He smiled.
“Oh, my-gee-whiz.” Witnessing our unspoken exchange, Dani threw her hands in the air. “I’m going to find Kyle and Bree.” And she skipped off.
“Was it something I said?” Jack laughed. He reached down and grabbed my hand and led me through parts of the crowd and over to a quiet spot on the edge.
“Can we see from here?”
“Oh. You want to see the movie?” he asked.
I punched him in the arm, and he feigned like it hurt.
He spread the blanket. “Yes, you’ll be able to see the movie.” I’ll be watching you and trying to figure out what you’re thinking. Don’t think I haven’t noticed how you’ve intentionally shut me out.
I batted my eyelashes at him.
“Hi, you two,” Briana said as Kyle fell beside me on the blanket.
Why is she always around?
Be nice. “Hey guys,” Jack said. “Danielle’s looking for you.”
“We just saw her.” Kyle pointed his finger out into the crowd. “She was with you.” He redirected his finger at me. “I thought it was you, anyway.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“She was talking to someone who I thought was you.” He shrugged. “Must have been wrong.”
“How long ago?” My eyes met Jack’s. You don’t think… Sandra…
No. No way. Jack sounded sure.
“A couple minutes. Enough time for us to make a small circle, then spot the two of you.”
My heart raced faster than it did after a fifty-yard sprint. You said no one knew where she was. She has to look like an old lady compared to me, right?
Don’t panic, Lex. In one smooth motion, Jack jumped to his feet. “I’ll find her.” He kept his tone light. Stay here. Okay?
I’ll go with you.
Stay, he ordered. He headed off into the crowd, back toward the vendors.
I refused to be treated like some dog he could order around. “You two mind watching our spot?”
Bree and Kyle exchanged looks and after a shrug, Kyle said, “You mean lounge on this blanket and watch the movie? Sure.”
I moved in the opposite direction from Jack, careful to keep my thoughts to myself. Everything seemed normal. Kids from seventh grade through twelfth settled in, waiting for the movie to start. The sun had disappeared and darkness fell over the campus.
I heard a girl squeal over my right shoulder. I whipped around to see a sophomore lacrosse player carrying a freshman girl like a sack of potatoes. She was playfully beating his backside.
I tried to relax, but the weight of a thousand bricks pushed hard on my chest. Where are you, Dani?
Lexi! You didn’t stay put, did you? Jack asked. Why don’t you ever listen?
I just don’t. Find her?
No.
“Hi, Lexi.”
I knew that voice behind me. I immediately closed off my mind to Jack. “Seth. What are you doing here?”
“Looking for someone,” he said.
“Oh, yeah? At Wellington? Seems strange.” My eyes darted left, then right, still searching for Danielle. And now for Jack. How did Seth get through the Wellington gates?
“Yeah, maybe you can help me.” He held something in his hand. A picture of some sort. “Does this remind you of anyone?”
He flipped the picture around, but it was too dark. “I can’t really see it.”
“Let’s move into the light.” Seth’s fingers circled around my forearm, and he led me away from the crowd and behind one of the vendors. Lights were strung overhead. Warning bells blared inside my head.
I examined the picture. It couldn’t be. Well, it kind of looked like Briana, but not totally. The hair wasn’t right. The girl in the picture had straight, jet black hair, whereas Briana’s was red and curly. The girl in the picture had a large gap between her two front teeth. Briana’s teeth were perfectly straight and bleached super white.
The girl in the picture was definitely not Bree. Nevertheless, the resemblance was staggering.
“You recognize this person?” Seth’s voice was calm, yet his eyes darted in several directions in the span of a second.
“No.” I handed the picture back to him. “Good to see you Seth, but Jack will be missing me. I need to get back to my friends.”
“Not so fast.” He reached out and grabbed my arm again, stopping my forward motion.
“I think you do recognize the girl in this picture.”
“Why would I tell you if I did?”
He smiled. “I’m not your enemy, Lexi.”
