Читать книгу The Outliers - Kimberly McCreight, Kimberly McCreight - Страница 13

We do as Cassie has told us. Jasper and I drive briefly north on 95, then to Route 3 and onward north on 93 for almost an hour. The lights of Boston fade out behind us quickly and soon we pass out of Massachusetts and into New Hampshire. The highway is still wide, but pitch black on either side. Jasper and I each text Cassie again, more than once, hoping she’ll tell us something. How far north on 93? What next after that? What town are you in? Anything that might get a response. Are you okay? Please, answer us. But Cassie hasn’t. Not a single time.

The only person I have heard from is my dad. He’s already sent half a dozen texts, all of which sound pretty much exactly the same as the one that just came through: Please, Wylie, tell me where you are. Please come home. I’m worried. He’s called a couple of times, too. Left a message once, though I haven’t been able to bring myself to listen to it.

Not surprisingly, my dad found the Be back soon note I left in our kitchen lacking. But he’s trying so hard not to freak out. To even act like he’s also kind of proud of me for making it outside. To be honest, I felt pretty good about it, too. For a whole twenty minutes after we pulled away from the house, I was on an actual I’m-cured high.

Now, that prison-break rush is gone, but I still feel better than I have in months. Like being in the middle of this actual emergency is exactly the cure I’ve been searching for. Or maybe it’s just harder to hear all the alarms sounding in my head now that they match reality. Because there I am, hurtling north to an unknown destination for an unknown reason to save a friend whom I love, but whom I also know cannot be trusted—and I feel calmer than I have in months.

Jasper and I don’t talk much as the miles pass except “Are you cold?” and “Can we change the station?” Pretty soon almost every alternative on Jasper’s old-school radio is static, except some talk-radio program about the evils of psychiatric drugs and teens, which under the circumstances—my circumstances—feels pretty awkward.

Luckily, it’s hard to hear much of anything anyway over the roar of Jasper’s car. Riding in the worn Jeep feels like being a stowaway in a cargo plane. Like I’m in a space not meant for passengers. And the farther north we go, the colder it gets. Soon, my toes are almost numb, despite the fact that Jasper keeps turning up the heat. As I check the time on my phone—almost eight thirty p.m.—I’m starting to worry that the cold and the noise might be a sign something is dangerously wrong with the Jeep. I peer over toward Jasper’s feet, where the sound and the wind seem to be coming from.

“There’s a hole.” Jasper points down.

“In the floor?” I ask, squeezing the door handle so hard my hand starts to throb.

“Don’t worry. It’s not dangerous or anything,” Jasper goes on. “It’s nowhere near the pedals. My brother should fix it. It’s his car. But he never thinks about anything, except getting laid and beating the shit out of people.” Jasper looks like he’s going to say something more. Instead, he half smiles. “Like me, for instance, when he realizes I took his car.”

“Oh,” I say.

“Whatever. It’s fine. He’s big, but seriously slow. I can usually outrun him. Once I didn’t.” He points to a scar next to his right eye. “Pushed me into the corner of our coffee table. Only five stiches, but the blood was insane. Luckily, my mom is a nurse, so she was pretty calm about it. She did have to replace part of the carpet afterward, though.”

“That’s terrible.” I wince. “She must have killed him.”

Jasper glances over at me. “Yeah, not so much. In my house, it’s survival of the fittest.”

This must be the “hard-knock life” Cassie told me about. “Oh,” I say again, because I have no idea what I’m supposed to say.

“Yeah, my mom only gets involved in my life if it’s going to have a direct effect on her wallet.” He smirks like he doesn’t care, but I can tell he does. “She’s got high hopes about my future as a human ATM.”

“That sucks.” And it does.

“Yeah,” Jasper says quietly. “There are worse things, I guess.”

My phone buzzes in my hand again then. Wylie, please don’t do this. Answer me. Right now.

“Cassie?” Jasper asks hopefully.

I shake my head. “My dad again.”

“Is he pissed?”

“Worried, I think mostly.”

“That’s nice,” he says, like my dad being worried is proof that I’ve got it so much better.

“Yeah, I guess,” I say, staring down at my phone. And maybe it should feel nice, but it doesn’t. Probably because the more texts he sends, the more it feels like it’s about him getting me to do what he wants instead of how much he loves me.

