The Institute Read online

“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.”

  SHOTS FOR DOTS

  1

  Outside the door of the Institute’s canteen and TV lounge area, Kalisha put an arm around Luke’s shoulders and pulled him close to her. He thought—hoped, really—she meant to kiss him again, but she whispered in his ear instead. Her lips tickled his skin and gave him goosebumps. “Talk about anything you want, only don’t say anything about Maureen, okay? We think they only listen sometimes, but it’s better to be careful. I don’t want to get her in trouble.”

  Maureen, okay, the housekeeping lady, but who were they? Luke had never felt so lost, not even as a four-year-old, when he had gotten separated from his mother for fifteen endless minutes in the Mall of America.

  Meanwhile, just as Kalisha had predicted, the bugs found him. Little black ones that circled his head in clouds.

  Most of the playground was surfaced in fine gravel. The hoop area, where the kid named George continued to shoot baskets, was hot-topped, and the trampoline was surrounded with some kind of spongy stuff to cushion the fall if someone jumped wrong and went boinking off the side. There was a shuffleboard court, a badminton set-up, a ropes course, and a cluster of brightly colored cylinders that little kids could assemble into a tunnel—not that there were any kids here little enough to use it. There were also swings, teeter-totters, and a slide. A long green cabinet flanked by picnic tables was marked with signs reading GAMES AND EQUIPMENT and PLEASE RETURN WHAT YOU TOOK OUT.

  The playground was surrounded by a chainlink fence at least ten feet high, and Luke saw cameras peering down at two of the corners. They were dusty, as if they hadn’t been cleaned in a while. Beyond the fence there was nothing but forest, mostly pines. Judging by their thickness, Luke put their age at eighty years, give or take. The formula—given in Trees of North America, which he had read one Saturday afternoon when he was ten or so—was pretty simple. There was no need to read the rings. You just estimated the circumference of one of the trees, divided by pi to get the diameter, then multiplied by the average growth factor for North American pines, which was 4.5. Easy enough to figure, and so was the corollary deduction: these trees hadn’t been logged for quite a long time, maybe a couple of generations. Whatever the Institute was, it was in the middle of an old-growth forest, which meant in the middle of nowhere. As for the play
ground itself, his first thought was that if there was ever a prison exercise yard for kids between the ages of six and sixteen, it would look exactly like this.

  The girl—Iris—saw them and waved. She double-bounced on the trampoline, her ponytail flying, then took a final leap off the side and landed on the springy stuff with her legs spread and her knees flexed. “Sha! Who you got there?”

  “This is Luke Ellis,” Kalisha said. “New this morning.”

  “Hey, Luke.” Iris walked over and offered her hand. She was a skinny girl, taller than Kalisha by a couple of inches. She had a pleasant, pretty face, her cheeks and forehead shiny with what Luke supposed was a mixture of sweat and bug-dope. “Iris Stanhope.”

  Luke shook with her, aware that the bugs—minges were what they were called in Minnesota, he had no idea what they were called here—had begun to sample him. “Not pleased to be here, but I guess pleased to meet you.”

  “I’m from Abilene, Texas. What about you?”

  “Minneapolis. That’s in—”

  “I know where it is,” Iris said. “Land of a billion lakes, or some shit like that.”

  “George!” Kalisha shouted. “Where’s your manners, young man? Come on over here!”

  “Sure, but wait. This is important.” George toed the foul line at the edge of the blacktop, held the basketball to his chest, and began speaking in a low, tension-filled voice. “Okay, folks, after seven hard-fought games, this is what it comes down to. Double overtime, Wizards trail the Celtics by one point, and George Iles, just in off the bench, has a chance to win this thing from the foul line. If he makes one, the Wizards tie it up yet again. If he makes both, he’ll go down in history, probably get his picture in the Basketball Hall of Fame, maybe win a Tesla convertible—”

  “That would have to be a custom job,” Luke said. “Tesla doesn’t make a convertible, at least not yet.”

  George paid no attention. “Nobody ever expected Iles to be in this position, least of all Iles. An eerie silence has fallen over the Capital One Arena . . .”

  “And then somebody farts!” Iris shouted. She put her tongue between her lips and blew a long, bubbly honk. “A real trumpet blast! Smelly, too!”

  “Iles takes a deep breath . . . he bounces the ball twice, which is his trademark . . .”

  “In addition to a motor mouth, George has a very active fantasy life,” Iris told Luke. “You get used to it.”

  George glanced toward the three of them. “Iles casts an angry look at a lone Celtics fan razzing him from center court . . . it’s a girl who looks stupid as well as amazingly ugly . . .”

  Iris blew another raspberry.

  “Now Iles faces the basket . . . Iles shoots . . .”

  Air ball.

  “Jesus, George,” Kalisha said, “that was horrible. Either tie the fucking game or lose it, so we can talk. This kid doesn’t know what happened to him.”

  “Like we do,” Iris said.

  George flexed his knees and shot. The ball rolled around the rim . . . thought it over . . . and fell away.

  “Celtics win, Celtics win!” Iris yelled. She did a cheerleader jump and shook invisible pompoms. “Now come over here and say hello to the new kid.”

  George came over, waving away bugs as he did so. He was short and stocky, and Luke thought his fantasies were the only place he would ever play pro basketball. His eyes were a pale blue that reminded Luke of the Paul Newman and Steve McQueen movies he and Rolf liked to watch on TCM. Thinking about that, the two of them sprawled in front of the TV and eating popcorn, made him feel sick.

  “Yo, kid. What’s your name?”

  “Luke Ellis.”

  “I’m George Iles, but you probably knew that from these girls. I’m a god to them.”

  Kalisha held her head. Iris flipped him the bird.

