“But you just said—” Charley asked.
“This ghost inquisition over yet?” Minnie said, holding her arms up as if we were robbing her.
“Maybe Minnie just lives in her own reality,” Charley said.
“Don’t all of us?” Cord said. A nervous laugh erupted among us, but we felt on edge, and no one felt safe. A pregnant pause followed.
“We should get some sleep,” Charley said, curling up at the top of the bed opposite mine. Cord sat next to her, his thigh literally an inch from hers. Minnie sat on my bed next to me, curled up with a pillow in her lap. She bit her lips, anxiety like a glassy bubble around her, ready to shatter.
Cord and Minnie agreed.
I picked up a tiny white feather that had fallen from a pillow.
Charley’s voice softened. “Hey, Julia I know you were freaked out today at the park. It hasn’t changed anything with us. We’re glad you’re here.”
And in that moment, for the first time in forever, I felt a rainbow of hope.
18
Charley
I could feel Cord looking at me, even with my eyes closed. Funny how you can just feel that in the air. Like his stare was a physical weight on my skin. I wondered if that was a psychic thing, or if everyone felt that way.
Sitting on the bed, our legs were super close, and I glanced up at him, wondering what he was thinking. Actually, I knew what he was thinking. I knew boys.
My heart had stopped hammering, and my fingers didn’t tingle the way they had when we were all standing in the hallway earlier. But a serious panic still hovered like a cloud in the room. There was a potential poltergeist down the hall, and that was something none of us could swallow.
I guessed having four psychics in a single room was a pretty strong place to be, and maybe we could fight off any kind of evil spirit with our abilities. Maybe? The thought made me scoot closer to Cord; we slumped side-by-side leaning against the wall.
Something creaked outside the room, and a flash of light lit up the hallway. My heart sputtered in my chest, but Julia and Minnie didn’t notice. They slumped over pillows on the other bed, murmuring stuff and then dozing off, like kids trying to stay awake at a sleepover.
I looked at the door, waiting for the door to blow off, for a blade to fly through the air. Nothing happened.
All was quiet. No lights. No noise.
After a few minutes, I relaxed into the pillow, trying to find safety next to Cord.
“How your tests going?” he asked.
Small talk. The perfect avoidance. I picked a piece of fuzz off my pajamas. “I don’t know. Weird. Kind of creepy. I mean, Sammy’s room is haunted. Kinda hard to ignore.”
“I get it.”
I paused. “Don’t you … feel like you’re being used?” I looked at the ceiling. “I’m constantly being asked to spy and look into dark vibes. I always feel like I have spiders crawling on me afterwards. I can’t wait to just get paid and be done.”
“Sure, I get you. They got me making predictions about military targets and all.”
I frowned.
He nodded. “The other day, they show me a map of this place called Severodvinsk? In Russia. They ask me to tell them what was gonna happen there later. I don’t think I’m gonna be able to do it. But then I just think real hard about the map and just know stuff.”
“What?”
“It flies at me. Bam. Bam. Bam.” He slapped his hands together. “I seen this big concrete building. All these waves from the ocean. I says to them I think it’s some sort of channel with water in it. And there’s this big ol’ copper-colored submarine. It’s halfway in the water and something sat on top of it. I’m thinking I seen a gun or missile launcher?”
“Well. Were you right?”
He shook his head. “Next day, they look at satellite pictures. They says to me, ‘Cord, you dead wrong.’ The pictures don’t show no water there.”
He paused dramatically, bit his lip and shook his head.
“Really?” I asked, genuinely surprised.
“Yeah, I’m telling you. Then Missus Carrillo tells me, ‘Cord, you’re done.’ She just shuts me out.”
“Shuts you out?”
He nodded slowly, meeting my eyes. Devastation flooded his face.
“Charley, I know I was right. I know it in my heart.” He thumped his chest with his right knuckle.
“She’s so intense,” I said, snorting.
