The Outliers

  “And so why didn’t he just tell us about this once we were in the police car with him?” I ask when we’re almost at the steps to the main cabin.

  Before Quentin can answer, the door swings open and two young guys in low-hanging jeans step out. The first is short with a white-blond buzz cut, a beaked nose, and dark circles under his eyes. There’s a tattoo on the inside of his forearm, a small square grid with some circles in it—like a game board. The second guy, much taller with big cheeks, has the same tattoo, but on the side of his neck. Each of them has a laptop gripped under an arm. They’re youngish, but older than Cassie and me. Older than Quentin.

  “Oh, hi,” Quentin says to them, startled and kind of nervous. But also like he’s trying to play it cool, which he’s not very good at. “Thanks again for coming all the way up here, guys. I know it’s not the kind of thing you usually do.”

  “Mmm, yeah,” the blond guy grunts without slowing down. “Pretty much the fucking opposite.”

  “Later,” the other one mutters, his cheeks quivering as he jogs down the rest of the steps.

  We watch them stalk away, lighting cigarettes as they head on foot down the driveway and disappear.

  “Who are they?” I ask.

  “Um, hacktivists?” Quentin says, his voice rising at the end even more than usual. “But I don’t think they like being called that. They don’t seem to like a lot of things.”

  “Hacktivists?” Cassie huffs. Though I’m not sure why this, of all the crazy things we’ve been told, would suddenly seem so absurd to her.

  “Level99,” Quentin goes on. “Not that they’ll admit that’s who they are. They are kind of like the CIA, but with tattoos.” He shrugs. “But they did agree to come all the way up here to figure out who breached your dad’s data—things are so out of hand we couldn’t risk them doing it remotely—and to secure our smartphones. They had all the texting and everything blocked temporarily, which is why Officer Kendall couldn’t reach us when you got here. And with the generator out we didn’t even know it was Officer Kendall until he came up to the main cabin, so we were staying out of sight. Just in case.”

  “My dad said something about someone getting into his data.” I feel a little relieved to have two tiny dots I can connect, even if it makes my dad more involved, not less. “But he said it was the whole campus.”

  “It could have been, I guess,” Quentin says, though it’s obvious he doesn’t think so. “There’s a lot we still don’t know.”

  Inside, the main cabin is nothing like the one we were kept in. The furniture is old, but the room is brightly lit and sparkling clean, with a dozen long picnic tables and benches set out in two perfect rows. The windows look new, but more than one is open, the filmy faded curtains fluttering on the crisp breeze. A larger table at the back is covered with a green tablecloth, a couple of stainless-steel coffee urns on top, a stack of white mugs next to it. Like for a crowd, except there’s not a soul in sight.

  We’re still standing there next to the door when an old woman, frail but purposeful, comes out from the back carrying a stack of folded towels in her veiny arms.

  “Hi, Miriam,” Quentin calls, but carefully. Like he doesn’t want to scare her.

  “Oh my!” She jumps anyway, pressing a hand to her bony chest. “I didn’t see you there!”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you. Have you seen Dr. Simons around, maybe with a young guy?”

  “They were just here,” she says, looking around, her forehead crinkled. When she doesn’t spot them, she peers down under the table nearest to her as though they could be hiding under there. “Wait, now I remember. Dr. Simons was going to show the boy something on one of the computers in the back office.”

  “Okay, thanks, Miriam,” Quentin says, smiling gently as she moves on toward the door. “Miriam was a combat nurse in Vietnam. She has crazy stories.”

  “And she knows my dad?” Because my dad has no friends. Then again maybe knowing all these people is just another of his lies.

  “Either him or Dr. Simons, I’m not sure. Everybody here knows one of them, or knows somebody who knows them. These days, Miriam is an archivist at the university library. Maybe that’s how she knows your dad?” The library. My dad’s favorite place on campus. “Almost everyone is a professor or a researcher, except for me and Miriam. Dr. Simons was my professor at Stanford before they kicked me out.”

