That’s when I met the Fab Four, the It girls of Samohi. They are, in order of supreme coolness: Veronica (varsity tennis, daughter of Hollywood studio owner, legs that go up to my chin), Kat (varsity tennis, famous for shameless drinking and dancing), Olive (varsity tennis, signed up for the Biology Club in tenth grade by accident because she thought it was sex ed), Tish (varsity tennis, owns exactly twenty-six pairs of black Manolos). They seemed so happy in a deep way, like no one could get to them or take away the confidence that they got from one another. They were surprised to learn that their favorite band was also my favorite band and that I, too, dreamed of someday living on the beach in Santa Barbara. And they liked my boots. Seriously. They thought my boots were epic and that I had this earthy sense of style. I was in.
We’ve been friends for almost four years now, and it’s an odd dynamic between us. The four of them have everything in common: their clothes, the tennis team, an obsession with football stud Drew Bailey. I stick to my uniform, wouldn’t be caught dead in a tennis skirt, and can barely keep a straight face when Drew Bailey is speaking. But they like that I join in without making waves, and I like being part of a group. It’s almost as if I have a safe place to hide among them, where I blend in and no one sees me at all. It’s not perfect, but compared to all the other ways a girl like me can get through high school, it works. Well, it worked until I went and got myself kidnapped.
Life’s a Beach and Then You Drown
So in early April I was hanging out with the Fab Four watching that oh-too-scandalous Tuesday night teen drama when I noticed some numbers in the bottom left corner of the screen, directly across from the network logo in the right corner. These white, almost clear numbers flashed during the first minute of the opening credits of the show. I knew better than to mention it (remember, I’m masquerading as normal), and then the numbers disappeared. I forgot all about it until the next week when a different set of numbers popped up in exactly the same place. I scanned everyone’s face to see if they noticed. Nothing. The opening scene started and Jessica’s sister was hooking up with her crush, so I moved on.
But the next week a third set of numbers appeared, ever so faintly again, during the opening credits. They were quickly imprinted in my mind, and I felt the process starting. The numbers were lining up with the previous two sets. I was on the verge of slipping into Digit mode right there in front of my friends and in immediate danger of missing the opening scene. I reached into my pocket, pulled out my iPhone, and flipped to the photograph of a perfect oak tree that I keep for emergencies. After about forty-five seconds, I snapped out of it and got back into the show.
But by the time I got home, my willpower was all used up. No tree, no perfect circle, nothing was going to be able to distract me from that number sequence. So I went up to my room and decided to air out that part of me that doesn’t care whether I have lip gloss on or whether my thong is low enough to wear with my new jeans. I sat down at my desk and wrote each set of numbers. The first set was 55431. The second was 23185. Week three was 3211911, making the number sequence all together 55431231853211911. I stared at it until order took over the chaos, mostly. It was pretty basic. The first fourteen numbers are the basic Fibonacci numbers but reversed. A Fibonacci sequence is where each number is the sum of the two numbers before it. So start with 1 and then 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55 is a classic one. 1 + 1 is 2, 1 + 2 is 3, 2 + 3 is 5, et cetera. So if you take away the 911, it’s just a reverse Fibonacci. Reverse Fibonacci 911.
That really got me nowhere, so I got in bed. The Fibonacci sequence was pretty remedial, and the only thing interesting about it was that it was backwards. I started thinking that the Fibonacci thing was just to get us to understand the concept of reversal. And then there was 911. Reverse 9/11? Was this some sort of message to honor the victims of the terror attacks? Was there someone at the TV station who was trying to make a political message about terrorists or foreign policy? Sure, that made sense as long as their most sought-after pundits were teenage girls watching weekly beachside hookups. And, oh by the way, if these girls also happened to be mathletes (a phrase that makes me cringe in its sarcasm) who would be able to decipher the code. Unlikely.
It couldn’t be an accident that the code unraveled in a nearly coherent way, but I had no idea what it meant. Surprisingly, I felt pretty relaxed after letting Digit out of the box and giving her a little exercise. I fell sound asleep.
