You Won't Know I'm Gone Page 17

  “What?” I say, rubbing the remaining sleep out of my eyes as Cam and Luke take large, panicked steps across the empty dorm room toward our bunk. Cam is holding his laptop in one hand and grabbing at his hair with the other.

  “What time is it?” Anusha asks weakly next to me, her bedsprings whining under her shifting weight. I glance at the clock on the nightstand but before I can report the fact that it’s 5:32, Cam cuts me off.

  “Screw the time,” Cam says, his voice harsh and heavy, like he just ran down the hall. And from the look on his face, he probably did.

  “Reagan, you’re everywhere,” Luke says and every muscle in my body locks up.

  Luke and Cam sit on the edge of my bed, not caring that I’m still wrapped up in blankets.

  “What do you mean she’s everywhere?” Anusha replies, dragging her comforter with her and wrapping herself up like a burrito as she joins us on my bed.

  “I mean there’s videos of Reagan breaking up the fight from last night everywhere,” Luke continues as Cam scans through website after website, each featuring grainy photos of me in my Catwoman mask knocking Batman to the ground.

  “Oh shit,” I say under my breath, my heart now pounding out anxious, rapid beats.

  “A few people took cell phone videos of what happened last night,” Cam explains. “Of the fight, of the guy pulling out the knife and stabbing the other guy. Of Reagan knocking the knife out of the guy’s hand and slamming him to the ground. And the fact that you were dressed up as Catwoman and took down a guy dressed as Batman is just too ironic for this story not to get picked up around the world. The video is shaky and dark and since you have on a mask, you can’t really tell it’s you. But you can hear your voice.”

  “Here, just watch,” Luke says, hitting the play button on CNN.com. The white button spins and then a pretty, blond anchor pops up on screen.

  “The search is on this morning for a real-life superhero who was able to stop a violent, nearly deadly fight at a music venue in Washington, DC,” she says into the camera before grainy video of the concert plays. “Over two hundred and fifty people packed into a Georgetown club to watch rock band Last Night in Sweden on Halloween night when two men dressed as Batman and Superman got into a physical altercation. After the suspect dressed as Batman pulled out a knife and began stabbing the victim, a very brave woman dressed as—get this—Catwoman … leapt off the stage and was able to disarm the twenty-five-year-old suspect, stopping what police say could have been a homicide. Take a look.”

  The anchor stops talking and there I am, jumping off the stage, demanding he put down the knife, and then knocking it out of his hand and slamming his body to the ground. You can then hear me screaming for someone to call 911 from down on the ground next to Superman. It’s shaky and grainy and dark, but it’s me.

  “Oh, holy Jesus,” I mutter, my voice muffled by the hand over my mouth before the anchor continues.

  “A member of the band, drummer Roxie Lennon, reported that the hero who jumped to Superman’s rescue was an area college student she met before the show. The victim, twenty-six-year-old Rich Davidson, suffered stab wounds to his stomach but is listed in stable condition. The real mystery this morning … Who is Catwoman? Police report she took off before they arrived on the scene, which has the Internet buzzing. Perhaps Gotham isn’t the only city with crime-fighting superheroes after all.”

  Cam clicks out of CNN and scrolls through dozens of news websites.

  “Look at all these,” he says, pointing at the screen. “CNN, Fox, NBC, ABC, CBS, Huffington Post, Reddit, the New York Times, Daily Mail. Check out these headlines: “Catwoman Takes Down Batman,” “Catwoman Rushes to Superman’s Aid,” “Catwoman vs. Batman: The Real Superhero Story.” You name it, you’re on it, not to mention the fact that you’re trending on Twitter with the hashtag #CatwomanHero. Everyone is trying to figure out who you are.”

  “I might be really screwed,” I say, my hands cupping my shaking head. “Maybe we need to find someone. Tell them what happened before they—”

  But before I can finish my sentence, a fist pounds at our door and it flies open. My father is standing in the doorway, dressed in a black sweater and jeans. His eyes are jagged slits and his cheeks are streaked scarlet.

  “Dad,” I say, my body knocked backward, shocked by his presence. “What are you doing here?”

