“Look, she’s younger here,” Callie said. Marguerite Blaine’s hair was long in this picture, her cheeks fuller. “She was living in Orion when this license was made.”
Hal clicked again. We saw a document that at first seemed like gibberish. Lots and lots of words. Nia squinted. “I think this is the deed to her house,” she said.
Hal clicked again. We were looking at a form I recognized because we’d just talked about them in Civics. “That’s a census form,” I said. “Look, it shows where you live, how much you make, your job.”
“How did Thornhill get all this stuff?” Callie said.
Hal shrugged. He clicked past a diploma and a copy of an email Marguerite had sent to the Dannon Corporation complaining about a bad yogurt.
“Click on Louise,” Callie said, a little breathless. “I want to know where she lives.”
But when Hal got back to the list, Nia said, “No, wait. Click on Mrs. Bragg.”
Hal clicked. We were looking at Mrs. Bragg’s latest health history—something her doctor would have filled out at a physical. “She’s allergic to honey?” Cornelia said.
Then Hal clicked onto what almost looked like a Facebook photo album, except these weren’t the kind of pictures you’d see on Facebook. A lot of them were blurry and it took a second to even tell what they were. There was one of Mrs. Bragg picking up a box of cereal in the grocery store, but taken from a weird angle—she was only in one corner of the photo and she wasn’t smiling. Clearly she had no idea the camera was there. “Do you think it was taken by a surveillance camera?” said Callie.
“That sounds right,” said Hal.
“And creepy,” I said.
Hal kept paging through and found some pictures of Heidi. School pictures mixed with shots of her at playgrounds when she was little, and then winning a junior beauty pageant in sixth grade. Pictures of her now. Some that looked like they were scanned from a yearbook, and some with her face half-obscured, like the surveillance images of her mom. In one, you could see Heidi’s face and most of her arm. She was talking on a cell phone while her dad pumped gas.
“I didn’t even know there were cameras at the gas pumps,” Callie breathed.
“Apparently,” said Hal, flipping through image after image of Heidi’s mom, “they’re everywhere.”
“Try Max Beckendorf,” Nia said.
Hal went back to the master list, and suddenly there was Mr. Thornhill, but much younger—the picture was a group shot from the newspaper—people who’d raised money for an animal shelter before Amanda, or any of us, were born. “Look at his hair!” Callie said.
“Look for Annie Beckendorf,” I asked.
Hal went back to the list, but before he could click on Annie’s name, we heard footsteps coming our way. Cornelia moved like lightning, clicking on a video of the talent show.
Mrs. Bennett was now standing in the room. “Having fun?” she said, flashing a smile that was as warm as it was clear. She looked at her watch. “Cornelia, it’s time for your game. And then, I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to come with me to the open house after.” Mrs. Bennett worked in the admissions office of the local community college. “Hal, can you rake while we’re gone? Say, in about half an hour? The lawn looks like it could use a little help.”
“Sure,” Hal said. You could almost see the wheels turning in his brain, thinking of the hours ahead to pore over the files on the Thornhill disc. Maybe Mrs. Bennett felt like she could see them too.
“Dad’s going to be home all day, so he’ll check in with you about the yard,” she added.
“Sure, Mom,” Had said, swallowing hard. Half an hour wasn’t nearly enough time.
As soon as we were sure Mrs. Bennett was out of earshot, Nia rolled up her sleeves. “If we only have half an hour to work together,” she said, “we’re going to need to be quick.”
“No kidding,” Callie said, sucking in a breath, her eyebrows raised.
“Furthermore,” Nia continued, “as fun as it is paging through this information randomly, we need to be more systematic.”
“Agreed,” Callie replied. With her math brain, Callie liked nothing better than data organized into a chart. Better even would be something she could graph.
We dove into the project of trying to figure out what all these people had in common. We took notes. We made charts. We opened files and closed them, paging through the people, trying to cross-reference them, figure out family relationships, who lived in Orion when.
What connected them?
We realized we were going on longer than a half hour, but we figured Hal’s dad would come get him. We wanted to go as long as we could.
“Fact one,” Callie said.
“Everyone in Thornhill’s files seems to be placed into two age groups,” said Hal.
“People our parents’ age, approximately,” said Nia, speaking slowly so her note taking could keep up. “And people our age, approximately.”
“Fact two,” I said. “The people on the list who are in our age group are the children of people in the older range.”
Nia was biting her lip as she wrote, repeating slowly: “. . . in the older range. Got it.”
“Three,” said Hal. “Most of the people in the files live in Orion.”
“And a lot of the ones who don’t live here now used to,” Callie said.
“Four,” I said, holding up four fingers, “there’s at least one older member of every family who has a Social Security number starting with 090-56-24. The last two digits are the only ones that change from individual to individual.”
“I’d have to go in and look at them all systematically,” said Callie. “But I can’t remember seeing any of the last two digits that was a number less than twenty or higher than sixty or so.”
“Iris’s and Pen’s Social Security numbers are only one digit apart,” I said. “Because they were assigned at the same time.”
