Free Truest by Jackie Lea Sommers Page B

“Busy day today? Silas says you’re teaching him to be a detailing machine.”
    â€œI’m learning lots from him too.” I looked at Silas and muttered, “A lamentation of swans. ” Silas grinned. His parents looked unperturbed. I guess when you had one child who was a trivia factory and another who lived on that blurred line between reality and reverie, you had to be choosy about which questions to ask.
    The roof was even better than the rumors I’d heard. The famous fire pit was the stunning centerpiece, a huge slate-colored stone ring that matched the giant planters around the edges of the patio, most of them holding plants with lemon-scented petals and waxy leaves. Set up in the corner of the roof was some large apparatus with a protective covering over it—probably Mr. Hart’s telescope.
    The patio faced east toward Green Lake, and the sun had nearly set behind us, turning the lake dark and steely. The moon was just starting to hint at its place in the sky. I settled myself into a patio chair near the fire pit, and Silas handed me the little orange radio. “See if you can figure this out while I start the fire.” It was made out of thick plastic—like my old Fisher-Price toys—with a clear face and dial for the stations. Even with the patio lights, it was still hard to see the dial, so I tinkered with it until I found the right station and then turned the volume up. Meanwhile, Silas had made a tepee of firewood and lit the kindling beneath it.
    Tonight’s show had just one feature story, this time about Heaven’s Gate, a cult that had committed mass suicide in 1997 in expectation of reaching an alien spacecraft in the tail of the Hale-Bopp comet. Sullivan Knox detailed the death scene: bodies of men and women dressed in black, purple shrouds covering their faces, and brand-new Nikes on their feet. The fire warmed the soles of my feet, Sullivan’s voice was comfortably familiar, and Silas furrowed his brows in the most adorable, thoughtful way as he scratched something in his notebook.
    â€œWhat did you think?” I asked Silas when the show was winding down. “Interesting, right?” I was surprised by how badly I wanted him to love it as much as I did.
    He nodded, impressed, and put his Moleskine in his back pocket. “Is every night like tonight?”
    â€œSome nights they do three shorter stories instead.”
    â€œCool.” Silas poked at the fire with a stick, his long shadow stretching out behind him till it joined the darkness of the night.
    â€œCan you imagine being convinced of something like that?” I asked, leaning back in my seat and staring up at the stars. “That the earth was going to be recycled and your one shot at survival was to evacuate by eating some tainted applesauce and boarding a UFO to another level of existence?” I shook my head in disbelief. “It’s like sci-fi.”
    â€œYeah,” said Silas, still moving embers around in the pit, his face orange in the glow from the fire. “I think something would have to be off in you in the first place to be able to make that jump. I mean, Laurel . . . she gets convinced of some weird stuff, but I don’t think it was just the books she read that did it. She’s really sick to start with.” He paused, and in his silence I heard the dog-day cicadas singing. Then he asked, “But how do you unlock someone’s mind?”
    And when he looked up at me, I swear he was hoping for me to have the magic answer. “I—I don’t know,” I managed.
    â€œDoes anyone? It’s like a code only God can crack.”
    Those words sat in my stomach, this image of God as a detective, as a sleuth or a computer hacker, one with the best of intentions. God dressed in black with glasses and a goatee, typing in confident keystrokes as he solved the puzzle of Laurel Hart.
    Silas phoned me later that week, a business call: his dad