Challenger Deep Read online

  “What are you on?”

  “I asked you a simple question. Why is it so hard to answer?”

  “It’s not, you’re just acting like a freak.”

  “Maybe I’m fine and everyone else is a freak. Have you considered that?”

  “Whatever.” Finally he looks at me. “Are you gonna work with me on this, or do I have to do it all myself? You’re the artist—you should be doing the PowerPoint.”

  “Digital is not my medium,” I tell him. Then for the first time I focus my attention on the screen. “What’s the project again?”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Yeah, of course I am.” But I’m not kidding and it troubles me that I’m not.

  Max moves the mouse like it’s a living thing. Maybe it is. He clicks and drags and drops. He’s building a fictional earthquake scenario in Miami. A science project. Now I remember. After my last test, I know I should take this seriously, but my mind keeps flying elsewhere. We chose Miami because the city’s skyscrapers are designed to withstand hurricanes, not earthquakes. In our PowerPoint, glass towers crumble. Mega-devastation. It should get us an A.

  But it makes me think of the earthquake in China that I worry I could cause if I think about it too much.

  “Would a seven point five do this much damage?” he asks. I watch his hand continue to move the mouse, but sometimes it feels like it’s my hand, not his. I can feel my fingers clicking that mouse. It’s unnerving.

  “I’m not entirely in myself,” I say. I meant to say it in my head, but it came out of my mouth.

  “Just shut up with the freaky crap, okay?”

  But I can’t stop. I’m not sure if I want to. “I’m kind of like . . . all around me. I’m in the computer. I’m in the walls.”

  He looks at me, shaking his head.

  “I’m even in you,” I tell him. “In fact, I know what you’re thinking, because I’m not entirely me anymore. I’m partially in your head.”

  “So what am I thinking?”

  “Ice cream,” I instantly say. “You want ice cream. Mint chip, to be exact.”

  “Wrong. I was thinking that Kaitlin Hick’s rack would really bounce big-time in a seven-point-five earthquake.”

  “No, you’re confused.” I tell him. “That’s what I was thinking. I just put it in your head.”

  Max leaves a few minutes later, kind of backing out of the front door, like there’s a dog that might bite his behind if he turned his back on it. “I’ll finish the project alone,” he says. “No problem. I’ll do it myself.” And he’s gone before I can even say good-bye.

  52. Evidence of the Truth

  Dad calls to me in that “we have to talk” kind of voice after a dinner that I had no appetite for. I have an urge to bolt, but I don’t. I want to pace the family room, but I force myself to sit on the sofa. Still, my knees bounce like my feet are on miniature trampolines.

  “I emailed the track coach to get a schedule of meets,” he tells me. “He says there is no Caden Bosch on the team.”

  I knew this would happen eventually.

  “Yeah, so?” I say.

  My father gives an exasperated puff of air that could blow out birthday candles. “It’s bad enough that you lied to us about this—but that’s another conversation.”

  “Good, can I go now?”

  “No. My question is why? And where do you go after school? What have you been doing?”

  “That’s three questions.”

  “Don’t be cheeky.”

  I shrug. “I go walking,” I say honestly.

  “Walking where?”

  “Just around.”

  “Every day? For hours?”

  “Yeah. For hours.” My sore feet are evidence of the truth, but it still doesn’t give him what he needs.

  He runs his fingers through his hair, imagining his hair actually gives him some resistance. “This isn’t like you, Caden.”

  I stand up and find myself yelling. I don’t even mean to, I just am. “SINCE WHEN IS WALKING A CRIME?”

  “It’s not just the walking. It’s your behavior. Your thinking.”

  “What are you accusing me of?”

  “Nothing! This is not an inquisition!”

  “I didn’t make the team, okay? I got cut and I didn’t want to disappoint you, so now I go walking, all right? Are you happy?”

  “That’s not the point!”

  But it’s the only point he’s getting. I head for the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “For a walk. Unless I’m grounded for getting cut from the team.” And I’m out the door before he can say anything more.