  “Oh,” I say, trying not to make my disappointed face.

  “Yeah, apparently, they prefer you actually go to class. But Dr. Simons made it so that I could voluntarily withdraw at least. I’m back here, at UMass now. Not as prestigious, but I’ll graduate.”

  Cassie, who’s been lingering near the door, finally steps up next to us. “Can we go find Jasper now?” she asks, sounding impatient. “I really need to talk to him.”

  She’s not going to confess her affair in the middle of this mess, is she? It was one thing to tell me, but telling Jasper is another thing entirely. “Maybe you should wait until we’re home before you talk to Jasper?”

  “That’s okay,” Quentin says, oblivious. “Come on, we can go in back and find him.”

  Just then a short, older man with a ring of curly gray hair comes out from the back. He’s wearing khakis and a burgundy cable-knit sweater that hugs a big, very round belly. Dr. Simons. All the pictures I’ve seen are pretty old, but that belly and the ring of hair haven’t changed a bit.

  “Dr. Simons, this is Wylie,” Quentin says, presenting me like a gift.

  “Wylie!” Dr. Simons calls, his face lighting up as he makes his way over. “My goodness, your father said you were tall, but you’re taller than me!”

  My dad loves to talk about my height even though I’m only a little taller than average. Probably because me growing normally is the one thing he can safely report that makes it sound like I’m thriving.

  Dr. Simons’s handshake is warm and firm. “Please have a seat.” He motions to a nearby table. “I apologize for all the cloak-and-dagger nonsense. Your dad and I have been doing our best to manage this, well”—he takes a breath and looks toward the door—“fundamentally unmanageable situation.”

  “Is Jasper back in the office?” Quentin asks. “Cassie was hoping to see him.”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” Dr. Simons says after hesitating for a second, like he’s not exactly sure where he left Jasper. It makes me wonder if he might be a little senile like Miriam. “Adam is showing him the testing material.”

  “Come on, I’ll bring you,” Quentin says to Cassie.

  Cassie looks back at me, her eyes watery and worried. “Unless you want me to stay, Wylie. I can if you want me to.”

  “No, that’s okay. You can go,” I say, even though I would really like for her to stay. For my sake, and for hers. Jasper isn’t going to react well to finding out he was right about the other guy. “But think about waiting to tell him if you can. The truth will still be there when we get home.”

  “Okay,” Cassie says, tears making her eyes shine as she reaches forward to squeeze my hand. “I’ll think about it.”

  But I can already see her chewing on her lower lip as she heads toward the back. She’s not going to listen to a word I said.

  “I just spoke with your father. He is still some distance away,” Dr. Simons says, sitting down as he peers hard at his watch. If he is trying to hide that he’s concerned, he’s failing. When I look up at the clock on the wall, it’s past three thirty a.m. I’m afraid to ask what time was he supposed to be here. “He’s had to take a slightly more circuitous route for obvious reasons.”

  “No, not obvious,” I say, taking a seat at the long table across from him. “Listen, I’m not trying to be rude, but nothing about this is obvious to me.”

  “No, of course not. You can call him if you’d like,” Dr. Simons says, looking around like he’s searching for a phone. “You should have a signal in here. It’s boosted. You should know he feels terrible for lying to you when Karen was there. The t
iming of this—it caught him very much off guard. And then for his later texts, he was genuinely trying to be sure that you didn’t get mixed up in this.”

  “So he pretended to be Cassie texting me she was afraid someone was going to kill her?”

  “In your father’s defense, he wasn’t responsible for that specific message; I was.” Dr. Simons takes a deep breath and rubs his forehead. “I realize now that it was unnecessarily frightening. But at the time, you were en route and we needed to get you here—and out of harm’s way—quickly. I could have done so another way; that’s clear to me now. You should ask your father about it. When he heard about that message, he wasn’t at all happy.”

  When I pull out my phone, there is a signal and already a new text from my dad.

  I’m sorry, it reads. For everything.

