The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled

by Amanda Valentino

  My mom’s eyes begged me not to ask. The skin at my mom’s temples constricted, and she clenched her jaw, I could see that the topic was causing her pain.

  But I needed to ask. I need to ask now. “Did Dad—?” I said. “Did Dad tell you about where he grew up?”

  “Oh, Zo.” My mom can sing in one note what it might take other people a hundred pages to put into words. And she was almost singing now, so in the lilting way she spoke those two syllables “Oh, Zo,” I could hear what she meant: I can’t talk about it. She meant: It doesn’t mean I love you any less. She meant: You forgot spoons.

  And I got it, I really did. She just couldn’t go there. For years, things had been hard. And now, our life had settled into a routine. Mom actually likes her job, or should I say her two jobs: music teacher at the high school and jazz singer two nights a week. For Pen and Iris, Pinkerton was a vague memory. Orion was home now.

  But not to me, I wanted to say. I touched the pendant under my shirt. I knew the vial was still inside it. I didn’t know if I would ever do anything with it . . . but I wanted it. I needed it with me the way I’d needed—insisted—on our dining room table having five chairs when my mom had bought only four. Four chairs would have made it feel more real that my dad was never coming back.

  The next morning I was already awake when my mom came into my room.

  “Zoe?” she said, shaking my shoulder. “Time to wake up—you’re leaving for Washington extra early, remember?”

  “Hmm,” I said.

  “Want me to drive you?” she asked.

  “No, that’s okay. You stay here and get the girls up . . . I can ride my bike and meet my friends.” Easier this way. I could slip off and she could stay here, have a few quiet moments before the twins roared away.

  Usually it was me wrestling my sisters into readiness, all of us in the kitchen, bumping into each other, pulling glasses down for OJ, or shoving sandwiches into lunch bags; but once I’d stumbled downstairs at this extra-early hour, only slightly more alert after my shower, it was just me and Mom. She still smelled of the perfume she wore when she was getting ready to go out at night. I couldn’t help but wonder if she had slept at all. What time had she gotten home?

  She set the kettle on to boil, and laid out on the table a package of Carnation hot chocolate powder and a single-serving box of corn pops—the cereal that, in a variety pack, everyone in my family leaves for last.

  “You’ll have to eat the cereal dry,” Mom said now. “We’re out of milk. I meant to get to the store yesterday, but I got busy—”

  “That’s okay,” I answered. For a while after my dad died, we didn’t have the money for food—we ate a lot of tomato soup and mac and cheese from a box. Now, my mom was making okay money, but almost never had the time to shop.

  “Hot water?” she said, as the whistle in the dinged-up kettle blew. I pushed my mug across the table so my mom could pour.

  Eunice P. Clarke was really fond of small mugs the color of polluted pond water. We have, like, twenty-four of them, and not one is large enough to accommodate a whole packet of cocoa. If you wanted to even get close to the right proportion of water to powder, you had to mound the cocoa on the water’s surface, so that it looked kind of like a volcano waiting to blow. A volcano with mini marshmallows on top.

  “I found this in the mailbox last night,” she said. “You forgot the street number when you wrote out the address.”

  “What?” I said, racking my brain to remember the last time I’d written anyone a letter. “Are you sure it isn’t a letter to me?”

  “You’re the return address,” she said. “And it’s your handwriting as well.”

  I reached for the sealed envelope Mom slid across the table. Already, there was a hollow feeling in my chest. Surprises, I’d come to learn, were never good.

  From the moment I touched the envelope, I was sure it was from Amanda. This might sound dumb, but even if she’s running for her life, Amanda loves paper. Every letter I’d ever gotten from her—before and after her disappearance—had been transformed by her into something beautiful. She’d mark it with her coyote totem, or even just distress it a little with an interesting tear or an artful ink stain. She wasn’t afraid of cheap paper—half her journals were plain old copybooks—but she decorated them with ribbons or glued-on buttons or pictures from magazines. Everything she’d ever touched she’d made her own.

