We step out into the hall. Christina excuses herself and disappears into another doorway.
Richard asks how I’m feeling.
I’m just about to tell him that I feel fine when I realize that that isn’t exactly true.
I don’t feel bad.
As matter of fact I’m feeling good, but I’m also feeling really weird. I turn around to face him because he’s a little behind me, but as I turn, I startle myself because I feel like there’s more of me turning than there is of me. It’s like my body has extra rooms somewhere—little hidden places that I can’t see are taking up space and making me bigger than I’m supposed to be.
“I don’t know,” I tell him. “A little weird, honestly.”
Paul grabs me by the arm, starts to pull me down the hall. “Come with me.”
My balance is funny right now, so I stumble a bit as he pulls me. “Where are we going?”
“Glide rooms,” he says. “Gonna show you how it works.”
Richard follows us down the stairs and into the common room, where Paul drags me to a second hallway that leads off to the opposite side of the dorms.
We stop in front of a door. Next to it is a picture of a Ghostbusters-style cartoon Locust holding a knife and fork over the Earth with a big red circle around it and a slash through it. “THE KITCHEN IS CLOSED” is written in block letters underneath.
I gesture at it. “Funny.”
Paul shrugs. “Who ya’ gonna call?” He motions for me to look through the glass. Corina is inside with Damon. They’re both dressed in white bodysuits that have the pentagon and triangle design on the back. Corina seems to be asleep on the bed and Damon’s talking into a thin microphone that rises like a weed off an otherwise empty desk.
“Witness chamber,” Paul tells me. “They act like an amplifier for the signals that the patch transmits, so they’re the only place where we glide—it doesn’t work anywhere else.” He shrugs. “When we glide, we go one at a time. Corina’s under now, and the other person—in this case Damon—dictates what they witnessed while the other person is under.”
I watch for a moment. Corina isn’t moving at all. She looks dead.
I step away from the window. “Isn’t it not okay for others to know what we witness?” I ask him. “How come Damon’s doing that with Corina in the room?”
Paul giggles. “You wouldn’t hear a nuclear bomb going off when you’re under.” He tugs at my shirt. “Corina’s not even in Corina right now. She’s somewhere else as someone else some other time—not home right now, please leave a message.”
“Paul?”
“Morpheus.” He tries to make his voice deep when he says it, but his baby face just makes the whole thing ridiculous.
“Stop that. How does the person who goes second dictate? Isn’t the other person awake then?”
It’s Richard who answers. “The second witness waits until their partner leaves the room.”
“Why don’t they just have us go alone?”
Paul smiles. “Because witnessing’s like the Force—it has a light side and a dark side. We’ve got to watch out for each other in there.” He turns to face me. “When we’re under, our mind isn’t in our bodies and if it gets untethered, we’re in trouble.”
I can’t help but be a little irritated that this is the first I’m hearing about this. “What happens if we get untethered?”
Paul looks at Richard and then back through the window at Damon and Corina. “We die.”
“We die? We can die in there?”
“Really not a big concern, Alex.” Richard points at a thing hanging on the wall above Corina. It looks like a slice of Live-Tech. “Gliding is only dangerous to the witness if they’re down too long and the biology gets exhausted, so if somebody’s under for more than thirty minutes, all the glide partner has to do is attach that to the witness’s neck and it brings them back.”
I look at the thing Richard’s pointing at. “That’ll save us?” I turn to Paul. “Have you ever had to use it?”
“Nope.” He turns, smiles, raises his eyebrows at me. “But I’m sure as heck gonna make sure you know how.”
We walk farther down the corridor and stop at the door to another chamber. “What’s with the suits?”
Paul shrugs. “They’re part of the job description.” He wrinkles his nose. “They help regulate our biology while we’re on long glides—that’s why they fit so tight. I keep bugging Richard to change them, but he doesn’t like my designs.” He looks accusingly at Richard, who shrugs. “I’m a pudgy white boy, so these ones make me look like cauliflower.”
Paul opens the door and jerks his head. “C’mon.”
Inside, he points at the couch. “Lie down. Close your eyes.”
I shake my head. “Nah.” Then: “I’m good.”
Paul rolls his eyes. “Don’t be silly.” He points at the couch. “Lie down.”
Richard steps in from behind me. “It’s perfectly safe, Alex, but it’s fine if you’re not ready.” He shrugs, looks pointedly at Paul. “We could do this just as easily tomorrow.”
I look at the couch, then at Paul, then at Richard. They don’t seem worried. I’m being stupid. I sigh, shrug. “Now’s fine.” Then: “Don’t I need a suit?”
