The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled
Read The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled Online
Authors: Amanda Valentino,Cathleen Davitt Bell
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Social Issues, #Adolescence, #Mysteries & Detective Stories, #Friendship
the
AMANDA
project
Unraveled
BOOK FOUR
BY AMANDA VALENTINO
AND CATHLEEN DAVITT BELL
Table of Contents
Z
oe here. The
secret guide. The one who’s been shadowing everyone else. Keeping information to myself, watching from a distance, hiding clues. Not fun, I know—I didn’t like it, either. But I didn’t have a choice, as crazy as that sounds.
The craziest part, though?
I’ve started to be able to do this thing. I can barely say it out loud—because first of all, I’m not sure it’s true. And second, no one would ever
believe me.
I wouldn’t believe me.
Except it’s just what happens.
I’ve always been good at reading people—listening to them, knowing what they are thinking even when they don’t say it out loud. I think because of this, I’ve always been good at hiding, too. Hiding in plain sight—when Amanda and I were little that was a game for us.
But now, sometimes, when I look at a person and really focus,
I can tell exactly how their eyes are going to move. I can sense the music of their breathing, the rhythm that governs when they blink, when their eyes glaze over into a stare. And because I can see these things, I can make myself—as far as that person can tell—invisible.
Don’t get me wrong. I can’t actually make myself invisible—I don’t really disappear. When I look down, I can always see myself.
But in my head, everything slows down. I feel like my breath lines up with the blinks of the person’s eyes. I’m not actually sure how it works. All I know is that I can make it nearly impossible for that person to see me in that moment.
It’s easy to hide when you know where someone isn’t going to look. And since Amanda left Orion, I’ve been hiding all the time.
For a minute,
I thought Nia was going to pass out.
We were sitting on a bench outside school. I’d dragged her there when she’d started to slump over in the lobby of the auditorium just after the school talent show. She was leaning forward, her dark hair flopped over and exposing the back of her long neck. I wasn’t sure if she needed air, or if I should be calling an ambulance. I was trying not to panic. In
the chaos at the end of the show, we’d lost track of Callie and Hal, the only other people who had a chance of understanding what was going on.
“Keep your head between your knees,” I told Nia, my own head swimming with bad ideas. Should I get a teacher? My mom? My instinct was to hide.
“Death,” Nia whispered again, looking up, her dark eyes clouded with fear. “I can’t stop seeing it.”
I glanced
over my shoulder to make sure no one else could hear. I half expected the guys who were after Amanda to be bearing down on us now—there were a few of them who had chased us through the woods earlier in the day. But from where we were sitting I could see the main entrance to the school, and there was no one. Or at least no one I could see. School at night is always a little eerie.
I bit my lip
and screwed up the courage to ask a question I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer to. “You’re
definitely
not talking about Amanda?” I swallowed.
I was referring to Amanda Valentino, our missing friend. About a month ago, she’d disappeared, and we’d been looking for her, following a series of cryptic clues she kept leaving in our path. Now we didn’t know if she was still in Orion, or hiding
out somewhere else. We’d met the man we believed to be her father—but only after he’d been captured by the people who were after Amanda.
While Nia, Callie, and Hal had been working as a trio, I’d been looking for Amanda on my own—though Amanda hadn’t wanted it that way. When she’d left me clues that clearly indicated we four were supposed to band together as her guides, I’d revealed myself .
. . hard to believe it had only been this afternoon. It felt like forever.
Nia rubbed her eyes and sat up. She was dressed in a white boatneck shirt, black skinny jeans, and black-and-white-striped ballerina flats, an appropriate color scheme considering Nia tends to see the world in black and white. You’re her friend or you’re not. You speak the truth every time you open your mouth—or you’re
a liar. If she had bad news for you, she wouldn’t sugarcoat it.
“I told you,” Nia said. “I can only see into the past. The death wasn’t Amanda’s.”
“Here.” I lifted a vintage pink purse off Nia’s lap and she sighed in relief, as if it were a heavy suitcase I was offering to help her carry.
Nia, Hal, and Callie had first seen the purse a little over a week before, in the hands of a woman named
Waverly Valentino, who claimed to be Amanda’s aunt. Then, half an hour ago, we’d seen it again. This time, with a woman with dark skin, dozens of little braids, and blue eyes. She let us buy the purse from her for less than she’d paid, and then disappeared into the night. Nia had opened the purse to find it lined with a scrap of old baby blanket that had been embroidered with the name Ariel—which
we’d come to learn was the name Amanda was born with. Touching the bit of blanket—that’s what had set off Nia’s vision.
Since we started looking for Amanda, the four of us have been able to do things that should be impossible. Hal knows things he shouldn’t, all psychic-style. He gets premonitions and hunches that are always—as in, 100 percent—right. Callie has gotten really strong—she can tear
a door off its hinges. And Nia can often touch an object and feel something or know something about its history. She knows who used it or touched it last and what it witnessed. I haven’t even told the others about what I can do—how do you explain making yourself virtually invisible? Weirder still, the first time the four of us gathered, we’d noticed that when we were all touching, we felt an electric
charge run through us.
Now, as I was opening the purse to take another look at the blanket, Callie and Hal ran out to join us. When Callie was one of the über-popular I-Girls, I’d seen a lot of her. I blend into lots of groups, so we ended up at the same parties and club meetings. Sometimes we ended up at different ends of the same table at lunch. I could always tell she didn’t think she was
as pretty as Kelli, Traci, and Heidi—the other I-Girls. She didn’t seem to realize that there was something about her beauty that goes beyond theirs. Her smile could make the difference between an overcast sky and a sunshiny day.
