The Institute

1

On a fine Minneapolis morning in April of that year—Tim Jamieson still months from his arrival in DuPray—Herbert and Eileen Ellis were being ushered into the office of Jim Greer, one of three guidance counselors at the Broderick School for Exceptional Children.

“Luke’s not in trouble, is he?” Eileen asked when they were seated. “If he is, he hasn’t said anything.”

“Not at all,” Greer said. He was in his thirties, with thinning brown hair and a studious face. He was wearing a sport shirt open at the collar and pressed jeans. “Look, you know how things work here, right? How things have to work, given the mental capacity of our students. They are graded but not in grades. They can’t be. We have ten-year-olds with mild autism who are doing high school math but still reading at a third-grade level. We have kids who are fluent in as many as four languages but have trouble multiplying fractions. We teach them in all subjects, and we board ninety per cent of them—we have to, they come from all parts of the United States and a dozen or so from abroad—but we center our attention on their special talents, whatever those happen to be. That makes the traditional system, where kids advance from kindergarten to twelfth grade, pretty useless to us.”

“We understand that,” Herb said, “and we know Luke’s a smart kid. That’s why he’s here.” What he didn’t add (certainly Greer knew it) was that they never could have afforded the school’s astronomical fees. Herb was the foreman in a plant that made boxes; Eileen was a grammar school teacher. Luke was one of the Brod’s few day students, and one of the school’s very few scholarship students.

“Smart? Not exactly.”

Greer looked down at an open folder on his otherwise pristine desk, and Eileen had a sudden premonition: either they were going to be asked to withdraw their son, or his scholarship was going to be canceled—which would make withdrawal a necessity. Yearly tuition fees at the Brod were forty thousand dollars a year, give or take, roughly the same as Harvard. Greer was going to tell them it had all been a mistake, that Luke wasn’t as bright as they had all believed. He was just an ordinary kid who read far above his level and seemed to remember it all. Eileen knew from her own reading that eidetic memory was not exactly uncommon in young children; somewhere between ten and fifteen per cent of all normal kids possessed the ability to remember almost everything. The catch was that the talent usually disappeared when children became adolescents, and Luke was nearing that point.

Greer smiled. “Let me give it to you straight. We pride ourselves on teaching exceptional children, but we’ve never had a student at the Broderick quite like Luke. One of our emeritus teachers—Mr. Flint, now in his eighties—took it on himself to give Luke a tutorial on the history of the Balkans, a complicated subject, but one that casts great light on the current geopolitical situation. So Flint says, anyway. After the first week, he came to me and said that his experience with your son must have been like the experience of the Jewish elders, when Jesus not only taught them but rebuked them, saying it wasn’t what went into their mouths that made them unclean, but what came out of them.”

“I’m lost,” Herb said.

“So was Billy Flint. That’s my point.”

Greer leaned forward.

“Understand me now. Luke absorbed two semesters’ worth of extremely difficult postgraduate work in a single week, and drew many of the conclusions Flint had intended to make once the proper historical groundwork had been laid. On some of those conclusions Luke argued, and very convincingly, that they were ‘received wisdom rather than original thought.’ Although, Flint added, he did so very politely. Almost apologetically.”

“I’m not sure how to respond to that,” Herb said. “Luke doesn’t talk much about his school work, because he says we wouldn’t understand.”

“Which is pretty much true,” Eileen said. “I might have known something about the binomial theorem once, but that was a long time ago.”

Herb said, “When Luke comes home, he’s like any other kid. Once his homework’s done, and his chores, he boots up the Xbox or shoots hoops in the driveway with his friend Rolf. He still watches SpongeBob SquarePants.” He considered, then added, “Although usually with a book in his lap.”

Yes, Eileen thought. Just lately, Principles of Sociology. Before that, William James. Before that, the AA Big Book, and before that, the complete works of Cormac McCarthy. He read the way free-range cows graze, moving to wherever the grass is greenest. That was a thing her husband chose to ignore, because the strangeness of it frightened him. It frightened her as well, which was probably one reason why she knew nothing of Luke’s tutorial on Balkan history. He hadn’t told her because she hadn’t asked.

“We have prodigies here,” Greer said. “In fact, I’d rate well over fifty per cent of the Brod’s student body as prodigies. But they are limited. Luke is different, because Luke is global. It isn’t one thing; it’s everything. I don’t think he’ll ever play professional baseball or basketball—”

“If he takes after my side of the family, he’ll be too short for pro basketball.” Herb was smiling. “Unless he’s the next Spud Webb, that is.”

“Hush,” Eileen said.

“But he plays with enthusiasm,” Greer continued. “He enjoys it, doesn’t consider it wasted time. He’s no klutz on the athletic field. He gets along fine with his mates. He’s not introverted or emotionally dysfunctional in any way. Luke is your basic moderately cool American kid wearing rock band tees and his cap around backward. He might not be that cool in an ordinary school—the daily trudge might drive him crazy—but I think even there he’d be okay; he’d just pursue his studies on his own.” He added hastily: “Not that you’d want to road-test that.”

“No, we’re happy with him here,” Eileen said. “Very. And we know he’s a good kid. We love him like crazy.”

“And he loves you. I’ve had several conversations with Luke, and he makes that crystal clear. To find a child this brilliant is extremely rare. To find one who’s also well-adjusted and well-grounded—who sees the outward world as well as the one inside his own head—is even rarer.”

“If nothing’s wrong, why are we here?” Herb asked. “Not that I mind hearing you sing my kid’s praises, don’t get that idea. And by the way, I can still beat his ass at HORSE, although he’s got a decent hook shot.”

Greer leaned back in his chair. The smile disappeared. “You’re here because we’re reaching the end of what we can do for Luke, and he knows it. He’s expressed an interest in doing rather unique college work. He would like to major in engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, and in English at Emerson, across the river in Boston.”

“What?” Eileen asked. “At the same time?”

“Yes.”

“What about the SATs?” It was all Eileen could think of to say.

“He’ll take them next month, in May. At North Community High. And he’ll knock the roof off those tests.”

I’ll have to pack him a lunch, she thought. She had heard the cafeteria food at North Comm was awful.

After a moment of stunned silence, Herb said, “Mr. Greer, our boy is twelve. In fact, he just turned twelve last month. He may have the inside dope on Serbia, but he won’t even be able to raise a mustache for another three years. You… this…”

“I understand how you feel, and we wouldn’t be having this conversation if my colleagues in guidance and the rest of the faculty didn’t believe he was academically, socially, and emotionally capable of doing the work. And yes, at both campuses.”

