HEAR

by Robin Epstein

  We head up a wide staircase.

  “A bed and closet space are all I need,” I tell him. Though it would be nice to have a television, WiFi, air conditioning, and a minifridge.

  “Then this should do the trick.”

  Brian opens the door. He wasn’t kidding. The room actually looks like an observatory, the kind meant for astronomers. The deep-blue walls are stenciled with constellations, and there’s a refractor telescope perched on a tripod, its long gleaming tube trained out the window.

  “That’s a pretty powerful gadget, that telescope. You can get either an excellent view of the moon or insight into our neighbors’ sleeping habits. But I trust that you’ll use it only for the purposes of good?”

  I’m not sure what he means. Maybe this is another test. “Education only, I promise.” I swing my bag off my shoulder and set it down on the enormous bed in the corner of the room. I nearly jump when the mattress rumbles and undulates. When I put my hand down on the bed, waves ripple out.

  “A water bed?” I exclaim, grinning. I’ve never actually seen one of these things before.

  Brian nods. “They were all the rage once. I could never get used to the bobbing, though. You don’t have issues with motion sickness, do you?”

  I climb on board and lie down on my back. It feels like I’m on a raft in a pool. “I think I’ll be fine.” I stare up at the ceiling. “Are those—”

  “Afraid so.” Brian flicks off the lights, and the star stickers on the ceiling glow in the dark. “I created this observatory around the same time several of my colleagues were conducting the first governmental experiments with LSD.”

  I struggle to sit up. “The government experimented with LSD? Why?”

  He chuckles. “A lot of people asked exactly that question. Initially those in charge were convinced the drug would unlock the secrets of the universe.”

  “Which secrets?”

  “Chaos theory for one.”

  We did a unit on chaos theory in physics. Feeling the need to impress the professor, I decide to show off. “Oh yeah, the uncertainty principle, right?”

  “Correct.” Brian seems pleased. He taps his index finger to his nose. “And if we pay attention to the uncertainty principle, what’s the one thing we know we shouldn’t rely on?”

  I rack my brain for an answer . . . something . . . anything . . . Nothing comes.

  He smiles. “Well, it’s a bit of a trick question, because I was referring to those extended weather forecasts. We know weather is a complex system made up of the total behavior of all the molecules that comprise the Earth’s atmosphere. So if even one of those tiny particles starts dancing around in an unexpected way, it creates chaos. And chaos, as the name suggests, throws everything off, making your weatherman, Storm Fields, look as silly as his stage name sounds.”

  I laugh, and Uncle Brian’s eyes twinkle. He clasps his hands behind his back. “The other key element of chaos theory, of course, is its paradox. Despite all its seeming randomness, no matter how complex a system may be, it still relies on an underlying pattern. It still follows a certain order. And the trick—the trick!—is figuring out what that order could be.”

  I close my eyes for a moment, the mattress rocking gently beneath me. “So the government thought they could find the order by giving its scientists hallucinogenic drugs?”

  He chuckles. “It was the early seventies. We’ve come a long way since then.”

  I open my eyes and struggle to get up from the water bed; I also struggle to imagine my great-uncle hanging out with people who took LSD. Both prove difficult.

  Brian lends a hand and pulls me up. “That part just requires some practice,” he says. “Now I’ll leave you to do whatever it is young women need to do to get ready for the evening. My quarters are upstairs on the third floor, so while you’re here, this will be your domain. I’ll stay out of your area if you stay out of mine. Deal?”

  “Deal,” I echo, though now, of course, he’s got me wondering what he’s hiding above me.

  “Good. One last thing: I tend to pace. It’s a habit I formed when I was a young man, much like your ring twisting.” He nods toward my hands; they instantly fall to my sides. “If the shuffling overhead gets too loud or wakes you up, just bang on the ceiling with a broom. I’ll get the point.”

  I glance around for a broom. I don’t see one. I force a smile. “I don’t think you’ll need to worry about that. I’m a champion sleeper. Fire alarms have blared, and I’ve slept through them.”