Wednesday morning I woke up with the code on my lips. I walked the perimeter of my room, running my hand along the bumper stickers that covered my walls. I admired my work, the precision with which they were hung corner to corner, almost like bricks stacked to perfection. I stopped at 9/11 NEVER FORGET. I ran my fingers over the numbers, 911. It’s the number you call in an emergency, of course. It’s a date and a phone number. But why put a reverse in front of it?
With my mind stuck firmly in computer mode, I decided I’d be late for school and just sit down and let it happen. Reverse 911. The numbers flipped in front of my eyes and actually reversed 9/11 to 11/9. November 9. It was now April, so it couldn’t be a date for something to happen soon. Did anything big ever happen on November 9? Not in my lifetime that I remembered, so I grabbed my laptop and Googled November 9.
As I read through the results, I got a lot of garbage like movie openings, appellate court hearings, and celebrity birthdays. There were tons of articles about John F. Kennedy. I guess the most interesting thing that ever happened on November 9 was his election as president in 1960. There were pictures of Jackie and him celebrating, and it all seemed so romantic. Her clothes and her gloves and her hair fascinated me. I ended up spending a half-hour poring through these articles. “JFK: The first Catholic President.” “JFK: How the Celebrities Loved Him . . .”
Finally, my dad knocked on my door. “Aren’t you still enrolled in high school?” he asked, looking at his watch.
“Got distracted,” I said, slamming shut my laptop and shoving it in my backpack. I was really late.
“Anything good?” he asked. My dad is always dying to hear about new theories I am developing or codes I am cracking, but he is careful not to make too much of it. I think that until I am eighteen he’d rather see me as a mall rat than a mathematician. But still, he can’t help but ask.
“Just a number game in my head. I’m making something out of nothing.”
I made it into school by second-period English class. Mr. Schulte doesn’t really like me because he thinks I don’t apply myself in his class. The problem is that I have English with the Fab Four, so I spend most of the time texting them about how hot Drew Bailey looks today or how gross Tessa Jergen’s toes are.
Anyway, halfway into class, Mr. Schulte opened his laptop to look up a quote from a poem he couldn’t remember, and his face totally changed as soon as he hit his homepage. No one said anything. Olive, the cleverest of the Fab Four, texted me: Boyfriend dump him? I thought, Well, maybe, because when he looked up, I saw a tear in his eye.
“Um, kids . . .” he started. “I just saw on the Internet that this morning there was a terrorist attack on a New York airport. A suicide bomber boarded a plane that was awaiting takeoff. Eight people were killed.”
Did my heart stop? Maybe. My mind started racing. The numbers, the code—were they revealing a target? I think I already knew, but I had to ask the question: “What airport was it?”
“JFK.”
I Keep Pressing “Escape” but I’m Still Here!
The classroom erupted into a chorus of Oh my Gods. “Oh my God, who could do something like that?” “Oh my God, my grandparents live in New Jersey.” “Oh my God, are they coming to L.A. next?” Oh my God. I heard them as if through a tunnel, their voices dissolving into a hum. I knew the details of the bombing were about to unfold, and I knew that I was about to freak out. My body somehow got me out of the classroom, into my car, and then home. I raced to my room and slammed the door like something was chasing me. I had the sneaking suspicion that maybe I was
going crazy, that maybe this fake life I’d been trying to live had made my mind bend in a way it could not recover from. And who was I going to tell? “Uh, hello? FBI? Listen just as Kayla was unbuttoning Brendan’s shirt in the opening scene of my very favorite show, I noticed some numbers, and, well, I think I know how the terrorists are communicating. Sorry I didn’t call earlier . . .”
No, that wasn’t going to play. And the whole thing could have been just a coincidence. Although I knew deep down that it wasn’t. The more I know about math, order, and chaos, the less I believe in coincidences anymore. Everything I look back on in life that I thought was a coincidence seems now as if it must have been by design. What I really wanted was for someone to tell me my math was wrong.
