In full light, the apartment lost its spookiness. Its layout was identical to some he'd visited for lesson purposes. Big combo living and dining room - no dining setup in Wyn's apartment, but the size matched - in the center, which was fed from the front door by a big kitchen with bar seating on one side of the island. Two bedrooms judging by the number of doors off the living room, one larger one with a bathroom attached and another smaller one. A second bathroom near to that. Wyn was probably using the smaller bedroom as an office or something, which Ari understood to be common enough among people who could afford to do that. Wyn or somebody he'd hired had painted the wall shared by the balcony doors a dusty matte green that contrasted with the white and pine crispiness of the rest of the interior fixings. Ari understood that some apartment dwellers had permission to do such things, but he couldn't imagine how.

Overall, though, it was a normal apartment. There were no creepy tchotchkes lining the shelves and the candles looked perfectly harmless and mundane extinguished and lined up behind the glass of the hutch that sat between the doors to the second bathroom and the biggest bedroom. Anyone who hadn't been in the room that afternoon could walk in, see them, and assume they stood at the ready for deployment on staycation date nights or something.

It was also a tidy apartment for a guy living on his own. The least tidy part of the apartment was the area around the couch, which was piled with printouts and folders Ari was not at all prepared to investigate. Most tidy was the kitchen, for the same reason any loner guy's kitchen is ever tidy.

Wyn's claim that the apartment contained any food at all was a generous one. In his riflings through the cabinets and fridge, Ari found the following:

-A carton containing eight of twelve large eggs

-A glass pitcher of unidentifiable brown liquid

-A sealed package of American cheese singles

-An open three pound bag of flour

-An entire drawer dedicated to the storage of various instant noodle packages

-Sugar in the appropriate bowl

-A stick of butter or margarine, unwrapped in a dish and thus unidentifiable

-Four oranges

Ari spent a few minutes determining which felt more off-limits, the ingredients or the noodles.

It had been twenty minutes already, and Wyn was still dead to the world. Ari was finally fishing out a rattling bowl of dried noodles when the doorbell chimed. He stood upright fast and whipped an accusatory look at the door. Then, out of habit, he went to scope out the situation through the peephole.

The man in the hallway was prettier than he was handsome, but plenty of both. He was pale with stick straight blond hair worn loose to his shoulders. His clothes were neat and on the casual side of business casual. Pale blues and whites and grays. Sears portrait studio energy. He had a floppy gray messenger bag under one arm. He gave Ari the impression of the most Tiger Beat-friendly member of a hair metal band, ten years past the high times and running his dad’s car dealership.

"Hi. Can I help you?"

"Where's Wyn, and who are you?"

"Wyn's resting. I, uh, came to help on short notice."

"The old guy couldn't deal anymore, huh?"

"Seems that way." Ari winced at himself. Why compound the lie?

"Typical." And then the door was pushing forward into the apartment, sweeping Ari aside.

"Hey!"

"I'll be quick, I just have some paperwork to drop off." Saying this, the stranger disappeared into Wyn's room and shut the door.

Ari gave the front door as hard a kick as he could manage without getting the property office called and sulked into the living room. He stopped just short of yanking the bedroom door open. 

What would he have to do that for? Why the impulse?

Beyond the door, indistinct voices carried out a conversation. The most audible sentence Ari caught was the stranger’s parting words to Wyn: ”Get up. You look like a pile of laundry."

And then the guy pushed back out of the bedroom, passing so close to Ari on his way out of the apartment that his cologne hit Ari in the face. He’d heard smells like that described as ‘animalic,’ the kind of polite language used for luxuries.

The rich really could get away with anything. Barging into your apartment, smelling like a dog park, the works.

Ari's eyes stayed fixed on the apartment's front door until the hiss of running water drew his attention back to the half-open door to Wyn's little suite. He shuffled back to the kitchen and brought out another noodle bowl. And the eggs.

Ari was still decoding the buttons on the electric kettle by the time Wyn reappeared. It was nicer than the one at the hostel by several orders of magnitude. It also had way too many buttons than anything designed to do a single task ought to have.

"You want to boil it if you're making one of those." Wyn seated himself at the kitchen island with his new packet of papers. He'd swapped out the Caligari outfit for an enormous UVM sweatshirt and a pair of acid washed jeans that were ripped and frayed dramatically at the knees. He wore black leggings under these, and no shoes or socks.

Not wanting to undercut his own intelligence by asking which button would boil the water, Ari punched the button with the highest number on it. The clear glass kettle lit up blue and began to obediently gurgle and hiss. Ari cracked an egg onto the noodle puck in each bowl. 

"So, who was that guy?"

