The Cipher Read online

  None of this should have surprised Melanie. She knew she was a pleaser. She had agreed to join that nightmare community garden project last summer just to avoid a mild flicker of disappointment in her dad’s eyes after he suggested it. She’d done a lot of stuff like that. It was insane. She knew it.

  Was the Smiles situation really any different?

  Melanie circled ISSUES w/ his dad.

  She could hardly blame Smiles for having a complex about his dad—he was Robert Smylie, after all. That was bad enough, but Melanie knew it was his mom who’d really broken him. Not Rose. No, his biological mom, who left when he was only two years old, with no explanation.

  It was arrogant to pity him, but she couldn’t help it. They had known each other forever, and she had always felt the need to be delicate with Smiles—like he was a cracked dish, and Melanie had to preserve the pieces of him until he could be glued together, magically restored.

  Ms. Phillips droned on at the chalkboard as Melanie’s pocket vibrated with a text.

  Smiles: “My life is bizarre. Call me.” He kept forgetting she didn’t have a study hall this semester and couldn’t talk in the afternoons. He kept forgetting they were on a break.

  The list was supposed to help her decide what to do, but now it sickened her. There was something gross about evaluating a person like this. Based on this page, it looked like Melanie thought she was too good for him . . . and maybe she did. Number eight said it all: She was ashamed to have a boyfriend who had been kicked out of high school. Melanie could hardly even bring herself to say the word expelled. On the list she had written ((school situation)), the two layers of parentheses like makeup over a wart.

  But Smiles would never be ashamed of her, if their places were reversed. He didn’t make judgments like that. Smiles, actually, had a much better heart than she did. The thought made Melanie feel both happy and sad.

  The bell rang at last, but Melanie sat rooted there, studying the stupid list while the room emptied in a shuffle of bodies and books. Her fellow Kingsley students, starched and clean in purple-and-gold uniforms, clotted at the door to the brick-lined, waxed-floor hallways. They felt measurably quieter these days, without Smiles’s too-loud voice ringing through them. She crumpled the page tightly, thinking she was alone until she felt the presence at her back.

  Jenna Brooke was standing behind her left shoulder, waiting.

  God, she had probably read the whole “Smiles” list, too.

  “So we’re going to Alyce tomorrow, yeah?” Jenna said brightly.

  “Yeah, Jenna.” They went every Friday. It wasn’t news.

  Jenna hugged a book at her chest. Her buggy eyes always freaked Melanie out. “Walk to physics together?”

  “I’m going to my locker.”

  Melanie gave a smile that she hoped wasn’t too encouraging, then darted.

  She didn’t throw the list away on the way out. For all she knew, Jenna would root through the trash for it.

  7

  “SMIIIIIIILES! HAPPY BIRTHDAY!”

  Mr. Hunt grabbed the edge of his desk, heaved himself up, and greeted Smiles at the entrance of his massive office.

  “Thanks, Mr. Hunt.”

  He was taller than Smiles and pushing three hundred pounds, and whenever he did anything remotely physical he broke out in a sweat. For such a porker, the guy looked amazingly good, Smiles thought. He dressed in creamy business shirts and ties done up in fat, perfect knots—today’s tie was powder blue over a nuclear-white shirt. Mr. Hunt looked fresh and new, wrapped up like a Christmas turkey.

  He checked his Rolex and gave Smiles a joking punch on the shoulder. “Came early, did ya?”

  Smiles, two hours late by then, laughed. “Just for you, Mr. Hunt.”

  On the ride over to the Alyce Systems headquarters—a mirrored behemoth on Water Street—Smiles had managed to convince himself he shouldn’t take his dad’s talk of dying seriously. Maybe he’d last a long time. Maybe there’d be a miracle. But he couldn’t shake the other bomb he’d dropped: the mystery letter from his mom. A message from the grave, it sounded like. And a “package” to go with it—a notebook of some kind. Smiles was beginning to think that the universe just liked screwing with his head.

  As much as he wanted to read anything his mom had written him, he was getting a bad vibe about it. She had talked to him about everything—her irresponsible days in the Tri-Delt house at Boston University, the cheesy guy at the gym who always hit on her, whatever. One summer she’d kept going on rants about her athlete’s foot. What couldn’t she tell him?

  It wasn’t going to be good, Smiles had figured on the way over, the news of her letter turning sour in his stomach. But being in the presence of Mr. Hunt made things seem more manageable. The guy was like comfort food on legs.

