Unraveling

by Elizabeth Norris

  I haven’t told him about Ben.

  Usually when I’m right, I’m all about rubbing it in Alex’s face, since if I’m being honest, Alex is right more often than I am. But in Spanish, when I slid into my seat next to him and he gave me his WTF just happened? face, my mouth dried out and I couldn’t speak. And now every time I think about telling him, I can’t make myself do it.

  Now that I know I was right, I don’t feel vindicated or anything. I don’t want to brag about it or give Alex a hard time because for once he was actually wrong. I feel strange, unsure of my movements and actions and thoughts. I feel like I’m not me. What if Ben didn’t bring all of me back from the dead? Or what if I’m just not supposed to still be here?

  When we pull into my driveway, I pause before I open the door. “If I run in and grab my suit, can you drop me off at the cove?” I ask Alex.

  “Why…”

  Then he shuts up. Because he was going to ask why I would go to La Jolla Cove instead of Torrey Pines. But he already knows.

  I can’t go back to Torrey Pines right now—not until I figure out how my John Doe really died and how it relates to the countdown. I can’t go back there and see skid marks from the truck that killed me.

  Especially not today.

  Torrey Pines—my beach, the one where I spent my summers, wasting my days, soaking up sun, making sand castles. That stretch of the ocean was mine—especially once I was old enough to actually make some money, and I took care of it and the people who swam there.

  It was Alex’s and my beach. And now it’s not—not anymore.

  “I’ll get Struz to pick me up later.”

  Alex glances at me. “You okay?”

  I nod, but he sees it’s halfhearted.

  “You don’t need to take all this on yourself, you know. I’ll do some research this afternoon. See what else I can find.”

  I lean my head back against the headrest and sigh—fifteen days isn’t a long time. “So you’ll drop me off?”

  Because he’s Alex and he’ll do anything to keep from going home, he says, “Of course, J.” And then when I don’t move, he turns to look at me and smiles. “You did mean today, right?”

  I smile and jump out of the car.

  On the last day of third grade, Lesley Brandon had an end-of-the-year party. She lived in Santaluz, so she had enough space to invite our entire elementary school, and she had just about the most beautiful pool I’d ever seen—someone totally designed it to look like a pond! With a waterfall! It was awesome. I raced everyone—and won, multiple times—and then Kate and I jumped off the top of the waterfall into the deep end until Lesley’s mother yelled at us.

  Out of our entire elementary school, Alex was the only kid who didn’t get in and swim.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t know how, either. His mom had signed him up for one of those Mommy and Me swim classes when he was little, but he was still awkward and scared, so he sat outside the pool and just sweated.

  That whole summer I made him come to the beach with me, and I taught him to swim, like really swim so that he could actually get into the pool the following year and race people, and beat them. Not me, but other people.

  When I get back in the car, I look over at Alex. I can’t see his eyes through his black Oakleys, but I don’t need to. He’s got his jaw set, and he’s practically grinding his teeth, trying to think of something to say.

  I want to tell him more about Ben, not so he knows I’m right—though I have to admit a part of me does want to push him and say, “I told you so!” The greater part of me, though, just wants to hear his take on this whole thing because if thinking I died generates reflection, actually knowing I did takes it to a whole new level. It makes me wonder if there’s a reason I’m still alive, if there’s a reason the world has given me a second chance at life.

  Still, I can’t seem to make myself form the words. It’s not that I don’t know what to say, it’s that I don’t know enough yet.

  And I need Alex to believe me when I tell him this time.

  15:01:00:34

  The cove is right at the edge of downtown La Jolla, which means parking is a bitch. Alex pulls up near the cliffs, and right as I’m opening the door to get out, he says, “So, Ben Michaels?”

  “Really? You decide you’ve got something you want to talk about now?” I wave to the crowds of people and cars and the general insanity around us.

  Alex smiles. “Well, I was sort of waiting to let you bring it up, but since you’re not going to, I thought I’d just pry it out of you.”

  I roll my eyes. “Right, so what about him?”

  Alex shrugs. “I just never would have figured he was smart.”

  I can’t help but smile. At least I wasn’t the only person fooled. Alex is typically a nicer person than I am, so it counts for something that he had Ben pegged the same way I did.

  “J?” Alex says.

  “Hmm?”

  He lowers his voice and makes an attempt to sound serious. “You know what I’m going to say. He kicked your ass today when it came to that excerpt. Like full-on dragged you to the gallows.”

  “You’re the biggest dork alive,” I say as I get out of the car.

  “What do you expect?” Alex calls after me. “I’m half-Asian!”

  I shake my head and keep going, my pace picking up as I get to the narrow steps that will lead me down the rocks to the beach. I pull my cap and goggles on, and I tuck my clothes in the crevice between a couple of hard-to-reach rocks.

  And I don’t look back.

  15:00:53:49

  Once upon a time, swimming was a stress reliever for me. Something about the rush of the water, the rhythmic movements, the absence of conversation, the pure isolation of it all—it helped quiet everything in my mind so I could focus. Swimming let me think.

