“It’s just not like you,” Mom replied. “You never lay around the house like this. You never watch TV like this. Or play that game all the time…”
“Skyrim.”
“It’s not like you. Sophie called again, you know.”
Sophie, wanting to go out and do… something. Shop for lipstick or try to find a dress that would make her size 6 look like a size 2 or… whatever. Alix couldn’t be bothered. She had dragons to kill—on the Xbox that it turned out 2.0 had bugged, right inside her own house.
When Alix had told them that Cynthia was a double agent, Williams & Crowe had been delighted because it helped explain the listening devices they’d started discovering all around the Banks’ property.
Cynthia had been good at what she did, that was for sure. Everything about that girl had been a lie.
So Alix had ended up at Dr. Ballantine’s office, listening to the woman drone on about kidnapping and stress and trigger this and trigger that.
Dr. Ballantine had an abstract oil-smear painting on one wall. Alix would stare at the browns and reds, and fantasize about smashing it on Dr. Ballantine’s head, and then she ended up wondering if that was a sign that she really was somehow going crazy.
She could almost hear Mom saying, “Violence isn’t like you, Alix.”
Alix wasn’t like Alix.
If she’d been smarter about hiding how she was feeling, she’d have been able to avoid the couch sessions, but instead, she’d ended up talking to Dr. Ballantine while the shrink made notes.
“Were you scared?” Dr. Ballantine had asked.
“Of course I was scared. But I’m fine now. I mean, I got out all right.”
“Are you scared now?”
Alix shrugged. “No.”
Yes.
No?
Yes?
Not really.
Alix didn’t know how she felt.
“Are you still skipping track and field?”
“I dropped it.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s not a real thing. Who cares if you win or lose?”
“Some people care.”
Alix rolled her eyes. “Well, I don’t.”
“Why not?”
Because it’s all bullshit, Alix wanted to say, but that would just start up another line of questioning about why she felt that running was bullshit, and the only answer to that was that she couldn’t help but think that every time she went out onto the track to run around and around the that damn oval, Moses would be sitting up there in the crowd, watching from behind his reflective aviator lenses, and laughing at the goofy things rich kids did with their spare time while he and his crew were busily hacking together another crazed attack on “the man.”
Moses and the 2.0 crew had played a different game. The games of high school seemed silly and small after that.
Alix realized that Jonah was looking at her worriedly. Again.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“Sure you are,” he said. “Are you taking that Xanax or whatever Dr. Ballantine says you should take?”
“Why?”
“ ’Cause I wouldn’t,” Jonah said. “They’ll make you fuzzy. Fuzzier,” he amended, looking at her critically.
“How would you know?”
Jonah gave her an exasperated look that reminded Alix of Mom when she was trying to get Jonah to pay attention to her, and that made her realize how differently he was acting generally. He hadn’t been running off. He was always where he was supposed to be after school. Hell, he was practically always around, just like he’d been waiting outside her classroom when she came out of class He was bitching about his grades, she realized with a start.
He’s keeping an eye on you. And then she almost laughed out loud at the sudden surge of affection she felt for her ADHD caretaking little pain-in-the-ass brother.
“Do you want to go get coffee?” she asked abruptly.
“Seriously? You think I need to be more wired?”
Alix laughed and pulled into the Starbucks. The girl at the counter looked like Cynthia. Alix stifled shock/nostalgia/fear/camaraderie as she handed across her credit card. PTSD. It will keep happening, but less and less, Dr. Ballantine claimed. For now, though, every time Alix saw a girl with long lustrous black hair, she was sure it was Cynthia.
And, of course, it was always some other Asian girl, and then Alix would hear Cynthia say contemptuously, “Her? She’s not even Chinese. She’s Vietnamese. We’re not all the same, you know…”
As Alix and Jonah made their way back to the car, Alix deliberately made herself look at every single person in the parking lot, proving to herself that she wasn’t seeing any more Cynthias or Adams or Kooks or Tanks or Moseses. None of them were here. They were all gone.
Alix put the car in drive and got them back out on the road while Jonah prattled about whatever Jonah prattled about now.
The FBI and Williams & Crowe had assured her that 2.0 had moved on, probably dedicated to wreaking havoc elsewhere. There was no one stalking her. There was no one peering in through the windows of her house. There was no one watching over her.
Jonah punched her shoulder. “Are you even listening to me?” he demanded.
“What?”
“You just ran that stop sign!”
“I did?”
“Yeah. And you stopped at the crossing before, where there wasn’t one.”
“I guess I’m distracted.”
Jonah groaned. “You are so going to get me killed.”
“Do you ever wonder about the kind of work Dad does?”
Jonah gave her a surprised look. “Are you still thinking about all that 2.0 stuff?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Kind of.”
Someone honked behind her.
Alix stepped on the gas and then, in a split-second decision, swerved for the turnpike entrance.
“Where are we going?” Jonah yelped as he grabbed for a door handle.
“Who cares? I don’t want to go home right now.”
“Is this a kidnapping?” Jonah asked.
“I just want to drive. I’m sick of people looking at me and asking me if I’m okay.”
“Welcome to my world.” Jonah snorted.
Alix gunned the MINI. They shot up the on-ramp to merge with turnpike traffic, rolling north toward Hartford. Alix rolled down her window, trying to enjoy the rush of noise.
“As long as we’re driving…” Jonah hooked his phone into the stereo, and pretty soon they were arguing about whether he was really going to try to play Raggaeton in her car while she was driving. Wind whipped Alix’s hair. Jonah turned up the music, full of swagger and Spanish and innuendo.
It felt good to drive.
You could just keep on driving. Just keep going. Don’t stop. See how far you can go. Just fuck it and bail.
Alix wondered if this was what it had been like for Cynthia when she walked away from a Stanford education to join up with 2.0.
It was an insane choice. Like a train jumping its track and then deciding it was supposed to be a lear jet, instead. Girls like Cynthia didn’t belong in gangs of pranking, political crazies. And yet she’d joined Moses and the rest of the crew. Cynthia had done everything perfectly. She’d gotten the perfect scores. Gotten the perfect acceptance letters. She’d shown herself she could do it, and then she’d walked away.
Alix thought of all the students at Seitz, every one of them Ivy League crazy. Like horses with their jockeys whipping them forward from their starting gates, trained to gallop, to clear their hurdles… And then there was Cynthia, who, after being given the winner’s cup, had thrown it down and walked away.