  “Just flew in,” he answers, then points at me. “You and I need to talk. Tribunal chamber. Now.”

  With that, he turns on his heel, walking toward the East Hall, leaving the four of us in stunned silence, our lungs empty, our mouths open.

  “Now!” I hear him yell from down the hallway, and whoever was sleeping in the private rooms is up now. I scramble off the bed, grabbing my sweatshirt and slippers.

  “Do you think he knows?” Cam asks.

  “Of course he knows, you idiot,” Anusha answers for me, slapping Cam across the shoulder.

  “We should come with you,” Luke states, grabbing for my hand as I slip my arms through my sweatshirt.

  “No,” I say, shaking my head and pulling my long hair out of the neck of my sweatshirt. “There’s no point. I’m the one on that video. There’s no way I’m going to let you guys get in trouble. Especially you, Luke. You weren’t even with us.”

  “I know,” Luke answers with a small shrug. “I just don’t want you to be alone.”

  “Cam and I should go with you,” Anusha says and starts getting up off the bed. “We were there too. You shouldn’t be the only one who gets in trouble. Let us help at least take some of the heat off you.”

  “Absolutely not,” I say over my shoulder as I make my way toward the door. “I won’t let you guys risk your spots here. Stay put. Please.”

  Before they can argue with me, I walk quickly down the hall, knowing my father will get only more annoyed with each passing minute he’s left waiting for me. I wonder who else will be in the Tribunal chamber. If the entire senior leadership team knows what happened last night. If they’ll all be sitting in various states of dress on their imposing throne, waiting to kick me out, my fate sealed by catchy headlines and shaky cell phone videos.

  By the time I reach the closed, imposing steel doors, I’m out of breath, fear tightening its grip on my lungs, forcing me to swallow air in sporadic gasps.

  I close my eyes for a moment, trying to calm myself down, but my hands are shaking as I pull down on the cold door handle. It swings open with a noisy creak. When I force my legs to move inside, my father is standing alone in the center of the room, his arms crossed, his mouth twisted into a livid scowl. I scan the imposing senior leadership seats for Director Browning or Stony Face, but they’re not there. We’re alone. And that might be even more frightening.

  “Sit,” my father barks, slapping the steel table where I sat during my trial. My little white, wooden seat is gone, so I make my way around the table and hoist my body up onto its sturdy surface. The chilly metal immediately soaks through my thin pajama pants, triggering a shiver I cannot suppress.

  “Do you know why you’re here?” my father asks, his fingers gripping at his wide, imposing hips as his body leans forward, like he’s ready to pounce on me, rip me to shreds. I tell my tongue to speak, to string together a sentence or two. But it won’t move. I stare at him, frozen, gripping the edge of the table. My silence only pisses him off more and he presses louder this time: “Well, do you?!”

  “Yes. I think so,” I answer quietly.

  My father picks a Black Angel tablet off the table and flips it around so that the grainy photo of me knocking Batman to the ground is staring me right in the face. Above it, a headline reads: “The Search for a Real-Life Superhero.”

  “Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” my father says with a bitter-soaked tongue. “Do you have any idea how stupid it was for you to not only sneak out of CORE without permission, but then get involved in a public fight?”

  “Yes,” I answer, my voice weak. “But I couldn’t just let
him die. I had to help him. That’s what you and Mom taught me. That’s what you would have done.”

  My father’s face suddenly softens. I study him as he looks me up and down. His chestnut hair has given way to hundreds of strands of gray in the last few months. The lines around his eyes and mouth have deepened, and he’s lost weight since the last time I saw him. He puts the tablet down on the steel surface and pulls himself on the table next to me.

  “What am I going to do with you, Reagan?” he says, shaking his head with both disapproval and confusion. His body is close enough for me to touch, but there’s still a divide between us, an imaginary wall he’s built up over the last year, brick by impassable brick. “Part of me is proud of you for saving this man. The other part of me wants to strangle you for being so irresponsible. You know you could have blown your own cover and more important, put the entire agency in jeopardy, right?”

  “I know,” I answer quietly.

