The Infinite Noise

by Lauren Shippen

  “I don’t want you to grow paranoid, Caleb,” she soothes, her soft, lukewarm comfort reaching out for me. “I know that Chloe has learned a lot about the AM in these past few weeks—and I’m very much responsible for that—but I don’t want her filling your head with fears.”

  “No, no, she’s not,” I rush to explain, telling myself to remember to ask Chloe later about what Dr. Bright has told her. “But I’m still, like, totally freaked out. If Adam’s parents see people like me as something to be experimented on, then how can I know he won’t eventually feel the exact same way?”

  Even after we got together and things in our relationship shifted, Adam always treated me the same. The thought of him turning on me—of looking at me differently, feeling differently, scares me more than I’m willing to admit. Even to Dr. Bright.

  “Have Adam’s parents ever treated you differently?”

  “No, not really. But I mean, I’ve barely met them,” I add, thinking that the first and only time I’ve had any signification interaction was Adam’s birthday. “They’re hardly ever around. And I don’t think Adam has told them much about me.”

  “That’s good.” She smiles. “I don’t want you to fret too much, Caleb, but it might be good to keep the Hayeses ignorant of your ability. At least until we find out more.”

  “Are you—” I have to swallow again, feeling on the verge of tears. “Are you gonna look into it?”

  “I’ll make some inquiries,” she says. “Your safety is very important to me.”

  And I believe her. I trust her. The calm radiating from her is real now and settles around me like a blanket as we move on to other topics. Maybe I was too caught up in Chloe’s emotions earlier—maybe she was too caught up in some thoughts she misinterpreted. Maybe this was all just a really bad game of telephone and I have no reason to freak out.

  Which, of course, is when Adam shows up, freaking out.

  “I walked over here from my aunt’s house,” he pants, Dr. Bright still standing with her hand on the doorknob after letting him in. “What the hell happened with Chloe today? She was acting sort of strange when we saw her earlier, but I just kind of thought it was Chloe being Chloe.”

  “She saw all this stuff in your parents’ thoughts,” I explain, trying to balance my panic with Adam’s panic with Dr. Bright’s concern. I have terrible whiplash and now I’m going to crack from stress.

  “Yeah, that they work for the military?” he scoffs. “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Well, where do they work?” I ask.

  “They work at a hospital,” he says, barely leaving out the “duh.” “Because they’re doctors.”

  “What hospital?” I prod.

  “The—the one over on First.” His face creases in a frown, and I feel a drop of uncertainty ripple out from the core of his concern. “I don’t know, does it matter?”

  “How do you not know where your parents work?” I push.

  “They don’t talk about it.” He throws up his hands, and in doing so, pushes more of his nervous energy onto me. “A lot of the research they do is confidential!”

  “See what I mean?” I turn away from him, pacing the tiny room. “Who knows what shady shit they’re up to!”

  A lance of burning-hot hurt pierces through me and I stay faced away from Adam so I don’t have to see the pain I’m feeling etched on his face.

  “Hey,” he barks, “those are my parents!”

  “Gentlemen, let’s try to remain civil, please.”

  Dr. Bright’s voice cuts through the tension, some of her Therapist-Mode calm—still real and solid—soothing the burn. I’d forgotten she was there—so caught up in Adam’s feelings that hers were a distant memory. I can’t process like this, and I’m relieved when Dr. Bright agrees to leave us alone in her office, even though I’m left with the swirling whirlpool of anger-hurt-fear that’s standing in front of me in the shape of my boyfriend.

  My boyfriend who cares about me. Who knows about my weird ability and likes me anyway. My boyfriend who would never put me in harm’s way or tell my secret or betray me. I’m being a dick.

  “I’m sorry,” I sigh, turning to look at Adam and trying to hold myself together. “I overreacted earlier. Chloe saw a bunch of stuff, but we don’t know anything for sure.”

  Adam’s shoulders inch down as he exhales, and I step forward to bridge the chasm between us. His face is relaxing and just looking at it makes my insides untwist.

