Don't Turn Around

by Michelle Gagnon

  “It is pretty lame,” Amanda admitted, taking another sip of punch. “I missed it last year.”

  “The deejay was better. I mean, he still sucked, but less badly.”

  They stood next to each other for a minute. Peter searched desperately for something else to say. Then her face lit up, and she waved at someone across the room. “Nice talking to you,” she tossed back before walking off.

  Dumbfounded, Peter watched her leave. She joined a small knot of girls and launched into conversation. She was animated, using her arms to talk, throwing her head back to laugh. The complete antithesis of the girl he’d just spoken with, like someone had inserted a quarter and she came to life. Peter wondered if she was talking about him—but a minute passed, and none of the other girls so much as glanced in his direction. Somehow that made it even worse, like Amanda had forgotten all about him before getting halfway across the room.

  He sulked for the rest of the night, to the point where Mackenzie got annoyed and left the after-party in a huff with one of her friends. Peter felt a little bad about that, but couldn’t summon the effort to text an apology. He ended up getting hammered and crashing out on Donnie’s couch.

  He started frequenting common Brookline Girls’ hangouts, looking for Amanda, but came up empty.

  Then one day in early spring, Peter ran smack into some sort of parade as he was coming out of the Apple store. He was trying to cross the street to get to the parking lot, cursing the fact that his car would be blocked in until the crush of people dissipated.

  Peter was so focused on forging his way through that he didn’t even see her. He looked down when a hand grasped his elbow, braced to tell someone off. Instead, he found himself inches away from the girl from the dance. This time, she was smiling.

  “Hey,” Amanda said, leaning in close so he could hear her.

  Peter was flustered to see her again, but quickly recovered and said, “Hey.”

  “Not a lot of guys come to this sort of thing. Good for you.” She was carrying a placard. Printed in large letters was NOW, with NATIONAL ORGANIZATION FOR WOMEN in smaller type below it.

  “Yeah, well … I’m a big believer in the cause,” he said.

  “That’s great.” She linked arms with him and said, “Let’s hurry, I don’t want to miss the first speaker.”

  Months later, when they were officially a couple, Peter confessed that he hadn’t originally been there for the rally. Amanda laughed and teased that he got her to date him under false pretenses. It had become something of a joke between them.

  It was hard to believe that was only a year and a half ago.

  He listened to the sound of her breathing. He couldn’t tell if she was really sleeping, or just lying there quietly.

  “Amanda?” he finally whispered.

  “Mm?”

  “You awake?”

  “I am now.” She sounded annoyed. “I have class early tomorrow, Peter.”

  “I know. I think we need to talk, though.”

  She didn’t answer. He felt her go rigid beside him, her breath rising and falling less steadily.

  “What’s going on, Amanda?”

  “I told you, we’re just friends.”

  “It looked like more than friends.”

  “It’s not.”

  “So we’re still together, then?”

  A long beat.

  After a minute, he said, “I can’t believe you’re dumping me for someone like that.”

  “Like what?” She turned over and leaned on her elbow, her face slit by light from a gap in the venetian blinds. Reprovingly, she said, “You don’t even know him.”

  “Sure I do. He’s Mr. Perfect. Probably on student council, sings a capella, rows crew. We used to laugh at guys like that.”

  She didn’t answer, and he knew he’d hit a mark. Peter laughed. “No way. Does he really sing?”

  “He’s prelaw,” she said defensively. “He wants to become a community organizer, start working for change at a grassroots level. You and he actually have a lot more in common than you’d think.”

  “Yeah? Like what?”

  Amanda paused, like she knew that what she was about to say was wrong. She went ahead and said it anyway. “His sister died of PEMA, too.”

  The silence was different this time. Peter felt like he couldn’t breathe, as if his rib cage had shrunk around his lungs, rolling them into a tight ball and forcing the air out of them.

  “Peter …” she said.

  Ignoring her, he got out of bed and started pulling on his pants.

