So I looked at the Rasmussem people, who wanted to know about Emily, and I asked Ms. Bennett, “What about her?”
“Does she have friends?”
“Sure.”
Ms. Bennett continued to look at me expectantly. Was I supposed to give names and addresses?
Mom filled in. “Emily has lots of friends. When she was living at home, she would have had a sleepover or gone to somebody else's house every weekend if we'd let her. She loves staying in the dorm—s he says it's like a sleepover every day of the week.”
“So she's enjoying the college experience?” Ms. Bennett asked.
“Yes,” Mom told her, somewhere between proud and snappy, as though she suspected Ms. Bennett was somehow or other criticizing Emily.
“Problems at home?”
Even though Ms. Bennett was still looking at me, and I was shaking my head no, it was Mom who answered. “My husband and I have very good relationships with both our daughters. Don't you go implying that this is somehow our fault.”
Mr. Kroll said, “Neither Rasmussem Corporation nor its employees mean to imply—”
Ms. Bennett talked right over him, “And yet Emily's note clearly shows that she has chosen not to return to her home or college.”
Ah, yes, the note. That short, scary note: “Not anybody's fault. This is MY choice.” What in the world could that mean? Other than, of course, what it sounded like it meant?
“Well, that's nonsense,” Mom was telling Ms. Bennett. “Emily has come home just about every weekend.”
Ms. Bennett raised her eyebrows.
Mom supplied the explanation no one had asked for: “Because she still has ties to her high school friends.”
She didn't say what she could have: Emily has always been the popular sister. Mom's good about not labeling, for which I can only be thankful, because Emily is the popular one, the smart one, the pretty one—which either leaves me with negatives or with nothing. Dad calls me levelheaded. That's pretty much a last-ditch-effort-to-say-something kind of compliment, if you ask me: Grace, her personality is such an inoffensive shade of beige.
“All right,” Ms. Bennett said smoothly.
All right? I thought. It was like she was conceding a point in a debate. Were we debating?
Ms. Bennett asked, “Boyfriend?”
“Yes,” Mom told her. “Frank Lupiano, a nice boy who both Mr. Pizzelli and I approve of.”
“Did she meet him at college?” Ms. Bennett asked.
“High school,” Mom said. “He's gone to Boston now, but they're always calling or messaging each other. They're still very close.”
“Hmmm,” Ms. Bennett said. “Is there anything you can think of, Grace? Any unhappiness your sister might have shared with you?” She held up a hand to silence my mother, who was about to protest.
Popular, smart, pretty. If Emily hadn't also been the kind one, I could have hated her. Instead, I wanted to be her. “No,” I said. “I can't think of anything.”
“We'll let that go for now,” Ms. Bennett said. “You tell us if anything comes to mind.”
“All right,” I said. I could have said that Emily was the well-adjusted daughter in our family. Sure, I have friends, but Emily had more friends than she knew what to do with. She was a joiner, and all you had to do was look at her yearbook to see that there was hardly a club she didn't belong to. And most often, she was voted president of the club.
Me, the only thing I've ever joined was Odyssey of the Mind, and that was because my homeroom teacher bullied me into it. But I dropped out because (a) I am not really team oriented, and mostly (b) I was too worried about freezing up during the spontaneous, or improvisational, part. What if I blurted out something stupid and embarrassed myself ? Or what if I couldn't think of anything at all and the whole team failed because of me? Emily didn't have worries like that.
And yet, apparently, she had some sort of worries.
And I was supposed to find out what they were. And talk her out of worrying about them.
Which was another worry for me.
Rasmussem Corporation was founded in Rochester, so the facility on Lake Avenue is both gaming arcade and international headquarters. When we got there, I saw a sign in the front window of the arcade:
CLOSED FOR ROUTINE MAINTENANCE
SORRY FOR THE INCONVENIENCE
Mom saw it, too, and sniffed. “Don't want to scare the paying customers away.”