  “Big day, kid. Very big day.”

  A brisk smell of shaving lotion and mesquite-spiced cologne assaulted Smiles’s nostrils as Mr. Hunt wrapped him in a bear hug. It lingered while Mr. Hunt clapped him on the back and slid into his desk chair of buttery leather. On the bookshelves behind him sat a basketball in a glass case, signed by all the Celtics on one of the old championship teams—Larry Bird and Kevin McHale and the rest of them. Beside it sat a fleet of model cars: a Bentley, a Maybach, and an Aston Martin. You could find the real versions in his garage. Mr. Hunt took pride in maintaining them himself.

  “Go on, sit down.” He motioned Smiles to the far windows while he gathered files. “Sit, sit.”

  It was a corner office, and like everything else about Mr. Hunt it was ludicrously big. You could play a game of racquetball in one half and host a dinner party in the other. Smiles crossed the plush white carpet to a seating area by the windows. Up here on the top floor of the skyscraper, they had twenty-foot ceilings. The floor-to-ceiling windows gave an IMAX view of the Atlantic Ocean, the harbor, and the streets below.

  The coffee table had a spread of glossy magazines. Wired, Forbes, something called The Robb Report—thick wedges of a sumptuous kind of life. Smiles inhaled the pleasant, empty smell of vacuumed carpet. Looking down at the plaza in front of the office building, he could see its signature element: the fifty-feet-high bronze sculpture of the Alyce Systems logo. One old-fashioned key standing upright, another pointing downward, their teeth meshing in the middle. The tiny people below streamed around the huge sculpture as they went about their ant-colony business. From up above, it was hard not to feel superior.

  “Over there, darling,” Mr. Hunt was saying to an office worker. She left a tray with bottled water and enormous cookies as Mr. Hunt trekked over with the papers.

  “All right then,” he huffed. “Ready to get rich?”

  They plopped into the deep chairs by the windows. Mr. Hunt pushed over a fountain pen and a document that said RECEIPT AND RELEASE at the top. Three sticky tabs protruded from the edges, telling him where to sign.

  Smiles uncapped the pen, a heavy silver job that felt right for the occasion. “Can I get a drum roll here?”

  Mr. Hunt liked that one. He chuckled as Smiles signed on the three lines, which were actually dotted. “You won’t have to sign like this for every check,” Mr. Hunt said. “Just the initial payment.”

  Smiles wasn’t getting the whole $7 million today. The trust paid out in little installments at first. They would increase in amount until he turned twenty-five, when he would get the balance in one big chunk. Those were the terms his dad had set when he established the trust, and from what Mr. Hunt had said it was all standard stuff. Whatever—Smiles wasn’t complaining.

  His first payment, the check he was getting today, was for something close to $50,000. Not too shabby.

  “You should realize,” Mr. Hunt said, “that this will be your full inheritance. You know that your father has been . . . well, preparing, shall we say. Virtually all his holdings are going to his wildlife foundation, his educational charit
ies, and the symphony.”

  Smiles knew that already—his dad was already famous for giving away basically his entire fortune. Mr. Hunt was acting like this was all extremely sensitive stuff, but Smiles had never been bothered by it. It was one of the reasons he admired his dad, even if it made him that much harder to live up to. “If I need more than seven million to get by, I’m in pretty serious trouble.”

  Mr. Hunt let out a roar of laughter. “Great attitude there. Okay, I just want you to be clear on that. You know that your father always wanted you to—”

  “Find my own thing. I got it, Mr. Hunt, but thanks.”

  Smiles slid the document back across the table.

  Mr. Hunt checked the pages and set them aside. For such a giant person, he could be very delicate.

  “Okay, now, start a file at home. You’ll get receipts in the mail after each payment. Save them for your records.” Smiles nodded, fully intending to do this but also knowing he’d get lazy and blow it off.

  Mr. Hunt then launched into a spiel about K-1 forms and tax stuff that Smiles nodded at but didn’t listen to. He was seized with a new anxiety about his mom’s message. He felt like he might suffocate if he didn’t hear her words soon.

  “I have to ask you . . .” Smiles blurted as Mr. Hunt bit into a hubcap-sized sugar cookie from the tray. “It’s something about my mom.”

