But he waves me off. “You’re not getting out that easy. I know you understand that this can’t happen again?”
“I do.”
He nods. “I trust you. You’re going to be on your game for me, right?”
Whatever was sitting on my heart before moves. I can breathe again. “Yessir.”
He cocks an eye at me. “Damon’s not going anywhere.”
“It’ll be cool. I won’t start anything.”
“Or finish anything?”
I shake my head. “But Damon’s getting in trouble, too, right?”
He doesn’t answer my question. Instead he stands up. “You going to be alright?”
I nod. He offers me his hand. I stand and take it. He surprises me by pulling me in for a hug and I surprise myself by returning it. He lets me hold him for a second and then separates himself. “You’re going to be fine,” he whispers. “You’re safe here.”
I want to tell him that I know that, but I can’t make the words happen.
When he lets go, I ask him the question that’s been floating in the back of my mind since yesterday. “Richard?”
“Yeah?”
“Why didn’t I warn myself about my parents? When I wrote the letter?”
He studies me, biting his lip as he thinks. “The Gentry’s Oracle device? The one that chooses your targets? It sees all the possibilities, Alex. When we started evaluating you, it saw all the ways your life and the lives of all the people around you could play out.”
Too much. “It chose to let my parents be murdered?!”
He leans back against his desk, out of my arms’ reach, before he says more. “Alex, your parents were going to die in every future the Oracle saw. As painful as it is to accept, having it happen like this was the least terrible way for everybody, including them.”
“Bullshit.” The word hurts coming out because my throat is so tight, but even while I’m saying it, I’m remembering what my Voice told me before the patch sent her away.
Remembering what I said to me in my letter.
He sighs, shrugs, shakes his head slowly. “There was no saving them, Alex, and trying to save them could have meant that you wouldn’t be here right now and that we would all die an even more horrible death at the hands of the Locusts. Your parents’ murders aren’t your fault, and what you eventually write will save your life and your freedom and allow you to come here to be with us as part of the team whose work means the human race has a chance to survive.”
I nod because I don’t want to talk about this anymore. I’m still not writing the letter.
“I’m going to meet with you and Damon this afternoon when you’ve both cooled off a bit more.” He nods. “Right now, go find Paul. Tell him you’re sorry.”
* * *
• • •
Paul’s in the commons talking with Corina when I come back. She raises her eyebrows at me to see if I’m okay. I smile, pretend that I am.
“I’m gonna let you two talk.”
I watch her go up the hallway to the bunks before I turn to Paul, who’s looking up at me from the couch.
My hands are sweaty, so I wipe them on my pants.
“I . . .” I start, but I don’t know exactly what to say. “I’m sorry I hit you.”
He nods, starts untucking his shirt from his pants. “Do you want to see my bruise? It’s gonna be a good one.”
I don’t want to see his bruise. I feel bad enough without seeing anything at all. “Nah. I . . . Look, I am sorry. I didn’t know it was you, I thought—I wasn’t . . .”
He stops pulling at his shirt. “You’re sure you don’t want to see it? It’s gonna look just like your elbow.” He tucks his shirt back. “Seriously, though . . . it did hurt.”
“I didn’t even know it was you.”
He waits a moment, then lets out a breath. “I know.” Then: “It’s cool. I’ve had worse knocks that I deserved less.”
“Nah, I shouldn’t’ve done it.”
He smiles and it gets quiet. I don’t know what to do, so I start looking at the door to the dormitory, but I don’t know if it’s right to leave.
Paul follows my eyes, then looks over at the games along the wall. He gestures with his chin at a motocross VR near the pinball machines. “You wanna race?”
He ends up beating me five times before I win once. I try and tell myself it’s because I feel bad for elbowing him, but the fact is that he’s just flat-out better at it than I am.
After dinner, back in the room: “We’re cool, right?”
He looks at me, shrugs. “Yeah, why? You’d rather I was mad at you?”
“No . . .” But in a way, I would. As is, I just feel bad with nobody to get mad at for it.