There was only one person I could talk to, so I got back in my car and drove a teensy bit too fast to UCLA. I parked illegally in front of one of the fraternity houses and ignored the super-cute shirtless guy sitting on the balcony who was yelling at me to move my car. As I ran, I wondered: Could that guy be smart? Is it hard to get into UCLA? Maybe he’s from out of state? Isn’t it really hard to get into UCLA from out of state? I made a mental note to look into this as soon as I relieved myself of the burden of having to save the free world from the bad guys.
I found my dad in his office, meeting with a bunch of professors. Well by “found” I really mean “burst in on and knocked down two.” Aren’t you supposed to know not to stand in front of a closed door? Anyway, I helped them up, apologized, and introduced myself all in one breath. My dad looked at me in horror but quickly realized something was up that was more important than this meeting.
“My wife has been training Farrah to make a grand entrance since she was two. She’ll be very pleased to hear about this.” Polite chuckles all around.
Dad suggested they continue their meeting after lunch, and the professors happily agreed, some of them backing out of the room in a don’t-hurt-me sort of way.
“So what have you got?” Dad asked me as he stretched in his chair.
“Terrorists. I saw the code they were sending on TV, and it was obviously a signal that an attack would be at JFK.” Dad was not exactly springing into action. “Have you even heard about it? Dad, there was a terror attack.” That was the first my dad had heard about the suicide bomber. He was horrified and was certainly paying attention now. He flipped open his laptop and went straight to CNN. Seeing it was so much more intense than hearing about it. The video clip showed Terminal 8 covered in smoke, fire trucks parked in the Arrivals lane where waiting taxis should be. People running from baggage claim empty-handed.
“My God, honey. Seven people. Five passengers and a pilot and a copilot. Plus the bomber.” My dad was shaking a little and sat back down in his desk chair. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. I wondered if he trying to rub the image from his mind or if he was hiding a tear. He went back to the news story. “This is awful. It was a businessman from Connecticut, his wife, and their three children. Could have been so much worse if the bomber had been inside the terminal. It says here the airport’s been closed in case there are more attacks. Awful, just awful.”
I sat down on the couch opposite his desk. I don’t know much about shock, but I imagine this is what it was. The only hope I was hanging on to was that my dad would tell me my math was wrong, that I was overreacting, maybe going a little crazy, and that there was nothing I could have done to prevent the scene I just saw.
“Sweetheart, is this why you are here? Did they let you out of school early because of this attack? Do you want me to take you home? And what does this have to do with a TV show?”
I tried to shake my head clear, walked over to his desk, and wrote down the series of numbers. “Over three weeks I saw these numbers flash at the beginning of a TV show. When you line them up, this is what you get.” He looked at them for a long time, and I was starting to get impatient. “Nothing?”
“I see nothing, honey.” Dad looked at me with confusion. I met his eyes with a little hope.
“Okay, let me explain it to you; maybe I have this all wrong.” Even saying it made me feel lighter. Who did I think I was? Ha! It was probably some copyright information, and I was going to need a few more weeks in hypnotherapy. So I worked through the numbers, reversed them, got to 11/9, and then Googled it for him. I slowed down as I got to the end of my case, the dread in the pit in my stomach returning. I knew I was right.
My dad leaned back in his chair, hands folded on his lap, and smiled that I-love-you-no-matter-how-big-of-a-wack-job-you-are smile I always count on. “I see it, honey, but it’s a little far-fetched. I think the truth is that you are stressed out socially and bored academically. Maybe we should work on some college-level stuff at home, not all the time, but just enough to keep your imagination engaged and, well, productive.”
“My imagination? I’m not going crazy. Well, okay, maybe I am going crazy, but it’s not because I’m bored and need to see codes where they aren’t. I’m going crazy because I almost had this figured out at eight a.m., and this happened at ten. Dad, eight people were blown up.” I started to cry.
My dad put his arms around me. “Honey, this has nothing to do with you. This happened three thousand miles away to people you were never going to meet. Think about it. Do you really believe that the U.S. government, the FBI, and Homeland Security weren’t able to stop this horrible attack, but you could have? It’s, well, a little ridiculous, frankly.”
