The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled (3 page)

Chapter 4

I
still can
remember the phone call that changed everything. I was watching TV with my mom—a Food Network show about a chef who travels the world trying to find the most disgusting-sounding foods. Bugs, worms, animal intestines, sausages made from blood that are called puddings. The show was almost over and I was annoyed that my mom was going to miss the end. So I was only half listening to her.

“Yes, this
is she,” and then silence, and then the word, “No,” and then her voice starting to shake, “No.”

I remember she sat down on the floor. Right on the linoleum.

I remember that the show was still going, but I wasn’t watching anymore.

I remember that Pen was sitting at the kitchen table doing her homework. She was really little then, but she knew something was wrong too. I could see her moon face
through the door.

I remember when my mom started to cry.

“Constantina’s your mom, and aren’t your sisters Iris and Penelope? So George is your dad.” Hal said now. I was still staring at the screen. I so didn’t want to talk about this.

I swallowed hard. I thought of six different ways I could make myself disappear. Under the couch. Through the open French doors. Behind the curtains. Or the desk.
Or by holding a book open in front of my face. “Yes . . . George Costas is my dad,” I said.

“Oh,” said Callie.

“I wonder why his name is highlighted in yellow like that?” Nia asked.

I was doing a really good job hiding my emotions, but I know my voice shook when I said, “Maybe because my dad’s dead.”

I could tell from the silence that no one knew what to say. I guess they were all thinking
about whether to say “Sorry,” but they couldn’t tell if that would just make me feel worse.

I was glad I’d told them. Sort of. I also felt my brain traveling to the hall closet. I could pretend I needed to go to the bathroom and hang in the dark silence for a while, and then slip out the front door.

But instead I forced myself to look at the computer.

Hal scrolled down the list again. “Here’s
my family,” he said, tight and grim. He looked up at Cornelia. “See, Corn? There’s you.” For the first time, Cornelia didn’t look like she was one step ahead of all of this. Her eyes opened wide. I thought for a second about Iris and Pen. They didn’t know what I did about how my dad had really died.

Nia crossed her arms in front of her chest. “Am I on that list?” she asked. Hal scrolled through.
“There,” he pointed for her.

Nia leaned forward then shot right back up again. Her eyes narrowed. “My parents are on there too. And Cisco.”

“Are mine?” Callie asked. Hal scrolled down some more and found hers. “My mom—” Callie said. “Is her name the regular color?”

“Yes,” Hal confirmed. “It is.”

Hal scrolled down from her name, and clicked on one of the other names on the list. A new window
opened.

“So let me show you how this whole thing works,” Hal said. “Ever heard of Marguerite Blaine?”

We all shook our heads.

“Me neither,” said Hal. He clicked on the paper clip next to her name. “But here’s her driver’s license.” And there it was. A scan of a Indiana license, showing a woman with tight curly hair, big blue eyes and a goofy smile. Hal scrolled down. “She lives in a town called
South Whitley. She’s forty-three. Five foot six.” He scrolled down and we saw another license, this time from Maryland.

“Look, she’s younger here,” Callie said. Marguerite Blaine’s hair was long in this picture, her cheeks fuller. “She was living in Orion when this license was made.”

Hal clicked again. We saw a document that at first seemed like gibberish. Lots and lots of words. Nia squinted.
“I think this is the deed to her house,” she said.

Hal clicked again. We were looking at a form I recognized because we’d just talked about them in Civics. “That’s a census form,” I said. “Look, it shows where you live, how much you make, your job.”

“How did Thornhill get all this stuff?” Callie said.

Hal shrugged. He clicked past a diploma and a copy of an email Marguerite had sent to the
Dannon Corporation complaining about a bad yogurt.

“Click on Louise,” Callie said, a little breathless. “I want to know where she lives.”

But when Hal got back to the list, Nia said, “No, wait. Click on Mrs. Bragg.”

Hal clicked. We were looking at Mrs. Bragg’s latest health history—something her doctor would have filled out at a physical. “She’s allergic to honey?” Cornelia said.

