HEAR

by Robin Epstein

  He sighs and remains standing. “Kassandra, I apologize. That came out less elegantly than intended. What I meant was that I have been asking your father to send you back here for quite some time now, but it was only after your run-in with the authorities that he relented.”

  What?! No. No way. I shake my head. “ You wanted me to come here? Dad was the one who stopped it? That makes zero sense. It’s”— I’m about to use the word “crazy,” but I stop myself, since crazy seems A-OK here—“wrong. Just wrong.”

  “I must say, Kass,” he says, “I’ve been very gratified to see that in the last two years specifically you’ve started using your abilities in such a constructive way.”

  I swallow. “What are you talking about?”

  “I know about all of your exploits as the anonymous vigilante. ‘Ally X,’ righter of wrongs. That’s why I needed you back. That’s why you getting caught was such a surprisingly good”—he pauses, a gleam in his eye—“roll of the dice for me.”

  Though I’ve never fainted before, this could be my moment.

  “What baffles me, though,” he continues, “is how the police were able to catch you. Why did you get caught this last time? Do you even know the answer to that yourself?”

  My head shakes, involuntarily. I don’t want to sound too full of myself, but it never occurred to me that I’d get busted. I think the realization that I’d gotten caught, that I’d slipped up somehow, was even more upsetting to me than getting handcuffed with those extra-strong garbage-bag ties and thrown in the back of the police cruiser.

  “No one else knew I was responsible for the other stuff,” I finally manage. “I acted alone and anonymously, and I was always in and out before anyone noticed. That was something I was really proud of . . .”

  “I would imagine.”

  “So how do you know?”

  Brian takes off his glasses and tucks them into his shirt pocket, glancing again at my desk chair. I relent with a nod. He sits, and I ease down onto the edge of my water bed, mostly because I’m not sure if my legs can support me for much longer.

  “Let me ask you something first, Kassandra. Why is it, do you think, that you were able to get away with your shenanigans for so long? And how is it, do you think, that you’ve been able to slip in and out of so many places without being noticed?”

  I lift my shoulders. “Because I’ve been really careful.” It’s true: as a planner, I’ve measured distances, triple-checked schedules, kept detailed logs of people’s comings and goings. “I spent a lot of time—” I stop at Uncle Brian’s headshake.

  There is, of course, another answer.

  Every meticulous planner knows that despite all the hard work, shit happens. Regardless of how finely tuned your plan is, something can go wrong. Someone leaves his house a minute early or a minute late. There’s a freak storm. Bad traffic. Gluten. Yet I always managed to stay one step ahead of the unexpected. It wasn’t that I didn’t make mistakes. It was something else. And what I think Uncle Brian is trying to get me to admit is that every time the risk of getting caught lurked, I got a feeling—literally, a physical sensation—that told me to get the hell out of wherever I was.

  “Because I’m really lucky?” I offer.

  Brian sighs. “Luck had nothing to do with it, and you know it. It’s your ESP.”

  I stare at him blankly. In this shadowy room, with the fake stars overhead and the oversize telescope and my body gently bobbing up and down on a water-filled mattress, I once again feel as if I’ve entered some hallucinatory dreamscape. I do not have ESP. Maybe the other HEARs do—I’ve allowed myself to accept that possibility, given the seemingly indisputable evidence—but I do not. I am here because my father called in a favor.

  “ You felt the danger, am I right?” Brian presses. His voice is still calm, but I hear urgency. “ Your body was flashing hazard. Kass, everyone has moments of foresight. People know who’s calling before they pick up the phone; mothers sense what their babies need through their coos. That expression, ‘Your ears must have been burning’? These moments happen occasionally for most people. But there are some who can channel that sensitivity much more precisely, and far more often. You showed great aptitude for this even as a child in our summer program. No one recognized your talent aside from me—not even you—which is why it’s so lucky I have you back now.”

