Others See Us

by William Sleator

  “You had a good year, Jared,” Annelise said. “It’s written all over you.”

  “You too,” I said, and emboldened by the positive feelings I was still getting from her, I added, “I didn’t think you could get any better-looking than you were a year ago, but you managed.”

  “Oh, come on, Jared,” she said shyly, though I knew she was pleased. “So, did you have a nice bike ride?” she asked me; I had told her last year how I always went out on the bike first thing.

  I couldn’t lie. “Well, not exactly. The brakes failed.”

  She quickly leaned forward, concerned. “Oh, Jared, you should be more careful on that old thing! I hope you weren’t hurt or anything.”

  “No, I didn’t get hurt,” I said, and that was the truth. “What’s it been like here so far?” I asked her, hastily moving the conversation away from the bike. I didn’t want Annelise, of all people, to think I was the kind of stupid and clumsy person who would fall into a disgusting swamp.

  “It’s been fine. Same as it always is. As usual, the best thing about being here is Grandma, she’s such a character.” Annelise laughed. “I love the way she puts the fear of God into all her kids, especially my dad. He’s so different around her than he is at home, you know what I mean?”

  I got a sudden flash of Uncle George as a pompous, domineering bore, who was sometimes rude to Annelise’s friends. “Sure I know,” I said without thinking. “If he insulted a friend of yours, Grandma would just insult him right back, wouldn’t she?”

  She stared at me, radiating confusion. “How do you know he does that?”

  There was no way to answer her. I’d said too much. I realized now I was going to have to be careful with this new skill—if that’s what it was—or else I’d be making unexplainable blunders. “Well, I mean … um,” I said stupidly, knowing that even if I’d been able to think of a lie, I’d never be able to say it convincingly.

  “What does insult mean?” Amy asked, listening to us now because she could sense something uncomfortable was going on.

  “Fix that tower, Amy,” Annelise quickly told her, and turned back to me. “I guess I must have said something to you about it last summer,” she murmured. “I just didn’t expect you to remember. But since you do … Well, you can imagine how satisfying it is the way Grandma just effortlessly cuts through Dad’s little fixations.”

  “Fixations?”

  “Oh, ever since we got here, all he’s been talking about is this supposed crime wave,” she said. “He always has to have something to worry and lecture people about.”

  “You mean the stuff about the ATM and the break-in next door? He was telling Dad about it.”

  She rolled her eyes. “That’s exactly what I mean. Like in less than a minute he’s showing off what an authority he is on all the local goings-on.”

  “Yeah, but that break-in does sound kind of strange.”

  “You’ve only heard about it once,” Annelise said, with an infectious little chuckle. “Believe me, after listening to him go on and on about it, all you want is to forget the whole thing. ‘The Winstons refuse to say what’s missing, like they’re afraid to mention anything specific. And since they won’t say what was stolen, there isn’t much the cops can do,’” she quoted, imitating Uncle George’s voice. “Luckily Grandma’s as tired of hearing about it as I am. She changes the subject as soon as Dad brings it up, usually to something outrageous, like how she wants to bomb the Winstons’ three-car garage. I love the way she’ll just say anything that pops into her mind—things you’d think an old lady like that would never dream of.”

  “I know,” I said. “And she gets a kick out of embarrassing people.”

  “Embarrassing, embarrassing,” Amy chanted to herself, letting wet sand drip through her fingers.

  I wanted to keep Annelise entertained, and the way she had described Grandma putting down her father let me know she’d enjoy hearing something similar. “Like what she said about my dad as soon as we got here today,” I added.

  “Yeah?” Annelise eagerly prompted me, her smile encouraging. “What did she say?”

  “She said something about how Dad didn’t hesitate to immediately help himself to a drink, despite the price of gin.”

  “Sounds just like her!” Annelise paused. “Exactly how much would you say your dad drinks every day?”

