The Doubt Factory Read online

  “I’m definitely bummed I missed it,” Jonah said. “I’d pay money to see Mulroy take one in the gut.”

  “Jonah!”

  Alix stifled a laugh. Doctors described Jonah as having poor impulse control, which basically meant that Jonah’s entire world was a series of decisions that balanced precariously on the razor’s edge of clever vs. stupid.

  Stupid normally won out.

  Which meant that since he started attending Seitz, it was Alix’s job to keep an eye on him. When she’d protested that playing nursemaid for her younger brother wasn’t her idea of a good time, Mom hadn’t even yelled; she’d just sighed in resignation.

  “I know it’s not fair, Alix, but we can’t always be there… and Jonah…” She sighed. “It’s not his fault.”

  “Yeah, yeah. It’s his nature, just like the scorpion and the frog.”

  Alix’s nature was just the opposite. She knew the difference between clever and stupid, and didn’t feel any need to dive across the line. So, as long as Mom was doing Pilates and fund-raisers and book clubs, and Dad was down in the city or seeing clients in DC, Alix was in charge of keeping an eye on the little nutball.

  “We could punch him for charity,” Jonah was saying. “Like those old-time dunk tanks. Big fund-raising thing. Thousand dollars a pop.” He mimed punches. “Bam! Bam! Bam! Slug Mulroy and feed the homeless. I bet even Alix would donate to that,” he said. “It would make her early-decision application look good.”

  “There aren’t any homeless in Haverport,” Alix said. “We put them on a bus to New York.”

  “So save the whales! Who cares, as long as we get to punch Mulroy.”

  “I don’t think assault is a joke,” Mom said.

  They went back and forth like they always did, with Mom taking it seriously, trying to persuade Jonah to stop being “troublesome,” and Jonah taking the opportunity to poke at her, saying just the right thing to annoy her again and again.

  Alix tuned them out. When she played the attack back in her own mind, it made her feel a little nauseated. It had been a completely normal, boring day. She could still see Mulroy walking over to the guy, thinking that he was in charge, thinking he knew what was up. Mulroy and Alix had been fooled by the spring sunshine. They’d been living inside a bubble that they’d thought was real.

  And then this guy turned up at school, and the bubble popped.

  “It was weird,” Alix said. “Right after he punched Mulroy, the guy held Mulroy up so he didn’t fall over. He was gentle about it. It almost looked tender, the way he laid him in the grass.”

  “Tender?” her mother said, her voice rising. “A tender assault?”

  Alix rolled her eyes. “Cut it out, Mom. I’m not Jonah. I’m just saying it was weird.”

  But it really had looked tender, in the end. So slow and careful and gentle as he laid the man down. Tender. Alix knew the power of words. Dad had drilled it into her enough as a kid. Words were specific, with fine shadings and colors. You chose them to paint exactly the picture you wanted in another person’s mind.

  Tender.

  She hadn’t chosen the word accidentally. The only other word she could think of that might have described the moment was apologetic. Like the stranger had actually been sorry he’d beaten Mulroy up. But that didn’t match with what had happened. No one accidentally shoved a fist into another person’s stomach.

  Oh, gee, sorry about that. I didn’t see your belly there.…

  Dad had been reading on his tablet, half listening, half working. Now he broke in as he kept tapping on his tablet. “The school is going to hire an extra security detail. They have the young man’s face from the security cameras—”

  “They probably got a thousand pics,” Jonah said.

  Dad went on undeterred. “—police have him identified. He should be found soon.”

  “He’s identified?” Alix asked, interested. “They already know who he is? Is he famous or something? Is he from around here?” He looked so familiar.

  “Hardly,” her father said. “He’s just a vandal they’ve been looking for.”

  “How’d you find that out?”

  “I called the school,” her father said, barely looking up. “Mr. Mulroy, despite his terrible skills at self-defense, is a very efficient administrator.”

  “I’ll bet he’s getting a lot of calls right now,” Mom said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if some parents pull their children.”

  “There’s extra security?” Alix asked. “Do they think he’ll come back?”

