Sixteen
I made sure the lock engaged before heading toward the pitted parking lot. Across the street, the twenty-four-hour sign on the All Nite mini-mart attached to the gas station blinked. The parking lot and streets were quiet, except for the freeway noise from three-quarters of a mile away. Still, I wondered if I was making a mistake. What if the men from SMART Ops had somehow found us again and were out here, watching me?
I hesitated, just as red words flared in my head.
Visual scan: Activated.
I froze next to a maroon sedan, trying to push away the images that zoomed through my mind. The models, makes, and colors of all the cars in the parking lot. Their license-plate numbers. Close-ups of the bedraggled garlic bushes that surrounded the perimeter, the lone oak tree. The viscous spill of brown liquid on the asphalt to the left of our room.
No human threat detected.
My hands shook, so I shoved them into my pockets and fought back the dizzying swell of disgust. I could hate the functions all I wanted, but I couldn’t argue that this one was useful. It would be a waste not to make the most of it.
But as I hurried across the parking lot and into the street, I realized I missed the darkness. While night vision was handy, having the dark ripped away from me without choice felt like just another piece of humanity had been stolen.
The red twenty-four-hour sign on the door blinked and emitted an intermittent buzz. I kept my head low while walking through the door but took in everything. Despite the ratty exterior, the inside of the store was spotless. Five aisles of snacks and sundries were neatly arranged in the middle of the small enclosure, with a gleaming silver soft- drink dispenser in the back left corner and a refrigerated section on the right. But I wasn’t here for food.
A middle-aged woman—DANA, her name tag read—flashed me a lipstick-stained smile before returning to a gossip magazine behind the counter. She didn’t seem especially interested in me. Unfortunately, the young male security guard filling his coffee cup in the back did. He smiled and waved a friendly greeting, but all I could think about was whether or not the gun I saw strapped to his waist was loaded.
Before I knew it, my eyes zeroed in on the weapon. Inside my head, a beep sounded. Then the image enlarged behind my eyes, rotated in a three-hundred-sixty-degree turn.
While the gun twirled, the red words declared:
Sig Sauer P229, 9mm.
I whirled from the guard, averting my face, pretending to inspect the candy section while grasping the shelf to steady myself.
My panicked gaze fell on a package of Starbursts. The sight reminded me of Hunter’s Jeep, of how he made me feel so very real and vulnerable. The simple memory of his hand, reached across the scattered candy to curve around mine, was enough. No matter how silly it sounded, those feelings I experienced with Hunter made me feel like anything was possible, like I didn’t have to turn into a machine.
Overcoming my inertia, I grabbed the candy and carried it to the counter. I could sense the security guard’s stare but didn’t look his way.
No need to worry yet. More than likely, they’d had a high rate of crime in the area, and this was all just an exercise to prevent any shoplifting. But I didn’t know enough about the SMART Ops and how they operated to be one hundred percent comfortable with that assessment. Plus any attention at this point was bad.
I caught the slightest sounds he made, even over the pop song that played a way-too-jaunty tune. The slight creak of his knee when he shifted his weight. A raspy noise, like he was scratching the stubble on his chin.
I needed to get out of here. Now.
“Can I have one of those precharged disposable cell phones, too?” I said in a low voice, pointing to the display behind the cashier’s bushy brown hair.
The woman clicked her tongue. “Oh, no, hon, did your smartphone die? Everyone thinks they’re so amazing, but give me something basic and reliable any day.”
I let my hair shield my face and gave a small smile, but didn’t comment. The less memorable our interaction, the better. The register beeped. After I paid, I thanked her and scooped up the plastic bag to leave. The security guard’s gaze rested on me from ten feet away.
As I walked toward the door, I just knew the security guard would follow.
I entered the deserted night, the distant rush of cars and the hum of the neon sign the only noise. The word VACANCY across the street glowed like a beacon, but I ignored it and made a right turn instead. Toward the empty stretch of road ahead. If this guy wanted to follow me, I wasn’t about to lead him to Mom.
One, two, three more steps down the cracked sidewalk. He followed. Maybe he was just coming outside for a smoke. Maybe—
I whirled just as his hand reached to tap me on the shoulder.
“Oh!” he said, jumping back. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to frighten you. I was—I was just wondering . . .”
My fingers tightened on the plastic bag reflexively.
“. . . if you’re from around here, maybe you’d like to go grab a cup of coffee sometime?”
I blinked. A cup of coffee? This guy was asking me on a date? My fingers relaxed at the same time I felt warmth spread through my cheeks.
Fake warmth that felt so amazingly real.
“Um, thanks, but I don’t think my mom would approve.” On so many levels.
His tentative smile vanished. “Your mom? How old are you?”
“Sixteen.”
Now his cheeks were the ones blotchy with embarrassment. He lurched several hasty steps back and held his hands out in front of him, as if they could protect him from his own disastrous thoughts. “Oh . . . ah . . . I had no idea. I figured, with you walking by yourself at night . . .” He kept glancing back over his shoulder at the mini-mart, like the cashier might dash out and save him.
“Just grabbing a snack and heading back to the hotel room,” I said, shaking my bag and biting back a smile. “Have a good night.”
Once he slouched his way back into the mini-mart, I scurried across the street for Room 33.
I immediately crossed to the bed and sat, digging the phone out of the plastic bag so I could activate it and begin punching in his number.