Richard looks at me, smiles. “Suits are necessary when you’re down for substantial time. You won’t be down that long—at worst you’ll be a little short of breath when you come up.”
I nod and lie down on the couch, relieved not to have to change into weird clothes for the moment. When I close my eyes, I feel strange again, like I’m bigger on the inside, too, like my mind and my body have extra spaces. It’s disorienting, like I walked through the door to my bedroom and ended up in Walmart. “It’s bigger in here.”
“I know. Now picture yourself in something that moves—I use a mining cart like in Indiana Jones, but it doesn’t have to be that. Calvin uses a horse and Corina pictures a train—it can be anything.”
There’s only one thing that moves that I can imagine using. I picture my board. I can see it in my mind, the grip tape covered in spray stencils that Julio cut for me. “Got it.”
“Now get in it, or on it, or over it, or whatever it is that you do with it, and start going downhill.”
At first I’m confused, but then I figure it out. I just have to picture it. “Got it.”
“Don’t open your eyes.”
I relax into it, sliding down like I did before, searching for my Voice.
But then things get weird.
Instead of the simple guitars I heard before, now it’s like a death metal band with a billion electric guitars playing power chords and noodle solos.
It’s so loud that it hurts and I think I start to whimper or something, because suddenly Paul’s hand is on me.
“Stay on the path,” he says.
I don’t know what he means until I think, Path? Then I see a path and I’m on it. When I’m on the path, it’s like there’s walls up on either side of it and all the guitar noise gets muffled.
“Take the first off-ramp you see.”
Off-ramp? And then there is one. I tell Paul.
“Take it.”
I lean to the right to guide my board onto it. I feel it lock in.
It gets suddenly dark. And then there’s a light ahead. It gets brighter and brighter until suddenly:
It’s all wrong. The couch is gone. Paul. The glide room. I’m not . . . We’re in the Central Hall. It’s glaring, nearly blinding from the yellow carpet, the white furniture. There are books on shelves in front of me, red leather bindings—somehow I know they’re red, but they don’t look red; they look a nearly screaming orange.
There’s a grand piano. I play the piano. I’ve played since I was four. Grandma Bev bought me a keyboard.
I breathe in, but it’s not me breathing. It’s somebody else. The breath is shallower than I expect. I want more air, but I don’t need more. The breath is fine for her.
Us.
I’m not just me right now. I’m mainly someone else. My name is Jordan. I brush hair out of my face. It’s not in my face, I just do it as a habit. It makes me feel like a pop star.
“There’s one more,” my mom says. The sound of her voice is strange, a dream-sound that would scare the shit out of me if I heard it in my life, but to Jordan it’s just the way her mom sounds, like all voices sound. “It’s from Grandma Bev.” She holds out a package to me. It’s wrapped in paper that Jordan knows is blue, but to me it looks gray. The pink balloons that dot it look comfortingly normal to the way I see them when I’m me.
Excitement. Jordan has been waiting for this present. Grandma Bev. Jordan pictures her—an older woman, dyed red hair, heavyset but made of love. Jordan’s hand quivers as she reaches for the package. She takes it. I feel it pressed against her fingers, the weight of it as her mom lets go.
She brings it back toward us slowly. She’s still smiling, but it feels different on the inside. It’s work now.
Jordan is sad. Her feelings sit inside her and me both. I’m sad with her. We miss Grandma Bev, want her here.
Know we can’t say anything. Mom says she loves her mom, but she worries that Grandma is an ungodly influence on us, the girls. Jordan doesn’t bring it up anymore. She’s found other ways to communicate with Grandma Bev—secret ways.
The girls: I have sisters, Samantha and Avery. Jordan’s feelings cloud over, thinking about it. She never used to lie, keep secrets, but her mom and dad . . .
They wouldn’t understand. They’d think she was falling, failing, turning bad.
Girls shouldn’t have secrets, not from their mothers.
Girls shouldn’t have boyfriends, not unless their fathers approve.
Jordan presses a nail underneath the tape of the package in her lap, serrates it. “I wonder what it is . . .” Our voice sounds as strange in our head as the others do outside.
The speaker comm on the table chimes. Jordan’s mom lights up. “That’ll be your dad!”
Jordan pauses, but I want Jordan to keep unwrapping. I can feel how much she wants to have something more of Grandma. I feel Jordan’s frustration, but she says nothing, her fingernail still pinched between the flaps of the box.
She smiles, but it’s not a real one. We think about our lips, our eyes, how high to raise our eyebrows. We’re practiced at this. “Hey, Dad!” we say brightly to the face on the screen.
