The main hallway of Laura Mulvey Memorial High School was made entirely of glass. The lighting was perfect for selfies as the afternoon sun reached its highest point. Cassandra could almost feel its heat scalding her skin as she tried to catch her breath.
The man stationed at the front whose job was to be armed with a gun in case anyone tried to kill the precious youth resources contained within these halls glanced at her a few times, but ultimately decided not to intervene in what had a high likelihood of being typical teen drama—breakups, boyfriends, that sort of thing.
On a Monday, a week from prom, a substitute teacher in AP English would normally have been a blessing.
Cassandra had been sitting at her desk, her phone concealed in the pages of the book they were ostensibly studying, The Sun Also Rises, scrolling through the dress group.
At this point, prom barely felt real. She had once heard Europeans were surprised to learn that prom was something that actually happened and not just a convention of American television shows. She understood why now. Could she even go at all? If her powers were getting stronger, what would an environment like that be like? She felt almost physically sick just imagining the searing glows of all those numbers on her retinas.
The substitute teacher, Mr. Delmas, was connecting his personal laptop to play a movie for the class. After the last time a teacher had connected their personal laptop to the Smart Board (he had tried to access an educational website beginning with the letter P and hit enter prematurely) there was now a school-wide policy that laptops could not be connected to Smart Boards until the desired video was already playing.
Aidan was sitting next to her, his chin on his hands, gazing at the blank Smart Board.
Perhaps it was wrong to feel this way, but sometimes, she wondered if one of the reasons she liked Aidan so much was because he didn't have numbers. The space over his head was a blank slate. She could talk to him all day and almost forget that she had a horrific ability. It felt vaguely unfair to like someone for such selfish reasons.
Then again, that wasn't the only selfish reason she had for liking him.
Even in their conversation last night, he had done nothing but try to assuage her worries. He insisted on her intelligence, on her worth, like it was a point that could not be ceded. Like it was one of the axioms of his personal philosophy—life is a logical, analyzable system, and Cassandra is a smart, good person.
Having a brilliant person insist on your own brilliance was flattering enough, but the thing that was stranger, almost painful, was having that brilliant person insist that your own failure to recognize that worth was his moral imperative to correct. She wasn't sure he would succeed, but she welcomed his attempts.
Just sitting next to him was odd. When he saw her, he saw a smart, valuable person. When she saw him, she saw relief. Relief from the numbers, but also relief from the worry the numbers gave her. Maybe that was a trap. Maybe his kindness was blinding her. It was something she felt she could start relying on. It would be almost as bad as numbing her power with drugs.
And that relief itself could be short-lived. After all, he was a man. She saw his lack of numbers as soothing, but surely he saw them as a problem needing correction. A correction which her own actions were delaying. They were going to prom as friends. That meant she was taking away his opportunity to go to prom with someone not-as-friends, didn't it?
Was it something she was subconsciously trying to prevent?
She dismissed the thought. He was good-looking, kind, and intelligent, but didn't seem to have any other girls in his life. But that was only as far as she knew. Maybe he had girls he was interested in that he had just failed to mention to her. Or decided not to. Maybe he had a sort of schism in his mind—Cassandra for intelligent, stimulating conversation, and other girls for other kinds of stimulation.
The crude phrasing that she had, even only in her thoughts, attributed to Aidan repulsed her.
Although, wasn't it unfair to not even consider the possibility that he wanted something from other girls? It was tantamount to erasing a part of his humanity just because it was inconvenient to her.
Maybe he even wanted something from her?
Julianna's words from yesterday came back to her. She might have had a point. The back-and-forth, the teasing, the wordplay between them—was there anything inherently flirtatious in that? Or did talking to a brilliant person like Aidan by its very nature have shades of flirtation to it? Was that combination—intelligence and kindness—impossible to not misinterpret?
Or, like Julianna also suggested, maybe he was gay.
This was why her power was so cruel. She never asked to see these glimpses of people's personal lives, but once she did, she couldn't help wanting to know more. Not just when—but why? Or why not? How? Where?
And maybe the reason it was easier for her to deny Aidan his potential desire in this way was because, after seeing so much data, part of her couldn't help but see sex as base, animalistic, and meaningless. That a person, by engaging in the type of thing dogs and rabbits and even plants did, was lessening themselves as a human.
She was no longer at risk of dehumanizing Aidan—she felt she was on the verge of dehumanizing people entirely at times.
She couldn't even picture herself having sex. Not because she didn't have interest in it, but because, on some level, not having had it allowed her to distinguish herself from the sea of numbers. At least when she looked in the mirror she didn't have to see numbers. What would it mean to give that up? To have even her reflection remind her of a power she never asked for?
And yet, in moments like this, moments when she thought about Aidan, she couldn't help but wishing this power were stronger—to know not what someone had or hadn't done, but how they felt.
The movie finally began. It was Doubt, starring Meryl Streep. They weren't studying the play or anything, but evidently, this was a film considered literary enough to serve as an intellectual substitute for reading the actual novel they had been assigned.
Cassandra's gaze fell back to her phone, still hidden in the book. They were seniors, though, so she probably didn't have to worry so much about keeping it out of sight. Other students were using their phones openly.
Except Aidan. His eyes were trained on the movie.
She kept scrolling. Ever since the incident in Lyra, she had wondered if absolutely everything—all text, even—would reveal numbers to her. But at least so far, looking at the names in the dress group, nothing was appearing to her. Of course, she had seen most of these girls walking around, so she knew their numbers anyway. It was hard not to remember. She resented the amount of mental space the data was taking up in her brain. It would be nice if there were a way to force yourself to forget something. That, she decided, would have been a nice superpower instead of this one.
Mr. Delmas paused the movie. "Does anyone have thoughts so far?"
Julianna raised her hand. "We're supposed to be wondering if the priest did it to the kid or not, right?"
"This is an open forum for your thoughts and questions. The questions are whatever you think are important."
"Well, I think he did. Remember the scenes where it was about how clean the Philip Seymour Hoffman priest character keeps his fingernails? I think that may have been a clue that he's gay. And why else would they include a scene that he's gay in a movie like this unless it's supposed to indicate that he did what Meryl Streep's character thinks he did to the kid?"
Suddenly, Cassandra perceived something in her mind, something flexible, like a tendon. Something she could push…
As she looked up, she felt the tendon flex and suddenly, over the heads of the characters in the scene, the priest and the young boy, she saw matching dates and times.
She stood up so fast her chair clattered to the ground behind her.
"Cassandra?" Aidan asked in concern.
Without a word she ran out of the room.
She found herself in the main hallway, panting and trying to breathe.
What just happened?
What was that push?
Suddenly, from behind her came a voice.
"Cassandra Featherberry?"
She didn't dare turn around. Not just yet. "Yes," she said.
"Come with me. We need to talk to you."