“Good.” He points at my bed. “Now, lights out, Neo. You gotta witness tomorrow.”
Ridiculous. “Why? It’s not even eight.” I haven’t had this conversation since I was in elementary school.
“Why, Morpheus.” He raises his eyebrows at me. “Because you’re witnessing tomorrow and there’s nothing that’ll suck your energy like time travel.”
“I’m not calling you Morpheus.”
He grabs my toothbrush from the shelf above my desk and hands it to me. “G’night, Neo.” He’s smiling.
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.” He stops smiling and nods his head. “Seriously. You need to sleep.”
I don’t want to give in, but it’s not like I have much else I was going to do tonight. And I guess I am pretty tired.
Twenty-Five
Paul wakes me up with a pillow to the head. “WAKE UP! YOU’RE witnessing today!” When I sit up, he screams and begs me not to hurt him.
If this continues, I’m going to have to elbow him again.
We’re the only ones at breakfast.
“Where’s Corina?” I ask Paul as innocently as I can.
He starts to shrug but it turns into a full-body leer. “Why do you want to know where Corina is?”
I act like I don’t care, but I can feel myself turning red. “Just curious.”
He wrinkles his nose and winks at me. “Simple curiosity. She’s working with Calvin today.”
I nod like it doesn’t matter. It shouldn’t matter. I don’t even know her.
Paul chats about this and that through breakfast. Afterward, he leads me back to the commons to the same glide room we were in yesterday.
“Today’s the real deal, so you’re going to need to suit up.” He opens the door. There are two white suits laid out on the couch. “That’s yours,” Paul says, pointing to one of the suits. “You can change in there.” He points at a door.
I take the suit and change, putting my clothes in the cubby marked with my name. When I come back, Paul hands me a headset. “You’ll get your instructions through this. Put it on while I change.” He stops in the doorway to the changing room and turns back to me. “And don’t laugh when I come back.” He touches his chest. “Sensitive.”
I smile, but I don’t know if he’s joking or not and put on the headset. There’s no sound that comes through it, but when I put it on, I feel something shift in my head, like I suddenly understand the answer to a problem I didn’t know I had. It’s disorienting.
I now know all about my target.
Jordan Castle, the president’s daughter. I was in Jordan’s mind yesterday. She is the eldest daughter of President Vincent Castle and is the poster child for the presidential “More to Life, America” campaign that promotes healthy, values-based decision-making for teens and tweens.
My job will be to witness futures where she grows concerned about Incursions, starts believing that they’re real—despite her father’s public denial of their existence—and becomes determined to use her platform to make the world aware of the danger the Locusts pose, and of how Live-Tech can protect us.
Then there’s nothing more and the headset is just an uncomfortable thing on my head.
When Paul comes back, he stands awkwardly in the doorway and I have to bite my cheek hard to keep from laughing. He’s visibly chunky in normal clothes, but the suit makes it so much more . . . like cauliflower. “You know what you’re doing?” he asks me.
I nod. “Yeah, I think so.” I point at the headset. “This thing . . .”
“That thing,” he agrees. “You go first. I’ll be here to make sure everything goes alright for you.” He pats the bed. “Lay your one-fifty-plus self down on the witness couch.”
I lie down.
“Alright,” Paul says as I stretch out. “Before you go, as a Jedi, there’s some rules I’m supposed to make sure my Padawan understands.”
The references. “Okay.”
“Well, then. The big-time-big rule is that we never ever ever ever talk about what we witness with anyone. No one. Nobody. If Sabazios himself asks you, you say: ‘No, sir. I will not tell you, sir.’ Capisce?”
I don’t know what capisce means, but I remember what Richard said yesterday after I got my patch. “Yeah, Richard said that.”
“Good. Next rule: What we see cannot change what we do. If you see something that says ‘NEWS FLASH: Underwear Causes Ball Cancer,’ you can’t tell me to start going commando.”
“Okay.”
