by Zoe Cannon
Heather shook her head. “It’s not. You were completely justified to suspect me of… whatever. I wasn’t acting like myself.”
She still wasn’t acting like herself. Something about the way she spoke was… wrong. It didn’t sound like Heather.
Heather took a step forward.
The pin at her shoulder glittered in the light.
It took Becca a few seconds to understand what she was seeing. “You joined the Monitors.”
Heather fingered the pin. “A couple of days ago.”
“How could you do that, after everything that’s happened?”
“They didn’t want to let me in at first,” said Heather. “But I explained how much I wanted to make up for what my parents were. They’re going to have to watch me extra-carefully, to make sure I’m not trying to infiltrate them so I can pass information to dissidents, but that’s okay. They’ll start to trust me eventually.”
Becca couldn’t take her eyes off the pin. “That’s not what I meant. How could you join them after what happened to your parents? After what we found in the photo album?”
Heather’s eyes went cold. “My parents were dissidents, Becca.”
The classroom door opened.
They both swiveled their heads toward the sound. Mr. Adams, their Citizenship teacher, stood in the doorway. “Are you supposed to be in here?” he asked. A rhetorical question.
“We were just leaving.” Heather strode to the door and disappeared into the hall.
Becca had no choice but to do the same.
* * *
When Becca rang Heather’s doorbell that evening, she half-expected Heather to slam the door in her face. Instead Heather met Becca’s eyes with a blank expression. “Hi, Becca.”
Becca looked away. Seeing a stranger looking out of Heather’s eyes was too unnerving. “I, um… I was hoping we could talk.”
Without a word, Heather opened the door and motioned Becca inside. Becca only caught a glimpse of the immaculate living room, with furniture in various shades of cream, before Heather led her upstairs to her room.
Heather still hadn’t unpacked her things. A couple of cardboard boxes stood against the far wall, next to her bed. The room, aside from the bed and the boxes, was bare.
Becca had felt almost as comfortable in Heather’s old bedroom as she did in her own. Here, she felt like an intruder.
Maybe she shouldn’t have come.
But she had to find out what was going on.
Heather sat gingerly on the edge of her bed. “What did you want to talk about?” she asked, her expression bland. She sounded like she was talking to a stranger. Not her best friend of ten years.
Becca stayed standing. “What do you think? That.” She gestured toward Heather’s Monitor pin.
“The Monitors? What about them?” She shrugged. “I know I didn’t want to join before, but you remember what I was like before. All I cared about was how much fun I was having and what other people were saying about me. Sometimes your life has to fall apart before you can really see what’s important, you know?” She smiled—the first smile Becca had seen from her since her parents’ arrest. It hung on her face like a badly-fitting mask.
“If you’re just doing this so people will stop thinking you’re a dissident, you can tell me. You don’t have to pretend with me.” Becca hoped that was the reason. If all this was an act, it would explain why Heather didn’t seem like herself anymore. And why she would join the Monitors even after everything that had happened.
The smile dropped from Heather’s face. “So you think if I actually care about something bigger than myself, I must be pretending?”
Either Heather didn’t trust Becca at all anymore, or… she meant it. She believed in the Monitors, in Internal, in all of it. Not in the offhand way she used to—the way Becca used to—but the way the political kids did, the ones who had dreamed of working for Internal since kindergarten, the ones Heather and her friends had always made fun of.
“But what about your parents? What about…” The eye on Heather’s pin watched her. She hesitated. Should she really be talking about this with a Monitor, of all people?
What was wrong with her? This was Heather. Her best friend. The idea of Heather trying to get revenge against her mom had almost made sense—she could see Heather going after her mom in a storm of grief, not thinking about what she was doing or what it meant. Turning Becca in, though, would take a level of coldness that Heather didn’t have.
At least, the old Heather hadn’t.
Becca forced herself to finish. She wouldn’t let herself think something like that about her best friend. Bad enough that she had suspected her of plotting revenge. “What about the note, and the stuff I found in my mom’s—”
“You said you weren’t going to talk about this anymore,” Heather interrupted. She crossed her arms.
“I didn’t figure you wanted to hear about it yet, on top of everything else you were dealing with. But I can’t forget what I found. I don’t understand how you can just dismiss it.”
“My parents were dissidents.” Heather spoke each word with contemptuous precision. “Everything in that note was a dissident lie.”
“If it was all a lie, then why did I find that file on my mom’s computer that said…” She glanced down at Heather’s pin again. “…that said Public Relations had told her what to get that dissident to say?”
“Maybe you misread it. Maybe someone knew you’d look there and planted it for you to find. How should I know?” She drew her arms in closer to her chest. “But you know what? I don’t care. I don’t care why you found whatever you found, and I don’t care why my parents wrote that note in the first place. They were dissidents, and now they’re gone. That’s all that matters.”
She sounded like she was talking about people she had seen on the news or something. Not her own parents. Becca studied Heather, looking for some trace of the grief she had seen the night she had gone to 117 to save her. She couldn’t find anything.
