The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled Read online

  the

  AMANDA

  project

  Unraveled

  BOOK FOUR

  BY AMANDA VALENTINO

  AND CATHLEEN DAVITT BELL

  Dedication

  For Max and Eliza,

  my very own guides

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  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

  Many Thanks

  From the Website

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Zoe here. The secret guide. The one who’s been shadowing everyone else. Keeping information to myself, watching from a distance, hiding clues. Not fun, I know—I didn’t like it, either. But I didn’t have a choice, as crazy as that sounds.

  The craziest part, though?

  I’ve started to be able to do this thing. I can barely say it out loud—because first of all, I’m not sure it’s true. And second, no one would ever believe me.

  I wouldn’t believe me.

  Except it’s just what happens.

  I’ve always been good at reading people—listening to them, knowing what they are thinking even when they don’t say it out loud. I think because of this, I’ve always been good at hiding, too. Hiding in plain sight—when Amanda and I were little that was a game for us.

  But now, sometimes, when I look at a person and really focus, I can tell exactly how their eyes are going to move. I can sense the music of their breathing, the rhythm that governs when they blink, when their eyes glaze over into a stare. And because I can see these things, I can make myself—as far as that person can tell—invisible.

  Don’t get me wrong. I can’t actually make myself invisible—I don’t really disappear. When I look down, I can always see myself. But in my head, everything slows down. I feel like my breath lines up with the blinks of the person’s eyes. I’m not actually sure how it works. All I know is that I can make it nearly impossible for that person to see me in that moment.

  It’s easy to hide when you know where someone isn’t going to look. And since Amanda left Orion, I’ve been hiding all the time.

  Chapter 1

  For a minute, I thought Nia was going to pass out.

  We were sitting on a bench outside school. I’d dragged her there when she’d started to slump over in the lobby of the auditorium just after the school talent show. She was leaning forward, her dark hair flopped over and exposing the back of her long neck. I wasn’t sure if she needed air, or if I should be calling an ambulance. I was trying not to panic. In the chaos at the end of the show, we’d lost track of Callie and Hal, the only other people who had a chance of understanding what was going on.

  “Keep your head between your knees,” I told Nia, my own head swimming with bad ideas. Should I get a teacher? My mom? My instinct was to hide.

  “Death,” Nia whispered again, looking up, her dark eyes clouded with fear. “I can’t stop seeing it.”

  I glanced over my shoulder to make sure no one else could hear. I half expected the guys who were after Amanda to be bearing down on us now—there were a few of them who had chased us through the woods earlier in the day. But from where we were sitting I could see the main entrance to the school, and there was no one. Or at least no one I could see. School at night is always a little eerie.

  I bit my lip and screwed up the courage to ask a question I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer to. “You’re definitely not talking about Amanda?” I swallowed.

  I was referring to Amanda Valentino, our missing friend. About a month ago, she’d disappeared, and we’d been looking for her, following a series of cryptic clues she kept leaving in our path. Now we didn’t know if she was still in Orion, or hiding out somewhere else. We’d met the man we believed to be her father—but only after he’d been captured by the people who were after Amanda.

  While Nia, Callie, and Hal had been working as a trio, I’d been looking for Amanda on my own—though Amanda hadn’t wanted it that way. When she’d left me clues that clearly indicated we four were supposed to band together as her guides, I’d revealed myself . . . hard to believe it had only been this afternoon. It felt like forever.

  Nia rubbed her eyes and sat up. She was dressed in a white boatneck shirt, black skinny jeans, and black-and-white-striped ballerina flats, an appropriate color scheme considering Nia tends to see the world in black and white. You’re her friend or you’re not. You speak the truth every time you open your mouth—or you’re a liar. If she had bad news for you, she wouldn’t sugarcoat it.

  “I told you,” Nia said. “I can only see into the past. The death wasn’t Amanda’s.”

  “Here.” I lifted a vintage pink purse off Nia’s lap and she sighed in relief, as if it were a heavy suitcase I was offering to help her carry.

  Nia, Hal, and Callie had first seen the purse a little over a week before, in the hands of a woman named Waverly Valentino, who claimed to be Amanda’s aunt. Then, half an hour ago, we’d seen it again. This time, with a woman with dark skin, dozens of little braids, and blue eyes. She let us buy the purse from her for less than she’d paid, and then disappeared into the night. Nia had opened the purse to find it lined with a scrap of old baby blanket that had been embroidered with the name Ariel—which we’d come to learn was the name Amanda was born with. Touching the bit of blanket—that’s what had set off Nia’s vision.

  Since we started looking for Amanda, the four of us have been able to do things that should be impossible. Hal knows things he shouldn’t, all psychic-style. He gets premonitions and hunches that are always—as in, 100 percent—right. Callie has gotten really strong—she can tear a door off its hinges. And Nia can often touch an object and feel something or know something about its history. She knows who used it or touched it last and what it witnessed. I haven’t even told the others about what I can do—how do you explain making yourself virtually invisible? Weirder still, the first time the four of us gathered, we’d noticed that when we were all touching, we felt an electric charge run through us.

