Miracle - Chapter 4: Chapter 4

I was taking a crumb-and-okra stuffed chicken out of the oven for dinner when Maddy came bounding into the kitchen, her hair stringy from the pool, with a towel slung across her shoulders and shorts over her bright green bathing suit.
"Oh. My. God. Connor, you missed the craziest day!"
"At the pool?" That seemed doubtful, summer days at the Prickly Pear public pool were usually yawn-worthy. Kids horsing around. Water splashing. The smell of sunscreen and junk food. An inevitable cannonball contest. Two teenaged lifeguards puffing their whistles with disinterest when people ran past them.
"Yeah. Justin and Alex got into a huge fight." Her eyes were sparkling with excitement, which made sense when she added the next two words. "Over me."
I set the browning pan on top of the stove and closed up the oven, trying to hide a wince as the movement jarred my banged-up innards. "Yeah? Now who's getting themselves into trouble?"
"Hey, I didn't do anything! Alex thought it would be a good idea to smack my butt when I walked by. Then he and Justin got into it. Pushing and shoving and yelling. Justin pushed Alex into the pool and then Maisie—that's Alex's girlfriend, you know?—called me a slut so I decked her. Her brother started cussing me out so Justin punched him, and then they got into a fight too. And then basically everybody was fighting and Tyler's dad showed up with a couple officers to break it up. We all got sent home."
She looked awfully pleased for someone who'd just been kicked out of the neighborhood pool. "But before that, Mr. Crockett made sure I was okay and when he found out how it all started he said it weren't no wonder, on account of I'm so beautiful."
I cocked an eyebrow.
"And then he gave me fifty bucks."
She could have just led with that. "Fifty?!"
"Yup." She fanned a set of ten dollar bills in front of my face. "Check it out. He said he was setting an example for the boys. How to woo a pretty girl instead of fighting."
"Don't you think that's kind of weird? It sounds more like he was flirting with you himself."
"Oh, he totally was." She shrugged, tucking the cash into her back pocket.  "Happens all the time. Men are so easy."
"And it doesn't bother you?"
"Why should it? It's just for fun. All I had to do was smooch a cop's cheek. I got to teach those redneck boys a lesson, and got fifty dollars out of the deal."
I thought back to this morning. Marvin's hand trailing across my shoulders. Being called a sweet little thing. His lips on the side of my face. He hadn't offered me money, but I think if he had it would have felt just as skeezy. Actually, scratch that, it would have made it worse.
But Maddy laughed it off like it was an everyday thing. I had the sudden epiphany that maybe it was, for her. Until today I'd never thought much of the way guys flirted with her, the comments they made, the way they'd find reasons to touch her arm or her hair or whatever. She usually flirted right back, whether she liked the guy or not. Man, she probably dealt with creepy dudes like Marvin every single day. I'd even assumed at first that he'd mistaken me for her.
"Doesn't it ever, you know, scare you? Guys coming on to you like that. What if they decided to try something?"
"Well, that's why I picked me a big strong boyfriend."
I frowned at the flippancy of the answer, and I guess she realized I was thinking about earlier today. Or maybe just that my prospects of getting a big, strong boyfriend were a lot less promising. Her smile turned sympathetic.
"Aw, lighten up, bubba. Look, you're right, sometimes it can get dicey. But like I said, men are easy. Mostly what they want is for you to choose them. If you play along, let them feel like they're winning you over, or even just that they might be able to, they're less likely to try and force you. It's like... the more control they think they have, the more control you actually have."
"That's kind of mean, though, isn't it?"
"It can be, if you're not careful. As long as everyone's having fun it's cool. But sometimes," she held her hands up, "it's survival. Gotta do whatcha gotta do."
"Until the town pool turns into a battle royale and gets shut down," I observed dryly.
She grinned. "Maybe."
I shook my head and stabbed the chicken with a fork to check whether it was done. The inside looked good, so I turned off the burner under the mashed potatoes and grabbed plates out of the cupboard. Spooning the stuffing out of the chicken, I said, "You wanna go tell Mom that dinner's ready?"
"Sure."
Mom was a messy eater. She preferred fingers to utensils whenever possible, and she had the habit of talking with her hands, so frequently our greasier, saucier, or crumbier meals ended up in her hair.
That's what I was counting on.
