“You know what your father always says: ‘You’ve got to spend money to make money.’ This business is guaranteed to turn a profit in mere weeks. It’s sure to tide us over until your father lands some new clients.”
My heart skipped a beat. “What’s the matter with his old ones?”
“He finished all the projects he had contracted to do. Right now he’s focused on acquiring new projects.”
“What about that Dupree project?” I asked.
“It never worked out. Your father is hopeful about several new leads he has. I’m sure he’ll secure something soon. If not, maybe this new marketing venture will turn into his full-time job as well.”
The dollars in our account disappeared faster than I could think of them. I sank down on the bed, my head drooping into my hands.
“Matt.” Along with her soothing words, Mom stroked her fingers through my hair. “I know you’re frustrated that it’s going to take a while before you can come home, but it’s not as if you’re being hurt in the meantime. Miss Smoot e-mails me regularly about how well you and Lauren are doing. You’ve both made lots of new friends. You’re doing exceptionally well in your schoolwork, and just look at the job experience you’re getting. Think what an amazing resume you’ll be able to put together once you get out. Miss Smoot also sent me pictures of the workhouse.” Mom gave me a playful jab on the leg. “Talk about cushy. Don’t you just love it there? I worry that you won’t want to come home when the time comes.”
I took a long, hard look at her, and a big lump tightened in my chest. Would I want to come home when I was able? I’d always assumed I would, but now that I thought about it, I had to wonder—especially after this. Living on the top floor was pretty cool, but home was home. Either way, if my parents kept managing our family account with this crazy logic, I doubted I’d ever get to make that choice.
I WASN’T SURPRISED TO SEE THE FDRA limo outside with Gorilla Man leaning against the trunk. What had surprised me was the fact that Mom had totally bought into the whole the-FDRA-workhouse-is-a-fabulous-place, don’t-worry-that-it’s-making-your-kids-have-convulsions bit. I didn’t care what Honey Lady said or how convinced Mom was. Seizures were a big deal. If nobody else was going to help Lauren, I’d have to do it myself.
Mom hadn’t said a whole lot more, and Abbie—still freaked by my shoe-throwing tantrum—stuck close to Mom on the bed and slurped her thumb like it was a root-beer Popsicle.
No matter what I said, Mom was convinced her new “business venture” was going to bring in piles of money. What was the minimum age for kids at the workhouse? I hadn’t seen any kids younger than about eleven. So unless the FDRA changed the rules again, that gave us five years before Abbie showed up. I’d be eighteen by then—legally the government would have to set me free and give me an individual limit—but Lauren would still be there. The chances of my entire family ever living at home together again were about as good as the product of two positive numbers coming out negative.
The front door slammed behind me as I stepped onto my front porch. Gorilla Man popped to his feet, turning to look at me. His face wrinkled with confusion. He looked back down the road—where he’d been keeping watch for my arrival—and then at me again.
“I’m ready,” I said, holding up my hands to show I wasn’t going to put up a fight. “Let’s go.”
I stared at the black privacy glass during the entire two-hour drive, thinking what it would be like to spend almost my entire teenage life at the workhouse. No attending Friday night high school football games. No being the star of the school math team and chess club. No prom—I like to think I’d have been cool enough by senior year to get a girlfriend.
“You, young man!” Crab Woman’s always grainy voice welcomed me back. “You’ve caused a lot of bother for us around here. Don’t think you’ve gotten away with anything. Miss Smoot will be coming up to the top floor just as soon as she can break away from a meeting. Do you hear me?”
I waved limply at her as I moved toward the elevator, still lost in my own thoughts. Gorilla Man followed closely, but he didn’t go upstairs with me.
I realized something else I’d miss in here—my driver’s license!
“Hey, bro, you’re back. What gives? They catch you?” Coop’s voice barely registered in my brain.
I walked into my room, thinking only, I’m here forever. Mom and Dad were living it up on the outside, thanks to the new limit I’d given them. Why should they have all the fun? Maybe I wanted to buy some things too.
