S'wanee: A Paranoid Thriller Read Free Page B

was lined with cars, so he turned on his hazards.
    There were three people in line. The lone attendant looked Cody’s age and was in no hurry. Behind her were FedEx posters of London and Paris and Beijing. The World on Time.
    She checked his driver’s license and disappeared into the back. Two more people had lined up behind him.
    Cody’s boss had given him a full hour for lunch but asked him to hurry. The new iPads made the Genius Bar busier than usual. “Go! Go get it,” Marcie told him. “I need the exercise.” Marcie did speed laps around the mall’s top floor during her lunch break when Cody wasn’t there to eat with her.
    The girl was gone forever and then passed back by the counter to the office to get her supervisor, who went to the back with her, and then the girl returned with the FedEx rectangle. She scanned and slid the envelope across, saying nothing. “Thank you,” Cody said.
    Cody pulled the tab across the envelope in his front seat and emptied a square cardboard sleeve onto his lap. It was white with purple lettering and said, “The Information You Requested,” although he hadn’t.
    Even before he opened the sleeve, Cody knew what was inside.

Chapter Three
    B y three thirty the Genius Bar had slowed, and the next appointment was at three forty-five. Cody slipped through the back workstation, where the real geeks fixed the broken computers that had been checked in and not just reset. He took a tester MacBook with him. Nobody stopped him—everybody trusted Cody.
    On the back stairs near the freight elevators, Cody slipped
The S’wanee Call
DVD into the slot. He heard the disk spin and accelerate, and the screen went black for a moment.
    And then S’wanee came alive.
    Clanging bells from an unseen tower and then a burst of color and energy and voices and students and professors talking to him directly, explaining this world they lived in and studied at and played in, inviting him in and asking him to stay, and he was there with them, in their beautiful world.
    They were bright and casual and in between classes or on their way to practice, and some were in their ancient dorm rooms, others clustered happily on the trodden lawn, as if they’d always belonged to one another. They were articulate and excited about life and living and not embarrassed to show it to anyone who cared to look in at them. Had they always been that way?
    It was a slick, fast-cutting production, an avalanche of people and places and
feeling
s and longings. There was so much they wanted to show and say, to tell him all about it…
    “Cody! We need you!” His boss was leaning out the metal door, down the cinder-block hallway.
    •   •   •
    “We are devoted to this thing called the S’wanee Call. The S’wanee Experience. It’s life-changing, I would say.”
    “Because there’s something about the S’wanee Call that really binds us together and that we can all say we share in.”
    They liked that phrase, the “S’wanee Call.” It did have a ring.
    “Just last weekend, a friend of mine, we were having dinner, and he said, ‘You know, I just had a great S’wanee Day,’ and students here really know what that means.”
    Maisy, the mother dachshund, nosed her way into Cody’s off-limits bedroom and watched him at his computer, unafraid.
    “It wouldn’t be S’wanee if you weren’t friends with your professors. They play more than just a teacher role; they’re mentors, they’re friends, they’re family, I guess.”
    The microwave in the kitchen beeped a reminder that his Olive Garden leftovers were done and waiting.
    Anne from Atlanta, English major; Ross from Boston, psychology; Maddie of Scottsdale, history; Sean from Miami, undecided; Dean Emeritus Apperson, behavioral sciences—gray, tweedy, with crisp diction and an easy smile. He sat in a tapestry chair by a crackling fireplace. Was he thin blooded, or did it get cold there? The preppy students were dressed for sunny warmth. They were white and