“Hopefully not ten years,” I quip, referring to how long it took Odysseus to get back to Ithaca after the fall of Troy.
“Don’t even joke,” Mom groans. “It’s bad enough I have to miss my client’s big day.”
When I hang up, I tell Rosa and Margo about Mom’s bad luck and my good fortune.
“Did your dad have to go into the office because they’re clearing out the protesters’ camp?” Rosa asks.
I hadn’t even thought about the protesters and the judge’s decision and what those hipsters said at the concert last night. I’ve been too busy worrying about how to clean up my mom’s sweater and get it back into her closet without her noticing it’s missing.
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“That could get ugly,” Margo says. “Do you think they’ll bring in the riot squad?”
“Why would they do that?” I say. “It’s not like there’s going to be a big fight or anything.”
“You think?” Margo says. “After they’ve been camping there for weeks?”
I shrug, because I’m too tired to argue. I just want to take a nap in my own bed in the blissfully odorless quiet of my room.
“Did you girls have a good time last night?” Mrs. Jiménez asks when we get in the car.
Rosa mumbles something incomprehensible in Spanish, making it clear that covering up last night’s disaster is down to me.
“Yeah!” I say with as much enthusiasm as exhaustion and stress about Mom’s sweater allows. “It was unbelievable.”
As in you just wouldn’t believe what actually happened, and I’m not going to be the one to tell you. I lean my head against the window and let the rest of the drive pass in silence.
Scruffles greets me with joyous abandon after Mrs. Jiménez drops me off. You’d think I’d been away for a year.
“Hey, cute puppy!” I tell him, scratching behind his ears. “I missed you, too! We’re going to play, but first I’ve got an important job to do.”
He looks up at me expectantly, head cocked to one side, as if to say, Okay, what?
I head to the washing machine in the basement, with Scruffles following close on my heels, and pull the smelly sweater out of my backpack. I’d done some more research online and found a website that said dry-clean only items can also be washed by hand, but there’s a delicate cycle on the washing machine that I figure is pretty much the same thing. I don’t want to risk scrubbing any lingering molecules of some random guy’s puke off with my actual hands. What happens if he had some deathly communicable disease like Ebola or bird flu or necrotizing fasciitis, that bacterial infection that eats your skin? No, thanks.
Scruffles is sniffing a little too intently at my backpack, and I realize that it smells of vomit, too. I throw it in the machine with the sweater.
While the cycle is running, I go upstairs to study for AP US History. Scruffles comes with and curls up on the bed next to me, his body warm against my hip. I’ve made flash cards based on old AP exam questions, and I start going through them, one by one.
Scruffles puts his head on my AP book, which is lying open on the bed. He looks like he’s studying, too.
I take a picture of him and send it to Dad.
scruffles is studying hard. think he’s going to do better on the APUSH exam than I am.
Usually Dad responds quickly, even if he’s busy, but this time he doesn’t. He still hasn’t texted me back forty minutes later, when I go down to take the sweater out of the washing machine.
To my horror, I see that the zipper on my backpack caught a thread of the sweater and pulled it during the wash. There’s a snag in the back. I feel sick to my stomach. I am dead. Or I’m going to be if I can’t fix this.
I try pulling the thread back through and stretching the sweater to its proper shape. Hopefully Mom won’t notice. But it’s still pretty obvious it isn’t in the pristine state it was when I took it out of the closet. This is turning out to be a complete disaster. Why did I borrow the sweater in the first place? What was I thinking?
According to my online research, the sweater has to be laid flat to dry. If that’s going to happen before Mom gets home, I better do it outside. Thankfully Mother Nature is cooperating.
Scruffles follows me out the back door and immediately takes off after a squirrel, which of course he doesn’t catch, but it never stops him from trying.
He trots back, tongue hanging from the side of his mouth. It looks like he’s smiling. Scruffles has definitely not inherited the Wallach overachiever gene. He doesn’t sit around worrying that Mom and Dad are going to freak out and think he’s a total failure at life because he didn’t catch a squirrel. He just finds the nearest patch of sunshine, flops down, curls up, and takes a nap.
