That was about as close as I ever got to being caught.
But I still had to be careful. With great power comes a great need to hide it from other people so they don’t turn you into their tool. I learned that one the hard way.
“Hey, Mikey, see if you can make Sister Katheryn get us out of math today.”
“Hey, Mike, tell Sister Grace to take us out to the field this afternoon.”
“Mike, make Sister Beatrice dance again. That was freakin’ hilarious.”
Granted, if you’ve never seen a nun break-dance before, you are missing something. But it became necessary to keep things under wraps, not to end up as everybody’s lackey. As soon as someone finds out what you can do, they immediately start thinking about how it can benefit them. That’s called human nature.
And there were other limitations. For starters, I learned that I could only make suggestions that the other person was at least open to. Jason Merin never shared the cinnamon-chip muffins his mother sent him, no matter how much I prodded. He couldn’t even entertain the idea. But Davey “Plopper” Plimpton—who I soon discovered was game for just about anything (including, apparently, dropping a deuce in his second-grade teacher’s desk drawer, which was the straw that landed him in St. Mary’s)—had no problem sneaking into the trunk by Jason’s bed while everyone was asleep and swiping me two.
Still, whatever it was, it had to be within reason. In a world surrounded by mantras—do unto others, turn the other cheek, cast the first stone—somehow within reason became mine. “You can’t push too hard,” my dad later taught me. “You can’t just go up to some random guy on the street and tell him to give you a million dollars, or even a thousand. He won’t go for it. It’s outside the realm of possibility. Fifty dollars, on the other hand . . .”
It was only a matter of figuring out who could be manipulated and to what degree. Thankfully, most of the sisters were open-minded. And my life at St. Mary’s was bearable—even, at times, pleasant. But it wasn’t enough. I was an outsider. I was named by a committee of nuns after some of their heroes. The other kids looked at me differently (unless I told them not to). They didn’t trust me. And I didn’t blame them. We were all outsiders. Satellites. Leftovers. We were the uneaten onion rings of the world, and nobody but God wanted us.
And there were days I wondered about that, too.
I know what you are thinking. “Hel-lo, dipwad. Why didn’t you just use your little mind trick on some poor, unsuspecting couple and convince them to adopt you?” After all, St. Mary’s was in the business of shucking kids off onto nearly anyone who would have them. The beds were full. The donations scarce. If you were willing to feed a mouth, St. Mary would give you one, even walk it out to your car and help you buckle it in. But there were three reasons I didn’t go for that plan.
Reason one: Almost nobody ever visited St. Mary of the Woods School for Wayward Boys except parents who already had boys there—and usually then only on the holidays when the boys would plead to go home and the parents would remind them of all their past atrocities under the watchful eye of a half dozen crucifixes.
Reason two: Those few who did visit were always in the market for the one or two snot-nosed toddlers or soggy-diapered babes who still sounded cute when they burped. The would-be parents cooed, and gooed, and gaaed, and made ridiculous faces, and any of us older boys who saw them pointed and laughed out of jealousy. If you were over the age of five, you were used goods.
And the most important reason of all: I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to con some poor, hapless couple into adopting me. I wanted someone to choose me because they wanted to. Not because I looked deep into their eyes.
Which is why I stared down at my shoes the day Dad came to St. Mary’s, looking, he said, for someone who could help him take over the world.
By the time he showed up, I was nine years old and practically had full run of the joint. I knew who could be manipulated and who couldn’t. I knew exactly what I could get away with. I had almost come to terms with the fact that I would be stuck there until I was eighteen, at which point I would probably get a job at JCPenney persuading women to buy overpriced perfume. I had big dreams. But I never dreamed of working as part of a criminal enterprise. The thought simply hadn’t occurred to me. Maybe it was all the stained glass.
He wore a Hawaiian shirt that day, like all the other days. Pink and orange—two colors that have no business mingling anywhere but a sunset. It didn’t help that his hair was orange as well, both the spiked mess on top of his head and the overgrown shrub on his face. He was tall and skinny—not toothpick skinny, but Popsicle stick, easy. His big green eyes always seemed to be looking at everything but the person he was talking to, meaning it would be hard to get his attention, even if I wanted to.
Yet there was something magnetic about him. This man was different from all the other adopting parents who were trolled through the school—yuppies and DINKs in dress shoes with designer purses tucked under their armpits. This man had awful taste in clothing and was too cheap to get a decent haircut, and you could tell he didn’t get enough sleep by the dark half-moons beneath his eyes. He walked with a shuffle, as if he was afraid to completely lift his feet. And he chewed his lip. The top one with the orange mustache hairs cresting it. Sister Katheryn introduced us.
“Michael, this is Mr. Edson.”
“Professor Edson,” the man corrected.
“Excuse me. Professor. He’d like to talk with you for a bit. Would that be okay?”
I looked at the man, and he looked at his tennis shoes. He was fiddling with a smooth black box that he quickly stuffed back in his pants pocket. I nodded, and Sister Katheryn led us into a small room with an old oak table and three or four high-backed chairs. Then she turned and left the three of us alone. Just me, the orange-maned man in the Hawaiian shirt, and the Holy Spirit. He spent a minute funneling his beard through his hands before he spoke.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello,” I said.
