He made his comical frowning face. “To be clear, by ‘this,’ you mean sex.”
“You don’t have to keep saying it. Yes.”
“But at graduation you said—”
“I know what I said at graduation. And that’s true.” She smiled at him. “Only tonight seems so rushed.”
“Rushed? It’s been a year, Sadie.” His voice rose with emotion. “I’ve waited for a goddamned year.”
Sadie gazed at him in shock, hardly recognizing her boyfriend in this guy with the hard eyes and set jaw. The smile felt galvanized on her face. “Are you angry? Because I won’t have sex with you?”
“Yes. No. I’m—” He dropped his arms and took a step away from her, raking his hand through his hair. “I’m confused. If you loved me the way I love you—”
“I do.” She did.
“Then you would want this too.”
“You know I do. Very much.”
“But not tonight,” he said.
“Right,” Sadie agreed hopefully, not realizing, until it was too late, that it was a trap.
He looked beyond her. “I don’t know, Sadie. I just don’t know.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket and checked the time. “I should go.”
Sadie blinked, feeling cold and confused. “Like that? You’re going to leave it like that? For six weeks?”
He avoided her eyes. “No. I just—let me cool off. I’ll be in touch.”
“Four…”
I’ll be in touch.
I’ll be in touch.
I’ll be in touch.
“Three…”
Torches were still casting gold light at the corners of the pool, but the party had thinned out, and the band was packing up.
Decca stood looking down at Sadie, who was lying on one of the chaise lounges.
“The usual?” Decca asked.
“Oh yes,” Sadie said, getting to her feet.
They grabbed two leftover bottles of champagne and went past the pool and out the gate in the hedge fence that separated the Ames house from the golf course. Picking a spot with no trees overhanging, they each popped the cork on their bottle.
They gave the toast they’d been giving since they were six with apple juice, saying “To friends like you” in unison. Then, sitting back-to-back for support, they looked up at the sky. It was dark enough that they could see thousands of stars.
“You should have let me start a fire,” Decca said. “We could have been doing this hours ago.”
Sadie took a gulp of champagne. “Right. I promise I’ll listen to you next time.”
“That would be confusing,” Decca said, and they laughed.
They stayed like that, sipping from their bottles, watching the sky and talking only to point out a shooting star or comet.
“What’s he like?” Decca asked after a while.
“Who?”
“Your guy. The one whose head you’ll be in. What does he look like?”
“How do you know it’s a guy?”
“Is it?” Decca asked.
“I’m not supposed to say anything,” Sadie told her.
“Why? Is it like a wish, and if you share it won’t come true?”
“Exactly.” Sadie watched the bright light of a satellite moving slowly across the sky. “He’s really cute,” she said finally.
Decca hooted. “I knew it. What color hair?”
“Dark. And blue eyes.”
“Mmmm, I love that type.” Decca leaned her head back against Sadie’s shoulder. “I know it’s confidential and all that, but I have an incredibly important question that you will be uniquely qualified to answer.”
“What is it?”
“What guys talk about while peeing at urinals.”
Sadie laughed and pretended to flick her on the head. “I’m going to miss you,” she said softly.
“I’m going to miss you more.”
“Two…”
After Decca left, Sadie had curled herself into the window seat of her bedroom. Her parents were asleep, and silence had settled over the house.
When Sadie was younger, spending time alone in the echoey house when her parents were out had scared her, so she’d made a list of different kinds of silences. Silence of anticipation, silence of grief, silence of tranquility, lonely silence, welcome silence, intimate silence, pregnant silence, silence of contempt. The silence surrounding her now was familiar, the silence of gates and guards and wide lawns and double-paned windows that kept you safe. Locked in. The silence of home.
She left the lights off, not needing to see the slate-gray walls of her room, the string of ribbons won over ten years of spelling bees hung above the six tennis trophies and three cups from the national debate championships. The pictures of her and the tennis team, her and Decca, her and Pete. Especially the ones of her and Pete.
Instead she stared out into the darkness that spread in front of her like an inky carpet, past her backyard with its perfect squares and rectangles, past the golf course to the shimmering glow on the horizon.
City Center.
She knew what she was seeing was just the halcyon lights on the highway that marked the outer perimeter of the City Center. And she knew the twinkling was an optical effect caused by humidity in the air. But to her it still looked like a mystical Valhalla, sparkling with passion, adventure, and—
“One. Syncopy engaged.”
—life.
She opened her eyes.
CHAPTER 5
WEEK 1
It was pitch black.
Sadie blinked to make sure her eyes were open. Syncopy between her and Subject 9 should have been established instantaneously. She should be seeing and hearing everything he did.
She was getting nothing. Something had gone wrong.
Where am I?
The pounding of her heart flooded her ears. Oh god, she was trapped somewhere, stuck between his mind and—
From far away, she heard a faint, eerie whistling, like wind blowing through a deserted graveyard at night. It was joined by a sound like bones rattling, and she felt a jolt and heard a voice say, “You bastard. You did it.”
Light flooded in all at once, making Sadie reel. A blindfold, she thought. We were blindfolded.
He was blindfolded, she corrected, reminding herself she was supposed to remain objective. She blinked but was having trouble making out details.
“Now you see why they call him Frosty the Snowman,” a male voice said. “Stays icy cool under pressure.”
A hot wave of sensation crashed over Sadie, knocking her back, but in the time it took her eyes to adjust, it fizzed and became sticky and uncomfortable and then vanished. An emotion? A thought?
Things began to swim into focus. The first thing she noticed was that they were in a room filled with probably fifteen guys, all of them in their early twenties. Subject 9 had been standing, but he sat down now, joining three others at a table with a pile of poker chips in the middle. The others formed an attentive audience on the perimeter. One of the guys at the table was playing with the chips, shuffling them in one hand, which accounted for the rattling-of-bones sound.
Unlike the guys Sadie knew who wore tailored khakis and fitted collared shirts, the crowd here was nearly all dressed in overalls, a white V-neck or Henley shirt, and black work boots. Chapsters, she thought to herself.
She’d learned about the Chapster style in the “Film and Society” seminar she’d sat in on at the university, a look that was borrowed from Charlie Chaplin’s assembly-line worker in the movie Hard Times. The professor had said it was popular among residents of urban communities. The Chapsters even named their boys after former presidents, to glorify an older and presumably better era. Compared with Pete and his friends, she thought the Chapsters looked a little bit menacing. No, she corrected herself after a second glance. Masculine.