The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled (4 page)

“What
are
those?” Nia said, as much to herself as to us. “Why do they all
have them?” She thought another minute, biting on a nail. “And why are there no other pictures of my mom before she was ten? I mean, my dad’s got stuff in here from birth.”

“Hold on,” said Callie, her eyes closed like if she looked at us, the idea she was holding on to so very gently in her head would float away. “Nia, how old is your mom?”

“She’s young,” Nia said. “She married my dad when she
was still in college. He was in grad school. So she was only twenty-two when Cisco was born. She’s thirty-nine now.”

“Zoe, how old would your dad be if he were still alive?”

“He’d be forty-eight,” I said.

“That makes him nine years older than my mom,” Nia said. “And three years older than Callie’s. Hal, how old is your dad?”

“Umm . . .” Hal said. “Hold on.” He did some quick thinking, and
then answered, “Forty-seven?”

“Wow,” said Callie. Her green eyes lit up with the knowledge that she’d just solved a complicated math problem.

“Uh, Callie?” said Hal. “I think you forgot to show your work.”

“What?” Callie said, as if she couldn’t understand why we hadn’t followed her. “So the ages our parents are in the first picture or record or whatever we have of them are all from the same
year.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Your dad, Zoe, he would have been nineteen when my mom was sixteen, Hal’s dad was eighteen and Nia’s mom was ten. They all started to have a record of their existence at the same exact time.”

“Wow,” said Nia. “So something must have happened in that year. Something that started all the information about them being collected.”

“Nineteen eighty-four,” Callie
said. “What the heck happened to everybody in nineteen eighty-four?”

Before we had any time to think about that, we heard the garage door open. “Shoot, that’s my mom,” Hal said. He was closing the file and ejecting the disc. “How long have we been here?”

Nia looked at her watch. “It’s been four hours!”

“I never raked the lawn.”

“Your dad never came in to get you,” I pointed out.

“That’s weird,”
said Hal. “He’s usually totally on my case about that kind of thing.”

We all rushed into the backyard through the French doors in the office. The yard was already raked.

And there was Hal’s dad, drinking a cup of coffee, reading the paper, his raking gloves on the table as if he’d just taken them off.

Hal gave his dad a look, and Mr. Bennett flexed his arms comically.

“Sometimes raking is
just what a body needs after spending a whole week crammed like a sardine into a plane,” Mr. Bennett said.

Hal laughed. Sort of. He kind of choked. This was not how the Bennett family normally worked, I surmised.

Then Mr. Bennett winked. “No need to tell Mom, though, okay?” He lifted the paper back up in front of his face before Hal had a chance to answer.

Chapter 5

T
wo days after
my dad died, my mom pulled into our driveway in a used RV she’d bought without a word of warning. She’s so tiny she could barely reach the steering wheel from the enormous “captain’s chair” that is the driver’s seat. Still, she loaded Iris, Pen, and me into the RV and pulled out of the driveway without looking back. That was the last we saw of the house we’d all been born in.

We’d said good-bye
to no one. Not our friends. Not our teachers. Not the neighbors we had known all our lives, whose casseroles we left to rot in the fridge. We ran like people being chased. I found out later that we probably were.

When we asked my mom why—which, trust me, we did many, many times over the course of the year we spent on the road—she would close her eyes and say, “I’m sorry. It was just something
I had to do.” Once, when we were lost in Arizona, and it was hot out, we had to drive with no A/C because we were about to run out of gas in the middle of the desert. Pen, who is not one to keep her opinions to herself, said, “Why are we even doing this? Answer us for real this time, okay?” Pen had sounded like she was about to cry, and so my mom said, “I don’t know. I’m following instructions, okay?”
And her voice was so desperate we didn’t follow up with any more questions, even though what she’d said made absolutely no sense.

