Shock Read online

  “What’s up,” he said.

  “Nothing,” she answered, not looking at him.

  Gaia’s skin felt like it was on fire. The last time she’d seen Ed, he’d been standing on the sidewalk, half drunk, calling her a liar and a cheater and demanding she stay the hell away from him. Her guts turned into a colony of cockroaches, skittering around inside her. She wanted nothing more than to just go back to being friends. But the way he’d spoken to her last night? That wasn’t just going to go away. And she had to be honest: She had lied to him. Having Sam show up out of the blue had really knocked her for a loop, and she had been lying to Ed when she’d said she didn’t have feelings for Sam anymore. That made her feel horribly guilty. Like maybe Ed was right for wanting to keep his distance. Like maybe she needed to be on her own until she sorted out her unbelievably annoying jumble of emotions.

  “So how’s Sam,” he said, as if he’d been reading her mind and the guilty feelings that were blotched all over it. He was convinced she’d been canoodling with Sam behind his back.

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him,” she told him, emphasizing the last half of her sentence.

  No need to tell him that he’d just tried to kill her. And no need to tell him that before that, Sam Moon’s return to the land of the living had made her feel confused. Still, as far as Gaia was concerned, she hadn’t done anything about her confusion—that was what counted. And Ed was supposed to trust her. And he didn’t. Which was why she was pissed.

  “So, I’m doing a skateboard clinic as part of intramural week,” he said.

  “Uh-huh,” she murmured. No congratulations, no questions—not even a little bit of teasing about how he was joining in with the school-spirit masses.

  This was so WEIRD. Like a new reality show: When Best Friends Go Bad. They didn’t speak to each other like this. Except they did now. Gaia felt horrible. But this conversation had to end. She needed him to get away from her, fast.

  “Yeah. I thought it’d be fun,” Ed said. It was a limp, nondescript sentence, and it plopped onto the floor between them and lay there. For Gaia the silence that followed was full of unspoken accusations. You can’t be part of anything, you freak, he seemed to say. Like a family. Like a couple. Like anything you desperately want and won’t let yourself have. It stung to hear him say it—stung for the words to be there, sandwiched between the lines in glaring, accusing, ten-foot-high red letters. Without another word Gaia turned back to her locker, hoping he wouldn’t see the slight tremble of her chin as she listened to his sneakers squeak down the hall away from her like the turns of a screwdriver driving a rusty screw deep into the soft flesh of her heart.

  Gaia

  I wish I didn’t have buttons. The same way I don’t have fear. I wish nobody could push my buttons the way Ed does, making me feel like everything I do is wrong and useless and mean. I wish that nothing would infuriate me, or make me feel insecure, or rattle my cage.

  It’s my fault, though. If I hadn’t shown Ed where my buttons were, he wouldn’t be able to push them.

  I thought I was okay, not being close to anyone. I thought I had taught myself not to wish for what I can’t have. After my mother died and my father took off, I shut myself off. Personally, I think it was a pretty impressive feat for a kid that young. After a while I didn’t know what I was missing.

  Well, now I know, don’t I? What I’m missing.

  Being close to Ed felt like…what did it feel like? It wasn’t like he was my other half or anything doofy like that. Plato had this whole thing in the Symposium about how everyone used to be smushed-together couples with four legs and four arms and their sex organs locked in a constant erotic knot. Then something happened to blow us all apart, and now we spend our whole lives looking for our other halves. I guess some couples feel that way, but not me and Ed.

  Still, there was something in the way we were together that was so easy. It felt like home. Being with him, being his friend, filled something in me that I didn’t know was empty. And then having him become my confidant and my actual boyfriend—that made the connection so much deeper. But the best part was always having him as my friend.

  It was a blessing and a curse. The blessing part is what I just said. The closeness. The comfort. The home.

  The curse part is that once you’ve felt that comfort and it’s taken away from you, all of a sudden you miss it—even though you never knew you wanted it before you had it. All these nerve endings flapping in the breeze, looking for the tooth that just fell out.

