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for jillellyn riley and lisa holton
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
About the Author
WHO IS THIS AMANDA TRULY?
Signal From Afar
CORNELIA’S CODE
Copyright
About the Publisher
CHAPTER 1
Why is it that when you don’t want to think about something, you can’t stop thinking about it?
From the second I woke up, the scene Amanda had witnessed at my house yesterday kept playing over and over in my head like some kind of sick YouTube video on repeat. I’d thought about it while I was getting dressed, while I was riding my bike to school, and even while Kelli and I stood by her locker and she tried to recap the entire plot of the Reese Witherspoon movie she’d caught just the tail end of last night. Now I was sitting in history class, hearing not Mr. Randolph explaining the causes of World War I but my dad’s voice in my head saying the same words over and over again while I tried to figure out what, exactly, Amanda had overheard. Everything, probably. The phone rang while I was upstairs looking for my Scribble Book, and since my dad was practically screaming into the receiver by the time I got back to the kitchen, the conversation had obviously begun a while back. I mean, considering how much she and I have talked, Amanda had obviously known something was going on. She knew more than anyone else at school did. But up until yesterday she hadn’t known everything. She hadn’t known the worst of it. She knew about my mom, but she didn’t know about the money. And now she did.
The crazy thing was, she hadn’t seemed surprised. It was almost as if somehow she’d guessed a long time ago …
“… Which is why, yes, the assassination of the Archduke is the catalyst but is not the cause per se.” I’m usually kind of into Mr. Randolph’s class even though I’m not exactly what you’d call a history buff. He’s really nice and patient and he explains everything clearly, and he’s one of the only teachers at Endeavor who actually prepares you for the test he’s going to give. Still, there was no way I could concentrate on this morning’s lesson.
I shook my head and straightened up in my chair, clicking some lead out of my mechanical pencil. Perhaps if I resembled an attentive student, I would become one.
“Did you all write that down? Entangling alliances. If you remember nothing else from today, remember that.”
The board was covered in notes, but Mr. Randolph had found room to write entangling alliances in letters almost six inches high and he’d underlined “entangling” about fifty times. I rolled my eyes at myself as I began to copy down the crucial phrase. No doubt entangling alliances was the only thing I’d be remembering from today’s class. Too bad I had no idea what they were or who had them.
Just as I started writing alliances, Lexa Booker, who was sitting next to me, slid a crumpled piece of paper across my notebook. I palmed it expertly—Heidi and I have had enough classes together that I can pretty much make a note from her disappear in a nanosecond—and finished the word, then carefully unfolded the paper.
I looked up. The desks in Mr. Randolph’s room are in a big horseshoe, and Heidi was all the way on the other side of it, but her eyes met mine and she raised her exquisitely shaped eyebrows. I nodded almost imperceptibly, grateful to have something to think about besides Amanda knowing even more about my screwed-up family than she had last week. This Saturday’s party was going to be amazing, and the I-Girls—Kelli, Heidi, Traci, and yours truly (okay, I briefly spelled my name with an “i,” but not anymore!)—the reigning queens of the ninth grade, were going in green. That was cool—I have a dark green fitted T-shirt, and once when we all went to the movies I wore it. Lee was there, and he’d said my eyes looked really pretty when I wore green. Thinking about Lee, I felt my face go pink, which is what happens to redheaded Irish girls when we’re embarrassed. Or scared. Or hot. Or just the slightest bit nervous or uncomfortable. Basically between twenty and a thousand times a day. “Callista Leary?”
My head shot up at the sound of my full name. Had Mr. Randolph noticed the note going around the horseshoe? Some teachers, if they catch you passing a note, make you read it out loud to the class. Not that this was such an incriminating missive, but still. Then I realized it was a woman’s voice that had said my name and Mr. Randolph wasn’t even looking at me; he (along with everyone else in the room) had turned toward the door where one of the secretaries from the main office was standing.
