The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled

by Amanda Valentino

  From the gazebo, we rode our bikes to the library, locked them there as a decoy in case any of our parents came looking for us, and then took the city bus to the OCP campus. It was a short, easy ride out there, and for a second I wondered why Orion would still bother to maintain a bus line going out to the campus of a school that had been closed for more than twenty-five years.

  We found seats in the back and, since the bus was empty, we were able to talk in low voices about the Thornhill files and strategies we might employ to find Robin in Washington, D.C.

  “So has anyone had any more thoughts about the files?” Nia asked.

  “It seems so weird,” Hal said. “That he’d be compiling all that information. It’s creepy.”

  “I know we’ve been assuming he’s a good guy and all,” Callie said. “But what if he’s a criminal? What if he’s stealing all those people’s identities or something?”

  “Frankly,” said Callie. “It’s a just a little hard to take in. I mean, a couple of weeks ago I would have sworn Mr. Thornhill’s one goal in life was to punish students, and now I have to reconcile that with him as . . . a human being. Someone’s dad.”

  “And Amanda’s dad no less,” Nia added.

  “He wasn’t awful,” Callie mused. “He was strict, but now that I think about it, he was always fair, too.”

  “And outside of school, he was actually nice,” I volunteered, immediately regretting that I’d shared this information.

  “What?” said Nia. Three pairs of eyes turned to stare at me.

  “You knew him outside of school?” Callie’s voice echoed Nia’s tone.

  “Sort of,” I answered. “He was a family friend.” I didn’t add that, in Orion, he was our only family friend.

  Nia put her fingers on her temples as if a headache had just exploded.

  “When we moved to Orion, he took care of everything for us,” I reluctantly went on. “He got my mom the job at the school. He helped us find our house. He was—he was the only person we knew in the world. My mom told me my dad trusted him. Now that I know he’s Amanda’s dad, I can see why.”

  Suddenly the three of them were staring at me like I’d done something wrong. “What?” I said.

  “Nothing,” Callie answered, looking away, like if I didn’t get it, maybe I didn’t deserve to.

  Hal was the one to explain. “It’s just that it kind of blows our minds that you know all this stuff about Amanda’s life that we don’t. That you knew Amanda when she was—” It was clear he didn’t know how to finish that sentence.

  “The real her,” said Nia.

  “I don’t know how much of the person I knew was real,” I offered.

  “Yeah, but you knew so much more than the rest of us,” Callie said. “Sometimes I feel like everything Amanda ever told me was a lie. I know she had to, but still. I wonder.”

  “I still can’t believe her name isn’t even Amanda,” Nia said.

  “It isn’t Arabella either,” I pointed out.

  “But you knew her,” Callie said. “Before she was starting to figure all this stuff out. Before she was prepping us to be her guides. There’s something about all these secrets . . . I don’t know. It’s just wrong, somehow.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But it isn’t her fault. All of this—those sneaky pictures, all that collected information. That’s what’s really wrong.”

  Callie nodded, reassured.

  With squeaking brakes and a grinding engine, the bus came to a stop across the street from a decaying sign hanging crooked from a single post: ORION PHARMACEUTICAL COLLEGE: WHERE FUTURE PHARMACISTS COME TO LEARN.

  “Maybe that tagline was what did the college in,” Nia suggested. We all laughed.

  It took us about two seconds to see that the campus was heavily guarded, and when I say heavily, I mean guards pacing the perimeter. The whole campus was basically half a dozen brick rectangular buildings with flat roofs and dirty glass windows. It was surrounded by a chain-link fence that looked like it had been there since the place was closed.

  “Whoa,” said Hal.

  “Double whoa,” said Callie.

  We were standing in the bus stop shelter. One of the guards was already watching us. “Let’s move,” I said.

  “Where?” Callie said, though she was already jogging along at my side, Nia and Hal not far behind. And, ugh, Hal was swinging his arms as he ran. I guess because he’s a runner he was used to doing this to go faster, but the movement called a lot of attention to him.

  “Anywhere, just as long as it looks like we have to be somewhere that isn’t here.”

  “But where are we going?” Nia said. With the exception of the chain-link-encircled OCP campus, this was pretty much Nowheresville. There was a barely unfrozen cornfield across the street from the college and woods on either side of it.

  “Where we’re going isn’t the point,” I said. Would they believe me? I took a deep breath. “The point is just to disappear.”

  “Disappear?” Nia scoffed.

  I pointed to a thick-trunked maple tree that must have been standing in this spot for more than a hundred years. “Stand here. Make sure to stand in the shade. The sun is coming from right over the college, which means anything shaded is blocked from view by the tree.”

  “Okay,” Callie said. She had her hands on her hips. She was looking at me like her eyes were going to bug out of her head. “Now what?” she said.

  “Stay still,” I said. “Until the guards forget they ever saw you.”

  “How do you know they will ever forget?”

  “Because this is what I do,” I said. “I disappear.”

  “You what?” This was Nia.

  “It’s not like I actually turn invisible or something,” I said. “Just sort of invisible.”

  I remembered English class: give an example.

  “When I cut class,” I said. “I can walk down a hallway past a teacher and never get asked for a pass.”

  “Seriously?” said Hal. Before Amanda, Hal had cut class, like, maybe twice in his life.

  I rolled up my sleeve. The henna tattoo of a chameleon was almost gone, but I’d kept it alive by tracing over the lines in pen from time to time.

  “See that?” I said.

  “Yeah,” said Nia in a tone that let me know she was still waiting for me to explain.

  “Remember,” I said. “That is me.”

  Chapter 6

  About 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 d
ay 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 o
nto 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.”