by Jeff Nesbit
Chapter Three
It was only a different type of game to him at first. But, not surprisingly, it became more as he grew accustomed to it. Jude wasn’t satisfied to just call on forces—he wanted to learn how to use his mind to get other people to bend to his will. I think he enjoyed the mind games even more than his ability to call on outside forces to get what he wanted.
“You worry too much,” Jude told me. “What’s the worst that can happen? We get kicked down the road to yet another foster home? It’s not like anyone would believe us or even care. They don’t punish you for your thoughts or what you tell people.”
“I know, but …”
“But what? Do they have mind police sitting around telling us what we can think and what we can’t? What we say? Of course not. We can think whatever we’d like. We can wish for anything we’d like. We can daydream about anything we’d like. No one can keep us from doing that. They’re just thoughts. It’s the actions that matter.”
Jude won these arguments. It wasn’t like I could counter them. I certainly couldn’t see anything around us that would keep us from wondering and thinking about the things Jude talked about.
By the time we were in middle school, we were already on our sixth set of foster parents. Jude had long ago given up on the questions. He no longer cared why no one had adopted us when we were babies. Because that, of course, is the only time kids get adopted. Everyone wants to adopt a baby—a brand-new human being they can raise as their very own and teach to think like them. No one wants kids with their own minds.
And Jude very much had his own unique mind. I did too. But I tended to be a listener, a follower, a scribe of the events around me. Jude was the kid who forged ahead. I tended to follow behind and take his lead.
Jude found creative ways into social circles wherever we landed. He didn’t wait to ask questions. Whenever circumstances changed, for whatever reason, he just moved on, did his own thing, won friends, and quietly punished any possible enemies.
Sometimes, for fun, he made suggestions—ones that his highly inventive mind dreamed up—and then sat back to see what would happen. It was his private game.
After our blissful, largely uneventful couple of years with the nice, elderly couple on the farm in Waterford, Virginia, we had to move on yet again.
The man had been an insurance salesman. But he retired after the company he worked for had been crushed by the economic recession in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and the couple had been forced to sell their farm. They moved to a crummy one-bedroom apartment in the closest town—which, of course, left no room for us.
We went back into the system, which spit us out and landed us with a family that somehow managed to jam ten kids into a townhouse in Purcellville, Virginia. Four of the kids were their biological children. They split two of the bedrooms on the top floor of the townhouse. The six foster kids, including us, slept on pullout beds in the basement.
Jude said this particular set of foster parents paid for the townhouse from what the state gave them to take care of us. I’m sure he was right. What I never could quite figure was why the state let so many kids stay in that townhouse. Maybe they decided it was better than shipping us off to some institution.
Jude didn’t care. “It is what it is,” he said. And we certainly weren’t given a chance to ask anyone that question. The state could be a rather impersonal thing.
By then, I’d already read all the books on foster care. I’d studied them over and over. That was just my nature. I couldn’t help it. I knew, for instance, that a lot of your brain development occurs when you’re young, like three or four. Without loving parents telling a child what to think, who knew what happened in a just-beginning-to-form brain?
Foster kids have higher suicide rates, higher rates of depression, and a greater chance of getting hooked on drugs. We’re worse in school, and we’re much more likely to get in trouble. Half of the foster kids in the United States choose to be homeless when they turn eighteen, thinking that it’s a better alternative than the lot they’d drawn up to that point.
In fact, a few studies reported that a third of the homeless in America had once been foster kids. I don’t know if that’s true or not. But Jude said it didn’t matter. We were never going to be that sort of statistic, he vowed. We would absolutely control our own destiny. Statistics were just that—statistics.
There was an unspoken hierarchy in the Purcellville foster home. The four teenage kids who belonged to the family, all boys, were in charge. They grabbed fistfuls of french fries at dinner and left the scraps for the rest of us. They took the seats in the Ford truck, leaving the rest of us to hang out in the bed of the truck. They got a ride to school. We took the bus.
Their parents didn’t step in. If anything, they seemed to get a perverse pleasure in watching this dynamic. I couldn’t even begin to explain the psychology behind it. Someone, somewhere, could probably have come up with an explanation.
“Leave it alone,” Jude said once. “It doesn’t matter. It’s not something we can control—at least not right now.”
But I watched Jude with those four boys—and I learned. Jude said he didn’t care, that he was ignoring the injustice of it. He claimed to pay no attention to the slights, the taunts, the not-so-subtle threats that if we didn’t toe the line and follow along, we’d be out on our own or in an even more horrible foster-care situation.
In practice, though, Jude did something else. Unlike the rest of us foster kids, he adopted a stance of hanging out with the four boys, echoing their words, puffing them up, telling them how wonderful and smart they were. As he became their personal echo chamber, both at the house and in school, the four boys began to cut Jude some slack. But more important, they started listening to his suggestions here and there. I could tell Jude was setting them up, though I couldn’t even imagine what form the setup would take.