Maybe I should learn from my dog.
But with four AP exams and the SAT coming up, I can’t afford to snooze, even though I’m tired from not sleeping well last night. Since it’s nice out, I decide to study on the patio, stretching out on one of the chaises with my flash cards.
“What do you think about Manifest Destiny?” I ask Scruffles. “Wasn’t it just imperialism by another name?”
Scruffles raises an eyebrow and ignores me. I don’t blame him. It’s too nice to study. I close my eyes and think about summer, when maybe I’ll be at the beach with Jamie Moss, because we’ll be dating after he asks me to prom …
High-pitched barking wakes me up. Scruffles is scratching at the back door, and then I hear the garage door opening.
MOM. IS. HOME.
Heart pounding, I grab the sweater, which, thankfully, is almost dry, fling the back door open, and race upstairs, barely able to breathe by the time I get to the top step just as I hear Mom and RJ talking in the kitchen.
I race down the hall to my parents’ room, as quietly as I can, and try to fold the sweater as neatly as Mom’s other ones. It looks a little lumpy. Whatever. No time to redo it.
I slip the sweater to the bottom of a pile and tiptoe back out to the hall, listening carefully for sounds of RJ. He’s not in his room, so I duck into the bathroom and flush, like that’s where I’ve been the whole time. After splashing water on my overheated face, I casually head downstairs as if I’ve been studying all day and have absolutely nothing to hide. Just call me Bond. Samantha Bond.
RJ is already slumped on the couch in the family room with the TV on.
“How was Odyssey of the Mind?” I ask my mom.
“Awful. RJ’s team lost, and there’s been a major catastrophe at work that has Dad tearing his hair out,” Mom says.
“What happened?”
“After the judge ruled last night, the mayor moved in the riot police early this morning to clear the protesters,” Mom explains. “Some of the protesters got hurt because they refused to respect the eviction order. Apparently these people don’t believe in obeying the law.” She slams her purse down on the counter.
“How badly hurt?” I ask, thinking about the hipster couple at the concert last night.
“Badly enough to end up in the hospital,” Mom says. “It’s all over the news. But that’s not the worst of it.”
“What’s worse than people being hurt?” I ask, with a rising sense of panic. “Is Dad okay?”
“Physically, yes. But the bank suffered a cyber breach,” Mom says, taking some hamburger meat out of the freezer. “The criminals say they’ve got over fifty terabytes of data and they’re going to publish the first cache of documents tomorrow.”
“What’s a terabyte? Is that a lot?”
“The prefix tera comes from the Greek word for monster,” Mom says. “So let’s put it this way: Fifty terabytes is the Mother of All Monster Hacks.”
I refrain from rolling my eyes at my mom’s ridiculous explanation. She could have just said yes. Instead, I say, “No wonder Dad’s tearing his hair out. What are the documents about?”
“That’s what the IT team and the cyber-security consultants are trying to figure out,” Mom says, banging the microwave door closed on
the frozen meat and pushing the defrost button. “How the hackers got in, what they were able to get, and how bad it’s going to be for the company. If they really have fifty terabytes of data, bad is an understatement.”
I’ve always taken my parents at their word that the protesters were crazy, ignorant people who are unemployed and looking for a handout from the real “job creators” of the world like Dad. But if they’ve managed to hack the supposedly ultra-secure computer systems at the bank, they can’t be that stupid, can they?
“How bad could it get?” I ask. “Dad’s company hasn’t done anything wrong, has it? He’s not … There’s no way Dad could end up in jail, right?”
Mom turns and stares at me, shocked. “Samantha Wallach! Why would you say something like that?”
“Nothing! It’s just …”
“It’s just what? Your father is a good man. He wouldn’t get involved in illegal activity.” She slams the cupboard door. “Which is more than I can say for these cyber punks who are trying to wreak havoc.”
