Unravelling
Unravelling
Elizabeth Norris
24 meets the X Files in the biggest teen blockbuster of the summer…STOP THE COUNTDOWN. SAVE THE WORLD…Leaving the beach, seventeen-year-old Janelle Tenner is hit head on by a pickup truck.And killed.Then Ben Michaels, resident stoner, is leaning over her. And even though it isn’t possible, she knows Ben somehow brought her back to life…Meanwhile, Janelle’s father, a special agent for the FBI, starts working on a case that seems strangely connected to Ben. Digging in his files, Janelle finds a mysterious device – one that seems to be counting down to something that will happen in 23 days and 10 hours time.That something? It might just be the end of the world. And if Janelle wants to stop it, she’s going to need to uncover Ben’s secrets – and keep from falling in love with him in the process…
Dedication (#uf0083e95-8fe1-597e-bd05-842665179fc4)
For the Js—without you, none of this would have been possible
Contents
Cover (#u9833262a-c6bb-56d9-9881-5f47c3b15222)
Title Page (#litres_trial_promo)
Dedication
Part One
24:00:14:32
23:23:57:07
23:23:57:06
23:23:56:49
23:23:56:42
23:23:56:40
23:23:22:29
21:22:40:34
21:22:07:29
21:22:07:28
21:20:59:31
21:18:10:00
21:18:03:54
17:09:40:41
17:05:07:12
16:23:33:54
16:19:58:49
16:09:48:02
15:19:53:38
15:16:55:49
15:16:03:24
15:15:51:47
15:10:55:00
15:08:50:05
15:04:00:43
15:02:05:07
Part Two
15:02:02:41
15:01:01:19
15:01:00:34
15:00:53:49
15:00:53:01
15:00:21:24
14:22:13:58
14:21:55:36
14:21:42:59
14:21:39:08
14:21:34:11
14:21:11:21
14:20:15:50
14:16:34:07
14:06:56:32
14:04:29:51
14:00:01:13
13:22:45:41
13:22:43:57
13:22:43:56
13:22:18:41
13:22:07:19
13:21:48:38
13:21:35:17
10:07:01:31
10:06:23:12
10:05:56:29
10:05:48:45
09:17:34:28
09:15:41:29
09:07:18:35
09:01:29:50
09:00:52:06
09:00:31:54
08:19:27:33
08:18:56:47
08:18:52:11
08:18:50:33
08:18:48:53
08:18:40:32
08:18:34:51
08:18:31:16
08:18:29:47
08:17:42:19
08:17:36:29
08:15:56:47
08:05:46:15
08:03:34:58
08:03:30:01
08:03:09:40
08:00:01:38
07:23:29:17
07:23:12:54
07:18:47:39
06:01:10:48
05:23:51:24
05:23:41:48
05:18:13:34
04:00:00:00
03:08:20:00
02:20:12:55
02:15:19:49
02:14:35:02
02:14:04:13
02:09:55:46
02:09:31:38
02:09:22:03
02:09:18:52
02:09:11:37
02:08:48:22
02:08:30:29
02:08:30:00
Part Three
01:01:26:07
01:01:15:40
01:01:10:01
00:23:02:31
00:21:56:29
00:21:50:01
00:21:47:19
00:21:02:44
00:20:42:58
00:20:41:04
00:20:41:03
00:20:40:13
00:20:37:40
Turn the page for more amazing teen books from HarperCollins . . .
Slide
Hereafter
Partials
Acknowledgments
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
—Robert Frost
can tell the exact moment Nick steps on the beach.
It doesn’t matter that we’ve only been on three dates or that I wasn’t his biggest fan for the last five years. It doesn’t even matter that his romantic attempts to win me over this summer could be just a means to an end—better girls have been taken in by lesser guys.
But when the air changes, the temperature drops a fraction of a degree, the wind picks up, and a shot of electricity moves through the sand under my feet, I know he’s here.
At least, that’s what I tell Elise, since she likes to swoon over my sort-of love life and gets annoyed when she thinks I’m keeping the details to myself.
I can tell the exact moment Nick steps on the beach, though.
But that’s just because it’s sort of hard to miss seventy-eight twelve-year-olds rushing the beach.
Today I’m actually relieved to see the tidal wave of Little Leaguers descend on Torrey Pines, and I can’t help but smile. Not because of them—not even because of Nick—but because their arrival signifies the end of another ten-hour shift. My last dawn-to-five lifeguard shift this summer. Which is bittersweet, because I love spending my days here—there’s something about the wide-open expanse of water, especially at dawn, when the only people here are the diehard surfers. But I don’t love the long days or the Little League camps or the weekend warriors.
“Damn, J,” Steve says as he gets out of the truck, his eyes wandering to the tendrils of my scar peeking out from under the left strap of my bathing suit. “You’re bailing?”
I grab my duffel and jump from the guard stand into the sand—and ignore the urge to remind him that the scar is nothing he hasn’t seen all summer. “Dude, it’s all you until sundown.”
Steve doesn’t get the chance to say anything else. A clump of wet sand hits me in the leg, followed by a chorus of prepubescent male snickers.
“Aw, Nick. How many times I gotta tell you not to throw stuff at chicks to get their attention?” Per usual, Kevin Collins, mediocre quarterback, star shortstop, and biggest man-whore of Eastview High School stands surrounded by a half-dozen of his Little League campers. “Sorry, Janelle, but you know my man. He’s got no skillz.” He throws an arrogant smile at me because he knows he looks good enough without a shirt that most girls will forgive anything.
But I’m not most girls.
Instead I turn to his best friend. A blush and a lazy smile on his face, he’s swinging his hands together nervously. Tanned skin, short black hair, almond eyes, washboard abs. If I were Elise, I might say Nick Matherson is so pretty it hurts.
Instead I say, “Hey. Happy last day of camp.”
His smile widens, and something in my chest flutters a little—like it always does when he directs that smile at me. “Thanks. They were punks today since, you know, they knew they couldn’t really get in trouble. I thought I might lose my mind, but I’m just glad it’s over.”
I nod—he’s already told me he doesn’t think he’ll coach or work camp again next year.
“I brought you something,” Nick says, reaching into the pocket of his board shorts and extending his loose fist to me. Only he doesn’t open his hand. He just waits.
“What is it?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Come here and see.”
I take a hesitant step closer and reach out my hand. I’m not sure what he could bring me that would fit into his hand, but the fact that he thought of me when I wasn’t around—enough to actually bring me something—makes me smile.
When I touch his wrist to turn it over, his skin is warm. I feel a tingle run through my body as I use my other hand to open his fingers.
And when I see, I can’t help gasping a little. It’s a hundred times better than a piece of jewelry. It’s a packet of lavender seeds. Something I’ve wanted. Something I mentioned to him just yesterday.
“The guy I bought them from said you can plant them in a planter, not like, actually outside, if you don’t want. Hopefully it will help your mom with those headaches,” Nick says.
“Nick, it’s perfect. Thank you,” I say with a smile, and I lean in to hug him. Instead he drops his head, and our lips brush up against each other quickly, before I pull back. I work here, after all, even if it is my last day for the summer.
“I heard you had a rough save this morning,” he says with a laugh. “Two grown men?”
“It was just a rip current,” I explain, a blush creeping into my face as I give a quick rundown of the incident. As I’m talking, I glance over Nick’s shoulder and see Brooke Haslen giving me her scariest death glare.
“But wait,” Nick says. “Elise said both guys were, like, three bills easy.”
“I had the rescue board with me. I swam out there, got them both on the board, and swam them parallel to the shore until we could get back in. It wasn’t a big deal.”
“Whatever, Janelle,” Kevin says as he throws an arm around my shoulder. “We know you’re hiding crazy guns. Think you could take me?” He flexes his biceps, which would be impressive if he weren’t so cocky.
“Dude, get off her,” Nick says, as he pushes Kevin. It only takes two shoves before they’re full-out wrestling and punching each other in the sand. Moments like this I wonder if they share the same brain.
Before the swarm of Little Leaguers rushes over to cheer them on, I start walking toward the parking lot. I still have to pick my brother up from his best friend’s house and drop him off at water polo practice, then go home, shower, and change before Nick brings me back here for the annual back-to-school bonfire.
“Janelle!” Nick shouts.
I turn around in time to see Kevin knock him over and push him face-first into the sand. Nick rolls over and punches Kevin hard in his lower back—kidney shot—and spits sand out of his mouth. “I’ll pick you up around eight tonight, right?”
I nod, and a grin overtakes his face. I start to return the smile, but then Kevin is on top of him again, and they’re back at it.
I turn around and catch Brooke staring at me. I lock onto her blue eyes and refuse to look away. There was a time when I might have been the kind of girl to wilt under the disapproval of Brooke Haslen. She’s seemingly everything I’m not—tall, blond, beautiful, perfect. And if this were three years ago, I might have felt guilty about the fact that Nick asked me out only a few days after he broke up with her. But not anymore.
Brooke and I stare at each other as I pass by her and her friends. It’s Kate who actually breaks the glare for us. She reaches for a can of soda and leans in front of Brooke. Then she looks up—sees me—then frowns and tries to look away.
When I get to my car, I understand. Brooke’s smirk. Kate’s regret.
The windshield of my Jeep reads BITCH in fluorescent pink window paint. Apparently, I’ll also be running through a car wash on my way to pick up Jared.
Or not. Because as I open my door and chuck the duffel into the passenger seat, I realize my tire is flat. It doesn’t just need more air. It’s dead flat—the rim of my tire is on the pavement.
And it’s not the only one.
My other front tire is flat too.
Kate would know I have a spare in the back of the Jeep. She knows my dad wouldn’t let me get my license until I’d successfully demonstrated I could change a tire, check my oil, and jump-start the car.
When your ex–best friend and the ex-girlfriend of your sort-of boyfriend call you a bitch—in neon-pink window paint—and slash your tires, the temptation to break down and cry is definitely there. My eyes sting, my body feels hot in that “I’m treading the emotional line between fury and tears” sort of way, and I’m tempted to just throw my arms out wide, look up at the sky, and scream at the top of my lungs. Only, this is hardly the first time I’ve felt this way. Slashing tires might be new, but the life-ruining sentiment is still the same.
And I’ve dealt with far bigger issues than high school mean girls.
Digging into the glove compartment for my cell, I contemplate heading back to the beach and asking Nick for help. But being a damsel in distress isn’t really my thing. And I don’t want Nick to make any wild guesses about how this happened—he might act like a Neanderthal sometimes, but he’s actually a smart guy, and BITCH plus two flat tires equals only one possible culprit. Plus, if I go back down to the beach for help, Brooke will get the satisfaction of seeing that she got to me.
So I call AAA and explain the problem while changing into my running sneakers. It’ll take them at least an hour to get here to change the tires, but no big deal, I’ll be back tonight. And they’ll charge the tires to the credit card, so I won’t have to worry about that.
Then I start walking. This stretch of Highway 101 is wide open—just cliffs, beach, and two-lane highway. I can easily hike up the hill and run into Del Mar. It’s a little more than two miles, but if I run full speed, I can probably make it in under fifteen minutes. I dial the one person who’s never let me down.
Because he’s Alex, he answers on the first ring. “What’s up?”
“I need a favor.”
“Sure.”
I smile into the phone. “Can you pick Jared and me up at Chris Whitman’s house? He lives in Del Mar on Stratford Court at Fourth Street.”
“Of course, but what’s wrong with the Jeep?” I hear him grabbing his keys.
“Flat tire. Long story.” He starts to protest. “I’ll tell you all about it when you get there.”
“Yeah, no problem. Do you want me to pick up something on the way?”
Crap. That reminds me. I promised Jared a carne asada burrito from Roberto’s. I’m not going to have time, and it would be out of Alex’s way. . . . I bite my lip and close my eyes for a split second, weighing Jared’s disappointment against time.
I’m about to ask Alex if he can stop at the drive-through at Cotija’s, which isn’t quite as good but is at least on the way, when I think I hear someone shout my name.
But it’s drowned out by the screech of brakes and the grinding of metal on asphalt.
bservation skills are hardly a hereditary gene, but before I died, I would have always said I either inherited mine from my dad or honed them living with my mom.
I also would have said I was the most observant person I knew—it was why I had the most saves out of all the lifeguards at Torrey Pines.
But somehow I manage to miss the faded blue Toyota pickup until it’s so close I can feel the warmth of the engine and smell the smoke of locking brakes. Until the only thing I have time to do is haphazardly throw an arm in front of my face. Because apparently I’m vain like that.
here’s a second of scorching heat and a sensation of vertigo, then my heart stops, everything freezes, and suddenly I don’t need to breathe. The last thing I hear is Alex saying my name, his voice raised in question.
But there’s no pain. In fact, when I die—and I know I’m dying, I’m as certain as I’ve ever been about anything in my life—there’s an absence of pain, a lightness almost, as if all my worries about Jared getting enough to eat, making his water polo practices, getting good grades, adjusting to high school, about my dad working himself into the ground, getting enough sleep, spending enough time with Jared, about my mom taking her medicine on time, getting out of bed before three, not noticing I dumped the last of her gin down the drain—it all just escapes.
And I’m dead.
The clichéd whole-life-flashing-before-my-eyes moment doesn’t come either. Instead I see just one day. The most perfect day of my existence. Maybe the sight of it really is just my optic nerves firing as my body shuts down. But the feeling—that’s more than just my body’s physiological reaction. Because I can feel everything I felt that day.
And there’s nothing clichéd about it at all.
I see the heavy heat of the midday summer sun beat down on my mother, surrounding her like some sort of halo, her belly swollen and pregnant with Jared. Her dark olive skin gleams in the reflection of the sunlight off the sand, and a thick mess of black hair is piled in a loose bun on top of her head. She claps her hands and throws her head back, letting out wild, joyful laughter from her mouth.
I hadn’t remembered she could look so beautiful—so alive.
Our discarded attempt at re-creating Cinderella’s castle with sand slumps next to her, surrounded by bright pink buckets and shovels.
Love blossoms in my chest—not just my love for her, but also her love for me—and the warm peace of the feeling wraps around me like a thick blanket.
Then I see myself, a fearless three-year-old with a body board and fins, attacking the waves as if conquering them will allow me to make my mark on the world. I’m laughing and swimming. The spray of the saltwater stings my face, the roaring thunder of the swells mixing with my mother’s laughter filling my ears. The smell of the ocean and Coppertone SPF 45 in my nose.
Excitement. Happiness. Peace. Perfection.
shock of electricity rips into my chest and shoots through the rest of my body.
My perfect day at the beach fades to black. And with the blackness comes the pain, roaring to life in my bones, my muscles, every fiber of my being.
The electrical wave flies through me again, and this time my heartbeat answers. It pounds as if the strength of it can counteract the aching hollow emptiness it feels, as I’m ripped away from my memory.
“Janelle,” someone whispers. “Janelle, stay with me.”
Something about the voice is familiar—not necessarily the speaker, but the way it whispers my name. It reminds me of my dad and the way he used to say my name when I was little and he came home and kissed my forehead in the middle of the night. Or the way Jared used to say my name when Mom was on a rampage and he wanted me to read him Harry Potter to drown everything out.
And something deep inside me aches to hear this voice say my name that way again.
The blackness bleeds to white, so bright it glows. Heat floods my body, and I’m on fire. It feels like the light is burning me from the inside out.
uddenly I’m somewhere else.
My head is throbbing, like someone just took a sledgehammer to it. There’s water—freezing-cold water—all around me, and my arms and legs feel sluggish and hard to move. Panic threatens to overtake me as I sink deeper. I open my eyes, but the salt stings them and I can’t see. Even if I could swim, I don’t know which way is up. My insides burn because I want to breathe. I open my mouth because I have to—even though I know I’ll drown.
It’s drown or let my lungs burst.
Only I know this isn’t me, it’s not my memory—it’s someone else’s. I’m just somehow along for the ride. I know because ever since I was a little kid, I could practically swim better than I could walk.
An arm wraps around me and pulls me to the surface and I see . . .
Myself.
I’m ten, wearing a pink flowered bathing suit because even though I hated pink that summer, my dad bought it for me, and he did the best he could. My wet hair, so dark it almost looks black, is swept off my face, and my chocolate-colored eyes are almost too big for my face. The sun is behind me, backlighting me—and I look like an angel.
At least, that’s what this memory feels—that I’m an angel. Which is weird, because I can’t think of a single person who would think of me that way. Not even Jared, and he loves me.
The white light rips through my body again.
And again, I see myself—at school this time, in fifth grade, playing four-square on the playground with Kate and Alex and another boy, whose name I can’t remember now. I’m laughing, the waves of my hair bouncing up and down. And I feel . . . longing, like this memory wants nothing more than to join in. But for some reason it can’t.
And again—in sixth grade, Alex and me walking my brother to school. I reach out and ruffle Jared’s hair. He swats at my hand, and I laugh.
And again. Again. Again. And again.
The scenes of my life play out in rapid succession, as if I’m an observer to my own life.
Celebrating good grades. Perfect test scores. Reading books during recess. Swim meets and ocean swims. The breakup of my friendship with Kate. Debate competitions with Alex. Tutoring Jared and Chris in the library after school. Lifeguarding, walking on the beach with Nick.
And the emotion I feel is undoubtedly love—heart aching, chest filling, so powerful it hurts, like these are memories of someone watching me, someone whose happiest moments are when he sees me smile, and someone who aches and feels powerless and heartbroken when he knows I’m sad. Someone who loves me.
lackness again.
“Stay with me,” the voice says. “Janelle, stay with me.”
My eyes flutter open, and through blurred vision, I see a figure leaning over me. The sun is above, silhouetting him so I can’t make out any features. My whole body throbs with the rhythm of my pulse—each beat emphasizing the excruciating, ripping pain as it ebbs and flows through my body. My bones feel broken, I can barely breathe, and my heart pounds at express-train speed.
I try to move, try to see the guy above me, but I can’t. Because I can’t control my arms. Or my legs. In fact, I can’t even feel my legs. For all I know, they’re just gone.
“Hold on, Janelle. Hold on,” he whispers. Then, “I’m sorry. This will hurt.”
He moves his hand, which I just now realize had been resting palm down on my heart. It moves up to my shoulder, the warmth of his bare hand against my bare skin oddly cooling, and as his hand passes over my collarbone, I feel bones move and snap, not like they’re breaking, but like they’re melding back together.
“Ben!” someone shouts.
His hand flows over my arm, then reaches underneath to my back, settling on my spine. As he touches me, everything in my whole being feels like it’s not just on fire, but like I’m seconds from spontaneous combustion.
A flash of white again, brighter than looking at the sun—I can’t see anything—then this time I see myself as I must have looked only minutes ago. Wearing my red bathing suit and matching shorts. A dusting of sand sprinkled in patches on my olive skin. Running sneakers, no socks, my brown hair pulled into a messy ponytail. My cell phone to my ear, I pause, close my eyes, and pinch the bridge of my nose like I always do when I’m debating something. And then the truck is there as if it came from nowhere, and it’s hurtling toward me at breakneck speed.
And then I can’t breathe.
“Ben! We gotta go!”
Cool lips lightly touch my forehead, and the pain subsides, fading to a dull ache all over my body. My vision returns, and a pair of dark brown eyes—so dark they’re almost black—hover above me. He smells like a mix of mint, sweat, and gasoline. “You’re going to be all right,” he says, the relief of the statement coming out in a sort of sigh as he leans back.
I try to focus, because I know I recognize him from somewhere.
“You’re going to be all right,” he says again, only it’s not like he’s trying to convince me I’m okay—it’s more like he’s saying it to himself . . . out of relief. His smile widens as his hand reaches out and brushes a strand of hair from my face.
Then, of all the people in the world, Elijah Palma, notorious bad boy and stoner extraordinaire, is suddenly in my face, grabbing the arm of the guy in front of me.
That’s when recognition sets in. Those huge brown eyes, the wavy dark hair, the tortured half smile belong to another Eastview stoner. Ben Michaels. We’ve gone to school together since fifth grade. I’ve never spoken to him. Not even once.
“Let’s go!” a third voice shouts, and this one I know. Reid Suitor, who’s been in my homeroom and a few of my classes since middle school. Kate had a crush on him in eighth grade, but he wasn’t interested.
Elijah pulls Ben away from me, and as the two of them disappear from my line of sight, I struggle to sit up. My chest hurts with each breath I take, and my whole body feels bruised and broken. I can’t help but wonder if I just imagined everything—if the truck swerved to avoid me, if Ben pulled me out of the way, or if there was even a truck at all.
But when I sit up, I see the pickup, crashed into an embankment, the front end smashed in. And in my right hand, I’m still holding my cell phone, only it’s been crushed to pieces.
As if it had been run over. By a truck.
I look up to the road toward Del Mar, and I see Reid, Elijah, and Ben riding bicycles up the hill. For some reason I want Ben to look back, but he doesn’t.
Then suddenly people are everywhere. Surrounding me and saying my name. I recognize Elise and a parent of one of the baseball kids. And Kevin and Nick.
I wonder how long I was dead. Because I know with absolute certainty that I was. Dead.
And I also know with absolute certainty that somehow— even though it defies any logical explanation—Ben Michaels brought me back.
omeone called the paramedics, probably Steve. Even though I insisted I was fine, they loaded me up in the ambulance and sent me to Scripps Green, where they ushered me straight into an ER exam room.
Nick is with me, sitting next to me, holding my hand and talking about some time when he was a little kid and he fell off his bike. His dad was trying to teach him to ride, but since his dad isn’t patient or good at teaching anything, Nick fell.
I listen to him, to his story, and I try to focus on all the details—like the fact that it was a black-and-red Transformers bike his mom had bought custom-made down in Pacific Beach, and that his dad was really angry at him for falling and wanted him to get right back onto the bike. I know he’s just trying to help, so I swallow down the temptation to snort and say, You fell off your bike? I just got hit by a truck!
It’s weird, though. As he talks, I feel off—like I’m spacing out. I can’t help but think of Ben Michaels hovering over me, his hands on my skin, the way he said my name. The unflinching certainty that I was dead and now I’m not—and it’s because of Ben. Somehow, he brought me back to life.
Someone squeezes my hand, so I open my eyes—when did I close them?—and Nick smiles at me. He really is beautiful, but I honestly can’t remember how Nick even got here. Did he come in the ambulance with me? Or did he follow in his car?
“Janelle?” Nick asks. “Janelle, are you okay?”
He stands up and grips my hand too hard, and a wave of nausea rolls through me. He says something else, but I don’t hear him.
A nurse leans over me and shines a flashlight in my eyes. She turns and says something to someone close to her—not Nick. I’m not sure where he went. The nausea turns to cramps, and I just want to curl my knees into my chest and lie alone in the dark. But when I try to do that, someone grips my legs.
People yell at each other, and the whole room sounds fuzzy until I hear Alex. I can’t concentrate on who he’s talking to or what he’s saying, but I can tell by the cadence of his voice that it’s him. I want to ask when he got here and if my brother is okay. But my mouth doesn’t work, and his voice sounds farther and farther away.
My muscles uncoil and relax again, but I’m struggling to catch my breath, almost wheezing.
Something pinches my arm, and a steady warmth begins to spread through my body. Heaviness sets in. Hands let go of me, and I can’t hold myself up anymore. I slump down but fight to keep my eyes open. I wonder where Alex went.
Only I must say that out loud, because then he’s standing over me. “Just relax. You had a seizure, but you’re fine.”
“Alex.” I try to grab his arm, but my hand just flops around.
Because he speaks my language, he says, “Jared’s fine. I took him to polo and called your dad.”
And then he leans down so I can whisper in his ear. “At Torrey, the Jeep . . .”
“What happened to your car?” Nick asks, his face hovering above me.
Thankfully Alex hushes him and pushes him away as I close my eyes. “I’ll take care of it, don’t worry.”
There was something I wanted to tell him. Something important.
“Wait,” I whisper before he goes away. “Alex . . . I died.”
“Shh,” he whispers back, and I picture him shaking his head. “You’re going to be fine, Janelle. You’re going to be fine.”
The worst thing about coming back to life isn’t, believe it or not, how physically painful it is. Don’t get me wrong—even though all my bones seem to be working just fine, they feel like they were broken into tiny pieces. My body is stiff, it aches with a steady, throbbing consistency, and I’m having a hard time making it obey me the way it should.
But worse is the hollowness.
It makes sense, really. I just looked into the great expanse of nothingness, had a moment—no matter how quickly it passed—to think about what my seventeen years add up to, and the dominant emotion staring back at me now is regret.
It’s not that I haven’t accomplished things. It’s not that the people I leave behind won’t remember me. It’s not even that I’m young and there was so much more I wanted to experience—so much more I wanted to do.
It’s the realization that I was practically dead already.
It’s that for the past I don’t know how many years, I’ve moved through life stuffed with straw, hollow and unfeeling. Day after day passed, and I went through the motions and focused on the mundane because the significant was too hard. I had conversations about schoolwork, weather, laundry, groceries, even sports, because things like quitting swimming, losing my best friend, getting drugged at a party, watching my mother’s mood swings slowly kill her, watching my father give up on her—on us—all threatened to unleash a floodgate.
I go out with a guy who, when he’s being serious, is interesting and funny and sort of sweet. We get along well enough, too, but if I’m really honest with myself, I don’t see a future with him. I can’t even see us together when school starts, let alone see myself trying to date him long-distance or go visit him when he’s in college. And I know we just started dating, but isn’t that what I should be imagining if I was really into him—isn’t that part of the reason why people start dating? Yet I choose to date him rather than hold out for someone I could love. Why? Because his ex-girlfriend’s a bitch? Because he’s pretty? Because it feels good to be liked? Because I don’t want to date someone I really care about since it will hurt more when it ends? Since I’d have to try?
How can I ever dare to meet my own eyes again? I can’t. Not even in dreams.
That night, in a drug-induced sedation, I dream my brother is crying, and instead of my dad teasing Jared to “man up” like he always does, I hear his voice, even and soothing. I can’t quite catch what he’s saying at first. Then Jared sniffs, and my father says, Your sister’s so tough, it’s frightening. That girl will outlive us all.
I dream about Ben Michaels hovering over me, somehow bringing me back from the dead.
And I dream about a doctor and two nurses looking at my X-rays. They stand right near my bed, the X-rays up in the light box. One of the nurses leaves as the doctor points to something on the image.
The doctor and remaining nurse whisper to each other.
The nurse comes back, and she’s brought another doctor with her. The four of them gesture to the X-ray, their voices floating through the room.
It looks like her backbone and spinal cord were completely severed and fused back together.
An old injury, maybe?
Maybe she had surgery?
Nothing in her medical history.
They sigh.
It doesn’t . . . it doesn’t look like an old injury . . . and even if it was . . . I’m not sure how anyone would be able to walk after an injury like that.
She’s lucky she isn’t paralyzed.
Lucky? It’s a miracle she’s even alive.
he day I’m released from the hospital my dad takes me home.
“She should rest,” Dr. Abrams tells him. “Stay off her feet, no physical exertion—”
“You said she hasn’t had any more seizures after the first one,” my dad says.
Dr. Abrams nods and explains why it’s important to keep an eye on me anyway.
To anyone else, it would look like my dad is listening respectfully and absorbing the details. I know better. He tugs on his left ear, which means he’s annoyed and running low on patience. He asks specific questions that suggest more medical knowledge than he has, which means he’s shown my test results and chart to someone at the Bureau, probably a medical examiner.
I don’t exactly care, though, that my dad has been giving everyone in the hospital a hard time. I’ve got more important things to focus on. Like what the hell Ben Michaels did to me. It’s just about all I’ve been able to think about since I woke up. I tried to have the conversation several times—where I said, “Alex, I died,” and he patted me like a two-year-old and basically said,
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I roll my head to the side to look at Jared. “What’s up, dude? You gonna tell me what happened to your hand?”
His right hand looks slightly bruised. I reach out, touching his knuckles. He winces. “What happened?” I whisper.
