Quicksilver (6 page)

When I came down to breakfast the next morning and saw the newspaper lying on the table, I braced myself for the worst. But my mom passed me the croissants and went on reading the classifieds without even glancing up. And once I’d unfolded the front section and flipped to the local headlines, I understood why.

“TEENS STOP RUNAWAY BUS, SAVE DRIVER,” the article began, and beneath it were two school pictures. One was of Milo, minus the glasses and wearing an artificial smile.

The other was the girl with the pink cell phone.

Disbelieving, I skimmed the rest of the story. The details were pretty much what had actually happened, except with the other girl—Breanna Gingerich, apparently—taking charge of the wheel. One of her friends claimed to have helped Milo with the CPR until the ambulance arrived, while the other took responsibility for making the 911 call. Thanks to their quick thinking and courageous teamwork, said the article, the driver had made it to hospital alive, with a good chance of recovery.

I stared at the page, the croissant crumbling forgotten in my hand. I didn’t mind Breanna and her friends taking credit for what I’d done: if anything, I was grateful. I was just surprised they’d had the nerve to pull it off.

No, more than surprised. I didn’t believe it. There was no reason three total strangers, let alone a bunch of giggly girls who couldn’t be more than fourteen, would lie to the police and the media for my sake. Not unless there was something in it for them, and they could be sure of getting away with it.

Which meant that Milo hadn’t just covered for me. Somehow he’d talked the girls into covering for me too.

0 0 1 0 0 0

“Hey there, hero!” called Jon heartily as Milo came through the sliding doors. “Nice picture in the paper!”

Milo pulled the earbuds out of his ears. “Thanks,” he said without enthusiasm. He stuffed the headphones into his pocket and headed for the stockroom, not even glancing at me.

I was glad he was playing it cool, but it didn’t make my job any easier. I still owed him an explanation for last night.

Halfway through the shift, I switched off with Kayleigh and was heading to the break room when Milo slipped into the corridor behind me. “I feel like a secret agent,” he said. “Do you have the documents, comrade Nikita?”

Nikita was actually a boy’s name in Russian, but I wasn’t going to make myself obnoxious by saying so. “It’s a long story,” I said. “What about later, on the bus? Or have you sworn off public transit?”

“Have you?”

“Not really. What are the odds of anything like that happening again?”

“Zero, I hope,” he said fervently. “But my brother’s home for the weekend and we’re going out for pizza, so the bus is out. Can you give me the short version?”

The break room was empty. No more excuses. I shoved coins into the coffee dispenser and fished a couple of creamers out of the fridge while I waited for the cup to fill. Then I took a deep breath and said, “First, I need to thank you for what you did last night. That was pretty brilliant of you, bringing the girls in on it.”

I wasn’t just flattering him, either: it really had been a genius move. Not only did it give Breanna and her friends good reason to keep their mouths shut, it also guaranteed that any other pictures they’d taken of me would be long gone by now. The only possible glitch was that I’d probably been caught on video, since all the city buses had cameras these days. But how likely were the police to even look at the tape, let alone make an issue of it?

“Yeah, well.” Milo took the coffee out of the dispenser and handed it to me, then started plugging in his own change. “I’m just glad they decided to play along.”

I glanced at the door, half hoping one of the other employees would come in and interrupt us. But nobody did, so I took the plunge. “So. You’re probably wondering why I took off like that.”

Idiot. Of course he was; that was why we were here. “Look, this is really private and personal, so please don’t tell anybody. But a few months ago, before I moved here, something happened to me. Something … bad.”

Milo kept his head down, watching the cup as it filled. But his shoulders tensed, and I knew I’d got his attention.

“It wasn’t my fault,” I went on in a low voice. “I couldn’t have done anything to stop it—I know that now. But there was an investigation, and it was all over the news, and everybody in my school was talking about it. It was like I wasn’t even a person to them anymore, just a story. The kind of story that follows you around for the rest of your life.”