Jasper holds up a hand. “Sorry, I hate when people say that kind of crap to me. ‘Your mom loves you, I’m sure. She’s your mother.’” And now he sounds pissed—a little bit like a guy who could punch somebody in the face. “My mom is living proof that life is full of messed-up options.” He shakes his head. Shrugs. “Maybe your dad’s an asshole. How would I know?”

I don’t feel like I know either. But I do think the time has come that I answer, tell my dad something that will calm him down.

We heard from Cassie. She’s totally okay. She just got mixed up in something and needs us to come get her. We’ll be back soon! Xoxo

I hit send, staring at my totally unconvincing x’s and o’s. Even the exclamation point was overkill. But it’s not a lie. Not completely.

NO, comes my dad’s response almost instantly. You should NOT be doing that. Tell Karen where she is NOW and she will go get her.

“He wants me to tell Karen where Cassie is,” I say, staring at his all caps, which are digging under my skin.

“You think we should tell him?” Jasper asks. I can’t tell if he sounds judgmental or I’m just hearing it that way.

“And you don’t?” I ask. Because the truth is I’m not sure what I think. It does feel vaguely insane that this—of all situations—is when I suddenly decide to do what Cassie wants, the way I used to. But then again, me feeling worried about something isn’t actually a very good indication of whether it’s the right course of action.

“Technically, we don’t know where she is yet,” Jasper says. “Can’t we wait? See what she says next? You could pretend you didn’t see his message yet or something.”

“Lie.”

“Buying us some time to think, I’d call it. But sure, lie is another word for it,” he says, like I’m the jerk. “I’m okay with a little misdirection, as long as he’s not a cop or something.”

My stomach pulls tight. Why is Jasper worried about cops? “No, he’s a scientist. Why?”

“I dated this girl once and her dad was a probation officer,” he says. “I didn’t find out until after he caught us together. He had one of his friends lock me up in a holding cell overnight.” He shakes his head and almost laughs. “She and I were both kids. It’s not like it was a crime or something. But man did her dad scare the crap out of me. I didn’t go near another girl for weeks.”

I stare at the side of Jasper’s face. Does he actually think his girlfriend’s best friend is going to enjoy hearing about his sexcapades?

“Anyway.” He clears his throat and looks confused when I keep scowling at him. “What kind of scientist is your dad?”

I put my phone facedown on my lap, trying to pretend I’m actually interested in this conversation instead of just buying myself time before I answer my dad’s text like Jasper suggested. But it does feel like the best I can do for Cassie is wait to find out what’s going on before I decide to rat her out.

“Live Conversation and Emotional Perception: Implications for the Integrative Approach to Emotional Intelligence,” I say, repeating the title of my dad’s study, trying to make it sound like something Jasper would never understand.

“Right,” Jasper says with a thoughtful frown. “I mean—I don’t have any idea what integrative whatever emotional perception is. Am I supposed to?”

I shrug. “I wouldn’t if my dad didn’t talk about it nonstop. He set up this test to look at this one small part of ‘perception,’ which is this one small part of this one approach to emotional intelligence—that’s the ‘integrative’ part. Anyway, my dad started studying emotional intelligence, which is basically like IQ but for feelings, after he met my mom and got totally convinced she was psychic because she always knew what he was thinking. I think she was the only person who ever really understood him.”

I was passing through the foyer on my way upstairs to bed when I spotted the green flyer on the floor. It was in front of the mail slot, tucked under yet another Wok & Roll menu.

The Collective, it read in big black letters across the top, and beneath it the details of some kind of lecture: The Spirituality of Science, Seven p.m., December 18! Explore the intersection between freedom, faith, and science.

“Huh,” my mom said, appearing behind me and reading over my shoulder. She twisted her wavy hair into a knot at her neck. “Life in a college town—the good, the bad, the vaguely fanatical. Sometimes I love it, and sometimes I wish the flyers were all about garage sales.”

She was trying to make like the flyer just happened to have been slipped under our door. She did the same thing the time I met her at work and someone had stuck a collage of the Middle East under her windshield wiper. It had a skull and crossbones over it.

“Is this about your story?” I asked, thinking, of course, about the baby dolls. Almost a month and a half after the first one, another had been delivered three separate times.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” she said, like the possibility had honestly not occurred to her.

“And what’s ‘The Spirituality of Science’?”

“Who knows?” she said, a hint of humor back in her voice as she wrapped an arm around my shoulders and squeezed. “More proof it’s a free country. And thank God for that.”