“So you’re saying something like forty of the people in this group,” Nia said, “these people who come from all over the place and don’t even know each other and are all different ages—you think they all got their numbers at the same time?”
“That’s impossible,” Hal said.
“I know.”
“And fact five,” Callie said. “People with these closely sequential Social Security numbers are also the ones who have those long numbers that start with C33 after their names. And they are missing information about their youth.”
Callie was right. All the young people like us on the list had tons of information about their childhood. Report cards, school schedules, bus passes, sports achievements, pictures playing in backyards that looked like they’d been taken by a satellite. Every time Nia had made honor roll it had been printed in the newspaper. Programs from my early piano recitals were in there. School pictures.
And for some of the older people, that stuff was there too. I saw pictures of my mom, the farm she grew up on in Oregon. An article in the newspaper about her family manning a Greek culture booth at the grange fair—that was so them. My grandmother, who we called Yiayia, probably brought her homemade yogurt and pastries and wore her embroidered skirt and headscarf from Limnos. My mother had always celebrated our Greek heritage. She had joked that my dad was just barely Greek enough for her parents, but he squeaked by.
Hal recognized his mother’s pictures too. She was a majorette—funny—and then he laughed so hard I thought would die when he found out she’d failed Home Ec. Callie’s dad was a basketball star in high school. There were lots of team pictures for him, write-ups in the paper.
But my dad—it was like he hadn’t even existed until suddenly he had a driver’s license at nineteen and a high school diploma in the form of a GED. He’d worked in a factory for about six months when he was twenty. He’d taken a couple of classes at a community college. He’d always told us stories about hitchhiking across the country the year he turned twenty-one. There was a picture of him standing with a frame pack outside a truck st
op—he was in the background of a picture of a motorcycle. Then there was a picture of him at a bank when he must have been about twenty-two. A record of a hospital visit six months after that—apparently he’d burned himself cooking.
There was nothing about Callie’s mom until she started a graduate program in astronomy. At age sixteen. “Wait,” Hal had said. “Didn’t she even go to high school? College? Wouldn’t that be on here?” There had been nothing.
And nothing about Hal’s dad until he was eighteen years old and suddenly, there he was, in a picture of the summer intern program at some accounting firm in Philadelphia. We had transcripts of his college classes, his business major, his straight As.
Lots of the C33 adults were like that. At least one in each married couple, and when an adult wasn’t married, you could count on his or her childhood, or large parts of it, being missing. Louise Potts was like that. So was Frieda Starfield.
“Except my parents,” Nia said. But she didn’t write this down on her list of facts. Instead, she took the mouse and reopened her mother’s file. There Mrs. Rivera was, age ten, looking very much like Nia, in braids and a school uniform, standing with her classmates in rows. The caption on the photo was in Spanish, but Nia translated.
“That’s her fifth-grade class picture,” she said. “My mother grew up in Colombia.” Hal flipped through some pictures. “That’s my abuela’s house.” She pointed.
“So how come everyone has a parent with a blank childhood but you?”
“Maybe they don’t follow your life until you marry the person they’re following,” said Callie.
“That makes sense,” Hal mused.
“But it doesn’t,” said Callie. “Because my mom is the one that disappeared, not my dad. She’s the one that’s part of all of this.”
“But look at this,” Hal said. “We’ve seen this before.” There was a small card scanned in, topped with a number that began with C33 and then the word discharge. Then a signature at the bottom we could hardly make out, and in very tiny script below that, Facilitator, Orion Pharmaceutical College. We kept skipping over them because we didn’t understand them. “Everyone without a documented childhood has one of these. Both Amanda’s parents have them. They both have C33 numbers and no childhood documentation.” He turned to Nia. “Your mom has one as well.”
“What are those?” Nia said, as much to herself as to us. “Why do they all have them?” She thought another minute, biting on a nail. “And why are there no other pictures of my mom before she was ten? I mean, my dad’s got stuff in here from birth.”
“Hold on,” said Callie, her eyes closed like if she looked at us, the idea she was holding on to so very gently in her head would float away. “Nia, how old is your mom?”
“She’s young,” Nia said. “She married my dad when she was still in college. He was in grad school. So she was only twenty-two when Cisco was born. She’s thirty-nine now.”
“Zoe, how old would your dad be if he were still alive?”
“He’d be forty-eight,” I said.
“That makes him nine years older than my mom,” Nia said. “And three years older than Callie’s. Hal, how old is your dad?”
“Umm . . .” Hal said. “Hold on.” He did some quick thinking, and then answered, “Forty-seven?”
“Wow,” said Callie. Her green eyes lit up with the knowledge that she’d just solved a complicated math problem.
“Uh, Callie?” said Hal. “I think you forgot to show your work.”
“What?” Callie said, as if she couldn’t understand why we hadn’t followed her. “So the ages our parents are in the first picture or record or whatever we have of them are all from the same year.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Your dad, Zoe, he would have been nineteen when my mom was sixteen, Hal’s dad was eighteen and Nia’s mom was ten. They all started to have a record of their existence at the same exact time.”
