Boy 2.0, page 16
Coal didn’t care that Doc looked like she might cry. “But I’m here,” he said. “It did work out.”
Doc shook her head again. “She never talked about you. Never. There’s information we’re still missing,” she said. “By the time I even knew you existed, she was long gone. There’s something we don’t understand yet. Some reason she wanted to hide you, even from me.”
“How long have you known who I was?” Coal asked.
Doc hesitated.
“How long?” he demanded.
“Eight years,” Doc said.
“You’ve known everything about me for eight years?”
“Not everything,” Doc said. “But yes, I knew more than most.”
“How much more?”
Doc took her eyes off the road for a moment and met Coal’s gaze. She knew about his skin. She knew. She’d known this whole time.
Coal’s throat closed around a scream he refused to let out. He swallowed it down hard. “How did you and Tom get to be my foster parents? That can’t have been a coincidence.”
“It wasn’t,” Doc said. “Once we found out about you, we came up with a plan to get custody. Tom had the means to make all of that happen, but it took a while.”
“You mean he had the money to make it happen.”
“Well, yes,” Doc said. “He was supposed to look out for you.”
“Part two of the experiment?”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“What was it like, then?” Coal asked.
“Your mother was hopeful that your ability to make yourself invisible was a fluke. She monitored you for months, and it never happened again. But her research was about making someone who could do exactly what you did. If anyone knew about you, it would be dangerous. She had to keep you a secret.”
“How do you know what she thought?”
“Michelle left her files in a safety deposit box. Once the account that paid for it closed from lack of use, they reached out to her emergency contact. That was me. Even then I had to go through a bunch of legal hoops to open it. It was a long process. But once I knew you existed, I reached out to Tom, and—”
“Then he got me,” Coal finished.
“We didn’t like moving you from the Herbsts. They seemed really nice. But we wanted you with us.”
Coal hadn’t thought about the Herbsts and their dog, Mush, for a long time. There had been two other foster kids in the house, too, Julian and Arianna. Julian had been almost eighteen and out of foster care, looking to do things on his own. He was barely ever there. Most of the time it was just Coal and Arianna, who was a month younger than him, but acted like she was older because she’d been at the house longer. It was Mush who was the real boss, though. She would come waggling over with her short feet and long ears to bark at any and everything. Nobody could get a word in edgewise when Mush was on a tear. The day Coal left, everyone gathered in the living room to say goodbye. Even Julian. Mush, for once, was quiet.
“So you knew about me. You knew what I could do.”
“Like Michelle, we hoped it would never happen again,” Doc said. “But when you mentioned that your skin changed a few days ago . . . I was worried.”
“She left me behind and disappeared,” Coal said. He gripped the sides of the seat and rocked his head back and forth. “A person can’t just disappear.”
“They can if they’re smart,” Doc said. “And your mother was a genius.”
Doc was taking a circuitous route, constantly checking the rearview mirror as if she was certain someone was following them. When they finally got to their neighborhood, Coal felt the relief wash over her. But as she prepared to turn onto their street, she hesitated, turned the car away, and hit the gas.
Coal looked back. Two police cars were parked outside the McKay house—and one very shiny black SUV.
“Now what?” Coal asked.
“Unfortunately, now you’re on your own for a little bit.”
“What does that mean?” Coal asked. “What am I supposed to do?”
“You’ll need to hide,” Doc said.
“Where?”
Doc stopped the car and rummaged through her purse until she found a single door key. She pressed it into Coal’s hand. “Turn off your phone. I’ll come and get you as soon as it’s safe. But even there, you have to be careful. Your mother’s research is at Tom’s house.”
Coal’s stomach tightened. The whole time, his mother had been within arm’s reach, and he’d had no idea. He got out of the car, slammed the door closed behind him, and ran down the block clutching his backpack. He paused briefly and saw that Doc had made a U-turn and was returning the way she’d come. She made a right onto their street. She looked back just for a second, to watch him standing there, then hit the gas and was gone.
Coal was on his own.
Again.
23.
Coal stood outside the gates of Tom’s house. It looked different now. More distant. Like a picture of a house he once knew, and not the thing itself. He’d been squeezing the key so hard he could feel every indentation.
He was just about to unlatch the gate and walk up the driveway when a light came on and he turned, panicked. A car was idling in the street, its headlamps trained on his face. He shielded his eyes.
“You’re here.”
It was a girl’s voice. Not the police. He relaxed a little and squinted, trying to make her out through the windshield glass. “Who are you?”
“I’m the person whose ID you stole to break into one of the Mirror Tech labs this afternoon.”
Isadora. Crap.
Isadora pulled the car to the side of the street and got out. “You’re just going to stand there with your mouth hanging open?” she asked.
“What are you doing here?” Coal asked.
“Saving your behind,” she said.
“From what?”
“From whatever secret experiment you ran away from,” she said. “I saw the security videos.”
“Which one?” Coal asked.
She shook her head. “There’s more than one? You really need to be more careful, invisible boy.”
“You know.”