  Then Kate ruined that for me.

  Because of her, I lost a block of time at that party freshman year. I still don’t know what actually happened. Just that Kate and her new popular friends handed me a watered-down beer, and then I woke up at two a.m. in some unknown car with my jeans undone and underwear ripped. For months, I replayed every possible scenario over and over whenever I was alone. How did I end up in that car? What ripped my underwear? Who undid my jeans? Even swimming couldn’t help me make sense of those questions. Even swimming couldn’t make them right.

  Lives are made of strings of moments, and every once in a while, one of those moments is pivotal and defining. It changes everything, alters you so completely that when you look back, there’s a clear before and after.

  Different people have different pivotal moments in their lives.

  Before: Kate and I were friends, and we teased Alex about everything—even made him play Barbies with us.

  After: We didn’t speak.

  Before: I was a swimmer. Someone who needed to be in the water every day in order to feel complete, whole, happy.

  After: I couldn’t bring myself to be alone, and swimming became just a sport other people did.

  Before: I was naive and believed the best of people.

  After: I recognized that the only person you can ever truly rely on is yourself.

  Only now, getting drugged at a party isn’t the most defining moment of my life. Now it’s just something I survived, something I moved past and got over, maybe not completely, but enough.

  Now I need to swim again—alone. And I can, because that old moment is just a shadow compared to the moment I died.

  And the moment Ben Michaels brought me back.

  15:00:53:01

  The water is freezing when it hits my toes, my feet, and my bare legs, but I run into the water and try not to wince as the waves splash my stomach. The Pacific Ocean in September is hardly what we’d call tourist friendly. But the tourists keep coming—they’re like that.

  When I’m knee deep, I throw my body forward and dive in. For a second the sheer cold pounds against my head, and I feel like my brain might shut off. My eyes water slight
ly, but I’m already moving. My body takes over without needing to be told what to do. It remembers this. My arms reach in front of me and pull the water underneath me with each stroke, and my legs move with a steady thrum.

  At the very least, in fifteen days, a bomb is going to go off. If Alex and I are right, it might spread a genetically engineered virus that will do to everyone what it did to the man in that house.

  Salt water stings my dry lips as I take a breath, and I only hear waves and the even rhythm of the beating of my own heart.

  I picture the man’s detached jaw and wonder if dying like that was as painful as it looked.

  A wandering piece of seaweed tangles itself in my fingertips, and I almost have a heart attack and die right there. Instead I grab it and fling it somewhere without breaking stroke.

  Somehow the radiation and the UIED are connected to the unidentified man whose unidentified truck killed me. Somehow they’re connected to three old cases from 1983, and somehow—

  Suddenly, with my pulse echoing throughout my body, the taste of salt on my tongue, and nothing but ocean surrounding me, it occurs to me that something about Ben saving me is just plain wrong. It’s incredibly convenient that a guy who can manipulate molecular structure was there, at the scene of the accident, to bring me back from the dead.

  Unless it wasn’t just some unrelated phenomenon.

  Unless it’s all connected.

  Someone who can remake skin to get rid of a scar, someone who can restart a stopped heart, someone who can meld bones back together…

  What else is someone like that capable of?

  15:00:21:24

  “So are you going to tell me what the hell that was last night or what?” I say when Struz picks me up.

  Only I make a mistake. The car door’s open, but I’m not actually inside it yet, so he looks at me and just starts to drive. He catches me off guard, and I have to run after him for ten feet before I reach the stopped car. And sure enough, as soon as I’m an arm’s length away from the door he speeds off again.

  I run after him again, but this time I slow down sooner and hesitate slightly on my way to the door. When I’m two arms’ lengths away, I burst forward and swing myself into the car, slamming the door shut behind me.

  We’re already driving when I say, “Jerk.”

  “You know better than to ask me about cases, Princess.”

  I’ve known Struz just about my whole life it feels like, which means I know exactly what I can ask him about and how I can do it. “I’m not asking you about a case. I’m asking you about something I saw.”

  Struz shakes his head. “Yeah, and you still haven’t told me how you ended up past the border at the crime scene.”

  “Counterintelligence.”

  “I’m not joking—”

  “Struz, neither am I! I saw that guy in the doorway, dead with his freaking face melting onto the floor. You think I don’t know this isn’t something to joke about?”

  And then I take a deep breath and tell him almost everything. I tell him about the files I saw in my dad’s study, about the UIED, about the autopsy report of my John Doe, about the theory that Alex and I came up with in the library.

  I still don’t tell him about Barclay bringing me to the scene. Struz isn’t stupid. He totally knows how I got there. He just wants confirmation, but I’m not going to sell Barclay out, even if he is a douche bag.

  And I don’t tell Struz about Ben. Yet. Because I don’t want Ben to be involved in this virus. Coincidences do happen even if they’re unlikely, and I’m probably jumping to conclusions by even considering that.

  When I finish, Struz sighs. “This is a bad one, J-baby.”

  And I wait, because I know there’s more coming.

