The Yawn Test

Maya yawned on purpose at table seven.

She wasn't tired. She had eaten half a sandwich and she was watching Devon, who sat across from her with his mouth full of crackers. Three seconds. Four. Devon's jaw stretched wide and he yawned too, crackers and all, and looked annoyed about it like she had reached over and pulled his chin down.

"Stop it," he said.

"I didn't touch you," Maya said.

She had read about this on a Sunday when she was supposed to be cleaning her room. Yawns were contagious. Everybody knew that. But the article said something stranger underneath the part everybody knew. It said there were cells in your brain that fired when you did a thing, and the same cells fired when you only watched somebody else do that thing. Your brain could not always tell the difference between doing and watching.

Maya had not been able to leave that alone since.

She yawned again, bigger. Down the table, a girl named Priya looked up, blinked, and yawned into her elbow.

Maya hadn't even been looking at Priya. Priya had only been looking at her.

That was the part that didn't fit. Maya turned it over. She had aimed at Devon. Priya had caught it sideways, just from watching, the way you catch a ball nobody threw to you on purpose.

She stopped yawning and started thinking.

If watching a yawn made your brain do the yawn, then watching anything made your brain do a quieter version of that thing. That was a much bigger idea than crackers and tired faces. That meant when she watched Devon drop his fork, some small part of her brain dropped a fork too.

She tested it without telling anyone.

She watched Marcus across the room reach for his cup, miss, and knock it. Water everywhere. And her own hand, flat on the table, had twitched. Not a lot. A flinch, the size of a thought, like her fingers had tried to catch a cup that was four tables away and not hers.

Maya looked at her hand like it belonged to someone she was only watching.

She got up. She walked the long way past the windows where the little kids ate, because the little kids were the best test. There was a boy, maybe six, holding his sandwich the way you hold something you love. He bit it. His whole face did the work of biting, jaw and eyebrows and everything.

Maya felt her own jaw tighten. She wasn't hungry. She had a sandwich back at table seven. Her mouth did not care. Her mouth was helping the little boy chew.

She sat down on the empty end of the little kids' bench, which you were not supposed to do, and watched.

A girl scribbled with a crayon, pressing hard, tongue out the corner of her mouth. Maya's tongue pushed against her own teeth. A boy laughed at nothing and her own cheeks lifted before she decided to let them. She was not copying these kids. Copying was a choice. This was happening underneath choosing, in the basement of her, where the lights came on whether she flipped the switch or not.

So this was why a baby smiles back at you. Nobody teaches a baby to smile back. The baby watches your face and the watching is already the doing. The smile is just the part that leaks out. Every face she had ever watched, her brain had quietly tried on. Every time someone cried in a movie and her throat got tight even though nothing was happening to her, nothing at all, she had just been sitting in the dark. That tight throat was her brain doing the crying in a small safe size. When her grandmother's hands shook and Maya's own hands felt the shaking, that wasn't her imagining it. That was a real signal in a real cell, firing because it could not help it.

She had spent her whole life thinking she was watching other people from the outside.

She had never been outside. Not once. She had been running everybody, quietly, in the basement, the entire time.

The lunch monitor, a tired man named Mr. Okafor, came over because a fifth grader was not allowed at the kindergarten bench.

"You're in the wrong spot," he said.

"I'm doing an experiment," Maya said.

"On what?"

Maya looked up at him. He had his arms crossed and his mouth in the flat line teachers used when they were deciding how much patience they had left. And while she looked, she felt her own arms want to cross. She felt the flat line pull at her own mouth.

"On you," she said. "A little."

Mr. Okafor frowned. Maya felt her own forehead try the frown on.

"My face is doing your face," she said. "I can't stop it. It just does it."

Mr. Okafor opened his mouth to send her back. Then he yawned. Enormous. He covered it too late, embarrassed, and Maya watched the embarrassment cross his face, and felt the warm prickle of it cross her own, secondhand, free.

"That's it," she said. "That's the whole thing. You just caught mine from an hour ago."

"Go eat your lunch," Mr. Okafor said, but the flat line was gone now, replaced by something he hadn't decided to show her.

Maya walked back toward table seven through the middle of all of them. Two hundred kids eating and talking and laughing, and every single one of them was secretly doing each other, a whole room of brains quietly practicing every face they saw, nobody alone, nobody watching from outside, the room running itself through itself like water through water.

She stopped in the middle of the floor.

She yawned, once, on purpose, and turned in a slow circle to watch it travel.