  53. Hindsight at My Feet

  On the way to school a few years ago, Dad had an unusual freak-out moment. Unusual, because anytime my dad freaks out, it’s as predictable as a tax table, but this was something new. Mackenzie was in the back, and I was riding shotgun. From the moment we left the driveway, Dad was jittery, like he had had too much coffee. I figured it was something to do with work, until he let out an unsettled sigh and said:

  “Something’s wrong.”

  I didn’t say anything, I just waited for him to explain, because he never says anything provocative without explaining himself. Mackenzie, however, doesn’t have patience to wait.

  “What’s wrong with what?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” Dad said. “I don’t know.” He was distracted enough to miss a yellow light, and had to slam on the brakes to keep from careening into the intersection as the light turned red. He looked at the cars around us nervously, and said, “I’m just having trouble driving today.”

  I started to worry that maybe he was having a heart attack or a stroke or something, but before I voiced my concerns, I noticed something at my feet right next to my backpack. It was metallic and oddly shaped, but was only odd because of its location. It was a common enough object, but you generally don’t see such a thing lying on the floor. Only after I picked it up did I realize what it was.

  “Dad?”

  He glanced over to me, saw what I was holding, and all of his anxiety melted with a single short laugh of recognition. “Well, that would explain things, wouldn’t it?”

  Mackenzie leaned forward from her spot in the backseat. “What is it?”

  I showed it to her. “The rearview mirror,” I told her.

  Dad pulled over to the side of the road to readjust himself mentally to the idea of driving without being able to instantly see behind him.

  I remember looking at the adhesive pad on the windshield where the mirror should have been, and shaking my head like my father was clueless. “How could you not know it was gone?”

  Dad shrugged. “Driving’s automatic,” he said. “You don’t think about those things. All I knew was that I felt somehow . . . impaired.”

  I didn’t get it at the time, but that feeling—knowing something is wrong, but not being able to pinpoint what it is—is a feeling I’ve come to know intimately. The difference is, I’ve never been able to find something as easy and as obvious as a rearview mirror lying at my feet.

  54. Due Diligence

  I stare at my homework, unable to lift a finger to do it. It’s as if my pen weighs a thousand tons. Or maybe it’s electrified. That’s it—it’s electrified—and if I touch it, it will kill me. Or the paper will slice an artery. Paper cuts are the worst. I have legitimate reasons for not doing my work. Fear of death. But the biggest reason of all is that my mind doesn’t want to go there. It’s in other places.

  “Dad?”

  It’s getting toward “that time of year,” and my father sits at the kitchen table with his laptop, stressed and distracted by the new tax code, and some client’s haphazard collection of receipts. “Yes, Caden?”

  “There’s this boy at school who wants to kill me.”

  He looks at me, into me, through me. I hate when he does that. He glances back to his laptop, takes a deep breath, and he closes it. I wonder if he’s doing it to hide somet
hing from me. No, it couldn’t be. What would he be hiding? That’s crazy. But still . . .

  “Is this the same kid as before?”

  “No,” I tell him. “It’s someone different.”

  “Someone different.”

  “Yes.”

  “A different kid.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you think he wants to kill you.”

  “Kill me. Yes.”

  Dad takes off his glasses, and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Okay. Let’s talk about this. Let’s talk about these feelings you’re having—”

  “How do you know it’s just a feeling? How do you know he hasn’t already done something. Something bad!”

  Again he takes that deep breath. “What has he done, Caden?”

  I start getting louder. I can’t help myself. “It’s not what he’s done—it’s what he’s going to do! I can read it in him! I know! I know!”

  “All right, just calm down.”

  “Are you even listening to me?”

  Dad stands up, finally maybe taking this as seriously as he should. “Caden, your mother and I are worried.”

  “Well, that’s good, right? You should be. Because he might be after you, too.”

  “Not about him,” my father says. “About you. Do you understand?”

  Mom comes in behind me, making me jump. My sister is with her.