“You weren’t subtle with the fabric at the lab,” she said. “Once I noticed my ID was missing, I figured you were going to try to use it somehow, so I asked a friend of mine in security to look out for you.”
Coal groaned.
“I got a call this afternoon that you tried a break-in. Did you really get a baby to help you?”
“Hannah isn’t a baby. She’s seven.”
Isadora raised her eyebrows.
“How many people have seen that video?” Coal asked.
“Nobody looks at those files unless something happens,” Isadora said. “And the files get deleted after a few days. I went ahead and deleted this one early. There was only one person who pulled it before me.”
“Dr. Achebe.”
“Which is why you went back?” she asked. “To destroy the file?”
“Something like that,” Coal said.
“But instead of destroying the file, you raised a whole hornet’s nest of mess.”
“How do you know?”
“Friend in security. He helped me find your house, too,” she said. “Now you’re alone, standing in front of a dark, creepy manor. Do you have a plan B?”
“The plan is you leave, and I—”
“Sorry, I can’t just leave,” Isadora said. “You’re clearly in trouble, and Mirror Tech is obviously doing something shady. I know what it’s like to be in trouble and alone.”
Coal opened his mouth to ask, but Isadora rolled her eyes.
“Look, I might be able to help you, so let me. What do you need?”
“I need to find out who I really am.” He sighed. “I need to know how I was made.” He showed her the memory sticks. “I have some files. There are more in the house.”
“Then we start there,” she said.
For the first time in hours, Coal felt relief. Some of the tension in his body softened away. He went through the gate and up to the house. Isadora pointed her key toward her car and locked it. The lights faded and they walked up the driveway in darkness.
Coal closed the door gently behind them and entered the alarm code into the keypad. He shrugged off his backpack and led Isadora through the familiar space, trailing his finger over the console in the entryway, and then along the walls that led to the kitchen at the back of the house. After just a week with no one in the house, there was a thin layer of dust over everything. There was still food in the fridge. He sniffed at a container of milk and poured himself a glass.
“Thirsty?” he asked.
Isadora shook her head.
He drained the glass, and then they made their way upstairs. Coal felt the familiar grain of the wooden railing beneath his palm. He went straight to his room. The door was ajar, and the sight of his bed with the red plaid sheets and the New York Jets pillow he and Tom had gotten after a game immediately made him relax. But only a little. Nothing had changed. Obviously. No one had been there. It was as if the whole previous week had never happened. His laptop was still on his desk, the sticky notes with scribbles, the cup with markers and pens, the picture of him and Door from seventh-grade field day in the frame, like it was waiting for him to come back. But this wasn’t home anymore. He froze.
“What’s wrong?” Isadora asked.
Several sounds and images came to Coal at once: Tom screaming at things that weren’t there. The police arriving. The social worker. The McKays. The gunshot. Turning invisible. Mirror Tech. The photo of him with his mother. Doc with the hammer.
Coal explained about what had happened with Tom. Then about what he’d learned at Mirror Tech.
Isadora listened quietly. With each new revelation, her eyebrows creeped up higher. When he was done, she put her hand on his. “That’s a lot.”
Coal nodded. He was grateful he wasn’t alone. “We should check Tom’s office.”
“Okay.”
The room was dark wood, with a wall of built-in bookshelves and a couple of leather armchairs on a slightly worn rug. At the end of the room was Tom’s desk. Coal checked there while Isadora looked through the files that were neatly lined up at the bottom of the bookcase. There was a lot to go through: taxes, medical forms, old bills, stuff from the state about Coal, but nothing that seemed to be related to who Coal was really, the Snow White Project, or his mother. They checked Tom’s bedroom next, but there wasn’t anything unusual there, either.
As Coal moved through the hallway, something squeaked under his feet.
“What’s that?” Isadora asked.
“It’s an old house,” Coal said with a shrug.
“Hmm,” she said. She lined her foot up next to Coal’s and shifted her weight, making the wood squeak again.
They pulled back the runner. In the dim light coming through the window, the squeaky spot didn’t look any different from the rest of the floor, but Isadora felt around with her hands, and one of the boards dipped slightly under her fingers. Coal put his hand next to hers, and they pressed harder. One edge went down, the other went up. Underneath was a gray metal safe. They had to pry up a couple more boards before they could see all of it.
Coal stared.
“It’s not going to open itself,” Isadora said.
He pulled the safe out of the floor and looked at the keypad. He tried the code for the house alarm. The panel made an obnoxious beep. Coal tried Tom’s birthday. Then he tried his own birthday.
The lock released, and the little door popped open.
That was a surprise. Coal’s heartbeat quickened. It felt like a clue. Like affirmation that this was waiting for him.
Inside was a zipped plastic bag with three memory sticks. Under that was a scrapbook, and then several black notebooks. Coal pulled each of them out of the safe and laid them in a semicircle. He went for the scrapbook first. The opening page was the picture from the Mirror Tech files. The one of him and his mother staring into the camera.
“Who’s she?” Isadora asked.
