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  A police officer grabbed me roughly from behind, dragging me backward to make way for the medical workers. Angus lunged forward to stop him, his fingertips gouging the cop’s shoulder. The policeman was thrown backward as if electrocuted.

  I stumbled forward and John caught me. I heard a sickening crack as the cop’s head smacked the pavement. Whipping around in John’s arms, I saw Angus standing over the cop he’d rendered unconscious.

  It was like time stood still as we all accepted the inevitability of what would happen next. Seconds later Angus allowed himself to be tackled to the ground.

  The heavy door opened, letting fresh air wash into the humid, stale room. In with a youngish cop came Angus, looking no worse for the wear, behaving like it was no big deal that he had just assaulted a police officer. They had taken Angus separately in a police car. The rest of us were driven in a white corrections van, a police chaperone riding in the back to make sure we didn’t talk and change our stories. After a fifteen-minute ride, we’d pulled into an underground parking garage. They’d taken us in and questioned us individually before leading us to this large room with a concrete floor and benches lining the walls.

  Angus’s smile disappeared when he saw why we weren’t talking. There were twelve of us in the room, and one stranger.

  I’d heard him give his full name and date of birth to a cop when they had us sit on the low concrete wall, out on display for all of Barton Springs to see, some people even taking photos. John Ford. Four months older than me. Already eighteen. I knew that was going to make things worse for him.

  I couldn’t believe they’d slapped handcuffs on him as well. The only thing he’d done was pull Liv out of the water. But happily it worked in our favor. There was no need to even discuss it; we automatically knew to coordinate our statements and point the finger at him for the damaged public property. We’d completely screw him over.

  Everyone waited for the cop to call the next name. Liv’s friends Emma, Serena, and Kate had escaped the roundup at Barton Springs, so we knew support would arrive soon. Until then we waited. A couple of the boys were vibrating with anger but were barely moving—just knees bouncing up and down and sudden shifts from upright to elbows on knees. Whenever they made eye contact with John, they simply looked bored and unimpressed, the standard reset face when dealing with the public. Then their gaze would slide away as if they had already moved on.

  John sat directly across from me on a bench by himself, long legs crossed at the ankle in front of him. Once in a while he’d subtly roll his left shoulder, like he was testing out an injury. I saw him scratch the back of one of his hands, and I suddenly remembered seeing his hands on Liv, how they’d been unexpectedly scaly and raw. It was eczema. His hands were a crazy contrast to his otherwise tan, smooth skin. Like he knew I was thinking about it, he shoved his hands deep in his pockets to hide them from view.

  It was impressive how contained he was in light of the fact that he was essentially trapped in a jar with a different species. He didn’t know, but subconsciously it had to unnerve him. I knew it was eerie to be in such close quarters with this many people who looked so much alike and pretended you didn’t exist.

  I tried to avoid eye contact, which was difficult. I found myself continuously looking sidelong at him, wanting to know what he was thinking. Maddeningly, whatever that had been—reading his mind—was gone. It was like I’d imagined it.

  He knew exactly what had really happened: I had predicted an emergency from hundreds of feet away, and he’d seen Angus bend steel. He must have known I’d stayed underwater a little too long. And he may have been the only other person besides Angus and myself to see what happened to the cop when Angus touched him.

  No one would believe him, I told myself. Or if they did, they couldn’t do anything about it. Everything that had occurred sounded right out of a ridiculous urban myth, no matter what any bystanders or even police claimed they saw. We could cover our tracks somehow. We always did. I wasn’t sure we had ever had an incident on this scale, though. And the police had taken our fingerprints.

  Everyone I knew had instantaneously iced me out while we were at Barton Springs. I began to realize that among our people, this was on me. It seemed lost on them that Liv could have died while they watched. I was being blamed for doing the one thing we weren’t allowed to do.

  I turned my gaze to the dirty floor, shocked at my friends’ coldness. It was terrifying, like being completely separated from a lifeline.

  The walls were so glaringly white, they hurt my eyes. I stared at the fluorescent tube lights that lined the ceiling and decided to put three of them out with a glance. When the room dimmed, I expected some sort of acknowledgment—a half smile—something to let me know we were going to be okay. I felt the Lost Kids refuse to even look over, though they obviously knew it had been me.

  And so I sat by myself at the end of my bench, isolated just like him. Angus and Liv now sat together. Liv whispered in his ear.

  John caught me watching the exchange. This time I didn’t turn away from him. He looked back at me, openly questioning. Even though he appeared calm at first glance, I could see in his eyes that he was exhausted and stressed. I wasn’t sure if he was trying to figure out the ramifications of being arrested or if he was mentally ticking through all the unbelievable things he’d witnessed today, wanting to grasp a plausible explanation.

  I stared deep into his eyes, silently asking him to never talk about what happened. I experienced a glimmer of the feeling I’d had at Barton Springs when we looked at each other for the first time. He looked straight back at me, and I realized he wouldn’t say a word. He was smart enough to know no one would believe him anyway. Still, he wanted answers. I couldn’t give him what he wanted, so I dropped my eyes from his and cordoned myself off. He didn’t exist. Again.