  My parents’ eyes meet, and it’s like mind reading. I can feel their thoughts shooting through me: Dad, to Mom, and back to Dad again. Mental Ping-Pong through my soul.

  My mom turns to my sister. “Go upstairs.”

  “No, I wanna stay here.” My sister puts on a face to match her whine, but Mom won’t allow it.

  “Don’t argue with me. Just go!”

  My sister slumps her shoulders and stomps up the stairs, exaggerating every footfall.

  I’m alone with my parents now.

  “What’s wrong?” Mom asks.

  “Remember what I told you? About a kid at school?” Dad says, making it crystal clear that I can’t tell either of them anything in confidence. I give her the details, and she weighs it a little differently than Dad.

  “Well, maybe we need to look into this. Find out about this boy ourselves.”

  “See, that’s what I’m saying. Look into it!” I feel the tiniest bit relieved.

  Dad opens his mouth like he’s going to speak, but closes it again, reconsidering his reaction. “Okay,” he says. “I’m all for due diligence, but . . .”

  He never finishes the “but.” Instead he goes into the living room, kneeling by the bookshelf. “Where’s last year’s yearbook?” he asks. “Let’s see this kid for ourselves.”

  And now that they believe me, I feel relieved. But not really. Because I know they don’t believe me. They’re just going through the motions, to placate me. To make me feel like they’re on my side. But they’re not. They’re like Ms. Sassel and my teachers and the kids who look at me with evil intent. It’s like these aren’t my mother and father, they’re just masks of my parents, and I don’t know what’s really underneath. I know I can’t tell them anything anymore.

  55. A Regular Infestation

  What I had once thought were rats on the ship’s deck are not rats at all. Although I think I’d prefer it if they were.

  “They’re a nuisance,” Carlyle tells me, as he does his best to poke them out of corners and wash them from the deck. They run from his soapy water. They don’t like being wet, or for that matter clean. “Just when you think you’ve got a handle on ’em, more of ’em show up on deck.”

  Some ships are infested with rodents. Others cockroaches. Ours has an infestation of free-range brains. The smallest are the size of a walnut, the largest are the size of a fist.

  “The damn things escape from sailors’ heads when they’re asleep, or when they’re not paying attention, and go feral.” Carlyle pushes his mop toward a cowering batch of them, and they skitter away on purple little dendrite legs.

  “When the day comes to do the dive,” Carlyle tells me, “I gotta make sure there’s not a single brain on deck to foul things up.”

  “If they’re brains from the crew, why are they so small?” I ask.

  Carlyle sighs sadly. “Either they didn’t use ’em and they atrophied—or they used them too much, and they burned out.” He shakes his head. “Such a waste.”

  He dips his mop into his bucket of soapy water and sloshes it into dark corners, flushing the hapless brains out from their hiding places, and washing them out of the ship’s drainage holes into the sea.

  He finds a small one clinging to the strands of his mop and he bangs the mop against the rail to dislodge it. “There’s no end to them. But it’s my job to get ’em off the ship before they breed.”

  “So . . . what happens to the brainless sailors?” I ask.

  “Oh, the captain finds something to fill their heads with, and then sends them on their merry way.”

  But somehow it doesn’t sound too merry to me.

  56. The Stars Are Right

  It’s the middle of the night. I stand above Calliope at the tip of the bow, and I’m filled with a nasty kind of anticipation. Like the feeling you get five minutes before you realize you’re going to throw up.

  There’s a storm on the horizon. Lightning illuminates the distant clouds in erratic bursts, but it’s still too far away to hear the thunder. The sea is too rough for me to drop down into her arms tonight. She has to shout over the roar of the sea to be heard.

  “The captain is not entirely wrong to think me magical,” she confides. “I see things no one else does.”

  “Things in the sea?” I ask. “Things beneath the waves?”

  “No. It’s toward the horizon that I cast my eyes. I see the future in the stars that ride the horizon. Not just one future but all possible futures at once, and I don’t know which one is true. It’s a curse to see all that might happen but never know what will.”

  “How can you see anything in the stars?” I ask her. “The stars are all wrong.”

