A World Without You (21 page)

Sometimes they notice me,
sometimes they don't. I wonder if I'm fading in and out of existence, or if they are.

• • •

Sofía once told me that she found a red Moleskine notebook among her mother's possessions after she died. The first twenty or so pages were filled with her chicken scratch, but the rest were blank.

Sofía had sat there, in the middle of the bedroom her mother retreated to when her father drank too much, surrounded by her clothes and the smell of her perfume, and she read every single page.

Her mother had started the book the day she took a pregnancy test and realized she was going to have another child. More than half the written pages were about her hopes and her fears for Sofía while she was growing in her belly. She poured her heart into those pages, whispering in writing that was barely legible her wish that Sofía would be another girl, that
she would grow up strong and courageous, far more so than her mother had ever been.

The rest of the written pages were from after Sofía was born. More and more time passes between each entry. Some of the entries were angry—at Sofía, at her father, at the life her mother struggled with. But some of them were far kinder. These entries were written in pencil, hardly leaving a mark on the page, as if her mother was so certain the good days would not last that she left herself an easy way to erase the marks should they prove untrue.

Sofía said that when she found the notebook, she cried—for the first time since the accident, she cried. And she held that book close to her heart, upset not just because of what the pages held, but because of all the pages that held nothing at all. Most of the book was blank. Although Sofía's mother started writing in the notebook before Sofía was born, somewhere between giving birth to her little sister, raising three daughters, living with Sofía's father, and everything else life threw at her, she just . . . quit. Maybe she forgot. Maybe she ran out of things to say. But either way, the blank pages would remain forever empty.

Since I can't access the timestream and I'm stuck at home, I've been writing in an old notebook. Sometimes, instead of jotting down ideas of ways to get everything back to normal, I just write about Sofía. Or
to
Sofía. And sometimes the blank pages stare at me, waiting, and I don't know if they'll stay blank forever or if they'll become something more.

My words would give them meaning, but there's a meaning behind blank pages too.

• • •

I got Pheebs's laptop. If I can't figure out the past through the timestream, maybe I can figure out more from the USB drive.

For the most part, the recorded sessions are a weird hybrid between what I know happened and what doesn't make sense. It's all talk. Talk, talk, talk. No powers.

I don't know if it was the officials who tampered with the videos, but whoever did it did a good job. Any outsider watching these would have no idea that each session with the Doctor was a group lesson about controlling our powers. Gwen's fires are either missing altogether or they're the result of matches or lighters that the Doctor jumps up quickly to confiscate. Rather than travel through time, I just stare blankly ahead. When Ryan uses his telepathy, it simply looks like he's throwing something.

And Sofía is always visible.

I watch her, mostly. Sometimes I can line up my memory with the way she appears on-screen. The moments in sessions when she'd turn invisible are altered so that she just grows very still and withdrawn, sometimes hiding behind her hair.

I like to think I've been a good student. I always paid attention during the Doctor's sessions, and I've always wanted to have control over my powers, to not be such a liability.

But now I'm watching her instead of Dr. Franklin. I'm looking at the moments that made her go invisible. There are times during the Doctor's sessions when it's like a gun blast going off; Sofía flinches visibly, and then that weird sort of stillness washes over her, indicating that she went transparent in real life.

It happens when Dr. Franklin talks about the way we react to things that make us anxious, about how our first instincts in moments of fear or pressure may not be our best ones. It happens when Harold talks to his ghosts loudly, in a way that
overtakes the session and the Doctor has to escort him out. It happens when Ryan sits too close to Sofía or pays her too much attention.

It happens when the Doctor talks about family. He likes talking about family and the way it defines us, and every time, Sofía goes invisible.

The videos cycle quickly,
one into another, cutting on and off at the very beginning and end of each session. Except one.

I sit up straighter in bed. I vaguely remember this day, when Ryan had tried to strengthen his telepathy and mind-control powers. He was still developing them—he was much better at telekinesis then, but not all the mind stuff. The screen shows Ryan in full meltdown mode as he stands and screams at everyone, but in real life he just lost control of his power. We were all sitting there as he was experimenting, trying to implant an idea inside of us. The Doctor had started with something innocuous: Make us all think about wanting to eat an apple. At first it worked. In fact, the Doctor had a basket of apples, and we all stood up to get one, even though we'd just had breakfast. But as we ate the apples under Ryan's influence, they turned bitter in our mouths. He lost control not just of his own mind but of ours as well.

I gag thinking about it now. For me, the apple turned to
dust. Sofía said hers became slimy and filled with worms, so soft she could squish the rotten insides in her hand. Whatever Harold saw of his apple made him scream and throw it across the room, nearly breaking the office window.