Carefully, Milo pulled his hot chocolate out of the dispenser and fitted a lid onto it. He still didn’t look at me.

“So my parents and I decided to move,” I said. “We even changed our names, so we could start over.” It was a risk, telling him that. But if he tried to look up Nicola Johnson online and couldn’t find her, I wanted him to know why. “Nobody from my old life knows where I am now, and I want to keep it that way.”

“And that’s why you ran off and left me doing CPR on that guy by myself,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said. “I felt bad, but you were doing all right. And … this isn’t just about me.” I laced my fingers around my cup, watching the steam coil and vanish in the air. “My parents left their jobs and their friends and everything, just to give me a chance at a normal life. I don’t want them to have to go through that again.”

We stood in silence a moment, listening to the tinny pop music from the loudspeaker. Then Milo said, “Okay.”

Which could mean any number of things—
okay, I understand what you’re saying; okay, I forgive you for ditching me; okay, I’m on your side
. I was hoping for the last one, but I couldn’t be certain until he turned his head, and his dark eyes locked onto mine.

He looked serious. He also looked slightly nauseated, but the disgust wasn’t aimed at me. He held my gaze steadily, and then one corner of his mouth turned up in a rueful smile.

“Wow,” he said. “Life can be pretty complicated, eh?”

I knew, then, what he thought had happened to me. He was wrong, but I wasn’t about to tell him so. At least it was the kind of tragedy that would make sense to someone like Milo, something he wouldn’t find hard to believe.

If only it were half so easy to explain the truth.

0 0 1 0 0 1

March made one last halfhearted attempt at snow, but it melted as soon as it hit the ground. Then April arrived in force, stealing the chill from the air and washing the grit-dulled streets to a sheen. I took my mom’s umbrella to work three days in a row, until a freak gust turned it inside out and I had to huddle inside my coat instead.

Jon kept offering me rides, and I kept declining them. Milo and I didn’t see much of each other, but whenever our paths crossed, he gave me a nod as if to say,
Don’t worry. I’ve got your back.
Mom pulled up the carpet in the living room and refinished the old wooden floor, which turned out to be gorgeous. Dad coaxed her into going out for dinner and a movie every Friday, and after their first couple of dates, she stopped worrying about leaving me alone in the house. All seemed well, except for one thing.

I was restless. Worse than restless, I was
itchy.
Frustrated, short-tempered, and increasingly depressed, because I couldn’t find enough to do with my hands. My mother’s new decorating theme was cozy and organic, the opposite of the airy modern look she’d always gone for before, and the more our house looked like a feature in
Country Living
magazine, the less use she had for even the most practical devices I could build. I’d already automated my entire room from light switch to curtains, and I’d been warned against piling up too much electronics junk in the basement. So right now I was building a couple of laptops from parts I’d got cheap off the Internet, with a vague idea of selling them and making a profit when I was done.

But I wanted more. I always had, but now I wanted it worse than ever. A chance to build something new and challenging and exciting, something other people could see and use, something that actually
mattered.
How I could do that without getting noticed by the media was a question I hadn’t resolved yet, but I couldn’t bear to hide my LED under a bushel for much longer. Because six months ago, in a desperate all-or-nothing effort to escape from Mathis, I’d tackled the greatest technological challenge of my life. My synapses had sizzled like white lightning; my body had thrown itself completely into the task; and when I finished the machine and turned it on, the surge of exhilaration was like nothing I’d ever felt before. It was like a dam had burst inside me, and my whole mental landscape had changed.

Ever since then, I’d been constantly bombarded by ideas, and I couldn’t look at the simplest machine without thinking about how to improve it. As I swiped groceries over the scanner and keyed in produce codes, I was envisioning the technology that would make both those tasks unnecessary. When I watched a news report about a mechanical exoskeleton that could help people with spinal cord injuries, I started brainstorming ways to make the device stronger, lighter, and cheaper. At night I lay awake calculating equations to the last decimal point, designing and testing prototypes in my head until they worked without a hitch.

