by Sean Rodman
A couple of days later, Asha and I were at the climbing gym. It’s one of my favorite places to go, and Asha was always into it as well. Things had been tense between us since she had told me about her summer job. I thought having a proper date might help sort things out between us. A proper date for us involved climbing up a fifteen-foot wall. I was about to head up, with Asha belaying me. I glanced over to see her holding the safety rope attached to my harness.
“Belay on,” she said. I started up the wall. At five feet, I lunged for a big jug-shaped grip and missed. I fell back, feeling the safety rope lock tight. Damn. I wasn’t focused.
Asha unlocked the belay device and let the rope slip through her fingers, dropping me down. When I was about a foot from the blue crash mats, she tightened the harness. I jerked to a halt. I was stuck like a fish on a line, dangling just off the ground. She grinned at me.
“Cute,” I said. “You’re gonna let me down?”
“I guess. You want to try again?” said Asha. She looked pretty with her long dark hair back in a ponytail. The tight white T-shirt didn’t hurt either.
“Actually, maybe I’ll hang out for a while like this,” I said. “It’s a nice view.”
Asha laughed. All right, things were going well. Time to get something off my chest.
“Listen,” I said. “We never finished that conversation about you going away this summer.”
“What’s there to finish?” she said. “You obviously don’t like it. And I don’t have a choice. I need the money for tuition.”
“So it’s just about the money?” I said. Okay, now this felt awkward with me stuck at the end of the climbing rope. But I couldn’t go anywhere without Asha letting me down.
“Well, I guess not,” she said. She coiled some loose rope around her hand, thinking. “I’m also kind of proud that I got this job. It wasn’t easy. It’ll look good on my resume, and that’ll help on my college application. I sort of thought you might be proud of me too.”
Why would I be proud of her? I actually thought she’d come up with the worst possible way to earn money. But I was smart enough not to say that.
“I am proud of you,” I said. “It’s just that I don’t understand how money can be more important than-”
“Than what, Bex?” Asha cut in.
“More important than you?”
“No! More important than us,” I said. “We’re pretty great together, you know?”
“I know.”
“Then how can you leave?”
“Bex, part of liking someone is trusting them. Letting them do what they need to do.”
“And, what-you don’t need me anymore?” I cut in.
“I didn’t say that, Bex,” said Asha. “For such a smart guy, you can be a real dumbass sometimes.”
Asha unhooked her harness from the line and spun away. I dropped down onto the crash mats on the floor and watched her go.
Crap. That got out of hand fast.
So much for my great plan to fix things.
But there had to be a way for me to manage this. I was the one who always figured out the angles, who came up with the solution to the problem. Why couldn’t I figure her out?
Then it hit me. If I did the DMA run with Kieran, I could make enough money to convince Asha to stay home for the summer. I’d give her all of the money, and she’d have her tuition. She wouldn’t have to go anywhere until the fall. It was more extreme than anything I’d done before. Way more extreme. But it would be worth it. This was the way to fix everything.
I dug my phone out of my backpack. My hands shook a little as I texted Kieran.
I’m in.
The next day, Asha was still avoiding me in the cafeteria. I’d been watching her and a bunch of her girlfriends across the big hall. She hadn’t looked over at me once. Jake sat down next to me. He followed my gaze.
“Hey, why is Asha sitting over there?” Jake said. “This is our table.”
“I don’t know what’s up,” I said. Jake raised his eyebrows.
“I don’t believe you,” he said. His big hands folded around a burger, and then he took a monster bite. Chewed. Waited. He knew that eventually I’d spill. He was right. It took about a minute.
“So we had a fight,” I admitted. “About her going away this summer. But it’s all good now. I’ve got it all figured out.”
“Bex, you’re one of the smartest guys I know,” said Jake. “But you’ve always kind of sucked when it comes to girls. Run the plan by me.”
“All right, but this stays totally with you,” I said. Jake nodded.