“Um … that’s me.” Everyone was staring, and I could feel the heat spreading across my face and down my chest in a hard-core blush.
“You’re wanted in the vice principal’s office.”
For a split second it was as though I’d just been addressed in a language other than English; I literally couldn’t make sense of the words she’d spoken. “I’m … ?” I repeated stupidly.
“You can take your things,” she added, bobbing her head with its tight bun. “You won’t be coming back this period.”
As if my befuddlement were written on my face, Mr. Randolph said, “You’ll get the notes from someone tomorrow, Callie. Go with Mrs. Leong for now.”
Suddenly I wasn’t confused anymore, I was frightened.
Could this have something to do with my mom? I stood up fast, nearly toppling my desk. Then my backpack got twisted up in the chair and my shaking fingers couldn’t work the zipper. I could practically hear everyone in the room pitying me.
As I passed her, Heidi whispered, “What happened?” Unlike Traci and Kelli, Heidi knew about my mom. She knew, but we never talked about it. Just like we never talked about anything else that happened that night. Ever.
I shook my head as a way of saying I had no idea, and as she reached out her hand to touch mine for a second, her lovely face wrinkled with concern, I had this really ugly thought. Is she doing that because she’s worried about me or because she wants it to look like she’s worried about me?
I seemed to be having those thoughts about Heidi a lot lately, but before I could turn back to check the expression on her face, I was outside the classroom with the door swinging shut behind me.
It was weird walking down the silent hallway. Normally I’m only in the corridors between classes, when there are a million other Endeavor students elbowing past one another to get to class. Now it was so silent I could actually feel the echo from the click of Mrs. Leong’s chunky heels. I noticed a corner of an old homecoming banner had come loose, the heavy blue felt swaying in a breeze I couldn’t feel. “The Endeavor Enders: We don’t GOT spirit, we ARE spirits!” How had anyone ever thought having a ghost for a mascot was a good idea? And why did I have to be reminded of ghosts now, when for all I knew I was about to find out that my mom was …
Mrs. Leong pushed open the door to the main office. Here there was no hint of the silence of the hallways—a dozen phones seemed to be ringing at once, a Xerox machine was going about a hundred miles a minute and at least two other secretaries were busily typing away at their computers. It was like I was in the headquarters of a major corporation instead of the office of the Endeavor Unified Middle and High School.
Remembering Amanda’s suggestion for a new school motto ("We don’t stand a ghost of a chance!") momentarily held my anxiety at bay, but my stomach sank as Mrs. Leong gestured toward Vice Principal Thornhill’s office. “Go in. He’s expecting you.” I had a second to consider the irony that it was Mr. Thornhill who was about to witness my getting the worst possible news about my mom. For no good reason, my dad totally hates him, yet it was in this man’s office that he’d have to tell me the awful truth.
Heart pounding, I pushed open the door, sure the next sight I’d see would be my father’s tear-stained face.
CHAPTER 2
But my dad wasn’t even there.
Three chairs faced Mr. Thornhill’s desk. The middle one was empty, while the other two were filled by Nia Rivera, the biggest freak in the ninth grade, and Hal Bennett, who I guess is what you could call a recovering loser. All through middle school, Hal was this bean pole who wore high-waisted, too-short pants and looked like his mom cut his hair by putting a bowl over his head and trimming around the base of it. But he must have spent his summer watching Queer Eye for the Straight Guy or something because when we got back to school in September, he had become Über-cool. Now he wore vintage T-shirts and worn jeans that he totally filled out, if you know what I’m saying, and his dark blond hair had this whole shaggy-but-styled thing going on. Also, he was, like, an artistic genius. Maybe he always had been, but this year he’d done a devastating caricature of Thornhill in the school paper that created a buzz for a few days, and then he was chosen to go to New York to represent the entire state of Maryland in a contest that some big museum sponsored back in November. He’d even shown up on the I-Girls' radar—Kelli and Traci were talking at lunch last week about what a hottie Hal Bennett was becoming, and after years of being afraid that they would somehow find out that he and I had hung out together before I became an I-Girl, I suddenly wanted to tell them. I didn’t say anything, though. I noticed that Heidi did not weigh in at all, and what if I told them about our once having been friends and then he somehow got re-dorkified?