  I was a little shocked. I had assumed Grandma was just teasing. Now I didn’t know what to say. Why did Annelise care about the specifics of Dad’s drinking behavior? And why, come to think of it, was she so scornful of her own father?

  “How much he drinks every day?” Amy repeated.

  Annelise laughed warmly. “Can’t you tell when I’m joking, Jared?” she said, affectionately pinching my cheek, and I forgot everything else.

  Including Amy, who was taking off toward the water. “Amy, come back here!” Annelise yelled, jumping up to retrieve her.

  Supper was the traditional steak—blood rare for Grandma—and scalloped potatoes with onions and cheese and a big salad and strawberry shortcake. As the meal ended, I felt oddly fuller than ever before, as though I had eaten my own as well as everyone else’s food. And I was besieged by a curious combination of resigned energy stirred together with complacent lethargy. The usual people did most of the cleaning up, and the usual others did their best to avoid it. (Grandma, as she often did at such times, quietly disappeared for a while.) Annelise was one of the most helpful, chattering gaily, making the work enjoyable, thoughtfully fixing Dad an after-dinner drink. Her behavior made Lindie’s silent participation seem sullen.

  I sensed very strongly how much the family loved Annelise.

  After supper there were fireworks on the beach. Annelise moved Grandma’s chair for her, made sure Dad had another drink, then sat next to me. I would have liked to slip away with her, but it was too risky. With everyone in the family gathered in one place, our absence would certainly have been noticed. People would wonder what we were doing alone together at night, skipping the fireworks, and our family frowned upon romantic relations between cousins. Other evenings, when there was no official party going on and everyone was dispersed, would be safer.

  But it was not easy to be satisfied with just sitting next to her, aware of her happy feelings about me. And I couldn’t get any deeper into what she might be thinking; she kept touching my fingers in the sand, and the electric tingle obscured almost everything in my mind.

  As soon as the fireworks were over, Uncle George herded his family back to their cottage. With Annelise gone, there was no reason for me to stay around—especially since I was so eager to get to my journal. I was still mystified by what was happening to me and knew that the only way to make sense of it would be to write everything down.

  Mom and Dad wanted to stay at the beach a little longer. I excused myself and raced to our cottage. I punched in the security code, 9832, which shut the alarm off for thirty seconds, quickly unlocked the door, and locked it carefully again from the inside. Then I hurried up to my room and to my journal. It was going to take quite awhile to get all this recorded.

  Two years ago I had discovered a loose board at the back of my closet, and underneath it a space that was just the right size for my fat spiral notebook. I made sure, when taking the journal out at the end of every summer, to nail the board back in place, so that if people came to do repairs before our arrival, it would not be discovered and replaced by something more difficult to pry open. I lifted the board and reached inside.

  The notebook wasn’t there.

  three

  I sank down onto my bed after a frantic search through my room, and Mom and Dad’s room, and the rest of the house. It didn’t take very long, since we had barely unpacked and there was hardly anything to search through.

  The baffling part wasn’t that someone had broken into the house; the alarm system was probably malfunctioning. What was impossible to understand was how anyone could have known exactly where my journal was hidden.

 
At least I was pretty sure Mom or Dad hadn’t taken the journal. They hadn’t come back from the party yet, and if they’d found it before then—when I was out on the bike or in the shower, for instance—they certainly would have said something about it.

  Mom and Dad figured prominently in it, of course. But even when it came to Mom and Dad, I hadn’t said anything particularly offensive. There were the usual complaints and descriptions of family squabbles, but most of that stuff they were already aware of. And there was hardly anything in it at all about most of the relatives. I talked about people at school; I wrote stories inspired by my favorite old-time horror movies. No one’s feelings around here would be hurt by reading my journal. That wasn’t the problem.

  The problem was what the journal said about Annelise. I squirmed when those particular entries flashed with appalling, photographic clarity into my mind: my fantasies about Annelise, my very specific remarks concerning her appearance, my attempts at romantic poetry, my secret longings.

