Could I really be tuning this in? Or was I just imagining it?
Either way, I felt a little bad for him.
“I’m sorry, sir,” I said. I tried hard to look sorry but wasn’t sure I was doing it. I didn’t feel that sorry. “I’m waiting before my . . . violin lesson.”
He glanced at my violin case, and I could sense his mind shifting. So I tried to put a thought into his head: They make me take the lessons. I hate ’em.
I imagined his thought: Give the kid a break. He has problems too.
“Okay. We get more customers and you gotta move.”
“Thanks.” I smiled at him.
He smiled back.
I felt a surge of good feelings. We were both happy and I had gotten what I’d wanted. By being nice! That was a strange new feeling for me. But something didn’t feel right. And then it hit me: being nice was so Eddie. You’re supposed to be bad, I told myself. Hey, man, sometimes being nice can be bad, especially if you’re not sincere.
I focused back on the house across the street. The Burger Clown manager put a soda in front of me but I never got to drink it. I thought I heard Ronnie’s high voice screaming.
Across the street, two construction workers in white hardhats and work boots were carrying a long metal pipe. They stopped in front of the house. They heard the screaming too. They looked at each other, then back at the house. They were wondering what to do. I could hear them wondering!
I created a thought and imagined it as a laser beam splitting just before it entered their heads, right through their hardhats.
Throw that javelin through the window and save the screaming kid.
The men hoisted the pipe, turned, and hurled it right at the picture window. It shattered the glass.
The tall, vicious dogs jumped the fence and ran away. The construction workers looked at each other, then ran away too.
By the time I got across the street to the house, Ronnie and Buddy had leaped through the broken window and were racing toward me.
Nineteen
TOM
SOMEWHERE IN NEW JERSEY
2012
“EDDIE!” Ronnie yelled at me. “I knew you’d find me.”
“Sorry to disappoint you,” I said. “Follow me.”
“Oh. Tom.” He did sound disappointed.
He followed me around the house to the driveway. I opened the door of the first black SUV. Just as I figured, the keys were under the mat. I had read about this on a secret website for carjackers. Cops want their keys handy for quick getaways but not too handy, such as in the ignition.
“You drive,” I told Ronnie. “Like you did when you busted us out of the insane asylum last year.”
I ran to the second SUV, found its keys, and pitched them into the bushes. That would block the third car and give us a few extra minutes.
By the time I got back to the first car, guys in suits were running out the door, guns drawn. But Ronnie had the motor running and the police radio on. He was kneeling on the front seat. He still couldn’t see over the wheel and reach the pedals at the same time. Buddy was taking up the passenger seat, growling, just daring me to push him off. Ronnie lifted one of his floppy ears and whispered something. The dog gave me a dirty look and went into the back. I climbed in and stomped on the accelerator.
Ronnie blasted through the chainlink fence out to the street and took off.
“Find a highway, and then we’ll ditch the car,” I shouted. “It probably has a GPS, so it’ll be easy to track.”
“GPS?”
“Later.” I twisted around so I could crawl down under the steering wheel and put my left hand on the brake and my right hand on the accelerator. Just like old times.
Ronnie had really quick reflexes. He maneuvered that big SUV like a racecar, off the street and onto a road that fed into the highway, and then onto the highway with sudden moves, but smooth too, yelling down to me, “Gas . . . more gas . . . let up a little . . . okay, be ready . . . pedal to the metal!”
He didn’t call for the brake much, which Grandpa always says is the mark of a good driver, always thinking ahead.
Now I had to think ahead. We ditch the car, but then what? Where do we go? Back to the wagon? Who will protect us there? I couldn’t even get Eddie on the brain waves. Who do I need to make contact with? The aliens? How do I do that? Am I totally on my own? Just what powers do I have, besides breaking windows? Wind power is pretty awesome but it isn’t going to be enough. Hearing voices and thoughts? That would help. But maybe I had just been imagining them. Humans are good at imagining things, even half humans.
