Revealed

by Amanda Valentino

  Normally when I’m working I don’t even notice if my phone buzzes, but now I was so glad to have something to focus on other than Heidi’s voice that in my eagerness to answer the call, I dropped my brush ten feet to the ground. There was a text message, and when I opened it, I saw it was from Cornelia.

  IDK IF THIS IS WHAT U WERE WAITING

  FOR, BUT IT WAS JUST POSTED. IT CAME

  FROM FREE2BU&ME.

  FREE2BU&ME. Could that be Frieda’s screen name?

  The posting from FREE2BU&ME followed.

  HAL, IF YOUVE BEEN LEAVING

  ME VM MSGS, TXT ME W/ WHAT U BOUGHT

  THE DAY WE MET IN BALTIMORE.

  “Come on, you have the cool clothes, the groovy hair, the earring. You need this. It completes the look.”

  “Give me a break, Valentino. I don’t have a ‘look.’” I shook my head at her, embarrassed. We were standing in a vintage clothing store in downtown Baltimore, and in front of her, Amanda was holding a worn biker jacket, the silver zippers gleaming against the weathered leather.

  Amanda wore a tailored skirt and jacket of navy blue, and her hair was pulled back from her face in a tight, low bun. On her feet were low gray pumps, and the stockings had seams up the back. I didn’t normally notice her outfits, but today she looked exactly like the pictures of my grandmother, who’d worked as a secretary (or, as she’d called it, a “Kelly girl”) in New York in the 1950s.

  “Hal Bennett, do you really not know you have a look?” She cocked her head at me, like she was trying to decide if I was kidding her.

  “Come on,” I said, pulling on her arm that wasn’t holding the jacket. “Let’s go meet Frieda.”

  Something in my voice must have convinced her I was telling the truth because she slipped her arm out of my grasp and dropped the jacket to the floor. Then, taking both my hands in hers, she looked at me for a long, long moment. “You have a look, Hal. You look like a sensitive guitar-playing painter who can run 5K in under fifteen minutes.”

  Despite (or maybe because of) the intensity of her gaze, I laughed. “Listen, I can’t speak for the sensitive thing, but as for the rest—I don’t look like those things, Valentino. I am those things.”

  But my joke didn’t make her laugh. “Exactly,” she said. Then she bent down, picked up the jacket, and slipped my arm into it.

  Sometimes it was easier to humor Amanda than to fight her, and now was definitely one of those times. I let her work the jacket over my shoulder, then slipped my other arm into it. She came back to stand in front of me, untucking the collar where it had gotten twisted.

  “Aah,” she said, looking at me like I was something she’d made and was pleased with.

  “Satisfied?” I teased.

  She moved me a few paces to the left, then turned me around to face a mirror that hung on the back of a dressing-room door.

  I had to admit it—the jacket made me look very, very cool. It was cut broad at the shoulders and narrow at the waist, and seeing me in it, you’d think I’d just hopped off my motorcycle and was heading to play a quick guest set with Mick and Keith.

  “You’ve got a good eye, Valentino, I’ll give you that.” I forced myself to look away from that guy staring back at me in the mirror. Because there was no way around it—he was way cooler than I’d ever be. “Now, let’s go.” I started to remove the jacket.

  But Amanda put her hand on my chest, stopping me.

  “You’re going to tell me that the clothes make the man, so I need this jacket, right?” I asked.

  She shook her head slowly. “Don’t you get it, Hal?”

  “What?” Suddenly I didn’t feel like joking anymore.

  “Nature forms us for ourselves, not for others; to be, not to seem.”

  Now it was my turn to shake my head. “Still not getting it,” I admitted.

  And now she was the one who smiled. “I am saying that you need this jacket because you don’t need this jacket.”

  Heart pounding, I entered Frieda’s number and typed a reply.

  BLACK LEATHER VINTAGE JACKET. HAL.

  It seemed I’d barely hit SEND when my phone buzzed again. I flipped it open and read the new message on my screen.

