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

following,” said Callie.
    “That makes sense,” Hal mused.
    “But it doesn’t,” said Callie. “Because my mom is the one that disappeared, not my dad. She’s the one that’s part of all of this.”
    “But look at this,” Hal said. “We’ve seen this before.” There was a small card scanned in, topped with a number that began with C33 and then the word discharge . Then a signature at the bottom we could hardly make out, and in very tinyscript below that, Facilitator, Orion Pharmaceutical College . We kept skipping over them because we didn’t understand them. “Everyone without a documented childhood has one of these. Both Amanda’s parents have them. They both have C33 numbers and no childhood documentation.” He turned to Nia. “Your mom has one as well.”
    “What are those?” Nia said, as much to herself as to us. “Why do they allhave them?” She thought another minute, biting on a nail. “And why are there no other pictures of my mom before she was ten? I mean, my dad’s got stuff in here from birth.”
    “Hold on,” said Callie, her eyes closed like if she looked at us, the idea she was holding on to so very gently in her head would float away. “Nia, how old is your mom?”
    “She’s young,” Nia said. “She married my dad when shewas still in college. He was in grad school. So she was only twenty-two when Cisco was born. She’s thirty-nine now.”
    “Zoe, how old would your dad be if he were still alive?”
    “He’d be forty-eight,” I said.
    “That makes him nine years older than my mom,” Nia said. “And three years older than Callie’s. Hal, how old is your dad?”
    “Umm . . .” Hal said. “Hold on.” He did some quick thinking, andthen answered, “Forty-seven?”
    “Wow,” said Callie. Her green eyes lit up with the knowledge that she’d just solved a complicated math problem.
    “Uh, Callie?” said Hal. “I think you forgot to show your work.”
    “What?” Callie said, as if she couldn’t understand why we hadn’t followed her. “So the ages our parents are in the first picture or record or whatever we have of them are all from the sameyear.”
    “What do you mean?” I asked.
    “Your dad, Zoe, he would have been nineteen when my mom was sixteen, Hal’s dad was eighteen and Nia’s mom was ten. They all started to have a record of their existence at the same exact time.”
    “Wow,” said Nia. “So something must have happened in that year. Something that started all the information about them being collected.”
    “Nineteen eighty-four,” Calliesaid. “What the heck happened to everybody in nineteen eighty-four?”
    Before we had any time to think about that, we heard the garage door open. “Shoot, that’s my mom,” Hal said. He was closing the file and ejecting the disc. “How long have we been here?”
    Nia looked at her watch. “It’s been four hours!”
    “I never raked the lawn.”
    “Your dad never came in to get you,” I pointed out.
    “That’s weird,”said Hal. “He’s usually totally on my case about that kind of thing.”
    We all rushed into the backyard through the French doors in the office. The yard was already raked.
    And there was Hal’s dad, drinking a cup of coffee, reading the paper, his raking gloves on the table as if he’d just taken them off.
    Hal gave his dad a look, and Mr. Bennett flexed his arms comically.
    “Sometimes raking isjust what a body needs after spending a whole week crammed like a sardine into a plane,” Mr. Bennett said.
    Hal laughed. Sort of. He kind of choked. This was not how the Bennett family normally worked, I surmised.
    Then Mr. Bennett winked. “No need to tell Mom, though, okay?” He lifted the paper back up in front of his face before Hal had a chance to answer.

Chapter 5
    T wo days aftermy dad died, my mom pulled into our driveway in a used RV she’d bought without a word of warning. She’s so tiny she could barely reach the steering wheel from the enormous “captain’s