The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled Read Online Free PDF Page A

sixty or so.”
    “Iris’s and Pen’s Social Security numbers are only one digit apart,” I said. “Because they were assigned at the same time.”
    “So you’re saying something like forty of the people in this group,” Nia said, “these people who come from all over the place and don’t even know each other and areall different ages—you think they all got their numbers at the same time?”
    “That’s impossible,” Hal said.
    “I know.”
    “And fact five,” Callie said. “People with these closely sequential Social Security numbers are also the ones who have those long numbers that start with C33 after their names. And they are missing information about their youth.”
    Callie was right. All the young people like uson the list had tons of information about their childhood. Report cards, school schedules, bus passes, sports achievements, pictures playing in backyards that looked like they’d been taken by a satellite. Every time Nia had made honor roll it had been printed in the newspaper. Programs from my early piano recitals were in there. School pictures.
    And for some of the older people, that stuff wasthere too. I saw pictures of my mom, the farm she grew up on in Oregon. An article in the newspaper about her family manning a Greek culture booth at the grange fair—that was so them. My grandmother, who we called Yiayia, probably brought her homemade yogurt and pastries and wore her embroidered skirt and headscarf from Limnos. My mother had always celebrated our Greek heritage. She had joked thatmy dad was just barely Greek enough for her parents, but he squeaked by.
    Hal recognized his mother’s pictures too. She was a majorette—funny—and then he laughed so hard I thought would die when he found out she’d failed Home Ec. Callie’s dad was a basketball star in high school. There were lots of team pictures for him, write-ups in the paper.
    But my dad—it was like he hadn’t even existed untilsuddenly he had a driver’s license at nineteen and a high school diploma in the form of a GED. He’d worked in a factory for about six months when he was twenty. He’d taken a couple of classes at a community college. He’d always told us stories about hitchhiking across the country the year he turned twenty-one. There was a picture of him standing with a frame pack outside a truck stop—he was inthe background of a picture of a motorcycle. Then there was a picture of him at a bank when he must have been about twenty-two. A record of a hospital visit six months after that—apparently he’d burned himself cooking.
    There was nothing about Callie’s mom until she started a graduate program in astronomy. At age sixteen. “Wait,” Hal had said. “Didn’t she even go to high school? College? Wouldn’tthat be on here?” There had been nothing.
    And nothing about Hal’s dad until he was eighteen years old and suddenly, there he was, in a picture of the summer intern program at some accounting firm in Philadelphia. We had transcripts of his college classes, his business major, his straight As.
    Lots of the C33 adults were like that. At least one in each married couple, and when an adult wasn’tmarried, you could count on his or her childhood, or large parts of it, being missing. Louise Potts was like that. So was Frieda Starfield.
    “Except my parents,” Nia said. But she didn’t write this down on her list of facts. Instead, she took the mouse and reopened her mother’s file. There Mrs. Rivera was, age ten, looking very much like Nia, in braids and a school uniform, standing with her classmatesin rows. The caption on the photo was in Spanish, but Nia translated.
    “That’s her fifth-grade class picture,” she said. “My mother grew up in Colombia.” Hal flipped through some pictures. “That’s my abuela ’s house.” She pointed.
    “So how come everyone has a parent with a blank childhood but you?”
    “Maybe they don’t follow your life until you marry the person they’re