1st Case - James Patterson Page 0,3

out from under the dark cloud that MIT—not to mention my mother—had hung over my head. I wanted to get away from there ASAP. I’d get myself organized when I unpacked later, at home.

“I don’t understand, Angela,” Mom said. “We’ve gone over it five times and I still don’t know what happened here. How is that even possible?”

“Because Angela’s being evasive,” my youngest sister, Hannah, chimed in while I kept my head down and kept on stuffing things randomly into boxes.

“Good word,” Mom said to Hannah, but with her eyes still on me. “And a good observation, too.”

My other sister, Sylvie, was too busy trying on my roommate’s perfume to get involved. Hannah was more like me, sticking her nose in whenever things got tense.

Mom pressed on. “What exactly did the disciplinary board charge you with? Can you at least tell me that much? I mean, seriously, sweetheart. What’s with the cloak-and-dagger act?”

“Please don’t worry about it,” I said. “It’s going to be fine.”

“How can you be so calm? You got kicked out of MIT halfway through your first year, for God’s sake.”

I was actually only two months into a graduate master’s program in Computation for Design and Optimization. But I thought it better not to point that out. The less we talked about it, the sooner I’d be out of there.

Then again, my mother doesn’t tolerate being ignored any better than I do. I had to say something.

“I don’t think this program was right for me,” I told her.

“That’s bull crap,” Hannah blurted out. “You said this program was made for you.”

“Yeah, exactly,” I said. “As in, I could teach this stuff.”

That part was true. I’m not an egotist, but I’m not afraid of facts, either.

The facts were that I’d been one of the three youngest people admitted to the Boston Mensa chapter when I was four years old. I’d graduated high school with a 4.5 GPA, and I’d sailed through my undergrad years at Carnegie Mellon. I hadn’t been retested for IQ since I was twelve, but the number back then was 180 on the nose. That doesn’t make me a better person, but it’s not something I try to hide, either.

“So you get yourself thrown out?” Mom said. “This is the solution?”

I just looked at her. She knew it was more complicated than that, even if I wasn’t sharing the particulars. I hated leaving Mom so far out of the loop. It was just that the alternative—going into all the gory details of my academic demise—was an even more embarrassing prospect. Maybe I could come a little cleaner after the smoke had been clear for a few days. But in the meantime, I was all about making the quickest possible exit.

And before I had to manufacture anything else to fill that increasingly uncomfortable silence, the door to the hall banged open. My suite mate, A.A. Wang, was standing there now, heaving for breath like she’d sprinted the length of MIT’s famous Infinite Corridor.

“I just heard,” she said. “What the f …” She trailed off with a flick of her eyes in Sylvie and Hannah’s direction. “Hi, girls. Hi, Mrs. Hoot.”

“A.A., thank God you’re here,” Mom said. “Could you please shed some light? My charming daughter seems to be suffering from some kind of selective amnesia.”

“She doesn’t know any more than you do,” I lied. “Leave A.A. alone.”

A.A.’s birth name is Melanie, but she’s a gigantic Winnie-the-Pooh fan, which is also to say an A.A. Milne fan. She took the name for her own in second grade, and it just stuck. My sisters absolutely idolized her, from the tips of her tattooed eyeliner to the toes of her fabulous shoe collection. Truth be told, I idolized her a little myself.

“Why are you just standing in the hall?” Sylvie asked.

Which is when I got the signal that A.A. had been not so subtly sending my way.

“Mom?” I said. “Can you and the girls take these last boxes down? I’ll bring my bike and meet you at the car.”

Mom begrudgingly accepted the box I held out, but her eyes were still on A.A. “She tells you anything, you call me,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” A.A. answered. She and my mother were practically friends on their own, for better or worse. I loved them both to pieces. Just not always in the same room at the same time, when they could gang up on me.

“See you downstairs, Lisa,” I tried, and hip-checked her toward the door.

“A mother cares,” Mom said. “That’s all