It got worse after that. It wasn't just the apple inside our heads, twisted and gross, it was Ryan's entire mind. His whole mentality poured into our brains, taking over, erasing us, flashing us with memories we didn't want to see, things Ryan had experienced that none of us knew: his mother, an actress, who could barely remember his name; his father, a director, who hated his mother for cheating on him and took it out on his son. A parade of nannies, each increasingly incompetent, except for one when he was twelve, who hurt him in ways none of us could ever have imagined.

It was too much. To have ourselves in our bodies but also Ryan, to feel everything he felt coating our brains like black mold. By the end of the session, we were all clutching our heads and crying, and the Doctor had to use his healing power on each of us just to get us off the floor.

Except Ryan. The Doctor couldn't heal Ryan, because the memories he lived with, the thoughts inside his head—those were all his own. The Doctor couldn't take them away.

Maybe that's why Ryan worked so hard to advance his telepathy and control his own mind. Maybe with that control, he could block part of himself off, the part that poisoned us all when we touched it.

In the video, though, that whole session plays out much differently. Basically, we all just talk, and then Ryan breaks down, crying—actually crying, I'd never seen him do that before—and spends the rest of the session confessing his
darkest secrets, telling us about a nanny who abused him, parents who neglected him. We're disturbed, obviously, even the Doctor, but we didn't have those feelings literally pressed into our brains, and at the end of the session, we all leave.

Except Ryan. The Doc calls his name.

“Yeah?” Ryan asks sullenly.

“Come on back in, buddy,” he says. “I want to ask you some things.”

Ryan plops back down in one of the blue plastic chairs, and the Doc pulls up another one so he can face him.

“What?” Ryan asks, an edge to his voice.

“I wanted to thank you for opening up to us today,” Dr. Franklin says.

Ryan shrugs.

“And I also want to say that when you're ready, we could go to the police with some of this information. It's not right, the way the adults in your life have treated you. You understand that, yes? In fact, it's criminal, particularly what your nanny did. We could press charges . . .”

He stops when he notices Ryan laughing.

“Oh my God, really?
Really?
” Ryan says, his eyes lighting up with glee. “I thought I laid it on too thick, honestly, but you really bought all that, didn't you? Hook, line, and sinker.”

The Doctor leans away, his eyes narrowing. “You made all that up today?” he asks. “Ryan, I'm deeply disappointed in you.”

Ryan shrugs. “I just wanted to see if I could make you guys believe me. And I could. Good to know.”

“Trust, once broken, is hard to establish again,” Dr. Franklin says.

Ryan slumps in his chair. “I just wanted to have a little fun.”

“Making up a story about being abused as a child is not ‘fun,' Ryan.”

“It is for me.”

The Doctor glowers, but Ryan continues. “Look, I'm
bored
, okay? Bored. I don't belong here. Locked up with these crazies.”

“No one here is ‘crazy,'” Dr. Franklin says. “Berkshire Academy is for the emotionally and behaviorally disturbed.”

“Whatever. They don't tell you everything. They're crazy. Which, to be fair, is sometimes amusing. I wonder if I can use that for my benefit. It'd be neat to make Harold believe his ‘ghosts' are real. Or maybe make Gwen burn this whole place down.”

“Gwen's been responding very well to her therapy,” Dr. Franklin says.

Ryan snorts. “I bet I could make her do it.”

“Why?” The Doctor is trying very hard to keep his face straight, to be the kind, patient listener, but I can see there's disgust in his eyes.

“It'd be fun,” Ryan says. “To see what I could do. To make them all fail. If I had a lighter, I'd give it to Gwen right now, and I'd make the little pyro burn this whole school down.”

“You could cause serious damage, Ryan. Your lies and manipulation aren't just words. People could get hurt, even die.”

Ryan shrugs.

Dr. Franklin leans over, moving his face so that he meets Ryan's gaze. “Ryan,” he says in a very serious tone, “your manipulation seriously concerns me. I need to know that you understand the difference between right and wrong.”

He talks for a while more, but my eyes are glued on Ryan's face. This is not a side of him I've ever seen before.
Or have I?

“Do you?” Dr. Franklin asks him.

“Do I what?” Ryan's eyes shift to the wall, as if the wood grain holds more entertainment than this conversation.

“Do you understand what I'm saying? Do you feel like you know the difference between right and wrong?”

“Yeah,” Ryan says, pushing up from his chair and heading to the door. “Of course I do.”

But there's a difference between knowing what's right and wrong and actually acting on it.