“But—”
“Everybody has secrets they don’t want the world to know, Sammy,” Mom says. “No matter how upstanding a person they are.”
Truth, I think, remembering what I was doing right before I came downstairs.
I feel bad for my dad, but right now I’m more concerned with making sure my own secrets stay hidden.
April 7
I’m worried about Dad. He looked like an old man when he came home. Not as old as Grandpa Marty, but still. I wonder if he’s worried about losing his job. If he does, then what will happen to us? Will I still be able to afford to go to college? I have good grades, but not academic-scholarship-to-top-tier-school kind of grades. Just what I need, a little more pressure and anxiety in my life as I go into exampalooza.
How did the hackers get into the bank’s computer systems? I mean it’s a bank! Isn’t it supposed to be extra secure?
Even the bank’s computer geeks and their special security consultants don’t know yet, according to Dad. They think it might be something called a Darkhotel operation, where they target high-level executives when they log into the hotel Wi-Fi and then trick them into downloading a browser update that’s really software that gives them a way of getting a back door into the company’s secure networks. Dad said he vaguely remembers downloading some update when he was in a hotel in Germany.
The worst is that they don’t even know the full scope of what the hackers have.
Uh-oh. RJ’s screaming. He must be having a nightmare … Hold, please.
Yep … I went into his room just now. He was tangled up in his sheets as if he’d been trying to fight them, and groaning like he was in pain. And then he screamed again.
“RJ, wake up, you’re having a bad dream,” I said, shaking him gently.
He was totally out of it, like he always is when he comes out of one of his nightmares.
“Whatimizit?” he said.
I told him it was after eleven and asked him what he’d been dreaming about.
“I dreamed that the hackers stole everything. And we woke up and we were sleeping on the ground and it was snowing and we had absolutely nothing. No food. No clothes. No money. They even took Scruffles.”
I tried to lighten the mood by joking. “How’d they manage to download the dog?”
“It was a dream, Sammy,” RJ said, with an impressive amount of snark for someone who’d just woken up. “If they could download the house, why would the dog be a problem?”
“Good point, little bro,” I admitted.
And then he asked me, straight up, if Dad was going to be okay and if we were going to be okay. You know, us as a family. Like I have any more idea than he does.
But I wanted the poor kid to be able to sleep, so I just flat-out lied to him. I said, “Don’t worry, RJ. You know Dad. He’s got this under control.”
RJ smiled, leaned back against his pillow, and shut his eyes. I guess he’s still young enough to believe that’s true.
“Any blowback from the concert?” Margo asks me as we walk into school together on Monday.
“So far so good,” I tell her. “But it was a close thing with the sweater. I only just got it back in the closet before she got home with RJ.”
“Nice!”
“Yeah. Now let’s hope she doesn’t notice that it seems to have shrunk in the wash, even though I washed it on the delicate cycle.”
“That’s not good,” Margo says. “But if it makes you feel any better, I had to listen to my mother lecturing me all day yesterday about how I shouldn’t hang out with Rosa because she’s a bad influence.”
I stop walking and stare at her. “Rosa? A bad influence? Why would she think that? Rosa’s never even had a detention!”
“I know that,” Margo says. “But she got into the car reeking of puke.”
“That wasn’t her fault! It was that idiot guy behind us.”
“I know!” Margo says, a defensive note starting to creep into her voice. “But my mom … Well, she’s … she didn’t believe Rosa was telling the truth.”
There’s something about how she says her mom didn’t believe Rosa was telling the truth, and the way she doesn’t quite meet my eyes when she says it, that makes me wonder what is going on.
“We all smelled like puke, Margo. You did. I did. We all did,” I point out. “We told your mom what happened when we got in the car. So why is Rosa the bad influence? Why not me?”
Margo is still avoiding my gaze, staring down the hall as if the answer to the meaning of life is on one of the posters at the end of it.
“Margo, why?” I press her.
She exhales loudly in frustration as she finally turns to look at me.
