I rush to the huge bay window as Mother takes out the navy-blue tablecloth she stores in a drawer beneath the sill and covers her petri dishes and microscope. Squares of neon-violet lights are moving through the inky sky around our property like a spaceship looking for a place to land, the Juniperions come to take me home.
The question is: How did they find us?
The CB radio crackles to life with Dieter’s voice. “Juniper 4321, this is Ackerman1. Turn off and remove all batteries from cellphones. Stat. U.S. government UAV surveillance drones spotted above compound. Code 3. Employ SOP for SIP. Over.”
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Standard Operating Procedure. Shelter In Place.
Click. Pop. The power is cut, plunging the house into darkness. We can’t use lanterns this time. Code 3 means secure the location against Outsider infiltration by sheltering in place. Cutting power makes the compound difficult to see, but the drones have spotlights. We can’t go full dark unless we’re underground, and we can’t head for the bunkers.
It make sense that Mother covered her stuff in the window before she ever got the call. She’s nothing if not calm and efficient in an emergency. I don’t know if that’s from her training as a nurse or a prepper. Probably both.
“Go get your phone,” Mother says calmly, reaching for her own.
“I’ll go,” Birdie says, rushing for the stairs.
“They can see inside our house,” Blue says. It’s not a question. I’m not sure if it’s one of her Blue-isms or she’s being rhetorical.
“Put on a balaclava and close all the curtains, too,” Mother yells to Birdie. She rushes to her bedroom and brings out two face masks for me and Blue. “Put these on and close the downstairs blinds.”
Balaclavas are not standard operating procedure for Code 3 situations, but we do as directed.
“You think they’re trying to spy on us?” I close the blinds behind our couch before removing my mask.
“Us. Them. Everyone,” Mother says. “The director of the FBI admitted to using drones for domestic surveillance, border patrol, investigations, the protection of key personnel on the ground during classified operations. It’s been going on for years, which proves some people weren’t as paranoid as others claimed. The issue at hand is how our compound got on their radar in the first place.”
My skin goes cold as Whitlock’s face flashes in my mind. His questions about our coalition, the map he gave Rémy. Mother strikes a match and lights a candle on our coffee table. Her face cast by deep shadows that mirror her concern. Mother said she heard Daniel wasn’t as close-lipped as he should have been, and we refused to listen. But what if we were both wrong? What if Whitlock talked to someone after talking to me?
Birdie rushes down the stairs to rejoin us, thick bangs poking up as she peels off her mask. “What do we do now?”
It’s the question of the hour, the month, maybe our whole lives. “There’s nothing left to do but wait,” Mother says.
Birdie flops aggressively into an easy chair. Wait is not in her vocabulary. To be honest, it’s not in mine anymore, either.
LP
LISTENING POST
THERE’S A SUBSTITUTE teacher standing behind Mr. Whitlock’s desk when I walk into chemistry. I’m not entirely surprised since we spotted another unmarked car parked outside the school this morning. Still, his absence makes me stop short. Birdie actually spotted the car first and threw her head against the seat moaning, “What now?” It’s become her standard response. But I kept my suspicions to myself and looked for Mr. Whitlock’s car. I didn’t spot his Subaru in the faculty lot and thought he might be having it detailed on the school’s bill. Now, I’m not sure what to think.
The reality of how reliant I’ve become on Mr. Whitlock hits me like ice down my back. Maybe I told him too much. Maybe the feds are following up about Rémy. He’s not here, so I can’t ask. And I don’t think I should call Whitlock on his cellphone to ask if he snitched, whether he gave me his number or not.
The dry-erase marker squeaks across the whiteboard behind Whitlock’s desk as the sub writes her name in giant swirly letters. She nods a greeting to me before announcing we’ll be using this class time to catch up on anything we’ve been working on that isn’t lab related. Translation: Mrs. Amanda Abbott doesn’t know anything about chemistry and is only here to hand out bathroom passes and make sure nobody sets the room on fire. My initial assessment is confirmed when she pulls out a notebook and a Jane Austen novel, flipping to her last marked page. A lithe, modern embodiment of Elizabeth Bennet herself.
