Revealed

by Amanda Valentino

  The only other times I ever felt like that were when I was with Callie.

  Was this information I really needed Nia Rivera to have? Being with Nia was like a day spent ice-skating on a frozen lake—bracing, fun, kind of exhilarating even, but proceed at your own risk.

  As it became clear I wasn’t going to finish my sentence, Nia shrugged. “I sense you’re pleading the Fifth.”

  Girls talked to one another. I might have had mostly guy friends and a sister who’s not exactly president of a sorority, but my mom spends about half her life on the phone. Callie and Nia didn’t strike me as the kind of girls who’d describe themselves as BFF, but did I want to risk Nia’s telling Callie that I had a thing for Amanda?

  I forced myself to meet her gaze. “I did not like Amanda, Nia,” I said. “Not like that.”

  She nodded in a way that made me think I’d made my point. “Got it,” she said.

  By the time school ended, I was so tired I could have curled up anywhere—even the floor of the lobby—and easily lost consciousness for about a month.

  Apparently I looked as exhausted as I felt because the first thing Callie said when she saw me at rehearsal was, “Are you sick, Hal?” She started to lift her hand, and for a second I thought she was going to check my forehead like my mom does when she wants to know if I have a fever. The thought of Callie’s warm hand against my skin was so nice I almost forgot that I was supposed to be keeping her safe by keeping her away from me.

  Nia was looking at her script and counting something; she didn’t seem to hear Callie’s question, instead announcing, “Twenty-five,” as she slammed the play shut. “Tell Hal that on opening night, while he’s enjoying the play from the audience, we will, between us, have twenty-five costume changes to oversee.” She turned to me, eyes blazing, and her familiar glare was oddly friendly. It made me think of Frieda’s warning. When you’re together you’re . . . I had no idea what she would have said if she’d been given the time to finish her sentence, but I know how I would have ended it.

  When you’re together you’re happy.

  From the stage, Mrs. Hayworth rallied her troops. “I need my costume crew.”

  I had to tell them about what Frieda had said. “Hey, guys . . .”

  “Now!” Mrs. Hayworth bellowed.

  Nia groaned. “That woman is the devil.”

  Callie shot me a questioning look, and I shrugged. I’d been waiting since Saturday; I could wait another couple of hours.

  “It’s cool. I’ll tell you later. Meanwhile, any chance you’ve got something in there that I could take a look at, little lady?” I indicated her bag. On Friday afternoon I’d painted the final leaf on the final tree in an Arden that now looked remotely like a forest. Callie and Nia might be busier than ever with costume crew, but I had before me at least an hour or two of leisure.

  Callie nodded and swung the pack off her shoulder. The way she handed it to me made me think it wasn’t going to be all that heavy, but the momentum of her swing must have been greater than I realized because as I grabbed the strap of her bag, I almost dropped it.

  “Whoa, this thing’s heavy.”

  Callie shook her head and smiled a puzzled smile. “It’s weird, sometimes it feels really heavy to me and sometimes it doesn’t seem so bad.” She shrugged. “I think it depends on how tired I am.”

  Well, after two sleepless nights, I was definitely tired. I made my way over to a seat toward the rear of the center section of the auditorium while Nia and Callie headed to the stage, Nia muttering something about people “who got volunteered for actual work while the people who volunteer them seem to end up having an enormous amount of free time on their hands.” The word time made me think of Amanda’s watch, its mysterious inscription, my own failure to figure out what she was trying to tell me.

  Oh, yeah, Bennett. You’re definitely the man to unlock the mystery of this box.

  Since Louise’s, I hadn’t seen the box outside of the photographs Callie had taken and sent me and Nia, but it was just light enough in the auditorium for me to make out the carvings Callie had been trying to describe to us. I’d hoped getting my hands on the actual box would make it obvious to me that there were drawings like the ones Callie thought she’d seen, but the maze of vines and leaves was so intricate, it was hard to see if there were individual figures hidden in the carvings.

