The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled

by Amanda Valentino

  Then we started to flat-out run.

  Chapter 17

  Before we’d gotten down the steps, Hal had a hand on my arm. “Wait,” he said to Nia and Callie. “Go back.”

  Nia looked at her watch. “We have to be back at the bus for lunch in ten minutes,” I said. “And it’s a fifteen-minute walk. Cisco—”

  “Just wait a second,” Hal warned, and sure enough, we’d just made it back behind the bushes where we’d been talking to Mrs. Leary when a shiny black SUV pulled up at the curb at the base of the museum stairs. Two men in dark suits hopped out.

  “They’ll be gone soon,” Hal said. “They won’t see us.”

  “Do you think they’re here for us?” Callie asked anxiously. “Or for my mom?”

  Hal shook his head. “I can’t tell.”

  “We have to go help her.” Callie started to poke her head out.

  Nia shook her head, her hand on Callie’s arm. “We can’t. Chances are they’re looking for us. We won’t be able to help Amanda if we go in there and get caught.”

  “You need to trust your mom, too, Callie,” Hal added. “If we get caught, we’ll never get the enhancement eraser to Amanda.”

  “That’s easy for you to say,” Callie snapped at them. “Your mom and dad are safely tucked away back in Orion. My mom could be in danger in there.”

  “Callie’s right,” I said. “If I’d had a chance to save my dad, I would have wanted to be able to try.”

  “Thanks, Zoe.” Callie looked at me with big sad eyes and it was like Amanda was here—there weren’t too many people who could see deep inside me the way Amanda could, but Callie was seeing deep inside me now. I think she got it then—the feeling she’d just had, of seeing her mom again after not knowing where she had gone, not knowing if she was even alive…the intensity of that feeling allowed her to understand what it was like for me, to have my dad completely gone.

  I don’t know what she would have ultimately decided to do—whatever it was, I am sure Nia and Hal would have joined me in backing her up—but just then the men in suits came jogging back out of the museum, their open jackets catching the breeze. When one spoke into his walkie-talkie I could see that he was saying the words searched, no evidence, kids.

  “They were looking for us,” I breathed. “Not your mom.”

  Callie pulled down the hood of her jacket and let her long hair tumble out. She had to give it a good shake to set it free. “Sorry,” she mumbled.

  Hal knocked into her shoulder, a playful bump. Nia touched her arm. “It’s fine,” Nia said.

  “But now,” said Hal, “we really have to get going.”

  Callie was holding her back straight, her muscles clenched—seeing her mom and then having to say good-bye was almost worse than not seeing her at all.

  Cisco’s face was pale and his mouth set in a determined line. I felt immediately bad for how worried he must have been. Nia had called him to tell him we were fine and just running late, but still . . . I don’t think he believed we were okay until he saw us. Nia went right to him and pulled him aside, I’m sure to tell him about finding Callie’s mom and what she’d asked us to do.

  Next Nia needed to check in with the one Rivera who was probably most anxious to hear she was okay: her mom. She’d promised to call her during lunch.

  “I’ve got to call my mom too,” Hal said.

  “And I have to call my dad,” Callie said. “Though I’m still not sure if this phone call is for my dad to make sure I’m okay, or for me to make sure he’s okay.”

  Suddenly, I felt like an orphan. I mean, I have a mom and everything, but she’d sent me off on my bike this morning knowing I’d be in a strange city all day long. Trust is one word for it. But more likely, my mom was just too busy with her jobs to have much of a choice. My mom assumes I can take care of myself and, because she has so much going on, she cannot deal with the alternative.

  But I pulled my phone out of my pocket anyway because I didn’t want Callie, Hal, and Nia to feel sorry for me, and I actually dialed my mom’s cell. As soon as the phone started to ring on the other end, I felt good, too. Having lost my dad, I never forget how lucky I am to at least have a mom.

  I knew she must be at work, so at first I wasn’t surprised to hear laughing in the background when she picked up. She was probably in the faculty break room eating lunch.

  “How’s the trip?” she asked.