“I tried to punch Alex,” Jared says with a shrug. But he at least has the decency to drop his eyes and look embarrassed. “He’s fine, though.”
I made Alex take self-defense classes with me the summer before sophomore year. We always joked that if a guy attacked us, Alex would duck and I would knee the guy in the balls. (There’s a rumor I’m the reason Dave Kotlar only has one testicle now, but it’s a total lie. I have no idea what he did to himself, but since he hasn’t made any big attempts to dispel the rumors, it must be way more embarrassing than getting beat up by a girl.)
So I know if my brother—who’s never been in a fight in his life—tried to throw a punch at Alex, my best friend would do what he’s best at. He would duck.
“You were in the hospital, dying for all he knew, and Alex took me to polo.”
“Um, because I asked him to. Alex is well trained.”
Jared doesn’t smile like I want him to.
“Jared—”
“Whatever, it doesn’t matter,” he huffs. “I missed anyway.”
I open my mouth to try to explain, but I realize that would mean explaining my friendship with Alex, and I don’t know how to explain something that’s just always existed. He’s lived two doors down from me my whole life. Once upon a time, our moms took us to playgroups together, swimming lessons, even dance classes.
But Jared knows that. What he doesn’t know is that Alex has been helping me deal with our mother’s illness and cover up her drinking since Jared was too young to know there was a problem. Or that our friendship has survived because Alex listens to me. Because Alex knows that supporting me means tackling obstacles my way—head-on. And I don’t know how to explain that Alex is the only reason I’ve been able to stay sane while Dad worked and I had to be a parent—the only reason Jared has been able to do things like play water polo.
Which is why Alex, despite how much he would have been freaking out on the inside, would have taken Jared to polo like it was just another normal day.
But by the time I have all that sorted out in my head, Jared has started telling me about his first (half) day of school— freshman orientation.
“After the assembly and the tour, I went to my first two classes—”
“What do you have?”
He frowns at me. “Biology and ENS. But the cool part was, after I came out of ENS, Nick and Kevin were waiting for me.”
Exercise Nutritional Science is a glorified gym class all freshmen have to take, but more importantly . . . “Nick and Kevin were on campus?”
Jared nods. “They brought three pizzas from Uncle Vinnie’s for me and my friends, and we all sat and ate, and they told stories about their freshman year. It was awesome.”
“Awesome?” I ask, even though I don’t need to. Anyone getting attention from the two most popular seniors at East-view would be glowing a little. If Nick and Kevin were here, I would hug them—even Kevin—because I want my brother to be happy more than anything. And he’ll probably be over the moon all week.
“Yeah, did you know they had English together their freshman year? Nick said Kevin used to lean back in his chair all the time. And every day their teacher would say, ‘Mr. Collins, don’t lean back in your chair, please,’ and he’d say, ‘Okay,’ but then he’d do it anyway.”
I am not at all surprised by this story.
“And then one day when Kevin was hitting on this hot girl in his class, he leaned back just a little too far and he fell over. But it didn’t matter because the girl he liked went out with him that weekend anyway.”
Again, I’m not surprised.
“And Kevin said they used to jump up and touch the overhang whenever they were coming down the library steps. They’d even run, jump, hit the ledge, and then jump down the rest of the stairs, but near the end of freshman year, they both did it one time, only when they jumped, Nick fell and got a concussion.”
I can easily picture Kevin and Nick jumping down the library steps and somehow managing to wipe out. “What about the rest of your classes?”
He shrugs, obviously less interested. “I have ceramics and then English with Sherwood.”
I wince at the name of his English teacher. Jared will never be able to write an essay if I don’t get him out of there.
“Yeah, Kevin took one look at my schedule and told me to run for the hills.”
“He did?” This time I am surprised—in a good way.
Jared nods. “He and Nick said I should fill out a schedule change request to be bumped into honors. So I did that before Nick drove me home.”
I’m suddenly not sure whether I should be pleased or worried about the interest Nick is taking in my brother. On the one hand, I can’t believe he convinced him to take an honors class, and I’m undoubtedly in their debt for getting Jared to actually follow directions and get out of Sherwood’s class—anyone who doubts that there’s something wrong with public education in this country just needs to sit in her class for a day to know—but what will happen to Jared if Nick and I break up?
“All right, J-baby, you ready?” my dad says before I can think of a way to explain that to my brother.
“I’d really prefer if you didn’t call me that in public,” I say as I slide out of the hospital bed and into the wheelchair they’ve brought for me.
My dad smiles because he knows I don’t really mean it, and Jared slips in behind me, half pushing, half hopping. My back is stiff and my leg muscles are still sore, but I could feel worse—I could be dead.
Also, I’ll be back at school this week. So will Ben Michaels. And I plan on figuring out exactly what happened.
“What’s for dinner tonight?” Jared asks. “Something we can get delivered,” I say at the same time my dad says, “I asked Struz to pick up some Chinese.”
“Sweet!” Jared says. “You think he’ll get that awesome spicy kung pao chicken? I haven’t had that in forever. Or, oh—call him and tell him to get the special General Tso’s!”
Ryan Struzinski, aka Struz, has been working with my dad for ten years. He’s in his thirties now, I think, but he’s really an overgrown kid with a superhero complex. It’s why he and my dad get along so well. Knowing Struz, he’ll order the whole left side of the menu. “Don’t worry, Jared. Something tells me we’ll have enough food.”
“What about egg rolls? And fortune cookies. He’d better get a shitload of them.”
Jared is still running down the list of Chinese food he’s hoping for—that kid can eat his way through anything—when we get outside. My dad’s car is parked in the fire lane—shocking. Even less shocking is the collection of file boxes that he has to move to squeeze both Jared and my wheelchair into the backseat—no doubt because he’s going to work late into the night. Just like he would any other night. Tonight he’ll just have to work at home.
“You and Struz planning to Mulder and Scully it after Chinese tonight?” I ask as I slide my seat belt on. My dad has every season of The X-Files on DVD. When we were little, instead of Saturday morning cartoons, Jared and I had Saturday morning X-Files marathons.
“Dude, have you found the unit that hunts aliens yet?” Jared asks.
My dad chuckles. “Not yet, but don’t worry. I won’t give up. Hunting aliens is the reason I joined the FBI, after all.” This is actually not a lie. Of course, the truth is that there isn’t a unit that actually hunts aliens. There aren’t enough creepy cases that point to aliens or unsolved paranormal mysteries to assign to even one guy in a basement.
“The truth is out there,” Jared says with a laugh.
“I want to believe,” I add, because that’s my line. Yes, I am aware how lame we are.
“Trust no one,” my dad says, trying to make his voice sound ominous.
“Believe the lie!” Jared shouts.
I let the two of them continue to volley taglines back and forth during the ride home. I jump in occasionally when there’s a lull and Jared is trying to remember a good quote, but mostly I think about the same thing I’ve thought about the whole two days I spent lounging around the hospital. I think of Ben Michaels—of the fact that I was dead and now I’m not. Because all that X-Files stuff is only entertaining until it hits too close to home. Right now none of it is as strange as Ben Michaels bringing me back from the dead.
As my dad turns off the car, I gesture to the wheelchair. “We can just leave that in the car. I’m fine.”
“J-baby, are you—”
“Dad. I’m fine.”
Jared jumps in front of us and unlocks the front door, and my dad is about to say something when the sound of glass breaking makes all three of us freeze.
or the past nine years, my dad has been the head of the counterintelligence unit at the San Diego office of the FBI. It’s ironic, really. This man who dedicates his life to the pursuit of truth, who works a nineteen-and-a-half-hour work day, who watches repeats of The X-Files and quotes it to his children, lives in a house where Truth always remains Unsaid.
And for almost as long as I can remember, I’ve learned to do the same.
My mother is bipolar. And at present, she’s not exactly functioning.
When I was seven, during one of her manic episodes, she stopped taking her meds, pulled both Jared and me out of school, and drove us up the coast—at least twenty miles over the speed limit, with the windows down—all day and into the night, until we stopped at the Northern California border and got a hotel room. We stayed up late, jumped on the beds, had a popcorn fight, and laughed until our stomachs cramped.
By the next morning she’d come down and wouldn’t get out of bed. We were holed up in our room at the Anchor Beach Inn in Crescent City, California, with the curtains drawn and the lights turned off, while she slept it off for two days before my dad found us and brought us home.
After that, my mom and dad fought—about her medicine, about Jared and me, about how much she slept and how much he worked, about her medication and his inability to express his feelings, about her spontaneity and his rigid schedule, about everything. They fought all the time—days, weeks, months, years. Until at some point—and I can’t remember when— the fighting stopped, she started drinking herself into a self-medicating coma, and our house just fell . . . silent.
And Jared and I were on our own.
’ll go check on her,” I say, ignoring the wave of anxiety rolling through my stomach.
My dad shakes his head. “I can do it. You just—”
“I’m okay—promise,” I say, giving him my best I’m fine! smile. “She’ll want to see me anyway, and you have to bring in the boxes.” I don’t wait for a response. Both Jared and my dad are secretly happy to let me do the honors, even if they won’t tell themselves that.
I slip into her bedroom and pull the door shut behind me, carefully enough so it doesn’t make a sound as it latches. Her bedroom is cloaked in darkness. The combination of the thick shade and the heavy velour drapes pulled tightly over the picture window blocks out every speck of light, and I have to pause and let my eyes adjust. If I didn’t know it was summer and the sun hadn’t yet set outside, I’d think it was the middle of the night. More disturbing is the stale smell of the air—like old, wet newspaper and mold. The recorded sound of rain plays softly on repeat, and I hear her grunt as soft light floods the bathroom.
I ignore the clothes and bedsheets strewn all over the room and breathe through my mouth as I move to the bathroom.
“Mom?” I ask. I hesitate before I open the door, like I always do. Because I’m afraid of what I might see on the other side. “Are you okay?”
“Oh, fine, just fine,” she answers as the faucet turns on. I let go of a breath I didn’t know I was holding and push open the door.
Her wild hair is standing on end, black against the paleness of her skin. Under her T-shirt and shorts, I can see the bones sticking out at her joints in all the wrong places, and when her eyes meet mine in the mirror, I’m struck with the image of her I remembered when I was dying—and how it should be some sort of crime for God to let a woman like that turn into someone like this.
“Janelle?” she asks, fumbling with a foil packet of Advil. All the medication in our house now comes in single-serving packets. “Are you feeling better? Your father said you were sick.”
I nod. “I’m fine.” It’s possible he told her what happened with the truck and she forgot, or it’s possible he didn’t tell her at all. I’m not sure which is worse, but it doesn’t matter because the result is the same.
A quick glance at the broken glass in the sink—not on the floor and no blood—tells me she’s fine. The thin layer of dust covering the whole bathroom tells me I need to stop avoiding this room and get in here to clean this weekend.
“My head just hurts so much.” She throws a hand over her eyes to shield them from the light.
“Here, let me help you.” I’ve barely torn open the packet when she snatches the pills from my hand and swallows them dry. “Have you eaten anything today? Struz is bringing over Chinese food.”
“Great, the whole house will smell awful,” she says with a snort. “It’s like your father does this to me on purpose. He knows how terrible my headaches are and he knows how much strong smells bother me. And loud noises. I just need peace and quiet. I need to rest.”
I flick off the bathroom light and help her back to bed.
“I just need to rest,” she repeats as she gets under the covers. She looks small and fragile, like a sick child instead of my mother. “Can you get me a cold compress?”
Part of me wants to say, Get your own compress, but instead I nod.
Just because I died and had a moment of reflection doesn’t mean anything’s going to change around here.
It’ll take a lot more to wake this hollow heart.
hoa, whoa, whoa!” Struz says, his six-foot-seven-inch wingspan flailing around the dining room table, almost knocking into both me and Jared.
I make eye contact with Alex, who’s been eating his second dinner with us every night since he was old enough to think up a good excuse to walk over to our house by himself—his mom cooks only organic, vegan, and gluten-free meals. He grins at me as he goes to take a sip of his Coke, but thinks better of it. Probably because he knows what’s coming. Struz has made us laugh until soda comes out of our noses many times.
Struz continues, “Jim! You gotta be kidding me. You mean you haven’t done a background check or a fingerprint analysis or anything on this Nick character?”
Jared laughs so hard he spits some of his Chinese food back onto his plate. Alex throws his napkin at Struz’s face. Dad and I shush them.
Struz dramatically wipes a hand through his hair and turns back to his captive audience. “That’s just not okay. I mean, seriously!” he continues, his voice quieter now, as he gestures to the flowers Nick brought earlier. “Jared! This guy brought J-baby roses! Pink ones! And we don’t even know who he is. What is wrong with your father?”
“Nick could be a terrorist,” Alex says. He finds that way too funny.
“He could be an alien!” Jared laughs.
I roll my eyes.
“No, seriously,” Dad says. “Let’s hear something about this guy. How did he win you over?”
Batting his eyes like a cartoon character, Alex says, “He’s dreamy,” with a dramatic sigh.
“That better not be an imitation of me,” I say.
Alex just laughs.
I look at Struz, who does his “give it to me” hand gesture, and then Dad, who also appears to be waiting for some kind of response. “Nick’s smart; he works hard.”
“At sports,” Alex coughs.
“Don’t be such an intellectual snob.”
“Seriously, Alex,” Struz says. “Professional athletes get a lot of play.”
I ignore that comment, since Dad and I haven’t really ever had the “who are you dating” conversation, and I’d prefer not to have it right now. And I’d really prefer not to talk about any of the guys in my life and how much “play” they are or aren’t getting. Struz included. “Nick wants to play football at USC next year,” I add, because something needs to be said.
“I suppose if he goes to USC, he’s good enough for me,” Struz says—not surprising, since that’s where he went to college. “But if he goes to UCLA, you have to break up.”
Jared laughs and announces that his lifelong dream is to go to UCLA, and I break open a fortune cookie. Stuffing the cookie into my mouth, I unroll the fortune and can’t help snorting a laugh.
Everyone pauses. “What’s it say?” Jared asks, reaching across the table.
Instead of answering, I flick the fortune to Alex before getting up. I grab my plate and a couple of empty cartons and head into the kitchen. Just before I turn the water on, I hear Alex’s voice reading my fortune. “Soon life will become more interesting.”
Jared’s unrestrained laughter drowns out what anyone else might be saying, and I’m glad.
I see those images of myself playing out again, watching my life pass me by. As if dying and then being resurrected weren’t enough—as if anything could become more interesting than that.
“Just not sure if interesting will be a good or a bad thing, huh?” Alex asks when he comes through the kitchen. He hands me the dirty dishes and opens the cabinet to grab some Tupperware. Struz did order the left side of the menu, and we’ll be eating Chinese for the next few days.
“I was dead, Alex,” I repeat, because we’ve had this conversation already. At least six times. In the hospital. Whenever Alex made it into my room without Jared or Nick.
“J,” Alex whispers, his hand falling on my arm, “I can’t imagine all the shit you’re feeling, but come on—you got hit by a truck, you lost consciousness, and you had seizures in the hospital.”
“One seizure.”
He pulls his hand back. “It wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for your mind to make something up. Besides, when’s the last time Ben Michaels and Elijah Palma even came to the beach?”
I can’t argue with that. I’m at the beach almost every day, and I can’t remember ever seeing them. Not that I would have been looking, though.
Logically, I know he’s right. I’ve heard the Near-Death Experience stories. People seeing angels, tunnels of light, balls of energy, even God. I don’t believe in that. I believe the mind is a powerful thing, and I believe people see what they want to see.
But why did I see Ben Michaels?
“J, did you hear what I said?”
“Hmm?”
Alex glances at the door to the dining room and lowers his voice as he sits on top of the counter and leans over my shoulder. “We should be asking about John Doe, his truck, and where the hell it came from.”
I found out some of the details at the hospital. After hitting me—if it even did—the truck crashed into an embankment and the driver—still unidentified, since the license in his wallet was a fake—died on impact.
Based on the skid marks and the collision, they’re betting he was flying down the hill at more than eighty miles an hour. It’s no wonder I didn’t see the truck coming.
But I still feel like an imposter—alive, when he’s not.
“Are you listening to me?”
“What? Sorry.” I turn off the water and dry my hands, making an attempt to give Alex my full attention.
“I was saying . . .” He draws it out, and I wave my hand to hurry him along. “I found out the truck that hit you, there’s no record of it. They couldn’t pull up the plates or the guy’s registration in the system—no record of any of them.”
“Wait, what was the fake name?”
Alex balks. “Does it matter?”
I don’t have a reason that I can explain. But it does matter.
“Don’t obsess over the unimportant stuff,” Alex says, and I nod because the last thing I want to do is get into an argument about my tendency to overanalyze and the way it drives Alex crazy. “Nothing he had on him matched anything in the DMV database.”
“What, so they’re all fake?”
Alex shrugs. “I don’t know. I only half heard the conversation your dad was having with the cops afterward, but when they ran the VIN and even the parts for the truck, nada.”
“That’s impossible. Even if somebody made fake plates and IDs—even if they stole parts from several trucks, the model numbers would still register. They’d just register to different vehicles.” I shake my head. “Who would go to the trouble for an old Toyota?”
“That’s the kicker,” Alex says, folding his arms across his chest and leaning against the kitchen counter. When he does that, he looks weirdly like my dad. “It’s not a Toyota.”
“Please, are we really going to have an argument about cars again? I thought we agreed you’d stick to calc and physics and leave practical knowledge to me.”
He smiles but doesn’t say anything. He knows something I don’t. And he’s dying to share. I wave for him to continue.
“The frame of the truck is the same design as a ’79 Toyota, but the engine and the vehicle paperwork, even the logo are all really different. It’s actually a 1997 Velociadad.”
“A what?” I turn back to the dishwasher. “I’ve never even heard of a car company anywhere in the world by that name.”
“Which is probably why I heard your dad ask if the truck appeared out of thin air,” Alex says.
I’m not even sure what I can say about that—what can anyone?
Alex is right, of course. This is more important than whether Ben Michaels resurrected me or I hallucinated it. This is real, and my dad is investigating it. That automatically gives it more urgency. It’s something I can handle now.
“Could someone be running a chop shop?” Alex asks. “Stealing vehicles, repackaging and reselling them as something else?”
“It’s possible, but why bother with all the hassle?”
Alex just shrugs and doesn’t say anything else, which means we’ve both reached our limit. Because I’m still pissed that he doesn’t believe that I died, I add, “No theories? C’mon, they don’t let just anyone into West Point.”
“Don’t say that out loud.” Alex looks around shiftily.
I roll my eyes. “Your mother hasn’t bugged my house as far as I know.”
“Your dad thinks I’ll be able to get in.” Of course Alex will get in. He has a 4.6 GPA and he’s bilingual. And my dad will write him a recommendation, since he went to West Point and graduated at the top of his class. Which is one of the reasons Alex wants to go.
Alex has gone silent, staring into space with his jaw set. I feel bad now for making him think about all the drama he’ll have to deal with when he finally admits to his mother he’s not going to graduate early and go to Stanford, thereby deviating from the life plan she’s been outlining for him since he was conceived.
“So which one of the boxes do you think has stuff about the truck in it?” I ask, because getting back to the investigation will be the only way to make him feel better—and because I know my dad has info about the truck. It doesn’t matter that the FBI doesn’t allow you to investigate anything that happens to you or your family or even people you know. My dad wouldn’t let a truck just appear out of thin air and hit me without investigating it.
“When I helped Jared bring them into the office, I set the lightest box in the back corner, farthest from his desk.” He doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t need to. We’ve been spying on my dad and comparing notes about his cases practically forever. We’re nerds like that.
hen my cell phone beeps in the middle of the night, I almost say Whatever and go back to sleep. A stolen Toyota—or whatever it is—is hardly worth waking up to check out.
Except for the fact that the driver is dead, when it should have been me.
I roll out of bed and fumble into the hallway. We’ve lived here my whole life, and I’ve done the get-up-in-the-middle-ofthe-night stunt enough that I don’t need to turn on the lights. But I curse silently as I head down the stairs and see the sliver of light coming from my dad’s study. Either he and poor Struz are still working, or he’s fallen asleep at his desk.
I imagine it’s this way for all law-enforcement agents—long hours, sleepless nights, obsessive attention to detail, poring over case files. Every FBI agent I know has at least two cases they’ll never forget and never stop thinking about, investigations they’ll carry with them in the back of their minds always, for their entire lives. The one that went right. And the one that went wrong.
For my dad, the case that went right was the one that made his career.
It was more than ten years ago. It was his first case with Struz, who was a junior analyst at the time. I was too young to remember any of the details now, except the ones I heard repeated whenever he relived the story.
Ten Russian spies were discovered and arrested in Temecula, of all places. One was a Fox News reporter, popular with the public and, of course, beautiful. She ended up getting caught in a trap an undercover FBI agent set for her, and as a result all ten of them—and some guy bankrolling them in Budapest—went down. The undercover agent? My dad.
But the case that went wrong—the one still unsolved—is even older. It happened one of his first years on the job, before he got involved in counterintelligence. When my mom was pregnant with me—just after she’d found out I was a girl.
A seventeen-year-old girl—captain of the swim team, with an academic scholarship to USC, a boyfriend, friends, the perfect family, with a dog and white picket fence—went missing from her bedroom. All her possessions were untouched and in their rightful place. No forced entry, no signs of a break-in, no one heard or saw anything unusual—it was like she just . . . disappeared into thin air.
Except for a bloody partial handprint on her wall.
The files are all still on the corner of his desk. My dad reads them every night before he goes to sleep. If he even sleeps at all.
When I get to the bottom of the stairs and peek inside his office, it’s empty. The boxes are all over the place, some of them open, piles of papers laid out everywhere. My dad’s one of those visual/tactile learners. He’s got to lay everything out, move it around, and really study it, and then answers just come to him.
Obviously, he and Struz were working, and on an older case, something ongoing if it has this much of a paper trail, but everything looks like he just left it and went up to bed.
Which isn’t like him.
Although his oldest child did just come back from the dead. I suppose I could cut him some slack.
The “light” box that Alex strategically placed so I could snoop through it is one of the open ones. Only it doesn’t have anything to do with my truck or the driver. It’s an old case file from 1983, a series of deaths in California and Nevada, where the victims were killed from radiation poisoning. Deep gamma burns practically disfigured the bodies, most likely the result of some kind of nuclear exposure.
I leaf through the pages, scanning them for anything that might explain why these old files are in my dad’s study. Apparently, nothing other than the actual bodies had any kind of radiation residue—as if the bodies had been dumped somewhere else after exposure.
“All the nuclear plants nearby were searched, and nothing was found amiss.” I jump and drop the folders back into the box. “And the victims were never identified. Not even by dental records.”
When I turn around, my dad is leaning in the doorway to the office. He’s in sweatpants and an old army T-shirt—one that he doesn’t quite fill out the way he used to—his tattoos peeking out from under the sleeves. The lines in his face are starting to show, and his hair is starting to gray. He wears “tired” like an old friend.
“So they just stopped investigating?”
“I’ve got boxes full of theories and investigation notes,” he says with a shrug. “But they never found anything, and there were only three victims. After that, it seemed like just the Bureau’s presence stopped whatever was happening.”
This bothers me more than knowing that there are people out there who we know are guilty, but can’t prove it. This is more than just a flaw in the system. Because no one figured it out. These people died alone, and they’re the only ones who know how it happened—them and whoever was responsible. Someone else should know.
I’m about to say something when I see a photograph on top of a stack of papers on my dad’s desk. It looks like the body of a man—I think—and I can’t tell how old he is, because his body is so badly distorted by the radiation burns that he doesn’t even look human.
Nausea rolls through me. This photograph isn’t from the eighties. Based on the time stamp at the bottom corner, it’s from last week. Six days ago.
“Don’t ask,” my dad says before I can open my mouth. He moves farther into the room and flips over the photograph. “You know I can’t talk about active cases.”
The distorted image of the dead man in the photo is burned into my retinas, and I have to blink a few times to try to see something else. And that’s when I realize there was something else in the photograph—a set of numbers, written in marker on top of the picture. 29:21:33:21.
hat are the numbers?” I ask as I reach for the photo and turn it over. For a minute I feel a sense of déjà vu, like I’ve seen them before. Then I realize why. They’re similar to a set of numbers I saw out of the corner of my eye when I walked in, written on top of another picture—one I hadn’t really looked at.
There are photos everywhere in this office. Reaching across the table, I grab a different one. This one is the body of a woman. The whole right side of her body is covered in burns that render her unrecognizable. The left side of her body looks pristine. It makes it even harder to look at her.
The numbers are there, though, in my dad’s handwriting. Written in black Sharpie in the top corner of the image. 44:14:38:44. I look back at the other set of numbers and the photograph of the dead man. The dates of the incidents on the time stamps are fifteen days apart. “It’s a countdown, but to what?”
A quick look of surprise flits across my dad’s face before he looks even-keeled again, and I know I’ve hit it right.
He shakes his head the way he does when he can’t figure something out.
“You’re counting down to something. I mean, what’s the end date?” Because that’s the bottom line—what’s important. Countdowns lead to something. What and when are the important questions to answer first. The how and why will come later.
He doesn’t answer. Not that I really expected him to. The fact that he hasn’t shooed me back upstairs to bed yet means he’s frustrated enough to forget the rules.
I set down the photograph and reach for one of the reports, skimming for numbers. I see them—46:05:49:21—and a reference to forty-six days only a sentence later. But I see something else too—UIED—before my dad remembers himself and pulls the report from my hand, placing it back on his desk.
“There’s something off about this one.” I have no idea what he means by “off.” He’s investigated thousands of cases, and there’s always one keeping him up at night.
But I know what UIED means—Unidentified Improvised Explosive Device.
How a countdown factors into a UIED is relatively easy to deduce. The countdown is a timer for some kind of explosive. But what it has to do with the bodies and the radiation is well beyond me.
“Where did you find an unidentified explosive device?” I ask. “Is it a bomb?” I grab the report back from him and flip through it.
“San Diego PD followed a lead and found it in an abandoned motel room after the first crime scene two months ago. They called in the bomb squad and us.”
“And?” But I’m still flipping through the report, and one line catches my eye.
So far all attempts to stop the countdown have been unsuccessful.
“This thing isn’t like anything I’ve ever seen,” my dad says, but it’s clear from his quiet, distant tone that he’s talking to himself. Then he sees the look on my face and adds, “The bodies and the UIED might not be connected,” but I can tell he doesn’t believe that.
I gesture to the countdown on the photographs. “You’re keeping track of how it relates to these deaths. How does it?” He must at least think it does, if he’s gone to the trouble to cross-reference them down to the second of the countdown. But even with my photographic memory and affinity for numbers, I don’t see an obvious connection. “Is there some kind of pattern?” If there is, I don’t see it.
My dad shakes his head, and for a minute I think he’s going to tell me—to say something else about the case. But instead he nods toward the door. “Go on, go back to bed.”
My skin itches—or rather, something underneath my skin itches—everywhere.
“You have to be exhausted, J-baby,” my dad says. “Don’t worry about this one. You know I’ll figure it out.”
I nod and leave the room, even though I’m not convinced the way I usually am.
I was exhausted. But now I’m not. Because I have the same feeling I did when I watched Ben Michaels ride his bike up Highway 101. Deep-seated conviction. A feeling of absolute certainty I couldn’t ignore even if I wanted to.
I glance at my watch and hope being resurrected from the dead didn’t affect my ability to do math in my head. Based on the time stamps of the photographs, we’re at twenty-one days, seventeen hours, thirty-nine minutes, seventeen seconds. And counting.
t’s been four days, and I still haven’t been able to figure out how the UIED fits in with my dad’s case. I’ve tried to do some more snooping, but Dad has taken to locking his office when he knows I’m around and he isn’t. I can’t stop thinking about it, though. Those radiation burns are all I see when I close my eyes.
But the first person I see when I get out of Nick’s car in Eastview’s student lot is Ben Michaels.