  Mr. Hunt paused mid-chew, then gulped down a mouthful of cookie. “Sure, what is it?”

  “My dad said you have a message from her. A letter or something, for when I turned eighteen.”

  Mr. Hunt nodded, but his face had suddenly turned haggard. He brushed a microscopic crumb from his lapel and sighed. “I was afraid that this would happen.”

  “What?”

  “That he would forget.”

  “Forget what?” Smiles wasn’t getting this.

  Mr. Hunt held his palms out in a calming way. “There was a letter from your mom, yes. And she wrote it for you to read it when you turned eighteen. But Smiles . . . when your father was in the hospital after his first seizure, he asked me to destroy it. I shredded that letter months ago.”

  “But she wrote that for me.” Smiles was trying not to blow his stack. He needed to hear his mom’s last words to him. Her last words. “What did it say?”

  Mr. Hunt just shook his head. “I didn’t read it. I assumed it was personal, obviously.”

  “But he told me about the letter today.”

  “Well, that’s what I was afraid of. You know how it can be.”

  Yes, Smiles knew how it could be. His dad could have hour-long conversations and not remember them the next day. The lost spots in his memory, they happened more and more. He had forgotten about telling Mr. Hunt to destroy the letter.

  “The letter was from my mom. Did he even have the right to do that?”

  “It’s not really a question of having the right,” Mr. Hunt said. “There aren’t laws about this kind of thing.”

  Gone, just like that. Destroy the letter—who cares about Smiles? His head spun as he focused on a drop of water sliding down one of the water bottles. His mom’s wild laugh echoed in his mind; his chest seized with a physical ache.

  “What about a package? There was a package with the letter . . . or, well, the letter was going to tell me about a package. A notebook, actually.” Even as the mixed-up words came out of Smiles’s mouth, he knew they sounded strange.

  Mr. Hunt listened, his expression blank. “I don’t know anything about packages or notebooks. I’m sorry.”

  So that was it then. Smiles fell back into his chair.

  “You’re upset about this,” Mr. Hunt said carefully.

  “Yeah, I am.” His voice came out cold. Mr. Hunt wasn’t to blame, but Smiles couldn’t help it.

  “You feel cheated; I can understand that.” Mr. Hunt cracked open a bottle of water, measuring his words. “Your mom could be impulsive, Smiles, I think you know that. And let me tell you something else: Your dad has the best judgment of any single person I know. You have to trust him on this one—trust that you didn’t want to read whatever was in that letter.”

  Mr. Hunt put his hands together, finished with his speech. The office rang with silence and suddenly Smiles had risen to his feet.

  “Good-bye, Mr. Hunt.” The words dribbled from his mouth, and then his legs were carrying him out of the office so he could get out of there and sit in the Infiniti and process this on his own.

  “Smiles, wait.”

  He was almost to the door. When he turned around, Mr. Hunt was holding an envelope.

  “Don’t you want your check?”

  11

  “MY LIFE IS bizarre. Call me.”

  Smiles needed a good vent, and he was pretty sure Mel had a free period in the afternoon. He shot her the text as he flew over the Longfellow Bridge on his way back from Mr. Hunt’s office, completely forgetting that it was Thursday and Ben would be waiting for a ride back from MIT. Smiles picked him up every week—or almost every week. To be perfectly honest, it wasn’t the first time it had slipped his mind.

  Luckily he saw him from the Infiniti: the tiny frame, the semi-hunched back, the determined little steps down Massachusetts Avenue. Smiles had to laugh. His next-door neighbor was a bizarre dude, no doubt, but it was a relief to see him. Much better to hang out with Ben for a few hours than to sit around alone, stewing about the letter.

  Smiles couldn’t resist. He floored it, angled to the curb, and jammed on the brakes. The screech sent Ben about twenty feet in the air. On the way down, his army backpack disengaged from his shoulder and landed in a spray of pens. He really made it too easy. Smiles tried not to overdo it, but in fairness, Ben was like a walking solicitation for practical jokes. He was wearing a typical outfit today: tattered blue jeans and a yellow dress shirt that fit him like a tent, his freakishly thin body imperceptible beneath it. He looked out at the world through timid brown eyes that were the stuff of bullies’ dreams.

  Smiles tapped the horn as Ben gathered up his backpack. He jerked upright, his shirt billowing around him, pirate-style.

  Smiles rolled down the window. “Hey, bud!”

