The Possible

by Tara Altebrando

  She still didn’t say anything.

  “With my mind?”

  She shook off her silence. “I don’t know what I think. You just told me you think you might actually have powers. You said, and I quote, ‘I am the proof.’”

  “I’d hardly use my powers to kill my brother.”

  “Mom?” Her daughter looked scared now.

  Liana ignored her. “Well, I’m airing it. It’s part of the story.”

  “You can’t.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “But I am.”

  Her phone rang and she said, “I have to take this.”

  “But Mooom,” her daughter groaned.

  I wasn’t sure what else to do, so I sat there and made small talk with Liana’s daughter and waited for her to come back. When she did she said, “You’ll never believe who that was.”

  “Who?”

  “A woman who claims she’s the friend Crystal had that big break with right before the telekinesis started.”

  “And?”

  “And I don’t know yet, but she wants to talk.”

  “Mooom,” the girl whined. “You said it’d be fast. We’ve been here forever.”

  “Yes,” Liana said, and she picked up her coffee cup. “We’re going right now.”

  •••

  She e-mailed me later:

  You’re right. I should have told you. Here’s a sneak peek.

  I clicked to listen.

  An incredibly interesting and, well, tragic, figure in this whole story is Crystal’s daughter, Kaylee.

  Kaylee is now seventeen years old and lives in a nice house in a small town about an hour north of New York City, where she has been raised from the age of four by a perfectly normal and well-intentioned couple. She has good friends, gets excellent grades, plays softball, and has the sort of life that anyone would wish for their child if they had to give that child up for adoption.

  However, when you meet Kaylee, you see that there is an edge to her. She is, perhaps, quick to judge. Like she has this elaborate sort of categorization of people in her school, like crazy nicknames for certain clicks. Swifties, Rachels. Big Bangers, the Triplets of Belleville. It goes on. And sure some of the names are kind of funny—Princess Bubblegum for one—but they’re also sort of, well, mean.

  She has an almost stunted-in-childhood sense of what is right and wrong, and you sense, when you ask her about her past, that she is hiding something, perhaps hiding how skilled she is at disguising the wounds she carries with her from her past.

  She will tell you about how she dreams about Jack, and how her mother killed him. She’ll talk about it all in a casual, clinical way, almost as if she’s discussing things that took place in a book she read and not in her own life. She didn’t seem that interested in ever meeting Crystal until I knocked on her door, a fact that has made me wonder whether it’s because she has some deeper sense of the truth of Crystal’s claims.

  When I met Kaylee, pretty much the first thing I asked her was whether she had telekinetic powers.

  Hold that thought for a second. Here’s a random sampling of me asking teenagers like Kaylee if they have telekinetic powers.

  No.

  Of course not.

  What? No.

  (laughter) No.

  When I asked Kaylee, she studied me for a second and said, “Do you?”

  She agreed to an interview, in spite of her parents’ very obvious wish that she not get involved with me and my pesky podcast. But she only agreed to talk to me if I helped her arrange a trip to visit Crystal.

  Here’s how part of that interview went down.

  •••

  I didn’t have to listen to our conversation in the studio to remember how it went, and anyway she hadn’t sent it. She’d sent another clip in a separate e-mail.

  •••

  LIANA: What’s Kaylee like? How do you guys know each other?

  CHIARA: She’s my best friend. Has been since we were in like fifth grade.

  Oh, Chiara. What have you done?

  LIANA: And she never told you about Crystal until last month?

  CHIARA: Never. I seriously couldn’t believe it . . . but then I could.

  LIANA: What do you mean?

  CHIARA: There’s something different about her. Something I can’t quite name, but I don’t know. It makes sense to me now that she has this sort of dark past that she carries with her.

  LIANA: Why? Why does it make sense?

  CHIARA: I don’t know. I mean, we’ve always done normal kid stuff, like play with Ouija boards and try to guess numbers the other one is thinking of and stuff. But she could, I don’t know . . . She could almost convince you some of it was real. Like one time I remember she told me this statue she had was haunted by the ghost of a Salem witch or something. She admitted later that she was pulling my leg, but I mean, that’s weird, right? Who thinks of stuff like that? And one time, she made a joke about this other girl at school tripping and then the girl tripped and I mean, I don’t know. I just never forgot about all that.

  Thanks, bestie. Thanks a lot.

  •••

  Another clip.

  I asked Kaylee again, more recently, if she herself had telekinetic powers.

  Her answer that time? Of course not.

  And yet, if you ask some of her classmates, well, the answers become a little bit different . . .

  (Background chatter)

  BENNETT: I asked her to roll a pair of sixes on a pair of dice once, and she did it like no problem.

  GIRL: No one should be that good at pitching. I mean, the stuff she gets a ball to do, it’s bonkers.

  AUBREY: She came to see me in the hospital after a tree branch fell on me. She was into this guy I was going out with. She seemed, I don’t know, guilty about something. I had a concussion and a fractured rib. She told me I was lucky it hadn’t been worse.

