Mind Games (6 page)

T
OTAL
C
ORRECT
: 12/25 = 48 percent

E
XPERIMENTER
C
OMMENTS
: Re-test. We will never hear the end of the first test where Kathleen got a higher grade than Claire.

S
UBJECT
C
OMMENTS
: Higher than you, too, Ji Oh.

T
OTAL
C
ORRECT
: 3/25 = 12 percent

E
XPERIMENTER
C
OMMENTS
: Took twice as long as previous test. Lots of daydreaming going on.

S
UBJECT
C
OMMENTS
: I had trouble concentrating.
I
could only think how much Kathleen was going to hate me if I did better than her the second time. Not that I believe
I
'm psychic or anything, but is it possible that worrying affected my score?

T
OTAL
C
ORRECT
: N/A

E
XPERIMENTER
C
OMMENTS
: Subject smart enough to quit while ahead.

S
UBJECT
C
OMMENTS
: I don't want to play anymore.

A
NALYSIS

It was pretty weird when Claire and Kathleen got those good results the first time. A lot of their guesses were the same, too. If I wasn't watching them every second, I'd swear somebody was cheating.

I tend to think along those lines because I'm an expert cheater. All those times Claire thought I was so good at Pictionary, she never guessed I was just looking at the card. Which is why I can't believe Claire could have extra-special powers of perception. Sometimes I don't think she even has
regular
powers of perception. I've tried so many times to clue her in—nicely—about what people are saying behind her back. About her poodle hair, and that hyena laugh, and the people (the ones who care, which is not many) who ask me why can't she just relax and have fun. Then of course there are the nonstop comments about Kathleen. Maybe Claire's just gotten used to blocking it all out.

Teachers always call on Claire, which I guess she can't help, but it's also not a great thing when you're trying to make other people like you. Of course when Mr. Ennis wanted an update on our Mad Science experiment, he asked Claire.

She told him what we had that was usable in our report, which was basically nothing. Kathleen did not like to hear that her results didn't matter, and she really did not like to hear it when Ben suggested that we had shown ESP was 99.9 percent unlikely to exist (or something like that). He'd worked up some statistics to prove it. Mr. Ennis said they didn't prove anything. But if we wanted to quit now, that was fine. We just couldn't take the project to the science fair—even the lame one at our school. Because it wasn't any good.

Mr. Ennis took a vote to see if we should keep going. The results were very surprising (at least to a nonpsychic person like me).

Kathleen raised her hand first. "We like this experiment."

"We do?" Ben asked.

"We, as in me and Kathleen," Claire clarified. This was called appeasing Kathleen.

"Ah," Marina said. "American democracy." She looked at Kathleen. "What the group wants—this is the way I vote."

"You're so good to me, Marina." Kathleen hugged her. "Ooh, you smell so good. Sausage."

Brandon saw Kathleen eyeing his flattop and used his legs to tip his chair backward. "If you're gonna sniff me, I'm voting no."

Kathleen sighed. "But you have such nice hair."

"I'm voting no anyway."

"Chair legs on the floor," Mr. Ennis said. "What's your vote, Ji?"

I had to think about it. I mean, I was pretty sure we would never find the evidence to prove our hypothesis. But I was still more curious about ESP than, say, the Hubble constant, which I could tell was the suggestion on Ben's lips. "I say we stay with our experiment," I said.

Claire looked at me and smiled. Why was she smiling? If she really had ESP, she'd know I wanted to yell: Do we always have to vote the same way? Do the same things? Mad Science?! But I could never say that to her. So I just smiled back. Claire doesn't get the concept of the fake smile at all. At least you always know she means it when she's acting friendly. Not that that's too often lately.

Anyhow, it was decided. ESP won. And this time it wasn't because of a roll of the dice.

The dice did come in handy for our psychokinesis (P.K.) experiment, where subjects are asked to will the dice to fall a particular way.

Claire's score sheet (the only one worth looking at) will demonstrate how this test worked—or didn't work, I guess we could say.

You will note that things were going along pretty well through the twos. I was thinking that suddenly I didn't feel so bad about Claire always beating me at Sorry! and Monopoly and the Game of Life. (Why do you think I decided to start cheating at Pictionary?)

But things started to go bad during the threes. That's when Mrs. Gershwin, the school librarian, came over to us. She was upset that we were using the library for gambling.

Although we were of course not gambling and Mrs. Gershwin is of course clueless (she didn't notice our dice use for two weeks), she was right when she said that our project was turning out like crap. (Actually, what she said was craps. Hello?!)

Since Marina thought this was a good thing (having recently learned about Maryland crabs in ESL class), we were then treated to an in-depth explanation of the digestive process by Ben Lloyd. It also marked the occasion of Marina's first English swear word. (Although she knew lots of Russian ones and even some Spanish ones, which she was happy to teach us in return. I wish I knew some Korean ones, but my parents don't believe in swear words.)

Anyhow, by the time this was all sorted out and we were able to restart Claire's P.K. test in Mr. Ennis's room after school, she was no longer on a roll.

We therefore remained without a shred of scientific evidence for ESP. No statistically significant results. Just a few glimmers of weirdness.

I will now save myself some work by including an article from the
Waverly
Times that explains what happened next.

A few days after the basketball game, we had a school holiday—Yom Kippur, I think. A whole bunch of us were going to go to a sidewalk sale at the mall in the afternoon. Claire loves the mall but she hates my new friends, so I was surprised when she decided to come. I prayed that Kathleen would not invite herself along and ruin the day for all of us. And, of course, that Claire would not get all moody and ruin the day just for me.

Shockingly enough, Ben announced in Mad Science the week before that he didn't have any plans for the holiday. Therefore, he proposed that we use part of our day off to work on our experiment.

Marina called him loco. (She learned that in ESL class, mistakenly thinking it was an English word.) Brandon applauded her for making everyone laugh. Everyone but Ben.

"What if I pay you to come to my house and work on our project?" Ben asked us.

That sure got our attention.

Eighty-three dollars and thirty-three cents apiece, Ben said. More per person if not everyone showed. Leave it to Ben to come up with a ridiculous amount like $83.33. But when I asked him about it, he only shrugged.

"You think you can bribe us?" Brandon asked Ben.

"Yep."

I looked at Claire. He could certainly bribe us—after all, we could make a mall trip anytime. "Where are you going to get that much money?" I asked Ben.

"You'll find out on Wednesday morning," he said. And that was all he would tell us.

Claire and I thought we'd go straight from Ben's to the mall. But we never did make it there. By the time I got the money, I wound up donating it to the food bank. I couldn't imagine myself ever wearing a sweater that would only remind me of everything that happened. But more on that later.

Since I knew I would be responsible for the Experiment section of the report, I put my journalism skills to good use and took extremely neat and detailed notes on the meeting, as follows: (Please excuse my day planner—I ran out of paper.)