AS SOON AS the three-tone chime sounded the end of the school day, the Berkeley hallways flooded with students. Everyone herded toward the main front doors, where they would pour themselves into waiting hovers or pause at the edge of the school’s virtual tech-net, muttering furiously into their contacts as they replied to their queue of messages. Standing there, they looked like the edge of an undulating human bubble.
Rylin walked into the mounting tide of students, toward the science building. She had missed psychology class earlier and needed to make up the lab if she didn’t want to fail.
This morning she had messaged Berkeley to tell them she wasn’t feeling well. She had her tampered mediwand all prepped and ready to use—she and Chrissa had rigged it years ago to mark them sick whenever it scanned—but the Berkeley administrators didn’t even request proof of her supposed illness. They just took her word for it, which sparked a feeling of guilt Rylin hadn’t anticipated. She did her best to push that guilt aside and focus on Hiral.
She hadn’t seen him since last weekend at the mall—which had gone much better than Rylin expected. Hiral had stayed to help her and Cord run the experiment, and then they had all gotten milkshakes together at the famous blend-bar in the food court. To Rylin’s surprise, and delight, it had seemed as if Cord and Hiral were getting along. Or at least they were pretending to, for her sake.
But since that day, Hiral had been mysteriously absent. He kept saying that he was busy, that there were “things” he needed to “take care of,” but he didn’t volunteer any details, and Rylin didn’t press for them. She didn’t get the sense that he was angry with her about Cord. Actually . . . Rylin couldn’t help being unpleasantly reminded of his behavior the last time they dated, when he’d started dealing drugs with V.
He wasn’t doing that anymore, she reminded herself. She knew that he wasn’t. What Chrissa said last weekend was just messing with her head.
So today Rylin had decided to take the morning off and steal a few hours with Hiral before his late work shift. She’d cooked breakfast tacos and curled up with him in bed, her arm thrown across his chest, her head nestled into his shoulder. And even though he’d smiled and said all the right things, Rylin still couldn’t shake the sense that he wasn’t wholly there with her, in the moment, but somewhere far away.
She turned now into the psych classroom, where Professor Wang was standing behind her desk, shuffling a few items into her forest-green shoulder bag.
“Hi, Professor. I’m sorry I missed class earlier; I wasn’t feeling well.” Rylin’s eyes roved over the equipment arranged on her lab console, patches and wires covered with the little red hearts that marked them as medical devices.
The professor brushed aside her excuse. “Another student missed class today as well, so you won’t have to perform this lab alone. It’s much better when these questions come from a human instead of a computer program.” She gave a brisk nod. “Here he is now.”
Cord strode into the room, grinning even wider when he saw Rylin at their usual station. “Rylin. I guess we’re both stuck doing penance this afternoon.”
Professor Wang snapped her bag shut with a decided click. “Yes, the irony wasn’t lost on me, that the two of you missed class on the same morning,” she said coolly.
“Lucky us,” Cord said lightly. “I guess it’s true what they say, that timing is everything.”
The professor glanced impassively from Rylin to Cord, and Rylin couldn’t help feeling that in that single moment, she’d grasped their entire history. After all, she did study people for a living. “You two know the drill by now. When you’re finished, submit your results electronically. I’ll see you in class tomorrow.” She crossed the room and pulled the door shut behind her.
Cord immediately rounded on Rylin. “So, Myers, spill. Where were you this morning?”
“I was sick.” She didn’t exactly want to tell Cord that she’d been in bed with Hiral. “What about you—were you playing hooky?” She tried to deliver the phrase the way Cord always did, but couldn’t quite manage his insouciance.
“I was,” he said levelly, his gaze fixed on her. “You should come with me next time. It’s been a while.”
Rylin flushed and tapped quickly at the tablet to avoid having to answer. “Playing hooky” was what Cord called it when he went to his dad’s old garage in West Hampton and raced illegal driver-run cars along the Long Island Expressway. He’d actually taken Rylin there once last year to show her just how heart-stoppingly fast those cars could go. They’d ended up driving to the beach and building a sandcastle like children.
Then they’d slept together for the first time—right there on the beach, in the middle of a rainstorm, because they couldn’t wait another minute to get their hands on each other.
She wondered if Cord was thinking about that day too, only to remember that she shouldn’t be thinking about it. They were friends, and nothing more.
Friends who happened to have a romantic history.
“Lie detector lab,” Rylin read aloud, letting her hair sweep forward to block her face. “Students will use somatic feedback and biosensors to determine when the other is telling an untruth. The average person . . .”
Rylin trailed off there, and perhaps Cord was reading the same thing at the same time, because he didn’t ask her to continue.
The average person tells a lie at least two times per day. Being deceitful—to protect ourselves, to protect the feelings of others, or to promote our own interests—is so common that we even have a saying: “To lie is human.” Yet most people can detect falsehoods in others with less than 30 percent accuracy. In this lab, we will re-create a version of the conditions used by law enforcement in official lie-detection procedures. . . .