Paul hesitates, wags his fingers in the air. “Three . . . Oh yeah—and this is another big one—no matter what you see—you report it. Doesn’t matter what it is—could be a newspaper article on the desk in front of you—a bit of gossip from your wife or husband—don’t matter. Report it.”
“Gotcha.”
“And if you see something really awful—a horrible accident that kills children and nuns or a massive earthquake that swallows Iowa or whatever—you’ve still got to report it.”
I was feeling pretty good about the whole thing, but when he says this, I sit up. “You’ve seen things like that?”
He raises his eyebrows and sighs. “Can’t tell you that. Rule number one. You ready?”
I take some deep breaths. They don’t help much. “I guess.” I close my eyes. Path. Skateboard. Off-ramp. Darkness. Light.
It’s too bright for me from where I’m perched. Everything is a wash of white so intense that the walls themselves seem backlit to me. Not to Jordan, though. The brightness, the paleness, that’s all normal to her—I get that now. What’s making her uncomfortable is something else entirely.
We’re at a table, chrome rimmed with a hard red spotted surface that makes me think of the 1950s. The table’s round, big. We’re surrounded by people who are laughing, talking, whispering, eating. There’s a mess of sound so confusing and unnatural that I want to close my ears, make it go away, but I can’t.
I don’t have ears here, Jordan does, and these sounds are normal to her.
There’s ice cream in front of us. We’re out for her birthday with a hand-selected group of people her age from church. We’re smiling, even though the whole thing is a charade. We’re making eye contact with a girl our age who’s sitting next to Jordan. She’s blond, too, like Jordan. Her hair is straight, shorter than it should be, so her face looks wide even when it isn’t. Her name is Melissa, and we’re talking about the More to Life, America Working Conference we went to last month in Des Moines.
More to Life, America is why Jordan’s uncomfortable. Melissa talks about it like a true believer. Melissa’s excited and every time she smiles, Jordan wants to wince.
Jordan doesn’t like More to Life, America. The whole thing was her mom’s idea. Her mom and Dr. Halliday, the family pastor.
The only thing she likes about MtLA is The Conference.
The Conference. In Jordan’s mind, The Conference is capitalized and written in big bold letters. The Conference changed her life. It was at The Conference where Jordan met Will. Jordan’s mind is a whirl of activity—replaying images of her time with Will in Des Moines—arguing in a working group that became a silly game of one-upmanship, talking one-on-one at the lunch table when the rest of the room seemed to disappear.
Copying his name off the contact list, along with his email and phone number, and hiding it from Julia, her chaperone.
Hiding Will.
But Julia knew. Will’s working group was changed. Jordan was made to sit elsewhere at lunch.
Grandma Bev helped her contact him afterward. She’s been their Friar Tuck ever since.
Will.
Will reads books, has never eaten Korean food, wants to join the marines. Will shares her doubts about MtLA, about church, about God.
Will is someone with whom she can be honest. Her true self.
Will’s face is everywhere in Jordan’s mind, clouding out Melissa, the melting ice cream in front of her, the fact that she’s minutes away from having to make her birthday “speech” to the group—a two-minute sound bite promoting MtLA, and its mission to “help restore traditional family social values through community building and fostering social support networks, which will help adolescents make positive choices and get the help they need to avoid poor decisions, which might result in lifelong damage and trauma.”
“ . . . I still think it would have been a good addition to the MtLA mission.” Melissa makes a face like she’s missed an opportunity.
“Yeah,” Jordan agrees, not knowing what Melissa’s talking about.
Linda Castle catches our eye from the table where she’s sitting with Denise, her chief of staff. Jordan’s mom nods at Jordan, holds up a finger. One minute. Behind us, Jordan can hear the doors opening, the shuffle and clacks of press people and their cameras coming into the ice cream parlor, then the whiz of shutters.
Jordan turns to try and pay attention to what’s happening elsewhere at the table. Melissa is the only person she really knows here. The others are kids she’s seen before, sat in church youth classes with, but that’s it.
