“Becca. Say something.” Her mom’s hand tightened on her arm.
Becca struggled to bring the world back into focus. “It’s okay.” She cleared her throat. “It’s okay. They were dissidents, right? So you had to do it.”
Her mom still looked concerned. “It’s understandable for you to have trouble with this.”
“Was it…” Becca gestured toward the TV. Most dissidents were shot without ceremony on the underground levels of 117, but some executions were televised, the dissidents confessing their crimes into the camera before they died. Sometimes the executions were replayed for days afterward. When she had flipped through channels earlier, had she narrowly avoided seeing Heather’s parents die?
Her mom shook her head. “Considering the Thomases’ former positions in Surveillance, Public Relations wanted to keep the details quiet.”
Good. At least there was no chance Heather had seen it.
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine. Really.” What else had she expected? As hard as it was for Becca to believe, they had been dissidents. They wouldn’t have confessed otherwise. What was her mom supposed to do, let them go anyway just because their daughter missed them?
Becca pulled her arm into her lap, away from her mom’s hand.
She understood. She did.
But what was she going to tell Heather?
Chapter Three
Becca had never been so grateful for a weekend in her life.
But the two days passed too quickly, and before Becca had gotten past
Avoiding Heather before lunch wasn’t hard. The only class they had together this year was Citizenship, in the afternoon. But when lunchtime came around, she stood in front of the cafeteria doors for a full five minutes as the river of students flowed around her. Two choices—sit with Heather and answer questions about her conversation with her mom, or sit someplace else and let Heather think she had abandoned her along with everybody else.
Or option three—skip the whole thing. She turned around. She wasn’t hungry anyway.
“The smell of the meatloaf scared you away too?” a voice behind her asked.
Becca spun around. It took her a moment to figure out where she recognized the boy from. It was the hair that did it—the black hair falling into his face. He was the one who hadn’t looked away when she had caught him staring on that first awful day.
Now he smiled, a slow smile that filled up his entire face. Becca made herself remember that he had been one of the gawkers that day, craning his neck to get a glimpse of Heather’s tragedy. She didn’t smile back.
“Where are you headed?” he asked.
Becca shrugged. “I don’t know. The library, I guess.”
“Good, me too.” He started walking. Now that Becca had said she was going to the library, she had no choice but to walk there with him.
He moved clumsily, like he had only recently gotten tall and hadn’t quite realized it yet. “I don’t blame you for not wanting to eat in there,” he said. “I’ve seen the way everyone looks at you and Heather now.”
“It’s not like you weren’t watching too.” She studied him out of the corner of her eye as she spoke, trying to figure out who he was. He had to be new; she hadn’t seen him around here before that day in the cafeteria. But something about him made her certain she knew him from somewhere.
He looked faintly embarrassed. “I heard the rumors like everyone else. I wanted to know what was going on. It took me a while to figure out they were all going after your friend for no real reason.”
He started up the stairs. Becca followed him, struggling to keep up with his long-legged stride. “What changed your mind?”
“Everyone has a different story about the two of you. All anybody really knows is that Internal took her parents. And having dissident parents doesn’t make you a dissident.”
Becca wished more people saw it that way. Weird, though, that this stranger would, when none of Heather’s friends were willing to stand by her. So did he know her and Heather from somewhere? The more she talked to him, the more she got the sense that she should remember him.
“Do you mind if I ask you something?” she asked as they walked. “Don’t be offended, okay?”
They reached the top of the stairs, directly in front of the library. He stopped outside the door. “Go ahead.”
“Are you new here, or do I know you?”
“I’m new.” He smiled again. “I’m Jake, by the way.”
Becca let her breath out. “Good. I haven’t forgotten you, then. But…” She frowned. “You still seem familiar. Are you sure we haven’t met before?”
“I lived around here a few years ago.” His voice dropped as he pushed the library door open. “We went to junior high together. I think you were in my English class.”
Jake. Right. She thought she remembered him now—a short skinny kid who had always been joking around. The time away had agreed with him. His chatter that had bordered on obnoxious seemed to have mellowed into a quiet friendliness… and, she had to admit, he was a lot nicer to look at now.
She looked away and hurried into the library before he could notice her studying him.
The library—twice the size of the one at the old high school, with shelves that towered above Becca’s head —was empty except for a couple of girls at the computers and a boy with a stack of books beside him. Becca sat down at the nearest table. Jake took the chair across from her.
“You left halfway through the year,” Becca remembered aloud. “Actually, I heard—” She closed her mouth before the rest of the sentence could escape.
“You heard I was a dissident? Yeah, I’ve heard that one too.” He smiled, as if to reassure her that he wasn’t offended. Becca smiled back in relief.
Maybe that was why he wasn’t as quick to condemn Heather as everyone else. He’d had his own experiences with people’s vicious assumptions. Nothing weird about it after all.
“Well, thanks for not thinking the same thing about me,” said Becca.
He leaned back in his chair. “You don’t look like a dissident to me,” he said with another smile.
Wait. He was flirting, wasn’t he? She basked in the unaccustomed attention. A wave of guilt followed. Heather was sitting alone in the cafeteria, still thinking she had a chance of getting her parents back, and Becca was in the library flirting with a boy. Some best friend she was.
“Is something wrong? You look upset.”
Becca had missed her chance to flirt back. “Nothing’s wrong. I’m just worried about Heather.” She hadn’t understood until now how much she wanted somebody on her side in all this. Normally she had her mom and Heather—but now Heather was the one who needed her help, and her mom was part of the problem. “I don’t know why everyone keeps saying she’s a dissident. If she were a dissident, they would have executed her.”
“I’ve heard of dissidents getting released every once in a while, if they’ve cooperated.”
“That’s not what happened with Heather,” Becca said sharply. “She wasn’t even arrested.”
“I’m just saying they might think that’s what happened. Or maybe they think Internal let her go so she’d lead them to other dissidents. I don’t think they’ve thought it through that far, though. They’re just vultures feeding on someone else’s misery.”
Hadn’t Becca thought of them in exactly those terms, that first day? She really did have an ally—one she never would have known about if he hadn’t passed by at exactly the right moment…
How had he just happened to be there?
There was something strange about the way he was looking at her. Underneath his casual demeanor, he was watching her with too-sharp eyes.
She blinked, and it was gone.