“I nominate you as the first victim,” Cord declared. Rylin didn’t protest. She felt a cold dread twisting in the pit of her stomach, like some scaly creature stirring to life. If she got called in for questioning about Mariel’s death, would the police do something like this? It wouldn’t matter, she told herself; she didn’t know anything about what had happened to Mariel.
But what if they discovered what Mariel had on Rylin—that she had been stealing drugs? Maybe she could deny it, Rylin thought wildly; after all, it was her word against a dead girl’s.
If nothing else, maybe this lab would give her some useful practice at lying under pressure.
She held out her wrists, letting Cord swab them with an antiseptic pad, deliberately avoiding making eye contact with him. He peeled the backs from a series of sensor patches before placing one on each of her wrists, and another at the center of her forehead. His touch on her skin was very precise and methodical.
The average person tells a lie at least two times per day. How many times had Rylin lied so far today—to Hiral, to the school, to Chrissa? And those were just the recent ones. As she began to tally up all her mistruths and half-truths, Rylin felt a little sick.
She’d lied to Hiral about Cord, and to Cord about Hiral, and to the police about what happened to Eris. She’d lied to Chrissa too, in an effort to keep her safe. And most of all Rylin had lied to herself, when she absolved herself from all of it. She’d told herself over and over that she didn’t have a choice. Didn’t she?
The biosensors kicked on, and Rylin’s vitals were suddenly depicted on the tablet before them, pink and yellow lines tracking her elevated heart rate, capillary dilation, and sweat levels. The official government machines were exponentially more accurate than this, she knew; those also tracked rapid eye movement and neural firings in the brain.
“Your heart rate is already a little elevated,” Cord pointed out, a curious note in his voice. “Let’s start with a couple of control questions. What’s your name?”
“Rylin Myers.” The lines stayed horizontal.
“Where do you live?”
She had a feeling he wanted her to say New York or the Tower, but Rylin couldn’t resist. “The thirty-second floor.”
Cord nodded, his lips curling a little at the edges. “Where are you applying to college next year?”
Rylin tried to sit up straighter, to see the questions written there on the tablet, but Cord had angled the screen away from her. Was that really one of the lab prompts?
“NYU,” she said slowly. “I’m applying other places, but NYU is my top choice. It has the strongest holography program in the country. Besides, I don’t want to leave New York, not when Chrissa still has two more years of high school.”
She didn’t mention Hiral, though he was another reason for staying in New York. He kept saying how proud he was that Rylin was applying to college, studying something she loved. Though he did clam up a little whenever she mentioned it.
But even if she did get into NYU, Rylin wasn’t sure how she would pay for it. She’d been surreptitiously applying for holography scholarships, leadership scholarships, anything she could think of. Not that she especially wanted to share this with Cord, who’d never faced a financial problem in his life. He wouldn’t understand.
“You’ll get into NYU,” Cord declared. “After the faculty see Starfall, there’s no way they won’t admit you.”
“You watched Starfall?” She hadn’t told anyone at school about her film. How did Cord even find out about it?
“Of course I did. I loved it,” he told her. Rylin felt oddly touched.
“Though I have to ask,” Cord went on, “which character was based on me? The neighbor, or the new guy at the end of the film?”
Rylin rolled her eyes, fighting a smile. Of course Cord would think that he was in the movie somehow. “Where are you applying to college?” she asked, realizing that she didn’t know.
“I’m not sure. I think I’ll just file the Common Application a bunch of places and see who takes me.” He gave an uncertain shrug. “I still have some time to figure it out.”
Rylin felt a little catch in her chest, because she recognized Cord’s confusion for what it was: the feeling of not knowing what to do, what step to take next, when you had no parents to advise you. It was the terrifying feeling of making a monumental life decision and knowing that whether you failed or succeeded, you would do so wholly on your own.
“Sorry, we’ll keep going.” Cord slid his finger along the screen to reveal the next question. “How many times have you been in love?”
“What? What kind of question is that?” she spluttered.
“I don’t know, Rylin, it’s right there on the instructions!” Cord held out the tablet as evidence; and sure enough, there it was, written in the signature bold-faced type of the lab program. “Probably just Wang trying to get a laugh out of a bunch of seniors,” he added, but Rylin had a different theory.
“Or she wrote a specific set of lab questions just for us. To punish us for missing class.”
“It does sound like something she would do. She’s got a bit of a masochistic streak.”
Rylin let out a strangled half laugh. She couldn’t help it: This was all so bizarre, being here with Cord, trying to be friends with him despite constant reminders of their awkward, tangled history. “She’s probably filming us right now!”
To her relief, Cord burst out laughing too. “You’re right. We’re probably test subjects in some experiment of hers!”
The laughter seemed to loosen something between them, and Rylin’s chest eased up a little. But she still hadn’t answered the question. The lab wouldn’t let them move on until she did.
