“Fine,” Abby finally said, composing herself. “I wasn’t going to say anything, but I guess we’re a little past this now.”
Dan shared a nervous glance with Jordan.
Abby picked up her fork and dragged it softly across her plate as she began to speak. “When I was little, I used to go through my mom’s clothes looking for hats and skirts and scarves and stuff to play dress up. She and my pops shared dressers, and one time I found this … this box.” She inhaled deeply, then pressed on. “I didn’t know what it was, but when I opened it and saw a bunch of papers, I—I started reading them. They were all letters. From my grandpapa. He was already dead by then, and my pops never talked about him, except to say what a mean man he’d been.… But these letters … Grandpapa just kept apologizing. He kept saying he was sorry for sending his little Lucy away. Away to that place.”
“And let me guess, that place was Brookline,” Jordan said coldly. He obviously still wasn’t convinced.
“It had to be,” Abby replied quickly. “There was stuff about how she was dangerous, and how he had sent her away for her own good. And there was more.… Grandpapa kept talking about ‘making a trip to New Hampshire.’ He never mentioned Brookline by name, but …”
“But I can see how you would put two and two together,” Dan finished, trying to show at least a little support.
She nodded. “It all adds up. I mean, listen, I didn’t think it was possible, either. Part of me always assumed I was imagining it, or had completely read them wrong. After that first time, my pops found out I’d read the letters and moved them all. But I never forgot. And when I got the letter about this program, well, I thought the fact that it was in New Hampshire was a sign.”
“A sign of how ridiculous this story is,” Jordan protested, sinking down lower in his seat. “I mean what, you just thought you’d come work on your art skills and find your long-lost aunt at the same time? Kill two birds with one stone?”
Abby looked horrified.
“Jordan …” Dan warned.
But Jordan barreled right on ahead, gesturing first to Dan and then to Abby. “Let me guess, you guys made this up together, thought you’d have a harmless laugh at my expense. Well, ha ha. Very funny. It’s not working, okay? I am not that gullible.”
“Jordan, why would I make something like this up? It’s too sick.…”
Jordan shrugged. “Who knows? Attention? Fun? Take your pick.”
“God, you’re such an asshole sometimes!” She clenched her jaw and looked at Jordan as if she had never really seen him before.
“Let’s all calm down and just think for a minute,” Dan said, hating to see the anger between them. “First of all, Jordan, I have to ask—do you really think I wrote this note to myself? For attention?”
Jordan sighed. “I don’t know anymore, man. You. Abby. I don’t know what’s going on. I feel like you’re trying to make me look stupid. Like the two of you are ganging up on me.”
“Okay, and Abby, do you think there’s any chance this could be a different Lucy Valdez?” he asked.
“No,” she replied firmly. “I know it’s her, and I bet there’s more evidence somewhere in the old wing about what they did to her.”
Jordan snorted.
Suddenly Abby slammed her fist down on the table. Both boys jumped in their seats. Dan’s plate rattled, his hill of macaroni crumbling.
“What would it take for you to trust me?”
Jordan didn’t say anything.
“I trust you,” Dan said in a placating murmur.
“Uh-huh, Peeta Mellark over here believes you. In other news, rain is wet,” Jordan said. “Color me sur-freaking-prised.” Taking his coffee and pie, he left without another word. The rain and the sounds of the dining hall rose up to fill the silence left by Jordan’s angry departure.
“Are you all right?” Dan asked.
“Would you be?”
“No. No, I guess not.”
“Then there’s your answer.” She took a spoonful of her minestrone. “Ugh. It’s cold.”
Dan scrambled for something helpful to say. All he could think about was how, if Abby could keep such a big secret so well, there might be any number of things she still hadn’t shared. Not that he was any better. “You know what? About Jordan? I think he’s still upset about the date thing. He’s probably worrying that we can’t be a duo and a trio at the same time, you know?”
“Hm? What? A duo?” Abby frowned, staring off into the middle distance. “Oh, right. Yeah, maybe. Maybe that’s it.”
