Revealed (5 page)

My mom was standing in the front hallway with her hands on her hips when I opened the door. One look at her face, and it wasn't hard to imagine she'd been in that exact position for the past several hours.

“Henry Bennett!” she announced the second she saw me, and I wondered why I'd been so scared of Officer Marciano. He had nothing on my mom.

“Do you realize that a man was
attacked
in his own office at your school? Do you know what it feels like when I'm driving home from work and I call your cell phone
three
times and get
no
answer? And then I call your sister and she says you haven't come home yet? Do you realize I am thinking you could be
dead
somewhere?” Her eyes welled up at her last question, but I knew now was definitely
not
the time to point out that
obviously I wasn't dead, what with my having just walked in the front door.

“I'm really sorry, Mom,” I said.

“Oh, you better
believe
you're sorry, young man. And you can sorry yourself into the kitchen and set the table for dinner and after we eat you can sorry yourself into doing the dishes right before you do all your homework. And nothing else, no games, no guitar, no internet, nothing.”

“I'm on it!” I said quickly, and I followed my mom down the hallway and into the kitchen, where Cornelia was sitting at the table doing her homework.

My mom's a great mom, but she's not exactly a great cook (let's just say the burned roast wasn't character-illogical)—last year, when we re-did our kitchen, she jokingly asked the contractor if instead of a stove we could just get a phone with all the local take-out restaurants on speed dial. I saw a menu from John's Pizzeria open on the counter and had the feeling the doorbell would be ringing shortly.

As I set the table, my mom opened a bag of salad and tossed in some olive oil and vinegar, muttering something about “band practice” and being “too big a star to call your own mother.” I realized she thought I'd been out with these sophomores who'd approached me a couple of weeks ago about playing with them in the upcoming talent show. At the idea that I'd spent my afternoon hanging out and playing Dylan riffs on my guitar, I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. If only my life were that . . . normal.

I grabbed some silverware from the drawer and put my arms around my mom, kissing her on the cheek. “Mom, I promise. No matter how big a star I become, I'll never forget about you.” I gave her a hug and she let me do it, which meant she was almost over being mad.

“You should feel free to forget about me,” Cornelia said without looking up from her notebook.

“Who are you again?” I asked.

“Hardy har har.” Cornelia tightened her ponytail, still studying the book in front of her.

People say my mom, Cornelia, and I look alike, probably because we all have blue eyes and pale skin. If you ask me, I'm not nearly as good-looking as the two of them—you're not supposed to say things like this about your mom, but when she was younger she was a total betty, as Amanda would have said (I've seen the photos). When Cornelia was a baby, people would literally stop on the street to say how pretty she was, and even though she's too young to be a hottie or anything, all signs point to her being gorgeous when she's older—not that I'd ever tell
her
that. She's already taller than a lot of the girls in her grade and her hair is the same excellent red as my mom's.

I've never really cared much about how I look, but this summer my mom's friend from her junior year abroad in France came to visit with her husband and daughter, Charlotte, who's sixteen. Charlotte was cool and everything, but she made a whole big deal about how I had to dress better and change my hair because (and I quote), “Hal, you are
dee-licious
.” It was way embarrassing, but I let her take me shopping for new clothes, and we went to this salon in town where she told the woman how to cut my hair, which, apparently, was not delicious so much as it was a “
dee-sastaire!
”

Sitting in the salon covered in gunky hair gel while a woman wearing spandex demonstrated how I was supposed to “
shake
the shape into it, just
shake
the shape into it,” I thought about all the great artists I admire. Picasso. Rembrandt. Giotto. The hairstylist said I should seriously consider getting something called lowlights (the opposite, apparently, of highlights).

It was hard to picture Michelangelo getting lowlights.

“I'm telling you, a
lot
of my customers are getting them these days.” She fussed with my hair, pulling it against my cheek. “It would
really
bring out this gorgeous skin tone.”

I told her I'd think about it just to get Charlotte to let me leave the salon. Then I was so pissed off I marched into a jewelry store right across the street from the salon and got my ear pierced. I don't know why exactly—I just felt like after a day spent with other people telling me what to buy and what to wear and how to shake my head I needed to make a decision for myself. The truth is, it hurt like hell, and my mom practically had a stroke when she saw what I'd done. I'm glad I did it, though. Partly because I kind of like how the little gold hoop looks, but mostly because it reminds me of a time I decided to do something and did it.

After dinner, the phone rang, but neither Cornelia nor I went for it. Sure enough, it was for my mom—some friend who wanted to know if my mom was free for lunch Friday. Within half a second, it was clear they were going to be on the phone for the next twenty minutes, which is a short conversation for my mother.

Cornelia and I may
look
like our mom, but sometimes I worry that in every other way, we resemble our dad. My mom is someone who's totally engaged in the world at all times. When I was a kid, she worked full-time
and
she was president of the PTA
and
she did all this volunteer community organizing
and
she found the time to help me and Cornelia do things like make dioramas for
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
. In between doing all of that, she had literally dozens of friends—work friends, college friends, friends who were the moms and dads of kids we went to school with, friends from her book group.

I remember my parents having all these conversations before we moved to Orion about whether my mom would be isolated if we came here, which in retrospect was nothing short of hilarious. We moved to Orion because of my dad's work (also hilarious—he travels so much it's hard to see how he actually works
here
), but within about a week (okay, maybe I'm exaggerating, but you get the idea) my mom had a big job in the admissions office at the local college and before you knew it, the phone was ringing a thousand times a second with her friends inviting her and my dad to people's houses for dinner every weekend and it was like we'd lived in Orion for years, not months.

