by Max Barry
“I thought this was going to be cooler,” she complained to Eliot. He was a part-time lecturer, teaching a few advanced classes, which did not include her. Whenever she saw his car parked out front, she headed for his office, because he was the only one she could talk to. “I thought it would be like magic.”
Eliot was busy with papers. But she figured he had an obligation to deal with her, since it was basically his fault she was here. “Sorry,” he said. “At your level, it’s just books.”
“When is it like magic?”
“When you finish the books,” Eliot said.
• • •
By the end of the year, she could see where it was going. She wasn’t learning persuasion, was still deep in Plato and neurolinguistics and the political roots of the Russian Revolution, but she was starting to sense the connections between them. One day she got to dissect a human brain, and as she peered through goggles at a frontal lobe, sliding the scalpel through the meat, separating decision making from motor function, memory from reward centers, she thought, Hello. Because she knew what the meat did.
• • •
She played soccer. You had to do a sport, soccer or basketball or water polo, and she was short and hated the swimsuits, so, soccer. On Wednesday afternoons she lined up with the other girls, shin guards stuffed into knee-high purple socks, her hair dragged back, a yellow shirt billowing, and she chased a ball around a field. The girls were all ages, so it was mostly an exercise in kicking the ball to the oldest and shouting encouragement. The exception was Sashona, who was only Emily’s age but strong and graceful and had shoulders like battering rams. Soccer was supposed to be noncontact but Sashona’s shoulders would put you on your ass anyway. After a goal, she would pump her fist, unsmiling, like she was satisfied but not surprised, and although Emily didn’t enjoy soccer much, she found this terribly impressive. She wanted to be as good at something as Sashona was at soccer.
At night, she sat by the window of her cloister room, books piled on her desk. She studied with her hair pinned up and her school tie slung. She didn’t really enjoy reading but she liked how the books were clues. Each one a piece in a puzzle. Even when they didn’t fit together, they revealed a little more about what kind of picture she was making.
One day, exploring a corridor she’d always assumed went nowhere, she discovered a secret library. She didn’t know if it was actually secret. But it wasn’t marked, and she never saw anyone else. It was very small, with shelves that stretched up so high she needed a wooden ladder to reach them. Up there, the books were old. The first time she cracked open a volume, its pages came apart in her hands. After that, she was more careful. It occurred to her that maybe she was not allowed here, but that had not been included in Charlotte’s comprehensive list of rules, and the old books turned out to be interesting, so she stayed.
One shelf was for disaster stories. There was probably a classification scheme she hadn’t figured out. But the common thread seemed to be that a lot of people died. After a few books, she realized they were all the same story. They were set in different places, in Sumeria and Mexico and countries she’d never heard of, and the details differed, but the basics were the same. A group of people—sometimes they were called sorcerers, and sometimes demons, and sometimes they were just ordinary people—ruled over a kingdom or nation or whatever. In four of the books, they began building something impressive, like a crystal palace or the world’s largest pyramid. Then something bad happened and people died and everyone started speaking different languages. This story felt vaguely familiar to Emily, but she didn’t place it until she came to a book in which the impressive thing was a tower named Babel.
She thought she heard a noise and froze. But it was far away. She suddenly saw herself: sitting on the floor of a library in a blazer and pleated skirt, navy ribbons in her hair, reading old books. Before she had come here, Emily had seen girls like this—girls who wore ribbons, and enjoyed books—and thought they were a different species. She had thought they were separated by walls. Yet here she was, on the other side, and she didn’t know how she had done it. She didn’t feel like a different person. She was just in a different place.
• • •
The junior dining hall made excellent chocolate milk shakes. Emily got into the habit of swinging by after Macroeconomics and carrying one out to a sunny spot on the grass at the side of the building, where she could read. The cup was comically big. She always felt a little sick at the end of it. But she kept going back.
One day she passed a boy with a laptop at one of the outdoor tables. She had seen this boy in the halls, but they didn’t share any classes because he was older. He was more advanced. She snuck a glance at him, and another, because he was pretty cute.
The next day he was there again, and this time he looked up as she passed. His eyes took in her enormous milk shake. She kept walking to her sunny spot but couldn’t concentrate on her book.
The day after that, he saw her coming, stretched, and pushed the hair out of his eyes. “Thirsty, huh?” She smiled, because she had been thinking of saying something, and the something was Boy am I thirsty!
“Yeah,” she said. “I am thirsty.” She walked on.
On Wednesday, she bought an extra milk shake and deposited it on his table. His eyes, gray and soft as pillows, registered surprise. “I thought you looked thirsty, too.” She walked away, pleased with herself.
On Thursday she brought him no drink. She had thought about this. She simply walked by. There was a terrible moment when she thought he wouldn’t say anything—maybe he was too engrossed in his computer and hadn’t even noticed her. Should she circle around again, or was that too humiliating?
“Hey, wait,” he said.
She stopped.
“Thanks for the shake yesterday.”
“No problem.”
She stayed, smiling, hoping it wasn’t over.