  Now, as I was opening the purse to take another look at the blanket, Callie and Hal ran out to join us. When Callie was one of the über-popular I-Girls, I’d seen a lot of her. I blend into lots of groups, so we ended up at the same parties and club meetings. Sometimes we ended up at different ends of the same table at lunch. I could always tell she didn’t think she was as pretty as Kelli, Traci, and Heidi—the other I-Girls. She didn’t seem to realize that there was something about her beauty that goes beyond theirs. Her smile could make the difference between an overcast sky and a sunshiny day.

  Hal, who was jogging along at Callie’s side, is also a sunshiny kind of guy—he’s had a thing for Callie for years and it’s
pretty obvious it’s mutual. He was gazing at her, kind of dumbstruck, until Nia stood up and positioned herself between them.

  “Wasn’t Hal amazing?” Callie said, her freckled skin glowing. His band’s performance in the talent show had been awesome.

  “Aren’t you glad Heidi and her I-Girl lip-sync routine didn’t win?” Nia added.

  None of us are really fans of the I-Girls. Granted, we all have our biases, and it’s hard to see things objectively some times. My friend Kenzi, who is popular but isn’t part of the I-Girl clique, tells me that a lot of them can be sweet. I’ll believe it when I see it.

  “I’m so glad Bea won—she totally deserved it,” Hal said diplomatically. Bea Rossiter had survived a hit-and-run car accident earlier in the year. Only the four of us knew that the Queen Bee I-Girl, Heidi Bragg, had been behind the wheel, gunning for Bea because she’d mistaken her for Amanda. We’d all known Heidi was evil, but we hadn’t realized how far she’d go. We still didn’t know why she’d done it. Now Bea was back from surgeries and rehabilitation, looking better than ever and surprising everyone with her beautiful singing voice.

  “Yeah, Bea was great,” I agreed. I gave Hal a little wake-up punch on the shoulder. “But hey, something came up.”

  “Right . . . ,” said Hal. Callie shook her long hair out behind her. Nia straightened her glasses.

  “The purse that woman sold us,” I went on. “It’s lined with part of Amanda’s baby blanket. Nia got a sudden wave, touching it.”

  “I felt death,” Nia said, then quickly added, “but not Amanda’s.”

  Hal picked up the purse and passed it back and forth between his hands like it was a basketball. He opened it and peered inside, poking at the lining.

  “Look,” he said, pulling out a postcard. “This was tucked inside the lining.”

  “What’s on it?” Callie said, taking it out of his hands. “It’s some kind of monument.” She flipped it over and read the caption. “The World War Two Memorial. In Washington, D.C.”

  “Okay,” said Nia. “That’s kind of random.”

  “Do you think it’s a clue?” Callie asked.

  “Maybe we’re supposed to go on the History Club trip to Washington,” I said. The man we believed to be Amanda’s father? He was actually the vice principal of our school. Mr. Thornhill. When we’d discovered him in an abandoned airplane hangar after he’d been abducted, he’d told us to go to Washington to look for Amanda’s sister, Robin.

  “That reminds me,” Nia said now. “I pulled a few strings with the president of the History Club, and guess who are all now members in good standing, and eligible for participation in the field trip to Washington that leaves Monday?”

  Callie laughed, and Hal smiled too. Nia does not mess around.

  I took the postcard and held it up to the streetlight. I’m really into photography and I was hoping that with all the time I’d spent looking at photos for newspaper and yearbook I’d see something the others had missed. And I did. I think.

  “Look at that,” I said, passing the card to Hal, and pointing to where a little mark had been pressed into the cardstock. The mark could have been made by a fingernail.

  “You think this dent is supposed to tell us something?” Hal asked.

  Callie took the card. “This could have been made by accident,” she said.

  “I don’t know,” Nia sniffed. “Nothing with Amanda ever seems to be an accident.”

  Hal was staring at the front of the purse now—it was adorned with a leather sunflower. “Wait a second . . . this is brilliant. Do you see?”

  “Um, no?” I said.

  “Callie?” he prompted, like she should be the one more likely to. Callie has a genius math brain inherited from her astronomer mother—who is also missing, by the way. Callie doesn’t know where she is, only that her mom felt she had to leave in an effort to protect Callie. “Don’t think of it as a flower,” Hal said. “Don’t think of the petals. Think of something else.”

  “Of what?” she said, squinting, focusing. And then suddenly, she got it. “It’s a clock!”

  “Exactly,” Hal said. And then I got it too. Because surrounding the yellow petals of the flower were green leaves—twelve of them to be exact, spaced evenly around the flower like the numbers on a clock. Except when you looked closely, there weren’t twelve. The leaf in the nine o’clock position was missing.

  I got this weird chill down my spine that I always get when Amanda’s clues start to make sense. It’s like, suddenly, she’s with you. She’s here. She’s speaking to you again, but in a language only you can understand.

