One of the staff members passed by, Allen, the mousy guy, and waved at them from under the shade of the willow tree, letting them know they were safely under watch. No funny stuff. If Allen only knew.
"When did you quit eating?" Freeman asked. "Was it a gradual thing, or did you just wake up one morning and discover that oatmeal tasted like the sole of a tennis shoe?"
"I haven't quit eating. I still eat way too much."
"Yeah. You're, what, seventy pounds soaking wet?"
"Sixty-eight pounds and probably eleven-sixteenths of an ounce, if the two tablespoons of lunch have digested properly."
"A girl as tall as you ought to weigh at least ninety, maybe a hundred."
"If you believe the charts. But who cares about the charts? All I know is what I see in the mirror. A big fat buttery tub of lard."
"You're nothing but a sheet of skin stretched around a stack of bones."
"Bet you say that to all the girls."
"No, really. You're way too skinny."
"I'm a total lard-ass."
"Don't believe everything Daddy says. Daddies have been known to be wrong. Or psycho, in some cases."
Freeman stood, found a flat stone, and skimmed it across the water. It bounced six times before sinking. He walked over to Vicky and knelt beside her. He tried to concentrate, but he could smell her hair again.
"I'm sorry I was mean to you," he said. "I just get a little jumpy when it kicks in like this and I can read too many people at the same time-"
"Wendover causes it. Kracowski's little treatments. I used to read books with titles like Mysteries of the Mind, Secrets of the Unknown, parapsychology and ghosts, that kind of thing. I even practiced ESP every night, scrunching my face until I thought my eyeballs would pop. But I never got any good at it. Then I come here and, boom, I'm practically Miss Cleo overnight."
"Did Paula and Randy take you to the little room with the table and chairs?"
"And the deck of cards? Yeah."
"And Paula held up one at a time, showing the back of the card, and you had to guess what symbol was on it?"
"Yeah. A circle, a square, a plus sign, a five-pointed star, and a set of three wavy lines. Pretty corny. I mean, the Rhine Research Center was using that eighty years ago. Most parapsychologists use machines these days."
"Machines make it harder to cheat." Freeman flipped the penny and caught it, peeked, and held it flat inside his fist.
"Tails," Vicky said.
Freeman opened his palm. Tails.
"How many cards did you get right?" she asked.
"Twenty-two out of twenty-five."
"I got three."
"Three? You can do better than that by guessing."
"You think I want those nuts to know I can read minds? Are you crazy or something?"
" 'Crazy' doesn't exist in the twenty-first century," Freeman said. "Only science and blame. This place is just a cover for whatever Kracowski is up to. Have you seen the Wendover fundraising brochures yet? 'Give from the Heart to Society's Child.' We're the products of everybody's collective guilt."
"Then what are you acting so guilty about?"
Jesus Henry Christ, Freeman thought. Don't let her get into that secret little spot in my head. The one where I've hidden you-know-what. The big troll.
"I'm not guilty," Freeman said quickly, before his thoughts ran away to those shadowy cracks. "And I've done much better on the card reading. I used to get twenty-five out of twenty-five, back when I was six."
"Six? You could read minds when you were that young? Before Kracowski?"
"My Dad was into it."
"Whoa. When you said 'Dad' I felt some bad vibes. What's up with that?"
"Nothing. You think too much for a girl."
"You haven't known many girls, have you?"
"Well, sort of."
"Don't bother lying to somebody who can see inside your skull, Freeman."
"Okay, okay. I've never kissed one, if that's what you want to know."
Vicky sighed with dramatic flair and shook her head. "I meant being empathetic with a girl. Caring about one. Having a friend."
"Don't need any damned friends." Beyond the lake, beneath the stone face of Wendover, the other children played. Freeman tried to learn the score of the soccer match in progress, but whatever juice had allowed him to jump his mind across the grass was now drained. Maybe he'd used it all up trying to sneak past Vicky's defenses.
"Sorry I called you a lard-ass," he said.
"That's okay. I'm sorry I jumped into your head with-out permission. Or, what do you call it, 'triptrap'?"
"My Dad's name for it. Did you have a treatment recently?"
"Yesterday. Those mirrors creep me out. And the humming, like a hive of metal bees in the walls."
"That's what causes it. The mind reading, I mean."
"Yeah," Vicky said. "I could read real good yesterday. Like in the lunchroom. I believe that if I had concentrated, I could have read every mind in the room. Or maybe not by concentrating, but its opposite. Shutting down, meditating, going blank."
"Letting the thoughts in." Freeman flipped the penny again, glanced at it. Heads. "Sometimes when you chase them, they get all mixed up with your own thoughts, and that's a good way to go crazy."
"Remember what I said about 'crazy.'"
"My power's going away already. I can feel it fading, sort of like a car radio going to static."
"It usually lasts a day or two for me. I've had four of Kracowksi's treatments. I don't know what he's up to, but I can feel the tingling."
Freeman rubbed his scalp at the memory of the seizure. "It's not too bad, though. Not like my Dad's experiments. But I'm not going to talk about him."
"Yeah, right. They say it only hurts for a little while. I've heard that all my life, and it hasn't stopped hurting yet."
"You ever heard of the Trust?"
"The Trust? No."
"Good."
"What's the Trust?"
"Never mind."
"I can't never mind. I have to always mind."
"Forget it."
"Listen, I know exactly what you're thinking,'' Vicky said. "I'm Jane Fonda and you're Robert De Niro in Stanley amp; Iris, and you expect me to take you on and teach you and open up a whole new world. Rescue you from yourself."
"No. I wasn't thinking that at all. That sounds like a dumb movie."
"I've seen worse, but not lately."
Freeman flipped the penny again, caught it, and held up his closed fist.
"Heads," Vicky said.
Freeman glanced at the coin, shielding it from her. Heads again. "No, tails," he said putting the penny in his pocket.
The sun was sinking now, just touching the ridges in the west. Freeman looked across the lake, expecting one of the house parents to wave them inside. From here, they wouldn't be able to hear the bell that signaled dinner.
He saw somebody under the trees and thought at first it was Randy, the muscle jock. He tried for a quick triptrap but the person was too far away, and the power really was on the blink. Then the figure came out into the muted light of sundown. It was the old man in the robe.
"You see him, too," Vicky said.
"The geezer in gray. I've seen him twice."
"What's he doing down there?
"Maybe he decided it was time for a bath."
Vicky stifled a laugh. "That's mean, Freeman. He might be the nicest person here, for all you know."
"I thought he worked at the home, like a janitor or something. Figured he must have been here so long they didn't give him a hard time about the way he dressed. Saved on uniform expenses."
The man moved closer to the water's edge, then paused and seemed to sniff the air. He looked toward Wendover on the rise of lawn above the lake, then at Vicky and Freeman. Freeman couldn't tell whether the man was smiling or grimacing as he approached the water, back stooped with the effort of descending the bank.
"The stupid old coot's going for a swim," Freeman said. He and Vicky stood so they could see better. "He'll freeze to death."