“‘Tonight’s headline: Twerp perps pop from cops! Details at eleven!’” Cass said.
Aly pulled back her newly blond hair into a scrunchie. “When we get to Chicago, I’m washing out this disgusting color.”
“Your hair was blue before this,” Cass remarked.
Aly stuck out her tongue.
“I think it looks nice,” I said, quickly adding, “not that blue wasn’t nice. It was. So was the orange.”
Aly just stared at me bewildered, like I’d just said something in Sanskrit. I turned away. Sometimes I should just keep my mouth shut.
Cass cracked up. “Maybe she can borrow the red coloring from your skin.”
“Once we’re in Chicago, Aly, you’re getting on a plane to Los Angeles,” Dad said. “To see your mom.”
“What am I going to tell her?” Aly asked.
“The truth,” Dad replied. “She has to know everything. And she has to keep what happened to you a secret—”
“She won’t do that!” Aly said. “I mean—I vanished for weeks. She’s going to open a federal investigation!”
Dad shook his head. “Not when she realizes what’s at stake. That there’s still a hope of curing you kids. Our job now is to create an airtight alibi, which we all will use. It has to explain why three kids disappeared and then slipped back weeks later, all at the same time. We have to somehow contain this. People in our hometown are going to ask questions. Yours, too, Aly.”
“So … um …” Cass said uneasily. “How do I figure into these snalp?”
“Snalp?” Dad said.
“Plans,” I translated. “It’s Backwardish. Remember? He uses it when he’s feeling silly. Or nervous.”
“Or deracs,” Cass added.
Dad looked him straight in the eyes. He knew about Cass’s background. Honestly, I couldn’t imagine what Cass was thinking. Mainly because I don’t know what’s it’s like to have two parents in jail on a robbery conviction. What I did know was that he’d be sent back to child services until he was eighteen. Which meant, under our circumstances, forever.
“Of course I have plans,” Dad said. “Don’t you y-worr … wy-orr …”
“Yrrow?” Cass said. “As in, worry?”
Dad was already scribbling on a sheet of legal paper. “Exactly,” he said.
“Okay then, I won’t,” Cass said, looking very, very worried.
* * *
“Next station stop, Chicago, Illinois!”
As the conductor’s voice echoed in the train car, the sun burned through the window. Aly and Cass had fallen asleep, and I was almost there, too.
Dad’s eyes were bloodshot as he put the final touches on the list we’d been working on for hours. I read it for about the hundredth time.
“Um,” I said.
Aly sighed. “Complicated.”
“Out of our minds,” Cass added.
“I think we can make it work,” Dad said with a deep breath.
“I like the ‘hardened street tough’ part,” Cass said.
“Now for your story, Aly,” Dad went on. “We need something your mom can jump on board with.”
“Mom and I are no strangers to alibis,” Aly said. “I’ve been working with covert government groups for a long time. We can say I was on a CIA project. Much less complicated than your epic lie.”
Dad removed his porkpie hat and ran his fingers through his steadily graying hair. “One thing you need to know, guys. Your disappearances have been in the news. Luckily for us, the reports have stayed local. Three separate communities, three separate disappearances, three different times. Well, four, including Marco. Now three of you are showing up at once. Up to now, no one has connected the disappearances. That’s our task—containing the stories. Keeping them strictly local news.”
“No publicity,” Aly agreed, “no photos on the web, play it down on social media.”
Dad nodded. “Ask—insist—that your friends not blab about it. For privacy’s sake.”
“I will keep the news away from hardened-street-tough circles,” Cass said.
“Contain, concentrate, commit—that’s the only way we are going to solve this genetic problem,” Dad said.
No one said a word. We were all trying our hardest to avoid the great big fat imaginary elephant in the room—and on its side was an imaginary sign that said HAPPY FOURTEENTH BIRTHDAY crossed out in black with a skull underneath.
“This may be the last time we see each other,” Aly said in a tiny, weak, unAlylike voice.
“I will die before I let that happen to any of you,” Dad replied. His face was grim, his eyes steady and fierce. “And I won’t rest until my company finds a cure.”
“What if they don’t?” I asked.
Dad gave me a steady have-I-ever-let-you-down? look. “You know the McKinley family motto. It ain’t over …”
“Until the fat lady sings.” I couldn’t help smiling. There were about a dozen McKinley family mottoes, and this was one of Dad’s favorites.
“La-la-la,” Aly sang, smiling.
Dad laughed. “Sorry, Aly, you don’t fit the bill.”
Cass, who hadn’t spoken in a long time, finally piped up softly. “Mr. McKinley?” he said. “About number seven on your list …?”
Dad smiled warmly. “That’s the only one we don’t have to worry about. Because it’s the only item that’s one hundred percent true.”
“IT MEANS A soprano,” I said, scrolling through a Wikipedia page on my trusty desktop. We’d been home for ten busy days, buying a bunk bed and a desk and a bike and clothes for Cass, catching up with teachers and friends, telling the alibi over and over a thousand times, buying hair dye to cover up the white lambda shape on the backs of our heads, blah-blah-blah. Today was going to be our first full day in school, and I was nervous. So of course it was a perfect time to procrastinate—like looking up Dad’s odd saying about the singing fat lady.
“I hated that show,” Cass called out from the top bunk.
“What show?” I asked.
“The Sopranos,” Cass said. “My last foster family binge-watched all seventeen years of it. Well, it felt like seventeen.”
“No, I’m talking about ‘the fat lady,’ ” I said. “It means a soprano—like, an opera singer. It’s a way of saying the opera’s not over until the soprano sings her big showstopping tune.”
“Oh,” Cass said. “What if she’s not fat? The show keeps going?”
“It’s a stereotype!” I said.
Cass grunted and sat up, dangling his legs over the side