  The young cop entered. “Julia and Olivia Jaynes,” he called out. I felt John recognize my last name from the Jaynes Pavilion sports arena. I wondered if he now realized me and Liv were sisters.

  Things had changed at the police station since the last time I’d been out of the room. Now it was dominated by suits—a combination of our parents and their lawyers. They were here to fix this thing. In a matter of hours, wheels had been set in motion. You would have thought a celebrity or political figure had been caught breaking the law, not that a group of kids had been merely detained.

  “Wait here.” The police officer gestured to some chairs. I could wait all day. I wasn’t ready to face what was coming next.

  Liv stared straight ahead. I rested the back of my head against the wall behind me, settling in for another wait, my eyes burning, covered in a film of grime from both sunscreen and sitting for hours in that warm, airless room.

  “He’s not even supposed to be here. He was supposed to be safely on scholarship at that goddamn academy.” The woman’s voice sounded angry and teary at the same time.

  “We’ll figure it out. There’s no way he would vandalize some runoff grate. They just want to hold someone accountable for shutting down the pool and costing the city money.”

  I realized I could faintly hear what was going on directly behind me through the wall. It was obviously John’s parents talking.

  “No matter what, we’re going to have to pay for a lawyer.” The way his mother said this made it clear this was going to be a financial hardship. “What the hell kind of charge is ‘criminal mischief’?”

  “Let’s talk to him first, before he feels this enormous disappointment coming from you. It’s been hard enough on him this summer.”

  “That’s not fair. I’m sorry, but how did we get here? He was on this great track, and now it feels like everything has gone completely off the rails.”

  “He got injured. He came home.”

  “But he was going to get a great scholarship to a top university. Have this tennis career if he wanted it. And now? He seems like he doesn’t give a shit about anything since he came back.”

  “Stop, Kathle
en. Okay? Let’s just get him home.”

  “How are you not worried about this?” Her voice sounded incredulous.

  “I’m very worried.” When the calm voice said that, it was worse than Kathleen’s outburst.

  Just then a door clicked open and the hallway hushed. Victoria, hair in a tight bun, stalked out of an office across the hallway. She was wearing sky-high heels, making her six feet tall, and she looked made of ice.

  “Dr. Jaynes, I’m sorry you had to come all the way down here.” An older police officer approached, holding out his hand. They obviously knew each other, since he didn’t introduce himself. She eyed him but didn’t say a word and didn’t take his hand, then turned abruptly to one of the lawyers. She whispered something to the lawyer, who looked up and said, “They go through the back door. Understood?”

  “I didn’t see any media….” The cop stopped talking at their expressions and changed direction. “Of course.”

  The apologies were beginning. This was exactly why Novak donated millions of dollars to campaigns, to the university, to other powerful people’s causes. He needed to have this kind of influence just in case something like this happened.

  I watched Victoria dismiss herself from the conversation and wander farther down the hall. At first her mind was elsewhere, but then she focused on something. And she smirked. I leaned forward to see what she was looking at. Victoria had heard about the stranger in our midst and was checking him out.

  John sat on a chair across from where Victoria was standing. He had the balls to confidently lock eyes with her, which probably accounted for her smirk. I’d never seen anyone stand up to her like that, let alone an eighteen-year-old boy. Or maybe that was exactly the type of person who was unafraid: someone like Angus.

  I saw John had been given his phone back. He looked down at it and then up at Victoria again, as if reconciling what he was reading with the live version of her. I guessed what he was reading. Victoria probably did too. I understood why he was questioning his sanity right now, wanting to know more, trying to justify what he’d seen. John actually succeeded in making Victoria uncomfortable. She pivoted on her heel and stalked back down the hallway toward us.

  “Let’s go,” Victoria rasped at Liv and me, exposing the fact that she wasn’t totally in control. The police officers snapped into motion, ready to provide us with an escort. Liv stood up, and I reluctantly followed. We had to pass John on the way to the exit. His was a front-row seat to this Kennedy-like show of power—the rich people getting their kids off, the regular person completely screwed. I kept my eyes down, not liking at all that I felt ashamed.

  I saw him slide his feet back in anticipation of our passage, either to be polite and make room for us to pass, or because he didn’t want us near him. As I drew closer, I strained to see out of the corner of my eye if I’d been right about what was on his phone, but I couldn’t quite see.

  John loosely cradled his phone in one hand and then put it in his pocket. His ratty beach towel and All the King’s Men had been returned as well and sat in a pile on the bench beside him. With a look I forced the paperback book to fall from the bench and skid under Liv’s feet as she walked by. She tripped and stumbled forward. John reflexively half stood up and grasped her arm to steady her. I was one step behind them and deftly removed the phone from his pocket during the diversion.

  Liv recovered from the rare stumble and shot John a look of death for touching her. She replaced the flip-flop she had lost, and our procession continued toward the exit, his phone now plastered to my side. I looked straight ahead and kept walking, feeling his eyes on my back.

