The Eighth Sense

The sign over the folding table said GUESS YOUR HEARTBEAT. Below it, in marker, somebody had added: harder than it sounds.

"It is not harder than it sounds," Maya said. "It's your own heart. You're sitting right on top of it."

The table had a clip-on pulse monitor with the screen taped over so you couldn't cheat. You closed your eyes, counted your own heartbeats for fifteen seconds, then they showed you the real number.

Maya went first. She closed her eyes, lips moving. "Eighteen," she said.

The woman running the booth peeled back the tape. "Twenty-two."

"That's wrong," Maya said.

"The monitor's not wrong."

"No, I mean I'm wrong." Maya frowned at her own chest like it had lied to her. "Soren. You do it."

Soren clipped it on. He sat very straight. He didn't move his lips. After a while he said, "Thirteen."

Tape came off. "Thirteen," the woman said.

Maya stared at him. "You hit it exactly."

"I felt it," Soren said, like that explained anything.

"Felt it where?"

He thought about it. "In my neck. And sort of behind my ribs. There's a little push."

Maya put two fingers on her own neck. Then she dropped them. "No. Not fingers. You did it without touching."

"You don't touch your own ear to hear," Soren said.

That stopped her.

The woman at the booth was already turning to the next family, so they took the clip and went to sit on the bleachers with it, which nobody told them they could do and nobody told them they couldn't.

"Do it again," Maya said.

Soren did. Eleven. The monitor said eleven. He did it a third time and missed by one, and got annoyed at himself, which Maya found hilarious.

"You can feel your own heart from the inside," she said. "That's. Okay. That's a whole sense. That's a sense I didn't know I had."

"You have it," Soren said. "You're just not good at it."

"Rude."

"I mean it like a fact, not a mean thing."

"I know." She clipped the monitor back on her own finger. Closed her eyes. "Okay. Quiet."

She sat there. The gym roared around them, sneakers and a popcorn machine and somebody testing a microphone. Maya sat inside all of it with her eyes shut.

"It's like static," she said finally. "I feel something but I can't tell if it's my heart or my stomach or me wanting it to be my heart."

"That's the thing, though," Soren said. He had his notebook out. His pencil was moving. "It's a real signal. Your body's measuring you the whole time. Heartbeat, breathing, if you're hungry, if you're cold. There's a nerve for it. It goes straight up into your brain."

"Then why can't I read mine and you can read yours?"

Soren stopped writing. "I don't know."

Maya opened one eye. She liked it when he said that. It meant the door was still open.

"Try this," she said. "You're calm right now. Thirteen, eleven, whatever. What happens if your heart's going fast?"

"Like scared fast?"

"Like scared fast."

Soren considered. "Last year. The dog at the corner house. It came over the fence and I didn't see it and it barked." He was quiet. "I couldn't have counted anything. I couldn't even count to one."

"So when it matters most you lose it too."

"I guess." He looked uneasy. "That's a weird thing to find out."

Maya was holding the monitor and looking at the taped-over screen and not putting it on. "My cousin gets these. Where her heart goes a hundred miles an hour and she thinks something's really wrong, like emergency wrong, but the doctor says nothing's wrong." She turned the clip over in her hand. "What if that's this? What if she's reading the signal too loud, and you read it just right, and I can barely read it at all, and we're all using the same sense?"

Soren had stopped writing again.

"Same eyes," Maya said, slower now, finding it as she said it. "Some people see far, some people need glasses. Same ears. Same nose. Why would the inside one be different. Why would everybody be exactly the same at feeling their own heart."

"They wouldn't," Soren said. "They aren't. That's what we just proved. Twenty-two and thirteen."

"And it's not which one's better." She was almost talking to herself. "If you feel everything really sharp, that's not automatically good, that could be the hundred-miles-an-hour thing. And if you barely feel it, like me, that's not good either, maybe, because then how do you know when you're actually upset?"

Soren wrote the word VOLUME and underlined it twice and didn't say why.

Maya finally clipped the monitor on. Closed her eyes. But this time she didn't try to count. She just listened the way you listen for one instrument in a whole band.

The popcorn machine. The microphone. Then under all of it, when she stopped reaching for it, something small and patient, pushing, pushing, pushing in her neck.

"Oh," she said.

"What."

"It was there the whole time." She didn't open her eyes. "I was listening so hard I covered it up."

"How many?"

She counted. It was difficult and she lost it twice and found it again. "Twenty."

Soren peeled the tape.

The little screen said nineteen.

Maya opened her eyes and looked at the number and then looked at her own chest, the same chest that had been carrying that drum around the gym all afternoon, around the school all year, around everywhere she had ever been, the whole time, never once stopping, never once asking her to notice.

"It never turns off," she said.

"No," Soren said.

"It's been talking this whole time and I've been not listening for eleven years."

Soren held the clip out to her. "So listen."

Maya took it back, pressed her eyes shut, and went looking, on purpose, for the smallest sound her own body was making.