Dan didn’t want to take her response as personally as he did, given the fight she’d just had with Jordan, but she’d really turned cold there at the mention of the word date. Everything seemed to be slipping out of control. His new best friends were quickly withdrawing—from him and from each other. He had to find answers and hold the group together, or they’d be total strangers again. Then the Hydra really would be dead.
“Don’t worry, we’ll figure this whole thing out,” he said.
“I know I will,” Abby said coolly. “I’m going back into that office. One way or another.”
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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CHAPTER
No 17
The next morning it was time to pick a new set of classes, which meant that Dan had already been at the program for a full week and counting. In some ways, he couldn’t believe that it had been that long, but by and large, he felt like it had been much, much longer.
Dan planned to wait for Abby and Jordan at the admin building to see if there were any classes they wanted to take together, but when he got there, he saw that Abby was already moving from table to table in the art department area. She gave him a quick wave and then kept on going. Dan felt a pang of rejection, but pushed it down.
“So I might have been out of line last night.”
It was Jordan. He grabbed Dan and pulled him over to the Theoretical Mathematics table.
“Might have been?” Dan asked.
“Yeah, yeah, I know you’re on her side,” Jordan began, “but I swear I’m looking out for both of us. Between you and me, I’ve seen girls like Abby go through this kind of identity meltdown thing before. This whole story about her ‘aunt’ will blow over, you’ll see.”
“That doesn’t exactly sound like an apology,” said Dan. Anyway, what did Jordan even mean, “girls like Abby”?
“Fair enough.” Jordan inched forward toward the professor’s table, where the sign-up sheet waited. “Listen, Abby’s great, I love her and everything, and shame on me if this thing with her aunt is for real. I just can’t get wrapped up in a bunch of drama right now. I’m here for math, not la la crazy ghost hunting. I could’ve handled it better, though, that’s for sure. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is I’m sorry I was a jerk last night. And about the Hydra thing: it’s probably like you said, just Joe being an asshole.”
“No harm done,” Dan replied with a shrug.
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
“All right, then.” They’d made their way to the front of the line, and Jordan signed his name on the clipboard in the tiny scrawl of a true mathematician.
“I’m going to head over and sign up for Twentieth-Century German Lit,” Dan said.
Jordan stuck his finger in his throat and made a noise like he was choking, then smiled and went off in the opposite direction.
It wasn’t until the end of the morning, after waiting in one course line after another, that Dan acknowledged the sad truth: the three of them hadn’t chosen a single class together. Dan waded among all the students hanging around outside, and he finally found Abby finishing up a conversation with some people he didn’t know. He waited off to the side until she noticed him, and then with a wave to her other friends, she came up and immediately started talking about all the new classes she was excited to take. Adva
nced Portraiture, Impressionism, Graphic Novel Illustration. Jordan eventually found them, and his list of classes proved similarly alienating—Multivariable Calculus, Real and Complex Analysis.… Dan could solve for zero, but this went far beyond a fundamental grasp of numbers. He gazed down at his own schedule—history, literature, more history.… None of it matched up.
As they were talking, Dan noticed that as friendly as their conversation might sound to an outside listener, Abby never once actually looked at Jordan, and Jordan kept directing his jokes at Dan. It was hard to deny now: in the space of a few days—a few hours, really—their whole easygoing dynamic had changed. Is this what it always felt like, getting close to people?
The new class schedule meant a new routine, so Dan went from building to building, map in pocket, relearning his daily pattern. He hardly saw Jordan or Abby. They didn’t even share a common lunch hour anymore. True, they still met for dinner every night, but the conversation was now full of inside jokes from their different classes and stories for which the other two “just had to be there.” Jordan had said he’d apologized to Abby, and the fact that they could still sit at the same table seemed evidence of that. But she seemed distant, and pointedly avoided any mention of her aunt. Dan wondered if she still planned to go back to the warden’s office. He personally had no desire to ever go there again.
