by Zoe Cannon
Heather jerked away. She started walking again, quicker this time. “I have to try.”
Becca tried to grab Heather’s shoulder again, but Heather twisted away from her and took off running toward the road.
“Wait!” Becca shouted.
Heather kept running.
There was only one thing that might stop her.
“I’ll talk to my mom,” she called.
Heather stopped.
She made her way back to Becca, step by tentative step. “You’ll make her understand?”
“I’ll do whatever I can.” And she would—no matter how unlikely it was that her mom would listen. Because if this didn’t work, Becca didn’t know what else she could do to keep Heather from going to 117.
She held her breath as Heather considered her offer.
The tension went out of Heather’s shoulders all at once. “Okay. Talk to her.”
“Promise me you won’t go to 117 until I talk to her.”
Another long hesitation. Finally, Heather nodded. “I promise.”
* * *
Becca didn’t see her mom that night, or the night after that. She went to bed in an empty apartment, and woke up to find her mom’s sheets rumpled and a frozen dinner missing from the freezer. Same old routine.
A few years ago, her mom had made it home for dinner most nights. But over the years, she had helped make 117 the best processing center in the country—or had done it singlehandedly, the way some people told it. Now, in addition to local dissidents, 117 processed the worst dissidents from all across the country. They came in on windowless trucks in the middle of the night, and disappeared into the underground levels before morning.
Everyone knew about 117. Everyone who worked in Processing wanted the prestige of being assigned there. And the busier the processing center became, the less time Becca’s mom had for anything but work.
On the third night, Becca didn’t bother to wait for her mom before microwaving a frozen dinner for herself. She picked at the rubbery pot roast as she flipped through channels. Some stupid sitcom. That TV movie about the woman who finds out her husband is a dissident. Executions. A cartoon about a talking dog.
The door clicked open.
Her mom stumbled inside, her face tinged with gray. She gave Becca a tired smile. “Becca. It’s so good to see you. You wouldn’t believe how busy they’ve been keeping us.” She collapsed onto the couch beside Becca.
Her mom looked much too tired to discuss Heather’s parents. Heather would understand if Becca had to wait another day. Becca could even say her mom had stayed at work all night.
No. She had promised. And if she waited too long, Heather might get impatient and go to 117 anyway. This conversation had to happen now. Becca sighed in resignation.
“What’s wrong?” Her mom watched her through half-closed eyes, her head resting against the back of the couch.
Becca ignored the temptation to say “nothing,” escape to her bedroom, and forget her promise to Heather. Her mom wouldn’t believe her if she said nothing was wrong, anyway. “I need to talk to you about Heather’s parents. I know what you said before, but isn’t there still some chance you got it wrong?”
Her mom closed her eyes all the way. Her frown lines grew more pronounced. “We had this conversation, Becca.”
“Can’t you at least look into it? Look at the evidence. Look at who turned them in.” The image of Heather striding into 117 demanding her parents’ release haunted Becca, giving her voice urgency. “If you don’t find anything, you’re not any worse off, and if you do, you’ll have saved two innocent people.”
“Listen to me.” Her mom opened her eyes and looked at her. Becca hadn’t noticed before how pronounced the dark circles under her eyes were. “I know how hard it is to learn something like this about people you were close to. But you’re going to have to accept it.” She folded her arms across her chest. Conversation over.
But it couldn’t be over. Not yet. “Please. I promised Heather I’d—”
Her mom’s brow furrowed. “I told you how I feel about you spending time with Heather in light of all this.”
"I can’t just abandon her. She’s my best friend. And she doesn’t have anyone else right now."
Her mom rubbed her temples. "In addition to your safety, you have to consider how this could affect your future prospects. You’re graduating next year. If Heather is arrested for dissident activity, a close association with her could seriously harm your chances of finding a good position with Internal."
"I’m not interested in working for Internal." Becca wasn’t going to let her mom sidetrack her with this old argument. "Please just say you’ll look into it. Do it for me."
“Becca.” Her mom rested a hand on her arm. “It’s over.”
“You could have misunderstood them.” She was reaching now, she knew. “Or maybe they—”
Her mom held out her other hand to stop her. “Becca… I executed them the night they were arrested.”
The ground dropped away underneath her. Her vision blurred as the room spun.
“It was necessary. They didn’t know as much as we had hoped, so we didn’t make much progress in finding the other members of their group. There might still be dissidents inside Internal. If we’d waited any longer, they could have been rescued.”
I talked to my mom like you asked, but she couldn’t get your parents released, because she had already killed them. Hysterical laughter rose in her chest.
“Becca. Say something.” Her mom’s hand tightened on her arm.
Becca struggled to bring the world back into focus. “It’s okay.” She cleared her throat. “It’s okay. They were dissidents, right? So you had to do it.”
Her mom still looked concerned. “It’s understandable for you to have trouble with this.”