  “We’ve got the UIED downtown at the Federal Building. The good news is it’s not going any faster. We’ve still got a couple of weeks, but we’ve been calling in experts to look at the UIED for weeks now and nobody’s come up with shit,” he says, and somehow it sounds more serious coming from him than from my dad. Because Struz is almost always playful and funny. He never really gets serious. Only he is right now.

  A couple of weeks…

  “The timer just keeps counting down. Nothing we do seems to work to disable it. And none of the tests can figure out what it even is. We’ve started coming up with backup plans for what to do if we can’t shut it off, but we can’t just drive it into the desert if we’re not sure what’s going to happen.”

  “Fly it out into space?” I say, even though that’s a bad sci-fi movie cliché.

  Struz glances at me out of the corner of his eye, and I feel sick. Because I can tell that’s something that’s actually on the table.

  “Is it a virus?” I ask. “The radiation?”

  Again he sighs. “We’re not sure. It could be. Or it could be nothing. But we have to consider every scenario so we can plan for them. We’ve got a theory that a virus in small doses, injected right into the bloodstream, would kill via radiation poisoning, whereas if it’s induced into the atmosphere—converted to an atmospheric pathogen—it could be pumped through the air vents, for instance, and that might do what happened to the people in that house.”

  People. As in more than one, more than just that guy.

  I have to take a deep breath to keep myself from throwing up all over Struz’s car.

  “How many people were in the house?” I ask.

  “There was a family of four, all identities confirmed,” Struz says, and I wonder how old the children were. I wonder if they were boys or girls, what their mother was like, what kind of job their father had, what schools they went to, what dreams they had. I wonder if they loved one another the way I love Jared.

  “And the other three bodies we still haven’t been able to identify.”

  “Wait?” I ask. “So there were three more bodies in the house?”

  Struz nods.

  “And you can’t confirm their identities?”

  “No, but we do know they didn’t live there.”

  I shake my head, trying to wrap my mind around all of this.

  “What?” Struz asks, giving me his sidelong glance again.

  “I can’t help wondering where all these unidentifiable people are coming from.”

  14:22:13:58

  When I burn the macaroni and cheese beyond repair and drop one of my parents’ nice crystal wineglasses, I admit to myself that I can’t wait until tomorrow to talk to Ben. I might have a limited time frame to figure things out. Nothing can wait. My mind is running in circles, and my hands have developed a slight tremor. I have to know what he’s keeping from me. I have to know if he’s somehow connected to this.

  Things like laundry can wait. Even if it means Jared will shrink another one of my sweatshirts.

  I order a pizza and leave Jared money and a note. Alex can’t get away from his mother to drive me, and I refuse to ride my bike that far, so I decide to chance having my license taken away and just drive myself. I only had that one seizure, and it was right after Ben messed with my body’s molecular structure. A seizure as a side effect is probably getting off easy.

  Alex calls as I’m driving. He’s whispering, and I can barely hear him over the running water in the background—this is how he hides from his mother.

  “Are you going to tell me what your obsession with Ben Michaels is all about? I thought you were over the whole thing.”

  “I just need to talk to him about some stuff,” I say. It’s lame, even for me.

  Alex says something about my obsessive personality and looking for things in people that I want to see, but I don’t hear him because my phone is beeping.

  As I pull it away from my ear to see who’s calling, it occurs to me that maybe I shouldn’t be driving with a suspended license and talking on my cell phone and checking my call waiting.

  It’s Nick.

  “Alex, I gotta go,” I say into the phone, more because of the whole illegal driving thing and less because of Nick. “I’
ll call you later.”

  He tells me to be careful and hangs up.

  Nick is still calling on the other line, and I don’t know what to do about that. So I do nothing and just let it go to voice mail. We never really had the official “we’re together” talk so I don’t know if we are, but it’s becoming abundantly clear—if it wasn’t before, and it sort of was—that I don’t really want us to be “together.”

  He’s pretty and he’s got great abs, like the kind that are so toned you can sometimes see the definition through his T-shirts, and when it’s just us, he’s funny and charming and smart and interesting.

  But he’s also immature at least fifty percent of the time. It’s like he’s two different people. I like the thoughtful guy who listens to what I say and is sweet to my brother. I even like the guy who will make me laugh when I’m stressed out. But when he’s with Kevin and his boys, he’s the guy performing to a crowd, doing things just for the attention. And I don’t really want to be with that guy.

  Right now with everything else going on, blowing him off requires less thought and less energy. So even though it’s a shitty thing to do to someone and he probably does deserve better, right now there are too many more important things I need to worry about.

  Like whether I’m going to die of radiation poisoning in fourteen days.

  14:21:55:36

  Pacific Beach is the epitome of predictable. It’s full of people who are overtanned and underdressed. And not just the MTV-type frat guys and blond chicks in their twenties; there are also all the people who used to be those people twenty years ago and are now leathery-skinned women who need to stop smoking and eat a burger or middle-aged hairy-chested guys with beer bellies who are still hitting on college girls, or younger. Gross.