We lie well.
He smiles back at us; his face is lined. His hair is gray. He insists it’s regal, stentorian, but Jordan knows the truth. He looks old.
He does. I’ve always thought so, too. I know the man on the screen.
He’s the president of the United States.
“Happy birthday, JJ!” he says.
“Thanks, Dad!” Jordan looks down. “I’m opening Gram’s present.”
He nods, looks warily at Mom. “What is it?”
Jordan takes the cue, slipping the box out of the wrap. “A new screen . . .” She has a screen. Grandma knows this. It’s not a better screen, either. It unfolds to the same size, weighs the same. It’s the same brand. “Wow,” she says, opening the box to examine the contents.
New feelings. Disappointment. Something else. Concern. She’s worried about her Grams. She presses the power button, watches as the screen brightens.
Icons appear.
It takes her a moment. I see it before she does, but when she does, she works hard to keep her face neutral.
The icons have labels. The labels have a message. “Press me,” the first one says. “When no one,” the next. “Is watching,” the third. “Especially,” the next icon continues, “your parents.”
Then: “Love Naomi.”
It’s just a name to me, but the Bible story is thick in Jordan. Naomi, the mother-in-law of Ruth, a woman Ruth would follow anywhere, who helped Ruth navigate her way into a new life with her own people, away from the Moabites from which Ruth had come. Jordan first called her Naomi after she snuck a disguised copy of Harry Potter into Jordan’s reader when she was ten, an invitation to break away from her mom and dad’s strict sense of right and wrong.
Grandma Bev calls Jordan Ruth sometimes, especially when she’s forwarding a letter from Will.
The last icon says “Press me now.”
Jordan’s finger hesitates over the icon before she taps it; pressing it commits her to another secret.
Tap.
The icons shuffle and rename themselves. She holds it up to show the family.
“Why do you get two screens when I don’t even have one?” Avery asks.
Jordan doesn’t roll her eyes. Instead: “You can have my other one, okay?”
And then I’m back in myself and I’m looking through my own eyes at Paul. My mind is racing and I can hardly breathe. When I lift up my hand, it’s shaking. I think I might be dying and I look at Paul for help, but he’s laughing at me.
“First witness’s a bitch.”
“What . . .” I have to take a breath and try again before I can even say a sentence. “What the hell was that?”
“Superpowers, man! I told you—you just went into the future in somebody else’s mind!” He’s squatting down to get his head at my level and he leans in. “So?”
“What?” I ask, not sure what he wants.
“How was it?”
I think about what I saw. I can still see the images and I can recall the voices and smells. It’s all way too weird. I shake my head. “The colors . . .”
“What you see is different with every target.” He smacks his lips. “I bet for you, it’s more than just the colors and stuff. For you it’s probably—”
“They’re different . . .”
Richard is sitting in the chair at the desk, watching us. “Sensory perception is different for everybody. My blue is going to be different than yours. We both call it blue because that’s what we were told to call the color we see, but we aren’t seeing it the same way. Electrical impulses from our ears aren’t necessarily interpreted the same way by our minds. We have different numbers and qualities of olfactory and taste sensors, too. Different levels of sensitivity at our nerve endings, so when you’re in somebody else’s mind, every sensation’s going to be different.”
Paul rolls his eyes. “I wouldn’t know from all that. Except for color and sound, for me it’s all fuzzy, like I’m watching underwater.” Paul looks at me. “But you with your ten-lane highway, you probably see so clear you could count fleas on the family dog.”
The experience was so strange to begin with and now, thinking about it afterward, it’s like having a strong memory that couldn’t have ever happened. Like when the little girl pushes through all the coats in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and finds the snowy forest. In my mind, Jordan Castle’s birthday melts and now I’m remembering me watching the Narnia movie with Pete.
“So? Was it clear, like you were actually there?” Paul brings me back to the moment.
Jordan. Being there, in her head, was clear. I think that’s what was so weird about it—I was her and me at the same time. Her eyes were mine. Ears, nose, all of it. “Yeah.” And then: “I was Jordan.”
Richard shakes his head. “Leave names out of it.” But it barely registers.
“I was a girl,” I continue.
I turn to Richard. He looks uncomfortable.
Paul is laughing, though.
I start to say more, but Richard waves me off. “We don’t share what happens on the job with anybody, Alex—if the wrong information spreads, it could cause real complications.”
“She’s been lying to her parents.” I think a little more. “She’s got a boyfriend,” I add helpfully before realizing that I must sound like a total idiot.
“That’s good, buddy.” Paul pats my knee. “It’s all part of being a healthy adolescent.”