“My name is Benjamin Edson. Have you heard of me?”
If he wasn’t a saint, a president, or an American Idol contestant, I hadn’t heard of him, and I knew right from the start he wasn’t a saint. “Should I have?”
“I hope not,” he said, looking around the room. “Did you hear Sister Katheryn and me talking about you?”
I shook my head out of politeness, then thought better of it. There didn’t seem to be any point in lying to this man. I had heard. I had heard her say the words “Really? Michael? Our Michael?” when he asked to see me specifically.
“Are you really planning on taking over the world?” I asked.
“No,” the man said. “That was just a joke. Why? Are you interested in taking over the world?”
“Are you kidding?” I cringed. “That’s like asking to have everyone’s problems dumped on you all at once.”
Professor Benjamin Edson pounded on the table with hairy-knuckled fists, causing me to jump out of my seat. “That’s exactly what I keep telling them, but they never listen to me.”
I said I didn’t know who them was. He said he didn’t either. This man was bizarre. I kind of liked him.
“You don’t need to take over the world to make an impression,” he said.
“Oh,” I said.
“Power is recognizing that you have a choice and then having the courage to make it.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. I had no idea what he was talking about.
He asked me a few questions, normal interview stuff. If I had lived here at St. Mary’s all my life. If I enjoyed reading and learning about new things. What my favorite flavor of ice cream was. If I knew anything about my parents. If I got along with everyone at the school.
Yes. Definitely. Cherry cordial. No. More or less.
“I hear you are interested in magic,” he probed. I nodded self-consciously. He seemed to know a lot about me already.
“Just a few card tricks. I’m not very good,” I said.
“M
y great-grandfather was a magician. He was pretty good. But don’t worry. We all have something that makes us special. I have a few tricks I could teach you.”
He asked about my friends at St. Mary’s and if I had any other hobbies. I made up some things. I could tell he wasn’t convinced, and I wasn’t trying as hard as I could have. Finally he folded his hands in front of him.
“Can I ask you a rather personal question, Michael?”
I nodded.
“Do you believe in God?”
I’m sure I must have looked even more confused at that point. I glanced around the room to make sure we were sitting in the same place. There was a cross on three out of four walls. There was a chapel down the hall where alabaster angels loomed over you. The whole place smelled like incense, except for Father Gabriel’s breath, which smelled like communion. Maybe it was a trick question.
“I was raised by nuns,” I said.
“Just because you are raised by accountants doesn’t mean you can balance a checkbook.” He laughed a little at his own joke, but then his smile retreated back under his mustache again. “I take your point, though. So I assume you believe in good and evil, then?”
I wasn’t used to anyone talking to me like this. As if there was more than one way to answer a question.
“I guess so.”
“So,” he pressed, leaning across the table so that I could see traces of gray in his flaming orange beard, “which are you?”
His breath smelled like butterscotch.
I just sat there, speechless. Legs crossed. Arms crossed. Crosses all around. I wanted to say good. I really did. I wanted to say it because I knew it was the right answer. But the more I thought about it, the less sure I was. I had done some mean things already, and I was only nine. I once convinced Jalen Scott to let me eat his entire birthday cake and then convinced him to clean up the mess after I threw up all over his bed. I had convinced poor sixty-year-old Father Howard to bend over backward and try to kiss his own butt, causing him to topple and nearly break a hip. I had done several things I wasn’t proud of. And I had done some of them to nuns.
Then there was the whole “all of us are sinners” thing that had been drilled into me since before I even knew what guilt felt like. So I knew, even then, what the answer couldn’t be.
“I guess,” I began, “. . . I guess I don’t know.”
Professor Edson leaned back in his chair and exhaled deeply, like a man who has just finished Thanksgiving dinner. He looked around the room.
“You have a big family here,” he said, his voice tinged with regret. “Lots of brothers and sisters. Fathers and mothers. A whole host of people looking out for you.”
“I guess,” I said, though watching you might have been more to the point.
“It’s a safe place,” he mumbled to himself, looking around. “But I said I would, and I will.” Then, before I could ask him “Would what?” he turned back to me. “Do you want to see a magic trick?”
I nodded. None of the teachers at St. Mary’s ever performed any magic tricks, though Sister Juanita sometimes seemed like she could appear from out of nowhere. Benjamin Edson showed me his empty palm. “I learned this from my father,” the man said. Then he reached behind my ear and produced a penny, tarnished green so that Abe’s face looked to be covered in mold. He set it on the table between us. Then he stood up and reached out to shake my hand, and I knew our conversation was over.
“It was nice meeting you, Michael Marion Magdalene Morn.”
“Yeah, you too,” I said, feeling my stomach sink, thinking that the interview was over too quickly, that I had screwed it up somehow, probably my one shot at getting out of here. That I wasn’t going home with this strange man in the hideous pink-and-orange shirt who really had no intentions of taking over the world.
