The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled

by Amanda Valentino

  Then our parents finally took a good hard look at us, too, and I realized how crazy all of this must appear. We had a lot of explaining to do.

  Our hair and clothes loose and disheveled, lab equipment smashed to pieces on the floor, papers blown onto every surface. Heidi was sobbing, her head in her hands. Mrs. Bragg was trying to comfort her, but her lipstick was smeared on her cheek and Heidi wouldn’t meet her eye. She seemed to really want her dad. Amanda’s hair was tangled and her face was flushed. Where she’d pulled out her IV, a thin trickle of blood had drawn a line from the inside of her elbow down to her wrist.

  I couldn’t stop shaking. My teeth. My hands. My shoulders. “Kids,” Thornhill said, putting a hand on my shoulder, touching Nia next, then working his way down to Callie, Hal. “You did it. It’s over.”

  “It’s over?” Nia said, like someone had just told her the whole thing had been a practical joke. Hal kicked at some broken glass on the floor. Callie pinched her nose at the bridge. I noticed for the first time that my legs were aching, that I hadn’t eaten since that tuna sandwich Dr. Joy left us.

  Then my mom swallowed me up into the biggest embrace ever invented. I could feel her wet tears on my cheeks when she kissed me and I could smell her perfume that reminded me of our old life together, back before everything changed and then changed again.

  Over my mom’s shoulder I could see that Mr. Bennett had an arm around Hal. Callie and her mom were hugging like they would never stop. Mrs. Rivera was holding Nia’s face between her palms while Cisco hung off her like for once he was the adoring cheerleader and she was the star. Which, of course, she was.

  I saw Amanda standing between Thornhill and Rosie. Thornhill was looking at Amanda, shaking his head and kind of half-choking, half-laughing. Rosie had a smile across her face that could have powered the lights of Times Square. Amanda was smiling, too, that so-Amanda smile: her lips curved up into a bow, her gray-green eyes calm and knowing. And then she shook her head in disbelief, and, looking at her dad and her sister like she never wanted to take her eyes off of them, she drew them both in and buried her head in their chests.

  As soon as the hugging sessions had ended—and they went on for quite a while—the grown-ups began telling us how they found us and we told them what had just happened in the lab.

  Apparently, the Official’s cover-up of our disappearance had nearly gone as planned. Heidi started planting the story about how Nia, Callie, Hal, and I had run away from the field trip in a copycat version of Amanda’s disappearance, and everyone on the trip had believed it, with others coming forward to corroborate her story. Cisco had almost fallen under Heidi’s control himself. Listening to her story in conference with Mr. Fowler, he’d felt strangely unsettled, but attributed the feeling to concern for his sister. It was only when Rosie called his cell and she’d heard him repeating Heidi’s story that she was able to break Heidi’s hold. “Cisco,” Rosie had shouted into his ear. “Get to the train station, pronto.”

  Once he was two blocks from the Capitol, he came to his senses. Just as he and Rosie were hopping onto the next train back to Orion, he called his mom and told her everything he knew. Rosie and Cisco reached Orion just in time for the emergency meeting of the C33 Underground Rescue.

  (Claiming to be upset by the disappearance of her “friends,” Heidi announced that her mother had arranged for a private car to bring her back to Orion also—Mrs. Bragg got on the phone with Mr. Fowler to set it up, and that was when the Official whisked her away to the pharmaceutical college.)

  But back to the meeting of the C33 Underground Rescue: This was a group founded by Thornhill when he first came back to Orion, realizing that he could not rejoin his family until he was sure that Dr. Joy and the Official had been stopped. Working with Hal’s dad, they had located and spoken with as many of the former C33s as they could find, building a network through which they could share information about what the Official and Dr. Joy were up to and protect themselves and their families.

  Oh, and the boyfriend I was sure my mom had started seeing even though I didn’t think she was ready? He didn’t exist. My mom had been spending her nights working with Thornhill’s group, which had gone into overdrive after his abduction. After our trip to the airstrip, which the former C33s had been aware of, the group had liberated Thornhill, and now he was back to lead the group. She’d been taking care of him at our house when I’d called earlier that day—it was his voice I’d heard in our kitchen.