  “We are able to do these dangerous jobs because we are protected by secrecy,” he says, his hands gripping the table, his eyes staring straight ahead. “You could have blown the cover off of an agency that has been performing undercover tasks for this government for decades. Do you understand the responsibility that comes with being a Black Angel? This is not a joke. We are not role-playing here. This is real life. Every day, we are risking our lives to keep this nation safe from terrorists and drug bosses and human traffickers and a very long list of criminals, and you could ruin all of that because you wanted to sneak out and see a god damned concert!”

  My blood feels like lighter fluid racing through my veins. But it isn’t anger that’s causing the heat. It’s shame. For breaking the rules. For ignoring my gut. For endangering the secrecy that surrounds the Black Angels.

  “How did you even leave the building?” Dad continues, turning toward me. “Trainees need permission and passes.”

  “I figured out a way to sneak out,” I finally say, not wanting to get Cam into trouble.

  “Why did you do it?” my father asks, shaking his head. “Forget risking your place here and jeopardizing the agency. You know you have a price on your head. You know you’re a target. I just don’t understand why, after a year of us all trying to protect you, you’d risk your life by leaving the safety of CORE.”

  “I don’t know,” I answer and stare down at the dark, acid-stained concrete floors. “I guess I just needed a moment to breathe. It’s so heavy down here. It’s all so hard. I haven’t felt even a trace of normalcy in over a year. I guess I wanted to be in the real world. Even if it was just for a couple of hours. Because at least then, I could breathe.”

  My father and I stare down at the ground in silence, our legs swinging almost in unison as we sit next to each other on the cold metal table.

  “Who else knows?” I quietly ask.

  “No one,” my father answers with a sigh. “I got in around three in the morning. The video was sent to myself and a few senior leaders from a contact in the CIA asking if this could have been one of our people. I watched the tape, realized it was your voice, and then immediately went into our security system and erased everything.”

  “You covered for me?” I ask, my eyebrows rising with surprise. I thought my father wanted me out of the Black Angels. This was his chance to ban me from this life.

  “Does that surprise you?” he asks.

  “Yes,” I answer and follow his eyes back down to the ground. “After everything that happened with your testimony in the Tribunal and our fight this spring, I … I guess I didn’t expect it.”

  “You’re my daughter,” Dad answers, his voice surprisingly small. “It’s my job to protect you. That’s why I gave the testimony I did in the Tribunal in the first place. That’s why I said you didn’t belong here. I was trying to keep you safe. You’re a smart girl. Couldn’t you pick up on that?”

  “No. I thought you were punishing me.”

  “Why would I punish you?”

  “Because Mom is dead and I’m not,” I answer, and the jagged rock of sorrow beneath my breastbone shifts and scratches at my flesh. “Because maybe in the deepest parts of your soul, you think it was my fault.”

  “I’ve never said that, Reagan,” Dad answers defiantly, his fingers gripping the steel table even tighter.

  “You’ve never had to,” I say, rubbing the tops of my freezing thighs with my hands. “It’s been over a year since she died, and do you know how many times you’ve hugged me?”

  “I’ve been away.”

  “Even before that.”

  “I clearly don’t keep track of hugs like you do.”

  “I’ve felt really alone, Dad.” I say the words that have been sewn on my soul for months. They’ve been pulled at, fussed with, and torn apart so many times that the pain barely registers anymore. I swallow hard and take a breath. I need to get this all out. “I thought after the Tribunal, you just wished I’d disappear. You wished it’d been me who died instead of her.”

  There. I said it. As the words leave my body, my limbs begin to shake and my lungs feel like they might just pull apart. Whether he meant to or not, Dad has made me so much worse. This last year, maybe I could have gotten through it with him. Maybe I would have lost some of my anger, toward myself, toward Torres, if he’d just tried. Hugged me. Kissed my forehead. Told me it was going to be okay. He couldn’t have fixed me, but just trying may have stopped me from wanting to fall apart.

  When I look back up from my spot of nothing on the ground, Dad’s smoothing something away from his face.

