The Adoration of Jenna Fox (6 page)

"Sorry," she says. "He thinks
he's a guard dog. Don't worry, though. He's all bark. Wouldn't hurt a
flea."

I nod. I never thought he would hurt me. He's a
dog. He barks. Should I have been afraid? Is this what all neighbors do? Warn
you about things? The way Mr. Bender warned me about the white house at the end
of my street? Is it a nicety that means nothing, but one of the many other
subtleties that has become muddled inside of me? Am I missing something, or are
they?

The woman lifts her hand, holds it there, and
then waves. A smile follows. "You okay?" she asks.

"Are you?" I ask. Maybe I need to be
concerned about my neighbors, too? She returns abruptly to her sweeping and I
leave.

Even though it is morning, the sky is still
dark with clouds and there are lights on in the next house. The white house. As
I get closer, I can see a glowing chandelier through a large window over the
door. More lights shine behind other curtained windows. The pillars on either
side of the door are cracked, lines running the length of them, bits of
concrete missing. I imagine they are bits that fell away with the last
earthquake and were never repaired, but still, the house looks to be well cared
for. Better than ours. It is not a frightening house, at least not what lies
outside. The front door opens, catching me. I try to resume my walk before I am
noticed, but it is too late. A shadowed figure reaches for a paper on the porch
but then stops and straightens without retrieving it. He steps out. It is a boy.
Like the boy I saw at the mission, he is tall and pleasant looking, but his
hair is as white as the other boy's hair was black. It is short and uncombed, a
scuffle of waves pointing in different directions.

"Hello," he calls. His voice is
pleasant, too.

"Hello."

"You new in the neighborhood?"

"Yes."

"Welcome. I'm Dane." He smiles. Even
from the street I can see the whiteness of his teeth.

"Hello," I say again.

I want to leave, but my feet seem stapled to
the ground. He is bare-chested and his pajama bottoms hang dangerously low. He
pulls them up and shrugs. Was I staring?

"I better go," he says. "Nice
meeting you."

"Bye, Dane," I answer, and
miraculously my feet are released and I continue on my walk.

When your life has had few events to occupy it,
it's amazing how a simple encounter can seem like an entire three-act play. I
replay it over and over in my head while I continue on my way to Mr. Bender's
house. Dane. White house. White pajamas. White teeth. There was nothing
frightening about it, except the way I was frozen on the street.

Persona

Finding his house is easy. Left. Left. Left. A
ten-minute walk at most. He is surprised to see me but invites me in.

"Coffee?"

"I can't drink. I mean I don't
drink coffee," I say.

Mr. Bender stirs cream into his. He
offers me juice, milk, bagels, and muffins. I say no to them all. "I'm on
a special diet," I tell him.

"Allergies?"

"No. Just special."

He nods. It is a nod that says, yes, I
know.
What does he know?
He says there isn't a thing you can't find out
about your neighbors on the Net. Has he found out something about me?

"Did you get your pictures of the
pine serpent?" I ask.

"Yes. Dozens. I'm trying to choose
the best ones to send to my agent."

"Did you get some pictures with the
birds?"

"A few. But the few were fairly
amazing. I got lucky."

"May I see them?"

"The pictures?"

"No. The birds."

Our footsteps make whooshing sounds on
the rain-soaked ground. Puddles spot the pathway into the garden. With his long
stride, Mr. Bender steps over them, but I step in them. "I don't know how
many there'll be," he says, "with the storm and all."

All I want is one.

We sit on the log bench. He's right.
There are not many. Only two, the rest still huddled away from the storm. But the
two that come will land only on his hand.

After twenty minutes, he puts the
birdseed away and we walk back to the house. He pours himself another cup of
coffee and I shuffle through photos of the pine serpent.

"Don't worry about it, Jenna."

What makes him think I'm worried? And
why should it matter so much that a small brown bird lands on my hand anyway?
What makes him think I care?

"Some things take time," he
says.

Too many things take time. I've lost so
much time already. A year and a half might as well be a lifetime for me.
"I don't have time to spare," I tell him.

He laughs. "Sure you do. You're
only seventeen. You have lots of time."

I set the pictures in my hand down on
the table.

I never told him I was seventeen.

"Where did you find that out, Mr.
Bender?" I ask. "On the Net? Am I one of the neighbors that you find
things out about?"

He refills his coffee mug.
"Yes." He's not apologetic.

"You're not embarrassed about your
snooping?"

"It's not snooping. I need to know
about my neighbors."

Maybe so. Maybe I do, too. "Then I
have a confession to make," I tell him. "You're not the only snoop. I
did some checking, and I found out a few things about you, too."

"Oh?" His brows arch, and he sits
down opposite me.

"Have you had surgery, Mr. Bender? Or
maybe you simply have excellent genes?"

"Meaning?"

"You look like you're about forty-five.
Fifty at most."

He doesn't reply.

"But Clayton Bender the artist was born
eighty-four years ago. You either hold your age really well, or
—?"

"You expect me to fill that one in?"

"No. I've already figured out you can't be
him. No one's genes are that good. I just don't know who you really are. A
serial killer, maybe?"

He smiles. "You've got quite an
imagination. Nothing that dramatic, I'm afraid." He takes a long sip from
his mug. "But still serious enough it needs to remain a secret. Only a few
people know. My agent, for one. He helps build the quirky-artist persona to
keep people away. You're right. I'm not Clayton Bender, but I took his name almost
thirty years ago."

"Your own name wasn't good enough?"

"The name, yes. But the life that went
with it, no."

"Where's the real Mr. Bender?"

"He passed away."

"Did you kill him?"