Eileen said, “I’m not sending a twelve-year-old halfway across the country to live among college kids old enough to drink and go to the clubs. If he had relatives he could stay with, that might be different, but…”

Greer was nodding along with her. “I understand, couldn’t agree more, and Luke knows he’s not ready to be on his own, even in a supervised environment. He’s very clear-headed about that. Yet he’s becoming frustrated and unhappy with his current situation, because he’s hungry to learn. Famished, in fact. I don’t know what fabulous gadgetry is in his head—none of us do, probably old Flint came closest when he talked about Jesus teaching the elders—but when I try to visualize it, I think of a huge, gleaming machine that’s running at only two per cent of its capacity. Five per cent at the very most. But because this is a human machine, he feels… hungry.”

“Frustrated and unhappy?” Herb said. “Huh. We don’t see that side of him.”

I do, Eileen thought. Not all the time, but sometimes. Yes. That’s when the plates rattle or the doors shut by themselves.

She thought of Greer’s huge, gleaming machine, something big enough to fill three or even four buildings the size of warehouses, and working at doing what, exactly? No more than making paper cups or stamping out aluminum fast food trays. They owed him more, but did they owe him this?

“What about the University of Minnesota?” she asked. “Or Concordia, in St. Paul? If he went to one of those places, he could live at home.”

Greer sighed. “You might as well consider taking him out of the Brod and putting him in an ordinary high school. We’re talking about a boy for whom the IQ scale is useless. He knows where he wants to go. He knows what he needs.”

“I don’t know what we can do about it,” Eileen said. “He might be able to get scholarships to those places, but we work here. And we’re far from rich.”

“Well now, let’s talk about that,” Greer said.

2

When Herb and Eileen returned to the school that afternoon, Luke was jiving around in front of the pick-up lane with four other kids, two boys and two girls. They were laughing and talking animatedly. To Eileen they looked like kids anywhere, the girls in skirts and leggings, their bosoms just beginning to bloom, Luke and his friend Rolf in baggy cords—this year’s fashion statement for young men—and t-tops. Rolf’s read BEER IS FOR BEGINNERS. He had his cello in its quilted case and appeared to be pole-dancing around it as he held forth on something that might have been the spring dance or the Pythagorean theorem.

Luke saw his parents, paused long enough to dap Rolf, then grabbed his backpack and dove into the backseat of Eileen’s 4Runner. “Both Ps,” he said. “Excellent. To what do I owe this extraordinary honor?”

“Do you really want to go to school in Boston?” Herb asked.

Luke was not discomposed; he laughed and punched both fists in the air. “Yes! Can I?”

Like asking if he can spend Friday night at Rolf’s house, Eileen marveled. She thought of how Greer had expressed what their son had. He’d called it global, and that was the perfect word. Luke was a genius who had somehow not been distorted by his own outsized intellect; he had absolutely no compunctions about mounting his skateboard and riding his one-in-a-billion brain down a steep sidewalk, hellbent for election.

“Let’s get some early supper and talk about it,” she said.

“Rocket Pizza!” Luke exclaimed. “How about it? Assuming you took your Prilosec, Dad. Did you?”

“Oh, believe me, after today’s meeting, I’m totally current on that.”

3

They got a large pepperoni and Luke demolished half all by himself, along with three glasses of Coke from the jumbo pitcher, leaving his parents to marvel at the kid’s digestive tract and bladder as well as his mind. Luke explained that he had talked to Mr. Greer first because “I didn’t want to freak you guys out. It was your basic exploratory conversation.”

“Putting it out to see if the cat would take it,” Herb said.

“Right. Running it up the flagpole to see who’d salute it. Sticking it on the five-fifteen to see if it gets off at Edina. Throwing it against the wall to see how much—”

“Enough. He explained how we might be able to come with you.”

“You have to,” Luke said earnestly. “I’m too young to be without my exalted and revered mater and pater. Also…” He looked at them from across the ruins of the pizza. “I couldn’t work. I’d miss you guys too much.”

Eileen instructed her eyes not to fill, but of course they did. Herb handed her a napkin. She said, “Mr. Greer… um… laid out a scenario, I guess you might say… where we could possibly… well…”

“Relo,” Luke said. “Who wants this last piece?”

“All yours,” Herb said. “May you not die before you get a chance to do this crazy matriculation thing.”

“Ménage à college,” Luke said, and laughed. “He talked to you about rich alumni, didn’t he?”

Eileen put down the napkin. “Jesus, Lukey, you discussed your parents’ financial options with your guidance counselor? Who are the grownups in this conversation? I’m starting to feel confused about that.”

“Calm down, mamacita, it just stands to reason. Although my first thought was the endowment fund. The Brod has a huge one, they could pay for you to relocate out of that and never feel the pinch, but the trustees would never okay it, even though it makes logical sense.”

“It does?” Herb asked.

“Oh yeah.” Luke chewed enthusiastically, swallowed, and slurped Coke. “I’m an investment. A stock with good growth potential. Invest the nickels and reap the dollars, right? It’s how America works. The trustees could see that far, no prob, but they can’t break out of the cognitive box they’re in.”

“Cognitive box,” his father said.

“Yeah, you know. A box built as a result of the ancestral dialectic. It might even be tribal, although it’s kind of hilarious to think of a tribe of trustees. They go, ‘If we do this for him, we might have to do it for another kid.’ That’s the box. It’s, like, handed down.”

“Received wisdom,” Eileen said.

“You nailed it, Mom. The trustees’ll kick it to the wealthy alumni, the ones who made mucho megabucks thinking outside the box but still love the ol’ Broderick blue and white. Mr. Greer will be the point man. At least I hope he will. The deal is, they help me now and I help the school later on, when I’m rich and famous. I don’t actually care about being either of those things, I’m middle-class to the bone, but I might get rich anyway, as a side effect. Always assuming I don’t contract some gross disease or get killed in a terrorist attack or something.”

“Don’t say things that invite sorrow,” Eileen said, and made the sign of the cross over the littered table.

“Superstition, Mom,” Luke said indulgently.

“Humor me. And wipe your mouth. Pizza sauce. Looks like your gums are bleeding.”

Luke wiped his mouth.

Herb said, “According to Mr. Greer, certain interested parties might indeed fund a relocation move, and fund us for as long as sixteen months.”

“Did he tell you that the same people who’d front you might be able to help find you a new job?” Luke’s eyes were sparkling. “A better one? Because one of the school’s alumni is Douglas Finkel. He happens to own American Paper Products, and that’s close to your sweet spot. Your hot zone. Where the rubber meets the r—”

“Finkel’s name actually came up,” Herb said. “Just in a speculative way.”