  “It seems unlikely.” Dad finished his salad and set it aside. “But better safe than sorry.”

  “Yeah,” said Jonah. “If we aren’t careful, we’ll come into school and the whole place will be tagged.”

  “I didn’t say he was a spray-painter,” Dad said. “I said he was a vandal.”

  “Like he breaks windows and things?”

  “Don’t get any ideas,” Mom interjected.

  “What did I do?” Jonah looked wounded.

  “You sounded like you wanted to start a fan club,” Alix said.

  “You know, sometimes a question is just an innocent question,” Jonah groused.

  “Not with your track record, young man,” Mom said as she cleared the salad dishes.

  Dad was ignoring the interplay, still tapping out e-mails on his tablet.

  “Mr. Mulroy didn’t know what other things the young man had been up to. All he knew was that he’d been associated with extensive vandalism incidents.”

  “So does the vandal have a name?” Alix asked.

  Dad looked up at her, frowning, suddenly serious.

  Alix stopped short, surprised. It was the first time he’d really looked at her all night. Normally, Dad was Mr. Multitasker, thinking about other things, working out puzzles with his job, only half there. It was a joke among all of them that you sometimes had to ask him a question three times before he even heard you. But now he was looking at Alix full force.

  When Dad focused, he really focused.

  “What?” Alix asked, feeling defensive. “What did I say?”

  “No.”

  “No, what?”

  “No, he doesn’t have a name.”

  “Nice. Ghost in the machine,” Jonah said, as usual completely unaware of the way the energy in the dining room had changed. “The man with no name.” He made a funny ghost noise to go with it. “Woooo.”

  Dad didn’t even look over at Jonah. He was still looking at her, and she felt suddenly as if she was picking her way through a conversation that had become more important than she’d expected. Like the time Jonah had joked about seeing Kala Spelling’s mom having coffee with Mr. Underwood, the European History teacher.

  “So…” Alix hesitated. “If they don’t know his name… then how do they know who they’re looking for? I thought you said he was identified.”

  “He has a track record,” Dad said.

  “But you don’t know his name?”

  “He has a nickname,” Dad said finally. “Something he marks his work with.”

  “And it’s…”

  “2.0.”

  “That’s my GPA!” Jonah said.

  “In your dreams,” Alix retorted. To her father, she said, “What’s the name supposed to mean?”

  “If anyone knew, I’m sure they would have caught him already.”

  Alix couldn’t sleep. The strange day and conversations hung with her. Finally she got up and turned on her computer. Jonah wasn’t allowed to have a computer in his room, but Mom and Dad trusted her not to do “anything inappropriate,” as Mom put it, without actually meeting Alix’s eyes when she said it. So Sophie and Denise had spent a year jokingly warning her not to do “Anything Inappropriate” with her computer in her room.

  She opened a browser and ran a search for 2.0.

  She found Wikipedia entries. A lot of entries for Web 2.0, Health 2.0, Creative Commons, and the Apache Software Foundation came up. There were fistfuls of computer list
ings, actually. Software companies released new versions all the time, tracked by their release numbers: .09 beta, 1.2 release, 2.0. The Chrome browser she was using now had a release number, too, except it was something like 33.0.

  2.0…

  She tried image searching and scrolled idly through the pictures that came back. Lots of corporate logos, antiseptic and staid, even as they tried to claim that they were doing something new. Gov 2.0, City 2.0, and—seriously?—even a Dad 2.0. Apparently everything was 2.0. Even Dad could get a new version. Alix tried to imagine what a “Dad 2.0” would look like, but all that came to mind were paunchy old dudes wearing hipster plaids and skinny jeans while swaggering around in Snuglis—

  An image caught Alix’s eye. She scrolled back up. She’d almost missed it, but it was different from the others.

  A spray-paint tag on the side of a smokestack. Instead of the carefully designed corporate brands with 2.0s affixed as an afterthought, this was 2.0 as red scrawl spray. From the image, it looked like it was maybe at an oil refinery. And the graffiti was high up, almost impossibly high. The image was a little blurry, shot with someone’s phone, but the 2.0 was starkly legible. In the foreground, dark and sooty pipes ran this way and that, linking grimy holding tanks in an industrial tangle. Against that dark foreground, the number was like a beacon, rising high above the pipes and steam.

