Jadie in Five Dimensions
Page 3
I groan as the realization hits me. “You dummy.” Now I see what’s wrong with his hair. It’s parted on the wrong side. “You reversed yourself.”
“Uhhh…” Thinking up a lie is too much for Marius. He stares at me pitifully.
Hauling my helpless, backward brother away from the door, I open it for him and guide him in. “Why’d you do this? You know how you react to it.”
“Ty said he thought I could get used to it.” While Marius stumbles toward his bed, I scoop up the paper he dropped and tuck it into my own pocket. Marius looks around the room, which appears reversed to his brain, then moans and falls over on his side.
Reversing is similar to the flips they teach us in geometry class—where you imagine a two-dimensional shape lifting off the paper and turning over. It becomes a mirror image of itself.
The same thing can happen to a human when we’re lifted out of our universe. That’s why we’re supposed to always wear our bracelets on the left arm. If we switched, the Transporter might accidentally flip us and return us to Earth with our heart and other organs on the wrong side of our bodies.
Marius and I knew about the possibility of reversal from our parents long before we were Agents. But Miss Rose made a point of discussing it when she trained me, Marius, Ty, and Alia late last year.
Our 4-space liaison brought us together in Alia’s family rec room to begin our lessons. That is, the four of us kids were in the room. As a 4-space being, Miss Rose doesn’t fit in a human dwelling any more than a human could fit inside a two-dimensional universe as thin as a sheet of paper. (Miss Rose says such universes exist but their life-forms haven’t evolved beyond amoebas.) During the lessons, her disembodied voice filtered into Alia’s rec room from someplace outside three-dimensional space.
“There is no chance of accidental reversal as long as you follow procedure,” she explained. “Those of you tempted to experiment by switching your bracelets to the other arm might wonder what it feels like. For some, nothing would be different. Most humans, however, experience severe nausea and lack of coordination. The condition is remedied by returning to 4-space and flipping back. Even for people unaffected by the change, reversing yourself is not recommended. It would be detrimental to the Seers’ plans if a reversed individual was examined by a doctor. The secrecy of our activities is vital. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Miss Rose,” we chorused, knowing that each of us was going to reverse ourselves as soon as we possibly could.
I did it during my second solo assignment and landed back on Earth with my birthmark on my right arm instead of the left. When I looked around, the world seemed perfectly normal.
Marius tried it later the same day and managed only a few steps before throwing up on his shoes.
I wasn’t around when Alia and Ty made their attempts, but I know that Ty was walloped with a migraine and Alia sat down on the ground and refused to move until Miss Rose rescued her. It was impossible to switch back without help from the fourth dimension. They either summoned Miss Rose and confessed, or their parents did it for them. I was the only one who got away with it. I wore long sleeves until my next course correction, then unreversed myself. The adults thought I was the only kid virtuous enough to follow directions.
Now I’m going to have to call Miss Rose to come flip Marius back to normal. I lift the bracelet in my hand to look for the little recessed button that summons her and remember at the last second that it isn’t mine.
Downstairs, the doorbell rings. Alia.
My stomach lurches as it hits me again. My birthmark. The photo album in my room. What I know that I can’t unknow. I don’t want to call Miss Rose. She’s the last person in or out of my universe that I want to see right now. “Marius, you’re going to have to call Miss Rose yourself.”
“No!” Marius lifts his head off the bed. “She’ll lecture me on blah, blah security and blah, blah the future of the human race. Leave me alone. I’ll take care of it.”
“How? You think you can stay like this until your next course correction?” Agents can’t call on the Transporter whenever we want. The connection is only activated when a course correction is transmitted to our bracelets, and it lasts until we request transport home. If Marius has already completed a course correction today—which he must have, since he reversed himself—he won’t get another until tomorrow at the soonest.
“Don’t worry about me,” Marius groans. “I’ve got this.”
Downstairs, Mom calls, “Ja-die! Alia’s here for you!”
I flinch, hearing my name dragged out so that it sounds like those initials. J.D. “Suit yourself,” I tell Marius, heading for the door.
“Don’t tell Mom!”
“I won’t.”
As much as I don’t want to face Miss Rose right now, Mom and Dad are a close second. How much of the truth about Jocelyn Lowell do they know?
6. JADIE
In the foyer at the bottom of the staircase, I find Mom chatting amiably with Alia. Mom doesn’t look like a diabolical kidnapper. Her sunglasses are perched on top of her head where she put them when we left the soccer field. I’m one hundred percent certain she’s forgotten they’re there and will be searching for them within the next half hour.
She also doesn’t seem to notice how Alia keeps glancing over her shoulder and shifting from foot to foot. Alia wants to finish her business with me and beat her parents home, but Mom blathers on. “If your mother can make her famous egg yolk tarts for the bake sale, that would be perfect. If not, maybe the sweet bread she brought to the New Year’s party?”
“Uh-huh.” Alia’s eyes dart toward me. “Oh, here she is! Excuse us, Mrs. Martin.” She grabs me by the arm and drags me out the front door. “Do you have it?” she whispers as soon as we’re outside. I extend the bracelet, which she snatches from my hand. “Do you think your mom will tell mine that I was here while I was grounded?”