Throughout dinner, I watched her pick up pieces of chicken, stuff them in her mouth, then gesticulate energetically at the television as she offered commentary to the guests of Lindsay Lohan's Beach Club. Quality entertainment right there, let me tell you. But I was glad for her taste in trashy television as I watched her grab her hair repeatedly in frustration, smear garlic butter sauce up one side of her face, and drop small glops of mashed potatoes and slices of okra on her thighs as she balanced her plate on her knees.
I ate slowly, keeping an eye on Mom's plate, and jumped up to bring her seconds as soon as it was empty. My thoughts kept racing obsessively back to the call I'd overheard, and I kept having to rein them in so I could pay attention. I'd probably only get one shot at this tonight. It had to work, because I needed answers before I what-iffed myself into a panic. If I got caught up staring at Mom, staring at Maddy, wondering if our mother really was trying to sell us off and what the hell I would do without my sister if she succeeded, I could miss my chance to do anything about it.
Sure enough, when Mom's show had ended and she wiggled her plate at me to indicate I could take it back to the kitchen, she had stuffing crumbs sticking to her cheek and scattered in her bangs. It didn't take long for her to stand up from the couch with an annoyed grunt, trying to wipe smears of potatoes from her lap.
"Jesus, Connor, why is everything you cook always so sticky? I'm going to take a shower. Don't you start washing dishes 'til I'm done."
"Yes, ma'am," I replied, turning my back to the living room in an attempt to stifle the triumph in my voice. I busied myself wiping down the counters instead, since that didn't require any of our precious hot water, and listened for her footsteps as she tromped down the hall to the bathroom.
The pipes squealed as she turned the shower on. I forced myself to wait, and listen. Only when the white noise from the spray started getting irregular, with splashes that meant she was actually under the water and therefore unlikely to come out until she was done, did I drop the dishcloth and dart back into the living room.
Her phone was sitting on the end table, plugged into its charging cord.
Before I touched it, I glanced down the hall to be sure Maddy was in our room. Then I snatched the phone up and hit the home button. Mom's phone was a much fancier model than mine and Maddy's, and when the screen lit up it asked for a passcode. I tapped the number one, four times. The home screen appeared.
I didn't even know why Mom bothered with a passcode if she was going to make it that easy, but whatever.
Call log first. I tapped contacts, then recent calls, then...
"Shit." There were calls from this morning, but every one was marked as an unknown number. The only one from today with a name was the Bucky Mart where Mom worked, and it had come in an hour before dinner, so that wasn't it.
This didn't make sense. Hadn't she been on hold? The calls should have been outbound, so why would the number be unknown? I looked up the details for all three from this morning, but they each showed as an incoming call. The first was a missed call, the second was an hour and eight minutes, and the third was twenty-three minutes long. Who called someone and then put them on hold for an hour?
I closed out of the call log and opened Mom's text messages instead. Nothing. Some chatter about a poker game at Bible study on Thursday, a couple work-related threads with co-workers, and some chats with "M.J.", her weed dealer up in Colorado who occasionally hooked her up. Nothing about our child support. Or our dad. Or a seedy business deal involving the sale of her children to a porn producer, or child prostitution ring, or whatever the hell she was trying to do.
Oh god, the more I thought about it the more I was freaking out. You heard stories about this kind of stuff, articles online about kids kidnapped in the middle of a shopping mall and never heard from again, police busts of organizations selling kiddy porn on the dark web. Ashton Kutcher made a whole speech to the U.S. Senate about it not that long ago—Maddy and I had watched the video on YouTube, and we both cried.
I had to find out what was going on.
I closed out the messages and started looking for Mom's banking app, as it was my last hope. I found the icon, but by now my fingers were trembling so hard I accidentally tapped the one next to it instead. A blank white screen pulled up as whatever it was loaded. I hit the home button impatiently, because I was running out of time—we had limited hot water, so Mom wouldn't be in the shower more than five minutes.
But the damn white app wouldn't close. I heard the shower screech off, and thumped the home button about a jillion times in panic. If I couldn't kill the stupid thing it was going to get me caught.
Suddenly, black lettering blossomed across the center of the screen, in bold font like a company logo.
Elioud Biogenesis.
The words slid up to the top of the screen to make room for a login form. The user ID was populated already: MadisonHayes04. And a cursor was blinking at me from the password field.