But even though they have all these friends and they're constantly doing things with other couples, if you ever looked around the living room at one of their dinner parties, you'd notice that everyone present was there because one person in the couple is friends with my mom, not my dad. In fact, my dad doesn't really seem to
have
any friends—not even old friends from college or high school who he loves but only sees every few years. When people are over, he's usually somewhere just on the outside of things. Not in any crazy way—he's not, you know, standing in the corner staring at a wall. He's just . . . on the edge. Alone, even in a crowd.

I'd always thought he was just shy, but now I found myself wondering if there was more to the story than his personality.

Why were we on the list?

x0x0callicatx0x0:
This box is incredible.

When we left Play It Again, Sam, we'd had to decide who was going to take the box. I said it probably wasn't a good idea for me to have it at my house. My mom's not a snoop, exactly, but she's in and out of my room, drawers, and closet with clean laundry and sheets and stuff just enough that I wouldn't want to promise she wouldn't find something I'd hidden and start demanding to know where I'd gotten it.

According to Nia, her mother
is
a snoop. So we gave the box to Callie because even though her dad's trying to stay sober and provide for them and stuff now, he's still a little more . . . distracted than Nia's and my parents.

artislifeisart94:
can u describe it? i cant tell much from the picture u emailed.

NAR1010:
yeah the flash kinda makes everything look washed out.

x0x0callicatx0x0:
theres a pattern, for sure. & these little buttons or something.

NAR1010:
you try pushing them?

x0x0callicatx0x0:
ya think?

Nobody typed anything for a minute, and I stared at the photo, trying to make out the buttons Callie had described. When my phone rang, I was still staring at the washed-out picture on my screen.

It was Callie. “I've got Nia on the line, too. We think we should post a picture of the box on the website.”

“I don't know.” I thought about Louise's warning. “What if the people who Louise is trying to keep the box from are monitoring the site?”

“What if they are? What are they going to do, break into one of our houses and steal the box?” Nia laughed at the preposterousness of her own suggestion.

Callie's voice was less amused. “Nia, these people may have attacked Thornhill in his office. Do you seriously think they'd hesitate to break into one of our houses?”

I'd learned enough in the time I'd known her not to push Nia when she was thinking about something. And sure enough, after a brief pause, she said, “Okay, you've got a point.”

There was the squeak of my door opening and I spun around in my chair; obviously our discussion of break-ins was giving me the heebie-jeebies.

But it was just Cornelia, carrying a bowl of chocolate ice cream. “According to our mother, you only kind of deserve this.”

I nodded my thanks and reached for the bowl. Cornelia let me take it, then stepped forward to study the picture of the box on my computer screen. “Mom's gonna go postal if she finds out you're online.”

“Then we're agreed,” I said, ignoring Cornelia. “We won't post a photo on the website, but we'll try to figure out together how the box works.”

Nia snorted. “When, exactly, do you propose we do that? According to my mom, I've got twenty minutes after the last bell rings to get home or I'm grounded.”

My mother had basically said the same thing to me over dinner. “Lunch?” I offered.

“I could do that,” Nia said.

“Not me,” Callie sighed. “Mrs. Watson just assigned me to give Ryan Lewis extra math help at lunch all week.”

I'd never had any strong feelings about Ryan Lewis, who's in my bio class and who I ran track with last year. But at the thought that he was going to be getting forty-five minutes alone with Callie every day for a week, I suddenly found myself hating the guy for no good reason.

“What's that picture?” asked Cornelia, who doesn't wait for you to get off the phone before she asks you a question. She was pointing at the screen.

I held up a finger to ask her to give me a second. “Look, I'll think of something, okay? Give me twenty-four hours.”

“How's twelve?” Nia countered.

“Fifteen.”

“Done,” Nia capitulated. There was a voice in the background and Nia said, “Gotta go.”

“Bye, guys,” said Callie.

“Bye,” I said, and we all hung up.

Cornelia was bent over my desk, her nose practically touching the computer screen. “Why don't you want to post this?”

I hesitated. Was I really going to tell her that Callie, Nia, and I were in possession of a box that a group of dangerous, possibly violent people might be after? But it wasn't like she didn't know what we were up against. Like I said, Cornelia's basically a computer genius—we'd relied on her to set up theamandaproject.com, to deal with all the snags we'd hit when people logged on to tell us their Amanda stories. So she was in pretty deep already. Was the situation with the box really going to freak her out?

“We went to Play It Again, Sam,” I started, and I explained everything that had happened since that morning. I couldn't bring myself to tell her about seeing our family on Thornhill's computer, though. Instead, I just finished by asking as casually as I could, “Hey, it's no big deal, but if I needed to log on to Thornhill's laptop, you couldn't help me with that by any chance, could you?”

Cornelia didn't crack a smile, but it was clear she found my attempt to be nonchalant tremendously amusing. “No big deal? You just ‘happen' to want access to Vice Principal Thornhill's computer? The guy in a coma in the ICU? The guy whose office is a crime scene?”

I forced a smile. “Just a little practical joke involving a password and his Facebook account.”

She raised her eyebrow at me, glanced at the computer screen one last time, then turned to go.

“Hey,” I called. “There hasn't been any post on the site from a woman named Frieda, has there?” Frieda Levinson was the artist Amanda had taken me to meet in Baltimore, the reason she'd insisted our cutting school was educational enough to be called a field trip. Ever since Callie, Nia, and I had followed up on the stories Amanda had told us about her family life only to discover that Amanda might not even
have
any parents, the few adults we
did
know existed had taken on extra importance. I'd left messages on Frieda's voice mail, but she hadn't called me back, and the phone number for the studio where Amanda had taken me to see Frieda's art had been disconnected. I'd hoped she would get in touch with us via the website.