The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled (5 page)

Chapter 6

A
bout two weeks
before Amanda chalked Thornhill’s car, I found a flyer taped to the outside of my sax case advertising a piano-sax duo playing a set at Arcadia, the club in Orion that has a jazz night once a week. I’d thought the group looked mildly interesting until I read at the bottom who they were—The Brubella Duella, the group was called, with Zoe Costas on sax and Amanda Valentino on piano. Um, Zoe Costas?
That’s me.

Amanda had scrawled a note on the bottom of the flyer:
Rehearsal Tomorrow @ 5.

I showed up at the rehearsal nervous and early and full of questions but there was something about the way that the room was set up (no privacy from the club staff) and the way Amanda kept interrupting me—I was never able to ask a single one. Once the sound check was completed, the list of songs set, and
we’d started to play, I forgot all about questions and how public and exposed this performance felt. It was just music, which always makes me forget about what it means to see or be heard—I just want to be one with the thing I am making. After the rehearsal, as we were leaving Arcadia, Amanda wandered into a tattoo parlor on the same block, as if she were drawn in, by a design hanging over the counter.
I followed, nearly blinded by the lights inside.

Like everything else with Amanda, we probably didn’t just “happen upon” the tattoo place. Later, I wondered if the club date’s sole purpose was to situate us there.

“Who gets these?” I said. The idea of being marked by something, permanently, of never being able to change that . . . I’d never understood the appeal.

But then Amanda, who changes
everything about herself from day to day, lifted the sleeve of her biker jacket to show me her henna tattoo, a coyote design on her inner arm. “Want to pick something too?” she asked. “For the show?”

“Okay,” I said, reminding myself that these tattoos wash off. I pointed to a canary. “How about that? You know, a music maker?”

Amanda shook her head. She was wearing a platinum blond wig that hung
down past her shoulders, red velvet leggings, and sneakers with platform heels. With the biker jacket, she looked, frankly, like the lead singer from some kind of screamer band.

That afternoon, through her music, I’d kept feeling her almost tell me something and then hold back. She would start phrases with a lot of weight to them and then she’d end them softly. Chords got complicated, and never
quite resolved. I liked what she was doing musically, but it made me feel worried.

But now, in the tattoo parlor, she was smiling widely, like something was funny, and I followed her finger with my eyes to a crescent-moon of an animal with short legs and a long tail that always made me think of the southwest.

I laughed.

The chameleon. Master of camouflage. A lizard who can go anywhere without
being seen, and pass as anything—a leaf, a dried stick, a pile of sand. They fit into their surroundings so well, they seem to disappear.

“I guess that’s perfect,” I said.

“It is,” she answered back. “But not for the reason you’re thinking.”

“Huh?” I said.

“People used to think the chameleon changed for camouflage, but we know now there’s a lot more to them than just hiding.”

“Then what’s
the hiding all about?” I asked. “They do it just for fun?”

“Scientists now think it’s all about communication,” Amanda said. “Chameleons change color to send messages to each other.”

“Really?” I said. “But how could that even work?”

“You tell me,” she said, staring with her large gray-green eyes at the animal etching on the wall.

“Hiding in plain sight is something Amanda taught me,” I
explained to Callie, Hal, and Nia now. We were still hiding in the shade of the maple tree across the street from the heavily guarded Orion College of Pharmaceuticals. “Or sort of taught me. When we were little, we used to practice.” They were staring. “Together.” Still: stares. “For fun?” Hopelessly not getting this. “We’d pick a stranger at the library and follow them around town as they did their
errands.”

“Wow,” said Hal. “That certainly is an
unusual
form of entertainment.”

“It was,” I insisted. “You see, there were tricks we started to learn and I’ve kind of gone on to perfect them on my own. Like I was telling you: lockers. In school you can do a lot with lockers.”

“You hide inside lockers?” Callie asked.

