doorway. “Are you supposed to be in here?” he asked. A rhetorical question.
“We were just leaving.” Heather strode to the door and disappeared into the hall.
Becca had no choice but to do the same.
When Becca rang Heather’s doorbell that evening, she half-expected Heather to slam the door in her face. Instead Heather met Becca’s eyes with a blank expression. “Hi, Becca.”
Becca looked away. Seeing a stranger looking out of Heather’s eyes was too unnerving. “I, um… I was hoping we could talk.”
Without a word, Heather opened the door and motioned Becca inside. Becca only caught a glimpse of the immaculate living room, with furniture in various shades of cream, before Heather led her upstairs to her room.
Heather still hadn’t unpacked her things. A couple of cardboard boxes stood against the far wall, next to her bed. The room, aside from the bed and the boxes, was bare.
Becca had felt almost as comfortable in Heather’s old bedroom as she did in her own. Here, she felt like an intruder.
Maybe she shouldn’t have come.
But she had to find out what was going on.
Heather sat gingerly on the edge of her bed. “What did you want to talk about?” she asked, her expression bland. She sounded like she was talking to a stranger. Not her best friend of ten years.
Becca stayed standing. “What do you think? That.” She gestured toward Heather’s Monitor pin.
“The Monitors? What about them?” She shrugged. “I know I didn’t want to join before, but you remember what I was like before. All I cared about was how much fun I was having and what other people were saying about me. Sometimes your life has to fall apart before you can really see what’s important, you know?” She smiled—the first smile Becca had seen from her since her parents’ arrest. It hung on her face like a badly-fitting mask.
“If you’re just doing this so people will stop thinking you’re a dissident, you can tell me. You don’t have to pretend with me.” Becca hoped that was the reason. If all this was an act, it would explain why Heather didn’t seem like herself anymore. And why she would join the Monitors even after everything that had happened.
The smile dropped from Heather’s face. “So you think if I actually care about something bigger than myself, I must be pretending?”
Either Heather didn’t trust Becca at all anymore, or… she meant it. She believed in the Monitors, in Internal, in all of it. Not in the offhand way she used to—the way Becca used to—but the way the political kids did, the ones who had dreamed of working for Internal since kindergarten, the ones Heather and her friends had always made fun of.
“But what about your parents? What about…” The eye on Heather’s pin watched her. She hesitated. Should she really be talking about this with a Monitor, of all people?
What was wrong with her? This was Heather. Her best friend. The idea of Heather trying to get revenge against her mom had almost made sense—she could see Heather going after her mom in a storm of grief, not thinking about what she was doing or what it meant. Turning Becca in, though, would take a level of coldness that Heather didn’t have.
At least, the old Heather hadn’t.
Becca forced herself to finish. She wouldn’t let herself think something like that about her best friend. Bad enough that she had suspected her of plotting revenge. “What about the note, and the stuff I found in my mom’s —”
“You said you weren’t going to talk about this anymore,” Heather interrupted. She crossed her arms.
“I didn’t figure you wanted to hear about it yet, on top of everything else you were dealing with. But I can’t forget what I found. I don’t understand how you can just dismiss it.”
“My parents were dissidents.” Heather spoke each word with contemptuous precision. “Everything in that note was a dissident lie.”
“If it was all a lie, then why did I find that file on my mom’s computer that said…” She glanced down at Heather’s pin again. “…that said Public Relations had told her what to get that dissident to say?”
“Maybe you misread it. Maybe someone knew you’d look there and planted it for you to find. How should I know?” She drew her arms in closer to her chest. “But you know what? I don’t care. I don’t care why you found whatever you found, and I don’t care why my parents wrote that note in the first place. They were dissidents, and now they’re gone. That’s all that matters.”
She sounded like she was talking about people she had seen on the news or something. Not her own parents. Becca studied Heather, looking for some trace of the grief she had seen the night she had gone to 117 to save her. She couldn’t find anything.
“Why are you staring at me like that?” Heather snapped.
“They were your parents. How can you talk like they don’t even matter to you?” For once she wanted what she was hearing to be a lie.
Heather looked at her in disbelief. “I thought you were the one who couldn’t forget what we found. Don’t you remember the stuff that note said?” Her voice rose until she was almost yelling. “They were dissidents!”
“They were your parents!”
“I wish I had never known them!” Heather propelled herself off the bed. “They pretended to be normal parents, they pretended to love me, when all along they only cared about poisoning society with their lies. They even managed to poison you! Look at what this is doing to you!”
Becca shrank back from Heather’s rage. “What I found is real. Come to my apartment and I can show you.” But she knew Heather wouldn’t do it. Heather was turning into somebody Becca didn’t know, and Becca didn’t know how to stop it.
Or was Becca the one who was changing?
No. She wasn’t the one in the wrong here. Heather didn’t care about her parents anymore. She didn’t care about the truth. She had pushed Becca away for no reason, and now she wouldn’t listen.
Becca fed the anger, just like she had with her mom yesterday. The hotter it burned, the less the word echoed in her mind.
“First my parents. Now you.” Heather sagged back onto the bed, like her legs wouldn’t hold her anymore. A second ago she had sounded ready to explode; now her voice quavered with the threat of tears. “Are you turning into a dissident now? Is that what this is?”
The echoes got louder, roaring in Becca’s ears, only now they spoke with Heather’s voice.
“I’m not a dissident,” she whispered.
It felt like a lie.
“Then why are you doing this? Why can’t you just leave it alone?” Heather swiped the back of her hand across her eyes. “Like it’s not hard enough knowing what my parents were without you acting like you’re on their side.”
On their side.
A dissident.
She tried to focus the anger, bring it closer, build it hotter. She tried to remember that Heather was the one who was wrong.
It was getting harder. Harder to remember that she wasn’t a dissident. Harder to make herself believe it.
“What about what you’re doing?” She flung the words at Heather. “Your parents have only been dead a few weeks, and you’re throwing them away like they never mattered.”
Heather didn’t answer. Her shoulders curled; she started trembling. It took Becca a minute to realize she was crying.
Becca wanted to apologize… but if she did, it would mean she was wrong and Heather was right. And if Heather was right, that meant Becca was what Heather said she was.
Finally, Heather looked up, her face streaked with tears. All the missing grief had come back again, all at once. “I can’t let myself forget that they were dissidents,” she whispered. “Not ever. If I do, I’ll start hating Internal