  But there’s something bigger—something worse. Once someone has been that close to you, he’s got too much on you. He knows how to hurt you, how to push those goddamn buttons. Hell, he can push them without even realizing it.

  I want to be calm, cool, buttonless. No way in, no way out. Not even a zipper.

  Not fearless, feelingless. That’s a genetic mutation I could really get behind.

  Ed

  Here is the thing I have to get through my thick, stupid head: The Gaia I fell in love with obviously does not exist. Therefore, I do not care that she’s gone. Right? WHO CARES? NOT ME. I don’t care that she lied, snuck around, maybe even cheated on me with Sam. Since the dependable, honest person I thought she was never existed, technically, I can’t miss her. How can you miss a mythical creature? Do I miss unicorns? No. Do I miss the Yeti? No. Do I miss Anna Nicole Smith’s dietician? No. And why is that? Because none of those creatures can exist, do exist, will exist. And I don’t miss Gaia-my-best-friend because she doesn’t exist, either. Now I should be cured.

  Except I’m not. The feelings I had for her—the ones that just yesterday were a huge, comfortable blanket around my heart—they just won’t get out of me. No matter how much evidence I tally up to the contrary, those feelings want to swim around in my consciousness.

  The word love keeps floating around inside my head, like the afterimage of a flashbulb. Except in my head the word love is purple, and it looks kind of like a balloon. When I met Gaia for the first time, I saw that love balloon in my head. It was small then and just hovered around in the background as I thought about calculus, and history, and my Regents exams. I got to know her better, and I started to think, Maybe I love her. Maybe this word I’ve heard about all my life has a new meaning, maybe it’s something I feel for this girl.

  That’s when the love balloon started getting bigger. But the color of a real balloon gets paler as it fills with air. The love balloon in my head just became a richer shade of purple, and when I thought of Gaia, it got bigger. The night we spent together, it got huge. And whatever I was doing in my day, that purple balloon would bounce around and make me feel great, because I knew what it meant and I felt all this love for this weird, annoying, funny, crazy girl. I’d say to myself, like I was trying it out, “Oh, I love Gaia,” and it made me feel so great.

  Well, now I don’t love Gaia. I was wrong about her and I was wrong about feeling that way about her. But the big purple love balloon DOES NOT GET THE MESSAGE. It still bounces around in my head, but now, instead of being comforting, it’s annoying, like Barney.

  I try to poke it with an imaginary needle, but it’s made of some really tough kind of rubber. I try to make it burst into flames and hit the ground, like the Hindenburg. Oh, the humanity! But the damn thing won’t deflate and it won’t burst. It’s still hanging out in my head, looming and bouncing like a permanent purple storm cloud.

  Oh my God. What was that conversation? We’re worse than strangers. It’s like we hate each other. She actually hates me. This feels terrible. Cutting off Gaia is like cutting off my own leg—losing it completely, not just having it paralyzed. But she’s been lying to me, and I’ve got to get rid of her now, before I get in even deeper. It’ll be better this way in the long run.

  The trouble is, how do I make a long run with only one leg?

  Plausible Cover Story

  She should have been able to tell the difference between a masked operative and the president of the Shakira
fan club.

  Yellow Sticky

  THANK GOODNESS GAIA HAD OTHER things to occupy her mind. Her phone finally snapped out of its reverie and went through to Dmitri. Gaia thanked the God of Unpredictable Cell Phone Service and put the phone to her ear.

  “Dmitri,” she said. “It’s Gaia.”

  “How are you this morning,” he said.

  “I’m all right,” she lied.

  “I thank you again for rescuing me and bringing me back,” he said. “My apartment is very comforting to be back in. It is not so much dustier than when I left it.”

  “Well, good,” she said. Was this why he had called? To chat about his one-bedroom in Chinatown?

  “I wonder if I can ask for your help,” he said, answering her unasked question with his polite segue. “I think I have some information that may be of assistance in finding your father. But I need you to help me get to it. Are you opposed to a little breaking and entering?”

