The Innocence Treatment

by Ari Goelman

  I stood next to Sasha as he filled a new plate at the seafood table. “Thanks,” he said. “The guy was about to stamp on my face when you got in his way.”

  “Wasn’t there a less painful way to get your glasses—”

  “Hey,” he interrupted, and I remembered that the security guys surrounding us were all working for the Department. “Are you okay with driving us home?”

  “Not really. Why?”

  He blinked a few times, forehead crinkling. “I can barely see across the room now.”

  “You really need glasses to see? I figured they were just for the Department to—”

  “Nope. I’m super-nearsighted, and go figure—the Department has never offered to pay for the eye operation. So can you drive home?”

  “I guess. No stupider than anything else I have planned for tonight.”

  Sasha smiled and took my arm. “I can’t see squat, so you’ll have to be my guide to the party. Tell me if we pass anyone I should say hi to.” In a lower voice, lips so close to my ear I could feel his breath, he said, “Clock’s ticking. I’m supposed to be on my way home right now, so I can boot up my backup glasses as quickly as possible. Where are we going?”

  I led him toward the Great Hall. “Not too fast,” he cautioned, lips brushing my ear. “We’re just ambling through the party.” He smiled at some guy who happened to catch his eye, and waved at someone else.

  We made our way through the dance floor, Sasha clasping the hands of anyone he recognized, bumping chests, etc. For all the world just the cool new kid having a good time at a party. The only false note: the bruises coming up on his face.

  I couldn’t quite imitate his nonchalance, but I slowed to his pace and smiled at anyone I recognized.

  We passed Riley dancing with a very good-looking guy I’d never seen before. She waved me over. I mouthed bathroom and kept walking.

  Finally we made it to the base of the main staircase. We picked our way past the handful of kids sitting on the enormous stairs. Upstairs, a dozen or so people were watching a movie in Riley’s home theater, while a few more were wandering around trying the locked doors to the bedrooms, maybe looking for another bathroom. We weren’t the only couple up there either—at least three couples had given up on finding more privacy and were making out in the darker corners of the hallway.

  I led Sasha down the hall to the back staircase. A tuxedoed waiter walked out of the stairwell, balancing a tray of drinks on one hand. He carefully closed the door behind him, making sure the lock engaged, before walking past us.

  Once the waiter was past, Sasha waved his wand at the lock. “Alohomora!” he said.

  I glanced at him, puzzled.

  “Sorry. Harry Potter joke. It’s the magic spell that … Forget it.” Sasha tried the door handle. “Do you have a way of getting the door open?”

  “Hopefully.” I flipped open the numeric keypad next to the fingerprint lock. “Assuming they haven’t changed the servants’ code in the last few months…” I punched the numbers: 1-0-3-0. Riley’s birthday. A small click, and I pushed the door open. The back staircase was much less fancy than the main one: tiled steps, exposed brick wall bare except for lights and surveillance cameras.

  I ran up the stairs, averting my face from the cameras and clutching Sasha’s hand in mine. With any luck, whoever was watching the cameras would miss us. They had a lot to watch tonight. If they did see us, hopefully they’d just assume we were sneaking off to make out in privacy, now that Sasha’s glasses had been disabled. We emerged in a hallway on the third floor, a few yards from Riley’s rooms. I glanced down the hall toward her father’s office. The door was closed, but a little light bled out from beneath it.

  “In here.” I led him into Riley’s art room/office. As usual, her desk was barely visible beneath a pile of clothes and other crap. I pushed a pair of jeans out of the way and opened the desk’s top drawer. It was filled to bursting: hair ties, lipstick, perfume, vitamins, and so on. I picked up two big handfuls of stuff and put them on the floor, trying to keep everything more or less together.

  I turned back to the desk drawer, sifting through what was left. What if Riley had started keeping the whistle somewhere else? What if she had thrown it out? I took out a box of colored pencils. Three pads of sticky notes. An energy bar. A box of birth control pills.