“Also…” Luke turned to his mother, eyes bright. “Boston is a buyer’s market right now when it comes to teachers. Average starting salary for someone with your experience goes sixty-five thou.”

“Son, how do you know these things?” Herb asked.

Luke shrugged. “Wikipedia, to start with. Then I trace down the major sources cited in the Wikipedia articles. It’s basically a question of keeping current with the environment. My environment is the Broderick School. I knew all of the trustees; the big money alumni I had to look up.”

Eileen reached across the table, took what remained of the last pizza slice out of her son’s hand, and put it back on the tin tray with the bits of leftover crust. “Lukey, even if this could happen, wouldn’t you miss your friends?”

His eyes clouded. “Yeah. Especially Rolf. Maya, too. Although we can’t officially ask girls to the spring dance, unofficially she’s my date. So yeah. But.”

They waited. Their son, always verbal and often verbose, now seemed to struggle. He started, stopped, started again, and stopped again. “I don’t know how to say it. I don’t know if I can say it.”

“Try,” Herb said. “We’ll have plenty of important discussions in the future, but this one is the most important to date. So try.”

At the front of the restaurant, Richie Rocket put in his hourly appearance and began dancing to “Mambo Number 5.” Eileen watched as the silver space-suited figure beckoned to the nearby tables with his gloved hands. Several little kids joined him, boogying to the music and laughing while their parents looked on, snapped pictures, and applauded. Not so long ago—five short years—Lukey had been one of those kids. Now they were talking about impossible changes. She didn’t know how such a child as Luke had come from a couple like them, ordinary people with ordinary aspirations and expectations, and sometimes she wished for different. Sometimes she actively hated the role into which they had been cast, but she had never hated Lukey, and never would. He was her baby, her one and only.

“Luke?” Herb said. Speaking very quietly. “Son?”

“It’s just what comes next,” Luke said. He raised his head and looked directly at them, his eyes lighted with a brilliance his parents rarely saw. He hid that brilliance from them because he knew it frightened them in a way a few rattling plates never could. “Don’t you see? It’s what comes next. I want to go there… and learn… and then move on. Those schools are like the Brod. Not the goal, only stepping stones to the goal.”

“What goal, honey?” Eileen asked.

“I don’t know. There’s so much I want to learn, and figure out. I’ve got this thing inside my head… it reaches… and sometimes it’s satisfied, but mostly it isn’t. Sometimes I feel so small… so damn stupid…”

“Honey, no. Stupid’s the last thing you are.” She reached for his hand, but he drew away, shaking his head. The tin pizza pan shivered on the table. The pieces of crust jittered.

“There’s an abyss, okay? Sometimes I dream about it. It goes down forever, and it’s full of all the things I don’t know. I don’t know how an abyss can be full—it’s an oxymoron—but it is. It makes me feel small and stupid. But there’s a bridge over it, and I want to walk on it. I want to stand in the middle of it, and raise my hands…”

They watched, fascinated and a little afraid, as Luke raised his hands to the sides of his narrow, intense face. The pizza pan was now not just shivering but rattling. Like the plates sometimes did in the cupboards.

“… and all those things in the darkness will come floating up. I know it.”

The pizza pan skated across the table and banged on the floor. Herb and Eileen barely noticed. Such things happened around Luke when he was upset. Not often, but sometimes. They were used to it.

“I understand,” Herb said.

“Bullshit he does,” Eileen said. “Neither of us do. But you should go ahead and start the paperwork. Take the SATs. You can do those things and still change your mind. If you don’t change it, if you stay committed…” She looked at Herb, who nodded. “We’ll try to make it happen.”

Luke grinned, then picked up the pizza pan. He looked at Richie Rocket. “I used to dance with him like that when I was little.”

“Yes,” Eileen said. She needed to use the napkin again. “You sure did.”

“You know what they say about the abyss, don’t you?” Herb asked.

Luke shook his head, either because it was the rare thing he didn’t know, or because he didn’t want to spoil his father’s punchline.

“When you stare into it, it stares back at you.”

“You bet it does,” Luke said. “Hey, can we get dessert?”

4

With the essay included, the SAT test lasted four hours, but there was a merciful break in the middle. Luke sat on a bench in the high school’s lobby, munching the sandwiches his mother had packed for him and wishing for a book. He had brought Naked Lunch, but one of the proctors appropriated it (along with his phone and everyone else’s), telling Luke it would be returned to him later. The guy also riffled through the pages, looking either for dirty pictures or a crib sheet or two.

While he was eating his Snackimals, he became aware of several other test-takers standing around him. Big boys and girls, high school juniors and seniors.

“Kid,” one of them asked, “what the hell are you doing here?”

“Taking the test,” Luke said. “Same as you.”

They considered this. One of the girls said, “Are you a genius? Like in a movie?”

“No,” Luke said, smiling, “but I did stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.”

They laughed, which was good. One of the boys held up his palm, and Luke slapped him five. “Where are you going? What school?”

“MIT, if I get in,” Luke said. Which was disingenuous; he had already been granted provisional admission to both schools of his choice, contingent on doing well today. Which wasn’t going to be much of a problem. So far, the test had been a breeze. It was the kids surrounding him that he found intimidating. In the fall, he would be in classes filled with kids like these, kids much older and about twice his size, and of course they would all be looking at him. He had discussed this with Mr. Greer, saying he’d probably seem like a freak to them.

“It’s what you feel like that matters,” Mr. Greer said. “Try to keep that in mind. And if you need counseling—just someone to talk to about your feelings—for God’s sake, get it. And you can always text me.”

One of the girls—a pretty redhead—asked him if he’d gotten the hotel question in the math section.

“The one about Aaron?” Luke asked. “Yeah, pretty sure I did.”

“What did you say was the right choice, can you remember?”

The question had been how to figure how much some dude named Aaron would have to pay for his motel room for x number of nights if the rate was $99.95 per night, plus 8% tax, plus an additional one-time charge of five bucks, and of course Luke remembered because it was a slightly nasty question. The answer wasn’t a number, it was an equation.

“It was B. Look.” He took out his pen and wrote on his lunch bag: 1.08(99.95x) + 5.

“Are you sure?” she asked. “I had A.” She bent, took Luke’s bag—he caught a whiff of her perfume, lilac, delicious—and wrote: (99.95 + 0.08x) + 5.

“Excellent equation,” Luke said, “but that’s how the people who make these tests screw you at the drive-thru.” He tapped her equation. “Yours only reflects a one-night stay. It also doesn’t account for the room tax.”

She groaned.

“It’s okay,” Luke said. “You probably got the rest of them.”

“Maybe you’re wrong and she’s right,” one of the boys said. It was the one who’d slapped Luke five.