  “I would never wish it was you who died instead of your mother, Reagan. Never,” Dad answers, finally looking up, and now I know what he was pushing away. It was tears. His light brown eyes are glassy and when he blinks, a fresh tear falls down his face. “I have never wanted to punish you. I just couldn’t bear to lose the last thing I love.”

  My body falls backward, my mouth gaping open. All this time I thought he was pushing me away because he was angry. Because I brought him pain.

  “But, I don’t understand,” I say, my voice barely above a whisper. “I don’t understand what happened in the Tribunal and then the way you acted toward me at the safe house. You haven’t even checked on me during Qualifiers. Not once. I know you could. But you haven’t. Not an email, not a message, nothing. You’re not the father you’ve been the last seventeen years before any of this happened.”

  “I know,” he answers, the tears coming faster now. And I realize it’s only the second time in my life I’ve ever seen my father cry. “I don’t know how I can ask you to forgive me, but I was only doing it to protect you, Reagan.”

  “Protect me from what?”

  “From the Black Angels,” Dad answers, sniffing and swatting at the tears that keep falling down his cheeks. “I don’t want you to be here. That’s why I testified that you didn’t belong. I was hoping the Tribunal would vote to kick you out so that you could just go to college. Get away from all of this. But once you made it, I just … I’m ashamed to say it, but I was really hoping you wouldn’t make it through the first round or would quit. But I got word overseas that you kept excelling and doing better and better. And that scares the hell out of me because the last thing I want is for you to be on the Rescue/Take-down team, to be in immediate danger like that. I’d die if anything happened to you.”

  “Dad, nothing will happen to me,” I begin to say but he cuts me off.

  “You don’t know that,” he counters, his voice almost angry. He sucks in a noisy breath through his snot-filled nose and looks away, his eyes scanning the room before he turns them back to me. “It’s a very, very dangerous world out there, Reagan. Getting more dangerous by the day. Being on the RT, you’re on the front lines. The possibility of you getting injured or dying is very real. And I can’t lose you, Reagan. I just can’t.”

  Dad buries his face in his large hands, hiding his tears and breathing deep into his palms, trying to control his overflow of emotions. All this time, I had no id
ea his coldness, his betrayal, was a mask. And seeing him like this, watching him bat away each tear, I almost want to give up. I almost want to say I’ll stop training. That I’ll go to college. Be normal. But then I think of my mother … of Torres … and I can’t. I cannot walk away from this. Not yet.

  “Daddy,” I whisper, standing up and facing him. He pulls his hands away from his face and the dark ocean he put between us, the wall he built around himself, disappears. We see each other for the first time since my mother died. His eyes shine, even through his crippling sadness, with love. Unmistakable, unconditional love. I put my arms around his shoulders and feel his wet tears on my face. He pulls me closer to him, hugging me for the first time since the barn in Colombia. “You guys used to tell me all the time that I was born to be a Black Angel. Remember?”

  “Yes,” my father answers, his voice muffled by my shoulder.

  “I used to find that so annoying,” I say and he chuckles, his tears slowing. “But you know what? I think it was true.”

  Dad slowly pulls away from our embrace, wiping his eyes with the backs of his hands. “I know it’s true,” he answers. “That’s why I covered for you this morning. This could have been my key to keep you safe. To get you kicked out. But I saw the way you jumped into action. I saw on that video how you risked your life for someone you never even met. We always knew you had Black Angel in your blood. I guess now, I selfishly don’t want it to be true.”

  “What would Mom want you to do?” I ask, leaning my body against the cold table next to him. “She wouldn’t want you to put me in a box to keep me safe. She wouldn’t want you to hold me back.”

  “No, she wouldn’t,” Dad says, a small laugh bubbling up his throat. He shakes his head and smiles. “She’d put me into one of her choke holds, I think.”

  “She totally would,” I say and laugh. Dad grabs my hand and puts it to his cheek before kissing it twice. “Mom would want me to use my talent to help people. I couldn’t save her. But I can save other people’s mothers, daughters, brothers, sons. She told me once that’s why she did this. Because those people meant something to somebody. And she didn’t want them to die alone.”