  If anybody in the family read those things, it would be worse than humiliating; it would destroy any chance of Annelise and me spending time alone together. And right this minute somebody probably was reading them.

  I found some loose sheets of paper and a pen and began scribbling everything down. Describing the situation and my feelings about it is what I always do when I’m upset about something; it doesn’t actually solve the problem, but it usually helps me deal with it.

  And tonight it was more important than it had ever been to get my thoughts down on paper. It wasn’t just the need to release my anxiety about the missing journal. I also wanted to try to organize the peculiar mental sensations I’d been feeling all afternoon, the invisible voices, the numbers, the alien emotions invading my mind.

  But writing about it wasn’t working now. I was distracted by the thought that somebody might read what I was writing, and that froze me up. After a few minutes I threw down the pen and paper in frustration.

  The security alarm went off while I was washing up. I jumped. Then, above its shrill chirping, I heard Mom berating Dad for drunkenly pushing the wrong buttons. The alarm was turned off almost immediately, and as I stepped out of the bathroom, I could hear Mom on the phone, explaining to the cops that it had just been a mistake and wouldn’t happen again.

  I got into bed with Anna Karenina. I loved this book. I was especially impressed by the way Tolstoy seemed to know exactly what was going on in the minds of the characters, all of them so different from one another. But I couldn’t concentrate and soon turned off the light, worrying about who had my journal and whether or not I was going crazy.

  I felt a little more clearheaded when I woke up the next morning.

  OK, maybe reading minds was impossible. But it was also true that a lot of the thoughts I’d been getting had a mundane pettiness—and also a kind of logic—that just didn’t seem like hallucinations. My family easily could be thinking these things. And if I really had this power to hear their thoughts, then all I had to do to find out who had the journal was to peek into the minds of everybody around me. Maybe when I found the person with the journal, I’d somehow be able to make sure that the thief said nothing to anybody else about it.

  If it wasn’t already too late, that is. I had to hurry. Once news of the journal got around, there’d be no hope of anything happening between Annelise and me.

  I stepped into the kitchen and was almost knocked over by a grinding headache and miserably pervasive nausea. I had never seen Dad look so bad; he was obviously the one who felt sick. I stifled my gag reflex and probed a little deeper. And I was amazed by how much my vision had improved overnight.

  What I had seen yesterday was like fuzzy silhouettes on a window shade. Today the shade was gone; I could look through the window into the dimly lit interior of Dad’s mind. And I could see no inkling of my journal there, only bewilderment about how he had gotten so drunk last night and worries about what he might have said and how much of the evening he had forgotten. It took a little effort, but I found that I was also able to struggle out of his noxious head after I learned what I wanted. I was even able to begin to construct a kind of shield to protect my own brain from his hangover.

  Mom, whose brain was not fogged by alcoholic residue, was even easier to read. She was aching with frustration, since she was dying to nag at Dad about how embarrassingly drunk he had been last night—he had never done that in front of her family before—but she didn’t want to mention it in my presence. And there seemed to be nothing in her mind about the journal either.

  It occurred to me, as I was putting together my usual peanut butter, salami, and cheese sandwich, that I had better tell Mom and Dad that our security system was malfunctioning; whoever had stolen the journal had gotten into the house without setting off the alarm. But in order to tell them, I’d have to mention the journal, and I didn’t want them to know about that. It was a real dilemma. I was incapable of lying and saying that something else was missing. At the same time, it was really my duty to inform them about the malfunction. If they didn’t get the alarm system fixed right away, other things would probably be stolen, too. My predicament reminded me of something I had heard yesterday, but at first I couldn’t think of what it was.

  It was not until I had wolfed down the sandwich—it required a certain concentration while I was eating it to maintain my shield against Dad’s increased disgust—that the obvious fact finally dawned on me.

  There was nothing wrong with our alarm system. It had worked perfectly when Dad accidentally set it off last night. What was wrong was that somebody knew our security code. I sat there, thinking hard, as the situation clarified.