  I thought about everything that had happened to me that morning—the guards at the World War II Memorial, seeing Ravenna, meeting Callie’s mom. I couldn’t help it. I choked on a sob.

  “Zoe?” My mom’s voice rose. “Are you okay?”

  I took a deep breath. “I’m fine.” I said, getting myself under control.

  But then I heard laughter in the background again. I heard a teakettle whistle that sounded way too familiar for my mom to be at work.

  “Are you at home?” I was shocked.

  The whistling abruptly ended and then I heard a low voice say something that I couldn’t quite decipher through the phone. But it didn’t really matter what the voice said. What mattered was that it was a man’s voice.

  “I came home for lunch,” my mom explained.

  “Really?” I said. My mom never comes home for lunch. She doesn’t think much about food—usually she’ll skip lunch and practice instead. “Is anyone sick?”

  I heard another rumble in the background—it was definitely a man. “Iris and Pen are fine,” my mom said. “I just had something I needed to do.”

  “Who’s with you?”

  “No one,” my mom said.

  “I heard someone.”

  “No one you know. Look, I’m so sorry, Zoe. I can’t explain now but I have to go. Please be careful on your trip. You will be okay? Promise me?”

  I promised, and then, without further ado, she was gone. I stared at the phone for a minute.

  “Are you okay?” It was Nia asking, and her question made me realize my face must be betraying my thoughts. I quickly composed it.

  But then, when I met Nia’s eyes, a confession poured out. “My mom basically hung up on me,” I blurted, half hoping Nia would think I was joking and laugh.

  She didn’t laugh. She squinted the way she does when she’s reading and gets so absorbed she doesn’t realize her face is essentially talking back to the book.

  “I think she’s dating someone,” I went on.

  “Uh-huh,” Nia said.

  “She’s staying out late,” I said. “I don’t think she’s telling the truth about where she goes.”

  “That doesn’t sound good,” Nia said. I was glad she didn’t try to tell me that I should be happy for my mom, that she was starting to make a new life for herself. I’d tried hard enough to convince myself of that inside my own head.

  “Just now,” I said. “I heard a man’s voice over the phone.”

  “But isn’t she at school? It could have been another teacher.”

  “No,” I said, and I wished now I hadn’t started to tell Nia any of this. “She was at home.”

  “Oh.” The way Nia said it made me realize it was as bad as I thought. To her credit, she didn’t look away from me. She kept our gazes locked, her dark eyes unflinching.

  “My call home was weird too,” Callie said when she and Hal joined us and I found myself telling them about what was going on with my mom. She was looking at her phone as if it had tried to bite her.

  “You mean because you couldn’t tell your dad you saw your mom?” Hal said, a step behind.

  “He could totally tell something was up,” she said. “He kept asking me why I sounded so different and I kept saying, ‘Do I sound different . . . ?’ I mean, he might not be the most successful single parent, but he is my dad.”

  “Next time, tell him you’re in love,” Nia suggested.

  Callie’s face went beet-red.

  Hal stared down at his shoes.

  Nia looked at me, shrugged, and rolled her eyes. Nia has very little patien
ce for beating around the bush.

  “Let’s get some lunch,” Hal said to change the subject, and grabbing the lunches we’d brought with us out of the cooler, we found a spot on some benches under a tree in a picnic area near the bus. Except for me. I hadn’t packed a lunch. I wish I could say I’d forgotten, but really, it was because when I’d opened the fridge, there hadn’t been any food that I could take. My mom’s moussaka from the night before wasn’t something you could really expect to eat cold, out of a Tupperware. There had been potatoes, uncooked. A half-rotten onion. A jar of mayonnaise. And just enough peanut butter and bread for the twins to pack lunches for themselves. I’d thought long and hard about the banana that was black on the skin from being in the fridge, deciding eventually that it wouldn’t survive the trip.

  “You didn’t bring anything to eat?” Nia asked. Leave it to Nia to ask.