I sat down at the computer and started clicking. Why not? Neither of my parents cared about the limit or how high our debt racked up. I’d show them I didn’t care either.
I bought everything. Dozens of transactions. I didn’t even know what I was buying. I just pointed and clicked. Designer handbag. Sure, that looked good. Point, click, eye scan. Top-of-the-line espresso machine. The scent of coffee made me queasy, but who cared? Point, click, eye scan. A jackhammer. Ruby earrings. A dog kennel. I bought it all.
Man, the boxes were sure going to pile up outside my door over the next few days.
Hey. Wait a minute. Boxes.
The computer chair made a popping noise as I sprang out of it.
“Jeffery?” I called down the hall, even though I had no idea if he was anywhere near his bedroom. I passed Coop’s door and banged on the next one, taking note of the pile of freshly delivered boxes on the floor. “Jeffery, you in there?”
A minute later he opened it. “Oh, it’s you! Are we ready for water jousting now? I’ll grab the paddles. . . .”
“Hang on.” I slapped my palm against his door to keep it from closing on me. Easing it back open wide, I took a couple of steps inside. “Here. I’ll help you.” Man, oh man. I had to stop and check my bearings for a minute. Jeffery’s room had the exact same floor plan and furniture as mine, but that was the end of the similarities. A LEGO skyscraper as thick as a cinder block stood in one corner, reaching all the way to the tall ceiling. Smaller LEGO buildings were in the construction phase around it. Swords and other medieval weapons covered an entire wall, each with a gold identification plate above it like it was in a museum. The name of one sword, King Arthur’s Excalibur, I recognized. These were no cheap plastic or aluminum models. These were heavy-duty, intricately detailed, probably-sharp-enough-to-slice-your-thumb-off duplicates. An aquarium that had to be five feet long stretched against the wall by his bed, filled with exotic-looking fish. But that wasn’t everything. There were also the boxes—piles, stacks, mounds of them everywhere. Most of them unopened.
I tapped the tip of my shoe lightly against a nearby box. “Looks like you’ve been ordering a lot of stuff since you got here.”
Jeffery popped up on the far side of his bed, holding up two long kayak paddles. Each of the ends had been padded with a three-foot diameter foam ball and then covered in heavy-duty vinyl. One was black. One was blue.
“Cool, huh? See, we can pound each other with these and never get hurt.”
“Jeffery, you’re a smart kid.”
“I know. You like them?”
“Yeah, but that’s not what I’m getting at. You’re a Top Floor. You’re a genius in . . . whatever that electronic-simulations stuff is that you do for your job. I’m just . . . lost when it comes to all this.” I lifted my arms out wide, gesturing to the mountains of stuff.
Deep lines appeared on his forehead. “What do you mean?”
“You know—I know you know—that if you keep ordering stuff like this, you’re never going to make it out of here.”
He tossed the paddles down on his bed. Hard. “Yeah? You know what? You are right. I do know that.” Weaving around the boxes, he made his way over to me and stood, puffing up his chest as he faced me. A lot of hot air came out of that little guy. “Who says I want to get out?”
I was so surprised, my brain blipped out, and I had to reboot it to get it thinking again.
“You don’t want to go home?” I asked. “Ever?”
>
“Why would I want to leave a place like this?” Stepping back and spreading his arms out wide, he turned in a slow circle. “Look at the setup we’ve got, Matt. Work is cool. School is even interesting here. In a few years we’ll have moved completely into college-level classes. Once we turn eighteen, we’ll be able to write our own tickets in life. We’ll get tons of scholarship offers, or even job offers right off the bat. We’ll be floating in money.” His thumbnail scraped at the packing tape holding a nearby box tightly closed. “If I feel like it, I’ll sell off some of this stuff when I get out. Live off the cash for a while, maybe. It is getting crowded in here, though. I’m going to have to move away from electronics and go to something smaller, like diamonds. Or gold. Bars of solid gold. The PMC I bought will go a long way toward keeping me here.”
“PMC? You mean you bought one of those little personal helicopters?”