“Oh, yeah?” I was not convinced. “What do you want from me, Seth?”
“Shouldn’t you really be asking, ‘What does Jack want from you?’” His smirk slid through my veins like a venomous snake.
Okay, I’ll bite. “What does Jack want from me?” Besides hopefully, my adoration, and something beyond sisterly fondness. My lips quirked at that last thought.
“Why don’t you take a ride with me?”
“What? You’re crazy. I’m not going anywhere with you.” I tucked my shaking hands into my armpits and looked over his shoulder. “Besides, we’re on lockdown.” Which is why I was shocked Seth was allowed in.
“You will if you want to know what you were engineered to do. And why Jack spent a year spying on you inside this school.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Seth left me in a sea of scents from funnel cake to cotton candy, right after I promised to meet him in the parking lot at ten p.m. He promised he could show me what I was designed to do. Not even Jack could do that.
Now, how would I break away from Jack without him knowing where I was going? I smoothed my hands over my jeans before I circled to the front of the vendors to look for him.
Where the hell are you? Jack growled inside my head.
I found him standing beside the blanket. Dani sat in the lotus between Bree and Kyle, who tipped back a bottle of water. I let out a relieved breath.
“Where were you?” he practically barked.
I ran my fingers across his lips and then manually tipped the corners upward. “Turn that frown upside down,” I said. “I’m fine.” Except now I wondered why he’d spied on me for an entire year before he enrolled in Wellington. That would have to wait. First I’d let Seth show me what my father had kept from me about my genetic design.
He cupped my cheek. “You scared me.”
I’m sorry. I just couldn’t stand the thought of something happening to Dani. Did you see anything strange?
He shook his head. I’m pretty sure it was nothing. Kyle had probably seen you and just misjudged how much time had passed. He grabbed my hand and pulled me closer. You owe me a date.
We both looked down at his blanket at the same time. Three bodies took up the entire blanket.
Wanna make out under the bleachers? Jack wiggled an eyebrow at me.
Heat crept up my back and flushed my cheeks. Squeezing his hand, I led him over to the bleachers. “Not under. That sounds… I don’t know. Sleazy or something.”
He leaned close to my ear. “I like it when you blush.”
“I don’t blush.”
“Oh, you do, Miss Matthews. And it’s beautiful.”
My heart sang at his words. I was a giddy teenager celebrating her first teen crush.
We sat just as the opening credits started for Harry Potter: Chamber of Secrets. Safe choice given the age range of the students.
Jack leaned back against the bench behind us, and I snuggled into his arm. As he watched the start of the movie, I studied his profile—the crookedness of his nose, like it had been broken before, his eyes so dark they appeared black here in the darkness, and the small amount of stubble to his face after a long day.
He turned and caught me staring at him. His eyes warmed when they met mine. Our relationship had definitely taken a sharp turn somewhere along the path into something different. Something overwhelming.
He leaned in and kissed me, pressing hard. His hand slipped
behind my neck. His fingers laced through my hair. When he pulled away, he said, “You learned to control your thoughts rather quickly.”
“Hmm.” I figured I had to.
“I wish you didn’t hide so many of your thoughts from me. I enjoyed having you inside my head. Even when you were moody.”
“Moody?” I slapped at his arm. He caught my hand and squeezed it, pulling me closer.
We sat there in silence and watched the movie. From time to time, I glanced at him. As I stared at this beautiful boy beside me brushing his fingers up and down my arm, I knew there were many things that could separate us.
I leaned my head against his shoulder.
He turned his head and kissed my hair. I might not be able to hear your thoughts right now, but I sense your fear of something. I’m not going anywhere. I’ll always be here to protect you.
But what if I was going somewhere? I only hoped he wouldn’t be too mad.
~~~~
Seth and I entered the nursing home after ten p.m. Strangely, the nurses outside my grandmother’s room only waved at Seth and me, barely lifting their heads from their gossip session and late-night chocolate binge.
“They’re used to me coming in at strange hours to sit by my mom’s bed,” he said in answer to my unspoken curiosity.
