I know the stereotypical images people have when they first hear the word homeschooled. They assume it’s super religious and not very difficult, like we sit around all day learning God made dinosaurs for the cavemen to ride.
In my case, however, my parents took Josie out of public school when the kindergarten teacher said it was impossible for her to already read on a fifth-grade level, so clearly she’d just learned to sound out words without understanding them; I’ve never so much as stepped into a real school. (From what I hear, I haven’t missed out on much.) Instead Mom and Dad lined up a series of tutors—their assistants and grad students from other areas of the university—and made me and Josie work harder than anyone else. Every once in a while they’d bring in other professors’ kids, so we’d be “socially well-adjusted.” The other kids have become my friends, but mostly it was only my sister and me in it together. So Josie and I learned about modern literature from a would-be PhD who mostly made us study her thesis on Toni Morrison. Our French lessons were taught by a variety of native speakers, though we got a mix of dialects and accents—Parisian, Haitian, Quebecois. And somehow we made it through science as taught by my mother, which was definitely the hardest of all.
It was a Saturday afternoon, gusty and overcast. My parents were at the university, working in their lab; Paul and Theo were supposed to be going through equations here, but Theo had coaxed Paul outside to see his latest modifications to his beloved muscle car. So Josie and I had the place to ourselves.
And instead of helping me study, Josie was nagging.
“C’mon,” Josie said, as she played with one of the long vines of Mom’s philodendron. “You’d love the Art Institute.”
“Chicago’s so cold in winter.”
“Whine whine whine. Buy a coat. Besides, it’s not like it never gets cold at Ris-lee or Ris-mee—”
“Rizdee.” That’s how most people shorten the name of the Rhode Island School of Design. “And yeah, I know, but it’s still the best place for art restoration in the country, hands down.”
Josie gave me a look. We’re pretty different, for sisters—she’s average height while I’m tall; she’s athletic while I’m anything but. She inherited our parents’ love of science and is following in Dad’s footsteps by becoming an oceanographer; I’m the odd duck of the family, the artsy one. Josie’s laid-back while I freak out about every little thing. Yet despite all our differences, sometimes she can see right through me. “Why are you learning how to be an art restorer when you’re going to be an artist?”
“I’m going to try to be an artist—”
“Do or do not, there is no try,” Josie said in her best Yoda impersonation, which is sort of scarily good. “You want to be an artist. A great artist. So be one. The Art Institute of Chicago would be the place for that, right?”
“Ruskin.” The word came out of my mouth before I could stop myself. Josie gave me a look that I knew meant I wasn’t going to be able to drop it. “The Ruskin School of Fine Art at Oxford. In England. That would be . . . the ultimate.”
“Okay, while I would miss you like crazy if you were in England, don’t you think you ought to at least think about getting yourself to your ultimate? Because, trust me, nobody else is going to get you there.” But then she got distracted from her lecture. “What is this thing?”
Like I said before, our parents don’t usually work with cool sci-fi gizmos. This was one of the exceptions. “It’s something Triad Corporation came up with.”
Josie frowned. “I haven’t seen this before. What is it?”
“It’s not a consumer product. You know Triad supplied the funding for Mom and Dad’s research, right? Well, this is for measuring . . . dimensional resonance. I think.” Sometimes I tune out the technobabble. It’s a survival mechanism.
“Is it supposed to be blinking red?”
I don’t tune out everything. “No.”
Quickly I stepped to Josie’s side. The Triad device was a fairly plain metal box, like an old-fashioned stereo, but the front panel usually showed various sine waves in shades of blue or green. Now it pulsed in staccato red flashes.
I might not be a scientist, but you don’t need advanced degrees to realize that red equals bad.
My first impulse was to open the garage door and yell for Paul and Theo, but Theo sometimes wound up parking way down the road. So I grabbed my cell phone instead. I hit Paul’s number, and he answered, short and brusque as ever: “Yes?”
“This—thing from Triad, the one in the corner? Should it be flashing red?”
He paused for less than a second. When he spoke again, the intensity of his words gave me chills. “Get out of there. Now!”
I turned to Josie. “Run!” Instantly she fled; Josie’s smart like that. Me? Not quite. I’d kicked off my shoes and so I spent three precious seconds stepping back into them before dashing to the door. Just as I hit the threshold, though—
The light was as brief as a camera flash but a hundred times brighter. I cried out, because it hurt my eyes, and dizziness rushed over me, maybe from moving too fast. Losing my balance, I staggered onto the front steps and tried to suck in a breath, but it was hard to do, as if someone had punched me in the gut.
Then broad, strong hands closed around my shoulders, and when my vision cleared, I was looking up into Paul’s eyes.
“Marguerite? Are you all right?”
“Yeah.” I leaned forward, trying to find the angle that would allow me to steady myself. Cool rain had begun to fall, but very lightly, almost a mist. My forehead rested against his broad chest; I could feel his heart beating quickly through his damp T-shirt, as if he were the one afraid.
“What happened?” Theo came running across the yard then, his Doc Martens splashing through the mud. “Marguerite? What happened?” Josie came running up too.
“That damned Triad machine is what happened!” Paul kept holding on to me, but his fury shook me even then—hinting, maybe, at the real Paul inside. “Did you set it to run an overload test?”
“No! Are you crazy? You know I wouldn’t do that and leave it unattended.”
“Then why did it overload?” Paul demanded.
“What? It did?” Theo looked so stricken. “Jesus. How did that happen?”