Impulse

by Steven Gould

  “It’s a parent’s job to peer and pry into every facet of their child’s life. Didn’t you know? Meet any boys?”

  I stood up, very dignified and said, “None of your beeswax.”

  “Ah,” Mom said. “Maybe you’ll meet some tomorrow.”

  I stamped my foot. I hate that she knows me so well.

  Dad came in the front door, which was really weird, you know? He doesn’t usually use doors at home.

  “I think I scraped the new car on the garage door.”

  Mom laughed.

  Dad looked offended, but I could tell it was put on. “How was school?”

  “Okay. But I need a phone.”

  He looked shocked, as if I’d asked him for crack. “Absolutely not!” Dad said.

  “Why not?”

  “Location services.”

  I looked at Mom. She was frowning. She looked back at me. “It’s true, honey. Think about it: a cell phone checks in with the network even when you’re not using it.”

  Dad got his haunted look. “You jump to another city, then back, the network will note the different cell towers with no time between. If nothing else, it will probably generate an alert for an illegally cloned phone. If anyone else is looking specifically for us, it’s exactly the kind of thing they’d search for.”

  “Most of the kids have cell phones. They look at me like I’m from Mars when I say I don’t have one. And I could check in with you guys after school without having to borrow one.”

  Dad probably doesn’t realize it, but when he’s getting stubborn about something, he juts his jaw forward. He was doing it now.

  “I’ll only carry it at school. When I’m not there, it will be on its charger, here.”

  Dad shook his head again. “That won’t work. It would take just one slip. Just one instance of leaving it in your pocket when you jumped someplace else.”

  Mom tilted her head. “I wonder if there’s a way to limit the phone to one locale? Program it not to connect to nonlocal networks. Maybe limit it based on GPS?”

  I looked back at Dad. “Yeah, like that!”

  His jaw still projected forward.

  Mom said, “It couldn’t hurt to investigate. I’d feel better if there was a way for us to get hold of her after school.”

  Dad looked at Mom as if she’d stabbed him in the back.

  She raised her eyebrows. “It’s a tradeoff, obviously, but if she jumps home every five minutes to let us know where she is, that also has problems, right? Someone could see her. The same problem exists for us, you know? We can’t follow her around.”

  Dad looked down at the floor. “She should be at home after school. We just said she could go to school. We didn’t say she could go anywhere she wants.”

  My mouth dropped open. “Daddy! Look at me!”

  He reluctantly raised his head.

  I stretched both hands out and pointed back at myself.

  And jumped.

  I was in New York City, on the edge of Washington Square Park. It was dark and cold but I was still wearing my snowboarding jacket, hanging open. I zipped it up and walked, not really paying attention to where I was going. I went down streets that got progressively more narrow and twisty. I was surprised when I found myself staring across traffic at the Hudson River. The wind off the river was hard and damp, numbing my face. I looked at my watch. It had been twenty-five minutes since I’d jumped.

  I went back to the house in New Prospect. Mom was there, Dad wasn’t.

  Mom sighed but didn’t say anything.

  “Did he get the point?” I said. I was trying for defiant but it came out strident.

  “He did.”

  I looked around.

  Mom said, “He’s waiting at the cabin. I was waiting here.” We’d been calling the Yukon house, ‘the cabin’ and the house in New Prospect ‘the house’ to differentiate. “Go tell him supper is ready.”

  Supper was a little tense. I would have sat silently through the whole thing, but Mom drew me out and I talked about humanities and biology and math and, very briefly, about PE. At the very end of the meal Dad said he’d talk to somebody about the phone thing, and I apologized for jumping away during the earlier argument.

  “Where’d you go?” he asked.

  I smiled and didn’t say anything.

  * * *

  The very first day of school I’d walked the entire way from the house. A path cuts through the wooded rear of two neighboring properties, well away from the road and houses, before it enters the public woods that are part of the park adjacent to the school grounds.