  Now this was getting interesting. “Not if it means getting more information about my father,” she told him.

  “That is good. Your father trained you well.”

  “I guess. So what’s the deal?” she asked him, impatient.

  “I don’t want to say on the phone,” he said. “I’ve sent you instructions via e-mail. You can go retrieve them.”

  “Why won’t you just tell me?” she seethed.

  “Too much to tell,” he said. “Too many details. You need to see them and commit them to memory. You should know that this is how things are done in the Organization.”

  “Yeah, but the Organization should know that e-mail is never secure,” she retorted.

  “This one is. It’s encoded and contains a self-destructing virus. It can only be read once.”

  “Okay, fine.”

  “You can check in with me if you have any questions. Otherwise I will expect a visit from you when you’ve completed the task I’ve laid out for you.”

  “Okay.” Gaia snapped her phone shut and started to head for the front doors of the school just as the bell rang.

  “Gaia Moore,” a voice boomed from behind her. She turned to see Vice Principal Lorenz—the grooviest school administrator on the entire East Coast. Lorenz never wore suits, preferring jeans and a sweater, or khakis if he really had to dress up. His thick salt-and-pepper hair had only recently lost its extra ponytail length. Most students liked his get-to-know-you attitude—he acted like the tormented poems of the literary-magazine crew were genius and even thought the cheerleaders were following their bliss. And he liked everyone to call him Bob. Even Gaia thought he seemed cooler than your average schoolhouse bureaucrat—on a normal day. But at this moment he had a distressingly friendly look on his face, like it was time to have a talk. And Gaia didn’t have time for one of those.

  “It looks like you’ve got somewhere to go,” he said.

  “No. No, I was just walking…past the front door, to my next class,” she said. She had to get to a computer and then bust out of school to complete Dmitri’s assignment. She wanted to do it now. But Bob Lorenz had a different task in mind.

  “I’ve noticed you’ve been missing a lot of classes,” he said, putting a reassuring hand on Gaia’s shoulder. “And even when you’re here, you don’t really seem present. Is something going on?”

  Well, let’s see. My dad has disappeared, a mysterious old man is sending me on a secret mission, and both my ex-boyfriends are haunting me, in their own special ways.

  “No!” Gaia said. “Nothing’s going on.”

  “I know you have an unsettled home life,” Bob went on, clamping that hand onto her shoulder and strolling down the hall with her…away from the front door. “It must be really tough. If you want to talk about it, you know my door is always open.”

  Yeah, or I could just watch Dr. Phil, Gaia thought. “I know,” she said aloud. “I was actually planning to stop by later this week.”

  “Well, why don’t we just chat now?” he asked, steering her into his office. “I mean, you’re here, I’m here. We can talk about all the classes you’ve missed.” He pulled a file out from a stack on top of his desk. It had a yellow sticky on it. Clearly he’d been watching Gaia for a while…. She cursed silently. Should have played my part better, s he grumbled to herself. I’m setting off alarms left and right. If the school’s administration thought she was some kind of tormented teen in need of intervention, then intervention was what she was going to get—and that meant less freedom to come and go as she pleased. Less freedom to defend herself and find her father.

  This was not good.

  Every muscle in Gaia’s body felt poised for action. Finally there was something she could do about the Mystery of the Missing Parent—and all she had to do was get to a computer to find out what it was. Instead, she was sitting in the vice principal’s office, being gently scolded for missing assignments and not being more “proactive in her educational advancement.” Ugh.

  The intense irony of it was, with one thunk of her leg she could have had Vice Principal Bob on the floor and stepped on his unconscious body on the way out the door. But he was a nice guy. And she didn’t want to get herself arrested. No, she had to play her part for now; nod and smile as if she understood her shortcomings and really, really wanted to better herself. She’d bide her time, make it through this meeting, and check her e-mail in the school library. Whatever was waiting in her in box, it would have to keep for an hour or so.

