Minnie inhaled.
“She had a heart attack,” Julia said. “Hours after I said she looked sick in the lab.”
Minnie’s mouth opened like a rusty garage door. Heart attack? “She okay?” I asked.
A nearby lady with blonde bubble hair overheard and glanced up. I didn’t care.
Julia waited for the lady to look away before nodding, wide-eyed. “Dr. Carrillo said she went to the hospital.”
Minnie threw her hands in the air. “I told y’all that I sat smack in front of a ghost in the lab. Who done call herself Carol.”
“But Dr. Carrillo said she was okay.” Julia lowered her voice, glancing at the people around us.
“Maybe she was okay. But now she’s dead,” Minnie said.
“Dead,” Cord said. All expression fell off his face, like a chalkboard wiped clean.
Minnie nodded. “Scared the livin’ daylights outta me.”
“That’s who you saw?” I felt like I’d chewed a live wire. I remembered she had said Carol’s name, but I didn’t really know whether to believe Minnie’s abilities or not.
“Where was this?” Henry asked. He brushed his hair off his face. Perfect ears. Of course.
“In the lab. She just looked on me with the saddest darn face,” Minnie said.
“Maybe the scientists killed her on purpose,” Henry suggested. The man next to me jerked and took in each of our faces. When his gaze landed on me, I bulged my eyes at him until he looked away. God, why doesn’t he just mind his own business?
“Did she provide further information?” Samuel asked.
“Nu-uh.” She shook her head. “She just sat there watchin’ in the corner. ”
I didn’t want to talk about Carol. I didn’t want to think about dead people watching us. SRI had grown sharp teeth since we’d set foot onto campus.
The air felt so thick with anxiety I could almost smell it. We were silent, but clearly Carol hovered along the edges of everyone’s minds.
The bus crawled up narrow streets in the city, past colorful flats, and back down hills. It felt like a rollercoaster lurching for the bay.
Eventually, we spoke again, agreeing that SRI was weird so far—for me, it was an icepick on the door to my abnormal mind—and Henry brought up the Chinese kids Dr. Carrillo had mentioned at our pseudo-orientation. Extraordinary Human Body Function subjects.
“Have you ever seen anyone who can do this spontaneous combustion? Someone who can see through walls?” Henry asked.
We shook our heads.
Again, the blonde bubble hair lady glanced up. Her eyes widened slightly before looking out the window. I exhaled loudly. She is so nosy.
“Makes me want to try it,” Henry said. He didn’t say which part, combustion or seeing through metal walls. Maybe all of it.
“What part?” I asked.
“All of it,” he said. Just as I suspected.
For a moment, I thought of home. I kind of wished I could have those powers. Just waved my hand to throw Dad across the room when he hurled a coffee cup at Mom or Cindy. I thought about the time he whipped a running garden hose around inside the house. Mom was just as bad, with a mouth like a bolt of electricity, attacking whatever vertical object might be near.
They weren’t all bad. They had good moments. I clearly remember the time when Dad checked out library books on camping so he could learn how to do it with us. We had planned a camping trip out east, but a tornado and flash flood killed the plan. It would’ve been fun. And Mom, she used to let me sit at her feet while she smoked and read stories to me at night.
I imagined what Cindy was doing at that very moment. Maybe watching Bonanza? I could see her then, laying on her stomach on the floor. A smaller, more stubborn version of me, maybe she acted like I did at that age: letting high-school boys run their hands up my shirt and down my pants behind the post office. She was probably fine. She was tough to break. Like steel. Still, I couldn’t help but feel as though I should have told my parents where I’d gone, or I should have just brought her with me.
From the bus stop, we walked to Katerina’s address: a lime-green, two-story row house with a jutting bay window. We rang the buzzer, and after a moment, the door swung open wide.
Katerina’s smile fanned across a perfect face. She was hips and lips and a waterfall of hair. She wore beige chiffon bell-bottom pants dotted with a cool green-and-purple paisley pattern, and the matching crop-top had flowing sleeves and showed off a tanned belly. The curl of a spicy perfume floated in the doorway.