“I’ve never been a milk shake guy. But they’re good.”
“They’re better than good,” she said. “I’m addicted.” She sucked at her straw.
He leaned back. “Do you want to sit?”
“I have a bunch of reading to do. Thanks, though. Maybe another time.” She walked away. He didn’t try to stop her, which was a little disappointing, and he didn’t seek her out later, either. But that was okay. She was playing a long game. It was naughty. What she was doing was practicing. Trying to persuade another student. But only a little, nothing she’d get in trouble for. The fact was, if you paid attention, people tried to persuade each other all the time. It was all they did.
The next day, she headed for her sunny spot with no milk shake. Her heart thumped, because if he saw this and didn’t respond, she would look pitiful. But she rounded the corner and his computer was closed and on the table were two milk shakes. He smiled, and gestured for her to sit, and she did.
• • •
His name was Jeremy Lattern. He had wanted to be a zookeeper. His family had a tiny house in Brooklyn but his mother rescued animals: rabbits and mice and ducks and dogs and two chickens. One of the chickens was insane. It ran in circles, making noises like it was drowning. His parents had wanted to get rid of it, but Jeremy pleaded for mercy. He thought he could cure it. He imagined this chicken becoming his friend, and people saying, “Jeremy’s the only one who can go near that chicken.” But this never happened. One day the chicken attacked him, pecking his face, and his father wrung its neck. That was how he got the small scar near his left eye, and decided against zoology.
Emily told him that her family were Canadian and she was raised on hockey. She described how when she was six, her father took her to a game and she was terrified because the crowd was so angry. There was an incident, a splash of players on the ice, and she turned to her father for protection but his face was monstrous. On the way home, he asked if she’d had fun, and she said yes, but whenever she even saw hockey on TV, she felt sick.
These were all lies, of course. You couldn’t tel
l a student anything true about yourself. This wasn’t a rule, exactly; it was obvious. She was in her second year and learning how people could be categorized into distinct psychographic groups based on how their brain worked. Segment 107, for example, was an intuition- and fear-motivated introvert personality: Those people made decisions based on avoiding the worst outcomes, found primary colors reassuring, and, when asked to pick a random number, would choose something small, which felt less vulnerable. If you knew someone was a 107, you knew how to persuade them—or, at least, which persuasion techniques were more likely to work. This was not very different from what Emily had always done, without thinking about it too much: You developed a sense of what a mark desired or feared and used that to compel them. It was the same, only with more theory. So that was why you shouldn’t talk about yourself, and why the older students were so aloof and inscrutable: to avoid being identified. To guard against persuasion, you had to hide who you were. But she suspected she was not very good at this. She guessed there were a whole bunch of clues she was inadvertently dropping to someone like Jeremy Lattern every time she opened her mouth, or cut her hair, or chose a sweater. She figured the reason the school had a no practicing rule was that sometimes people did it.
• • •
“Tell me what they teach you,” she said. “Give me a sneak preview.”
They were making slushies. They had progressed beyond milk shakes. The advantage of the slushie was you had to leave school grounds. Tuesdays and Fridays, if the weather was clear, they walked the three-quarters of a mile to the nearest 7-Eleven. She liked walking beside Jeremy Lattern, because cars would zoom by and the drivers would probably assume she was his girlfriend.
“You use very direct language,” he said. “You don’t ask. You command. That’s a useful instinct.”
“So tell me why I’m learning Latin.”
“I can’t.”
“Do you always follow the rules?”
“Yes.”
“Bah,” she said, defeated.
“The rules are important. What they teach us is dangerous.”
“What they teach you is dangerous. What they teach me is Latin. Dude, I’m not asking for state secrets. Just give me something. One thing.”
He attached the slushie lid and poked the straw through the plastic.
“Bah,” she said again. They walked to the front of the store and stood in line behind a kid paying for gas. The man behind the counter was balding, in his fifties, Pakistani or something like it. She nudged Jeremy. “Which segment is this guy?” He didn’t answer. “I’m thinking one eighteen. Am I right? Come on, I’m doing segmentation; you can answer the question.”
“Maybe one seventy.”
She hadn’t considered that one, but saw instantly how it made sense. “See, that wasn’t so bad. Now what? What do we do once we know he’s a one seventy?”
“We pay for our slushies,” Jeremy said.
• • •
She hung with Jeremy in his room sometimes. Once she stuck chewing gum into the lock before she left and came back when she knew he had a class. She went to his bookshelf and pulled down three titles she had been eyeing for a while. She was sitting on his bed, deep in Sociographic Methods, when the door opened. Jeremy stood there, one hand on the knob. She had never seen him mad before. “Give me that.”
“No.” She sat on it.
“Do you know what they’ll do—” He tried to grab it and she resisted and he landed on top of her. This she slightly engineered. His breath brushed her face. She let the textbook slide out and clunk to the floor. He raised a hand and it hovered a moment, then came down on her breast. She inhaled. He moved his hand away.
“Keep going,” she said.
“I can’t.”
“Yes you can.”