Every so often, I popped up to check for police cars, and not just the ones that would be coming after us. How long could we be driving around with a thirteen-year-old boy who looked ten at the wheel? Even if no cops spotted us, what about other drivers? Unless they were all too busy talking or texting to notice Ronnie.
The radio started to crackle. “Enterprise Two, come in, Enterprise Two. This is Federation.”
“Gas . . . more . . . okay, we’re coming to an exit . . .”
“Enterprise Two, where are you?”
“That doesn’t sound like a cop radio,” said Ronnie.
“It’s got to be a federal task force after the aliens.” I felt excited and scared. “Like a special unit. X-Files.”
“What?”
“And those call signs: Enterprise and Federation. Pretty cheesy. You’d think they could do better than Star Trek.”
“What’s that?”
“A TV show about looking for aliens. After your time.”
“Enterprise Two, you are moving. We have you.”
“Okay, Ronnie, off the highway fast. Gotta find, like, an underpass or a concrete building that might block the GPS signal.”
I knew he didn’t fully understand what I was talking about, but the little guy knew just what to do. Ronnie took a screaming right onto a highway exit, yelling to me, “Gas, gas, all you got . . . okay, lift off the pedal . . .”
I kept poking my head up from under the dashboard, taking quick peeks as we started weaving through side roads toward what looked like an old abandoned industrial park alongside railroad tracks overgrown with weeds.
We circled the area, which was surrounded by a twenty-foot chainlink fence with barbed wire on top.
“Brakes!” The SUV jerked to a stop in front of a gate too heavy to crash through. There was a massive padlock on the front.
I leaned out the window and focused hard, thinking wind, storm, gale force, cyclone, hurricane, tornado. The fence was rattling and my head felt as though the padlock banging against the chain links was banging against my skull. But the lock and fence held. I fell back exhausted.
“Can’t do it,” I whimpered.
Buddy licked my face, hard, to get me going. It didn’t feel friendly.
“You can do it,” said Ronnie.
I took a deep breath and stuck my head out again. This time I imagined a ray of sunlight shining through a magnifying glass focused on the padlock, imagined the ray narrower and narrower, stronger and stronger, a pencil of light with the heat of a hundred suns, a million suns, burning, scalding out of my brain, boiling me along with the target. The padlock began to sizzle and smoke. Just before I passed out, the padlock melted and the gate swung open.
Twenty
BRITZKY
SOMEWHERE IN NORTHERN VIRGINIA
2012
WE were near Washington, D.C., when Alessa and I were kidnapped off the tour. One minute we were sitting in the wagon eating turkey wraps, and the next we were being hustled toward a van by Erin and two security guys. We didn’t have a chance to say goodbye to Eddie, wherever he was. Would Eddie even care?
I tried to squirm out of a security guy’s grip. “Where are we going?”
“Someplace else.” He pushed me into the back of the van. Alessa was pushed in next to me. There was a metal screen between the front and back of the van. We were in a cage.
Erin leaned in
. “It’s nothing personal.”
Yeah, right, I thought. I said, “Is the tour over?”
“For you two. We’re headed for the Capitol.”
She slammed the back door shut and locked it. The van began moving.
“Wasn’t the tour about kids leading the way?” said Alessa.
“That was then,” I said. “Before Homeland Security took over.”
“What about Eddie?” said Alessa.
“The good jock? He goes along.”
“I thought you liked him.”
“I do,” I said. “Remember when he was pretending to be Tom last year? He did everything we told him to do. I thought it was because of us. But it’s him, the way he is.”
“He came up with the idea of Tech Off!” said Alessa.
“Because he couldn’t figure out how to turn on a computer.”
“What’s your point?”
“If you can convince him that something is good for the team, he’ll go along,” I said. I felt a little disloyal dissing Eddie, but it was the truth. “He’s the good jock. He won’t ask questions, try to look under the rock.”