  I NEED TO SEE U. TAKE THE 1:42 FROM

  ORION TO BALTIMORE ON SAT. MEET ME

  @ THE OLD TRAIN STATION. I WILL NOT

  CONTACT U AGAIN BTWN NOW & THEN.

  There was one final sentence, three words long.

  TELL NO ONE.

  Chapter 11

  I went to Baltimore alone.

  At first I was going to tell Callie and Nia about Frieda’s text. I knew I should. I kept hearing my mom’s voice:

  What would you want them to do if the situation were reversed?

  And of course the answer was obvious: I’d want them to tell me.

  When we were walking out of school together on Friday and they started talking about how we needed to find a way to convince our parents to let us go to Baltimore so we could find Dr. Joy, I tried to change the subject. “Do you realize nobody but Thornhill seems to know we’re supposed to be in Saturday detention for the car thing?”

  As soon as the sentence was out of my mouth, I thought about how my dad’s always saying there are no accidents. Had I mentioned our not having to serve detention out of a guilty conscience? Was part of me hoping they’d suggest we all go to Baltimore together on Saturday so that I’d have to bring them with me to meet Frieda or at least tell them about her?

  If so, my plan backfired, since my mentioning Saturday provided them with the opportunity not to suggest we spend the day investigating but to remind me that some of us were going to be spending Saturday stuck in the theater and working on costumes for a certain play because a certain other somebody who shall remain nameless had signed them up for a certain job that never seemed to end, whereas that certain somebody’s job did not require a Saturday shift.

  “Wow, that guy sounds like a real jerk,” I agreed, then hopped on my bike and hightailed it out of the parking lot.

  I told myself I wasn’t telling them about my trip because Frieda had been explicit in her instructions: TELL NO ONE.

  So it wasn’t like she’d told me to tell them and I hadn’t.

  I even tried to convince myself it was safer for me to go alone than to drag the girls into it (oh, yeah, because I’d so totally rescued Callie and Nia from creepy doctor guy—not!). I told myself all kinds of stuff, but by the time I got on the train Saturday afternoon, I was pretty sure the truth was a whole lot less altruistic.

  I wanted to go to Baltimore alone.

  I wanted to be the one who discovered the missing link to Amanda, the one who found her when no one else could. And I didn’t want to share all of my memories of that day in the city, how it felt when Frieda took me seriously as an artist, how grown-up it seemed to be ordering lunch at a Baltimore diner right as the rest of my class was sitting in fourth period. That day was one of the happiest of my life, and it was also private. It was mine. Mine and Amanda’s.

  Wondering if that made me a total jerk, I opened the folder Cornelia had slipped into my hand as I was walking out the door earlier. I’d told her I was on my way to an afternoon rehearsal (note to self: add “lies to awesome little sister” to list of things to admire about Hal Bennett), and she gave me a sort of funny look before saying she’d printed out everything that had come into the website in the past couple of days. “I figured you and Callie and Nia might want hard copies.”

  At the mention of Callie and Nia, I couldn’t meet Cornelia’s eyes, so I just mumbled something vague, then took the pages from her and pushed the button to open the garage door and grab my bike. My mom was at a conference, learning about pursuing “nontraditional” college applicants. I couldn’t help thinking she wouldn’t exactly appreciate my “nontraditional” plans for the afternoon.

  As the train pulled out of Orion and I flipped open Cornelia’s folder, the henna tattoo of the cougar on the inside of my forearm caught my e
ye. I touched it lightly, thinking of all the things that had happened in the brief time since Amanda had convinced me to get it. Somehow I felt like the person who’d taught me that cougars are strong and solitary, that they stake out their territory and patrol it, would understand my needing to go to Baltimore alone.

  The thought of Amanda understanding me, wherever she was, made me feel comforted somehow, and as I started flipping through the pages Cornelia had printed out, I didn’t feel quite so much like the world’s most selfish immature loser.

  The top page was a posting from someone who thought Amanda was part of a crazy science experiment that turned her invisible, and she got stuck that way.

  I chuckled and turned to the next printout—a testimonial written by a girl from a town called Saint Albans in Wyoming. She wrote that when her dad had a heart attack and it looked like he wasn’t going to pull through, Amanda had spent a day and a night sitting with her outside ICU, waiting for news (he’d survived, she told us, and was helping her mother prepare dinner as she was posting).

