Lies I Live By

by Lauren Sabel

  “What are you doing here?” I blurt out.

  “Leave your manners at home today?” Monty says.

  “On the train, I think.”

  “Well, as hard as it may be to believe, I actually teach a class here.” Monty tries to run his hand through his hair, but his bangs just move as one solid piece and then pop back into place.

  “A class on how to be an environmentally-conscious punk?”

  “Very funny. Intro to mining,” Monty says. “It’s just a lecture, really, one I usually give at Stanford.”

  “How very fancy of you,” I respond, a smile playing on my lips.

  “That’s me. Fancy Monty,” he says. “I’m sure it has nothing to do with my name being on the building.” He rolls his eyes toward the science building. There’s a plaque on the front door with the name COOPER etched into it.

  I’m unsure how to respond. “They’re probably all here to see your lecture,” I finally say, gesturing to the students in every window.

  “Yeah. They’re all camped out to hear my lecture tomorrow,” Monty replies. A smile briefly flashes across his face, making his pale skin and awkwardly stiff haircut look almost cute.

  “You should smile more,” I say.

  “As soon as world poverty comes to an end,” he responds. “Or man walks on the moon.” He presses his index finger against his lips. “Wait, that already happened.”

  “Calliope,” Jasper calls. He comes up behind me, stopping short when he sees me standing with Monty. “Hi?” Jasper says hesitantly.

  Monty nods at Jasper, and then looks at me and winks. “I’ll leave you to whatever this is,” he says. Then he turns and walks toward the science building, but on the edge of the quad, he stops, turns around, and looks at the envelope in Jasper’s hand. I didn’t even notice Jasper was carrying it. “Jasper,” Monty says, his smile vaguely unnerving. He pushes his armband higher up on his arm, and then he turns and disappears into the building.

  I turn on Jasper. “Why did you take it? What if Indigo realizes it’s missing?”

  “I didn’t mean to,” Jasper says, holding it up. “I just raced out after you and . . .”

  “Well, we can’t get back in to put it back,” I say. “Anthony already left for the night.”

  “I’ll return it tomorrow. Nobody’s gonna miss it,” Jasper says, and I reluctantly agree. Indigo won’t even be back in the office until tomorrow morning, and there’s no reason he would use an already completed envelope anyway. “Now, what happened in there?” Jasper asks. I try to turn away, but he gently lays his hand on my arm. “Tell me,” he says.

  “I saw myself in a strange building,” I say. “It was awful.”

  “What happened?”

  “I was screaming,” I say slowly. “And I was hurt, pretty badly, I think.”

  Jasper looks concerned. “Is that why you bolted out of the office?”

  “Sorry I ran. It just freaked me out,” I say. “I’ve never seen myself in a vision before.”

  “Could you tell when it happens?”

  “I have no idea. I mean, I looked pretty similar to how I do now, so it must be soon, right?”

  Jasper shakes his head. “Although we see other people’s future selves clearly, our view of ourselves is skewed. We always associate ourselves with how we look now,” he says. “You could be fifty when this happens. Or even eighty.”

  “That’s so not helpful,” I say. “And how do you know this?”

  “We did a lot of this kind of work at the New York office,” Jasper says. “That’s how I realized how goofy I look.”

  I roll my eyes. “Be serious.”

  “Seriously?” Jasper says. “I guess it’s our minds protecting us from ourselves.” He nods up toward the windows of the science building, where several students are staring at us. “Let’s get out of here. Away from these nosy kids.”

  I snort out a laugh. “You sound like a cartoon villain.”

  “Har har har.” Jasper weaves his arm through mine, and we start walking across the quad. “Besides, I don’t see why you’re so freaked out. If your vision is true, just stay away from that building,” he says. “Then it can’t happen to you.”

  “Brilliant plan, genius,” I respond. “If I knew where the building was.”

  “Did you see any clues of its location?” he asks.

  “There was a field of snow,” I say, stepping off the grass into the parking lot. “So avoid wintery places for a while?”