“Come, come, I show you my pad.” Her accent was thick. She led us down a narrow corridor, up some steps, and into her apartment.
“Oooo-eeeee fancy,” Minnie said.
Cord brushed past me, smelling like soap, and I noticed that he looked kind of foxy, dressed in a crisp white shirt and gray trousers. “I never seen nothing like this,” he said.
In the living room, Henry spread himself on a velvet sofa next to Julia, glued to her like always. She, on the other hand, acted like he was covered in barf. Minnie plopped on the floor while Samuel leaned against the wall with the energy of a caged lion. I dropped into a soft beanbag, and a sigh escaped me. I studied two velvet paintings on the wall: one of a bullfighter and another of the Pink Panther. Smooth glowing globs rolled like gooey dough inside three lava lamps.
The room smelled like chocolate. Two metal pots sat on the coffee table, next to a pile of metal skewers and a bowl with fruit and white pound cake. “This is something new. Very hip,” Katerina said.
Julia smirked and rolled her eyes.
Katerina laughed like a fairy as she lit a small burner beneath the pot and then handed each one of us a long skewer. “It is called fondue. It is … terrific, shall we say?”
“Fond-what?” Cord asked.
“Fonduuuue,” Samuel corrected.
“Oh.” Cord shrugged.
I studied my metal wand. I’d never heard of fondue either. I watched Katerina slide the fruit on the skewer, dip it into the melted chocolate, and take a bite. Chocolate dripped down her cheek and she laughed again. “America is wonderful. Wonderful.”
Cord and I exchanged a look. Katerina was every kid on Christmas morning. America was her Santa. Each of us took turns dipping the pieces into the hot liquid chocolate, smiling, chewing, and nodding with approval.
Katerina handed us each Cokes, and when she came to me, I took it hesitantly. “Do you have Sprite? I like Sprite,” I said.
Katerina tilted an ear to one shoulder and back.
“No? Okay, I guess Coke is fine.” I waved my hand.
“No.” She chuckled. “I forget. In my country, we nod to say no.” She nodded. Then she shook her head from shoulder to shoulder again. “And this is yes.”
“What country’s that?” I asked.
“I am from Bulgaria.”
“It’s part of that Warsaw Pact, right?” Cord said.
Kid is way smarter than I thought.
“Uh, where?” I asked.
Julia glared at me. “It’s near Romania, Greece, Yugoslavia,” she said. Henry pointed his fingers like a gun at her.
“Good! Good!” Katerina said, grinning and doing the sideways headshake again.
“That country’s Communist,” Cord rubbed his head, hair cut short in almost a flat top.
Katerina barely flinched, her smile still painted on her face.
“Yeah, the Communists are bad. They want to blow us up,” I said. At least that’s what the TV said.
“It’s far more complicated than that, Charley.” Samuel’s tone sounded condescending. “They follow the ideology championed by political revolutionary Vladimir Lenin.”
Samuel paused, waiting for me to acknowledge his wisdom in social studies. I didn’t.
He exhaled and continued. “It’s also drawn from a form of Marxism. You know … a combination of communism and socialism that’s centered on the idea of economic equality—”
“Dictatorship,” Cord interrupted. He
sat taller and leaned forward. “I tell you. It’s where you don’t get to vote. The government controls everything. Businesses. People.” He stopped and looked at Katerina, frowning. “Wait. They don’t let nobody out of the country—”
“Some people leave, but not many,” Katerina answered quietly, scratching the back of her head and looking away.
“Why are you here, then?” I asked. The beanbag ate my body like a closing clamshell. My plaid miniskirt climbed up my thighs in that soft chair, but I didn’t mind. Maybe Henry would notice.
“Because I’m a magician!” She looked like she grew two inches. “I do amazing tricks and, just when I began to show the world my abilities, Dr. Strong saw me. He brought me here to test me for supernatural gifts. Many months before you come.”
“Missus Carrillo don’t care about magicians,” Cord said, squinting and leaning back on the sofa, a bit of flint in his voice. “She thinks all of us are really psychic.”
“No,” Julia said.
“No?” Cord asked.