At the time I thought, basically, she’d lost her mind. Sometimes I noticed when she registered us at campsites, she would even go so far as to use different, random names—Dolly Nabokov, Mrs. Reginald V. Quilty, Arianna Adore. Weird stuff. When we finally landed here
in Orion, and my mom enrolled us in school, she went back to using our real names, though she made up this story about losing all our files in a fire to explain why we weren’t forwarding our transcripts from our old life and wasn’t able to produce Social Security numbers. In a way, it was as if our entire existence—my dad, California, all of it—had never been real.

The day after we’d gone through
Thornhill’s computer files at Hal’s house was a Sunday. Nia had church and a family lunch, Hal texted that he was going for a long run, and Callie was helping her dad haul and stack wood for his new furniture building business. I made toaster waffles for Iris and Pen while my mom slept in, recovering from whatever she’d been doing until four in the morning—I heard her car roll into the driveway.

At noon, my mom emerged, ate a leftover waffle, and took the girls to a birthday party. I practiced the sax for awhile, though it was hard to focus. I couldn’t stop thinking about the pictures and documents that were on Thornhill’s computer. If my mom was at the grocery store, was someone taking pictures of her right now? Did whoever was collecting all these pictures and information know what
she was doing at night? I wanted to warn her that her private life was not as private as she thought it might be. I didn’t want to talk to her about the obvious fact that she had a boyfriend, but was it irresponsible not to let her know that someone, somewhere was watching?

At two I left the house on my bike to meet up with Nia, Hal, and Callie at the gazebo in the center of town. We’d told our
parents we were meeting to study at the library.

“I did some research last night,” Callie said, when we were gathered—Nia was last, rushing from the Rivera four-course Sunday meal. “Orion College of Pharmaceuticals was founded in the 1950s. It got some kind of government grant and was able to build a campus outside town—as well as purchase buildings in town—all in its first year. That’s pretty
fast for a college, apparently. Most start small and build up over time, but OCP hit the ground running. Which means it had money from the beginning, and lots of it.”

“Okay,” said Nia. “Why did they close?”

“Try a different question,” Callie said. “Not
why
did they close. But
when
. Remember 1984, that magic year when half our parents suddenly start to have lives? The year when your mom is ten,
my mom is sixteen, Zoe’s dad is nineteen and Mr. Bennett is eighteen?”

“Yeah,” I said. I felt a kind of shiver of dread. After twenty-four hours and hardly any sleep, Thornhill’s computer file made no more sense to me than it had the day before. And I wasn’t exactly filled with optimism that some innocuous explanation for what we’d found was waiting around the next corner. There was just no way
this much surveillance could lead to good news.

“That would be the year.” Callie pursed her lips in grim resignation.

From the gazebo, we rode our bikes to the library, locked them there as a decoy in case any of our parents came looking for us, and then took the city bus to the OCP campus. It was a short, easy ride out there, and for a second I wondered why Orion would still bother to maintain
a bus line going out to the campus of a school that had been closed for more than twenty-five years.

We found seats in the back and, since the bus was empty, we were able to talk in low voices about the Thornhill files and strategies we might employ to find Robin in Washington, D.C.

“So has anyone had any more thoughts about the files?” Nia asked.

“It seems so weird,” Hal said. “That he’d be
compiling all that information. It’s creepy.”

“I know we’ve been assuming he’s a good guy and all,” Callie said. “But what if
he’s
a criminal? What if he’s stealing all those people’s identities or something?”

“Frankly,” said Callie. “It’s a just a little hard to take in. I mean, a couple of weeks ago I would have sworn Mr. Thornhill’s one goal in life was to punish students, and now I have
to reconcile that with him as . . . a human being. Someone’s dad.”

“And Amanda’s dad no less,” Nia added.

“He wasn’t awful,” Callie mused. “He was strict, but now that I think about it, he was always fair, too.”

“And outside of school, he was actually nice,” I volunteered, immediately regretting that I’d shared this information.

“What?” said Nia. Three pairs of eyes turned to stare at me.

“You knew him outside of school?” Callie’s voice echoed Nia’s tone.

“Sort of,” I answered. “He was a family friend.” I didn’t add that, in Orion, he was our only family friend.

