Don't Look Behind You

by Lois Duncan

  “You’ll have to admit it’s ironic,” Lorelei said wryly. “We finally have something in common, and it has to be this.”

  “Our situations aren’t comparable,” said Mom. “You didn’t bring your injury on yourself. When Larry told me Valerie wasn’t at Kim’s house, I was so upset I just had to rush right over there, even though I knew I shouldn’t be driving.”

  They were seated side by side in dilapidated armchairs, weighed down by identical casts on their right arms. I was scrunched up on the sofa with my feet in my father’s lap and a blanket wrapped around me, for despite the heat of the room I was shivering uncontrollably. Jason lay sprawled on the floor with his head on Porky’s haunches, and Tom Geist stood by the door, regarding us all as though he had seen enough of us to last him forever.

  “I guess you realize your life here is over,” he said. “Security’s impossible now. Vamp may be dead, but the people who hired him are not. Professional killers are a dime a dozen. If one falls down on the job, they send in another.”

  “We can never go back then?” Mom asked. “Is that whatyou’re saying? We’re going to have to stay in hiding forever?”

  “It doesn’t have to be that way,” said my father. “No one can know for sure what happened here last night. Vamp could have murdered me before he met his own death. If so, there wouldn’t be any further reason to search for me. All you’d need is a death certificate with my name on it, and the rest of you could go home and take up your lives again.”

  “Go home without you!” exclaimed Mom. “This is no time for joking.”

  “It’s one solution,” Dad said. “I think you should consider it. You were right when you said we’ll have to keep hiding forever. As long as they think I’m alive, they’ll consider me a threat to them.”

  “Then we’ll start a new life somewhere else,” Mom said determinedly.

  “You can’t do that as part of the program,” Tom told her. “Relocation is almost always a one-shot deal. I may be able to pull enough strings to get you new documentation, but you can’t expect to be subsidized by the government.”

  “Uncle Max can help us,” Jason said. “He and Dad are buddies. If he was to ask—”

  “Don’t hold your breath,” Lorelei told him. “Now that Max has no more need of your father, I doubt very much that we can count on him for anything.”

  “I hate to believe that, but maybe it’s true,” Dad said. “At any rate, Max has no access to government funding. We can’t keep reaching back for props to hang onto. If we’re going to make a fresh start, it will be on our own. There’s no one left to depend on except ourselves.”

  “And each other,” Mom said softly.

  “Yes, and each other,” Dad said. “Will that be enough for us to build a new life?”

  At first I thought the question was directed at Mom, but then I saw that he meant it for me as well.

  “Of course,” Mom said immediately, but I remained silent. The truth was, I wasn’t too sure that it would be enough for us. Still, what choice did we have? We had burned our bridges, and there was nothing left for us to do but move onward.

  “Do you think we can do it?” Dad asked me. His eyes were hopeful, and I knew that he desperately wanted some reassurance. Despite my reservations, I found myself nodding.

  “This time I’m choosing my own name, though,” I told him.

  EPILOGUE

  It was December when I first saw the boy at the mall.

  Of course, today I don’t think of him as “the boy” anymore; he has a name and a place of his own in my life. At the time, though, that’s all he was, just a teenage boy, standing by himself at a department store window, while crowds of holiday shoppers shoved their way past him.

  December is a month that is rife with nostalgia. If there’s anything deep in your heart that you want to keep buried, you can count on December to bring it to the surface. That’s probably why I saw him, or at least why I noticed him. Maybe it was my way of putting the past December behind me, or maybe I had a longing to live it over again.

  I had gone to the mall to take my brother Christmas shopping, since Mom worked as a secretary for an insurance company and didn’t have the time to do that sort of thing anymore. Nor did my grandmother, who worked at the Empress Boutique, a shop that specializes in designer clothing. My father hadn’t found a permanent job yet, but during the Christmas season he was working temporarily at a sporting goods store. He said it felt strange to have come full circle and be selling skis like he did when he first met Mom.

  I now have a job myself, my first one ever. I got it to earn some spending money for Christmas and then decided to keep it until I graduate. On weekends I work at a Jamba Juice. It’s sort of fun, except for the awful uniform, but at least my hair’s not long enough to need a hairnet. It has grown out some, but it still doesn’t reach my collar, and it’s going to take a long time to get it like it used to be. I’m wondering now if it’s worth the effort to grow it. It’s easier to take care of when it’s short like this.

  I’d been playing it cautious, keeping to myself a lot, determined never again to get too close to anybody. Then I saw this boy—dark-haired and tall, wearing a white shirt with red stripes—and my breath went out of me in a painful gasp. He had his back turned toward me, and I moved forward until I was standing next to him at the window and saw that he was looking at a crystal prism.

  I’m usually very wary about talking to strangers, but I couldn’t stop myself this time. Without my ever intending it, I heard myself say to him, “I had one of those once, and it really meant a lot to me.” Actually, I still had the prism in a dresser drawer. It had been in one of the boxes we’d brought back from Norwood.

  He turned to face me, surprised, yet obviously pleased.

  “Well, hi,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d knowme.”