“Because my mom didn’t believe us. After you guys left the next day, I got in major trouble. She thought we’d all been drinking and she was going to ground me for a month,” Margo says. “And she said she was going to call your parents. I couldn’t let her do that because then your parents would know you went to the concert.”
Just the thought of Mrs. McHenry making that phone call is almost enough to send me into a panicky tailspin. I take a deep breath and remind myself that it didn’t happen. That my secret is still safe.
“So you decided to throw Rosa under the bus to save me—and yourself?”
“Because I know my mom would believe it of her,” Margo says. “My parents are … Well, sometimes they can be … you know … not very PC or whatever.”
I think the word she’s looking for is racist. And while I hate that Margo let her mom think that about Rosa to save her own skin, at the same time I can’t help being grateful that she did it to save mine. And that makes me feel awful.
“It just seems … wrong,” I say. “You were the one who was going to let the drunk college guys buy you a drink. Not Rosa.”
“What are you complaining about?” she demands. “I covered for you, Sammy. So you can’t tell Rosa about this. Promise me you won’t!”
I don’t want to promise anything, because if I were Rosa, I’d want to know that Mrs. McHenry secretly thinks the worst of me, just because of my race. Or would I? Would it make me feel uneasy every time I went to Margo’s house? Would I still want to be friends with Margo if I knew she would lie about me to save Rosa?
Is ignorance really bliss or is it better to know the truth, even if it hurts?
“I won’t tell her,” I finally say, with great reluctance. “But don’t ever do that again. To either of us.”
“I won’t,” Margo says, but she doesn’t sound very happy. And as we go our separate ways to class, I’m not sure if I believe her anyway.
As the morning goes on, I don’t know if it’s my imagination, but I feel like people are looking at me. I keep glancing down to check that I’m not wearing my breakfast on my vintage R.E.M. tee and my jeans are zipped, which they are. I even go into the bathroom in between classes to make sure that a disfiguring zit hasn’t erupted on my face since I left the house this morn
ing. But my skin is no more blemished than usual. When I walk to stats, Jamie Moss calls out to me, but he doesn’t ask me for my homework.
“Sammy, hey! How’s life treating you?”
“Okay, I guess.”
“Are you sure?” he asks, the corner of his adorable mouth turning up.
“Um … yeah. How about you?”
“I’m good. We won three to zero over the weekend. You should have come,” he says. “I’m starting to take it personally that you never come to see me play.”
“Oh, it’s not that. I just went to a concert on Saturday and then I had to catch up on homework and—”
“Yeah? Who’d you see?”
“Einstein’s Encounter at the Bowery Ballroom.”
“Never heard of them.”
I guess Jamie isn’t into indie bands.
“You should come to the next game. It’s on Tuesday. Here.”
“Definitely,” I say, even though I have no idea if I can make it.
“Cool.” Jamie grins and winks at me as we head to our respective desks.
I need to raise my prom asking odds.
Until Geneva Grady hands Jamie her cell phone and he looks at it, and the two of them exchange a glance and start whispering, shooting a look over at me as they do.
It feels like I’m walking around with a sign on my back that says something I really need to know, but it’s written in Popular People, a language I don’t speak.
It’s not till I get to the media center for my open and bump into Noah that I’m finally clued into what’s going on. He’s wearing a particularly awesome Talking Heads T-shirt under a hunter-green flannel, which brings out that shade in his eyes.
“Hey, Noah,” I say. “So what do you think of the Lighthouse Book Club selection? Did you start it yet?”
This month’s book is M. L. Stedman’s The Light Between Oceans. It’s probably the most appropriately titled book we’ve ever read for the Lighthouse Book Club, given that the setting is a remote lighthouse off the coast of Australia.
“I like it so far,” Noah says. “Although I can’t imagine living on a lighthouse rock in the middle of nowhere. I mean, I’ve got no problem being alone if I’ve got good tunes and plenty of books to read. But not for months at a time—especially with no Internet!”
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