  The second day of school, now that I had my bearings, I jumped straight to the last bit of woods, not on the path, but to a ledge above it, halfway up a limestone cliff. You couldn’t see this shelf unless you were above looking straight down, or twenty feet up one of the trees growing below. This let me peek over the edge and make sure no one was around before jumping down to the path where it left the woods.

  Most of the kids arrived at the front of the school, dropped off by parents or busses or driving themselves, but there was a cluster of smokers at the edge of the athletic field, sheltering from the wind in the lee of the bleachers and stamping their feet in the crusty snow while they got their fix.

  I swung wide, keeping the collar of my jacket pulled high. One of the smokers was a taller girl with one of her sleeves hanging empty. When I reached the door, I glanced back and confirmed what I’d thought. It was Caffeine. Her jacket was partway open and I saw the sling, inside. Worse, her head came up sharply when I turned to look back, and I saw her scowl. I went inside trying not to hurry, but my heart was pounding.

  I dropped off my coat in my locker and headed for biology. My heartbeat slowed and I did some slow deliberate breaths, a trick Mom taught me, to finish calming. Tara, it turned out, had a seat at the very back of the classroom.

  “No wonder I didn’t see you, yesterday. You’re way back here in Outer Mongolia.”

  She nodded. “I’m a buffer zone between nations.” She pointed at the empty desk to her left. “Daniel-vania gets a little too talky with Becky-stan.” She pointed at the desk to her right. “So Mr. Hill put me here, as an intervening neutral power. Noise in this part of the classroom dropped twenty decibels.”

  “Did you mind?”

  “Nah. Mr. Hill asked me to do it, as a favor.”

  “Do they pay any more attention in class, now?” I gestured left and right.

  “Depends if they’re in possession of their cell phones. If they are, then they spend the whole time texting each other. Mr. Hill won’t take their phones away if he notices, as long as they’re quiet, but a lot of the other teachers follow the cell-phone policy to the letter.”

  I’d been given a copy of the policy when we enrolled but I wasn’t even going to read it, since I didn’t have a phone. But then, at the end of the process, they wanted my signature on all the student-behavior policies, so I’d skimmed it. No phone use in the classroom, including texting or any audible alerts or ringtones. Phones confiscated and only returned to the student’s parent or guardian at the end of school day.

  But I’d still seen people using their phones in class. Between classes, they sprouted in kids’ hands like blossoms after desert rain.

  “When are you going to get a phone?” Tara asked.

  “Working on it,” I said.

  I gave the school cafeteria one more try at lunch but it was no good. When you have to be told that the green beans are, well, green beans, you know they’ve been cooked too long. The entrée was breaded mystery meat baked so dry and stiff that it defied the plastic cutlery. When I picked it up and tried to bite it instead, it defied my teeth.

  “Look on the bright side,” said Jade. “Jell-O!”

  “Uh oh,” said Tara. “Caffeine approaching.”

  I glanced around.

  Caffeine was juggling her tray, her lunch half eaten, and her backpack with her one good arm. It looked like she would drop one or the other at
any moment. I wondered why she hadn’t just left her backpack and gone back for it after she’d bussed her tray, but then I realized she was walking in the wrong direction to drop off her tray. The dishwashing window was on the other side of the cafeteria.

  “Maybe she’s changing seats?” I said, half to myself.

  Tara said, “She keeps looking at you.”

  I pivoted off the bench seat and stood, abruptly, while Caffeine was still a few yards away. Her eyes went wide, her tongue went to her lips and she lurched forward, as if she had tripped. But I had my hands on both sides of the tray and, though the food and milk carton slid sideways, I lifted it up and kept it from spilling.

  “Oh, you poor thing,” I said, loudly. “Let me help you with that.”

  Caffeine’s face twisted, ugly, and I knew I’d guessed right. She’d planned to “accidentally” spill it on me as she went by. There were three teachers on lunchroom duty so she couldn’t attack me overtly.

  “Where are you headed? I’ll carry it.”

  She jerked her chin toward the dirty dish drop-off window.