“No,” I said. “I can’t fit inside a locker. Plus I don’t know the combinations.
Plus other people’s lockers probably have old food and nasty gym socks in them. But all I need is one open locker to keep a teacher from seeing me when I’m in the hallway and not supposed to be.”

“Wait,” said Nia. “You can be walking down an empty hallway and pass a teacher and they seriously will not
see
you?”

“It’s not so much that he hasn’t seen me,” I said. “It’s more like he doesn’t know
that he’s seen me. Or he doesn’t remember that he cares.”

Nia, naturally, needed evidence. “So . . . how? How exactly do you do it?”

“I slow my pace,” I began, “but almost imperceptibly. Then I kind of—I don’t know—I hold my breath in a certain way. I sing silently inside my head. Or sometimes I hum out loud if I don’t think it will be distracting. I pick a song I think is going to help me.
Sometimes it’s something that distracts the person, sometimes it’s something that is so the opposite of them . . . it puts me in a rhythm that basically they cannot respond to. Like a modern and dissonant harmony for someone who only can hear pop melodies. They’ll tune the song—and me—out.”

“I would definitely think the singing would draw attention to you,” Callie said.

“If you do it right,
they don’t notice. Think about music you hear in a store. You don’t think twice about it, right? If the store were quiet,
then
you’d feel weird.”

“Um . . . okay?” Nia said. Obviously, this was going to take a little more explaining.

“The trick with the locker,” I went on. “The other day I used that when Mrs. Mukoski caught me out of class during History without a pass. I saw her coming and I
started to hum ‘Strangers in the Night.’ Do you know it?”

“As a classic example of schmaltz, yes,” Nia said.

“But not to Mrs. Mukoski,” I said. “She was probably in college when that song was popular. To her, it might be all about falling in love. So I looked not exactly at the teacher, not exactly away, more like at the open locker, so Mrs. Mukoski started looking at that locker also. She’s
wondering, Why am I looking at this locker? Why is it open? Has something been taken from inside it? And then she’s hearing the music, and it’s triggering a memory for her. She’s suddenly remembering some 1960s sorority dance or something. She wasn’t thinking about me, that’s for sure. And two seconds after I was gone, she wouldn’t remember that I was even there.”

“That works?” Hal asked.

“Of
course it works.”

“You know,” said Nia, “what you’re doing has a name.”

“It does?”

“It’s called misdirection,” she said. “I read about it in this book about Harry Houdini. It’s how magic tricks work. Misdirection means you flick your wrist as you pull a quarter out of a kid’s ear so the kid thinks you’re maybe flicking a quarter out of your sleeve instead of guessing that you’re hiding it inside
a closed fist. Misdirection is how pickpockets make it so you don’t feel their hand in your purse—they’re stepping on your toe, apologizing, directing your attention to something else. Psychologists have done studies—if someone wearing a red handkerchief in their jacket pocket tries to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, you’re less likely to question them than if they pitch the bridge with no hanky.
It’s like your brain gets distracted by the color. It breaks up your concentration, your ability to think logically.”

“Wow,” I said. “What was that word?”

“Misdirection,” Nia repeated.

I felt a little stupid for not knowing that word, but when I looked at Callie she shrugged, and then Hal said, “Nice SAT word, Nia.”

“Misdirection,” I repeated, trying out how the word sounded on my lips. I
didn’t say that what I was doing was misdirection times ten, that even Harry Houdini couldn’t disappear the way I had been disappearing lately.

“So what do we do now?” Hal said. “How do we walk out from behind this tree and get into the campus without being seen?”

“It’s just like I said,” I explained. “We walk in the opposite direction of the campus, and we walk like we’re late. We split up.
They’re probably looking for a group of kids. If we each seem to be alone, the guards see us but they dismiss us right away. The most important thing is that we’re not threatening to them, and as guards, their brains are trained to focus only on what might possibly be a threat.”

“Okay,” Callie said.

