Spontaneous (16 page)

D
ylan left the next morning through the front door, picking up his skateboard on the way out and saying, “Thank you for letting me feel, you know, all the . . . you know.”

Oh, I knew, but no thanks were necessary. I was the one who should have been thanking him, for introducing a colorful diversion from our predicament, a predicament that became darker as soon as I sat down to breakfast.

My parents didn't say a word about Dylan. Instead they informed me that authorities had captured my classmates Yuki Dolan and Cameron Quell as they were trying to leave town. Yuki was curled up in the trunk of her cousin's Miata and Cameron was on foot, jogging through the woods with a backpack full of supplies. No dogs or helicopters were needed to track them down. Officers had simply predicted their movements and were waiting for them. It was eerie and telling, and made me want to hide in the house.

It was an instinct confirmed by Rosetti. Later that morning, she sent me a text:

Stay put. I'm coming over to talk.

Me: To me?

Rosetti: You can invite what's-her-name too. I'm sure you tell her everything anyway.

She wasn't wrong there. Between the two texts, I had already shot off a message to Tess:

Lady Nightshade Alert!

Because Paula had confiscated her keys for fear she'd blow up while driving, Tess arrived by bike half an hour later. Mom greeted her at the door with a hug. “You can't believe how happy I am to see you, Tessy.”

“I've lucked out so far, haven't I?” Tess said as she kissed Mom on the cheek.

When Rosetti rolled in a few minutes later, there was only a handshake and a quick explanation that she needed to “borrow the girls for a second or two” and then she'd be on her way. Mom saw no harm in that. Borrow away, as long as we were within yelling distance. So Tess and I wrapped ourselves in blankets, and we decamped to the back deck, where we watched the wind blow dead leaves into little tornadoes as Rosetti got, as she put it, “down to brass tacks.”

I had no idea where that term came from, but I imagined a
corkboard full of photos of the victims and strings leading from each of the photos back to a series of brass tacks that were skewering an envelope emblazoned with a big black question mark. While we'd been in the tents, Rosetti had obviously been out there doing some serious detectiving, and now was the time for the big reveal, for her to take down that envelope, tear it open, and knock our socks right the fuck off.

“So what is it?” I asked. “GMOs? Aliens? Lay it out there.”

“It's what I've feared since the beginning,” Rosetti responded. “And you deserve to know. You are victims of the most heinous violation of human rights I have ever seen perpetrated on this soil.”

“We're what now?” I asked.

“You're being monitored and tracked,” she explained. “Nanotechnology, injected and now embedded in your arteries. Most likely near your heart.”

“You're kidding?” Tess said, placing a hand on her chest.

“You've been tagged like a wild animal and there is nothing you can do about it,” Rosetti explained. “That's why the next thing I'm going to ask you is important. Since I've ruled out illicit substances as the delivery device, can either of you think of an instance when your entire class might have been subjected to invasive practices at the hands of government officials?”

“You mean besides what we just went through?” Tess asked. “You mean was there another time when we were sequestered for days in tents and given a full battery of batshittery?”

Rosetti smirked and said, “It would have been more subtle than that. A field trip to an army base, a—”

I shot a triumphant finger to the sky. “Washington, DC. Eighth grade. We all went to DC together.”

“Every eighth grader in the Northeast does that trip,” Tess said.

True but, nevertheless, the info raised Rosetti's eyebrows. “I suspect you were all in the same buses and hotels?”

“Probably . . . definitely,” I said as realizations bloomed. Now
this
made sense. This wasn't some blowhard jumping to conclusions. This was about collecting evidence and presenting a logical case that would stick. Brass tacks, my friends.

“Go on,” Rosetti said. “Give me details.”

“Oh, oh, oh,” I yelped. “We toured the Pentagon. We were all in this auditorium together and we listened to some military guy talk about national defense. I remember that.”

“Interesting,” Rosetti said. “Worrisome, but interesting.”

Maybe it seemed obvious to you from the beginning.

Well, duh, Mara, why'd you swim through that sea of red herrings when we all knew from the beginning that there are drones and war-machine shit out there that can vaporize a person from two continents away? Obviously.

A very good point, and one I would have completely brushed off unless it came from the mouth of Special Agent Carla Rosetti of the FBI. Her stellar record of sleuthing and bad-guy-catching was the single thing I needed to pull the veil from my eyes. Tess was tougher to convince.

“So you're blaming the government?” Tess said. “Aren't
you
the government?”