She shook her head. “The kid’s right. I forgot how to calculate the fucking tax. I suck.”

Luke watched her walk away, her head drooping. One of the boys went after her and put an arm around her waist. Luke envied him.

One of the others, a tall drink of water wearing designer glasses, sat down next to Luke. “Is it weird?” he asked. “Being you, I mean?”

Luke considered this. “Sometimes,” he said. “Usually it’s just, you know, life.”

One of the proctors leaned out and rang a hand bell. “Let’s go, kids.”

Luke got up with some relief and tossed his lunch sack in a trash barrel by the door to the gym. He looked at the pretty redhead a final time, and as he went in, the barrel shimmied three inches to the left.

5

The second half of the test was as easy as the first, and he thought he did a passable job on the essay. Kept it short, anyway. When he left the school he saw the pretty redhead, sitting on a bench by herself and crying. Luke wondered if she’d bricked the test, and if so, how badly—just not-gonna-get-your-first-choice badly, or stuck-with-community-college badly. He wondered what it was like to have a brain that didn’t seem to know all the answers. He wondered if he should go over there and try to comfort her. He wondered if she’d accept comfort from a kid who was still your basic pipsqueak. She’d probably tell him to make like an amoeba and split. He even wondered about the way the trashcan had moved—that stuff was eerie. It came to him (and with the force of a revelation) that life was basically one long SAT test, and instead of four or five choices, you got dozens. Including shit like some of the time and maybe so, maybe not.

His mom was waving. He waved back and ran to the car. When he was in and belted up, she asked him how he thought he’d done.

“Aced it,” Luke said. He gave her his sunniest grin, but he couldn’t stop thinking about the redhead. The crying was bad, but the way her head drooped when he pointed out the mistake in her equation—like a flower in a dry spell—had somehow been worse.

He told himself not to think about it, but of course you couldn’t do that. Try not to think of a polar bear, Fyodor Dostoyevsky once said, and you will see the cursed thing come to mind every minute.

“Mom?”

“What?”

“Do you think memory is a blessing or a curse?”

She didn’t have to think about it; God only knew what she was remembering. “Both, dear.”

6

At 2 AM on a morning in June, while Tim Jamieson was night-knocking his way up DuPray’s main street, a black SUV turned onto Wildersmoot Drive in one of the suburbs on the north side of Minneapolis. It was a crazy name for a street; Luke and his friend Rolf called it Wildersmooch Drive, partly because it made the name even crazier and partly because they both longed to smooch a girl, and wildly.

Inside the SUV were a man and two women. He was Denny; they were Michelle and Robin. Denny was driving. Halfway along the curving, silent street, he shut off the lights, coasted to the curb, and killed the engine. “You’re sure this one isn’t TP, right? Because I didn’t bring my tinfoil hat.”

“Ha ha,” Robin said, perfectly flat. She was sitting in the backseat.

“He’s just your average TK,” Michelle said. “Nothing to get your undies in a bunch about. Let’s get this thing going.”

Denny opened the console between the two front seats and took out a cell phone that looked like a refugee from the nineties: blocky rectangular body and short stubby antenna. He handed it to Michelle. While she punched in a number, he opened the console’s false bottom and took out thin latex gloves, two Glock Model 37s, and an aerosol can which, according to the label, contained Glade air freshener. He handed back one of the guns to Robin, kept one for himself, and passed the aerosol can to Michelle.

“Here we go, big team, here we go,” he chanted as he gloved up. “Ruby Red, Ruby Red, that’s what I said.”

“Quit the high school shit,” Michelle said. Then, into the phone, crooked against her shoulder so she could put on her own gloves: “Symonds, do you copy?”

“Copy,” Symonds said.

“This is Ruby Red. We’re here. Go on and kill the system.”

She waited, listening to Jerry Symonds on the other end of the call. In the Ellis home, where Luke and his parents slept, the DeWalt alarm consoles in the front hall and the kitchen went dark. Michelle got the go-ahead and gave her teammates a thumbs-up. “Okay. All set.”

Robin slung the go-bag, which looked like a medium-sized ladies’ purse, over her shoulder. No interior lights went on when they exited the SUV, which had Minnesota State Patrol plates. They walked single file between the Ellis house and the Destin house next door (where Rolf was also sleeping, perchance to dream of smooching wildly) and entered through the kitchen, Robin first because she had the key.

They paused by the stove. From the go-bag, Robin brought out two compact silencers and three sets of lightweight goggles on elastic straps. The goggles gave their faces an insectile look, but rendered the shadowy kitchen bright. Denny and Robin screwed on the silencers. Michelle led the way through the family room into the front hall, then to the stairs.

They moved slowly but with a fair amount of confidence along the upstairs hall. There was a rug runner to muffle their steps. Denny and Robin stopped outside the first closed door. Michelle continued to the second. She looked back at her partners and tucked the aerosol under her arm so she could raise both hands with the fingers spread: give me ten seconds. Robin nodded and returned a thumbs-up.

Michelle opened the door and entered Luke’s bedroom. The hinges squeaked faintly. The shape in the bed (nothing showing but a tuft of hair) stirred a little, then settled. At two in the morning the kid should have been dead to the world, in the deepest part of his night’s sleep, but he clearly wasn’t. Maybe genius kids didn’t sleep the same as regular ones, who knew? Certainly not Michelle Robertson. There were two posters on the walls, both daylight-visible viewed through the goggles. One was of a skateboarder in full flight, knees bent, arms outstretched, wrists cocked. The other was of the Ramones, a punk group Michelle had listened to way back in middle school. She thought they were all dead now, gone to that great Rockaway Beach in the sky.

She crossed the room, keeping mental count as she did so: Four… five…

On six, her hip struck the kid’s bureau. There was a trophy of some kind on it, and it fell over. The noise it made wasn’t loud, but the kid rolled onto his back and opened his eyes. “Mom?”

“Sure,” Michelle said. “Whatever you want.”

She saw the beginnings of alarm in the boy’s eyes, saw him open his mouth to say something else. She held her breath and triggered the aerosol can two inches from his face. He went out like a light. They always did, and there was never a hangover when they woke up six or eight hours later. Better living through chemistry, Michelle thought, and counted seven… eight… nine.

On ten, Denny and Robin entered Herb and Eileen’s room. The first thing they saw was a problem: the woman wasn’t in bed. The door to the bathroom was open, casting a trapezoid of light on the floor. It was too bright for the goggles. They stripped them off and dropped them. The floor in here was polished hardwood, and the double clack was clearly audible in the silent room.

“Herb?” Low, from the bathroom. “Did you knock over your water glass?”