And then there was an opening. Benjamin Edson shoved his hands into his pockets and looked me right in the eyes for the first time, almost as if he was looking through them, snaking his way into the folds of my brain. And I could have said it. Could have returned his stare easily enough and planted the seed.
“Get me out of here,” I could have insisted.
“Take me home.”
But I didn’t.
He slipped on his coat and walked to the door where Sister Katheryn was already standing. Then he turned and glanced down at his chest.
“What do you think of this shirt? Too much?”
I shrugged. The professor nodded, smiled, and turned. I watched him sign out and then escape through the front door of the building without another word to anyone else.
“He seemed to like you,” Sister Katheryn said, emphasizing the he way too much. I didn’t bother to smile politely. I had blown it. I looked Sister Katheryn in the eyes and suggested that I should take the afternoon away from my studies to reflect on the meeting I just had and God’s great plan for me. She agreed that was a great idea.
Instead I spent that afternoon eating cupcakes that the school cook had baked for Father Matthew’s birthday and feeling sorry for myself. “You have a big family here.” He had said it softly, sadly, as if he knew, as if he could see the little pit that had opened up inside me. And then he left.
I had to face it. I was stuck at St. Mary’s for the next decade or so. If that was the case, I was going to see just how far my power could take me. I couldn’t take over the world, but maybe I could take over the school. If I could get Sister Beatrice to attempt a backspin, I could probably get everyone in the place to bend to my will.
I was still planning my takeover of St. Mary’s three days later when the professor showed up again, wearing the exact same shirt as before. He had a stack of papers tucked in his armpit and two ice-cream cones in his hands. One of them looked to be chocolate. The other was cherry cordial.
“I’ve come to show you another magic trick,” he said, then bent down and whispered, “I’m going to make you disappear.”
THE INSTRUMENT, NOT THE CROSS-DRESSER
What I’ve done since escaping St. Mary’s . . . it’s criminal. In the past year alone, I’ve robbed banks. I’ve robbed people. I’ve robbed people standing outside banks. I’ve committed a handful of cons. I have resisted arrest, though the officer didn’t know I was resisting, so maybe it doesn’t really count. I have broken and entered, usually into some university laboratory to swipe dangerous chemicals or a cutting-edge prototype. I have loitered extensively. I once ordered a water at a restaurant and then filled the clear plastic cup with Sprite. I am thirteen years old and I already have a history that would land me on America’s Most Wanted, provided anyone actually knew who I was. But Dad makes sure we escape without a trace. He keeps us safe.
If I was a supervillain, my name would be the Influencer or Mr. Manipulative or Dr. Suggestive—though I guess that last one’s got more of a late-night cable television ring to it. I would wear an all-black bodysuit with a picture of a skull on the front, except instead of eye sockets there would be those little swirlies that hypnotists and magicians use, the ones that seem to spin forever like a bathtub that won’t stop draining. And I would also have rocket boots, because why not.
Except I’m not a supervillain. Not even close. Supervillains are beyond me. Not to mention most of them are totally bat-crap crazy. Stalin was a supervillain. Genghis Khan. Vlad the Impaler. Then of course there’re the ones everyone usually thinks of, with the flashy costumes and the spiked gauntlets and the never-ending maniacal giggles like a chronic case of evil hiccups. Guys with names like Doombringer, Dealer, and Doctor Apocalypse. General Xog. The Nihilist. All those deranged demagogues in their secret lairs with their legions of henchmen and their laser death rays and demands for total subjugation. The ones you hear about on the news terrorizing other cities. Making their ridiculous ultimatums. Planning to alter the moon’s gravitational pull in order to sink Iceland or infiltrating the United Nations with a Ban Ki-moon cyborg. To be a supervillain, you really have to want it; you have to let the ends justify the means.
>
I’m not even sure what my ends are yet. Dad thinks I’ll go to college someday. I think it would be cool to go scuba diving off the coast of Australia. It would probably behoove me to get kissed by someone who isn’t a nun somewhere that isn’t my cheek. I have goals, but they’re not exactly the stuff of world domination. Like I said, I’m no supervillain. I’m not even that bad a guy, really.
And Dad’s not either. He’s more of your mad-scientist type. He knows a crap ton about engineering and math and chemistry and physics, and history and literature, for that matter. He devours books like bonbons. He’s always spouting quotes at me the way the sisters used to do at St. Mary’s, but his at least come from more than one book. I’m fairly certain he’s a genius. Dad says the word genius originally meant “guardian spirit,” in which case he’s definitely a genius. He’s scatterbrained. And odd. And he dresses like an escaped mental patient. But he’s not insane. And he’s not really evil. Dad doesn’t believe in dichotomies, in one or the other. It’s not a line where you fall on one side or the other. It’s a great big circle, and he and I are in the center of it.
He once told me over a box of melty bonbons there are three kinds of people in the world: those who don’t believe in anything, those who believe in the one thing, and all the rest of us schlepps in the middle who don’t know what to think. Dad says the first two are dangerous, the one because you have no idea what they are going to do next, the other because you know what they’re going to do, and they are going to do it no matter the costs. But us, we’re not dangerous. We’re just survivors.
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