A Girl Named Digit (7 page)

John turned to me. “You have a cell phone?”

Hmmm. Yes. “No, I left it at home.” I was on my way to some mystery hideout for God knew how long. I wasn’t about to relinquish my oak tree photo and end up in a straitjacket. I made a mental note to put it on airplane mode as soon as we got there. I leaned back against the elevator wall and reached into my back pocket to switch it to vibrate.

After about thirty minutes, the elevator stopped and started to move up toward sea level. When the doors opened, we were in a windowless, rectangular room, maybe twelve by eight feet. The security guy held the doors open for us to cross the threshold and started to show us around. There were two mismatched upholstered chairs in front of an old TV, a small table between the chairs, and literally nothing else. With a flourish, he opened a small cupboard with two deflated twin-size blow-up mattresses and two sleeping bags. “Would you like turndown service now, or would you like to do it yourself later?”

Ah, everyone’s a comedian, even the security guy. He and John shared a little chuckle at his joke, like this was our honeymoon suite at some fine hotel. It was actually pretty funny, but in spite of myself I turned bright red. I hadn’t quite thought this whole thing through logistically. Was I going to be shacked up with John in a windowless room, sleeping next to him and sharing a bathroom? Was this even legal? I’m sure my parents must have thought of this and had decided to trust him. But based on what, a thirty-minute meeting?

They were both looking at me, no longer laughing and potentially reading my mind. “Farrah, we are only going to be here for a week or so. I know it’s grim, but the only thing that matters is that you are safe.” John sounded like he was reading from a script.

“Sure. And do we get rations of dried food and Tang?” I was mostly trying to change the subject, but it was a legitimate concern.

Security guy smiled. “No, that part’s pretty good. The elevator car that brought us here will come by three times a day, unmanned, and deliver food and documents as necessary. John, you can just text special requests to 4352, and depending on who’s running the kitchen, you might get lucky. Other stuff like toothpaste and clean underwear should be in your survival bags.”

I was red again.
Did that guy say “underwear”? Am I going to have to discuss my personal hygiene with these people?
My mind raced through all the possibilities for mortification.

Security guy shook John’s hand as he got back into the elevator, a bellhop just looking for a tip from the newlyweds. “Nighty-night.” Ugh.

John could tell I was about to freak out, so he tried to make everything seem really normal. “Wanna watch TV? Or should we just go to sleep? I’ll put it on and then see if I can get in touch with the kitchen. Do you want a snack or anything?” I could tell by the tone in his voice, sort of the way you talk to a puppy, that he was terrified that I was going to start to cry again.

I got my mattress, pressed the green button for automatic blow-up, lay down, and pretended to sleep until I eventually did.

So that’s how I ended up in this warehouse, sitting on this understuffed chair, watching the news break about my kidnapping on an antique TV. John was sitting on the other chair, taking in the rest of the five o’clock news. He switched the channel to another network to catch the tail end of my mom’s dramatic exit back into the house.

“She seems more like a Farrah than you do.”

“Everyone seems more like a Farrah than I do. It’s called irony, and the best part is that she’s named Rebecca. Wouldn’t I have made a better Rebecca?”

“Natalie.”

“What?”

“You seem more like a Natalie to me. Like Natalie Wood or Natalie Cole, a little more mysterious.”

That’s the last word I’d ever use to describe myself because for the past eight hours every thought I have jumps right on the brain slide and flies out of my mouth. Like right now, for instance: “It seems to me that ever since I failed to stop eight people from being blown up, every thought I have flies right out of my mouth. I suspect it’s shock, but I wouldn’t call it mysterious.”

“I don’t know. There’s something mysterious about you; maybe you don’t even know it. I don’t meet a lot of kids who spend their spare time hunting terrorists.”

Kids. Did he have to keep saying that? There I was in my best-fitting jeans with my best-fitting white T-shirt about to lie down and go to sleep next to a twenty-one-year-old man for God’s sake! I felt less like a kid than I ever had.