Robin advanced to the bed, taking her Glock from the waistband of her slacks at the small of her back while Denny walked to the bathroom door, making no attempt to muffle his footfalls. It was too late for that. He stood beside it, gun raised to the side of his face.

The pillow on the woman’s side was still indented from the weight of her head. Robin put it over the man’s face and fired into it. The Glock made a low coughing sound, no more than that, and discharged a little brown smut onto the pillow from its vents.

Eileen came out of the bathroom, looking worried. “Herb? Are you all r—”

She saw Denny. He seized her by the throat, put the Glock to her temple, and pulled the trigger. There was another of those low coughing sounds. She slid to the floor.

Meanwhile, Herb Ellis’s feet were kicking aimlessly, making the coverlet he and his late wife had been sleeping under puff and billow. Robin fired twice more into the pillow, the second shot a bark instead of a cough, the third one even louder.

Denny took the pillow away. “What, did you see The Godfather too many times? Jesus, Robin, his head’s halfway gone. What’s an undertaker supposed to do with that?”

“I got it done, that’s what matters.” The fact was, she didn’t like to look at them when she shot them, the way the light went out of them.

“You need to man up, girl. That third one was loud. Come on.”

They picked up the goggles and went down to the boy’s room. Denny hoisted Luke into his arms—no problem there, the kid didn’t weigh more than ninety pounds—and gave his chin a jerk for the women to go ahead of him. They left the way they had come, through the kitchen. There were no lights on in the adjacent house (even the third shot hadn’t been that loud), and no soundtrack except for the crickets and a faraway siren, maybe all the way over in St. Paul.

Michelle led the way between the two houses, checked the street, and motioned for the others to come ahead. This was the part Denny Williams hated. If some guy with insomnia looked out and saw three people on his neighbor’s lawn at two in the morning, that would be suspicious. If one of them was carrying what looked like a body, that would be very suspicious.

But Wildersmoot Drive—named after some long-gone Twin Cities bigwig—was fast asleep. Robin opened the SUV’s curbside back door, got in, and held out her arms. Denny handed the boy in and she pulled Luke against her, his head lolling on her shoulder. She fumbled for her seatbelt.

“Uck, he’s drooling,” she said.

“Yes, unconscious people do that,” Michelle said, and closed the rear door. She got in the shotgun seat and Denny slid back behind the wheel. Michelle stowed the guns and the aerosol as Denny cruised slowly away from the Ellis house. As they approached the first intersection, Denny put the headlights back on.

“Make the call,” he said.

Michelle punched in the same number. “This is Ruby Red. We have the package, Jerry. Airport ETA in twenty-five minutes. Wake up the system.”

In the Ellis home, the alarms came back on. When the police finally arrived, they would find two dead, one gone, the kid the most logical suspect. He was said to be brilliant, after all, and those were the ones that tended to be a little wonky, weren’t they? A little unstable? They’d ask him when they found him, and finding him was only a matter of time. Kids could run, but even the brilliant ones couldn’t hide.

Not for long.

7

Luke woke up remembering a dream he’d had—not exactly a nightmare, but definitely of the not-so-nice variety. Some strange woman in his room, leaning over his bed with her blond hair hanging around the sides of her face. Sure, whatever you want, she’d said. Like a chick in one of the porno clips he and Rolf sometimes watched.

He sat up, looked around, and at first thought this was another dream. It was his room—same blue wallpaper, same posters, same bureau with his Little League trophy on it—but where was the window? His window looking out at Rolf’s house was gone.

He shut his eyes tight, then sprang them open. No change; the windowless room remained windowless. He considered pinching himself, but that was such a cliché. He popped his fingers against his cheek instead. Everything stayed the same.

Luke got out of bed. His clothes were on the chair, where his mom had put them the night before—underwear, socks, and tee-shirt on the seat, jeans folded over the back. He put them on slowly, looking at where the window should have been, then sat down to put on his sneakers. His initials were on the sides, LE, and that was right, but the middle horizontal stroke of the E was too long, he was sure of it.

He turned them over, looking for street grit, and saw none. Now he was completely sure. These were not his sneaks. The laces were wrong, too. They were too clean. Nevertheless, they fit perfectly.

He went to the wall and laid his hands against it, pressing, feeling for the window underneath the wallpaper. It wasn’t there.

He asked himself if maybe he’d gone crazy, just snapped, like a kid in a scary movie written and directed by M. Night Shyamalan. Weren’t kids with high-functioning minds supposed to be prone to breakdowns? But he wasn’t crazy. He was as sane as he’d been last night when he went to sleep. In a movie, the crazy kid would think he was sane—that would be the Shyamalan twist—but according to the psychology books Luke had read, most crazy people understood they were crazy. He wasn’t.

As a little kid (five as opposed to twelve), he’d gone through a craze of collecting political buttons. His dad had been happy to help him build his collection, because most of the buttons were really cheap on eBay. Luke had been especially fascinated (for reasons he could not explain, even to himself) with the buttons of presidential candidates who had lost. The fever had eventually passed, and most of the buttons were probably stored in the attic crawlspace or in the cellar, but he had saved one as a kind of good-luck talisman. It had a blue plane on it, surrounded by the words WINGS FOR WILLKIE. Wendell Willkie ran for president against Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 but lost badly, winning only ten states for a total of eighty-two electoral votes.

Luke had put the button in the cup of his Little League trophy. He fished for it now and came up with nothing.

Next, he went to the poster showing Tony Hawk on his Birdhouse deck. It looked right, but it wasn’t. The small rip on the lefthand side was gone.

Not his sneakers, not his poster, Willkie button gone.

Not his room.

Something began to flutter in his chest, and he took several deep breaths to try and quiet it. He went to the door and grasped the knob, sure he would find himself locked in.

He wasn’t, but the hallway beyond the door was nothing like the upstairs hallway in the house where he had lived his twelve-plus years. It was cinderblock instead of wood paneling, the blocks painted a pale industrial green. Opposite the door was a poster showing three kids about Luke’s age, running through a meadow of high grass. One was frozen in mid-leap. They were either lunatics or deliriously happy. The message at the bottom seemed to suggest the latter. JUST ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE, it read.

Luke stepped out. To his right, the corridor ended in institutional double doors, the kind with push-bars. To his left, about ten feet in front of another set of those institutional doors, a girl was sitting on the floor. She was wearing bellbottoms and a shirt with puffy sleeves. She was black. And although she looked to be Luke’s own age, give or take, she seemed to be smoking a cigarette.