  2.0. Bright and red and defiant.

  Alix clicked through to the site, hoping for more images or an explanation, but the site the image came from was just a website for street graffiti from around the world. Random people uploading their random exploits. Among all the other art, the one that she’d found wasn’t particularly compelling. It wasn’t complex or wildly colorful. It wasn’t clever or strange or thought-provoking. Except for its location, it was an unremarkable tag. Not like a Banksy, for example. Over the winter, Cynthia had become obsessed with Banksy because he’d been in the news again. She’d persuaded Alix to catch the train down to the city for the day to go on a treasure hunt for the guerrilla street art. They’d spent the day canvassing New York, digging up every instance they could find where the street artist had left his mark.

  Alix kept scanning images, focused in the way she normally focused on Calc prep. Half an hour later she found one more picture with the 2.0 tag, this time on the side of what looked like a metal-sided warehouse. The picture looked like it had been snapped from beyond barbwire, but when she clicked through, there wasn’t any information on this one, either. Just a big metal building in some place that looked like it might have been a desert, judging from the yellow dirt around it.

  2.0…

  A new version of… something.

  Alix kept scrolling, but those were the only images that seemed relevant to 2.0 and vandalism, and even those didn’t carry any real information. She went back to the smokestack picture and studied it again.

  The graffiti was ridiculously high up on the smokestack. Impossible for anyone to miss. A red scrawled challenge. An arrogant mark. A statement, standing out like a beacon above the soot and industrial grime of the refinery.

  2.0.

  Something new.

  3

  WHEN ALIX PULLED HER RED MINI into Seitz’s parking lot the next day, she found herself being challenged by a cop, who allowed her to park only after he saw Jonah’s and her school uniforms.

  “Use the spaces on the far side of the lot,” he said.

  “What the hell?” Alix muttered as she maneuvered the MINI through the clogged parking area, avoiding students and other cars searching for spaces. She found an empty slot and parked.

  “Is there some kind of event happening?” Jonah wondered as students and people from off the street streamed past.

  “Guess we’re going to find out.”

  Alix grabbed her schoolbag and climbed out of the car. Standing beside her MINI, she scanned the crowd around the Seitz main gate. Maybe someone famous was coming to tour the school. Seitz students and teachers, along with town bystanders, clogged all the sidewalks and approaches to the grounds.

  Alix caught sight of Derek and Cynthia in the throng. “Come on,” she said to Jonah. “And stick close, for once.”

  She pushed into the crowd, bumping and nudging through, wedging herself between students and bystanders. Up ahead, she spied yellow crime-scene tape and heard someone shouting for everyone to “move back, move back.”

  Broken glimpses through the crush of the crowd showed the flashing red lights of an ambulance. Alix’s heart beat faster.

  I hope someone isn’t hurt was her first thought. Followed quickly by I hope it’s not someone I know.

  Pushing through the crowd was slow. She was fighting against the tide, she realized. People were gradually being herded back behind the low perimeter wall that ringed Seitz’s grounds. She finally managed to squeeze through the press to where she could get a view and was relieved to see there wasn’t anyone lying dead. There was a fire truck parked beside the ambulance, and a couple of firemen in heavy Day-Glo coats sitting on the steps of the fire truck.

  How bad can it be if the firemen are drinking coffee?

  She craned her neck and caught another glimpse of yellow crime-scene tape being stretched to push the crowd farther back. Beyond the tape, though, all she could see were the fire truck and ambulance parked on the quad, and, of course, Widener Hall, with its four stories of classroom windows, all looking down on the Seitz grounds like rows of empty eyes.

  “What’s going on?” Jonah grabbed her shoulder and jumped, yanking on her in the process and earning them both dirty looks as he jostled the bystanders around them. “I can’t see!”

  Alix shrugged his hand off her shoulder. “I don’t think anybody knows.” She stood on tiptoe again. Now she spied a bunch of cops standing at the doors to Widener.

