Watts’s book. Brendan was scheduled to serve hors d’?uvres.
Brendan moved in front of her. “Please, j-just one question.”
“What?” Her otherwise remote, expressionless face suddenly tightened like a fist.
“Did you ever go to a hospital?”
“No.”
“Nicole, think!” he said, running after her.
“I said no.”
“Never?”
“NO.”
“You sure?”
Suddenly she stopped. “Get out of my
He caught her arm. “Can I look at the top of your head, please?” He moved his hands to part the hair on her crown.
“Get out of here.” And she whacked his hand.
“Do you have any scars on your head?”
She did not answer him and ran down the path to the cafeteria. Before entering, she stopped in her tracks. With an almost robotic movement, she turned and looked back at him for a long moment. Then she ran into the building.
Brendan followed her. The cafeteria entrance was toward the rear. He stuck his head in. Because most upperclassmen had left for the summer, the place was only partly filled with students.
In the rear of the room he spotted Nicole and Mr. Kaminsky at a table by themselves. They were not eating, but talking heatedly. After a few minutes, Nicole slipped him a package. He looked in and slipped out the contents, inspected it then put it back in the envelope, dumped it into his briefcase, and left.
She followed him with her eyes until they landed on Brendan just a moment before he slipped out of view.
Instantly, he disappeared out a side door, leaving her wondering if he had noticed that she had given Kaminsky a videocassette.
29
Travis could tell time, of course. But he had no idea what hour of day it was or what day of the week—or how many days he had been in this room. Everything was a big bright blur. But he figured it was two days since the needle test, because his neck didn’t hurt anymore—yesterday it was like bee stings.
Today was another test day, but no needle this time, Vera said. He also knew that if he didn’t cooperate, they’d send him back to his room and turn off the lights for hours. That was the one punishment he couldn’t take. Total blackness in that locked room. The first time they did that he screamed and cried until he thought he would die. In fact, he knew he would rather die than go through that again.
Vera came in with Phillip. Although Travis could walk, they put him in a wheelchair and snapped a harness on him like a seat belt so he couldn’t get up.
For the first time they brought him outside the room.
He was in a long dimly lit corridor with pipes overhead. On either side of the corridor were windows with shades drawn down from the outside. The only sounds were from television sets. There must have been a set in each room all playing the same stuff because the sound followed him as they pushed him down the hall.
At the end of the corridor, they turned left into a room full of shiny metal equipment and computer terminals. They wheeled him to a table near a computer with some electronic equipment attached to it.
“Don’t be afraid, this isn’t going to hurt,” Vera said. “We’re just going to look at pictures of your brain.”
Travis’s heart pounded. He didn’t like this. He didn’t like the looks of those machines and another man sitting in the dark rear of the room at another computer terminal.
Phillip pulled up a chair in front of him. “Listen, kid, this is going to be a piece of cake. You’re not going to feel anything, it’s not going to hurt. just answer a few questions and do a few puzzles. That’s it. It’ll be fun, okay?”
Travis nodded.
“It’s just a simple test. Vera’s going to ask you some questions, and you’re going to give the answers. Got that? So, be a good boy.” Phillip stared at him hard, and Travis heard:
Vera came over and put gobs of jelly stuff on his head and rubbed it into his scalp through his hair. It didn’t smell bad, but it felt yucky. She told him it would wash right out. Phillip then fitted onto his head a tight black rubbery cap. It had lots of red wires attached like snakes. Those Phillip connected to the machine and the computer. He pulled the cap tightly over Travis’s eyebrows and fastened it across his chin so that only his face was exposed. Then he taped some wires on Travis’s cheeks and the space above his eyebrows.
Travis sat still at the table, listening to the faint hum of the machine.
When they were set, Phillip joined the other man at the computer in the back, and Vera sat at the machine. “Just relax and answer the questions,” she began. “Some of the questions will be easy, some will be hard. But the important thing is that you try the best you can. Okay? Because the better you do, the sooner you go home.”
Travis looked at her blankly.
As if reading his mind, she said, “Yeah, for real. You do real good on these and you can go back to your mom.”
He didn’t know whether to believe her or not, but he didn’t want to take the chance. “Okay.”
She set the small clock down beside her and opened the booklet she had. “How many states in the United States?”
“Fifty.”
“Good.”
“How many days in two weeks?”
“Fourteen.”
“Name me six types of trees.”
“Um … Pine, oak, birch, beech, magnolia, orange.”
Vera nodded and scratched in her book.
She asked several easy questions like that, then said they were going to switch to different kinds of questions. “While training for a marathon, Jack ran fifty-two miles in four days, how many miles per day did he average in this period?”
“Thirteen.”
“Excellent.”
After a few more like that, the questions got harder. “Now I’m going to say some letters, and you repeat them after me.
“Good.”
“Do the same with these:
Vera nodded. “Good,” she said. “Now give me the letters in the backwards:
“Do the same with these:
Vera whispered, “Jesus!”
Then she did the same, adding one more letter each time, until he repeated a ten-letter series backward. He