Then Hal
clicked onto what almost looked like a Facebook photo album, except these weren’t the kind of pictures you’d see on Facebook. A lot of them were blurry and it took a second to even tell what they were. There was one of Mrs. Bragg picking up a box of cereal in the grocery store, but taken from a weird angle—she was only in one corner of the photo and she wasn’t smiling. Clearly she had no idea the
camera was there. “Do you think it was taken by a surveillance camera?” said Callie.

“That sounds right,” said Hal.

“And creepy,” I said.

Hal kept paging through and found some pictures of Heidi. School pictures mixed with shots of her at playgrounds when she was little, and then winning a junior beauty pageant in sixth grade. Pictures of her now. Some that looked like they were scanned from
a yearbook, and some with her face half-obscured, like the surveillance images of her mom. In one, you could see Heidi’s face and most of her arm. She was talking on a cell phone while her dad pumped gas.

“I didn’t even know there were cameras at the gas pumps,” Callie breathed.

“Apparently,” said Hal, flipping through image after image of Heidi’s mom, “they’re everywhere.”

“Try Max Beckendorf,”
Nia said.

Hal went back to the master list, and suddenly there was Mr. Thornhill, but much younger—the picture was a group shot from the newspaper—people who’d raised money for an animal shelter before Amanda, or any of us, were born. “Look at his hair!” Callie said.

“Look for Annie Beckendorf,” I asked.

Hal went back to the list, but before he could click on Annie’s name, we heard footsteps
coming our way. Cornelia moved like lightning, clicking on a video of the talent show.

Mrs. Bennett was now standing in the room. “Having fun?” she said, flashing a smile that was as warm as it was clear. She looked at her watch. “Cornelia, it’s time for your game. And then, I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to come with me to the open house after.” Mrs. Bennett worked in the admissions office
of the local community college. “Hal, can you rake while we’re gone? Say, in about half an hour? The lawn looks like it could use a little help.”

“Sure,” Hal said. You could almost see the wheels turning in his brain, thinking of the hours ahead to pore over the files on the Thornhill disc. Maybe Mrs. Bennett felt like she could see them too.

“Dad’s going to be home all day, so he’ll check in
with you about the yard,” she added.

“Sure, Mom,” Had said, swallowing hard. Half an hour wasn’t nearly enough time.

As soon as we were sure Mrs. Bennett was out of earshot, Nia rolled up her sleeves. “If we only have half an hour to work together,” she said, “we’re going to need to be quick.”

“No kidding,” Callie said, sucking in a breath, her eyebrows raised.

“Furthermore,” Nia continued,
“as fun as it is paging through this information randomly, we need to be more systematic.”

“Agreed,” Callie replied. With her math brain, Callie liked nothing better than data organized into a chart. Better even would be something she could graph.

We dove into the project of trying to figure out what all these people had in common. We took notes. We made charts. We opened files and closed them,
paging through the people, trying to cross-reference them, figure out family relationships, who lived in Orion when.

What connected them?

We realized we were going on longer than a half hour, but we figured Hal’s dad would come get him. We wanted to go as long as we could.

“Fact one,” Callie said.

“Everyone in Thornhill’s files seems to be placed into two age groups,” said Hal.

“People our
parents’ age, approximately,” said Nia, speaking slowly so her note taking could keep up. “And people our age, approximately.”

“Fact two,” I said. “The people on the list who are in our age group are the children of people in the older range.”

Nia was biting her lip as she wrote, repeating slowly: “. . . in the older range. Got it.”

“Three,” said Hal. “Most of the people in the files live in
Orion.”

“And a lot of the ones who don’t live here
now
used to,” Callie said.

“Four,” I said, holding up four fingers, “there’s at least one older member of every family who has a Social Security number starting with 090-56-24. The last two digits are the only ones that change from individual to individual.”