One night, the entire family of kids—foster and “real” kids alike—watched an old movie. It was the original horror film, one that spawned others in the genre years later. It was supposed to scare the living daylights out of us. One of the other foster kids had heard about it and rented it from the public library. The movie was called The Bad Seed. The original was filmed in the 1950s, but it was remade decades later.
I watched Jude while the film played. He smiled and laughed throughout. During a movie that was supposed to be scary—a story about a pretty, adorable little girl who killed friends and neighbors to get what she wanted whenever she wanted. But I could see Jude thought the movie was silly—especially the ending, when a lightning bolt zapped her on the dock of a lake as she looked at the water for a medal her mother had tossed into the murky depths.
“No way,” he whispered to me at the end. “No way does that happen in real life.”
“Why not?” I asked him.
He frowned. “Because it doesn’t work that way. That idiot girl didn’t need to kill those people. There are other ways to get what you want. And you don’t need to put the janitor in the incinerator to cover your tracks. That’s plain stupid.”
At the time, we were studying chemistry in middle school. Jude took an uncanny interest in the class, which was unusual for him. He didn’t ordinarily put so much work into studying. That was my thing. But there was something about this particular class that fascinated him. I think it had something to do with understanding the fundamental essence of the world, which is what chemistry can teach if one pays attention.
Jude launched his game about six weeks after we’d learned some of the basics of chemistry. It started with another old movie, a western starring Clint Eastwood. Jude spent the entire time talking about how gunpowder had changed everything in the Old West.
“The invention of gunpowder,” he said, “was the coolest thing ever.
“What’s more,” Jude then whispered to one of the biological kids, “we could actually do it o
urselves. We could make gunpowder right in our own kitchen.”
The boys didn’t believe him, of course. But Jude taught them. They concocted the gunpowder themselves and made it right there in the kitchen three days later when their mother was out shopping. Jude made them write down the ingredients themselves and then buy it from the store. He patiently explained the process to them.
Jude then took the four boys to a construction site around the corner. They “borrowed” some of the pipe intended for the interior plumbing and brought it back to the townhouse. Jude showed them how to take the gunpowder and stuff it inside a six-inch pipe, close off the ends, and then put some string in one end.
“Just for fun,” Jude suggested, “why not see what happens if you light the end and drop it inside one of the Porta-Johns on the construction site this weekend when no one’s around? That would be cool, right? Just see what might happen?”
The four teenagers were suckered in.
It was pretty interesting, I had to admit. The pipe exploded inside the Porta-John and blew the sides open in either direction. A fountain of waste exploded a good twenty feet into the air like an erupting geyser. The four boys laughed themselves silly watching it.
Jude simply wore that odd smile again.
“But wouldn’t it be even cooler,” he suggested to the boys a while later, “to try out the pipe bombs on some of the mailboxes in the neighborhood? To put one inside a mailbox and blow it to smithereens?”
So the four boys took some more gunpowder, filled more pipes, and then fanned out across the neighborhood to target some of the mailboxes of our neighbors.
I watched as Jude faded into the background throughout all of this. I took his lead and stayed in the shadows as well.
The four boys planted the pipes, blew up the mailboxes, and then ran back to the townhouse to talk about the daring effort.
Jude suggested other targets, including one of the blue USPS mailbox drops right outside the 7-Eleven a few blocks from the house.
“What morons,” Jude said to me after they’d gone.
“How so?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “Well, for one thing, it’s a felony to blow up mailboxes. It’s a federal crime. The local paper says that the FBI has already shown up to investigate, along with the local cops. Porta-Johns are one thing. Mailboxes are something else entirely.”
I almost gasped. But I had to admit, I was also curious about where this train wreck might end up. “But we’re involved, aren’t we?”
“No, we’re not,” Jude said firmly. “They wrote the ingredients down, they bought them from the store, and they took those pipes and stuffed the gunpowder inside. They blew them up at the construction site while we watched. They walked around the neighborhood and put them in the mailboxes—”
“But you gave them the idea,” I interrupted. “Doesn’t that mean something?”
“Yeah, maybe. But it won’t matter after tonight—not after the security camera at the 7-Eleven clearly shows them putting that pipe bomb inside the mailbox. They can squawk all they want about where they got the idea from. They’re the morons who’ll be on the security camera tape.”
And just like clockwork, agents with blue windbreakers that had the letters FBI emblazoned across the back showed up the next morning. They sat down with the four boys and their parents to explain what they’d seen on the camera. They sternly announced that it was a federal crime to blow up mailboxes and warned that the four boys could have been sent away for the rest of their natural lives as domestic terrorists if they’d been eighteen years old.
The four boys did everything they could to pin it on Jude. They squealed like stuck pigs—telling the FBI agents that Jude was the mastermind behind the effort, teaching them how to make the gunpowder, showing them where to find the pipe, suggesting the targets.
Jude sat there calmly throughout his interrogation. He didn’t deny anything but calmly and very directly pointed out to the FBI agents that they’d all taken chemistry class together and that he’d never made the gunpowder, never stolen pipe from the construction site, never blown up anything. And, he noted, he wasn’t on the security camera either. As far as he knew, Jude said, it wasn’t a crime to listen to other people.