"That's Caleb. I do some semi-regular work with him." Wyn cast a frown down at the plastic bowl Ari set in front of him. "I didn't ask for one."

Ari wanted to say that he, personally, hadn't asked for anything that happened that day. "You look hungry."

That was true. He looked worse for wear overall in spite of the nap and the shower. In place of makeup, there were lines under his eyes from lack of sleep.

Planner girl behavior.

True to the persnickety impression he’d made so far, Wyn peeled the flap up on his bowl and wrinkled his nose. “Does this cook the egg?”

“If you actually leave it closed, yeah.”

Apparently that was enough explanation for Wyn. He got up for a pair of chopsticks from one of the drawers, and even brought a set for Ari.

Ari considered thanking him and decided against it. He flipped the ramen island is his bowl over so everything could get a good dunk in the soup and soften up. Wyn didn't touch his.

"Is it work like we just did?"

"For the most part, though there is an entertainment angle to it." Wyn used his chopsticks to weigh down the flap on his bowl and got up from his seat. He slipped off into the living room again. "But you didn't come here for that.”

Anxiety welled up in the center of Ari's body and he decided to douse it with food. It didn't exactly work, but the noodles were a welcome break from pancakes and pancake-adjacent foods. He was lifting the bowl to his face to more easily gobble down the quasi-poached egg  when Wyn reappeared with a plastic folder and pushed it across the kitchen island.

"I'm about to disappoint you, I'm afraid." Wyn pulled his chair - the same high-legged steel kind supplied to every apartment with an island like that - back out and settled in it to eat.

Ari picked the folder up, but he didn't open it. Its foggy blue surface was still shiny and clean, and it was translucent enough that Ari could make out the telltale shapes of Excel rows on the crisp letter size printouts. It made him anxious in a way he might not have been if Wyn had just brought the spooky notebook out again.

"Why's that?"

"Because I don't actually know what's happening." 

When Wyn ate, he used the fingers of one hand to push his hair back to keep from inhaling it. Ari couldn't imagine keeping his hair any longer than a close crop if it didn't politely curl up and keep to itself.

"I think it'd be scarier for me if you did," Ari admitted. He watched Wyn do his hair-rescuing ritual for a moment or so, then snapped his attention back to the file. "And I would have heard about it before now."

"You think the police are so observant?"

"I think anybody who figured it out couldn't help but share it. Unless it was nothing."

"But you don't believe it's nothing, or you wouldn't be here."

"Yeah."

"So open it."

Inside, true to Ari's expectations, the topmost pages on the stack were simple spreadsheets that could have passed at first glance for an attendance record at a tiny private school. Names, ages, grade levels, X's and O's denoting something that wasn't transparent to Ari. All alphabetical, and neat, and plain. The original was probably formatted on a fairly old computer. It reminded Ari immediately of the grinding Gateway tower his father refused to be parted from. There were also columns for additional, less explainable parameters.

And, an addition no doubt made by Wyn: Several names highlighted in red.

Maya Acardi's was one of them. He'd looked for hers first. In one of the columns Ari couldn't understand, her entry was labeled 'Projective.'

"Am I supposed to know what any of this means?"

"If you want to find yours, I'll explain." Wyn dropped out of his seat again and came back with two glasses of the brown stuff from the pitcher. It was tea. 

He was filed under S, on the second sheet.

SHAY, Ariel L.

He knew all the normal stuff it listed about him and glazed over it to the columns on the farther side. According to the sheet, he was compliant. Whatever that meant. His sleep was disturbed, which he vaguely remembered having been a problem at one point. Where Maya was marked as Projective, whoever typed the sheet called Ari 'Repulsive.'

"That's just mean," Ari said, immediately regretting the joke. He raised his eyes from the paper and tried to read Wyn's face. Expectant, but not impatient. "What's it mean when it calls me repulsive?"

Wyn stuffed his hands into the opposite sleeves of his sweatshirt and leaned back a little. "How much of what we just did felt real to you?"

"It all felt like it was happening."

"You know what I mean."

"I think it would take a lot to fake it like that." Ari could feel his eyes roving the room, but he wasn't taking in the information that passed through them.

"Do you believe in telekinesis at all?"

When Ari was younger, he'd had what he now considered a very normal and age-appropriate curiosity about things like ghosts and psychics and the Bermuda Triangle. Every school book fair was packed with volumes of one to two page entries about any number of unsolved mysteries.

Mummies' curses.

Pulp writers predicting the sinking of the Titanic.

It was fun. He'd grown out of it.

And yet he said, "Yeah.” A beat. “Kind of.”

Wyn unveiled his hands and snatched the folder and its papers back. He was smiling in a way Ari felt he was already starting to recognize. "That's good enough for now."