  This envelope was made from paper that was thin, almost more of a gray than a white, like the sky on a day that can’t quite decide whether to rain. I could see that someone had used white pastels to draw rain clouds. It was a funny kind of chalky pastel marking. But there was no denying that it was beautiful once you’d seen that it was there—a drawing of a chameleon, like the one she’d chalked on my locker the morning she disappeared.

  My mom was right about the address. It was written in my handwriting, made out to Constitution Avenue in Washington, D.C. But it was weird. There was no street number on the address. The post office had stamped INSUFFICIENT ADDRESS—RETURN TO SENDER. In the upper left hand corner of the envelope, where the return address belongs, was my name. Again, in my handwriting.

  But I had never seen this envelope before.

  With shaking hands, I tore it open.

  “What is it?” my mom said.

  “Umm . . . ,” I said. There was nothing inside.

  Part of me was so disappointed, I didn’t even want to bother making up a story. But I did. I lowered my voice, took a deep breath, looked my mom right in the eye.

  “I think it’s this chain letter thing a bunch of friends at school are trying out,” I said. I sometimes hate how good I am at lying.

  “Is it connected to the D.C. trip?” my mom said.

  “Not really,” I said, but then wondered for a second if maybe it was. As with the postcard, it was leading me to Washington D.C. Could that mean something? I stuffed the note into the pocket of my vest.

  My mom raised her eyebrows. She leaned back in her chair and sighed. Usually she’s too busy, but when we do sit down together and actually talk I am always startled by how little she lets you get away with.

  “Mom,” I said. I wanted to tell her that I knew. About Dad. That she didn’t have to hide it from me anymore. “Yesterday—”

  But she hadn’t heard me. When I looked up, she was staring out the window, lost in thought. Or maybe she was half asleep. She was out so much at night these days I’d seen her drift off at the dinner table, and once, when I went by her office at school to ask a question, she had her head down on her desk with her eyes closed.

  The cocoa was starting to sink into the water, and as I watched it drop, I gave it a stir before looking at my watch, seeing how late it had gotten, and running out to get on my bike so I could meet the heinously early bus to D.C.

  Chapter 11

  The sky was just starting to get light as I pulled into the Endeavor parking lot, and I noticed that no one but me had come on a bike. There were Heidi Bragg and the I-Girls shimmying out of the back seat of Heidi’s mom’s BMW SUV. I caught a glimpse of Mrs. Bragg—hard, beautiful, amoral. Another fine product of the C33 program. What does that mean for the rest of them? And wait a minute, what were Heidi and the I-Girls even doing here? The History Club was for brainiacs—had they talked their way into this trip last minute just like we had?

  Meanwhile, Nia and her irresistible brother Cisco were emerging from his Honda. Cisco was coming along on the trip as a peer chaperone. The girls in the History Club were going to be very excited.

  Nia came over to the bike rack and we quickly found Callie and Hal.

  “Are you guys still thinking about the stuff we found?” Callie asked as soon as we’d said hello.

  Hal nodded. “It’s weird not to be able to talk about it with my mom,” he said.

  “I know,” Callie said.

  “I told Cisco,” Nia said. “And I kind of assumed my mom would bring it up with me—she hates secrets. But when I started to appr
oach the subject with her, she cut me off.”

  “That’s how it was for me too,” I said.

  Mr. Fowler called us to the bus. I felt in my vest pocket for a stick of gum—I always chew gum on buses to keep from getting sick—and I felt the folded corners of the little white envelope that had come for me.

  “Did any of you get any messages?” I said. “Or mail?”

  “Oh,” said Callie. “I almost forgot.” She pulled an envelope out of her bag that looked just like mine. It had been opened. She said, “It looked like I was the one who mailed it. It’s my handwriting. But it’s not from me.”

  Hal reached into his back pocket. “Here’s mine,” he said.

  “I got one too,” Nia said, pulling out hers. Hal’s and Nia’s were identical to Callie’s and mine. The same strange chalky drawings of their totems, marked in such a way that you could only see them in a certain light.

  The four of us got on the bus in time to get seats together. Heidi and the I-Girls boarded after all the seat pairings were gone, and asked people to move to let them be together.

