Revealed

by Amanda Valentino

  “More like seven minutes in hell if it involves either of these two,” said Lexa Booker (what, was she now Lexi?!), who was in my bio class and who I hadn’t realized was an I-Girl. She was staring daggers at me and Callie.

  “I mean it. What were you doing in there?” Heidi repeated.

  A couple of juniors whose names I didn’t know and who I didn’t recognize from any of the play rehearsals I’d attended walked past us. “Yo, man,” one of them called to a guy down the hall. “What up?!” In the distance, I heard the sound of the doorbell ringing.

  “Why, Heidi, do you have something in there you don’t want us to find?” Callie’s voice was strong and sure, her hands in fists on her hips.

  The doorbell rang again, and I had the vague sense that someone should answer it as another group of people I didn’t remember being in the cast walked by, calling over their shoulders to people behind them to follow.

  “You’re crazy, you know that?” Heidi shouted at me and Callie. “You’re crazy and your friend is crazy and the only reason you think she’s so special is because you’re all crazy!” Heidi’s face was grotesque, contorted with rage until she was nearly unrecognizable.

  “No, Heidi, actually she is special,” Callie said. “You’re the one who’s not special.”

  To my amazement, Callie’s insult enraged Heidi so thoroughly she practically convulsed, even though I didn’t think it was that terrible a thing to say. I’d heard worse. From Heidi, actually.

  “You will so live to regret saying that.” Heidi’s voice was shaking with rage.

  By now the hallway was so crowded Callie and I and Heidi and the I-Girls were slowly being pressed up against opposite walls of the hallway as more and more kids flowed past, oblivious to the drama.

  “Who are all these people?” asked the now soggy I-Girl.

  But Heidi was still staring bullets at me and Callie. “I want you to tell me what you were doing in that room.”

  “It’s just a laundry room,” I said as a group of girls pushing through the crowd jostled Callie and me in the direction of the front door. “You have some embarrassing dirty laundry?”

  “Hal Bennett, you are a total—” But the last part of her sentence was lost as Callie and I pushed our way through the crowd and outside into the cold night air.

  The scene on the front lawn was total pandemonium. In the time we’d been inside, dozens of cars had parked on the block, and what seemed to be hundreds of people were streaming toward the Braggs’. Most of the faces looked vaguely familiar from the Endeavor hallways, but a couple of the guys were wearing Harrison jackets, from this really artsy-fartsy school across town; I wondered how a party attended by half the population of Endeavor High and half the population of our archrivals was going to end.

  You didn’t have to be an expert in adolescent behavior to know there was only one answer to that question: not well.

  I took Callie by the hand and pulled her down to the corner, glad that Nia had suggested a place to meet that wouldn’t be in the middle of what was shaping up to be one of the biggest parties in Orion’s history.

  To my amazement, when we found Nia, she was still energetically texting.

  “What are you doing?” I demanded. “Who are you texting?”

  Nia looked up and met my confused gaze with a clear, confident one. “Everyone,” she answered simply. Then she looked down at her screen, typed something, and added, “Well, I mean, I’m not texting everyone.” Her face, when she glanced up at me again, was a smirk. “Cisco is.”

  And suddenly the massive party forming just behind me was a little less mysterious.

  “Um, Nia,” Callie asked. “What exactly are you saying?”

  Nia typed one last thing, then slipped her brother’s phone into her bag and smiled at us, her face the picture of innocence. “Didn’t you get one?”

  Callie and I looked at each other, then simultaneously reached for our phones. I had one missed text, and I opened it.

  PARTY AT THE BRAGGS’, GUYS.

  C U THERE! CISCO

  “You know what’s bad about having a brother who’s the most popular guy in the junior class?” Nia asked, and Callie and I both stared at her expectantly.

  Nia laughed. “Nothing,” she said. “Now wait for me here. I’ve gotta give my brother his phone back.”

  Chapter 22

  When Nia returned and said, “Follow me,” neither of us asked any questions, but after walking in silence for a minute or two, Callie abruptly stopped and I did, too. “Nia, where are we going anyway?”