  Jasper and I cross the parking lot and stop in front of the Mustang. “I’d say so,” he says, and opens the door for me. “Or we can go and look for your inner demons. Blindfold optional.”

  I shake my head. “Sounds fun, but I have to pass,” I say. “I prefer to face my inner demons at home.”

  Charlie is sitting on the front steps when Jasper and I pull up. I open the car door and jump out before it comes to a full stop, my mouth falling open in surprise. Charlie stands up, and he’s obviously just come from work since he’s wearing a Musée Méchanique T-shirt with his name tag on it.

  “Hi,” I say.

  Charlie looks at me, and then over at Jasper, who is pulling the car to the curb beside me. To my horror, Jasper gets out of the car and approaches Charlie.

  “I assume this is Charlie,” Jasper says, glancing at Charlie’s nametag with a sly grin on his face. “Nice of you to announce who you are to everyone.”

  “Why is he here?” Charlie asks me.

  “Well, he . . . um . . .”

  Charlie’s face gets really red. “This is the guy you chose over me?”

  I’m not sure if I’m more afraid that I’m going to cry or that Charlie is.

  “Did you choose me?” Jasper asks, his gaze firmly settling on me. “Are we dating?”

  I’m so embarrassed I can barely speak. “I’m sorry,” I say, addressing Charlie first. “I didn’t choose Jasper over you, I just . . . um . . .” I bite my lip and look at Jasper. “No, we’re not dating.”

  I glance over at Charlie, whose fists are balled by his side. He looks like he’s going to punch Jasper.

  “So why are you here?” Jasper asks Charlie.

  “Shut up, Jasper,” I say.

  Charlie ignores him and stares directly at me. “I regretted that email as soon as I sent it, so I came over to see if we could maybe work this out,” he says, “but now I see that we can’t.” He glares at Jasper for a long, awkward moment. Jasper just gazes back apathetically, and then Charlie storms off.

  “Wait!” I call after him, but Charlie disappears over the hill.

  “So we’re a thing?” Jasper asks me. I can’t tell if he’s making fun of me or not, but I don’t have the energy to figure it out.

  “Just go home, Jasper,” I say as I climb up the stairs to the front door. “I need to be alone right now.”

  “But what about your . . . you know?” he asks, stopping himself before he says the word vision aloud. “Don’t you want to talk about it?”

  “No,” I respond.

  Jasper looks like he wants to say something back, but he just climbs into the Mustang and drives away. I unlock the door and enter the house, and then I shut the door softly and lean back against it. My phone vibrates in my pocket. I pull it out and look at it, hoping it’s Charlie, but it’s Jasper.

  U ok? the text says.

  Ok, I write back.

  I pocket my phone and take a deep breath, and then I cross the empty living room in three steps and pop into the kitchen. My mom is sitting alone at the kitchen table, and I’m relieved to see her by herself for once. After that horrible image of me bleeding in that building, and then the disappointment written across Charlie’s face when he saw me with Jasper, I could use some Mom time.

  “Hey Cal,” Mom says, glancing up from her work. “You should teach my students to write.”

  I sit down at the table and look at the paper in front of her, which is filled with red slashes and phrases like “Remember commas!”

  “
Or at least punctuate,” I say. It actually makes me glad I went to Bloody Hell. Even though it was an altogether boring experience, at least I learned my grammar.

  “I saw the Bernsteins’ nephew gave you a ride home from work,” she says. “What’s his name again?”

  “Jasper.”

  “Right, Jasper,” she says. “And Charlie was waiting for you.”

  “Yeah, it was bad.”

  “Bad?”

  “Worse than bad. Like, gut-wrenchingly terrible.” I sit down at the table and drop my backpack by my feet. “You ever do something you wish you could take back?”

  Mom shifts her eyes away. “Once,” she says, her voice distant. “But sometimes we do things because we have to, not because we want to.”

  “But I wanted to kiss Jasper,” I argue. “It’s just . . . I want to be with Charlie more.”

  “I know what you mean,” Mom says, and it really sounds like she does. But before I can ask what she means, she adds, “And work? It’s good, I hope?”