Ms. Bennett, who was getting pretty good with forestalling argument by holding up her hand, held her hand up for Mr. Kroll.
The mobot limo drove around to the back, where we could get out without anyone on the street seeing. Once we were on the sidewalk, the car drove off—presumably to park itself somewhere it wouldn't get ticketed, towed, or de-hubcapped. Ms. Bennett swiped her nametag under a scanner to open the service door.
Someone must have been watching for us, because a young woman in a white lab coat was coming down the hallway to greet us.
“Any change?” Ms. Bennett asked her.
The young woman, who looked about Emily's age, shook her head.
Ms. Bennett told us, “Emily is in gaming cubicle eighteen.”
“Can I get you anything?” the girl—her name badge identified her as Sybella—asked Mom. “There's a Tim Hortons next door, and their coffees are pretty good.”
Mom looked ready to slap her. “You've gone and gotten my daughter stuck in one of your stupid games, and you're thinking an iced cappuccino is going to make me feel better?”
You could see the Sybella girl thinking like, Yeah, probably caffeine wasn't the best thing to offer YOU.
Mr. Kroll—cut off yet again by one of Ms. Bennett's Silence gestures—announced, “I'll be in my office if anyone needs me.” He hesitated, perhaps debating whether to inform Mom that neither Rasmussem nor any of its employees had been the ones to get Emily stuck in the game, or maybe considering whether he wanted to tell Sybella that he would like a cup of coffee. In any case, Ms. Bennett was hustling us down the hall, and he stayed behind.
If you go into Rasmussem to play a game with a group, they put you all together in a room big enough to accommodate however many total immersion couches you need, even though once you're hooked up, you're completely unaware of your physical surroundings and you don't need to be near the people you're playing with. You can play a game with people on a different continent ... if you happen to be the kind of person who knows people on different continents, or if you don't mind playing with people you don't know. The friends-all-together part is just for those few minutes before they hook you up and after the game is finished.
On the other hand, if you're playing a solitary game, they put you in a room that's only about a couple of feet longer and a couple of feet wider than the total immersion couch itself. Even the word couch is a bit of a hyperbole, as what we're talking about here comes closer to a doctor's examining table than anything you're likely to find in a living room.
Ms. Bennett opened a door, and there was Emily lying on her couch in her cubicle. I thought, in my levelheaded way, We won’t all be able to fit in there at once.
Another part of me taunted, You're trying to avoid thinking about Emily. It was true. My mind was flitting from one unimportant detail to another: the size of the cubicle; how Emily was wearing jeans and a white lab coat like the coffee enthusiast who had met us at the door; how her body looked small and little-girlish and unprotected, because if I saw her asleep at home, she'd be wrapped up in a blanket or comforter. I even took in that her eyes were closed but—beneath the lids—were darting back and forth, which I knew was because the Rasmussem experience taps into the same part of the brain where dreams come from. But it was still kind of creepy.
Mom, on the other hand, rushed right into that cubicle and cupped Emily's face in her hands. Then she dropped to her knees beside Emily's couch and began to cry—deep, racking sobs.
I could see Ms. Bennett hesitate before deciding to put her arm around Mom's shoulde
rs. “It's okay, Mrs. Pizzelli. She isn't in pain—the exact opposite, in fact. And we will find a way to get her to come back.”
That should be me offering comfort to my mother, I thought. But I've never been very good at that sort of thing—too selfconscious, too concerned about being rebuffed, too afraid of saying the wrong thing and making everything worse. Emily, of course, is a naturally warm and sympathetic person and always knows exactly what to say and do when people are happy or sad or scared.
I WOULD have put my arm around Mom, I thought as I stood there in the hallway.
It was just that Ms. Bennett was faster.
Even though she had hesitated.
If our positions had been reversed, Emily would have put her arms around Mom.
Ms. Bennett made Mom sit down on the edge of the couch, by Emily's feet. There were tissues on the shelf beneath the couch, and Ms. Bennett—taking no chances—handed Mom the whole box.
