UnSouled (7 page)

The fact that Connor has managed to get Lev a message gives Lev a wave of intense relief. But the message itself makes no sense. Clearly it’s a distress signal. Connor is in trouble.

“Who’s ‘us’?” Lev asks.

The visitor shakes her head and kicks the ground almost
like a child might. “Can’t tell you that.” She looks at Lev and squints against the rising sun. “Can you still blow up?” she asks.

“No.”

The woman shrugs. “Right. Anyway, I promised I’d tell you what I told you, and I did. Now I gotta go before my brother finds out I’m gone. Nice to meet you, Lev. It is Lev, right? Lev Calder?”

“Garrity. I changed my name.”

She nods approvingly. “Figures. Guess you wanted no part of a family that would raise you to want your own unwinding.” Then she turns and lumbers back to the car.

Lev considers going after her—telling her he wants to stay in Heartsdale too—but even if she falls for it, getting in that car would be a bad idea. Whatever trouble Connor is in, it would be folly to volunteer for more of the same.

Instead Lev hurries to the old crumbling school bus and climbs to the hood and then to the roof, avoiding patches that have rusted all the way through. From his high vantage point, he watches the T-Bird kick up dust on the dirt road until it turns left onto a paved road. Lev tracks it as long as he can until it disappears into Heartsdale. Now that he knows the general direction the T-Bird has gone, he can wander the streets until he finds it again.

Maybe Connor wants Lev to go on without him, but Connor knows Lev better than that.

FOLLOWING IS A PAID POLITICAL ADVERTISEMENT

“My Grandma won’t talk about it, but she remembers a time when cars burned in the street and bars on windows weren’t enough to keep the danger out. She remembers when feral teens terrorized our neighborhood and no one felt safe.

“Well, it’s happening again. The Cap-17 law let thousands of seventeen-year-old incorrigibles back into the streets and severely limits the age for which parents can choose unwinding.

“Last week a boy on my block was stabbed by one of them on his way to school, and I’m afraid I’ll be next.

“Call or write your congressperson today. Tell them you want the Cap-17 law repealed. Let’s make the streets safe again for kids like me!”

—Sponsored by Mothers Against Bad Behavior

Lev heads out into the scorching day on his reconnaissance mission. He keeps his head low but his eyes wide open. The T-Bird, Lev had observed, was dirty enough to suggest it was left out in the elements instead of in a garage—but Heartsdale is a rat’s warren rather than a grid, and a systematic search of the streets proves difficult.

By two in the afternoon, he’s desperate enough to risk contact with the citizens of the town. He prepares himself by buying a Chevron baseball cap at a gas station and a pack of gum. He wears the cap to further hide his face and chews several sticks of gum until the sugar is blanched out. Then he spreads half of the gum wad in his upper gums above his front teeth and the other half in his lower gums. It’s just enough to change the shape of his mouth without making him look too weird. Maybe his paranoia that he will be recognized is a little extreme, but as AWOL Unwinds are fond of saying, “Better safe than severed.”

There’s a Sonic that he had passed that morning, where pretty servers on roller skates bring food to parked cars, as they have done since the beginning of recorded fast-food history. If anyone knows the cars of this town, it will be the Sonic servers.

Lev goes to the walk-up window and orders a burger and
a slushy, faking an accent that sounds way too deep-South drawly to be from Kansas, but it’s the best he can do.

After he gets his food, he sits at one of the outdoor tables and zeroes in on one of the roller girls who sits at the next table, texting between orders.

“Hey,” says Lev.

“Hey,” she says back. “Hot enough for ya?”

“Five more degrees, you can fry an egg on my forearm.”

That makes her smile and look over at him. He can practically read her mind in her facial expressions.
He’s not a regular. He’s cute. He’s too young. Back to texting.

“Maybe you can help me,” Lev says. “There was this car with a ‘for sale’ sign parked by the side of the road the other day, but now I can’t find it.”

“Maybe it sold,” she suggests.

“Hope not. See, I’m gettin’ my license in a couple of months. I was really hoping for that T-Bird. It’s a green convertible. Do you know it?”

She continues texting for a moment, then says, “Only green convertible around here belongs to Argent Skinner. If he’s selling it, he must be having a harder time than usual.”

