The Intuitives(14)
It was just so… undefined.
She might have liked it, had it been a solid, dependable, gunmetal sort of gray, or if it had evoked within her the thrill of angry thunderclouds on the horizon. A hint of blue could have rendered it more hopeful, like the first gleam of sun in the sky after a long, cold night. Or if it had exhibited any variegation whatsoever, she might have found its contrasts intriguing, like water-polished stones at the bottom of a river—a river you could point to on a map and say, “Here. I’m right here.”
In the end, it was just a light, industrial gray, designed to hide the telltale signs of use, cheap to replace, and thoroughly inoffensive, which was perhaps the worst thing about it. Of course, that was what passed for interior design in military housing, a fact with which Mackenzie Gray was intimately familiar, having lived on one Army base or another for all seventeen years of her life to date.
But the dark gray carpet in her last home had at least conveyed a certain sense of place. At least she had felt, standing upon it, as though she were… somewhere. The light gray carpet in the upstairs hallway here, coupled with the slightly lighter gray of the walls, left Mackenzie feeling as though she were somehow standing nowhere at all, a feeling so unsettling that she tried to avoid it whenever she could.
Not that she would ever complain about it.
Mackenzie’s father, Brian Gray, was a bona fide member of the Special Forces of the Armed Forces of the United States of America. He was—as was every other member of his elite unit—the very antithesis of petulance, and he was not about to let any of his four beloved daughters grow up to be a sniveling little whiner. So Mackenzie Gray did not complain when her family moved from base to base. She did not complain about changing schools or leaving her friends. She did not complain about having to find yet another new Muay Thai coach. She certainly was not about to complain about the carpet.
Nonetheless, she was happy to avoid a bad situation if it was within her power to do so. She had just become very good, very early in life, at knowing the difference between those situations that she could affect and those that she could not. So when it came to the carpet, she said absolutely nothing, but she quietly positioned herself as far away from it as possible.
As the oldest of the girls, Mackenzie got first pick of bedrooms in every new home. This was a long-standing rule in the Gray family, and although one or another of her three sisters had occasionally launched a campaign to challenge its fairness, the familial hierarchy had proven itself highly resistant to insurgence. So when the Grays had moved into this most recent home on this most recent base, Mackenzie had selected the only downstairs bedroom for herself—a room that had been converted from a den-slash-office, with windows overlooking the small but immaculate front lawn.
In any other family, this might have been an odd choice. The room opened directly off the living room, with the noise of the television on the other side of the wall. But Mackenzie slept like the dead, and in any event, the family had survived one paternal tour after another by relying on strict discipline and routine. Bedtimes were adhered to religiously, and the television set was turned off every night by 9:00 p.m. on the dot, without exception.
And because the only rooms upstairs were the bedrooms that belonged to Mackenzie’s mother and sisters, Mackenzie never had to brave the gray carpet except under two circumstances: when she put away her sisters’ laundry every Saturday, and when she waited in line to video chat with her father every Sunday.
It was this latter event that had her sitting now in the hallway next to Megan, who was fifteen; who sat next to Madison, who was twelve; who sat next to Mia, who was nine. This was the only situation in which Mackenzie’s age worked against her, as she was the last one to speak to her father and therefore had to sit in the dreaded hallway the longest.
She sat with her back to the wall, playing with her phone, texting her most recent set of new friends, watching Muay Thai videos, generally embracing the suck, and trying not to think about the disturbing gray carpet. In no way was she going to let her sisters—or the carpet itself, for that matter—know that the stupid thing could unsettle her.
After just a few minutes, Stephanie Gray emerged from the master bedroom and signaled to Mia that it was her turn, an event that was repeated a few minutes later from Mia to Madison, and after that from Madison to Megan, and after that, finally, from Megan to Mackenzie. Mackenzie leaped to her feet as soon as the doorknob started to turn, brushing past Megan before her sister could finish getting out the door. Megan, however, was also a daughter of Brian Gray, and if she happened to feel that this was in any way rude, she held her peace on the subject, nodding to her older sister and shutting the door behind her as she left.
Mackenzie hurried to the computer at her mother’s desk, her nerves soothed by the warm colors of the bedspread and the abundant family photos that covered the walls, lending the room an aura of home that the hallway, with its industrial blankness, sorely lacked. Her father looked more tired and significantly more tanned than the last time he had been stateside, but his smile was comfortingly familiar. She took in his overall appearance of health and allowed her genuine happiness to shine through for his benefit.
“Hey, Dad. So what’s the weather going to be like this afternoon?” It was a running joke between them whenever her father was stationed in a timezone significantly ahead of her own, as he was now.
Her father grinned back. “Hot. Wear sunscreen.”