So instead I pedaled on around the block to check on the maple first. Then I cruised over to the bottom of the cul-de-sac. Elma looked okay, but I found myself staring at old number 9. The way it tilted to the side seemed jaunty, almost like an invitation.
I biked the long way back home, past the playground, where I saw Theo sitting on a swing, totally still. He wasn’t even using his foot to rock himself back and forth. I put my bike in the rack and walked over to him. He didn’t seem to notice me, so I said, “Hi, Theo.”
He looked up. There were dark circles under his eyes, the kind Benji got when his allergies flared up before his seasonal dose of antihistamines: shiny and almost purple.
“Thanks for the flowers,” I told him.
“Don’t thank me,” he said to the ground. “Thank the pain meds they gave me.”
“Okay, thank you, pain meds. It was very nice of you to give me flowers.” I tried to make my voice sound pleasant but mostly I was wondering why Theo had to have pain medicine at all. “Are you feeling better now?” I asked.
“No, Mori, I’m not.” His voice was heavy with anger. He tilted his head up to me and his hair fell back; I could see his eyes, but they weren’t the warm honey brown I was used to. They seemed iced over like solid amber. “My head hurts like someone is driving an ice pick through my nostrils and up into my brain, and your cheery chirping is like a dog whistle right in my ear. Over and over and over again.”
My throat closed in on itself. Theo was quick with put-downs, it’s true, but usually they were one-liners, and almost never aimed at me. “I see. Well, then. I guess . . . I guess I’ll just go home. Do you want me to tell your mom—”
He held up his hand and flapped it like a bird’s beak. “Stop talking, Mori. Please, for once.”
So I did. I got back on my bike and rode home, where I took the flowers he had given me and dumped them into the compost, note and all.
7
Mom pulled the casserole out of the small Jetsonator oven on our counter. I wasn’t allowed to use it yet, but it wasn’t like cooking was hard. You got the tray out of the refrigerator, put it in the oven, and pushed the GO button. Sometimes Dad actually combined ingredients and came up with his own concoctions, but it was better when we had the ready-made meals from the delivery service.
“Huh,” Mom said.
“What?” I asked from my perch on the red stool by the counter. I was stacking toothpicks to make a tree skeleton. I thought if I had a tissue I could color it green with a marker, then tear it up to make leaves. It was better than thinking about stupid Theo and his stupid head.
“I could’ve sworn it said sweet potato and black beans, but this is distinctly green, wouldn’t you say?”
“Green as Kentucky bluegrass.”
“It’ll be a mystery,” she said, and scooped out some of the casserole onto each of our plates while I took salads from the refrigerator, unwrapped and dumped them onto salad plates, then dropped the compostable containers into the bin.
Dad joined us at the dining room table, and we were in the middle of a fun guessing game about what our dinner was—
“I taste kale and red bliss potatoes—”
“And dill. Definitely dill.”
“Are those sweet peppers?”
—when the conversation took a decided right turn.
“Theo dropped off flowers for Mori,” Mom said to Dad.
Dad put down his fork and knife. “Theo Staarsgard?”
“No, Dad, the other Theo.” My voice sounded clipped. “Anyway, it wasn’t really him.”
“Oh? Who was it?” Mom asked. “Julia didn’t do it as a joke, did she?”
“No, it was him. But it was only because they have him on pain medication because his head hurts so much after his latency.”
Dad smiled and said, “Hey, now, don’t sell yourself short.”
“He told me himself, Dad. He told me to thank the medicine, not him. Why did he even need medication?”
Neither of them spoke. It was like they were playing rock, paper, scissors with their eyes to see who would have to answer this question. Mom lost. “The latency is a completely standard and simple procedure. Some people, though, just experience some discomfort. It’s like with your retina—when you get it adjusted and you get a headache—the latency can do the same thing.”
“It wasn’t discomfort. He said it was like someone was stabbing him up the nose.”
“He might have been exaggerating a little bit,” Dad said. “Listen, I remember after mine, I got to lie in bed and just listen to music, relax. I felt a little woozy, but after a couple of days, I was good as new. Better than new.”
“Why hasn’t anyone told me it could hurt?”
“We don’t want to worry you,” Mom said. “And for most people it doesn’t hurt. But you’re right. We should be talking to you more about this. You’re coming up on thirteen, and that can be a confusing time.”
“It’s almost a year away,” I said, trying to backtrack.
“It’s time to start preparing, though. To start thinking about your latency. It’s a big choice. Nothing is set in stone, and you have a say.”
“But I don’t have any idea what it should be!” I heard the hitch in my voice. On top of this new revelation that the latency might be painful was the continued pressure of making such a big, big choice.
“I know we’ve talked a lot about the latency because of Baba’s role in its development, but that was always in the abstract,” Mom said. Baba had been studying with a neuroscientist in Wisconsin who was investigating sudden savant syndrome—people who, after an injury, developed amazing abilities. Like someone would get hit on the head and boom—they could memorize long strings of numbers. Or they were in a car accident and wham—musical genius. That was Baba’s biggest contribution to Old Harmonie. Baba realized there was a way to cause the talent to be released without the accompanying damage to the rest of the brain. “You know about why the latency is so important, and her role in it.” She sprinkled salt onto her salad. “But I know it’s different when we’re actually talking about you.”