He looks exactly like the Ben Michaels I would have pictured before: standing with a group of other nondescript stoners, all wearing similar dark hoodies and grungy, no-name-band T-shirts, most of them smoking something more than conventional cigarettes, some of them drinking something more than water from a water bottle. Elijah Palma and Reid Suitor stand in the center of the group; Ben’s on the outskirts, shoulders slumped and his hands buried deep in the pockets of his baggy jeans while he half leans against some rich kid’s SUV. I can’t see his eyes under the mess of dark brown curls, but I wonder if he’s staring back at me.
And I feel like my forehead—the exact spot where his cool lips brushed my skin—is on fire, and I have this crazy urge to reach up and somehow wipe his touch away.
“Janelle, c’mon!”
Jared and Nick are a car’s length away from me, walking toward the school. I shift my bag and follow them, ignoring Nick’s raised eyebrow and the flood of heat rushing to my face.
Just like I ignore the stares from half the senior class when Nick puts his arm around my shoulder and we walk through the front gate.
Normally I’d be driving myself and getting to school early but I’m not allowed to drive. Once you have a seizure, even if it’s just one, you’re marked as a possible epileptic. Not that I don’t get it, I do. I’m just not a fan of this rule when it applies to me.
This means I’ve missed two days of school. Thursday Struz took me to see a specialist. She ran some tests, and hopefully she’ll clear me to drive when the results come back. And it’s not like anything ever happens on the first day of school anyway.
I missed an AP diagnostic and listening to the teacher read the syllabus? Oh, too bad. Friday my mother couldn’t stop throwing up, and even though I think she’s been taking all her meds, on days when her body has a physical manifestation of her depression, someone needs to keep an eye on her. And it’s not like my dad can do it.
“So, Bread Bites for lunch?” Nick asks when we’re standing outside my homeroom.
“I can’t,” I say, thankful for a legit excuse. It’s not that I don’t want to hang out with him—I do. I just hate that suddenly because I was injured he’s gone from goofy, immature, half-brained Nick to this skittish, hovering, insecure woodland creature who wants to attach himself to me at all times.
But Nick just looks at me, and he doesn’t jump to the obvious conclusion.
“Juniors don’t get off-campus lunches.”
A smile sweeps over his face, and he nods. “I can get you off campus for lunch. Or we can order delivery.”
And with that, the irritable, bitchy edge I’ve been walking around with the past few days melts away. Staying on campus for lunch as a senior is social suicide, and he’s risking it for me?
“It was awesome of you to bring Jared pizza, but you don’t need to worry about me like that.” Not that Nick’s popularity is going to suffer, but he never struck me as the kind of guy who’d forgo bullshitting with the boys to hang out with a girl. And I don’t need him to do that for me.
“Don’t look so surprised.” He laughs as he leans in and kisses the skin just beneath my ear.
Feeling his lips against my skin, I’m a little short of breath, and the smile on his face when he pulls back is almost enough to turn me into most girls.
Until I see Reid Suitor walk past us with his head down as he ducks into our homeroom. I don’t know exactly what I plan to say to him. But I know he was there when I died. He must know something.
“Gotta go,” I say to Nick before following Reid. He and I have been in Dockery’s homeroom since freshman year, and just like every other year, her walls are covered with old history posters—facts about US presidents, magazine collages about momentous dates or events. The only thing worse would be, of course, if the walls peeking out from behind the posters were painted something like a stifling bright orange. Oh wait, they are.
Per usual, Dockery’s animated face shines through her pile of platinum-blond hair, and she’s lost in a story about something embarrassing that happened to her while she was driving— seriously, her license should be revoked, not mine—but I wait, watching Reid, who’s perfectly in my line of sight.
He’s found the other two stoners in our homeroom, and the three of them are huddled together in the back corner as far away from Dockery as they can get.
I’ve never for the life of me understood Reid Suitor. Outwardly he doesn’t look like he’d have anything in common with Ben. His jeans seem like they fit, and he’s wearing a blue collared shirt and a gray V-neck sweater, which would look nerdy on most guys, but somehow it manages to look alternative on him. He’s always been cute—Kate’s probably still a little in love with him—and he’s got these bright blue eyes, eyelashes that extend for days, and sandy brown hair. Really, he could probably be some kind of Calvin Klein model.
But more than that, I know there’s a brain behind that pretty face. I had to proofread one of his essays in Honors Humanities last year—luck of the draw—and not only was his paper done, but it was actually good. Good enough that I had to struggle to edit it, which doesn’t happen to me often.
“Oh, Janelle!” Dockery says, handing me my schedule. “We missed you last week. I was so sorry to hear about your accident. I’m glad you’re okay!”
“Thanks,” I say before glaring at Alex, who’s already sitting at our usual table.
He just shrugs, like he can’t understand why I wouldn’t want Dockery—and thus the entire school—to know I got hit by a truck and came back from the dead. For someone so anti-drama, he’s clueless about how it starts.
With a sigh, I drop my bag next to him and flop into my chair before glancing down at my schedule. Once I look at it, I’m tempted to tear it into pieces.
It’s all wrong. Which is a nightmare. Because Miss Florentine, my guidance counselor, is overworked, and schedule changes are never guaranteed.
I look at my schedule again.
Earth science, American Literature, algebra, and chorus. So I’m supposed to take science for stoners, basic English, and freshman math. I wouldn’t mind chorus, but I don’t sing.
“Don’t be overdramatic. It’s not that bad,” Alex says. “Just follow my schedule. I’m sure we can get you bumped into my classes.”
Last resort, I could get my dad to call and complain, since that’s how things actually get done around here. I cannot get through junior year in classes with freshmen and stoners. “How full are your classes?” I ask as the bell rings.
“You should be fine for Spanish, but APEL . . . ,” Alex says, and I can’t stifle a groan. He wrinkles his nose. “Poblete had thirty-five of us on Thursday and forty-one on Friday.”
Thirty-two is supposed to be the cap on the AP English Language class. I’m doomed.
The majority of first period passes like this:
Alex goes to physics, and I head to the counseling office. The secretary says Florentine can’t possibly see me right now. I reword my request until she changes her mind.
Florentine says my schedule can be changed, but the classes I want are full.
I reword, and she sends me to Mr. Elksen, the VP in charge of scheduling, who can apparently override the rules.
Elksen’s secretary says I’ll have to come back later.
I try to reword, but she actually has a backbone.
I head to Principal Mauro’s office instead to see if she’ll override my schedule for me.
Her secretary says she’s busy, and I’ll have to come back later.
Mauro herself comes out to see what’s going on.
She says I have to fill out a schedule change request form and speak to Elksen like everyone else.
It’s amazing anything ever happens in this school.
I’m about to try to press my luck when the hallway double doors swing open, and Mauro stops listening and turns to see who else is interrupting her game of solitaire.
But it’s security.
And Ben Michaels.
His hood is pulled over his head, shading his hair and his eyes, the white earbuds of his iPod barely visible. He has no backpack, and as if he isn’t being escorted by two campus security guards, he just shuffles his ripped Chuck Taylors as he walks, with an ease that screams, I don’t care.
He’s just another one of those guys I can’t stand here, DGAFing their way through life.
“Miss Tenner?”
Ben’s head tips up at the sound of my name, and from underneath his hood, I can see his eyes widen in surprise for a second, before his whole body shifts, tension rolling through it.
I feel giddy with excitement, because he’s right here with the answers I need. My heart beats too fast—for a second—and then I remember we’re not alone.
I wish I could freeze everyone else and demand he clear up the muddiness in my brain and explain what happened at Torrey Pines.
But since I’m not magical . . . that isn’t possible.
I turn back to Principal Mauro. “I just really need to get my schedule fixed.”
“And as I said, you’ll need to go through the proper channels,” she answers automatically. “There are plenty of other students with scheduling needs as well.”
I want to shout at her. But I don’t.
I shift, adjusting the weight of my bag on my shoulder, and turn to leave.
And almost run right into Ben. I come within centimeters of touching him, and my eyes lock onto his. Then the scent of mint, soap, and gasoline hits me, and it’s like I’m on my back on the 101 looking up at him all over again. But he turns away, and we narrowly avoid any physical contact. I watch his back for a few seconds, but he doesn’t turn around.
It doesn’t matter. Every nerve ending in my whole body feels as if it’s on fire.
follow my messed-up schedule for the rest of the day, and each class I walk into, the teacher just looks at my name and gives me a sad look of apology. They let me sit in the back of the room and don’t even give me the books. It’s painful that they know I don’t belong in their classes, yet here I am.
The inefficiency makes me want to throw up.
And for all Nick’s flirting this morning, and all those sweet thoughts that turned me into a melty pile of mush, turns out he’s still a douche bag. Sure, I told him to go to lunch without me, but he said he wouldn’t.
sry babe get u off tmrw
Based on that grammatical monstrosity of a text, I know he’s already off campus with Kevin, headed to Bread Bites, so I wander into the quad for lunch.
I’m walking toward the grassy area in front of the L building when some girl lets out one of those bloodcurdling screams— the scary-movie kind. My body tenses, and I swear I can see headlights in front of me, and I have this crazy desire to throw my hand up and cover my face.
But as I whirl toward the sound, the girl—Roxy Indigo, who I only know because she got a 6 percent in our ceramics class freshman year—has dissolved into hysterical laughter, while she tries, halfheartedly, to pull her denim skirt—currently bunched up around her waist, revealing a black thong—back down over her hips. After homecoming last year, word around campus was she got so drunk at the after-party that she passed out and peed herself in the back of her date’s SUV.
Which reminds me that I don’t have any friends here, because I’ve never really wanted any.
Except . . .
Ben Michaels is staring at me. Lounging in the shade of the theater overhang with a couple of his stoner buddies, he’s only a few feet from Roxy, and once she gets her skirt readjusted, she’s headed back over there.
He doesn’t turn his head to look at her, even though it’s obvious she’s talking to him. He just watches me. And normally, this is the point where I’d roll my eyes at the creeptasticness of it all. I mean, hello, stalker much? But he’s not leering at me. And the look on his face isn’t this possessive, he-wants-to-devour-me kind of look. It’s different. Almost as if he’s daring me to go over there.
So I do. And as I walk toward him, I stare right back at him, letting every ounce of frustration—at my schedule, at this day, at this life I managed to create for myself—swell in my chest. Tension curls itself through my muscles, ready to unleash in his direction if he isn’t straight with me.
Only then I’m standing in front of him, and I realize I haven’t the slightest idea what I’m going to say.
It isn’t that easy to walk up to a guy in front of his friends and say, I’m pretty sure I died the other day and you brought me back to life. What do you have to say about that?
Instead I look at Ben and say, “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
He shrugs.
Fabulous. “Like, somewhere else?”
Someone snickers, and I glance to the right where Reid Suitor is sitting with four other guys whose names I don’t know. Reid and another guy are—no lie—chewing on pieces of grass.
“You lost, baby? Or are you looking to rebel against Daddy?”
“Wow, that’s original. What eighties movie did you steal that line from?” I say, turning left to the speaker. Elijah Palma. Great. This is already going worse than I had expected. Maybe I should just tell myself Alex was right—near-death experience triggered the firing of random nerve endings in my brain, and I imagined those visions. Maybe it was a sign there really is a hell and I’m going to end up there.
Elijah shrugs. His washed-out blue eyes are so bloodshot, he looks half-dead. “Hey, I’m willing to take one for the team.”
Someone punches Elijah in the shoulder and says, “Knock it off, asshole.” I know without looking that it’s Ben. His voice is already familiar to me, even though I’ve barely heard him say two words.
“Take one for the team?” I know I shouldn’t be egging him on, but I can’t help it. I still haven’t figured out what the hell I’m going to say to Ben, so I might as well burn my frustration by picking a fight with his friend. “What team are you even on, anyway?”
And no, I have no idea how to properly trade witty insults. But no one notices, because I’ve just implied Elijah’s gay, and it doesn’t matter that it wasn’t particularly clever.
“I don’t screw uptight virgins,” he sneers, and my face floods with heat.
Reid laughs, apparently in agreement.
I want to say something back, but my voice is frozen. Elijah, Reid, Roxy, Ben—they’re gone, no longer in front of me. Instead I’m fifteen again, waking up at 2:13 a.m. after I just lost my best friend, in a car parked outside Chad Brandel’s house with my jeans undone and my underwear ripped.
Doubled over in hysterics, Roxy leans into Elijah, and he wraps an arm around her. They’re perfect for each other.
“I said shut the fuck up, dude.” Again, it’s Ben.
But Elijah keeps going. “You think you’re the first prude to get in some kind of accident and realize you’re wasting your life away? You can’t just come over here for a pity fuck and an adrenaline rush. You—”
A fist crashes into his cheekbone, and the force rocks him backward, knocking Roxy to the side. A couple other guys laugh.
And then Ben is standing in front of me, holding on to his hand and rubbing his knuckles. He jerks his head toward the L building, and we both start walking that way.
It hasn’t escaped my notice that he stuck up for me. That he just punched one of his friends—a kid notorious for getting suspended at least once every few months for kicking the shit out of someone—because I’d been insulted.
The notion is a little barbaric, but I’m too flattered to care.
Ben opens the door to the first classroom and holds it for me. The lights are on, and about ten kids are eating at a table in the far corner of the room, but I don’t see the teacher. There’s only a note on her whiteboard that reads Do NOT leave a mess in the microwave. Please ☺.
“Hey, Ben,” one of the girls at the back table says. “Everything okay?” Only, as she stands up, I realize she isn’t a student at all. Miss Poblete is five foot nothing and probably in her late twenties, but she could easily pass for a student.
Ben nods. “Yeah, we just needed a quiet place to go over a few things.” As Ben lowers himself into a sitting position on one of the tables, I wonder why he seems so comfortable here.
Poblete smiles at me and sits back down.
“Book club,” Ben says.
“What?”
He nods toward Poblete and the others. “She has book club meetings every Monday. If we’re quiet, they won’t listen.”
My cheeks warm again as I turn to look at him. There’s no easy way to say any of this. “You were there, at Torrey Pines, the day I got hit by that truck,” I whisper.
It’s not a question, but he nods anyway. So much for Alex’s theory that Ben doesn’t go to the beach.
“What did you do to me?”
He looks down at his feet, dangling a few inches above the floor. He swings them lightly, nervously. “Nothing.”
I shake my head even though he isn’t looking at me. “No, I remember you. I remember seeing your face when I opened my eyes.”
He shrugs and doesn’t take his eyes off his shoes. “I checked to see if you were okay.”
I don’t know him at all, but I know he’s lying. “But I wasn’t okay.”
“You—”
“Don’t—” Lie to me, I want to say as I step closer to him. Instead I say nothing and glance toward the back of the room. No one’s looking at us.
When I turn back to Ben, he’s staring at me. His jaw sets into a hard line. “I’m not sure what you want me to say.”
“You did something to me, something I can’t explain.” I pause, trying to find the right words. But I’m not sure they exist. “I . . . I died.” I rush on before he can tell me I’m crazy. “I mean, I felt it. I felt myself die—my heart stopped, there was nothingness, then there was this lightness—” I stop because I’m not making any sense. “But then suddenly I was back and you were leaning over me. I couldn’t move, but you did something to my back so I could, and the doctors who looked at my X-ray said my back had been broken and healed again.”
I’m close enough to him now that he can’t swing his legs without them hitting me.
“So, Ben Michaels, what did you do to me?”
He looks up when I say his name, and his eyes connect to mine—they’re as black as an oil well. And I remember the way they looked at me before. “Does it matter?”
“Yes. Yes, it does.”
“Why?”
“Because I need to know,” I say, my voice rising uncontrollably. I take a deep breath and try to maintain my composure. Then I whisper, “Something happened to me, and I need to understand what it was.”
“No, you don’t,” he says with a small laugh.
And even though he doesn’t sound condescending, it makes me feel like he thinks I’m just a silly girl. Irrational and crazy. My fists clench at my sides, and I bite the inside of my cheek.
“You’re alive now, focus on that, right?” he says.
He waits for a response, but I don’t give him one. Sophomore year I tried to be a peer mediator, and they told us the best way to get people to keep talking was just to be silent. When you don’t say anything, the other person is tempted to fill that silence, and you can get more out of them. I didn’t make it as a peer mediator because I kept injecting my own opinions and judgments—shocking, I know—but I held on to that advice. It actually works.
And it works on Ben. He sighs and runs a hand through his hair, tugging on the ends. “If you keep focusing on what happened, when you actually die, you’ll still be thinking you haven’t really done anything.”
I pull back, and a hushed gasp escapes my mouth, because it’s like he was there with me when I was dying.
Is that what happened? I don’t even know.
“I didn’t mean that,” he says, sliding off the table. “That didn’t come out the way I wanted it to, I mean.” He pauses to chew on the corner of his bottom lip. “Look, I saw it happen. I came over to check on you, then when other people came over too, I backed away and gave them room.”
“But—”
He shakes his head. “No, I’m serious. You had a traumatic experience. I was the first person you saw when you opened your eyes.”
I nod, because Alex has already said as much, and, well, it does make sense. The problem is that deep inside my chest, that explanation feels wooden—hollow. And even Ben’s speech sounds rehearsed. I don’t hear any conviction behind his words.
“Why were you at the beach?”
He smirks. “What, I can’t go to the beach? It was summer.”
He starts to walk away, like our conversation is over.
“I don’t believe that,” I say. It comes out quietly, but I know he hears me because he stops. Keeping his back to me, he just waits, and I get the impression from his posture that he’s holding his breath. I believe he brought me back. I don’t know how yet, but I will. I do know that right now, I believe I’m here—I’m alive—because of him. The sense of gratitude makes me dizzy and light-headed, like I need to take a deep breath.
And apparently all rational thought leaves my head and my body takes on a life of its own, because I take a step toward him, reaching out, until the tips of two of my fingers brush against his. I don’t know what I’m doing, it’s been forever since I just held hands with anyone, and my hand seems to tingle with the touch.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Ben says. His voice is quiet and cracks slightly at the end, as if he feels helpless, as if he wishes he had some kind of answer. And that is almost enough to make me back off and leave Ben Michaels and whatever freaky shit he’s into alone. Only I’m tired of being hollow inside.
You’ll still be thinking you haven’t really done anything.
I want to feel something. I want to feel . . . alive.
And whatever he says, Ben Michaels is the reason I have the chance.
“I just . . . Thank you.” And as I say it, I squeeze his hand, the level of pressure directly correlating to the depth of emotion I’m feeling—that is to say, it had to feel a little like his bones might start cracking. “Thank you.”
I let go and leave him standing there. No matter how much I want to look back, I don’t.
hen I get home after Alex and I drop Jared off at polo, my mother is awake. And baking.
This happens sometimes, which almost makes everything worse. “Almost” because nothing beats the smell of warm bread.
“J-baby!” she calls when I open the door. “In here!”
“Here” is the kitchen. She’s showered and is wearing a bright green velour jumpsuit and more eyeliner than she needs. And she’s surrounded by possibly eight hundred muffins— blueberry, banana nut, bran, cornbread, chocolate chip—they’re everywhere. Literally. They cover every surface in our kitchen. As does flour.
My flip-flops stick to the linoleum floor. Egg, vanilla extract, butter—I’m not sure what I’m sticking to, but I know I’m annoyed. We’ll be eating muffins for every meal until we have to throw them out, and I’ll be the one cleaning this up.
“How was school, baby?” she asks, turning to give me a smile and a banana nut muffin. “Here, have one, they’re fabulous. I used your great-grandmother’s recipe, and I got it just right. They couldn’t be more perfect!”
“School’s fine,” I mutter as I take a bite. She’s right. She did get Nana’s recipe perfect, which is saying something. My dad’s grandmother owned a bakery.
“Jared said your schedule was all wrong. He told me they gave you classes that were easier than his and that you’d need to get it changed. Do you have any classes with Kate? Oh, here—try this one too. I’m not sure why it isn’t quite right, but they just didn’t rise as well as the first batch. They taste fine, though.” She hands me a flat cornbread muffin. She’s forgotten that I don’t like cornbread. Just like she’s forgotten that Kate and I aren’t friends anymore.
“I’m getting my schedule fixed,” I say, taking a bite of it anyway. “I filed paperwork with Elksen and now I’m just waiting for him to get around to it.”
“How is it?” she asks, nodding to the flat muffin. “I’m just not sure why they didn’t rise. I could throw them out, I guess, but that would be so wasteful. I just don’t know what happened. All the other batches look great.”
What happened is she messed up the baking soda or baking powder, but I’m not about to point that out. “It tastes great, Mom.”
She beams, and her dimples—the same as Jared’s—peek out of her cheeks. Even her nose scrunches up with her smile. She looks ten years younger than she did a few days ago. I can’t think of the last time she smiled like that.
I want to say something else, prolong this moment, but words fail me. And it doesn’t matter. She’s already turned back to the mixing bowl and begun a long explanation of why she decided to also make a batch of raspberry muffins and how they’ll be different from the blueberry ones, even though she’s using the same baseline recipe. I text Alex, Struz, and even Jared’s water polo coach to let them know there’ll be muffins on us for anyone who’s interested.
And then I just listen to her talk.
It’s not that I’m particularly interested in the art of baking muffins or that I don’t have a ton of other things I should do. I just love how animated she looks—so opposite of yesterday and the day before and the day before that.
I have a second chance to fix all this. To try harder.
My mother offers me a spoonful of batter, but I shake my head. The problem with days like this? They’re just enough to remind me what I’m missing. I don’t have a mother I can talk to. I will never be able to tell my mother about Ben Michaels, that he saved me somehow, that he’s denying it.
So after she finishes the raspberry batch, I grab the Clorox wipes and head to her bedroom. I throw the curtains wide, roll up the shade, and open the windows as far as I can. Once I’ve got some air in there and the ceiling fan is attempting to circulate it, I start picking up the clothes on the floor.
And when I’m rearranging the picture frames—putting the picture of Jared and me at Disneyland after we rode Space Mountain back on her nightstand—I see it.
My dad’s laptop, plugged in, still turned on, and resting on the bed, buried in her bedspread. He has his own room. My parents stopped sleeping together forever ago. She needed her own space for peace and quiet, and frankly, if they had to stay in the same room, he never would have come home from the office.
Which means he spent the morning in here—with her.
I sit down on the bed and pull the computer into my lap, open it up, and log in. His password would be complex. To anyone else—even someone who knows binary code. But I can hack anything my dad has passworded. I know him too well.
As it loads, I hear my mother’s singing underneath the thrum of the fan, and I can’t help wondering if this is why she’s awake and in a good mood. I know she’ll come down from this high— she always does. But could it be this easy to pick her back up again?
Scrolling through my father’s history, I open up the last files he viewed. One is a performance eval for Barclay, T. I don’t know the name, so he must be a new analyst. At first it appears to be anything but average. In fact, the first part is straight-up glowing. A hundred percent on handgun and rifle qualifications—it means he hit dead-center on all fifty shots. His computer skills are fantastic, and his actions directly led to closing a recent investigation. Only my dad is recommending he be moved to a different unit. Apparently T. Barclay doesn’t respond well to authority, and he blatantly disregarded an assignment my dad sent him on. That’ll probably ruin T. Barclay’s career. You can’t just not do what your boss tells you to when you’re in the FBI. Even when your instincts are good and you end up being right. The ends don’t justify the means in a bureaucracy.
The next file is paperwork on a gang case that goes to trial later this year. Normally I’d be all over that. But the third file is the autopsy report for Torrey Pines Doe 09022012. My John Doe.
Jackpot.
This is, of course, illegal. Just looking through my dad’s files could come with some pretty stiff penalties if the government found out—for me and for my dad. And even though I’ve been snooping through his files for a long time, my heart still races uncontrollably every time.
I glance at the bedroom door again and listen for anything out of the ordinary, but the only thing I hear—other than my own hammering heart—is my mother’s off-key version of an old Whitney Houston ballad.
Taking a deep breath, I turn back to the report.
My John Doe is still unidentified. They don’t even have an alleged identity next to his case file (which reduces him to the location and the date of his death). They’re putting him at approximately twenty-five to forty-five years, height and weight not applicable. That, I agree with. That I understand. What I don’t is what I read next. The physical examination.
FINDINGS:
01 Global burns consistent with radiation with extensive body
mutilation
02 Perimortal crush injury of right thorax
03 Head injury cannot be ruled out
What. The. Hell.
How can that even be possible? He wouldn’t have been exposed to radiation on the side of the highway—or in his car, for that matter. There’s no reason burns should have shown up on his skin postmortem. I’m not exactly up on medical science, but burns with extensive body mutilation are bad, and they tend to show up immediately. And if the crash killed him and not the burns . . . maybe that was why he was driving so fast. He could have been trying to get to a hospital. Or running from something.
Next page.
CAUSE OF DEATH:
01 Global burns
02 Perimortal crush injury, right chest
So far, the medical examiner is the only person who’s signed off on the autopsy. Maybe they’re getting another opinion. Not that I blame them—it seems more likely that someone switched up the bodies than that this is actually my John Doe.
EXTERNAL EXAMINATION:
The body is presented to the county morgue in a blue body bag and wrapped in a white to tan sheet. The remains are those of a Caucasian male and consist primarily of a severely burned body. Burns are consistent with chemical burns or radiation. There is no charring, but there is complete burning of the fl esh from many sites, massive destruction of bony tissues, and resultant profound mutilation of the body. Soft tissues of the face, including nose, ears, and eyes, are absent, with exposure of partially destroyed underlying bony structures.
My stomach turns at the possible image—I get the idea— and I scroll down to try to see more.
And the smoke alarm screeches.
I jump to my feet, automatically sniffing the air for smoke. My skin itches at the possibility of burns. I shut the laptop and toss it back onto the bed before I run to the kitchen.
Thankfully, nothing is on fire.
But the muffins in the oven are burning—and smoking— and my mother is standing in the center of the room looking at a broken coffee mug, black eyeliner tears streaking down her face.
nd you’re sure it was the same guy?” Alex asks.
I shake my head and take a sip of the mocha frappe I grabbed from It’s a Grind, thankful I managed to get out of the house and away from my mom’s latest episode. I worry a little— or sometimes a lot—about leaving her alone, but every once in a while I also just have to get away. Since Alex’s house is next door, I tell myself I won’t be gone long, and I won’t be far in case she needs me.
Alex and I are sitting at the dining room table in his house with just about every textbook he owns spread out on the table, and he’s buried in a slew of physics problems.
I can’t talk to him about Ben Michaels, so I’m focusing on the accident.
“They could have mixed up the bodies . . .” There could be more than one John Doe who died in San Diego on Monday. It’s less likely than people would think, but it’s possible. And despite the eighty-seven different conclusions my brain latched on to the moment I started reading the autopsy, it has occurred to me that I’m supposed to be looking at evidence and letting the conclusions fall into place as a result, rather than speculating.
“But if it is him, it means he crashed because he was already dead.”
Alex doesn’t even glance up from his physics book. “And then you could stop being a moron and blaming yourself.”
I don’t want to get into that again. “Just listen to me,” I say. “Three still-unidentified victims in San Diego thirty years ago, COD severe radiation poisoning. Then nothing. Now suddenly there are at least three new cases, all in the span of less than two weeks. And one of them might have died while driving.” Driving the truck that killed me.
I don’t say that because Alex has made it clear he thinks the whole Ben Michaels thing is in my mind. Instead I say, “Think about it. My dad’s got all these case files, and now by some freak coincidence a truck hits me and the driver might be related to the same case.”
This time Alex closes the book and leans back in his chair. “What do you think’s causing the radiation?” he says, reaching for the espresso I brought him and lifting it to his lips. Only it’s empty because he downed it the second I got here, and caffeine isn’t going to magically appear just because he hopes it might.
“Sorry, I should have gotten you a double.”
He shakes his head and tosses me the empty cup. “No, it’s cool. Hide it before my mom comes in here and sees it.” I crumple it and stick it in my purse with a smile. “So the burns?” Alex prompts.