He rolled off. “It’s not allowed.”
“Come on,” she said.
“We’re not allowed to be together.” That was a rule. Fraternization. “It’s not safe.”
“For who?”
“Either of us.”
She stared at him.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
She shuffled closer. She touched his white shirt. She had spent a lot of time imagining taking off this shirt. “I won’t tell anyone.” She stroked his chest through the fabric. Then his hand closed on hers.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
• • •
“What’s with the fraternization rule?” she asked Eliot. She wandered about his office, fingering books, being casual. Eliot looked up from his papers. Originally, Emily had been going to ask, Why can’t we have sex. Because, just once, she would like to see Eliot surprised or offended. Or anything, really. Just to prove that he was human. But then she lost her nerve.
“Students aren’t permitted to enter relationships with each another.”
“I know what it is. I’m asking why.”
“You know why.”
She sighed. “Because if you let someone know you well, they can persuade you. But that’s incredibly cold, Eliot.” She went to the window. Outside, she watched a sparrow hop across the slate roof. “That’s no way to live.” He didn’t reply. “Are you saying, for the rest of my life, I can’t have a relationship with an organization person?”
“Yes.”
“Do you appreciate how dull that is?” Eliot didn’t react. “And what about . . . you know, purely physical relationships?”
“It’s no different.”
“It’s completely different. Relationships, okay, I get it. But not for just sex.”
“There is no ‘just sex.’ It’s called intimacy for a reason.”
“That’s one word,” she protested. “Coincidence.”
“‘And the man knew Eve his wife, and she conceived and bore Cain.’ Note the use of the word knew in this context.”
“That’s from three thousand years ago. You’re talking about the Bible.”
“Exactly. The concept is not new.”
She shook her head, frustrated. “Have you ever done it?”
“Done what?”
“Broken the rule,” she said. “Fraternized.”
“No.”
“I don’t believe you.” She did. She was just pushing. “You must have thought about it. What about with Charlotte? There’s something going on with you guys. Your feet always point toward her. And she goes very still around you. It’s like when we’re acting up in class and she’s trying not to get pissed. She goes still when she’s trying to control her emotions.”
“I need to get some work done, if you don’t mind.” He sounded completely unruffled.
“I think Charlotte wants to fraternize with you,” Emily said. “Badly.”
“Out.”
“I’m going!” She left. She was more frustrated than ever.
• • •
She turned eighteen. She lay in bed awhile, thinking about what that meant. Anything? She got up and went to class and of course nobody knew. At lunch, she walked to the 7-Eleven with Jeremy and debated telling him the whole way. Finally, while filling her slushie, she said, “I’m eighteen today.”
He looked surprised. This was the kind of information you were not supposed to share. “I didn’t get you anything.”
“I know. I just wanted to tell you.”
He was silent. They walked to the front of the store. She smiled at the man behind the counter. “It’s my birthday today.”
“Oh my goodness.”
“Finally free.” She leaned across the counter, grinning. “Free to give a long and happy life.”
“I tell you what,” he said. “I give you the slushie for free.”
“Oh, no,” she said.
“Happy birthday.” He pushed it across to her. “You are a good girl.”
As they left the store, Jeremy seized her arm. “‘Give a happy life? Finally free?’”
She smiled, but he was serious. He steered her to a bench beside the road and sat her on it and stood there, glower
ing. She felt a tickle in her stomach, simultaneously sickening and thrilling. “You can’t do that.”
“I got a slushie. One free slushie.”
“It’s a serious breach of the rules.”
“Come on. Like word suggestion is even a real technique. I bet it’s nothing compared to what you can do.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Is this because he gave me a present and you didn’t?”
“You think the rules don’t apply to you? They do. You can’t practice. Not outside the school. Not on that guy. Not on me.”
“You? When have I ever practiced on you?” She poked him with her shoe. “As if I could compromise you. You’re going to graduate next year and I don’t know anything. Come on. Sit. Drink slushie. It’s my birthday.”
“Promise me you’ll never do that again.”
“Okay. Okay, Jeremy. I was just playing.”
After a while, he sat. She leaned her head on his shoulder. She felt very close to him. “I promise not to turn you into my thought slave,” she said, and felt him smile a little. But she had thought about it.
• • •
The next Tuesday, she hung around the school gates but Jeremy didn’t show up for their slushie run. She trudged back to the school. Something must have come up. Some class. He was getting busier. But she passed the front lawn and there he was, lounging with his friends, his pant legs rolled up in the sun. They were talking in the way of older students, no one laughing or even moving much, every sentence dripping with irony and layers of meaning, or so Emily guessed. She stopped. Heads turned. Jeremy glanced at her, then away. She walked on.
She understood that they couldn’t be seen together too often. They could not be attached. She knew this. She reached her room and sat at her desk and opened a book. If she turned her head, she could have looked down to the lawn and seen Jeremy and his little group of conceited friends. But she did not. Occasionally she leaned back and stretched her arms, or fiddled with her hair, because she knew he could see her, too.