Minders

by Michele Jaffe

  Pete gave her a wondering look. “I was kidding. Relax. I’m sure you were much too busy learning how to manipulate people without them knowing.”

  Sadie tried to keep her tone light. “If I could do that, do you think we’d be having this conversation?”

  He grinned at her. “How was it really? You look great, by the way.”

  “It was amazing, Pete. Incredible.”

  He tucked a stray piece of hair behind her ear. “And you’re excited to start?”

  “More than I’ve ever been for anything in my life,” she said. She’d known it was the wrong thing to say the minute the words were out, but she couldn’t take them back. She braced for his reaction.

  But he surprised her. He said, “I’m so happy for you, babe. Of course, I’m going to miss you.”

  She looked up at him gratefully. “I’m going to miss you too.” She touched his cheek. “A lot.”

  “And miss kissing me?” he asked, his nose rubbing against hers.

  “And miss kissing you,” she confirmed.

  “Maybe we should do something about that.” His hand slid up her thigh under her skirt.

  “Pete, there are people—”

  His lips were at her ear. “Your parents are great hosts. No one is paying any attention to us. We could leave, and they wouldn’t notice.”

  That was true. Apart from Decca and Pete and a few of her father’s partner’s kids, all the guests were her parents’ friends. “I’ve been going nonstop today, and I haven’t showered,” Sadie said, reaching down to halt the progress of his fingers up her thigh.

  “So?” He pulled away slightly and gave her a mischievous smile. “I wouldn’t mind getting a little dirty.”

  Sadie rolled her eyes. “That’s disgusting.”

  He grinned at her, his adorable grin, then took her hand and pulled her toward the stairs to the house. “Come on, let’s not waste time.”

  She planted her feet. “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s our last night together for six weeks. I was thinking we should make it… memorable.”

  No, she thought, her heart sinking. Not tonight.

  “Five…”

  Smile, darling, Sadie heard her mother’s voice in her head. “We agreed to wait until we felt ready,” she said. Her voice sounded high and a little panicked.

  Pete didn’t seem to notice. “Until you felt ready,” he corrected, tucking her hair behind her ears. “We’ve waited for a year. Isn’t that enough? Come on, babe. I love you. You love me. What more do you want?”

  She wanted to feel excited. She wanted to want it. And she didn’t. But she couldn’t tell Pete that. “I want it to be perfect.”

  “Trust me, it will be. Stop worrying. You’re overthinking it,” Pete coaxed. “Sometimes I wish you were a little less cerebral.”

  “There are plenty of airheads who would be happy to date you,” Sadie said coldly.

  He smirked at her and tapped the tip of her nose. “That was a joke, babe. Relax. You don’t have to take everything so seriously.”

  Over Pete’s shoulder Sadie saw Decca leaning against the side of the bar. She was telling a story, her hands cartwheeling in the air, the bartender captivated, laughing. As Sadie watched, Decca leaned toward him and whispered something in his ear, putting her hand on his chest. He took the hand and kissed it, and Decca tipped her head back and laughed.

  Why couldn’t she feel what they did? Why was it so easy for everyone besides her? What was wrong with her?

  Her eyes moved back to Pete, looking at her earnestly.

  “Seriously, babe, what are you so afraid of? It’s me, Pete. Your boyfriend. Who you love. What do you think is going to happen?”

  Nothing, she thought. I’m afraid of nothing—of feeling nothing, no connection, no passion, no heat.

  She reached up to straighten the collar of his shirt. “It’s just—this is a big deal,” she said, calling up an argument that had worked in the past.

  He made his comical frowning face. “To be clear, by ‘this,’ you mean sex.”

  “You don’t have to keep saying it. Yes.”

  “But at graduation you said—”

  “I know what I said at graduation. And that’s true.” She smiled at him. “Only tonight seems so rushed.”

  “Rushed? It’s been a year, Sadie.” His voice rose with emotion. “I’ve waited for a goddamned year.”