“Wow,” said Nia. “So something must have happened in that year. Something that started all the information about them being collected.”
“Nineteen eighty-four,” Callie said. “What the heck happened to everybody in nineteen eighty-four?”
Before we had any time to think about that, we heard the garage door open. “Shoot, that’s my mom,” Hal said. He was closing the file and ejecting the disc. “How long have we been here?”
Nia looked at her watch. “It’s been four hours!”
“I never raked the lawn.”
“Your dad never came in to get you,” I pointed out.
“That’s weird,” said Hal. “He’s usually totally on my case about that kind of thing.”
We all rushed into the backyard through the French doors in the office. The yard was already raked.
And there was Hal’s dad, drinking a cup of coffee, reading the paper, his raking gloves on the table as if he’d just taken them off.
Hal gave his dad a look, and Mr. Bennett flexed his arms comically.
“Sometimes raking is just what a body needs after spending a whole week crammed like a sardine into a plane,” Mr. Bennett said.
Hal laughed. Sort of. He kind of choked. This was not how the Bennett family normally worked, I surmised.
Then Mr. Bennett winked. “No need to tell Mom, though, okay?” He lifted the paper back up in front of his face before Hal had a chance to answer.
Chapter 5
Two days after my dad died, my mom pulled into our driveway in a used RV she’d bought without a word of warning. She’s so tiny she could barely reach the steering wheel from the enormous “captain’s chair” that is the driver’s seat. Still, she loaded Iris, Pen, and me into the RV and pulled out of the driveway without looking back. That was the last we saw of the house we’d all been born in.
We’d said good-bye to no one. Not our friends. Not our teachers. Not the neighbors we had known all our lives, whose casseroles we left to rot in the fridge. We ran like people being chased. I found out later that we probably were.
When we asked my mom why—which, trust me, we did many, many times over the course of the year we spent on the road—she would close her eyes and say, “I’m sorry. It was just something I had to do.” Once, when we were lost in Arizona, and it was hot out, we had to drive with no A/C because we were about to run out of gas in the middle of the desert. Pen, who is not one to keep her opinions to herself, said, “Why are we even doing this? Answer us for real this time, okay?” Pen had sounded like she was about to cry, and so my mom said, “I don’t know. I’m following instructions, okay?” And her voice was so desperate we didn’t follow up with any more questions, even though what she’d said made absolutely no sense.
At the time I thought, basically, she’d lost her mind. Sometimes I noticed when she registered us at campsites, she would even go so far as to use different, random names—Dolly Nabokov, Mrs. Reginald V. Quilty, Arianna Adore. Weird stuff. When we finally landed here in Orion, and my mom enrolled us in school, she went back to using our real names, though she made up this story about losing all our files in a fire to explain why we weren’t forwarding our transcripts from our old life and wasn’t able to produce Social Security numbers. In a way, it was as if our entire existence—my dad, California, all of it—had never been real.
The day after we’d gone through Thornhill’s computer files at Hal’s house was a Sunday. Nia had church and a family lunch, Hal texted that he was going for a long run, and Callie was helping her dad haul and stack wood for his new furniture building business. I made toaster waffles for Iris and Pen while my mom slept in, recovering from whatever she’d been doing until four in the morning—I heard her car roll into the driveway.
At noon, my mom emerged, ate a leftover waffle, and took the girls to a birthday party. I practiced the sax for awhile, though it was hard to focus. I couldn’t stop thinking about the pictures and documents that were on Thornhill’s computer. If my mom was at the grocery store, was someone taking pictures of her right
now? Did whoever was collecting all these pictures and information know what she was doing at night? I wanted to warn her that her private life was not as private as she thought it might be. I didn’t want to talk to her about the obvious fact that she had a boyfriend, but was it irresponsible not to let her know that someone, somewhere was watching?
At two I left the house on my bike to meet up with Nia, Hal, and Callie at the gazebo in the center of town. We’d told our parents we were meeting to study at the library.
“I did some research last night,” Callie said, when we were gathered—Nia was last, rushing from the Rivera four-course Sunday meal. “Orion College of Pharmaceuticals was founded in the 1950s. It got some kind of government grant and was able to build a campus outside town—as well as purchase buildings in town—all in its first year. That’s pretty fast for a college, apparently. Most start small and build up over time, but OCP hit the ground running. Which means it had money from the beginning, and lots of it.”
“Okay,” said Nia. “Why did they close?”
“Try a different question,” Callie said. “Not why did they close. But when. Remember 1984, that magic year when half our parents suddenly start to have lives? The year when your mom is ten, my mom is sixteen, Zoe’s dad is nineteen and Mr. Bennett is eighteen?”
“Yeah,” I said. I felt a kind of shiver of dread. After twenty-four hours and hardly any sleep, Thornhill’s computer file made no more sense to me than it had the day before. And I wasn’t exactly filled with optimism that some innocuous explanation for what we’d found was waiting around the next corner. There was just no way this much surveillance could lead to good news.
“That would be the year.” Callie pursed her lips in grim resignation.
The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled Page 3