Hal, who was jogging along at Callie’s side, is also a sunshiny kind of guy—he’s had a thing for Callie for years and it’s pretty obvious it’s mutual. He was gazing
at her, kind of dumbstruck, until Nia stood up and positioned herself between them.
“Wasn’t Hal amazing?” Callie said, her freckled skin glowing. His band’s performance in the talent show had been awesome.
“Aren’t you glad Heidi and her I-Girl lip-sync routine didn’t win?” Nia added.
None of us are really fans of the I-Girls. Granted, we all have our biases, and it’s hard to see things objectively
some times. My friend Kenzi, who is popular but isn’t part of the I-Girl clique, tells me that a lot of them can be sweet. I’ll believe it when I see it.
“I’m so glad Bea won—she totally deserved it,” Hal said diplomatically. Bea Rossiter had survived a hit-and-run car accident earlier in the year. Only the four of us knew that the Queen Bee I-Girl, Heidi Bragg, had been behind the wheel, gunning
for Bea because she’d mistaken her for Amanda. We’d all known Heidi was evil, but we hadn’t realized how far she’d go. We still didn’t know why she’d done it. Now Bea was back from surgeries and rehabilitation, looking better than ever and surprising everyone with her beautiful singing voice.
“Yeah, Bea was great,” I agreed. I gave Hal a little wake-up punch on the shoulder. “But hey, something
came up.”
“Right . . . ,” said Hal. Callie shook her long hair out behind her. Nia straightened her glasses.
“The purse that woman sold us,” I went on. “It’s lined with part of Amanda’s baby blanket. Nia got a sudden wave, touching it.”
“I felt death,” Nia said, then quickly added, “but not Amanda’s.”
Hal picked up the purse and passed it back and forth between his hands like it was a basketball.
He opened it and peered inside, poking at the lining.
“Look,” he said, pulling out a postcard. “This was tucked inside the lining.”
“What’s on it?” Callie said, taking it out of his hands. “It’s some kind of monument.” She flipped it over and read the caption. “The World War Two Memorial. In Washington, D.C.”
“Okay,” said Nia. “That’s kind of random.”
“Do you think it’s a clue?” Callie asked.
“Maybe we’re supposed to go on the History Club trip to Washington,” I said. The man we believed to be Amanda’s father? He was actually the vice principal of our school. Mr. Thornhill. When we’d discovered him in an abandoned airplane hangar after he’d been abducted, he’d told us to go to Washington to look for Amanda’s sister, Robin.
“That reminds me,” Nia said now. “I pulled a few strings with
the president of the History Club, and guess who are all now members in good standing, and eligible for participation in the field trip to Washington that leaves Monday?”
Callie laughed, and Hal smiled too. Nia does not mess around.
I took the postcard and held it up to the streetlight. I’m really into photography and I was hoping that with all the time I’d spent looking at photos for newspaper
and yearbook I’d see something the others had missed. And I did. I think.
“Look at that,” I said, passing the card to Hal, and pointing to where a little mark had been pressed into the cardstock. The mark could have been made by a fingernail.
“You think this dent is supposed to tell us something?” Hal asked.
Callie took the card. “This could have been made by accident,” she said.
“I don’t
know,” Nia sniffed. “Nothing with Amanda ever seems to be an accident.”
Hal was staring at the front of the purse now—it was adorned with a leather sunflower. “Wait a second . . . this is brilliant. Do you see?”
“Um, no?” I said.
“Callie?” he prompted, like she should be the one more likely to. Callie has a genius math brain inherited from her astronomer mother—who is also missing, by the way.
Callie doesn’t know where she is, only that her mom felt she had to leave in an effort to protect Callie. “Don’t think of it as a flower,” Hal said. “Don’t think of the petals. Think of something else.”
“Of what?” she said, squinting, focusing. And then suddenly, she got it. “It’s a clock!”
“Exactly,” Hal said. And then I got it too. Because surrounding the yellow petals of the flower were green
leaves—twelve of them to be exact, spaced evenly around the flower like the numbers on a clock. Except when you looked closely, there weren’t twelve. The leaf in the nine o’clock position was missing.
I got this weird chill down my spine that I always get when Amanda’s clues start to make sense. It’s like, suddenly, she’s with you. She’s here. She’s speaking to you again, but in a language only
you can understand.
“And do you see how she’s done the minutes?” Nia was saying. Most of the petals on the sunflower were yellow, but a lot of them—forty? fifty?—were tinged with brown. Except one of the tinted petals wasn’t brown. It was a shocking, stand-alone pink. And now I didn’t have to count the brown petals. I knew there would be sixty of them, as in sixty minutes to an hour. The pink
petal was at the thirty-minute mark.
“Nine thirty,” I said. “Which might mean—”
“We’re supposed to meet Amanda at the World War Two Memorial at nine thirty on the day of that field trip to Washington,” Nia finished.
Hal and Callie nodded.
“Are we assuming the chick with the cornrows stole the purse from Amanda’s so-called aunt?” I wondered aloud.
“There’s still so much we don’t know,” Nia
said. “For instance . . . what are we supposed to be doing in the fifty or so hours between now and nine thirty on Monday?”
No one had an answer for her. We looked out at the deserted school parking lot. I had a feeling Amanda would let us know.