  Sasha’s phone buzzed. He glanced at it, tapped out a quick message, and put it back in his pocket. “My handler’s getting impatient.”

  “Him and me both,” I said. There wasn’t much left in the drawer now. An old tablet computer. A silver frame with a picture of Riley and her parents in their old front yard. Damn damn damn.

  “What are you looking for?” Sasha asked.

  “A way to get her father out of his office,” I said. I picked up the picture frame, and finally, there it was, wedged in the corner of the drawer. A small green whistle. I closed my hand around it. I smiled.

  “Ah, so we can use his computer?”

  “Exactly.” I showed Sasha the whistle. “He’s going to take his dog for a quick walk.”

  It was a scheme Riley came up with when she was ten, crafty little girl that she was. Every time she blew the whistle she gave her father’s Pomeranian a treat. Cedar’s not a stupid dog. It didn’t take him long to start scratching on the office door every time Riley blew the dog whistle.

  I opened Riley’s door a crack so I could see down the hallway to where her dad’s office was. I brought the whistle to my mouth and blew.

  No movement from the office. I listened hard, but the music downstairs was too loud for me to hear a dog scratching at the door. Shoot. Maybe it had been so long that Cedar didn’t care about the whistle anymore. I blew the whistle again. Waited twenty seconds. Blew it again.

  Finally the door to Riley’s father’s office opened. Mr. Halston stood silhouetted, Cedar panting at his side. “For God’s sake, Cedar. You have to pee more often than I do.” Riley’s father ambled toward the servants’ staircase, one hand in Cedar’s thick fur. “We’ll go out the back way. God forbid Riley’s friends see any evidence she has a parent.”

  I stepped farther into Riley’s room, holding my breath, until I heard the door to the servants’ staircase close behind Mr. Halston.

  The moment the door closed, I led Sasha toward the office. “Come on. Before the server logs him out for inactivity.” I ran down the hallway and lunged across Mr. Halston’s office to tap at his keyboard and keep the connection alive.

  Sasha slid into Mr. Halston’s desk chair and started pulling up menus on the computer’s screen, leaning in so he could see the screen without his glasses. “You’re a genius,” he said. He waved a hand at the retinal scanner and the security fob mount. “Triple-factor authentication, and we didn’t even need a password.” He opened up a server and began sifting through folders. “Why did Riley have a dog whistle in her desk?”

  “Sometimes she wanted her dad out of his office.”

  “Yeah, I got that. But why?”

  “You know how it is…” I stopped myself, realizing that Sasha really didn’t know. How old had he been when the Department had found him in the refugee camp? Did he even remember his parents? “Growing up, sometimes you want your father to stop working. Riley’s father has always worked a lot.” I felt a pang of guilt, thinking of ten-year-old Riley staring at her father’s office door, blowing her stupid dog whistle, waiting for him to come out. Hoping he’d notice her.

  Sasha met my eyes. “Betraying your friends isn’t so fun, is it? I usually tell myself that I don’t have a choice. That I have to do it.”

  “But I don’t have to do it,” I said. “I could just live in ignorance.”

  “That’s the problem,” Sasha said. “You almost never have to do anything.” He hesitated. “Do you want me to stop?”

  I didn’t hesitate. “I want you to hurry up. Cedar’s too old to go for long walks.”

  Sasha turned back to the screen so quickly, I wondered if he’d have stopped
if I told him to. “We’ll be done in a minute. This guy has crazy-good access.” He clicked through a few more folders and typed Fie in a search dialogue. “Here you are: Fielding, Lauren, 349205.” He put out his hand. “Nano drive, please.”

  I took the ancient nano drive out of my pocket and handed it to him.

  He leaned over the computer and inserted the drive. “Thanks for grabbing this. I didn’t want to have to explain why I had it in my pocket when the guards frisked me.”

  “You think they would have cared about a nano drive?”

  “You can’t be too careful,” he said, straightening up. “When you’re about to do something totally dumb, I mean. Here we go.”