I lowered my voice and filled him in on what Kieran and I were planning. By the time I finished, he was mopping up the last of the ketchup with his fries. My plate was still full of cold cafeteria food.
Jake shook his head. “The DMA place sounds cool,” he said. “Might be worth checking out just to explore. I bet no one has ever been in there before.”
Bingo. Jake was on side.
“But, seriously-stealing phones?” he said. He rubbed a hand through his short brown hair. “What happened to ‘take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints’?”
I shrugged. “Guess I’m not the Boy Scout everyone thought I was.”
Jake looked at me.
“You’ve never been a Boy Scout.
You’re just smart about risks.” Jake leaned closer to me. “This plan of yours goes wrong, you’ll get busted huge. Like, cops, jail, the works.”
“It’s not even really a crime,” I said. “Nobody will get hurt. It’s a massive company. They won’t even notice the phones are gone. They’ve probably already forgotten that those phones are in the warehouse.”
“Maybe. But what do you know about Kieran? He strike you as reliable? Think he’ll save your ass if things go wrong?”
I hadn’t told Jake about the bridge the other night. Kieran had saved me.
“And even if it all works out and you get the money, then what?” he continued. “Her parents won’t have a problem with this? You think Asha won’t have a problem?”
“What do you mean?”
“Handing Asha some cash won’t fix things between you two. I doubt she cares about the money at all. This is about letting her do her own thing. Trusting her.” Jake sounded just like Asha. He was supposed to be taking my side, not hers.
“Jake, why the hell was I asking you for relationship advice?” I stood up, grabbing my backpack. I pulled out my headphones and my iPod. “Just stay out of my way, all right?”
Phones on, tunes cranked to maximum, I walked toward the door. My music sounded like static with a pulse. I was sealed in a bubble of noise. I felt angry and sad and scared, all at once.
I was losing my girlfriend.
Now my best friend was against me.
I just wanted to be able to think straight. I knew I could figure out the right thing to do. The right way to pull everyone together, to get control of the situation. If I could just get all the pieces straight in my head.
I was out of the cafeteria and into the main hallway when I was suddenly grabbed from behind. Jake spun me around, slamming me against the lockers. He pushed my headphones off.
“What the hell?” I said. Was Jake looking to fight? Had I pissed him off that much? I felt a cold knot in my stomach.
“You’re being an idiot, Bex. I don’t know what’s up with you. But you’re my best friend. And that means that I’ve always got your back, even when your head’s up your ass. You understand?”
I nodded.
“I’m coming with you. That’s not an option. You make a mistake, you’ll make it with me beside you.”
I knew I should be mad at Jake for acting like some kind of overprotective big brother. But the truth was, I was relieved. I guessed that Kieran wasn’t going to be happy about this. I was supposed to go see him tonight. Maybe I’d tell him about the new addition to our team then.
Maybe not.
I decided I didn’t care what Kieran thought about th
is. If my life was filled with static, at least I had one friend with me to try and see through it.
Chapter Seven
After school, I had to take three buses to get to Kieran’s house. It was out in a new development, one of a row of homes carefully designed to look old. I pressed the doorbell and heard a ringing far away in the house. Kieran’s dad opened the door. He was dressed in a pale gray sweater and collared shirt. He had small pinched eyes that frowned at me.
“Are you Kieran’s friend?” he asked.
“Yes, uh, sir,” I said. “We’re studying for the geography test.” Kieran had suggested the lie to me earlier. Studying on a Friday night sounded like a weak excuse, but whatever.
“I’m Mr. Ridgeway,” he said. He held out his hand, and we shook. “Come in.” He turned and walked inside. Weird. He gave off the same vibe that Kieran did sometimes. It was like he was an alien or something, just learning how to deal with humans.
“I’m glad Kieran’s made a friend,” he said over his shoulder. “Since we moved he’s spent far too much time in his room alone.” I wasn’t sure how to react, so I didn’t say anything. We walked through to the living room.