I was crushed. He was the only person in my life that I could count on to take me seriously. “Dad, nothing would make me happier than to be hallucinating this whole thing. Maybe spend a few weeks in a straitjacket or covered in Mom’s crystals and then just move on. But I have the worst feeling that I’m right.”
“This isn’t going to end here, is it?”
I shook my head.
“If you want the cable station that is broadcasting that show investigated, it’s not going to be by us, so don’t get any ideas, Nancy Drew. I’ll take you to the FBI or Homeland Security, but I can’t force them to take you seriously. This theory is a little thin.”
Eighty-five percent of me wanted to believe my dad, wash my hands of this, and watch the tragedy unfold on the news at arm’s length. Sometimes I really wish I were only 85 percent me.
Don’t Call Me Infantile, You Stinkybutt Poophead
Dad was worried about my mental health, with good reason. I think he wanted me to feel like he was on my side but also wanted someone in authority to tell me how ridiculous my theory was. So Thursday morning off we went to the Federal Building to FBI headquarters to line up with the rest of the fruitcakes who have secrets that may be of interest to national security.
We waited in line for about an hour until we were escorted into the Fruitcake Room. I didn’t see an actual sign calling it that, but you could tell by the way the people were escorted out in a thanks-for-coming-please-don’t-touch-anything-on-your-way-out sort of way that anyone who entered was considered a kook. Trust me, I recognized the look.
We were greeted by a guy, maybe twenty-one years old, in a wrinkled but expensive suit. “Welcome, please have a seat,” he said without really looking at us.
“You’re with the FBI?” Dad asked, horrified by how young this guy looked.
He met my dad’s eye. “Yes, sir. I get that all the time. I was an early matriculate in college and am on an accelerated path in the Bureau. But I assure you that I have adequate training to handle whatever concern you have brought in today.”
“Okay . . . I’m Ben Higgins, and this is my daughter, Farrah.”
“What have you . . . ?” He looked at me for the first time. “Farrah?”
“Yes,” I said.
“That’s your name?”
“Yes.”
My dad was losing his patience. “It’s her name. Can we move on?”
“Okay, sorry. What have you got for us?” he asked, straightening the already-straight papers on his desk.
My dad answered for me
, which was annoying but a relief. “My daughter has run across a series of numbers that she believes were broadcast to signal the site of yesterday’s terror attack.” He laid out the story, wrote down the numbers, and explained what a Fibonacci sequence was in more detail than at all necessary. He can’t help himself when he starts talking about this stuff. He spouted out details including but not limited to the fact that Fibonacci was really named Leonardo of Pisa and wrote a book in 1202. He pointed out that Fibonacci sequences are primarily found in nature, in the way leaves are arranged on a stem or in the way branches form on trees. My dad has often told me that he didn’t go to a lot of parties in high school. Not much of a mystery there. He moved on to the code that I saw and how I connected it to the attack at JFK. My face got hot as I watched the FBI guy reacting to the story. Was he so stony-faced because he realized we had a clue to a terrorist network? Or was he biting the inside of his cheek, trying not to laugh?
I knew the answer the minute he stood up, put both hands on his desk, and said, “Well, that’s a very interesting story. Thank you very much for coming in. And if you get any more messages, please give a call. Here’s my card. Goodbye.”
My father was annoyed. I mean, he didn’t believe it either, but I think he wanted the guy to at least give me props for a good story. “You have to admit that it is strange that those codes can be arranged to give such a clear message. Is there anyone available to at least investigate the station that is broadcasting this show?”
“I know a lot of parents have been upset about the inappropriate nature of that program and . . .” What? Was he like eighty years old now?
“Not the program. The codes,” my dad went on. “My daughter believes they’re connected to what happened yesterday at JFK . . .”
“Of course. We will look into it. Thank you for coming in.” Was I paranoid, or did I see a tiny smile in his eyes as he shuffled us out, official Fruitcakes.
A Girl Named Digit Page 2