  “Your house,” Nia said, like it was the most natural thing in the world for us to be headed over to Callie’s. “Now, can we please discuss the fact that everything in the Bragg household is shiny? Do they, like, spray it with something?”

  Standing still, Callie sighed. “Look, I know my dad’s not, you know, Father of the Year, but he’s going to notice if the three of us march in with this”—she indicated the box she’d insisted on carrying— “and, like, ask to borrow his blowtorch to open it.”

  “He’s not home,” Nia answered. She hadn’t stopped when Callie did, so after exchanging a look, the two of us hustled to catch up to her.

  “And how, exactly, do you know that?” Callie asked, just slightly out of breath from our brief jog. We passed the guard in his gatehouse and he gave us a friendly wave. Given everything we’d just discovered, I breathed a sigh of relief that he let us pass instead of, oh, taking out a machine gun and ordering us to lie on the ground until he could summon Chief Bragg.

  Nia smiled and waved back at him and the three of us took advantage of the green light to cross Willow Avenue.

  “As I was saying, how do you know my dad’s not home?” Callie repeated when we were safely on the other side of the street from The Acres, heading south toward Callie’s house.

  The three of us were walking side by side, and when I glanced over at her, I could see Nia’s smile of self-satisfaction. “I got my mom to invite him over for a late dinner with my parents. I knew we’d need a place to spread out with this thing.” She indicated the box, then added, “My parents are Colombian. Let’s just say they eat dinner late.”

  “Oh my god, I totally saw them talking to him when we left!” said Callie. I gestured to her that I could take the box, but she said she was okay, and we walked along in silence for a few minutes. I couldn’t believe Nia had thought so far ahead. While I’d been worrying about whether we’d even be able to find Amanda’s box, Nia had been planning where we’d go to catalog its contents.

  As we passed under a streetlight, Nia checked the cool, chunky watch on her wrist. “Cisco’s picking up me and Hal at midnight. That gives us a little over an hour.”

  I nodded. Was there nothing Nia hadn’t taken care of?

  We walked for several minutes before Callie broke the silence. “Hal, why did you say it was dangerous for us to be together?” Her voice was quiet, but it carried in the still night air.

  I took a deep breath. It was time to come clean.

  “I need to tell you guys something . . .” I started, and as the suburban neighborhood we were walking through slowly evolved into the countryside nearer Callie’s house, I told them about my trip to see Frieda and her warning about Dr. Joy being with them. I’d expected the girls to be mad at me for making the trip to see Frieda without telling them, but they just let me talk, not interrupting my story until I got to the part where Frieda said it was dangerous to be together.

  “Oh my god!” Callie gasped.

  “Yeah,” I agreed.

  We turned onto Crab Apple Road as I finished the story. It was a cool night, but we were walking fast and I was sweating. I unzipped my jacket.

  “Maybe Amanda didn’t know it was dangerous for us to be together,” Callie suggested. “Maybe we need to take Frieda’s warning seriously.”

  “What?” demanded Nia, her voice sharp. “You’re saying we should separate because that Frieda woman said so?”

&n
bsp; Callie shook her head. “Not exactly. I just mean . . . that inscription on the watch, wanting us to work together. It totally, like, flies in the face of Frieda’s warning. Maybe Amanda didn’t know the whole story.” We started up Callie’s driveway, the light of her front porch like a beacon.

  Now it was my turn to object. “I think Amanda did know. I’m sure of it. I think she knew we might get spooked and separate and she wanted to make sure that didn’t happen.” Suddenly, the final piece of the puzzle of Amanda’s gift fell into place so surely I could almost hear it, like the click of a key turning in a lock. The realization stopped me dead in my tracks. “That’s why she gave me a watch.”

  Nia and Callie were a few steps ahead of me, on Callie’s front porch, and now Nia turned back to where I was still standing in the driveway. “Watch out, you mean?” she suggested.