“Right. The burns are severe—hard-core severe.”
“So the obvious answer is some kind of nuclear radiation.”
I shrug. “Right, but from what?”
He’s chewing his lip, and I know my mission has been accomplished. Alex Trechter has completely abandoned his homework. A little contraband caffeine and something interesting to distract him is all he needs. “Could it be some kind of virus?” he asks. “Like an injection of something radioactive?”
“You watch too many bad movies.”
“I do not—”
“You still owe me for the two hours of my life that I lost watching Mission Impossible 2. I can never get those back.”
He rolls his eyes. “I’m serious.”
“Um, I’m serious too. What is with John Woo and those slow-motion doves?”
“Janelle, a virus would explain the late onset.”
I shake my head. “Not really. And wouldn’t the gamma burns manifest on the inside of the body, in the organs and body tissue?” I shiver a little at the mental image. “These burns were on his face and hands—exposed skin.”
Alex shakes his head. “It could still be some kind of virus— did you get the chance to read the internal examination?” When I shake my head, he continues, “I read viral terrorism is all the rage now. And it would make sense that your dad is involved— wasn’t he part of the team that investigated the viral hemorrhagic fevers two years ago in L.A.?”
“Yeah, they brought him and Struz in on that.” The virus in L.A. was like Ebola. It started with low-grade headaches, but within an hour or two the symptoms progressed to a debilitating fever and muscle pain. Within twenty-four hours the major organs, digestive system, skin, eyes, and gums of those infected would break down, deteriorate, and bleed. Then they were dead. The virus was caused by a bacteria terrorists had somehow managed to insert in select toothpaste tubes that were imported from China. I know people who still use baking soda instead of real toothpaste.
As much as I want to insist that Alex is wrong, I can’t. Just because I don’t know how someone would make it work like that doesn’t mean it’s not possible. I mean, some kind of bioterrorism in the form of a radiation virus fits a little too easily. Easily enough that it’s terrifying.
“How would someone make a late-onset virus like that?” I ask.
“J, I don’t know,” Alex says with a laugh. “I mean, contrary to popular belief, I’m actually not harboring a secret desire to grow up and become a bioterrorist.”
“Hello, Miss Tenner, have you come to do your homework here?” Alex’s mother, the formidable Annabeth Trechter, breezes into the dining room carrying a heap of folded pastel-colored towels. Despite the laundry, she looks like she just fell out of a business meeting in her skirt and suit jacket with her black hair pulled into a bun at the nape of her neck. She pauses in front of me and waits for my answer.
“No, ma’am,” I say, looking down to avoid her eyes—and I’d be embarrassed about that except Annabeth Trechter is the only woman who scares my dad. And she likes him.
“I actually dropped by to see if I could borrow Alex’s physics book when he’s finished,” I say. It’s only half a lie. “Eastview messed up my schedule and I’m not in the right classes, so I don’t have the books yet.”
She turns her attention to Alex. “You’ve finished your reading for English and your Spanish homework?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You have forty-three more minutes before dinner, and afterward you’ll be able to go to the Tenners’ to drop off your physics book, then you’ll come back promptly to study your vocabulary for the SATs.”
“Janelle and I were going to—”
“No, you studied vocabulary together last night. Tonight you’ll study with me.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I can’t help smiling at that. Alex looks right at me, and I know my expression says, Sucks to be you. Only then it doesn’t, because suddenly his mom’s attention is back on me, and I’m fighting to keep from shrinking down in my seat. I swear, she’s some kind of human lie detector, and any second she’s going to start berating me for keeping Alex from his real work. “How is your father?”
“He’s good,” I say, then force myself to elaborate. The more information you volunteer with Alex’s mom, the less likely she is to think you’re hiding something. “He’s been up late working on a new case, but you know him. He’ll solve it.”
Mrs. Trechter nods. “You can go home now, Janelle. Alex will bring the book by after dinner.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I say as I get up from the table and grab my purse and mocha frappe. “Thank you.” I turn and leave without looking back at Alex. Because we might make each other laugh. And because I know his mom is watching me leave, and she terrifies me.
Someday, I sort of hope I’m just like her.
uesday my schedule still hasn’t been changed, but my earth science teacher hands me a pass to the library as soon as I walk in.
I flash my student ID and the pass at the librarian and settle in at one of the computers. I should try to do some of the work I’m missing in the classes I’m supposed to be in, but I check my email first. There’s nothing interesting, so I open up Google, and because Alex’s theory has been on my mind, I type “radiation burns.”
Naturally, most of what comes up has to do with cancer patients and treatments for sunburn, which is hardly what I’m looking for. And I don’t really want to check out any of the pictures, thank you.
When I try “radiation poisoning,” a link for a story about the Chernobyl disaster pops up. In 1986 a nuclear power plant in Ukraine had a meltdown. It was considered the worst nuclear power plant accident in history. Twenty-eight people died that day, more than three hundred thousand people had to be evacuated to avoid the fallout, and it’s estimated that almost sixty thousand were exposed and five thousand of those exposed died. And if my John Doe was one of those first twenty-eight people, his autopsy would make sense, maybe. But he wasn’t. And that kind of exposure can’t be solitary.
No wonder the FBI has my dad on this case.
A group of freshmen escorted by a teacher I don’t know comes into the library. They’re loud and awkward, and occupying the librarian’s time. I’m tempted to keep reading about radiation poisoning, specifically how someone could harness radiation into some kind of viral form—if that’s even possible.
But I’ve only got about an hour until I’ll have to head out, so I pull up Eastview’s intranet, log into Alex’s account, and go to work downloading the notes and information I need. The librarian escorts the freshmen into one of the classrooms and begins some sort of presentation—most likely the “How to Use the Library” speech all freshmen have to sit through. I pull out my phone and make a to-do list based on the priority of the assignments.
“So your schedule sucks?”
My heart literally leaps into my throat, almost choking me, as I turn to see Ben Michaels slide into the chair next to mine. His hoodie is white today, but he wears it the same as before—over his head, pulled low enough to shield his eyes even though a few stray floppy curls of brown hair stick out. He’s giving me a wry, one-sided smile.
I want to ask him a million things all over again.
But the whole clogged-throat thing keeps the words from coming, so I do the next best thing and pull my shitty schedule from my pocket and hand it to him. His schedule probably doesn’t look any better, and he probably doesn’t care—I know that. But somehow, from the way he slumps into his seat and sighs, I think he just might understand. Or at least empathize.
He doesn’t even give me time to explain. “Algebra?” He laughs. “What, do they want you to teach the class?” He shakes his head and turns to the computer in front of him.
And that’s it.
I guess part of me hoped he’d say something else. Volunteer information. Start a conversation. After all, he’s the one who sat down next to me. It’s not like there aren’t thirty other computers in here.
I wait for a second before deciding, Screw it. I’m going to keep asking until I get the answer I want to hear. I turn to Ben’s profile and open my mouth, but pause as I realize he looks almost classically beautiful from this angle—his profile, the shape of his face—it just seems so perfect, and I’m frozen with surprise that I could see someone on campus for two years and not ever take the time to really notice him. He’s handsome in that kind of tall, dark, mysterious, and tortured way. It’s his eyes. They’re brown, but they’re so dark they sometimes look black. And the way he holds himself, it’s like he knows and takes advantage of his bone structure, the fact that his eyes are deep set—they look shadowed. His face is almost strangely blank, and it makes him look sad, like he has some kind of tragic secret, and for some ridiculous reason I wonder what it is.
He might hide behind the dark, brooding stoner thing, but his face is actually just as perfect as Nick’s or Kevin’s. I can’t help wondering if he gets the same kind of play.
I squelch that thought down. It’s none of my business what Ben Michaels does on his own time, so I try to look away and decide what I’m going to say, but I can’t seem to concentrate on my computer anymore. I want to keep staring—like if I look at him long enough, I’ll unravel the enigma that is Ben Michaels.
Then I see his computer.
He has the school mainframe open and my schedule on the screen. A few keyboard shortcuts, and it’s completely wiped. A blank slate.
“What are you doing?”
“Changing your schedule,” he answers, as if accessing the mainframe couldn’t get him expelled.
“But you can’t—how’d you—”
He shrugs. “I stole the password off Florentine as a freshman. I’ve been fixing schedules for a couple years now.”
I look around the library. No one’s paying attention to us, but we aren’t exactly hidden from sight, either. Anyone could glance this way and see the screen.
“Janelle,” he says, and just the way he says my name—like I matter—makes me turn back to him. There’s no tension lining his eyes; now they look like they could be smiling. “What classes do you want?”
Junior year is supposed to be the most important year for applying to colleges. And I did follow all the rules—I submitted my class requests on time, I got the paperwork signed off on. It’s not my fault the schedule is all messed up.
So I tell him.
Ben clearly knows his way around the software, deftly searching for the course titles. I point to the teachers and class periods I want—and effectively match my schedule with Alex’s.
When I pick Poblete’s third-period class, Ben cracks a half smile. But I have a moment of panic when he tries to insert me into the class and an error message pops up to declare the class is too full.
Ben chuckles beside me—I must have gasped or something— and I realized how close we are, how much I’m leaning into him. Close enough that I can feel his body heat next to me. Close enough that I can smell the faint mixture of what I’m coming to know as pure Ben—mint, soap, and gasoline. Despite the fact that we’re not actually touching, I’m leaning over his shoulder, my mouth dangerously close to his ear.
If he turned his head just a few more inches in my direction, he could kiss me.
I have no idea where that thought came from.
I lean back, shifting in my seat.
“Don’t worry, I got this,” Ben says, gesturing to the computer. “You think you’re the first person who I needed to override to get them into Poblete’s class?”
Obviously not. He enters an override code, and a class roster pops up.
“Wait,” I say, reaching for him. “Don’t take anyone out. That isn’t fair.”
“I won’t,” he says, but he’s looking at my hand on his arm, and I pull it back, my face heating up. “I just need to manually add you in, see?” He copies and pastes my student ID into the class roster.
Which is when it hits me that he has access to EVERYTHING—even grades.
“It’s so wrong, right?” he asks, as if he can read my mind. “That it’s this easy to hack into the system. To steal a password?”
“How often do you do this?”
He shrugs. “I’ve changed schedules for a few people who were freaking out about shit, but mostly I just change a couple of friends’ schedules at the beginning of each semester. Avoid the counseling office.”
“Have you ever changed . . . more than schedules?”
“Like grades?” he says with a laugh. “Of course not.”
I’m so relieved, I let go of the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.
“Although I think you’re the first person to recognize it’s the same program,” he adds. “None of my friends have put that together.”
“If they knew, would they ask you to do it?”
His head cocks to the side, and I can tell he’s chewing on the inside of his cheek. For some reason that makes me smile.
“I don’t think so. I mean, the guys who are my friends wouldn’t—they know I wouldn’t do it. And most of the other guys we hang out with, they don’t care enough to ask.” I’m tempted to tell him not to befriend any AP students because nobody cheats as much as they do, but I don’t. Because technically that’s me—I’m an AP student.
“What do you want last period?” Ben asks.
After I’m inserted into the right Spanish class, Ben prints my schedule and looks down, refusing to meet my eyes. My breath catches, and I wonder if he’s going to say something about the accident.
“So I’m not saying you would, but usually when I do this I make the person swear they won’t tell anyone.”
My insides plummet. “What, you don’t want eight hundred people asking you to schedule them?”
“No . . . it’s not about how many people are asking,” he says. “It’s more about why they’re asking, if that makes any sense. If it’s ‘Oh, counseling messed up my schedule and won’t fix it,’ okay. If it’s ‘I want a teacher who will let me cut class and not take attendance,’ I don’t want to bother.”
“Honor among cheaters?” I ask. And immediately regret it, because he glances up at me and looks pained—like I’ve insulted him.
“It’s just . . .” He sighs. “I don’t always make the right decisions, and I get that.” He shrugs. “But at the end of the day, I want to be able to look myself in the eyes and say I believe in them. I want to know I’d make each one again.”
I do know. It makes so much sense, my chest aches. Right should be about conviction. For all of my condescending comments about everyone else in this school, I can’t think of anything that I choose to believe in, that I choose to stand for. Except maybe Jared.
“And would you?” I ask, my voice barely above a whisper. “Would you do it again?”
Something in his face changes, and he pushes his chair back and stands up. I’m talking about more than my schedule now.
But he just shrugs. “Even I know Janelle Tenner shouldn’t be in earth science and algebra. They would have fixed it for you eventually. Why not speed up the process?”
“Thanks,” I say, but I don’t feel it. Inside my eyes are watery and my throat is tight. A heaviness weighs down on my chest. Because that isn’t at all what I wanted to hear.
I sit there for a long time after he’s walked away. I replay each moment in my mind—the accident, what I saw and felt, almost running into him in the office, seeing him at lunch the other day, this conversation. He’s not what I expected at all.
I replay it all. Over and over, like I’m trying to memorize each detail and figure it out.
Until someone touches my shoulder and I can’t help but jump.
“I’ve been calling you,” Nick says with a laugh. “Come on, let’s hit off-campus for lunch.”
I don’t roll my eyes, even though I want to. We just went through this yesterday—how does he not remember? “Nick, I can’t—”
“Don’t worry. Coach is at the gate. I already talked to him, and he said he’ll let you through.”
He flashes me such a big smile, I instantly feel bad for thinking the worst when he’s actually planned ahead.
I should be giving him a chance instead of second-guessing his motives, without looking down on him because he has different priorities than I do.
“Sure,” I say, and even though I would have said it was impossible, Nick’s smile gets even wider. “If you don’t think either of us will get in trouble.”
He holds out his hand and pulls me out of my chair—his skin warm to the touch. “I’m Teflon, baby, trouble rolls right off me.”
I laugh, and this time I do roll my eyes. Because I’m not sure I’m laughing with him or at him. But of course that was his point. It’s just the cheesy kind of thing he says, but somehow when he says it, it’s funny—I like that he doesn’t take himself too seriously.
I text Alex to see if he wants me to bring him back something, and as Nick leads me out into the parking lot, I look up to see Elijah Palma smoking some kind of homemade cigarette and staring me down.
Only as we lock eyes does it occur to me that for someone who’s allegedly a stoner, Ben Michaels didn’t smell at all like smoke.
ou’re not going to believe what I found,” Alex says as he slips into our library cube and slides the soundproof door shut. He’s leaning back, just barely balancing the weight of what looks like six more mega hardcovers to add to the twenty-something that are piled up around me. I want to laugh at his excitement—I love when he does his “I’m determined to solve this” thing. But I don’t laugh, because that’s a lot more reading.
We decided to hit S&E, the science and engineering library at UCSD, because his aunt works here, which means she’ll let us in and she’ll report back to his mom and tell her that we’re studying. And we are, just not anything school related.
“Please tell me it’s something productive and not another outdated copy of Maxim? Just because your mom won’t let you read it, doesn’t mean—”
Alex ignores me and dumps his books onto our table with the rest of them. I try not to be annoyed—though I don’t try too hard. Adding more books to this stack hardly seems to solve our problem. I’ve got everything from the 9/11 Commission Report to a Michael Crichton novel, not that any of it has turned out to be particularly helpful so far. The Crichton novel and a couple of other thrillers are pure fantasy or speculative fiction grounded in paranoia and conspiracy theory. And some of the more scientific bioterrorism books read as a sourcebook or guidebook for how to handle an outbreak. Then there are the true accounts of outbreaks of smallpox in the Soviet Union and Ebola in a Washington, DC, lab.
In other words, nothing even remotely helps me figure out how my John Doe ended up dead of radiation poisoning while he was driving a truck.
“You going to tell me what’s so exciting?” I ask. My phone starts vibrating against the table, but I’m not a hundred percent sure where it is under all these freaking books.
Alex grins before leaning forward and picking up one of the thickest books and thumbing through it. “I was looking through TheHandbook of Viral Bioterrorism and Biodefense, and I found this.” He opens the book wide to page 428, where the chapter heading reads “Biological Warfare of the Future: Viral Bioengineering.”
“Right now bioterrorism is based on bacterial agents,” Alex says. “Category A are the worst, like anthrax—they spread easily and quickly, and could lead to a wide-scale outbreak.”
“I know that. Everything we’ve read so far says that.”
“Which is why this book is so cool. It’s speculating what’s next. Viral engineering isn’t that far off. In fact,” he adds, pushing the book toward me, “look right here. It asks whether radiation can be harnessed into a transmissible virus. And it gives a detailed explanation of what geneticists might have to do in order to come up with something that could be engineered.”
He’s still smiling. Which doesn’t make sense, now that we’ve just proven finding information on how to become a bioterrorist isn’t all that hard.
But I’ve seen this look before. It’s the same look Struz and my dad get when they’re close to cracking a case, like they’ve discovered the secrets of the universe. It makes me think Alex is doing the right thing by deviating from his mother’s life plan. He doesn’t want Stanford undergrad and Johns Hopkins medical. He wants West Point and the FBI—like my dad. And the thought of Alex actually working for my dad someday makes me smile.
Then it hits me.
“Wait a minute,” I say. “Maybe we’re coming at this from the wrong angle. Maybe it doesn’t matter how the virus is being spread—someone from the CDC can figure that out. What’s important is the countdown.”
I stand up and push in my chair, stretching my legs. My phone vibrates again, and this time I see that it’s Nick. Again.
“Let’s say, for argument’s sake, someone has managed to engineer a virus. Whether it’s radiation poisoning or not, it’s ugly and it’s going to kill people. So how does picking people off one at a time—what does that have to do with the countdown?”
Alex gasps and sits up straighter. “That’s how they connect!” He looks at me, and I’m tempted to prompt him to tell me, but I know better than to interrupt his train of thought. “The UIED. It’s not a bomb. J, it’s something that will disperse the virus. Make it airborne or make it catch fire.”
A shiver moves between my shoulder blades. “But why would terrorists give the FBI a heads-up like that?”
“Because they’re sociopaths? I don’t know, but it makes sense. If the UIED goes off, the virus goes airborne, maybe it’s some kind of chemical explosion that triggers it. And maybe the FBI got their hands on the UIED earlier than they were supposed to. Or maybe the terrorists want us to know it’s coming. Think of the panic it would incite. And isn’t wrecking our way of life part of the whole terrorism package?”
My phone buzzes again, and this time I pick it up and toss it carefully from hand to hand. “So with that theory, my John Doe and the other victims, they’re test subjects?”
Alex shrugs. “Maybe people who pissed off the terrorist group?”
Somehow I’m not satisfied. This theory doesn’t give me an identity to associate with the guy who died the same day and time that I did on Torrey Pines Road.
“J?” Alex says.
“Hmmm?”
“You think it’s time we tell your dad?”
I’m about to nod. After all, it’s past time we shared our theories with him. It could be totally off, and it could be something someone already thought of. Or it could be right. Or it could fall somewhere in between. Either way he needs to know. But as I’m about to say that, the door to our room slides open and Nick sticks his head in and says, “Tell her dad what?”
Inwardly, I groan. I wouldn’t have told him where I was headed after school if I thought he and his other half were going to show up.
Kevin pops in behind him and pushes the door wider. “You confess your true feelings yet, Trechter?”
“Kevin, shut up,” I say as I focus on Nick. “What are you doing here?”
“I’ve been looking for you for, like, an hour,” Nick says. “Why didn’t you answer your phone?”
I gesture to the books. “I’m working?”
Nick picks up one of the books closest to him, and I’m tempted to take it away from him, but that’ll just look more suspicious, and I don’t trust him with this.
“You work too hard, J,” Kevin says. Shocking that he thinks so.
Nick puts the book down and leans against the door. “I know what the problem is. You need to have fun. Come with me to Hines’s place tonight.”
“Alex and I are going to finish studying and then . . .”
Alex knows me well enough to know I’m looking for an excuse, so he jumps in. “We’re going to watch Tron: Legacy.”
Since this is the Lamest Excuse Ever, there’s no way I can stand behind it.
“Um, no we’re not. That movie is only about a tenth as good as its soundtrack.”
Alex just smirks—I will totally get him back for this.
Nick says, “So it looks like you can come with me.”
“It’s Tuesday,” I say, even though I know that to Nick this isn’t an excuse. Especially not this year. His dad used to be strict about where he went—more because of sports than school— but his parents are getting divorced and he and his dad aren’t speaking, which means he’s been doing pretty much whatever he feels like since this summer.
“His parents are out of town until Friday.”
“I can’t,” I say without looking at Nick. Even I’m not immune to how gorgeous he is. I know how easy it is to be charmed by those almond eyes.
“I promise I won’t keep you out late,” he says, holding his hand over his heart. And when I look at him, I can’t help thinking of the first night we talked—really talked—this summer. He’d just found out his dad was having an affair with a girl who graduated from Eastview five years ago, and instead of getting wasted at one of the beach bonfire parties, he was just sitting by himself when I closed up the lifeguard stand and was getting ready to go home. I asked him how he was doing, and everything just poured out. We talked for three hours. About his family and their failings. About how we were afraid of disappointing people the way they disappointed us.
“I promise,” Nick says again. “Scout’s honor.”
“You must have been a horrible Boy Scout.”
“I wasn’t a Boy Scout,” he says, as if he can’t figure out why I would say such a thing.
“Seriously. I already have an essay to write, three chapters of history to read, a shitload of physics and calc problems, plus Spanish review.” I gesture to the mound of books all over the table, even though they have nothing to do with anything I’ve just rattled off.
He pouts. “You deserve a rest from taking care of everybody. A night of fun before diving back into the books. You didn’t get to come to the bonfire.”
Not that I’m disappointed about the bonfire, but I do work too hard.
“Just an hour,” I say, wondering when my willpower decided to go on vacation—and when it will be back.
“Of course.” Nick laughs. “I’ll have you home before eleven.”
“Let me pack up here,” I say. “I’ll meet you in the parking lot.”
After Kevin and Nick leave, I look at Alex. He jams his books back into his backpack. “Maybe you should trade those crappy vintage T-shirts and ripped jeans for short skirts and tank tops. You can start hanging out with Brooke, too.”
“You’re the one who ruined tonight with a lame excuse. I wanted to do something else, and you came up with a movie that only has a plot in the first thirty minutes?”
“It’s got great visual effects,” Alex says as he goes back to shoving his stuff into his backpack, and I grab the couple of books I do want to take home with me.
“Wait,” I say, reaching out to grab Alex’s shoulder. “Did you call my Great Gatsby T-shirt crappy? I fucking love this shirt.”
“Fine. Abandon me so I have to hang out with my mother,” Alex says, but he’s smiling again. Which is all I really needed to see.
t twelve forty-five I give up on Nick.
An hour and forty-five minutes is my threshold—and of course he’s so drunk he can’t stand up without leaning on me for support. I try to take his keys but give up on those after he bellows at me that he’s “just fine to drive, woman.”
I get yelled at enough by my mother—someone I’m obligated to love. I don’t need it from some shithead who slams two beers and then lets his friends pressure him into doing five shots of tequila in the span of an hour.
Plus, what the hell am I going to do with his keys anyway? Unlike 18 percent of my graduating class, I’m planning to not have a DUI on my record when I graduate. And since my license is already suspended because of the stupid seizure, driving really isn’t an option anyway.
I should have left a half hour ago when Cecily’s sister picked her up and offered me a ride, but I was still under the delusion that Nick would have an ounce of reliability. Now the problem, of course, is that Alex is asleep—not that his mom would let him out this late anyway—my mother lost her driving privileges ages ago, and Jared is too young. Both my dad’s cells have gone straight to voice mail for the past half hour. And no one else is sober or worth asking for a ride. I even glanced around for Reid Suitor, since he played baseball his freshman and sophomore years and I’ve seen him around this crowd before. Not that I’d really want a ride from him.
I suck it up, walk out to the front porch, and call Struz.
“J-baby!” he says with his usual enthusiasm, even though he’s whispering. “Whatever you need, it’s gotta be quick. We’re on something big tonight.”
“I’ve got a code twenty-one,” I say. My dad thought the whole FBI thing might hurt my social life when I was in junior high, so he and Struz came up with a bunch of numbered codes so I could call him from a friend’s house without people thinking I was some kind of snitch. He thought it’d be hard to explain to a bunch of teenagers that counterintelligence doesn’t really care about underage drinking.
Right this instant, though, I wouldn’t have stopped them from coming over here and busting up this party.
“Shit.” I hear rustling over the phone for a second. “Where are you?”
I give Struz the address, and he promises to send a junior agent or an analyst to come get me, then he’s got to run. I want to grill him about what they’re doing, but I know enough—and I respect them and their jobs enough—to let him go.
“You call for a ride?”
I turn to see Kevin in a wife beater, baggy jeans, and a sideways baseball hat. He looks ridiculous.
“What of it?”
Instead of spouting off some nonsense like I expect, he smiles and thrusts his hands into his pockets. “I’ll make Nick crash here if he doesn’t pass out.”
“Whatever, I don’t care.” Though that’s hardly true.
“I’ve had a lot of practice at ganking his keys,” Kevin says, and collapses into a porch chair. “I’d offer you a ride home, but . . .” He holds up a mostly empty bottle of beer.
“It’s fine.”
Kevin nods, and we sit in silence as the minutes tick by.
The cul-de-sac is quiet—most of the other houses have their lights off already, and not a single car turns onto the street, despite all the vibes I’m sending out into the atmosphere, hoping for headlights to appear. A breeze picks up, rustling through my hair, and I pull my hoodie over my head and fold my arms across my chest.
“It’s cool that you came tonight,” Kevin says suddenly, and I wonder why he even cares. “I know my man Nick fucked up and you didn’t have a good time or anything, but it’s cool that you came.”
“I’ll probably opt to stay home next time.”
“I don’t blame you. Some nights I’d rather just stay home and read.”
I turn to face Kevin. Other than the idiotic hat, the dirty wife beater, and the jeans that are belted around his thighs, he looks perfectly serious. But I know what this is. An act, a play, because this is Kevin and he’s like that.
Before he realizes what I’m doing, I snap a picture of him— beer in hand—with my cell. “If you try to hit on me again, I’ll show this to Coach Stinson and he’ll have you running stadium steps until baseball starts this spring,” I say, because Nick once confessed their baseball coach was a stickler about drinking. And because I’m like that.
But Kevin doesn’t get pissed off or nervous. He just takes another sip of his beer. “Touché, Tenner. Touché.” A word I didn’t even think was in his vocabulary.
Apparently this month is full of surprises. No one is as dumb as I thought they were.
hen the headlights of a Chevy TrailBlazer round the corner, I turn and offer Kevin a slight nod before heading down the steps.
“I’ll make sure Nick doesn’t drive,” he says again. I look back in time to see him raise his beer bottle in a salute.
“Thanks,” I say, even though I’ve pretty much decided I don’t want Nick Matherson to be my responsibility—no matter how pretty he is or how many great late-night talks we had sitting on the beach. I just don’t have the time or the patience.
The TrailBlazer stops at the edge of the Hineses’ driveway, and even though I knew it wouldn’t be Struz, I’m still disappointed when I see a dark brown head and a scruffy layer of facial hair. He’s an agent I don’t know, and he’s on his cell, not paying any attention to me when I open the door and slide into the passenger seat.
“—and now I’m stuck playing babysitter. This is ridiculous.” Nothing makes you feel uncomfortable quite like when you first meet someone who’s not just talking, but complaining, about you. “Yeah, well, next time we’re switching positions on this. I’m not playing this angle again.”
