HEAR

by Robin Epstein

  Nobody utters a word. My jaw is clenched. I’m breathing heavily.

  “Dude,” Alex finally says. He’s glaring at Pankaj. “Harsh.”

  “I got arrested by the police and expelled from high school when I was trying to help someone,” I hiss at him. “My admission to Columbia got revoked. How’s that for consequences? My whole future now rests in my uncle’s hands.”

  Pankaj just sighs and smiles. “ You still don’t get it, do you? Of course your uncle is going to come through for you. He’s going to give you, his favorite niece, that one infamous gold card. The card that was going to me—before you showed up.”

  My mouth falls open. “What?”

  “ You heard me,” he says, his attention back on the pool table.

  “I didn’t know.” Although now it makes total sense why Pankaj seemed to hate me as soon as he learned I was Brian’s niece.

  “There’s a lot you don’t know,” he replies.

  Dan crosses his arms over his chest and looks like he’s trying to work something out. “Well, why do you deserve the card, Pankaj? What entitles you to the golden ticket into Henley? After all, you’re only here because Professor Black fished you out of jail.”

  In unison, all heads turn in Pankaj’s direction.

  Well played, Dan, I think.

  But Pankaj isn’t ruffled in the least, or at least he’s very good at hiding it. He rests his stick against the side of the table. “For the record,” he says, holding his hands in front of him, a gesture of surrender, “that is not exactly true. Though for the record, yes, I do have a criminal record. But only for another six months, at which point I turn eighteen, and all my youthful indiscretions will be wiped clean.”

  “And your permanent record can begin,” I mutter.

  “ You sound like my sister.” His face brightens for a brief moment. “Though it’s not like Nisha can talk . . . Just like us, Nisha’s had her fair share of trouble with the law.” He turns back to Dan. “I’m curious, Dan,” he says, “do you know about my sister too? I mean, it seems a fair question considering how much you know about me. And by the way, how do you know so much about me?”

  Dan is unfazed by the sharpness of Pankaj’s tone, or at least he appears to be. “I did my homework. On all of you. If there was a public record, I found it.” He turns his blank stare to me. “I didn’t turn anything up on you, though, Kass. Then again, I didn’t look that hard because I assumed you were invited because you were Professor Black’s niece.”

  How reassuring. “So what did you do to get yourself arrested?” I ask Pankaj.

  “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Spill it,” Mara demands, impatient. “Come on, Kass just gave her confession.”

  Mara seems much less annoying to me at this point than she did at the beginning of the evening. I’m starting to wonder if we might even become friends.

  “Fine,” Pankaj says, lining up his next shot. “I spent a week in a hotel in New York. Now the hotel may have been under the mistaken impression that I was the son of one of their guests, and that error may have allowed me to stay at no cost to myself . . .”

  “Why would they think that?” I ask.

  “Because I may have slipped into his room when he was out, called the front desk, and said I needed another room for my teenage son. Then I may have described what I looked like and said the boy would arrive shortly to pick up his key.”

  “That’s, like, the perfect plan,” Alex says.

  “I know. I still can’t believe I got caught. But the man had a suspicious wife back home, and when she saw the extra charge on the credit card, she assumed he was putting up a mistress. She called hotel security to ‘have the home wrecker booted,’ and they found me sleeping in the bed.” Pankaj examines the remaining pool balls on the table and tries to find his next shot. “It was all sort of funny. A little less amusing when they carted me off to jail.”

  I shake my head, not sure what to make of his story. Is it even true?

  “What, Legacy?” Pankaj asks.

  “I’m just wondering how you got here.”

  “Before deciding how they were going to charge me, they did a psych workup.”

  “Did they think you were criminally insane?” I ask.

  His coppery eyes glitter at me in the soft lamplight. “They didn’t tell me what they were trying to diagnose,” he answers, which makes Alex laugh. “It was just two straight days of psychiatric evaluation. At the end they offered me a deal. Professor Black appeared with my court-appointed lawyer and said I could come here or take my chances in juvie.”

