The Cipher (3 page)

“Just give her a minute,” his dad said.

Smiles nodded as a delicate silence fogged the room, his mind still spiraling with questions about his mom's letter. Staring at the green screen, he flashed on a memory of his once-firm plan to become a movie director. He'd gotten the idea after seeing this cool Italian suspense flick at Darby Fisher's one night, and he knew instantly that it would be
his own way
. But by the time the camera he ordered arrived in the mail, he was pretty much over it.

There'd been a time, before the phrase had been pounded into his head, when Smiles thought finding
his own way
would mean running Alyce Systems itself. Bouncing down the executive floor at Alyce as a kid, he'd taken it for granted that one of the silver nameplates would eventually say
ROBERT
SMYLIE
JR
.
It was a stupid thought even before he got kicked out of high school. But sitting here with his cancer-stricken dad, their uncertain futures clouding the air, Smiles found himself strangely warm to the topic of Alyce.

“So Tuesday's the big day,” he said. “Is there, like, a time I need to be here?”

He was going to ask if he had to wear a tie or anything when his dad chuckled. “Oh, God no. No reason to drag you over here for that.”

Smiles nodded calmly, all the while feeling a fresh tide of shame wash over him. He'd thought he should support his dad on his big day, but of course there was no reason for him to come. He had nothing to do with his dad's company. He was going to be lucky to get a GED. He was an embarrassment. He was a fool.

“Yeah, okay, thanks. I'm late to Mr. Hunt's though, so . . .”

Smiles patted his dad's shoulder—the numb one, he realized too late again—and shoved the chair back into the corner. It banged against the wall, legs clattering on the linoleum floor.

“Robert, wait for—”

“I'll see you tomorrow,” he said over his dad's protest, and escaped into the hall.

He took a single breath of relief before seeing Shanti headed his way, pushing a cart with a huge birthday cake on it. Half the floor staff trailed behind her. They were just starting up with the first bars of the Happy Birthday song.

Smiles avoided their eyes. “Sorry, gotta go,” he said, slicing sideways through the nurses. The song petered out in confusion as he rushed forward and out to the parking structure. He drove away from it all as fast as he could.

5

SHE HAD BEEN
scrutinizing the list so intently she didn't notice Jenna over her shoulder.

The list said this:

Melanie had forced herself to stop at number eight. She'd been disturbed to find herself racking up cons with ease and unable to think of any more pros. Better to just stop there, at the bottom of the page.

This project had been a total, total bust.

It was the seventh such list she had made during trigonometry, and the seventh commitment in her life in which the negatives won out. The tally for “Volleyball Team” was five to six, but none of the others was even close. (Her upcoming visit to Smith College had scored exactly zero positives.)

None of this should have surprised Melanie. She knew she was a pleaser. She had agreed to join that nightmare community garden project last summer just to avoid a mild flicker of disappointment in her dad's eyes after he suggested it. She'd done a lot of stuff like that. It was insane. She knew it.

Was the Smiles situation really any different?

Melanie circled
ISSUES w/ his dad
.

She could hardly blame Smiles for having a complex about his dad—he was Robert Smylie, after all. That was bad enough, but Melanie knew it was his mom who'd really broken him. Not Rose. No, his biological mom, who left when he was only two years old, with no explanation.

It was arrogant to pity him, but she couldn't help it. They had known each other forever, and she had always felt the need to be delicate with Smiles—like he was a cracked dish, and Melanie had to preserve the pieces of him until he could be glued together, magically restored.

Ms. Phillips droned on at the chalkboard as Melanie's pocket vibrated with a text.

Smiles:
“My life is bizarre. Call me.”
He kept forgetting she didn't have a study hall this semester and couldn't talk in the afternoons. He kept forgetting they were on a break.

The list was supposed to help her decide what to do, but now it sickened her. There was something gross about evaluating a person like this. Based on this page, it looked like Melanie thought she was too good for him . . . and maybe she did. Number eight said it all: She was ashamed to have a boyfriend who had been kicked out of high school. Melanie could hardly even bring herself to say the word
expelled
. On the list she had written
((school situation))
, the two layers of parentheses like makeup over a wart.

But Smiles would never be ashamed of her, if their places were reversed. He didn't make judgments like that. Smiles, actually, had a much better heart than she did. The thought made Melanie feel both happy and sad.

The bell rang at last, but Melanie sat rooted there, studying the stupid list while the room emptied in a shuffle of bodies and books. Her fellow Kingsley students, starched and clean in purple-and-gold uniforms, clotted at the door to the brick-lined, waxed-floor hallways. They felt measurably quieter these days, without Smiles's too-loud voice ringing through them. She crumpled the page tightly, thinking she was alone until she felt the presence at her back.