  And I feel my stupid heart catch. Is it possible I won’t hate my dad forever? I guess I’m hoping it is. More than I realized.

  Where are you? I write back instead of calling. I’m afraid if I actually talk to him, he’ll make me furious all over again. That he’ll somehow topple all the excuses that Dr. Simons has been so carefully building in his defense. How long is it going to take you to get here?

  Still a couple hours, comes the quick response. I had to pull off for a bit. I promise, I will explain everything when I get there. But you can ask Dr. Simons anything. You can trust him. More soon. I’m so glad you’re okay. I love you, Scat. xo Dad.

  Scat. A nickname from the books I’d loved as a kid about a terrified cat who overcomes her fears with a spunky attitude and her trusty friends. My dad hasn’t called me that in years. He must feel really bad.

  OK, I write back. And that’s all. Because no matter what cute nickname he calls me, I’m not ready to forgive anything.

  “Were you able to reach him?” Dr. Simons asks.

  I nod.

  “In the past couple of weeks, your father considered warning you and your brother about these people from North Point. But he had no reason to believe that the threat they posed—at least to the two of you—was either credible or imminent. And in your condition, he didn’t want to worry you unnecessarily.”

  In your condition. My dad’s words. Because apparently that’s the way he talks to his friends about me. Just when I’m thinking there’s a chance I could forgive him eventually, he proves yet again what a huge asshole he is.

  I cross my arms, trying not to sound pissed off. Because really, I am mad at my dad and not Dr. Simons. And snapping at him isn’t going to get me what I want: information. “And who the hell is North Point?”

  “They are a defense contractor. Deep military ties, even deeper pockets. And apparently boundless determination. They want unfettered access to certain aspects of your father’s research.”

  “So they are the ‘threat’ that everyone was talking about?” I ask.

  Dr. Simons nods. “But to be clear, we have no reason to believe that they have located us yet. Everything we’re doing is simply with an abundance of caution.”

  I picture Doug’s red face, the way he looked at me in that diner like he wanted me dead, the way he chased after us in the woods so easily even though he was bleeding so much. The addition of Dr. Simons and Quentin has not made me feel like we’re going to be any less screwed if they do find us. And they already have once. Who says they won’t be able to do it again?

  “Yeah, I think they might be closer than you think.”

  Dr. Simons’s eyes widen. “What do you mean?”

  “Our car broke down, so we asked for a ride.” I’ll have to talk quickly if I’m going to get the story out. “They pretended they had this baby, but when we realized they didn’t, we tried to run. The guy, his name was Doug, or that’s what he said, jumped Jasper, so I had to—we ended up getting away, but barely.” I can’t bring myself to say the stabbing part. Especially not if Dr. Simons thinks that I have a “condition.”

  “That certainly does sound like it could be them. The fear, of course, was that, given the opportunity, they might try to grab you to elicit your father’s cooperation,” Dr. Simons says quietly, then he looks up at me with these sad brown eyes. “And I wouldn’t be so sure that your asking them for a ride was entirely voluntary. These people are terribly clever. And well trained.”

  I close my eyes, remembering suddenly. “We were both in the market for a couple minutes, and they were out there together alone by the car,” I say. They could have easily done something to make it not start. “But they were at the gas station first. How would they even know we were going to stop there?”

  “They were probably intercepting the texts from Cassie. Thanks to Level99, that won’t be happening again.”

  Looks like they were right to take Cassie’s phone. It was putting someone in danger: us.

  “But why did you bring Cassie here? And why did he act like he didn’t have any idea where Cassie was? He made it seem like I was the only one who knew. That I needed to tell him.”

  “I can promise you that everything your dad did was in an effort to protect you, to keep you out of this—what could be a very dangerous situation. I suspect he thought you were receiving false texts from someone who wasn’t Cassie—remember we didn’t realize she even had her phone. We had no reason to suspect she could be sending you texts. I’m sure he was also concerned about revealing too much over the phone. We knew that our communications had been hacked and they weren’t secured until just now. Your dad couldn’t risk giving out too much information over an unsecured line.”