  He sat back in the desk chair and dragged a bunch of folders onto the nano drive’s icon. Standing, he plucked the nano drive from Mr. Halston’s device and handed it to me. “And there you are.”

  He turned back to the screen. “Let me back out of here, and we can go.” As he spoke, his fingers continued to fly over the computer’s screen. I might not have noticed what he did next if his shoulders hadn’t suddenly tensed. Even so, I almost missed the moment when he deleted my folders, taking them permanently off the Department’s system.

  “Whoa!” I hit Sasha’s shoulder. “Why’d you do that? They’ll know someone broke into their system and deleted my files.”

  He didn’t answer. His face was oddly still as he stared at the screen, fingers still flying over the keyboard. “They won’t notice for a while,” he said. “I created some dummy folders. Assuming no one tries to open them in the next few hours, when the backup servers do their sync tonight, your backup files will be written over, too.”

  “But why?”

  He shut down the folder he was looking at and brought up the spreadsheet Mr. Halston had had up when he left the room. “Would you believe me if I told you I’m protecting you?”

  “No. I would not.”

  He glanced at me. “So call it a side project. Don’t ask more if you don’t want me to lie.” He rose. “We should get back.”

  I put the drive in my pocket, following him out of the office. “Why would someone at the Department ask you to delete Departmental data?” He didn’t have to answer. No one at the Department would ask that. Of course they wouldn’t. “Shoot. You’re subcontracting, aren’t you?”

  His left cheek gave a minuscule twitch. “Stop it,” he said. “I did what you wanted me to. Leave the rest alone. I assure you that the person who asked me to delete your data has no interest in the Department finding out what we did tonight.”

  “Who are you selling my files to?”

  “I don’t have your files,” Sasha said. “You have them in your pocket. All I did was delete the Department’s copy.”

  “For who?” I demanded. “Those are the records of my life! Who wanted you to delete them?”

  We heard steps in the stairwell, and both our heads swiveled toward the door. Someone opened the downstairs door, and we heard the distant voices of servants carrying out more party supplies.

  “We should go,” Sasha said. “And you should keep your voice down.”

  I darted into Riley’s room and put everything back in her desk drawer. Casting a quick look around the room’s mess, I was pretty sure Riley wouldn’t notice anything out of place.

  I rejoined Sasha in the hallway, and together we entered the servants’ stairwell. We were walking down the stairs, back under the surveillance cameras, when he paused. He turned to me, and I realized he was angry, too, or at least defensive. Keeping the back of his head to the camera, he said, “What would you do to get out of being a human surveillance camera? Recording every interaction you have with everyone and anyone you meet? I have to apply for a special permit from my handler to take my glasses off at any point between six a.m. and ten p.m. Seven days a week. And that assumes I’m in bed at ten. If I stay up later, the glasses stay on later.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “That time I met you in the tree house—that was the only unmonitored interaction I’ve had with another person in over a year. You know how I got there without my glasses? I pretended to go to sleep and then climbed out the bedroom window.”

  I thought of that night. The heat of his lips in the chilly air.

  “Then, the next day and the day after, I couldn’t talk to you about what happened between us. I couldn’t say a thing to you without everyone at work hearing every word. You have no idea how much I want to just have a private conversation with you.”

  I stepped toward him, in full view of the surveillance camera, and kissed him. He froze for a second, his face strangely naked without his glasses, then kissed me back.

  It felt very different from making out in the darkness of the tree house. The staircase was brightly lit with fluorescent light, and at any moment someone could have interrupted us. The nearest security camera was maybe five feet away and pointing straight at us. And still, it was two or three minutes before I pulled away.

  Sasha kept his arms around me and, lips near my ear, muttered, “Was that just to convince security we weren’t up to anything serious upstairs?”

  “Why else would I kiss you?” I whispered back as I took his hand and led him down the stairs. The party was in full swing when we emerged from the back staircase. A DJ had set up in the home theater, and the second floor was full of people dancing now, too.

  I looked around for Riley and Gabriella, wanting to say goodbye, but the place was thronged. It was all we could do to make our way down the main stairs toward the front door.