“Wait here,” said Mr. Ridgeway. He disappeared upstairs. I studied the room. The house was completely silent except for the hum of a fridge. The living room was perfect, like a set from a tv show. No mess. No clutter. No sign of what the Ridgeways were like. Maybe they hadn’t had time to really settle in yet. Mr. Ridgeway returned with Kieran. He looked like he’d been up all night. His hair was tangled, and his black T-shirt was wrinkled. He had huge bags under his eyes. He nodded at me. “Hey.”
“Boys,” Mr. Ridgeway said, “I’d appreciate it if you kept the noise down. I’ll be in my office.” It bugged me how he was looking at Kieran. Like he was something that smelled bad.
Kieran didn’t reply. We waited until his dad left.
A few minutes later we were upstairs in Kieran’s room. Like the living room, it looked as if it came straight from a furniture store. A cheap generic poster of a sailboat was neatly framed on one wall. The single bed was perfectly made up. Looking at Kieran, I guessed that he hadn’t slept in it recently.
“Dude,” I said. “You have the cleanest room I’ve ever seen. Do you actually live here or just visit?” I was trying to make a joke, but Kieran didn’t smile. He slumped into an office chair beside an empty wooden desk.
“It doesn’t feel like my room,” he said. “When we moved here, my dad paid someone to decorate the house. He bought everything new and left all our old stuff behind. I think he might have left me behind as well if he could have.” Kieran pulled out a battered black laptop from under the desk. “Doesn’t matter. I’m not planning on staying here for too long.” He jammed a memory stick into the laptop and typed.
I looked out the bedroom window at the sun setting behind the identical houses marching down the street, like an army of clones. This wasn’t a place I would want to stay in either. Before I could ask any more questions, Kieran spun the laptop around so I could see the screen.
“Here,” he said. “Like I said, I’ve got a bunch of blueprints and maps of the DMA site in here. It’s not complete. My dad nearly busted me copying this stuff off his computer, so I had to rush it. But there was enough for me to see that there’s no way in. That I could find.”
I sat down on the bed, taking his laptop with me. As I scrolled through the computer files, the screen filled with digital pictures and maps. I realized that this was going to be like breaking into a bank. There were security cameras, fences, guard posts-the works. Instead of getting frustrated, though, I was getting more excited. It was a puzzle waiting to be cracked. Kieran watched over my shoulder.
“You know, there are rumors about you at school,” I said to him, while I worked my way through the files. “Did you guys move here because of something you did?”
I turned and saw Kieran’s face tighten up. It looked the same as when he screamed at Mr. Kurtzia in the science lab. But he kept his voice steady.
“It wasn’t my fault that we moved,” he said. “It all started when my mom died.”
My hands froze on the keyboard.
“What happened to her? Like, an accident or something?” It sounded awkward as I said it. I should have kept my mouth shut.
“No,” said Kieran. “Suicide.” I felt so bad for him right then. He said the word flatly, like it didn’t mean anything. He stared at his hands in his lap, fiddling with a chunky ring on one finger. Then suddenly he looked at me, that hard look back in his eyes.
“I’m trusting you, right? You never repeat this shit that I’m telling you, get it?” I just nodded. Kieran went back to looking at his ring.
“I had a hard time with it. But my dad…” Kieran’s voice trailed off. “My dad wanted to pretend that nothing had happened, like we had to hide her death or something. I couldn’t talk about it with him.” Kieran’s voice was changing as he got more wound up. But instead of yelling, he dropped his voice almost to a hiss. Low. Spooky.
“He’s so useless,” he spat, his fists clenching. “You know something? When my mom got…sick, before she did it, you know what my dad did?” A vein throbbed near Kieran’s temple as he spoke. “He worked more. Longer hours, always at the lab. Every night. He couldn’t face her. Or me.” His voice shook. “When things got tough, he made my mom disappear.”
He looked out the window. It was like he was trying to get ahold of himself.
I waited.
