Luke had had enough. He was going to cry again pretty soon; he could feel it coming on like a thunderstorm. Doing that in company might be okay for Iris, who was a girl, but he had an idea (surely outdated but all the same powerful) about how boys were supposed to behave. In a word, like Nicky.
He went back to his room, closed the door, and lay down on his bed with an arm over his eyes. Then, for no reason, he thought of Richie Rocket in his silver space suit, dancing as enthusiastically as Nicky Wilholm had before dinner, and how the little kids danced with him, laughing like crazy and singing along to “Mambo Number 5.” As though nothing could go wrong, as if their lives would always be filled with innocent fun.
The tears came, because he was afraid and angry, but mostly because he was homesick. He had never understood what that word meant until now. This wasn’t summer camp, and it wasn’t a field trip. This was a nightmare, and all he wanted was for it to be over. He wanted to wake up. And because he couldn’t, he fell asleep with his narrow chest still hitching with a few final sobs.
3
More bad dreams.
He awoke with a start from one in which a headless black dog had been chasing him down Wildersmoot Drive. For a single wonderful moment he thought the whole thing had been a dream, and he was back in his real room. Then he looked at the pajamas that weren’t his pajamas and at the wall where there should have been a window. He used the bathroom, and then, because he was no longer sleepy, powered up the laptop. He thought he might need another token to make it work, but he didn’t. Maybe it was on a twenty-four-hour cycle, or—if he was lucky—forty-eight. According to the strip at the top, it was quarter past three in the morning. A long time until dawn, then, and what he got for first taking a nap and then falling asleep so early in the evening.
He thought about going to YouTube and watching some of the vintage cartoons, stuff like Popeye that had always had him and Rolf rolling around on the floor, yelling “Where’s me spinach?” and “Uck-uck-uck!” But he had an idea they would only bring the homesickness back, and raving. So what did that leave? Going back to bed, where he’d lie awake until daylight? Wandering the empty halls? A visit to the playground? He could do that, he remembered Kalisha saying the playground was never locked, but it would be too spooky.
“Then why don’t you think, asshole?”
He spoke in a low voice, but jumped at the sound anyway, even half-raised a hand as if to cover his mouth. He got up and walked around the room, bare feet slapping and pajama bottoms flapping. It was a good question. Why didn’t he think? Wasn’t that what he was supposed to be good at? Lucas Ellis, the smart kid. The boy genius. Loves Popeye the Sailor Man, loves Call of Duty, loves shooting hoops in the backyard, but also has a working grasp of written French, although he still needs subtitles when he looks at French movies on Netflix, because they all talk so fast, and the idioms are crazy. Boire comme un trou, for instance. Why drink like a hole when drink like a fish makes much more sense? He can fill a blackboard with math equations, he can reel off all the elements in the periodic table, he can list every vice president going back to George Washington’s, he can give you a reasonable explanation of why attaining light speed is never going to happen outside of the movies.
So why is he just sitting here and feeling sorry for himself?
What else can I do?
Luke decided to take that as a real question instead of an expression of despair. Escape was probably impossible, but what about learning?
He tried googling the New York Times, and wasn’t surprised to get HAL 9000; no news for Institute kids. The question was, could he find a way around the prohibition? A back door? Maybe.
Let’s see, he thought. Let’s just see. He opened Firefox and typed in #!cloakofGriffin!#.
Griffin was H. G. Wells’s invisible man, and this site, which Luke had learned about a year ago, was a way to get around parental controls—not the dark web, exactly, but next