“They’re testing us to discover if we’re psychic,” Julia said. “Not all of us are.”
I had to lean in because I could barely hear Julia. I stabbed another strawberry, popped it in my mouth, and flopped back onto the beanbag.
“Katerina, you ever get to know that gal, Carol?” Minnie asked. She didn’t wait for an answer. “She done died. D.I.E.D.” Her eyes grew big with the sentence, and I felt like I was going to puke with the change of subject.
“Yes, I did hear that,” Katerina said, nodding, eyes cast to the floor.
Cord leaned forward. “Them tests, do they kill people all the time?”
Katerina frowned. “Oh no. Very rare.”
“Rare, sure. But I’m guessin’ it ain’t unheard of.” Minnie crossed her arms and shook her head. “I don’t know about y’all, but I’m more nervous than a cat in a room full of rocking chairs.”
“Yeah, I’m bugged out,” I said.
An awkward silence fell on us again, and after a while, Katerina told us that she would do magic on stage with real supernatural abilities. She said that she wanted to work for the American government.
“What would you even do for the government?” Julia asked. She was a bunny, nibbling a piece of strawberry. No wonder she was bones.
“You know why they brung us here, Julia, right?” Cord said, reaching across the sofa to playfully slap her leg with the back of his hand. She pulled away.
“No.” Julia scanned us. “What do you mean?”
“CIA’s paying for these experiments,” Cord said.
“SRI has been doing government-related projects for decades, so I wouldn’t be surprised,” Samuel said. He didn’t eat the fondue, but rather stood motionless against the wall with arms crossed over his chest. A bitter shadow who watched our theater. “Who told you about the CIA, Cord?”
“Missus Carrillo mentioned it before that she’s trying to get money from them.”
“Well, that takes the cake!” Minnie said. “Y’all can’t argue. Money sure is good for science.”
True, big money from the CIA might mean even more cash to us for this bullshit study. Then I’d be able to just live here and never have to go home to Indiana. Maybe I’d have enough money for Cindy. I hadn’t told them where I went. The thought was a boulder on a catapult, slamming into my chest. I imagined Mom serving pie in the diner with dead eyes and her hair unwashed and knotted, her face painted with anxiety. She had no idea where I went.
Egg Salad also popped into my head. I wondered if he’d died. And if he hadn’t, I bet he was still mad about it. It seemed ridiculous, but he’d be the type to go to war with my parents over it. If that were the case, that I was wrong—which, can I just say, rarely happened—Mom would seriously flip out. Who would I be if my freaky ability disappeared?
Nervous, I took a long drink of my soda. In fact, I kept gulping it until I finished it. God, I needed some vodka in it. Or maybe I just needed some weed to relax. Maybe I could go find those happy tie-dye people I saw down at the park, dancing and lounging, clearly strung out on something. Maybe I could join their commune and just live in the park like them—or whatever planet they visited on those drugs.
Julia shifted in her seat, edging away from Henry, stammering. “I’ll be here for … a short time.” I had to lean forward because I couldn’t really hear her voice, thin like parchment paper. “Just to rule out any kind of weird thing…” She trailed off and took a quick sip of Coke.
“Weird thing?” I repeated. She was a mouse hiding her cheese.
“Nothing,” she said.
Quiet people drove me nuts. I reached over to touch her hand, just to see if I could peek inside her head. Maybe I’d see her past or future.
My fingers grazed the top of her hand, and the sting of electricity zapped me. Jagged pain. I jumped back and Julia screamed.
“Ow!” she shouted, holding her hand. She scowled at me. “Why did you do that?”
“I just wanted to see…” I shook out my tingling hand. That had never happened before. It felt like I’d stuck my finger in a light socket.
“I didn’t give you permission to see,” she said, standing up and squeezing her hand. She looked at Katerina. “May I please use your restroom?”
Katerina directed Julia through a hallway hidden by long, dangling strands of beads. I turned away from her snotty attitude and tried to jump into another conversation. Henry told Katerina and Cord about some surf break beneath the bridge that was apparently far-out.