Down the hall, the bathroom door opened. I jammed the home button in desperation, and finally the app minimized. I clicked the power button to shut off the screen and was just putting the phone back when Mom poked her head out of the hall.
"Connor Lee Hayes, you better not be messin' with my stuff. I'll whup your ass."
"Just cleaning the living room, Mom," I said, and because I didn't have a rag or wipe or anything, I rubbed the heel of my hand over a water stain on the end table. It would have been obvious to anyone who ever did chores that I was lying, but Mom had never been much of a housekeeper. She grunted.
"Go do the dishes."
"Yes, ma'am."
Somehow, the cooking and cleaning had fallen to me years ago. It wasn't exactly that Mom and Maddy had assigned me the work. It's just that I was the only one who cared whether we lived in a pigsty and ate anything besides beanie weenies and mac 'n cheese. So I took care of it, and I guess we'd all gotten used to the arrangement. I filled the sink with lukewarm water and a bit of Dawn, pulled on a pair of rubber gloves, and got to work.
But in my head I was repeating the strange words from that app. Elioud Biogenesis. Genesis, like the Bible. Eli, like the name, and -oud, like...
Cloud. That would work, I could remember that.
I couldn't write it down until I got back to my room, and it was probably safer if I didn't write it down at all. Still, I couldn't afford to forget. It was the only lead I had.
There was no indication that the app had anything to do with that disturbing conversation this morning. But it was weird that the user ID was my sister's name instead of one of the screen names Mom usually used. And whoever Mom was talking to had been particularly interested in Maddy. Maybe, if I checked it out, I'd get lucky and find a connection.
I got through the dishes as fast as I could, set them in the drying rack and hurried back to our bedroom. Maddy was lying on her stomach in her bunk, kicking her bare feet in the air as she flipped through a magazine and chatted with one of her friends—or maybe all of them, it sounded like a group call—on her phone. I paused for a second, listening to her recount the blow-by-blow excitement of the afternoon. She had changed out of her swimsuit and was in a pair of faded red pajama boxers, printed with little Texas state shapes. She had the matching tank top on, which I couldn't see while she was on her belly, but I knew it said Everything's Bigger In Texas right over the boobs.
She twisted over her shoulder long enough to smile and toss me a Ding-Dong from her stash, which I caught against my bruised stomach and immediately regretted. Then she returned to her magazine.
My throat tightened up. Most siblings would be at each other's throats sharing a bedroom. But Maddy and I didn't really fight. Like, ever. We might annoy or tease each other sometimes, but each of us was deeply in tune with the other's moods and needs, even when we disagreed. I admired her fire, her courage and unshakable determination. She respected my introverted tendencies, and encouraged my imaginative and sometimes nerdy interests. Together we had always been able to achieve whatever we set our minds to, from building a three-room treehouse entirely by ourselves down by the creek one summer, to making sure Maddy passed ninth grade math and I survived gym class in one piece. We were totally different in personality, but we were two sides of the same coin. I couldn't imagine life without her.
As appalling as it was that Mom was bargaining with unknown people for Maddy, I was grateful she was insisting on making us a package deal. I didn't even care that it was for money, and not because she actually gave a damn about me. I just couldn't stand the thought of someone taking my sister away.
I climbed up into my bunk and got my phone out. Its internet browser was crap, but I wasn't about to go out into the living room to use the family computer for this. I typed Elioud Biogenesis into the search bar, and waited impatiently while the little hourglass icon emptied and refilled a dozen times.
I was given a single page of results, none of which corresponded to an evil human trafficking company. There were some research papers in what looked like Russian or another foreign language I couldn't decipher.  A couple of new age, pseudo-religious articles that seemed to think the terms had to do with angels and crystal divination and the like. And a website titled Holistic Energy Healing that defined biogenesis as a way of channeling spiritual energy through music and amulets to cure things like cancer, obesity and depression.
Mom would rather do her own dental work than get involved with this kind of stuff. She considered all non-Christian mysticism to be Satanic, frou-frou nonsense. Which was ironic considering how mystical most of the Christian beliefs were, but I wasn't about to make that point with her.
I tried a couple other search engines, but the results were all the same. The internet didn't seem to know anything about this company or whatever it was. Suspicious, since I knew damn well there was a smartphone app for the thing. But my phone's generic Chinese operating system wasn't showing it in its app store, either.
That left only one option.
Tomorrow, I'd go to the library.