  I was looking at her and Callie but not seeing them. “Yeah. I mean no.” I focused my eyes on the girls. “Not watch out for them.” I thought of Frieda’s mysterious they. “Watch out for us. Watch out for each other.”

  “Take care of each other,” Callie said quietly.

  There was a moment of silence as Callie’s words sank in, then Nia said, “Um, this is all getting a little kumbaya for me, okay, kids? And we’ve got work to do.” She took the box from Callie, stumbling briefly as she felt its full weight.

  “God, Callie, have you been secretly working out or something? This thing is heavy.”

  “What?” asked Callie, distractedly pushing open the front door that apparently wasn’t locked. “Oh, yeah, I guess it is.”

  Nia and I followed her inside. As I stepped across the threshold, I briefly wondered what the house would be like. Her dad had seemed normal enough tonight, but I’d seen him downtown a few times over the last few months and he’d been in pretty bad shape—unshaven, unshowered, looking like he might have slept in his clothes. Would the house be weird, or look like it used to back when we were friends in sixth grade?

  But inside everything looked totally normal. Callie headed into the living room and pointed for Nia to put the box down on the coffee table, then went around turning on the lights. She disappeared through an archway, and I saw a bunch of chairs circling a space where a dining room table should have been but where instead there was just . . . nothing. But when she came back carrying glasses of water and a bag of pretzels, she didn’t mention the missing table and so neither did I.

  Then, as if on cue, we all took our places on the floor around the low coffee table.

  The rich wood glowed in the soft light of Callie’s living room, each piece of turquoise shining like a ray of starlight. As I stared at the box, thinking about how no one was ever, ever going to take it away from us again, I felt as if a massive weight had been lifted from my shoulders.

  “We’ve still got to open it, you know?” Nia pointed out.

  “You said something about buttons?” I prompted Callie.

  She nodded. “You can’t exactly see them,” she explained, then closed her eyes, feeling across the surface of the box briefly. “Here.” Her eyes flew open. “This is one.” She took Nia’s hand and placed it where hers had been, and as soon as Nia said, “Yes, I feel it!” she took my index finger and used it to push Nia’s finger aside and show me what they’d both felt.

  At first, I didn’t know what Callie and Nia were talking about, but then I did. The button was so small, and it fit into the pattern so naturally, that when I accidentally moved my finger off it, I had trouble finding it again. All three of us rose to our knees and leaned forward, our faces so close to the box that our heads knocked gently together. At first, it was impossible to see with our eyes what we’d felt with our fingers, but then Nia exclaimed, “It’s an eye!”

  “What?”

  She tilted the box slightly to catch the light and show us what she meant. “See? This is some kind of . . . it’s a lizard, I think.”

  Her word choice reminded me of something, and as she traced the outline of the creature with her finger, I suddenly realized what it was. “The car!” I shouted. “The drawings on the car.”

  Digging frantically in my pocket for my phone, I yanked it out, then shuffled through the photos until I came to the ones we’d taken of Thornhill’s car before we washed it. “Look!” I said, when I’d hit on the one I wanted. I turned the screen toward Callie and Nia.

  “Oh my god,” Nia murmured.

  The lizard she was touching on the box was an exact replica of the one Amanda had drawn on the car.

  Or, the one on the car had been a replica of the one on the box.

  “Push the button,” said Callie.

  Nia did. We all waited a minute, but nothing happened.

  Callie exhaled and I realized I, too, had been holding my breath.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “If there’s a lizard, there might be the other animals, too.” I pointed around at each of the girls as I spoke her totem. “Bear. Night owl.” Pointing at myself, I said, “Cougar.”

  “Coyote,” Nia said, adding Amanda’s totem.

  “Coyote,” I repeated.

  “Okay,” said Callie. “Let’s find them.”

  It was the definition of looking for a needle in a haystack. Fine, nearly invisible lines crissed and crossed, turning into leaves and elaborate abstract designs just as they seemed about to reveal themselves to be one of our totem animals. At first we were reluctant to mark the box, but when we found the cougar and immediately lost it, we agreed to use Nia’s lipstick to mark with a slightly sticky X each button when we found it.