THREAT ASSESSMENT:
AMANDA ABBOTT|5’6” WEAK TO AVERAGE BUILD|UNKNOWN SOCIAL GROUP|TRUSTING
MOST LIKELY TO: attempt to write the next great American novel.
LEAST LIKELY TO: pay attention to the hours and years passing before her eyes.
10/10 WOULD IMPEDE GROUP SURVIVAL IN EMERGENCY SITUATION.
CASUALTY POTENTIAL: high
I head to the table where Brian, Shawna, and Rémy are huddled, practically touching foreheads. When I slide onto a stool, they bloom apart like a human flower. “Was it something I said or something you heard?”
“Hi, Honey.” Rémy tips his head to one side and rubs his thumb under his chin.
It’s the first time I’ve heard my name sound like a term of endearment and didn’t cringe. He looks good for someone who was wrongfully suspended. But I can’t get a read on him, which is another first for me. I know Annalise is the reason he got suspended, but blurting that out in front of Brian and Shawna is out of the question.
“We were just talking about your alien language,” Brian says.
I blink despite my best efforts to retain a neutral expression. “Oh yeah. What’s the verdict?”
“Apparently, unless you have a decoder ring from Dieterack, the ruler of your planet, you’re not allowed the knowledge of the—” He furrows his brow at Rémy. “What did you call them?”
Now Rémy smiles at me. “The Juniperions.”
“Right,” Brian says. “The Juniperions.”
Dieterack. The Juniperions. Clever. I need this kind of levity today.
Rémy shrugs one shoulder. “The language is secret, but I did tell them why you’re really here on Earth.”
“Oh yeah, why is that?” I lean in to listen.
“To escape your home planet, of course, after you learned you were initiated into a group led by a leader hell-bent on starting a rebellion.” He schools his voice so I pick up on what he’s really trying to say.
“Seriously,” Shawna drawls in what can only be described as a vocal eye-roll. “Am I at a nerd convention or is this how all people without cellphones and Snapchat behave?”
“Hey! I have email, remember?”
“Email. Right.” Shawna shakes her head disapprovingly and pulls out a baggie of snow-white meringues. “Here, have some—puffy space cookies.”
The three of us descend upon that baggie like we haven’t eaten in days. They’re so melt-in-your-mouth delicious, dissolving on the tongue right as the vanilla hits, that I say if meringues be the food of space, bake on.
Rémy is watching me devour another cookie. His tawny eyes searching mine with an intense seriousness that makes my throat constrict. I’m not paying attention to the pause in the four-way conversation, because I’m suddenly dying to get him alone. And yes, I know how that sounds, but it’s not entirely what I mean.
“Maybe Brian and I should move down and leave you two alone for a while. You’re fogging up the beakers.”
“No. Don’t,” Rémy says sharply. “We need you to stay here.”
We?
The beakers are clear and free of fog, incidentally, but the comment from Shawna is enough to break our focus on each other. She darts her eyes from me to Rémy, equally perplexed as I am. The only difference is Shawna hasn’t been trained to keep the emotion from showing on her face.
I write, Everything okay? in my notebook using cipher and turn it toward Rémy.
&nb
sp; He writes, Not exactly. I didn’t spot the decoder ring on his left hand until he started to write his reply. Learning my sisters and I aren’t the only ones who know Pigpen cipher is one thing. Seeing Rémy’s stainless steel childhood decoder ring takes it to the next level.
He writes, Wait 5 minutes. Fake sick. Get pass for nurse. Then he gets up and walks to Whitlock’s desk to talk to the sub.
“What’s it say?” Brian asks. And just like last time his question earns him a “Tsk” from Shawna.
“Sorry. No Dieterack decoder ring. No translation.”
I keep one eye on my watch while we make small talk. Brushing the occasional meringue crumb off my sweater until the minute hand ticks its fifth mark. I slide off my stool and clutch my stomach with a moan.
“Oh no,” Shawna says. “There aren’t a lot of allergens in those meringues. Just egg whites, sugar…”
“It’s not your baking,” I tell her with a wink.