“Why are you staring at me like that?” Heather snapped.
“They were your parents. How can you talk like they don’t even matter to you?” For once she wanted what she was hearing to be a lie.
Heather looked at her in disbelief. “I thought you were the one who couldn’t forget what we found. Don’t you remember the stuff that note said?” Her voice rose until she was almost yelling. “They were dissidents!”
“They were your parents!”
“I wish I had never known them!” Heather propelled herself off the bed. “They pretended to be normal parents, they pretended to love me, when all along they only cared about poisoning society with their lies. They even managed to poison you! Look at what this is doing to you!”
Becca shrank back from Heather’s rage. “What I found is real. Come to my apartment and I can show you.” But she knew Heather wouldn’t do it. Heather was turning into somebody Becca didn’t know, and Becca didn’t know how to stop it.
Or was Becca the one who was changing?
Dissident.
No. She wasn’t the one in the wrong here. Heather didn’t care about her parents anymore. She didn’t care about the truth. She had pushed Becca away for no reason, and now she wouldn’t listen.
Becca fed the anger, just like she had with her mom yesterday. The hotter it burned, the less the word echoed in her mind.
“First my parents. Now you.” Heather sagged back onto the bed, like her legs wouldn’t hold her anymore. A second ago she had sounded ready to explode; now her voice quavered with the threat of tears. “Are you turning into a dissident now? Is that what this is?”
The echoes got louder, roaring in Becca’s ears, only now they spoke with Heather’s voice. Dissident.
“I’m not a dissident,” she whispered.
It felt like a lie.
“Then why are you doing this? Why can’t you just leave it alone?” Heather swiped the back of her hand across her eyes. “Like it’s not hard enough knowing what my parents we
re without you acting like you’re on their side.”
On their side.
A dissident.
She tried to focus the anger, bring it closer, build it hotter. She tried to remember that Heather was the one who was wrong.
It was getting harder. Harder to remember that she wasn’t a dissident. Harder to make herself believe it.
“What about what you’re doing?” She flung the words at Heather. “Your parents have only been dead a few weeks, and you’re throwing them away like they never mattered.”
Heather didn’t answer. Her shoulders curled; she started trembling. It took Becca a minute to realize she was crying.
Becca wanted to apologize… but if she did, it would mean she was wrong and Heather was right. And if Heather was right, that meant Becca was what Heather said she was.
Finally, Heather looked up, her face streaked with tears. All the missing grief had come back again, all at once. “I can’t let myself forget that they were dissidents,” she whispered. “Not ever. If I do, I’ll start hating Internal for killing them. And then I’ll end up just like them.”
Becca’s anger drained away, leaving only the echoes. Dissident. Dissident.
Heather wiped away her tears. The emotion vanished from her face so quickly Becca wondered if she had imagined it. “Are you done talking like a dissident?”
As though nothing had happened. As though she had never started crying.
“Actually,” said Becca, “I should probably go.” She had to get out of here. Away from this person who looked like her best friend but wasn’t. Away from the word that got louder in her head every time Heather said it.
Guilt stabbed at her. Heather needed her, and she was running away like a coward. She should stay. Try to help her. It was the right thing to do.
“Okay.” Heather shrugged, already turning away. “I’ll see you in school tomorrow, then.”
Becca escaped out the door. The echoes followed. Dissident. Dissident. Dissident.
She had a plan. She would drop the car off at home, and then she would go to the playground. Let her mind go blank for a while. Forget about her mom. Forget about what Heather had said.
But when she walked in the door, intending to toss the car keys inside and leave again, her mom was standing on the other side. Waiting for her.
“The two of us are going to spend some time together,” said her mom, daring Becca to contradict her. “And we’re going to fix this.”
Chapter Ten
Becca sat on the park bench with her mom, watching the sun go down. This park was nothing like her playground. The trees were spaced at precise intervals, the grass got mowed every Saturday, and the playground equipment in the distance gleamed as the last rays of the sun glittered off the rust-free metal. Becca hadn’t been here in years, not since the old brown grass had been replanted and the new swings and jungle gym had replaced a couple of splintery picnic tables.
The quiet beauty should have relaxed her. But she couldn’t relax, not with her mom sitting next to her, deliberately looking away as she waited for Becca to make the first move.
Becca stared up at the red-tinged clouds, hardly seeing them. “Just say whatever you brought me here to say.”
“I didn’t bring you here to have the same old arguments again,” her mom replied, still looking at the sky. “I miss you. I don’t like what’s happening to us. I brought you here because if we don’t work to get things back to the way they used to be, we’ll never get there.”
Becca brought her gaze back to earth, to her mom’s earnest face. “You want me to just ignore all of it? The things you did, the things—” The things I’ve learned?
“I executed a couple of dissidents, Becca. That’s all.” Her soft tone took the hostility out of her words. She stood up. “But we didn’t come here to argue about that again.” She held out a hand to Becca. “Let’s walk together.”
Becca stood up to join her mom, but didn’t take the hand she offered.
