“No, no, they didn’t take her anywhere. She’s just having a shower.”
“Luke likes her,” Avery announced. “He likes her a lot.”
“Avery?”
“What, Helen?”
“Some things are better not discussed.”
“Why?”
“Because Y’s a crooked letter and can’t be made straight.” She looked away suddenly. She ran a hand through her tu-tone hair, perhaps to hide her trembling mouth. If so, it didn’t work.
“What’s wrong?” Luke asked.
“Why don’t you just ask Little Kreskin? He sees all, he knows all.”
“She got a thermometer jammed up her butt,” Avery said.
“Oh,” Luke said.
“Right,” Helen said. “How fucking degrading is that?”
“Demeaning,” Luke said.
“But also delightful and delicious,” Helen said, and then they were both laughing. Helen did it with tears standing in her eyes, but laughing was laughing, and being able to do it in here was a treasure.
“I don’t get it,” Avery said. “How is getting a thermometer up your butt delightful and delicious?”
“It’s delicious if you lick it when it comes out,” Luke said, and then they were all howling.
Helen whacked the table, sending the cards flying. “Oh God I’m peeing myself, gross, don’t look!” And she went running, almost knocking George over as he came outside, noshing a peanut butter cup.
“What’s her deal?” George asked.
“Peed herself,” Avery said matter-of-factly. “I peed my bed last night, so I can relate.”
“Thank you for sharing that,” Luke said, smiling. “Go over and play HORSE with Nicky and New Kid.”
“Are you crazy? They’re too big, and Harry already pushed me down once.”
“Then go jump on the trampoline.”
“I’m bored of it.”
“Go jump on it, anyway. I want to talk to George.”
“About the lights? What lights?”
The kid, Luke thought, was fucking eerie. “Go jump, Avester. Show me a couple of forward rolls.”
“And try not to break your neck,” George said. “But if you do, I’ll sing ‘You Are So Beautiful’ at your funeral.”
Avery looked at George fixedly for a moment or two, then said, “But you hate that song.”
“Yes,” George said. “Yes, I do. Saying what I did is called satire. Or maybe irony. I always get those two things mixed up. Go on, now. Put an egg in your shoe and beat it.”
They watched him trudge to the trampoline.
“That kid is ten and except for the ESP shit acts like he’s six,” George said. “How fucked up is that?”
“Pretty fucked up. How old are you, George?”
“Thirteen,” George said, sounding morose. “But these days I feel a hundred. Listen, Luke, they say our parents are okay. Do you believe that?”
It was a delicate question. At last Luke said, “Not… exactly.”
“If you could find out for sure, would you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Not me,” George said. “I’ve got enough on my plate already. Finding out they were… you know… that would break me. But I can’t help wondering. Like all the time.”
I could find out for you, Luke thought. I could find out for both of us. He almost leaned forward and whispered it in George’s ear. Then he thought of George saying he had enough on his plate already. “Listen, that eye thing—you had it?”
“Sure. Everyone has it. Just like everyone gets the thermometer up the ass, and the EEG and the EKG and the MRI and the XYZ and the blood tests and the reflex tests and all the other wonderful things you have in store, Lukey.”
Luke thought about asking if George had gone on seeing the dots after the projector was off and decided not to. “Did you have a seizure? Because I did.”
“Nah. They did sit me down at a table, and the asshole doc with the mustache did some card tricks.”
“You mean asking you what was on them.”
“Yeah, that’s what I mean. I thought they were Rhine cards, pretty much had to be. I got tested on those a couple of years before I wound up in this charming hole of hell. This was after my parents figured out I really could move things around sometimes if I looked at them. Once they decided I wasn’t faking it just to freak them out, or as one of my little jokes, they wanted to find out what else was going on with me, so they took me to Princeton, where there’s this thing called Anomalies Research. Or was. I think they closed it down.”
“Anomalies… are you serious?”
“Yeah. Sounds more scientific than Psychic Research, I guess. It was actually part of the Princeton engineering department, if you can believe that. A couple of grad students ran the Rhine cards on me, but I pretty much zeroed out. I wasn’t even able to move much stuff around that day. Sometimes it’s just like that.” He shrugged. “They probably thought I was a faker, which was okey-doke with me. I mean, on a good day I can knock over a pile of blocks, just thinking about them, but that’ll never get me chicks. You agree?”
As someone whose big trick was knocking a pizza pan off a restaurant table without touching it, Luke did. “So did they slap you around?”
“I did get one, and it was a real hummer,” George said. “It was because I tried to make a joke. This bitch named Priscilla laid it on me.”
“I met her. She’s a bitch, all right.”
A word his mother hated even more than fuck, and using it made Luke miss her all over again.
“And you didn’t know what was on the cards.”
George gave him an odd look. “I’m TK, not TP. The same as you. How could I?”
“I guess you couldn’t.”
“Since I’d had the Rhine cards at Princeton, I guessed cross, then star, then wavy lines. Priscilla told me to stop lying, so when Evans looked at the next one, I told him it was a photo of Priscilla’s tits. That’s when she slapped me. Then they let me go back to my room. Tell you the truth, they didn’t seem all that interested. More like they were crossing t’s and dotting i’s.”
“Maybe they didn’t really expect anything,” Luke said. “Maybe you were just a control subject.”
George laughed. “Man, I can’t control jackshit in here. What are you talking about?”
“Nothing. Never mind. Did they come back? The lights, I mean? Those colored dots?”
“No.” George looked curious now. “Did they with you?”
“No.” Luke was suddenly glad that Avery wasn’t here, and could only hope the little kid’s brain radio was short-range. “Just… I did have a seizure… or thought I did… and I was afraid they might come back.”
“I don’t get the point of this place,” George said, sounding more morose than ever. “It almost has to be a government installation, but… my mother bought this book, okay? Not long before they took me to Princeton. Psychic Histories and Hoaxes, it was called. I read it when she was done. There was a chapter on government experiments about the stuff we can do. The CIA ran some back in the nineteen-fifties. For telepathy, telekinesis, precognition, even levitation and teleportation. LSD was involved. They got some results, but nothing much.” He leaned forward, blue eyes on Luke’s green ones. “And that’s us, man—nothing much. Are we supposed to achieve world domination for the United States by moving Saltine boxes—and only if they’re empty—or flipping the pages of a book?”
“They could send Avery to Russia,” Luke said. “He could tell them what Putin had for breakfast, and if he was wearing boxers or briefs.”