Lexicon

but her had pajamas. On her way to bed, a voice floated down the hallway: “Good night, girl in a doorway.”
    “Night, boy on a sofa,” she said. She closed her door. She couldn’t believe she had just said that. He was trouble, this boy. But the good kind.
    • • •
    In the morning, they were sat in a hall and given forms. The first questions she recognized: Was she a cat person or a dog person? What was her favorite color? Did she love her family? Even the weird one was right there:
Why did you do it?
It was at the very top of a page and the rest was nothing but endless lines.
    “Please answer with complete honesty,” said Charlotte. She moved between their desks, echoes of her heels bouncing between the floor and ceiling. “Anything less will not serve you well.”
    They asked her favorite movies. Songs. Books. She hadn’t read a book since she was eight. She glanced around. The ten-year-old was three desks behind. Her feet didn’t even reach the floor. Emily twirled her pen. She wrote:
Princess Lily Saves the World
. It was the only one she could remember.
    Charlotte collected the papers and disappeared for a while. People leaned across aisles and compared answers. She noticed a man in the corridor, tall with brown skin and eyes like rocks, watching them through the glass. She felt flustered for some reason and looked away, and when she looked back, he was gone.
    Charlotte returned with a TV on a trolley. “You will be shown a series of rapidly changing images. One of the images will be of a type of food. You are to write down the name of the food. Are there any questions?” She looked around. “Very well. Good luck.”
    Emily picked up her pencil. Charlotte pressed a button on the VCR. On the screen, text appeared—SERIES 1-1—then faded away. There was a second of blackness. Then a jumble of images flashed by and was gone. Emily blinked. The screen said: END OF SERIES 1-1. Heads bent over desks. Emily looked at her paper. That had been a lot faster than she’d expected. What had she seen? A laughing face. A family around a table. People kissing. Grass. A cow. A glass of milk? She wasn’t sure. Which was strange, because she was observant. She had quick eyes. So why wasn’t she sure about the milk? She glanced around. Everyone but her was writing. She chewed her lip. She wrote: MILK.
    “Pens down, please.”
    She glanced around. The curly-haired boy to her right had SUSHI. She felt cold. Had there been sushi? Maybe. She looked left. The angel girl: SUSHI.
    Charlotte prowled the desks. “Yes,” she said, passing a boy at the front. “Yes. Yes.” She stopped at Emily. “No.” Emily exhaled. “Yes. Yes. No.”
    She turned to see who else had fucked up. It was the ten-year-old, who looked devastated. Before she hid her paper, Emily saw: MILK.
    “Series two,” said Charlotte.
    Obviously, what she’d done wrong was let herself be misled by the other images. Breakfast, a cow, and there
had
been a glass, but empty. Her brain had filled that in. She was too imaginative. And the reason she didn’t get sushi was she didn’t know what the fuck sushi looked like. She kind of remembered now. But it wasn’t exactly a familiar food. These other guys probably ate sushi twice a week, with caviar and quail and whatever that paste was on the crackers yesterday.Pâté. That. She would get the next one.
    Images flickered. The screen blanked. Terror gripped her. There had been a banana. Definitely a banana. But also a sun, which kind of looked like a banana, and at the start she’d caught a glimpse of what might have been a fish. She had definitely seen palm trees and an ocean. She wasn’t sure about the fish. Or the banana. The banana could have been an afterimage of the sun. Why were there palm trees? Was that random, or was it trying to make her think of fish? She squeezed her pen. She wrote: FISH.
    “Answers, please.”
    She looked around. The curly-haired boy: BANANA. The angel girl: BANANA. The ten-year-old: FISH.
    “Yes. Yes. Yes.” Charlotte reached her. “No.”
    She had outsmarted herself. She should have trusted her instincts. She didn’t want to meet the curly-haired boy’s eyes but couldn’t stop herself. His eyes were closed, as if he was focusing, clearing his mind.
Dick
, she thought. But maybe she should do that.
    “Series three.”
    The screen barfed images. This time it talked, which took her by surprise: A man said, “Red,” and an old woman laughed, and was that a