  “No,” she tells me. “The stars are right. It’s everything else that’s wrong.”

  57. The Chemicals between Us

  Max and Shelby don’t come over anymore for our game-creation sessions. Max doesn’t come at all even though my house has been like a second home to him. He even avoids me in school.

  Shelby, on the other hand, makes an effort at conversation in school, but I doubt her motives. If she really wanted to talk to me it wouldn’t be so forced. What is she really up to? What is she saying to Max about me when I’m not there? I’m sure they’ve gotten another artist for their game. They’ll blindside me with it any minute. Or maybe they won’t tell me at all.

  Shelby corners me for a conversation. She tries to make small talk. Shelby is more about talking than listening, which is usually fine, but lately I haven’t been a good listener. Mostly I nod when I think it’s appropriate, and if a response is required I usually say, “I’m sorry, what was that?”

  But this time Shelby isn’t taking any of it. She sits me down in the cafeteria, forcing me to look her in the eye.

  “Caden, what’s going on with you?”

  “That seems to be the question of the month. Maybe it’s what’s going on with you.”

  Then she leans close and gets quiet. “Listen, I know about these things. My brother started getting drunk in tenth grade, and it just about destroyed him. I might have been like him, except that I saw what it did to him.”

  I pull away. “I don’t drink, okay? Maybe a beer at a party once in a while, you know, but that’s all. I don’t get drunk.”

  “Well, whatever it is you’re doing, you can tell me. I’ll understand. Max will, too—he just doesn’t know how to say it.”

  Suddenly all my words come out at Shelby in hard consonants. “I’m fine! I’m not doing anything. I don’t smoke crack, I don’t snort Ritalin or suck gas from whipped cream cans, and I don’t shoot up Drano.”

&nbs
p; “Okay,” says Shelby, not believing me in the least. “When you feel like talking about it, I’ll be here.”

  58. Head-banger

  There was this kid I knew back in the second grade. When he got mad, he would bang his head against the wall or the table—whatever was close by and bangable. The rest of us thought it was funny, so we tried to get him mad at every opportunity, just to see him do it. I was guilty of it, too. See, the teacher moved him around the room, hoping to find a spot where he would be okay. Eventually he got moved next to me. I remember this time I had grabbed his pencil while he was doing math, and pushed down on it, just hard enough to break the tip. He got mad, but not that mad. He glared at me and went to sharpen his pencil. When he got back I waited a minute, then tugged on his paper so his pencil left a streak across the page. He got mad, but not mad enough. So I waited a minute, then I kicked his desk hard enough to send his math book flying off the table and to the ground. The third time was the charm. He glared at me with crazy eyes and I remember saying to myself that I had really gone too far. Now he’d go nuts on me, and it would be my own fault. But instead he began to bang his head against his desk. Everyone was laughing and the teacher had to wrestle with him to get him to stop.

  The thing is, we never saw him as a person, just as an object of comic relief. Then one day I saw him in the playground. He was playing all by himself. He seemed fairly content, and it occurred to me that his odd behavior had left him friendless. So friendless that he didn’t know any better.

  I had wanted to go over and play with him, but I was scared. I don’t know of what. Maybe that his head-banging was contagious. Or his friendlessness. I wish I knew where he was today, so I could tell him I understand how it was. And how easy it is to suddenly find yourself alone in the playground.

  59. Man on Fire

  I have never ditched school. Leaving school without permission gets you detention or worse. I’m not that kind of kid. But what choice do I have now? The signs are there. Everywhere, all around me. I know it’s going to happen. I know it will be bad. I don’t know what it’s going to be or what direction it’s going to come from, but I know it will bring misery and tears and pain. Horrible. Horrible. There are a lot of them now. Kids with evil designs. I pass them in the hall. It started with one, but it spread like a disease. Like a fungus. They send one another secret signals as they pass between classes. They’re plotting—and since I know, I’m a target. The first of many. Or maybe it’s not the kids. Maybe it’s the teachers. There’s no way to know for sure.