Duplicity by N. K. Traver

Author:N. K. Traver
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466863729
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

13. WIRED X505

FORTY HOURS, fifty hours, seventy-five hours later, I lose track. JENA finally drops me in the game room for what she promises will be an eight-hour session, a reward for my conformity. I suspect the real reason is that I blacked out halfway through yesterday’s list and could hardly put two words together when she woke me, let alone enough thought to open my coding windows.

The walls open out. I slump down and lay there on the cold tile, my arm over my eyes, and think about how much I hate conforming. And about the lawn at the Wisconsin house we lived in when I was five. How you could see the whole Milky Way on a clear night. How the crickets chirped, how the wind sounded through the bushes around the fence. I feel the breeze come up against my face and the grass soften beneath me. I breathe out and try to remember my life before the shit hit the fan.

“People have been on the moon, Mom,” I say in my five-year-old voice. It’s one of the only times I remember sitting on Mom’s lap.

“Have they?” Mom asks. “Did you learn that today in school?”

“Yup.”

“And what do you think? Do you want to visit the moon?”

I think my answer is crashing my toy jet into a plastic dump truck. The orange one.

“Did they offer you the job, honey?” Dad asks, sliding the kitchen door behind him as he joins us in the yard.

“Yes,” Mom says.

“You don’t sound too happy. Isn’t it what you wanted?”

Mom combs my hair down on the side that always sticks up. “It’s a lot more travel than I thought.”

Dad sits in front of me and rescues a construction worker who’s about to get run over.

“I thought that’s what you loved about it,” he says. “A change of pace, a new company to consult for every couple of years. You’ve always wanted to get out of Wisconsin.”

“And away from my mother,” Mom says. They laugh about that, which makes me stop blowing up dump trucks and watch them. Grandma is over all the time, but her surprise visits are the best. She brings candies and bosses Mom around.

“I’ll never smother you like that, Brandon,” Mom says, kissing my head and setting me onto the grass. “You’re right, Matthew. This is the perfect chance for us to start fresh. I’m going to call Dale right now and accept.”

She kisses Dad and trots back inside. Dad pulls a brand-new silver airplane, still in its box, from behind his back.

“Whoa!” I shriek, because it’s one of those ones from the commercials, the ones that actually fly and you can tell them with your voice to light up and take off and fire missiles—“Dad, cool!”

“Thought you’d like it, son,” he says as I rip the box open. “We’re going to be flying on a real one like this in a month. Up in the sky. Right next to the moon. How do you like that?”

“A real one?”

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