Lies I Live By

by Lauren Sabel

  “Never mind,” I say. He nods and walks away.

  Through my bedroom’s open window, the traffic blaring by on the street below drowns out the buzz of the ten o’clock news. It’s so loud tonight that I can’t hear any of the words from my neighbor’s TV, so I just lie in my bed and try to think about Charlie, but my mind keeps straying back to Jasper. How exhilarated I felt as we drove to the warehouse, my arms tight around his waist. How he said Calliope in a way that made me love my own strange name. His fearlessness about standing up for what he believes in, even to Indigo.

  The door opens and Mom peeks her head into my room. Her glasses are askew on her face, and there’s a stray hair sticking out of her normally smooth bun. “Can I come in?” she asks, and I nod.

  “Will you close the window?” I ask.

  “Noisy, isn’t it?” She lets herself in and closes my window, then sits on the end of my bed. I scoot my feet up so she has enough room on the mattress. “What are you doing?” Mom asks.

  “Plotting the end of the world.”

  “As usual.” She bares her teeth in a nervous smile, which she always does when she’s uncomfortable. “Are you okay with this?” she finally asks.

  “With what?” I ask, shifting to prop a pillow behind my back.

  “With Richard and me moving so fast,” Mom says. “I know I’ve put you through a lot with dating all these years, but I really think this is the one—”

  “I know,” I say. “I do too.”

  Mom grins and relaxes a little, and I can tell how much she wanted this to go well. “I think he might . . . you know.”

  I won’t admit that I squeal, but my voice does something that’s a close relation to it. “Really?”

  “He keeps hinting about it,” Mom says, lowering her voice to a whisper, “and I saw a ring box in the nightstand.”

  “Oh, Mom, I’m so excited for you.”

  “Don’t get excited yet,” she says, crossing her fingers. “I could be wrong. But think, Cal: someone normal for a change.”

  Normal. Mom doesn’t know it, but Richard is the only thing normal in her life. “Right, normal,” I say, crossing my fingers too.

  “And the only man who can find my keys when I lose them,” Mom says, kissing me on the forehead. “Good night, sweetie,” she says, and then she leans down and wraps me in a hug. It feels good to have her arms around me but also just plain weird. I mean, Mom loves me, don’t get me wrong, but we’re not the kind of family that hugs and kisses. We’re the kind that feels an I love you should only be reserved for rare, life-threatening situations.

  “Good night,” I mumble, my face squished awkwardly against her shoulder bone.

  Mom lets go, and even though I’m the definition of a nonhugger, I miss the warmth of her arms. “Sleep well,” she says, walking out of my bedroom and shutting the door softly behind her. As I listen to her footsteps fading down the hallway, I glance down at my still crossed fingers and smile.

  When the door to her bedroom shuts, I realize my knees are still bent to give her room on the bed, as if she’s going to return for another hug. I straighten my legs, and then scoot down deeper into the bed and pull the covers up to my chin.

  Think about Charlie, I tell myself, but then I am remembering the discussion Jasper and I had a few days ago, about willing ourselves into each other’s dreams by implanting an image into the other’s mind before bed. Maybe it’s not too late to try it.

  I pull myself out of bed and hurry over to my desk. Yanking open the top drawer, I take out a pen and a scrap of paper. Make it as weird as possible. Then, when he tells me what he saw, I’ll know for sure that I’ve planted an image into his dream.

  A flamingo, I write down, and then, to be more specific, on the moon.

  After folding up the piece of paper, I put it back in the drawer and try to shut it, but the drawer catches on something. I yank out a flyer that’s stuck in the back and uncrumple it. It’s for the Academy of Sciences museum in Golden Gate Park, promoting their new Satellites exhibit. The flyer has one dirty, ragged edge from using it to pick the dirt out from under my nails at the diner the other day.

