Lies I Live By

by Lauren Sabel

  I open a new page and search the term thulium, and a hundred companies pop up, and, as Grace would say, they are all devoted to stealing precious minerals from Mother Earth. It seems as if everyone from research enthusiasts to third-world-country dictators to American corporations is searching for this metal, but no one except for a handful of environmentalists, or eco-doomers, as these websites are calling them, thinks the metal is dangerous.

  I click on the phrase eco-doomers, and it takes me to an end-of-the-world website. The white letters in all caps scream something about Nostradamus and how an asteroid will end the world. I’m rolling my eyes at the ridiculous number of conspiracy theorists in this country when there’s a ding. I click on Mail and there, along with spam emails, is a message from Charlie. With bated breath, I open it. If this was on the doomer website, it would say MY HEART DROPS.

  I need a break from our relationship. Please don’t contact me.

  Regards, Charlie

  Every other thought in my mind disappears when I see the word Regards. For the last three years we’ve been together, Charlie has always signed his emails, Devotedly, C. Plus, I know what “taking a break” means. It’s just a less painful way of saying “break up.”

  So it’s really over.

  With my heart in my mouth, I click reply, and type in the only thing I can think of: OK. Then my stomach ties in such tight knots I can hardly breathe.

  With tears pricking the corners of my eyes, I stare at the picture of Charlie and me on the tiny screen. We have our arms around each other, our hands tucked in the other’s back pockets, as if this fragile thing we called us would never end. I click the X on the upper right side of the screen, and my internet browser shuts down, taking Charlie’s email with it, but leaving this picture of what we used to be suspended across the small screen.

  I grab a pillow and pitch it across the room, but it doesn’t make me feel better. I understand now that heartache is not just an expression; the left side of my chest, above my heart, actually hurts. Even massaging the pain with my fingers doesn’t help.

  I collapse back in bed and stare at the ceiling, imagining myself in twenty years, all alone and surrounded by a dozen cats—or like Mom, trying to start over again at her age.

  Although never getting out of bed sounds good, I also don’t want to be alone, especially not today. I know I shouldn’t do it, but I call Jasper.

  Jasper drives up to my house in a neon yellow Mustang. As it rolls to a stop on the curb, the paint is so bright I almost have to shield my eyes to see him through the window. He’s drumming his fingers on the glossy leather wheel, and when he sees me, he kicks open the passenger door from the inside.

  “Howdy,” he says.

  I’m shocked by his casual attitude. Somehow I thought he would be nervous the first time he saw me after our kiss, like everything had changed between us, but he doesn’t seem awkward at all. In fact, he’s acting like our kiss never happened. I can play that game too, I decide, climbing into the car and shutting the door behind me.

  “Awkward much?” he asks, and I’m immediately irritated that he finds me so easy to read.

  “Frustrating much?”

  “Always.” He smiles and presses on the gas. He must have the other foot on the brake because the wheels squeal beneath the car.

  “Whose car is this?”

  Jasper shrugs. “I’ll return it.”

  I know Jasper’s a bit of a wild card, but stealing a car? If Charlie hadn’t just broken up with me, I wouldn’t even get in, but I would give anything to escape my tortured mind right now. “You didn’t really steal this, did you?” I ask.

  “No. Just taking a friend up on a favor,” he says. “Let’s call it payback.”

  I shake my head at him in disapproval, but I’m still glad he’s here. I lean back into the bucket seat, and my feet lift off the floor like a little kid’s.

  “So what’s up?” he asks.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Fair enough,” Jasper says, and slams his foot down on the gas again. We jolt ahead, and I try to buckle my seat belt, but it won’t latch. I dig into the latch with my nail, pull out a fake gold necklace, and then plug in the seatbelt. When I look up again, Jasper’s wearing a black blindfold over his eyes.

  “Tell me you can see out of that thing.”

  “What would be the fun of that?” he asks. He swerves the car back and forth, almost hitting parked cars in the empty street.

  “Tell me you can see through that blindfold!” I yell at him.