“And that’s bad?”
“It is when there’s something under the rock.” I suddenly thought, We could be bugged in here, and I made the zip your lip signal to Alessa.
Alessa got it and shut up too. We looked around for hidden cameras and microphones.
The van was on a highway, then outside a small city, then within rows of suburban homes, and finally into farm country. We turned up a two-lane road, then a one-lane dirt road leading up to a farmhouse surrounded by empty fields as far as I could see.
A man and a woman in dark suits came out of the farmhouse and opened the van doors. The woman said something to the two men in the front seats of the van, then hustled Alessa and me into the house. The van drove off. I could tell that Alessa was getting more scared now. I winked at her, trying to keep a brave front so she wouldn’t freak out, but my knees felt like Jell-O.
They put us in separate rooms.
Twenty-one
TOM
SOMEWHERE IN NEW JERSEY
2012
BY the time I came to, Ronnie had driven through the open gate of the industrial park and into an abandoned warehouse, a dingy, rusty old building with high ceilings and a floor littered with scraps of tire rubber and metal shavings. Rats scurried. Were those bats flying up near the ceiling? Buddy leaned out the window and barked at them. I thought I saw a snake slithering through piles of garbage. I shivered.
Ronnie put a hand on my forehead. “Are you okay?”
“Fine,” I growled, but I wasn’t. I had to hug my elbows to keep my body from shaking. I couldn’t tell if it was from thinking about snakes or from using my powers. I hoped using them wouldn’t always knock me out.
“That was amazing, the way you melted the lock,” said Ronnie. “Can you see through things?”
“Just fuzzy shapes,” I said. “I have to practice.”
Ronnie frowned.
Then a scary thought elbowed in. “How did they find you?”
“I don’t know. I thought I was home free, but then Buddy caught up to me and the agents showed up.”
“You didn’t take Buddy with you when you took off?”
“He’s Eddie’s dog.”
“Eddie left him,” I said. “Eddie said they wouldn’t let dogs in the hotel.”
We looked at each other but neither of us said anything about Eddie abandoning the rest of us for a hotel room. Neither of us wanted to diss Eddie. Yet.
Ronnie finally said, “I guess after a while, when Eddie didn’t come back, Buddy took off after me.”
“Why didn’t he go after Eddie?”
“Dunno.”
“How could he find you?” I said.
“Buddy’s a spaniel. He can smell your tracks.”
I didn’t want to say anything about Ronnie and smells. When I’d first met him and he’d been homeless, you could smell him coming.
Buddy knew we were talking about him. He climbed into the front seat and onto Ronnie’s lap. Ronnie lifted one of Buddy’s floppy ears and talked to him in a little baby voice.
Ronnie is gay, I suddenly thought. Not that there was anything wrong with that. I believe in equality for everybody, even though you can’t trust most people. I wondered if Eddie knew.
After a while, I said, “We can’t stay here. There are tracking devices in the car. The warehouse walls may not be enough to block them.” I started ripping out all the dashboard wires. One of them had to be the GPS.
“I need to ask you,” said Ronnie in a low voice. “Can you see through clothes?”
“I haven’t tried.” That was true. I hadn’t had time. I remembered the guy on the toilet in the trailer. I hadn’t looked through his clothes. “But I think so. Why?”
Ronnie’s mouth twisted as if he was trying to say something and couldn’t figure out how to form the words. He kept stroking Buddy, nervously, harder and deeper, until Buddy started to squirm.
“Hey, what’s this?”
Ronnie grabbed one of my hands and guided it to a spot on Buddy’s back, near his neck, where the fur and flesh were thick. I felt something solid, pea-size.
I fingered it, and when Buddy didn’t seem to notice, I squeezed it hard. Buddy still didn’t react. It wasn’t part of his body.
“Must be a microchip pet finder,” I said. “People implant it right under the fur, and then if the pet goes missing, they can track it. It’s a kind of GPS.”
