But it feels like some kind of awful key sliding into place. I’m terrified what’s going to happen when somebody pops the lock.
“Have you decided what you’re going to do, Ben?” my mom asked my dad that last night at dinner, her last night.
I didn’t know what she was talking about, except that she was launching into another one of their fights—the ones they had all the time now right in front of us, without ever revealing what they were actually fighting about. But from the way my dad’s face puckered, he knew what she meant. And he was not happy.
“Do about what?” I asked. This couldn’t be about my dad’s study. Finally that was finished, about to be published. “What happened?”
My dad eyeballed my mom: see what you’ve started. “There have been some lapses in cybersecurity campus-wide,” he said, glancing in my direction. “But Dr. Simons got a colleague from Stanford’s computer science department to bolster my study’s data security until our university can work out its problem.”
My mom crossed her arms. “And so that’s it?” she asked him. “You don’t have anything else to say.”
“Yes, Hope, that’s it.” Now he was glaring at her.
I’d stopped eating. Whatever they were fighting about, it was not campus data security. I looked over at Gideon, but his eyes were on his chemistry homework. I was never sure if he didn’t notice our parents fighting or if he just didn’t care.
“So I guess that means you still didn’t talk to Dr. Simons about the Outliers?” my mom pressed on. “I thought you said you were going to mention it the next time you spoke.”
My dad took a deep breath and put down his knife and fork to look at her.
“What are the Outliers?” I asked, hoping his explanation might make me less worried about them getting divorced.
“They’re the ones who can do Dad’s test blindfolded and with the headphones,” Gideon said without looking up from his homework. He was an expert on my dad’s work, had read every one of his papers, was always peppering him with questions. Partly that had to do with Gideon being interested in science, and partly that had to do with Gideon wanting my dad to be more interested in him. “You know, the ones with ESP.”
“It’s not ESP, Gideon!” my dad shouted.
Gideon startled, his cheeks flushing a blotchy pink. For a second I thought he might cry.
My dad closed his eyes, took a breath. “I’m sorry, Gideon, but you know how much I hate that comparison. It’s inflammatory, and it degrades the real potential of my research.” He reached out a hand but didn’t actually touch Gideon. “I shouldn’t have shouted, though. I’m sorry.”
In my dad’s defense, even I knew that ESP was not a word anyone was to use in our house. The number of times I’d heard my dad trying to explain to others that ESP was not what he studied was too many to count. And whenever he did, I could hear the defeat in his voice.
“Who are the Outliers then?” I asked again, because I needed that answer now.
“Outliers are the subjects whose results are outside the normal range. That’s all,” my dad said. “Outliers occur in all kinds of studies.”
“But not every Outlier is created equal,” my mom said. “Are they, Ben?”
And there was this way she said his name: like maybe Outlier was another word for mistress or prostitute.
“And ESP is literally reading someone’s thoughts, Gideon,” my dad said, ignoring her and turning back to Gideon. “In the old tests for ESP, they’d give one subject a picture of a shape to concentrate hard on, to think only of that thing—blue triangle, blue triangle, over and over again. And then they’d ask the other subject to guess what shape that person was thinking about. And no one can do that. That test has nothing to do with emotional intelligence. To an extent, ESP and the perception aspect of emotional intelligence are related: they are both about reading people. The subjects in my study exhibited a range of capacity for perceiving emotions, which did seem heightened when observing live conversation compared to their ability with static images. The Outliers exhibited an exceptional ability unrelated to the actual focus of my study—they could perceive emotions while blindfolded and wearing noise-canceling headphones. It certainly warrants further research.”
“Got to keep on studying and studying and studying before you say anything to anyone? Is that it, Ben?”
Again my dad ignored her. But I watched his face tighten.