“How did he make us forget like that?” Kate asked.
“Forget?” Nell said. “We weren’t forgetting. He was washing our brains out.”
“Brainwashing, you mean,” Susan said.
“Whatever it was. He did it.”
Max squinted into the trees. Was he still forgetting? It was midday already, and the heat pressed the whole wood down. Even the chirping of the birds in the trees had gotten drowsy and slow.
Susan sighed. “It did feel like a kind of forgetting,” she said. “I forgot I hated it here. Is that what you meant, Kate?”
“Yeah. I forgot I wanted to go home. Just for a minute.”
Susan drew her sleeve across her face. The heat had reddened her cheeks and damped the hair at her neck.
“That’s just what it was like,” she said. “He crowded me out of my own head.”
How did Susan always manage to find the right words? Max felt crowded out right now, his brain full of random bits of information he couldn’t add up.
“All that mattered was what he was saying,” Susan went on. “How did he do that?”
“By telling lies,” Nell said.
“Big, mean lies,” Jean added.
“Maybe,” Susan said. “But it didn’t have to be a lie, did it? The point was it was his thought, not mine. I could only think of what he was saying, and like Kate said, I forgot all the rest. He made me think of just the one thing, and for a second, it was all that mattered.”
Max nearly stopped walking.
One thing, he thought. One thing.
The words clanged in his head like a bell.
It had often seemed to Max, when he was younger, that things were easier for Susan. She knew how to behave in school; she had always earned gold stars for sitting nicely and doing her homework. She didn’t get sent out for roughhousing or for talking too much in class. She didn’t get KICK ME signs stuck to her back for having too many brainiac ideas. It bothered him, made him think something was wrong with him, to always be the one getting into one kind of trouble or another.
But in the past year or so he’d realized that Susan didn’t just behave; she made herself invisible. He didn’t envy that. Even his encounters with Ivan and Mo hadn’t made him want to shut up forever, never say what he thought or offer a new idea. He still envied one thing, though — her ability to blot out the world. Then she wasn’t invisible — everybody else was. He’d always wanted to know how she did that. His thoughts seemed to jump around in his head excitedly, and Susan would just dive deep into a book and be gone, living somewhere else, so completely immersed that the rest of them could yell and throw pillows and she’d barely notice. Now all of a sudden he knew what that was, and he thought it just might get them home. He hurried up to walk beside her, the peaches thumping against his back.
“Susan!” he said. “You know how you’re different from me? You know how?”
His unexpected enthusiasm made her jump. “How?”
“When you read a book, you don’t hear anything. Isn’t that right? We call you and call you, and you don’t even know it!”
“Well, I —”
“No, I mean in a good way. You concentrate like nobody I ever saw! Dad says that all the time, doesn’t he? And it’s true. When you’ve got your mind on something, you don’t even see where you are!”
“So?”
“So that’s why you broke us out of that room! You were thinking one thing, so hard, that it happened. Don’t you see? It’s just what you said. All you could think of was getting out! And in that rally — nobody could think about a thing but what the Genius was saying. I wasn’t even thinking about getting home anymore, and I bet you were the same! He crowded all the rest of it out with those words of his!”
Susan had been making her way around a ragged hemlock when he started talking, and now she stopped altogether, bewildered. The others caught up to them.
“Hey, what’s going on?” Nell asked him. “Is Susan okay?”
“She’s more than okay! She’s going to get us out of here!”
Nell pressed her lips into a flat line.
“Max, I think you’d better give me a turn with the peaches. Are you sure you’re feeling good?”
“I feel fine!” he said. “Susan, tell her!”
But Susan only shrugged, and Nell asked if maybe he’d hit his own head with a peach.
Max threw a hand up, sending the hemlock into shivers. “Listen,” he said, ignoring Nell. “And don’t think about what makes sense at home, but about what might make sense here. When I was hungry, hungry wasn’t enough — it was only when I started blacking out. All I could think of was peaches. I thought of peaches really hard — and they were there!”
“One thing?” Susan said. “Don’t people do that all the time? If that’s it, it should be common!”
Max nearly laughed. Of course Susan would think that — of course!
“People don’t think that way nearly ever,” he told her. “They’re always thinking a million things at once.” He pointed at Nell. “What are you thinking right now? Tell her.”
“Uh — maybe you need more protein in your diet? Dad says your brain goes fuzzy without it.”
“And?”
“And what?”
“And you’re not thinking that your legs ache, and you’re worried about the dogs, and wishing we could get out of here?”
“And thirsty,” Jean said. “Don’t forget thirsty.”
“See?” he turned back to Susan. “It’s never just one thing! We can pay attention to something, but it’s hard to put all the rest away. Only you do that!”
Susan blinked a few times, looking dazed. “Just thinking?” she said. “Just that?”
“Just!” Max cried. “It’s not just