  The last person to be invited to the C33 Underground Rescue meeting was Cornelia. She almost fainted when her doorbell rang and it was Cisco Rivera on her porch, asking her to go for a ride in his car. Hal was teasing her now about how her social status at school on Monday would shoot through the roof as soon as pictures of it went up onto Facebook. Pictures Cornelia herself probably leaked.

  It had been a good thing she was there, though: using theamandaproject.com, she had collected reports of an unmarked black van careening off the Orion highway exit about an hour after we’d disappeared from the capital. It had been spotted heading in the direction of the pharmaceutical college.

  Cornelia’s updates had also clued in Mrs. Leary, who’d become a frequent theamandaproject.com contributor. She’d rushed up from Washington, bringing a fresh batch of her formula for eradicating genetic tampering.

  They had been in the midst of planning how to get to the pharmaceutical college—suggestions from the floor ranging from contacting the military to using poison gas—when Chief Bragg had walked into the room, accompanied by Louise Potts. “We’ve been infiltrated!” a nervous C33 shouted in the deafening silence that greeted his presence. For a second, a collective shudder passed through the room, as everyone pondered the thought that Louise had been spying for the Braggs, Dr. Joy, and the Official all along.

  But as it turned out, despite appearances to the contrary, Chief Bragg had not been working with the Official. Also, as he explained, he had never known the full story of what was going on with C33. Brittney had never explained it to him in detail. And now, his wife and daughter were in danger, and he was there to help.

  All he’d known about Brittney’s childhood, he’d explained, was that it had been very painful and that she was determined to make things better for Heidi and Evan, Heidi’s younger brother. So Heidi and Evan were given every possible luxury and never told “no.” As Chief Bragg valued peace in the home above all else, he’d shrugged off Brittney’s plans for a secret office inside their house and the strange boxes she stored there. He’d suspected that something was off after Brittney arranged a cover-up for Heidi’s hit-and-run. He’d even told Officer Marciano to give Hal a hard time after Thornhill’s disappearance, based on school rumors Heidi had fed him about Hal painting Thornhill’s car and being seen many times in detention.

  But when Brittney then arranged—and paid for—Bea Rossiter’s plastic surgery and rehabilitation, he’d begun to quietly look into things and make some notes.

  But he hadn’t been willing to act until one of his deputies flew into his office with the news that four Orion ninth graders had disappeared during a class trip to Washington, D.C., and his daughter was insisting they had run away. And then he hadn’t been able to reach Heidi on her cell. And Brittney was not picking hers up either. Suddenly, he feared for their safety.

  Checking to make sure his gun was in his holster and his radio was fully charged, he rushed out to his car and drove straight to Play It Again Sam’s. He recalled spotting Brittney coming out of Louise Potts’s store one afternoon, and though Chief Bragg was not up on fashion, he was pretty good at detective work. He knew that name had come up in the Amanda disappearance so he looked up Louise. When he saw her Social Security number and realized it was a few digits off from his wife’s—he knew there must be a connection, so he went right to the store. And when he demanded some sort of explanation from Louise, she brought him to the meeting so he could learn firsthand what was what.

  And that was how, with the assistan
ce of all the C33s they could gather at short notice, Chief Bragg, some undercover members of Orion’s finest, and our parents stormed the door of the lab.

  “So now,” said Mrs. Leary, as Chief Bragg’s men carted the Official, Dr. Joy and the guards off to jail, “it’s time to end this.” She turned to Amanda. “There’s one more thing we still need to do to put this nightmare to bed.” She pulled a bottle of the liquid solution she’d created and started pouring it out into little paper cups she’d found by the water cooler.

  “You too,” said Chief Bragg, beckoning Heidi over. She was fully unattached from the machine now, smoothing down the front of her sweater, trying to regain her dignity.

  “But Mom—” I heard her say under her breath.

  Mrs. Bragg looked at her husband, saw that he was done making exceptions on their daughter’s behalf and said to Heidi in a low voice, “I think you’d better drink it like the rest of them.” Her husband looked at her pointedly. “I will too,” she added.

