Lakewood - Megan Giddings Page 0,37

told everyone to write down a description of an object and put it in a sealed envelope. They had two minutes to describe a location. Then 20 seconds to write down a color. In a completely skeptical voice, Dr. Lisa told them to inhabit a double consciousness. Keep your brain as open as possible to the other person. Let your thoughts find a mutual place, like tuning in to the same radio station. Don’t overthink it. When you’re tuned in, listen to the static of your own thoughts, but also the bursts you might be receiving from your conversation partner.

Lena kept turning to look at Charlie from across the room, as if it might help them to synch. His hair was cropped short and it emphasized how small his ears were for such a big head. A grass stain was on the right shoulder of his white dress shirt. No thoughts came to her that seemed obviously from someone else. She imagined instead that Dr. Lisa was going to show everyone their answers. Everyone else, including Charlie, would have read each other’s minds perfectly, somehow connected.

Maybe the government was creating a vast psychic network they would use to monitor the globe. And they were doing it by using a questionnaire that seemed better suited to a Find Your Good Christian Spouse website.

Dr. Lisa handed Charlie’s envelopes to Lena. She said the envelopes were not to be opened, but Lena could hold them and respond to what Charlie had written. “Write down how you think he responded.” For the first, she wrote Bacon cheeseburger, good bun, no tomatoes, extra fries at the bottom of the bag. Lena pushed her fingers against the second envelope. Looked again at Charlie. His ears might be smaller than hers, despite him being so much bigger than her. She scrawled This dumb office. Scratched out dumb, scribbled over the scratches to make it impossible to read. For the last one, Lena wrote Coral (pink-orange, not pink-red).

When the exercise was complete and Dr. Lisa had read everyone’s responses, Lena expected her to make some grand announcement: Some of you have achieved perfect sync. But instead she gathered her clipboards, the envelopes, her laptop, and slid them into her tote. She kept checking her cell phone as if she had somewhere important to be. She took off the pullover she was wearing to reveal a T-shirt covered in a print of pink and yellow ponies galloping. Tied her hair back and told them all to have a good night. She looked like a cool mom. Lena imagined her sitting across the dinner table from two kids, asking them, in the exact same tone she used while doing hypotheticals: “On a scale of one to ten, with ten being the best school day and one being a disaster, how was your day?”

12

That night, sitting alone again in her apartment, Lena started a new list, titled it “You’re an Adult.” She wanted to learn how to cook more, take better care of her car to save money, better understand the insurance paperwork she was getting sent about her mother’s care.

She showed it to Charlie the next morning, Day 14, in the break room. He went through the list and starred all the things he could help her learn. They worked on that instead of the six-month job performance plan they were given in their folders. That night, he went to her apartment and showed her how to change the tires on her car. It was impossible for her to do it wearing her cast, but she wrote down all the steps.

As he worked on the tires, Charlie told her which people he knew in town were super-racist, as if she would go up to people and get their first and last names before they said or did something awful. He thought the best thing to do when around those people was to smile, be on your most polite behavior, and never make direct eye contact. Lena knew all that already, but it was kind of Charlie to try to give her advice. There was dirt under his fingernails from changing the tire, sweat on his forehead.

She didn’t tell him these were things she’d known her entire life. Or, just on the being-a-woman level, Lena made sure to almost always wear headphones when she was alone in public. Almost every time she walked or ran, a car or pickup truck would drive by with a Confederate flag bumper sticker or front