A World Without You(68)
Since I can’t access the timestream and I’m stuck at home, I’ve been writing in an old notebook. Sometimes, instead of jotting down ideas of ways to get everything back to normal, I just write about Sofía. Or to Sofía. And sometimes the blank pages stare at me, waiting, and I don’t know if they’ll stay blank forever or if they’ll become something more.
My words would give them meaning, but there’s a meaning behind blank pages too.
? ? ?
I got Pheebs’s laptop. If I can’t figure out the past through the timestream, maybe I can figure out more from the USB drive.
For the most part, the recorded sessions are a weird hybrid between what I know happened and what doesn’t make sense. It’s all talk. Talk, talk, talk. No powers.
I don’t know if it was the officials who tampered with the videos, but whoever did it did a good job. Any outsider watching these would have no idea that each session with the Doctor was a group lesson about controlling our powers. Gwen’s fires are either missing altogether or they’re the result of matches or lighters that the Doctor jumps up quickly to confiscate. Rather than travel through time, I just stare blankly ahead. When Ryan uses his telepathy, it simply looks like he’s throwing something.
And Sofía is always visible.
I watch her, mostly. Sometimes I can line up my memory with the way she appears on-screen. The moments in sessions when she’d turn invisible are altered so that she just grows very still and withdrawn, sometimes hiding behind her hair.
I like to think I’ve been a good student. I always paid attention during the Doctor’s sessions, and I’ve always wanted to have control over my powers, to not be such a liability.
But now I’m watching her instead of Dr. Franklin. I’m looking at the moments that made her go invisible. There are times during the Doctor’s sessions when it’s like a gun blast going off; Sofía flinches visibly, and then that weird sort of stillness washes over her, indicating that she went transparent in real life.
It happens when Dr. Franklin talks about the way we react to things that make us anxious, about how our first instincts in moments of fear or pressure may not be our best ones. It happens when Harold talks to his ghosts loudly, in a way that overtakes the session and the Doctor has to escort him out. It happens when Ryan sits too close to Sofía or pays her too much attention.
It happens when the Doctor talks about family. He likes talking about family and the way it defines us, and every time, Sofía goes invisible.
CHAPTER 45
The videos cycle quickly, one into another, cutting on and off at the very beginning and end of each session. Except one.
I sit up straighter in bed. I vaguely remember this day, when Ryan had tried to strengthen his telepathy and mind-control powers. He was still developing them—he was much better at telekinesis then, but not all the mind stuff. The screen shows Ryan in full meltdown mode as he stands and screams at everyone, but in real life he just lost control of his power. We were all sitting there as he was experimenting, trying to implant an idea inside of us. The Doctor had started with something innocuous: Make us all think about wanting to eat an apple. At first it worked. In fact, the Doctor had a basket of apples, and we all stood up to get one, even though we’d just had breakfast. But as we ate the apples under Ryan’s influence, they turned bitter in our mouths. He lost control not just of his own mind but of ours as well.
I gag thinking about it now. For me, the apple turned to dust. Sofía said hers became slimy and filled with worms, so soft she could squish the rotten insides in her hand. Whatever Harold saw of his apple made him scream and throw it across the room, nearly breaking the office window.
It got worse after that. It wasn’t just the apple inside our heads, twisted and gross, it was Ryan’s entire mind. His whole mentality poured into our brains, taking over, erasing us, flashing us with memories we didn’t want to see, things Ryan had experienced that none of us knew: his mother, an actress, who could barely remember his name; his father, a director, who hated his mother for cheating on him and took it out on his son. A parade of nannies, each increasingly incompetent, except for one when he was twelve, who hurt him in ways none of us could ever have imagined.
It was too much. To have ourselves in our bodies but also Ryan, to feel everything he felt coating our brains like black mold. By the end of the session, we were all clutching our heads and crying, and the Doctor had to use his healing power on each of us just to get us off the floor.
Except Ryan. The Doctor couldn’t heal Ryan, because the memories he lived with, the thoughts inside his head—those were all his own. The Doctor couldn’t take them away.
Maybe that’s why Ryan worked so hard to advance his telepathy and control his own mind. Maybe with that control, he could block part of himself off, the part that poisoned us all when we touched it.
In the video, though, that whole session plays out much differently. Basically, we all just talk, and then Ryan breaks down, crying—actually crying, I’d never seen him do that before—and spends the rest of the session confessing his darkest secrets, telling us about a nanny who abused him, parents who neglected him. We’re disturbed, obviously, even the Doctor, but we didn’t have those feelings literally pressed into our brains, and at the end of the session, we all leave.
Except Ryan. The Doc calls his name.