On Friday night, Dan arrived in the dining hall to find Jordan waiting at their usual spot. Three legal pads sat on the table next to his food tray, each one covered in his messy scribbling. As Dan moved closer, he saw the scribbles were numbers and equations—the kind of equations that had enough letters to look like sentences. Jordan didn’t seem to notice Dan’s approach but stayed bent over one of the pads, his hand moving at lightning speed across the page.
“Homework?” Dan asked, taking the seat across from Jordan. He couldn’t remember ever seeing Jordan working outside of class, let alone on a Friday night.
“You could say that.” Jordan scratched his right temple with the dry end of a pen. “One of my teachers mentioned this problem that’s supposed to be unsolvable. But the thing is, there isn’t a proof yet that shows it’s unsolvable. So I’m working on either the proof or the solution, whichever comes first. Call it a pet project.”
“Or OCD.” Dan meant it as a joke, but Jordan’s head flew up, his unruly mop of hair springing out in all directions.
“Excuse me?”
“Nothing,” Dan said quickly.
Jordan bent over his paper again.
Then, with dinner in full swing and Jordan favoring numbers over Dan’s company, Abby arrived. She hit the salad bar and grabbed a glass of orange juice, but instead of joining them, she took a detour to a nearby table where the art kids congregated. Dan thought of them as the art kids because they chain-smoked, dressed like Broadway extras, and wore ironic grandma glasses even though maybe only one in five of them actually had bad eyesight.
Jordan had apparently noticed, too, despite being nose deep in math. “They think they’re it,” he said.
“I didn’t know she hung out with them.” Dan cringed. He sounded and felt so stupidly high school. Us versus Them. Outcasts versus In Crowd.
“Hi,” Abby said when at last she came over. She sat down, placing a sketchbook on the seat next to her. “I was just showing Ash and Patches some of my new work.”
“Patches?” Jordan said, looking up.
“Yes. Patches. Is there a problem with that?”
Mayday, Mayday.
“Nope.” Jordan snorted, low enough to sound like a cough. He brought his attention back to the legal pads. “No problem at all.”
Abby shifted in her chair, sitting with one leg crooked under her. Despite her expectant face and the paper flowers woven into her braid, she was troubled. His heart sank when she said, “So I was thinking tonight might finally be the night. What do you say? Feeling up to sneaking around?”
“I don’t know. It’s been a pretty long week.” He wished they’d never gone into the old wing. It was changing them all somehow. It was changing Abby. Dan pressed on. “I was hoping we could just watch a movie or something. Something light. Besides, if we get caught again—”
“We won’t get caught,” she said flatly, ignoring the rest of what he’d said. She dug into her salad, eating so fast Dan couldn’t imagine she had time to taste it. “So what do you say, meet me at the bottom of the stairs at eleven?” She stopped assaulting her food to look at him, her gaze unwavering.
“Um … I’m not sure …” Dan replied, not knowing what to say.
“Jesus, Abs, give the guy a break. He obviously doesn’t want to go.” Jordan flicked his eyes from Dan to Abby, a smirk on his face.
“Thank you so much for joining the conversation, Jordan. I was going to ask if you wanted to tag along, but I’m sure crunching numbers is more fun.” Abby stabbed a cherry tomato with her fork. The fork scraped hard against the bowl, sending a nails-on-chalkboard shiver down Dan’s spine.
“Yeah, it probably is. Maybe you can get your superawesome art buddies to go instead,” Jordan shot back.
“Maybe I will. At least they won’t go all A Beautiful Mind on us.”
“You wouldn’t even begin to know what is happening in my mind,” Jordan said. “Thanks to your stupid office I’ve been having these dreams. Nightmares. Like something got inside of me when we were down there and it’s been trying to claw its way out. But what would you care? You’re too busy thinking about yourself to worry about anyone else.”
Abby opened her mouth and shut it again.
