LIANA: (laughing) You’re probably right.
•••
The last thing I expected was an e-mail from Chiara. With the way we’d left things, I figured she’d need to cool down. I’d apologize, of course.
The e-mail’s subject line was “He Was Just Here a Second Ago.”
It had no content but had a Word attachment.
•••
HE WAS JUST HERE A SECOND AGO
A novel
By Chiara Lemmy
•••
I checked the bar at the bottom of the file. It was 55,879 words.
•••
I Googled the consciousness studies guy. The university page came up with a faculty directory. I stared at the Contact button for a good long while, then clicked. A form popped up.
•••
Name:
Kaylee Novell
Subject:
Telekinetic Powers
MESSAGE:
I’m writing because I’m Crystal Bryar’s daughter and I know you’ve been interviewed for the podcast about her.
I was wondering if you have any sense from your research as to whether TK can be passed down genetically. Does it run in families?
•••
I entered my e-mail address in a contact field and hit Send, then sat there, as if waiting for an immediate reply, for too long.
•••
I played hooky for two more days, sat in various parking lots around town for unsuspicious amounts of time, and watched tutorials and movies about TK on my phone.
I re-listened to the podcast so far, and I listened to the interview with the TK tutorial guy.
I hung a small stuffed Yoda toy that I bought in a 7-Eleven from my rearview mirror and imagined him coaching me.
Trust yourself, you must.
Prove this, you will.
If the Force was strong in me, it was high time I found out.
I found remote hills in local parks, remote patches of local beach, and tried to get stones and shells to move for me.
•••
I dreamed about Jack almost every night. So much so that I started losing track of what was imagined in sleep and what was real.
No, I had to remind myself, he was not eaten by a zombie dog.
Yes, on the other hand, he had always loved apple juice.
I dreamed I killed him.
It didn’t mean it was true.
•••
I dreamed about prom. Buckets of blood and fire that flies. I thought about shaving my head like Eleven.
•••
I dreamed about Aiden, too.
We were kissing and more.
When I woke up I felt funny.
•••
•••
Just watch me.
•••
My mother said, “You can’t stop going to school.”
•••
Just watch me.
•••
But she must have suspected what I was up to because on Thursday she drove me there and marched me into the main office with a note of some kind. I couldn’t imagine what possible excuse she’d come up with and I didn’t care.
I survived mostly by keeping my mouth shut, making myself small.
I watched Chiara present her book review of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou in class and get berated for not choosing something from the list. I watched her threaten to file official complaints of sexism if she didn’t receive full credit.
•••
I saw Aiden but ducked around a corner to avoid him.
What about him? Could I ignore him forever?
•••
I overheard:
“I can’t believe prom is tomorrow!”
“I can’t believe she killed her own brother.”
“Did you hear about how a bunch of the softball team’s gloves were cut up to pieces? She must have done that since they benched her.”
“I think she’s making it all up.”
“I think he’s still in love with her.”
•••
I didn’t know what to make of any of it.
The only person I actually spoke to was Bennett.
“We still on for tomorrow?” I asked.
“The big TK experiment?”
“That’s the one.”
“Yes, definitely.”
•••
Finally, something more than sure.
“YOU READY?” BENNETT ASKED.
“Ready.” I settled cross-legged on the floor of his room on Friday with the ninja on a game board in front of me.
I closed my eyes and held out my hands, not caring if I looked crazy. This was going to be it.
The first and last time I gave it everything.
And the absolute last time I would test myself for powers.
Opening my eyes, I set my sights on the ninja toy. I willed it to move. I rocked and hummed, I don’t even know why. I focused. I drifted. I forgot where I was and who I was with and why. I heard a whisper, and it sounded like Jack, and it said, Pretty please. With sugar on top.
I followed the whisper into some place far inside of me where memories lived. I saw a gust of wind blow a ball out of Jack’s hands.
•••
I felt a sort of gasp in my head and opened my eyes again, not realizing they’d been closed. “Did it move?”
“I don’t think so, no.”
•••
I went deeper into myself, toward Jack and the whisper and saw black behind my eyes and something—some particle or light moving—and I felt my bones on the floor and my breath leaving my body and into the ninja. “How about then?”
“No, sorry.”
I sighed, and looked at Bennett.
He gave me a look of sympathetic disappointment. “Maybe it’s the ninja. What if it was something that was, you know, yours.”
“Yes,” I said. “Good idea.”
I went to my purse to look for something and found the earrings I’d bought for the spoon-bending party, but had forgotten to wear. They were barely there hoops made of lightweight faux silver.
I put one down on the black side of the game board.
•••
What if there were things in life that, no matter how badly you wanted them—this college, that boy, this kind of hair, that kind of body, this amount of popularity, that trophy, this vacation, that friend—you were never going to have?