8

Mrs. Sigsby sat behind her desk, looking at her computer. She was wearing a tailored DVF business suit that did not disguise her beyond-lean build. Her gray hair was perfectly groomed. Dr. Hendricks stood at her shoulder. Good morning, Scarecrow, he thought, but would never say.

“Well,” Mrs. Sigsby said, “there he is. Our newest arrival. Lucas Ellis. Got a ride on a Gulfstream for the first and only time and doesn’t even know it. By all accounts, he’s quite the prodigy.”

“He won’t be for long,” Dr. Hendricks said, and laughed his trademark laugh, first exhaled, then inhaled, a kind of hee-haw. Along with his protruding front teeth and extreme height—he was six-seven—it accounted for the techs’ nickname for him: Donkey Kong.

She turned and gave him a hard look. “These are our charges. Cheap jokes are not appreciated, Dan.”

“Sorry.” He felt like adding, But who are you kidding, Siggers?

To say such a thing would be impolitic, and really, the question was rhetorical at best. He knew she wasn’t kidding anyone, least of all herself. Siggers was like that unknown Nazi buffoon who thought it would be a terrific idea to put Arbeit macht frei, work sets you free, over the entrance to Auschwitz.

Mrs. Sigsby held up the new boy’s intake form. Hendricks had placed a circular pink sticky in the upper righthand corner. “Are you learning anything from your pinks, Dan? Anything at all?”

“You know we are. You’ve seen the results.”

“Yes, but anything of proven value?”

Before the good doctor could reply, Rosalind popped her head in. “I’ve got paperwork for you, Mrs. Sigsby. We’ve got five more coming in. I know they were on your spreadsheet, but they’re ahead of schedule.”

Mrs. Sigsby looked pleased. “All five today? I must be living correctly.”

Hendricks (aka Donkey Kong) thought, You couldn’t bear to say living right, could you? You might split a seam somewhere.

“Only two today,” Rosalind said. “Tonight, actually. From Emerald team. Three tomorrow, from Opal. Four are TK. One is TP, and he’s a catch. Ninety-three nanograms BDNF.”

“Avery Dixon, correct?” Mrs. Sigsby said. “From Salt Lake City.”

“Orem,” Rosalind corrected.

“A Mormon from Orem,” Dr. Hendricks said, and gave his hee-haw laugh.

He’s a catch, all right, Mrs. Sigsby thought. There will be no pink sticker on Dixon’s form. He’s too valuable for that. Minimal injections, no risking seizures, no near-drowning experiences. Not with a BDNF over 90.

“Excellent news. Really excellent. Bring in the files and put them on my desk. You also emailed them?”

“Of course.” Rosalind smiled. Email was the way the world wagged, but they both knew Mrs. Sigsby preferred paper to pixels; she was old-school that way. “I’ll bring them ASAP.”

“Coffee, please, and also ASAP.”

Mrs. Sigsby turned to Dr. Hendricks. All that height, and he’s still carrying a front porch, she thought. As a doctor he should know how dangerous that is, especially for a man that tall, where the vascular system has to work harder to begin with. But no one is quite as good at ignoring the medical realities as a medical man.

Neither Mrs. Sigsby nor Hendricks was TP, but at that moment they were sharing a single thought: how much easier all this would be if there was liking instead of mutual detestation.

Once they had the room to themselves again, Mrs. Sigsby leaned back to look at the doctor looming over her. “I agree that young Master Ellis’s intelligence doesn’t matter to our work at the Institute. He could just as well have an IQ of 75. It is, however, why we took him a bit early. He had been accepted at not one but two class-A schools—MIT and Emerson.”

Hendricks blinked. “At twelve?”

“Indeed. The murder of his parents and his subsequent disappearance is going to be news, but not big news outside the Twin Cities, although it may ripple the Internet for a week or so. It would have been much bigger news if he’d made an academic splash in Boston before he dropped from sight. Kids like him have a way of getting on the TV news, usually the golly-gosh segments. And what do I always say, Doctor?”

“That in our business, no news is good news.”

“Right. In a perfect world, we would have let this one go. We still get our fair share of TKs.” She tapped the pink circle on the intake form. “As this indicates, his BDNF isn’t even all that high. Only…”

She didn’t have to finish. Certain commodities were getting rarer. Elephant tusks. Tiger pelts. Rhino horns. Rare metals. Even oil. Now you could add these special children, whose extraordinary qualities had nothing to do with their IQs. Five more coming in this week, including the Dixon boy. A very good haul, but two years ago they might have had thirty.

“Oh, look,” Mrs. Sigsby said. On the screen of her computer, their new arrival was approaching the most senior resident of Front Half. “He’s about to meet the too-smart-for-her-own-good Benson. She’ll give him the scoop, or some version of it.”

“Still in Front Half,” Hendricks said. “We ought to make her the goddam official greeter.”

Mrs. Sigsby offered her most glacial smile. “Better her than you, Doc.”

Hendricks looked down and thought of saying, From this vantage point, I can see how fast your hair is thinning, Siggers. It’s all part of your low-level but long-running anorexia. Your scalp is as pink as an albino rabbit’s eye.

There were lots of things he thought of saying to her, the grammar-perfect no-tits chief administrator of the Institute, but he never did. It would have been unwise.

9

The cinderblock hallway was lined with doors and more posters. The girl was sitting under one showing a black boy and a white girl with their foreheads together, grinning like fools. The caption beneath said I CHOOSE TO BE HAPPY!

“You like that one?” the black girl said. On closer inspection, the cigarette dangling from her mouth turned out to be of the candy variety. “I’d change it to I CHOOSE TO BE CRAPPY, but they might take away my pen. Sometimes they let shit slide, but sometimes they don’t. The problem is that you can never tell which way things are going to tip.”

“Where am I?” Luke asked. “What is this place?” He felt like crying. He guessed it was mostly the disorientation.

“Welcome to the Institute,” she said.

“Are we still in Minneapolis?”

She laughed. “Not hardly. And not in Kansas anymore, Toto. We’re in Maine. Way up in the williwags. At least according to Maureen, we are.”

“In Maine?” He shook his head, as if he had taken a blow to the temple. “Are you sure?”

“Yup. You’re looking mighty white, white boy. I think you should sit down before you fall down.”

He sat, bracing himself with one hand as he did so, because his legs didn’t exactly flex. It was more like a collapse.

“I was home,” he said. “I was home, and then I woke up here. In a room that looks like my room, but isn’t.”

“I know,” she said. “Shock, innit?” She wriggled her hand into the pocket of her pants and brought out a box. On it was a picture of a cowboy spinning a lariat. ROUND-UP CANDY CIGARETTES, it said. SMOKE JUST LIKE DADDY! “Want one? A little sugar might help your state of mind. It always helps mine.”