It was up to Dan to say the right thing. “What sort of nightmares?” he asked gently.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” Jordan pushed a hand through his tangled hair, smearing ink across his forehead. The poor guy had never looked so unhappy. He took off his glasses and wiped them on his shirt. Dan knew better than to press him.
After a minute Jordan sighed. “Wait, I do want to talk about it.” He looked around nervously, as if to make certain that nobody was eavesdropping. “It happened the night you guys went down into that basement—the night Joe caught us. I’ve had the same dream every night since then. Exactly the same. I keep dreaming that I’m in this … cell. And there are these doctors all in white looking down at me, only they don’t have faces. They have voices and hands and tools, but their faces have holes for eyes and noses and mouths. Then they put all these straps on me, lock me down, and …” Jordan’s shoulders sagged. He reminded Dan of a wounded animal. “They show me pictures. And they shock me. They shock me over and over again. There’s this white, hot pain and I can hear my parents talking somewhere behind the doctors. They’re saying, ‘He’ll be better now. He has to get better now.’”
“That’s horrible,” Abby whispered. “I’m sorry, Jordan.”
Jordan nodded, staring down at his equations.
Dan was frozen. He knew from Professor Reyes’s class that they used to administer electroshock therapy to homosexuals in order to “cure” them. Did Jordan know that, too, or had he dreamed it out of nowhere? And how about the fact that Jordan’s dream was so similar to his one he’d had. Was it yet another not-quite coincidence? Were they tapping into some Jungian collective unconscious? What was the connection?
Jordan gathered up the legal pads and tucked his pen into his jeans pocket. Then he stood, gave a half smile, and picked up his tray. He hadn’t touched his dinner.
“I need a nap. I’ll see you two around.…”
Jordan wove his way through the tables, ignoring a few kids who called greetings to him as he went.
“I guess that means he won’t be going back downstairs with us,” Abby said, returning to her salad.
Dan was shocked. “That’s a little harsh, don’t you think?”
“Well, it’s true!” Sighing, Abby let her fork drop into the wooden bowl and leaned back against her seat. “And the only reason you’re upset is because you obviously don’t want to go either, so why not just say so
?”
“It’s not that I don’t want to go with you.…” Dan struggled for the right words. “I just think maybe this whole thing is far beyond being too weird. You’re worried about your aunt, I totally get that. You want answers. I get that, too. It’s just that—”
“You don’t need to help me, Dan. I can do this on my own.” Abby snatched up her sketchbook.
“I want to help,” he said. “I want to help Jordan, and I want to help you, too, and I …”
I still want answers.
“Then help!” She caught her foot on the bench as she turned to leave and tripped. Grabbing a hold of the table before she could tumble to the ground, she dropped her sketchbook. Dan leapt forward to try to catch it.
Too late. The sketchbook hit the floor and fanned open, revealing page after page of dark, twisted drawings. Some loose sheets scattered. Reds, blacks, touches of blue and gray—with a central figure huddled at the center of every piece. The white shift she wore and the vacant look in her eyes gave it away.
It was the girl in the photograph. The girl Abby had drawn in her room. But there was something more going on in these illustrations. Suddenly Dan knew what Abby was thinking.
“Lucy,” Dan murmured. “You think the girl in the picture is Lucy Valdez.…”
“I’ve just been inspired, that’s all.” Abby grabbed the sketchbook and gathered up the loose pictures.
“I think maybe you should be looking for inspiration somewhere else.” Shit. That hadn’t come out the way he’d wanted it to.
“What would you know about it? You’re not an artist, Dan. You’re— I don’t know what you are. You hold things in. You never share your own opinions. Do you really believe me about my aunt? I don’t even know. You get some weird email and a threatening note, and you say you want answers, but you won’t even go down to the basement with me. What are you, Dan? Whose side are you on?” She turned and stomped away, not giving him a chance to respond. He wanted to answer, to say something, but she was already with her friends at the art table and the last thing he wanted was to have an audience while he tried to explain his worth.
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