Granted, Jude knew it was a crime to be an accomplice. But I think he also knew it would be nearly impossible for the FBI to pursue that course of action, given that Jude had done nothing more than plant a suggestion here and there. Jude’s fingerprints, so to speak, were nowhere to be found. The four boys, on the other hand, were caught red-handed, and no amount of squealing could erase that plain, simple fact.
In the end, the FBI concluded the same thing. They threatened to send the four boys—not Jude—off to juvenile detention for some period of time but ultimately decided against it after long consultations with the parents and several lawyers.
The four boys had been scared straight. They wouldn’t wander off the path ever again. They’d graduate from high school and safely fold themselves into crummy jobs and dull lives. They would never take risks again, and the FBI agents would continue to haunt their dreams.
But not Jude. The whole thing had been an experiment for him—one of many mind games—to see if words alone could move antagonists out of the way. They could. He’d learned an interesting, valuable lesson. You could sometimes get your way, get what you want, simply by talking. It was a very curious thing.
And he’d been able to do so with his own mind, without calling on outside forces. In this case, at least, it hadn’t been necessary.
The parents shipped us off to yet another foster home within two months of the incident. Jude may have fooled the FBI, but the parents had a pretty clear idea about the true mastermind behind it all.
Jude didn’t care, and I didn’t really care either. I was ready to move on again. I’d long ago resigned myself to both my fate in life and the fact that I would go where Jude took me. I was inextricably tied to Jude. It didn’t seem like I had much of a choice in the matter.
Chapter Four
My third girlfriend in five years was perplexed. We’d been planning a vacation to the Caribbean for the past couple of months, and I was postponing it to take the trip up north after I made my cameo appearance at the launch of Jude’s Senate campaign.
“You’re going to the Arctic ocean at this time of year, in the summer?” she whispered fiercely over her nonfat, sugar-free grande mocha coffee in the Starbucks on Madison Avenue near her office. “Why?”
Sandy was a nice young woman, an executive vice president of a decent-sized advertising agency with some A-list corporate clients. She worked hard, played even harder, and had a social network in the city to kill for. She just had lousy taste in boyfriends, she would occasionally remind me.
“It’s the time to go,” I offered lamely. “They’re going to record the lowest level of sea ice in history—”
“Yeah, so? I read that story. I know, because I read it already this summer in The New York Times. And I’m pretty sure it had your byline.”
“It did,” I said, “but no one gets the importance up there. They don’t understand what it means. It isn’t just about the area that the ice covers; it’s about the volume. A British researcher predicted twenty years ago that we’d see the Arctic sea ice disappear in our lifetime, not by the end of the century. And he was right.”
I was on a roll. “Have you seen the PIOMAS charts for the last twenty years? The NASA satellites can only look down on the surface area. They can’t pick up the cubic volume. I have to explain the difference between volume and ice cover, so people will understand why it’s fundamentally altering the jet stream and affecting extreme weather events like drought, heat waves, and storm surges …”
I stopped speaking. I could see I’d lost her already. I did that often with her, especially when I was focused on something—like right now and the meaning behind the
situation in the Arctic.
I cocked my head. “It was the PIOMAS chart, wasn’t it?”
“PIOMAS? Seriously?” She tucked a strand of shoulder-length blonde hair behind her right ear.
I hurried on. “Well, it’s important. These researchers at the University of Washington have been trying to guess the volume of ice being lost each year in the Arctic Ocean because of the extreme warming happening there. PIOMAS stands for—”
“I don’t care what it stands for!” Her voice rose a decibel. “That’s not the point. And I’m sure it’s important. But we’ve been planning to go to the Caribbean, and I already scheduled my vacation around my clients.”
“Can’t you reschedule?”
She exhaled dramatically. “I could, but not without moving heaven and earth. That’s why we planned it, so I wouldn’t have to go through this.”
I looked at her. We were right there at the edge of the boyfriend cliff. I’d been at the edge of that cliff many times over the years. I always walked right off the edge. And I was about to do it again.
It was a shame. Sandy was a really nice person. She was fun to be with. We seemed to like the same things. We could both go see the Yankees play and delight when they lost. We’d both rather see an off-Broadway play with struggling actors than The Book of Mormon. We enjoyed the flea market on Amsterdam Avenue on Saturdays. And we both loved the fact that we were infinitely more comfortable reading the Times at a coffee shop on Sunday morning than sitting in a church pew.
But—and I think Sandy knew this—I was always holding back. I never truly talked about anything of substance around her—or anyone else for that matter. How could I tell anyone what I’d seen in my life?
Sandy was so nice, in fact, that she’d never even asked about my inheritance, the wealth, or why I was working at the Times as an environmental science reporter when I didn’t need to. I was pretty sure she’d read stories about Jude and me over the years. She could fill in the blanks. But she didn’t ask outright, which was another thing I liked about her.