“And so it’s nothing to worry about?”

“No, definitely not. It’s just more proof that you cannot control the world,” she said, taking the flyer from my hands. She folded it crisply into a small, sharp square and slipped it into her back pocket, then kissed the top of my head. “Luckily, you don’t need to. Now, your dad didn’t see the flyer, did he?”

I shook my head.

“Then let’s not tell him,” she said. “After the baby dolls and Dr. Caton’s plummet from Mount Olympus”—she rolled her eyes—“I think his head might explode from even something as innocuous as this.”

“Why did Dad fire him anyway?” I wasn’t as curious about Dr. Caton’s fall from grace as Gideon, but the whole thing had seemed so weird and out of the blue and dramatic when it had happened a couple of months earlier, especially for my dad, Captain No Emotion. And my dad had still refused to talk about it.

“Dr. Caton was so used to getting his own way, he wouldn’t listen to your dad, who is not only a very gifted scientist and a very smart person, but also his boss,” my mom said. “I’m sure it’s hard to be well adjusted when you graduate high school at fifteen. From what your dad’s told me, Dr. Caton also came from an extremely wealthy family, who didn’t exactly take the time to socialize him down to size. Always getting what you want can make people extremely shortsighted. Which just makes me more glad that we’ve kept Gideon with his peer group.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call Gideon socialized.”

“Well, we are trying.” My mom laughed. “The point is sometimes it’s not what you believe that’s the problem, it’s how you believe it.”

“Break it down for me, then,” Jasper says, startling me back to the Jeep and the dark with his pseudo-surfer-boy twang. It reminds me of all the reasons I don’t like him.

“Break what down for you?”

“Your dad’s stuff.”

“His ‘stuff’?”

“Yeah, his research. We’ve got time. And I actually like science—you know, the dumb-jock version.” Now Jasper is mocking me. He thinks that’s why I don’t like him, because he’s a “jock”? I stare hard at the side of his face until he holds up a hand. “Too soon for jokes, I see that now.”

I don’t feel like talking about my dad’s work, but if I don’t distract myself, who knows where my mind will wander. Conversation about anything is a good thing. And my dad’s study is for sure a lot safer topic than Cassie and Jasper’s relationship.

“He’s done lots of studies about EI, but in this one he wanted to prove that with the part of emotional intelligence that is reading other people’s feelings, ‘perception,’ some people do it not just by looking at people’s faces or listening to their voices—which is how most people do it.”

He shrugs. “I wouldn’t say I’m exactly badass in that department. But I get that it’s a thing some people can do.”

“It’s like this tiny sub-thing in EI, not exactly something the world is holding their breath waiting to find out. Anyway, my dad ran his test trying to see if people could read feelings differently or better, I guess, if they were watching a live conversation between two other people instead of by looking at pictures of people’s faces, which is how they usually test it.”

“And?” Jasper asks, like he’s waiting for the big reveal that the study showed something amazing. He’s going to be disappointed, just like my dad.

“It’s not that exciting,” I say. “He learned some small things. But it’s not like he cured cancer or something.”

“Ouch,” Jasper says. “Way to take a man down at the knees.”

And he’s right. That was harsh. But that is the way I feel: annoyed. More than I realized. Even if he didn’t know it at the time—couldn’t have—my dad wasted the little time he had left with my mom. Instead of being with her and being happy, he was obsessed with yet another stupid study that no one is ever going to care about. And now she’s gone. And now, no matter what he does, he can never make up that lost time to her. Or us.

I shrug. “It’s important to him, I guess.” I can feel Jasper still staring at me, and I want him to stop. I want to change the subject before I start bawling my face off. “I just wish other things had been as important.”

My phone vibrates again in my hand then. I brace myself for another message from my dad. But it’s Cassie, finally. Take Exit 39C off 93. Onto Route 203. More soon.

My heart picks up speed as I type a response. Are you okay?? What’s going on?

Can’t talk now. Not safe. It’s an answer, at least. Just not the one I was hoping for.

“What is it?” Jasper asks.

“She wants us to get off at Exit 39C.” I check the GPS on my phone. “It’s about forty minutes away.”

“And that’s it? She didn’t tell you anything else?” That anger is back in his voice. He’s not shouting or anything, but it’s there. Beneath the surface. Makes me wonder how deep it goes.