  “It’s the middle of the night,” she protested. “Where are you going?”

  Angrily, Peter tugged a sweater over his T-shirt. He dug around the pile of clothes draped over the chair, trying to find his fleece by feel in the dark. He felt her eyes on him, but she didn’t say anything else.

  “I really loved you, Amanda,” he finally said.

  “I loved—”

  “Don’t. Just don’t.” Peter slipped on his sneakers without lacing them and slung his duffel over his shoulder. Without looking back, he stormed out of the room.

  It was just before dawn when Noa finally reached her spot. It was a place she’d discovered years earlier, the second or third time she’d run away from The Center.

  The Long Wharf Marriott was quiet this time of morning. The front doors slid apart silently. Noa kept her head down as she cruised past the yawning clerk at the desk. He eyed her, but went back to his newspaper when she made a beeline for the elevators.

  That was the trick she’d discovered with hotels—if you looked presentable and acted like you belonged there, they wouldn’t kick you out. The only time it hadn’t worked was when she came in sporting a black eye, courtesy of her new bunkmate at The Center.

  But usually, she skated past. Of course, getting into a room could be tricky, especially at this hour. The maids’ carts weren’t roaming the halls yet, with master keys tucked among rolls of toilet paper. Once Noa had gotten into a fancy suite that way, two enormous rooms and a mammoth bathroom all to herself until the locks were changed at eleven a.m. She’d taken a bath, stayed up late watching pay-per-view movies, gorged on everything in the minibar.

  She’d tried a few other hotels, but the Marriott was her mainstay, where she consistently got lucky. Plus on a previous foray, Noa had found a place where she could hunker down and not be bothered for at least a few hours. It wouldn’t be easy to sleep, but thankfully after everything that had happened she still felt wired. And she should be able to get online there. She wanted to get back in contact with A6M0. Clearly he or she knew what was going on, and Noa was getting tired of the coyness.

  She got off the elevator on the top floor and went down the hall. In the alcove past the ice machine was a battered metal door. She tried the handle: It turned. Noa heaved a sigh of relief.

  She’d discovered on an earlier visit that this particular room was usually unlocked. It was tiny and windowless. A linoleum floor that didn’t get cleaned as often as it should, a rickety table, three chairs, and a trash can. Some sort of employee break room, either too out of the way or so relentlessly grim that it was rarely used. Noa could care less. It was quiet, warm, and safe—and no one would be looking for her here.

  Noa sat down and plugged in her laptop. She generally preferred to let the battery run all the way down initially, but given the uncertain circumstances and lack of easy access to power outlets, she figured it was better to keep the charge up.

  She could have cried when the screen jumped to life—thank God it hadn’t been damaged by the drop from the tree.

  The chat window was still open to where she’d left it on the roof of the library. Noa had a flashback to rough bark tearing at her hands, cold air snaking through the gaps in her clothing. She shuddered.

  Still, she’d gotten away. And without A6M0’s help, she probably wouldn’t have. So that was something.

  She logged back in and sent a single word: Thanks.

  A few mi
nutes passed before her computer beeped. u r welcome popped on-screen.

  Why r u helping me? Noa typed.

  It’s complicated. Glad u got away, tho.

  Why is all this happening?

  A link popped up—the same one as before, to the shampoo site.

  I don’t get it, Noa wrote.

  U will.

  And A6M0 logged off.

  Noa stared at the screen. She debated trying to trace her guardian angel’s steps back through the internet, but sensed it would probably be a wasted effort. Anyone who remotely found a way out of that library was probably a hacker to be reckoned with. And besides, it seemed kind of rude. He or she had saved her, after all.

  Noa propped her feet on the edge of the chair, hugging her knees to her chest. She should keep digging through the files, but she really wasn’t in the mood. She was too tired to sleep, and probably wouldn’t be able to in such a bright room, anyway—that was the one drawback of this space: There was no way to turn the lights off.