  There’s that word again. “Lucky.” I feel like shouting that line from The Princess Bride, “I do not think it means what you think it means.”

  “No, ‘lucky’ is not the right word,” he says, as if reading my mind. Maybe he is, for all I know. His voice falters when he speaks again. “It’s fortuitous. And it makes Graham Pinberg’s senseless death all the more tragic. Tragic and ironic. With all the talent I’ve gathered here this summer, that I couldn’t stop his murder . . .” Brian’s head droops and he shakes it back and forth.

  I turn away, staring down at my hands in my lap. “I’m sorry about your friend,” I murmur. “I really am, Uncle Brian. But I need you to explain this to me. I don’t understand how this works. If I’m supposed to have ESP, why don’t I have it all the time? And if it’s so strong, why didn’t I have any sort of clue about it?”

  Brian pats his hands on his knees and stands. “Those are some of the questions we’ve been working on for a good long time, Kass.”

  “And?” I say, unable to hide my impatience. “What have you come up with so far? I feel like I’m supposed to know how you’re going to respond to that.”

  “Ah, ESP humor,” he muses, a smile flitting across his face. “Always good for a laugh. Graham was a fan too. And yes, of course I’ve come up with some theories about this. But you’re only first learning that you possess these abilities, Kass, so it’s important for you to explore them without outside influence. It’s also important for me to study how they flourish and manifest from this point forth.”

  I lift my eyes. “So the rest of them? Dan, Mara, Alex, Pankaj . . . they all have these same abilities too? That’s why you picked us?”

  “Everyone’s brain is slightly different, so everyone has a slightly different capacity.” Brian walks over to the telescope and bends a little at the waist. He squints into the eyepiece. “ Yes, there are overlaps in your abilities, but you all have unique blind spots too.”

  I try to follow, but can’t. “I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “Maybe it’s better explained as farsightedness.” He looks up from the scope. “Think of it as being able to read a movie’s subtitles but not being able to read your text messages if you hold your phone too close. We’ve discovered that something similar is true for people with ESP. Some people have a hard time forecasting what will happen to those with whom they’re closest. Often people can’t predict things about their own families for this very reason. They can’t see them clearly because they can’t be objective. These are the blind spots. The x factors. And given what happened to my friend, you can imagine that this area of study is very important to me right now.”

  I nod, thinking about him, thinking about the rest of my family. I’ve never been able to guess what my parents are thinking—about anything. “But obviously that wasn’t true for Dan,” I say.

  “True, though one could hardly say he was close to his father,” Brian replies. “And just to confuse matters, we’ve also found exactly the opposite can be true too: the closer you are to someone, the more accurate your predictions can be.”

  This is making me feel insane, and now I really want my uncle to leave so I can curl into the fetal position and shut out the world. But he doesn’t take the hint. Apparently communicating my thoughts to him is not part of my alleged psychic powers.

  And then, just like that, he shuffles toward the door.

  “As I said before, I believe we’re nearing our breakthrough, Kass. It’s dependent on you and your friends here, which is why having you together in t
he lab this summer is such a gift.” His posture stiffens as he reaches for the knob. “And with Graham gone . . . it’s also what makes the university’s hearing on HEAR’s closure all the more vexing.”

  “Wait . . . What did you just say?” I clutch the edge of the bed frame to steady myself. “HEAR’s closure?”

  “I was planning to tell you all before the tragedy, but yes, the fate of my lab is to be decided at the next meeting of Henley’s Internal Review Board. Years of research will come down to what the trustees choose to do in that one afternoon.”

  “Why would Henley close your lab?”

  “The powers that be don’t believe in my work. And, just as vitally, they don’t like me. You may find this hard to believe, but I am not the most beloved professor on campus. Graham and I used to joke about it. My lab got more attention than his, but he said he liked to have me around anyway, because his popularity rose by comparison.”

  There’s no point in trying to contradict him. I don’t know enough about Henley, and I don’t doubt him either.