“GPS? When are you going to tell me what that means?”
“It’s an electronic tracking device. I bet somebody used it to find you.”
“That makes no sense,” said Ronnie. “I don’t think we have microchips on our planet yet.”
“They could have put it in Buddy here on the tour. Maybe that security guy Brown. Takes a minute to inject it. They probably figured Buddy would always be with Eddie. It was a way to keep track of him.”
“What are we going to do?” said Ronnie.
“Leave him here, tied up so he can’t follow us,” I said.
Ronnie’s eyes actually bugged out. His mouth dropped open. “Can’t do that. It’s Buddy.”
“You want to get caught again? What were they doing to you when you were screaming like a girl?”
Ronnie sucked air. “I’m not leaving Buddy. You’re so smart, Tom—figure something out.”
Twenty-two
ALESSA
SOMEWHERE IN NORTHERN VIRGINIA
2012
MY room had a narrow bed, two wooden chairs, and a chest of drawers. No window. There were two framed needlepoints on the wall. One read HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS. The other read THE ROAD TO A FRIEND’S HOUSE IS NEVER LONG.
The signs made me lonely and sad. I sat down on the bed and cried for a minute or two, then stood up. Pull yourself together, Lessi. It’s always darkest before the dawn. Now, that was a needlepoint for you!
There was a knock on the door. Before I could say, “Come in,” the door banged open. The woman in the dark suit marched in, slammed the door behind her, and sat down in one of the wooden chairs.
“Sit down,” she said.
I kept standing. I didn’t feel so small and weak when I was taller than her.
“Whatever. I’m Agent Mathison and you are in big trouble, young lady.”
I sat down.
“Here’s the deal. We know everything. Your pal Todd just spilled his guts, which confirmed what we already knew. He won’t be prosecuted. But you will be prosecuted and so will your parents. Prison time. Unless you cooperate.”
“How?”
“Tell us what you know.”
“About what?”
“About Tom.”
“What about him?” I felt confused. Tom as Tom, or Tom as Eddie, or Eddie pretending to be Tom? I almost asked Agent Mathison, then bit my tongue to shut myself up. Just what was it Agent Mathison knew?
“When did you first meet
Tom?”
Be cool. Tell the truth as much you can. “Last year when he started Nearmont Middle School. We were both in orchestra. I played cello and he—”
“Who had the idea of Tech Off! Day?”
It had been Eddie being Tom, I thought, but something warned me against saying too much right away. I didn’t believe that “Todd just spilled his guts.” That wasn’t Britzky. “It was Tom’s idea. He thought people really needed to talk to one another face to—”
“What about the voices?”
I went into dumb mode. It worked with Mom and Dad when they interrogated me. “Voices?” I thought she was talking about the voices Tom hears, which he had thought were imaginary but now knew belong to Eddie and to aliens, like his dad and Dr. Traum.
“Telling him what to do.”
“Tom never lets people tell him what to do.”
“You think you can play dumb with me, young lady?” Agent Mathison was scowling.
“Is Tom in trouble?”
“Worry about yourself. You’re the one in trouble for withholding information from a federal officer.”
“Like FBI?”
“FBI takes orders from us.”
“I haven’t really seen much of Tom lately.” That was true. True was good when you were playing cat and mouse. “He’s, like, off the wagon a lot.”
“Where does he go?”
“I don’t know. Erin says he’s getting ready for his interviews.”
“I’m losing patience. What about the aliens?”
“You mean like illegal . . .”
“Now I’m getting angry.”
“Aliens from other planets?” I made the face Mom hates, the gimme-a-break face.
“Don’t play with me.”
I wondered how much Agent Mathison knew about the aliens. Obviously, she didn’t know Tom was a half alien or a twin. Had to keep it that way. What about Britzky? If he spilled his guts and I didn’t . . .
“Do you think Tom is crazy?” said Agent Mathison.
“No. Why?”
The Twin Powers Page 6