“The Dome probably just forgot we were there,” Freddy went on. “It’s had twelve teams to deal with forever. It’ll be different tomorrow.” He leaned back as a recruit from Team Five served them. He poured multiple drinks simultaneously, controlling the pitchers of water as if they were on invisible wires.
“You should try turning that into iced tea.” Freddy pointed toward a steaming glass of apple tea in front of Asha.
“But I want it hot.”
“I mean to practice manifesting your spade,” Freddy clarified. “Freezing your tea would definitely be a breakthrough. Try it.”
“The Dome tracks all of us through our bands,” Voss conceded, motioning with a cup of coffee toward Asha’s tea. “He could be right—it could help us get into the Dome.”
Freddy beamed at Voss’s validation. “See that?” He waggled a finger between himself and Voss. “Same wavelength, man.”
Asha hesitated. Then she placed a hand on each side of her cup, so just her fingertips touched the glass.
“You can do this,” Freddy said.
Asha closed her eyes and sat perfectly still.
Her eyes snapped open. “I can’t do it when everyone’s staring.” She started chewing her thumbnail. “It took everyone else here years to break through. You think you can just say ‘do it,’ and I’ll be able to do it? It’s hard!”
“Freddy,” Jack said. “You’ve been using your spade since I’ve known you. How come you haven’t broken through?”
Voss frowned. “What do you mean?”
“His spade is conspiracy theory. He never shuts up about these crazy ideas.”
“Incongruous logic,” Freddy corrected. “And my ideas aren’t crazy. Everyone just refuses to see what’s right in front of them.”
“He hasn’t figured out how to control the ideas he’s spouting off,” Asha said. “It’s like stray voltage. I read that Theorics like Freddy have a harder time breaking through than the other classifications because they aren’t even aware they’re thinking differently than everyone else.”
Freddy wrinkled his nose. “How do you know all that stuff?”
Asha held up her band. “Alexander showed me how to remotely access the Kwei Library. They have tons of training manuals and information about spade classifications.” She looked at them curiously. “What were you all doing with your downtime when all those teams were failing in the Dome?”
Freddy shrugged. “Watching them fail, I guess.” Then he perked up. “Does the library have stuff on the Guardian?”
“Yeah, but it was mostly just versions of what we already know,” she said. “I ran into restricted archives, but for that you need permission from the Hadley historian. So I looked him up. But the cadet forums say he’s some crazy old man who never leaves his house. So that was a dead end.”
“We haven’t broken through, and we’re not going to.” Voss skewered a massive seared rib-eye steak from a cart rolling past. He dropped it on his plate. “Not this fast anyway. The Dome isn’t going to accept us in the next two days. We need to get out of here soon with an honorable discharge. A mind-scrape after three days of memories is gonna mess with our brains.”
Asha slammed her cloth napkin on the table and glared at Voss. “You want to run away? They brought us here to protect people who can’t protect themselves! That includes little kids, and old people, and everyone walking around every day with these monsters just waiting to attack.”
Voss’s vast forehead wrinkled. “This morning you could barely stand up straight, man. Now you’re all committed to the cause?”
“I’m not a man, Voss. I have a name. Use it,” Asha snapped. “And I was having a bad morning when they brought me in.”
“Fine, Asha. Just remember that the only person who thinks we’re supposed to be here is delusional. Nobody else thinks we’re qualified. Because we aren’t. The Dome just confirmed it.”
“You’re avoiding the question: How can you want to quit? They save lives here. They protect people. I want to do that too.” She nodded at the large crest above the door. “One Life for Many. You see anything up there that says, ‘Unless you’re Voss Winter?’”
“You show me one person who’s ever fought for me, and I’ll sign up,” Voss said through a clenched jaw. “Until then, don’t give me that greeting card junk.”
Asha jabbed a finger at him. “My father fought in the marines to protect everyone—even the people who called him a terrorist when he wore a turban. He fought for them right up to the moment he was killed by a suicide bomber in Kandahar. So don’t talk to me about what’s greeting card junk. You’re selfish and stupid, and you don’t know what you’re talking about.” She crossed her arms and jolted back in her chair, shifting her gaze away.