They weren’t used to seeing me here this late. I was still in shock that I had just snuck out of Wellington in the back of Seth Whitmeyer’s SUV. Jack was going to be irate.
“Why do you come so late?”
He pushed open Gram’s door, and allowed me to pass through first. I had yet to think of him as a gentleman. He had saved my life last week, though.
“I’m a doctor. I work long hours.”
My grandmother slept soundly on her back. Her face looked relaxed and peaceful.
“Sit,” Seth ordered.
I evil-eyed him, then scooted the chair closer to Gram’s bed and sat. “Hi, Gram,” I whispered so as not to wake her.
“Now, I don’t know what we’re going to discover. Or why you’ve never experienced something before now.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, your abilities should have been apparent before now. Jack knew he could heal a bird’s broken wing when he was five.”
I thought about the little white pills that I hadn’t taken since the day Jack arrived at Wellington—the same pills Jack tossed into the swimming pool. “Maybe I don’t have these abilities you think I have.”
“For Jack’s sake, I hope you’re wrong.”
“Why for Jack’s sake?” My stomach tightened. Guilt churned there. I had lied to Jack—told him I was too tired to stay out when Dean Fisher granted an extended curfew.
Two kids in love are never too tired to be together. Jack didn’t question me, though.
“Jack has a lot riding on what we hope you can do. We’ll get to that. Now, I want you to concentrate on your grandmother.”
I stared at Gram’s beautiful face. The woman who raised me had been confined mostly to a hospital room for the past six years.
“She was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s seven or eight years ago, right?”
I nodded.
“Do you understand how Alzheimer’s works?”
I nodded again. I understood my grandmother gradually began to forget where she left her glasses, and eventually where she left me. And then who I even was.
I’d done a paper on Alzheimer’s when I was in Advanced Human Anatomy so I knew what happened to the brain of someone with the disease. The cerebral cortex shrunk. The ventricles enlarged. Among other things.
“I want you to think about what the brain is supposed to look like. I know you know the brain well, Lexi, from the classes you’ve taken.”
He was right. Was my life an open book to him?
“Now, touch her head. Press your fingers gently into her temple. Or her forehead. We might have to try different things.”
My arms, legs, back tensed. I had touched Gram a hundred times. Somehow this was different.
My fingers hovered just above her hairline. Shaking. “I’m scared,” I whispered.
Seth, surprisingly, said nothing as I dug deep inside my gut and searched my heart for the courage. Suddenly the love I felt for Gram took over. The shakiness in my fingers subsided. I stood straighter. I stared down at my sleeping grandmother and gently placed my hand on her head.
The coarseness of her silver hair tickled my fingertips at first. I pressed harder and concentrated, pulling up an image of the brain.
The picture of a normal brain inside my head morphed and twisted into a different picture. The cerebral cortex—the squiggly tube on the outside of the brain—contracted. As did the hippocampus. The ventricles grew to more than twice their normal size.
Suddenly, I was looking at the brain of someone with advanced Alzheimer’s.
I pulled my hand away with such force that I stumbled against the chair, missing the seat altogether, and fell to the ground, hitting my head against the bathroom door behind me.
“Whoa.” Seth stepped to my aid. “You okay?” He knelt beside me.
I rubbed the spot where I knocked my head. “Oh, my.” I stared up at the bed where Gram lay. “I saw her brain.” I couldn’t keep the astonishment out of my voice. “I saw what was wrong with her brain, didn’t I?” I turned my gaze to Seth.
He nodded, smiling, proud of himself. Or something.
I pushed myself up. “What does this mean?”
“It means, I think, if you wanted to, you could heal your grandmother’s brain. Rid her brain of the Alzheimer’s.”
“What?” I pulled my arm away from him, and pushed with my feet in a crab walk until I was as far away from him as I could get. Backed into the corner of the room. “Heal her brain of Alzheimer’s?” But there is no cure for Alzheimer’s.