  “Am I the only one who thinks it’s strange that the I-Girls are on an academic club trip?” I said.

  “Yeah,” Callie said. “What’s going on?”

  “How did they even talk their way into the club?” said Nia. “Eliza only let me join because we’re friends. She hates Heidi as much as I do.”

  “Hey, Wynne,” we all heard Heidi say in a sticky-sweet voice, addressing a girl with bushy brown hair, who always wore hooded sweatshirts and read romance novels under her desk during class. “Since you’re all alone in your seat, would you mind if people who have friends sat there instead so they could be together?”

  Nia made a clicking sound with her tongue against the roof of her mouth, and I agreed with what she was thinking. What was Heidi’s problem? Heidi was a girl who had it all—she was gorgeous, and she was smart as a whip—last year she won a schoolwide literary contest for her poem “Fashion Pollution.” People fell all over themselves to help her out, and her police chief dad and quasi-celebrity news anchor mom basically ran the town.

  “Why do people obey her every command?” I said, leaning across the aisle so that the other guides could hear me.

  “Yes!” Callie whispered. “Even if they only spend a few minutes with her, people feel like they’re her best friend.”

  “I’m guessing she’s like us . . .” Hal suggested. “That she has a power—to make people do what she wants?”

  “Oh, no,” Nia said, putting her head in her hands. “The idea of that girl being given special abilities on top of her extreme good luck in life makes me ill.”

  “It kind of makes me afraid,” said Hal.

  Just then Cisco and the other peer chaperones began handing out the scavenger hunt forms. Looking it over, I forgot all about Heidi for a moment. In fact, my jaw literally dropped. The sheet listed dozens of landmarks we were supposed to visit in Washington. The U.S. Capitol, the White House, the Vietnam Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial. . . . But then there was the extra credit, which listed a bunch of places that were totally obscure. Why would Thornhill want a bunch of high school students looking for the National Institute of Health’s Capitol Hill offices? And the Office of Management and Budget? Was it even safe for us to get out to Langley, Virginia, to take pictures of the CIA?

  I saw surprise on the faces of the other kids on the bus, and a lot of eye rolling—so much for scavenger hunts being “fun.”

  All except Heidi, who looked smug. She clearly was not prepared to do much, with her minions there to do it for her.

  It was sixth grade. The concert band at our school had won a trip to the state championships. We were staying at a Days Inn near the community college where the competition would take place the next day.

  After dinner at an Applebee’s, the band met in one of the hotel rooms, and spread out on beds and chairs and the floor to watch James Bond movies and eat popcorn. There wasn’t anything else to do.

  Or at least I thought there wasn’t, until Arabella pulled my sleeve. She raised her eyebrows. “There’s a bar mitzvah going on in the ballroom,” she said. “DJ, free food?”

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I said.

  “I have no idea what you’re thinking,” she lied. But we both knew what we had in mind.

  We waited until the trip chaperones and other kids’ eyes were all fixed on the TV. I didn’t even need to look at Arabella to know that this was the perfect time. But I looked anyway, because that was more fun. Our eyes met. “Now,” Arabella mouthed.

  We’d packed dresses to wear to the evening portion of the concert the next day. We went back to our room down the hall to change—our other two roommates were watching the movie. I followed her into the elevator, through the lobby with its mirror-clad columns and fake fireplace, and down a hallway to Banquet Hall A.

  We could hear music and then we were standing at the open doors to a the ballroom. There was a disco ball hanging over a dance floor, round tables being cleared of dinner dishes by waiters, and up on a platform a long rectangular table decorated with stuffed animals and canopied in balloons—a giant floating balloon ceiling. The guests were dressed up, some sitting down, a few dancing, others talking or milling about. There seemed to be a lot of kids—maybe a few years older than we were.

  Arabella pointed out a sign and slowed down to read it. “MAZEL TOV TO JONATHAN SCHWARTZ TODAY. I love bar mitzvahs.”