In an accusing voice, Mom managed to say, “You told me you had disconnected her.” She reached out her hand as though to pull loose the feed wires that stretched from Emily's temples to the wall panel behind her.
Ms. Bennett blocked her. “We did,” she assured Mom, assured both of us, even though I was still standing lumpishly in the hallway. “But when that didn't do any good, we hooked her up again so that we can monitor her responses and see where—in the game world—she is.”
Mom took a deep breath, but her voice shuddered nonetheless. “And now you want to do the same to Grace?”
I forced myself to be calm enough to say, “It doesn't hurt, Mom. It's just suction cups.” My mind, always ready to come up with a dire alternative, was quick to chime in: Or at least, it's never hurt before.
Ms. Bennett touched a button on the wall panel and the side wall slid down into the floor—instant small-groupsized room.
Little-Miss-Tim-Hortons Sybella was there, waiting to set me up.
“It should be me,” Mom said. She once more burst into tears, so I went over to the other couch. No kid should see her parent cry.
And no kid, even a beige, nondescript kid whose best quality is her lack of excitability, should leave her sister stranded and in trouble, even if it's that sister's own choice.
“As soon...”—Mom had to work hard to make her words intelligible to me—“...as soon as you get into the game, come straight back out again, so that I know you can.”
I could see Sybella press her lips together to keep from saying anything about how that was useless or a waste of time, but Ms. Bennett said, “That will be fine.”
Sybella gave me a hairband to get my forehead clear.
As though she had never seen me with my hair pulled back, Mom dissolved into tears again.
“Do you want to go to the restroom?” Ms. Bennett asked her. “Throw some cold water on your face?” Before I even realized this might have been something to panic over, Ms. Bennett assured Mom, “We won't send Grace till you're back.”
Mom nodded, and Ms. Bennett led her out of the room.
“Shoes or no shoes?” Sybella asked. “You don't need to take them off, but you might be more comfortable without.”
I kicked my sneakers off, only hoping—once it was too late—that my toes weren't beginning to come through my socks. I snuck a peek. No obvious signs of wear, but I wouldn't have chosen the Bugs Bunny pair if I had known anybody was going to see them.
“There's a shelf beneath the couch where you can put your shoes and any personal items,” she told me. “They'll be perfectly safe there. No one besides me will be coming in here.” She blinked, then added, “Well, and your mother and Ms. Bennett.” She patted the couch to indicate which direction for me to lie down—like it wasn't obvious by the pillow at the end near the wall with the panel.
“Need to loosen the button of your jeans? Your clothing shouldn't be tight or restrictive. Again, keep in mind that no one else will be seeing you.”
“I'm okay,” I told her. “I've done this before.”
She nodded emphatically. I noticed that she kept glancing at a clipboard. She wasn't checking things off, but she was making sure she went through the routine correctly. Since I'd played before, she could skip some of the handholding instructions, but now she'd lost her place.
“New here?” I asked, because she looked so frazzled.
It wasn't fair. She should have been calming me. It was my sister who was ... Well, I wasn't sure what was going on with Emily. But she was in some sort of trouble.
“Yeah,” Sybella said as she slathered my temples with some of that cold jellylike stuff that is supposed to help keep the leads on, but not stuck on. “The course description said 'game development and facilitation.' I didn't realize I'd be interacting with the public.”
After a few seconds of silence as she triple-checked that the wires were positioned correctly, it sank in that she'd said course description, not job description. “Are you an intern, too? Like my sister?”
“Yup,” she said. “I don't know her. They already asked. I mean, it's a big class.”
“You're in her class?” I echoed. It was hard to believe they could be in the same school and not know each other. Even people from my grade, three years younger, had known Emily. “So you only met once you both started working here?”
“Not so much,” Sybella said.