“And after Mom died,” he continued, “he tried to do the same thing to me. After she killed herself, I was pissed off at everyone. The fake smiles, the pretend friends. I mean, what’s the point?” He shook his head. “I wasn’t going to play along with it. My father thought he solved the problem when he found a therapist who would put me on a bunch of drugs.”
“Seriously?”
“Check it out.” Kieran pulled out a desk drawer. He held up a half-empty pill bottle. “Antidepressants,” he said. Another bottle: “Anti-anxiety meds.”
I shuddered. Who’d want to drug their own kid to keep them from grieving their mom’s death?
“Anyway,” Kieran said, “we finally moved when I got busted for starting a fire in one of the chem labs.” He shrugged. “Maybe I did it. Maybe not. Didn’t matter. It was enough to convince my dad that a change of scene would make me forget my problems.”
“Did it?” I said. He shook his head.
“That’s the problem,” he said. “My dad wants to forget her. Forget me. Make us go away.”
Kieran seemed to pull himself together a little. Maybe he saw the stunned expression on my face. There was way more going on here than I thought.
“Look, uh,” I said, “the idea of sneaking into the DMA site is awesome. But I can’t-I don’t want to get into something between you and your dad.”
“It’s not like that,” said Kieran, shaking his head. “You just help me figure out how to get in there, it’ll be an awesome run. And as a bonus we’ll make some money. Plus, I’ll be able to do something that really gets my dad’s attention, you know? No skin off your back.”
This was messed up. Part of me wanted to get up and leave right away, walk away from the whole complicated scene. I didn’t want Kieran’s problems. But I felt bad for him. I knew he didn’t have any friends at school to talk to. Despite his strangeness, I liked him. Especially now that I knew what he’d gone through.
And I wish I didn’t care about the money, but I did. The chance to fix things with Asha was too big to pass up.
I swallowed my unease.
“Maybe there’s something here,” I said. I pointed at a blocky map on the laptop screen. “This is where they used to rig up the rocket engines for testing.” I flipped to an old black-and-white picture of huge concrete pillars and iron girders. A massive rocket nozzle was strapped to the top. I’d read about something similar at an old NASA lab in California on the urban exploration websites.
“Underneath those
big platforms, they built tunnels and filled them with water,” I said. “The water would help keep the noise of the rockets down. Kept things from catching on fire too.” I explained that the blast from the rockets would turn the water in the tunnels to steam. The tunnels vented the steam out, safely away from the testing area. I tapped the screen to show a point well away from the fence line of the DMA site.
“See these marks on the map? I think this is where the old tunnels ended. That’s our way in.”
Chapter Eight
We decided that we needed to scout the entrance to the tunnels before going any further. Hopefully, DMA had figured that the tunnel entrances were in the middle of nowhere and just boarded them up. Worst case, they might have backfilled the tunnels with rubble. In which case, I’d need to come up with a new brilliant plan.
Kieran and I arranged to go out there Saturday night. I left a note for my parents saying that I was staying over at Jake’s house. As long as I told them where I was going, and had my cell, they never seemed to worry. A fringe benefit of my responsible “nice guy” image.
I’d been putting off telling Kieran about adding Jake to our team. But I didn’t have a choice now. Jake and I arrived at Kieran’s house together. When Kieran opened the door, he looked at Jake, then turned to me.
“It’s not a slumber party, Bex. What the hell is he doing here?”
“Nice to see you too, Kieran. It’s such a pleasure,” said Jake. It was obvious what he really meant.
“Jake’s coming with us,” I said. “We need him.”
“You told him?” said Kieran with disbelief. I nodded. Kieran swore and stomped away from the open door. Jake and I looked at each other, then entered the dark house. There was no sign of Kieran’s dad this time.
Kieran was pacing back and forth across the living room.
“What the hell gave you the right to tell him about our plans?” said Kieran.
“It’s my plan,” I said. “And it’s my call if we need extra help. Jake is good. The three of us can cover more ground than just you and me.”
