Chapter Six
THE ADDRESS I GOT OFF the Internet for Dr. Churchill’s office is on the corner of Vandeventer Avenue in the center of Princeton.
I park next to a fondue restaurant and check myself in the rearview mirror, finger-combing my hair flat in the hopes of making myself look more like a good kid, reliable.
Even though I washed my hands three times in the bathroom of a convenience store when I stopped for coffee, I can still feel the oily grit of dirt on my skin.
I try not to rub my fingers against my jeans as I walk into the reception area and up to the desk.
The woman answering the phone has dyed red curls and glasses hanging around her neck on a beaded chain.
I wonder if she made the chain herself; irrationally I associate crafting with friendliness.
She looks like she might be in her fifties from the lines on her face and all the silver at her roots.
“Hi,” I say. “I have an appointment at two.”
She looks at me without smiling and taps the keyboard in front of her. I know there’s not going to be anything on her screen about me, but that’s okay. It’s part of my plan.
“What’s your name?” she asks.
“Cassel Sharpe.” I try to stick to the truth as much as possible, in case there’s a need for elaboration or photo identification.
As she clicks around to figure out who made a mistake, I take stock of the office.
There’s a young woman behind the desk, wearing light purple scrubs, and I think she might be a nurse, since there’s only one doctor’s name—Dr. Eric Churchill, MD—on the door.
The few files on top of the cabinets in the back are in dark green folders, and a note about the holiday hours is taped to the front of the desk. On stationery. I reach for it.
“I don’t see anything here, Mr. Sharpe,” she says.
“Oh,” I say, my hand freezing. I can’t rip the tape without her noticing the movement. “Oh.” I try to seem worried and hope that she’ll take pity on me and do some more fruitless searching or, better yet, go ask someone.
She doesn’t seem to notice my fake distress and seems, in fact, more irritated than sympathetic. “Who made the appointment?”
“My mom. Do you think it might be under her name?” The nurse in the scrubs takes out a file and sets it on the counter, close to where I’m standing.
“There’s no Sharpe here,” the receptionist says, her gaze steady. “Maybe your mother made a mistake?”
I take a deep breath and concentrate on minimizing tells. Liars will touch their faces, obscuring themselves. They’ll stiffen up. They’ll do any of dozens of nonverbal things—breathe quickly, talk fast, blush—that could give them away. “Her last name’s Singer. Could you check?”
As she turns her face toward the screen, I slide the file off the counter and under my coat.
“No. No Singer,” she says, with profound annoyance. “Would you like to call your mother, maybe?”
“Yeah, I better,” I say contritely. As I turn, I pull the stationery sign off the front of the desk.
I have no idea if she sees me. I force myself not to look back, just to keep walking with one arm crossed over my coat to keep the file in place, and the other sliding the sheet of paper into the file, everything perfectly natural.
I hear a door close and a woman—maybe the patient that goes with the file—say, “I don’t understand. If I’m cursed, then what good is this amulet? I mean, look at it, it’s covered in emeralds; are you telling me it’s no better than a dime-store—”
I don’t pause to hear the rest. I just walk toward the doors.
“Mr. Sharpe,” a male voice says.
The doors are right in front of me. Just a few more steps will take me through them, but I stop. After all, my plan won’t work if they remember me, and they’ll remember a patient they have to chase down. “Uh, yeah?”
Dr. Churchill is a tan, thin man with thick glasses and close-cropped curling hair as white as eggshells. He pushes his glasses back up onto the bridge of his nose absently. “I don’t know what happened to your appointment, but I’ve got some time right now. Come on back.”
“What?” I say, turning toward the receptionist, hand still holding my coat closed. “I thought you said—”
She frowns. “Do you want to see the doctor or not?”
I can’t think of anything to do but follow.
A nurse leads me to a room with an examining table covered in crinkly paper.
She gives me a clipboard with a form that asks for an address and insurance information.
Then she leaves me alone to stare at a chart showing the different stages of sleep and their waveforms. I rip the lining of my coat enough to drop the file inside it.
Then I sit on the end of the table and write down facts about myself that are mostly true.
There are several brochures on the counter: “The Four Types of Insomnia,” “Symptoms of HBG Assault,” “Dangers of Sleep Apnea,” and “All About Narcolepsy.”