“Have a seat, Callie,” said Mr. Thornhill. Totally confused, I slipped into the empty chair. Clearly my being summoned here had nothing to do with my mother.
Mr. Thornhill had his hands folded under his chin, his index fingers touching the ends of his short, bristly moustache, forming a V around his mouth. The fluorescent light shone on his bald head, so shiny you’d have thought he spent his mornings polishing it.
No one was talking, and no one other than Mr. Thornhill acknowledged my entry. Since I’d never been in the vice principal’s office before, I checked out the room. There wasn’t a whole lot there, no diplomas or pictures of his family. One wall was covered in file cabinets with alphabetized labels, and in the center of the desk was a small pile of manila folders but nothing personal—no Endeavor mug to hold his pencils or a #1 DAD paperweight. It was almost weird how blank the room was considering Mr. Thornhill had been the vice principal here since I started middle school.
The silence grew. I turned my head slightly to look first at Hal and then at Nia, but he was staring at the carpet, and her thick hair hung along the side of her face so I couldn’t see her expression. As my eyes swept the room, Mr. Thornhill and I made eye contact for a second and his stare was so intense I had to look away. It was like he was … angry at me or something. For the first time, it occurred to me that I could be in trouble. I mean, he was the vice principal. I tried to think of a rule I might have broken recently, but it wasn’t like I’d been smoking in the bathroom or not doing my homework or anything.
“Well,” he announced finally, “I think you all know why you’re here.”
Okay, this was getting really weird. For the first time since Mrs. Leong had called my name, I actually started to find the whole thing funny. I imagined telling Heidi, Traci, and Kelli the story over lunch. And then it was like he thought I’d done something. With Nia Rivera! For the past two years, the words Nia Rivera had been a guaranteed punch line with the I-Girls, so I knew they’d crack up as soon as I uttered them.
As it happened, Nia was the first to break the silence. “Actually, I have no idea why I’m here.” She swept her long brown hair over her shoulder, not flirtatiously, like an I-Girl would have, but impatiently, like it was annoying to have hair.
I was really surprised by how confident she sounded, as if she wasn’t afraid of the vice principal at all, and for a second I was reminded of the fact that she is Cisco Rivera’s sister. Cisco is the coolest, most popular guy in the junior class. It’s hard to believe two people who are such polar opposites could be even distantly related, much less siblings. It makes you think their parents performed some kind of social experiment on them when they were young.
Mr. Thornhill slammed his hand down on the desk so hard I jumped slightly, but I noticed Nia did not flinch. “Nia, I really don’t have time for lies right now. This is potentially a very serious situation.”
Like I said, I don’t exactly spend a lot of time getting called into the vice principal’s office, but I had heard him get mad before. Actually, the person I’d heard him getting mad at was Amanda—many times since she arrived in October, and most recently about a month ago. I’d come to the office to drop off the day’s attendance slip for Mrs. Peabody, and his door was open and he was yelling at her. It was the day after the President’s Day holiday, and the vice principal had opened the door to his office to discover a huge stuffed raven wearing a stovepipe hat sitting on his chair. I don’t know how Thornhill figured out that Amanda had done it, and she’d never told me if he’d been right to accuse her or, if he had, how she’d gotten into the vice principal’s office in the first place, but he was furious. And that was far from the only time, either. After the master clock in the office was rigged to run fast so that school got out early two Fridays in a row, I could hear him yelling at her in his office while I was walking by in the hallway.
Now he sounded that mad. Mad like Nia had done something really, really terrible.