“I just want to do good, you know?” he said softly. He turned to look at me, and with our shoulders touching, our heads were suddenly really close together. “They don’t believe me about Severodvinsk, and I think Missus Carrillo’ll send me home. My dad’ll be so…” His voice petered out and he shook his head.
I tried, but I didn’t really understand this obsessive desire to do good for his family. I guessed every kid starts off wanting to please their parents in some way, but I gave up on that a long time ago. When I was thirteen, I didn’t take out the trash, and my dad dumped the bag of garbage on my bed. Not even setting the bag on my bed. He actually ripped open the black thing and let it all rain down onto my sheets and bedspread and all.
I remember he brought me into my bedroom after school and pointed at my twin bed. Streams of light from the window highlighted the brown banana peels and cereal boxes, the clumps of coffee grounds and the slimy plastic meat containers that piled on top of my bedspread. The purple floral pattern only visible in glimpses.
His voice was embedded in my mind: “God dammit, Charlotte. Ever heard of trying? For me, at least?”
I remember how I caught my breath at the scene and his words, but I didn’t reply. He walked away, the thudding of his feet down the stairs releasing a flood of tears.
It was such a bizarre lesson for an adult to give a kid, and I remember that moment, I decided that even if he did terrible things like that, I wasn’t going to do anything for him or anyone else. No one except Cindy. That was it.
I wondered what kind of family torment Cord had in his past. I wanted to dig into his skull, really dig in … but then I remembered that electric shock when I tried to touch Julia’s hand.
I wondered what a stranger would see about my family with the touch of my hand. A projector screen of my life: a series of cigarettes flicked in ashtrays. Clinking glasses of manhattans and the splash of cannonballs into the town swimming pool. They’d probably see those dominoes stacked on the crooked sidewalk and the sprinklers spraying darting skinny legs and green swimsuits. They’d see tears over the kitchen sink and the smell of cherry pie from the oven. They’d feel years of disappointment and the thudding of a wedge being slowly hammered between me and everyone else.
“Do you think I’d get zapped if I touched your hand?” I asked, my palm hovering over his. Part curiosity. Part flirting. Part connection. I’d never asked other boys before. I’d just secretly spied on them. But Cord would know, because he was different.
He shrugged, and a small, flirtatious smirk slid up one side of his mouth. That expression did something to me; it made my stomach stir. But really, any time a boy looked at me like that, I was immediately attracted. Boys were my flame, and I was a damn bug.
“So can I?” I asked.
He pressed his hand up to meet mine. His hand was rough, with creases along his knuckles. I held it with both hands, and a rush of feelings swelled inside me in the shape of words. Loyalty. Family. Soldier. Marriage. The words swept past me, and then, I saw him. Really saw him.
His friend Sweater was adventure. I saw scenes of Cord and this tall carrottop, as they drag-raced along a narrow dirt road through tall canyon walls, a river roaring some one hundred feet below, dust kicking up as they hit the first curve. Cord’s cheeks hurt from grinning. The pair lit tractor tires on fire and pushed them down the hillside and into a neighbor’s shed, and they mooned people on a train that plowed through a town called Minturn—and one of those passengers happened to be his priest.
I laughed out loud. “You mooned your prie
st?”
He paused, wide-eyed, and then chuckled. “Woah, you’re good!” he said, taken aback. “At first, I didn’t admit to it. But Sweater’s got this birthmark—easy butt to find. My mom hates Sweater. She says he’s a bad influence on me.”
I nodded. “She likes Stella, though,” I said. His girlfriend.
I saw her standing in the sunlight, grinning. She brushed back long dark hair and held up a basket filled with berries. Ridiculously adorable. I wanted to throw up. With that thin frame, she looked like a piece of art. She kissed his lips. Flowery perfume.
A strange flash of jealousy flickered in me.
Beyond Stella, a thundering cloud of Cord’s siblings tumbled out of the forest and onto the dirt road. His sister, Celia, black hair in pigtails, held up strawberries, each no bigger than a dime in her tiny cupped hand. Brown eyes like walnuts. “Taste like candy!”