  AIDEN: She has this long list of weird things that happened to her.

  Et tu, Aiden? WTF?

  •••

  I called Chiara.

  “You talked to Liana about me?”

  “Wait. What? What did she say?”

  “She sent me part of my episode. Did you know there was a whole one about me? Airing tomorrow?”

  “Of course not.”

  “You shouldn’t have talked to her.”

  “I thought I was helping. I shouldn’t have—”

  “Wait, is this what your novel is about? About all this? About me?”

  She breathed loudly and said, “Not everything is about you, Kaylee,” and hung up.

  •••

  I drove to Aiden’s house and thought about pounding on the door, but what if his mother answered? I texted him that I was outside, and he came out and got into the car.

  “You talked to Liana about me?”

  He seemed surprised that I knew. “I got ambushed, yeah, but I didn’t say anything bad.”

  “You said weird stuff happens to me!”

  “I said that weird stuff happens to everybody sometimes. And that it’s foolish to imagine that it’s more than chance.”

  “That’s not how she’s using it! Crystal’s accusing me of killing Jack, and now Liana has all these people saying there’s something weird and dark about me.”

  “You’re the one who’s been saying that!”

  “It’s different!”

  “You can’t have it both ways, Kaylee.”

  “Can’t have what both ways?”

  “Everything! You can’t be two things at the same time and you can’t treat everyone like . . .” He trailed off.

  “Like what?”

  “Like their whole existence is based on your needs and what you want them to be. You only see what you want to see, and then you’re like la-la-la about what you don’t want to accept.”

  “Oh my god, is this still because I wanted to go to prom with Bennett and not you?”

  He put his hands to his head like it hurt. “You know what, Kaylee? I nee
d a break.”

  “From what?”

  “Time to not be around you. A break from this friends thing.”

  “‘Friends thing’?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Panic rose in me. Not now, not Aiden. “Please don’t do this.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll feel different when all of this Crystal stuff calms down.”

  “This stuff doesn’t have anything to do with us.” I felt tears. “You’re my best friend.”

  “Not right now, I’m not. I can’t be.”

  •••

  What if you’d been right to basically never trust anyone? What if the second you started letting people in, they hurt you? What if you should have expected that but somehow didn’t?

  What if you’d never learned what trust was? Or how to figure out who was worthy of it? What if the very last person you’d ever thought to trust was yourself—because you were used to being left, tossed aside?

  What if you were so used to that that you’d started doing it to yourself, leaving pieces of you behind like roadkill on a highway to nowhere?

  •••

  •••

  What if you decided it was time to turn around, to return to the side of the road, the scene of the crime, clean it all up and start over, maybe set out in a different direction entirely? What if you’d actually been in the driver’s seat the whole time, only hadn’t realized it?

  •••

  •••

  At midnight I refreshed the website. The episode called “Kaylee” went live.

  •••

  What if the world was about to learn my secret?

  How I’d always suspected there was something special, but wrong, about me, something different, something bad.

  And how now Crystal was confirming it with her new theory.

  She hadn’t killed Jack.

  But maybe I had?

  It was a question that, once asked, could not be unasked.

  What if I had?

  What if I had been lying to everyone about what I knew or didn’t know about myself?

  What if Crystal was . . . right?

  I PRETENDED EVERYTHING WAS FINE the next morning, trusting that my parents hadn’t listened.

  I got ready for school, acted chipper over cereal, then got in the car and drove to the club, pulled into the parking lot, and shut my eyes. The front gate was padlocked. The club wouldn’t open on weekdays for another couple of weeks.

  Why would Liana throw me under the bus?

  Why would my friends help her?

  I sat there long enough to be sure that my parents would both have left for work, then I went home and out to the granny pod.

  I needed to sleep.

  So that I could think straight.

  So that I could come up with a plan, a destination.

  •••

  From: Coach Stacey

  We need to talk. Head of the league called. Sounded annoyed by podcast situation. Talked suspension. Call me. Where are you?

  Coach Stacey

  •••

  Liana left messages, sent texts, and e-mailed, as if not realizing how completely redundant it all was, since everything came to my phone.

  I ignored her all three ways.

  •••

  The door opened a few hours later.

  My mother—holding a cardboard box—was as surprised to see me as I was to see her.

  “Why aren’t you in school?” she said.

  “I’m not sure they let accused murderers go to school.”

  “What are you talking about?” She handed me the box—it was heavier than I thought it would be—and I took it and put it down on the floor.

  “The podcast today. It’s about me. And about how Crystal thinks I was the one who killed Jack.”

  “That’s it, we’re calling a lawyer,” my mother said firmly. “She can’t go around saying stuff like that.”

  “I signed something that waived my rights, I think.”

  She was about to say something, then stopped herself forcibly. She said, instead, “Surprise! Grandma’s moving in!”

  “What? Now?”

  “Now or never!” my grandmother said as she appeared holding three purses. “That’s what your mother told me. Now or never.”