But that was where it stopped. Because my workspace was limited, and even if I could afford the parts, the tools I needed were beyond my budget. My urge to create had never been so strong, yet there seemed no way to satisfy it.

But then I saw an interview in the paper with an artisan who made clocks out of recycled coffee cans, and he mentioned the local makerspace.

“It’s a place where engineers and woodworkers and artists—basically anybody who likes to make things—can get together and work on shared equipment,” I told Dad that evening, as I got up to pull my dinner out of the microwave. “If I go to a few of their events and Open House nights, I could apply to become a member—
ow!”

I stifled the gasp, but too late. My mother zipped across the kitchen at the speed of light, turning on the cold tap and dragging me over to the sink. “Honey, it’s hot! Be more careful.”

“Mom, I’m fine.” I pulled free, shaking water from my hands. “It was just a little steam.” I grabbed a potholder and carried the plate to the table, where my dad was looking over the brochure I’d printed out from the makerspace website. “But seriously, it’s perfect. I could make all kinds of stuff there. I could collaborate with other makers, work on bigger projects. And it’s not just for tech geeks either, they’ve got sculptors and musicians and people making jewelry. I wouldn’t even be the only girl.”

I might have spoken too quickly. I might have been a little flushed. I knew I ought to stay calm so my parents would see I’d thought this through and wasn’t just asking on impulse, but I couldn’t. I wanted it
that
badly.

Dad sighed. “Pumpkin,” he said, “it sounds great. But it’s fifty dollars a month. And if they see the things you can do, it’s going to attract attention—”

“I’m not going to show off,” I interrupted. “I know better than that. I can stick to easier projects when the others are around and do the more complicated parts on my own.”

“But you’ll be going to university in another year anyway,” Mom pleaded. “Can’t you wait until you’re a little older? Until you’ve taken a few courses, and it won’t look so … unusual?”

“Girls in engineering are always unusual, Mom.” Which, I realized a millisecond later, was pretty much the worst argument I could have used with her. In desperation I turned to my father. “I can’t stand playing around with old junk in the basement anymore. I can do so much better. I
need
this, Dad.”

Dad went quiet, and for a moment I thought I’d won him over. But then he glanced at Mom’s anxious face and shook his head. “I’m going to have to say no, sweetie. It’s not that we don’t trust you, but they’ve got some pretty dangerous equipment in that place. And there are too many things that could go wrong.”

“Like what?” I asked incredulously. “I’m not stupid, Dad. I’m not going to cut my hand off or blow anything up, and I’m not going to let anybody take pictures of me either. And besides, when I go into engineering, I’m going to be working with all kinds of stuff like this anyway. I know you’re scared of losing me again, but you can’t protect me forever.”

Mom got up and hurried out. I could hear her blowing her nose in the next room as Dad said heavily, “I know it’s hard, Tori. When I was your age—”

“Niki, Dad. My name is Niki, remember?” I was furious, but I kept my tone civil. My parents were all I had in the world now, and I couldn’t afford to alienate them. Literally. “And no, you don’t know how hard it is. You have no idea what it’s like to be me.”

Dad said nothing. I picked up my fork and tried to eat some lasagna, but it tasted like old plastic. I shoved the plate away. “I’m going to be late for work,” I said and left.

0 0 1 0 1 0

My phone clanked at me halfway to the bus stop. I pulled it out and read:

–Sorry, honey. Talk when you get back?

I knew what that meant: Mom was planning to cancel her night out with Dad so they could wait up for me, sit me down, and explain their decision all over again, in the most loving and guilt-inducing possible way.

What it
didn’t
mean was that their decision was going to change. I texted back with the last of my remaining patience:

–Nothing to talk about. I get it. It’s OK.

I sent it off, then added another:

–Working late. Home at 11. Kayleigh’s giving me a ride.

Which was a total lie, since Kayleigh wasn’t even on my shift tonight. But if Mom thought I’d be gone all evening anyway and that I was in good company, there’d be no point in her staying home.