“Have you ever had a job?” Rosetti asked her.

“I used to work at Boston Market,” Tess said.

“And what'd you do at Boston Market?”

“I picked chicken carcasses. So they could use them in sandwiches. Carvers they called them, though there was very little carving.”

This seemed to please Rosetti, and she leaned toward Tess and spoke to her in a tone of respect she had not previously bestowed upon my pal. “Hard, thankless work. And during your chicken pickin' stint, did you trust your employers? In other words, do you think the various levels of management at Boston Market always had your best interests in mind?”

“No, ma'am, I did not.”

“Okay then. Crazy as it seems, I'm no different from you. Only it's the government I do my chicken pickin' for. What do you two know about false flags?”

Tess stared at her, studied her, as if searching for a lie.

While I said, “I don't know the first thing about false anythings, but I do know what you're saying makes a lot more sense than some magical explanation. And really, isn't that what everyone else is selling?”

“Exactly,” Rosetti replied. “People see what they want to see, even when the evidence points in the opposite direction. My partner, for instance. I'm not about to share this information with Meadows because he loves this government more than he loves this country. The government has an agenda. Unfortunately, they're using kids like you to further that agenda. So you're the only ones I can trust. Together, we might be able to expose it.”

“Seriously?” Tess said. “The last time you asked for our help, Mara ended up in the hospital.”

“And for that I am supremely sorry,” Rosetti said, nodding at me. “I will not ask you to take any more risks. I only ask that you stay in touch. Consider this more like a friendship. Sharing gossip. Girl talk.”

Then she reached into her handbag, pulled out two flip phones, and handed us each one.

“Ooo,” I said, holding my phone up to the light like it was a diamond. “Is this a burner?”

“It's clean, untraceable, and has my number programmed into it,” Rosetti told us. “Call or text me whenever, about whatever.”

“Can Tess and I program each other's numbers in it?” I asked. “So we can group-text the latest and greatest?”

“Fine, sure,” Rosetti said. “But only the three of us. Dylan will not be involved with this venture.”

“You want me to keep a secret from my boyfriend?” I asked, which seemed like an impossibility now that we'd shared everything we possibly could.

“Every girl should have at least a few secrets from her boyfriend,” Rosetti said. “You're foolish if you don't. I picked you because you've proven to be smart and trustworthy. Don't let me down by proving otherwise.”

Tess held the phone in her lap. She opened it and shut it, making it snap like alligator jaws. She did it a few times as her lips moved, the same way they do when she's doing an equation in her head. Then she looked up, and said, “I have my own theories, you know?”

Rosetti smiled. “I bet you do.”

“Legit theories,” Tess assured her. “Stuff I've spent a lot of time figuring out.”

“And that's what it's for,” Rosetti said, pointing at the phone.

Tess held the phone in her fist for a moment, then pocketed it, and said, “You might as well know, sometimes we call you Lady Nightshade.”

S
natch. Grab. Gotcha. Not-so-fast. Um-where-do-you-think-you're-going-kid?

That was basically how the end of November went.

Every senior who tried to skip town was apprehended. Peacefully, thankfully, but a few situations were tense, with guns drawn and threats made that were more than idle. Disguises, Vespas, fake IDs—our fellow classmates tried everything, and they all failed. Which was still a better fate than spontaneous combustion, of course.

Thankfully, those had petered out. Harper Wie and Gayle Heatherton had been the last two. Coincidence? I doubted it. Something more than examinations seemed to have gone down in those tents. Rosetti was right: The implantation of tracking devices was glaringly obvious. But maybe Doc Ramirez and her team had taken additional measures to . . . defuse us.

Not that we could actually prove this. We were safe, but we were trapped. With no schoolwork to distract us,
downsized
from crappy part-time jobs, pariahs in a community of pariahs, we seniors were forced to avoid places in town where we were deemed a risk to the public, which was almost everywhere. The burners Rosetti gave me and Tess were essentially useless, because what were we going to text her?

Sitting on my back deck, staring blankly into the yard. Once again, no CIA hiding in the leaf piles. Will report back at the top of the hour.

In short: It sucked. The silver lining: sex.

Time on our hands meant Dylan and I were now having our fair share. Imagine a relationship montage from a movie, but instead of a couple enjoying picnics, walks on the beach and what not, it's just a whole lot of gettin' it on. That was basically December.