“Do you understand what’s going to happen?” Dad asked.
“Yes. You’re going to set free my inner genius.”
Dad laughed, and Mom said, “Well, we’re going to do our best. And we’ll probably do some dampening, too.”
Dampening was like the opposite of the latency. If you had some dangerous qualities, your parents could dampen them. They could do that at any time. Julia’s parents did it to her once. She was a little too competitive, so they dialed it down so that she wouldn’t hurt any of her friends—or herself—by pushing too hard. She said it felt like having your head swirled around in the clothes washer. “Have you ever dampened me?” I dragged a green leaf out of the casserole.
“No,” Mom said. “We haven’t ever had to.” Dampening was mostly done to keep kids safe and to help them succeed. Like if they were distracted a lot, parents might dampen their scattered attention when they started school so they could focus—but not too much to inhibit creativity. It was all a delicate balance, one of the challenges of being a parent, Mom always said.
“Though we certainly considered it when you were two and it seemed the only word you knew was ‘why?’ You always have been curious,” Dad said.
“But not too curious,” Mom said.
“Yes. You are the baby bear of curiosity,” Dad said.
“The Three Little Bears” was probably the first story that any kid in Old Harmonie heard. Moderation was key—not too hot, not too cold, just right. That’s what kept Old Harmonie going.
“Does everyone have a latency released?”
“Oh, Mori, don’t let Theo scare you.”
“No, I mean, does everyone have some hidden genius that needs to be set free?”
Mom’s body relaxed and Dad chuckled. “Oh, honey,” she said. That wasn’t what I had meant, either. I didn’t really know what my latency should be, but I assumed I had so
mething. Mom clapped her hands together and said, “We should make a list of potential latencies.” She was up from the chair and back with her tablet paper. It was new, and she was quite proud of it. It looked just like regular lined paper, but everything she wrote was fed to her central drive. She wrote Mori’s Latencies at the top and then drew a square around the words. She tapped her pen on the pad. No one said anything.
“Maybe it makes more sense to think about the skills you are already showing,” Dad said.
“Right,” Mom said. “Your testing shows a real aptitude for both logical and creative thinking, especially when it comes to details. And of course we’ve noticed your kindness.”
“That’s not a skill,” I told them.
All of this was making me feel about as low as the tides in the demonstration pools in Center Harmonie. Lower. Like the weird sluggy-snail thing that clung to the glass of the tanks.
“Okay, let’s do this,” Mom said. “Let’s start with the big categories. We’ve got memory, music, art, puzzles and logic, mathematics, language, neuro-physical, and mechanical and spatial skills. How about we start with memory?”
There were different kinds of memory. Some people, you could tell them a date, and they would tell you what day of the week it was and the weather and everything that happened to them on that day. But then there were people whose memory release was more about holding knowledge in their head, usually about a specific topic. To be able to have a whole encyclopedia of plants and animals in my head would be pretty cool. “I’d like specialized memory. For plants and maybe animals.”
This earned me another exchanged look between my parents. “Specialized memory isn’t usually recommended,” Mom said.
“Why not? Those were some of the first patients that Baba was working with when she developed the latency.”
“Sometimes the topic—well, first you have to have the ability latent in you, and that can actually be really hard to determine. It’s still one of the things people are working on, but, well, do you remember Annie Wilcow’s son?” Mom asked, turning to Dad. “He was showing a memory latency on his testing, and they thought it was for coding, but it turns out it was just random strings of numbers. If they had meaning, he couldn’t remember them. So his whole latency was totally wasted.”
“Even if it works, it’s kind of a waste,” Dad said.
“Why?” I asked.
“I know you like plants now, but it might change,” Dad said. “If I’d done specialized memory, it would have been for space exploration—which was on its last legs then, by the way, and now, well, that’s all kaput, isn’t it?”
“You could’ve been a historian,” I said.
“We’re not saying it has to lead directly to your job here,” Mom said.
“But you should be thinking of your future.”
“What were yours?” I asked.
Mom rubbed her temples. “Well, mine was visual memory. A good choice, since now I can see the long lines of genetic code and remember them and move them around easily in my head. It makes the work so much faster.”
“Mine was a puzzle latency: logical thinking. How one thing leads to another like loops on a chain,” Dad said.
“So you can predict how a disease might go,” I said.
“Right.”
“Let’s put that on my list.”
Mom wrote it down. “I think we should put visual memory for you, too. It’s really an all-around useful skill.”
“Fine,” I said. It was true that having a visual memory where I could store images of all the plants—images I could never draw accurately—would be useful. But I didn’t want my latency to mean more work on my eye. My retina cam and glasses were great, but Dr. Cartwright had said if we went in that direction, I’d need more care taken with my eye. No, thank you.