  The page after that was a post written by a girl named Poppy. She wrote that until Amanda came to her school, she was always made fun of for her patched clothing and shy personality, but when Amanda found her crying in the bathroom, she promised to make the bullying stop, which she did.

  Next came something from a girl who was sure Amanda was in Kansas, because a girl who tried out for the soccer team named Amanda Valentory (obviously, she informed us, the same person as our Amanda Valentino) also painted their principal’s car and then disappeared.

  Shaking my head, I turned the page and found myself reading an article someone anonymously submitted about a woman named Annie Beckendorf who’d been killed in a car accident just weeks before Amanda showed up in Orion. According to the article, “Ms. Beckendorf was hit and killed by a driver in a blue Mercedes when she ran a red light at high speed in what may have been a high-velocity chase with an unidentified driver in another car.” The person who’d sent in the article to theamandaproject.com had also scanned in a list of Ms. Beckendorf’s personal effects, a list that, according to the letterhead, was the property of the California Medical Examiner’s Office. Not really wanting to know how some random kid had hacked into the coroner’s computer files, I skimmed the list, looking for anything that might hold a key to the connection between Amanda and this Annie Beckendorf woman, and it was literally a key that caught my eye. Apparently, in addition to her purse, phone, and clothing, Annie Beckendorf had in her possession at the time of her death “one antique key, silver-plated.”

  I thought of the small silver key Amanda always wore on a ribbon around her neck. Everything about her changed almost daily—her hair color, her style, sometimes even her accent and skin tone. But she always, always wore the key on the blue ribbon.

  Suddenly I had an insane thought. Could Amanda have been the driver of the Mercedes? Could she have . . . killed a person accidentally and could she be on the run from her crime? If so, it would be just like her to wear a talisman to remind her of what she’d done, something that would make it impossible for her to put the accident out of her mind for even a day. Could her own guilt have been what made her realize the secret Callie was keeping, that she knew Heidi Bragg had hit Beatrice Rossiter that night while illegally test-driving her dad’s car?

  I didn’t even realize what I was doing until I’d actually hit Callie’s number on speed dial, and then I frantically pushed END CALL about a thousand times. Hey, Callie, it’s Hal. I completely lied to you and Nia about this, but I’m on my way to Baltimore and I want to run a theory by you. Is that cool?

  Anyway, Amanda didn’t exactly seem like the hit-and-run type. I thought of the girl with the dad in ICU, the girl she’d supposedly sat with through a day and a night, and the girl she protected from bullies. It wasn’t that you couldn’t be a good Samaritan and a murderer, but I just didn’t see an unlicensed Amanda stealing someone’s car and committing vehicular underaged manslaughter.

  Heidi Bragg, yes. Amanda, no.

  Thinking of Heidi hitting Beatrice Rossiter with her dad’s “borrowed” car reminded me of seeing Bea’s name on Thornhill’s list. Or not seeing Bea’s name on the list. Which had it been, again? I flipped open my phone and texted Cornelia.

  ANY LUCK GETTING INTO THORNHILLS

  COMPUTER?

  As if she’d been sitting and waiting for me to write to her, Cornelia texted back in less than a minute.

  AM RUNNING WEBSITE (FULL-TIME JOB)

  WHILE TRYING NOT 2 FAIL OUT OF SCHOOL.

  SO SORRY UNABLE TO SATISFY ALL UR

  MAJESTYS NEEDS IMMEDIATELY.

  MY BAD,

  I texted back, adding,

  THANKS FOR FOLDER. V INTERESTING STUFF HERE.

  She didn’t respond, too busy with other things, no doubt.

  It had been overcast when I’d boarded the train in Orion, and now sheets of rain slapped against my window. It created a beautiful effect, blurring the houses and landscape we were speeding through. Out of habit, I found myself opening my sketchbook and starting to draw, but my heart wasn’t in it. I realized that I missed Callie and Nia—it was weird to be on the train without them, to be looking for Amanda without them. By the time the train pulled into Baltimore, I felt like an über-moron for making the trip on my own. What did I think, that Amanda was going to magically appear on the platform of the station, that traveling in space equaled traveling in time back to that day?