  “Oh?” I hadn’t the slightest idea who he was.

  “I’ve been sitting across from you all semester in chemistry. Whenever you turn around, I try to make eye contact, but you look right through like I’m made out of glass.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “It hasn’t been intentional.”

  “I’m glad.” He smiled, and a dimple appeared at one corner of his mouth. He wasn’t as cute as Steve, and now that I saw him straight on from the front, there was less resemblance than I’d thought. Still, he was attractive, no doubt about that. He had an open face with an easy grin, and clear, light eyes that were fringed with surprisingly long lashes.

  “The prism’s pretty,” I said. “Are you considering it for your girlfriend?”

  “For my mom,” he said. “Do you think it’s something a mom might go for? What do you do with it anyway, wear it on a chain?”

  “You hang it in a window, so the sun shines through it,” I said. “The prism fractures the light and throws out rainbows. It’s supposed to be a symbol of new beginnings.”

  “That’s a nice idea.” He wasn’t looking at the prism. “I’ve been watching you in class, trying to think how to meet you. I figured you were new this year or, for sure, I’d know you.”

  “We moved here in September just before school started.”

  “Have you had a chance to get to know anyone yet?”

  “It’s not that easy when you enter a school in your senior year,” I told him. “Especially when you’re not into sports or anything.”

  “Would you like to go out sometime, and I’ll introduce you around?” He was trying to sound casual, but his face had gone suddenly scarlet. There was something oddly endearing about his blushing. “With the holidays coming up, there’s going to be a ton of parties.”

  My mind flew back to one party—one special party—and one special boy who danced with me in the firelight, his breath tinged with chocolate, a strand of silver in his hair. I clung to that precious memory, letting myself savor it, experiencing once again the flavor of first love. Then I shoved the memory out of my mind and sent it spinning down into the vast cavern of might-h
ave-beens.

  “That would be great,” I said. “I love Christmas parties.”

  That evening, when I got home, I hung up my prism.

  Q&A WITH THE AUTHOR

  Young adult author Barry Lyga sat down with

  Lois Duncan to ask her all about

  Barry: Lois, where did you get the idea for this book?

  Lois: I have five children, and so I was always aware of the dynamics of what was going on in their lives—not the details, needless to say, but I certainly knew how important it was to them to stay in the same school, surrounded by their friends; tohave a sense of continuity through their teenage years. I thoughtthe worst thing that could happen would be if I suddenly announced, “We’re moving to Australia tomorrow,” and yanked them away. Then I thought, what if they were put in aposition where, not only were they off to Australia, but they could never come back, they could never again have a chance to even communicate with any of their friends or follow up on anything they had started? They would just have to end their lives right at that moment and start them fresh. That would be very, very hard for them to do. That was the jump-off point for DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU.

  Barry: How did you research this?

  Lois: I seem to have been gifted with a large assortment of interesting people in my younger years. They always seem to show up every once in a while, and so I never actually lose anybody. I’ve told my children, whatever you do, don’t burn your bridges. You never know who you’re going to need later.

  One of my high school boyfriends was newly retired from the FBI just at the time I started writing DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU, so I was able to use him as my resource for the Witness Security Program, because there is very little non-fiction written about it.

  Barry: Do you think that there are any readers who might find April’s situation appealing, just at first? A lot of teens want to escape from their lives and try a new life.

  Lois: It’s hard for me to imagine anyone—any teenager—wanting to escape like this. For one thing, April is taking her baggage with her. Her parents are going! So she’s not really “escaping.” Normally, when teens want to escape they want to escape from their family situation, but here, April is taking it with her. In fact, it gets much worse for her, because she has nothing left except her family. I don’t really think that too many teens are going to be attracted to that idea. Especially when they realize that with the Witness Security Program you don’t move into some glorious, wonderful new existence. It’s not a big step upward into a glamorous life. It’s generally many steps backward.

  Barry: Is being in the Witness Protection Program really as difficult as you portray it in this book?

  Lois: Actually, it’s worse. I just received an anonymous e-mail from a teenage boy whose family is in the program. He wrote, “In our case, the Feds staged our deaths. It’s hard to disappear, but it’s even worse to know that the family you left behind believes you’re dead. Like April, I hated my new identity, and as much as my parents and I tried to get our new names to work for us, it was sometimes too hard for us. I’ve grown up without being allowed to have a girlfriend, go to parties, or have friends over, because something might ‘slip out.’ I can’t even be part of a social networking group like Facebook or MySpace.”

  Barry: Another thing that might make people not want to be like April is the fact that she makes many choices in the book that put other people in danger and, of course, she puts herself in danger. That’s sort of a common thing in teen years: making bad or ill-informed decisions. Were you hoping that the readers would relate to her? Or stand back and judge her for some of the things that she does?

  Lois: I didn’t have any hope particularly. I just wrote the story, but I thought that was exactly how a girl like April would act. I based the character of April on the personality of our youngest daughter, Kait. At that time, Kait was seventeen, as April is in the book, and very strong-willed. She was taking charge of her life, not wanting to be told what to do, and was making poor decisions impulsively. Yet she was a wonderful girl in every way. She was very brilliant and seemingly had it all. So April really was Kait.