Jenna Brooke was standing behind her left shoulder, waiting.

God, she had probably read the whole “Smiles” list, too.

“So we're going to Alyce tomorrow, yeah?” Jenna said brightly.

“Yeah, Jenna.” They went every Friday. It wasn't news.

Jenna hugged a book at her chest. Her buggy eyes always freaked Melanie out. “Walk to physics together?”

“I'm going to my locker.”

Melanie gave a smile that she hoped wasn't too encouraging, then darted.

She didn't throw the list away on the way out. For all she knew, Jenna would root through the trash for it.

7

“SMIIIIIIILES! HAPPY BIRTHDAY!”

Mr. Hunt grabbed the edge of his desk, heaved himself up, and greeted Smiles at the entrance of his massive office.

“Thanks, Mr. Hunt.”

He was taller than Smiles and pushing three hundred pounds, and whenever he did anything remotely physical he broke out in a sweat. For such a porker, the guy looked amazingly good, Smiles thought. He dressed in creamy business shirts and ties done up in fat, perfect knots—today's tie was powder blue over a nuclear-white shirt. Mr. Hunt looked fresh and new, wrapped up like a Christmas turkey.

He checked his Rolex and gave Smiles a joking punch on the shoulder. “Came early, did ya?”

Smiles, two hours late by then, laughed. “Just for you, Mr. Hunt.”

On the ride over to the Alyce Systems headquarters—a mirrored behemoth on Water Street—Smiles had managed to convince himself he shouldn't take his dad's talk of dying seriously. Maybe he'd last a long time. Maybe there'd be a miracle. But he couldn't shake the other bomb he'd dropped: the mystery letter from his mom. A message from the grave, it sounded like. And a “package” to go with it—a notebook of some kind. Smiles was beginning to think that the universe just liked screwing with his head.

As much as he wanted to read anything his mom had written him, he was getting a bad vibe about it. She had talked to him about everything—her irresponsible days in the Tri-Delt house at Boston University, the cheesy guy at the gym who always hit on her, whatever. One summer she'd kept going on rants about her athlete's foot. What
couldn't
she tell him?

It wasn't going to be good, Smiles had figured on the way over, the news of her letter turning sour in his stomach. But being in the presence of Mr. Hunt made things seem more manageable. The guy was like comfort food on legs.

“Big day, kid. Very big day.”

A brisk smell of shaving lotion and mesquite-spiced cologne assaulted Smiles's nostrils as Mr. Hunt wrapped him in a bear hug. It lingered while Mr. Hunt clapped him on the back and slid into his desk chair of buttery leather. On the bookshelves behind him sat a basketball in a glass case, signed by all the Celtics on one of the old championship teams—Larry Bird and Kevin McHale and the rest of them. Beside it sat a fleet of model cars: a Bentley, a Maybach, and an Aston Martin. You could find the real versions in his garage. Mr. Hunt took pride in maintaining them himself.

“Go on, sit down.” He motioned Smiles to the far windows while he gathered files. “Sit, sit.”

It was a corner office, and like everything else about Mr. Hunt it was ludicrously big. You could play a game of racquetball in one half and host a dinner party in the other. Smiles crossed the plush white carpet to a seating area by the windows. Up here on the top floor of the skyscraper, they had twenty-foot ceilings. The floor-to-ceiling windows gave an IMAX view of the Atlantic Ocean, the harbor, and the streets below.

The coffee table had a spread of glossy magazines.
Wired
,
Forbes
, something called
The Robb Report
—thick wedges of a sumptuous kind of life. Smiles inhaled the pleasant, empty smell of vacuumed carpet. Looking down at the plaza in front of the office building, he could see its signature element: the fifty-feet-high bronze sculpture of the Alyce Systems logo. One old-fashioned key standing upright, another pointing downward, their teeth meshing in the middle. The tiny people below streamed around the huge sculpture as they went about their ant-colony business. From up above, it was hard not to feel superior.

“Over there, darling,” Mr. Hunt was saying to an office worker. She left a tray with bottled water and enormous cookies as Mr. Hunt trekked over with the papers.

“All right then,” he huffed. “Ready to get rich?”

They plopped into the deep chairs by the windows. Mr. Hunt pushed over a fountain pen and a document that said
RECEIPT
AND
RELEASE
at the top. Three sticky tabs protruded from the edges, telling him where to sign.

Smiles uncapped the pen, a heavy silver job that felt right for the occasion. “Can I get a drum roll here?”

Mr. Hunt liked that one. He chuckled as Smiles signed on the three lines, which were actually dotted. “You won't have to sign like this for every check,” Mr. Hunt said. “Just the initial payment.”

