My eyebrows went up—we were a little old for hide-and-seek—but everyone made enthusiastic noises, and Mike set out the rules: No turning on the lights or going outside. If you made it back to the white couch before the person who was It found you, you were safe. The people who were caught couldn’t hide again or help It.
We pulled all the blinds to shut out the streetlights, left Maryanne counting to one hundred with her eyes closed, and spread out in the dark.
Quite a few people went upstairs or hid in the closets. I was more familiar with Maryanne’s house than most; I slipped into the laundry room.
There was a small door there leading to a space under the stairs. Maryanne would find me eventually, but she didn’t like the dark. She would search upstairs first and find someone else to be It.
I was just opening the door when somebody slipped inside the room. My eyes weren’t fully adjusted to the meager light coming through the half-buried basement window, but even in the dark I knew it was Mike.
That’s how far gone I was. I recognized him in the dark.
I opened my mouth to tell him to leave, but Mike lifted a finger to his lips, a gray outline. Footsteps passed by in the hall: Maryanne.
I waited until she had gone up the stairs. “Get lost in the dark?” I asked sarcastically.
A faint smile curled the corners of his mouth. “Yes.”
Liar. There was no point in asking him to leave so I started toward the door. Mike blocked me.
I stared at him in furious disbelief and a little fear. He was my equal in strength. I couldn’t move him if I tried and certainly not without making noise. It dawned on me that this had been his aim all along, not Maryanne. His note: “We have to talk.”
I turned my back to him. He could keep me here, but he couldn’t make me look at him.
“Angel—”
“And another thing”—I rounded on him in whispered fury as if we were in the middle of an argument—“don’t say my name like that!”
“Like what—Angel?” The word became an endearment on his tongue.
“You know!”
Unexpectedly, Mike relented. “Yeah, I guess I do.” He moved away from the door, toward me. There was nowhere to retreat in the small room, and I didn’t try. My vision was improving by the second, and I could see his face. It was as serious as his voice. “It’s not going to work, is it?”
I blinked rapidly. “What isn’t going to work?”
He didn’t answer, only coming closer so that we stood face-to-face.
Us. He meant us. The blood drained from my face, my control crumbling with it. “Why can’t you just leave me alone?” Everything had been so simple before he came along.
Mike considered my words as if the idea had occurred to him for the first time. “Leave you alone? I don’t think I can.” Then he was kissing me wildly, and I was kissing him back.
We didn’t break apart until Maryanne cried, “You’re It!” somewhere upstairs.
My breathing was choppy, and I felt like weeping. “We have to stop.”
Mike nibbled on my neck. “Why?”
“Because they’ll see.”
“Nobody can see in the dark,” Mike said logically.
I thought of infrared goggles and listening devices. But we were in a laundry room….
He started kissing me again, and I twisted my head aside. “Don’t you get it? We’re playing right into their hands. This is what they’ve wanted from the very beginning.”
“I prefer to think of it as joining forces.” I felt the touch of his fingers on my back like a brand.
“No. They want to study us because we’re different, unique.”
Mike already knew that. “So?”
“So how do you get more unique people, Mike?” Tears gathered in the back of my throat. “You breed them together. You get them to make babies.”
His arms fell to his sides.
I pressed on. “Do you know what their next step is? Can’t you guess? Tell me, Mike, have your parents been having fights lately?”
His face hardened. “They always fight. It’s nothing new.”
“Well, it’s new for my parents,” I said bitterly. “You’ve seen them together, haven’t you? Your dad and my mom, sneaking around, letting us see them. They’re going to get divorced and marry each other. You and I will end up living in the same house with rooms across the hall from each other. Won’t that be convenient?”
Mike didn’t get a chance to answer because Maryanne came back down the stairs, talking to the other kids. “I think we’re still missing Angel and Mike.”
She couldn’t find us together. I couldn’t betray her like that. Quick as a flash I ducked out the laundry room, ran down the hall and made a dive for the couch. “Safe!”
Laughing, the rest of the party trooped back down the stairs. Maryanne triumphantly produced Mike within a matter of minutes.
“Well, I’m going home now,” I told Maryanne, head down, one foot already on the stairs.
Before I could claim to have a headache, Mike spoke up. “Me, too. Coach will kill us if we don’t get a full eight hours’ sleep before the tournament.” He hustled me up the stairs ahead of him. “I’ll give you a ride home.”
What Maryanne thought about her date leaving with me I couldn’t bear to look and see.
The second we were outside, I jerked away from Mike. “You snake! What about Maryanne?”
He laughed, he actually laughed, and I came very close to decking him. “Maryanne was in on it,” he said. “I told her I liked you, and we planned the whole thing between us.”
Planned. The. Whole. Thing.
I remembered how Jimmy hadn’t been able to look me in the eye. “Jimmy, too?”
He nodded.
I kicked him in the shin and started walking.
“Ouch!” Mike followed me for a few steps, then turned back. I heard the sound of a car engine turning over, and he backed out of the driveway, I kept walking.
He drove past me.
A block later he parked his car and fell into step beside me. I could have yelled at him again, but I didn’t. I stopped fighting the tide once and for all, and we walked to the park in oddly peaceful silence. I removed my running shoes and went down to the river.