I grab my EDC and trudge to Mrs. Abbott’s temporary desk like some character in a play about sexual awakening.
Starring Honey Juniper: Unexpected Girl Next Door.
She looks stricken by my pained expression. “What’s wrong? Do I need to call someone for help?”
“No. This happens to me every few months or so, but never this bad. I think I need to go see the nurse. She may have to call my mother to pick me up.”
Her face blooms with the kind of understanding only women know, and she writes me a pass to the nurse without hesitation. “Take care.”
“Thanks.”
I shuffle out and find Rémy leaning against a row of sky-blue lockers, examining his camera’s viewfinder. I scan the hallway to make sure nobody’s watching and head toward him. My chest tightens, knowing what Annalise did to him. When he hears the soft pad of my lace-up boots, he looks up and smiles. Not in his usual effortless way. This is the tentative smile of somebody about to deliver bad news.
“I’m so sorry.” That’s the first thing I say. “I know you didn’t have anything to do with the—”
Rémy shakes his head, raising his index finger to his lips, stopping me from saying flash-bang grenade. “Let’s go to the library and work on that project.”
He’s acting like there’s a listening post nearby. Every single person in my life, except Blue, has been on a paranoia streak. Rémy hasn’t given me a reason to distrust him, but holding my questions while we walk silently through the hallways is a legitimate struggle.
Elkwood High has the smallest library I’ve ever seen. Four tall stacks and a row of shelves along the back wall might be a decent-sized school library for a town with under five thousand residents, but compared to those in the other towns and schools I’ve been to, it seems miniscule. Rémy walks through the room completely at ease, the town librarian’s son, nodding to a few people sitting on sky-blue plastic chairs at circular tables. He makes a right turn between the stacks farthest from the door, leading me all the way to the back corner. I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve never been inside the town library, where his mom works, so I don’t.
When we’re alone, in the quietest place in the school, he asks, “How’d you get out of class?”
I guess we need an icebreaker. “Female problems. You?”
“I paid a sophomore on the soccer team to text me from a burner phone pretending to be my mom. He did it from outside Whitlock’s class so I could get it back and give it you. The only number in the contacts is mine.”
“Burner phone? What are you, a spy?” I wrap my concern in a thin blanket of humor.
His chest visibly rises and falls. It’s not a sigh, exactly, but it levels the same anxious vibration that keeps me thinking there’s a paranoia contagion loose in Elkwood. And then, he hands me the phone. A burner that’s a million times nicer than the phone my sisters and I share. “It’s not who I am you have to worry about,” Rémy says quietly. “It’s who Mr. Whitlock might be.”
“What do you mean?” I narrow my eyes, stomach clenching for real this time.
“I take a lot of photos, as you know. I take them of people doing everyday things; sometimes I take them of nature or try to capture weather. Up close, from far away, different perspectives. I’ve taken hundreds in the last month alone, and half of them are of you and your sisters.”
“You’re always pointing your camera at me—us—when you think we aren’t looking. What’s that got to do with Whitlock?”
“I weeded through my photos while I was suspended, putting them in folders by the date they were taken, subject matter. Take a guess who else shows up the most in the photos of you and your sisters.”
“Annalise Ackerman?”
“She’s lurking in a few. But Whitlock is in a ton.”
My thoughts rush to Mr. Whitlock saying he was observant, that he had figured out who else was part of our coalition.
“He asked a lot of questions when they tried to pin that soda can smoke bomb thing on me.”
“Rémy, I—”
“It’s okay. I know when I’m being framed. My dad was a cop in Seattle.”
“Your dad’s a cop?” My heart stalls for a beat. That must be why Annalise warned me to stay away from him.
“He was a cop,” Rémy clarifies. “He got shot by a heroin addict and died in the line of duty.”
“Oh. Sorry. I’ve never lost anyone like that. I don’t know what to say.”
“It’s okay. It was a long time ago. We don’t need to talk about it. Whitlock, on the other hand, said some stuff we definitely need to discuss.”
“About the flash-bang grenade, or me specifically?”
