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“Good, Audie, good,” the professor said when I’d reported on everything I’d seen. I told him it was all true—the way the mattress lager looked, what Halli and the others were doing, the red roof, the snow—all of it.
“So now you’ve proven to yourself you can do it,” he said. “And it was easy, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah, it was,” I realized. Once I stopped telling myself I couldn’t really do it.
“Beginner’s success,” the professor reminded me. “So are you ready to take it a little further?”
“How much further?” I asked.
“You’re going to like this,” Albert said. He’d crowded into the sound-proof room with us to hear my report. Now he stuck around for the rest.
“You need to start by understanding something,” Professor Whitfield said. “Remember what I told you about cognitive dissonance? How yo
