The Outliers

  “You’re okay,” she says, flat and firm. Official. “You’re safe now.”

  It’s not comforting. Because I don’t feel safe. Maybe I never will.

  “Do you think you’re really an Outlier?” Jasper asks then.

  “I don’t know,” I say, and that’s the truth. There have been things I seemed to know somehow, even since Jasper and I left the house: Lexi and Doug’s missing baby, the old man being willing to hand over his keys, that truck driver caving to my threat. But there is so much else that I missed—who Quentin was, what Cassie would do. “Maybe I’m an Outlier. Maybe not.”

  “Are you going to be okay?” he asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say again, forcing a little smile. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  Because that’s the truth also. But it’s also true that I’ve felt much less panicked for hours now. Is that because I have this explanation now for how I am? Freed from anxiety Alcatraz because of this secret? I don’t know. I don’t feel like I know anything anymore, except that I need to get home, and I need to see my dad.

  Jasper reaches over again to squeeze my hand. But this time he doesn’t let go. Instead, he falls back asleep, fingers wrapped tight around mine.

  “I’ll call you,” he says when we finally pull to a stop at my house at a little past seven a.m. It sounds awkward and strange, like the bad end of an even worse first date. He knows it, too. But it’s a thing to say, much better than the truth: see you at Cassie’s funeral. Neither of us wants to think about that.

  “Thank you,” I say to Jasper as the police officer opens the back door to let me out. And that sounds just as weird. But it is the truth, too. If it weren’t for Jasper, I would have stayed there in that cabin with Cassie. Would have let it engulf me in flames.

  “Thank God you’re okay,” my dad says, grabbing me up on the front porch and dragging me inside. Hugging me just as hard as I’ve been needing him to ever since my mom’s accident. I had expected to feel more angry when I saw him. To be furious about what he kept from me. But in this moment none of that matters as much as the fact that he’s okay. That I didn’t lose him, too.

  I try to speak, but instead I start to cry, huge wet sobs. I didn’t even know I was holding them in. I can feel Gideon staring at me, leaning against the door to the kitchen. He looks worried when I finally pull back from my dad, wiping at my face.

  “What happened?” he asks, and there’s this little edge to his voice, like maybe I’m the person to blame for Cassie not coming home.

  “Hey, Gideon,” my dad says. “Let’s take it easy with the questions, okay? Let’s give Wylie a chance to get her bearings.”

  “I did everything I could,” I say to my dad as Gideon disappears into the living room. I say it even though it feels like a lie. Maybe especially because it does.

  “I know you did, sweetheart.” My dad wraps an arm around me again, and it feels so natural and right. “Everyone knows that.”

  It isn’t until much later, after I’ve washed my face and changed my clothes and tried again and again to scrub that awful smell of smoke and death out of my hair, after my dad has made me toast and tea and had me drink two glasses of water, that I finally begin to tell him everything. Or what I know, which is perhaps—no, surely—much, much less than everything.

  “I shouldn’t have—” He shakes his head, looks pained. For a second, I’m afraid I’m finally going to see him cry. “You had a right to know about your test results. It was wrong to keep them from you. I see that now. But please know I wanted to protect you. Whatever happens, I just—I wanted you to have a choice.”

  “A choice about what?”

  “Who knows where all of this will lead? But you’ve seen the reaction so far—Quentin and that Collective. And there is so much more that people don’t know. I can’t control what will happen once it is out of my hands.”

  “It already is out of your hands. Quentin—Dr. Caton, whatever his name is, he knew everything. I think he’s the one who hacked into your computer system.”

  My dad shakes his head. “He didn’t know everything. I realized some of the data had been compromised, and that my personal email had been, too. What I didn’t realize was that my cell phone had been hacked as well, probably using some kind of improvised IMSI device to listen in on my actual calls, too. And I certainly didn’t realize that they were sending you all those texts after we spoke at the gas station, manipulating what I had said and using it against you in an even worse way. They must have blocked my subsequent texts and calls to you somehow by accessing either your phone or the central servers, because on my end they all seemed to be going through. Because I never stopped trying to find you.” He shakes his head. “In any case, I’ve done additional research since my study that Dr. Caton certainly doesn’t know about. That’s all I’ve been doing since then, actually, looking exclusively at the Outliers.”

  “And?” I ask. “Because you seem worried, Dad, you honestly do. And worried, as you know, is not actually the best for me.”

  “I’m not worried, but I am concerned. And I want to be honest with you now—as honest as I possibly can be.”

  “Okay, but if this is you trying to calm me down—it’s not working.”

  “Well, as you know, there were only the three Outliers that were among the first group of participants—actually two and then you. Of course, you weren’t a part of the actual study. And I suspected right away that it was likely the phenomenon was somehow tied to age. You were all younger than the other participants.”

  “Yeah, Dr. Simons—or whoever he was—said it was all an age thing and those three—or two, and me, I guess—were all under eighteen.”