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Elizabeth Norris
24 meets the X Files in the biggest teen blockbuster of the summer…STOP THE COUNTDOWN. SAVE THE WORLD…Leaving the beach, seventeen-year-old Janelle Tenner is hit head on by a pickup truck.And killed.Then Ben Michaels, resident stoner, is leaning over her. And even though it isn’t possible, she knows Ben somehow brought her back to life…Meanwhile, Janelle’s father, a special agent for the FBI, starts working on a case that seems strangely connected to Ben. Digging in his files, Janelle finds a mysterious device – one that seems to be counting down to something that will happen in 23 days and 10 hours time.That something? It might just be the end of the world. And if Janelle wants to stop it, she’s going to need to uncover Ben’s secrets – and keep from falling in love with him in the process…
Dedication (#uf0083e95-8fe1-597e-bd05-842665179fc4)
For the Js—without you, none of this would have been possible
Contents
Cover (#u9833262a-c6bb-56d9-9881-5f47c3b15222)
Title Page (#litres_trial_promo)
Dedication
Part One
24:00:14:32
23:23:57:07
23:23:57:06
23:23:56:49
23:23:56:42
23:23:56:40
23:23:22:29
21:22:40:34
21:22:07:29
21:22:07:28
21:20:59:31
21:18:10:00
21:18:03:54
17:09:40:41
17:05:07:12
16:23:33:54
16:19:58:49
16:09:48:02
15:19:53:38
15:16:55:49
15:16:03:24
15:15:51:47
15:10:55:00
15:08:50:05
15:04:00:43
15:02:05:07
Part Two
15:02:02:41
15:01:01:19
15:01:00:34
15:00:53:49
15:00:53:01
15:00:21:24
14:22:13:58
14:21:55:36
14:21:42:59
14:21:39:08
14:21:34:11
14:21:11:21
14:20:15:50
14:16:34:07
14:06:56:32
14:04:29:51
14:00:01:13
13:22:45:41
13:22:43:57
13:22:43:56
13:22:18:41
13:22:07:19
13:21:48:38
13:21:35:17
10:07:01:31
10:06:23:12
10:05:56:29
10:05:48:45
09:17:34:28
09:15:41:29
09:07:18:35
09:01:29:50
09:00:52:06
09:00:31:54
08:19:27:33
08:18:56:47
08:18:52:11
08:18:50:33
08:18:48:53
08:18:40:32
08:18:34:51
08:18:31:16
08:18:29:47
08:17:42:19
08:17:36:29
08:15:56:47
08:05:46:15
08:03:34:58
08:03:30:01
08:03:09:40
08:00:01:38
07:23:29:17
07:23:12:54
07:18:47:39
06:01:10:48
05:23:51:24
05:23:41:48
05:18:13:34
04:00:00:00
03:08:20:00
02:20:12:55
02:15:19:49
02:14:35:02
02:14:04:13
02:09:55:46
02:09:31:38
02:09:22:03
02:09:18:52
02:09:11:37
02:08:48:22
02:08:30:29
02:08:30:00
Part Three
01:01:26:07
01:01:15:40
01:01:10:01
00:23:02:31
00:21:56:29
00:21:50:01
00:21:47:19
00:21:02:44
00:20:42:58
00:20:41:04
00:20:41:03
00:20:40:13
00:20:37:40
Turn the page for more amazing teen books from HarperCollins . . .
Slide
Hereafter
Partials
Acknowledgments
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
—Robert Frost
can tell the exact moment Nick steps on the beach.
It doesn’t matter that we’ve only been on three dates or that I wasn’t his biggest fan for the last five years. It doesn’t even matter that his romantic attempts to win me over this summer could be just a means to an end—better girls have been taken in by lesser guys.
But when the air changes, the temperature drops a fraction of a degree, the wind picks up, and a shot of electricity moves through the sand under my feet, I know he’s here.
At least, that’s what I tell Elise, since she likes to swoon over my sort-of love life and gets annoyed when she thinks I’m keeping the details to myself.
I can tell the exact moment Nick steps on the beach, though.
But that’s just because it’s sort of hard to miss seventy-eight twelve-year-olds rushing the beach.
Today I’m actually relieved to see the tidal wave of Little Leaguers descend on Torrey Pines, and I can’t help but smile. Not because of them—not even because of Nick—but because their arrival signifies the end of another ten-hour shift. My last dawn-to-five lifeguard shift this summer. Which is bittersweet, because I love spending my days here—there’s something about the wide-open expanse of water, especially at dawn, when the only people here are the diehard surfers. But I don’t love the long days or the Little League camps or the weekend warriors.
“Damn, J,” Steve says as he gets out of the truck, his eyes wandering to the tendrils of my scar peeking out from under the left strap of my bathing suit. “You’re bailing?”
I grab my duffel and jump from the guard stand into the sand—and ignore the urge to remind him that the scar is nothing he hasn’t seen all summer. “Dude, it’s all you until sundown.”
Steve doesn’t get the chance to say anything else. A clump of wet sand hits me in the leg, followed by a chorus of prepubescent male snickers.
“Aw, Nick. How many times I gotta tell you not to throw stuff at chicks to get their attention?” Per usual, Kevin Collins, mediocre quarterback, star shortstop, and biggest man-whore of Eastview High School stands surrounded by a half-dozen of his Little League campers. “Sorry, Janelle, but you know my man. He’s got no skillz.” He throws an arrogant smile at me because he knows he looks good enough without a shirt that most girls will forgive anything.
But I’m not most girls.
Instead I turn to his best friend. A blush and a lazy smile on his face, he’s swinging his hands together nervously. Tanned skin, short black hair, almond eyes, washboard abs. If I were Elise, I might say Nick Matherson is so pretty it hurts.
Instead I say, “Hey. Happy last day of camp.”
His smile widens, and something in my chest flutters a little—like it always does when he directs that smile at me. “Thanks. They were punks today since, you know, they knew they couldn’t really get in trouble. I thought I might lose my mind, but I’m just glad it’s over.”
I nod—he’s already told me he doesn’t think he’ll coach or work camp again next year.
“I brought you something,” Nick says, reaching into the pocket of his board shorts and extending his loose fist to me. Only he doesn’t open his hand. He just waits.
“What is it?” I ask.
He shrugs. “Come here and see.”
I take a hesitant step closer and reach out my hand. I’m not sure what he could bring me that would fit into his hand, but the fact that he thought of me when I wasn’t around—enough to actually bring me something—makes me smile.
When I touch his wrist to turn it over, his skin is warm. I feel a tingle run through my body as I use my other hand to open his fingers.
And when I see, I can’t help gasping a little. It’s a hundred times better than a piece of jewelry. It’s a packet of lavender seeds. Something I’ve wanted. Something I mentioned to him just yesterday.
“The guy I bought them from said you can plant them in a planter, not like, actually outside, if you don’t want. Hopefully it will help your mom with those headaches,” Nick says.
“Nick, it’s perfect. Thank you,” I say with a smile, and I lean in to hug him. Instead he drops his head, and our lips brush up against each other quickly, before I pull back. I work here, after all, even if it is my last day for the summer.
“I heard you had a rough save this morning,” he says with a laugh. “Two grown men?”
“It was just a rip current,” I explain, a blush creeping into my face as I give a quick rundown of the incident. As I’m talking, I glance over Nick’s shoulder and see Brooke Haslen giving me her scariest death glare.
“But wait,” Nick says. “Elise said both guys were, like, three bills easy.”
“I had the rescue board with me. I swam out there, got them both on the board, and swam them parallel to the shore until we could get back in. It wasn’t a big deal.”
“Whatever, Janelle,” Kevin says as he throws an arm around my shoulder. “We know you’re hiding crazy guns. Think you could take me?” He flexes his biceps, which would be impressive if he weren’t so cocky.
“Dude, get off her,” Nick says, as he pushes Kevin. It only takes two shoves before they’re full-out wrestling and punching each other in the sand. Moments like this I wonder if they share the same brain.
Before the swarm of Little Leaguers rushes over to cheer them on, I start walking toward the parking lot. I still have to pick my brother up from his best friend’s house and drop him off at water polo practice, then go home, shower, and change before Nick brings me back here for the annual back-to-school bonfire.
“Janelle!” Nick shouts.
I turn around in time to see Kevin knock him over and push him face-first into the sand. Nick rolls over and punches Kevin hard in his lower back—kidney shot—and spits sand out of his mouth. “I’ll pick you up around eight tonight, right?”
I nod, and a grin overtakes his face. I start to return the smile, but then Kevin is on top of him again, and they’re back at it.
I turn around and catch Brooke staring at me. I lock onto her blue eyes and refuse to look away. There was a time when I might have been the kind of girl to wilt under the disapproval of Brooke Haslen. She’s seemingly everything I’m not—tall, blond, beautiful, perfect. And if this were three years ago, I might have felt guilty about the fact that Nick asked me out only a few days after he broke up with her. But not anymore.
Brooke and I stare at each other as I pass by her and her friends. It’s Kate who actually breaks the glare for us. She reaches for a can of soda and leans in front of Brooke. Then she looks up—sees me—then frowns and tries to look away.
When I get to my car, I understand. Brooke’s smirk. Kate’s regret.
The windshield of my Jeep reads BITCH in fluorescent pink window paint. Apparently, I’ll also be running through a car wash on my way to pick up Jared.
Or not. Because as I open my door and chuck the duffel into the passenger seat, I realize my tire is flat. It doesn’t just need more air. It’s dead flat—the rim of my tire is on the pavement.
And it’s not the only one.
My other front tire is flat too.
Kate would know I have a spare in the back of the Jeep. She knows my dad wouldn’t let me get my license until I’d successfully demonstrated I could change a tire, check my oil, and jump-start the car.
When your ex–best friend and the ex-girlfriend of your sort-of boyfriend call you a bitch—in neon-pink window paint—and slash your tires, the temptation to break down and cry is definitely there. My eyes sting, my body feels hot in that “I’m treading the emotional line between fury and tears” sort of way, and I’m tempted to just throw my arms out wide, look up at the sky, and scream at the top of my lungs. Only, this is hardly the first time I’ve felt this way. Slashing tires might be new, but the life-ruining sentiment is still the same.
And I’ve dealt with far bigger issues than high school mean girls.
Digging into the glove compartment for my cell, I contemplate heading back to the beach and asking Nick for help. But being a damsel in distress isn’t really my thing. And I don’t want Nick to make any wild guesses about how this happened—he might act like a Neanderthal sometimes, but he’s actually a smart guy, and BITCH plus two flat tires equals only one possible culprit. Plus, if I go back down to the beach for help, Brooke will get the satisfaction of seeing that she got to me.
So I call AAA and explain the problem while changing into my running sneakers. It’ll take them at least an hour to get here to change the tires, but no big deal, I’ll be back tonight. And they’ll charge the tires to the credit card, so I won’t have to worry about that.
Then I start walking. This stretch of Highway 101 is wide open—just cliffs, beach, and two-lane highway. I can easily hike up the hill and run into Del Mar. It’s a little more than two miles, but if I run full speed, I can probably make it in under fifteen minutes. I dial the one person who’s never let me down.
Because he’s Alex, he answers on the first ring. “What’s up?”
“I need a favor.”
“Sure.”
I smile into the phone. “Can you pick Jared and me up at Chris Whitman’s house? He lives in Del Mar on Stratford Court at Fourth Street.”
“Of course, but what’s wrong with the Jeep?” I hear him grabbing his keys.
“Flat tire. Long story.” He starts to protest. “I’ll tell you all about it when you get there.”
“Yeah, no problem. Do you want me to pick up something on the way?”
Crap. That reminds me. I promised Jared a carne asada burrito from Roberto’s. I’m not going to have time, and it would be out of Alex’s way. . . . I bite my lip and close my eyes for a split second, weighing Jared’s disappointment against time.
I’m about to ask Alex if he can stop at the drive-through at Cotija’s, which isn’t quite as good but is at least on the way, when I think I hear someone shout my name.
But it’s drowned out by the screech of brakes and the grinding of metal on asphalt.
bservation skills are hardly a hereditary gene, but before I died, I would have always said I either inherited mine from my dad or honed them living with my mom.
I also would have said I was the most observant person I knew—it was why I had the most saves out of all the lifeguards at Torrey Pines.
But somehow I manage to miss the faded blue Toyota pickup until it’s so close I can feel the warmth of the engine and smell the smoke of locking brakes. Until the only thing I have time to do is haphazardly throw an arm in front of my face. Because apparently I’m vain like that.
here’s a second of scorching heat and a sensation of vertigo, then my heart stops, everything freezes, and suddenly I don’t need to breathe. The last thing I hear is Alex saying my name, his voice raised in question.
But there’s no pain. In fact, when I die—and I know I’m dying, I’m as certain as I’ve ever been about anything in my life—there’s an absence of pain, a lightness almost, as if all my worries about Jared getting enough to eat, making his water polo practices, getting good grades, adjusting to high school, about my dad working himself into the ground, getting enough sleep, spending enough time with Jared, about my mom taking her medicine on time, getting out of bed before three, not noticing I dumped the last of her gin down the drain—it all just escapes.
And I’m dead.
The clichéd whole-life-flashing-before-my-eyes moment doesn’t come either. Instead I see just one day. The most perfect day of my existence. Maybe the sight of it really is just my optic nerves firing as my body shuts down. But the feeling—that’s more than just my body’s physiological reaction. Because I can feel everything I felt that day.
And there’s nothing clichéd about it at all.
I see the heavy heat of the midday summer sun beat down on my mother, surrounding her like some sort of halo, her belly swollen and pregnant with Jared. Her dark olive skin gleams in the reflection of the sunlight off the sand, and a thick mess of black hair is piled in a loose bun on top of her head. She claps her hands and throws her head back, letting out wild, joyful laughter from her mouth.
I hadn’t remembered she could look so beautiful—so alive.
Our discarded attempt at re-creating Cinderella’s castle with sand slumps next to her, surrounded by bright pink buckets and shovels.
Love blossoms in my chest—not just my love for her, but also her love for me—and the warm peace of the feeling wraps around me like a thick blanket.
Then I see myself, a fearless three-year-old with a body board and fins, attacking the waves as if conquering them will allow me to make my mark on the world. I’m laughing and swimming. The spray of the saltwater stings my face, the roaring thunder of the swells mixing with my mother’s laughter filling my ears. The smell of the ocean and Coppertone SPF 45 in my nose.
Excitement. Happiness. Peace. Perfection.
shock of electricity rips into my chest and shoots through the rest of my body.
My perfect day at the beach fades to black. And with the blackness comes the pain, roaring to life in my bones, my muscles, every fiber of my being.
The electrical wave flies through me again, and this time my heartbeat answers. It pounds as if the strength of it can counteract the aching hollow emptiness it feels, as I’m ripped away from my memory.
“Janelle,” someone whispers. “Janelle, stay with me.”
Something about the voice is familiar—not necessarily the speaker, but the way it whispers my name. It reminds me of my dad and the way he used to say my name when I was little and he came home and kissed my forehead in the middle of the night. Or the way Jared used to say my name when Mom was on a rampage and he wanted me to read him Harry Potter to drown everything out.
And something deep inside me aches to hear this voice say my name that way again.
The blackness bleeds to white, so bright it glows. Heat floods my body, and I’m on fire. It feels like the light is burning me from the inside out.
uddenly I’m somewhere else.
My head is throbbing, like someone just took a sledgehammer to it. There’s water—freezing-cold water—all around me, and my arms and legs feel sluggish and hard to move. Panic threatens to overtake me as I sink deeper. I open my eyes, but the salt stings them and I can’t see. Even if I could swim, I don’t know which way is up. My insides burn because I want to breathe. I open my mouth because I have to—even though I know I’ll drown.
It’s drown or let my lungs burst.
Only I know this isn’t me, it’s not my memory—it’s someone else’s. I’m just somehow along for the ride. I know because ever since I was a little kid, I could practically swim better than I could walk.
An arm wraps around me and pulls me to the surface and I see . . .
Myself.
I’m ten, wearing a pink flowered bathing suit because even though I hated pink that summer, my dad bought it for me, and he did the best he could. My wet hair, so dark it almost looks black, is swept off my face, and my chocolate-colored eyes are almost too big for my face. The sun is behind me, backlighting me—and I look like an angel.
At least, that’s what this memory feels—that I’m an angel. Which is weird, because I can’t think of a single person who would think of me that way. Not even Jared, and he loves me.
The white light rips through my body again.
And again, I see myself—at school this time, in fifth grade, playing four-square on the playground with Kate and Alex and another boy, whose name I can’t remember now. I’m laughing, the waves of my hair bouncing up and down. And I feel . . . longing, like this memory wants nothing more than to join in. But for some reason it can’t.
And again—in sixth grade, Alex and me walking my brother to school. I reach out and ruffle Jared’s hair. He swats at my hand, and I laugh.
And again. Again. Again. And again.
The scenes of my life play out in rapid succession, as if I’m an observer to my own life.
Celebrating good grades. Perfect test scores. Reading books during recess. Swim meets and ocean swims. The breakup of my friendship with Kate. Debate competitions with Alex. Tutoring Jared and Chris in the library after school. Lifeguarding, walking on the beach with Nick.
And the emotion I feel is undoubtedly love—heart aching, chest filling, so powerful it hurts, like these are memories of someone watching me, someone whose happiest moments are when he sees me smile, and someone who aches and feels powerless and heartbroken when he knows I’m sad. Someone who loves me.
lackness again.
“Stay with me,” the voice says. “Janelle, stay with me.”
My eyes flutter open, and through blurred vision, I see a figure leaning over me. The sun is above, silhouetting him so I can’t make out any features. My whole body throbs with the rhythm of my pulse—each beat emphasizing the excruciating, ripping pain as it ebbs and flows through my body. My bones feel broken, I can barely breathe, and my heart pounds at express-train speed.
I try to move, try to see the guy above me, but I can’t. Because I can’t control my arms. Or my legs. In fact, I can’t even feel my legs. For all I know, they’re just gone.
“Hold on, Janelle. Hold on,” he whispers. Then, “I’m sorry. This will hurt.”
He moves his hand, which I just now realize had been resting palm down on my heart. It moves up to my shoulder, the warmth of his bare hand against my bare skin oddly cooling, and as his hand passes over my collarbone, I feel bones move and snap, not like they’re breaking, but like they’re melding back together.
“Ben!” someone shouts.
His hand flows over my arm, then reaches underneath to my back, settling on my spine. As he touches me, everything in my whole being feels like it’s not just on fire, but like I’m seconds from spontaneous combustion.
A flash of white again, brighter than looking at the sun—I can’t see anything—then this time I see myself as I must have looked only minutes ago. Wearing my red bathing suit and matching shorts. A dusting of sand sprinkled in patches on my olive skin. Running sneakers, no socks, my brown hair pulled into a messy ponytail. My cell phone to my ear, I pause, close my eyes, and pinch the bridge of my nose like I always do when I’m debating something. And then the truck is there as if it came from nowhere, and it’s hurtling toward me at breakneck speed.
And then I can’t breathe.
“Ben! We gotta go!”
Cool lips lightly touch my forehead, and the pain subsides, fading to a dull ache all over my body. My vision returns, and a pair of dark brown eyes—so dark they’re almost black—hover above me. He smells like a mix of mint, sweat, and gasoline. “You’re going to be all right,” he says, the relief of the statement coming out in a sort of sigh as he leans back.
I try to focus, because I know I recognize him from somewhere.
“You’re going to be all right,” he says again, only it’s not like he’s trying to convince me I’m okay—it’s more like he’s saying it to himself . . . out of relief. His smile widens as his hand reaches out and brushes a strand of hair from my face.
Then, of all the people in the world, Elijah Palma, notorious bad boy and stoner extraordinaire, is suddenly in my face, grabbing the arm of the guy in front of me.
That’s when recognition sets in. Those huge brown eyes, the wavy dark hair, the tortured half smile belong to another Eastview stoner. Ben Michaels. We’ve gone to school together since fifth grade. I’ve never spoken to him. Not even once.
“Let’s go!” a third voice shouts, and this one I know. Reid Suitor, who’s been in my homeroom and a few of my classes since middle school. Kate had a crush on him in eighth grade, but he wasn’t interested.
Elijah pulls Ben away from me, and as the two of them disappear from my line of sight, I struggle to sit up. My chest hurts with each breath I take, and my whole body feels bruised and broken. I can’t help but wonder if I just imagined everything—if the truck swerved to avoid me, if Ben pulled me out of the way, or if there was even a truck at all.
But when I sit up, I see the pickup, crashed into an embankment, the front end smashed in. And in my right hand, I’m still holding my cell phone, only it’s been crushed to pieces.
As if it had been run over. By a truck.
I look up to the road toward Del Mar, and I see Reid, Elijah, and Ben riding bicycles up the hill. For some reason I want Ben to look back, but he doesn’t.
Then suddenly people are everywhere. Surrounding me and saying my name. I recognize Elise and a parent of one of the baseball kids. And Kevin and Nick.
I wonder how long I was dead. Because I know with absolute certainty that I was. Dead.
And I also know with absolute certainty that somehow— even though it defies any logical explanation—Ben Michaels brought me back.
omeone called the paramedics, probably Steve. Even though I insisted I was fine, they loaded me up in the ambulance and sent me to Scripps Green, where they ushered me straight into an ER exam room.
Nick is with me, sitting next to me, holding my hand and talking about some time when he was a little kid and he fell off his bike. His dad was trying to teach him to ride, but since his dad isn’t patient or good at teaching anything, Nick fell.
I listen to him, to his story, and I try to focus on all the details—like the fact that it was a black-and-red Transformers bike his mom had bought custom-made down in Pacific Beach, and that his dad was really angry at him for falling and wanted him to get right back onto the bike. I know he’s just trying to help, so I swallow down the temptation to snort and say, You fell off your bike? I just got hit by a truck!
It’s weird, though. As he talks, I feel off—like I’m spacing out. I can’t help but think of Ben Michaels hovering over me, his hands on my skin, the way he said my name. The unflinching certainty that I was dead and now I’m not—and it’s because of Ben. Somehow, he brought me back to life.
Someone squeezes my hand, so I open my eyes—when did I close them?—and Nick smiles at me. He really is beautiful, but I honestly can’t remember how Nick even got here. Did he come in the ambulance with me? Or did he follow in his car?
“Janelle?” Nick asks. “Janelle, are you okay?”
He stands up and grips my hand too hard, and a wave of nausea rolls through me. He says something else, but I don’t hear him.
A nurse leans over me and shines a flashlight in my eyes. She turns and says something to someone close to her—not Nick. I’m not sure where he went. The nausea turns to cramps, and I just want to curl my knees into my chest and lie alone in the dark. But when I try to do that, someone grips my legs.
People yell at each other, and the whole room sounds fuzzy until I hear Alex. I can’t concentrate on who he’s talking to or what he’s saying, but I can tell by the cadence of his voice that it’s him. I want to ask when he got here and if my brother is okay. But my mouth doesn’t work, and his voice sounds farther and farther away.
My muscles uncoil and relax again, but I’m struggling to catch my breath, almost wheezing.
Something pinches my arm, and a steady warmth begins to spread through my body. Heaviness sets in. Hands let go of me, and I can’t hold myself up anymore. I slump down but fight to keep my eyes open. I wonder where Alex went.
Only I must say that out loud, because then he’s standing over me. “Just relax. You had a seizure, but you’re fine.”
“Alex.” I try to grab his arm, but my hand just flops around.
Because he speaks my language, he says, “Jared’s fine. I took him to polo and called your dad.”
And then he leans down so I can whisper in his ear. “At Torrey, the Jeep . . .”
“What happened to your car?” Nick asks, his face hovering above me.
Thankfully Alex hushes him and pushes him away as I close my eyes. “I’ll take care of it, don’t worry.”
There was something I wanted to tell him. Something important.
“Wait,” I whisper before he goes away. “Alex . . . I died.”
“Shh,” he whispers back, and I picture him shaking his head. “You’re going to be fine, Janelle. You’re going to be fine.”
The worst thing about coming back to life isn’t, believe it or not, how physically painful it is. Don’t get me wrong—even though all my bones seem to be working just fine, they feel like they were broken into tiny pieces. My body is stiff, it aches with a steady, throbbing consistency, and I’m having a hard time making it obey me the way it should.
But worse is the hollowness.
It makes sense, really. I just looked into the great expanse of nothingness, had a moment—no matter how quickly it passed—to think about what my seventeen years add up to, and the dominant emotion staring back at me now is regret.
It’s not that I haven’t accomplished things. It’s not that the people I leave behind won’t remember me. It’s not even that I’m young and there was so much more I wanted to experience—so much more I wanted to do.
It’s the realization that I was practically dead already.
It’s that for the past I don’t know how many years, I’ve moved through life stuffed with straw, hollow and unfeeling. Day after day passed, and I went through the motions and focused on the mundane because the significant was too hard. I had conversations about schoolwork, weather, laundry, groceries, even sports, because things like quitting swimming, losing my best friend, getting drugged at a party, watching my mother’s mood swings slowly kill her, watching my father give up on her—on us—all threatened to unleash a floodgate.
I go out with a guy who, when he’s being serious, is interesting and funny and sort of sweet. We get along well enough, too, but if I’m really honest with myself, I don’t see a future with him. I can’t even see us together when school starts, let alone see myself trying to date him long-distance or go visit him when he’s in college. And I know we just started dating, but isn’t that what I should be imagining if I was really into him—isn’t that part of the reason why people start dating? Yet I choose to date him rather than hold out for someone I could love. Why? Because his ex-girlfriend’s a bitch? Because he’s pretty? Because it feels good to be liked? Because I don’t want to date someone I really care about since it will hurt more when it ends? Since I’d have to try?
How can I ever dare to meet my own eyes again? I can’t. Not even in dreams.
That night, in a drug-induced sedation, I dream my brother is crying, and instead of my dad teasing Jared to “man up” like he always does, I hear his voice, even and soothing. I can’t quite catch what he’s saying at first. Then Jared sniffs, and my father says, Your sister’s so tough, it’s frightening. That girl will outlive us all.
I dream about Ben Michaels hovering over me, somehow bringing me back from the dead.
And I dream about a doctor and two nurses looking at my X-rays. They stand right near my bed, the X-rays up in the light box. One of the nurses leaves as the doctor points to something on the image.
The doctor and remaining nurse whisper to each other.
The nurse comes back, and she’s brought another doctor with her. The four of them gesture to the X-ray, their voices floating through the room.
It looks like her backbone and spinal cord were completely severed and fused back together.
An old injury, maybe?
Maybe she had surgery?
Nothing in her medical history.
They sigh.
It doesn’t . . . it doesn’t look like an old injury . . . and even if it was . . . I’m not sure how anyone would be able to walk after an injury like that.
She’s lucky she isn’t paralyzed.
Lucky? It’s a miracle she’s even alive.
he day I’m released from the hospital my dad takes me home.
“She should rest,” Dr. Abrams tells him. “Stay off her feet, no physical exertion—”
“You said she hasn’t had any more seizures after the first one,” my dad says.
Dr. Abrams nods and explains why it’s important to keep an eye on me anyway.
To anyone else, it would look like my dad is listening respectfully and absorbing the details. I know better. He tugs on his left ear, which means he’s annoyed and running low on patience. He asks specific questions that suggest more medical knowledge than he has, which means he’s shown my test results and chart to someone at the Bureau, probably a medical examiner.
I don’t exactly care, though, that my dad has been giving everyone in the hospital a hard time. I’ve got more important things to focus on. Like what the hell Ben Michaels did to me. It’s just about all I’ve been able to think about since I woke up. I tried to have the conversation several times—where I said, “Alex, I died,” and he patted me like a two-year-old and basically said,
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I roll my head to the side to look at Jared. “What’s up, dude? You gonna tell me what happened to your hand?”
His right hand looks slightly bruised. I reach out, touching his knuckles. He winces. “What happened?” I whisper.
“I tried to punch Alex,” Jared says with a shrug. But he at least has the decency to drop his eyes and look embarrassed. “He’s fine, though.”
I made Alex take self-defense classes with me the summer before sophomore year. We always joked that if a guy attacked us, Alex would duck and I would knee the guy in the balls. (There’s a rumor I’m the reason Dave Kotlar only has one testicle now, but it’s a total lie. I have no idea what he did to himself, but since he hasn’t made any big attempts to dispel the rumors, it must be way more embarrassing than getting beat up by a girl.)