  Ben cracked the door and sat down heavily in the car. It took all of his arm strength to heft the backpack onto his lap. It looked like there were bricks in the thing. “So, like, that never gets old to you?”

  It may not have been the first time Smiles had ambushed him on the sidewalk.

  “Not if your vertical leap keeps improving like that.”

  “Well, thanks for the ride, anyway,” Ben said. “Thought you might blow me off today.”

  “You kidding? Not a chance.”

  Smiles turned off Mass Ave and cut through a rat maze of back streets to the Pemberton, which was even closer to MIT than it was to Mass General. (Especially if you ignored a couple of one-way signs.) He had discovered the Pemberton entirely by chance, after getting thoroughly lost on the way back from the hospital during his dad’s first extended stay there. He’d pulled over in frustration and seen a FOR RENT sign in the office window. His presence was no longer requested at Kingsley by then, so Smiles had followed his impulse and signed a month-to-month lease for the one-bedroom—theoretically, a temporary base from which he could visit his dad every day. But when his dad had returned to their home in Weston that first time, Smiles had stayed on in the city. It had been almost six months since he’d moved in, and Smiles had spent every night of it at the Pemberton.

  “You’re gonna be ready early tomorrow, right?” Ben said as he huffed up the stairwell to the second floor.

  They were going to Fox Creek for the weekend. It was a huge casino just two hours away in Connecticut, and Ben had some nerd-fest math conference there. In the last year, Smiles had lost $22,000 playing online poker, but the last $10,000 or so was just unlucky breaks—he was actually getting pretty crafty at it. He’d be
en secretly thrilled when Ben asked for a ride. A nice little winning streak at Fox Creek could make for a decent birthday celebration, after all.

  “Yeah, definitely,” Smiles said.

  Ben was scurrying down the hall, all eager to get back to his formulas, but Smiles wasn’t ready to go back to his empty apartment. He semi-forced his way into Ben’s place and plunked down in the inflatable Budweiser Super Bowl chair.

  “So you gotta do some gambling with me tomorrow,” Smiles said. “I mean, as long as you’re at Fox Creek, you should have some fun.”

  Ben made a beeline for his desk (shocker) and started dumping books out of his bag. “I’m going for the conference, not to goof around,” he said.

  Smiles slumped in the plastic chair, reminding himself that he wasn’t dealing with a normal person here.

  The apartment looked exactly as it had that first day, six months ago. Halfway through a game of Call of Duty, Smiles had heard a clunking sound outside his door and found a scrawny-ass dude trying to lug a desk up the stairs by himself. Smiles’s first instinct was to whip out his phone and get it on video; it would have gone viral in a second. Instead, he had introduced himself and helped out.

  This had turned out to be a brilliant move. Smiles was just doing a good deed, but then Ben had let it slip that he was only sixteen and going to MIT. Which meant: mad genius. A brain like that could pay off big someday, Smiles figured, and he’d decided right then and there to chum up to the crazy little guy.

  The only furniture Ben had was the desk, a bed, a folding chair, and a card table to eat his meals on. The one addition since he moved in was the inflatable chair, which Smiles had picked up at the liquor store so he’d have somewhere decent to sit when he came over.

  Ben had his nose buried in his notebook already. The guy was a monk. Always working away, staying focused, making himself better. Smiles watched him and wondered, as he often did, why he couldn’t be more like that.

  He had his doubts by now that Ben would ever become the next Robert Smylie Sr.—the questionable hygiene alone would be an impediment to that kind of success—but Smiles had to admit he enjoyed the kid’s company. Hanging out for hours at a time in Ben’s place helped fill his days, yes, but he also liked the feeling it gave him to steer Ben away from his more disastrous life choices (e.g., Dockers) and instruct him on the finer things in life (e.g., RRL Low Straight Carolina Wash jeans in gray, single cuff). The one time he saw Ben in the Rag & Bone Yokohama shirt he’d given him for Christmas, his downy cheeks shaved for once, Smiles realized his grooming advice to Ben was probably the most productive contribution he’d made to society in his entire life. The strange friendship had even given him his last great idea for his own thing: to start a comprehensive life-skills school for the socially awkward. Hopefully with students more receptive than Ben, who despite that one shining moment seemed to ignore the copious copies of GQ and Men’s Health that Smiles “accidentally” left in Ben’s apartment in hopes they might stir some interest in his own betterment.