After we’d finished a Coke, a turkey sandwich, and three episodes of
Everybody Loves Raymond,
the reality of our situation started to sink in. This had been the first day of who knew how many that we were going to be stuck in that room. I looked around at the four gray walls, the corner bathroom complete with both a toilet and a sink, and our two makeshift beds. It was a little hopeless.

“Wanna play cards?” John reached for his survival pack—really just a duffle bag, but I imagined there were tons of Bondesque gadgets in there. A deck of cards seemed a little low-tech.

“I’ll play gin.” He dealt us each seven cards on the tiny table between our chairs. I tried to adapt, as I am a ten-card gin player, well, since I was three. We played silently, one word uttered every five minutes or so: “Gin.”

After I’d beat him twelve times in a row, he put his cards down and looked at me suspiciously. “You count cards too?”

“It’s not different from any other random pattern. I mean remembering a sequence of numbers, colors, and letters that has passed by leads you to a probability of what the next card is going to be. It’s really pretty easy. For me.” I was surprising myself. I would normally have let someone beat me at gin to avoid having this conversation. Especially someone who was becoming more relaxed and a tad bit hotter every second. But don’t get any ideas—it’s not as if I had suddenly experienced some metamorphosis and, like a caterpillar breaking free to reveal its true nature as a butterfly, I was finally being my true Self. It’s more like I’d already let my SAT scores out of the bag, and I knew I was going to be stuck here for a while. I didn’t want to beat the terrorists to the punch by dying of boredom.

“It’s all so crazy, isn’t it?” I was kind of thinking out loud.

“I agree it is all crazy. But which part are you talking about?”

“The terrorists wanting to kill me. So that I won’t stop them from protecting life. I guess a forest or a stream is more defenseless than I am, but not by much. I mean, how many people do they have to kill to save the planet?”

John shrugged. “I don’t know, but we’re doing a lot of damage. I read that Americans are using like 21 million barrels of oil every day. We’re going to blow through a lot of resources in the next ten years.”

“We are about 309 million Americans with a population growing at 1 percent a year. So that’ll be 341 million people using 23 million barrels of oil per day in ten years.” It sort of slipped out.

John stared at me in amazement. “Do you hire yourself out for parties?”

“Yep, that’s why they call me Party Girl.” I laughed for the first time, even though it was at my own inside joke. This was sort of fun, showing off for a person who wasn’t my dad.

I got up and paced back and forth across our cell, which took exactly six steps in either direction. “Can we go outside? Is there a roof deck or anywhere we can breathe for a second?”

John raised an eyebrow. “Yes, welcome to the St. Regis Hotel. Please take the far elevator bank to the Rooftop Lounge, where our host will meet you to freshen up your drink and slit your throat . . .”

I stopped pacing and my hand darted up to my neck. John softened a bit. “Hey, Farrah, I’m sorry, but this is serious. We’re not on a sleepover here. The guys who are looking for us have hunted and killed a lot of people.”

I sat back down in my chair, silent. Neither of us was sure if I was going to cry, but we both knew that he hadn’t needed to bring that up again.

Who knew the threat of tears could terrify a guy? John got up and grabbed our sleeping bags in one hand and fresh Cokes in the other. “There must be a fire escape off the exterior room there. Let’s sneak out for a second, then we’ll come in and get some sleep.” We walked through the only door in our cell into a huge exterior space with floor-to-ceiling windows that offered a view of another warehouse. I wondered how many people the FBI had holed up in these buildings; if we’d see another fugitive sneaking out for a little sanity.

John pulled up the rusty window and climbed through first. He held his hand out to me to help me through. The sun was setting, and it was getting cooler as we leaned back against the metal bars, pulling our knees up to our chins. John wrapped my sleeping bag around my shoulders, and I half thought he might keep his arm around me. It was a weird moment of noisy internal panic:
Is he making a pass at me? Gross, he’s like an adult. Am I even safe here? Who does this guy think he is? Oh no!! He’s taking his arm away! Please put your arm around me, pleeeeeease.

“Are you excited about MIT?” John was making casual conversation, but it took me off-guard to hear it said out loud.

“I guess. It’s a long way from Santa Monica, in every possible way. So, I guess so.”