Sometimes I wondered if my latency was something that hadn’t even shown itself yet. Something I had never tried or something I had tried and not been very good at. I thought of my drawings upstairs, how the lines were always shaky even when I held a leaf down and traced it. Or music. Maybe I was a glorious musician in the making, on some instrument I had never even seen, like a lyre or a didgeridoo, and all I needed was for the doctors to alter the right neural pathways to bring out the skill. Or maybe my latency would let me be the person who finally figured out how to put the vaccines we need right into our genes. That’s where thinking about the latency got overwhelming. The possibilities branched out like vines.
“I think we can skip arts and music,” Mom said. “Anything under mathematics?”
I shook my head.
“Remember, it’s not only computations.”
“I’m just not interested.”
“How about mechanical reasoning? You like to build things.”
I rubbed my eyes beneath my glasses.
“Someone’s getting sleepy,” Dad said.
“That’s probably enough for tonight. We’ve got a list started. We still have a lot of time, but a year can go by quickly,” she said. “I just want to be prepared.”
I frowned.
Mom ruffled my hair. “You know, why don’t we clean up, and then maybe we can watch a show?”
“Can we have cookies?” I asked. There’d been cookie dough in our delivery that day. Mom had tried to hide it when she unpacked the cooler the deliver bot had left on the front steps, but I had seen it.
Mom hesitated.
“Come on,” Dad said. “I haven’t had any sugar today.”
“We had ice cream at the cafeteria,” Mom said.
“That was coconut sorbet,” I said. “It was practically a health food.”
Mom relented and she even let me scoop out the dough onto the tray—I made them double the size she would have—and together we fed the tray through the oven. We ate them still warm as we sat on the couch. “You know, Mori,” she said, a bit of melted chocolate on her lip, “just take a little time and think about all you could do with an improved visual memory, how that would change your life. I don’t want you to rule it out because of your eye.”
My mouth was full of cookie. “Mmm-hmm,” I said. It wasn’t a lie, exactly. She thought I was talking about her suggestion; I was expressing my delight in the cookie. She reached out and tucked my hair behind my ear, which jostled my glasses, but I didn’t even complain. It took a split second for them to refocus and it looked like for just that moment, Mom was worried about something. But when the world was crisp again, she was smiling. “I love you, Mori.”
“I love you, too, Mom.”
“More than all the dandelions in Snowdrop field.”
“More than all the raindrops in the sea.”
She smiled, and I looked down at a magazine on the table. When I looked back up at her, it was there again, a flicker of worry, but only for a second, like when you’re flipping past stations on the television.
8
We sat on Julia’s lawn all morning, watching the house across the street so we wouldn’t miss the arrival of our new neighbor. Benji assured us he had it on good authority that it was move-in day.
“Good authority from who?” Theo demanded.
“Dr. Kellerman told me,” Benji said.
“Busybody,” Theo muttered. I tried to look at him without staring. He’d been glowering since he’d come out of the house that morning.
“But he’s usually right,” Julia said. Then she turned to me. “If the new boy is cute, we have to promise right now that we won’t fight over him.”
“You really think it will be a boy?” Benji asked.
Julia smiled. “Fifty-fifty chance, right?”
“I promise I will never, ever fight with you over a boy,” I told her. “DeShawn Harris could rip his actual heart from his chest and hand it to me, and I’d just pass it right on to you.”
“I think that is the most disgusting thing you’ve ever said in your entire life, Mori, but I appreciate it.”
“Focus!” Benji said. “They could be here any min
ute!”
It was nearly noon before the moving van arrived, and workers unloaded box after box, but there was no sign of the family. Finally, after Theo swore he was going to pass out from hunger, and Benji was nearly reduced to a puddle of anticipation, a KritaCar pulled up. The door slid open and a man stepped out. He was tall and his black hair reached for the sky, making him seem even taller. He was dressed more fashionably than any parent we knew: white pants that fell to his mid-calf and prismatic-lensed glasses that wrapped around his face, shielding his eyes.
“I’ll probably look like that when I’m older,” Benji said. But Benji’s brown skin was sallow, like sand, where the man’s skin glowed like the sun through autumn leaves. Benji kept his tightly curled hair cropped close to his head, and then there was also the matter of height: Benji had always been the smallest boy in our class. Even I had grown taller than him that spring. I’d stayed the same height all winter when the natural world lay dormant beneath our feet. When the trees popped out their budded leaves, and the crocuses and daffodils shot up from the ground, I grew three inches. My bones and joints ached, and each morning Mom would rub a salve of warm oil over my skin. “Growing pains,” she said with a sigh, a soft smile, and a shake of her head. It was the same look she reserved for the baby raccoons that emerged beneath our porch each spring.
“Maybe there are no kids.” Julia sighed, staring at the car in the driveway across the street.
As if to confirm this fear, out stepped an equally fashionable and beautiful woman: she wore a long, sleeveless dress that flowed down to her ankles and a chain of heavy, chunky beads around her neck. Her hair was twisted up into an elaborate bun, which seemed so glamorous compared to the short, practical haircuts the moms on our street wore. No way these two were parents.
The Firefly Code Page 4