  It felt like we’d been sitting for hours when, finally, the floor lamp Callie had brought over to the table illuminated the final totem: the night owl. I felt like howling at the sky as if I were an actual cougar, and I might have done it, too, if Nia’s next comment hadn’t brought me crashing down to earth.

  “What do we do now that we have them?”

  I raised my eyes to meet Callie’s and Nia’s stares. We’d come so far. Surely there had to be an Oz at the end of this yellow brick road.

  “And, guys, do you think that’s somebody’s totem?” Nia asked, pointing to the lizard.

  Callie looked puzzled. “Well, whose?”

  Nia executed her trademark eye roll. “Obviously, I don’t know whose. But there are our totems, and Amanda’s. So I am just making the leap.”

  I broke in. “Cut it out. Who knows whose it is? Maybe it is someone she looked for and never found. But it probably is significant because it was on the car.”

  Callie snapped her fingers. “The car. It could be the person who helped her graffiti the car!”

  “And who is he?” I groaned.

  “Or she,” Nia countered.

  “Whatev. However you slice it, the lizard is important,” I agreed.

  Her voice utterly confident, Callie decided. “We push the buttons. All five of them.”

  Nia shrugged slightly. “Didn’t do anything before.”

  “We only pushed one before,” Callie pointed out.

  “One, five, what’s the difference?” asked Nia. “What does it matter if we push them all at once or one at a time?”

  Callie stared at me, then at Nia. “Come together,” she said. “That was the message. Come together.”

  With that, she put two fingers on the box, one on each of the totem’s eyes nearest her. Without speaking, Nia did the same. I found the button of the last remaining totem.

  “On my count,” Callie said. “One. Two. Three.”

  I pressed my finger against the button as hard as I possibly could, but the force I exerted was unnecessary. No sooner had I put the slightest pressure on the eye of the coyote than I felt something deep inside the box fall into place.

  There was an almost inaudible click, and then a spring-loaded drawer in the box flew open.

  Chapter 23

  Nia gasped. I could feel my hands shaking. For a second we were all too shocked to move, and then Nia slipped her hand into the drawer. Th
ere must have been over a hundred pieces of paper stuffed into it—she couldn’t get them all at once and had to take out a bunch, then reach back in and get more.

  “What is it?” Callie asked eagerly. “Let me see!”

  “Chill,” Nia said sharply. There were still papers left in the drawer, but Callie and I ignored them and huddled around Nia to look at what she was holding.

  “It’s a map,” I said. The paper Nia was holding was an ordinary road map; there are a dozen like it in my mom’s car. I let my eyes follow a thick black line until they came to . . . “It’s Maryland,” I said. Sure enough, when Nia unfolded the map, it was a Rand McNally guide to Virginia and Maryland. We examined every square inch, but except for what looked like a coffee stain in one corner, there were no marks anywhere on it.

  “Okay, okay, let’s just . . . just look at something else,” Callie said, giving voice to the impatience we were all feeling.

  Nia put the map aside and we studied the next piece of paper, a newspaper article about a scientist, Dr. Cole Tobias, who’d disappeared from his home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, without leaving a trace, just days after publishing a major paper on climate change. According to the article, the authorities had concluded that there was no evidence of foul play. The article was dated five years earlier.

  “Callie,” Nia whispered, “that’s just like your . . .”

  “Yeah, I know,” Callie snapped. Nia and I looked at her, and she shrugged. “Sorry.”

  “Does the name Cole Tobias, age”—Nia glanced at the paper— “forty-five, mean anything to you?”

  Callie and I shook our heads and Nia put the clipping on top of the map. “Okay, strike two.”

  We all read the next page, a review of a book called Mapping the Human Genome by a woman named Maude Cooper.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. Maude Cooper. Maude Cooper. Where had I seen that name before?

  “Thornhill’s computer!” I snapped my fingers.