My brother had made it mean something. Cascade Falls was part of that, which only made me wish again I had made that tourist pay for his contempt. And that was a slippery slope. I focused on my book and the words swam into focus. I was close, very close to what I was trying to accomplish—it was only a matter of weeks or maybe days, I hoped. I’d had seven years of a normal life before I’d been kidnapped, Stefan said, although I couldn’t remember a single second of them; ten years of captivity, which I remembered with stark, vivid clarity; and nearly three years of freedom, freedom to do research; and now the time was almost right. I was almost there. All the more reason to learn more and do it faster.
A finger poked at my book on neurosurgery. “Parker, you’re always studying. If you’re not going to college, why bother?”
Parker wasn’t my real name, but Sarafynna didn’t know that. Then again, Sarafynna didn’t know how to spell her own name and that made me doubt she cared that my name was actually Michael. Or Mykyl. When it came to Sarafynna, I wasn’t too sure that wasn’t how the letters popped up in her brain. Truthfully, I wasn’t sure Sarafynna had a brain at all without an MRI to back that up. All that Sara—the nickname was much simpler and it didn’t make my mind twitch—knew was how to put whipped cream on top of the lattes and how to flirt. To “mack” or “hit on” guys. Since I didn’t know who Mack was, I went with the other one—“hit on.” That was more modern than “flirt” . . . to “hit on” guys. Whatever. I had more significant things to concentrate on.
Saving brain cells for important information outweighed saving them for teenage slang—which was mostly uninteresting anyway. Besides, in another month I wouldn’t be a teenager anymore.
In almost three years I’d learned about flirting and sex, but now, at nineteen closing in on twenty, I liked intelligence in girls or women. Sara was entertaining and she let me know my hormones were working at top capacity—she was gorgeous. . . . Hot, I mean—“hot” was what someone my age should say. But she didn’t have it all. I’d come to find out that I needed resourceful and smart too; Sara had everything except that. She had sunshine-bright blond hair—fake; big, turquoise eyes—fake; and she bounced wherever she went. That meant certain things on her, those things also fake, bounced with her as she went and rarely stopped bouncing. The first time Stefan had met her, he waited until I got off work that night and took me to the drugstore for a box of condoms.
I told him I didn’t need them, and he told me I was an idiot if I didn’t want to play in that sandbox. I was nineteen, he said with a grin, and that was what nineteen was all about. Nineteen and friction—knock yourself out.
But I didn’t. I saw her fake-colored contacts and thought about the one I wore that turned my one blue eye mossy green to match the other one—two fakes don’t make a reality; I thought about her lack upstairs of anything but whipped cream, and it seemed like a waste. Stefan and I had lived in Bolivia for two years before we came to Cascade Falls. I’d played in sandboxes there, whatever Stefan had said. It wasn’t as if I were a virgin. I’d had the experience . . . experiences. I’d been seventeen before I’d gotten to make my own choices, even a single one. Now that I had almost three years of making decisions for myself, I wanted to be sure that each one I made now was the best I could make.
Sara did bounce in a very intriguing way, though. It might be worth thinking about. Hmm.
“I might go to college someday,” I said, turning another page. What I didn’t tell her was that I was going to the equivalent of college and then some. I had the knowledge base for a medical degree with a specialty in biogenetics with an emphasis on polymorphism and pseudogenes, and a PhD in biochemistry and neurology.
Theoretically.
Nineteen and a doctor three times over, but it was amazing what you could learn when you could hack into the computer system of any university in the world. Computer hacking had actually been the easiest thing to learn compared to many other things. In fact, it was pretty boring.
Yes, I’m smart. I know.
The question was whether I was born that way or made that way.
“College sounds like a lot of work.” Sara’s voice brightened. “Except for the parties. I’ll bet frat parties are fun. Maybe I should go. My parents keep bitching at me to since I graduated.” She pushed up to sit on the counter—against the rules—but I was reading. Technically I shouldn’t notice.
And technically my eyes didn’t wander to technically not watch her bouncing—lying to yourself can be entertaining—when I saw past her to the television in the break room. What I saw on it made Sara’s whipped cream skills and bouncing vanish. The sound was turned low, but I could still hear it. I could still see him on the small screen. I saw a man I’d never expected to see again. His face had that enigmatic smile that could save your life or far more likely put you in your grave; he was Stefan’s father.
Or our father, Stefan would say. . . . Anatoly Korsak.