Mike did the same. We didn’t speak until we were at the bottom of the riverbank, far from any picnic tables, listening to the liquid syllables of the river’s flow. “You really think this is necessary?” he said.
“Yes.” I had personally washed all the clothes I was wearing, but there could be listening or tracking devices in the soles of our shoes. I rolled up my jeans and waded into the water to give an excuse for having bare feet.
Mike came in after me and cupped my face in his hands. He studied me for a moment, violet eyes intense. “God, Angel, do I terrify you half as much as you terrify me?”
“More,” I said, and our lips met again.
Mike finally pulled back and rested his forehead against mine. “You’ve been driving me crazy since I introduced myself on the bridge and you decided I had two heads. How did you know so soon? Was it the eyes? I’d forgotten we all had the same color eyes.”
“No. I knew about you from the trophies.” I explained about all the towns we’d both lived in. “I think the reason they move us so often is so we won’t notice that the whole population of the town changes over a two-year period. Even though your name was always on the trophy for the previous year, only about half of my classmates and teachers would remember you—and half of those would move away during the year I lived in that town.”
Mike nodded. “The towns are like movie sets. The casts change except for our parents.”
I wondered exactly how Mike had come by his awful mother and father. I’d had a choice of about eight pairs when I selected mine. Except for the lies standing between us, for all intents and purposes they were my parents; Mike’s were just actors playing the part of his mother and father.
“Our parents and Uncle Alb
ert and Aunt Patty,” I agreed. The pair of so-called relatives had come for periodic visits to all the towns I had lived in—obviously spies sent to evaluate me for the scientists.
“Mine were Uncle Arthur and Aunt Phyllis,” Mike said.
“I bet they’re the same people. I once took a photo of Uncle Albert, but—wouldn’t you know it?—the film was ‘accidentally’ exposed to light and ruined.”
Mike wasn’t listening. “How much do you remember?” he asked me. “About the Orphanage?”
“More than I should, considering how young I was at the time.” I was only three or four years old when I left. “I remember the tests: ‘What’s five to the ninth power? If you tell me you can have ice cream for dessert.’”
Mike nodded. “Two or three tests every day. Lots of math.”
“And the doctors.” They had played at being teachers, but I knew them now for scientists. They had never been truly comfortable with so many children, always slightly stiff, their smiles false.
“I remember that they never let us just play,” Mike said, hands shoved in his pockets. “It always had to be a contest. They encouraged us to compete with one another.”
“We hardly ever went outside. And when we did, it was just to the enclosed playground in the center of the building.” Leaving the Orphanage had been like being let out of prison. I still took pleasure in the simple feel of sun shining on my face.
Mike looked out across the water. “The better you did on the tests, the more tests you had to take.”
“So we all played dumb.” Nikita had pulled me aside one day at lunchtime. “They’re watching you,” he had told me. “If you don’t want to be locked up inside all day, don’t answer so many of their questions.”
“I remember the fire,” Mike said softly.
Ferocious heat Screaming. A flaming roof and timbers collapsing. “They kept the doors locked at all times to prevent us from escaping,” I said. “The sprinklers were supposed to put out any fires that started, but they didn’t work.” Sabotage.
The scientists had tried to keep the knowledge from me, but I knew a lot of children had died in the fire, somewhere in the range of thirty to forty. And more than a few had escaped as well.
“And then there was no more Orphanage.” Mike changed the subject. “So what now? I presume you’ve been doing the same as me, playing dumb, killing time until you’re old enough to make a living once you break out of the movie set.”
“Pretty much.” I hesitated. “I’m going to try a breakout once we start competing in badminton. I think Coach is for real, and he took the scientists by surprise. They didn’t have time to plan a strategy.”
“Funny,” Mike said, “I had almost exactly the same idea. Would you mind some company?”
“I’d love some,” I said softly. “To escape.” We made a pact together on our clenched fists, while the water flowed cold around our ankles.
“We’d better head back,” Mike said abruptly, “before they send out a search party.”
I nodded reluctantly. He was right, but I didn’t want to go just yet, to give this up.
I’d been fighting alone for so long.
“Angel?”
“I’m coming.” I waded out of the river.
“You realize, of course,” he said lightly, “that we’ll have to pretend to be dating, so we don’t arouse their suspicion.”
My heart turned to stone inside my breast, and I stopped dead.
Mike noticed. I couldn’t hide myself from him the way I could from others. “What is it? What are you thinking?”
“The same thing you are.” My heart pounded. “That if you’re lying to me, if you’re on the scientists’ side, I’ll carve your heart out with a dull knife.”
Mike laughed at my fierceness, the sound wild and bitter. “Close.” He kissed me twice on the lips, sipping from them greedily. “I was thinking that the scientists would be stupid to trust us if one of us is in their pay, because we’d be sure to double-cross them.”
CHAPTER 7
I MADE SURE MY PARENTS saw Mike kiss me good night at the door before going in.
My parents were shocked.
“Was that Mike?” Dad asked.
I nodded.
“But I thought you hated him,” Mom said. She and Dad both looked bewildered—and a little relieved.