  As I studied the pattern in search of hidden pictures, I was reminded of the summer before sixth grade, when I first moved to Orion and Callie and her mom took me stargazing. They tried to show me how to find the constellations, but I kept getting confused, thinking they meant one star when they meant another, connecting stars that weren’t meant to be connected into shapes that seemed as clear as the ones they were trying to weave together for me. Ultimately I’d concluded that the constellations were about as scientific as alchemy, which had made Callie’s mom laugh instead of making her angry.

  “O, ye of little faith,” she’d said, and as I remembered her saying that and thought of how brave Callie had been in the face of her mom’s disappearing and her dad’s losing it there for a while, I wanted to have faith, lots of faith, tons of faith. I wanted there to be not just drawings of animals but a map, a treasure map. A treasure map that pointed all the way to—

  “Well, hello, stranger.”

  I jerked my head up.

  And there, sitting in the seat next to mine, was none other than Heidi Bragg.

  A lot of really strange things had happened to me over the past couple of weeks, but Heidi Bragg coming over to talk to me was without a doubt one of the strangest.

  I didn’t say anything. All I could think of were the horrible insults she’d hurled at Callie, the story Nia had told me about the I-Girls playing a mean trick on her in sixth grade, and the image of Heidi running down Bea Rossiter with her daddy’s car.

  My mom says it’s wrong to hate anyone but Hitler, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, and George W. Bush. I couldn’t help thinking that if she knew her better, she’d add Heidi Bragg to the list.

  Heidi was wearing a low-cut pink T-shirt that showed why the guys in my grade liked her. She put her feet up on the chair in front of hers and went on talking like there was nothing the least bit unusual about our sitting and chatting. “So, what’s up?”

  “What do you want, Heidi?” My voice was sharp.

  “Jeez, friendly much?” Raising her arms above her head, she gave a loud yawn, then looked back at me and nodded toward the box. “That’s nice. Is it yours?”

  For a brief second, I got the strangest sensation that she knew the answer to the question before she asked it. But then I realized I was being paranoid. Whoever “they” were, Dr. Joy was not being held hostage by a coven of fourteen-year-old, lip-glossed females who’d christened themselves with the brazenly stupid name of “I-Girls.”

  “Nope.”

  “So whose is it?” Heidi gave me a shy smile, like my “nope” was a flirtatious joke I was playing on her.

  “It’s Callie’s, actually.” I’d meant Callie’s name to be a shot across the bow, an announcement about whose side I was on in the all-out social war that Heidi had declared. I almost wanted Heidi to say something mean about Callie just so I could . . . well, dumb as it may sound, I was ready to defend her honor and even her life, like Spiderman saving Mary Jane.

  But to my amazement, instead of curling her lip in disgust or spitting out more invective against her former friend, Heidi just sighed.

  “God, Callie must totally hate me.” She turned away from me slightly, like she didn’t want me to see how upset she was. “I bet she won’t even show at the cast party since it’s at my house.”

  I wasn’t sure how to respond. Was Heidi seriously surprised that Callie hated her?

  The box was heavy so I turned and put it on the seat next to me, then turned back to Heidi. “You can’t be serious.”

  Heidi was staring straight ahead at the stage, where Ms. Garner was directing some of the crew to place a small mound
of what was probably supposed to be dirt but actually resembled a pile of another brown substance.

  “Don’t you get it, Hal?” She shook her head and lowered her voice so I had to lean toward her. I was surprised by how good she smelled—not like Callie smelled good, but like the magazines filled with photos of well-dressed, skinny women on rooftops in New York that my dentist has in his waiting room.

  I realized I’d half expected her to smell of sulfuric acid.

  “Get what, Heidi?”

  She sighed, as if the memory she was about to share was so painful it was hard for her to articulate it. “Callie and I were friends for a long time. You know, we became the I-Girls together and that was . . .” She looked up at the ceiling for a minute before turning back to me. “That was almost three years ago.”

  “What’s your point, Heidi?”