  “I’m . . . uh . . .” I had a bunch of easy lies I could have used here. I’ve heard people say, “I don’t eat breakfast” often enough to claim I didn’t eat lunch, like it was some kind of principle of my existence. I could have said, “big breakfast,” and pretended like the four sips of hot chocolate and the tiny box of corn pops had been enough. But lying to these guys, the way I’d been lying to everyone since my dad died—strings of tiny, insignificant lies—felt wrong now. I just sighed. And then my stomach growled.

  Callie passed me a cheese stick. “My dad finally started going to the grocery store again, so I don’t have the heart to tell him he’s buying food I haven’t eaten since kindergarten.”

  Nia offered me a homemade empanada. “But that’s your lunch,” I said.

  “My mom packed extra. She’s been packing extra for weeks. I guess it’s for you.” She wrapped the empanada in a napkin and handed it to me. “These are corn and bean, but my mom uses pancetta. You’re not a vegetarian, are you?” I shook my head. “Of course you’re not,” she muttered. “My mom would have figured that out about you.”

  “I can’t take your lunch,” I said.

  “Of course you can,” Hal countered as he cut his candy bar in half with a plastic knife and gave me an exactly even share, wrapper still intact. “Because you know, Zoe.” He held up his half as if he were an announcer on TV. “Snickers satisfies.”

  I had to admit that it did. And it also felt nice to be taken care of. By my friends.

  Once we’d had a chance to eat a little bit, Nia pulled out the scavenger hunt sheet and looked at it. Scanning the crowd, I noticed that everyone in our grade was doing the same thing. Except for one person. “Guys, look,” I said, pointing across the lunch scene to the I-Girls. Lexi and Traci and Kelli were poring over their scavenger hunt sheet—I could see their sheets were covered in pen and they were looking at their camera phones and then writing. But where was Heidi?

  “That is weird,” Callie said, but we didn’t have a chance to speculate further. Just then, Cisco came over and took the scavenger hunt sheet out of our hands, shaking his head.

  “This is impressive,” he said, “in its blankness.”

  “Tell me about it,” Nia agreed.

  “You only have four out of the twenty-two places,” Cisco pointed out. “You need fifteen.”

  “I think we should resign ourselves,” Hal said. “We’re just going to fail.”

  “Ramona Rivera does not accept failure. Figure something out, dude, or Nia will have to tell our mother what’s going on here. And if my mom had any inkling about the goons dressed up like rangers chasing her daughter, I’m afraid Nia will be put under lock and key for the rest of her life. Then where will you be?” Cisco sat down heavily.

  “But I think Thornhill and Amanda are using the scavenger hunt to tell us something,” Nia said. “Whatever we get from it is what we’re meant to get from it.”

  “Very deep, Ni-Ni,” Cisco said. “But Mr. Fowler’s still going to fail you if you don’t come up with more pictures and quotes.”

  “Speaking of quotes . . .” Nia explained to Cisco about the quotes that were highlighted in some way.

  “Do they mean something?” Cisco asked. “Do you think they come together to work as a code?”

  I pulled out my camera, setting it to view mode and looked back for the highlighted quotes we’d found. From the Washington Monument, I read: Train up a child. From the World War II Memorial: The eyes of the world are upon you. From the Lincoln Memorial: We shall have here a new birth of freedom.

  “Wait a sec,” Cisco said, getting out his own camera. “I just remembered. I saw something like that in a picture I took when I went out to Arlington—the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier is one of the stops on the scavenger hunt, but there’s a whole lot of other stuff out there that’s pretty fascinating.” He flipped through the images on his phone until he found the one he wanted. “You know how I feel about JFK—I had to get a picture of his tomb. This is it.”

  He passed the camera to Nia, and we all looked at it together. It was a picture of about fifteen girls with Cisco smiling haplessly from the center of their group.

  If you were looking at the picture casually you might just think that the highlighted words were simply catching the sun’s rays in a certain angle, but to us, it was obvious. They were intentionally treated. From the line, The torch has been passed to a new generation, the phrase The torch has been passed was highlighted. And then, in a different part of the picture, from the line, Bear any burden—meet any hardship—support any friend—oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty, the phrase Bear any burden—meet any hardship—support any friend glowed in the same way as the other words we’d seen.

