Girl Gone Viral by Arvin Ahmadi

Author:Arvin Ahmadi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2019-05-21T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter

Seventeen

It occurs to me that night that I might never find my dad if I put all my eggs in one basket, especially when the White House could pulverize that basket by Easter, so I reach back out to Amber Donahue. I’d tried emailing her just before Thanksgiving, but that was her dad’s birthday and she said it wasn’t a good time. I emailed her again in December, but she was busy with finals. Maybe she didn’t want to talk to me. Maybe she’d made a mistake. I mean, a friend of my dad’s? My dad barely tolerated his own colleagues in the computer science department. I just couldn’t picture him skipping across campus for a friendly lunch with Amber’s father, who taught political theory.

Still, a lead is a lead. And with Neil Finch and Howie Mendelsohn jerking me around harder than a sinusoidal function, I feel an urge to put my detective hat back on and hear what she has to say.

This time when I email Amber, she responds right away. We hop on a video call.

“Hello!”

“Hi, Opal.”

“I’m—it’s nice to meet you. I have to say, I was surprised when I got your message back in October. I didn’t think my dad had any friends at Stanford,” I say, sitting at the edge of my bed with my back straight.

“I didn’t either. About my dad, that is.” Amber scrunches up her button-shaped face, which is blown up on my PolyWall. I notice the light blue scarf draped around her neck and the lion teddy bear tucked into the pillow on her bed. She’s a Columbia student, but I already knew that from the internet. “Sorry, it’s still hard talking about my dad after he died.”

A chill runs from my tightly wound fingers to my toes.

“Do you mind if I ask . . .”

“Suicide,” Amber says quickly.

“Right. I remember. I’m so sorry.”

“I always assumed he took his life because of his depression. He’d had it under control for as long as I knew him, but we moved to Estonia and all of us were a little lonely there . . . But after I read about you in Scalleyrag, I remembered something. Howie Mendelsohn had visited us the year before my dad took his life.”

My eyes pop out of my head. “Howie Mendelsohn visited you?”

“Yeah.”

“Like, real-world visited? He got out of his office and took an actual plane and showed up at your doorstep in Estonia.”

“Yes,” Amber says, and her expression is a combination of annoyed and hurt. I let her talk. “It was three years ago. I was working on my college apps and went into Papa’s office to ask if he had any connections in the admissions world. He was with this man who kind of looked like a washed-up opera singer. He was wearing a black suit with a white dress shirt, collar super unbuttoned, and he had a virtual reality headset tucked underneath his armpit. I didn’t think much of it, until I saw the picture in the Scalleyrag post about you.

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