I braced the arm of the chair and pulled myself up. The room spun, and not from the knock to my head. Bile rose to my throat. Suddenly, my senses were heightened. I saw Gram’s hand lotion and imagined the smell as if it were right under my nose. A car alarm blared outside the window on the other side of the room, like a distress signal inside my head.
“If you wanted to. Yes, you could heal her.”
If I wanted to…
Yes. I wanted to. Why wouldn’t I heal the only family member I had left of a horrible disease? “What makes you think I could heal her? Just because I could see the problem?”
“Because that’s what you were created to do.” Seth backed up and leaned against Gram’s dresser. “And everything else that my sister claimed has turned out to be true.”
“I’m like Jack?” I asked.
“No. Not exactly. Your ability is different from Jack’s. You were created to complement him.”
A different reality began to seep into my thoughts. My eyes sprung open. “I’ll get really sick if I do this, won’t I?” Like Jack.
“Probably. There seem to be consequences to the powers you have.” Seth cupped his chin with his hand. “But we have no idea. And you’re not equipped to heal your grandmother at this point.”
“What do you mean? You just said—”
“Well, it’s one thing for Jack to see a break in a bone. It’s like sewing up a cut. There’s a separation of skin, and that separation needs to come back together. Same with a bone. But with a disease that has affected so many other parts of the body…”
“Where do you begin?” I finished for him. I turned my eyes back to Gram.
Besides, what would Gram be coming back to? A deteriorated body? Her daughter was still long-gone. The loss of her son-in-law? Six years of her life gone. Confusion.
Me. She would come back to me. I could take care of her. She’d have a granddaughter who loved her. “The Program…” I searched Seth’s face. “You could teach me what I need to know, right?”
“More or less. It’s a matter of practice and trial and error.”
Trial and error? How could I even consider this? This was exactly why D
ad’s research was so controversial. The errors. At what cost were doctors, researchers, scientists willing to extend the lives of others? There was still no guarantee of forever.
I glanced again at my sleeping grandmother. A tear fell down my face. Oh, what I would give to hear my name on her lips again. To see recognition in her eyes.
“Does Jack know about this—my ability?”
“That you were engineered to diagnose and heal matters of the brain?” Seth crossed his arms and one leg. Relaxed compared to the nervous energy pulsating through my veins. “Yes.”
I squeezed the bridge of my nose. Why didn’t he tell me? He had to know I’d want to do what I could for Gram. “You said Jack spied on me for a year. Why did he do that? Why not just come find me?”
“Jack has told you how John DeWeese discovered a picture of you in the newspaper, right?”
I nodded.
“Well, Jack knew very little at that time about what the two of you could do. But when his dad moved him across the country to be closer to Wellington, he knew it had everything to do with you.”
“So he spied on me.” That didn’t explain anything.
“Before moving, all Jack knew is that he had the strange ability to heal some injuries, but not others. When he found out the daughter of his father’s ex-lab partner was at a boarding school known for producing the best pre-med students, he wanted to know if you knew more than he did. So he watched you every chance he got.”
“And The Program was formed.”
“That’s right. He’s been slowly learning everything he could about your fathers’ research. And what you might be able to do.”
“But that doesn’t explain why he didn’t just confront me. Ask me if I was like him.”
“And what would that have sounded like?” Seth smiled.
Like Jack was crazy. I got it.
“You said he had a lot riding on my ability. What did you mean by that?”
“You’ll need to ask him that.”
“I’m asking you. You brought me here, broke me out of Wellington tonight. I’m assuming to convince me that The Program is something I need—to learn more about my powers. Because if you brought me here to convince me to heal my seventy-six-year-old grandmother of one disease—to play God—only to break her heart that she missed the past six years of her life—”
“No, Lexi. I didn’t bring you here to heal your grandmother, necessarily. Unless that was something you wanted to do. You need additional training first.” This man was a walking contradiction. “You are very important to the research my sister, your father, Jack’s father, and others started twenty years ago.”