“Was it…” Becca gestured toward the TV. Most dissidents were shot without ceremony on the underground levels of 117, but some executions were televised, the dissidents confessing their crimes into the camera before they died. Sometimes the executions were replayed for days afterward. When she had flipped through channels earlier, had she narrowly avoided seeing Heather’s parents die?
Her mom shook her head. “Considering the Thomases’ former positions in Surveillance, Public Relations wanted to keep the details quiet.”
Good. At least there was no chance Heather had seen it.
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine. Really.” What else had she expected? As hard as it was for Becca to believe, they had been dissidents. They wouldn’t have confessed otherwise. What was her mom supposed to do, let them go anyway just because their daughter missed them?
Becca pulled her arm into her lap, away from her mom’s hand.
She understood. She did.
But what was she going to tell Heather?
Chapter Three
Becca had never been so grateful for a weekend in her life.
But the two days passed too quickly, and before Becca had gotten past There’s something you need to know in her imagined speech to Heather, it was Monday morning again.
Avoiding Heather before lunch wasn’t hard. The only class they had together this year was Citizenship, in the afternoon. But when lunchtime came around, she stood in front of the cafeteria doors for a full five minutes as the river of students flowed around her. Two choices—sit with Heather and answer questions about her conversation with her mom, or sit someplace else and let Heather think she had abandoned her along with everybody else.
Or option three—skip the whole thing. She turned around. She wasn’t hungry anyway.
“The smell of the meatloaf scared you away too?” a voice behind her asked.
Becca spun around. It took her a moment to figure out where she recognized the boy from. It was the hair that did it—the black hair falling into his face. He was the one who hadn’t looked away when she had caught him staring on that first awful day.
Now he smiled, a slow smi
le that filled up his entire face. Becca made herself remember that he had been one of the gawkers that day, craning his neck to get a glimpse of Heather’s tragedy. She didn’t smile back.
“Where are you headed?” he asked.
Becca shrugged. “I don’t know. The library, I guess.”
“Good, me too.” He started walking. Now that Becca had said she was going to the library, she had no choice but to walk there with him.
He moved clumsily, like he had only recently gotten tall and hadn’t quite realized it yet. “I don’t blame you for not wanting to eat in there,” he said. “I’ve seen the way everyone looks at you and Heather now.”
“It’s not like you weren’t watching too.” She studied him out of the corner of her eye as she spoke, trying to figure out who he was. He had to be new; she hadn’t seen him around here before that day in the cafeteria. But something about him made her certain she knew him from somewhere.
He looked faintly embarrassed. “I heard the rumors like everyone else. I wanted to know what was going on. It took me a while to figure out they were all going after your friend for no real reason.”
He started up the stairs. Becca followed him, struggling to keep up with his long-legged stride. “What changed your mind?”
“Everyone has a different story about the two of you. All anybody really knows is that Internal took her parents. And having dissident parents doesn’t make you a dissident.”
Becca wished more people saw it that way. Weird, though, that this stranger would, when none of Heather’s friends were willing to stand by her. So did he know her and Heather from somewhere? The more she talked to him, the more she got the sense that she should remember him.
“Do you mind if I ask you something?” she asked as they walked. “Don’t be offended, okay?”
They reached the top of the stairs, directly in front of the library. He stopped outside the door. “Go ahead.”
“Are you new here, or do I know you?”
“I’m new.” He smiled again. “I’m Jake, by the way.”
Becca let her breath out. “Good. I haven’t forgotten you, then. But…” She frowned. “You still seem familiar. Are you sure we haven’t met before?”
“I lived around here a few years ago.” His voice dropped as he pushed the library door open. “We went to junior high together. I think you were in my English class.”
Jake. Right. She thought she remembered him now—a short skinny kid who had always been joking around. The time away had agreed with him. His chatter that had bordered on obnoxious seemed to have mellowed into a quiet friendliness… and, she had to admit, he was a lot nicer to look at now.
She looked away and hurried into the library before he could notice her studying him.
The library—twice the size of the one at the old high school, with shelves that towered above Becca’s head—was empty except for a couple of girls at the computers and a boy with a stack of books beside him. Becca sat down at the nearest table. Jake took the chair across from her.
“You left halfway through the year,” Becca remembered aloud. “Actually, I heard—” She closed her mouth before the rest of the sentence could escape. I heard Internal took you.
“You heard I was a dissident? Yeah, I’ve heard that one too.” He smiled, as if to reassure her that he wasn’t offended. Becca smiled back in relief.
Maybe that was why he wasn’t as quick to condemn Heather as everyone else. He’d had his own experiences with people’s vicious assumptions. Nothing weird about it after all.
“Well, thanks for not thinking the same thing about me,” said Becca.
He leaned back in his chair. “You don’t look like a dissident to me,” he said with another smile.
Wait. He was flirting, wasn’t he? She basked in the unaccustomed attention. A wave of guilt followed. Heather was sitting alone in the cafeteria, still thinking she had a chance of getting her parents back, and Becca was in the library flirting with a boy. Some best friend she was.
“Is something wrong? You look upset.”