“And Hal?” I added. “Don’t swing your arms. It doesn’t make you look purposeful. It looks too
much like a wave. And the last thing we want to be doing is waving at these guards.”

“Whatever,” Hal said, but he kept his arms down from then on. We walked out of the guards’ direct line of sight before crossing the road, and cutting back toward the campus through the woods.

“Now what?” Nia said.

“Now I don’t know. We’ll get as close as we can from here and hope we can find another way in.”

“I know one,” Hal said. “There’s an unguarded back entrance near an old jogging trail.”

“Did you just have another premonition?” Nia asked, sounding excited.

“No,” he answered, a grin sneaking onto his face. “I just run here sometimes.”

“Oh,” she said, sounding deflated.

He added, “I don’t think I’ve seen these guards before though.”

We walked down toward the woods, then slipped through them
around the corner of the chain-link fence. Hal was right. There was an old garage right on the fence’s edge. Next to the garage was a gate in the chain-link fence—unfortunately securely closed and locked with an intimidating iron chain. Between the cover of the woods and the large garage, the guards patrolling the front and the back of the facility couldn’t see us.

“You sure we want to go in
here?” Nia said. “Not even the airplane hangar was this heavily guarded and we almost got caught there.”

Hal looked at Callie. Callie looked at me. I looked at Nia. “Okay, okay.” She sighed. “We need to break in here precisely because this place is guarded so heavily.”

“Precisely,” Hal said.

And then, as if it were no big deal, Callie broke the lock on the chain. The gate swung open and we
slipped silently inside.

There were enough big trees on the campus that we were able to dart from one to another without the guards spotting us. We had to just pray there weren’t any cameras installed—I didn’t see any. We hid behind some overgrown bushes on the side of the first building we reached. Nia stood up and looked through a window.

“It’s an old classroom,” she said.

“Anything remarkable
about it?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

Still keeping ourselves hidden along the walls and behind trees, we made our way over to another building. From the outside, this one seemed very large—about the same size as our high school. Once we got to the windows, we could see that it seemed so big because it enclosed a large courtyard. The interior windows looked through to the classroom we were peering
into now.

As we leaned against the building wall to see better, Nia suddenly jumped back, pulling her hands off the wall and rubbing them together as if to erase the feel of the bricks. “Whoa,” she said.

“Did you feel something?” I asked.

“More like heard,” she said. “Kids’ voices. It sounded like recess at an elementary school, like kids were playing outside. I think the courtyard in this
building was used as a playground.”

“A playground at a pharmaceutical college?” Callie said. “That would be some pretty young pharmacists-in-training.”

Nia nodded, grimly. “I don’t think they were training to be pharmacists.”

The windows were locked, but by pushing hard enough, Callie managed to snap the lock and lift the sash. Hal hoisted himself up and over the windowsill and the rest of
us followed.

“Do you think it’s strange,” he said, “that we aren’t hearing alarms go off?”

“Yes,” Callie said. “If they took the trouble to encircle an abandoned campus with a chain-link fence and patrol it with guards, you’d think the least they would do was install an alarm system.”

“Maybe they did,” Nia said. “It could be a silent alarm.”

“Do you have a sense of anybody coming?” I asked
Hal.

Hal paused for a moment, as though concentrating. He got a sort of faraway look on his face. Then he shook his head. “Not right now,” he said. “But still, we’d better hurry.”

Walking down the empty hall, we poked our heads into one unremarkable classroom after another, but once we rounded the corner, we noticed a change. When we tried to open doors to peek into classrooms, we found these
doors were locked.

When Nia put her hand on a doorknob, a strange look came over her face. Was she mad? Scared? Upset?

“I can feel some little kids,” she said. “This was the door to their quarters. They touched it hundreds of times, from the inside only. They used to stare at it all the time. They used to wonder what was on the other side of it. They wondered if the normal world, the world they
read about in books and saw in educational videos—they wondered if it was just outside this door. They weren’t allowed to leave.”