“They can’t make me stay,” Voss said finally.
“Then sneak away,” Asha said, pushing her plate away. “You’ll become one of the Many everyone here is willing to die for. My father protected cowards like you every day of his service. You go ahead and run. I’m staying as long as they let me. Even if that’s only two more days. Even if they lobotomize me afterward.” She began chomping angrily on her fingernails.
Freddy glanced back and forth between them. “Asha makes a lot of good points.”
“Nobody asked you, bro.” Voss scowled at him. Then he gave Asha a long look. “Sorry about your dad.”
Asha sat back, the anger draining from her. She stared at her chewed fingernails and tucked her hand under her thigh. “I don’t even remember him,” she said. “He died before I was born.”
“I’m still sorry.”
A scuffle and a clatter echoed from across Prophecy Hall. A small redheaded boy sprawled on the floor in the midst of a broken plate and a pile of food. “Oops.” Miles stood over the boy. “You should be more careful.” Miles and Janelle erupted with laughter.
Miles reminded Jack of Brandon Jordan back at St. Paul’s. They were both used to the hearty guffaws of a fan club. Freddy leapt up and ran across the hall to help the kid to his feet. He glared at Miles as he helped wipe food off the redheaded recruit’s uniform. Jack watched Claire, who was pretending not to notice the commotion.
“That guy’s a jerk,” Jack said, high-fiving Freddy as he returned. “That was cool of you.” Jack turned back to his table to find his team watching him. “What?”
Asha nodded at Claire, seated at the Team One table. “I thought you were friends with that girl, but she won’t even talk to you. What’s up with that?”
Jack shrugged.
Freddy grimaced. “Sensitive issue.”
“So what’s up?” she pressed.
“Jack’s an idiot,” Freddy answered.
“I coulda told you that,” Voss said through a mouthful of fried potatoes.
Freddy pointed a finger at him. “Don’t call my friend an idiot, or I’ll kick your butt. Only I can call him that.”
Asha rolled her eyes. “You can’t kick his butt, Freddy. His gift is strength.”
“He hasn’t even tested it out yet.” Freddy looked at Voss. “Can you twist an iron bar with your bare hands?”
“No, of course not,” Voss stammered.
“But you haven’t tried, right?”
“Why would I have tried to twist an iron bar?”
Freddy intercepted a nearby food cart and pushed it toward Voss. “No time like the present,” he challenged. “Try to bend that bar on the side.”
Voss shot a glance at it and turned back to his plate. “Nah. I’m good.”
“Don’t you want to know?” Freddy asked. “Or maybe you’re afraid to fail in front of everyone? Don’t be! Who cares if you fail? Fail all you want, we won’t care.”
Voss glared at Freddy, then spun on the bench to face the cart. He placed both hands on the metal bar that formed the side brace of the cart. His muscles tightened. But the bar remained straight.
“Told you,” Voss grumbled as he turned back to the table and stuffed his mouth with a forkful of steak.
>
“You barely gave it any effort!” Freddy protested, throwing his hands up. “I know you’re stronger than that.”
Asha turned to Jack. “So what happened with that girl?”
Jack shrugged again. “Nothing. We’re friends. We were, anyway.”
Asha looked to Freddy.
“Let’s just say Jack made a couple of bad choices.”
“Will you please stop talking, Freddy?”
“What? This is good therapy. That’s part of my spade.”
“No it isn’t,” Jack said.
Freddy ignored him. “So Jack and Claire were, like, super close since sixth grade. They were both on the track team.”
“Cross-country,” Jack corrected him.
“You want to tell this?” Freddy asked. Jack just snorted at him, and Freddy turned back to Asha. “Jack was city champ for middle school. The guy can fly. And Claire was the junior New Jersey state champ in the girl’s division. So they used to go on long runs together, like ten miles long.”
“You seriously ran ten miles a day?” Voss sounded reluctantly impressed.
“See, the doctor told him to take up exercising,” Freddy continued. “So Jack starts doing three hundred sit-ups and a hundred push-ups before bed. Ran ten miles every morning.”