  My mother said to come help with the rest of the boxes, so I did. Then she emptied one and handed it to me and said, “For your snow globes.”

  So as they unpacked Grandma’s clothes, I packed up Belize and Chicago and Disney and Paris, which had lost all its water now. I shook it and the snow inside clicked like sea salt.

  “That’s my fault,” my mother said to me.

  “What’s your fault?”

  “Paris. I was dusting. I knocked it off the shelf. I thought it was fine, but I guess not. Quel dommage!”

  “Oh,” I said.

  •••

  What if I was . . . disappointed?

  •••

  When I went to take the box up to the house she said, “You need to go to school.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I will.”

  •••

  I drove to school but I couldn’t bring myself to get out of the car. So I sat there until dismissal so that I could drive home and make it official feeling.

  I watched all my classmates burst out the front doors like confetti from a popper, dispersing and scattering to the wind, full of excitement. I spotted Bennett among the scatter and tracked his path, then started my car and followed him in his.

  He, at least, had seemed open to believing.

  I followed him home and parked right behind him in front of his house and got out, feeling like a crazy person.

  “What are you doing here?” he said, not coming toward me.

  “Did you think I really did it? That I rolled those sixes intentionally?”

  “I think we as humans are capable of things we don’t fully understand, so maybe you did, yes.”

  “Did you listen? Do you think I could have done that? Killed my brother?”

  “I honestly have no idea.”

  “What happened?” I said with some force.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, us?”

  “I don’t know. I just wasn’t feeling it, you know? You seemed to want it so badly I thought maybe I wasn’t seeing it. But in the end, I still wasn’t seeing it.”

  “You were kind of a jerk about it. You bailed on me when we had plans. That party was a big deal.”

  He stared at the ground.

  “Anyway,” I said. “I think I want to, I don’t know, try the whole TK thing. One more time. With everything I have. And I want there to be someone there who can witness anything that happens. I don’t know who else to ask who maybe gets it and might believe. I want you to take video. You up for it?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sure. Like now, you mean?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not ready yet. Friday?”

  “Sure. Actually I have something you might want. I picked it up on eBay a couple of weeks ago. Before . . . well. Can you wait?”

  I nodded.

  He went inside and came out with a copy of The Force, the book that had been written about Crystal. “You can have it if you want.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Thanks.”

  •••

  I went home and started reading, looking for some kind of guidance, I guess. Some small clue that would mean something to me, that would help me somehow control the world around me in the ways I suspected I could. But it was mostly a poorly written account of everything I already knew.

  There was a paragraph about Will Hannity. He described what it felt like to be in the house, in the room with Crystal when she was fourteen. How there were a lot of reporters there who didn’t know what to make of her and her flirtations. “I mean, we’re talking jailbait, right? Everybody wanted to get the story and get out of there.”

  Another name—Charles Abel—popped out as familiar in a passa
ge about the general unwillingness of people to accept TK as real. It was the professor of consciousness studies Liana had interviewed for the podcast.

  I went back to the first clips Liana had sent, realizing I’d never finished listening to that one interview—and it hadn’t aired as part of the podcast yet.

  I hit Play:

  •••

  MAN: Listen. If you ask a professional baseball player to hit a home run, is he able to do it all the time? Of course not. Does that mean he doesn’t have special home run–hitting abilities? No.

  LIANA: I’m speaking with Charles Abel, a consciousness studies professor from the University of Arizona at Tucson. You may be be wondering, like I am, what consciousness studies is. So, Professor Abel. What is it?”

  ABEL: It’s the study of the mind and its perceptions of the world and of itself. It encompasses a host of disciplines, like psychology, of course, but more than that it is the study of the big questions of human existence. What factors form our sense of self? We allow for investigations into anomalies of consciousness, of course. Can certain healers perceive disease in patients? Can certain minds predict future events? All that kind of stuff.

  LIANA: So, and don’t take this the wrong way . . . but it sounds like it’s a field that’s not especially well respected as a serious academic field.

  ABEL: Listen, I don’t have time to waste on that kind of thinking, you know? I’m here. I’m doing the work. I’m trying to unlock amazing aspects of the very nature of human existence. What’s more serious than that?

  LIANA: Have you ever found proof of telekinetic phenomena?

  ABEL: Back to baseball. We’ve done studies that show that people have the same average in attempts to control the outcome of dice as the batting averages of some highly respected athletes.

  LIANA: Isn’t that like comparing apples and oranges?

  ABEL: It’s people trying to control a ball and people trying to control dice.

  LIANA: I’m really trying. But I’m not seeing how . . .

  ABEL: Well, this is why our field of study runs up against such skepticism. There is, shall we say, a prevalent failure of the imagination in our culture. And in the case of Crystal . . . the idea that a teenage girl could do this? People thought they wanted to believe it, but they really didn’t. Because the idea of that would be terrifying. I mean, if Crystal had proved to be a real-life Carrie—I have a feeling there would have been a lot of fear and an awful lot of canceled proms that year.