  I nod, but the hair prickles at the back of my neck. I wish I could get Indigo’s opinion on what I saw, but I can’t ask for his help without admitting that I broke into the office, stole the envelope, and viewed the building against his wishes.

  “Work’s fine,” I finally respond, trying to remember what I last told her about my fictional job. “Where’s Richard?”

  “Pulling an all-nighter at the station,” she says. “They’re doing some training tonight.”

  Mom starts to describe Richard’s annual training exercises, but my mind drifts as I flash back to my vision again. Shivers creep up my neck, and I realize that all of the hairs on my arms are standing up.

  “You okay, honey?”

  I snap back to the conversation with Mom. “I guess so,” I respond, trying to pick the right words out of my scrambled thoughts. “I was just thinking about Jasper. We have sort of a . . . connection.” It feels good to be confiding in Mom about something, even though I can only tell her part of the story. “He’s different than Charlie. He’s kind of—”

  Mom’s phone rings, and she points to it and raises her eyebrows, asking me if I mind if she gets it. I shake my head, and she picks it up.

  “Hiya,” she says. I instantly know it’s Richard by the way she coos into the phone. I’ve experienced this enough times to know it could be a while, so I get up and pour myself a cup of coffee. I add a heavy dose of creamer and honey, and watch them swirl around before disappearing into the coffee.

  At the table, Mom cups her hand over the phone and mouths “just a second” at me.

  “I’d love to,” Mom says as I lower myself back into the seat across from her. “But I have a lunch meeting tomorrow.” She taps her pen against her grade book, where I see she’s drawn a series of boxes. The tapping is my cue to continue the drawing. She knows I can never resist this game we’ve been playing since I was little. I take the pen from her and draw a line coming out of the last box.

  “How late are you working tonight?” she asks into the phone, and her smile tells me he’ll be home soon.

  In my pocket, my phone bings. I wrestle it out and glance at the text. Jasper again.

  Re: envelope. I’ll return tomorrow. No worries, the text says, and ends with a smiley-face emoticon.

  I write gotta get this on the edge of Mom’s grade book, and Mom cups her hand over the phone again and mouths, “The nephew?”

  I nod and head up the stairs, thinking about how strange Jasper acted today, first picking me up in that expensive car, then pretending our kiss didn’t happen, then accidently taking the envelope from the office. But then again, Jasper is confusing sometimes.

  As soon as I get to my room, I type You better into my phone, and then I strip off my clothes and pull on my pajamas.

  I’m more ready than ever to climb into bed and sleep my thoughts away, but I end up just lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, watching the image of me in the building replay again and again like a terrifying GIF. I turn over in bed and force the image out of my mind, but the only other thing I can think about is that Jasper needs to return the envelope before Indigo finds out it’s missing. I try to clamp down the nervous fluttering in my chest. Indigo would kill me for going behind his back if he knew.

  I pull the covers over my head and stare at the light leaking through the material.

  Go to sleep, I beg my mind, I’ll think about it tomorrow.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  I immediately know that Indigo and Jasper have been dueling this morning because the energy in the office is like a harsh wind blew over the landscape of chairs and printers, computers and telephones, knocking out everything. All power. And everything is silent in their furious wake.

  I find Jasper and Indigo in the room behind Indigo’s office, which contains only the Faraday cage and a small chair and table. Indigo is sitting on a chair outside the cage, the Outgoing Sessions folder open beside him. Since Indigo smiles at me when I walk in, I assume Jasper found a way to put the envelope back in the Ongoing Sessions folder without him noticing.

  Perched on the metal bench inside the cage, Jasper is filling up page after page with obscure sketches, and then taping the pages together to make a long landscape of jagged drawings. The hastily taped paper now stretches over ten feet long, and shows a type of primitive story—an army base of some kind, maybe, or a warehouse?