  “Well, that’s very reassuring,” he says dryly. “These will get you into the house.” He hands me a key ring. It’s anchored to two thin strips of metal. One looks like a flattened IKEA Allen wrench; the other tapers to a squiggly line with three rounded ridges on one end. If you didn’t know better, you might think they were dental instruments. But since I do know better, I laugh out loud.

  “I take it you know what they are?” Brian asks.

  I nod. “They’re redundancies.”

  “Clever girl. Though I prefer to think of attaching keys to a lock-picking set as an example of my wit.”

  “Or maybe it’s an example of your craft?”

  His eyes twinkle again. “ Yours as well, perhaps? It seems like my nephew’s been doing at least one thing right all these years. We did have our doubts.”

  Before I can ask what he means by that (or get a sense of how much he knows about my lock-picking past), Brian hurries out and closes the door behind him. An overwhelming—and rare—desire to speak to my parents wells up, driven entirely by the need to pump them for any and all information about this peculiar relative of ours. I look at the clock. It’s not quite three o’clock. I might be able to catch them before they board their plane for China. But as I twist the ring on my pinkie, I think about Brian’s request that we not communicate with our parents. My mind—that impulsive teenage mind, so ripe for research—drifts from them back to my own predicament.

  What the hell have I gotten myself into?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I get to Rosalie’s early. I’ve been a meticulous planner my whole life. Some people might say this is to compensate for an impulsive streak that occasionally gets me in trouble. Those people might be on to something. But in practical terms it means I end up arriving early everywhere. Obsessive attention to detail requires knowing the lay of the land, so I build in the extra time to observe.

  The restaurant is cute and has the three elements vital to a date spot: good atmosphere (brick walls, wooden tables scarred with graffiti), low lighting (to maintain a little mystery), and a wide selection of cheap entrées (self-explanatory). The bar at the front is devoted to screens playing SportsCenter and to loud conversation.

  “Kass?” says a voice behind me.

  I turn around with a big smile. “Hey!”

  Alex isn’t alone. He’s sandwiched between a guy and a girl. I briefly wonder if they just happened to come through the door at the same moment, but my smile wavers as I recognize them. I saw their pictures in Brian’s office. They’re two of the HEARs. And, like Alex, they’re both even better-looking in person than they are in photos.

  “Kass, this is Mara, and this is Dan,” Alex says quickly.

  Mara curls a lock of dark hair around her index finger and smiles at me with closed lips. There’s something about the gesture, something about her, that tugs at some fuzzy memory. But there’s no way I know her. I would remember someone that pretty.

  Dan gives a nod without making eye contact. His bright-blue eyes focus on a point somewhere on the floor. He’s shorter than Alex, maybe five ten to Alex’s six feet, but he’s powerfully built. There’s something contradictory about him: that muscular frame doesn’t match the faraway gaze, the pale skin, the rumpled dark hair. He also seems to be milking the “I’m an enigma” vibe by avoiding my smile.

  “Hi,” I say. I don’t want to be
rude. On the other hand, I assumed this was a date, so I kind of want them to go away.

  “When Alex told us you’d arrived, we couldn’t let the day go by without meeting you,” Mara explains. She gives me one of those brutally unsubtle once-overs, making me certain that she now knows everything about me, down to the size of my underwear.

  She’s a petite/small.

  “ You know,” she adds, moving closer to me, “we hadn’t heard you were coming before today. It’s almost like you weren’t supposed to be here. But if Professor Black selected you, I’m sure you’re qualified. He wouldn’t lower his standards just to include his grandniece.”

  My eyes narrow. Is she trying to piss me off or get a rise out of me?

  Before I can respond, Alex laughs and steps between us. “Of course he wouldn’t.” He gives me a wink.