Nia put her fingers on her temples as if a headache had just exploded.

“When we moved to Orion, he took care of everything for us,” I reluctantly went on. “He got my mom the job at the school. He helped us find our house.
He was—he was the only person we knew in the world. My mom told me my dad trusted him. Now that I know he’s Amanda’s dad, I can see why.”

Suddenly the three of them were staring at me like I’d done something wrong. “What?” I said.

“Nothing,” Callie answered, looking away, like if I didn’t get it, maybe I didn’t deserve to.

Hal was the one to explain. “It’s just that it kind of blows our minds
that you know all this stuff about Amanda’s life that we don’t. That you knew Amanda when she was—” It was clear he didn’t know how to finish that sentence.

“The
real
her,” said Nia.

“I don’t know how much of the person I knew was real,” I offered.

“Yeah, but you knew so much more than the rest of us,” Callie said. “Sometimes I feel like everything Amanda ever told me was a lie. I know she
had to, but still. I wonder.”

“I still can’t believe her name isn’t even Amanda,” Nia said.

“It isn’t Arabella either,” I pointed out.

“But you
knew
her,” Callie said. “Before she was starting to figure all this stuff out. Before she was prepping us to be her guides. There’s something about all these secrets . . . I don’t know. It’s just wrong, somehow.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But it isn’t her fault.
All of this—those sneaky pictures, all that collected information. That’s what’s really wrong.”

Callie nodded, reassured.

With squeaking brakes and a grinding engine, the bus came to a stop across the street from a decaying sign hanging crooked from a single post:
ORION PHARMACEUTICAL COLLEGE: WHERE FUTURE PHARMACISTS COME TO LEARN
.

“Maybe that tagline was what did the college in,” Nia suggested.
We all laughed.

It took us about two seconds to see that the campus was heavily guarded, and when I say heavily, I mean guards pacing the perimeter. The whole campus was basically half a dozen brick rectangular buildings with flat roofs and dirty glass windows. It was surrounded by a chain-link fence that looked like it had been there since the place was closed.

“Whoa,” said Hal.

“Double whoa,”
said Callie.

We were standing in the bus stop shelter. One of the guards was already watching us. “Let’s move,” I said.

“Where?” Callie said, though she was already jogging along at my side, Nia and Hal not far behind. And,
ugh
, Hal was swinging his arms as he ran. I guess because he’s a runner he was used to doing this to go faster, but the movement called a lot of attention to him.

“Anywhere,
just as long as it looks like we have to be somewhere that isn’t here.”

“But where are we going?” Nia said. With the exception of the chain-link-encircled OCP campus, this was pretty much Nowheresville. There was a barely unfrozen cornfield across the street from the college and woods on either side of it.

“Where we’re going isn’t the point,” I said. Would they believe me? I took a deep breath.
“The point is just to disappear.”

“Disappear?” Nia scoffed.

I pointed to a thick-trunked maple tree that must have been standing in this spot for more than a hundred years. “Stand here. Make sure to stand in the shade. The sun is coming from right over the college, which means anything shaded is blocked from view by the tree.”

“Okay,” Callie said. She had her hands on her hips. She was looking
at me like her eyes were going to bug out of her head. “Now what?” she said.

“Stay still,” I said. “Until the guards forget they ever saw you.”

“How do you know they will ever forget?”

“Because this is what I do,” I said. “I disappear.”

“You what?” This was Nia.

“It’s not like I actually turn invisible or something,” I said. “Just sort of invisible.”

I remembered English class: give an example.

“When I cut class,” I said. “I can walk down a hallway past a teacher and never get asked for a pass.”

“Seriously?” said Hal. Before Amanda, Hal had cut class, like, maybe twice in his life.

I rolled up my sleeve. The henna tattoo of a chameleon was almost gone, but I’d kept it alive by tracing over the lines in pen from time to time.

“See that?” I said.

“Yeah,” said Nia in a tone that let
me know she was still waiting for me to explain.

“Remember,” I said. “That is me.”