shrank at least three inches into himself, losing strength right before my eyes.

  My parents once had a strong relationship, but years of bickering had frayed most of the cords that held them together. They tried not to argue when we were around, but thanks to my classmates who never included me, I knew well how to eavesdrop. I could hear their hushed voices down in the living room after we’d gone up to bed. They argued about me. Their most troublesome child, always coming home from school in tears. My father thought they should send me away to a school in Notness, where my differences wouldn’t matter as much, and I’d have a fresh start. My mother found this insulting.

  “You push things away when they get difficult,” she told him. “You’d just love it if all of us left, wouldn’t you?”

  These arguments had to have been on his mind as he drove us to the local police station. Streaked with regret, my father told the authorities that his wife must’ve been kidnapped, because there was no way she’d leave us willingly. He insisted they file a missing person’s report and send the search parties at once. But all they could do was apologize, because this didn’t look like a kidnapping. Her belongings were gone, and it was well within her own free will to go if she pleased. Even if we knew where she was, we couldn’t force her to come back.

  On our way out of the station, one of the officers patted my father’s shoulder and told him that the best thing we could do was think positively. Keep her in our thoughts. Maybe she’d turn up. It reminded me of what my mother used to tell me about thoughts having power. It felt like a sign. And so, for the whole first year of her disappearance, her return was all I thought about. It was a constant daydream in class, an ever-present prayer before bed. I thought about her so much, I barely slept a wink.

  It was a long time before I realized my mother was lying about a thought holding weight in the world. After all, she had also once told me that no matter what, she’d be there for me, and I knew now just how untrue that was. Perhaps lying was well within her wheelhouse, more than I’d ever known.

  It’s been two years since then, and yet, things have barely changed. The scabs haven’t healed yet; we have let them become scars. We keep picking at our wounds, willing them to bleed again and become scabs once more. It’s never-ending.

  We have vanished quite swiftly into a new routine. Our father, once a colossus we both feared and admired, lost his job at the civil service in the weeks following the disappearance after he’d had a breakdown in the office. The guilt became too much for him to properly function. He spends most of his days in his bedroom, staring at the ceiling and calling out for the wife that left him, as if she’ll pick up the phone and answer. Without an income to support us and a will to pick up the pieces, it was Brandyce who was forced to forgo all her exceptional offers abroad and take care of Dalton and me, since we are still too young in Eldae’s standards to fend for ourselves. Now, it’s too late for her. Opportunities to leave Eldae for Betnedoor are few and far between
, and if you don’t seize one when it first arrives, another is seldom on the way. Brandyce resents us for this. Me, especially, as the youngest. She now works several simple jobs in town to make ends meet, and I do my best to stay out of her way.

  Dalton is currently in his final year of schooling, and he will no doubt abandon us for better places the second he gets the chance. We don’t blame him. When I’m out of school, Brandyce will do the same, finally free of the burden of taking care of me. She won’t be able to go to Betnedoor like Dalton might, but she’ll move far away to the other side of Eldae and never come back. And I will be left to take care of our father, the man who once thought of shipping me off and forgetting me. I’ll do whatever small jobs downtown will take me, keep the house tidy, then lie on my bed just as he does, seeking the smell of her peony perfume and always coming up short.

  We will dissolve this way. And since I know now that thinking won’t change a thing, it is better not to think anything of it.

  CHAPTER ONE

  My mother’s favorite old-world house is haunted, I’m sure of it. When the sun hits it just right, the shadows of the ornate wooden banister look like a person reaching out for something, and the creak in the front door is like a voice, whispering a language at me that I can’t understand. I’ve theorized ghosts before in the past, but on my daily visits to watch the sunrise, I have never actually seen one. But I’ve never felt quite alone either. I’ve felt comfort—the kind my mother used to give me. The kind I don’t feel too often anymore except here.

  There’s no relief from the cold beneath the caved-in roof. I shiver as I navigate through the entryway, stepping over stray shingles. I’m nowhere near dressed for the weather, wearing only flannel pajamas and my mother’s corduroy jacket. Tomorrow, I’ll bring a blanket, although I know at some point soon, when the winter comes, I’ll have to stop coming, at least until the temperatures rise again. It won’t be this week, however. I’ll muster through as long as I can. Watching the sunrise from my own bedroom window just isn’t the same.

  Once I get to the center of the room, I stop and lie down on my back, looking up and out at the sky. It’s a perfect view. I never paid much attention to sunrises growing up. If I’m honest, I always missed them. Like most, I slept in, awakening to a sky already gray and a morning well under way. But after my mother left, a newfound restlessness took her place. Now, whether I like it or not, I watch dawn break every morning.