  “And besides,” I continue, “it’s not like you’ve told your parents about me, so even if they were experimenting on people—”

  His shoulders tense in their descent from around his ears and fear grabs my heart in its fist, pushing it up toward my throat.

  “Wait.” I stop in my tracks. “Why do you feel scared?”

  “I—” The blood has drained from Adam’s face and he’s staring at me in a way that makes me want to look behind me to see what horrible monster is lurking in the shadows. “I did tell them about you.”

  “What?” My stomach drops to the ground. The fist tightens.

  “Only sort of! After I first found out,” he says. “I wanted to make sure I wasn’t going completely crazy. So I asked some questions, you know? To see if it was neurologically possible. And my dad talked about all this theoretical stuff that mostly went over my head but it made me realize that you weren’t messing with me.”

  “But you never asked him about it again, right? So there’s no reason for him to think it has anything to do with me?” I continue hopefully for him. Adam is always asking weird stuff, maybe he’s already forgotten about it. But the fist gripping my heart is starting to dig its fingernails in.

  “Adam,” I prompt, fear rising up my throat like vomit.

  “You haven’t given me a lot to go on, okay, Caleb?” he says, his face an apology. “You don’t tell me how I can make things easier for you, so I had to do some independent research. I talked to my mom about, you know, brain stuff, and I—I—I was trying to be a good boyfriend!”

  “By going behind my back and telling your parents my biggest secret? How could you do that?” I can hear my voice climbing higher and louder and feel the edges of Dr. Bright’s bookshelves digging into my hips. I’ve backed away from Adam, trying to get as much distance as possible, but the iron grip in my chest persists.

  “I’m sorry,” he pleads, “I didn’t think it would be this big of a deal. It’s just my parents, it’s not like I told the whole world!”

  “Yeah, but it’s your parents who might just be evil scientists who totally fucked with Frank’s head!”

  I’m spiraling, I know I am. Dr. Bright must be able to hear us shouting, because her worry is starting to snake under the door and twist like vines around my legs, making it impossible for me to run away. Everything in my body is tight—the vines of her anxiety squeezing the blood out of my legs, pulling me into the ground, the fist pushing my heart up, up, up, leaving a dark, cold hollow of fear at my core.

  “—my parents aren’t dangerous, they would never hurt you.” Adam’s been talking and I can barely hear him through the molasses.

  “I don’t believe you!” I shout. “I can feel you panicking and I can feel Dr. Bright worried sick and I just—I can’t do this right now, okay?”

  I want to tell him to leave, to run away. I don’t know what’s going to happen next. Either I’m going to have a heart attack and die in front of him or I’m going to break everything in Dr. Bright’s office, and I don’t want Adam witness to either of those things.

  “What do you mean?” Adam takes a tentative step toward me like I’m a dangerous animal. I break completely.

  “It’s all too much!” The words are being simultaneously pushed and dragged out of my throat. “I’m barely dealing with my own feelings and then everything that’s been going on with you, I just—I can’t have all this stuff hanging over my head and fucking me up! What if I totally crack—what if your parents or the AM or Damien do something to me and I end up like
Frank, my emotions totally out of control—”

  “Caleb, nothing’s going to happen to you—” Adam, the idiot, takes another step, ignoring the basic human instinct of not going toward a wild animal when it starts foaming at the mouth. But a part of me is grateful for his movement because it spurs my own.

  “No, don’t—” I step sideways, walking toward the office door. “I need to be alone for a while—”

  “Okay.” Adam nods, looking at me like I’m a stranger. “I’ll walk you home.”

  “No!” I blurt, terrified by the idea of taking all of this outside with me. “I need to be alone-alone. Just—just let me be for a little while, okay?” He nods again and a new wave of fear washes over me, pushing molasses into my veins, making it hard to breathe.

  “And—” I choke out, “and don’t tell your parents anything else about me.” My voice is hard and I feel the edges of it cut through his fear to the blue place that’s always inside of him.

