Becca felt like an idiot. The strangeness she had seen in Heather, her too-quick response to Becca’s questions about her mom—they seemed like nothing when put up against the fact that she was all but accusing her best friend of… dissident activity, she realized. She had said she would never suspect Heather of being a dissident, but by bringing up a possibility like this, that was exactly what she was doing.
But still, doubts lingered in her mind.
Heather had said “for executing a couple of dissidents.” Not “my parents.”
Was she trying too hard to sound innocent?
Heather’s chair screeched against the tile as she stood up. She walked to the window.
“I’m sorry.” Becca got up to join her. “Dad told me this story about a friend of my mom’s who tried to kill her after Internal took her husband. It made me kind of paranoid, I guess.”
Heather didn’t look at her.
“It didn’t even occur to me that that would make you a dissident. I just remembered what it did to you when Internal took them, and how mad you got at me for no reason…”
Heather dug her fingernails into her palms. She drew her shoulders up and dropped her head, like a turtle trying to retreat into its shell.
Then, abruptly, her fists unclenched. Her shoulders dropped.
She turned to face Becca. “I’m sorry.”
Becca blinked. If anything, she had expected Heather to demand an apology from her, not the other way around. “For what?”
“You’re right. I was acting suspicious.” She fiddled with something on her shirt. “You believed me when nobody else would, and I screamed at you and pushed you away. You didn’t deserve that.” She dropped her hands to her sides. “I had to work through a bunch of stuff in my head, and every time I saw you it reminded me of all the things I didn’t want to think about.”
Like how Becca felt every time she looked at her mom. The thought of being to Heather what her mom was to her made her skin crawl. She tried to shake off the feeling. “It’s okay.”
Heather shook her head. “It’s not. You were completely justified to suspect me of… whatever. I wasn’t acting like myself.”
She still wasn’t acting like herself. Something about the way she spoke was… wrong. It didn’t sound like Heather.
Heather took a step forward.
The pin at her shoulder glittered in the light.
It took Becca a few seconds to understand what she was seeing. “You joined the Monitors.”
Heather fingered the pin. “A couple of days ago.”
“How could you do that, after everything that’s happened?”
“They didn’t want to let me in at first,” said Heather. “But I explained how much I wanted to make up for what my parents were. They’re going to have to watch me extra-carefully, to make sure I’m not trying to infiltrate them so I can pass information to dissidents, but that’s okay. They’ll start to trust me eventually.”
Becca couldn’t take her eyes off the pin. “That’s not what I meant. How could you join them after what happened to your parents? After what we found in the photo album?”
Heather’s eyes went cold. “My parents were dissidents, Becca.”
The classroom door opened.
They both swiveled their heads toward the sound. Mr. Adams, their Citizenship teacher, stood in the 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.”