  “Of course I can.” He turns to me and pulls the blindfold up onto his forehead. “Well, my eyes can’t . . .” I shoot him an angry look. “. . . but that’s never stopped me before. I may not be Indigo’s favorite, but he keeps me around for some reason.” Jasper pulls the blindfold back down, floors the gas, and the car shoots forward.

  I grab onto the door handle and yell, “Slow down!” But as I do, I realize that even though this is incredibly dumb and Jasper’s just showing off, there’s something alluring about it. The wildness, maybe. Or the fact that he doesn’t worry about letting his mind go—that he isn’t afraid to trust the things he sees in his own mind. I’m the opposite: I keep my mind on a tight rope, scared of what I might see.

  “We’re passing a red car,” Jasper says, and I nearly jump out of my skin as a maroon monstrosity almost takes off our side mirror. I stare in the rearview mirror as the red car turns onto another street.

  “Callie?” Jasper pesters, “was it red?”

  Now it’s my turn to reassure Jasper, like he does me, that what I am seeing in my mind’s eye is correct: that I’m not crazy, but some brand of special that can see without eyes.

  “It was blue,” I state angrily, hoping that, for once, our minds are wrong. If Jasper doesn’t know the color of the car, then it’s possible that Charlie didn’t really break up with me. It’s possible that I imagined it, I tell myself, it’s possible the car really was blue.

  Jasper can tell I’ve gone somewhere else. He pulls the car over, yanks off his blindfold, and glares at me, as if I was the one doing something incredibly stupid.

  “Have a little fun, Callie,” he says, holding the blindfold out to me.

  I slap the blindfold away. “Fun? You could’ve gotten us killed!”

  “Killed?” Jasper looks puzzled by the concept. He clicks the electric locks open and closed, open and closed. Click click click click. “I saw everything perfectly. Twenty-twenty, as they say.” He stares at me, willing me to understand him. “You can’t see things as they happen?”

  “With my eyes closed?” I shake my head. “Can you?”

  “Clear as day,” Jasper says, and stuffs the blindfold into his pocket. “You don’t get a turn driving the car, then.”

  “Fine.” I roll my eyes, but I’m secretly relieved that I won’t have to look like a coward when I refuse to play his dangerous game.

  “Hey, I didn’t mean anything by it,” Jasper says, laying his hand on top of mine. I hadn’t noticed I was gripping the side of the seat so hard my knuckles had turned white, and I force my hand to relax. “There’s a lot I can’t do,” Jasper adds, giving me a shy smile. “Like bend metal from over a hundred feet, for one. Or astral project, for two.”

  I slip my hand out from under his. “Have you ever tried to do it?” I ask. “Astral project on purpose? I mean, other than the night that your parents . . . um . . .”

  “Died?” He shakes his head. I notice he’s starting to pick at the skin around his fingernails. “Never. But that time, I almost didn’t make it back. You can get stuck out there, you know.”

  “Out where?”

  He lifts his eyebrows. “On the astral plane. Kind of . . . nowhere.”

  I’m surprised he’s confiding so much in me, but I guess I’ve been confiding in him a lot lately too. “What happened?” I ask, hoping he keeps talking, rather than giving me his usual shrug.

  Jasper stares out the windshield, and at
first I think he’s not going to answer. “I was the first one to the crash, and my parents were trapped beneath the car,” he says slowly. “I couldn’t have saved them anyway, since no one can bend metal during an astral projection,” he adds, “but I couldn’t accept that. I kept trying and trying, and I stayed out there so long that my cord almost broke.”

  “And if it had?”

  “No one knows exactly what would happen,” Jasper responds. “But I probably would have lost my mind, and then you never would have had the pleasure of my company.” He grins at me, and then, without looking, he floors the gas. The Mustang roars onto the street, straight toward an oncoming car. The other car squeals on its brakes, and, as Jasper slams on the brakes, ricocheting me against the seat belt, my scream is drowned out by Jasper’s.

  The sound briefly jolts me back to what I heard in my vision of the blacked-over building, and then I’m back in the car, gripping the dashboard with both hands.

