Select (Select #1)(17)

Dammit. She’d seen exactly what I’d done at the police station. I quickly looked for one more second, wanting to see his emails, his photos.

“Now.”

I handed the phone over to Victoria. We were close to the house, but she made a detour farther down the road to a dock landing. Pulling right up to the water’s edge, she stopped the car and looked down at the phone in her hand. Victoria also looked through his searches quickly, the only indication we had of what might be on a potential witness’s mind. Regardless of what he might say, it was obvious that what had happened today would reignite the fire this article started a year ago. I couldn’t overestimate how much trouble I was in.

Victoria handed the phone back to me like it was something disgusting. “Get rid of it.”

I opened the car door and walked in the dark to the water’s edge, throwing the phone as far as I could out into the lake.





I sensed Novak before I saw him, my eyes coming to rest on a shadow in the corner of the dark living room when we entered. He appeared to be lounging lazily in a soft, upholstered chair. Just sitting and waiting, which struck me as odd. Then I realized I never saw him not in motion or without his phone.

Crossing the room, Victoria stood before Novak, and I could sense the change in her attitude.

“Didn’t know,” Victoria said, so softly, most of her words dropping away.

“Not to try,” Novak said.

“Private. Please.”

She was pleading with him. And most definitely not for me. Her golden child had screwed up, and Victoria didn’t want to discuss it in front of me. He would never send our future leader down to our group, the Lost Kids, if that was what Victoria was worried about.

Liv and I stood in the foyer, the waiting making it worse. We were not together in this. Until this summer I’d never felt apart from my sister. Even when we were small, we didn’t fight—I didn’t dare, and Liv was too kind to and wanted to please me. She had broken our dynamic first by taking one step too deep into my territory.

My dad stood up, light on his feet. He was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt from a local club, his feet bare. I still saw him through a little girl’s eyes and could perfectly recall him tossing me into the air, me practically weightless and laughing uncontrollably.

“Liv, come with me.” Novak turned to walk toward his large office at the top of the stairs. I watched Liv, spine curved, flip-flops slapping on the limestone, following him at a snail’s pace. “Vic, come on,” he tossed out. Victoria snapped into motion and trailed them up the staircase, not sparing a backward glance for me.

I didn’t bother to sit down. Chewing a nail nervously, I walked over to the wall of glass and looked out at the water. At night, the house felt like a houseboat sitting on the silvery lake, the moon glinting off the water’s surface. Most of the lights were off in the houses across the lake. My stomach ached. How much should I tell Novak about what happened?

Should I tell him everything the stranger may have seen? There were so many things, all because I’d paid him far too much attention. If we hadn’t been speaking, he wouldn’t have followed me.

And then there was the other question: what I should tell Novak about myself. In the space of a couple of hours, I’d read someone’s mind and I’d known with certainty from a football field away that Liv was drowning. I’d suddenly seen all of Barton Springs in total clarity, like a scene laid out in front of me, and known exactly where to run. I didn’t understand it—was this what all the adults were capable of? This kind of power didn’t seem inconsequential the way Novak had said when I came to him after the ski trip. I didn’t know what to do, because after that meeting I was no longer certain what Novak’s reaction would be.

I heard a door open, and voices poured out into the hallway, echoing off the high ceilings. “Julia,” my dad called. His voice sounded so nonthreatening. Numb, I walked over to the stairs and looked up. Liv and Victoria stood in front of the display of family photos, watching me. When I reached the top, I edged past them, keeping my gaze averted.

I hadn’t been inside my dad’s office in years. To me this office felt like the nexus of power—where the secrets and the future were managed by my dad, “the Chosen One,” as Angus had once mockingly called him. It was only over the course of this last summer when I heard some snide comments about my dad slip out from the Lost Kids that I realized not everyone admired him. They especially loved talking about “Novak’s girls”—the revolving door of assistants he chose from an elite-seeming pool of predominantly female outsiders. Eventually, each and every one of them was dismissed and cut off when they’d inevitably become too infatuated with Novak. There’d been more than one restraining order. Novak knew we had that effect on the select few chosen to get that close to us, so it was a mystery why he continued to court trouble.

I could see how it would be easy for the other Lost Kids to resent Novak. Still, no one would ever dispute his leadership. For our own safety, no one mentioned the immediate past, but from the time we could speak we were introduced to our culture with stories of our ancestors and the diaspora of our people. As children we heard tales of the great ones—those who lived to one hundred and thirty, who could levitate, who could heal with their touch, and who could, most important, see the future. And we came to understand that Novak was like the great ones, the first in many generations, and he received guiding visions.