  On the front of the flyer, there’s a picture of a large metal satellite. I turn it over, and on the back, there’s a list of sponsors for the exhibit. There must be a hundred of them, including everyone from Coca-Cola to Boeing airplanes. But at the bottom of the list, almost torn off by the split in the paper, is the logo that looks like an infinity sign, made of two interlocking earths.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I’m standing in the kitchen in that wavering, half-asleep type of way I get at eight in the morning, making coffee with one hand and trying—and failing—to pour creamer into my mug with the other (how hard can it be?), when Mom comes into the kitchen in a maroon cashmere pantsuit, phone in hand. Creamer pools on the counter beneath my mug.

  “Morning,” I say as I swivel to pour some coffee into her chipped Stanford mug. At the same time, Mom quickly wipes up the creamer under my mug. We move like that: in the spaces between each other. Richard says that we know each other so well our movements fit together.

  “Where’s Richard?” I ask, yawning. I couldn’t sleep last night after finding the logo on the museum’s flyer. I was awake until after midnight, wondering what company it is and why I’ve seen their logo on both the redbrick warehouse and the satellite, and now, on the list of museum sponsors. I tried googling “infinity sign logo, two earths” and other similar terms, but nothing useful popped up.

  Sometime shortly past midnight, I heard Mom giggling, and I was grateful for the distraction. I finally forced myself to get back in bed, and as I drifted off to sleep, it occurred to me that I had thought I knew everything about my mom, but her giggling was something totally new: this was my mom in love.

  “Richard had an early call at the firehouse,” Mom says, pouring some honey into my coffee mug. Without even tasting it, I know it’s just the way I like it.

  “Do you ever worry about him?” I ask.

  “All the time,” she says, and takes a long sip. “Constantly. But he knows what he’s doing.”

  I remember the radiation I saw in my vision, and the way the man’s body was trapped under the red smoke. Did that man know what he was doing, too?

  “Some things aren’t worth worrying about,” Mom continues, trying to convince herself, and then she abruptly moves to pour herself more coffee, although she’s only drunk a sip. “I forgot to ask you: Would you mind if I brought Richard to Charlie’s show tomorrow night?”

  I’m rendered speechless for a moment, because it’s like the hug from last night all over again. I mean, Mom wasn’t the kind of parent who came to my elementary school plays—and how could I blame her? If she can’t find her keys in time to make it to her morning class, I can’t expect her to keep up with someone else’s life. But I could get used to this new mom. This new mom in love who will come to my boyfriend’s first ever photography show in some obscure art gallery all the way on the other side of town just because she knows it means a lot to me.

  “He’d love that,” I say.

  Her face brightens. “Great.”

  “Just don’t be surprised at the topic,” I add.

  “What’s the topic?” she asks.

  “You’ll see,” I say mysteriously. I grab a granola bar out of the pantry and drain the last drops of coffee. With Mom still staring curiously at me, I cross the living room and shut the door behind me.

  Jasper is holding court in the staff room when I arrive, doing magic tricks for the only two adult viewers I know. “It’s better that you don’t know too many people, for your own safety,” Indigo told me on my first day of work. “We’re taking a risk employing someone underage, and the more distant you are from the other viewers, the more normal we can keep your life.” I wonder if the adults have coffee dates and tea parties, but I’m guessing with the secret nature of the work we do, they don’t know each other too well either.

  I move c
loser to Jasper, standing between Martina, the German psychic with the thick accent, and Pat, who, with his military haircut, always looks like he’s fighting Nazis or doing something equally heroic.

  “What’s this kid’s story?” Pat whispers to Martina, and I shift slightly closer to Martina, hoping she doesn’t notice my sudden interest in being near her.

  “I heard Indigo brought him in from New York,” Martina whispers back.

  Pat sounds impressed. “The New York office?”

  She nods. “For some special ability.”

  “I hope this isn’t it,” Pat says, and they both snicker.

  This time, I clap extra hard for Jasper when he finishes his magic trick.

  After a few minutes, Pat and Martina leave, heading for their sessions.