Luke took the box and flipped up the lid. There were six cigarettes left inside, each one with a red tip that he guessed was supposed to be the coal. He took one, stuck it between his lips, then bit it in half. Sweetness flooded his mouth.

“Don’t ever do that with a real cigarette,” she said. “You wouldn’t like the taste half so well.”

“I didn’t know they still sold stuff like this,” he said.

“They don’t sell this kind, for sure,” she said. “Smoke just like Daddy? Are you kiddin me? Got to be an antique. But they got some weird shit in the canteen. Including real cigarettes, if you can believe that. All straights, Luckies and Chesterfields and Camels, like in those old flicks on Turner Classic Movies. I’m tempted to try, but man, they take a lot of tokens.”

“Real cigarettes? You don’t mean for kids?”

“Kids be the whole population here. Not that there are many in Front Half just now. Maureen says we may have more coming. I don’t know where she gets her info, but it’s usually good.”

“Cigarettes for kids? What is this? Pleasure Island?” Not that he felt very pleasurable just now.

That cracked her up. “Like in Pinocchio! Good one!” She held up her hand. Luke slapped her five and felt a little better. Hard telling why.

“What’s your name? I can’t just keep calling you white boy. It’s, like, racial profiling.”

“Luke Ellis. What’s yours?”

“Kalisha Benson.” She raised a finger. “Now pay attention, Luke. You can call me Kalisha, or you can call me Sha. Just don’t call me Sport.”

“Why not?” Still trying to get his bearings, still not succeeding. Not even close. He ate the other half of his cigarette, the one with the fake ember on the tip.

“Cause that’s what Hendricks and his fellow dipsticks say when they give you the shots or do their tests. ‘I’m gonna stick a needle in your arm and it’ll hurt, but be a good sport. I’m gonna take a throat culture, which will make you gag like a fuckin maggot, but be a good sport. We’re gonna dip you in the tank, but just hold your breath and be a good sport.’ That’s why you can’t call me Sport.”

Luke hardly paid attention to the stuff about the tests, although he would consider it later. He was back on fuckin. He had heard it from plenty of boys (he and Rolf said it a lot when they were out), and he had heard it from the pretty redhead who might have bricked the SATs, but never from a girl his own age. He supposed that meant he had led a sheltered life.

She put her hand on his knee, which gave him a bit of a tingle, and looked at him earnestly. “But my advice is go on and be a good sport no matter how much it sucks, no matter what they stick down your throat or up your butt. The tank I don’t really know about, I never had that one myself, only heard about it, but I know as long as they’re testing you, you stay in Front Half. I don’t know what goes on in Back Half, and I don’t want to know. All I do know is that Back Half’s like the Roach Motel—kids check in, but they don’t check out. Not back to here, anyway.”

He looked back the way he had come. There were lots of motivational posters, and there were also lots of doors, eight or so on either side. “How many kids are here?”

“Five, counting you and me. Front Half’s never jammed, but right now it’s like a ghost town. Kids come and go.”

“Talking of Michelangelo,” Luke muttered.

“Huh?”

“Nothing. What—”

One of the double doors at the near end of the corridor opened, and a woman in a brown dress appeared, her back to them. She was holding the door with her butt while she struggled with something. Kalisha was up in a flash. “Hey, Maureen, hey, girl, hold on, let us help.”

Since it was us instead of me, Luke got up and went after Kalisha. When he got closer, he saw the brown dress was actually a kind of uniform, like a maid might wear in a swanky hotel—medium swanky, anyway, it wasn’t gussied up with ruffles or anything. She was trying to drag a laundry basket over the metal strip between this hallway and the big room beyond, which looked like a lounge—there were tables and chairs and windows letting in bright sunlight. There was also a TV that looked the size of a movie screen. Kalisha opened the other door to make more room. Luke took hold of the laundry basket (DANDUX printed on the side) and helped the woman pull it into what he was starting to think of as the dormitory corridor. There were sheets and towels inside.

“Thank you, son,” she said. She was pretty old, with a fair amount of gray in her hair, and she looked tired. The tag over her sloping left breast said MAUREEN. She looked him over. “You’re new. Luke, right?”

“Luke Ellis. How did you know?”

“Got it on my day sheet.” She pulled a folded piece of paper halfway out of her skirt pocket, then pushed it back in.

Luke offered his hand, as he had been taught. “Pleased to meet you.”

Maureen shook it. She seemed nice enough, so he guessed he was pleased to meet her. But he wasn’t pleased to be here; he was scared and worried about his parents as well as himself. They’d have missed him by now. He didn’t think they’d want to believe he’d run away, but when they found his bedroom empty, what other conclusion could they draw? The police would be looking for him soon, if they weren’t already, but if Kalisha was right, they’d be looking a long way from here.

Maureen’s palm was warm and dry. “I’m Maureen Alvorson. Housekeeping and all-around handy gal. I’ll be keeping your room nice for you.”

“And don’t make a lot of extra work for her,” Kalisha said, giving him a forbidding look.

Maureen smiled. “You’re a peach, Kalisha. This one don’t look like he’s gonna be messy, not like that Nicky. He’s like Pigpen in the Peanuts comics. Is he in his room now? I don’t see him out in the playground with George and Iris.”

“You know Nicky,” Kalisha said. “If he’s up before one in the afternoon, he calls it an early day.”

“Then I’ll just do the others, but the docs want him at one. If he’s not up, they’ll get him up. Pleased to meet you, Luke.” And she went on her way, now pushing her basket instead of tugging it.

“Come on,” Kalisha said, taking Luke’s hand. Worried about his parents or not, he got another of those tingles.

She tugged him into the lounge area. He wanted to scope the place out, especially the vending machines (real cigarettes, was that possible?), but as soon as the door was closed behind them, Kalisha was up in his face. She looked serious, almost fierce.

“I don’t know how long you’ll be here—don’t know how much longer I will be, for that matter—but while you are, be cool to Maureen, hear? This place is staffed with some mean-ass shitheads, but she’s not one of them. She’s nice. And she’s got problems.”

“What kind of problems?” He asked mostly to be polite. He was looking out the window, at what had to be the playground. There were two kids there, a boy and a girl, maybe his own age, maybe a little older.

“She thinks she might be sick for one, but she doesn’t want to go to the doctor because she can’t afford to be sick. She only makes about forty grand a year, and she’s got, like, twice that much in bills. Maybe more. Her husband ran them up, then ran out. And it keeps piling up, okay? The interest.”

“The vig,” Luke said. “That’s what my dad calls it. Short for vigorish. From the Ukrainian word for profits or winnings. It’s a hoodlum term, and Dad says the credit card companies are basically hoods. Based on the compounding interest they charge, he’s got a…”

“Got what? A point?”