“Both.” Rémy pulls his laptop out of his backpack and takes a seat on the floor, long legs extended and crossed at the ankle. I sit beside him, shoulder to shoulder, thigh pressing against thigh, letting the warmth from his body take the chill from my thoughts.
He double-clicks a folder called Honey and pulls up every photo from the last two months. He clicks through them one by one, and I see my sisters and me through Rémy’s eye. Birdie, sitting on the table in the cafeteria looking ingénue gorgeous. The Birdie that makes Brian Sharazi stare. Blue, pressing a lapis-blue pencil to her cheek during an assembly. A petite cobalt-haired pixie, shouldering weird like a badge of honor. And me, twisting my hair into a bun to get down to business, climbing into the air shaft, looking like Katniss Everdeen in the woods. Responsible, Reactive, and Ready. And then I see Annalise in the background of a shot from the woods, stalking me. Rémy clicks to the next photo and I spot Magda watching us through the trees.
Click, click, click. Whitlock is in the assembly two rows behind me, staring. In the back of the student cafeteria, eyes glued to my sisters and me. He’s hovering in nearly every photo of us. Rémy keeps going, moving through time backward. He pauses on a photo from the day they threw the flash-bang grenades, before my sisters and I got outside. It’s of Whitlock, shaking hands with a man dressed in a black suit in front of an unmarked car.
Rémy speaks first. Good thing, because my thoughts are screaming traitor, making it hard to form words.
“He asked if I’d help him get information about where you live. I didn’t understand. I thought he meant the house on Overcast Road until he said the compound. That’s when he explained why he gave me a map to your real house. The one that put you and me in the same woods and ultimately got you shot in the arm by Annalise.”
I throw every keep-quiet rule to the wayside once again, because I need a sounding board for my suspicion. Someone I can trust. “Do you think Whitlock’s been talking to the feds about us like some neighborhood watchdog this whole time?”
“Or he is a fed.”
“No. He’s a prepper like us. Annalise targeted him to keep him away from our group. He was trying to get me to talk to him about our group. He said—” For a moment I lose the ability to speak. The hum from Rémy’s laptop turns to howling in my ears. He said he wouldn’t mind meeting the person in charge. “He gave me his private cellphone numb
er and asked if I could arrange a meeting for him with Dieter Ackerman.”
“Is your coalition doing something that could get you in trouble? I mean real danger, Honey, not minor stuff that can get you suspended from school.”
What’s in that bunker? What’s in that bunker? What’s in that bunker?
Daniel’s pensive expression flashes in my mind. He sent this guy named Thane out once. Later Ansel told me, Speculation was spreading that Thane might be talking to the feds.
Thane never came back. Now Daniel is gone. The reality that Daniel snitched to Whitlock before me—that Whitlock is a fed—hits like an overarching ballistic missile to my psyche.
I missed all the subtle clues, but they were there. Ansel telling me Daniel knew the rules. Whitlock giving Rémy the map. Annalise insinuating Birdie can’t talk to Daniel because snitches get stitches. I thought she meant me, because of Rémy, but I was wrong.
“I have to go,” I tell Rémy, jumping to my feet. “I need to find my sisters.”
“Honey, wait! You can’t just pull them out of their classes.”
“Watch me.”
GOOD
GET OUT OF DODGE
BLUE IS IN geometry, sitting alone near the windows, tucking a strand of cobalt hair behind her ear as she works on corresponding angles or whatever they have going on today. I’m working on correlations of my own, but I need my sisters to help me. I wave Rémy away so he’ll move down the hall before I knock on the classroom door. When I pull it open, Blue looks up like she’s been waiting for me.
“Sorry to interrupt, but I need to talk to my sister.”
Her teacher looks from Blue to me. “Is it urgent?”
“Oh no,” Blue laments. “Is it Banjo?” My little sister is playing the part of young girl stricken with worry for her beloved pet. A complete sham I’m beginning to recognize as a family trait. Showing for one day only.
Starring Blue Juniper: Lead Weird Sister.
I nod, forcing my eyes to water before I make a show of hanging my head.
Last Girls Page 24