April Henry - The Girl Who Was Supposed to Die

Without answering Liz, I shake my head and pull my wrist away. It’s all up to me, and I’m failing. My stupid brain won’t cough up part of an answer. Won’t even hint. Where would my parents go? Where would they hide something?

“Well, where do you think they are?” Liz’s face is only inches from mine. “Did they leave you a phone number? A code word? Is there a friend they might have gone to? We can’t help them if we can’t find them.”

I press my fingers against my temple so hard I’m sure I’m leaving bruises. In my mind’s eye, I see more flickers of memories. A little boy blowing out birthday candles. The man who is my father pointing at something, his face serious. The woman from the photo in my backpack standing over this very stove, holding out a wooden spoon for me to taste.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“Come on, Cady,” she urges. “Surely you remember something.”

I’m so overwhelmed by the mingling of past and present that it takes me a long moment to answer her. “No.” I need to explain that it’s all still like a dream or a nightmare, bits and pieces that don’t make any sense. I’m opening my mouth when her face tightens.

“All right,” she says firmly, and she steps back and pulls a gun from her purse. Ty lets out a gasp. “If you’re going to be like that.” Not taking her eyes off us, she calls out, “Michael?”

And Michael Brenner, the man I killed, steps in from the hall.

I cry out and put my hands over my eyes as my memories come flooding back.

I was supposed to be doing homework when my dad knocked on the door of my room. “Okay if I come in?”

I clicked off the YouTube video I had been watching on my laptop and back onto the screen with my English essay. “Sure.”

But when he pushed open the door, my mom was standing in the hall behind him. What was up? They seldom came into my room together, unless I was in really big trouble. Last May, when I had skipped school and taken off to the coast for the day with some friends, they had talked to me at the same time. Or talked at me. But what had I done lately that would cause them to look so serious?

My dad took a deep breath. “Your mother and I have been around and around about this.” They exchanged a glance I couldn’t read. “But we have to tell you at some point, and you’re old enough to know.”

A door closed in my head. Closed tight. Part of me had been wondering and worrying that this day was coming. Lately, it had been so obvious that something was wrong at our house. The closed doors, the muffled arguments, the conversations that turned into whispers or were dropped altogether when I came into a room. So which one would I end up living with? Would I have to move?

They still weren’t saying anything. Why couldn’t my parents just do it quick and clean, like pulling off a Band-Aid?

I decided to do it for them. “You’re getting a divorce.”

My dad blinked.

“What? No.” My mom shook her head. “It’s nothing like that.” She laughed a little, but it sounded sad. Her eyes were unfocused. “If only it were that.”

“Then what is it?” But my mind supplied another answer, even worse. “One of you has cancer?” My veneer of not caring shattered.

My dad threw up his hands. “Will you just let us talk?” The words exploded out of his mouth.

I shrank back in my chair. My dad never yelled. Never. Not even when I had been grounded for a month after the whole skipping school to go to the coast thing.

My mom laid a hand on his arm. “Patrick, you’re scaring her.”

He turned to her, speaking as if I wasn’t there. “I have to scare her, don’t I? She has to realize how serious this is. If we put one foot wrong, it could be the end for all of us.” He turned back to me. “Do you know what we do at work?”

“Research. In a lab. Into animal diseases.” I had no idea where this was going. Just that I was starting to shake. Whatever they were going to tell me was worse than divorce. Worse than cancer. “Viruses.” I had visited them once, four years ago, for Take Your Daughter to Work day. I had had to put on vinyl gloves, a paper suit, and a breathing mask, and I had to promise a million times that I wouldn’t touch anything without permission. I had gotten to feed the hamsters and the rats and even the monkeys they kept in the basement. Then a year ago, the company had been bought by another, bigger company. I hadn’t paid that much attention. All I knew was that my parents didn’t like their new bosses.

“Right.” He nodded. “And in the course of our research, your mother and I made a discovery.” My dad took my mom’s hand and squeezed it, then turned back to me. “We don’t want to tell you too much. It could be dangerous for you if we did. If things go bad, not knowing anything might be the only thing that saves you. At first it was just a promising development. But then we realized that the new owners of Z-Biotech are thinking of exploiting it.” His voice shook. “It’s actually worse than that. If what we’re thinking they’re doing is true, then—”

“Patrick.” My mom touched his arm again. “We said we weren’t going to tell Cady too much.”

I was frustrated by their unfinished sentences, by their hints. “What? You have to tell me something.”

My mom took a deep breath. “We need to stop the company before it’s too late. What they’re doing is not just illegal, but it could have devastating consequences for…” Her voice trailed off. “For everything. For thousands of people. Maybe millions. Do you understand?”

I didn’t understand anything. Only that I wished this was a dream. Even a nightmare because at least then I could wake up. I shook my head.

“Diseases can be used as weapons,” my dad said. “Remember when we talked about that when you took European history last year?”

He had tried to get me to see that history was more than a list of dates and battles, dry facts, the boring language of treaties. So he had told me that in the Middle Ages, besiegers had catapulted the corpses of the plague dead over castle walls. During the French and Indian War, Native Americans had deliberately been given blankets from a smallpox hospital. With no natural immunity, about 90 percent of the ones who caught smallpox died.

I nodded.

“Z-Biotech wants to use something we discovered in bad ways,” he said. “And we need to find a way to stop them.”

My mind whirled, not able to come to rest on anything. I wished it were still five minutes ago, and I was watching three high school guys dressed in coconut-shell bras and grass skirts badly lip-syncing to a popular song.

“So go to the police.” But even I knew that probably wasn’t the answer. The police probably wouldn’t understand. My parents had done post-doctorate work in clinical microbiology and virology. Only a few people in the world really understood what they did. And most of those people worked at Z-Biotech. “Or, I don’t know, go to the government. Aren’t there programs for whistle-blowers?”

“We don’t know who we can trust.” My dad scraped his hands back through his hair, so that it stuck up in tufts. “Some people in the government might actually support what Z-Biotech is doing, especially if it could be used against America’s enemies. And we need proof. They’ll destroy or hide the evidence long before anyone shows up to inspect things.”

My mother’s face was like a stone. “And if Z-Biotech ever figures out that we’re collecting information, we could be killed. All of us. Not just your father and me, but you and Max.”

An icy finger traced my spine. “But Max is just a little kid. What kind of people would murder a child?”