“That was their argument, too,” he mumbled.
But he won. I couldn’t imagine trying that argument with my own mother. What she would say. What she would think. I couldn’t even get her permission to go to Ryan’s award ceremony.
The downside to independence—nobody came looking for you.
I grew frantic, trying to find the right box. But so far the boxes were mostly old school supplies, trinkets from my childhood, and pictures in albums, printed from the digital copies she stored on her computer, in case of a virus that wiped it clean. She didn’t trust the Internet, didn’t want our pictures anywhere that could be traced. I think she’d read an article about that once, too. How nothing was truly untraceable online. All this print was cluttering our lives. Like living with our own past, boxed up and waiting.
“Can I help?” he asked, just as I let out a breath of relief, finding the stack of boxes I’d been looking for.
“Here,” I said, gesturing toward the collection of boxes in front of me, the ones we’d used for school experiments.
Ryan came closer as I pulled out the different chemicals—simple things, my mom had told me. Everyday things, from when she taught me. Textbooks and printed-from-the-Internet how-tos. She’d clear off the table upstairs and we’d cook at the kitchen stove, like we were making breakfast. Science was just a list of ingredients, she’d said. Science creates. I remembered dancing around purple smoke in the backyard, thrilled that we’d created this ourselves, watching until it fizzled and burned itself out.
I found my old notebooks, the recipes written in my own handwriting as I watched my mother.
“Kelsey? What the hell is all this stuff?” He was holding a container of one of the chemicals in his hand, frowning at the warning label.
“Chemicals,” I said. “From when my mom taught me science.”
He put it down, opened the box beside it, pulled out some wires. “And this?”
“Electronics. That was physics.”
I started making a pile of everything I needed while keeping an eye on the security screens, searching for signs of movement.
“See if you can find something called potassium nitrate,” I said. “That’s the only thing I’m missing.”
“Kelsey. This isn’t normal. You get that, right?”
I shook my head. “I used to be homeschooled. We needed all this.”
He shook his head again. “This isn’t like making homemade play-dough. I didn’t learn any of this in chemistry. Or physics.”
“I know. That’s why I tutor.”
“Kelsey, stop. Look at me. This isn’t normal.”
None of my life was normal, that was nothing new. I heard my mother’s voice, standing over the kitchen table, materials spread over top. You’re trapped in a basement, and this is what you find. How do you get out?
This was my education.
“This stuff isn’t safe,” Ryan said. He backed away from the boxes. “Your entire basement is combustible.”
“What?” I stepped back from the boxes I’d been rummaging through so haphazardly just moments before.
“Flammable. Combustible. Take your pick. All of the above.”
Like all it would need was a single spark and the whole house would go up in flames.
The lock at the top of the staircase made more sense now.
“Kelsey, they make us take hazardous materials courses as part of our training. This. Isn’t. Safe. This shouldn’t be in your basement.”
This isn’t safe. Surely my mother would’ve known that. Surely she wouldn’t have let me play with this as a child if I was truly in danger.
“Well, right now it’s our chance.”
There were fire extinguishers throughout the house. A precaution. A fear. But maybe something more. How safe was I really, sleeping above this?
He nodded, “Okay. But careful. We have to be careful.” And I heard an echo in the basement, my mother’s words, warning me. Ryan started moving with purpose again, tearing open the tops of all the boxes in this section, taking things out, putting them back.
Finally, I pulled out a familiar container. “Potassium nitrate,” I said, heading back toward the steps. “Come on.”
Ryan followed me out, but paused at the bottom of the steps to look behind him.
I didn’t like the way Ryan was looking around the basement, like it was something to fear. This was my mother. My mother.
But now I was thinking about that hidden compartment under the floor of the safe room. The passports.
Her, but not her. Me, but not me. Both had felt like strangers.
—
Ryan checked the windows once again as I set the stove in the darkened kitchen. I heard the click of the gas, took out a pan, and started mixing the ingredients. Ryan watched me from across the room, looking at me like he wasn’t quite sure what to make of me—the way Annika sometimes did, like our worlds were so far apart they almost circled all the way back around again.
“I’m sorry,” I blurted.
“For what?”
“You shouldn’t even be here. I’m so sorry.”
He shook his head. Took a step closer. “I’m not.”
I choked on tears. “You should be. I’ll get you out, I promise.”
“Us,” he said.
“Right.”
“You held us up with nothing but your fingers,” he mumbled. “I have no doubt.”
I looked up at him, at the way the light from the stove shone in his eyes, like a flame, and wondered what he saw in my own.
“I’m going to watch the monitors in the office,” Ryan said. He backed away, the smallest smile on his face. “I can’t believe your mother taught you to make a bomb,” he said, like he was impressed.
“A smoke bomb,” I corrected. A little lie. A white lie. The safest lie.
I willed my hands to be still as I poured the contents into paper towel rolls and inserted the fuses—a length of my shoelace for each—my hands hot against the cooling mixture.
I moved on instinct. Muscle memory. Everything she taught me, second nature.
My mother taught me many things that I knew she didn’t want me talking about. Careful, she’d tell me whenever I left the house—and I knew she wasn’t just talking about staying safe. But it was all a symptom of her paranoia. See it on the news, teach me to evade it.
Know the exits, she’d instruct after a news report of a fire death. She’d have me stand in each room of our house, eyes closed, and she’d ask, “Where’s the closest exit?” And I’d list them off—which window, which door. “Most deaths happen because you’re still trying to get out the way you’ve always gotten out,” she said, which was probably some warning fact she’d read on a website.
A news report of an armed intruder, and then came the lessons on how to disarm someone. Which joints to bend so that, muscle or no muscle, the wrist would cave, the weapon would fall. I wondered if things would’ve gone differently for her if she’d known this herself. If this was her way of making up for it.
Fear cannot hurt you, she’d promised. I learned from her fear, so I would not become a victim, as she had been.
If you are trapped inside a car trunk.
If you are kept in a basement.
If you are lost in the middle of the woods.
I grew up understanding all the horrible things that might happen to me. The things we could plan for and the things we could not.
I could be hurt.
I could be taken.
There were a thousand things that could kill me.
There were a million places I could be hidden.
But I thought I understood her biggest fear: I could leave one day as she had, disappear, and finally return—completely unrecognizable.
So. I never built anything more than a smoke bomb. But I did know how to create an explosion.
I was trying to remember the if that got us there, to trace it back. My mother sitting cross-legged on the basement floor, the materials spread out in front of her. “This is where the chemicals would go, and then all you need is a fuse….And voilà!” Secrets passed down from mother to daughter, like the perfect way to apply liquid eyeliner.