Overtaken Read Free Page B

through . . . a rocky patch. Things just got too intense between us.”
    Her version of events certainly matched the official story I’d heard when I’d first arrived in Barrington.
    â€œAnd that’s why you left town,” I probed, hoping to get some additional insight or clue about those missing months when she was away.
    â€œI stayed with cousins in Connecticut. Anyway, old news,” she declared with a sigh and an exasperated roll of the eyes, “because I’m back to stay.” Signaling she didn’t want to discuss the matter any further.
    I was about to probe a little deeper into Dana’s time away when a gang of her BFFs from cheerleading, Annie, Emily, Maddie, and Jaden, suddenly came outside and surrounded her.
    â€œHere you are,” squealed Jaden. “The party’s inside! C’mon!”
    And the girls dragged a laughing, protesting Dana by the arms back into the jam-packed pool house.
    I wasn’t exactly sure if Dana had told me the truth and nothing but the truth about her time away, but it was a beginning I intended to build upon.
    â€¢Â Â â€¢Â Â â€¢
    Dana’s party finally started to wind down around eight forty-five p.m. My father was on call at the hospital and insisted on picking me up, even though Oliver’s mother had offered to drive me home. With everything so uncertain, I had wanted to skip Dana’s party so that we could continue strategizing, but my father had practically ordered me to attend. I hoped it was because he saw us as a clandestine father-daughter Alias spy duo. Except without the exotic and glamorous locations.
    Exactly where that left my mother in this complex equation, I had no clue. To be honest, I was so wrapped up in my own personal angst and turmoil over my life that I couldn’t worry about her. Paranoia and caution had gotten the better of me. It was hard for them not to. Instead, I chose to send a brief, bland e-mail filling Lydia in on my classes (I used “fine” a lot), extracurricular school activities (busy supporting our football team in the playoffs), and my hectic social life. I told myself it was better this way, that I was protecting my mother. What could she possibly do all the way from Antarctica anyway? When in fact the truth was a bit more complicated and something I wasn’t quite ready to face just yet. And that was my (not so) repressed anger at her role in all this.
    How could she have sent me to Barrington? Did she have any idea what was really going on? She’d worked here years before, when the incident occurred—while she was pregnant with me. Did she have any clue that sending me back to the “safest town in America” would actually be the most dangerous thing for me?
    I just wasn’t prepared to take on that drama—a problem wrapped in a riddle wrapped in a bunker-buster of a bummer: If she knew, it would break my heart, and if she didn’t, I had no earthly way of explaining it to her. I didn’t have a shred of proof except for my currently nonexistent powers and a few hastily scribbled journal entries detailing a scattered selection of the whiplash-inducing revelations of the past few months. It’d be enough to convince my mom that I’d somehow developed an overreliance on cough syrup but not exactly groundbreaking revelations.
    My powers? Bar Tech?
    Hi, Mom, long time. Listen, I— No, no, things are good. They’re great, actually. I discovered my DNA is—yes, I know. Good stock. Not so much Dad’s side, sure, but— Are you sitting down? Yeah, you’re gonna want to do that. No, I’m not pregnant. That would be easier to say than . . . Um. Well. I can turn invisible.
    *Click*
    And that would be that. For as much as she loved to explore different philosophies, religions, and schools of thought, she was scientist and a journalist at heart. Rational to the core. Tales of superpowers and