  So there wasn’t much for her to do. The MailPlus where she maintained a PO Box was in Brookline, about a half hour away on the T. They opened at eight thirty, and she planned on casing the place for at least an hour before attempting to access her PO Box. Which gave her about three hours to kill.

  Noa went back to her inbox. Apparently Vallas had given up; there weren’t any new emails from him. Aside from his and the ones from A6M0, everything else was work-related or spam. This time, that fact gave her a little pang. If she had died on that table, no one would probably have noticed.

  Which might, she suddenly realized, have been the point.

  As kids got older, they ended up at The Center less and less frequently. Either they landed in juvie, or ran away for good and lived on the streets. Noa had recognized a few of them, begging on the T. She knew they probably remembered her, too, but they never acknowledged one another. One of those things that was universally understood but never discussed.

  Noa had found a way out of the system. And she’d been living off the grid, largely invisible, for nearly a year.

  But as far as Child Services was concerned, she was a foster kid with a history of running away—not a rarity at her age.

  Maybe she’d been taken because they knew no one would notice or care that she was gone.

  Were runaways even noted somehow by the system? Noa had hacked into the Children’s and Family Services database before, to change the paperwork when she was establishing her fake foster family. She also dutifully provided quarterly reports on successful home visits. Social workers tended to burn out quickly—since landing in the foster-care system at the age of six, Noa had been assigned to more than a dozen of them. Wards were frequently shuffled between them, and they were hopelessly overworked. Noa was fairly certain none of them had caught wind of anything strange going on with her case.

  But she’d caught someone’s attention. And there had been hundreds of files in the AMRF database. Maybe she hadn’t been their only guinea pig.

  Within a half hour, she was perusing the virtual version of her case file. There was a long procession of foster families listed on one page. All were memorable in their own way, though few of those memories were positive. Two stints in juvie: one a few weeks long, the other a few months.

  But none of that was what she was looking for. Noa moved the cursor, scanning down. There it was, three forms in: a line halfway down the page, beside the address and contact information for the family she lived with for a month when she was fourteen. Across the page, scrawled in the margin, were the words Ran away.

  Which wasn’t entirely true, Noa thought. Sure, she’d run away, but only because her new “dad” had been chasing her with a lit cigarette.

  She’d ended up in the Marriott break room that time, too. Then wandered the city for a bit until she’d linked up with a group of teens living under the highway overpass by a skate park. On her third night with them, one of the skater boys tried to rape her. She fought him off, ran into the street, and was almost sideswiped by a cop car. And just because she’d managed to break the kid’s arm in the struggle, she landed in juvenile detention for three weeks.

  At least they’d sent her back to The Center after that. Noa had figured out how to survive there by the time she was eight, right around when she stopped getting excited about visiting day for prospective families. By then, the concept of finding foster parents who were interested in more than the grand a month that came with her had been relegated to the same category as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

  But The Center was perpetually in need of open bunks, so they always ended up forcing Noa somewhere else. If she hadn’t been so good with computers, she’d probably still be shuttling back and forth. Or worse.

  Noa dropped her chin to her knees. She’d definitely been the exception to the rule. By the time most foster kids reached her age, they’d either found a family tolerable enough to stay with until they hit eighteen, or they lived on the streets permanently.

  She tried to recall the names of the ones who dropped off the grid: Dulcie Patrick, who took off shortly after her fifteenth birthday. Jenny Fulton, her bunkmate for nearly a year when she was twelve. Randy Quinn, one of the kids she’d seen begging on the T. One by one Noa looked up their CFS files: In each case, “ran away” was checked off in a special box at the bottom of the page. Noa found it depressing that runaways were common enough to merit a standard box on the form.

  Then, nothing. Of course, it wasn’t like there were any resources to look for them.

  Noa recalled the rows of warehouses she’d run past. Had other kids been laid out on tables inside? The thought was terrifying.