  Sadie gazed at him in shock, hardly recognizing her boyfriend in this guy with the hard eyes and set jaw. The smile felt galvanized on her face. “Are you angry? Because I won’t have sex with you?”

  “Yes. No. I’m—” He dropped his arms and took a step away from her, raking his hand through his hair. “I’m confused. If you loved me the way I love you—”

  “I do.” She did.

  “Then you would want this too.”

  “You know I do. Very much.”

  “But not tonight,” he said.

  “Right,” Sadie agreed hopefully, not realizing, until it was too late, that it was a trap.

  He looked beyond her. “I don’t know, Sadie. I just don’t know.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket and checked the time. “I should go.”

  Sadie blinked, feeling cold and confused. “Like that? You’re going to leave it like that? For six weeks?”

  He avoided her eyes. “No. I just—let me cool off. I’ll be in touch.”

  “Four…”

  I’ll be in touch.

  I’ll be in touch.

  I’ll be in touch.

  “Three…”

  Torches were still casting gold light at the corners of the pool, but the party had thinned out, and the band was packing up.

  Decca stood looking down at Sadie, who was lying on one of the chaise lounges.

  “The usual?” Decca asked.

  “Oh yes,” Sadie said, getting to her feet.

  They grabbed two leftover bottles of champagne and went past the pool and out the gate in the hedge fence that separated the Ames house from the golf course. Picking a spot with no trees overhanging, they each popped the cork on their bottle.

  They gave the toast they’d been giving since they were six with apple juice, saying “To friends like you” in unison. Then, sitting back-to-back for support, they looked up at the sky. It was dark enough that they could see thousands of stars.

  “You should have let me start a fire,” Decca said. “We could have been doing this hours ago.”

  Sadie took a gulp of champagne. “Right. I promise I’ll listen to you next time.”

  “That would be confusing,” Decca said, and they laughed.

  They stayed like that, sipping from their bottles, watching the sky and talking only to point out a shooting star or comet.

  “What’s he like?” Decca asked after a while.

  “Who?”

  “Your guy. The one whose head you’ll be in. What does he look like?”

  “How do you know it’s a guy?”

  “Is it?” Decca asked.

  “I’m not supposed to say anything,” Sadie told her.

  “Why? Is it like a wish, and if you share it won’t come true?”

  “Exactly.” Sadie watched the bright light of a satellite moving slowly across the sky. “He’s really cute,” she said finally.

  Decca hooted. “I knew it. What color hair?”

  “Dark. And blue eyes.”

  “Mmmm, I love that type.” Decca leaned her head back against Sadie’s shoulder. “I know it’s confidential and all that, but I have an incredibly important question that you will be uniquely qualified to answer.”

  “What is it?”

  “What guys talk about while peeing at urinals.”

  Sadie laughed and pretended to flick her on the head. “I’m going to miss you,” she said softly.

  “I’m going to miss you more.”

  “Two…”

  After Decca left, Sadie had curled herself into the window seat of her bedroom. Her parents were
asleep, and silence had settled over the house.

  When Sadie was younger, spending time alone in the echoey house when her parents were out had scared her, so she’d made a list of different kinds of silences. Silence of anticipation, silence of grief, silence of tranquility, lonely silence, welcome silence, intimate silence, pregnant silence, silence of contempt. The silence surrounding her now was familiar, the silence of gates and guards and wide lawns and double-paned windows that kept you safe. Locked in. The silence of home.

  She left the lights off, not needing to see the slate-gray walls of her room, the string of ribbons won over ten years of spelling bees hung above the six tennis trophies and three cups from the national debate championships. The pictures of her and the tennis team, her and Decca, her and Pete. Especially the ones of her and Pete.

  Instead she stared out into the darkness that spread in front of her like an inky carpet, past her backyard with its perfect squares and rectangles, past the golf course to the shimmering glow on the horizon.

  City Center.

  She knew what she was seeing was just the halcyon lights on the highway that marked the outer perimeter of the City Center. And she knew the twinkling was an optical effect caused by humidity in the air. But to her it still looked like a mystical Valhalla, sparkling with passion, adventure, and—

  “One. Syncopy engaged.”