“She has no idea you’re grounded. But you better pass along that message about the bake sale and say my mom called your house. Because if your mom doesn’t turn up with those tarts and they start talking…”
“Yeah, good thinking.”
It is, which is a little alarming because I don’t usually scheme and lie. Why am I suddenly good at it? I brace myself for Alia to ask whether I covered a course correction for her, but she darts down my front steps and sprints toward home without thanking me. My annoyance is tempered by the realization that if she hadn’t asked me for this favor… I still wouldn’t know where I came from.
Mom has retreated to the kitchen when I go back inside. I take the stairs two at a time and pass by Marius’s closed door without a twinge of guilt. His problem is of his own making. Mine is not.
This time when I pick up the baby album, I read through it carefully. To make it easier to handle, I pretend it’s not me in the pictures, just some kid named J.D.
The mother—Mrs. Lowell—assembled the album for her daughter to read in the future. She wrote in first person, referring to herself as I and her husband as your daddy, never mentioning their names or where they lived. The pages cover J.D.’s milestone moments: her first smile, her first word (kitty), and what day she started crawling. The kitty in question isn’t the one I saw at the apartment, but a fat, elderly-looking tabby that probably isn’t among the living anymore. There are pictures of the Lowells taking baby J.D. to a zoo, but I can’t tell which zoo.
When I come across a picture of J.D. sitting on her father’s lap at his desk, I get out a magnifying glass. The titles of the books on the shelf above his workspace are science and math related. Mr. Lowell could be a teacher, a scientist, or an engineer.
Next I turn my attention to J.D.’s brother. If he had his third birthday when J.D. was almost a year old, he’d be fifteen now, so I search Instagram, Snapchat, and Facebook. I eliminate most of the Sam Lowells I find—some of the Sams are the wrong age or the wrong race, and some are Samanthas. A few, I can’t tell. My gut feeling is that none match the boy in this album.
I turn back to the photos, and that glass window between Jadie 2.0 and Hysterical Me cracks a bit. Look at them! Really look at them! These are your birth parents! That boy is your brother!
Mrs. Lowell has chin-length blond hair, and in every picture, she’s smiling at the camera. There’s one shot of her with Sam and J.D. dressed in Christmas sweaters where Mrs. Lowell holds J.D. on her hip and J.D. is throwing a full-blown tantrum. The baby’s mouth is open wide, her eyes squeezed shut, her fists clenched angrily in the air. But Mrs. Lowell smiles brightly.
Underneath the photo, she wrote: You were offended by our ugly Christmas sweaters.
Mr. Lowell looks less comfortable in front of the camera than his wife. His smile is self-conscious, and the camera often catches him in the middle of pushing up his glasses. My favorite picture of him is from when J.D. is very small. Mr. Lowell is sprawled on a sofa. His glasses are perched on top of his head, and his light brown hair looks like a bird’s nest. Sam is on his lap, eyes closed, dozing. And J.D. is on Sam’s lap, taking a bottle from her father.
The caption: You woke everybody up early this morning!
Tears sting my eyes. I wipe them away, angry that this book is making me cry. I don’t remember these people. Nothing in these photos is familiar. But I can tell I was loved.
These people didn’t abandon me. I was kidnapped.
Then what? Did the kidnapper leave me in the snow? The Seers arranged my rescue from certain death and instructed Darrien and Becca Martin to take me home and raise me as their own. Why didn’t the Seers have them take me to the police or to a hospital where I could be reunited with my family?
Once I start questioning the Seers, it’s a slippery slope. Like, if it was possible to rescue Marius from a burning house, why not the rest of his family?
We’ve always assumed his parents are dead. What if they’re not?
Hysterical Me has stopped banging on the glass wall in my brain, and turns out, she wasn’t hysterical at all. See what I was trying to tell you? This is bad. You discovered something reeeeeally baaaaaad.
Questioning the Seers is discouraged. Miss Rose says human brains aren’t wired to untangle the complexity of course corrections, just as our eyes aren’t built to see ana or kata.
“Time is visible in both directions to the Seers,” Miss Rose explained. “They see backward and forward and sometimes both at the same time. Your species cannot perceive causality the way ours does.”
Either the Seers know where I came from and chose to separate me from my family—or they don’t know as much as they claim they do. In which case, what’s really happening when I steal some woman’s bag and throw it into the street? Or pour a glass of water on someone’s computer?
A chill runs up my back as I remember why I was in that apartment to start with. The Seers sent Alia to destroy Sam Lowell’s computer. Why?
At that moment, Dad calls for dinner with his usual method: bellowing up the stairs. “Jadie, Marius, dinner!”
I shut the book and shove it under my bed, out of sight. For good measure, I close my laptop, hiding my incriminating Google searches.
The scent of pizza greets me before I reach the kitchen, as do my parents’ voices. Entering the room, I glance their way, worried they’ll appear different to my eyes. Mom as a human trafficking genius. Dad as kidnapper extraordinaire.