  Leaning against the armrest on the other side of her seat from me, she wound her hair around her index finger. I watched as her finger twirled around and around. “Can’t you see, Hal? She betrayed me.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “She betrayed you? Heidi, you said she was dead to you. And I think you called us ‘freakazoid weirdos’ in front of half the school.”

  Heidi shook her head at the memory. “What Callie did was really painful, Hal.” She swallowed. “I’m not proud of how I acted, but haven’t you ever done anything you’re ashamed of?”

  In spite of myself, I thought of my solo trip to Baltimore. It wasn’t exactly behavior of the month.

  “I don’t know what to say,” I said honestly. Was it possible we’d . . . been wrong about Heidi? I remembered how much Nia had hated Callie at first, but how over time she’d come to trust and believe in her.

  Could something like that happen with Heidi Bragg?

  Heidi snickered a little. “You know, Hal, I sometimes wonder . . .”

  “What?” I asked, curious.

  And suddenly Heidi’s giggles became laughter so loud some people sitting a few rows ahead of us turned to see what the joke was. Confused, I watched her get to her feet.

  “What do I wonder, Hal?” And the sad, hurt girl who’d sat beside me a moment earlier was gone. In her place was the terrifying creature I’d always thought of when I thought of Heidi Bragg. “I’ll tell you. I wonder how someone who’s as naive as you manages to survive. That’s what I wonder.” And with that, she turned and strode down the row and along the center aisle to the front of the auditorium where most of the cast was gathered.

  Okay, that was completely bizarre.

  Did I imagine that entire random exchange? I looked at the seat she’d vacated, but if she’d been an apparition, she didn’t suddenly reappear. Her coming over to talk to and then insult me was just so odd, so . . . purposeless. So . . .

  And suddenly I felt sick. Had Heidi’s descending on me really been purposeless? Or had it had a very, very specific motive? Even before I turned my head to my left I was pretty sure what I’d find—or what I wouldn’t find.

  Sure enough, my eyes, when they landed on the seat that only a few minutes earlier had held Amanda’s box, only confirmed what I already knew.

  The seat was empty.

  The box was gone.

  Chapter 13

  “Well, what did you think she was coming over for?”

  “I just thought—” Confronted by Nia’s fury, I found it nearly impossible to form a sentence. I was used to calming Nia down, yes, but because she was mad at other people. Nia mad at you and in your face was a way, way scarier experience than just Nia mad.

  “Ooh, let me guess!” She waved her hands over an imaginary crystal ball. “It’s coming to me. Yes, you had a feeling! And your feeling told you that letting Heidi Bragg have Amanda’s most precious, most treasured—”

  “I screwed up, okay, Nia?” I’d already told them of my frantic search up and down the aisles and my panicked, fruitless hunt backstage for the box or Heidi herself. “Haven’t you ever screwed up?” To my horror I realized my question almost parroted Heidi’s earlier one to me.

  Haven’t you ever done anything you’re ashamed of, Hal?

  Well, yes, Heidi, as a matter of fact, I have—I believed something that came out of your mouth.

  Nia’s eyes flashed fire. “This isn’t a run-of-the-mill screw-up, okay, Hal? This is colossal.”

  Callie had stood quietly by us on the lawn out front of Endeavor while Nia bawled me out. Her silence made me think she might not be as mad as Nia.

  “Callie, I—” My voice was low, pleading, but she shook her head and held up her hand to stop me.

  “If it were anyone else, Hal. But Heidi? After those things she said to me?” Her eyes filled with tears, and when she blinked, they spilled over and ran down her cheeks.

  I thought of the night on Crab Apple Hill when she’d told us what had happened with Beatrice Rossiter, how she’d let me wipe away her tears after she cried.

  Now I wasn’t the one comforting her, I was the one making her cry.

  Maybe embarrassed by her tears, Callie suddenly said, “I’ve gotta go,” and dashed for her bike. Nia and I watched her leave, but there was no solidarity in our standing together. Callie’s hands must have been shaking because it took her a long time to get her bike unlocked. Once she did, she just jumped on and pedaled off, not turning around to wave good-bye.