What if admitting that was the hardest thing you ever had to do?
What if life was all about letting go?
•••
“I’m sorry,” Bennett said, after I’d tried everything I had in me to try. “I really wanted you to be able to do something. Anything.”
“Me, too,” I said. “Sort of. But I mean, it’s also good news.”
“It is?”
“I’m pretty sure I didn’t kill my brother.”
“I guess that is good news, yes,” he said, then shyness passed through his features and he said, “I’m sorry I was kind of a dick.”
“I’m sure it won’t be the last time,” I said, then added, “Sorry. I don’t know why I said that.”
He scratched his head. “This might sound dumb, but would you want to go to the thing tonight? I have tickets and I feel sort of losery not going.”
Ohmygod.
He was asking me to prom.
Bennett Freaking Laurie was asking me to prom.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“As friends,” he said, like that wasn’t obvious.
I shook my head and smiled. It was all so bizarre how things had turned out. “I don’t know . . .”
He shrugged a shoulder. “You have better things to do?”
•••
What if you got the very thing you wanted in a way you never imagined?
What if it was better that way even though you never could have thought it possible?
What if the person w
ho’d wanted that other thing was gone—poof?
What if she’d been replaced by someone more real? Someone less needy. Someone solid, unbending and true.
•••
I didn’t have much time to get ready. I burst into the house and went upstairs and past my parents’ bedroom, where my mom was on the phone—“. . . something about how she had him over a barrel,” then she saw me and said, “I’ve got to go.”
“Everything okay?” I said.
“Everything’s fine,” she said. “I thought you said you’d be out all afternoon. What’s up?”
“I’m going to the junior prom thing. Tonight. But I didn’t know I was going, so I don’t have anything to wear.”
She smiled and went to her closet and pulled out something the color of steel in a clear plastic garment bag.
“What is that?” I said.
She started to pull off the plastic. “I saw it the other day and it was your size and it was on sale and it was the last one, so I bought it. Just in case. I don’t know. It seemed somehow . . . you.”
She pulled the plastic away and turned the dress to face me. I stepped closer to feel its silky smoothness. “I love it.”
“Well.” She went for the zipper. “Try it on.”
•••
The dress was a spoon and I was a spoon and we were stacked in a drawer.
•••
“Thanks Mom,” I said, looking in the mirror on the back of my bedroom door. “You didn’t happen to also buy shoes, did you?”
“As a matter of fact . . .” She was back with a box a few minutes later.
“Who are you going with?” she asked.
•••
What if it didn’t matter?
•••
Before I went downstairs to wait for Bennett, I took the dry Paris snow globe out of the box they were all still in. And I thought about Aiden, and how mad I was at him for abandoning me, and how maybe if I channeled all of that into moving one tiny flake over one tiny Eiffel Tower, it would be real. Because the hurt of his abandonment felt strong enough, physical enough, that it seemed like if I could tap into that, harness that pain, I could do anything, even defy the laws of physics.
But Paris sat there, perfectly still.
And the AC cycled off and left the room quiet enough that I was able to hear in my own heart that it had been Kathryn Barlett-Austin who’d said “I think he’s still in love with her” in the bathroom that day, and it had never been Bennett I was supposed to see Paris and the world with.
A HUGE BANNER HUNG ACROSS the stage. It read: Tonight, We Are Young. If that was the theme, I didn’t get it.
The music was too loud and too ’80s. I stood next to Bennett by a table with a punch bowl and cheese and crackers.
“Oh my god, she came,” someone said.
“Freak,” someone else said.
“What is she doing here?” a girl said. “Did she actually find a date?”
I turned and gave her a meaningful glare and she got uncomfortable and hooked her friend’s arm and walked off. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get away from her. She creeps me out.”
“They want to believe it,” Bennett said. “As much as they don’t want to.”
“I know that feeling,” I said.
“Yeah, me, too,” he said. Then after a minute, he said, “You want to, like, dance?”
“Not really,” I said. Not with him, at least.
He looked relieved.
I said, “You can go talk to people or whatever. I’m good.”
“You sure?”
I saw Aiden across the room. I nodded. “I’m sure.”
My feet wouldn’t move. So I stood there for a moment, closed my eyes, and took a deep breath. I tried to feel my toes. It was easy. My shoes were too small or too pointy or too new.
•••
The banner over the stage started to fall about an hour into the dance. Right as I was standing under it. I had to move so as not to get hit. The whole thing seemed to happen in slow motion—the paper curling onto itself, everyone backing away wondering where it would land.
Only after it had ripped in half, leaving “Tonight, We Are” dangling from the wall above the stage, did I realize that people were staring at me. As if I’d done it. Like that was the best I could do?
Chiara walked over to me. “You came.”
“Yep.”
“With Bennett?”
“Stranger things have happened,” I said.