  And you know how medicine usually has a flavor, like cherry or bubblegum or grape, and you sometimes wonder why they even try to make it taste good, when, no matter how hard they try, it’s still disgusting?

  After having tasted Mrs. Leary’s concoction, I can now truly, one hundred percent appreciate the importance of adding cherry, bubblegum, and grape flavors to medicine, no matter how disgusting it tastes in combination with whatever grossness lies beneath.

  Drinking Mrs. Leary’s concoction tasted like drinking the slimy water at the bottom of a flower vase that has been left out too long. Mixed with coffee grounds. Mixed with dirt. Mixed with the stinkiest stinky cheese. And smelling it was almost as bad as drinking it. Something about that smell made you wonder—really wonder—if you would still be alive after putting whatever it was into your system.

  Did I mention that it was sludge green?

  And that it was foaming?

  And that Mrs. Leary casually mentioned that we should drink it fast before it ate through the cup?

  Even the adults were groaning and holding their noses, closing their eyes against the nasty green color, but after the noise had died down, Mrs. Leary explained how it worked.

  She had a look of excitement and discovery on her face as if it were the latest miracle cleaning product that was going to change the way people lived. In direct contrast to everyone else, who was simply struggling not to puke.

  “Dr. Joy’s breakthrough,” she explained, “was his discovery of an agent that could bind new genetic material to old. He would withdraw spinal fluid, introduce new genes, introduce the agent, and the new material would attach itself and begin to direct the growth of new cells in the body.

  “What the stuff you’re drinking does is attack the binding agent. It breaks it down such that any genetic material that’s been added to the body is flushed away.

  “Of course, we are all the products of much more than simple genetic product specifications. Our life experience determines to a great extent who we are and what we can do. It will be interesting to see what stays with us versus what goes. I can’t imagine I won’t be able to work as an astrophysicist anymore, or that Edmund Bennett will lose his crackerjack handle of numbers. But Callie—” She couldn’t resist the impulse to smooth Callie’s hair off her forehead. “Callie, I don’t think you’re going to be quite so strong.”

  Chapter 31

  When Amanda first brought me together with Nia, Callie, and Hal, we had almost nothing in common, except for the fact that we were in danger. What linked us was only that we all divided our existence at Endeavor High into two parts. Before Amanda. And After.

  When Amanda had come to our school, she’d made me feel like I could tell her anything, that she saw the good, the bad, and the ugly inside me. Sure, Amanda called me on the lies I tell myself, but she also made me feel honest and strong.

  Amanda did all of this for me. She did it for Nia, Callie, and Hal too. Our search for her had forced us to learn about ourselves—and what we could do. We’d become as close as four people possibly could be through our powers. But now Amanda was back. The parts of us that were linked were being erased. The danger was gone. What would be left behind?

  After we drank the medicine and left the lab, we all returned to our houses and slept. Not for the night. More like for three straight days—our parents told the school we had the flu. And it felt like the flu—you’d wake up, feel like you never were going to be able to get back to sleep and then check the clock six hours later and realize you’d been out cold.

  My mom kept me home from school until Friday. Alone in the house, I picked up the sax and practiced until I noticed I was hungry—looking at the clock, I saw it had been three hours.

  I texted Callie, Hal, and Nia and heard they were staying home Thursday as well. Callie had been up late stargazing with her mom—she did all the calculations most people used a computer for in her head. Nia was reading Dickens—she said it helped her unwind. Hal was drawing—none of us, I guess, had lost the abilities that we’d always felt defined us. Mrs. Leary’s Funky Juice had left that part of us alone.

  I guess I could have texted Amanda too, but I was so used to her being gone . . . I was so freaked out by the idea of what she’d be like without her powers. Was she going to live with Thornhill now? Was she going to go back to using her original first name?

  But when Friday morning rolled around and I went back to school for the first time, Amanda was still Amanda. I was walking up from the faculty parking lot—I’d gotten a ride with my mom—and Amanda was waiting for me just outside the front doors of the building. She was dressed in a navy blue Chinese-style velvet jacket buttoned up to her throat, black jeggings, and purple high-top Chucks that looked like she’d had them forever.