  “Well, let’s sit. I am starving,” Mara says. She pats her flat and tanned tummy, exposed by the doll-sized kid’s T-shirt she’s wearing. Though it’s tiny, the T fits her perfectly, and I notice it’s printed with the words camp dodona. Like the contours of her face, the words are also oddly familiar, floating at the edge of my mind. Why do I know that camp name, that logo? The a in Dodona is drawn to look like the Eye of Providence, the eyeball at the top of the pyramid on the dollar bill.

  Alex looks over to me. Sorry, he mouths.

  This makes me feel only somewhat better about the fact that Mara has just looped her arm in his.

  “Have any of you guys eaten here before?” I ask, resigning myself to an evening of unpleasant surprises.

  “ Yeah,” Dan replies in a monotone. From what I can gather, he is determined not to look at me, or anyone else for that matter. “Four,” he says to the hostess. He starts walking to an empty four-top before she’s had a chance to pick up the menus.

  “Just sit anywhere,” the hostess mutters sarcastically. She follows Dan and puts the menus down with a roll of her eyes.

  “So, what’s good here?” I ask as we sit.

  “I had the spaghetti with marinara sauce,” Dan says, already staring at the menu. “I’m going to get it again.”

  “Spaghetti and red sauce? That’s so boring!” Mara reaches for the breadbasket and grabs the best looking piece of focaccia. She doesn’t eat the bread; she just starts shredding it as she peers at the menu. “I think we should order the melanzana to start and then split the pizza rustica.”

  “I’m getting the spaghetti with marinara sauce,” Dan repeats.

  I’m equally unmoved by Mara’s suggestion, mostly because I’m not appreciating her bossiness, and I’m starting to wish I was back on my water bed. “I don’t want pizza either.”

  “Well, I’m always in the mood for pizza,” Alex says.

  “Great, then just you and I will share.” Mara pats Alex’s hand and looks back at me. “We must have been an old married couple in another lifetime. Alex and I have only been here for two weeks, but it feels like we’ve known each other forever.”

  A list of comebacks shuffles through my brain. But I decide to play nice. “So, there’s one more HEAR, right?”

  “Pankaj, pronounced punk-edge.” Dan repeats Brian’s pronunciation lesson.

  “Right.”

  “It’s an Indian name,” says Alex, answering the question I wanted to ask. “It’s from two Sanskrit words that mean ‘mud born.’”

  “Poor Pankaj,” I mumble.

  “Ah, but it signifies the lotus,” he counters, “the flower that rises from the mud. So it suggests beauty in the face of adversity.”

  “He blew us off,” Dan states, and for the first time, he fixes his blue eyes on me. His stare is intense. I blink. “Pankaj blew us off.”

  “He didn’t blow us off; he had other plans,” Mara corrects.

  Dan shrugs and turns back to his menu. “We were all at the dorm. When she told him we were going to dinner, he said he was busy.”

  “He said he’d catch up with us later,” Mara insists.

  “Classic blow off,” Dan replies in the same dull voice.

  “So, Mara, what brings you here?” I ask. I’d like to understand the tension at the table as much as I’d like to reduce it. When she cocks an eyebrow at me, I clarify: “I mean, to work in my uncle’s lab.”

  “Well, I’m going to be a freshman here in the fall, and the sooner I could get out of Oklahoma the better. But I’ve been coming to Henley forever. Sometimes I wonder if I was born in the lab.”

  “It would explain your good looks,” Alex says. I can’t tell if he’s flirting or if this is part of the rapport they’ve already established. When she blows a kiss back at him, I have another disorienting flash of déjà vu.

  Then it hits me. “Camp Dodona?” I point to Mara’s T-shirt. “Wasn’t that the name of the summer program here?”

  She focuses her attention back on me. “ Yeah, I was a camper from age four to eight.”

  “I’d forgotten that’s what it was called.” I say the words out loud, though I wish I hadn’t. The longer I stare back at her, the more I start to remember: We were in the same group, the one run by the ponytail guy. I don’t remember much, but I am almost certain that I didn’t like her then either. It’s coming back now, faintly: she was a brat, one of those presumptuous little girls who needed everything to go her way, who believed the sun rose and set on her command.