  Victoria put the G-Wagen in reverse and tore out of the parking lot, not speaking to either of us. From the blacked-out window of her Mercedes-AMG G65, I saw a Honda Accord in the parking lot, a Patagonia LIVE SIMPLY sticker on the bumper. I guessed it belonged to John’s family, since it was the only other civilian car in the lot.

  No one spoke. The atmosphere was so glacial, even Liv knew better than to say a word. I sat in the backseat, which gave me a small amount of privacy. I took out John’s phone to look at it. It was strange holding something that had just been in his hand.

  The phone wasn’t passcoded. It was as easy as sliding the power on, and the screen came alive with exactly what I thought would be there.

  It wasn’t the more generic profile of my father featured in the billionaire’s issue of Vanity Fair. It was the story that came out shortly after from a semitrashy online news source. Entitled “Novak Jaynes, the Luckiest Man Alive,” it was the one that had made all the rounds on social media, my school being ground zero. I was a little surprised it hadn’t been scrubbed from the internet, given Novak’s resources. I knew it by heart, but I found myself reading what was on his screen, wanting to see it from John’s perspective.

  We’ve all heard the phrase “born lucky.” But how many times can you get lucky before people start to wonder if something more is at play? At first glance Novak Jaynes is an accomplished hedge fund manager with movie-star looks, living a dream life of wealth and power in Austin, Texas. This began as a straightforward look at a man whose hedge fund has achieved outsize success and who had the good fortune to miraculously survive a near-death incident. But the profile took an unexpected turn.

  In the summer of 2001, just before the events of September 11, a twenty-four-year-old named Novak Jaynes started a hedge fund in a home office with $100,000. He predicted and profited handsomely from the market swing in 2001, single-handedly building the fund to one hundred million dollars in a breathtakingly short amount of time. He profited again during the market crash of 2008–2009. Today Novak Jaynes has an estimated net worth of over 1.2 billion dollars and has presumably made his investors millionaires several times over.

  Jaynes came to the attention of outside financial circles when he was profiled without his permission in a best-selling book about the profiteers from these two events. The book dubbed him “the Oracle of Austin.” From there, like it or not, he was on the map. And things got stranger as people began to look more closely at the man himself.

  In early 2013 Jaynes, a rumored adrenaline junkie, went skydiving in Monterey, California. When his chute deployed at fourteen thousand feet, Jaynes cut it loose, prepared to deploy his backup chute at six thousand feet. In a one-in-a-million chance, however, the backup didn’t deploy properly. Jaynes plummeted to the ground, outside the drop zone. When the instructors found him, he was reportedly sitting on the side of the road with only facial lacerations. He stunned bystanders by refusing emergency medical care, citing his preference for his own physician. He then walked away from what should have been an unsurvivable incident.

  There is no record of a Novak Jaynes before the year 2001, when he registered his fund with the SEC. Jaynes has declined to be interviewed for this article, and all the research tools available in this day and age yielded no results. Witness protection is one theory, though Jaynes would never live such a public life if this were the case.

  Over the past two years, Novak Jaynes himself seems to have broken with his strictly private nature by becoming a major philanthropist—donating to the University of Texas at Austin’s athletic facilities and medical school, Austin’s New Central Library, and countless other civic projects in and around the city. As a by-product of his celebrity, Jaynes’s family has been put in the spotlight as well, and very quickly it has become clear that Novak Jaynes’s family warrants as much scrutiny as the man himself. Jaynes has two daughters in his immediate family. But then there’s the extended family.

  Ten families seemingly related to Jaynes live on the same street in a winding, exclusive neighborhood. All of this is notable, certainly, but things grow odder when you hear that this group keeps almost exclusively to itself. Those who have seen them together speak in hushed tones about their pure beauty—”a band of angels” was one vivid description—and how there are so many of them who look so stunningly alike.

  Who are these kids who routin
ely receive national recognition in the various arenas in which they compete? They all attend the same exclusive private academy, St. Philip, a school that prides itself on sending students to the Ivies, which strangely none of these children attend, opting instead to stay local. When speaking to former and current students about the presence of Jaynes’s group at the school, it’s clear there is endless fascination and speculation where this group of children is concerned. There was both admiring and disparaging talk of the immense talent these children seem to possess—their incredible athleticism, their photographic memories. But then there were the stranger observations and rumors most likely born of envy: the eerie calm of the group, their seeming ability to communicate with just their eyes, and, most persistent, the conviction that if you watched them on the fringes long enough and hard enough, you would eventually catch them doing something out of the ordinary—making the impossible catch, jumping a little too high, each of them avoiding the cafeteria salad bar on just the days of the E. coli breakout.

  Regardless of the rumors, we all like to study the shiny people, the powerful and talented, to see how they differ from us. But there is something uncanny about a mysterious group of so many similar people, as if they are their own island, living among us but also apart from us.

  In the years since Jaynes’s outrageous windfalls, his fund has performed steadily, yielding only slightly better than average returns. Could this be an attempt to stay off the radar? If so, he is lying low for now.

  You can’t see the Jayneses’ home from the road, but from the water you get an unobstructed view. Staring at the architectural wonder of glass, rock, and steel, you have to wonder what takes place inside and what the Oracle’s next act will be.