  “Oh my god,” I murmur, watching the other car speed away in the rearview mirror.

  Jasper safely maneuvers the car to the curb, and we sit there numbly with cars passing us, the body of the yellow Mustang shuddering with each passing car.

  “You okay?” Jasper asks. He’s leaning back against his seat, breathing hard. He’s not wearing his seat belt; it’s a wonder he didn’t go through the windshield.

  “Uh-huh,” I say, but the sound of Jasper’s scream is pounding angrily through my temples. I’m sure that was the scream I heard in my vision, before the inky darkness covered everything. Could that have been Jasper screaming? I remember the horribly raw sound of it, and recalling how it sounded like someone was being tortured sends chills down my back.

  I watch the cars rushing past my window. I can’t tell Jasper about the scream, because if that is his future, telling him could greatly change his choices, and therefore, all of his future events. I’d tell Indigo, but he’s forbidden me to look into the building again, in case it’s being protected by psychics. I thread the necklace from my seatbelt between my fingers, not sure what I’m going to do. It’s dangerous for me, sure, but what if Jasper is being tortured in there? Shouldn’t I find out? I wrap the necklace around my thumb. And if I do, should I tell Indigo when he gets back into town tomorrow, and hope he helps me, and that I don’t get in too much trouble for going directly against his orders? Or should I just drop by the office today to view the building without telling him?

  I glance over at Jasper as he carefully maneuvers the car back onto the street. That’s too risky. What if Indigo finds out I viewed behind his back, directly against his wishes? But Indigo’s out of town for the day. Besides, what if Jasper is in trouble?

  Forget about it. I rub my shoulder where the seatbelt gave me a carpet burn, trying to focus on my stinging skin to force the sound of Jasper’s screaming out of my head, but it just grows louder, until it’s pounding across my temples.

  “You’re looking a little green,” Jasper says, taking a right turn at a ridiculously slow speed.

  “Just need some air,” I say, and roll down the window. I lean my head out, hoping for the wind to take the sound away, but the wind just pounds the scream deeper into my mind, until I’m sure it won’t go away unless I know whom that scream belongs to.

  Just forget it, I try to convince myself again, but I keep hearing it, like a song on repeat. I have to know who was screaming inside that building, and there’s only one way to find out.

  “Take me to the office,” I say. “There’s something I have to see.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  As usual, Anthony is sitting at the front desk, his feet up against the metal detector and his head tilted back in an open-mouthed snore.

  “Hangover much?” I ask.

  Anthony jerks awake, rubbing a string of drool from his bottom lip. “Uh-huh,” he grunts, and flips on the metal detector.

  I hoist my backpack onto the moving conveyer belt, and Jasper drops his wallet and phone onto it as well. “Could you let us into the office?” I ask.

  “Maybe. If you tell me what you’re doing here,” Anthony says, watching my backpack go through.

  “Secret project,” I say, and put my finger to my lips. “Mum’s the word.”

  Anthony looks up at me with a wicked smile on his face. “And what do I get if I don’t tell anyone?”

  That stumps me. What could Anthony want? I scan my memory, finally latching onto his comment last week about being on a Harley on the open road with me. “You love motorcycles, right?” I ask.

  Anthony smiles. “You remembered.”

  “Then you can take my bike for a spin sometime,” Jasper says. I give him a look that I hope says “thank you.”

  Anthony’s eyes light up, and then dim. “This isn’t anything dangerous?” he asks.

  “Not at all,” I promise.

  Anthony smiles in relief, and then he zips his lips closed with his thumb and forefinger. “And hope to die,” he says.

  Jasper and I walk through the metal detector, grab our stuff off the conveyer belt, and follow Anthony into the elevator. Anthony turns to push the button, and Jasper sticks his tongue out at me. I stick my tongue out back.

  When we get to the second floor, Anthony takes out his large ring of keys. “Make this quick,” he says. “I’m leaving in a few.”

  “Thanks,” I say, and Anthony nods and gets back into the elevator.