  It’s nothing sensational. A mixture of pale orange and lavender that appears brownish the poorer the air quality. I hear it’s always this way in Notness, where they’ve stripped most of their land clean to build manufacturing plants. At least we in Eldae get the essence of colors, faint as they may be. Today’s is the usual muted tangerine, getting more and more beige by the second. So pollution is bad today, I register. Good to know.

  Few works of literature from the old world survived the End, but in one of them—a small poem found tucked within a cookbook with its byline ripped off—the sunrise is described to be vibrant. Vivid. With pinks and reds and indigo, streaked across the sky like a painting. Some mornings I look up through the roof at the brown and recite some lines of the poem in my head, and it baffles me how at one point, hundreds of years ago, the sunrise actually looked that way. But the world was different back then. We call it the old one for a reason.

  We’re taught the lesson of the End every year in school, to make sure we never forget. It began with a string of natural disasters—fires, earthquakes, and mass floods that rose high enough to engulf full countries. Quarrels as to who was to blame broke out between the remaining nations, which escalated into a full-scale nuclear war. Nearly everything and everyone was decimated.

  But it was not a full apocalypse. Those who survived crawled out from the rubble, picked themselves up, and resolved to make good use of the last livable pieces of land left. They sought to create a new world—one more peaceful than that before it. Instead of breaking apart into separate nations like before, they formed a single country which they named Delicatum—a reminder of the delicate balance between us and this land. Delicatum has a single sovereign leader, to be elected every half decade as per the people’s choice. This was all very important to our founders: the single country, the single leader, the unity in it. For if history has taught us anything, it is that the more countries and leaders and general separation, the more potential for conflict.

  Delicatum is comprised of three united states, each serving its own purpose for the country. The largest state is Notness, which takes up most of what used to be the middle and western parts of North America. They specialize in manufacturing all of our commodities, with thousands of factories spanning the spacious land. And while many sovereigns have certainly attempted to push for more environmentally friendly means of production, the whole country lives under a near-constant shroud of smog.

  My state, Eldae, is to the east of Notness, filling up the rest of what’s left of America. Our southernmost region has enough fertile land to make us Delicatum’s source for agriculture, but the northern region, where I live, is practically useless. With such close proximity to Notness, too, our skies are always gray. It’s every kid’s dream to one day get the chance to move away to someplace better—to Betnedoor.

  Across the ocean in a small pocket of what used to be southern Europe, Betnedoor is the most prosperous state in Delicatum. Their purpose is to produce new technologies, although not many of their advancements make it over to Eldae and Notness. Air travel is rare and expensive, reserved only for the wealthier elite, so it’s a pipe dream to even consider visiting. Though we have plenty photos of it to prove otherwise, there is always a rumor amongst kids here that the streets in Betnedoor are paved with shiny gold.

  We can try all we want to not make the same mistakes the old world did, but we can’t control how their actions have affected us. The atomic bombs they dropped left chemicals that have conjured countless aftershocks, especially where the weather is concerned. Sometimes we have no rain for months. Our winters can be brutal.

  And then there is the phenomenon we call Darkenings, where, every thirty days, with the moon cycle, thick chemical particles bunch into the air and cover up the sun. We live in complete darkness for two whole days.

  In some areas, the effects of these particle buildups are so bad that the land is barely livable. Citizens of each state, regardless of radiation levels, get a mandatory immunity booster every year just to avoid any hugely adverse effects to exposure, like skin burns and diseases. That said, we’ve found ways to adapt the best we can, but sometimes it’s distressing to think of the way the old world left us. Even now, as I look around the skeleton of this house, one of thousands like this one lying around Eldae, I am reminded that we live in the wake of something much, much bigger than us.

  A hazy shade of gray settles over the sky, signaling daytime and my cue to come home. I cut through the front yard, stepping through weeds covered in frost. With a turn around the corner, the world changes from old to new. My home is a squat, concrete thing, the same as all the others down the street. These were quick and cheap to make in the beginning, much less expensive than trying to refurbish old houses. They might be terribly ugly, but they’re some of the better living options in Eldae. In more crowded cities, like Colburn, these structures are stacked into big, grotesque apartment buildings. At least we have our own space, separate from our neighbors. And we’re so close to the ruins, too, which is a plus. It isn’t lovely, but we could do worse.

  No one is awake yet when I creep in through the door. They never are. Father stays in his room all day anyway, and Brandyce and Dalton’s alarms won’t go off for another half hour. Mornings are always my time to breathe; the calm before the daily storms of judgment. In my room, I change into my school uniform: brown slacks, a button-down shirt, and a forest green sweater vest. The color varies based on which grade you’re in, although most kids believe it’s hardly necessary anymore. There are other ways to identify which class a student is in that you can’t take on and off like a vest. Still, it’s tradition. I tuck the wool into my trousers, then fasten it with a belt.