The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled (9 page)

Chapter 11

The sky was
just starting to get light as I pulled into the Endeavor parking lot, and I noticed that no one but me had come on a bike. There were Heidi Bragg and the I-Girls shimmying out of the back seat of Heidi’s mom’s BMW SUV. I caught a glimpse of Mrs. Bragg—hard, beautiful, amoral. Another fine product of the C33 program. What does that mean for the rest of them? And wait a minute, what were Heidi and
the I-Girls even doing here? The History Club was for brainiacs—had they talked their way into this trip last minute just like we had?

Meanwhile, Nia and her irresistible brother Cisco were emerging from his Honda. Cisco was coming along on the trip as a peer chaperone. The girls in the History Club were going to be very excited.

Nia came over to the bike rack and we quickly found Callie and
Hal.

“Are you guys still thinking about the stuff we found?” Callie asked as soon as we’d said hello.

Hal nodded. “It’s weird not to be able to talk about it with my mom,” he said.

“I know,” Callie said.

“I told Cisco,” Nia said. “And I kind of assumed my mom would bring it up with me—she hates secrets. But when I started to approach the subject with her, she cut me off.”

“That’s how it was
for me too,” I said.

Mr. Fowler called us to the bus. I felt in my vest pocket for a stick of gum—I always chew gum on buses to keep from getting sick—and I felt the folded corners of the little white envelope that had come for me.

“Did any of you get any messages?” I said. “Or mail?”

“Oh,” said Callie. “I almost forgot.” She pulled an envelope out of her bag that looked just like mine. It
had been opened. She said, “It looked like I was the one who mailed it. It’s my handwriting. But it’s not from me.”

Hal reached into his back pocket. “Here’s mine,” he said.

“I got one too,” Nia said, pulling out hers. Hal’s and Nia’s were identical to Callie’s and mine. The same strange chalky drawings of their totems, marked in such a way that you could only see them in a certain light.

The four of us got on the bus in time to get seats together. Heidi and the I-Girls boarded after all the seat pairings were gone, and asked people to move to let them be together.

“Am I the only one who thinks it’s strange that the I-Girls are on an academic club trip?” I said.

“Yeah,” Callie said. “What’s going on?”

“How did they even talk their way into the club?” said Nia. “Eliza only let
me join because we’re friends. She hates Heidi as much as I do.”

“Hey, Wynne,” we all heard Heidi say in a sticky-sweet voice, addressing a girl with bushy brown hair, who always wore hooded sweatshirts and read romance novels under her desk during class. “Since you’re all alone in your seat, would you mind if people who have friends sat there instead so they could be together?”

Nia made a clicking
sound with her tongue against the roof of her mouth, and I agreed with what she was thinking. What was Heidi’s problem? Heidi was a girl who had it all—she was gorgeous, and she was smart as a whip—last year she won a schoolwide literary contest for her poem “Fashion Pollution.” People fell all over themselves to help her out, and her police chief dad and quasi-celebrity news anchor mom basically
ran the town.

“Why do people obey her every command?” I said, leaning across the aisle so that the other guides could hear me.

“Yes!” Callie whispered. “Even if they only spend a few minutes with her, people feel like they’re her best friend.”

“I’m guessing she’s like us . . .” Hal suggested. “That she has a power—to make people do what she wants?”

“Oh, no,” Nia said, putting her head in her
hands. “The idea of that girl being given special abilities on top of her extreme good luck in life makes me ill.”

“It kind of makes me afraid,” said Hal.

Just then Cisco and the other peer chaperones began handing out the scavenger hunt forms. Looking it over, I forgot all about Heidi for a moment. In fact, my jaw literally dropped. The sheet listed dozens of landmarks we were supposed to visit
in Washington. The U.S. Capitol, the White House, the Vietnam Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial. . . . But then there was the extra credit, which listed a bunch of places that were totally obscure. Why would Thornhill want a bunch of high school students looking for the National Institute of Health’s Capitol Hill offices? And the Office of Management and Budget? Was it even safe for us to get out
to Langley, Virginia, to take pictures of the CIA?

