The Chase Page 0,18

walking around, Michael. I was awake."

"No, no, I'm not saying the phone calls aren't real. I'm saying the phone rang, and maybe somebody even whispered something at you-or maybe it was just static-but you imagined what it was saying. You put your own interpretation on the sounds. You didn't hear vanished until the psychic said vanished, right?"

"Yes," Jenny said slowly. In the bright May sunshine, the terror of last night seemed less real. "But-it wasn't like imagining it. I heard the sounds the first time when the phone rang at school, and in the end they came clear. And the word made sense. Not vanished, but famished-it fit in with those eyes."

"But that's just why you imagined it." Michael was waving a box of Cracker Jack, warming to his subject. "Maybe imagined isn't the right word. See, your brain is like a modeling system. It takes the input it gets from your senses and makes the most reasonable model it can from it. But when you're really stressed, it can take that input-like somebody whispering nonsense on the phone-and make the wrong model out of it. Your brain hears something that isn't there. It seems real because it is real-to your brain."

Dee was frowning, clearly not liking the idea of not relying on her brain. "Yes, but it isn't real."

"It's as real as any of the other models your brain makes all day. Like-last night I was doing homework in my living room, and my brain made a model of a coffee table. That's what it thought of the images my eyes were showing it. It took wood and rectangular and matched that with coffee table, and I recognized it. But if I was really stressed, I might see wood and rectangular, and my brain might make a model of a coffin. Especially if I'd been asleep or if I was already thinking about coffins. See?" Jenny did, sort of.

"But the coffin still wouldn't be real," Dee argued. "But how could I tell? "Easy. You could touch it-" "Touching's just another sense. It could be fooled, too. No, if a model's good enough, there would be no way to tell it wasn't real," Michael said.

It made sense, Jenny thought. It was like the dog yesterday evening. She'd been jumping at shadows because she was so frightened.

She sat back on the grassy knoll and let out a deep breath. The knot in her stomach had eased slightly-and now she could worry about other things.

Like Tom. As long as he wasn't there, things wouldn't be right.

The others were talking around her. "-we covered about half the streets yesterday," Dee was saying, "but we didn't find anything-" "I found blisters," Michael put in. "And if I keep missing my kung fu classes I'm not going to live through the next competition," Dee finished.

"You think you've got problems? I found scratches all over the hood of the Spider this morning," Audrey said. "Daddy's going to kill me when he sees it." She told the story of the dog that had followed them. Michael spilled his Cracker Jack in triumph. "You see? More modeling," he said. But Audrey

pushed down her designer sunglasses with one finger to stare over them.

"Jenny?" she said. "What's wrong?"

They were all looking at her.

Jenny could feel her lips tremble slightly, but she tried to sound off-hand. "It's just-Tom and I had a fight. And we sort of..." She shrugged. "Well, I don't know if we're together anymore or not."

They all stared as if she'd said the world was ending in a few minutes.

Then Michael whistled and ran his hands through his hair, rumpling it even more wildly. Dee, who normally scorned anything to do with romance, put a slender, night-dark hand on Jenny's arm. Audrey's eyebrows were hiked up into her spiky copper bangs. Zach shook his head, a distant flicker of ice in his winter-gray eyes.

Audrey was the first to recover. "Don't worry, chiri," she said, taking the sunglasses off and snapping them into a case briskly. "It's not permanent. Tom just needs some stirring up. Guys need to be reminded of their place every so often," she added with a severe glance at Michael, who spluttered.

"No. It wasn't a regular fight. It was about him-Julian. He thinks I belong to Julian or something, like one of those horrible old movies. Bride of the Devil. He thinks he's lost me already, so why compete?" She told them about it as best she could.

Audrey listened, her narrowed eyes turned in the