“Two,” she heard herself say, her voice almost a whisper. Cord’s head whipped up in surprise.
She didn’t need to clarify what she meant. She had been in love twice—with Hiral, and with Cord.
“Rylin,” Cord said softly, and leaned forward to brush a hair back from her cheek.
She stayed very still. She knew she should pull away, should tell Cord to stop—
The door swung open with a violent clatter, and Rylin tore herself away, the air rushing into her chest. Her eyes darted guiltily to the doorway. It was only one of the cleaning bots.
“Look, Rylin,” Cord began again, with a bursting sort of desperation. “I wasn’t joking earlier, when I told Professor Wang that timing is everything. Our timing has never been right.”
“And you think it’s right now? Cord, I’m dating someone else!”
“I know that! Am I wrong, or is there something still between us?”
“You’re wrong,” Rylin said, her breath coming in fast, frantic bursts. “There’s nothing between us.”
Cord looked pointedly down at the tablet, where Rylin’s bio-lines were roiling and fluctuating, colored a bright, erratic red.
Rylin said nothing. She just ripped the patches from her body and ran toward the door. She didn’t need to be an expert in psychology to interpret those spiking, wild lines.
They meant that she had lied, when she said there was nothing between her and Cord.
Later that evening, Rylin sat at her kitchen table, her head in her hands. Chrissa had volleyball practice, which meant that Rylin was alone with an uneaten plate of spaghetti and her self-recriminatory thoughts. What the hell had she been thinking, acting that way with Cord, letting him almost kiss her? And why had the tablet marked her words as a lie, when she felt certain that she meant them?
She wondered if she had been lying to herself. If, on some level, she believed that there was still something between her and Cord.
Rylin was so lost in thought that she almost didn’t hear the knocking at her front door.
“Hey,” Hiral said when she opened the door. “Are you busy?”
“Not really.” Rylin stepped inside, and he trailed along after her.
“I just wanted to say how great this morning was.”
“I know. It was great,” Rylin said quickly. She reached up to touch her necklace, the one Hiral had gotten her at Element 12 last week. It felt impossibly heavy on her skin, like a broken promise. This morning, when they’d been curled in bed—before that weird make-up lab and that heated moment with Cord—felt impossibly distant.
Hiral let out a breath. “I wanted to talk to you about next year.” From the way he said it, halting and uncertain, Rylin thought she could guess what this was about.
She took a step forward, closing her hands around his. “You’re worried about NYU, aren’t you? You think that if I get into this holography program, I’ll get all wrapped up in it and won’t have any time for you.” She winced, realizing that it was already close to the truth, now that she had to cut class just to see him. “Hiral, I promise that won’t happen.”
“I know, Ry. And I’m so proud of you for applying to college. But . . .” He paused. “I just wondered—you haven’t even submitted your NYU application yet, have you?”
“No.” Rylin wasn’t sure where this was going.
“Maybe we should go away instead, after you graduate high school. We could leave New York, like we used to talk about! Go to South America—or maybe Southeast Asia, somewhere far away and low-tech. Where we can be together with just the sunshine and the clean air and each other, like we always wanted.”
Was that really what she’d said she wanted? Rylin barely remembered the things she and Hiral used to talk about, years ago. She tried to imagine doing what Hiral said—leaving New York, getting out of the city and starting over—and drew a blank.
So much had happened this past year to change her. Rylin had discovered new depths within herself, new goals, because of Berkeley and holography . . . and Cord. She had learned to let herself actually hope for things again, which she hadn’t done since before her mom died. Because if you didn’t hope, or care, you weren’t in danger of being hurt.
But hoping for things also magnified your joy when they actually came true.
“Hiral, I’m glad you’re thinking about the future—”
“Because you never expected me to?”
Rylin winced. She hadn’t meant to sound condescending.
“I’m sorry.” Hiral reached below her chin to tip it up so that Rylin was looking into his eyes. “All I want is a future with you. But being in New York is tough for me, because of everything that’s happened. Because of who I used to be.”
There was a current of significance to his words that made Rylin’s stomach drop. “What’s going on, Hiral? Is there something you want to tell me?”
“No,” Hiral said too quickly.
Rylin looked directly into his warm brown eyes, the eyes she thought she knew so well. She didn’t need a biosensor to tell her that he was lying.
“What about you, Ry?” he asked, turning her own question on her. “Is there something that you want to tell me?”
Rylin wondered if Hiral had guessed about Cord—if he could see her guilt written there on her face. Maybe she should confess everything, clear the air between them of secrets.
“No,” she whispered instead.
She couldn’t bring herself to tell him about Cord. Whatever was bothering him, Hiral clearly had enough to worry about as it was. Her moment with Cord was nothing, just an almost-kiss. There was really nothing to tell.
But deep down, Rylin knew that was another lie to be added to her ever-growing tally.