The Doctor stares at the door for a long moment, and he looks torn about whether or not to chase Ryan down. In the end, he gets up and moves toward the video recorder, about to turn it off. For a moment, I see the Doctor's face close up. This had been an evening session, just before a weekend, and Dr. Franklin carries the weight of the entire week on his face. There is so much about these videos that's fake—everything that happened in them, really—but that look on his face, that's real. His eyes are still on the door, but I can see the crinkles in the corner, the way his brow furrows down, the cracks in his usual cheerful facade. He's showing exhaustion—a moment of defeat. He reaches for the door, his mouth already opening to call Ryan back.

Before he can, though, the door opens. His face tightens with anxiety as he turns, expecting to see one of us again. Instead, it's the unit leaders for the rest of the school, as well as a few of the teachers. Ms. Grantham is carrying a plate of cupcakes, and Mr. Glover has three bottles of wine in his arms, and the rest of the unit leaders burst inside, all singing “Happy Birthday” to him.

I had no idea that day had been the Doc's birthday. From
the look on his face, it seems like the Doctor himself didn't realize it. But it's kind of nice to see all that worry melt away as he blows out a candle on the biggest cupcake.

The other unit leaders spread out in the chairs we'd been sitting in. It's so weird to see the leaders acting like . . . I don't know, like people. I'm used to them bossing us around, not laughing and joking and smushing cupcakes in their mouths and getting a little tipsy on wine.

The party doesn't last long, but Ms. Grantham is the last to leave. She lingers on purpose, finding excuses to clean up dropped napkins from the floor or help put away the chairs, until she's the last person in the room. Dr. Franklin looks at her, and there's a question and there's hope drawing them closer, wrapping around them like strings. Before they do anything, though, Dr. Franklin reaches over and cuts off the video feed.

Phoebe

I'm half-asleep
when someone knocks on my door. “Yeah?” I call.

Mom steps inside, holding two letters. “Mail!” she says brightly as she tosses one of them to me. It's from James Jefferson High; inside are details for the class trip to Europe this summer.

“What's that?” I ask, looking at the open letter still in Mom's hand. The Berkshire Academy for Children with Exceptional Needs logo is emblazoned across the top.

“Bo's school wrote us a letter,” Mom starts.

“Is he in trouble?”

She shakes her head and passes the letter over to me. I get the impression that this whole “mail call” thing was just an excuse to show me the letter. I read quickly. The first page is a cut-and-paste form letter that was probably mailed out to every family. I already know most of it—that a girl from his class, Sofía Muniz, committed suicide. That government officials
have been observing the students, and that the board will be voting to determine the school's future in a few weeks. Parents are invited to give their opinions by phone or email.

The second page includes a personal note from Dr. Franklin, describing how the situation with the officials and the investigation affect Bo specifically. He warns us that Bo's therapy isn't working as well as he'd hoped, that he's changing his meds again, that Bo may have to be transferred to a new facility regardless of the school's fate.

“Huh,” I say, handing the letter back to Mom.

“I just wanted you to know,” Mom says. “We should be extra careful around Bo. It's a . . . sensitive time.”

“Okay.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” Mom asks.

“I'm not the one who needs to be talked to.” I don't break eye contact, the challenge between us clear. But when Mom leaves my room, she doesn't go to see Bo. Instead, she heads down the hallway to consult Dad.

Typical. She has the perfect way to start a conversation with Bo, but instead, she's going to squirrel away the letter and her fears behind Dad's office door. It's like they're actively trying to keep the silence, as if silence was the best—the only—possible option for this family.

I play on my phone until well past midnight, but what I really want is a distraction. I want my laptop back, and I'm a little pissed at the way Bo took it. I mean, I don't
really
care, I wasn't using it, but he didn't even ask. He acted like I wasn't even in the room. And besides, it's mine
.

I push myself off the bed and throw open my door. Bo's
light is off, and I can hear him snoring on his bed, but it's easy to break into his room, considering he has no door. My laptop's battery light glows just enough for me to find it on his desk, and I creep inside his room, stepping over his dirty clothes on the floor, and snatch it back.

It's not until I'm sitting on my bed, my laptop plugged into the charger and open on my pillow, that I notice there's a small drive attached to the side. It's broken and jagged, but the actual drive seems to work. I click on the USB icon and find video files. Each file name is just a series of numbers, but it doesn't take long to figure out they're dates and times. I select one at random, and in the brief instant between when the file loads and starts to play, I worry that I've just stumbled onto Bo's private porn stash.

But the video just shows a room. Dr. Franklin's office. There he is, behind his desk, taking notes.

I crank up the volume on my laptop as Dr. Franklin pauses his work and the door opens.

Bo is the first person in the room. Other kids, ones I recognize from Bo's school, follow. They all sit in a circle as if they've done this a hundred times. It's all routine for them.

I lean in closer, the screen illuminating my face.

“Good morning,” Dr. Franklin says. “I trust you all had a good Monday?”