  “A love god.”

  “But Adonis, not Cupid,” Luke said, getting into it a little. Trying, anyway. “Adonis is the god of desire and beauty.”

  “If you say so. How do you like the place so far? Sucks, doesn’t it?”

  “What is it? Kalisha calls it the Institute, but what does that mean?”

  “Might as well call it Mrs. Sigsby’s Home for Wayward Psychic Children,” Iris said, and spit.

  This wasn’t like coming in halfway through a movie; it was like coming in halfway through the third season of a TV show. One with a complicated plot.

  “Who’s Mrs. Sigsby?”

  “The queen bitch,” George said. “You’ll meet her, and my advice is don’t sass her. She does not like to be sassed.”

  “Are you TP or TK?” Iris asked.

  “TK, I suppose.” Actually it was a lot more than a supposition. “Sometimes things move around me, and since I don’t believe in poltergeists, I’m probably doing it. But that can’t be enough to . . .” He trailed off. Can’t be enough to land me here was what he was thinking. But he was here.

  “TK-positive?” George asked. He headed for one of the picnic tables. Luke followed, trailed by the two girls. He could calculate the rough age of the forest that surrounded them, he knew the names of a hundred different bacteria, he could fill these kids in on Hemingway, Faulkner, or Voltaire, but he had still never felt more behind the curve.

  “I have no idea what that means.”

  Kalisha said, “Pos is what they call kids like me and George. The techs and caretakers and doctors. We’re not supposed to know it—”

  “But we do,” Iris finished. “It’s what you call an open secret. TK- and TP-positives can do it when they want to, at least some of the time. The rest of us can’t. For me, things only move when I’m pissed off, or really happy, or just startled. Then it’s involuntary, like sneezing. So I’m just average. They call average TKs and TPs pinks.”

  “Why?” Luke asked.

  “Because if you’re just regular, there’s a little pink dot on the papers in your folder. We’re not supposed to see what’s in our folders, either, but I saw in mine one day. Sometimes they’re careless.”

  “You want to watch your step, or they are apt to get careless all over your ass,” Kalisha said.

  Iris said, “Pinks get more tests and more shots. I got the tank. It sucked, but not majorly.”

  “What’s the—”

  George gave Luke no chance to finish his question. “I’m TK-pos, no pink in my folder. Zero pink for this kid.”

  “You’ve seen your folder?” Luke asked.

  “Don’t need to. I’m awesome. Watch this.”

  There was no swami-like concentration, the kid just stood there, but an extraordinary thing happened. (It seemed extraordinary to Luke, at least, although neither of the girls seemed particularly impressed.) The cloud of minges circling George’s head blew backward, forming a kind of cometary tail, as if they had been struck by a gust of strong wind. Only there was no wind.

  “See?” he said. “TK-pos in action. Only it doesn’t last long.”

  True enough. The minges were already back, circling him and only kept off by the bug-dope he was wearing.

  “That second shot you took at the basket,” Luke said. “Could you have made it go in?”

  George shook his head, looking regretful.

  “I wish they’d bring in a really powerful TK-pos,” Iris said. Her meet-the-new-kid excitement had collapsed. She looked tired and scared and older than her age, which Luke put at around fifteen. “One who could teleport us the fuck out of here.” She sat down on one of the picnic table’s benches and put a hand over her eyes.

  Kalisha sat down and put an arm around her. “No, come on, it’s going to be okay.”

  “No it isn’t,” Iris said. “Look at this, I’m a pincushion!” She held out her arms. There were two Band-Aids on the left one, and three on the right. Then she gave her eyes a brisk rub and put on what Luke supposed was her game face. “So, new kid—can you move things around on purpose?”

  Luke had never talked about the mind-over-matter stuff—also known as psychokinesis—except
with his parents. His mom said it would freak people out if they knew. His dad said it was the least important thing about him. Luke agreed with both points, but these kids weren’t freaked, and in this place it was important. That was clear.

  “No. I can’t even wiggle my ears.”

  They laughed, and Luke relaxed. The place was strange and scary, but at least these kids seemed okay.

  “Once in a while things move around, that’s all. Dishes, or silverware. Sometimes a door will shut by itself. Once or twice my study lamp turned on. It’s never anything big. Hell, I wasn’t completely sure I was doing it. I thought maybe drafts . . . or deep earth tremors . . .”

  They were all looking at him with wise eyes.

  “Okay,” he said. “I knew. My folks did, too. But it was never a big deal.”

  Maybe it would have been, he thought, except for being freakishly smart, the kid accepted to not one but two colleges at the age of twelve. Suppose you had a seven-year-old who could play the piano like Van Cliburn. Would anyone care if that kid could also do a few simple card tricks? Or wiggle his ears? This was a thing he couldn’t say to George, Iris, and Kalisha, though. It would sound like boasting.

  “You’re right, it’s not a big deal!” Kalisha said vehemently. “That’s what’s so fucked up about it! We’re not the Justice League or the X-Men!”

  “Have we been kidnapped?” Praying for them to laugh. Praying for one of them to say of course not.

  “Well, duh,” George said.

  “Because you can make bugs go away for a second or two? Because . . .” He thought of the pan falling off the table at Rocket Pizza. “Because every now and then I walk into a room and the door closes behind me?”

  “Well,” George said, “if they were grabbing people for their good looks, Iris and Sha wouldn’t be here.”

  “Dinkleballs,” Kalisha said.

  George smiled. “An extremely sophisticated return. Right up there with bite my wiener.”

  “Sometimes I can’t wait for you to go to Back Half,” Iris said. “God will probably strike me dead for that, but—”

  “Wait,” Luke said. “Just wait. Start from the beginning.”