  “This still doesn’t make any sense,” I say. And maybe bits and pieces do, but the whole thing together? Not in the least. “And why my dad’s research? No one has ever cared about it before.”

  Dr. Simons frowns. “Did your dad have an opportunity to tell you about the Outliers?”

  “Yes, I mean no, not exactly.” Because actually it was Gideon who explained them. Why give my dad credit for being honest about anything? “They are the not-normal ones.”

  Dr. Simons nods. “That’s a fair description. The Outliers are the handful of test subjects who demonstrated simultaneous nonvisual and nonauditory emotional perception,” he says. “In other words, capable of reading other people’s emotions while blindfolded and wearing headphones. There weren’t many. Really, they were an inadvertent by-product of your dad’s research. The combined nonauditory, nonvisual segment of the test was meant to provide a control baseline. Your father was looking at the implications of live discussion on emotional perception. He never imagined that there would be some individuals capable of accurate emotional perception without visual or auditory clues. But their discovery could have profound implications.”

  “Profound how?” I swallow hard, try to keep my stomach from pushing farther up into my throat.

  “Well, for instance, the US Office of Naval Intelligence has been trying for years to use intuition in combat, and a discovery like this could be critical to that research,” he says. “I expect North Point’s interest in the Outliers is similar. Their ultimate goal would be to use the Outliers’ skills to develop some kind of innovative military strategy or technology.”

  “So why don’t these people just redo the study themselves, find their own Outliers?”

  “They’ve been unable to. Because the Outliers were an inadvertent, inappropriate by-product of your father’s study, their existence was acknowledged only in a footnote in his data section.”

  “Meaning?” I ask.

  “They were an accident,” he says. “We only know of three Outliers thus far. Notably, all of them were younger than the minimum age for study participants. All under eighteen. Two of the three were included because the study parameters were not properly administered by your father’s research assistant.”

  This is all Dr. Caton’s fault because of some mistake he made? It would explain why my dad was so angry at him.

  “Dr. Caton, you mean?” I ask.

  “Precisely,” Dr. Simons takes a breath, puts his h
ands flat on the table like he’s trying to make the next point really clear. “And because North Point has been unable to replicate the research, it seems they believe their only option is to find your father. Not only does he know that subject age is the key factor that unites the Outliers—several people know that, including myself—but your father is the only person who knows the actual names of the Outliers.”

  And I can see from the look on Dr. Simons’s face that this is the point he’s been bracing himself to deliver. That this is the essential detail.

  “Wait, so they literally want my dad?”

  He nods. “Yes, we believe so. But as I said, we are taking every possible precaution.”

  “Awesome,” I say quietly. Because I do not feel at all comforted. “And what about Gideon? If they want my dad, and they came after me—he’s just sitting home by himself.”

  “Thanks to Level99’s work in interrupting North Point’s communications, we have no reason to believe there’s anyone coming to your home, or that anyone would come after Gideon or you, had you remained there, which is what your dad wanted, of course,” Dr. Simons says. “But as an extra precaution, Officer Kendall also has a friend on the Boston police force who is keeping an eye on your house while your dad is gone, just in case.”

  “Oh,” I say, feeling even worse now about having taken off. My dad was right to try to get me home.

  “You know, we have met, you and I,” Dr. Simons says, changing the subject, probably because I look freaked out. “You and Gideon couldn’t have been more than five. Your parents came out to California to visit, and I think you went on to Disneyland afterward?” When I look up, he smiles gently. “Though, I suppose, if you have any memories from the trip, they would probably be of Mickey Mouse and not me.”

  I do not remember meeting Dr. Simons. But my favorite picture of my mom is from that trip, so young and happy, her hair in two braids, hands tucked into her overalls. I do have one actual memory, too—my mom and me near the cliffs of Carmel, lost in a sea of prairie dogs. Usually so calm and cool, my mom squealed and ran when the little animals started poking all their heads out of their dozens of holes. And there I stood, unable to tear myself away.