  I crammed all my stuff into my messenger bag and walked down the aisle toward the door. I saw a copy of Orion’s alternative paper, The Midnighter, on the seat across from me and scooped it up, too. Amanda loved that paper; so strange to see it here. As soon as I was back in Orion, I’d tell them everything—Frieda’s text, the trip to Baltimore to meet her, the printouts from Cornelia. Even the watch and its mysterious, confusing message. I smiled as I thought of Nia giving me crap for going it alone, for not being able to decipher Amanda’s gift without their help. Guess you’re not the Lone Ranger after all, are you? Did girls even know about the masked man? Or was that just something for guys and their dads? Thinking of Nia as a little kid watching old episodes of The Lone Ranger with her dad made me laugh out loud, and I was still smiling when I stepped off the train and into the driving rain. I pulled my hoodie up over my head and sprinted for the station, getting soaked in the few seconds I’d been exposed to the downpour.

  Standing just inside the automatic doors, I opened Frieda’s text and reread the instructions I’d memorized the first time I’d read them.

  MEET ME @ THE OLD TRAIN STATION.

  I looked around. The space I stood in was about as new as something that didn’t still have the wrapping on it could be—there were shiny ticket dispensers and modular, brightly colored plastic chairs. The floor was scuffed linoleum, but I had the feeling that had happened within minutes of the station’s ribbon cutting. No doubt about it, this was definitely the new train station.

  Despite the sign over his head, the guy manning the information booth didn’t seem too keen on giving out any actual information. Instead, he seemed to believe that I was some kind of bumbling lunatic put on this earth to torment him.

  “Come again?” He’d been doing a sudoku puzzle when I got to the window, and it was clear that every second away from it was torture for him.

  “The old station,” I repeated.

  “Whaddya mean, ‘old’?” He scratched at his stubbly cheek, looking so confused I almost wondered if the word itself was unfamiliar to him.

  Was it possible Frieda had been messing with me—just dragging me down to Baltimore to send me on some kind of wild goose chase?

  But why?

  I took a deep breath. “Is this a new train station?” I asked. “I mean, was it built recently?”

  “You betcha,” said the guy. “Two years ago.” The pride in his voice made it sound like he himself had laid the cornerstone.

  “So, the train station that was here before
this one. Where’s that?”

  Now the guy looked at me like there was no doubt in his mind that I was completely dense. “It was here.” He pointed to the ground in case I was missing the point. “We hadda tear it down to build the new one.”

  I have never been a violent person. My mom always says how proud she was that when I was little and other kids would take a toy from me in the sandbox, I’d never grab for it; I’d just slowly negotiate it back from them. But I swear, right at that second, I felt capable of punching in a wall.

  “Yeah,” the guy continued. “That’s all gone now. Some developer was talkin’ about turnin’ the waiting room into a restaurant like, wait, waddya call it—” He turned to someone standing in the office behind him, out of my line of vision. “Hey, Eddie, what’s the name of that place in New York—in, you know, Grand Central Station?” I couldn’t make out Eddie’s response, but Information Guy repeated it for my edification. “The Oyster Bar.” He smiled and nodded at the idea. “It’s a real nice space, that old waiting room, but now it’s just all boarded up.”

  “Wait!” I almost shouted, and he scowled at my interfering with his Oyster Bar–inspired reverie. “Did you say now? So it’s still there?”

  He shook his head, and his eyes briefly looked over my head to the far side of the station. “Kid, like I said, there’s really nothing there.”

  But I was already dashing in the direction his eyes had shown me. “Thanks!” I called over my shoulder, and I got a glimpse of him shaking his head as he pulled his sudoku puzzle back in front of him.

  I don’t usually ignore direct orders such as KEEP OUT, especially when they’re written in letters almost a foot high. Still, desperate times call for desperate measures, and when I got to the doors I just pushed through them without even hesitating, like instead of KEEP OUT they said COME IN.