  “No need for you to go. I’ll get it.”

  I went wide around her. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d tried to trip me, but I got her tray and dishes to the window without incident. By the time I’d returned, Caffeine was headed out the door.

  Jade and Tara looked unhappy and a little disturbed.

  “What?”

  Jade said, “She spit on your food.”

  My mouth opened but it took me a moment before I could think of anything to say. “Just when I thought the cafeteria food couldn’t get any worse.”

  Tara giggled and Jade’s hunched shoulders relaxed. The corners of her mouth twitched slightly.

  “I think I’m going to start bringing my lunch,” I said, and bussed my tray.

  * * *

  PE improved immensely since Caffeine was now spending that period in the resource study center until her wrist healed. I learned that it was a bad sprain, not a break, so she would probably be back in PE in a matter of weeks, not months.

  Too bad.

  My basketball skills had improved to the point that I could actually play in the games, but Coach blew the whistle at me so many times the first game that I went home and looked up the rules. My big sin was traveling, apparently, and something called the backcourt violation. Basketball also does something called a “jump” shot but it wasn’t my kind of jump. Tempting. I could really show them “traveling.”

  On Friday it started snowing midmorning and came down so thick and heavy that they dismissed school two hours early. It was chaotic as parents arrived or didn’t arrive to pick up kids. I looked for Jade and Tara but I couldn’t find either of them, so I started walking home. It seemed like the school vanished before I’d made it halfway across the field, shrouded from my view in the falling flakes. I could just barely make out the bleachers, but the woods and the town were completely invisible, so I just jumped directly to the house.

  No one was home, which surprised me for a moment. Someone had been there when I’d called home after school each of the previous three days, letting them know I was going off to Krakatoa for homework. When I’d get home when promised, they’d both be there, eager—perhaps too eager—to hear how my day had gone.

  But then I realized that they didn’t know school had gotten out early. I laughed at myself for thinking they just hung around waiting for my every appearance. That wasn’t how they’d behaved before this school thing, after all. They must have been making sure one of them was at the house just before school got out.

  I jumped to the cabin. Neither of them was there, either. I wandered up and down the stairs. Buzz was working again, thankfully. I could hear the distant humming from the top of the basement stair, which was reassuring. But it still felt weird that Mom and Dad weren’t around. Sure, I’d been left alone before, many times, but this was not the same.

  It was snowing in the valley, too, but lightly, nothing like New Prospect’s blizzard. I thought about snowboarding, but it was too cold here.

  I jumped back to the house in New Prospect. Tara or Jade could call. They might go to the coffee shop. Perhaps I should jump there to find out.

  I slapped my forehead. Sure, I’d hardly ever used a phone but that was no excuse. I’d been watching movies all my life. I got Tara’s number out of my backpack.

  She answered after one ring. “Can you believe this snow?”

  Sure, it was heavy—but she hadn’t lived in the Yukon in winter.

  “Fluffy,” I said. “Did you go home?”

  “Yeah, Mom said I had to go straight home. She didn’t want me out if it got worse. Jade’s Dad pulled the same thing when she called to see if she could go home with me.” She sighed. “They’re not that far away. I don’t think her parents approve of me.”

  “Oh? Why?”

  I could hear her breathing but it took her a while before she said, “Did you do the worksheet on protein synthesis yet?”

  “Don’t want to talk about it, eh? Yes, I did it in class.”

  “You finished it? He gave it to us at the end of class.”

  “Ten minutes before the end of class. I’d already read the chapter.”

  “Which wasn’t assigned until he handed out the worksheet.”

  “You don’t read ahead? Why don’t you want to talk about Jade’s parents?”

  She ignored me, saying instead, “What is the bit with the difference between the intron and the extron?”

  “That’s exon. Not extron.”

  “Exxon is an oil company.”

  “Do you want an answer? One ‘X’ not two. The introns are not coded into proteins. The exons are.”

  “It should be extron. A little robot that makes proteins.”