  As soon as she was gone, Nia turned to me. “Just so we’re clear, you do realize you basically handed Amanda’s most treasured possession to her enemy.”

  And even though (or maybe because) Nia’s words only stated what I already knew, I felt the need to defend myself. “Oh, get off your high horse, Nia. You don’t know that that box was any more important to Amanda than any other item in Louise’s store.”

  “Except Louise didn’t tell us it would be very, very dangerous for the wrong people to get ahold of her snakeskin clutch.” Nia gave a bitter laugh before pointing an accusing finger at me. “Keep telling yourself it’s not a big deal, Hal. Maybe that’ll make it true.”

  “She doesn’t even know the box belongs to Amanda,” I pointed out, desperate. “Maybe it was only . . . maybe she just wanted to show she could take it.”

  Nia crossed her arms and stared at me, her voice sickeningly sweet and faux-reassuring. “You’re right, Hal. We don’t know why she wanted it. Maybe because she thought Callie would miss it and she wanted to hurt her. Maybe she just liked it.” As if she’d flipped a switch, her tone changed and became accusatory. “Is that your defense, Hal? That we don’t have to worry about Heidi’s having Amanda’s box because we don’t know why she wanted it?”

  “I . . .” God, how did Nia always manage to make me sound like such a total jackass?

  As I stood there, mouth practically hanging open with inarticulation, she walked over to her bike, unlocked it, and headed out of the parking lot.

  “Thanks for your understanding!” I shouted after her lamely, but she was too far off (in every way) to respond.

  As I watched Nia disappear into the darkening evening, the truth of her words hit me full force in a way it couldn’t when I was so focused on deflecting her anger.

  You basically handed Amanda’s most treasured possession to her enemy.

  I’d lost it. Me. I’d practically . . . given it away. For all we knew, the box had a map directing us to where we could find her. Or maybe there were letters inside it explaining why she’d had to disappear. At the very least, it held items that she valued, things she’d wanted kept safe, not just because someone was after her and could take them, but because they were hers.

  “‘Self-trust is the first secret of success,’” Amanda said.

  “What?”

  We were sitting on the train coming home from Baltimore, and I was basking in the afterglow of the most perfect day of my life. Frieda and I had really talked about art, arguing about John Currin (me: he’s a fraud; Frieda: he’s a genius) and public funding for the arts, the power of oils versus the pleasure of watercolors, the
need to show your work versus the desire to keep it private. Her loft, which was also her studio, was full of pieces in progress as well as ones she had finished, quick sketches I took to be studies for future projects, photos pulled from magazines and tacked up on the bulletin board that covered one entire wall. The floor had, no doubt, been a pristine white at some point, but by now there was so much paint spattered under our feet that looking down felt almost as much like looking at a painting as did looking at the actual canvases hung all around us. There were three enormous skylights open to the brilliant blue sky, and one wall of the studio was all windows, so there seemed to be nothing standing between us and the rooftops. Talking to Frieda made me realize I had opinions on things I’d never thought I cared about, and I found myself imagining living in just such a loft someday, maybe in New York or Rome or hey, what the hell, even Baltimore.

  For the first time in my life, I could see what it would be like to live the life of an artist.

  Amanda repeated herself. “I said, ‘Self-trust is the first secret of success.’” Even though we’d left home early that morning and walked in a brisk breeze for at least a mile along the river before standing in the windblown harbor to admire the waterfront, Amanda’s hair was still in its perfect, tight bun, as coiffed and polished as if she’d borrowed not just the clothing but the spirit of the 1950s office girl she was impersonating for the day.

  “Oh,” I said as she looked at me over a pair of glasses attached to a chain around her neck—glasses I was about ninety percent sure she didn’t need. (Ninety was about the highest percentage of definite I ever felt when it came to Amanda.)

  The train’s gentle rocking was having a lulling effect—I wanted to close my eyes and slip into half dreams about a future in a sunny loft with a paint-covered floor and an Italian espresso machine like the one Frieda had used to make us coffee far too bitter for a wimp like me to drink.