  Next to the board there was a table laid with a white cloth. People had been sticking half-empty glasses, crushed cocktail napkins and used toothpicks on it, but earlier it displayed fancy calligraphied place cards for the tables. A few unclaimed cards remained.

  “Only four no-shows.” Arabella picked up the cards and fanned them out like she’d been dealt this hand. “So who do you want to be? Shelley and Gale Scott at Table Four? Or Myra and Gary Levine at Table Twelve?”

  “Um . . .” I was suddenly nervous. “Do you think this is a great idea, sneaking in? What if we get caught?”

  “What’s sneaking?” Arabella said. She looked to the left and right to make sure no one was watching as she pocketed Shelley and Gale’s tags and laid Myra and Gary’s back down. “For Jewish people, going to a big celebration like this is technically a mitzvah.”

  “What’s a mitzvah?”

  “It’s brownie points with God.” Arabella smiled. “And by the way, if anyone asks, just say you’re a cousin from Ohio. Everyone has cousins in Ohio they never see.” She laid a hand on my elbow. “Look,” she said. She pointed to a table at the far end of the room set up with platters and piles and towers of different kinds of desserts—éclairs, molded ice creams, miniature cakes shaped like soccer balls, a chocolate fountain, cut-up fruit, and a bowl of candy big enough to make Halloween blush.

  I guess I must have been staring in disbelief. “Come on. This is nothing. My mom and I once attended an insurance convention in Las Vegas for three days and had prime rib for lunch. That hotel room had cable and a pool, too.”

  “You did that with your mom?” I gasped.

  “Only because we had to,” Arabella said. I didn’t understand her comment at the time, but I thought about it constantly when we were traveling from campground to campground in the RV.

  I remembered something else in that year about Arabella—once, when we went camping with the Girl Scouts, she’d gathered wood, started a fire, hung up a tarp, and laid out her sleeping bag before the rest of us had figured out where the bathrooms were.

  I must have fallen asleep on the bus, because I woke up when we were pulling off the highway outside Washington, D.C., starting our lumbering ride on one of those main avenues heading toward the center of the city, where there’s a massive stretch of grass dotted with monuments—the Mall.

  “Okay, everybody,” Mr. Fowler announced, standing up in the front of the bus, clutching the sides of the seats to keep his balance. “I’m going to explain the rules of the first part of
your trip. So listen up.”

  Mr. Fowler teaches gym but has always wanted to teach history. The school lets him sub when history teachers are absent, but when Mr. Fowler subs, you have to be careful about what he tells you. He’s big on “teachable moments,” i.e. self-involved tangents, but he’s not much for “factual accuracy,” as in he once told my class that The War of 1812 referred to the U.S.’s record of victories versus losses in battles. We won the battles 18–12.

  “As you know,” Mr. Fowler said now, “this day has been set up as a scavenger hunt. You’re going to be divided up into groups of four, and each group is going to find all the landmarks on the list. Take pictures. We know most of you have cameras on your phones. If you don’t, grab a disposable camera from the front seat on your way out.

  “When you find the landmark, write a few lines on the paper explaining something about it—its function, how it was built, what it represents, some of the inscriptions you read there.” He checked his watch. “By the time we get out of the bus it should be just about nine thirty. We’ll meet back here at noon and again at three. Here is a list of the cell phones numbers for me and the other chaperones, as well as your classmates, in case you are running late to the rendezvous point. Use it only in an emergency. I don’t want calls asking me where to find the restrooms or snacks or other nonsense.

  “If you miss any of the check-ins or if you fail to find every landmark on your scavenger hunt sheet, you will be required to create a bulletin board for the History Club. These are time-consuming bulletin boards and you can expect to spend a full weekend on the project. You will also receive a letter home to your parents.”

  There were shouts and complaints, calls of, “No fair! That’s crazy.”

  “Hey, don’t look at me,” Mr. Fowler said. That’s another one of his favorite tricks—to try to be friends with us, acting like we’re all on some big team and the other teachers are the ones who are making our lives hard. “Mr. Thornhill planned this whole thing. And obviously, he’s not here to complain to, so just keep it to yourself. Any questions?”