“Personal Mini Copter. Yeah. It’s so cool. Miss Smoot won’t let me fly it yet—since I can’t get a license until I’m sixteen. She lets me store it on the roof, but she’s keeping the keys locked up somewhere.”
I’ve seen PMCs in action a couple of times. The image of Jeffery flying around in one of those little helicopters brought a smile to my face. If he could buy that now to use later, what was stopping me from ordering a great sports car? Oh, yeah. Reality. “Those PMCs cost almost as much as a car. Don’t you care about your family? They’ll get stuck with all that debt.”
He shrugged. “Serves them right.”
“But . . .” I had to stop for a second and admit that I’d been heading down that exact same road not five minutes earlier. “Okay, but don’t you miss them? And what about your friends on the outside? Don’t you ever want to see them again?”
“Guys like me don’t do well in the friend department.” He slumped down on an arm of his sofa, hanging his head so I couldn’t see his face. “You want to hear about my family?”
I felt my feet taking me a step backward, closer to the door.
His straight black hair hung down over his face. “My dad sits around on his butt all day, watching TV. My mom spends all her waking hours trying to earn money to keep the family going. You’ll never believe her brilliant plan to do it. Online slot machines. Now there’s a solid career path for anybody, huh?”
He looked up at me for a second and smiled—a weak, miserable smile.
“I have two older brothers. One’s in jail, and the other’s headed there.” Leaning forward with his elbows on his thighs, he clasped his hands together. His knuckles had gone white. “Why would I want to see any of their faces again?”
I found myself backing away another couple of steps.
“I’m just glad my brothers were too messed up to come here, so the FDRA took me. That’s the one good thing my brothers did. I have no desire to be in the same room with any of them ever again, and it’s cake to make sure I don’t have to. My family will never see the underside of their limit again in their lifetimes, and I get to live on the top floor in the meantime.” When he tilted his head up to look at me, his lips were trembling all over the place. Small pools of tears had collected at the inner corners of his eyes. “So to answer your question, no. I don’t miss my family.”
“HELLO, BOYS.” THE FEMALE VOICE sent a slice of cold fear into my chest. Jeffery slid an arm across the top half of his face as he did a quick turn to sit on the seat of his sofa, facing the back wall. Girls weren’t allowed in the boys’ bedrooms. Except one girl. One woman. She sounded too bubbly and syrupy for the lecture I knew she’d come up here to give me. What kind of punishments did they give Top Floors anyway?
I hadn’t heard her walk inside the room, so the sensation of her hand slithering onto my shoulder as she came up behind me gave me the creeps more than if someone had dumped a jar of spiders down my arm.
“Quite the collection you’ve got going here, Jeffery,” said Honey Lady.
Not making a sound, he nodded his head.
The shoulder hand slid down to grasp me tight above the elbow. Her long fingernails dug into my skin the tiniest bit. “All right, Matt. Time for our little chat. We’ll see you later, Jeffery. Don’t buy everything on one website!” She chuckled, as if she’d just made a joke. After closing the door on Jeffery, she forced out another laugh. “And don’t you worry, Matt. We’re just going to talk. That’s it.” Her smile was too calm. She seemed too happy as we headed toward my bedroom.
I hitched my thumb back toward Jeffery’s room. “Does that bother you at all?”
“Well, of course!”
Good. She was a rational person.
She grimaced, completely exposing all of her big, white teeth. “I, personally, would go crazy living among all that clutter.”
Maybe not.
“No, I mean, shouldn’t you say something to Jeffery?” I tried to pull my arm out of her claws as we walked to my room, but she hung on even tighter. “Is it really right for him to keep buying all that stuff and sabotaging his family’s limit?”
“That’s something Jeffery is going to have to work out with his family. I have no jurisdiction, and—frankly—it’s not my business how other people spend their money. Let’s go in.” She pointed to my door, waiting for me to open it for her—like I had any choice whether or not I wanted to invite her in.
Doing a quick scan of my room, she noticed my computer—exactly as I had left it in the middle of ordering a lawn mower.