  “Wanna see another magic trick?” Jasper asks me, and I nod. Isn’t that what people do when they’re like seven years old? But right at the beginning of the trick I can tell that this is different. It’s really complex, and it doesn’t involve cards or pulling a quarter out from behind your ear. He actually makes a coffee cup disappear.

  Like, gone. Poof! It makes me feel unsettled, like when I was in a small earthquake as a kid, and the ground shifted and buckled under my feet. The sidewalk literally lifted up into the air. It gave me this feeling that hasn’t really gone away to this day, like everything we think is solid can just crack and change beneath our feet. It’s that feeling of knowing what my world was, and then suddenly, it’s changed into something utterly unrecognizable. The solid facts of my life—just gone.

  Jasper’s trick makes me feel like that. Or maybe he does.

  “Where’d you learn to do magic tricks?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “Long story.”

  “Ah, the Magician’s Oath,” I tease, and he smiles this time.

  We try his disappearing act with a printer, then a bunch of paper files, even a whole computer.

  “Will you make that disappear?” I ask. “What about that? And that?”

  By the time we’ve worked our way across the staff room to the viewing room, we are laughing around each other like old friends. Indigo must notice the change in us, too, because he glances up from a pile of sealed envelopes on the desk in his office and smiles at us. Then, with his phone in one hand and a business card in the other, he shuts his office door. To anyone but Indigo, I think briefly, we must look like two normal teenagers, talking and flirting. Flirting. I wince at the word. I shouldn’t be flirting with anyone but Charlie.

  Jasper must notice my sudden change in mood, because he opens the viewing room door and gestures for me to go in first. “I’ll monitor,” he says.

  “And I’ll try not to laugh at your ‘serious’ voice.” I duck under his arm and enter the pale gray room, and everything changes. My body instantly goes into automatic pilot, sitting on the couch and letting my mind float. Jasper perches on the leather chair and holds up a sealed envelope, and I nod and lean back on the couch.

  “See you on the other side,” Jasper says.

  I focus on the sealed envelope as I open the suitcase in my mind and pack all of my worries into it. In goes the radiation at the warehouse, and the infinity logo, and the deadly wall of water. In goes my fear that Charlie will forget me in New York, and my nervousness about Mom somehow screwing it up with Richard, and my fear that I’m starting to fall for Jasper. Then I slam the suitcase shut and lock it.

  I let myself relax, picturing my thin body on a boat in the middle of the ocean. I slowly hoist myself into the water, and then, as the cool ocean envelops me, let my mind clear, welcoming in a white space that fills me, suspends me in the water, hovering ten feet above the ocean floor.

  The first thing I see when I get into my vision is a box with red smoke emanating from it. As the box begins to move, my hands start moving across the paper too, mirroring what I’m seeing in my mind.

  “Callie?” I hear a voice above the scene. It’s calm, and my breath slows down a little. “What do you see?”

  “I see a moving box,” I say, spitting out my impressions as I see them, and I hear Jasper making a note on a piece of paper. I focus on the vision in my mind, and the image of wheels comes to me, turning over and over on concrete, and then I realize what it is. “It’s a truck,” I say. I continue watching, suddenly seeing how the lines connect to one another. “On a highway,” I add.

  “What’s the truck carrying?” Jasper asks.

  With my eyes still closed, I focus on the red smoke beaming from inside the truck, and a shiver crawls across my arms. “Something radioactive.”

  “Go closer,” Jasper suggests.

  I zoom closer to the truck and dread rushes through me, making the hair stand up on my arms. On the upper part of the windshield, there’s the infinity symbol logo.

  “Do you get a sense of the location?” Jasper asks.

  I focus on the infinity logo, but everything begins to get hazy. Around me, the surrounding land starts to fade from view, as if somebody is erasing it from the outside in. “Something weird is happening,” I say aloud.

  “What’s going on, Callie? What do you mean by weird?” Jasper asks, but by the time he finishes the sentence, the entire image has been erased.