Bo looks over at the girl he's sitting beside. She's short, with brown skin and black hair. “The best,” he says with a smile.

Is that his girlfriend?
I wonder. Bo's chair is scooted close to hers, but she hasn't moved closer to him. He keeps looking at her; she sweeps her hair over one side of her face, the side closest to him, like she's trying to hide. But then she tucks some
of her hair behind her ear, and her hand drops beside his, her fingers brushing his open palm.

Dr. Franklin starts what looks like a group therapy session, with a theme of reading other people's emotions and caring about their comfort zones. He has one of the boys, a tiny little guy who's practically paper-white, stand in the center of the room for a demonstration about appropriate ways to treat people. Seems a bit cruel. The kid's shaking like a leaf, but most of my attention is on my brother.

I've never seen him like this. Unguarded. Real.

And more than that, I've never seen Bo as anything but my brother. Every time in my whole life that I've ever laid eyes on Bo, he's just been my brother. If I saw him in a crowd of people, like at an assembly, I would think:
There are all those people, and there's my brother.
He was separate. He was defined.

But here, in this video, at Berkshire Academy surrounded by people he knows that I don't, I'm seeing him not as my brother but just as a person. A stranger, even.

It's fascinating but also a little creepy.

I've never seen him wear such a puppy-dog look on his face, like the one right now in the video, as he stares at the girl sitting beside him. It makes me want to know her. Is she cool? Is she using Bo? Does she feel the same way toward him?

On the screen, Dr. Franklin turns toward the girl. “Sofía,” he says, “do you have anything to add?”

She shakes her head mutely.

So that's Sofía, the girl who killed herself. Dr. Franklin told me that she and Bo had been close, and now I can see the way he feels about her. More than “close.”

He loved her.

I can't see how she feels about him, though. She's guarded, but not obviously depressed. I guess I figured that someone who killed herself would look sad and tragic. A total emo, dressed in black, with a cutting habit. But Sofía looks . . .
normal
. There's nothing in the way she sits by my brother, in the way she listens to the others, in the way she sweeps her hair over her shoulder, to indicate that she's going to take her own life. I check the date on the file. It's like a countdown clock over her head. Three weeks after this video, this girl sitting by my brother will kill herself.

I watch the rest of the video, and maybe it's because I'm an outsider who doesn't know her personally, or maybe it's just because I know what will happen, but I can start to see the pieces of Sofía's fate fall into place. It's in the way she stands, as if just breathing is exhausting to her, as if carrying the weight of her own body around is dragging her underwater. It's in the way she watches other people, detached, curious, like a scientist observing animals in the wild. She goes through the motions. When someone else is upset or sad or happy, it takes her a second to realize that she should mirror that emotion back, and another second for her to arrange her face into a mask of whatever emotion she's hiding behind.

The little details all add up to one girl's death. Each warning sign is tiny, almost imperceptible. I watch the last few videos straight through, knowing that Sofía has only days left. Her eyes lose focus during the group therapy sessions as she gradually becomes more and more disinterested in what's happening around her. She gives the other girl in her class a silver bracelet as if it means nothing to her, but I saw the way her fingers
lingered on it in earlier videos. When Bo smiles at her, it takes her longer and longer to smile back, as if she has to remind herself what that configuration of facial features means, or maybe she's just mustering up the energy to mimic him.

Sometimes she is—I don't know how to say it, and it's weird to think this way because I never knew her, but sometimes it seems like Sofía is more herself. But then sometimes she just seems . . . absent.

I wonder, if I had been in Bo's class, if I had occupied one of those blue plastic chairs, would I have noticed that Sofía was fading away? Would I have seen the signs, and would I have known what to do? Or would I have been like everyone else in the video: completely oblivious?

That's not fair. Not everyone's oblivious. The doctor tries to draw Sofía out of her shell. They have a private meeting four days before she kills herself. He changes her medication, he asks about side effects, he wants her to start keeping a “feelings journal.”

“I want you to know,” Dr. Franklin tells her, “that people love you. I know you feel alone in your family, but you're not. People care about you. They see you. You matter.”

“I know,” Sofía says in a soft voice. But she doesn't sound like she believes it.

That's the last time she speaks on the tapes.

She doesn't disappear. She's still there, in each session.

Until she isn't.

There's a jump of several days without videos, and when they resume, a lot of the sessions are what I would expect—some students cry, and Dr. Franklin helps them through it,
even though he seems on the verge of breaking down too. But not Bo. I watch him. I
know
he was close to Sofía, that he cared about her as much or more than anyone else. But any time her death is brought up, Bo's face falls blank. He gets a sort of dreamy look in his eyes.

He never once seems to realize she's gone. That she's been gone for a while.