  As soon as we shut the office door, Jasper turns to face me. “What’s going on?” he demands.

  “I have to view something I saw at the bunker,” I explain. “And I need the sealed envelope I was viewing with.”

  Jasper blocks me as I try to move past him. “So we’re here because the envelope’s here?” he asks.

  “I’m hoping Indigo brought his paperwork back when he cleared the bunker,” I say. “That’s all I can tell you.”

  Jasper stares at me for a second, and then he nods. “I like a good mystery.”

  While Jasper goes into the viewing room, I stop by Indigo’s office to look for the envelope. I pick through the Outgoing Sessions file, hoping Indigo returned the envelope after he closed down the bunker last night. Luckily, he did, and I’m soon pulling out the envelope with the slightly bent edge.

  As I walk out of Indigo’s office and cross the recovery room, my mind is still whirling with doubt. If Indigo finds out I went behind his back, he’ll be livid—and I’ll feel terrible. There’s also the chance that enemy psychics could see me viewing the building again, and try to break into my mind. But if I don’t find out if that’s Jasper’s scream I heard, I might be putting his life in danger, because who knows when that vision may come true.

  By the time I enter the viewing room, I know that keeping Jasper safe is the only thing that matters.

  “What did you see at the bunker yesterday?” Jasper asks.

  “Will you just trust me?” I drop down on the couch with a blank stack of paper, a pen, and the envelope. Jasper crouches impatiently in the leather chair across from me, his gaze focused on the envelope in my hand.

  “I’m not sure if this is a good idea,” he says.

  “But I need this,” I say, waving the envelope. “It’s not like I’m taking it anywhere.”

  “Okay,” Jasper says hesitantly, and although he usually likes breaking the rules, this may be going too far, even for him. “Let’s do it.”

  Ignoring the doubt in his voice, I lean back on the couch, the soft pillows molding around my back. I hand him the envelope, and then Jasper starts to count down from ten, his voice soothing me into my vision. I breathe deeply and imagine getting off the boat into the water. I slowly release all of the weights, letting them drift to the bottom of the sea, and then I picture the building in my mind.

  “What are you looking at?” Jasper asks in a calm voice, and I turn my head and look down at the building on the edge of the snowy field. It’s whirling past me so quickly my mind can hardly catch it.

  “Slow it down,” I whi
sper to myself, and the world slows to a standstill.

  This time, there’s nothing there to stop me. I nervously look around for enemy psychics—although I’m not sure what they’d look like if I found them—and then I easily swoop into the building. I float down to the floor of what looks like the main office, landing in front of a bank of computer screens. Beside me, a man types on a keyboard, his round glasses slightly skewed above his red beard. On the screens are dozens of pictures of large, military-looking ships.

  Then everything speeds up; time courses past me like water through a sieve.

  As soon as it stops, I immediately feel a heavy weight come down over me. I nervously lick my lips. I want to leave this place. There’s something very wrong here.

  The man is now standing with his back against the computer screens, his hands in the air. Then, from behind me, I hear a bang, and I turn to see a bullet flying toward him, spiraling like a football. Inch by inch, the air slowly sucks away from it, and it seems to take forever to get to him. When the bullet finally strikes his body, I hear someone scream.

  A jolt races through my muscles, and my whole body tenses up. With my fists clenched at my sides, I flip toward the sound. The first thing I see is a gun, but its floating in air; there’s just a blank space where a person should be.

  And beyond that, I see something even more terrifying—I see me, across the room, blood streaming down the side of my head.

  I’m the one screaming.

  The air is cool as I shove the doors open and shuffle blindly onto the quad. Behind me, I hear Jasper calling my name, but it just makes me move faster. I don’t want to try to explain what I saw in there. My mind churns the same questions over and over: What was I doing in that building? And why was my head bloody?

  Across the quad, combat boots appear in the grass, and I look up to see Monty Cooper walking toward me. He’s wearing his safety-pin riddled jeans with a T-shirt that says Clean Land, Clean Water, and a black leather armband of a snake eating its tail. We both stop when we see each other.