“My mother,” Coal said. “I only found that out today.”
“Geez,” Isadora said. “She’s pretty.”
Coal nodded. He touched the photo gently. The smooth, cool surface beneath his fingers was unsatisfactory. What he needed was her. There. Now. To answer all the questions that were burning through him. He shook his head and continued to flip through the book. There were more photos of Coal alone, of Coal and his mother, of bath times, his hands around his mother’s finger, bright bubbly smiles, his mother reading him a book, his fingers clutched around the edges of his quilt.
Every single photo felt like a deep cut—and a relief at the same time. He’d had a mother. She had loved him. She had made him the quilt that had come with him to every foster home he’d ever had. But she had given him up, and he didn’t know why.
Isadora gave him time, but when he got to the end of the scrapbook, she said, “We should take a look at what’s on those memory sticks.” She got Tom’s laptop from his office and got to work. She scrolled through several files. “Your mother’s experiments,” she said.
“What do they say?”
“Your mom was doing cell research. Epithelial cells.”
“Lining,” Coal said. “Like skin.”
“Right,” Isadora said. “You can code one set of cells to behave like another, but it looks like what your mom was trying to do was get cells to behave in ways they just didn’t want to. She couldn’t make it happen.”
Coal picked up a notebook and ran his finger over one of the pages, feeling the indentations in his mother’s handwriting on the paper. “What about what’s in here?” he asked.
“Huh,” Isadora said. “They’re the same files.”
“Why would she do that?”
Isadora frowned and shook her head. She held the notebook up to the computer and compared them side by side. Then she leaned in closer.
“Did you find something?” Coal asked.
“They’re not exactly the same,” Isadora said. “The notebook has more information. You can see there’s a notation here to continue on another page. And when you go to that page”—she flipped through the notebook—“there’s an additional set of data.” She grinned. “The only reason to do that is so no one else could get this extra information. You can’t do a keyword search for something that only exists in a notebook.”
“But what does it say?” Coal felt on edge. Like he was close to understanding everything, and yet everything was taking too long to reveal itself. His body felt hot, cold, tired, energized, tight, and relieved at the same time.
“Take it easy,” Isadora said. “You’re freaking out.”
“Wouldn’t you?” Coal asked.
“Of course,” Isadora said. “This is a lot for me to wrap my mind around; I can’t imagine how tough this is for you. Just . . .” She trailed off. “Whoa.”
Coal opened his eyes. In the patchy moonlight, his arms were fading into the background. His hands took on the pattern of the parquet floor and a bit of the color of the rug.
Isadora touched his skin. “This is amazing,” she said. “Your mother was really a genius.”
Coal focused on calming his mind and his skin gradually returned to normal. Isadora stared at him for several more seconds with her mouth hanging open.
“Is everybody going to look at me like that from now on?” Coal asked.
“Sorry,” she said. “It’s just amazing to watch.” She shook her head and put the final memory stick into the laptop. “There are files here I can’t get into,” she said.
“Show me,” Coal said.
Isadora hovered over a part of the screen where the cursor disappeared and reappeared as she moved it. “Hidden files,” she said.
“Dr. Achebe mentioned finding some of her research recently.”
“If she was so secretive, it’s odd that she would leave anything on the Mirror Tech servers.”
“He had pictures of me,” Coal said.
“It’s almost as if she left pieces of information in different places so you could follow the breadcrumbs.”
Coal threw his head back and yelled in frustration at the ceiling.
“The password’s got to be particular to you,” Isadora said. “Something she left you with.
“The blanket,” Coal said. “There’s a chemical formula embroidered on my baby blanket.”
“A chemical formula for what?”
Coal took the laptop from her and typed in C191H173O21S5N3. This was the answer. He was sure of it. He hit enter.
Incorrect password
Coal slumped against the wall.
“I’m sorry,” Isadora said. “I don’t have any other ideas. I thought for sure she’d have chosen a code you would be able to decipher, but Tom wouldn’t. Something easy enough but not obvious.”
Coal sat up. Tom would know the formula for coal. He would have seen it on the baby blanket. But he might not have guessed what message his mother was trying to send with it. He typed in the formula again, this time adding an E between the structure for sulfur and nitrogen so it spelled out C191H173O21S5EN3. CHOSEN. He hit enter.
The folder unlocked.
Coal and Isadora yelped.
Coal clicked on the first file and they began reading side by side.
“Look. Dr. Achebe’s in this one,” Isadora said.
Hunter’s position is that the funding is necessary but I won’t give them access to my research. It’s too personal.
“Oh no,” Isadora said.
“What?” Coal asked. Then he saw.
I noticed the mole several days ago, but it was somewhere on the periphery of my mind while I tried to finish the last tests on lab CS701. Today I couldn’t ignore it. There it was, uneven, discolored, and blooming on my shoulder. I biopsied it and checked it under the microscope. It’s melanoma. Here’s the funny part: I never step out of the lab for long enough to get any kind of sunlight. Skin cancer is the very last thing I would have expected.