This was March. Emily had been going to school for almost seven months, working at Rasmussem for three. It was amazing that she hadn't arranged a Get-to-Know-One-Another Ice-Cream Social, or a Halloween party, or a Thanksgiving feast, or a Christmas gift exchange in that time, not to mention a Valentine's Day dance.
Mom and Ms. Bennett came back in. Mom looked like she was holding herself together through sheer will. She sat down on Emily's couch, but on the side near me, and she took my hand.
“Ready, Grace?” Ms. Bennett asked. “We're going to set you down in the game that Emily's development team was working on. Because game time moves much more quickly than real time, we can't pinpoint exactly where she is, but you should be in her vicinity.”
“So,” my mother asked, “how does Grace get out of the game?”
I knew the answer to that, because that's something they always remind you of just before you go under.
“As with all our games,” Ms. Bennett told Mom, “there's a safety feature we've built in, because these games are supposed to be fun. If something seriously spooks one of our players, or if—in this case—Grace wants to confer with us because she's learned something she thinks might be helpful, all she has to do is say: 'End game. Bring me back to Rasmussem.' ” To me, she said, “Again, bear in mind it won't be instantaneous because of the time differential, but we'll pull you out if you speak those words—or if we sense by your bio readings that something is severely bothering you. Except for this first time, when we'll just pull you back automatically right away, to assure your mother it can be done.”
I couldn't think of any more questions to delay things. “Okay,” I said.
“Do I need to let go of her hand?” Mom asked, which I thought was a reasonable question, but apparently not, because Sybella snorted, though she tried to mask it with a cough.
Ms. Bennett must have been getting exasperated, because she said, “It's not like we're giving her electric shock treatment or defibrillating her. Grace, close your eyes and count back from one hundred by sevens.”
Why was it always sevens? Last time I'd played, I'd told myself I was going to do some memorizing so as not to embarrass myself, but of course I hadn't gotten around to that. I closed my eyes. “One hundred. Ninety-three...” Okay, everything after that was complicated, at least for me, at least without pencil and paper. Okay, seven from fourteen would be seven, so—minus one...“Eighty-six.” Could they tell if I used my fingers? Did everybody else do this faster? Was I the biggest loser to ever lie down on one of these couches?
I opened my eyes to see if they were laughing at me, and I was in Emily's game.
Chapter 3
br /> Emily’s Game
NOBODY HAD SAID anything about what kind of game Emily had been working on, but immediately I could see that it was a kids' game. Specifically—and I say that even though normally speaking I hate stereotyping—it was a little girls' game. The colors gave it away: pink and lavender and lilac and violet and teal. Any self-respecting boy would be gagging already. I myself was concerned about instant-onset diabetes from all the sweetness.
It wasn't that I'd been expecting something in particular. But now, forced to think about it, I was amazed to find that Emily was trying to lose herself in a game aimed at ten-year-olds. I guess I'd subconsciously been assuming she'd be in a fantasy medieval world where—as a kick-butt type of warrior queen—she'd be in the middle of high adventure in some exotic locale, menaced by fierce-but-surprisingly-attractive bad guys, and surrounded by her own handsome-and-ready-to-die-for-her company of fighters.
Oh, wait. That was what I would have chosen.
Still, this game looked like PBS programming for kids barely old enough to spell PBS.
I found myself in a white latticework gazebo, sitting on one of those suspended-from-the-rafters porch swings, which was garlanded with fragrant flowers of the aforementioned girly-girl colors. To the left of the gazebo was a Victorian-style house—ditto on those colors—sitting on the edge of a little lake, complete with swans. At least the swans were white and didn't look too much like plush toys. To the right was a wooded area—not scary let's-lose-Hansel-and-Gretel-type woods, but almost like a slightly disorderly orchard with a variety of trees, many of them in full blossom. The trees were obviously more than a background, because there was a path of crushed sparkly white stones leading into them.
A butterfly—an oversized monarch that looked as though it had been tapped by a glitter stick—landed on my hand on the swing's armrest.
“You don't happen to know where Emily is, do you?” I asked the butterfly.