It had turned out that running came naturally to Jack. In fifth grade he started running through Jersey City, early in the morning. But when he blacked out and woke up on a random park bench, his mother forbade him from running alone. The cross-country team at St. Paul’s started at eighth grade, but Jack’s mom called the coach anyway. Coach told her Jack was welcome to run with the team during practice, but he pointed out that Jack wouldn’t be able to keep up with the older kids. He would need a running partner.
Then one afternoon in early September, Coach introduced Jack to a transfer student, a girl who was also going to be in sixth grade. She was looking for a running partner. Coach told them to meet him the next morning at five thirty in the St. Paul’s parking lot.
They didn’t talk at all that first morning, he and Claire. They sat in the front row of Coach’s large van. Six older kids flopped in the rows behind them, snoring on the twenty-five-minute drive to the running trails at Glen Ridge. When they arrived, Coach opened the doors and the older kids rose like zombies, out into the cool air, jogging to warm up. “Back here in an hour,” Coach told the two sixth graders. “You’re not here, I leave you.”
They ran together, still not saying a word. Claire was a natural. Jack felt clumsy next to her, but at least his lungs and muscles were in good enough condition to keep up with her. They made it back in under an hour.
It took them a full week to say more than two words to each other, but it was the beginning of a strong friendship. They were a team within a team. And he never blacked out when he ran with her. Not once.
That friendship lasted until eighth grade. That’s when Brandon Jordan, the football star and unrepentant bully, asked Claire out. The news flashed through the middle school. Nobody had ever seen them talk before. The girls thought he was out of her league. Jack thought Brandon was a jerk.
Inexplicably, Claire had said yes. And to Jack’s own dismay, the news struck him like a wrecking ball to the stomach.
Toward the end of the school year, Jack found himself telling Claire, in the middle of a crowded diner on Kennedy Boulevard, that he had feelings for her.
“She got upset,” Freddy narrated.
Asha sat back, twirling a teaspoon between her fingers. “That must be hard to lose a friend like that. You were just being honest.”
“Right, but that wasn’t the bad choice,” Freddy said.
Jack knew that for all Freddy’s transparency, for all his lack of filters, he wouldn’t tell them about the Incident. That was Jack’s alone to tell.
Asha and Voss looked at Jack. Freddy elbowed him. “Therapy, man,” he said. “Besides, if we get our minds wiped, they won’t remember it anyway.”
Jack sighed and began to talk.
Claire was upset when Jack told her he liked her. But a couple of weeks later she asked if they could meet up. He kept putting her off. He didn’t want to be vulnerable in front of her again, and he was incapable of faking it—at least with Claire. She was smart enough to see that.
Then Claire did something very un-Claire: She didn’t let it go. She texted him again. She asked if they could meet up at the diner on Kennedy Boulevard that Friday, just like they used to. She wanted to be friends, and she wouldn’t take no for an answer.
Jack stood outside the diner that night, trying to muster the courage to go inside. He saw her sitting in a booth near the far window, in a midnight-blue dress.
He wasn’t ready yet. But he didn’t want to stand there like an idiot, so he took a brisk walk around the block. He practiced saying “Hey, Claire” in a breezy way. He practiced his casual wave. He and Claire had been close, but she wasn’t a hugger, or even a high-fiver. Claire was a waver. Come to think of it, Jack had never so much as seen her holding hands with Brandon.
Jack quickened his pace around the block. It was now or never.
But then he slipped away.
One minute he was walking up to the diner door. The next he was standing in the parking lot, leaning against his bike. Jack had blacked out.
Panicked, he looked at his phone. 10:40 p.m. Two texts from Claire.
9:20 p.m.
Ur coming, right?
9:55 p.m.
Guess not. Thx a lot.
He sprinted to the diner and yanked open the door. Claire wasn’t there. He texted her once, then twice, then called three times in a row. Nothing.
Claire never answered any of his texts. He counted down the hours until Monday when he could see her in class and apologize. But Claire wasn’t in class on Monday.