  “Caleb, you’re acting like I betrayed you.” His eyes are shiny and my jaw clenches further, teeth pressing into and sliding against each other like shifting tectonic plates. “I didn’t do anything wrong, I lo—”

  His mouth snaps closed and my stomach plummets. I can feel him wanting to shove the half-said words back into his mouth. I know that impulse well.

  “You mean a lot to me,” he finishes. “I don’t want you to shut me out.”

  My hand is on the doorknob, the vines dragging me toward where Dr. Bright stands panicked in the waiting room. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to turn away from him but I need to get out of the chokehold I’m in.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper, opening the door and walking out.

  50

  ADAM

  “Do you experiment on people?” I shout, the kitchen door swinging angrily on its hinges behind me. My parents turn to look at me in surprise. Saturday dinner is bubbling away on the stove and my dad is mid-pour from a nice bottle of wine. I want to break everything in the kitchen.

  “Honey,” my mom says, a look of panic on her face, “what?”

  “Caleb, he—” No, Adam, don’t cry, you don’t get to cry yet. You have to stay angry.

  “That girl we ran into yesterday,” I start again, “Chloe—”

  “Oh, yes, she was lovely.” My dad smiles and I want to shake him until his teeth fall out.

  “She’s a mind reader,” I blurt and, fuck, I really shouldn’t have done that. The glass from my dad’s hand drops to the floor, spilling red wine over his shoes like blood. It makes my stomach roil.

  “Okay.” My mom turns the stove off and wipes her hands on her apron. “Let’s all go to the dining room and sit down.”

  “Rebecca—” My dad protests from the floor, where he’s picking up glass shards.

  “It’s time, Eli,” she says, and the gravity in her voice makes me want to rewind this entire thing and go back to a time where I didn’t know anything. Why couldn’t “ignorance is bliss” have been the lesson my parents instilled in me?

  Two minutes later, we’re all sitting stiffly at the dining room table, staring at each other like there’s a bomb on the table that one of us needs to disarm.

  “You didn’t seem all that surprised to hear that Chloe was a mind reader,” I say finally, hands twisting frantically under the table. I wish we weren’t sitting down. I wish we could be doing this somewhere I could pace around and smash things.

  “She’s not the first mind reader we’ve met,” my mother says calmly, like that’s not the biggest fucking revelation of my entire life.

  “What the fuck,” I grit out, furious.

  “Adam,” my dad chastises, “language.”

  “No,” I say, shaking my head, “I’m sorry, I’m not going to apologize for swearing, you just told me that you’ve known mind readers exist. I now have to recalibrate my entire world view, again. I think I’m allowed some fucking expletives.”

  His jaw clenches and he takes his glasses off to rub at the bridge of his nose.

  “Fine,” he says. “You’re right.”

  “But you’ve known about mind readers for a little while.” My mom tilts her head, and knowing I have the same physical tic makes me disproportionally pissed. “And empaths.”

  “Yeah,” I say unapologetically, “I have. But I don’t experiment on them for fun.”

  “We don’t do it for fun,” my dad says, and I nearly black out in rage.

  “I’m sorry, but what the hell does that mean?” I demand.

  “What your father is trying to say is that we’re doctors.” My mother is a stoic column, and every moment she stays calm makes me angrier and angrier. “We’re not some mad scientists who are creating Frankenstein monsters in our labs. We took an oath. We look after people. We make them better.”

  “How?” I ask. “Chloe’s friend is seriously messed up from what you did to him.”

  “Military funding is extremely unreliable, boychik,” my dad says, putting his glasses back on and entering what I’ve always thought of as Professor Mode. “That project was defunded. There was nothing else we could have done. We did our best.”

  “Your best wasn’t good enough!” I croak, tears bubbling up again.

  “It often isn’t,” my mom says sadly, and I can hear the weight of the world in her voice. “But we have to keep trying.”

  “Why?” I ask, not understanding one jot of this.

  My dad smiles softly at me.

  “Knowledge.”