Her mom started walking down the path. “Do you remember when we used to come here and feed the ducks?”
Her mom’s words immediately called the memory to mind. Becca cringed at the thought of that younger Becca with her hand clasped in her mom’s much larger one, giggling as she threw bread to the ducks. She hadn’t known then what her mom was capable of.
Now every time Becca looked at her mom she thought of Jake’s mother. Of all the false confessions. Of Heather’s parents, who had been dissidents but might also have been right.
If they had been dissidents, and Becca thought they had been right, what did that make Becca?
“What’s the point of remembering that? They filled in the duck pond two years ago.” She didn’t want to think about the times she had been happy with her mom. She didn’t want to remember how close they used to be. It would only remind her of what was missing. Heather, her mom… she was losing everyone.
Before all this, she would have gone to her mom for advice about Heather. Her mom would have known what to do.
Her mom sighed. “Are you going to keep pushing me away like this?”
As if what had happened were Becca’s fault. As if Becca were the one who had killed people’s parents, who had abandoned the truth in favor of whatever lies her bosses told her to feed to the dissidents.
“Don’t you miss it at all?” her mom asked. “The time we used to spend together? The talks we used to have?”
Of course she did. But what was she supposed to do, make herself forget everything she had found out?
They walked together in silence for a couple of minutes as the sky grew darker.
Her mom’s phone buzzed. Her mom picked it up and frowned at the display. “It’s work.”
“Do they want you to go in?” If her mom had to rush off to work, they could put this off until another time. Becca could arrange to be busy whenever that was.
“They can live without me for one night.” She reattached the phone to her belt.
Becca couldn’t remember ever seeing her mom ignore a call from work before.
“Things used to be a lot simpler, didn’t they?” her mom mused. “Before work got so busy. Before this thing with Heather and Jake.”
In school earlier, Becca had greeted Jake like she always did, and they had kept their conversation to safe topics like always. She hadn’t mentioned what her mom had said about him and his family. She had told herself it was because they were in school, where anyone could overhear, but she knew better.
If he found out her mom had been the one to kill his mother, he wouldn’t want anything to do with her. The memory of Heather’s reaction was still fresh in her mind. But it wasn’t just that. She didn’t want to ask him if her mom’s story was true because she didn’t want to try to decipher his answers to figure out whether he was lying. She’d done enough of that lately. More than enough.
For one irrational second, she thought about asking her mom for advice.
Then she remembered again.
“It’s not just you,” her mom continued, as though Becca had answered her. “I miss the way things were before work got so crazy. Back when I could actually spend time with you.”
“I miss it too,” Becca admitted, even though she wasn’t sure she wanted to respond. “It was nice when the most important thing in the world was feeding the ducks.” But she didn’t have go to back that far to find a time when things had been easier. She only had to go back a month, to before Heather’s phone call.
In front of her, Becca saw the bench where they had sat and watched the sunset. The path had taken them in almost a complete circle.
“Things are harder for both of us now. Especially for you.” Her mom slowed down. “But I want you to know I’m still here if you need me. If there’s anything you want to talk about, anything you want to ask me, you can. About Jake’s family, or what happened with Heather, or anything else.”
Becca wished she could. But it wasn’t as simple as her mom made it sound. Asking about
what she had found on her mom’s computer didn’t just mean admitting she had gone snooping through her files. It meant admitting she knew something she wasn’t supposed to know. Something Internal had kept secret for… how long? How long had they been doing this?
She was about to answer with some kind of noncommittal refusal when she stopped. Something was bothering her about what her mom had said, something besides how she wished she could take her mom up on her offer.
No, it wasn’t about what her mom had said. It was about the way she had said it.
It reminded her of something. It reminded her of…
That conversation with Jake. The one where he’d asked her about Heather just a little too intently.
She had been wrong about Jake.
This time, she didn’t think she was wrong.
“You’re trying to find out if I’m a dissident.”
Her mom said nothing.
Becca faced her. “That’s why you brought me here. It had nothing to do with fixing things between us. You just wanted to get me to… what, ask you if the dissidents have been right all along?”
“I do want to fix things between us. And I want to make sure you’re all right. I can see you changing, and it worries me.” Her mom didn’t change her tone, didn’t break her calm. Of course she didn’t. She did this with dissidents all the time.
Becca broke away from the path and took off running toward home.
* * *
Her mom caught up with her before she even made it out of the park.
She couldn’t outrun her mom. There was no point in trying. She slowed down to let her mom walk beside her.
“I’m not a dissident.”
Her mom could tell when she was lying. Did she see it now?
“I’m sorry I brought it up the way I did,” said her mom. “I should have just asked. But considering the way things have been between us, I didn’t know if you’d talk to me at all, let alone tell me the truth.”
They left the park. As they moved onto the road, they started walking single-file: Becca in front, her mom behind.
“So this was all an act. Just a way to get me to let my guard down.” With her mom behind her, out of sight, Becca almost felt like she was talking to herself.