I pick up the one on HBG assault. That’s the legal term for what my mother did to that rich guy. Assault. There are bullet points with a list of symptoms, and the caution that the diagnostic differential (whatever that means) on each is pretty broad:
· Vertigo
· Auditory Hallucinations
· Visual Hallucinations
· Headaches
· Fatigue
· Increased Anxiety
I think of Maura’s music and wonder just how weird the hallucinations can get.
My phone buzzes and I take it out of my pocket automatically, still staring at the pamphlet.
I’m not surprised by any of the information—like, I know I get headaches a lot because my mother gave an emotional working the way other parents give a time-out—but it’s still strange to see it printed in black and white.
I flip open my phone and let the pamphlet fall to the floor. Get over here, the message reads. We’ve got a big problem. It’s the only text message I’ve ever gotten where everything is spelled right. It’s from Sam.
I push the buttons to call him back immediately, but the call goes to voice mail and I realize he must be in class. I check the time on my phone. A half hour more until lunch. I text quickly—wht did u do?—which might not be the most sensitive message, but I’m imagining disaster.
I’m imagining him caught with my book, ratting me out. I’m imagining being doomed to sifting through my parents’ detritus until Grandad finds some other odd job for me.
The reply comes fast. Payout.
I breathe. Someone must have won a bet and, of course, he doesn’t have the cash to cover it. B ovr soon, I text back as the door opens and the doctor walks in.
Dr. Churchill takes the clipboard and looks at it instead of at me. “Dolores says there was some kind of mix-up?”
I assume that Dolores is the unfriendly reception desk lady. “Mom told me that I had an appointment with you today.” The lie comes out easily; I even sound a little resentful. There’s a tipping point with lies, a point where you’ve said something so many times that it feels truer than the truth.
He looks at me then, and I feel like he sees more than I want him to.
I think about the file sitting in my coat, so close that he could reach down and grab it before I could stop him.
I hope he doesn’t have a stethoscope, because my heart is trying to beat its way out of my chest. “So why’d she make you an appointment with a sleep specialist?
What kind of problems are you having?” he asks.
I hesitate. I want to tell him about waking up on the roof, about my sleepwalking and the dreams, but if I do, he might remember me. I know he’s not going to write the note I need—no doctor in his right mind would—but I can’t risk him writing Wallingford any other kind of letter.
“Let me guess,” he says, surprising me, because how could anyone guess why a patient came to a sleep clinic? “You’re here for the test.” I have no idea what he’s talking about.
“Right,” I say. “The test.”
“So, who canceled the appointment? Your father?”
I’m in over my head, with nothing to do but play along. “Probably my father.”
He nods like that makes sense, fishing around in a drawer until his gloved hand emerges holding a fistful of electrodes.
He begins attaching them to my forehead, their sticky sides pulling at my skin.
“Now we’re going to measure your gamma waves.
” He switches on a machine and it jumps to life, needles skittering across paper in the pattern that’s mirrored on a screen to my left.
“Gamma waves,” I repeat. I’m not even asleep, so I don’t see the point in measuring my gamma waves. “Is this going to hurt?”
“Quick and painless.” The doctor peers down at the paper. “Any reason why you think you’re hyperbathygammic?”
Hyperbathygammic. That long medical term for worker. HBG. Heebeegeebies.
“Wh-what?” I stammer.
His eyes narrow. “I thought—”
I think of the woman I heard in the reception area. She was complaining about getting worked, and she sounded like they’d done a test on her to prove it. But he’s not asking me if I think I’ve been worked. He’s asking if I think I’m a worker.
This is the new test, the one that they keep talking about on the news, the one that conservative politicians want to make mandatory.
Theoretically, compulsory testing will keep HBG kids from breaking the law by accident when using their powers for the first time.
Theoretically, the results are supposed to stay private, so there’s no harm, right?
But no one really thinks those results are going to stay private.
They’ll wind up with the government, which loves to draft workers for counterterrorism and other odd jobs.
Or—legally or not—those results wind up in the hands of local authorities.
If mandatory testing happens, the rest will be hard on its heels.
Yeah, I know the slippery slope argument is a logical fallacy, but occasionally a slope feels particularly greased.