“Or maybe he’s buying somethin’ better.”

She gives a dubious chuckle, and Lev gives her a winning smile with slightly puffy lips. She takes a moment to reassess, decides even with a driver’s license he’s still too young for her attention, and says, “He’s on Saguaro Street, two blocks up from the Dairy Queen.”

Lev thanks her and heads off with his burger and slushy. If he appears overeager, it’ll just play into his cover story.

Having passed the DQ earlier that morning, he knows exactly where to go—but as he reaches the corner, he hears something that sounds out of place in a town like Heartsdale. The rhythmic chop of an approaching helicopter.

Even before it arrives, a series of police cars pull onto the street. Their sirens are off, but their speed speaks of urgency. There are more than a dozen vehicles. There are Juvey squad cars, black-and-whites, and unmarked cars as well. The helicopter, now overhead, begins to circle the neighborhood, and Lev gets a sick feeling deep in the pit of his gut.

Rather than following the cars, he comes at the scene from an adjacent street, cutting through a few backyards, so as not to be seen. Finally he finds himself peering through the slats of a wooden fence at an unkempt ranch-style house that is in the process of being surrounded.

A house with a green convertible T-Bird parked on the driveway.

6 • Connor

That same morning, Argent comes down with a TV and plugs it into the outlet attached to the single dangling light fixture.

“All the comforts of home,” he happily tells Connor.

Argent, who must watch bad TV and infomercials all night long, didn’t wake up until after Grace had been gone and back, delivering her message to Lev. “Mum’s the word,” she had said. Connor has never known anyone else who actually used that expression. Now, as she enters behind Argent, she gives Connor a surreptitious zipped-mouth gesture.

The little TV pulls in a weak wireless signal from the house that makes everything painful to watch.

“I’ll figure out how to make it work better,” Grace tells Conner.

“Thanks, Grace. I’d appreciate that.” Not that Connor has any interest in watching TV, but showing Grace more appreciation than Argent shows her is key.

“No worries,” Argent says. “We don’t need a signal or cable to watch videos.”

By Connor’s reckoning, he’s been in captivity for about twenty-four hours now. Lev better have gone on without him. An antique shop near the high school in Akron where they first got separated. That should be enough for Lev to find it.

Argent, who called in sick at the supermarket, spends the morning playing his favorite videos, his favorite music, his favorite everything for Connor.

“You’ve been out of circulation for a while,” Argent tells him. “Gotta reeducate you on what’s cutting-edge in the world,” as if he thinks Conner was literally hiding under a rock for two years.

Argent’s theatrical tastes lean toward violent. Argent’s musical tastes lean toward dissonant. Connor’s seen enough real violence not to be entertained by it much anymore. And as for music, knowing Risa has broadened his horizons.

“Once you let me out of this cellar,” Connor tells Argent, “I’ll take you to see bands that will blow you away.”

Argent doesn’t respond to that right away. Since yesterday, Connor’s been mentioning things that they might do together. As buds. Connor suspects that whatever time frame Argent has in his head for Connor’s conversion, the turning point has not yet been reached. Until it is, anything Connor says will be suspect.

Argent leaves Connor with Grace to run some errands, and she is quick to bring out a plastic chessboard, setting up the pieces. “You can play, right? Just tell me your move, and I’ll make it for you,” Grace tells him.

Connor knows the game but never had patience to learn strategy. He won’t deny Grace the game, though, so he plays.

“Classic Kasparov opening,” she says after four moves, suddenly not sounding low-cortical at all. “But it’s no good against a Sicilian Defense.”

Connor sighs. “Don’t tell me you have a NeuroWeave.”

“Hell no!” says Grace proudly. “The brain’s all mine, such as it is. I just do good at games.” And then she proceeds to trounce Connor with embarrassing speed.

“Sorry,” says Grace as she sets up a second game.

“Never apologize for winning.”

“Sorry,” says Grace again. “Not for winning, but for being sorry for winning.”

Throughout the next game, Grace gives a blow-by-blow analysis, pointing out all the moves Connor should have made and why.

“Don’t worry about it,” Grace says, capturing Connor’s queen with a bishop hiding in plain sight. “Morphy made that slip against Anderssen, but still won the freaking match.”