Julia wouldn’t last long for sure in this program. I’d crush her with my psychic abilities. But the rest of us? Me, Samuel, Minnie, Katerina, Henry, and Cord? We were here to stay. If the CIA funded us, we would be rich. And these people were cool city. If it worked in my favor, I’d put Indiana in the rearview mirror of my life for good.
10
Julia
The hallway looked dark and sulky, a claustrophobic tunnel. How did people live like that? Tiny little apartments, tiny little hallways, stacked inside buildings with people on every side.
In the living room, voices ebbed like water. They talked about telepathy as if it were as ordinary as a golf game. In one way, it was reassuring to know I wasn’t the only misfit in the world. It felt like I’d been born with blue hair and suddenly found a whole town of blue-haired people.
On the other hand, in the Cavanaugh world, discussion of the paranormal was about as normal and as comfortable as eating razor blades. If you did eat razor blades, you were shipped off to crazy land—or worse.
For years, I made things happen privately. At seven, I was so happy about a boy, I made a flower bud blossom inside a sealed jar in a matter of seconds. When I told my mother, she didn’t believe me. But Aunt Sabrina, she did. She saw me snap tree branches from several feet away. She took me into the Macintyre House, the only place on the compound that lacked expensive furniture and fancy décor. Books with cracked spines and torn dust jackets lined bookshelves like lined up piano keys. I’d often see her curled with a book along a basic sofa or melting into an egg-shaped chair.
“You’ll have to be careful with those skills, little Julep, or your Grandfather will find out,” she had warned me, crouching down on one knee to look me in the eye. She was young, just eighteen, with her dark hair parted down the middle. She had a fierceness to her I wished I could possess.
I remember how she sat in a rocking chair and opened a book, The Second Sex. “What’s that about?” I asked.
“Change,” she had said. “Nowadays, women in our society do not really expect a lot from life. She’s here as someone’s keeper—her husband’s or her children’s.”
I nodded.
“Or in your case, Grandfather’s.”
I remember not fully understanding at the time.
“I believe it’ll change. That mindset. And I’m going to help.”
I didn’t know if it was that revolutionary mindset or her psychic gift, but shortly thereafter, she disapp
eared. She could have gone here, to Stanford, for all I knew. Or this could have been the purgatory before crazy land. I didn’t know; I simply knew I teetered on the edge of a dangerous precipice, a place where I could be locked away or eliminated, just like Aunt Sabrina.
I stuffed the thoughts down, deciding I must return home as soon as possible. Let these people get poked and prodded like lab rats. I would not do it.
When I reached the bathroom door, a shadow caught my eye. I stopped to look, peering inside the bedroom across the hall. The girl in the blue dress stared back at me. She stood stock still, almost eerily so.
“Hello,” I said, raising a hand in the air. “I didn’t mean to intrude.”
She wore a small, thin smile, and she looked so familiar. Too familiar. I knew her.
“Hello.” Her voice sounded thick, maybe a bit like Katerina’s. Maybe she was her sister. She looked like a shadow, as she stood several feet deep inside the bedroom. It was dim, like a spent match.
“I’m Julia,” I said with a nervous laugh, and then I pointed to the bathroom. “I just need to…” I shut the door to the bathroom. A small laugh escaped me. How odd that we kept running into each other.
After using the restroom, I gazed at myself in the mirror. Dark circles dipped beneath my eyes. Maybe it was bad lighting, but I felt like being here—and the fear of being found out—had pulled something out of my skin. Made me look even more pale and pasty.
I realized with a start that I looked like Aunt Sabrina did the last time I saw her. That’s who that woman looked like. Aunt Sabrina, but older.
A memory stirred in my mind. The red and orange flames licking the black sky as the Macintyre House went up in a bright blaze. Aunt Sabrina wailed, but not because fire ate her house: because fury consumed her. She screamed at Grandfather near the pond, her shrill and panicked voice echoing across the still water. The smell of burning wood singed the air, and, still small, I hugged Father’s leg and shivered from the cold. The next day, Aunt Sabrina was gone. No one ever spoke of her again.
Extraordinary Lies Page 8