I saw surprise on the faces of the other kids on the bus, and a lot of eye rolling—so much for scavenger hunts being “fun.”

All except Heidi, who looked smug. She clearly was not prepared to do much, with her minions there to do it for her.

I
t was sixth grade. The concert band at our school had won a trip to the state championships. We were
staying at a Days Inn near the community college where the competition would take place the next day.

After dinner at an Applebee’s, the band met in one of the hotel rooms, and spread out on beds and chairs and the floor to watch James Bond movies and eat popcorn. There wasn’t anything else to do.

Or at least I thought there wasn’t, until Arabella pulled my sleeve. She raised her eyebrows. “There’s
a bar mitzvah going on in the ballroom,” she said. “DJ, free food?”

“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I said.

“I have no idea what you’re thinking,” she lied. But we both knew what we had in mind.

We waited until the trip chaperones and other kids’ eyes were all fixed on the TV. I didn’t even need to look at Arabella to know that this was the perfect time. But I looked anyway, because that
was more fun. Our eyes met. “Now,” Arabella mouthed.

We’d packed dresses to wear to the evening portion of the concert the next day. We went back to our room down the hall to change—our other two roommates were watching the movie. I followed her into the elevator, through the lobby with its mirror-clad columns and fake fireplace, and down a hallway to Banquet Hall A.

We could hear music and
then we were standing at the open doors to a the ballroom. There was a disco ball hanging over a dance floor, round tables being cleared of dinner dishes by waiters, and up on a platform a long rectangular table decorated with stuffed animals and canopied in balloons—a giant floating balloon ceiling. The guests were dressed up, some sitting down, a few dancing, others talking or milling about. There
seemed to be a lot of kids—maybe a few years older than we were.

Arabella pointed out a sign and slowed down to read it.
“MAZEL TOV TO JONATHAN SCHWARTZ TODAY.
I love bar mitzvahs.”

Next to the board there was a table laid with a white cloth. People had been sticking half-empty glasses, crushed cocktail napkins and used toothpicks on it, but earlier it displayed fancy calligraphied place cards
for the tables. A few unclaimed cards remained.

“Only four no-shows.” Arabella picked up the cards and fanned them out like she’d been dealt this hand. “So who do you want to be? Shelley and Gale Scott at Table Four? Or Myra and Gary Levine at Table Twelve?”

“Um . . .” I was suddenly nervous. “Do you think this is a great idea, sneaking in? What if we get caught?”

“What’s sneaking?” Arabella
said. She looked to the left and right to make sure no one was watching as she pocketed Shelley and Gale’s tags and laid Myra and Gary’s back down. “For Jewish people, going to a big celebration like this is technically a mitzvah.”

“What’s a mitzvah?”

“It’s brownie points with God.” Arabella smiled. “And by the way, if anyone asks, just say you’re a cousin from Ohio. Everyone has cousins in
Ohio they never see.” She laid a hand on my elbow. “Look,” she said. She pointed to a table at the far end of the room set up with platters and piles and towers of different kinds of desserts—éclairs, molded ice creams, miniature cakes shaped like soccer balls, a chocolate fountain, cut-up fruit, and a bowl of candy big enough to make Halloween blush.

I guess I must have been staring in disbelief.
“Come on. This is nothing. My mom and I once attended an insurance convention in Las Vegas for three days and had prime rib for lunch. That hotel room had cable and a pool, too.”

“You did that with your mom?” I gasped.

“Only because we had to,” Arabella said. I didn’t understand her comment at the time, but I thought about it constantly when we were traveling from campground to campground in
the RV.

I remembered something else in that year about Arabella—once, when we went camping with the Girl Scouts, she’d gathered wood, started a fire, hung up a tarp, and laid out her sleeping bag before the rest of us had figured out where the bathrooms were.

I must have fallen asleep on the bus, because I woke up when we were pulling off the highway outside Washington, D.C., starting our lumbering
ride on one of those main avenues heading toward the center of the city, where there’s a massive stretch of grass dotted with monuments—the Mall.