  “It makes sense,” Dan says. “In all the decades that Professor Black’s lab has been open, this is the first time he’s handpicked his test subjects.”

  “How do you mean?” I say.

  “Normally he uses Henley students, but he reached out to all of us, made the opportunity virtually impossible to turn down, didn’t he?”

  Before anyone can answer Dan, we hear voices and laughter in the hallway. A moment later three Henley students walk in; I’m guessing by their comfort level—and their surprise at seeing us—that they’re Hounskull members. The first through the door is a pretty brunette with porcelain skin and drink-flushed cheeks. Two large guys trail her, one with his baseball cap facing forward, the other with his turned back.

  “Oh!” the girl exclaims.

  Alex nearly drops his pool stick. “Um . . . hi,” he stammers.

  My eyes flash between him and the girl. For a second, I wonder if they know each other, but her glance skims past Alex without any sign of recognition. As he continues to stare at her with unguarded, almost childlike fascination, his veneer of confidence fades. The reaction has the bizarre double effect of endearing him to me and making me grateful our dinner wasn’t a date after all. Had he become so blatantly infatuated with another girl while we were alone, I would have been pissed. And with everything else that’s going on, the last thing I need is to start spinning in an angry jealousy spiral.

  “Sorry!” the girl says, her English accent turning the word singsong. “Didn’t think anyone was up here.” The boys at her side move through the space to grab pool sticks from the wall mount, not seeming to register we’re here at all. One of the guys starts pulling the billiard balls from the table’s pockets and rolls them to the other, who racks them.

  “Were you playing?” she asks with an apologetic smile.

  As Alex continues to gape at her, his whole struck-dumb-by-Cupid’s-arrow thing starts to become less than adorable. Mara gets up and starts moving toward the stairwell.

  Dan points to the wall clock. “We have to go anyway.”

  Pankaj rolls his eyes. “ You’re really worried about violating curfew?” he asks quietly.

  “ Yeah, I’m worried,” Dan replies.

  Pankaj shakes his head dismissively. “It’s not like we have room check or like anyone’s watching us.”

  “Someone’s always watching,” Alex says. A smile plays on his lips. “The question is if that someone is looking for anything in particular.”

  Before I can ask him what he means, Mara is already halfway out the door. Dan is right on her heels. Pankaj reluctantly follows, as do I, and Alex brings up the rear. But midway down the staircase, Alex hesitates.

  “ You know what? I’m not even a little tired,” he says. “I’m going to stay and hang out here for a while.”

  “Don’t stay too late,” Dan warns.

  “Thanks, Mom.” Alex and Pankaj exchange a glance, as if sharing an inside joke.

  Mara is also staring at Alex, and I can see she’s wondering if she should offer to stay out with him. But as she’s weighing her options, Alex turns and walks back up the stairs.

  “Have fun,” she yells after him, not sounding like she means it.

  “How was your evening?�
�� Brian calls out as I unlock the front door. “I’m in the kitchen. Come have some ice cream.”

  I close the door behind me, loudly. I march in to find my great-uncle reaching into his freezer.

  “ You run an ESP lab?” I demand.

  “Here, I got your favorite,” he replies cheerily, ignoring my brusque tone. He pulls out a carton and peels the top off the bucket of Edy’s Slow Churned and then tips the green mint chocolate chip in my direction. I have to hand it to him: if he’s trying to distract me, it’s working. Green mint chocolate chip ice cream is what heaven tastes like.

  “My dad told you my favorite flavor of ice cream?”

  “No,” he says.

  As I take the frozen tub from my uncle’s hand, a chill runs through me. “Then how did you—”

  “Just a guess,” he interrupts. He motions to the table. “Have a seat. It’s my favorite too. And to answer your question, yes, I do run an ESP lab. You know, Kass, those with closed minds are always suspicious of those at the forefront of science.”