  “But if I can present the review board with some interesting new data at this critical meeting, and show them that it won’t take very much money to keep us up and running—a hundred thousand dollars at most—I’m hopeful they’ll relent.”

  I blink, not sure that I’ve heard him correctly. I was assuming he’d say something in the range of millions. “A hundred thousand dollars? That’s it?”

  “I’ve secured an outside grant from an interested party, but it’s up to the university to provide the rest.”

  I rub the bottom of my chin and consider this. There seems to be an obvious answer to his dilemma. “Uncle Brian, Dad invests loads of money in science and tech start-ups. I’m sure he’d be happy to help you. Why don’t you just ask him?”

  “No.” He shakes his head vigorously. “Out of the question.”

  “I really don’t think it’d be a problem—”

  “No,” he repeats, cutting me off. “Taking money from your father for this is the one thing I can never do. And it’s not appropriate for us to discuss. Understood?”

  Before I can even nod, he’s out the door.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I can’t remember when I first heard the term “mind virus,” though it might have involved a lolcat meme of a kitten wearing a lime-rind helmet. But now I can’t stop thinking about it. Since Uncle Brian dropped the ESP bombshell on me—I have ESP? . . . I have ESP . . . I have ESP!—I feel infected. I flash on the idea more frequently than I blink.

  I’m also tired and wrecked, but sleep is impossible.

  How can someone have ESP and not know until she’s told?

  There are so many counterintuitive problems with that question that I feel like my head might explode as I try to work through them.

  At 4 a.m., I clamber out of my sloshing bed and go online.

  I don’t know what I’m looking for exactly. I think of how Dan researched the group, so I decide to start with him. He seems to be doing incredibly well on the experiments we’ve performed, and I imagine a thorough Google search should turn up some decent information. But all I get are stories about another Dan Taylor: the owner of an auto body shop who was convicted on multiple counts of insurance fraud.

  Then I search for train derailments two years ago. I quickly discover Dan’s mother’s name and start digging around on her instead. Bingo. As it turns out, Lauren Taylor had her share of “luck” over the years: both epically good—she won a lottery jackpot when “a family member” bought her a ticket for her birthday—and nightmarishly tragic. Not only did her husband die in a horrible accident, but she witnessed the aftermath of a robbery that had turned deadly.

  I click on a news interview. My boy grabbed my sunglasses from my purse and wouldn’t let them go, the newspaper quotes her as saying. “So by the time I got them out of his hands and walked into the convenience store, the gunmen had just fled through the back door. If it wasn’t for the struggle with the glasses, we would have been inside too.”

  The convenience store owner and three customers were shot dead.

  I look at the date on the article. Dan was three years old at the time.

  I start thinking about the other HEARs. I know some backstory on both Mara and Pankaj, but though I’ve seen the evidence of Alex’s talent, his past is still a mystery to me . . . I type Alex Hill, Texas into the search bar. A few unrelated results pop up, but after those there are links about and pictures of Alex as a Boy Scout. Literally, in uniform. He must have been seven or eight in the pictures, but cute and mop haired in a way that forecasts the handsome guy to come. Apparently he tried to warn several members of his troop not to canoe on the lake where they were camping. In a published report, their distraught scout leader was later quoted as saying, “If I’d just listened to him, those boys would be alive today.”

  I also discover an abandoned blog Alex kept until last year, making various calamitous predictions, such as Ten Car Pileup on the Interstate! Later, he’d post a link to a story about or a picture of the disaster if it made the news.

  I could probably keep searching their histories for hours, but I’ve learned what I need to know.

  I move on to general ESP research.