  “Well, that’s not exactly true. Eighteen wouldn’t be some bright-line cutoff in any case—changes with age are fluid and individual specific. Perhaps it’s something related to brain structure or connectivity. Both are so dynamic in the teenage years. And it could be that whatever aspect of the brain is enabling this nonvisual, nonauditory emotional perception disappears in adulthood because it has been allowed to lie fallow.”

  “‘Lie fallow’? You’re beginning to lose me.”

  “It atrophies, dries up, dies,” he says. “From lack of use. This is all just speculation at this point. I don’t know what’s causing the phenomenon, only that it exists. There is so much work left to do. But I think there is a chance, if the Outliers could learn to use these heightened perceptive abilities, to cultivate them as a legitimate skill, then perhaps they could subsist into adulthood. And could possibly become even stronger and broader. That it could lead to a genuine, scientifically verifiable intuition of some kind.”

  “Right, well, that sounds good,” I say. “So back to that concerning part?”

  “I’ll need to do proper, full-scale trials, with a much more substantial study group. And as I said, we don’t know the cause. It could be something other than brain structures—genetics, for instance. She never wanted to be tested, but your mother had heightened emotional intelligence. And then there’s your grandmother …”

  “You think she—”

  “I don’t know,” he says firmly, realizing probably that he never should have brought her up in the first place. It’s not like my grandmother’s story has a happy ending. “Socialization could be the central factor. Or there could even be some kind of viral mutation at play, I suppose, though that would not seem to account for everything in this circumstance. Also, we haven’t included sexual orientation or gender identity as a factor, and as I said, the sample size is far too small in any case to draw any definitive conclus—”

  “Dad, stop,” I say. “Please. Spit it out. What is it? Because whatever is freaking you out, I can tell you are circling around it.”

  “There appears to be a significant gender disparity, Wylie.”

  “English, please?” I ask.

  “The Outliers—so far they are all girls,” he says. “Even in the subsequent trials.”

  “Okay,” I say slowly. ??
?Sounds good. Score one for the ladies.”

  “But if this skill really does belong exclusively to women, men—all men—will be left standing on the sidelines.”

  “Then that will suck for them,” I say, and I am not trying to blow this thing off. But I still don’t see what he is getting at, or maybe I don’t want to. But it’s that look on my dad’s face that’s gnawing at me. The fear. I just want him to stop looking so worried. “It’s not like all those men get to decide what’s true.”

  “You’d be surprised what some people think they have the right to decide,” he says. “For generations, men claimed what made women different also made them inferior. And now I’m going to give them ammunition?”

  “We are weaker because we can do something extra that they can’t?” I ask. “That makes no sense.”

  “So much of what people believe makes no sense, Wylie.” He shakes his head. “That’s what can make the world such a terrifyingly tragic place.”

  Tragic. Not an accident. It pops into my head. I’ve been trying to write Quentin’s talk of my mom’s accident off as yet another one of his lies, but now it’s all I can think about.

  “Dr. Caton and fake Dr. Simons said that what happened to Mom wasn’t an accident.” I clasp my hands together in my lap so I don’t have to watch them start to tremble. “They lied about so many things, so I’m not sure that …”

  But already my dad’s eyes are glassy. “If you’d asked me a few weeks ago, I would have said it was definitely an accident. Now, I’m not so sure.” He smiles, but it’s such a terrible smile. And for the first time actual tears make it out of his eyes. “She was driving my car that night. Maybe someone even thought she was me.”

  “Who? Dr. Caton?” I ask.

  He shakes his head and wipes at his face. “I don’t think so. Only because there were things that Dr. Caton still wanted, that he would have needed to know from me.”

  “Then who?”

  He looks at me, uncomfortable. Like this is the very last thing he wants to tell me. “I honestly don’t know.”

  “So this whole ‘other people’ thing that Quentin kept talking about?”

  “I want to tell you that he made that up. Believe me, I do. But this research has broad implications. Just what will the Outliers be able to do if they are given the opportunity to perfect their skills? It could be much greater than we realize, and valuable to a whole range of people. Good and bad.” He looks down for a minute. “You know, your mom wanted me to tell you about your test results. She thought you deserved to know. That you had a right.” He takes a deep breath. “I didn’t even tell her about your results until a month later, after Thanksgiving. And then we fought about it nonstop right up until the accident. Six wasted weeks. One of my greatest regrets will always be that I didn’t listen to her. She was right. She was always right about everything. Obviously, I shouldn’t have recorded your results at all. But the scientist in me …” He shakes his head again. “I was hesitant enough that I switched them with Cassie’s, then came to my senses and pulled them down altogether. But by then it was too late—the data had already been hacked.”

  “Did you know when Cassie was gone that it had something to do with this?”

  He shakes his head some more. “I didn’t know. But then, when Dr. Simons called that evening when Karen was here to tell me that his friend who’d been helping us with cybersecurity had reported another attempted data breach, I was concerned,” he said. “It seemed like a significant coincidence. But I also couldn’t see how they were actually connected. I certainly never considered Dr. Caton an actual threat.”