  As if nothing had changed, she didn’t bother with the formality of saying hi. She looked, if anything, a little bored. “It’s so weird to see you here,” I said. “Back in school.”

  “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose,” she said.

  “I—” I started. “I don’t even know what name to call you.”

  “I’ve had a lot of them, haven’t I?” she said. “But Amanda is the first one I chose myself, so I think it’s the one that I will keep.”

  “Nia told me it means, ‘She who must be loved.’”

  “I like that,” she said. She didn’t say a word about the “must” in that phrase—but it was important, I thought. I’d never had a choice with Amanda. We’d been instant friends since the first time I met her. That night, my mom made lasagna and Amanda’s made a salad; the grown-ups talked over cheese and crackers on the back deck my dad built himself; and Amanda and I swung upside down from the monkey bars on my ancient swing set.

  Now she smiled, as if she knew I was thinking about that night. Did she? “Have you been sleeping a lot?” she said.

  “For days.”

  “Me too,” she answered. “And when I wake up and go downstairs, my dad’s sleeping on the couch. He keeps jumping up and offering to make pancakes.”

  “Can you still—?” I started. “Do you still have powers?”

  She looked at me mysteriously. “Do you?”

  Later that day, I had a free period and was heading to the band room to practice—I could not get enough music around me, it seemed—when I saw Nia at her locker. “Come to the library with me,” she said. We sat for the full period pretending to read magazines.

  “Is your power totally . . . gone?” I asked her.

  Nia looked down. “I’ve been putting my hands on all these super-significant family things. My grandma’s wedding portrait, my brother’s first soccer trophy—”

  “And—?” I said.

  “And nothing at all,” she said. She shrugged. “What about you?”

  At the table next to us, Kevin Hwang threw a crumpled-up paper at Elizabeth Mop. “You loser!” he said. They were both laughing. And I realized something. I didn’t know if they were flirting because they liked each other or flir
ting because they were bored. Four days before I would have known the whole story. My ability to read people so well that I knew more about what they were thinking than they did? That was gone.

  “Have you tried to hide?” Nia asked me now.

  “I saw Mr. Fowler this morning on my way to French. I kind of ducked away from him. After everything that happened in Washington, I just couldn’t deal.”

  “Oh, my,” Nia said. “I wouldn’t have wanted to run into him either. So you hid?”

  “Well, I don’t know if you could really call it hiding,” I said. “All I know is I looked away, I imagined myself playing the most un-Mr. Fowler-ish music I could think of.”

  “What would that be?”

  “Joni Mitchell. Cerebral, female, deep.”

  “Okay, I can see that.”

  “And he didn’t see me. Or at least he didn’t say anything if he did.”

  “Coincidence?” Nia said.

  I shrugged.

  At lunchtime, I stood for a few seconds at the cafeteria door, surveying the scene. How was it possible that so much had changed and yet the lunchroom looked exactly the same? The band kids still sat together, the newspaper kids, the basketball guys, the lacrosse team, the I-Girls. Cisco was holding court at the cool juniors’ table, Bea Rossiter was laughing with a group of friends.

  But wait. The I-Girls table. Heidi, Lexi, Kelli, and Traci were sitting the way they always sat, grouped around their queen, leaning toward her, trying to get her attention, to share a comment, a laugh, a stick of gum.

  Except Heidi wasn’t the queen. It was Lexi sitting in the middle now. Heidi was sitting at her side. Heidi was the one leaning in, the one looking to get Lexi’s attention.

  “Um, what is Heidi wearing?” I heard someone say behind me. I turned around to find Hal and Callie. When I met their gaze they both looked down and blushed. They were holding hands.

  I smiled, but quickly brought the focus back on Heidi. She was dressed as she always dressed—leggings that showed off her shapely legs, chunky boots that said “I just rolled out of bed and into $500 worth of leather,” a long sweater that looked like it was made out of something expensive like cashmere, and then on top of all of that, a man’s tie.