The Inner Circle - Brad Meltzer [10]
“Most people stare at my boobs,” she says with a laugh, catching my gaze.
“I-I didn’t mean—”
“Oh jeez—I’m sorry—I embarrassed you, didn’t I?” she asks.
“No. Nonono. No.”
She laughs again. “You know you’re a horrible liar?”
“I know,” I say, still staring at her scars.
“And you know you’re still staring at my scars?”
“I know. I can’t stop myself. If we were in a desert instead of in these dusty stacks, I’d bury myself right now.”
“You really should just go for my boobs,” she says. “At least you get a better view.”
Instinctively, I look—and then just as quickly stare back at her scars. “It looks like a dog bite.”
“Motorcycle crash. My fault. My elbow hyperextended and the bone broke through the skin.”
“Sounds excruciating.”
“It was ten years ago, Beecher,” she says, confidently shrugging the entire world away as her eyes take hold and don’t let go. She’s staring just at me. “Only the good things matter after ten years.”
Before I can agree, my phone vibrates in my pocket, loud enough that we both hear the buzz.
“That them?” Clementine blurts.
I shake my head. Caller ID says it’s my sister, who lives with my mom back in Wisconsin. But at this time of the day, when the supermarket shifts change, I know who’s really dialing: It’s my mom, making her daily check-up-on-me call, which started the day after she heard about Iris. And while I know my mom never liked Iris, she has too much midwestern kindness in her to ever say it to me. The phone buzzes again.
I don’t pick up. But by the time I look back at Clementine, all the confidence, all the conviction, all the fearlessness is gone—and I’m reminded that the real reason she came to the Archives wasn’t to share old scars or see overmuscled Secret Service agents.
Last year, Clementine’s mom died, but it wasn’t until a few months back that Clementine called in sick to the radio station and went back home to clean out her mom’s closet. There, she found an old datebook that her mother had saved from the year Clementine was born. Sure enough, on December 10, there were hand-drawn hearts and tiny balloons on the day of her birth, there was a cute smiley face drawn on the day she came home from the hospital, but what was most interesting to Clementine was when she flipped back in the datebook and saw the entry on March 18, which had a small sad face drawn in it, followed by the words Nick enlists.
From that, she finally had a name and a lead on her dad.
From me, thanks to our recent emails, she had the Archives.
From those, I had only one call to make: to our facility in St. Louis, where we store the more recent army enlistment records.
Ten minutes ago, Clementine was in front of me. But now, as I head for the metal door ahead of us, she starts falling behind, going surprisingly silent.
In life, there’s the way you act when you know people are watching. And then there’s the way you act when no one’s watching, which, let’s be honest, is the real you. That’s what I see in Clementine right now: I spot it for just a half-second, in between breaths, just as I take the lead and she ducks behind me, thinking I can’t see her. She’s wrong. I see her. And feel her.
I feel her self-doubt. I feel the way she’s unanchored. And in the midst of that single breath, as her shoulders fall, and she looks down and slowly exhales so she won’t explode, I spot that little dark terrified space that she reserves for just herself. It only exists for that single half-second, but in that half-second I know I’m seeing at least one part of the real Clementine. Not just some fantasized cool jazz DJ. Not just some ballsy girl who took on the bully in seventh grade. The grown her. The true her. The one who learned how to be afraid.
“I should go. I hate when I’m all woe-is-me-ish,” she says, regaining her calm as I tug the metal door and we leave the stacks, squeezing back out into the pale blue hallway. She’s trying to hide. I know what it’s like to hide. I’ve been doing it for the past year of my life.
“Don’t go,” I shoot back, quickly lowering my voice. “There’s no—They said