Freddy overheard Brandon telling his friends that Claire had transferred. Typical Claire, she hadn’t told anyone. Freddy reported that Brandon actually seemed upset—an emotion Jack didn’t know he had.
That’s probably why she wanted to meet at the diner, Jack had thought. She had wanted to tell him she was leaving. For a while it was the great mystery of the school. Claire had just up and left, dropping everything in her life.
Only Freddy had trouble believing it. “She wouldn’t just leave,” he insisted. “Maybe she was kidnapped.”
“If she was kidnapped it would be all over the news, Freddy,” Jack had said.
But a few days later, Freddy found a website that transcribed police scanners and showed Jack a printout.
At 10:09 p.m. on Friday night, police were called by an elderly woman at 62 Highland Avenue. She had heard screaming. Out her bedroom window she had seen a girl, Caucasian, long brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, in a midnight-blue dress. The girl was crouched on the sidewalk. She was the one screaming. A man in black was walking away from her.
“That’s six blocks from the diner,” Freddy told him. “What was Claire wearing that night? Did you see her?”
“Just tell me what happened,” Jack demanded, his heart beating out of his chest.
Freddy placed a second printout in front of him. Police had arrived at the scene. But there was no girl and no man in black. They searched the neighborhood and found no trace of them. There was no evidence that anything had happened. The police concluded that the elderly woman had either imagined it or that whatever happened would remain a mystery.
Frustrated and shaken, Jack held up the printout. “What am I supposed to do with this, Freddy?”
Freddy didn’t know. Jack didn’t know. They contacted the school she was attending up in New Hampshire. They assured them that Claire was fine. That was the last piece of information Jack had about Claire—until he saw her across the library’s Manifestation Room at the Hadley Academy for the Improbably Gifted.
Jack pushed green beans around his plate. Around him, kids talked and laughed and shoveled food in their mouths. The activity made the cavity in Jack’s chest that much
worse.
“She’s okay now,” Freddy assured him, gripping his shoulder.
“Is she? I haven’t talked to her. I don’t know what happened. She won’t let me apologize. I can’t even get near her.”
“They really create a fake school like that?” Voss asked. “They answered the phone and everything?”
Asha sighed. “You’re missing the point, Voss.” She turned to face Jack. “No wonder she’s not talking to you. But you have to let it go and focus on what we need to do now.” She waved a hand in the air. “You make eighth grade sound so dramatic. Somebody dated somebody else. Who cares? Why couldn’t you just act like normal human beings?”
Voss cocked an eyebrow at her. “What kind of middle school did you go to?”
Freddy had picked a roasted chicken drumstick off a serving tray and dropped it on his plate. “None. She was homeschooled. Right?”
Asha’s face reddened. “What makes you say that?”
Freddy wiped his hands on his napkin. “It’s not an insult. Homeschooling is a totally underrated form of education. You just have no idea what middle school is like. You’re sheltered.”
“I’m not sheltered.”
“Okay. What’s Star Wars?” Freddy asked.
Asha’s fingernail was back in her mouth. “What, because I don’t know some dumb TV show I’m sheltered?”
“What’s Facebook? What’s Instagram? You ever heard of those?” Freddy continued.
“We’re not talking about me right now, Freddy. This is about a distraction that we can’t afford.”
“Wait. You’ve never heard of Star Wars?” Jack asked.
“Were you held in some tower, like Rapunzel?” Freddy asked. He snapped and pointed at Asha. “Wait. Maybe a desert island? Was there an evil mom involved? Keeping you away from the world?”
“Do you just spew out whatever comes into your head?” Asha demanded.
“She’s homeschooled. Who cares?” Voss said. “In three days we won’t even know each other. And Jack here won’t remember that girl he’s so in love with,” Voss said, pointing across Prophecy Hall. “We got two more chances in the Dome, and bro, I am not going back with my memories scraped out. Who knows what else they might take by accident? So if Jack is the Guardian, he better come up with a new way of breaking through or whatever. Because the way everyone else here broke through ain’t gonna work for us.”
The Hadley Academy for the Improbably Gifted Page 8