  We stepped outside, into a cloud of tobacco and marijuana smoke. I took out my cell phone and texted Riley a quick apology for not saying goodbye before we left.

  We got back to the car, both of us still jittery with excitement. Sasha took my hand, and I leaned toward him. “Maybe we don’t have to go straight home,” I said.

  He kissed me. A quick, chaste touch of our lips. Then he met my eyes, sighed, and handed me the car keys. “I have to get my backup pair of glasses on. Or we’re gonna catch someone’s attention.”

  I glanced down at the keys, puzzled.

  “You’re driving me home,” Sasha said. “I can’t see squat.”

  “Oh. Right.” I walked around the car and sat in the driver’s seat. I held the keys toward the ignition and the car purred to life, the smell of slightly burnt French fries filling the air.

  “Now what?” I said, once Sasha had folded himself into the passenger seat.

  “Now you take me home.”

  “No. I mean, how do I back up?”

  He stared at me, comprehension slowly dawning on his face. “Wait. You’ve never driven before?”

  “I have a disability,” I said. “At least I used to. I wasn’t even supposed to cross the street on my own. You think they were going to let me drive?” I looked at the gearshift and saw the letters there. “How hard can it be? I assume R is for reverse.” I tried pulling the gearshift toward the R but it didn’t move.

  “You have to hold the button in,” Sasha said, then put his hand over my hand to prevent me switching gears. “Okay. Let’s switch places. I’ll drive.”

  “You can’t see.”

  “And you can’t drive. I’ll be fine. Probably.”

  We switched places, and he backed the car out of its parking spot, hunched forward, squinting over the wheel like an old man. Once we made it to the highway, he relaxed a little as the car’s autodriver took over.

  Getting from the highway’s exit to our subdivision was more sketchy.

  The car’s ancient safety features were all that saved us. It abruptly braked half a dozen times when Sasha was about to rear-end the car ahead of us, and several times swerved itself back to the center of our lane, when Sasha drifted toward opposing traffic. Fortunately, it was almost 11 p.m. on a Saturday, and the suburban streets were quiet.

  When we finally got to his house, he jumped out of the car. “Let me get my glasses back on. Then I’ll give you a lift home.”


  “I live two blocks away. I’ll walk.” It was still a thrill to me—walking around by myself at night. “Unless … Did you want to open the files with me?”

  He inhaled sharply, then shook his head. “I can’t. My handler knows I’m home. He’ll go crazy if I don’t get my glasses back on.” He smiled at me—the kind of sweet, sad smile that would have melted my brain if I had let it. I didn’t let it. “You’ll have to fill me in. I trust you.”

  His words hung there for a moment, as awkward as if he’d just confessed his undying love to me. Because I sure don’t trust him. Like him, yes. Desire him, definitely. But trust…? I’m not an idiot anymore.

  “Sure,” I said after the moment had become thoroughly awkward. “I’ll tell you all about it tomorrow.”

  “In the tree house?” he said. “Ten thirty tomorrow night?”

  “As close to that as I can get out.” I started to walk away. At the same moment he started to come around the car toward me.

  We both froze, then he continued toward me. His hands were cold, his lips warm. “This was a really fun date,” he said a few seconds later.

  I snorted. But he was right, it really had been fun. My first date ever. “See you tomorrow,” I said.

  I walked home, feeling happy and nervous, one hand cradling the nano drive in my pocket. As far as I could tell, we had gotten away with something we had no business getting away with.

  My mother was waiting up for me in the living room. “Did Sasha drop you off?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “I walked from his house. He got his glasses broken at the party, so we had to stop at his place first.”

  She kissed my cheek. “Did you have fun?”

  “Sure. We didn’t stay long, because of his glasses, but it was fun.”

  “What happened to his glasses?”

  Before I could answer, Evelyn came down the stairs dressed for bed. “You okay?” she said.

  “Sure!” I found myself slipping back into my old perky tone, as much to reassure myself as them. “I love Riley’s Halloween parties.”