  “That’s from Kennedy’s inaugural address,” Nia murmured. “It’s the one that has the line in it, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.’” Nia was almost as good at quotes as Amanda.

  “Do those words mean anything to you?” Cisco said. “Do you think you could scramble all the letters and spell out a meeting place Amanda has in mind?”

  Callie looked exhausted. “That’s two hundred and forty letters,” she said, coming up with the number so quickly I realized she must have counted them out of habit. “Do you know how many possible permutations there could be?”

  “Do you think they’re the words Amanda was hoping we would find?” Hal said. “There could be more of them out there. We’ve barely scratched the surface of all the places Thornhill wanted us to see. Did she highlight words on every spot on this list?” He waved the scavenger hunt sheet and I immediately began to feel overwhelmed.

  “The ones on the World War Two Memorial make sense,” I suggested. “She sent us there, with the postcard.”

  “She sent us to the Lincoln Memorial, too,” added Callie. “And the Washington Monument’s a given since it’s right where the bus parked, she could assume everyone would go there.”

  “But JFK’s tomb?” Hal said. “That’s random.”

  “Not necessarily,” Nia mused. “If Amanda knew Cisco was coming on this trip, she might have remembered that JFK was one of his personal heroes. It makes complete sense that he would take a picture of his tomb—and she knew Cisco would get that information back to Nia.”

  “Am I that obvious?” Cisco asked. Nia raised her eyebrows. “Okay, I guess I am.” He shrugged and gave one of his trademark sheepish Cisco smiles. And then his face lit up. “Dude!” he said. “Maybe I’m not that transparent. Last fall, I saw Amanda at this party—I was there with my friends and she was hanging out with a crowd of seniors. We got to talking and it turns out we both were huge JFK fans. We talked about how Vietnam would have been totally different if he hadn’t been killed. But how would she know that I would go there?”

  “She wouldn’t know,” I said. “She’d guess. I think she’s used to guessing. She trusts her own instincts. And usually they’re right on target.”

  Hal shook his head—I couldn’t tell if it was in resignation or admiration. “Amanda had been in control of our movements all day.
Everything we’ve seen, she’s wanted us to see?”

  “She must be nearby,” Callie added. “She’s probably just a few steps ahead of us. Maybe we’re supposed to use the quotes to find her—maybe they’re laying a path.”

  Nia picked up the sheet again. “They must mean something,” she said. “I can feel it. They’re like a poem or song lyrics or something. Where you feel like you get it, but you can’t say exactly what it’s about.”

  Together we all looked down at our sheet and read the quotes to ourselves in silence.

  Train up a child . . . The eyes of the world are upon you . . . It is fitting and proper that we here shall have a new birth of freedom . . . The torch has been passed . . . Bear any burden—meet any hardship—support any friend.

  Chapter 18

  One of the things my dad was always really good at was telling stories about misunderstandings. His favorite kind of story was the kind where someone says “I want hotdogs,” but someone else hears “Terrible hot rod,” and all sorts of confusion ensues. He collected these stories the way some people collect stamps, or snow globes, or salt and pepper shakers in the shape of cows. My dad told his stories to people when he was selling cars on the lot, told them to other parents during our music recitals, told them to my mom when they were doing the dishes and we were in bed, told them on car trips, he told them to my friends when they were over (embarrassing!), and he told them to Amanda.

  And once, he told one when our two families were out to dinner together. It was the night of elementary school graduation and we were at the Greek pizza place, my dad leaning back in his chair with a very sleepy Pen slung over his shoulder. Iris was already asleep on my mom’s lap. Mom was chatting with Amanda’s mom as Amanda and I were asking for our zillionth quarter to play the car driving video game they had next to the door. Rosie, or Ravenna as I called her then, had gone to the movies with a friend. To keep our attention and give the moms more time to talk—and because he was running out of quarters—my dad said he would tell us a story instead.