  I think then of the last time my dad and I spoke. When I was on the phone with him at the gas station. How I had shouted at him that I wished he’d been in the car that night instead of my mom. That I wished he was dead basically. I wince, remembering.

  “I didn’t mean it. What I said about you and the accident. Really I didn’t.”

  “I know. And I’m sorry for threatening to call Dr. Shepard. But as soon as you said you’d heard from Cassie and were going to get her—I knew something was very, very wrong. I figured she must have told you something very serious for you to go, and then you wouldn’t tell me where she was.”

  “Because I didn’t know yet,” I say. “I just—I wanted to be a good friend.” I shake my head as the tears flood back.

  My dad reaches forward and puts his hand over mine. “I know you did, and this isn’t your fault, Wylie. It’s mine. I did try everything I could think of to find you. I called the police, but they dismissed me even faster than they had Karen. There was no doubt you’d left on your own, and they made it clear they weren’t chasing after you, period. So my mind jumped to my only other alternative, Dr. Shepard. Obviously, those texts that said I had called her and that she’d reported you a danger weren’t from me. I promise I never would have actually done it. But I shouldn’t have even suggested it,” he says, looking sad. “It’s not an excuse, but I was terrified that something would happen to you. You should have seen me here trying to track your phone. For a moment, I thought I had it. But the signal up there was weak. I had it at one point while you were somewhere in New Hampshire, so I knew you were far away already, but then I lost it for good right after that. They must have had it scrambled up at the camp, too.” My dad reaches forward with his other hand and wraps it around the back of my neck, eyes glistening as he rests his forehead against mine. “I’m just so glad that you’re okay.”

  His forehead is still resting against mine when the doorbell rings. I think of how the doorbell rang when Karen showed up at our door. Only two days earlier, but it feels like a lifetime ago.

  “Wait here,” my dad says. “I’ll get it.”

  I listen as he goes out to the foyer and opens the door. There’s a voice I can’t make out. Then my dad speaks.

  “Yes, can I help you?” He does not at all sound like he actually wants to help. The other person must say something else, something I still can’t hear. “Can’t this wait?” my dad asks, sharp now, for sure. “She’s exhausted.”

  “She” would be me, obviously. Now I’m up, headed to see who’s there, what’s going on. Because I am worried. And not because I am an Outlier—my dad and I have a lot more talking to do before I will believe that is true—but because anybody in my position would be.

  “Afraid it can’t wait, Dr. Lang,” a gruff, official-sounding voice says as I get into the foyer. “We have some questions we need to ask your daughter. Unfortunately, time is of the essence.”

  “She’s already told the police everything she knows,” my dad says, as I try to see past the door. Still not entirely sure that I even want to.

  “I understand that and I’m sorry, sir,” another voice says, polite but firm. “But she’s going to have to go through it one more time with the Department of Homeland Security.”

  When I finally look around my dad’s arm, which is gripped hard on the door, there are six officers of some kind standing on our front porch. All large, plain-faced, white men. They have on matching Windbreakers with big gold emblems over the right side of their chests. They somehow look identical despite big differences in body type.

  “Wylie Lang?” one of them asks. The tallest of the group. He’s smiling at me now, but his teeth are too big and too bright.

  “Did you find Cassie?” I ask. Because yes, there is still a small part of me that is hoping she could somehow be alive.

  “I’m afraid so, miss,” another one answers. He is the most muscular, more like a marine. “Deceased at the scene as you described. Along with all the other members of this group: The Collective.”

  “What? They’re all dead?” I ask, my heart picking up speed. I think of Fiona and Miriam. And Lexi with her baby waiting for her at home. Maybe not innocent, not completely. But none of them deserved to die. “Dead how?”

  “Dr. Quentin Caton,” a third agent says. “We believe him to be the perpetrator.”

  “Perpetrator of what?
” Because there are so many options.

  “Multiple gunshot wounds, looks like an automatic weapon,” he says, like I should know this already. “We have no specific reason to believe that any of the members of The Collective or Dr. Caton were able to flee. In fact, it appears to be a murder-suicide scenario. But we will need to wait for an official identification of the bodies to be sure, as well as medical examiners’ reports.”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense. They only had one gun. And it was an old rifle.”

  “Well, perhaps there was an arms cache you were unaware of?” the skinny one offers, like I’m an idiot to think I’d know about all their guns, and maybe I am. And yet, none of this feels right.

  Unless they really came, that’s what I think next. They came and killed them all.

  “North Point, the defense contractors? Maybe it was them?”

  “North Point, miss?” the short one asks, his hair so light it’s almost white. He’s got a tone, goddamn stupid kid.

  “They’re defense contractors,” I say, already wishing that I hadn’t said that part. Because it sounds stupid. But also like the only explanation that makes sense. “They want my dad’s research.”

  The officers all look at one another with these scrunched-up eyebrows. The pudgy one is already typing the name into his phone. “North Point, huh?” he says out loud. “Well, we’ve got a church, a glass door company, and digital solutions—whatever that is. No defense-related anything.”