Smiles wasn't getting the whole $7 million today. The trust paid out in little installments at first. They would increase in amount until he turned twenty-five, when he would get the balance in one big chunk. Those were the terms his dad had set when he established the trust, and from what Mr. Hunt had said it was all standard stuff. Whatever—Smiles wasn't complaining.

His first payment, the check he was getting today, was for something close to $50,000. Not too shabby.

“You should realize,” Mr. Hunt said, “that this will be your full inheritance. You know that your father has been . . . well, preparing, shall we say. Virtually all his holdings are going to his wildlife foundation, his educational charities, and the symphony.”

Smiles knew that already—his dad was already famous for giving away basically his entire fortune. Mr. Hunt was acting like this was all extremely sensitive stuff, but Smiles had never been bothered by it. It was one of the reasons he admired his dad, even if it made him that much harder to live up to. “If I need more than seven million to get by, I'm in pretty serious trouble.”

Mr. Hunt let out a roar of laughter. “Great attitude there. Okay, I just want you to be clear on that. You know that your father always wanted you to—”

“Find my own thing. I got it, Mr. Hunt, but thanks.”

Smiles slid the document back across the table.

Mr. Hunt checked the pages and set them aside. For such a giant person, he could be very delicate.

“Okay, now, start a file at home. You'll get receipts in the mail after each payment. Save them for your records.” Smiles nodded, fully intending to do this but also knowing he'd get lazy and blow it off.

Mr. Hunt then launched into a spiel about K-1 forms and tax stuff that Smiles nodded at but didn't listen to. He was seized with a new anxiety about his mom's message. He felt like he might suffocate if he didn't hear her words soon.

“I have to ask you . . .” Smiles blurted as Mr. Hunt bit into a hubcap-sized sugar cookie from the tray. “It's something about my mom.”

Mr. Hunt paused mid-chew, then gulped down a mouthful of cookie. “Sure, what is it?”

“My dad said you have a message from her. A letter or something, for when I turned eighteen.”

Mr. Hunt nodded, but his face had suddenly turned haggard. He brushed a microscopic crumb from his lapel and sighed. “I was afraid that this would happen.”

“What?”

“That he would forget.”

“Forget what?” Smiles wasn't getting this.

Mr. Hunt held his palms out in a calming way. “There was a letter from your mom, yes. And she wrote it for you to read it when you turned eighteen. But Smiles . . . when your father was in the hospital after his first seizure, he asked me to destroy it. I shredded that letter months ago.”

“But she wrote that for me.” Smiles was trying not to blow his stack. He needed to hear his mom's last words to him. Her
last words
. “What did it say?”

Mr. Hunt just shook his head. “I didn't read it. I assumed it was personal, obviously.”

“But he told me about the letter today.”

“Well, that's what I was afraid of. You know how it can be.”

Yes, Smiles knew how it could be. His dad could have hour-long conversations and not remember them the next day. The lost spots in his memory, they happened more and more. He had forgotten about telling Mr. Hunt to destroy the letter.

“The letter was from my
mom
. Did he even have the right to do that?”

“It's not really a question of having the right,” Mr. Hunt said. “There aren't laws about this kind of thing.”

Gone, just like that. Destroy the letter—who cares about Smiles? His head spun as he focused on a drop of water sliding down one of the water bottles. His mom's wild laugh echoed in his mind; his chest seized with a physical ache.

“What about a package? There was a package with the letter . . . or, well, the letter was going to tell me about a package. A notebook, actually.” Even as the mixed-up words came out of Smiles's mouth, he knew they sounded strange.

Mr. Hunt listened, his expression blank. “I don't know anything about packages or notebooks. I'm sorry.”

So that was it then. Smiles fell back into his chair.

“You're upset about this,” Mr. Hunt said carefully.

“Yeah, I am.” His voice came out cold. Mr. Hunt wasn't to blame, but Smiles couldn't help it.

“You feel cheated; I can understand that.” Mr. Hunt cracked open a bottle of water, measuring his words. “Your mom could be impulsive, Smiles, I think you know that. And let me tell you something else: Your dad has the best judgment of any single person I know. You have to trust him on this one—trust that you didn't want to read whatever was in that letter.”

Mr. Hunt put his hands together, finished with his speech. The office rang with silence and suddenly Smiles had risen to his feet.

“Good-bye, Mr. Hunt.” The words dribbled from his mouth, and then his legs were carrying him out of the office so he could get out of there and sit in the Infiniti and process this on his own.

“Smiles, wait.”

He was almost to the door. When he turned around, Mr. Hunt was holding an envelope.

“Don't you want your check?”