Connor isn’t so lucky. Grace wipes the floor with him again. Actually, Connor would have been disappointed if she didn’t.

“Who taught you to play?”

Grace shrugs. “Played against my phone and stuff.” Then she adds, “I can’t play games with Argent. He gets mad when I win, and even madder when he wins, because he knows I let him.”

“Figures,” Connor says. “Don’t let me win.”

Grace smiles. “I won’t.”

Grace leaves and returns with an old-fashioned backgammon board—it’s a game Grace has to teach Connor how to play. She’s not very good at explaining, but Connor gets the gist of it.

Argent comes back during the second game, and with a single finger, flips the board. Brown and white pieces scatter everywhere.

“Stop wasting the man’s time,” Argent tells Grace. “He doesn’t want to do that.”

“Maybe I do,” Connor tells him, making sure to force a smile when he says it.

“No, you don’t. Grace just wants to make you look stupider than her. And anyway, she’s useless. She couldn’t once get her game on in Las Vegas.”

“I don’t count cards,” mumbles Grace morosely. “I just play games.”

“Anyway, I got something much better than board games right here.” And Argent shows Connor an antique glass pipe.

“Argie!” says Grace, a little breathless. “You shouldn’t be using great-grandpa’s bong!”

“Why not? It’s mine now, isn’t it?”

“It’s an heirloom!”

“Yeah, well, form follows function,” says Argent, once more completely missing the actual meaning of the expression. This time Connor doesn’t bother to point it out.

“Wanna smoke some tranq?” Argent asks.

“I’ve been tranq’d enough,” Connor tells him. “I don’t need to smoke the stuff.”

“No—see it’s different when you smoke it. It doesn’t knock you out. It just throws you for a loop.” He pulls out a red and yellow capsule—the mildest kind used in tranq darts—and puts it in the bowl with some common yard cannabis. “C’mon, you’ll like it,” he says as he lights it.

Connor had done his share of this sort of thing before his unwind order was signed. Being hunted kind of killed his taste for it.

“I’ll pass.”

Argent sighs. “Okay, I’ll admit something to you. It’s always been one of my fantasies to do tranq with the Akron AWOL and talk some deep spiritual crap. Now you’re actually here, so we have to do it.”

“I don’t think he wants to smoke tranq, Argie.”

“Not your business,” he snaps without even looking at Grace. Argent takes a hit from the pipe, then puts it over Connor’s mouth, holding Connor’s nose so he has no choice but to suck it in.

The physiological response is quick. In less than a minute, Connor’s ears feel like they’re shrinking. His head spins, and gravity seems to reverse directions a few times.

“You feeling it?”

Connor doesn’t want to dignify him with a response. Instead he looks to Grace, who just sits helplessly on a sack of potatoes. Argent takes a second hit and forces Connor to do one as well.

As Connor’s mind liquefies, memories of his life before unwinding come rushing back to him. He can almost hear his parents yelling at him and him yelling back. He can remember all the things—both legal and otherwise—that he did to numb the feeling of being troubled and troubling in a dull Ohio suburb.

He sees a little bit of his old self in Argent. Was Connor ever this much of a creep? No—he couldn’t have been. And besides, he got past it, but Argent never did. Argent is maybe twenty, but he’s still wallowing in the loser mud hole, letting it turn into a tar pit beneath his feet. The anger that Connor feels toward Argent dissolves into the liquid of his thoughts, spreading into a thin, wide layer of pity.

Argent takes another hit and reels. “Oh man, this is good stuff.” He looks bleary-eyed at Connor. The combination of tranq and weed have made Connor emotional. He knows it’s about his own past, but Argent takes it as a connection between them.

“We’re the same, Connor,” he says. “That’s what you’re thinking, right? I coulda been you. I can still be you.” He starts giggling. “We can be you together.”

The giggle is contagious. Connor finds himself giggling uncontrollably as Argent makes him take another hit.

“Gotta show you this,” Argent says. “You’ll get mad, but I gotta show you anyway.” Then Argent pulls out his phone and shows him one of the pictures he took with Connor yesterday.

“Good one, right? I put it up on my Facelink profile.”

“You . . . did what?”

“No big deal. Just for my friends and stuff.” Argent giggles again. Connor giggles. Argent laughs, and Connor finds himself laughing hysterically.