I smiled.
I saw his white clapboard house, Stella’s log house across the street. The actual girl next door. Secret kisses behind the barn in seventh grade. Holding hands in high school. Taking her to prom. But I didn’t feel his emotion for her. Loyalty maybe. Friendship. She was safety. Expectation, and even a bit of panic.
Inside his house I saw a framed picture of his father, a smiling soldier drying his socks over a campfire. I saw his mama standing over the hot stove, turning tortillas on a pancake grill. Stella melting butter on the tortilla and holding it out to him. One bite for Cord; one for her. They talked and chewed.
I felt Cord’s sputter of nerves when he saw Stella rubbing the ring finger on her left hand and then tilted her head, looking up at him with a crooked smile. He hasn’t asked her yet. But she’s waiting.
I let go of his hand but couldn’t look at his face. “Wow, thanks. Your family looks nice.” I paused, keeping my gaze down. “And so does Stella.”
“Sure,” he said, but there was no fire in it.
19
Julia
I listened to everyone wake up that morning and talk about heading out to the lab. I couldn’t imagine going back there after what happened. After dozing off again, I finally rose, my blood chilled from the previous night.
Outside my window, I spotted Samuel and Henry walking through the Oval, the large oval-shaped lawn in front of the campus’ main quad. Palm trees surrounded the area, and the two walked past students playing Frisbee or studying on the grass.
Henry walked with the confident air of a leader, placing his hand on Samuel’s shoulder. They walked side by side before stopping to greet a woman with a red beehive hairdo.
Henry let go and shook the woman’s hand. She gave him a piece of paper and a paper bag that was folded over something in the shape of a brick.
The red-headed woman turned and walked away, poised. Her body and that beehive hair made her look like a thin exclamation point. What are they doing?
The ringing telephone made me jump. I turned away from the window, confused by the exchange I had just witnessed, and picked up the phone, expecting to hear the only person who knew this number.
“How’s life back home?” I leaned against the wall and twirled the black cord between my fingers.
“Boring without you.” Victoria’s voice sounded crisp and light, and I imagined her standing in a white tennis skirt, ready for an afternoon at the club. “Lots of mosquitoes. You?”
I gazed at the closet door, the blank walls, the gray sky outside my window. What should I have said? Jail. It felt like jail. I might or might not be hallucinating about our dead aunt. Instead, I kept my voice light. “I checked out Chinatown, the Mission District. The bridge is great. It’s just the same as Bobby’s eighth birthday.”
“So.”
“Do my parents know you’re calling?”
She paused, hesitating. “Uh, no.” She stopped again. God, I hated when she did that. She was the decisive one, so when she hesitated, I knew I was screwed. “You should know what I found out.”
I waited, feeling as if my eyebrows were falling into my eyes.
“About Aunt Sabrina. I asked the help, and after Florence, everyone’s afraid to talk. I went to the hideous new house they built. It’s so weird how nothing grows there since the fire. Nothing worth reporting.”
That didn’t surprise me. They pretty much razed the whole house after the fire, even the charcoaled rubble. That new house felt like an imposter with no heart and soul. We used to wonder if Aunt Sabrina had indeed died and cursed the place.
Now I wondered if we had it all wrong: maybe she had cursed SRI, a place she was taken to die.
“But I did find something else inside my mom’s desk drawer.”
That was a risky move by my cousin, considering her mother lived on the edge of snapping in two. She would lose it when we stepped foot in the living room, too close to the expensive white furniture. We couldn’t enter that room, let alone sit in there. I was afraid to even look inside.
“It was just a guess, really. She also keeps the pills there.” We both knew about her mother’s pill habit—the way she’d put them in a little locket she wore around her neck, slipping them into her mouth when she was away from the house.
“Anyway, I found a train schedule.”
“So? That’s not surprising. Grandfather owns a railroad.” I felt like adding, duh, because it was not at all important.