  Vallas’s flash drive still jutted out of her USB port. She’d separated out the folder with her name at the top, but there had been hundreds of others. She’d mainly been interested in finding out what had been done to her, so she’d shifted those to the side. Now Noa started perusing the rest of what she’d downloaded.

  Many folders had oblique titles: more science stuff, probably. She clicked on a few that were labeled with names, but they turned out to be more scanned-in, incoherently scrawled doctors’ notes.

  Halfway down the page, a name jumped out at her. Alex Herbruck.

  She remembered Alex. An Irish kid with brownish-red hair, green eyes, skin mottled by freckles and pimples in roughly equal proportions. A Southie who compensated for his small stature with an attitude of sheer ferocity. Their stints at The Center had overlapped a few times. They’d always gotten along okay. He tried to kiss her once, but when she shoved him away he didn’t take it personally, just halfheartedly called her a lesbo and moved on to Dulcie Patrick.

  She’d liked Alex, at least as much as she’d liked anyone there. Noa opened the folder and discovered a similar jumble of files. She clicked a few buttons, grouping them by file type so that there would be some sort of organization as she combed through them.

  Right away, a series of jpegs jumped out at her. That was odd. Her file had only had one, of her lying on the table looking dead.

  She clicked, and a photo filled the screen.

  It was definitely Alex. And he was definitely dead. His eyes were closed but his lips hung open and loose, paleness setting his freckles in stark relief. He looked even smaller than she remembered; it seemed like the table was swallowing him.

  But that wasn’t the worst part. His chest had been peeled open, each side stretched out by some sort of metal clamp. The exposed interior was bright red like the rind of a fruit. On the right side the rib cage had been cut away, revealing a glimpse of charred lung. Alex had been a chain-smoker; she remembered him puffing away when they were ten or eleven years old. Once they’d caught him stealing packs out of the janitor’s locker and he’d almost been sent to juvie for a few days.

  Noa clicked on the tab to close the picture. Her right hand was shaking so badly she had to clasp it with her left to steady it. Even though her screen had reverted to the default version of the ni
ght sky, she could still see the image of Alex there, like it had been engraved in permanent pixels.

  She scrolled down the list of folders, zeroing in on names. None of the rest sounded familiar, but she kept scrolling down … down … down, for what seemed like pages and pages.

  After fifty names, Noa stopped counting and sat back in the chair. Was it possible that there had been that many of them? And were they all dead?

  There was only way to find out. She steeled herself, went back to the top of the page, and opened the first folder.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Peter sat before a terminal in the Tufts computer lab. Fortunately security was lax here. He’d hovered by the door for less than five minutes before another student came by and waved their ID card in front of the access panel.

  He held a hand to his mouth, stifling a yawn. He’d barely slept last night. Luckily it was midterms, so the Tufts library had been open when he stumbled out of Amanda’s dorm. He curled up in an oversized reading chair tucked in the corner and tried to sleep, but every half hour or so jolted awake. He had gritty eyes and a terrible taste in his mouth. He’d tried to clean up in the men’s bathroom by the periodicals room, but still. Storming out of Amanda’s room had probably been a mistake.

  Not that he would have been able to sleep there, either, he reminded himself. Peter rolled his head from side to side, then cracked his knuckles in succession, right hand, then left, before settling back to work.

  He’d learned his lesson about trying to access AMRF’s files; he definitely wasn’t in the mood for another visit from Mason. But that didn’t mean he was going to just lie down and take it, either. /ALLIANCE/ was still down, along with the backup wiki. So he was cruising the chat forums and imageboards frequented by his minions. There were numerous new threads posted on all of them, variations on the theme, “WTF happened to /ALLIANCE/?”

  He logged into the most popular one under his handle, Vallas. It took ten minutes to compose a call to arms. Part of him wished he had more information to give them, or at least a better sense of what he was getting them into. The last thing he wanted was to put any of his fellow hackers in Mason’s crosshairs.