Security mode: On.
The voice command startled me so much, I almost dropped the phone. Security mode, what did that even mean? Was I going to be tracing this call somehow, or even recording it? Hastily I hit the disconnect button.
I stared at the way my fingers tightened around the phone. All I’d wanted to do was hear Hunter’s voice, just for a few minutes, and now even that had been taken from me. But I couldn’t risk his safety, or Mom finding out.
I turned off the phone to preserve the battery and shoved it into my bag while cold seeped into the ever-widening void inside me. Then I slumped onto my back on the bed and stared at the small black beetle that crawled across the yellowing ceiling with no apparent urgency or concern, wondering if emotions were a little overrated.
Forty minutes later, I sat in a stiff-backed chair in front of the wobbly motel mirror. With one hand, Mom deftly pulled a comb through my hair, stopping about halfway down.
“Shorter,” I said.
Blue eyes met my green ones in the mirror. “Are you sure?”
No. “Yes. Besides, it’s shorter in the passport photo.”
A pause. “You realize it won’t grow back.”
I froze, transfixed by the chin-length strands in the mirror. Actually, I hadn’t realized, but it made sense. Of course my hair couldn’t grow. Why would it? Hair growth implied human hair follicles. Live ones. Such a stupid little thing, and yet as my gaze swept the discarded, curling strands that littered the brown carpet, my eyes burned.
“Shorter,” I repeated stubbornly. “Anyway, why do you care so much about my hair? It’s not like it matters.”
In fact, Mom hadn’t been thrilled with this whole experience. She’d immediately turned away when I’d first emerged from the bathroom with my hair jet-black, as if she couldn’t bear to look at me, and the first snip had been especially hard for her, based on the way her fingers trembled while holding the scissors.
She tugged the comb back through, stopping just below my ears this time. She lifted the scissors.
Snip, snip.
Pieces of black hair scattered onto the white towel wrapped around my neck and onto the floor, triggering a memory of a different mirror, a different haircut. That same little girl I’d remembered before, sitting in front of Mom with a towel blanketing her, holding out a hand for a lollipop while Mom snipped away.
I frowned. The memory was still fuzzy, vague. The little girl’s face was impossible to see.
I pushed to retrieve the image, to focus in, but the memory disintegrated into nothingness, leaving behind a residue of longing that I didn’t understand.
That longing vanished as another memory surfaced.
White walls, white lights. The smell of bleach. A man in a lab coat, powering a drill to life . . .
I shook my head and, ignoring Mom’s sound of protest, bolted out of the chair. No. I didn’t want to experience that, not again. I raised my hands to my cheeks and focused on the mirror. I saw a girl with short, choppy black hair, a girl who looked dangerous and edgy. Much more fitting than the innocent schoolgirl look the U.S. military had chosen for me.
Much less like the version of me from that awful memory.
“Are you okay?”
I caught Mom’s gaze in the reflection again, saw the way her hand hovered halfway to my arm, like she wanted to comfort me but realized her touch wouldn’t be welcome. I sidled away out of reach, in case she overcame her reservations.
Should I ask her about the memory? Demand an explanation? Or was it another one of the things I’d be happier not knowing?
I chose the latter and instead asked a different question that had just occurred to me. “Who chose how I look?” I asked, turning to face Mom in time to watch her fumble the scissors in an uncharacteristically clumsy act. She stooped to the ground, pausing there for a few heartbeats longer than necessary. I wondered if something in my question had upset her, but by the time she rose, her face was a poised mask. Still, something tight grabbed at her mouth, thinned it.
“Not me” was all she said, before turning and disappearing into the bathroom.
When she reemerged later, her hair fell to the same spot inches past her shoulders, but the familiar blond color was gone, replaced by a reddish brown to match her phony passport photo. This was not the Mom from Clearwater, from my programmed memories, and just like that, I felt another tether to my past tear free.
My hair was still scattered across the stained carpet like the dandelion seeds I’d seen a toddler blow back in Clearwater, walking with his mom down our street. I leaned over and rescued a few silky strands, only to let them slip between my fingers, to watch them float back to the floor. Hair, weeds, life—all of them transient.
Shaking off the melancholy, I started picking up the hair in earnest.
“Here, let me help.” Mom squatted down to scoop up pieces, too.
“No, thanks, I’ve got it.”
She remained in a squat, balancing her hands on her thighs. “Mila, I realize that you’re angry, but we have to be able to work together.”
The darker hair gave her skin a porcelain glow, adding a hint of fragility to her face. But I knew it was just an illusion, in much the same way that my appearance was. No one would look at her long-legged, slender beauty and suspect the mental and physical strength that lurked beneath. Just like no one would look at me and suspect I was anything other than a normal teenage girl.
It made me wonder how many other people out there hid behind their outer shells.
“Fine. But only if you drop the Mom act completely, and treat me like an equal. Deal?”
She stared at me for several long seconds, her eyes roving over my face almost as if she were memorizing the contours, while her hand clutched the phony birthstone charm. For a moment I thought she might argue. Beg me to believe that, despite everything, she felt like a real mom, that she hadn’t faked that part. And before I could help it, that same crazy hope spiraled through me.
It died a second later, when she agreed, in an oh-so-soft voice: “Deal.”
I immediately went back to collecting hair off the floor, all the while trying to convince myself that that’s exactly what I’d wanted her to say.