“I did.” I didn’t explain my change of heart, and they were too cautious to ask.
I wanted to ask Mom if, now that Mike and I were dating, the farce with Mr. Valiant would stop. I had to bite my lip to keep the question back.
I had difficulty falling asleep that night. My mind kept racing on a treadmill: thinking about Mike, thinking about the badminton tournament, thinking about my parents, thinking about Mike and me at the tournament.
The scientists had already made two attempts to keep Mike and me from attending Zones, but the competition was scheduled for Thursday night. The bus would leave after school tomorrow. What else could they do?
I underestimated them.
When I got up in the middle of the night to go downstairs to get a glass of milk, I tripped over a heavy box at the top of the stairs.
My eyes were still half closed, and I hadn’t turned on the light. The box hit my left leg at shin level, and I fell.
If I’d grabbed the rail, I would have wrenched my arm, and I needed my arm to play badminton. The nature of the stairs, dropping away in the dark, aided me and gave me time to get my hands under me and kick up my legs. I pushed off the fourth step with my hands, cartwheeled down the stairs, and landed hard at the bottom, but on my feet, not my arms. I didn’t even twist my ankle.
The thumps woke my parents. The lights came on, and they both appeared at the top of the stairs.
“Angel? What is it? Are you all right?” Dad asked.
I sank down against the living room wall and started to cry.
Mom hurried toward me and almost tripped on the box herself. “What’s this doing here? Did you fall? Oh, my God, Angel!”
They weren’t in on it. They hadn’t known. I cried harder in my relief.
Mom helped me up, depositing me on the living room sofa. She turned on more lights and checked me over carefully. Had I hurt myself? Was I okay? Should she call a doctor? She didn’t wait for my reply. “I’m going to call a doctor.” She stood up.
“No.” My voice was hoarse, but it stopped her. “The tournaments tomorrow.”
Dad caught on first. Black rage filled his face. He caught my mother’s arm when she would have gone to the phone. “No, Eileen. Angels okay. She doesn’t want to go to the doctor, do you?”
I shook my head. Adrenaline crashed through my system. The stairs were carpeted and only one flight long. I probably wouldn’t have been killed by the fall, but a sprained wrist, a concussion, and a broken leg were all distinct possibilities.
Dad carried the box down from the top of the stairs. It contained Mom’s old sewing machine, which we kept in the basement. While I watched, he very methodically smashed the whole thing to pieces.
I insisted on doing some stretches to prevent stiffness before I went back to bed. Mom sat by my bedside. I fell asleep only to wake up again and hear Dad yelling at someone on the phone. Mom was still there. She stroked my hair, and her hand trembled. “Go back to sleep.”
I needed to be rested for the tournament so I closed my eyes and slept again.
Coach had instructed Mike and me not to go for a run that morning, so I didn’t see Mike until I got to school. I examined him anxiously from across the hall. No cast, no limp, no black stitches crawling caterpillar-wise across his forehead.
“Hey there,” Mike said, smiling at me.
I wasn’t alone anymore. I had a partner. “Hey yourself.” I walked across the hall, hooked an arm around his neck and kissed him lingeringly.
Wendy was gaping when we finished, but as soon as she found out that Maryanne didn’t mind and even seemed to be interested in Jimmy, she was happy. “I knew it!” she
kept saying. “Now we can double-date.”
Carl shook his head. “Talk about an unholy alliance. You and Angel are bad enough together,” he told Wendy. “Add Mike to the mix and … there might not be a building in town left standing after you three get through with it.”
The bell rang and I was forced to wait until noon hour before I could tell Mike what had happened the night before. We sat close together on the grass outside under the guise of cuddling.
“I had a little mishap last night.” In retelling it, I made it sound almost like fun. “Fastest way to go downstairs,” I joked.
Mike didn’t laugh. He swore under his breath and hugged me.
I felt instantly better, which was scary. How could Mike come to mean so much to me in such a short time? Yesterday I had still been convinced that I hated him.
“There’s something I want to talk to you about,” Mike whispered while nibbling on my neck.
“What?” I breathed, but although he continued to drop kisses on my face, his next words weren’t romantic at all.
“After Coach’s big recruiting speech, I looked up badminton in the almanac. Do you know what it said? It said badminton would become a medal sport in 1992, but mixed doubles aren’t scheduled to be added until 1996.”
I ran my fingers through Mike’s hair. “So you think it is a scientists’ trick after all, and Coach is a much better actor than we thought?”
Mike shook his head. “I think he’s training us for the Olympics, all right, just not the 1992 games.”
I looked at him quizzically.
“Two years ago there was a boy in my class who didn’t know how to use a rotary-dial telephone.”
The implications rocked through me. “Wendy sometimes makes small slips,” I said. I told him about the fines she had mentioned and her strange question as to whether I had known Mike “Before, or should I say After.”
I kissed his chin, murmuring, “And come to think of it, when Maryanne first moved to Chinchaga she called good-looking boys ‘chunks’ instead of ‘hunks.’”
Mike traced my jawline with his finger. “People who just recently moved to town always rave about the low prices.”
VIOLET EYES Page 6