  I sputter back to the surface with my hands sweating and heart racing. I’ve never seen anything be erased in a vision, and everything about it creeps me out. After not finding anything unusual at the warehouse, I had started to think that maybe I was jumping to conclusions about this company somehow being involved in the little boy’s death. But in over a year of doing this, I’ve never seen anything like this. If somebody purposefully kept me from seeing the location of that truck, there’s got to be something they are protecting. Now I’m more determined than ever to find out what company that logo belongs to.

  “Welcome back,” Jasper says calmly.

  “I saw the logo again,” I say.

  “So?”

  Why does it matter so much to me? I know that Indigo would tell me to just pass the intel on to the professionals, and he’d be right. But then I hear the little boy’s haunting cry in my mind, and picture his sweet, terrified face—and something in me rebels against what I’m supposed to do. I know that if I just blindly pass on information and hope someone stops it from happening, it could fall between the cracks. The terrified little boy could fall between the cracks. Rage rises up in me at the thought of him dying when I maybe could have done something about it, like alert those people that the tidal wave will be hitting at that location, at a specific time in the future. But when and where? “We have to find out what that company is,” I insist.

  Jasper leans back and laces his fingers behind his head. “Did you forget the whole ‘we are just eyes’ thing? We report the information, we don’t solve the problem.”

  Jasper’s apathy toward the situation makes me feel like I’m going to burst. It’s like I’ve been calmly doing what I was supposed to do for so long, and all that tension, that inability to do anything in the real world, has built up inside of me. “And maybe that’s not good enough anymore,” I whisper. “Maybe I saw a little boy killed by a tidal wave while I was standing on a satellite with this logo on it.” I gaze at Jasper, my eyes a red-hot flame. “And maybe this same logo is on a nearby warehouse, and also on a truck carrying radiation,” I add. “And maybe I don’t know how they connect, but I know they connect somehow.” I tear my eyes away from his as I climb to my feet, already packing my backpack. “We have to figure out what that company is.”

  Jasper doesn’t move. “Why don’t we just view it?”

  “Because both times I’ve tried to focus on the logo, everything gets hazy—or erased. It’s like I’m being blocked from finding out anything more. And the internet hasn’t been helpful at all.”

  “So what do you want to do?” Jasper asks.

  I tell him about the flyer I found in my desk last night with the logo on it.

  “It was a pamphlet for some new exhibit at the museum,” I explain
.

  “So we go there and ask what?”

  “If that company sponsored the exhibit,” I say. “Maybe the museum can tell us who it is.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  After a train ride from Berkeley and a bus ride across the city—and an hour of Jasper wishing his bike wasn’t in the shop—we’re finally walking across Golden Gate Park toward the Academy of Sciences. The smell of pizza from a nearby food truck is washing over us, and Jasper obviously can’t focus on anything else.

  “I’m thinking a slice of pepperoni,” he says. “What about you?”

  “Seriously? It’s ten a.m.”

  “So?”

  I shake my head. “Maybe after.”

  “I’ll hold you to that,” Jasper says, but I don’t even look at him: my attention is focused on the science museum a hundred yards in front of us. It’s a huge building, housing both an aquarium and a giant exhibit hall, all topped by a roof made of live plants. People are streaming in and out of the front doors, under a huge sign announcing a new exhibit about the power of satellites.

  As we walk toward the giant front doors, our hands brush, shooting guilt through me. Great. Apparently now I feel guilty just hanging out with him. I know we’re not doing anything wrong, but it feels like I’m cheating on Charlie. It’s hard to describe, but it’s like, when Jasper’s nearby, my entire being is magnetically pulled toward his. No matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to stop flirting with him. Even when my mind says no, my body says yes.

  This is work, I tell myself, and I instantly wonder if the logo is the only reason I’ve insisted we come here. Or did I also want an excuse to spend more time with Jasper?

  In the museum’s grand lobby, there are dozens of little kids skirting in and out of exhibitions with San Francisco Public Elementary balloons pinned to their T-shirts.