“You doing a little shopping yourself?” she asked, lifting one corner of her mouth in a teasing smile.
“No.” I reached around her and clicked cancel. “Not anymore.”
“It makes no difference to me.” Shrugging, with her arms out wide, she sauntered over to one of the chairs at the table. “Order whatever you want.”
I sat in the chair across from her. “Maybe later.” Or not.
“All right, Matt. We’ve got a problem here.”
“I know. I ran off. But I’m back. I had to talk to my mom, and you wouldn’t let me.”
Her eyebrows bunched together, and she leaned forward, taking one of my hands gently in hers. “What are you talking about?”
“No cell phone. No e-mail. How do you expect me to talk to my parents?”
“Guess what? I know for certain that your e-mail problem is being looked at right this very minute. I wouldn’t be surprised if you were able to communicate with your parents by tonight!” She beamed at me with so much enthusiasm I almost expected her to pull out her cheerleader pom-poms.
I sat back in my chair, pulling my hand away. “That would be . . . good.” I wasn’t sure if I bought her story. “It feels like you’re cutting us off from our families on purpose.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Well, I guess for now it doesn’t matter either way. I talked to my mom and found out what I needed to know. I’m back. I’ll stay as long as you make me. End of story.”
She tilted her head, smiling that sweet smile of hers that had a tendency to turn my brains into sugar crystals. “Oh, Matt. If only it were that simple. I’m afraid you’re a security risk now.” She dug into the front pocket of her suit jacket and, holding up her index finger, said, “Just one minute.” She disappeared, ducking to the side and under the table. Before I could lean over to see what she was doing I felt her hand and something cold and hard around my ankle.
I jerked my leg to the side. “What are you doing?”
“I’m so sorry, Matt.” The honey voice stayed just as sugary sweet.
A thick, heavy, metal band was fastened around my ankle. I yanked on it, but it was too tight to slip off and it wouldn’t unfasten.
“It’s regulation. You’re a runner risk now. It’s our responsibility to know where every single one of our children is at all times. I’m sure you understand, a smart Top Floor like you.”
The rounded edges of the metal band hurt as they dug into my hand, but that didn’t make me stop tugging.
“The only way it will unlatch is if I activa
te a special remote, which is kept locked in a safe in my office. The remote can only be activated by me, after a retina scan.”
“There’s some sort of tracking device in here?” I banged it against the side of the table.
“Matt. Relax. It’s not like you’re going to go anywhere anyway. Just pretend it isn’t even there. It’s not heavy. It’s completely waterproof. You can still go swimming!”
Rah! Rah! Matt’s on a leash now. Go, fight, win!
My leg froze for a minute, hanging in the air. “It’s just for my protection. Right?”
She beamed. “Exactly.”
Slowly, my leg sank to the floor. “I can just stay on the top floor and do my work and hang with my buddies and absolutely nothing will happen. It won’t send an alarm unless I do something stupid, like try to go down to another floor—which I’ll never do again, since I know it prevents you from keeping me safe.”
She shoved my arm playfully. “You’ve got it now.”
“If I stop trying to take it off, and do exactly what I’m supposed to do, it will come off someday, won’t it?”
“We’ll see.”
“I’ll be happy here! I’ll work hard and get As on all my school assignments. I’ll even order lots of fun things so I’ll never want to leave the top floor.”
Patting me on the arm, she stood up. “Let’s see how things are going in a few weeks. If you can live up to that high standard you just set for yourself, then I don’t see any reason why we won’t be able to talk about a potential removal date. Okay?”
I smiled what I hoped looked like a sincere, cooperative smile. “Okay.”
I sat staring out my window for a long time after she left. Three things I knew for sure now.
(1) Honey Lady didn’t care how much stuff we bought. She liked it if we bought enough to keep us distracted from thinking about life on the outside. (2) I was going to have to pretend that I was being a good, compliant little Top Floor until I could figure out exactly what was going on. And (3) When the time was right, ankle monitor or not, I was out of here.
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