Becca had missed her chance to flirt back. “Nothing’s wrong. I’m just worried about Heather.” She hadn’t understood until now how much she wanted somebody on her side in all this. Normally she had her mom and Heather—but now Heather was the one who needed her help, and her mom was part of the problem. “I don’t know why everyone keeps saying she’s a dissident. If she were a dissident, they would have executed her.”
“I’ve heard of dissidents getting released every once in a while, if they’ve cooperated.”
“That’s not what happened with Heather,” Becca said sharply. “She wasn’t even arrested.”
“I’m just saying they might think that’s what happened. Or maybe they think Internal let her go so she’d lead them to other dissidents. I don’t think they’ve thought it through that far, though. They’re just vultures feeding on someone else’s misery.”
Hadn’t Becca thought of them in exactly those terms, that first day? She really did have an ally—one she never would have known about if he hadn’t passed by at exactly the right moment…
How had he just happened to be there?
There was something strange about the way he was looking at her. Underneath his casual demeanor, he was watching her with too-sharp eyes.
She blinked, and it was gone.
Well, of course she was feeling paranoid, after what had happened to Heather’s parents. After what she had learned about them.
“Is she doing okay?” asked Jake. “It’s got to be tough, going through something like that.”
Why did he care so much about Heather, anyway? He didn’t know her.
He had that sharp look in his eyes again.
“I mean, she probably didn’t even know they were dissidents.” He watched her like he was waiting for something.
It was as if someone had dumped a bucket of cold water over Becca’s head.
Of course. She should have seen it earlier. She should have guessed.
Jake wasn’t interested in Becca. He didn’t feel bad for Heather. And he hadn’t just happened to show up at the right time.
He was spying for Internal.
The school, like everywhere else, was crawling with Monitors, but everyone knew who they were. Internal needed other people too—people who watched for dissident activity without anyone knowing it. People like Jake. Jake, who had maneuvered her into a conversation about Heather so he could fish for information.
It was bad enough that everyone at school thought Heather was a dissident. If Internal suspected her too, that was a whole different kind of dangerous.
But they had let her go. If they suspected her, why would they have let her go?
It was too easy to think of reasons. Maybe they were hoping she would lead them to other dissidents—Jake had even mentioned that possibility. Maybe letting her go had been some kind of test. Or maybe they just wanted to be sure.
Internal would only need to watch her for a while to realize she was innocent, though. It wasn’t as if she would do anything suspicious. Except that it wouldn’t take much to incriminate Heather at this point. The way Becca’s mom talked about her proved that. All Heather had to do was say one thing that somebody like Jake could misinterpret.
The others might be vultures, but Jake was a predator. He could draw blood.
Jake waved a hand in front of her face. “Becca? You still there?”
“I have to go,” she mumbled. She didn’t look at him as she hurried out of the room.
Only after the library door closed behind her did she realize how suspicious she had just made herself look.
* * *
Usually when Becca’s mom got home early—which these days meant before eight—they had dinner together and spent the evening catching up. This time, Becca told her mom she had already eaten, and holed herself up in her bedroom after a few minutes of small talk. She walled her textbooks around herself and let everything but homework fade to the back of
her mind.
Even with her door closed, the doorbell jarred her out of her studying trance. She frowned at her computer screen, trying to pick up her lost train of thought. Her mom could deal with it.
“Becca’s not home right now,” she heard her mom say to whoever was at the door.
What? Becca scrambled out of her chair and opened her bedroom door just in time to hear the visitor’s response.
“Actually,” said Heather, “I came to talk to you.”
Becca rushed down the hallway into the living room. Heather stood on one side of the door, her mom on the other. Heather’s hair was mussed, and her makeup was smudged with tears. Her shirt looked like she had pulled it out of the laundry.
Heather’s look of determination changed to a confused frown. “I thought you weren’t here.”
Becca glared at her mom, who was still standing between her and the door. “I was just in my room.”
“You haven’t answered my calls.”
Becca hadn’t meant to keep ignoring Heather’s calls. She had just needed more time to figure out what to say. Now, though, her time had run out. “We can talk now, if you want.” Becca pushed in front of her mom. She glanced back toward her room—and toward her mom, standing behind her. Too close. Any place in this apartment would be too close. “Outside.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” said her mom. “You said you had a lot of homework.”
Heather tried to step past Becca into the apartment. “Since I’m here, I might as well talk to your mom myself.”
Becca shifted to block Heather’s path. “Why don’t we go out to the parking lot? We can talk there. It’ll be easier.”
“What did you want to talk to me about, Heather?” Her mom’s voice betrayed only mild curiosity.
Heather took a deep breath. “My parents were arrested a few days ago.” She craned her neck to see past Becca. Another breath. “I thought maybe there was something you could do. You know, to get somebody to understand that they’re innocent.”
Please don’t tell her, Becca silently begged her mom. However hard it would be for Heather to hear the news from Becca, hearing it from Becca’s mom would be so much worse.