“I’d have to go in and look at them all systematically,” said Callie. “But I can’t
remember seeing any of the last two digits that was a number less than twenty or higher than sixty or so.”

“Iris’s and Pen’s Social Security numbers are only one digit apart,” I said. “Because they were assigned at the same time.”

“So you’re saying something like forty of the people in this group,” Nia said, “these people who come from all over the place and don’t even know each other and are
all different ages—you think they all got their numbers at the same time?”

“That’s impossible,” Hal said.

“I know.”

“And fact five,” Callie said. “People with these closely sequential Social Security numbers are also the ones who have those long numbers that start with C33 after their names. And they are missing information about their youth.”

Callie was right. All the young people like us
on the list had tons of information about their childhood. Report cards, school schedules, bus passes, sports achievements, pictures playing in backyards that looked like they’d been taken by a satellite. Every time Nia had made honor roll it had been printed in the newspaper. Programs from my early piano recitals were in there. School pictures.

And for some of the older people, that stuff was
there too. I saw pictures of my mom, the farm she grew up on in Oregon. An article in the newspaper about her family manning a Greek culture booth at the grange fair—that was so them. My grandmother, who we called Yiayia, probably brought her homemade yogurt and pastries and wore her embroidered skirt and headscarf from Limnos. My mother had always celebrated our Greek heritage. She had joked that
my dad was just barely Greek enough for her parents, but he squeaked by.

Hal recognized his mother’s pictures too. She was a majorette—funny—and then he laughed so hard I thought would die when he found out she’d failed Home Ec. Callie’s dad was a basketball star in high school. There were lots of team pictures for him, write-ups in the paper.

But my dad—it was like he hadn’t even existed until
suddenly he had a driver’s license at nineteen and a high school diploma in the form of a GED. He’d worked in a factory for about six months when he was twenty. He’d taken a couple of classes at a community college. He’d always told us stories about hitchhiking across the country the year he turned twenty-one. There was a picture of him standing with a frame pack outside a truck stop—he was in
the background of a picture of a motorcycle. Then there was a picture of him at a bank when he must have been about twenty-two. A record of a hospital visit six months after that—apparently he’d burned himself cooking.

There was nothing about Callie’s mom until she started a graduate program in astronomy. At age sixteen. “Wait,” Hal had said. “Didn’t she even go to high school? College? Wouldn’t
that be on here?” There had been nothing.

And nothing about Hal’s dad until he was eighteen years old and suddenly, there he was, in a picture of the summer intern program at some accounting firm in Philadelphia. We had transcripts of his college classes, his business major, his straight As.

Lots of the C33 adults were like that. At least one in each married couple, and when an adult wasn’t
married, you could count on his or her childhood, or large parts of it, being missing. Louise Potts was like that. So was Frieda Starfield.

“Except my parents,” Nia said. But she didn’t write this down on her list of facts. Instead, she took the mouse and reopened her mother’s file. There Mrs. Rivera was, age ten, looking very much like Nia, in braids and a school uniform, standing with her classmates
in rows. The caption on the photo was in Spanish, but Nia translated.

“That’s her fifth-grade class picture,” she said. “My mother grew up in Colombia.” Hal flipped through some pictures. “That’s my
abuela
’s house.” She pointed.

“So how come everyone has a parent with a blank childhood but you?”

“Maybe they don’t follow your life until you marry the person they’re following,” said Callie.

“That makes sense,” Hal mused.

“But it doesn’t,” said Callie. “Because my mom is the one that disappeared, not my dad. She’s the one that’s part of all of this.”

“But look at this,” Hal said. “We’ve seen this before.” There was a small card scanned in, topped with a number that began with C33 and then the word
discharge
. Then a signature at the bottom we could hardly make out, and in very tiny
script below that,
Facilitator, Orion Pharmaceutical College
. We kept skipping over them because we didn’t understand them. “Everyone without a documented childhood has one of these. Both Amanda’s parents have them. They both have C33 numbers and no childhood documentation.” He turned to Nia. “Your mom has one as well.”