  “And do you see how she’s done the minutes?” Nia was saying. Most of the petals on the sunflower were yellow, but a lot of them—forty? fifty?—were tinged with brown. Except one of the tinted petals wasn’t brown. It was a shocking, stand-alone pink. And now I didn’t have to count the brown petals. I knew there would be sixty of them, as in sixty minutes to an hour. The pink petal was at the thirty-minute mark.

  “Nine thirty,” I said. “Which might mean—”

  “We’re supposed to meet Amanda at the World War Two Memorial at nine thirty on the day of that field trip to Washington,” Nia finished.

  Hal and Callie nodded.

  “Are we assuming the chick with the cornrows stole the purse from Amanda’s so-called aunt?” I wondered aloud.

  “There’s still so much we don’t know,” Nia said. “For instance . . . what are we supposed to be doing in the fifty or so hours between now and nine thirty on Monday?”

  No one had an answer for her. We looked out at the deserted school parking lot. I had a feeling Amanda would let us know.

  Chapter 2

  I remember the day I first saw Amanda at Endeavor High. It was in the cafeteria, on Halloween. There were stuffed paper bags painted orange that were supposed to look like pumpkins hanging from the ceiling on fishing line.

  I was sitting at the band table, thinking about those pumpkins, sort of listening to Dwayne Wright from band go on and on about his girlfriend from camp.

  I’ve always been good at reading people. When someone’s talking, most people only hear their words, but I hear more. I hear throat clearing, I register hesitation, I note stutters. I take in the way they shift their feet, grab their own arms, look away. Which is how I knew that Dwayne’s girlfriend was not for real. I couldn’t blame him for making one up. I would have, too, if I were constantly bullied for being the shortest kid in the class.

  I took a bite from my bologna sandwich—I hate bologna but my mom buys it because it’s cheap—and I happened to look toward the lunch line and saw something that made me freeze.

  I saw her.

  My friend.

  My best friend, and maybe my only real friend ever.

  Ever since Arabella Bruyere had moved without so much as calling me to say good-bye—I’d only found out she was gone when I saw the FOR RENT sign in front of her house—I hadn’t had anyone I could call a real friend. Sure, I was a member of about fifteen different clubs and activities. There were a ton of people I said hi to, in the halls at Endeavor and out and about in Orion. But Arabella had been the last person who made me laugh so hard I blew soda through my nose. Whom I told every secret I had. Who was as comfortable getting herself a snack in my house as I was.

  I literally had to blink to convince myself I was really seeing her. I hadn’t laid eyes on Arabella in three years, and that was when we both lived clear across the country.

  Arabella’s family were the only people I’d ever met from my dad’s past. I was about eight when they moved to our town and right away, we’d started hanging out together. My mom would cook dinner or play music, and Dad and Arabella’s mom, Amy, would rehash old stories about when they were younger. Arabella and I thought they were talking about summer camp, or boarding school, or college, maybe. Sometimes they referred to “the lab,” but it was never clear what that meant—a science lab? When we first started getting together, my dad and Amy
had done a lot of laughing, but in the months before the Bruyeres left, there was a new tone in my dad’s and Amy’s voices. They were scared. Apparently, we’d all been in danger—my dad and Amy must have known at the end. And then the Bruyeres were gone.

  And now here Arabella was again, slipping into the dwindling end of the food line, looking exactly the same in spite of being dressed in an Asian-inspired high-necked gray dress with two sticks holding back her severe bun. The last time I’d seen her she’d been in braids.

  Seeing her—just that glimpse of her gray-green eyes, her full lips set in a determined expression of calm—everything about her, about my old life, came flooding back. I remembered all I’d been working so hard to forget—how it had felt when my dad was alive, and my mom didn’t seem scared all the time, before Arabella had moved and my emails to her had started to bounce back, before my mom took us on a colossal “you’re being homeschooled in an RV moving all over the country” road trip, before we’d come here, to Orion.

  Before.

  When I’d thought my life was normal.

  Seeing Arabella, I felt this amazing light turn on somewhere deep inside me. I felt the way I do when I’m alone, playing the sax—like I can finally turn off the part of myself that was figuring everyone else out and listen for a second to what was inside me.

  She was stepping out of the lunch line, walking past our table. I could see that she’d snagged a slice of cheddar cheese off a sandwich and put it on her piece of apple pie. Along with the carton of milk on her tray, she’d re-created my dad’s favorite late-night snack. He used to fix it for Arabella and me when she had sleepovers at my house.

  “Arabella,” I said out loud. I was already half out of my seat to run after her when Justin, who plays tenor sax in the jazz band, spoke up. “The new girl?” he said. “Her name’s Amanda actually. Not Arabella. She’s in my math class.” I sat back down.

  Why would Arabella have used a different name?

  My eyes trained on Arabella’s, I waited for her to see me, and when she did, she looked at me hard. But there was no smile, no sign even that she recognized me. Without seeming to move a muscle, she mouthed the words, “L’observateur est un prince qui jouit partout de son incognito.”