  —life.

  She opened her eyes.

  CHAPTER 5

  WEEK 1

  It was pitch black.

  Sadie blinked to make sure her eyes were open. Syncopy between her and Subject 9 should have been established instantaneously. She should be seeing and hearing everything he did.

  She was getting nothing. Something had gone wrong.

  Where am I?

  The pounding of her heart flooded her ears. Oh god, she was trapped somewhere, stuck between his mind and—

  From far away, she heard a faint, eerie whistling, like wind blowing through a deserted graveyard at night. It was joined by a sound like bones rattling, and she felt a jolt and heard a voice say, “You bastard. You did it.”

  Light flooded in all at once, making Sadie reel. A blindfold, she thought. We were blindfolded.

  He was blindfolded, she corrected, reminding herself she was supposed to remain objective. She blinked but was having trouble making out details.

  “Now you see why they call him Frosty the Snowman,” a male voice said. “Stays icy cool under pressure.”

  A hot wave of sensation crashed over Sadie, knocking her back, but in the time it took her eyes to adjust, it fizzed and became sticky and uncomfortable and then vanished. An emotion? A thought?

  Things began to swim into focus. The first thing she noticed was that they were in a room filled with probably fifteen guys, all of them in their early twenties. Subject 9 had been standing, but he sat down now, joining three others at a table with a pile of poker chips in the middle. The others formed an attentive audience on the perimeter. One of the guys at the table was playing with the chips, shuffling them in one hand, which accounted for the rattling-of-bones sound.

  Unlike the guys Sadie knew who wore tailored khakis and fitted collared shirts, the crowd here was nearly all dressed in overalls, a white V-neck or Henley shirt, and black work boots. Chapsters, she thought to herself.

  She’d learned about the Chapster style in the “Film and Society” seminar she’d sat in on at the university, a look that was borrowed from Charlie Chaplin’s assembly-line worker in the movie Hard Times. The professor had said it was popular among residents of urban communities. The Chapsters even named their boys after former presidents, to glorify an older and presumably better era. Compared with Pete and his friends, she thought the Chapsters looked a little bit menacing. No, she corrected herself after a second glance. Masculine.

  The door to the room opened, and Sadie heard the sound of music, voices, and laughter from other parts of the building. What is this place? she wondered, recalling advice Catrina had given them at a lunch Q&A during orientation. “Think of yourself like an anthropologist dropped into an unfamiliar locale. To get your bearings, you’d note the terrain and the wildlife and make yourself acquainted with the important people in the village. You should go through the same exercise when you begin Syncopy. The more detail you can collect, the better your assessment of the internal mindscape will be.”

  Sadie took in what she could see of the room. It had a high curved ceiling and wide windows framed in stone with pointed arches at the top, like a Gothic university building, or the Detroit Union Club, where her Mind Corps interview had been. Only here the windows were missing most of their panes, the wood-paneled walls were covered with brightly colored graffiti rather than demure hunting landscapes, the wide-screen television was showing advertisements rather than market updates, and she was pretty sure these guys weren’t leaders of industry and law. Leaders of lawlessness, more likely.

  At least with so many people she’d be able to learn Subject 9’s name, she thought.

  “That was epic, Frosty,” a guy with big ears standing behind Subject 9 said, reaching down to pump his hand.

  The guy next to him nodded vigorously. “Seriously, Snow. You killed it.”

  Killed what? Sadie wanted to know. And was it really so hard to use a name?

  While they spoke, the graveyard-like whistling Sadie had noticed at first rose and fell in pitch, and she realized she’d been wrong about it coming from far away. It was actually inside Subject 9’s head, the sound of chemicals—thoughts and emotions—moving through his mind faster than the speed of sound. It oscillated, as though it was made up of several different threads superimposed on one another.

  “They’re like the electronic relays that make your computer work,” Catrina had explained during the Q&A lunch. “At the beginning the impulses will probably sound like white noise, a low hum. To start with, focus on how and when they change. With practice you should be able to key them to the specific mental processes they represent.”