Was the gettin'-it-on
good
gettin'-it-on? It was certainly diverse. Positionally, that is. Forward, backward, sideways, wrapped up around each other in the shadows behind an inflatable Santa in Claire Hanlon's front yard. Gymnastically epic stuff.

The only issue was, it never reached the dizzying heights of that first time. A little odd, because technically that first time wasn't very good. It was fumbly and messy. There's no question that we got better at the mechanics the more we learned about each other's bodies. Nevertheless, diminishing returns. Not that I worried
too much about it. I often found
firsts
to be the best, and Dylan and I had plenty of other
firsts
to look forward to in our relationship. And let's not forget that I had a major conspiracy to feed my anxiety fix.

I wanted to show Dylan the burner, to explain my arrangement with Rosetti, and yet not much was happening on that front. I also didn't want thoughts of the special agent to dredge up memories about his family's past troubles. So during every carnal episode, I stifled the urge to shout out, “It's a government plot! We're guinea pigs! We must fight back. To war! To war! To war!” And after every carnal episode, I shifted our focus to other, less acrobatic endeavors. Socialization, for instance.

Our time in the tents had brought me closer to the other seniors than I had first realized, and I was starting to miss them. Also, I wanted to promenade Dylan and my true love in front of our peers, to have them whistle and pat our backs and say things like, “I always thought you two were perfect for each other
.
”

But when New Year's Eve came and went with nary a social engagement other than another roll behind the inflatable Santa, I realized that it would take more than texting my old chums with pleas of :

let's hang

—which were always answered with variations on:

thanks but no thanks.

Everyone had resigned themselves to being homebodies and that was understandable. At first. But as the days bled into each other and I didn't hear a word about theories, let alone parties—I mean, come on, every night was essentially a Friday night—I began to think differently about my former classmates.

They were, to put it bluntly, a bunch of cowards.

T
ess was still Tess, of course. Remarkable, reliable, brave. On a sharp and sunny afternoon during the first week of January, I invited her for a bike ride, and she happily accepted. I hadn't been seeing her much lately either, but that's because she'd been too busy scouring Reddit for “promising leads.” She'd invited me to join her, but I'd declined on account of it sounding about as appealing as taking a skinny dip in a septic tank.

We decided to ride our bikes as far from my house as possible, while staying within town limits, which we calculated would bring us to the Shop City Mall. The Shop City Mall had been closed for over a decade. Stores sat empty the entire time, waiting for a rebirth that was often promised, but never came. My parents had always blamed its demise on Amazon and Target, but I blamed the fact that Cinnabon is fucking gross and not a single living person has ever bought anything from a Brookstone.

We weren't in a rush, so we took the long cut through the center of town, expecting maybe to see some of our classmates out and about. But Main Street was a broken expanse of empty. They hadn't even fixed the guardrail on the Centennial Bridge or pulled the snowplow out of the Patchcong River after the #ForBilly riots. The stone steps of the State Street Theater were covered in a layer of dead leaves and I doubted that anyone had been inside since the emergency town hall, two days after we lost Perry Love.

We continued along the Old Post Road, through the tunnel of bare trees, and past the Covington Quilt Museum and its still-gaping, RAV4-shaped wound. Empty out there as well.

We didn't talk at first, because we never talked all that much when we rode together. It was rarely ever about that. And yet, as we got closer to the mall, I felt a need to confess. “I feel a bit weird keeping this from Dylan,” I shouted through the wind at her.

“Keeping what?” she shouted back. Like me, she'd owned her bike for years and there were streamers on the handgrips that, though faded, still flared when she rode.

“The Rosetti thing,” I replied. “The conspiracy investigation. I want to tell him about it. I want to tell everyone about it and live our lives. Have fun. Be social. Get on with our futures.”

“About that,” Tess said as she skidded to a stop. “If it makes you feel any better, I don't think it matters.”

“What?” I asked, kicking up my own batch of dust. “Our lives? Our futures?”

“Rosetti's theory. Another in a long line of flawed ideas. You
don't share every flawed idea you hear with Dylan, do you? So why is this one different?”

“Because it's not flawed. She knew Doc Ramirez put tracking devices in us from the get-go.”

“Hardly the get-go. If you've done even a little digging, you'd know that the public has been asking for us to be tracked for months. It's been a standard part of stump speeches:
Contain the Curse!
It's all about giving the constituents what they want.”

“So what? Doesn't mean Rosetti is wrong about anything. The government wants to exploit us because they know more than they're letting on.”