Whatever it was, I definitely didn’t want to be associated with it. Or her. I cleared my throat. “Um, Mr. Thornhill, I think there’s been some mistake. We don’t even know one another.” Sometimes the cluelessness of adults is nothing short of shocking. I mean, not to be snotty, but I’m an I-Girl and Nia’s a social leper. Did Mr. Thornhill think we were friends or something?
“Callie, you’ve always been an excellent student with spotless behavior.” Mr. Thornhill tapped the folders on his desk and I wondered if one of them had something to do with me. “I highly doubt you want to ruin such a stellar record by failing to tell me what you know.” Was it my imagination, or did Mr. Thornhill emphasize the word stellar? Once again, I thought of my mother.
“Look, Mr. Thornhill, they’re not lying,” said Hal. “We really don’t hang together.” As he leaned forward, the small gold loop in his ear caught the light, and I remembered Traci had said something about his supposedly getting a tattoo somewhere on his body over the summer.
“No, you look, Hal. I am talking about a serious act of vandalism. I want you to tell me what you know and I want you to tell me now."
Mr. Thornhill was so angry a vein bulged on his neck. I
actually felt a little afraid of him. This time, when I glanced over at Nia, she was looking at me, and I knew the What the hell? look on her face was mirrored on my own.
“Why don’t you tell us what you know?” said Hal. His voice was calm, soothing. Like he thought Mr. Thornhill was crazy or something.
Which, given the circumstances, didn’t seem so impossible.
Mr. Thornhill leaned forward and jabbed his finger in Hal’s direction. “Don’t you condescend to me, Hal Bennett. You all know what Amanda Valentino did this morning. What I want to know is, why has she implicated the three of you in her crime?”
Okay, this was so weird. I mean, I’d just been thinking of Amanda when Mrs. Leong called me into Thornhill’s office, and now he was mad at me for something she’d done. But still, what he was saying made no sense. I mean, Amanda and I were friends, but Amanda and Nia and Hal weren’t. Nobody was friends with Nia, except maybe some of the other weirdos in Model Congress or Mock Trial or whatever lame clubs she belonged to. And as hot as Hal may have been, he still only hung out with a few other dorky guys whose names escaped me. But not Amanda.
“Look, obviously you’re not going to believe us if we say we’re innocent. So why don’t you just ask her yourself? She’ll tell you,” said Nia, and the crazy thing was that now her confidence didn’t remind me of Cisco so much as of Amanda, the only other person I knew who never backed down in the face of authority.
Vice Principal Thornhill got up and walked around to the front of his desk. Then he leaned back on it and crossed his arms, staring at each of us in turn.
“That’s a lovely idea, Nia, and I’d be happy to comply. There’s just one problem with your plan. As the three of you know perfectly well, Amanda Valentino has disappeared.”
CHAPTER 3
I felt as if Mr. Thornhill hadn’t spoken so much as he’d just slammed me in the head with a piece of wood from my dad’s workshop. Amanda had disappeared?
“But—” I was about to say that Amanda hadn’t disappeared, that she’d just been over at my house yesterday, but before I could finish my sentence, Nia cut me off.
“But you don’t seem to understand, Mr. Thornhill. None of us is even friends with Amanda Valentino.”
I jerked my head to stare at her. On the one hand, I knew Nia was telling the truth. I knew it. How could Amanda have been friends with someone so … well, so weird? And she’d never even mentioned Nia, not once. Of course they weren’t friends.
But there was something about the way Nia’s face was whiter than the school mascot and how tightly she was clutching the arms of her chair that made it seem as if she were lying. Which would mean she and Amanda were friends. Only that was …
“Impossible, Nia,” said Vice Principal Thornhill, and now he sounded almost tired. “That is simply not possible.” He walked over to the window and opened the blind. “First of all: look.”
The sky had cleared after last night’s rain, and the bright sun on the wet pavement of the parking lot was nearly blinding. I squinted against its rays as the three of us stood up and went over to the window.