  It turns out reputable scientists have taken the field seriously since at least the 1880s. In the 1930s, J. B. Rhine, a researcher at Duke University, established the parapsychology lab there and professionalized the study with a book called Parapsychology: Frontier Science of the Mind. But perhaps not surprisingly, there are many more people on the record trying to debunk ESP and dismiss it outright. They call its supporters everything from “shamans and charlatans” to “crackpots and boobs.” Even the National Academy of Sciences has weighed in: in the 1980s they produced a book-length study called Enhancing Human Performance, which essentially writes off the entire field as bogus because none of the predictions or “proofs” could ever be replicated in a lab.

  Yet Alex knew of a specific shooting before it happened. Dan foresaw a train derailment. Mara sensed a looming environmental catastrophe. How could you possibly repeat any of those things in a lab?

  Parts of the Enhancing Human Performance report are online, so I check it out. I’m most intrigued by what I find in its preface. I tend to skip prefaces on principle—if it’s important information, you should call it chapter one and start your page numbering there. But because it’s one of the only available sections, I dig in. I learn that the report was commissioned by the US Army Research Institute.

  I know nothing should surprise me at this point. But . . . the US Army studies ESP ?

  I Google further, digging down to the website of the US Army Research Institute. It’s “under construction.” A near-blank home page tells interested parties that they can visit the institute itself in Virginia or consult its archives . . . located in Peabody Library, Henley University.

  That’s when I get a twitch. It’s less mental lightbulb than electric shock. My body convulses, just for an instant. Then it’s gone. Granted, I’m anxious and lonely and sleep deprived. But I also recognize this as something different.

  I have no idea what it’s supposed to mean or signify—if anything—but it gets my attention. And it gets me dressed.

  No doubt this archive’s convenient location has a lot to do with my great-uncle’s research, and I’ll just bet my dad knows something about it, too. I dial Dad’s cell, but it goes straight to voice mail.

  “Hi, Dad. It’s your daughter again. Call me, okay? Please call me. Like, as soon as you get this. And, um . . . just call me. Thanks.”

  It’s 5:24 a.m. when I slip out of Uncle Brian’s house and head for campus. I hurry through the empty and silent green. When I arrive at the library’s doors, I find a boy sitting off to the side, passed out drunk. At least that’s what I’m guessing from the wet stain on his T-shirt and the beer bottle sitting next to him again
st which his flip-flops lean. I never thought I’d be happy to stumble across a pasty, wasted college student, but there’s something about seeing this kid snoozing peacefully out in the open while a shooter’s at large that makes me feel protected here in this ivory tower.

  I sidestep the guy and pull the library’s door handle. Locked. I peer through the door’s window and see nothing but darkness inside. I pull again, harder this time, because I’m mad at myself for not checking library hours, but I succeed only in waking Sir Pale Ale, whose eyes pop open.

  He scrambles to his feet and puts on his flip-flops. “What time is it?” he croaks. He wipes the back of his hand against his mouth, then rubs the top of his head several times.

  I check my phone. “It’s about ten to six.”

  A look of confusion flashes across his face. “In the morning?”

  “ Yeah.”

  “Thank God,” he mutters, scratching his belly.

  “Hey, what time does this place open?”

  “Eight.”

  I chew my lip, glancing back toward Brian’s house. “Dammit.”

  “ You really need to find an answer that bad, huh?” He stretches and yawns for several seconds like a cartoon bear greeting the morning. I can see his belly protruding from under his T-shirt.

  I turn and examine the door’s lock to see if I can get in another way. I’m fairly certain I could pick it, but I imagine the door will be alarmed. When I look up at the corners of the eaves, I see the security cameras trained at the stoop.

  “Thanks anyway,” I mumble.

  I walk over to the chapel and sit on its stairs to think for a while. At least it’s getting light out. I can see a few security guards roaming the green. But when I close my eyes and turn my face in the direction of the sun, it’s like I’ve hit the sleep button on the computer. Everything spontaneously powers down.

  When my eyes open, the first thing I do is check my phone clock. It’s a few minutes before eight. I stroll back over to the library and get into the line that has already formed at the door. Flip-Flops is still there, leaning against the side of the building. He nods to me as I walk in.