  I remain standing. “I wouldn’t say that I have a closed mind. I would just say a lot of the people who claim to have psychic abilities are big phonies.”

  “And by extension ESP can’t be real because we don’t have proof; is that your thought?” He takes two bowls down from the cabinet above the table and then reaches into a drawer for spoons. “But before people learned that the Earth was round, what did they think? Automobiles, airplanes, the Internet—none of these things were even conceivable until one day, ‘suddenly,’ they were. So to think that we already know everything that we’re going to know about how this works”—he sets the spoons down and taps his head—“is, if I may say, pure folly. And my job as a scientist is to explore and explain that which is not understood.”

  I’m worried I’ll fall into a trap if I try to argue. Instead, I offer cautiously, “Do you hate it that people must think you’re crazy?”

  “Kassandra, I couldn’t care less about that. The doubters are the ones who need to worry. I feel sorry that they are so lacking in imagination, but I have bigger concerns.”

  “Like what?”

  He sits and scoops some ice cream into his bowl. “I believe that I’m on the cusp of a truly important discovery, an innovation that could allow anyone to access these abilities. But there are still some critical steps we need to get through. One of those is making sure my test group here can perform reliably. For that to happen, you all must first be released from the bonds of conventional thought.” He looks up expectantly, waiting for me to join him at the table.

  I feel the confusion settle on my face, screwing up my features, and I sit. “The bonds of conventional thought?”

  He nods. “Here’s an example. Picture a month on a wall calendar. Now, what comes after any given Monday?”

  “Tuesday.”

  “And after Tuesday?”

  “Wednesday.”

  “ Yes, of course. On a calendar it’s very clear that each day follows the next in a straight line going from left to right, correct? That’s the ‘conventional’ way of thinking about time, like an arrow hurtling across a flat plane.” Brian sets down his spoon and sticks his finger in the air and then makes a fist. “But what if you think of time as a sphere? So even on Monday”—he points to the back of his hand—“Wednesday already exists over here.” He points to the front. “Now imagine that the sphere is transparent. If Wednesday already exists, if it’s already present at the beginning of our week, we should be able to access it Monday morning. We should be able to see into our ‘future.’”

  “That’s . . . Whoa.”

  “Damn straight,” Brian says with a laugh, picking up his spoon again.

  As I pick up my own spoon, I have a moment of insight, or maybe I should call it foresight. My uncle has gathered his group here this summer to send us hurtling through his spherical notions of space and time. We are his crash-test dummies. He’s going to probe our heads in an attempt to make these mental connections and leaps. The HEARs are his latest, greatest hope.

  For him, “teenager” is just another word for “guinea pig.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Eight fifty-eight a.m.,” Dan says, spinning on his stool in the lab when Uncle Brian and I arrive the following morning.

  The lab is spacious, even more impressive than what I imagined, knowing what I do about Henley. Several workstations, topped with thick black slate, are scattered throughout. Along the back wall hangs a twelve-foot whiteboard scribbled with intimidating formulas and a doodle of a bulldog barking, Let Me Atom! The other walls are lined with built-in glass-and-wood cabinets. Their shelves are neatly arrayed with books and scientific equipment: microscopes, scales, beakers. In one corner, a mid-century modern lounge chair sits next to a stereo system. I wonder if the people who designed this place were Swedish. It sort of has the feel of an IKEA catalog come to life.

  Dan is wearing exactly what he wore to dinner last night. From the redness of his eyes and the patchy stubble around his face, it looks like he pulled an all-nighter.

  “Dan,” Brian asks him point-blank, “were you up the whole evening?”

  “ Yeah.”

  “Unacceptable.”

  “But I was back in time for curfew,” Dan protests.

  Brian sighs. “Curfew is not my attempt to prevent you from doing things, or to keep you safe from the creatures of the night. I’ve established a curfew to get you to bed sooner because you need to get at least eight hours of sleep.”

  “Eight hours?” Dan snickers. “I haven’t slept that much since I was a baby.”