  Psychic battles have been going on for thousands of years. Native American shamans used to battle among the tribes, knocking things over with a point of their fingers, changing the weight of objects using just their minds. This isn’t new: it isn’t even particularly creative. It’s just a twisted type of machismo, where one person gets to win while the other has to lose. And it doesn’t help that psychic battles cross the line between playing and working. The competition of which psychic can find the best information first is intoxicating, making the battles feel like play, but the fact that we usually do it in order to solve difficult problems for the government makes it the most serious work imaginable.

  Jasper is talking now, short stuttered words and barely comprehensible sentences. “Someone’s on the ground,” he says, his hand flying over the paper. “And he’s bleeding . . .”

  He rips himself out of the trance, sweating and panting. He stabs his finger onto his drawing of a man lying on the ground, and there’s a look of triumph on his face as he asks Indigo, “Did you catch that?”

  I look at Jasper, but I don’t think he’s even noticed me standing outside the cage yet, my fingers wrapped like tinsel around the bars.

  “Very good,” Indigo says. His voice is calm, almost cold. “But I can do better.” He flicks his finger to suggest that Jasper move off the bench. “Try to keep up.”

  As Indigo climbs past him into the cage, Jasper moves out of it in short, jerky movements, and I can tell his mind is still in his vision. I know the feeling.

  When Indigo dips in, it’s like a storm gathering. His hands flicker above the paper, like bits of lightning waiting to strike. He doesn’t speak, but his lips move. He gets there quicker than others; he’s had years of practice.

  “I’m in,” he says, and he sounds victorious. “The air is thin here. I’m looking down on the clouds.”

  In a psychic battle, both people must view the same scene to see who gathers the most information, so Indigo’s viewing the same moment as Jasper, but from outer space. Show-off.

  I grip the cage and lean in farther so as not to miss anything. Except for these battles and occasional monitoring, it’s rare to see another viewer at work. We’re all left alone in our own heads, wondering if we are doing it right, and if anyone’s doing it any different, or any better. “We all have our own process,” Indigo told me when I first started working here. “The important thing is to give into it. That’s the secret of shamans for thousands of years. Don’t doubt. Just do.”

  Indigo is speaking now, so fast it’s almost in tongues. “There are screens. I can’t see much else, b
ut . . . wait. I see a gun firing . . .” Indigo is sketching rough lines across the paper, but his hand seems disconnected from his body. His lips are clenched so tightly I’m afraid he’s not going to breathe, so I hold my breath with him.

  “It can’t be,” Indigo says, and a tear rolls down his cheek. I tighten my hands around the cage and shake it.

  “Wake him!” I hiss at Jasper. “He’s too deep.”

  But Jasper is already moving, opening the cage and shaking Indigo by the shoulders. “Indigo, come back to us,” he’s saying.

  “Come back, Indigo,” I say.

  “Indigo, can you hear me?” Jasper shouts.

  For a few seconds, tears streak down Indigo’s face, but then he snaps out of it. He jerks his head up, his eyes clear, and he laughs weakly. “I think I’ve found something.”

  He immediately gets out of the cage, and barely looking in my direction, glances at his watch. “We’ll pick this up tomorrow,” he says. “There’s something I have to find out.” He picks up his briefcase, shoves the Outgoing Session folder in it, and dashes out of the office.

  “That was weird,” I comment.

  Jasper shrugs. “Indigo’s weird.”

  When we hear Indigo’s old Volvo clunk to a start, Jasper and I both walk into the recovery room. He collapses onto the couch.

  I sink down onto the couch beside him. “Did you put it back?”

  “Of course. He didn’t even notice,” Jasper says, smiling triumphantly. “I am a magician, you know.”

  I’m so happy Indigo didn’t find out that we borrowed the envelope that I’m almost giddy. “As long as you use your magic for good, I’m fine with that.”

  “Wanna go to lunch to celebrate?” Jasper asks. “That battle took it out of me.”

  I know I shouldn’t keep spending time with Jasper outside of work and I’m still upset over the breakup with Charlie, but I’m starving. It couldn’t hurt just to eat with him, could it?

  “What about veggie burgers?” I ask, climbing to my feet. I put out my hand and pull Jasper up.