“Okay, everybody,” Mr. Fowler announced, standing up in the front of the bus, clutching the sides of the seats to keep his balance. “I’m going to explain the rules of the first part of your trip. So listen up.”

Mr. Fowler teaches gym but has always
wanted to teach history. The school lets him sub when history teachers are absent, but when Mr. Fowler subs, you have to be careful about what he tells you. He’s big on “teachable moments,” i.e. self-involved tangents, but he’s not much for “factual accuracy,” as in he once told my class that The War of 1812 referred to the U.S.’s record of victories versus losses in battles. We won the battles 18–12.

“As you know,” Mr. Fowler said now, “this day has been set up as a scavenger hunt. You’re going to be divided up into groups of four, and each group is going to find all the landmarks on the list. Take pictures. We know most of you have cameras on your phones. If you don’t, grab a disposable camera from the front seat on your way out.

“When you find the landmark, write a few lines on the paper
explaining something about it—its function, how it was built, what it represents, some of the inscriptions you read there.” He checked his watch. “By the time we get out of the bus it should be just about nine thirty. We’ll meet back here at noon and again at three. Here is a list of the cell phones numbers for me and the other chaperones, as well as your classmates, in case you are running late
to the rendezvous point. Use it
only
in an emergency. I don’t want calls asking me where to find the restrooms or snacks or other nonsense.

“If you miss any of the check-ins or if you fail to find every landmark on your scavenger hunt sheet, you will be required to create a bulletin board for the History Club. These are time-consuming bulletin boards and you can expect to spend a full weekend
on the project. You will also receive a letter home to your parents.”

There were shouts and complaints, calls of, “No fair! That’s crazy.”

“Hey, don’t look at me,” Mr. Fowler said. That’s another one of his favorite tricks—to try to be friends with us, acting like we’re all on some big team and the
other
teachers are the ones who are making our lives hard. “Mr. Thornhill planned this whole thing.
And obviously, he’s not here to complain to, so just keep it to yourself. Any questions?”

The four of us stared at Mr. Fowler. Then turned to each other.

“Thornhill planned this trip?” Hal said.

“Is the whole scavenger hunt a clue?” Callie asked.

“Amanda was still here when he put the trip together,” Nia said, thinking out loud. “He wouldn’t have had much of a chance to make changes since
he was assaulted not long after she left.”

“That’s right,” Nia said. “He must have planned this trip with Amanda in mind.”

“Great,” said Callie. “So now, not only are we supposed to be decoding Amanda’s clues, we’re also supposed to be cracking the code someone else has left for her?”

I took the pendant out from under my shirt and ran my fingers over the filigree.

“Do you guys think
Amanda’s
in D.C.?” Hal asked. “Do you think she’s living here now? Has she left Orion for good?”

“Obviously, we don’t know,” Nia said. “But it would make sense. Thornhill planned this trip before he knew Amanda was going to disappear. He’d have thought she’d be on it. He must have wanted to lead her here—”

“Listen up,” Mr. Fowler said, raising his voice to quiet us all down—everyone was talking loudly
at this point. “I’m going to read out the groups.”

Suddenly: silence. Forget the bulletin board. Forget the letter home. What would be worse than anything was getting stuck for the day in a high-pressure scavenger hunt with someone you could not stand?

“Group one,” Mr. Fowler began. “Jerry Miller, Hank Albright, Stef Stone, Kendall Minovi. Group two,” he continued, working his way down the list.
As he read, there were whoops and groans as people registered their fates. I noticed two important things. Number one: friends were generally being split up. That was not good for us. Number two: the I-Girls got to be together as usual.

Mr. Fowler had gotten about halfway down the list when he read, “Nia Rivera.” I don’t think he actually paused before moving on to the next name, but at the time,
I felt like the moment between when he read Nia’s name and when he read mine lasted an hour. “Zoe Costas, Henry Bennett, Callista Leary.”