So I know if my brother—who’s never been in a fight in his life—tried to throw a punch at Alex, my best friend would do what he’s best at. He would duck.
“You were in the hospital, dying for all he knew, and Alex took me to polo.”
“Um, because I asked him to. Alex is well trained.”
Jared doesn’t smile like I want him to.
“Jared—”
“Whatever, it doesn’t matter,” he huffs. “I missed anyway.”
I open my mouth to try to explain, but I realize that would mean explaining my friendship with Alex, and I don’t know how to explain something that’s just always existed. He’s lived two doors down from me my whole life. Once upon a time, our moms took us to playgroups together, swimming lessons, even dance classes.
But Jared knows that. What he doesn’t know is that Alex has been helping me deal with our mother’s illness and cover up her drinking since Jared was too young to know there was a problem. Or that our friendship has survived because Alex listens to me. Because Alex knows that supporting me means tackling obstacles my way—head-on. And I don’t know how to explain that Alex is the only reason I’ve been able to stay sane while Dad worked and I had to be a parent—the only reason Jared has been able to do things like play water polo.
Which is why Alex, despite how much he would have been freaking out on the inside, would have taken Jared to polo like it was just another normal day.
But by the time I have all that sorted out in my head, Jared has started telling me about his first (half) day of school— freshman orientation.
“After the assembly and the tour, I went to my first two classes—”
“What do you have?”
He frowns at me. “Biology and ENS. But the cool part was, after I came out of ENS, Nick and Kevin were waiting for me.”
Exercise Nutritional Science is a glorified gym class all freshmen have to take, but more importantly . . . “Nick and Kevin were on campus?”
Jared nods. “They brought three pizzas from Uncle Vinnie’s for me and my friends, and we all sat and ate, and they told stories about their freshman year. It was awesome.”
“Awesome?” I ask, even though I don’t need to. Anyone getting attention from the two most popular seniors at East-view would be glowing a little. If Nick and Kevin were here, I would hug them—even Kevin—because I want my brother to be happy more than anything. And he’ll probably be over the moon all week.
“Yeah, did you know they had English together their freshman year? Nick said Kevin used to lean back in his chair all the time. And every day their teacher would say, ‘Mr. Collins, don’t lean back in your chair, please,’ and he’d say, ‘Okay,’ but then he’d do it anyway.”
I am not at all surprised by this story.
“And then one day when Kevin was hitting on this hot girl in his class, he leaned back just a little too far and he fell over. But it didn’t matter because the girl he liked went out with him that weekend anyway.”
Again, I’m not surprised.
“And Kevin said they used to jump up and touch the overhang whenever they were coming down the library steps. They’d even run, jump, hit the ledge, and then jump down the rest of the stairs, but near the end of freshman year, they both did it one time, only when they jumped, Nick fell and got a concussion.”
I can easily picture Kevin and Nick jumping down the library steps and somehow managing to wipe out. “What about the rest of your classes?”
He shrugs, obviously less interested. “I have ceramics and then English with Sherwood.”
I wince at the name of his English teacher. Jared will never be able to write an essay if I don’t get him out of there.
“Yeah, Kevin took one look at my schedule and told me to run for the hills.”
“He did?” This time I am surprised—in a good way.
Jared nods. “He and Nick said I should fill out a schedule change request to be bumped into honors. So I did that before Nick drove me home.”
I’m suddenly not sure whether I should be pleased or worried about the interest Nick is taking in my brother. On the one hand, I can’t believe he convinced him to take an honors class, and I’m undoubtedly in their debt for getting Jared to actually follow directions and get out of Sherwood’s class—anyone who doubts that there’s something wrong with public education in this country just needs to sit in her class for a day to know—but what will happen to Jared if Nick and I break up?
“All right, J-baby, you ready?” my dad says before I can think of a way to explain that to my brother.
“I’d really prefer if you didn’t call me that in public,” I say as I slide out of the hospital bed and into the wheelchair they’ve brought for me.
My dad smiles because he knows I don’t really mean it, and Jared slips in behind me, half pushing, half hopping. My back is stiff and my leg muscles are still sore, but I could feel worse—I could be dead.
Also, I’ll be back at school this week. So will Ben Michaels. And I plan on figuring out exactly what happened.
“What’s for dinner tonight?” Jared asks. “Something we can get delivered,” I say at the same time my dad says, “I asked Struz to pick up some Chinese.”
“Sweet!” Jared says. “You think he’ll get that awesome spicy kung pao chicken? I haven’t had that in forever. Or, oh—call him and tell him to get the special General Tso’s!”
Ryan Struzinski, aka Struz, has been working with my dad for ten years. He’s in his thirties now, I think, but he’s really an overgrown kid with a superhero complex. It’s why he and my dad get along so well. Knowing Struz, he’ll order the whole left side of the menu. “Don’t worry, Jared. Something tells me we’ll have enough food.”
“What about egg rolls? And fortune cookies. He’d better get a shitload of them.”
Jared is still running down the list of Chinese food he’s hoping for—that kid can eat his way through anything—when we get outside. My dad’s car is parked in the fire lane—shocking. Even less shocking is the collection of file boxes that he has to move to squeeze both Jared and my wheelchair into the backseat—no doubt because he’s going to work late into the night. Just like he would any other night. Tonight he’ll just have to work at home.
“You and Struz planning to Mulder and Scully it after Chinese tonight?” I ask as I slide my seat belt on. My dad has every season of The X-Files on DVD. When we were little, instead of Saturday morning cartoons, Jared and I had Saturday morning X-Files marathons.
“Dude, have you found the unit that hunts aliens yet?” Jared asks.
My dad chuckles. “Not yet, but don’t worry. I won’t give up. Hunting aliens is the reason I joined the FBI, after all.” This is actually not a lie. Of course, the truth is that there isn’t a unit that actually hunts aliens. There aren’t enough creepy cases that point to aliens or unsolved paranormal mysteries to assign to even one guy in a basement.
“The truth is out there,” Jared says with a laugh.
“I want to believe,” I add, because that’s my line. Yes, I am aware how lame we are.
“Trust no one,” my dad says, trying to make his voice sound ominous.
“Believe the lie!” Jared shouts.
I let the two of them continue to volley taglines back and forth during the ride home. I jump in occasionally when there’s a lull and Jared is trying to remember a good quote, but mostly I think about the same thing I’ve thought about the whole two days I spent lounging around the hospital. I think of Ben Michaels—of the fact that I was dead and now I’m not. Because all that X-Files stuff is only entertaining until it hits too close to home. Right now none of it is as strange as Ben Michaels bringing me back from the dead.
As my dad turns off the car, I gesture to the wheelchair. “We can just leave that in the car. I’m fine.”
“J-baby, are you—”
“Dad. I’m fine.”
Jared jumps in front of us and unlocks the front door, and my dad is about to say something when the sound of glass breaking makes all three of us freeze.
or the past nine years, my dad has been the head of the counterintelligence unit at the San Diego office of the FBI. It’s ironic, really. This man who dedicates his life to the pursuit of truth, who works a nineteen-and-a-half-hour work day, who watches repeats of The X-Files and quotes it to his children, lives in a house where Truth always remains Unsaid.
And for almost as long as I can remember, I’ve learned to do the same.
My mother is bipolar. And at present, she’s not exactly functioning.
When I was seven, during one of her manic episodes, she stopped taking her meds, pulled both Jared and me out of school, and drove us up the coast—at least twenty miles over the speed limit, with the windows down—all day and into the night, until we stopped at the Northern California border and got a hotel room. We stayed up late, jumped on the beds, had a popcorn fight, and laughed until our stomachs cramped.
By the next morning she’d come down and wouldn’t get out of bed. We were holed up in our room at the Anchor Beach Inn in Crescent City, California, with the curtains drawn and the lights turned off, while she slept it off for two days before my dad found us and brought us home.
After that, my mom and dad fought—about her medicine, about Jared and me, about how much she slept and how much he worked, about her medication and his inability to express his feelings, about her spontaneity and his rigid schedule, about everything. They fought all the time—days, weeks, months, years. Until at some point—and I can’t remember when— the fighting stopped, she started drinking herself into a self-medicating coma, and our house just fell . . . silent.
And Jared and I were on our own.
’ll go check on her,” I say, ignoring the wave of anxiety rolling through my stomach.
My dad shakes his head. “I can do it. You just—”
“I’m okay—promise,” I say, giving him my best I’m fine! smile. “She’ll want to see me anyway, and you have to bring in the boxes.” I don’t wait for a response. Both Jared and my dad are secretly happy to let me do the honors, even if they won’t tell themselves that.
I slip into her bedroom and pull the door shut behind me, carefully enough so it doesn’t make a sound as it latches. Her bedroom is cloaked in darkness. The combination of the thick shade and the heavy velour drapes pulled tightly over the picture window blocks out every speck of light, and I have to pause and let my eyes adjust. If I didn’t know it was summer and the sun hadn’t yet set outside, I’d think it was the middle of the night. More disturbing is the stale smell of the air—like old, wet newspaper and mold. The recorded sound of rain plays softly on repeat, and I hear her grunt as soft light floods the bathroom.
I ignore the clothes and bedsheets strewn all over the room and breathe through my mouth as I move to the bathroom.
“Mom?” I ask. I hesitate before I open the door, like I always do. Because I’m afraid of what I might see on the other side. “Are you okay?”
“Oh, fine, just fine,” she answers as the faucet turns on. I let go of a breath I didn’t know I was holding and push open the door.
Her wild hair is standing on end, black against the paleness of her skin. Under her T-shirt and shorts, I can see the bones sticking out at her joints in all the wrong places, and when her eyes meet mine in the mirror, I’m struck with the image of her I remembered when I was dying—and how it should be some sort of crime for God to let a woman like that turn into someone like this.
“Janelle?” she asks, fumbling with a foil packet of Advil. All the medication in our house now comes in single-serving packets. “Are you feeling better? Your father said you were sick.”
I nod. “I’m fine.” It’s possible he told her what happened with the truck and she forgot, or it’s possible he didn’t tell her at all. I’m not sure which is worse, but it doesn’t matter because the result is the same.
A quick glance at the broken glass in the sink—not on the floor and no blood—tells me she’s fine. The thin layer of dust covering the whole bathroom tells me I need to stop avoiding this room and get in here to clean this weekend.
“My head just hurts so much.” She throws a hand over her eyes to shield them from the light.
“Here, let me help you.” I’ve barely torn open the packet when she snatches the pills from my hand and swallows them dry. “Have you eaten anything today? Struz is bringing over Chinese food.”
“Great, the whole house will smell awful,” she says with a snort. “It’s like your father does this to me on purpose. He knows how terrible my headaches are and he knows how much strong smells bother me. And loud noises. I just need peace and quiet. I need to rest.”
I flick off the bathroom light and help her back to bed.
“I just need to rest,” she repeats as she gets under the covers. She looks small and fragile, like a sick child instead of my mother. “Can you get me a cold compress?”
Part of me wants to say, Get your own compress, but instead I nod.
Just because I died and had a moment of reflection doesn’t mean anything’s going to change around here.
It’ll take a lot more to wake this hollow heart.
hoa, whoa, whoa!” Struz says, his six-foot-seven-inch wingspan flailing around the dining room table, almost knocking into both me and Jared.
I make eye contact with Alex, who’s been eating his second dinner with us every night since he was old enough to think up a good excuse to walk over to our house by himself—his mom cooks only organic, vegan, and gluten-free meals. He grins at me as he goes to take a sip of his Coke, but thinks better of it. Probably because he knows what’s coming. Struz has made us laugh until soda comes out of our noses many times.
Struz continues, “Jim! You gotta be kidding me. You mean you haven’t done a background check or a fingerprint analysis or anything on this Nick character?”
Jared laughs so hard he spits some of his Chinese food back onto his plate. Alex throws his napkin at Struz’s face. Dad and I shush them.
Struz dramatically wipes a hand through his hair and turns back to his captive audience. “That’s just not okay. I mean, seriously!” he continues, his voice quieter now, as he gestures to the flowers Nick brought earlier. “Jared! This guy brought J-baby roses! Pink ones! And we don’t even know who he is. What is wrong with your father?”
“Nick could be a terrorist,” Alex says. He finds that way too funny.
“He could be an alien!” Jared laughs.
I roll my eyes.
“No, seriously,” Dad says. “Let’s hear something about this guy. How did he win you over?”
Batting his eyes like a cartoon character, Alex says, “He’s dreamy,” with a dramatic sigh.
“That better not be an imitation of me,” I say.
Alex just laughs.
I look at Struz, who does his “give it to me” hand gesture, and then Dad, who also appears to be waiting for some kind of response. “Nick’s smart; he works hard.”
“At sports,” Alex coughs.
“Don’t be such an intellectual snob.”
“Seriously, Alex,” Struz says. “Professional athletes get a lot of play.”
I ignore that comment, since Dad and I haven’t really ever had the “who are you dating” conversation, and I’d prefer not to have it right now. And I’d really prefer not to talk about any of the guys in my life and how much “play” they are or aren’t getting. Struz included. “Nick wants to play football at USC next year,” I add, because something needs to be said.
“I suppose if he goes to USC, he’s good enough for me,” Struz says—not surprising, since that’s where he went to college. “But if he goes to UCLA, you have to break up.”
Jared laughs and announces that his lifelong dream is to go to UCLA, and I break open a fortune cookie. Stuffing the cookie into my mouth, I unroll the fortune and can’t help snorting a laugh.
Everyone pauses. “What’s it say?” Jared asks, reaching across the table.
Instead of answering, I flick the fortune to Alex before getting up. I grab my plate and a couple of empty cartons and head into the kitchen. Just before I turn the water on, I hear Alex’s voice reading my fortune. “Soon life will become more interesting.”
Jared’s unrestrained laughter drowns out what anyone else might be saying, and I’m glad.
I see those images of myself playing out again, watching my life pass me by. As if dying and then being resurrected weren’t enough—as if anything could become more interesting than that.
“Just not sure if interesting will be a good or a bad thing, huh?” Alex asks when he comes through the kitchen. He hands me the dirty dishes and opens the cabinet to grab some Tupperware. Struz did order the left side of the menu, and we’ll be eating Chinese for the next few days.
“I was dead, Alex,” I repeat, because we’ve had this conversation already. At least six times. In the hospital. Whenever Alex made it into my room without Jared or Nick.
“J,” Alex whispers, his hand falling on my arm, “I can’t imagine all the shit you’re feeling, but come on—you got hit by a truck, you lost consciousness, and you had seizures in the hospital.”
“One seizure.”
He pulls his hand back. “It wouldn’t be out of the ordinary for your mind to make something up. Besides, when’s the last time Ben Michaels and Elijah Palma even came to the beach?”
I can’t argue with that. I’m at the beach almost every day, and I can’t remember ever seeing them. Not that I would have been looking, though.
Logically, I know he’s right. I’ve heard the Near-Death Experience stories. People seeing angels, tunnels of light, balls of energy, even God. I don’t believe in that. I believe the mind is a powerful thing, and I believe people see what they want to see.
But why did I see Ben Michaels?
“J, did you hear what I said?”
“Hmm?”
Alex glances at the door to the dining room and lowers his voice as he sits on top of the counter and leans over my shoulder. “We should be asking about John Doe, his truck, and where the hell it came from.”
I found out some of the details at the hospital. After hitting me—if it even did—the truck crashed into an embankment and the driver—still unidentified, since the license in his wallet was a fake—died on impact.
Based on the skid marks and the collision, they’re betting he was flying down the hill at more than eighty miles an hour. It’s no wonder I didn’t see the truck coming.
But I still feel like an imposter—alive, when he’s not.
“Are you listening to me?”
“What? Sorry.” I turn off the water and dry my hands, making an attempt to give Alex my full attention.
“I was saying . . .” He draws it out, and I wave my hand to hurry him along. “I found out the truck that hit you, there’s no record of it. They couldn’t pull up the plates or the guy’s registration in the system—no record of any of them.”
“Wait, what was the fake name?”
Alex balks. “Does it matter?”
I don’t have a reason that I can explain. But it does matter.
“Don’t obsess over the unimportant stuff,” Alex says, and I nod because the last thing I want to do is get into an argument about my tendency to overanalyze and the way it drives Alex crazy. “Nothing he had on him matched anything in the DMV database.”
“What, so they’re all fake?”
Alex shrugs. “I don’t know. I only half heard the conversation your dad was having with the cops afterward, but when they ran the VIN and even the parts for the truck, nada.”
“That’s impossible. Even if somebody made fake plates and IDs—even if they stole parts from several trucks, the model numbers would still register. They’d just register to different vehicles.” I shake my head. “Who would go to the trouble for an old Toyota?”
“That’s the kicker,” Alex says, folding his arms across his chest and leaning against the kitchen counter. When he does that, he looks weirdly like my dad. “It’s not a Toyota.”
“Please, are we really going to have an argument about cars again? I thought we agreed you’d stick to calc and physics and leave practical knowledge to me.”
He smiles but doesn’t say anything. He knows something I don’t. And he’s dying to share. I wave for him to continue.
“The frame of the truck is the same design as a ’79 Toyota, but the engine and the vehicle paperwork, even the logo are all really different. It’s actually a 1997 Velociadad.”
“A what?” I turn back to the dishwasher. “I’ve never even heard of a car company anywhere in the world by that name.”
“Which is probably why I heard your dad ask if the truck appeared out of thin air,” Alex says.
I’m not even sure what I can say about that—what can anyone?
Alex is right, of course. This is more important than whether Ben Michaels resurrected me or I hallucinated it. This is real, and my dad is investigating it. That automatically gives it more urgency. It’s something I can handle now.
“Could someone be running a chop shop?” Alex asks. “Stealing vehicles, repackaging and reselling them as something else?”
“It’s possible, but why bother with all the hassle?”
Alex just shrugs and doesn’t say anything else, which means we’ve both reached our limit. Because I’m still pissed that he doesn’t believe that I died, I add, “No theories? C’mon, they don’t let just anyone into West Point.”
“Don’t say that out loud.” Alex looks around shiftily.
I roll my eyes. “Your mother hasn’t bugged my house as far as I know.”
“Your dad thinks I’ll be able to get in.” Of course Alex will get in. He has a 4.6 GPA and he’s bilingual. And my dad will write him a recommendation, since he went to West Point and graduated at the top of his class. Which is one of the reasons Alex wants to go.
Alex has gone silent, staring into space with his jaw set. I feel bad now for making him think about all the drama he’ll have to deal with when he finally admits to his mother he’s not going to graduate early and go to Stanford, thereby deviating from the life plan she’s been outlining for him since he was conceived.
“So which one of the boxes do you think has stuff about the truck in it?” I ask, because getting back to the investigation will be the only way to make him feel better—and because I know my dad has info about the truck. It doesn’t matter that the FBI doesn’t allow you to investigate anything that happens to you or your family or even people you know. My dad wouldn’t let a truck just appear out of thin air and hit me without investigating it.
“When I helped Jared bring them into the office, I set the lightest box in the back corner, farthest from his desk.” He doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t need to. We’ve been spying on my dad and comparing notes about his cases practically forever. We’re nerds like that.
hen my cell phone beeps in the middle of the night, I almost say Whatever and go back to sleep. A stolen Toyota—or whatever it is—is hardly worth waking up to check out.
Except for the fact that the driver is dead, when it should have been me.
I roll out of bed and fumble into the hallway. We’ve lived here my whole life, and I’ve done the get-up-in-the-middle-ofthe-night stunt enough that I don’t need to turn on the lights. But I curse silently as I head down the stairs and see the sliver of light coming from my dad’s study. Either he and poor Struz are still working, or he’s fallen asleep at his desk.
I imagine it’s this way for all law-enforcement agents—long hours, sleepless nights, obsessive attention to detail, poring over case files. Every FBI agent I know has at least two cases they’ll never forget and never stop thinking about, investigations they’ll carry with them in the back of their minds always, for their entire lives. The one that went right. And the one that went wrong.
For my dad, the case that went right was the one that made his career.
It was more than ten years ago. It was his first case with Struz, who was a junior analyst at the time. I was too young to remember any of the details now, except the ones I heard repeated whenever he relived the story.
Ten Russian spies were discovered and arrested in Temecula, of all places. One was a Fox News reporter, popular with the public and, of course, beautiful. She ended up getting caught in a trap an undercover FBI agent set for her, and as a result all ten of them—and some guy bankrolling them in Budapest—went down. The undercover agent? My dad.
But the case that went wrong—the one still unsolved—is even older. It happened one of his first years on the job, before he got involved in counterintelligence. When my mom was pregnant with me—just after she’d found out I was a girl.
A seventeen-year-old girl—captain of the swim team, with an academic scholarship to USC, a boyfriend, friends, the perfect family, with a dog and white picket fence—went missing from her bedroom. All her possessions were untouched and in their rightful place. No forced entry, no signs of a break-in, no one heard or saw anything unusual—it was like she just . . . disappeared into thin air.
Except for a bloody partial handprint on her wall.
The files are all still on the corner of his desk. My dad reads them every night before he goes to sleep. If he even sleeps at all.
When I get to the bottom of the stairs and peek inside his office, it’s empty. The boxes are all over the place, some of them open, piles of papers laid out everywhere. My dad’s one of those visual/tactile learners. He’s got to lay everything out, move it around, and really study it, and then answers just come to him.
Obviously, he and Struz were working, and on an older case, something ongoing if it has this much of a paper trail, but everything looks like he just left it and went up to bed.
Which isn’t like him.
Although his oldest child did just come back from the dead. I suppose I could cut him some slack.
The “light” box that Alex strategically placed so I could snoop through it is one of the open ones. Only it doesn’t have anything to do with my truck or the driver. It’s an old case file from 1983, a series of deaths in California and Nevada, where the victims were killed from radiation poisoning. Deep gamma burns practically disfigured the bodies, most likely the result of some kind of nuclear exposure.
I leaf through the pages, scanning them for anything that might explain why these old files are in my dad’s study. Apparently, nothing other than the actual bodies had any kind of radiation residue—as if the bodies had been dumped somewhere else after exposure.
“All the nuclear plants nearby were searched, and nothing was found amiss.” I jump and drop the folders back into the box. “And the victims were never identified. Not even by dental records.”
When I turn around, my dad is leaning in the doorway to the office. He’s in sweatpants and an old army T-shirt—one that he doesn’t quite fill out the way he used to—his tattoos peeking out from under the sleeves. The lines in his face are starting to show, and his hair is starting to gray. He wears “tired” like an old friend.
“So they just stopped investigating?”
“I’ve got boxes full of theories and investigation notes,” he says with a shrug. “But they never found anything, and there were only three victims. After that, it seemed like just the Bureau’s presence stopped whatever was happening.”
This bothers me more than knowing that there are people out there who we know are guilty, but can’t prove it. This is more than just a flaw in the system. Because no one figured it out. These people died alone, and they’re the only ones who know how it happened—them and whoever was responsible. Someone else should know.
I’m about to say something when I see a photograph on top of a stack of papers on my dad’s desk. It looks like the body of a man—I think—and I can’t tell how old he is, because his body is so badly distorted by the radiation burns that he doesn’t even look human.
Nausea rolls through me. This photograph isn’t from the eighties. Based on the time stamp at the bottom corner, it’s from last week. Six days ago.
“Don’t ask,” my dad says before I can open my mouth. He moves farther into the room and flips over the photograph. “You know I can’t talk about active cases.”
The distorted image of the dead man in the photo is burned into my retinas, and I have to blink a few times to try to see something else. And that’s when I realize there was something else in the photograph—a set of numbers, written in marker on top of the picture. 29:21:33:21.
hat are the numbers?” I ask as I reach for the photo and turn it over. For a minute I feel a sense of déjà vu, like I’ve seen them before. Then I realize why. They’re similar to a set of numbers I saw out of the corner of my eye when I walked in, written on top of another picture—one I hadn’t really looked at.
There are photos everywhere in this office. Reaching across the table, I grab a different one. This one is the body of a woman. The whole right side of her body is covered in burns that render her unrecognizable. The left side of her body looks pristine. It makes it even harder to look at her.
The numbers are there, though, in my dad’s handwriting. Written in black Sharpie in the top corner of the image. 44:14:38:44. I look back at the other set of numbers and the photograph of the dead man. The dates of the incidents on the time stamps are fifteen days apart. “It’s a countdown, but to what?”
A quick look of surprise flits across my dad’s face before he looks even-keeled again, and I know I’ve hit it right.
He shakes his head the way he does when he can’t figure something out.
“You’re counting down to something. I mean, what’s the end date?” Because that’s the bottom line—what’s important. Countdowns lead to something. What and when are the important questions to answer first. The how and why will come later.
He doesn’t answer. Not that I really expected him to. The fact that he hasn’t shooed me back upstairs to bed yet means he’s frustrated enough to forget the rules.
I set down the photograph and reach for one of the reports, skimming for numbers. I see them—46:05:49:21—and a reference to forty-six days only a sentence later. But I see something else too—UIED—before my dad remembers himself and pulls the report from my hand, placing it back on his desk.
“There’s something off about this one.” I have no idea what he means by “off.” He’s investigated thousands of cases, and there’s always one keeping him up at night.
But I know what UIED means—Unidentified Improvised Explosive Device.
How a countdown factors into a UIED is relatively easy to deduce. The countdown is a timer for some kind of explosive. But what it has to do with the bodies and the radiation is well beyond me.
“Where did you find an unidentified explosive device?” I ask. “Is it a bomb?” I grab the report back from him and flip through it.
“San Diego PD followed a lead and found it in an abandoned motel room after the first crime scene two months ago. They called in the bomb squad and us.”
“And?” But I’m still flipping through the report, and one line catches my eye.
So far all attempts to stop the countdown have been unsuccessful.
“This thing isn’t like anything I’ve ever seen,” my dad says, but it’s clear from his quiet, distant tone that he’s talking to himself. Then he sees the look on my face and adds, “The bodies and the UIED might not be connected,” but I can tell he doesn’t believe that.
I gesture to the countdown on the photographs. “You’re keeping track of how it relates to these deaths. How does it?” He must at least think it does, if he’s gone to the trouble to cross-reference them down to the second of the countdown. But even with my photographic memory and affinity for numbers, I don’t see an obvious connection. “Is there some kind of pattern?” If there is, I don’t see it.
My dad shakes his head, and for a minute I think he’s going to tell me—to say something else about the case. But instead he nods toward the door. “Go on, go back to bed.”
My skin itches—or rather, something underneath my skin itches—everywhere.
“You have to be exhausted, J-baby,” my dad says. “Don’t worry about this one. You know I’ll figure it out.”
I nod and leave the room, even though I’m not convinced the way I usually am.
I was exhausted. But now I’m not. Because I have the same feeling I did when I watched Ben Michaels ride his bike up Highway 101. Deep-seated conviction. A feeling of absolute certainty I couldn’t ignore even if I wanted to.
I glance at my watch and hope being resurrected from the dead didn’t affect my ability to do math in my head. Based on the time stamps of the photographs, we’re at twenty-one days, seventeen hours, thirty-nine minutes, seventeen seconds. And counting.
t’s been four days, and I still haven’t been able to figure out how the UIED fits in with my dad’s case. I’ve tried to do some more snooping, but Dad has taken to locking his office when he knows I’m around and he isn’t. I can’t stop thinking about it, though. Those radiation burns are all I see when I close my eyes.
But the first person I see when I get out of Nick’s car in Eastview’s student lot is Ben Michaels.
He looks exactly like the Ben Michaels I would have pictured before: standing with a group of other nondescript stoners, all wearing similar dark hoodies and grungy, no-name-band T-shirts, most of them smoking something more than conventional cigarettes, some of them drinking something more than water from a water bottle. Elijah Palma and Reid Suitor stand in the center of the group; Ben’s on the outskirts, shoulders slumped and his hands buried deep in the pockets of his baggy jeans while he half leans against some rich kid’s SUV. I can’t see his eyes under the mess of dark brown curls, but I wonder if he’s staring back at me.