  “Then that changes now,” Brian states firmly, setting his briefcase down at his desk. “Brain function is dependent on the quantity and quality of rest you get. The brain simply doesn’t work as effectively if it’s tired.”

  Dan shakes his head. “I’ve done the research too, Professor. Believe me, I only need four hours of sleep.”

  “That’s just not true. You may be functional at four hours and still sharper than your peers, but sleep makes us all more mentally agile.” He flips open his briefcase, and he glances up, his face softening. “It boggles my mind that high schools start so early in the morning, forcing you out of the REM sleep you all so desperately need. It’s as if those running the show are trying to keep you stupid.”

  Keep us stupid? Was Uncle Brian trying to be offensive, or did he just get lucky? I try to catch Dan’s eyes, but he’s gone back to spinning.

  There’s laughter in the hallway, and a moment later Alex and Mara walk in together. Mara playfully hits Alex on the arm.

  “ You are so bad,” she says, taking a seat on one of the stools and flirtatiously crossing her legs. In that instant, last night’s fleeting thoughts of possibly befriending her melt away. I can’t get a read on this girl. Then again, I can’t get a read on anyone here. Dan seems like he might have Asperger’s syndrome; Alex is a smooth talker; Pankaj is a juvenile delinquent at best and a budding criminal at worst. That’s as close as I’ve come to forming any insight on the HEARs, my fellow guinea pigs.

  Alex offers Brian and me a smile. “Morning, everyone.”

  “How are you today?” Brian asks.

  “Great,” Mara replies.

  “Me too,” Alex adds. I can’t help but wonder what I missed when I went back to Uncle Brian’s last night. Did Alex not stay at Hounskull? Did he and Mara meet up?

  Dan looks at his watch. “It’s 9:01. Where’s Pankaj?”

  As Brian eyes a clock on the wall, Pankaj sweeps into the room.

  “Speak of the devil,” Brian murmurs.

  “I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard that line as I walk through a door,” he replies, raising his giant coffee cup in greeting.

  “Nice one,” Alex laughs.

  “Pankaj Desai,” Brian says, “this is Kassandra Black, my niece
.”

  “ Yes, the niece. We met last night.” The niece, he says, as if I’m not sitting ten feet away from him. He takes a sip of his coffee, shifting his eyes to me.

  “Good morning,” I say, but he doesn’t respond. “Looks like ‘the rocket’ could use some stronger fuel this morning,” I hear myself add, as I imagine dumping the drink over his head.

  To my surprise, he lowers his cup and smiles at me.

  In that split second, I’m jolted by a disorienting sense of familiarity. It’s like that feeling of bumping into an old friend in an unexpected place, or seeing someone you know on the news. You do a double take, thinking it’s not possible yet sure you saw something you recognized. But I shake it off. I must be imagining the sensation with Pankaj, caught off guard by how friendly he suddenly appears.

  I turn away, toward Mara. She’s taken a deck of cards out of her bag, and though I think it’s an odd choice to play some version of solitaire right now, no one else seems particularly surprised. She shuffles, draws six cards from the deck, and sets them down in a cross pattern in front of her. Then she pulls four more cards and places them to the right of the cross in a vertical line. As she bends over the spread, Mara’s lips twist in a frown.

  “Whatcha got there, sister Mara?” Alex asks.

  “Hmm?” She sounds like she’s just been roused from sleep. “Just wanted to see something.”

  Alex catches me looking and cocks his thumb in Mara’s direction. “Our girl here is deep into tarot cards. Does readings every day.”

  I have no idea what the correct response is. I glance at Uncle Brian for a cue, but he’s perusing something in a folder, his face hidden.

  “Oh, cool,” I say, though I’m thinking something far less generous.

  “Or spooky, depending on your outlook,” Alex says with a chuckle.

  “So, Mara, what’s the outlook for today?” I ask, playing along. At least it’s better than silence. “Do you see rain this afternoon?”