  Constant Skitz

  “STUPID ORGANIZATION,” SHE MUTTERED as she waited impatiently for the infuriatingly slow 56-K modem to connect her to the Internet. “Left over from the Cold War. About as updated as Tang or the Fonz. Like this stupid modem,” she added, giving the pesky peripheral a whack.

  This was a serious breach of security as far as she was concerned. Sending sensitive information over the Internet? Duh. Any twelve-year-old with a Dell could hack into it, encoded or not. Forcing Gaia to read it here, at school? Double duh, ha-doi, and a dah-hicky. This was public property. Maybe the fact that it was teeming with innocent civilians would make a less cynical operative think she was safe here, but Gaia knew her enemies better than that. Her classmates were in as much danger as she was, and whoever was after her—whoever had her father—wasn’t going to let a few hundred teenage martyrs stand in his way.

  Gaia swallowed hard, the knowledge that she was in constant danger peeking above the surface of her consciousness again. She couldn’t live in a state of constant skitz. But she couldn’t stop being vigilant, not for even one second. They were after her. Whoever they were. And they’d used something as innocent as a bite of chicken potpie to get her father. When anything could be a weapon, the world could start looking exceedingly twisted.

  The modem finally connected, and she maneuvered through web pages till she got to her e-mail program.

  To: [email protected]

  From: [email protected]

  The Worldwide Travel Agency at 53 West 35th Street is a front for the Organization. In there are files pertaining to your father’s disappearance. They are labeled Moorestown and are enclosed in a brown cardboard accordion folder wrapped with a thick brown string. The label is red. The exact location is not known, but it’s most likely in the top drawer of file cabinet A (see map below). Also central to your search is a travel dossier. This is in a yellow file folder in a drawer on the right side of the desk marked FF. It is labeled Places of Interest. Break in and deliver the files to me today at 5 P.M. at my apartment. Be careful.

  Gaia eyed the e-mail with total and complete concentration. She had a photographic memory. The image of the words seared into her frontal lobe as the distractions of the library fell away. There was something meditative about this action: The words became more than black and white on the screen; they took on a life of their own, the shapes of the letters forming patterns that Gaia recognized apart from the meaning of the words themselves. Wow, her brain was freaky sometimes.

  A pensive haze settled over her for a mom
ent. There was nothing but the words and the message they brought her. Until a hand clamped over her eyes and the world went dark.

  Stupid Cell Phone

  SAM’S POSSESSIONS LAY IN A TANGLED heap on the floor, looking like they’d been ransacked by a couple of angry prison guards. He surveyed the mess with frustration and fury. He couldn’t blame anyone but himself for it. He’d been tearing through his own stuff for half an hour, trying to find his cell phone.

  He picked up the regular phone and was greeted, yet again, by the incessant whine of an Internet connection. Dmitri was still on-line, and all Sam wanted to do was call Gaia. The guy had been locked up for so long, he hadn’t even heard of DSL. Whatever he was doing, he was doing it at a crawl, and Sam was itching with impatience.

  He had an almost physical need to speak to Gaia—it pained him as much as the red scars of the gunshot wounds and operation incision that were the legacy of the time he’d spent in Loki’s prison. The last time he’d seen her, she’d been trying like hell to get him out of her apartment while her boyfriend—her boyfriend!—read her the riot act in front of her building.

  It just killed him. All Sam wanted for Gaia was for her to be happy, and she seemed miserable. Okay, he had to be honest: all he wanted, really, was for Gaia to be happy with him. Of course he was jealous that Ed got the title of boyfriend and everything that went with it. Everything that went with it. An image of Gaia wrapped in the thin sheets of his dorm-room bed flashed through Sam’s brain. He pushed it back into whatever corner it had jumped out of. He was not going to think about that. Gaia had too much going on in her life to deal with Sam’s feelings for her. She’d made that much clear. If he’d never been shot, if he’d never disappeared from her life, then things might be different. But they weren’t. They were like they were, and he had to keep his distance and give Gaia her space.