“Hold your horses. It was dated the day after my Mother’s birthday. The day after the fire at Aunt Sabrina’s place. And … there was one line that was circled in red pen. The eight-fifteen train to Mandaree, North Dakota.”
“Okay? What’s in Mandaree?”
“No idea. I’d never heard of it.”
Before I came to SRI, I liked to picture Aunt Sabrina humming to herself as she swung on a white porch swing. Or I imagined she lived in a tall glass building that sat atop a grassy hill. Then once I got here, to SRI, I thought maybe she had been taken to the Dungeon too, murdered in the lab somehow. Something like that. I did not imagine her in North Dakota. Did she run away?
“Can you believe it?” Victoria spoke low, her voice rushed as if she were afraid she’d be caught any moment.
I said nothing, deciding that maybe it wasn’t a clue. It might have been happenstance.
Victoria kept her voice low. “Maybe she just wanted to move west. She was kind of a hippie.”
“That was a decade ago,” I said. “She was a feminist, not a hippie.”
Victoria snorted. “In our family, they’re all the Devil’s spawn.” As are psychics.
“Grandfather must’ve just sent her someplace,” I said. A lump rose in my chest. Just like he sent me here. To this place. I paused, bit my lip. “Do you think she’s dead?”
Victoria exhaled. “God, I hope not.” That familiar echo of mourning settled onto us. “They didn’t even give her a proper funeral.”
I had to share my suspicions. “Because I think I saw her ghost in the city. That’s why I would’ve thought she had been sent to SRI.” Though Katerina said the other day that SRI’s psychic experiments were started just a few months ago, long after Sabrina’s disappearance.
“Jules…,” Victoria sang. “You what? What on earth are you talking about?”
“I was seeing this girl all over the place. She appeared in the most random places and then poof, she just disappeared. A little later, I realized it was her. It was Aunt Sabrina! I spoke to her. But she disappeared the instant I turned away. Real-life human beings don’t do that. I think maybe it was her ghost.”
“Hmmmm.”
Victoria was obviously questioning my sanity. Of course. How could she not?
The seconds stretched, and I hated it. Victoria and I were connected. Strung together with golden thread, part of the messed up Cavanaugh family quilt, and the awkward silence on the phone made me feel like we had been snipped in two.
“Why did Grandfather send me away?” The words gushed from my mouth.
Victoria paused. “I figured it was because he was afraid of you.�
��
I twirled a piece of hair around my finger, pulling hard enough that it hurt.
She continued. “I mean, you did crush your cheating boyfriend inside a really pricey car.” She paused. “Plus, as we both know, he likes us under his thumb.”
I swallowed the reminder. “You have to find out—”
“I gotta go,” Victoria whispered quickly. Her mother called for her in the background. The sound made my stomach recoil, because she sounded so much like my own mother. “Love you so, so much, Cuz. But Mother will freak if she finds me in her bedroom.”
She hung up, and I stood gripping the phone, a life preserver in a sea of questions. Maybe I could go to North Dakota and find out what had happened to Sabrina.
Unless the answers were right here in San Francisco.
20
Julia
Inside the cafeteria, tables with dark veneer tops cluttered the light space. Professors and students crowded the tables, mingled near the windows, and stood in line for food. We stepped into line, and two large women in white clothes placed hamburgers and pineapple upside-down cake on our trays.
Cord and Charley had pulled me out of my dorm room and made me come eat with them.
In line, Henry appeared next to me. He smelled like cigarettes.
“Where’d Samuel go?” Cord asked him.
“Haven’t seen him,” Henry said.
Ohhhkay, lie. I’d seen them outside together with that woman just before my call with Victoria! I wanted to ask about it, but my voice caught on the barbs in my throat, as if from habit.
“Maybe he went home. Because hello. His room was haunted,” Charley said.
“Yeah, he was definitely scared. Maybe he went home,” Henry said.
“Oh, I meant to tell you!” Charley turned to me in line, pointed a french fry at me. “We gotta find out how Minnie’s remote viewing session went.”
Extraordinary Lies Page 14