  What the—?

  It looked like they were in some kind of hazmat gear.

  Maybe something broke in the labs. Some kind of spill.

  “Alix!” Derek and Cynthia were elbowing through the crowd to join them. “Did you just get here?”

  “Yeah. Do you know what’s going on?”

  “Everyone’s clueless,” Derek said as he squeezed into Alix’s personal space. He shifted apologetically, trying to give her room, and bumped into her again as Cynthia plowed through to them as well.

  “They’ve had us locked out for the last twenty minutes,” she said breathlessly. “The fire truck got here just before you did. The guys in the bodysuits, too.”

  Alix noticed that Jonah was getting antsy, looking for a chance to slip away. She barely snagged him by his book bag and dragged him back as he tried to make an escape. “Nice try, bro.”

  “Come on, Alix,” Jonah whined as she got a firm grip on his arm. “I just wanted to see if anyone was dead in the ambulance.”

  My brother, ghoul in training, Alix thought.

  But Jonah’s mention of bodies mirrored her own suppressed worry. The whole thing was too weird, and now that Jonah had said it out loud, it made her own anxiety suddenly feel more real as well. As if he’d invoked something that had to happen now that he’d said it.

  It had happened to her friend Anna Lenay that way. She’d lost her mother and father in a small-plane accident when they were sophomores. Before her parents left, Anna had joked with her dad that he was probably going to crash the plane. It was the last thing she’d said to them before they took off for Martha’s Vineyard, and Alix had been there to hear it.

  One of the guys in the hazmat suits jogged over to the crowd. He was sweating when he pulled off his hood. He spoke to an officer who looked like he was in charge, and then the police were telling everyone to step back even farther.

  “Maybe it’s a bomb,” Jonah said.

  “You better hope not,” Alix replied darkly.

  They’d had a bomb scare in the fall. The faculty and students had been cleared off the entire campus, dorms, faculty housing, science and humanities buildings, the pool house, everything,
while K9 units went over the grounds. No one had been caught for it, and Alix had never said anything out loud, but she privately suspected Jonah had been behind the scare. It was the kind of thing her brother would do. The kid had serious impulse-control problems.

  Luckily, Jonah hadn’t even been suspected. He’d covered his tracks, at least. Alix wondered if he’d been disappointed. It was at least possible that he’d been trying to get himself caught so he wouldn’t have to attend Seitz, but she never asked.

  The cops kept pushing everyone farther back, and the crowd got tighter as a result. Alix was shoved up against Jonah and Cynthia and Derek. Some of the really little kids were starting to freak out. Older ones were talking on their cell phones, giving a blow-by-blow of what was happening, or else texting and posting photos online as it all went down.

  Alix was starting to feel claustrophobic. The crush and shift of the crowd were overwhelming.

  “We need everyone to step back, please! Behind the yellow tape! All the way back!”

  The jostling increased. A truck rumbled through the crowd with the word SWAT on the side.

  “Worse and worse,” Cynthia said.

  “You think there are hostages?” Derek wondered.

  “Yeah. SWAT got a call about a crew of free radicals holding a bunch of innocent alkanes prisoner in the chem lab,” Cynthia said.

  In the crush, Alix couldn’t turn to respond. She was sweltering in her school blazer. Seitz school uniforms were uncomfortable enough as it was, and now in the unseasonably warm spring sunshine, packed in the crowd, the layers of clothing were becoming unbearable.

  A news crew showed up. A camerawoman and blow-dried-hair guy with a microphone went from person to person, asking questions. The camerawoman was gesturing for the guy to move into a better position. Everyone watched the SWAT police get out of their armored truck. They started pulling equipment and setting it up on the grass.

  “Bomb squad,” someone said.

  It looked that way to Alix as well. The cops all had heavily padded protective garments. The SWAT guys were skulking around the edges of Widener, carrying assault rifles, and now the guys in heavy bodysuits were lumbering up the steps of the building. The SWAT guys pressed themselves up against the brick on either side of the doors. Riot helmets and body armor. It looked like the movies: cops all around the doors, ready to bust in and start blasting away at the bad guys.