  “ You weren’t there, were you?” she asks incredulously.

  I’m about to lie. The lie feels easier. But Alex was present when Brian mentioned it earlier, so I can’t deny it. “Briefly,” I say.

  She doesn’t press me any further. Maybe she knew I disliked her. Maybe she disliked me too.

  It isn’t until the food comes and Dan is tucking into his spaghetti that he finally starts speaking again. “Now that Kass is here I hope we start getting into the hard-core ESP experiments. All the ESP-lite crap that we’ve been doing for the past two weeks has been a total waste of time.”

  I laugh. So that’s it: Dan just needed some food to regain his sense of humor. Boys and their stomachs, I think. It’s sort of reassuring to know that even at a college like Henley, the male species is the same. “That’s so funny,” I tell him.

  “What is?” He twirls the pasta between his fork and spoon. “What’s funny?”

  “ESP . . . That’s what you said, right?”

  “ Yeah,” Dan confirms. “ESP: Extrasensory perception. Mind reading. Psychic capability. Telepathy.”

  “No, no, no. I know what it means. But . . .” I look over to Alex for support.

  He doesn’t smile back. In fact, he looks surprised. “Kass, you know what HEAR stands for,” he says.

  “Sure, Henley Engineering Anomalies Research.”

  “Right . . .” He seems confused that I’m confused. “And you know what anomalies are, yeah?”

  I’m guessing he’s trying to draw the obvious answer out of me, so I repeat exactly what Uncle Brian said earlier. “Anomalies are phenomena that deviate from the expected order. And they do brain mapping, study the way neurons fire . . .” It takes me a beat to process the words that just came out of my mouth.

  In life there are certain connections you don’t make, certain things you just don’t expect: Your first really bad haircut. Your best friend turning against you. Projectile vomit. Learning your uncle runs an ESP lab? That one just shot to the top of my list. It takes another second before I think, No way, and I can see this for what it is—a practical joke. Seems a little mean that they’d prank me on my first day, but if this is an initiation, some smarty-pants version of a hazing ritual, I can handle it. “ You’re saying you’re all here because, rather than going to some other type of nerd camp at a prestigious university, you decided to spend your summer testing out your ‘ESP skills’ in this lab?”

  No one answers. I’ve got to give it to them: they’re all playing their part
s really well. Excellent poker faces, all of them.

  “Okay, so I should assume normal people know about the Henley ESP lab too?”

  More silence.

  “Obviously I’ve asked the wrong group that question.”

  “Wow,” says Mara.

  “Come on, she didn’t mean anything by that,” Alex says, springing to my defense.

  Mara opens her mouth, but our waitress approaches, and everyone instinctively quiets down.

  “How is everything?” she asks with a sidelong glance at Dan. “Do you guys need anything else for now?”

  Sometimes I have a little problem with self-censorship. Sometimes I’m a little impulsive. It’s what got me kicked out of high school, what wrought TLTRML. You’d think these experiences would have taught me a lesson, convinced me to reform my ways. You’d be wrong. “One quick question for you,” I say, smiling up at her.

  “Sure.”

  “Did you know there’s an ESP lab running on the Henley campus?”

  The waitress glances from side to side as if she’s searching for the reality show cameras. Her own smile falters. “Well, I’m going to be a junior there in the fall, and I’ve never heard that before, so . . .”

  Alex clears his throat, getting her attention. Then he smiles at her. “Can I ask, what’s your major?”

  “English.”

  “That’s what I would have guessed. You don’t look like a woman who has spent a lot of time in the bowels of the engineering department. Your skin has too much of a glow for that. Thanks.”

  “No problem.” As the waitress moves away, there is a little extra wiggle in her walk.

  I hold out my hand: evidence presented, case closed.

  “She’s an English major, Kass,” Dan mutters. “So obviously you can’t expect her to know anything useful.” It’s the most emotion I’ve heard in his voice yet.

  “Also, it’s not like Henley’s the only university to have an ESP lab,” Alex adds. “All the best research institutions in the world have them.”