He laughs. "No, Jenna, I promise you his
passing was quite natural."

"How did you meet him?"

He stands and walks over to the kitchen sink,
pouring the rest of his coffee out. "I ran away when I was sixteen. I had
no other options." He turns back to face me. "I got mixed up with
some people who could do me some serious harm. A friend gave me some money and
his car, and I ended up on the other side of the country on Bender's doorstep.
He was a loner out in the desert and needed a worker, so I helped him out and
he helped me, no questions asked. I stayed with him for three years."

"He was an artist then?"

"Of sorts." He smiles and shrugs,
joining me at the table again. "He got by with a small Net business
—grinding and then selling natural pigments to artists
all over the world—and the rest of the time he wandered the desert collecting
stones. He piled them into little monuments wherever he took a notion. I didn't
understand it, but I helped him. In a strange way, it helped me not to think.
Maybe that's why he did it, too. Then one day he went out ahead of me looking
for stones, and when I caught up with him, he was dead. I never found out what
it
was. Heart attack or stroke. I don't know. I buried him and gave him
his own monument and then I waited for another year, thinking someone would
show up. Family, friends, someone to claim the house, but no one ever came. In
the meantime, I just kept stacking the stones. I lived off the money he had
stashed away, but I knew that couldn't last forever, and then one day it
finally occurred to me. I didn't have to hide out forever. I could be Clayton
Bender. I had his birth certificate and other documents, and not a soul in the
world seemed to know him. I've been him ever since."

"And your old life? Do you ever miss
it?"

"Parts. Mostly I regret that I never saw
my parents again."

"Or your best friend?"

He shrugs and looks away so I can't see his
eyes. "Now you know my secret," he says. "Will you keep
it?"

"I have no one to tell. And I wouldn't
even if I did."

"Good. You ready to tell me your
secrets?"

"I don't have any," I say. "None
that I remember at least."

It occurs to me that Mr. Bender is much more
clever at finding information about Jenna Fox on the Net than I am. If he knows
I am seventeen, what else does he know? Secrets that I don't even know? My
hands tremble. I have never seen them tremble before. I stare at them.

"Jenna?"

I clasp my hands together to make them still.
For the first time, I notice they don't interlace smoothly. It feels like I
have twelve fingers instead of ten. I keep reworking them,
reclasp-ing
,
but it still feels awkward. Why won't they lace together?

"Jenna? You all right?"

My hands.

I shove them both beneath my thighs, out of
sight.
He made it his business to know.
I look at him. "What else
did you find out about me, Mr. Bender?"

"I don't think I
—"

"Please."

"I read that you were injured in an
accident. They didn't expect you to survive."

The room spins, and I hold on to the table.
Worse, I feel like I am on the edge of shutting down. It's as though, spoken
aloud, the word
accident
is a switch, and it's making everything inside
me go black. Is that why I avoid it with Mother and Father? I struggle to
focus.
Find your way. Make it your business.
"What kind?"

"Of accident?"

"Yes. That."

"A car accident."

A
car
accident? Why did I think it was
something else? Something more terrible? There are thousands of car accidents
every day. It is practically common.
A car accident.
I can almost say it
out loud. Except I wasn't expected to survive
—and
I did. That is not common.

"Anything else?"

"The article was more about your dad.
Anything he does is news, and he was taking a leave of absence from his work
because of your condition. Since you were underage, a
lot
of information
was unavailable, but the
Boston Globe
managed to find out that the
nurses thought your condition was pretty grave." He pauses. Is he
retrieving information or planning a lie? I watch his eyes carefully. His
pupils dart to the left and then back to me. "That was about all the
article said, Jenna."

A lie.

Does he know I have no memory?
What else?
But
curiously, he still seems to want to be my friend so I drop it. For now.
"Did I pass?" I ask.

"Pass?"

"The Bender Neighbor Investigation?"

He smiles. "You passed the day I met you,
Jenna. You gave me honesty and attitude. I liked that."

"I don't remember giving you
anything."

"Attitude,
Jenna. You walked right up to me.
Told me what you thought of my work. You weren't afraid of anything."

But I'm afraid of everything. Myself. Mother.
Lily. Friends who haunt me in the night. Even going to school, which is
something I asked for. If I have attitude, it is hiding somewhere deep,
someplace I'm afraid I may never find.

Jenna Fox / Year Twelve

Jenna is at the shore. A pitchfork is in her
hands. Cords of hair whip from her ponytail across her face. She smiles at the
camera and says, "Come on, Mom, put it down and help me!" At twelve
years old, I still called her Mom. When did I begin calling her Claire? I can't
recall, but I feel the hardness of the word on my lips. The camera wobbles, and
Claire's voice is loud. "In a minute. Let me get a little more
first."

Was this a family getaway? A day at the beach?
Every aspect of Jenna's life is recorded. Father comes into view with a silver
pail in hand, and he waves it in front of my face. "All
mine,"
he
teases. "I won't go hungry! Can't say the same for you two."

Jenna laughs, this person that is me, and
calls, "He has a hundred quahogs, Mom! Put that down, or we'll
starve!" Jenna thrusts her pitchfork into the sand and the camera zooms in
on her sandy feet, then glides up the length of her body, like every inch is
being adored. It finally stops on my face. It rests there. Caressing. Watching.
Watching what? The enthusiasm? The ruddy cheeks? The anticipation? Watching all
the breaths, heartbeats, and hopes of Matthew and Claire Fox? For a moment, I
can see the weight of it in Jenna's face. My face. "Mom!" Jenna
pleads. The camera wobbles, is turned off, and a new scene appears, focusing on
a campfire
—