And I feel like my forehead—the exact spot where his cool lips brushed my skin—is on fire, and I have this crazy urge to reach up and somehow wipe his touch away.
“Janelle, c’mon!”
Jared and Nick are a car’s length away from me, walking toward the school. I shift my bag and follow them, ignoring Nick’s raised eyebrow and the flood of heat rushing to my face.
Just like I ignore the stares from half the senior class when Nick puts his arm around my shoulder and we walk through the front gate.
Normally I’d be driving myself and getting to school early but I’m not allowed to drive. Once you have a seizure, even if it’s just one, you’re marked as a possible epileptic. Not that I don’t get it, I do. I’m just not a fan of this rule when it applies to me.
This means I’ve missed two days of school. Thursday Struz took me to see a specialist. She ran some tests, and hopefully she’ll clear me to drive when the results come back. And it’s not like anything ever happens on the first day of school anyway.
I missed an AP diagnostic and listening to the teacher read the syllabus? Oh, too bad. Friday my mother couldn’t stop throwing up, and even though I think she’s been taking all her meds, on days when her body has a physical manifestation of her depression, someone needs to keep an eye on her. And it’s not like my dad can do it.
“So, Bread Bites for lunch?” Nick asks when we’re standing outside my homeroom.
“I can’t,” I say, thankful for a legit excuse. It’s not that I don’t want to hang out with him—I do. I just hate that suddenly because I was injured he’s gone from goofy, immature, half-brained Nick to this skittish, hovering, insecure woodland creature who wants to attach himself to me at all times.
But Nick just looks at me, and he doesn’t jump to the obvious conclusion.
“Juniors don’t get off-campus lunches.”
A smile sweeps over his face, and he nods. “I can get you off campus for lunch. Or we can order delivery.”
And with that, the irritable, bitchy edge I’ve been walking around with the past few days melts away. Staying on campus for lunch as a senior is social suicide, and he’s risking it for me?
“It was awesome of you to bring Jared pizza, but you don’t need to worry about me like that.” Not that Nick’s popularity is going to suffer, but he never struck me as the kind of guy who’d forgo bullshitting with the boys to hang out with a girl. And I don’t need him to do that for me.
“Don’t look so surprised.” He laughs as he leans in and kisses the skin just beneath my ear.
Feeling his lips against my skin, I’m a little short of breath, and the smile on his face when he pulls back is almost enough to turn me into most girls.
Until I see Reid Suitor walk past us with his head down as he ducks into our homeroom. I don’t know exactly what I plan to say to him. But I know he was there when I died. He must know something.
“Gotta go,” I say to Nick before following Reid. He and I have been in Dockery’s homeroom since freshman year, and just like every other year, her walls are covered with old history posters—facts about US presidents, magazine collages about momentous dates or events. The only thing worse would be, of course, if the walls peeking out from behind the posters were painted something like a stifling bright orange. Oh wait, they are.
Per usual, Dockery’s animated face shines through her pile of platinum-blond hair, and she’s lost in a story about something embarrassing that happened to her while she was driving— seriously, her license should be revoked, not mine—but I wait, watching Reid, who’s perfectly in my line of sight.
He’s found the other two stoners in our homeroom, and the three of them are huddled together in the back corner as far away from Dockery as they can get.
I’ve never for the life of me understood Reid Suitor. Outwardly he doesn’t look like he’d have anything in common with Ben. His jeans seem like they fit, and he’s wearing a blue collared shirt and a gray V-neck sweater, which would look nerdy on most guys, but somehow it manages to look alternative on him. He’s always been cute—Kate’s probably still a little in love with him—and he’s got these bright blue eyes, eyelashes that extend for days, and sandy brown hair. Really, he could probably be some kind of Calvin Klein model.
But more than that, I know there’s a brain behind that pretty face. I had to proofread one of his essays in Honors Humanities last year—luck of the draw—and not only was his paper done, but it was actually good. Good enough that I had to struggle to edit it, which doesn’t happen to me often.
“Oh, Janelle!” Dockery says, handing me my schedule. “We missed you last week. I was so sorry to hear about your accident. I’m glad you’re okay!”
“Thanks,” I say before glaring at Alex, who’s already sitting at our usual table.
He just shrugs, like he can’t understand why I wouldn’t want Dockery—and thus the entire school—to know I got hit by a truck and came back from the dead. For someone so anti-drama, he’s clueless about how it starts.
With a sigh, I drop my bag next to him and flop into my chair before glancing down at my schedule. Once I look at it, I’m tempted to tear it into pieces.
It’s all wrong. Which is a nightmare. Because Miss Florentine, my guidance counselor, is overworked, and schedule changes are never guaranteed.
I look at my schedule again.
Earth science, American Literature, algebra, and chorus. So I’m supposed to take science for stoners, basic English, and freshman math. I wouldn’t mind chorus, but I don’t sing.
“Don’t be overdramatic. It’s not that bad,” Alex says. “Just follow my schedule. I’m sure we can get you bumped into my classes.”
Last resort, I could get my dad to call and complain, since that’s how things actually get done around here. I cannot get through junior year in classes with freshmen and stoners. “How full are your classes?” I ask as the bell rings.
“You should be fine for Spanish, but APEL . . . ,” Alex says, and I can’t stifle a groan. He wrinkles his nose. “Poblete had thirty-five of us on Thursday and forty-one on Friday.”
Thirty-two is supposed to be the cap on the AP English Language class. I’m doomed.
The majority of first period passes like this:
Alex goes to physics, and I head to the counseling office. The secretary says Florentine can’t possibly see me right now. I reword my request until she changes her mind.
Florentine says my schedule can be changed, but the classes I want are full.
I reword, and she sends me to Mr. Elksen, the VP in charge of scheduling, who can apparently override the rules.
Elksen’s secretary says I’ll have to come back later.
I try to reword, but she actually has a backbone.
I head to Principal Mauro’s office instead to see if she’ll override my schedule for me.
Her secretary says she’s busy, and I’ll have to come back later.
Mauro herself comes out to see what’s going on.
She says I have to fill out a schedule change request form and speak to Elksen like everyone else.
It’s amazing anything ever happens in this school.
I’m about to try to press my luck when the hallway double doors swing open, and Mauro stops listening and turns to see who else is interrupting her game of solitaire.
But it’s security.
And Ben Michaels.
His hood is pulled over his head, shading his hair and his eyes, the white earbuds of his iPod barely visible. He has no backpack, and as if he isn’t being escorted by two campus security guards, he just shuffles his ripped Chuck Taylors as he walks, with an ease that screams, I don’t care.
He’s just another one of those guys I can’t stand here, DGAFing their way through life.
“Miss Tenner?”
Ben’s head tips up at the sound of my name, and from underneath his hood, I can see his eyes widen in surprise for a second, before his whole body shifts, tension rolling through it.
I feel giddy with excitement, because he’s right here with the answers I need. My heart beats too fast—for a second—and then I remember we’re not alone.
I wish I could freeze everyone else and demand he clear up the muddiness in my brain and explain what happened at Torrey Pines.
But since I’m not magical . . . that isn’t possible.
I turn back to Principal Mauro. “I just really need to get my schedule fixed.”
“And as I said, you’ll need to go through the proper channels,” she answers automatically. “There are plenty of other students with scheduling needs as well.”
I want to shout at her. But I don’t.
I shift, adjusting the weight of my bag on my shoulder, and turn to leave.
And almost run right into Ben. I come within centimeters of touching him, and my eyes lock onto his. Then the scent of mint, soap, and gasoline hits me, and it’s like I’m on my back on the 101 looking up at him all over again. But he turns away, and we narrowly avoid any physical contact. I watch his back for a few seconds, but he doesn’t turn around.
It doesn’t matter. Every nerve ending in my whole body feels as if it’s on fire.
follow my messed-up schedule for the rest of the day, and each class I walk into, the teacher just looks at my name and gives me a sad look of apology. They let me sit in the back of the room and don’t even give me the books. It’s painful that they know I don’t belong in their classes, yet here I am.
The inefficiency makes me want to throw up.
And for all Nick’s flirting this morning, and all those sweet thoughts that turned me into a melty pile of mush, turns out he’s still a douche bag. Sure, I told him to go to lunch without me, but he said he wouldn’t.
sry babe get u off tmrw
Based on that grammatical monstrosity of a text, I know he’s already off campus with Kevin, headed to Bread Bites, so I wander into the quad for lunch.
I’m walking toward the grassy area in front of the L building when some girl lets out one of those bloodcurdling screams— the scary-movie kind. My body tenses, and I swear I can see headlights in front of me, and I have this crazy desire to throw my hand up and cover my face.
But as I whirl toward the sound, the girl—Roxy Indigo, who I only know because she got a 6 percent in our ceramics class freshman year—has dissolved into hysterical laughter, while she tries, halfheartedly, to pull her denim skirt—currently bunched up around her waist, revealing a black thong—back down over her hips. After homecoming last year, word around campus was she got so drunk at the after-party that she passed out and peed herself in the back of her date’s SUV.
Which reminds me that I don’t have any friends here, because I’ve never really wanted any.
Except . . .
Ben Michaels is staring at me. Lounging in the shade of the theater overhang with a couple of his stoner buddies, he’s only a few feet from Roxy, and once she gets her skirt readjusted, she’s headed back over there.
He doesn’t turn his head to look at her, even though it’s obvious she’s talking to him. He just watches me. And normally, this is the point where I’d roll my eyes at the creeptasticness of it all. I mean, hello, stalker much? But he’s not leering at me. And the look on his face isn’t this possessive, he-wants-to-devour-me kind of look. It’s different. Almost as if he’s daring me to go over there.
So I do. And as I walk toward him, I stare right back at him, letting every ounce of frustration—at my schedule, at this day, at this life I managed to create for myself—swell in my chest. Tension curls itself through my muscles, ready to unleash in his direction if he isn’t straight with me.
Only then I’m standing in front of him, and I realize I haven’t the slightest idea what I’m going to say.
It isn’t that easy to walk up to a guy in front of his friends and say, I’m pretty sure I died the other day and you brought me back to life. What do you have to say about that?
Instead I look at Ben and say, “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
He shrugs.
Fabulous. “Like, somewhere else?”
Someone snickers, and I glance to the right where Reid Suitor is sitting with four other guys whose names I don’t know. Reid and another guy are—no lie—chewing on pieces of grass.
“You lost, baby? Or are you looking to rebel against Daddy?”
“Wow, that’s original. What eighties movie did you steal that line from?” I say, turning left to the speaker. Elijah Palma. Great. This is already going worse than I had expected. Maybe I should just tell myself Alex was right—near-death experience triggered the firing of random nerve endings in my brain, and I imagined those visions. Maybe it was a sign there really is a hell and I’m going to end up there.
Elijah shrugs. His washed-out blue eyes are so bloodshot, he looks half-dead. “Hey, I’m willing to take one for the team.”
Someone punches Elijah in the shoulder and says, “Knock it off, asshole.” I know without looking that it’s Ben. His voice is already familiar to me, even though I’ve barely heard him say two words.
“Take one for the team?” I know I shouldn’t be egging him on, but I can’t help it. I still haven’t figured out what the hell I’m going to say to Ben, so I might as well burn my frustration by picking a fight with his friend. “What team are you even on, anyway?”
And no, I have no idea how to properly trade witty insults. But no one notices, because I’ve just implied Elijah’s gay, and it doesn’t matter that it wasn’t particularly clever.
“I don’t screw uptight virgins,” he sneers, and my face floods with heat.
Reid laughs, apparently in agreement.
I want to say something back, but my voice is frozen. Elijah, Reid, Roxy, Ben—they’re gone, no longer in front of me. Instead I’m fifteen again, waking up at 2:13 a.m. after I just lost my best friend, in a car parked outside Chad Brandel’s house with my jeans undone and my underwear ripped.
Doubled over in hysterics, Roxy leans into Elijah, and he wraps an arm around her. They’re perfect for each other.
“I said shut the fuck up, dude.” Again, it’s Ben.
But Elijah keeps going. “You think you’re the first prude to get in some kind of accident and realize you’re wasting your life away? You can’t just come over here for a pity fuck and an adrenaline rush. You—”
A fist crashes into his cheekbone, and the force rocks him backward, knocking Roxy to the side. A couple other guys laugh.
And then Ben is standing in front of me, holding on to his hand and rubbing his knuckles. He jerks his head toward the L building, and we both start walking that way.
It hasn’t escaped my notice that he stuck up for me. That he just punched one of his friends—a kid notorious for getting suspended at least once every few months for kicking the shit out of someone—because I’d been insulted.
The notion is a little barbaric, but I’m too flattered to care.
Ben opens the door to the first classroom and holds it for me. The lights are on, and about ten kids are eating at a table in the far corner of the room, but I don’t see the teacher. There’s only a note on her whiteboard that reads Do NOT leave a mess in the microwave. Please ☺.
“Hey, Ben,” one of the girls at the back table says. “Everything okay?” Only, as she stands up, I realize she isn’t a student at all. Miss Poblete is five foot nothing and probably in her late twenties, but she could easily pass for a student.
Ben nods. “Yeah, we just needed a quiet place to go over a few things.” As Ben lowers himself into a sitting position on one of the tables, I wonder why he seems so comfortable here.
Poblete smiles at me and sits back down.
“Book club,” Ben says.
“What?”
He nods toward Poblete and the others. “She has book club meetings every Monday. If we’re quiet, they won’t listen.”
My cheeks warm again as I turn to look at him. There’s no easy way to say any of this. “You were there, at Torrey Pines, the day I got hit by that truck,” I whisper.
It’s not a question, but he nods anyway. So much for Alex’s theory that Ben doesn’t go to the beach.
“What did you do to me?”
He looks down at his feet, dangling a few inches above the floor. He swings them lightly, nervously. “Nothing.”
I shake my head even though he isn’t looking at me. “No, I remember you. I remember seeing your face when I opened my eyes.”
He shrugs and doesn’t take his eyes off his shoes. “I checked to see if you were okay.”
I don’t know him at all, but I know he’s lying. “But I wasn’t okay.”
“You—”
“Don’t—” Lie to me, I want to say as I step closer to him. Instead I say nothing and glance toward the back of the room. No one’s looking at us.
When I turn back to Ben, he’s staring at me. His jaw sets into a hard line. “I’m not sure what you want me to say.”
“You did something to me, something I can’t explain.” I pause, trying to find the right words. But I’m not sure they exist. “I . . . I died.” I rush on before he can tell me I’m crazy. “I mean, I felt it. I felt myself die—my heart stopped, there was nothingness, then there was this lightness—” I stop because I’m not making any sense. “But then suddenly I was back and you were leaning over me. I couldn’t move, but you did something to my back so I could, and the doctors who looked at my X-ray said my back had been broken and healed again.”
I’m close enough to him now that he can’t swing his legs without them hitting me.
“So, Ben Michaels, what did you do to me?”
He looks up when I say his name, and his eyes connect to mine—they’re as black as an oil well. And I remember the way they looked at me before. “Does it matter?”
“Yes. Yes, it does.”
“Why?”
“Because I need to know,” I say, my voice rising uncontrollably. I take a deep breath and try to maintain my composure. Then I whisper, “Something happened to me, and I need to understand what it was.”
“No, you don’t,” he says with a small laugh.
And even though he doesn’t sound condescending, it makes me feel like he thinks I’m just a silly girl. Irrational and crazy. My fists clench at my sides, and I bite the inside of my cheek.
“You’re alive now, focus on that, right?” he says.
He waits for a response, but I don’t give him one. Sophomore year I tried to be a peer mediator, and they told us the best way to get people to keep talking was just to be silent. When you don’t say anything, the other person is tempted to fill that silence, and you can get more out of them. I didn’t make it as a peer mediator because I kept injecting my own opinions and judgments—shocking, I know—but I held on to that advice. It actually works.
And it works on Ben. He sighs and runs a hand through his hair, tugging on the ends. “If you keep focusing on what happened, when you actually die, you’ll still be thinking you haven’t really done anything.”
I pull back, and a hushed gasp escapes my mouth, because it’s like he was there with me when I was dying.
Is that what happened? I don’t even know.
“I didn’t mean that,” he says, sliding off the table. “That didn’t come out the way I wanted it to, I mean.” He pauses to chew on the corner of his bottom lip. “Look, I saw it happen. I came over to check on you, then when other people came over too, I backed away and gave them room.”
“But—”
He shakes his head. “No, I’m serious. You had a traumatic experience. I was the first person you saw when you opened your eyes.”
I nod, because Alex has already said as much, and, well, it does make sense. The problem is that deep inside my chest, that explanation feels wooden—hollow. And even Ben’s speech sounds rehearsed. I don’t hear any conviction behind his words.
“Why were you at the beach?”
He smirks. “What, I can’t go to the beach? It was summer.”
He starts to walk away, like our conversation is over.
“I don’t believe that,” I say. It comes out quietly, but I know he hears me because he stops. Keeping his back to me, he just waits, and I get the impression from his posture that he’s holding his breath. I believe he brought me back. I don’t know how yet, but I will. I do know that right now, I believe I’m here—I’m alive—because of him. The sense of gratitude makes me dizzy and light-headed, like I need to take a deep breath.
And apparently all rational thought leaves my head and my body takes on a life of its own, because I take a step toward him, reaching out, until the tips of two of my fingers brush against his. I don’t know what I’m doing, it’s been forever since I just held hands with anyone, and my hand seems to tingle with the touch.
“I don’t know what you want me to say,” Ben says. His voice is quiet and cracks slightly at the end, as if he feels helpless, as if he wishes he had some kind of answer. And that is almost enough to make me back off and leave Ben Michaels and whatever freaky shit he’s into alone. Only I’m tired of being hollow inside.
You’ll still be thinking you haven’t really done anything.
I want to feel something. I want to feel . . . alive.
And whatever he says, Ben Michaels is the reason I have the chance.
“I just . . . Thank you.” And as I say it, I squeeze his hand, the level of pressure directly correlating to the depth of emotion I’m feeling—that is to say, it had to feel a little like his bones might start cracking. “Thank you.”
I let go and leave him standing there. No matter how much I want to look back, I don’t.
hen I get home after Alex and I drop Jared off at polo, my mother is awake. And baking.
This happens sometimes, which almost makes everything worse. “Almost” because nothing beats the smell of warm bread.
“J-baby!” she calls when I open the door. “In here!”
“Here” is the kitchen. She’s showered and is wearing a bright green velour jumpsuit and more eyeliner than she needs. And she’s surrounded by possibly eight hundred muffins— blueberry, banana nut, bran, cornbread, chocolate chip—they’re everywhere. Literally. They cover every surface in our kitchen. As does flour.
My flip-flops stick to the linoleum floor. Egg, vanilla extract, butter—I’m not sure what I’m sticking to, but I know I’m annoyed. We’ll be eating muffins for every meal until we have to throw them out, and I’ll be the one cleaning this up.
“How was school, baby?” she asks, turning to give me a smile and a banana nut muffin. “Here, have one, they’re fabulous. I used your great-grandmother’s recipe, and I got it just right. They couldn’t be more perfect!”
“School’s fine,” I mutter as I take a bite. She’s right. She did get Nana’s recipe perfect, which is saying something. My dad’s grandmother owned a bakery.
“Jared said your schedule was all wrong. He told me they gave you classes that were easier than his and that you’d need to get it changed. Do you have any classes with Kate? Oh, here—try this one too. I’m not sure why it isn’t quite right, but they just didn’t rise as well as the first batch. They taste fine, though.” She hands me a flat cornbread muffin. She’s forgotten that I don’t like cornbread. Just like she’s forgotten that Kate and I aren’t friends anymore.
“I’m getting my schedule fixed,” I say, taking a bite of it anyway. “I filed paperwork with Elksen and now I’m just waiting for him to get around to it.”
“How is it?” she asks, nodding to the flat muffin. “I’m just not sure why they didn’t rise. I could throw them out, I guess, but that would be so wasteful. I just don’t know what happened. All the other batches look great.”
What happened is she messed up the baking soda or baking powder, but I’m not about to point that out. “It tastes great, Mom.”
She beams, and her dimples—the same as Jared’s—peek out of her cheeks. Even her nose scrunches up with her smile. She looks ten years younger than she did a few days ago. I can’t think of the last time she smiled like that.
I want to say something else, prolong this moment, but words fail me. And it doesn’t matter. She’s already turned back to the mixing bowl and begun a long explanation of why she decided to also make a batch of raspberry muffins and how they’ll be different from the blueberry ones, even though she’s using the same baseline recipe. I text Alex, Struz, and even Jared’s water polo coach to let them know there’ll be muffins on us for anyone who’s interested.
And then I just listen to her talk.
It’s not that I’m particularly interested in the art of baking muffins or that I don’t have a ton of other things I should do. I just love how animated she looks—so opposite of yesterday and the day before and the day before that.
I have a second chance to fix all this. To try harder.
My mother offers me a spoonful of batter, but I shake my head. The problem with days like this? They’re just enough to remind me what I’m missing. I don’t have a mother I can talk to. I will never be able to tell my mother about Ben Michaels, that he saved me somehow, that he’s denying it.
So after she finishes the raspberry batch, I grab the Clorox wipes and head to her bedroom. I throw the curtains wide, roll up the shade, and open the windows as far as I can. Once I’ve got some air in there and the ceiling fan is attempting to circulate it, I start picking up the clothes on the floor.
And when I’m rearranging the picture frames—putting the picture of Jared and me at Disneyland after we rode Space Mountain back on her nightstand—I see it.
My dad’s laptop, plugged in, still turned on, and resting on the bed, buried in her bedspread. He has his own room. My parents stopped sleeping together forever ago. She needed her own space for peace and quiet, and frankly, if they had to stay in the same room, he never would have come home from the office.
Which means he spent the morning in here—with her.
I sit down on the bed and pull the computer into my lap, open it up, and log in. His password would be complex. To anyone else—even someone who knows binary code. But I can hack anything my dad has passworded. I know him too well.
As it loads, I hear my mother’s singing underneath the thrum of the fan, and I can’t help wondering if this is why she’s awake and in a good mood. I know she’ll come down from this high— she always does. But could it be this easy to pick her back up again?
Scrolling through my father’s history, I open up the last files he viewed. One is a performance eval for Barclay, T. I don’t know the name, so he must be a new analyst. At first it appears to be anything but average. In fact, the first part is straight-up glowing. A hundred percent on handgun and rifle qualifications—it means he hit dead-center on all fifty shots. His computer skills are fantastic, and his actions directly led to closing a recent investigation. Only my dad is recommending he be moved to a different unit. Apparently T. Barclay doesn’t respond well to authority, and he blatantly disregarded an assignment my dad sent him on. That’ll probably ruin T. Barclay’s career. You can’t just not do what your boss tells you to when you’re in the FBI. Even when your instincts are good and you end up being right. The ends don’t justify the means in a bureaucracy.
The next file is paperwork on a gang case that goes to trial later this year. Normally I’d be all over that. But the third file is the autopsy report for Torrey Pines Doe 09022012. My John Doe.
Jackpot.
This is, of course, illegal. Just looking through my dad’s files could come with some pretty stiff penalties if the government found out—for me and for my dad. And even though I’ve been snooping through his files for a long time, my heart still races uncontrollably every time.
I glance at the bedroom door again and listen for anything out of the ordinary, but the only thing I hear—other than my own hammering heart—is my mother’s off-key version of an old Whitney Houston ballad.
Taking a deep breath, I turn back to the report.
My John Doe is still unidentified. They don’t even have an alleged identity next to his case file (which reduces him to the location and the date of his death). They’re putting him at approximately twenty-five to forty-five years, height and weight not applicable. That, I agree with. That I understand. What I don’t is what I read next. The physical examination.
FINDINGS:
01 Global burns consistent with radiation with extensive body
mutilation
02 Perimortal crush injury of right thorax
03 Head injury cannot be ruled out
What. The. Hell.
How can that even be possible? He wouldn’t have been exposed to radiation on the side of the highway—or in his car, for that matter. There’s no reason burns should have shown up on his skin postmortem. I’m not exactly up on medical science, but burns with extensive body mutilation are bad, and they tend to show up immediately. And if the crash killed him and not the burns . . . maybe that was why he was driving so fast. He could have been trying to get to a hospital. Or running from something.
Next page.
CAUSE OF DEATH:
01 Global burns
02 Perimortal crush injury, right chest
So far, the medical examiner is the only person who’s signed off on the autopsy. Maybe they’re getting another opinion. Not that I blame them—it seems more likely that someone switched up the bodies than that this is actually my John Doe.
EXTERNAL EXAMINATION:
The body is presented to the county morgue in a blue body bag and wrapped in a white to tan sheet. The remains are those of a Caucasian male and consist primarily of a severely burned body. Burns are consistent with chemical burns or radiation. There is no charring, but there is complete burning of the fl esh from many sites, massive destruction of bony tissues, and resultant profound mutilation of the body. Soft tissues of the face, including nose, ears, and eyes, are absent, with exposure of partially destroyed underlying bony structures.
My stomach turns at the possible image—I get the idea— and I scroll down to try to see more.
And the smoke alarm screeches.
I jump to my feet, automatically sniffing the air for smoke. My skin itches at the possibility of burns. I shut the laptop and toss it back onto the bed before I run to the kitchen.
Thankfully, nothing is on fire.
But the muffins in the oven are burning—and smoking— and my mother is standing in the center of the room looking at a broken coffee mug, black eyeliner tears streaking down her face.
nd you’re sure it was the same guy?” Alex asks.
I shake my head and take a sip of the mocha frappe I grabbed from It’s a Grind, thankful I managed to get out of the house and away from my mom’s latest episode. I worry a little— or sometimes a lot—about leaving her alone, but every once in a while I also just have to get away. Since Alex’s house is next door, I tell myself I won’t be gone long, and I won’t be far in case she needs me.
Alex and I are sitting at the dining room table in his house with just about every textbook he owns spread out on the table, and he’s buried in a slew of physics problems.
I can’t talk to him about Ben Michaels, so I’m focusing on the accident.
“They could have mixed up the bodies . . .” There could be more than one John Doe who died in San Diego on Monday. It’s less likely than people would think, but it’s possible. And despite the eighty-seven different conclusions my brain latched on to the moment I started reading the autopsy, it has occurred to me that I’m supposed to be looking at evidence and letting the conclusions fall into place as a result, rather than speculating.
“But if it is him, it means he crashed because he was already dead.”
Alex doesn’t even glance up from his physics book. “And then you could stop being a moron and blaming yourself.”
I don’t want to get into that again. “Just listen to me,” I say. “Three still-unidentified victims in San Diego thirty years ago, COD severe radiation poisoning. Then nothing. Now suddenly there are at least three new cases, all in the span of less than two weeks. And one of them might have died while driving.” Driving the truck that killed me.
I don’t say that because Alex has made it clear he thinks the whole Ben Michaels thing is in my mind. Instead I say, “Think about it. My dad’s got all these case files, and now by some freak coincidence a truck hits me and the driver might be related to the same case.”
This time Alex closes the book and leans back in his chair. “What do you think’s causing the radiation?” he says, reaching for the espresso I brought him and lifting it to his lips. Only it’s empty because he downed it the second I got here, and caffeine isn’t going to magically appear just because he hopes it might.
“Sorry, I should have gotten you a double.”
He shakes his head and tosses me the empty cup. “No, it’s cool. Hide it before my mom comes in here and sees it.” I crumple it and stick it in my purse with a smile. “So the burns?” Alex prompts.
“Right. The burns are severe—hard-core severe.”
“So the obvious answer is some kind of nuclear radiation.”
I shrug. “Right, but from what?”
He’s chewing his lip, and I know my mission has been accomplished. Alex Trechter has completely abandoned his homework. A little contraband caffeine and something interesting to distract him is all he needs. “Could it be some kind of virus?” he asks. “Like an injection of something radioactive?”