But they look like themselves. Some people think they make an odd couple because my mom is a tall redhead with the build of a female wrestler (she’s actually a bookkeeper), and my dad is a short and pudgy Black guy who thinks an earring makes him edgier than your average history professor. (It doesn’t.) I’ve heard people call them Mutt and Jeff, and I had to look that up, but the point is, they’re ordinary. You’d never guess they’re also agents for superintelligent four-dimensional beings. At the moment, Mom is fussing at Dad for bringing home pizzas after she went to the store. “I was making a chef’s salad. I bought grilled chicken strips and—”
“Chef’s salad? The kids won their games this morning. They don’t want salad.”
“You mean you don’t want it.”
Dad winks at me. “Congratulations on your game, Jadie-bean.”
“Thanks.” I avoid his gaze, looking at the pizza instead. I’ve had nothing to eat since that lousy burrito, but I’m not hungry. “Marius won his game too?”
“Of course we did.” Marius drops into the chair across from me. “I was pitching, wasn’t I?”
My mouth flops open. Marius’s complexion is back to normal, and his hair is parted on the correct side. His dark eyes shoot a laser-beam message at me.
Don’t say anything.
7. JADIE
Marius stares at me intensely, and I drop my eyes first.
How did he unreverse himself without calling Miss Rose?
Assuming he reversed himself during a course correction, the only way for him to get back to 4-space the same day would be to borrow a friend’s bracelet and hope a mission appeared when he needed it.
How likely is that?
Remembering the scrap of paper Marius dropped on the floor, I ease it out of my pocket and unfold it under the table. I’m not surprised to see a long string of numbers that look like Transporter coordinates.
“You okay, Jadie?” Mom asks. “Aren’t you hungry?”
I lift my head. Mom and Dad are both pointedly eyeing my empty plate. Marius has taken two slices, one from each pizza, and on any other day, I would’ve wrestled him for the pieces with the most toppings. I help myself to a slice of mushroom–black olive and a slice of pepperoni-sausage to match my brother, even though I don’t want either. “Just distracted. A school assignment has me stumped.” I glare across the table at Marius. “But I’ll figure it out.”
Marius gazes with pretended fascination at the light fixture overhead, chewing noisily.
I’m onto you, brother.
About a month ago, on a Saturday afternoon, I heard a commotion through my bedroom window and pulled up the blinds. Next door, Dr. Rivers was yelling at Ty. Apparently, Ty had dropped his bracelet in the backyard and crushed it so thoroughly with the lawn mower that it was unrecognizable.
“I ask you to do one thing,” Dr. Rivers shouted. “One thing to pull your weight around here, and you manage to destroy your bracelet? Of all the stupid, careless things… This is an embarrassment for the Seers!”
Ty leaned away from his father like the Tower of Pisa, saying nothing and staring across the yard as if pretending to be somewhere else. I remember thinking that Dr. Rivers didn’t know his son very well because Ty isn’t stupid or careless. He probably crushed the bracelet on purpose because he’d been tinkering with it and didn’t want anyone to know.
I hadn’t thought about it much at the time, but it seems significant now.
Ty pulverized his bracelet and had to be given a new one. Today, he had a project he wanted Marius to help him with, during which it seems like Marius reversed and unreversed himself while carrying Transporter coordinates in his pocket.
The Transporter moves Agents from place to place on Earth, getting us to our destination in seconds because the machine itself is located outside our three-dimensional space. I knew what it did long before I started training as an Agent, since my parents used it every day. But it was Miss Rose who explained how it works.
By that point in our training, Miss Rose had started using an avatar—a three-dimensional puppet that stood in for her. We all blamed Marius, who’d complained that being taught by a disembodied voice was freaky. The avatar was not an improvement, being a mannequin that stared at us with unblinking eyes and a creepy, fixed smile.
“On the table,” the avatar said without moving its mouth, “you will find a maze and a pencil. Please put your pencil tips on the starting point and, when I say go, move through the maze without lifting the pencil until you reach the exit.”
Marius and I exchanged glances, preparing to race each other. But it was Ty who completed the puzzle first.
Alia raised her hand. “Can it work the other way? Ana out of this world and kata back?”
“Good question.” Miss Rose’s avatar turned its whole body toward Alia and bobbed, the closest it could come to nodding. “Put your pencil on the starting point of the maze again. Move it down and then up.”
I stared at my paper, uncertain how to follow those instructions.
“She means like this.” Ty lifted the paper slightly off the table and stabbed his pencil straight through it.
“Exactly right, Ty,” said Miss Rose. “Reversing the ana and kata directions during Transportation is possible, but not advisable. Your universe is delicate. You must trust that we know the best way to nurture it.”
You must trust. We hear that a lot from Miss Rose. Up until now, I did trust.
If Mom and Dad aren’t as innocent as they seem at dinner tonight, that means they collaborated with Miss Rose to take me from the Lowells. If I show them J.D.’s album, the first thing they’ll do is consult her on what to do, now that I’ve discovered the truth. My parents have been Agents for Miss Rose since she first recruited them in college two decades ago. In fact—innocent or guilty—confronted with that album, they’ll turn immediately to Miss Rose for advice. And I don’t think that would be a good idea.