None that know her. The feeling in her seems to blend with me. It’s familiar enough that it could be my own. The kids around her have a life in common that isn’t hers. Jordan thinks about what they would do if they knew about Will, the lies, the charade she lives.
Charlatan. The word is large in her brain, flashing to draw attention. She winces against it, takes a breath, focuses on what’s happening now.
The tall boy sitting directly across the table is talking loudly now. He’s got an easy face, playful. Jordan listens, but she doesn’t know what he’s talking about. These kids all go to school together. Jordan is homeschooled in her Rapunzel’s tower.
Instead of just laughing along, Jordan looks at Melissa for guidance—asks her with our eyes what he’s talking about. The part of us that’s me can’t help but think about how I feel when I have to ask Zeon or Beems what’s happening.
Unlike Zeon, Melissa looks thrilled to be asked, which sends the flush of discomfort through Jordan that she gets whenever something reminds her of how different she is. Melissa leans in: “Ms. Fredericks—she’s our math teacher? She’s getting married to Mr. Sung.” Melissa doesn’t tell us who Mr. Sung is.
Neither of us care enough to follow up. We’re both camouflaged outsiders, pretending to understand. Instead, Jordan listens.
She likes the boy’s voice. Likes . . . but she clamps down on whatever feeling there was before it can even rise to the level of a thought. Instead she looks down at her ice cream, forces herself to take another bite. She watches the spoon rise to her mouth, bracing herself. She does not like half-melted ice cream in the least. It feels bad in her mouth, like cold mayonnaise.
She sucks it off the spoon anyway and her mouth is awash in chocolate-flavored cold-mayonnaise-feeling half-melted ice cream. She smiles through it, then turns the spoon upside down in the bowl and pushes it softly away from herself.
There’s a hand on our shou
lder. We look up at her mom, smile. “JJ, do you want to say something to your friends for your birthday?”
It’s speech time. Jordan stands, begins to talk.
The speech scrolls through Jordan’s mind like movie credits. She reads it, the words, the gestures, the smiles, the pauses, but that’s not where Jordan’s mind is.
Jordan’s mind is on the gift from Grandma Bev, the screen. The one that’ll help her talk to Will.
When I open my eyes, memories of Jordan’s mind are left behind in me like morning dew. “Oh shit.”
Paul looks at me.
I shake my head. “Just weird.”
He smiles. “Wish you could talk about it?”
I nod, then feel like I’ve broken some rule by even admitting that. I sit up and step away from the couch.
“Someday,” Paul says as he lies down where I just was, “when all this is over, we’re going to hold a witness reunion”—he props himself up on one elbow—“and I’m going to make Sabazios pay for it, and all we’re going to do is talk about all this stuff we couldn’t talk about at the time.” He bugs his eyes. “I have things to tell you, my boy. Things to tell you.”
I think about Jordan Castle’s secret boyfriend. “Yeah.” I walk around to the dictation station. “I bet.”
I dictate everything I can remember into the microphone while Paul goes under. It’s eerie having him there—he’s completely still, barely breathing. I keep thinking he might be dead, which makes it hard to focus on the dictation.
Untethered. The word begins to chime in my head. I keep picturing Paul’s mind wandering around on the glide path, floating past the noisy parts, lost forever while his body starts to decay. I look up a lot at the Live-Tech device on the wall above his head that Paul said would save us. It’s not a patch—it looks more like a feather, and I don’t understand how I’m supposed to use it. Paul said he’d teach me, but I guess he forgot. I’ll have to ask when he wakes up.
If he wakes up.
I finish dictating and wait for him to open his eyes. I stare at him to make sure he’s alive. When he finally does, I’m relieved, but it’s even more awkward. I don’t know how I’m going to wait for some reunion to talk about this shit. I want to talk now. Instead I ask about the feather. He laughs and shows me that I just have to hold it against his neck to bring him out of a glide.
Strange Days Page 13