“That’s usually a cliché, right? Usually not true. But in this case”—she smiled—“absolutely true.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t support you with the whole novel thing. I should have.”
“Yes, you should have. I mean, I was ready to believe you had like telekinetic powers and you didn’t think I could write a novel? I get enough of that in class, where all the guys think they’re going to be the next Franzen or whatever, even though they never sit down to write more than two paragraphs. You’re supposed to be my best friend.”
“I know,” I said. “I am. I want to be.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Since you’re my best friend I have to ask you, is someone planning on dumping a bucket of blood on my head?”
She smiled. “Nobody thought you’d show.”
•••
Aiden appeared. “Can I have this dance?”
I heard echoes from Carrie. They’re going to laugh at me. I saw fireballs behind my eyes, imagined horrified screams.
“Where’s Kathryn?” I said.
“She doesn’t mind.”
“You asked her permission?”
He took my hand and led me out to the dance floor, then turned and pulled me into his arms, like in a movie but a different one from Carrie.
And just like that he wasn’t my friend Aiden anymore. He wasn’t LEGO anymore. He’d softened. Or my view of him had. I saw his curves now along with his edges. I saw the way his bones poked out of his shirt, the way his hair caught the light. He was a mystery I wanted to solve.
But it was too late.
“My mother told me she knocked the snow globe off the shelf the other day when dusting. Explains the leak.”
“Good to know,” he said, then we were quiet for a while, swaying to the music, every nerve ending awakening.
Then I said, “I just spent hours trying to get proof that I have powers on video and nothing happened. I’m not sure how to feel. I mean, maybe I’ve always known that none of it was real? But I’m also, I don’t know, disappointed somehow.”
“I want to tell you something,” he said, after a minute.
I looked up at him.
“You’re not special.” He stopped moving, got completely still, and the room around him appeared fuzzy. “You’re totally ordinary like the rest of us. You’re not cursed or touched or weird or broken. No more than anyone else.”
I nodded and started to cry and looked away.
“You’re not special.” He waited for me to look back. “You have to stop believing that you are. Stop letting people, least of all people like Crystal, fool you into thinking you are.”
I sniffled and nodded again and it felt like there was some kind of popping inside my head, some force bursting this haze that had clouded everything that had been happening with Crystal and the podcast and me. Crystal had been a manipulator her whole life; she still was. “It must have been some kind of trick she pulled,” I said. “Another hoax.”
“That’s more like it.” Aiden squeezed my hand twice in affirmation.
The dance floor lights were dazzling, like neon snow, and I wondered for a second whether Crystal had ever been in love, or thought she was.
“The guard must have been in on it,” I said.
Aiden nodded and said, “Now you’re talking.”
•••
What if I could prove it?
•••
The theme song we’d all voted on played, and even though I’d voted fo
r it and had loved it, it felt sort of silly now, so overblown with false import. Like it didn’t know it was just a song.
“I’m gonna head out.” Bennett had his car keys in his hand. “You want a ride?”
•••
I slipped out of my dress and hung it on the hook on the back of my closet door. I wondered if I’d ever wear it again and, if not, that seemed sort of sad and wasteful.
I sat down at my desk in my underwear. I could still feel the warmth of Aiden’s hand on mine.
I opened the top drawer and took out the letter that granted me approval to visit, scanned until I found what I was looking for: Crystal’s e-mail address in the fine print at the bottom.
I woke up my laptop.
•••
Dear Crystal,
I figured out what you’re up to. I know the guard was in on it. I’m going to prove it.
Kaylee
•••
That quickly, I had a new e-mail and I thought maybe my message to Crystal had bounced. But no.
•••
Well, hello Kaylee.
What a pleasure to hear from you. I’ve been following the podcast with interest, of course, eager to hear my own contribution but more eager, really, for yours. If I were closer I’d suggest we meet face to face, as I take it from your note that you suspect that you might have some kind of telekinetic ability.
But since a meeting seems unlikely, I will say only this: the world is full of people who believe things that aren’t true.
I have done studies where people were presented with factual evidence that runs against their beliefs and yet they held tight to those beliefs unwaveringly. Global-warming deniers. Anti-vaxxers. Birthers. Newtown-never-happened types. No amount of evidence will convince them to rethink their beliefs. They cling to untruths as truths.
Most people I encounter don’t believe in telekinesis and don’t want to. And any evidence the scientific community has offered up over the years has done nothing to change that.
This leaves me and my intellectual pursuits—and you, as well—in a bit of a pickle. Fortunately for me, I like pickles. The sourer, the better.
I have not studied the potential genetic aspect of TK, so I can’t speak directly to your question, but I’d be eager to hear from you again as you continue to study your own consciousness. You are the only one who can ever truly know what you’re capable of. Or not.
The Possible Page 15
