The Outliers (The Outliers, #1)(20)

The Collective, it read in big black letters across the top, and beneath it the details of some kind of lecture: The Spirituality of Science, Seven p.m., December 18! Explore the intersection between freedom, faith, and science.

“Huh,” my mom said, appearing behind me and reading over my shoulder. She twisted her wavy hair into a knot at her neck. “Life in a college town—the good, the bad, the vaguely fanatical. Sometimes I love it, and sometimes I wish the flyers were all about garage sales.”

She was trying to make like the flyer just happened to have been slipped under our door. She did the same thing the time I met her at work and someone had stuck a collage of the Middle East under her windshield wiper. It had a skull and crossbones over it.

“Is this about your story?” I asked, thinking, of course, about the baby dolls. Almost a month and a half after the first one, another had been delivered three separate times.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” she said, like the possibility had honestly not occurred to her.

“And what’s ‘The Spirituality of Science’?”

“Who knows?” she said, a hint of humor back in her voice as she wrapped an arm around my shoulders and squeezed. “More proof it’s a free country. And thank God for that.”

“And so it’s nothing to worry about?”

“No, definitely not. It’s just more proof that you cannot control the world,” she said, taking the flyer from my hands. She folded it crisply into a small, sharp square and slipped it into her back pocket, then kissed the top of my head. “Luckily, you don’t need to. Now, your dad didn’t see the flyer, did he?”

I shook my head.

“Then let’s not tell him,” she said. “After the baby dolls and Dr. Caton’s plummet from Mount Olympus”—she rolled her eyes—“I think his head might explode from even something as innocuous as this.”

“Why did Dad fire him anyway?” I wasn’t as curious about Dr. Caton’s fall from grace as Gideon, but the whole thing had seemed so weird and out of the blue and dramatic when it had happened a couple of months earlier, especially for my dad, Captain No Emotion. And my dad had still refused to talk about it.

“Dr. Caton was so used to getting his own way, he wouldn’t listen to your dad, who is not only a very gifted scientist and a very smart person, but also his boss,” my mom said. “I’m sure it’s hard to be well adjusted when you graduate high school at fifteen. From what your dad’s told me, Dr. Caton also came from an extremely wealthy family, who didn’t exactly take the time to socialize him down to size. Always getting what you want can make people extremely shortsighted. Which just makes me more glad that we’ve kept Gideon with his peer group.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call Gideon socialized.”

“Well, we are trying.” My mom laughed. “The point is sometimes it’s not what you believe that’s the problem, it’s how you believe it.”

“Break it down for me, then,” Jasper says, startling me back to the Jeep and the dark with his pseudo-surfer-boy twang. It reminds me of all the reasons I don’t like him.

“Break what down for you?”

“Your dad’s stuff.”

“His ‘stuff’?”

“Yeah, his research. We’ve got time. And I actually like science—you know, the dumb-jock version.” Now Jasper is mocking me. He thinks that’s why I don’t like him, because he’s a “jock”? I stare hard at the side of his face until he holds up a hand. “Too soon for jokes, I see that now.”

I don’t feel like talking about my dad’s work, but if I don’t distract myself, who knows where my mind will wander. Conversation about anything is a good thing. And my dad’s study is for sure a lot safer topic than Cassie and Jasper’s relationship.

“He’s done lots of studies about EI, but in this one he wanted to prove that with the part of emotional intelligence that is reading other people’s feelings, ‘perception,’ some people do it not just by looking at people’s faces or listening to their voices—which is how most people do it.”

He shrugs. “I wouldn’t say I’m exactly badass in that department. But I get that it’s a thing some people can do.”

“It’s like this tiny sub-thing in EI, not exactly something the world is holding their breath waiting to find out. Anyway, my dad ran his test trying to see if people could read feelings differently or better, I guess, if they were watching a live conversation between two other people instead of by looking at pictures of people’s faces, which is how they usually test it.”

“And?” Jasper asks, like he’s waiting for the big reveal that the study showed something amazing. He’s going to be disappointed, just like my dad.

“It’s not that exciting,” I say. “He learned some small things. But it’s not like he cured cancer or something.”

“Ouch,” Jasper says. “Way to take a man down at the knees.”

And he’s right. That was harsh. But that is the way I feel: annoyed. More than I realized. Even if he didn’t know it at the time—couldn’t have—my dad wasted the little time he had left with my mom. Instead of being with her and being happy, he was obsessed with yet another stupid study that no one is ever going to care about. And now she’s gone. And now, no matter what he does, he can never make up that lost time to her. Or us.