“Yeah.” He stopped looking at the kids outside—George and Iris, presumably—and turned to Kalisha. “She told you all that? To a kid? You must be an ace at intrapersonal relationships.”

Kalisha looked surprised, then laughed. It was a big one, which she delivered with her hands on her hips and her head thrown back. It made her look like a woman instead of a kid. “Interpersonal relationships! You got some mouth on you, Lukey!”

“Intra, not inter,” he said. “Unless you’re, like, meeting with a whole group. Giving them credit counseling, or something.” He paused. “That’s, um, a joke.” And a lame one at that. A nerd joke.

She regarded him appraisingly, up and down and then up again, producing another of those not unpleasant tingles. “Just how smart are you?”

He shrugged, a bit embarrassed. He ordinarily didn’t show off—it was the worst way in the world to win friends and influence people—but he was upset, confused, worried, and (might as well admit it) scared shitless. It was getting harder and harder not to label this experience with the word kidnapping. He was a kid, after all, he had been napping, and if Kalisha was telling the truth, he had awakened thousands of miles from his home. Would his parents have let him go without an argument, or an actual fight? Unlikely. Whatever had happened to him, he hoped they had stayed asleep while it was going on.

“Pretty goddam smart, would be my guess. Are you TP or TK? I’m thinking TK.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Except maybe he did. He thought of the way the plates sometimes rattled in the cupboards, how his bedroom door would sometimes open or close on its own, and how the pan had jittered at Rocket Pizza. Also the way the trashcan had moved by itself the day of the SAT test.

“TP is telepathy. TK is—”

“Telekinesis.”

She smiled and pointed a finger at him. “You really are a smart kid. Telekinesis, right. You’re either one or the other, supposedly no one’s both—that’s what the techs say, at least. I’m a TP.” She said this last with some pride.

“You read minds,” Luke said. “Sure. Every day and twice on Sunday.”

“How do you think I know about Maureen? She’d never tell anyone here about her probs, she’s not that kind of person. And I don’t know any of the details, just the general outline.” She considered. “There’s something about a baby, too. Which is weird. I asked her once if she had kids, and she said she didn’t.”

Kalisha shrugged.

“I’ve always been able to do it—off and on, not all the time—but it ain’t like being a superhero. If it was, I’d bust out of here.”

“You’re serious about this?”

“Yes, and here’s your first test. First of many. I’m thinking of a number between one and fifty. What’s my number?”

“No idea.”

“True? Not faking?”

“Absolutely not faking.” He walked to the door on the far side of the room. Outside, the boy was shooting hoops and the girl was bouncing on a trampoline—nothing fancy, just seat-drops and the occasional twist. Neither of them looked like they were having a good time; they looked like they were just passing time. “Those kids are George and Iris?”

“Yup.” She joined him. “George Iles and Iris Stanhope. They’re both TKs. TPs are rarer. Hey, smart kid, is that a word, or do you say more rare?”

“Either is okay, but I’d go with more rare. Rarer sounds like you’re trying to start an outboard motor.”

She thought this over for a few seconds, then laughed and pointed that finger at him again. “Good one.”

“Can we go out?”

“Sure. Playground door is never locked. Not that you’ll want to stay long, the bugs are pretty fierce out here in the boondocks. There’ll be Deet in your bathroom medicine cabinet. You should use it, and I mean really slather it on. Maureen says the bug situation will get better once the dragonflies hatch out, but I haven’t seen any yet.”

“Are they nice kids?”

“George and Iris? Sure, I guess so. I mean, it’s not like we’re besties, or anything. I’ve only known George for a week. Iris got here… mmm… ten days ago, I think. About that, anyway. After me, Nick’s been here the longest. Nick Wilholm. Don’t look forward to meaningful relationships in Front Half, smart kid. Like I said, they come and go. And don’t any of them talk of Michelangelo.”

“How long have you been here, Kalisha?”

“Almost a month. I’m an old-timer.”

“Then will you tell me what’s going on?” He nodded to the kids outside. “Will they?”

“We’ll tell you what we know, and what the orderlies and techs tell us, but I got an idea that most of it’s lies. George feels the same. Iris, now…” Kalisha laughed. “She’s like Agent Mulder on that X-Files show. She wants to believe.”

“Believe what?”

The look she gave him—both wise and sad—again made her look more like a grownup than a kid. “That this is just a little detour on the great highway of life, and everything’s going to come out all right in the end, like on Scooby-Doo.”

“Where are your folks? How did you get here?”

The adult look disappeared. “Don’t want to talk about that stuff now.”

“Okay.” Maybe he didn’t want to, either. At least not quite yet.

“And when you meet Nicky, don’t worry if he goes off on a rant. It’s how he blows off steam, and some of his rants are…” She considered. “Entertaining.”

“If you say so. Will you do me a favor?”

“Sure, if I can.”

“Stop calling me smart kid. My name is Luke. Use it, okay?”

“I can do that.”

He reached for the door, but she put her hand on his wrist.

“One more thing before we go out. Turn around, Luke.”

He did. She was maybe an inch taller. He didn’t know she was going to kiss him until she did it, a full-on lip-lock. She even put her tongue between his lips for a second or two, and that produced not just a tingle but a full-on jolt, like sticking a finger in a live socket. His first real kiss, and a wildersmooch for sure. Rolf, he thought (so far as he could think in the immediate aftermath), would be so jealous.

She pulled away, looking satisfied. “It’s not true love or anything, don’t get that idea. I’m not sure it’s even a favor, but it might be. I was in quarantine the first week I was here. No shots for dots.”

She pointed to a poster on the wall next to the candy machine. It showed a boy in a chair, pointing joyously at a bunch of colored dots on a white wall. A smiling doctor (white coat, stethoscope around his neck) was standing with a hand on the boy’s shoulder. Above the picture it said SHOTS FOR DOTS! And below: THE QUICKER YOU SEE EM, THE QUICKER YOU’RE BACK HOME!

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Never mind right now. My folks were full-on anti-vaxxers, and two days after I landed in Front Half, I came down with chicken pox. Cough, high fever, big ugly red spots, the whole nine yards. I guess I’m over it, since I’m out and about and they’re testing me again, but maybe I’m still a little bit contagious. If you’re lucky, you’ll get the pox and spend a couple of weeks drinking juice and watching TV instead of getting needles and MRIs.”

The girl spotted them and waved. Kalisha waved back, and before Luke could say anything else, she pushed open the door. “Come on. Wipe that dopey look off your face and meet the Fockers.”