  Catrina had made it sound banal and basic, but the reality of it—she was listening to his mind working!—was amazing.

  Sadie tried to focus on the behavior of the sounds, but the number of people speaking around them made it hard to process.

  A guy on the left who seemed to have the sniffles said, “Got to say, thought you were going to end up more like a snowflake than a snowman after that last one, if you get my drift,” prompting a chorus of laughter around the table.

  “So you going to tell us your secret, Ice Baby?” a little guy with red hair asked.

  Ice Baby? Sadie repeated. This was getting ridiculous. And secret to what?

  “I was just lucky,” a voice very close to her said, and she realized it was the voice of Subject 9. It was low but not too low, and nice, she thought. It wouldn’t be a bad voice to listen to for six weeks.

  From his left a voice said, “Lucky that all of you are such crap card players, that is.” The speaker, a guy with dark skin and slicked-back hair, leaned forward to touch Subject 9 on the shoulder. “No offense, friend.”

  “None taken,” Subject 9 assured him.

  The guy directly across the table hefted himself out of his chair and pushed a pile of poker chips toward Subject 9. “Take your winnings, Little Ice.”

  There was a slight uptick in the volume of sound inside Subject 9’s head, and Sadie saw a flickering out of the corner of her eye, but when she turned to look there was nothing there. “Thanks, Willy,” Subject 9 said.

  A name! Sadie thought. Even if it wasn’t his, it was a start. An associate. Her first entry into her mental notebook.

  “You earned them,” the guy called Willy told him. Sadie concentrated on making mental notes of his characteristics the way they’d been taught in orientation. He was big, from muscle not fat, but with wide-spaced gray eyes, light brown hair, and a genuine, open smile, he looked too much like an overgrown schoolboy to be intimidating. He wore a chalk-striped denim cap far back on his
head, with matching chalk-striped denim overalls. “I think it’s pretty amazing, you sitting there blindfolded for three hands and predicting what we had just from hearing how we bet. Tell you the truth, felt like you were reading my mind.”

  Sadie agreed that was pretty amazing. If Subject 9 had actually done what Willy had described, it would mean he was either exceptionally good at both poker and reading people’s voices, or exceptionally lucky.

  Or cheating, she added, which, given Curtis’s warnings about his criminal tendencies, was probably the most likely.

  “Wouldn’t take long to read your mind, Willy,” the guy with the red hair said, and everyone, including Willy and Subject 9, laughed.

  A voice directly to Subject 9’s right cut in, saying, “Are we done with the circus performance yet? I want to play some cards.”

  Another momentary rise in volume followed his words, and Subject 9 asked, “You in a rush to lose more money, Linc?” His voice sounded lower to Sadie, and strained.

  But she had a second name. Linc. Short, no doubt, for Lincoln.

  Sadie expected Subject 9 to turn toward Linc, the way he had whenever anyone else addressed him, but he gave only a quick glance, just enough for Sadie to get the impression of a well-built guy with pale skin, chin-length black hair, and lips pressed together tightly in distaste. She didn’t see his eyes, and she had the impression Subject 9 was deliberately avoiding them.

  Clearly there was some history between them. For a second time Sadie thought she saw something flutter at the edge of her range of vision, but when she looked, she found nothing there.

  The guy with the slicked-back hair said, “What’s wrong, friend Linc? Tired of having money slip through your fingers?”

  Linc was on his feet so fast his red leather club chair tipped backward and thudded to the ground. “What the hell is that supposed to mean, friend?” he hissed.

  There was a collective intake of breath in the room, and everyone seemed to stiffen. Subject 9’s eyes moved very slowly to stare at Linc, and everything inside him went silent. Sadie had been to a lot of debates, but she’d never seen an atmosphere go from jovial to explosive so quickly over words.

  If there’s a fight, I won’t push the panic button, she resolved, steeling herself. I told Curtis I could handle violence, and I won’t let him down.