“You watch too many bad movies.”
“I do not—”
“You still owe me for the two hours of my life that I lost watching Mission Impossible 2. I can never get those back.”
He rolls his eyes. “I’m serious.”
“Um, I’m serious too. What is with John Woo and those slow-motion doves?”
“Janelle, a virus would explain the late onset.”
I shake my head. “Not really. And wouldn’t the gamma burns manifest on the inside of the body, in the organs and body tissue?” I shiver a little at the mental image. “These burns were on his face and hands—exposed skin.”
Alex shakes his head. “It could still be some kind of virus— did you get the chance to read the internal examination?” When I shake my head, he continues, “I read viral terrorism is all the rage now. And it would make sense that your dad is involved— wasn’t he part of the team that investigated the viral hemorrhagic fevers two years ago in L.A.?”
“Yeah, they brought him and Struz in on that.” The virus in L.A. was like Ebola. It started with low-grade headaches, but within an hour or two the symptoms progressed to a debilitating fever and muscle pain. Within twenty-four hours the major organs, digestive system, skin, eyes, and gums of those infected would break down, deteriorate, and bleed. Then they were dead. The virus was caused by a bacteria terrorists had somehow managed to insert in select toothpaste tubes that were imported from China. I know people who still use baking soda instead of real toothpaste.
As much as I want to insist that Alex is wrong, I can’t. Just because I don’t know how someone would make it work like that doesn’t mean it’s not possible. I mean, some kind of bioterrorism in the form of a radiation virus fits a little too easily. Easily enough that it’s terrifying.
“How would someone make a late-onset virus like that?” I ask.
“J, I don’t know,” Alex says with a laugh. “I mean, contrary to popular belief, I’m actually not harboring a secret desire to grow up and become a bioterrorist.”
“Hello, Miss Tenner, have you come to do your homework here?” Alex’s mother, the formidable Annabeth Trechter, breezes into the dining room carrying a heap of folded pastel-colored towels. Despite the laundry, she looks like she just fell out of a business meeting in her skirt and suit jacket with her black hair pulled into a bun at the nape of her neck. She pauses in front of me and waits for my answer.
“No, ma’am,” I say, looking down to avoid her eyes—and I’d be embarrassed about that except Annabeth Trechter is the only woman who scares my dad. And she likes him.
“I actually dropped by to see if I could borrow Alex’s physics book when he’s finished,” I say. It’s only half a lie. “Eastview messed up my schedule and I’m not in the right classes, so I don’t have the books yet.”
She turns her attention to Alex. “You’ve finished your reading for English and your Spanish homework?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You have forty-three more minutes before dinner, and afterward you’ll be able to go to the Tenners’ to drop off your physics book, then you’ll come back promptly to study your vocabulary for the SATs.”
“Janelle and I were going to—”
“No, you studied vocabulary together last night. Tonight you’ll study with me.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I can’t help smiling at that. Alex looks right at me, and I know my expression says, Sucks to be you. Only then it doesn’t, because suddenly his mom’s attention is back on me, and I’m fighting to keep from shrinking down in my seat. I swear, she’s some kind of human lie detector, and any second she’s going to start berating me for keeping Alex from his real work. “How is your father?”
“He’s good,” I say, then force myself to elaborate. The more information you volunteer with Alex’s mom, the less likely she is to think you’re hiding something. “He’s been up late working on a new case, but you know him. He’ll solve it.”
Mrs. Trechter nods. “You can go home now, Janelle. Alex will bring the book by after dinner.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I say as I get up from the table and grab my purse and mocha frappe. “Thank you.” I turn and leave without looking back at Alex. Because we might make each other laugh. And because I know his mom is watching me leave, and she terrifies me.
Someday, I sort of hope I’m just like her.
uesday my schedule still hasn’t been changed, but my earth science teacher hands me a pass to the library as soon as I walk in.
I flash my student ID and the pass at the librarian and settle in at one of the computers. I should try to do some of the work I’m missing in the classes I’m supposed to be in, but I check my email first. There’s nothing interesting, so I open up Google, and because Alex’s theory has been on my mind, I type “radiation burns.”
Naturally, most of what comes up has to do with cancer patients and treatments for sunburn, which is hardly what I’m looking for. And I don’t really want to check out any of the pictures, thank you.
When I try “radiation poisoning,” a link for a story about the Chernobyl disaster pops up. In 1986 a nuclear power plant in Ukraine had a meltdown. It was considered the worst nuclear power plant accident in history. Twenty-eight people died that day, more than three hundred thousand people had to be evacuated to avoid the fallout, and it’s estimated that almost sixty thousand were exposed and five thousand of those exposed died. And if my John Doe was one of those first twenty-eight people, his autopsy would make sense, maybe. But he wasn’t. And that kind of exposure can’t be solitary.
No wonder the FBI has my dad on this case.
A group of freshmen escorted by a teacher I don’t know comes into the library. They’re loud and awkward, and occupying the librarian’s time. I’m tempted to keep reading about radiation poisoning, specifically how someone could harness radiation into some kind of viral form—if that’s even possible.
But I’ve only got about an hour until I’ll have to head out, so I pull up Eastview’s intranet, log into Alex’s account, and go to work downloading the notes and information I need. The librarian escorts the freshmen into one of the classrooms and begins some sort of presentation—most likely the “How to Use the Library” speech all freshmen have to sit through. I pull out my phone and make a to-do list based on the priority of the assignments.
“So your schedule sucks?”
My heart literally leaps into my throat, almost choking me, as I turn to see Ben Michaels slide into the chair next to mine. His hoodie is white today, but he wears it the same as before—over his head, pulled low enough to shield his eyes even though a few stray floppy curls of brown hair stick out. He’s giving me a wry, one-sided smile.
I want to ask him a million things all over again.
But the whole clogged-throat thing keeps the words from coming, so I do the next best thing and pull my shitty schedule from my pocket and hand it to him. His schedule probably doesn’t look any better, and he probably doesn’t care—I know that. But somehow, from the way he slumps into his seat and sighs, I think he just might understand. Or at least empathize.
He doesn’t even give me time to explain. “Algebra?” He laughs. “What, do they want you to teach the class?” He shakes his head and turns to the computer in front of him.
And that’s it.
I guess part of me hoped he’d say something else. Volunteer information. Start a conversation. After all, he’s the one who sat down next to me. It’s not like there aren’t thirty other computers in here.
I wait for a second before deciding, Screw it. I’m going to keep asking until I get the answer I want to hear. I turn to Ben’s profile and open my mouth, but pause as I realize he looks almost classically beautiful from this angle—his profile, the shape of his face—it just seems so perfect, and I’m frozen with surprise that I could see someone on campus for two years and not ever take the time to really notice him. He’s handsome in that kind of tall, dark, mysterious, and tortured way. It’s his eyes. They’re brown, but they’re so dark they sometimes look black. And the way he holds himself, it’s like he knows and takes advantage of his bone structure, the fact that his eyes are deep set—they look shadowed. His face is almost strangely blank, and it makes him look sad, like he has some kind of tragic secret, and for some ridiculous reason I wonder what it is.
He might hide behind the dark, brooding stoner thing, but his face is actually just as perfect as Nick’s or Kevin’s. I can’t help wondering if he gets the same kind of play.
I squelch that thought down. It’s none of my business what Ben Michaels does on his own time, so I try to look away and decide what I’m going to say, but I can’t seem to concentrate on my computer anymore. I want to keep staring—like if I look at him long enough, I’ll unravel the enigma that is Ben Michaels.
Then I see his computer.
He has the school mainframe open and my schedule on the screen. A few keyboard shortcuts, and it’s completely wiped. A blank slate.
“What are you doing?”
“Changing your schedule,” he answers, as if accessing the mainframe couldn’t get him expelled.
“But you can’t—how’d you—”
He shrugs. “I stole the password off Florentine as a freshman. I’ve been fixing schedules for a couple years now.”
I look around the library. No one’s paying attention to us, but we aren’t exactly hidden from sight, either. Anyone could glance this way and see the screen.
“Janelle,” he says, and just the way he says my name—like I matter—makes me turn back to him. There’s no tension lining his eyes; now they look like they could be smiling. “What classes do you want?”
Junior year is supposed to be the most important year for applying to colleges. And I did follow all the rules—I submitted my class requests on time, I got the paperwork signed off on. It’s not my fault the schedule is all messed up.
So I tell him.
Ben clearly knows his way around the software, deftly searching for the course titles. I point to the teachers and class periods I want—and effectively match my schedule with Alex’s.
When I pick Poblete’s third-period class, Ben cracks a half smile. But I have a moment of panic when he tries to insert me into the class and an error message pops up to declare the class is too full.
Ben chuckles beside me—I must have gasped or something— and I realized how close we are, how much I’m leaning into him. Close enough that I can feel his body heat next to me. Close enough that I can smell the faint mixture of what I’m coming to know as pure Ben—mint, soap, and gasoline. Despite the fact that we’re not actually touching, I’m leaning over his shoulder, my mouth dangerously close to his ear.
If he turned his head just a few more inches in my direction, he could kiss me.
I have no idea where that thought came from.
I lean back, shifting in my seat.
“Don’t worry, I got this,” Ben says, gesturing to the computer. “You think you’re the first person who I needed to override to get them into Poblete’s class?”
Obviously not. He enters an override code, and a class roster pops up.
“Wait,” I say, reaching for him. “Don’t take anyone out. That isn’t fair.”
“I won’t,” he says, but he’s looking at my hand on his arm, and I pull it back, my face heating up. “I just need to manually add you in, see?” He copies and pastes my student ID into the class roster.
Which is when it hits me that he has access to EVERYTHING—even grades.
“It’s so wrong, right?” he asks, as if he can read my mind. “That it’s this easy to hack into the system. To steal a password?”
“How often do you do this?”
He shrugs. “I’ve changed schedules for a few people who were freaking out about shit, but mostly I just change a couple of friends’ schedules at the beginning of each semester. Avoid the counseling office.”
“Have you ever changed . . . more than schedules?”
“Like grades?” he says with a laugh. “Of course not.”
I’m so relieved, I let go of the breath I hadn’t realized I was holding.
“Although I think you’re the first person to recognize it’s the same program,” he adds. “None of my friends have put that together.”
“If they knew, would they ask you to do it?”
His head cocks to the side, and I can tell he’s chewing on the inside of his cheek. For some reason that makes me smile.
“I don’t think so. I mean, the guys who are my friends wouldn’t—they know I wouldn’t do it. And most of the other guys we hang out with, they don’t care enough to ask.” I’m tempted to tell him not to befriend any AP students because nobody cheats as much as they do, but I don’t. Because technically that’s me—I’m an AP student.
“What do you want last period?” Ben asks.
After I’m inserted into the right Spanish class, Ben prints my schedule and looks down, refusing to meet my eyes. My breath catches, and I wonder if he’s going to say something about the accident.
“So I’m not saying you would, but usually when I do this I make the person swear they won’t tell anyone.”
My insides plummet. “What, you don’t want eight hundred people asking you to schedule them?”
“No . . . it’s not about how many people are asking,” he says. “It’s more about why they’re asking, if that makes any sense. If it’s ‘Oh, counseling messed up my schedule and won’t fix it,’ okay. If it’s ‘I want a teacher who will let me cut class and not take attendance,’ I don’t want to bother.”
“Honor among cheaters?” I ask. And immediately regret it, because he glances up at me and looks pained—like I’ve insulted him.
“It’s just . . .” He sighs. “I don’t always make the right decisions, and I get that.” He shrugs. “But at the end of the day, I want to be able to look myself in the eyes and say I believe in them. I want to know I’d make each one again.”
I do know. It makes so much sense, my chest aches. Right should be about conviction. For all of my condescending comments about everyone else in this school, I can’t think of anything that I choose to believe in, that I choose to stand for. Except maybe Jared.
“And would you?” I ask, my voice barely above a whisper. “Would you do it again?”
Something in his face changes, and he pushes his chair back and stands up. I’m talking about more than my schedule now.
But he just shrugs. “Even I know Janelle Tenner shouldn’t be in earth science and algebra. They would have fixed it for you eventually. Why not speed up the process?”
“Thanks,” I say, but I don’t feel it. Inside my eyes are watery and my throat is tight. A heaviness weighs down on my chest. Because that isn’t at all what I wanted to hear.
I sit there for a long time after he’s walked away. I replay each moment in my mind—the accident, what I saw and felt, almost running into him in the office, seeing him at lunch the other day, this conversation. He’s not what I expected at all.
I replay it all. Over and over, like I’m trying to memorize each detail and figure it out.
Until someone touches my shoulder and I can’t help but jump.
“I’ve been calling you,” Nick says with a laugh. “Come on, let’s hit off-campus for lunch.”
I don’t roll my eyes, even though I want to. We just went through this yesterday—how does he not remember? “Nick, I can’t—”
“Don’t worry. Coach is at the gate. I already talked to him, and he said he’ll let you through.”
He flashes me such a big smile, I instantly feel bad for thinking the worst when he’s actually planned ahead.
I should be giving him a chance instead of second-guessing his motives, without looking down on him because he has different priorities than I do.
“Sure,” I say, and even though I would have said it was impossible, Nick’s smile gets even wider. “If you don’t think either of us will get in trouble.”
He holds out his hand and pulls me out of my chair—his skin warm to the touch. “I’m Teflon, baby, trouble rolls right off me.”
I laugh, and this time I do roll my eyes. Because I’m not sure I’m laughing with him or at him. But of course that was his point. It’s just the cheesy kind of thing he says, but somehow when he says it, it’s funny—I like that he doesn’t take himself too seriously.
I text Alex to see if he wants me to bring him back something, and as Nick leads me out into the parking lot, I look up to see Elijah Palma smoking some kind of homemade cigarette and staring me down.
Only as we lock eyes does it occur to me that for someone who’s allegedly a stoner, Ben Michaels didn’t smell at all like smoke.
ou’re not going to believe what I found,” Alex says as he slips into our library cube and slides the soundproof door shut. He’s leaning back, just barely balancing the weight of what looks like six more mega hardcovers to add to the twenty-something that are piled up around me. I want to laugh at his excitement—I love when he does his “I’m determined to solve this” thing. But I don’t laugh, because that’s a lot more reading.
We decided to hit S&E, the science and engineering library at UCSD, because his aunt works here, which means she’ll let us in and she’ll report back to his mom and tell her that we’re studying. And we are, just not anything school related.
“Please tell me it’s something productive and not another outdated copy of Maxim? Just because your mom won’t let you read it, doesn’t mean—”
Alex ignores me and dumps his books onto our table with the rest of them. I try not to be annoyed—though I don’t try too hard. Adding more books to this stack hardly seems to solve our problem. I’ve got everything from the 9/11 Commission Report to a Michael Crichton novel, not that any of it has turned out to be particularly helpful so far. The Crichton novel and a couple of other thrillers are pure fantasy or speculative fiction grounded in paranoia and conspiracy theory. And some of the more scientific bioterrorism books read as a sourcebook or guidebook for how to handle an outbreak. Then there are the true accounts of outbreaks of smallpox in the Soviet Union and Ebola in a Washington, DC, lab.
In other words, nothing even remotely helps me figure out how my John Doe ended up dead of radiation poisoning while he was driving a truck.
“You going to tell me what’s so exciting?” I ask. My phone starts vibrating against the table, but I’m not a hundred percent sure where it is under all these freaking books.
Alex grins before leaning forward and picking up one of the thickest books and thumbing through it. “I was looking through TheHandbook of Viral Bioterrorism and Biodefense, and I found this.” He opens the book wide to page 428, where the chapter heading reads “Biological Warfare of the Future: Viral Bioengineering.”
“Right now bioterrorism is based on bacterial agents,” Alex says. “Category A are the worst, like anthrax—they spread easily and quickly, and could lead to a wide-scale outbreak.”
“I know that. Everything we’ve read so far says that.”
“Which is why this book is so cool. It’s speculating what’s next. Viral engineering isn’t that far off. In fact,” he adds, pushing the book toward me, “look right here. It asks whether radiation can be harnessed into a transmissible virus. And it gives a detailed explanation of what geneticists might have to do in order to come up with something that could be engineered.”
He’s still smiling. Which doesn’t make sense, now that we’ve just proven finding information on how to become a bioterrorist isn’t all that hard.
But I’ve seen this look before. It’s the same look Struz and my dad get when they’re close to cracking a case, like they’ve discovered the secrets of the universe. It makes me think Alex is doing the right thing by deviating from his mother’s life plan. He doesn’t want Stanford undergrad and Johns Hopkins medical. He wants West Point and the FBI—like my dad. And the thought of Alex actually working for my dad someday makes me smile.
Then it hits me.
“Wait a minute,” I say. “Maybe we’re coming at this from the wrong angle. Maybe it doesn’t matter how the virus is being spread—someone from the CDC can figure that out. What’s important is the countdown.”
I stand up and push in my chair, stretching my legs. My phone vibrates again, and this time I see that it’s Nick. Again.
“Let’s say, for argument’s sake, someone has managed to engineer a virus. Whether it’s radiation poisoning or not, it’s ugly and it’s going to kill people. So how does picking people off one at a time—what does that have to do with the countdown?”
Alex gasps and sits up straighter. “That’s how they connect!” He looks at me, and I’m tempted to prompt him to tell me, but I know better than to interrupt his train of thought. “The UIED. It’s not a bomb. J, it’s something that will disperse the virus. Make it airborne or make it catch fire.”
A shiver moves between my shoulder blades. “But why would terrorists give the FBI a heads-up like that?”
“Because they’re sociopaths? I don’t know, but it makes sense. If the UIED goes off, the virus goes airborne, maybe it’s some kind of chemical explosion that triggers it. And maybe the FBI got their hands on the UIED earlier than they were supposed to. Or maybe the terrorists want us to know it’s coming. Think of the panic it would incite. And isn’t wrecking our way of life part of the whole terrorism package?”
My phone buzzes again, and this time I pick it up and toss it carefully from hand to hand. “So with that theory, my John Doe and the other victims, they’re test subjects?”
Alex shrugs. “Maybe people who pissed off the terrorist group?”
Somehow I’m not satisfied. This theory doesn’t give me an identity to associate with the guy who died the same day and time that I did on Torrey Pines Road.
“J?” Alex says.
“Hmmm?”
“You think it’s time we tell your dad?”
I’m about to nod. After all, it’s past time we shared our theories with him. It could be totally off, and it could be something someone already thought of. Or it could be right. Or it could fall somewhere in between. Either way he needs to know. But as I’m about to say that, the door to our room slides open and Nick sticks his head in and says, “Tell her dad what?”
Inwardly, I groan. I wouldn’t have told him where I was headed after school if I thought he and his other half were going to show up.
Kevin pops in behind him and pushes the door wider. “You confess your true feelings yet, Trechter?”
“Kevin, shut up,” I say as I focus on Nick. “What are you doing here?”
“I’ve been looking for you for, like, an hour,” Nick says. “Why didn’t you answer your phone?”
I gesture to the books. “I’m working?”
Nick picks up one of the books closest to him, and I’m tempted to take it away from him, but that’ll just look more suspicious, and I don’t trust him with this.
“You work too hard, J,” Kevin says. Shocking that he thinks so.
Nick puts the book down and leans against the door. “I know what the problem is. You need to have fun. Come with me to Hines’s place tonight.”
“Alex and I are going to finish studying and then . . .”
Alex knows me well enough to know I’m looking for an excuse, so he jumps in. “We’re going to watch Tron: Legacy.”
Since this is the Lamest Excuse Ever, there’s no way I can stand behind it.
“Um, no we’re not. That movie is only about a tenth as good as its soundtrack.”
Alex just smirks—I will totally get him back for this.
Nick says, “So it looks like you can come with me.”
“It’s Tuesday,” I say, even though I know that to Nick this isn’t an excuse. Especially not this year. His dad used to be strict about where he went—more because of sports than school— but his parents are getting divorced and he and his dad aren’t speaking, which means he’s been doing pretty much whatever he feels like since this summer.
“His parents are out of town until Friday.”
“I can’t,” I say without looking at Nick. Even I’m not immune to how gorgeous he is. I know how easy it is to be charmed by those almond eyes.
“I promise I won’t keep you out late,” he says, holding his hand over his heart. And when I look at him, I can’t help thinking of the first night we talked—really talked—this summer. He’d just found out his dad was having an affair with a girl who graduated from Eastview five years ago, and instead of getting wasted at one of the beach bonfire parties, he was just sitting by himself when I closed up the lifeguard stand and was getting ready to go home. I asked him how he was doing, and everything just poured out. We talked for three hours. About his family and their failings. About how we were afraid of disappointing people the way they disappointed us.
“I promise,” Nick says again. “Scout’s honor.”
“You must have been a horrible Boy Scout.”
“I wasn’t a Boy Scout,” he says, as if he can’t figure out why I would say such a thing.
“Seriously. I already have an essay to write, three chapters of history to read, a shitload of physics and calc problems, plus Spanish review.” I gesture to the mound of books all over the table, even though they have nothing to do with anything I’ve just rattled off.
He pouts. “You deserve a rest from taking care of everybody. A night of fun before diving back into the books. You didn’t get to come to the bonfire.”
Not that I’m disappointed about the bonfire, but I do work too hard.
“Just an hour,” I say, wondering when my willpower decided to go on vacation—and when it will be back.
“Of course.” Nick laughs. “I’ll have you home before eleven.”
“Let me pack up here,” I say. “I’ll meet you in the parking lot.”
After Kevin and Nick leave, I look at Alex. He jams his books back into his backpack. “Maybe you should trade those crappy vintage T-shirts and ripped jeans for short skirts and tank tops. You can start hanging out with Brooke, too.”
“You’re the one who ruined tonight with a lame excuse. I wanted to do something else, and you came up with a movie that only has a plot in the first thirty minutes?”
“It’s got great visual effects,” Alex says as he goes back to shoving his stuff into his backpack, and I grab the couple of books I do want to take home with me.
“Wait,” I say, reaching out to grab Alex’s shoulder. “Did you call my Great Gatsby T-shirt crappy? I fucking love this shirt.”
“Fine. Abandon me so I have to hang out with my mother,” Alex says, but he’s smiling again. Which is all I really needed to see.
t twelve forty-five I give up on Nick.
An hour and forty-five minutes is my threshold—and of course he’s so drunk he can’t stand up without leaning on me for support. I try to take his keys but give up on those after he bellows at me that he’s “just fine to drive, woman.”
I get yelled at enough by my mother—someone I’m obligated to love. I don’t need it from some shithead who slams two beers and then lets his friends pressure him into doing five shots of tequila in the span of an hour.
Plus, what the hell am I going to do with his keys anyway? Unlike 18 percent of my graduating class, I’m planning to not have a DUI on my record when I graduate. And since my license is already suspended because of the stupid seizure, driving really isn’t an option anyway.
I should have left a half hour ago when Cecily’s sister picked her up and offered me a ride, but I was still under the delusion that Nick would have an ounce of reliability. Now the problem, of course, is that Alex is asleep—not that his mom would let him out this late anyway—my mother lost her driving privileges ages ago, and Jared is too young. Both my dad’s cells have gone straight to voice mail for the past half hour. And no one else is sober or worth asking for a ride. I even glanced around for Reid Suitor, since he played baseball his freshman and sophomore years and I’ve seen him around this crowd before. Not that I’d really want a ride from him.
I suck it up, walk out to the front porch, and call Struz.
“J-baby!” he says with his usual enthusiasm, even though he’s whispering. “Whatever you need, it’s gotta be quick. We’re on something big tonight.”
“I’ve got a code twenty-one,” I say. My dad thought the whole FBI thing might hurt my social life when I was in junior high, so he and Struz came up with a bunch of numbered codes so I could call him from a friend’s house without people thinking I was some kind of snitch. He thought it’d be hard to explain to a bunch of teenagers that counterintelligence doesn’t really care about underage drinking.
Right this instant, though, I wouldn’t have stopped them from coming over here and busting up this party.
“Shit.” I hear rustling over the phone for a second. “Where are you?”
I give Struz the address, and he promises to send a junior agent or an analyst to come get me, then he’s got to run. I want to grill him about what they’re doing, but I know enough—and I respect them and their jobs enough—to let him go.
“You call for a ride?”
I turn to see Kevin in a wife beater, baggy jeans, and a sideways baseball hat. He looks ridiculous.
“What of it?”
Instead of spouting off some nonsense like I expect, he smiles and thrusts his hands into his pockets. “I’ll make Nick crash here if he doesn’t pass out.”
“Whatever, I don’t care.” Though that’s hardly true.
“I’ve had a lot of practice at ganking his keys,” Kevin says, and collapses into a porch chair. “I’d offer you a ride home, but . . .” He holds up a mostly empty bottle of beer.
“It’s fine.”
Kevin nods, and we sit in silence as the minutes tick by.
The cul-de-sac is quiet—most of the other houses have their lights off already, and not a single car turns onto the street, despite all the vibes I’m sending out into the atmosphere, hoping for headlights to appear. A breeze picks up, rustling through my hair, and I pull my hoodie over my head and fold my arms across my chest.
“It’s cool that you came tonight,” Kevin says suddenly, and I wonder why he even cares. “I know my man Nick fucked up and you didn’t have a good time or anything, but it’s cool that you came.”
“I’ll probably opt to stay home next time.”
“I don’t blame you. Some nights I’d rather just stay home and read.”
I turn to face Kevin. Other than the idiotic hat, the dirty wife beater, and the jeans that are belted around his thighs, he looks perfectly serious. But I know what this is. An act, a play, because this is Kevin and he’s like that.
Before he realizes what I’m doing, I snap a picture of him— beer in hand—with my cell. “If you try to hit on me again, I’ll show this to Coach Stinson and he’ll have you running stadium steps until baseball starts this spring,” I say, because Nick once confessed their baseball coach was a stickler about drinking. And because I’m like that.
But Kevin doesn’t get pissed off or nervous. He just takes another sip of his beer. “Touché, Tenner. Touché.” A word I didn’t even think was in his vocabulary.
Apparently this month is full of surprises. No one is as dumb as I thought they were.
hen the headlights of a Chevy TrailBlazer round the corner, I turn and offer Kevin a slight nod before heading down the steps.
“I’ll make sure Nick doesn’t drive,” he says again. I look back in time to see him raise his beer bottle in a salute.
“Thanks,” I say, even though I’ve pretty much decided I don’t want Nick Matherson to be my responsibility—no matter how pretty he is or how many great late-night talks we had sitting on the beach. I just don’t have the time or the patience.
The TrailBlazer stops at the edge of the Hineses’ driveway, and even though I knew it wouldn’t be Struz, I’m still disappointed when I see a dark brown head and a scruffy layer of facial hair. He’s an agent I don’t know, and he’s on his cell, not paying any attention to me when I open the door and slide into the passenger seat.
“—and now I’m stuck playing babysitter. This is ridiculous.” Nothing makes you feel uncomfortable quite like when you first meet someone who’s not just talking, but complaining, about you. “Yeah, well, next time we’re switching positions on this. I’m not playing this angle again.”
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Elizabeth Norris
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Детская фантастика
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: 24 meets the X Files in the biggest teen blockbuster of the summer…STOP THE COUNTDOWN. SAVE THE WORLD…Leaving the beach, seventeen-year-old Janelle Tenner is hit head on by a pickup truck.And killed.Then Ben Michaels, resident stoner, is leaning over her. And even though it isn’t possible, she knows Ben somehow brought her back to life…Meanwhile, Janelle’s father, a special agent for the FBI, starts working on a case that seems strangely connected to Ben. Digging in his files, Janelle finds a mysterious device – one that seems to be counting down to something that will happen in 23 days and 10 hours time.That something? It might just be the end of the world. And if Janelle wants to stop it, she’s going to need to uncover Ben’s secrets – and keep from falling in love with him in the process…