  Someone knew the security code for our alarm system. Someone also knew the security code for the Winstons’ alarm system, as well as the secret numbers for people’s ATM cards. As soon as Uncle George mentioned the robberies yesterday, his and Dad’s ATM numbers and alarm security codes flashed instantly into their brains, as easy for me to pluck as ripe tomatoes, except it took me until now to figure out whose voices I was hearing. The more I thought about what Uncle George told us, the more sure I was about how these crimes had been committed—and how my hidden journal had been found.

  I was not the only person around who could read minds.

  four

  “Beautiful fireworks last night, didn’t you think?” Mom was saying, making chitchat in front of me while inwardly brooding about Dad.

  “Mmm,” Dad said, not wanting to think about bright, sparkling lights.

  I nodded. I was preoccupied by the fact that this other person with ESP was almost certainly someone who had been at the party yesterday. Only someone who had been close enough to me to read my mind would have known the security code for our cottage as well as where I had hidden the journal. I had already eliminated Mom and Dad. Uncle George was not a suspect, since he had been so genuinely baffled by the robberies, and neither was Amy. That left me with nine other people in the family to worry about. The only course of action, as I had realized when I woke up, was to go out and directly probe everyone’s mind for knowledge of the journal. I had to get started.

  “Guess I’ll see what’s going on down at the beach,” I said, getting up.

  “Have a good time,” Mom said. She eyed me approvingly in my bathing suit. “Just don’t get too much sun.”

  The first person I ran into, before I even reached the volleyball net, was my cousin Eric, Aunt Maggie’s son, a year younger than I was. “Hey, Jared.”

  “Heading for the beach?” I said, digging into his mind.

  I barely pushed in the shovel. He was happy to be strolling along beside me, but right underneath that was his panting eagerness to see Annelise. I was stunned. Eric felt the same way about Annelise that I did! He thought about her all the time. And somehow he had gotten the idea she was attracted to him, too. He wanted to—

  I instantly backed off, embarrassed, not wanting to be a Peeping Tom. Knowing how Annelise really felt about me, I als
o felt sorry for the poor guy. This was a lot more awkward than anything I had picked up yesterday.

  “Hope you put on some sunscreen,” Eric was saying. “The first day I was here I got into a long conversation on the beach and forgot to put any on, and I got burned so bad I was sick,” he told me, concerned about my well-being, which only made me feel worse for him. The less I knew about Eric’s mind, the better. I had already discovered the only information I needed: Clearly he knew nothing about the journal. If he’d been aware of my feelings for Annelise, which were spelled out on almost every page, it would have hit me the instant I’d taken my first peek into his brain.

  “You been following this stuff about the ATM robberies and the break-in and that accident?” I asked him.

  He shrugged. “We keep the ATM cards locked up now.”

  “But what about that break-in?” I asked him. “You can get killed by crazies who break into your house. Doesn’t that kind of bother you?”

  “The Winstons weren’t attacked. Nobody saw a burglar around here. There wasn’t any violence. I might be kind of worried if I was afraid of somebody making off with my Macintosh or the VCR. But that’s not what was stolen. The Winstons said it was something personal, nothing valuable to anybody else. Who’s to say they didn’t just lose the stuff themselves?”

  “What was the accident?” I asked him.

  “Oh.” He sighed. “It was awful. A girl named Dee-Dee over on Indian Neck went out in her family’s boat alone, and a squall came up, and … she drowned.”

  “Oh, no.” What else could I say, since I didn’t know the girl? I felt funny talking about it.

  We were now close enough to the beach for me to see that Annelise was not there. Her parents, Uncle George and Aunt Beatrice, were heading out to sea in a sailboat. But that wouldn’t interfere with my plan. I didn’t need to probe Uncle George’s mind about the journal, since I was already pretty certain he didn’t have ESP, and Aunt Beatrice was almost as unlikely a suspect. And their departure meant that Annelise might be alone in their cottage right now.…