  51

  ADAM

  Just like that, the dream is over and school is a torturous slog again. Caleb won’t return my texts, won’t look at me in class—he’s pale-faced and grim, keeping his head down as he marches through the halls. I want to reach out, say something—anything—but I can’t get my feet to move or my mouth to work.

  We’d only been together for a few months but he’d already changed the landscape of my days. Now I’m back to hiding in the library, keeping an eye out for danger, working as hard as I can to make myself invisible. Not even my nook feels secure enough, so I’ve taken to sitting on the floor in the dark, dusty stacks.

  “Adam?”

  My daily self-pity sesh is interrupted by Caitlin, who has somehow tracked me down in this far corner of the library.

  “What do you want?” I sigh, not having enough energy to put up with any small talk.

  “Um, the Gorgias?” she says, inching toward me like I’m a bomb waiting to go off.

  “What?”

  “Gorgias,” she repeats. “It’s, um—it’s right behind you.”

  My brain catches up to the fact that I’m leaning against the philosophy books and Caitlin isn’t actually here to check on me—she just wants to read some Plato.

  “Oh,” I say, turning around to grab the slim volume from behind my right ear. “Here you go.”

  I hand her the book and she smiles awkwardly at me. We haven’t spoken since the football game, a fact I am beginning to deeply regret. Caitlin has been kind to me—has put up with my prickliness more than anyone else has other than Caleb, and now Caleb—well. I should probably wait for Caitlin to leave before I careen back into my wallowing.

  “Are you okay?” she asks after a few seconds of tense silence.

  “I’m—” I start before realizing that this is my chance to course-correct from the past few months; from getting so caught up in my own love life that I ignored the friendship of a girl who maybe needs it as much as I do.

  “I’m not great, to be honest,” I say finally, and Caitlin grimaces sympathetically before gingerly sitting down on the carpet.

  “What’s going on with you and Caleb?” she asks gently. “Did you guys break up or something?”

  “I don’t know,” I reply, horrified to find my voice thick and my eyes stinging. “We got into a pretty big fight and now he’s not talking to me and I don’t know what to do about it.”

  “What was the fight about?” she asks. “Not that I’m trying—I’m not
trying to pry or anything, I just maybe could help if I knew what happened? Ugh, sorry, you don’t have to tell me anything.”

  She’s rambling, something Caitlin rarely does, and twisting her hands in her lap. I want to tell her it’s fine, tell her that I’m just happy she’s here, happy she’s listening at all, happy that she cares, but that all feels too earnest and too honest for the moment. So instead I focus on the matter at hand.

  “I can’t really—I can’t tell you,” I say. “It’s kind of a long, complicated story and a lot of it isn’t my story to tell, but … I screwed up. I wasn’t honest with him about some stuff and now he’s scared off and I always knew that he was going to get scared off but I thought it would be about the other thing, there’s no way I could have seen this coming—”

  Now I’m rambling and I don’t know how to stop but thankfully Caitlin interrupts me.

  “What other thing?”

  “Oh.” I turn red, angry at my mouth for communicating without my permission. “You know, just … the way that I am.”

  Caitlin looks at me like she wants to say something, like she’s weighing all the different arguments in her head, but she stays silent, her eyes turning soft.

  “It was never going to last.” I stare into my lap, wishing desperately that I could just stop talking. “I’ll be fine.”

  “I’m—” Caitlin is at a loss for words and I feel guilty for always putting her in these unique, un-Caitlin-like situations.

  “I’m sorry,” she says finally. “But maybe—maybe it isn’t totally over yet. I’ve seen the way Caleb looks at you. I was even—I was a bit jealous, at first, if I’m honest. But I couldn’t even stay jealous because you two … you just fit.”

  And that, more than anything, is what makes the tears leave my eyes and start rolling down my cheeks. I try to brush them away surreptitiously, murmuring a thank-you before hurriedly asking Caitlin about why she’s reading Plato when classes end tomorrow. She sees my need for a change of subject and starts explaining why she loves Socratic dialogue so much. I let her voice wash over me and, just for a moment, everything hurts a little less.