“You’ll love it.” John was looking out into the alley below us, scanning for I don’t know what.

“How’d you finish college so fast?”

He took a long sip of his Coke and smiled at me. “I don’t know. Maybe I’m not just a pretty face either.”

I smiled, a little embarrassed, and started scanning the alley for nothing too, while I thought about my new favorite word:
either.
He could have just said, “I’m not just a pretty face.” But he added
either. Either
can be an adjective (
I could lean over and kiss either his neck or his lips
), a pronoun (
His neck or his lips? Either will do
), or, like here, an adverb following a negative subordinate clause (
I’m not just a pretty face either
). I wondered if it could be a name. We could have a daughter and call her Either.

I could feel him watching me and hoped I’d kept my mouth shut during that last bit of craziness. I turned to him quickly to check. “What!?”

“Nothing.” A cold wind blew between the buildings, and he pulled the sleeping bag tighter and shivered a little.

“Are you picking up Steven’s shoulder shudder there?” I said, laughing.

He was trying not to smile. “Ouch, that’s harsh. The guy’s been through a lot.”

“Like what? Schoolyard bullying?” Is it possible to have a really attractive neck? I’d never noticed anyone’s neck in my life, and now I could not stop staring at this one.

The head on top of the neck was talking. “No, seriously, that thing he does is some sort of a post-traumatic tic. It’s a really bad story. You sure you want to hear it?”

I knew I was going to feel either really bad or really terrified. So, no. “Okay.”

“His first job at the FBI was on a task force to build weapons testing centers in the Southwest. He found a desert location where he figured they could do a little weapons testing without bothering anyone, not realizing that the desert is its own ecosystem and that Jonas Furnis was watching. The story goes that after the first day of testing, he was kidnapped from his bed and was kept prisoner for eighteen months. He was tortured brutally. They voluntarily freed him in the end, but not before they’d put him through months of electroshock therapy and cut off all of his fingers on his left hand. When he came back, he was doing that shudder thing all the time.”

“All his fingers? Why?”

“I don’t know really. Consensus around the FBI was always that it was to remind him not to identify them. Almost poetic, like we’ll make sure you can’t point the finger at us.”

“Did you make that up?”

He laughed. “No, I couldn’t make up something that dumb and live with myself.” He was quiet for a second and drained the last sip of his Coke. “But really, seriously, Steven is a nice guy and I guess a hero.”

We sat in silence for a while. I played through my initial hilarity at Steven’s weird tic, mentally kicking myself for the tenth time that week. Who did I think I was busting on a former terror hostage when chances were pretty good that I was next? I tried to imagine what Steven had been through, the kidnapping, the torture, and the likelihood of it happening to me. At least until I got completely distracted by John’s right forearm. It was strong but not veiny in a Mr. Universe kind of way. And had just the right amount of hair to suggest he has fully completed puberty but not enough to suggest a square yard of carpet on his back.

John broke the silence. “I guess Steven was never able to finger his captors.”

“Ha-ha.”

“He could never point them out.”

“Cute.”

“He wasn’t playing with a full hand.”

“Stop, please.”

“The whole thing’s hard to grasp, right?”

“Well, now I know how he felt. Held captive by the corniest person in the world.”

“Point taken.”

Ugh.

A reporter was talking in voice-over as the camera panned the front entrance to my high school. “Local Santa Monica High School senior Farrah Higgins, seventeen, has now been missing for more than twenty-four hours. Experts say that the first twenty-four hours of an abduction are critical and that the likelihood of recovering the victim alive declines significantly after that time.”

Switch to smiling reporter. “Cliff Townsend here at school with several of Farrah’s classmates.” Olive, Veronica, Tish, and Kat are standing (or is
posing
a better word?) next to the school entrance. “Girls, what can you tell me about Farrah? Did you suspect that she was being followed? Did she have any new acquaintances?”

“Acquaintances?” Veronica was stumped.

“Friends,” clarified the reporter.

“Oh, well, not that we knew. She hung out with us a lot. She was a little brainy but normal,” said Kat.