Lexicon

school would be different because it taught interesting, useful things, and that was a joke, in Emily’s opinion. Grammar was not interesting. It was not useful to know where words came from. And no one explained it. There was no overview. No road map. Classes were eight to twelve students of wildly different ages, all of them ahead of Emily and no one asking the obvious questions. She had to stay up at night, staring at textbooks, trying to figure out why any of this mattered.
    She learned Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, which was the order in which people optimally satisfied different types of desires (food-safety-love-status-enlightenment). She learned that leverage over people’s desire for knowledge was called
informational social influence
, while leverage over people’s desire to be liked was
normative social influence
. She learned that you could classify a person’s personality into one of 228 psychographic categories with a small number of well-directed questions plus observation, and this was called
segmentation
.
    “I thought this was going to be cooler,” she complained to Eliot. He was a part-time lecturer, teaching a few advanced classes, which did not include her. Whenever she saw his car parked out front, she headed for his office, because he was the only one she could talk to. “I thought it would be like magic.”
    Eliot was busy with papers. But she figured he had an obligation to deal with her, since it was basically his fault she was here. “Sorry,” he said. “At your level, it’s just books.”
    “When is it like magic?”
    “When you finish the books,” Eliot said.
    • • •
    By the end of the year, she could see where it was going. She wasn’t learning persuasion, was still deep in Plato and neurolinguistics and the political roots of the Russian Revolution, but she was starting to sense the connections between them. One day she got to dissect a human brain, and as she peered through goggles at a frontal lobe, sliding the scalpel through the meat, separating decision making from motor function, memory from reward centers, she thought,
Hello
. Because she knew what the meat did.
    • • •
    She played soccer. You had to do a sport, soccer or basketball or water polo, and she was short and hated the swimsuits, so, soccer. On Wednesday afternoons she lined up with the other girls, shin guards stuffed into knee-high purple socks, her hair dragged back, a yellow shirt billowing, and she chased a ball around a field. The girls were all ages, so it was mostly an exercise in kicking the ball to the oldest and shouting encouragement. The exception was Sashona, who was only Emily’s age but strong and graceful and had shoulders like battering rams. Soccer was supposed to be noncontact but Sashona’s shoulders would put you on your ass anyway. After a goal, she would pump her fist, unsmiling, like she was satisfied but not surprised, and although Emily didn’t enjoy soccer much, she found this terribly impressive. She wanted to be as good at something as Sashona was at soccer.
    At night, she sat by the window of her cloister room, books piled on her desk. She studied with her hair pinned up and her school tie slung. She didn’t really enjoy reading but she liked how the books were clues. Each one a piece in a puzzle. Even when they didn’t fit together, they revealed a little more about what kind of picture she was making.
    One day, exploring a corridor she’d always assumed went nowhere, she discovered a secret library. She didn’t know if it was actually secret. But it wasn’t marked, and she never saw anyone else. It was very small, with shelves that stretched up so high she needed a wooden ladder to reach them. Up there, the books were old. The first time she cracked open a volume, its pages came apart in her hands. After that, she was more careful. It occurred to her that maybe she was not allowed here, but that had not been included in Charlotte’s comprehensive list of rules, and the old books turned out to be interesting, so she stayed.
    One shelf was for disaster stories. There was probably a classification scheme she hadn’t figured out. But the common thread seemed to be that a lot of people died. After a few books, she realized they were all the same story. They were set in different places, in Sumeria and Mexico and countries she’d never heard of, and the details differed, but the basics were the same. A group of people—sometimes they were called sorcerers,