  Barry: If April was Kait, I have to ask about April’s mother, Elizabeth, since she is an author. What was the significance of that? Do you relate to Elizabeth in any way?

  Lois: I definitely related to Elizabeth because I thought, What would happen to me if my family went into the Witness Security Program? I’m not by nature a particularly social person, so it would not have affected me as far as taking me away from social activities, but what if I could no longer write? My whole identity is my career as a writer, and what if I had to give that up? I could never again be in touch with my agent or my editors. I could never use my professional name, after I’d spent years developing and becoming “Lois Duncan.” I could never claim that I’d written any of the books that I’d written before. My career would be gone. What would I find to do with myself if I could no longer be what I was—a writer?

  Barry: You moved April and her family from Virginia to Florida. How did the landscape in Florida affect the story? You talked about the New Mexico landscape and the mountains being important to two of your other books, I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER and KILLING MR. GRIFFIN.

  Lois: Well, I grew up in Florida. I try my best to set my stories in locales that are familiar to me. So it was natural to move them into a locale that I could relate to, and the little inland Florida town—what did I call it?—I think of it as “Dullsville.”

  Barry: Grove City.

  Lois: Grove City, yes, of course it would be called Grove City. That’s the kind of name all these little towns have. It seemed like a good place to move them. There’d be nobody there they’d run into from before. It would be dull and it would be like they were stuck in a pocket somewhere. I knew exactly what the landscape would be like; what the temperature would be like.

  Barry: I want to ask a little bit about the character of Uncle Max, because he’s a character who, in the beginning of the book, seems like someone we should trust implicitly. He’s a figure of authority who works with the FBI, but as the book goes on we come to trust him a little bit less. How do you convey to a reader which characters should be trusted?

  Lois: That’s too good a question, because I don’t have an answer for it. Max uses people. You look into the background of him growing up with April’s father and being the leader of the two of them even then, and when Max needs somebody to do something, he goes and picks a person he can influence who will fit into that slot and do what he’s told. He feels no guilt about the fact that the person he’s using in this way is his old childhood friend.

  I think that’s very often what law enforcement does, particularly to their snitches. They use them and discard them, and that’s what Max is doing here. I don’t think Max is either good or bad. He is playing the role that he has been trained to play and is good at.

  Barry: He is what he is.

  Lois: He is what he is.

  Barry: What about Lorelei? Max moves the story in a certain direction. How does Lorelei help move the story along, and was it important to you that you have three generations of the family represented?

  Lois: I wanted to have a third generation of the family because it’s much harder to change your life completely and leave everything behind if one of people you’re leaving behind is a loved one. It would be much easier to move out of a place where you just had social friends. But in this case it’s Elizabeth’s aging mother, and there are no other children to take care of that mother when she gets old and sick. To just say, Goodbye, mother—I’ll never see you again. It’s been great.… That would be one of the most painful moves I would think any normal woman could make. And so I thought that decision to move and leave Lorelei behind gave an added depth to the story.

  Barry: In I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER, at the end of the book, Julie gets herself into a very bad situation andRay comes to her rescue at the last minute. In KILLING MR. GRIFFIN, which was published a fe
w years after, Susan gets into a very bad situation and at the last second the detective comes in and rescues her. In DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU, which was published a decade after KILLING MR. GRIFFIN, April gets herself a bad situation but she gets herself out of it, and I found that really interesting. Could you talk a little bit about the evolution of the female protagonists in your work?

  Lois: I think that in KILLING MR. GRIFFIN, the one who actually saves Susan is Mrs. Griffin, who brings the police officer to the house. So it’s not just men saving women. And in the other situation it is Julie’s deep, loving relationship with Ray that brings him there that night, and Julie has developed that relationship. So she’s played a part in her own salvation. But you’re right. There are very distinct lines here, and April takes it to the ultimate in DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU when she actually kills the hit man. So, yes, I did have her much more actively involved there.

  Barry: Precognition is mentioned sort of explicitly in I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER and obliquely in KILLING MR. GRIFFIN, but both times they were casual references. There’s no reference to it directly in DON’T LOOK BEHIND YOU, but I do know that there’s a tragic story to do with precognition behind that book. If you want to talk about that, I’m sure your readers would be interested in hearing about it.

  Lois: Yes, I will talk about it, because I’ve had a chance to think about it so much. For those who aren’t familiar with the term, precognition is foreknowledge of something that hasn’t yet happened, but is going to happen, and we all seem to have a little bit of that. You get a hunch or you just get a creepy feeling about something that’s going to happen, but you don’t really take it seriously.

  Precognition is a form of ESP, which is extrasensory perception. Known as the sixth sense, it is believed in by some people and scoffed at by many. A pair of psychologists who have been doing laboratory research have discovered that ESP is processed in the same portion of the brain that processes memory and imagination. If this is true, it would be natural that, if you’re getting precognition, it would be mixed in with the very same elements that a fiction writer is using when she’s writing, and that ESP would become part of the memory and imagination that are the essence of creativity.