She sounded like she was talking about people she had seen on the news or something. Not her own parents. Becca studied Heather, looking for some trace of the grief she had seen the night she had gone to 117 to save her. She couldn’t find anything.
“Why are you staring at me like that?” Heather snapped.
“They were your parents. How can you talk like they don’t even matter to you?” For once she wanted what she was hearing to be a lie.
Heather looked at her in disbelief. “I thought you were the one who couldn’t forget what we found. Don’t you remember the stuff that note said?” Her voice rose until she was almost yelling. “They were dissidents!”
“They were your parents!”
“I wish I had never known them!” Heather propelled herself off the bed. “They pretended to be normal parents, they pretended to love me, when all along they only cared about poisoning society with their lies. They even managed to poison you! Look at what this is doing to you!”
Becca shrank back from Heather’s rage. “What I found is real. Come to my apartment and I can show you.” But she knew Heather wouldn’t do it. Heather was turning into somebody Becca didn’t know, and Becca didn’t know how to stop it.
Or was Becca the one who was changing?
Dissident.
No. She wasn’t the one in the wrong here. Heather didn’t care about her parents anymore. She didn’t care about the truth. She had pushed Becca away for no reason, and now she wouldn’t listen.
Becca fed the anger, just like she had with her mom yesterday. The hotter it burned, the less the word echoed in her mind.
“First my parents. Now you.” Heather sagged back onto the bed, like her legs wouldn’t hold her anymore. A second ago she had sounded ready to explode; now her voice quavered with the threat of tears. “Are you turning into a dissident now? Is that what this is?”
The echoes got louder, roaring in Becca’s ears, only now they spoke with Heather’s voice. Dissident.
“I’m not a dissident,” she whispered.
It felt like a lie.
“Then why are you doing this? Why can’t you just leave it alone?” Heather swiped the back of her hand across her eyes. “Like it’s not hard enough knowing what my parents were without you acting like you’re on their side.”
On their side.
A dissident.
She tried to focus the anger, bring it closer, build it hotter. She tried to remember that Heather was the one who was wrong.
It was getting harder. Harder to remember that she wasn’t a dissident. Harder to make herself believe it.
“What about what you’re doing?” She flung the words at Heather. “Your parents have only been dead a few weeks, and you’re throwing them away like they never mattered.”
Heather didn’t answer. Her shoulders curled; she started trembling. It took Becca a minute to realize she was crying.
Becca wanted to apologize… but if she did, it would mean she was wrong and Heather was right. And if Heather was right, that meant Becca was what Heather said she was.
Finally, Heather looked up, her face streaked with tears. All the missing grief had come back again, all at once. “I can’t let myself forget that they were dissidents,” she whispered. “Not ever. If I do, I’ll start hating Internal for killing them. And then I’ll end up just like them.”
Becca’s anger drained away, leaving only the echoes. Dissident. Dissident.
Heather wiped away her tears. The emotion vanished from her face so quickly Becca wondered if she had imagined it. “Are you done talking like a dissident?”
As though nothing had happened. As though she had never started crying.
“Actually,” said Becca, “I should probably go.” She had to get out of here. Away from this person who looked like her best friend but wasn’t. Away from the word that got louder in her head every time Heather said it.
Guilt stabbed at her. Heather needed her, and she was running away like a coward. She should stay. Try to help her. It was the right thing to do.
“Okay.” Heather shrugged, already turning away. “I’ll see you in school tomorrow, then.”
Becca escaped out the door. The echoes followed. Dissident. Dissident. Dissident.
She had a plan. She would drop the car off at home, and then she would go to the playground. Let her mind go blank for a while. Forget about her mom. Forget about what Heather had said.
But when she walked in the door, intending to toss the car keys inside and leave again, her mom was standing on the other side. Waiting for her.
“The two of us are going to spend some time together,” said her mom, daring Becca to contradict her. “And we’re going to fix this.”
Chapter Ten
Becca sat on the park bench with her mom, watching the sun go down. This park was nothing like her playground. The trees were spaced at precise intervals, the grass got mowed every Saturday, and the playground equipment in the distance gleamed as the last rays of the sun glittered off the rust-free metal. Becca hadn’t been here in years, not since the old brown grass had been replanted and the new swings and jungle gym had replaced a couple of splintery picnic tables.
The quiet beauty should have relaxed her. But she couldn’t relax, not with her mom sitting next to her, deliberately looking away as she waited for Becca to make the first move.
Becca stared up at the red-tinged clouds, hardly seeing them. “Just say whatever you brought me here to say.”
“I didn’t bring you here to have the same old arguments again,” her mom replied, still looking at the sky. “I miss you. I don’t like what’s happening to us. I brought you here because if we don’t work to get things back to the way they used to be, we’ll never get there.”
Becca brought her gaze back to earth, to her mom’s earnest face. “You want me to just ignore all of it? The things you did, the things—” The things I’ve learned?
“I executed a couple of dissidents, Becca. That’s all.” Her soft tone took the hostility out of her words. She stood up. “But we didn’t come here to argue about that again.” She held out a hand to Becca. “Let’s walk together.”
Becca stood up to join her mom, but didn’t take the hand she offered.
Her mom started walking down the path. “Do you remember when we used to come here and feed the ducks?”
Her mom’s words immediately called the memory to mind. Becca cringed at the thought of that younger Becca with her hand clasped in her mom’s much larger one, giggling as she threw bread to the ducks. She hadn’t known then what her mom was capable of.
Now every time Becca looked at her mom she thought of Jake’s mother. Of all the false confessions. Of Heather’s parents, who had been dissidents but might also have been right.
If they had been dissidents, and Becca thought they had been right, what did that make Becca?
“What’s the point of remembering that? They filled in the duck pond two years ago.” She didn’t want to think about the times she had been happy with her mom. She didn’t want to remember how close they used to be. It would only remind her of what was missing. Heather, her mom… she was losing everyone.
Before all this, she would have gone to her mom for advice about Heather. Her mom would have known what to do.
Her mom sighed. “Are you going to keep pushing me away like this?”
As if what had happened were Becca’s fault. As if Becca were the one who had killed people’s parents, who had abandoned the truth in favor of whatever lies her bosses told her to feed to the dissidents.
“Don’t you miss it at all?” her mom asked. “The time we used to spend together? The talks we used to have?”