“You’re trying to find out if I’m a dissident.”
Her mom said nothing.
Becca faced her. “That’s why you brought me here. It had nothing to do with fixing things between us. You just wanted to get me to… what, ask you if the dissidents have been right all along?”
“I do want to fix things between us. And I want to make sure you’re all right. I can see you changing, and it worries me.” Her mom didn’t change her tone, didn’t break her calm. Of course she didn’t. She did this with dissidents all the time.
Becca broke away from the path and took off running toward home.
Her mom caught up with her before she even made it out of the park.
She couldn’t outrun her mom. There was no point in trying. She slowed down to let her mom walk beside her.
“I’m not a dissident.”
Her mom could tell when she was lying. Did she see it now?
“I’m sorry I brought it up the way I did,” said her mom. “I should have just asked. But considering the way things have been between us, I didn’t know if you’d talk to me at all, let alone tell me the truth.”
They left the park. As they moved onto the road, they started walking single-file: Becca in front, her mom behind.
“So this was all an act. Just a way to get me to let my guard down.” With her mom behind her, out of sight, Becca almost felt like she was talking to herself.
“Not at all. Everything I said was true. I miss you, Becca.”
And Becca missed her. Even knowing why her mom had really come out to the park with her didn’t change that.
But the person she missed had never existed.
A car passed them, temporarily blinding Becca with its headlights. “I know something is going on,” her mom said over the noise. “I know Heather and Jake have been telling you things.” She lowered her voice as the car disappeared into the distance. “You’re starting to wonder if they’re right. It’s understandable.”
Heather and Jake. Her mom was going to try to blame this on them. Becca remembered what had happened the last time her mom had thought one of her friends was a dissident. She still had nightmares sometimes where Anna accused her of turning her over to Internal.
“They haven’t—” Becca started.
Her mom spoke over her. “But some part of you knows that what they’ve been telling you is wrong. That’s why it all seems so confusing. Whatever they’ve told you, I can explain it all for you if you just ask. If you don’t talk to me, I can’t help.” Her voice, floating up from someplace behind Becca, was tight with restrained fear.
“Heather joined the Monitors. She wouldn’t have done that if she was a dissident.” But Becca had no way to defend Jake. Nothing to say that would save him if her mom decided the only way to keep him from passing dissident ideas to Becca was to have Internal arrest him again.
“I don’t know who let that girl into the Monitors, but whoever did it is either an idiot or needs to be investigated. Not only were both her parents dissidents, now she’s started spreading dissident ideology herself.”
“All she’s told me is that Internal was right to execute her parents!” She knew it was hopeless even as she said the words. Her mom wasn’t going to drop this. She could see what was happening to Becca, and in her mind, the only reasonable explanation was that Heather and Jake were responsible. Nothing Becca said would change that.
Nothing she said about Heather and Jake, at least.
But if she admitted to finding the evidence…
Her mom would know she had been snooping. She would know that Becca had information she wasn’t supposed to have.
But she would also know that Becca had gotten the information from her computer. Not from Heather or Jake.
“After what Anna told me…” Saying Anna’s name felt like betraying her all over again. “I went on your computer one night when you were at work. I looked through your files. And… I found something.”
They were almost home. The glow of the parking lot illuminated the road ahead of them.
“One of the dissidents’ files had information about what he was supposed to confess to. What you were supposed to make him say.” Becca didn’t know if her mom could hear her. She was speaking so softly she could barely hear herself.
Her mom’s answer, when it came, was just as quiet. “We need to have a talk.”
Neither of them said anything else as they walked through the parking lot and into the building. The stairwell was silent, but Becca couldn’t think over the sound of her uneven breaths.
Becca followed her mom into the apartment. She felt like she was walking to her execution.
Her mom sat down on the couch. Becca joined her.
Was this how her mom looked when she was interrogating a dissident? That carefully-blank expression, those unreadable eyes?
Her mom spoke first. “I’m sorry for lying to you.”
That wasn’t how she had expected her interrogation to begin.
'I didn’t want to do it,' her mom continued. 'But you have to understand, nobody outside Internal is supposed to know about this. It’s not even well-known inside Processing. If anyone found out that you had this information… or that you got it from me…' A hint of fear crept into her too-neutral tone.
Becca kept quiet. She didn’t need her mom finding out about the conversation she’d already had with Heather.
'Dissidents have been passing around distorted versions of the truth for years,' said her mom. 'These things always make it back to them sooner or later. But it’s important that everyone else believes it’s just another dissident lie, if they hear about it at all; otherwise what we’re doing would be meaningless. If that weren’t so important, I would have told you the truth a long time ago. I never wanted to keep anything from you.'
“It’s not about you lying to me.” Everything her mom had done, and she thought lying to Becca was the worst part? “It’s about what you’ve been doing. All the false confessions.” She had to force every word out of her mouth. Talking about this with Heather had been hard enough. To talk about it with her mom, with someone who worked for Internal, was practically unthinkable. But at the same time, something in her unclenched a little with every word she spoke. It felt good to talk to her mom again. To be able to tell her the truth.
She kept going. “I know you. You wouldn’t do something like this. The truth matters too much to you.” She met her mom’s eyes, but only for a second. It was too hard to look at her. “But you’ve been doing it all along, haven’t you?”
Her mom’s phone buzzed again. Her mom ignored it.
“You need to remember something.” Her mom got off the couch and knelt between Becca and the coffee table, so Becca had no choice but to look at her. “No matter whether these people have done what they’ve confessed to or not, they’re still dissidents. We can simply execute them, or we can go a step further and use them to strengthen society. We choose the latter.”
Becca had told herself the same thing, when she had first found out. Those people were dissidents. They deserved whatever happened to them.
She went cold.
No. She wasn’t like the people her mom was talking about. She hadn’t done anything that would get her arrested. Right?
But what had Anna done?
Even if Becca had been telling the truth about her, Anna would only have been guilty of passing along a rumor she might not have even believed. Hadn’t Becca given that same piece of information to Heather? Hadn’t she done something more serious than that when she had gone through her mom’s files?
“What about…” Her mouth was dry. “What about people who haven’t done anything but say the wrong thing?