  “Well, the introns have something to do with regulating the expression of the genes, if that makes you feel any better. But it’s exons that get translated into proteins.”

  “I don’t think they like my skin color.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Well, we’re not rich, either. Jade’s mom is an orthopedic surgeon. Her dad is an engineer. They have a huge house. Someone comes in to clean.”

  I thought about the house in the Yukon and this one, which wasn’t exactly small. On the other hand, Tara wasn’t crowded into a refugee camp on the Pakistani border, either. I wondered who was really doing the comparing, Jade’s parents or Tara?

  “Well, if that’s true, it’s totally lame.”

  “It’s just—hang on a second. Jade’s calling.” I thought for a second she’d hung up, but there was no dial tone. Then her voice came back. “Call you later? Jade wants to watch Tenchi Muyo! together.”

  “I didn’t know you guys were otaku.”

  “Hell, yes! You?”

  “Yes. But I thought you were stuck at home. Both of you.”

  “Oh, yeah. We watch it separately, the DVDs, but we stay on the phone.”

  “Now that’s just weird. What season?”

  “We’re watching Tenchi Muyo! GXP.”

  “Sick,” I said. “Seina beats up the Daluma Pirate Guild.”

  “You are otaku!”

  “Sure. I even have the manga.”

  “No way!”

  “Well, I do. I’ll lend them to you, if you want.”

  “Where did you get them? I saw an issue, once, at the anime con in Phoenix, but it was the only copy and someone was buying it when I saw it. It was the second season, Shin Tenchi Muyo! The manga came after, right?”

  “Yeah. They’re not really canon so don’t get upset when you see stuff that wasn’t in the anime.”

  “What kind of—shit! That’s Jade. We’ll talk, yeah?”

  “Sure.”

  * * *

  I jumped back to New York, to Washington Square Park. It was cold, windy, late, even dark, afternoon, and something smelled really bad. The smell was coming from a person wearing so many layers of clothing that I couldn’t make out a gend
er, sitting against one of the two trees that bracketed my jump spot.

  “Oh, excuse me,” I said.

  The person, man?, yelled—a deep, hoarse voice—and scrambled out onto the sidewalk, climbing awkwardly to his feet and hurrying away from me, his face peering fearfully over his shoulder.

  Damn. I walked the other way. I really needed to get a different jump site in New York City.

  I walked under the arch and up Fifth Avenue. The sidewalks were crowded and people brushed against me, edging around, walking much faster than I was. I worked at it, increasing my pace, avoiding elbows and shoulders, trying to create more of a presence. Fear me! I thought fiercely. It didn’t seem to help. They didn’t even seem to see me.

  It was just like the school hallways.

  Well, it was just like the school halls before they thought I’d broken Caffeine’s arm.

  I passed what I thought of as the pie-wedge building, the odd-shaped skyscraper between 22nd and 23rd streets, where Broadway crossed Fifth Avenue, then took the crosswalk to Madison Square Park.

  It was less crowded over here. I sat down on one of the benches. Hundreds of people passed by but it didn’t make me feel any less alone.

  Shit. Was that what I’d been trying to do? Feel less lonely?

  I walked back down Fifth Avenue to the big Barnes & Noble at 18th street. I spent some time looking through the manga but it only reminded me of Jade and Tara. I moved over to the YA section, checking favorite authors for new books. Though there wasn’t anything that grabbed me, I saw several old friends on the shelves. But I didn’t need to buy any of them, they were waiting for me at home.

  I jumped away from the revolving door, half in, half out.

  The book I wanted was at the cabin but I took it to the house, to be near the phone in case somebody called.

  But nobody did.

  NINE

  Davy: Phone

  “Amerikate” was an expatriate mobile-applications developer living in Bristol with her partner and two daughters. She’d already written an application that mapped cell towers to GPS coordinates and was quite willing to modify it quickly for the kind of money Davy was offering.

  “Why restrict it, though?” she asked.

  “There’s a nondisclosure agreement involved. I’m not at liberty to give you more details,” Davy said.