“The government wants to contain us. Because they know less. Be wary of the government, but put your focus on the science. Something our friend Lady Nightshade is forgetting.”

“So remind her. Have you been using the burner? At least sharing
the science
with her? I'm sure she'd like to hear about it.”

Tess shook her head. “I'm not ready to share with anyone yet, because I'm not sure what I've found. You'll be the first to know, though. So hold on to that burner. If it's really untraceable, then it might come in handy. We might need a way to talk to each other if things get worse.”

“Worse?” I said, almost choking on the word. “Well, thanks for the reminder that my life can still get shittier. In the meantime, what theory am I supposed to share with Dylan?”

“None of them,” she replied as she adjusted her banana seat, which had gone a little crooked. “What I'm trying to say is don't worry so much about what you tell him. It'll only add stress to his
life and then it will eventually turn out to be as meaningless as all this other nonsense. I mean, everyone has a theory. Even he has one, right?”

I shrugged. “A while back Dylan did say he thought it was all due to karma. But then he made some nonsensical joke about Jennifer Lawrence, so I figured he was kidding.”

Tess snorted out a little laugh, and started pedaling. “Actually that's one of the more novel ones I've heard. I mean, that poor girl never did catch a break, did she? And Gayle Heatherton was the last victim. Makes you think, doesn't it?”

Déjà vu. I mean, what the fuck did Jennifer Lawrence have to do with anything? I wanted to ask, but by the time I caught up to Tess, we were climbing a hill and my lungs were fighting too hard against the crisp air.

When we reached the crest, the Shop City Mall was spread out below us in all its derelict glory. Tess kept going, so I followed, coasting down the road and howling into the wind, which is the only way to properly bike downhill.

As we blazed into the parking lot, we zipped our lips and jammed our brakes. Because, uh-oh, we were not alone. A man carrying a yellow hard hat hurried toward us, waving it as he ran. “Whoa, whoa whoa,” he said. “What're you doing here. Gonna have to move along.”

“Ummm, why?” Tess replied as she surveyed the empty lot. “This place has been closed forever. I doubt we'll be bothering anyone who's looking to shop at the Talbots.”

The man used the hard hat to point to an entrance of the mall where at least a dozen other construction workers had gathered.
“Not shopping,” he said. “Schooling. Didn't you hear? Board is reopening the elementary and middle schools, but since the high school is a mess, everyone except those seniors will be taking classes here.”

“Kids are taking classes in, like, the RadioShack?” I asked.

The man put his hat back on. “Whatever works. Got a food court for science labs . . . and food. Clear out the JCPenney and you have yourselves a gym. Plenty of room for whatever you want in there. The rest of you kids have been given a clean bill of health, so you deserve to go back to class. We should have it ready in a week or two and then you can get on with things. My daughter will be there. She's a junior now, so you probably know her. Lucia Watson? I'm surprised you haven't—”

Then the man shut his trap, took a step back. His eyes widened as it finally dawned on him who he was talking to.

Tess put her hands up in surrender and said, “Don't worry. It's not—”

“No!” the man shouted and he wagged a finger. “Get the hell out! You're not wanted. Not here, not anywhere.”

“We're not dangerous to anyone but ourselves,” I said. “I think that's been proven.”

But the man wasn't having it. He ran back toward the other workers, gesticulating as he went. Tess and I mounted our pink steeds and scrambled to line up our feet with the pedals. By the time we were moving, the mob was upon us, shouting and shaking their fists like a good mob should. We made it out of the parking lot, barely, and chugged up the hill without looking back.

Now, I've never considered myself particularly cool, but I've
been fortunate enough to have escaped any serious bullying in my life. I've been harassed, sure. What girl hasn't? Teased, without a doubt. But bullying—and I mean the constant and unrelenting variety—is something I don't have much experience with.

As my lungs and heart dug their claws into my ribs, I imagined this is how it felt to be bullied, to constantly fear that someone is behind you, chasing you up an endless hill, and if you stop moving, you'll fall back into their clutches. So you can imagine my relief when I reached the crest, and it was now the high school I spotted in the distance, speckled by a fresh flurry of snow.

Tess and I raced down the other side and away from the men and we howled even louder than before and it was in the midst of that howl and those snowflakes that I finally put two and two together.

“Well, aren't I officially the world's biggest idiot?” I said with a gasp when we were finally far away enough to feel safe. “Dylan meant our old classmate Jennifer Lawrence, didn't he?”