“What are we looking at?” asked Hal, and I realized I was so lost in my own thoughts I hadn’t been looking for anything to look at.
“My car,” said the vice principal.
As soon as he said it, I saw which car was his. Which car had to be his. Parked slightly off to one side of the faculty parking lot, it was the brightest thing in sight. Actually, it could have been the brightest thing in the entire world. Even from a distance, it seemed to throb with color—I couldn’t decipher all the designs,
but there was a gigantic rainbow that extended from the front wheel to the back wheel and a huge peace sign covering most of the driver’s side door. I could just make out what looked like a group of stars on the back door and a bright yellow sun on the hubcap below it.
The whole thing was so outrageous that I suddenly burst out laughing. I couldn’t help myself—it was like the car was some huge joke of Amanda’s. Only, once I started laughing, I couldn’t stop. I was sure everyone else was going to laugh, too, but they didn’t, and I started to get freaked out, like maybe I was getting hysterical or something. I almost wished someone would throw a glass of cold water in my face.
“I’m glad you find this funny, Callista,” said Mr. Thornhill.
It wasn’t a glass of cold water, but it worked like one. As if I had an on-off switch, I stopped laughing immediately. Mr. Thornhill left the blind up, walked back to his desk, and sat down. I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to sit down also, but since neither Nia nor Hal made a move to go back to their chairs, I stayed with them by the window. I didn’t look back at the car, though. I was afraid if I did I’d just start laughing again.
“Even if Amanda did paint all over your car,” said Hal, “what makes you think we had something to do with it? Like Nia said, we aren’t even, you know, friends with her.”
I was about to open my mouth to correct Hal and tell Mr. Thornhill that I was friends with Amanda even though obviously Hal and Nia weren’t, when Hal looked directly at me with his startlingly blue eyes and added, “We don’t know her at all.” Was it my imagination or was he trying to tell me something?
Or trying to tell me not to tell something?
“If you aren’t friends with her,” said Vice Principal Thornhill, “then why, in addition to vandalizing my car, did she spray-paint a symbol on each of your lockers?”
Amanda had spray-painted something on my locker? I was about to ask what, but before I could say anything, Mr. Thornhill continued.
“And perhaps you’d like to tell me if she left something inside your lockers?”
She’d gone in my locker? Why would he think she had gone in my locker? Anyway my locker was locked, and nobody but me knew the combination.
As if speaking my thoughts, Hal said, “How could Amanda even have gotten inside our lockers?”
For the first time since we’d entered his office, Mr. Thornhill smiled. “An excellent question, Hal,” and he slipped his hands behind his head and leaned back in his chair. “Why don’t you tell me?"
“I just like having them, knowing somewhere there’s a lock and I could open it if I wanted to.”
Outside it was pouring, a freezing February rain that seemed as if it might continue forever. The rain only made my room, which I generally love anyway, feel even cozier, like a tiny haven that the wet and cold could never penetrate. Even the fact that the silence from my dad’s workshop meant he was probably drinking and not working didn’t bother me when Amanda started talking about something cool, like why she collected keys.
“They’re not worth anything,” I pointed out. As usual, my mind was quick to turn to money. It’s funny how when you don’t have any, suddenly all paths seem to lead to it.
“True,” said Amanda, fingering the tiny, ancient-looking key she always wore on a ribbon around her neck. “But I like their symbolic value.”
We were sitting on the floor, Amanda resting her back against the big armchair and me facing her, my back against the bed. We were both wearing a pair of slippers from the basket by the front door, and I had my comforter wrapped around my legs. The day before, Amanda had cut her hair short and blunt, but today she was wearing a long, platinum wig. I’d asked her if it was because she didn’t like the cut, but she’d said, “No, I like it. Why do you ask?” in this way that made it seem like wearing a wig the day after you get your hair cut was just something anybody would do.