Page 9 of Trapper Road

I’m momentarily speechless.

Lanny rolls her eyes, which of course makes him defensive. “No, really, I can show you the websites that prove it. Kevin showed me.”

I set down my glass, trying to figure out the best way to respond without setting him off. What I want to say is that Kevin is clearly full of shit and doesn’t know what he’s talking about, but that’s a guaranteed way to turn Connor defensive, which won’t help matters.

“Honey,” I say instead, “Whatever Kevin showed you, there are massive amounts of data you can look at. Don’t just dive into one site and believe everything it says. You know better than that. If you had done that with Melvin—”

That hits home to him. He knows how many wildly inaccurate “factual” websites there are out there that deal with our whole family. According to one of them, Connor is actually a clone. According to another, he doesn’t really exist, and an actor plays him for the cameras.

People do love their fake reality.

He leans forward. “It’s not the same thing. It’s not just one site. There are plenty—”

“Do me a favor,” Sam says. “Check out who runs the site. Find out what they’ve studied and published. Find out who they are and why they’re saying what they’re saying. Don’t believe everybody who claims to know the secret truth. In fact, don’t trust any of them.”

Connor crosses his arms defensively, but at least he seems to be listening.

“Unless you want to be giving a bunch of money to con artists for the rest of your life, you have to develop a really good bullshit detector. It can be tough to figure out which sources you can trust online and which you can’t. I can sit down with you and show you how people manipulate you, but ultimately, it’s really simple. They do it through fear, and if not fear, then making you feel superior and part of the secret. In fact,” he says, turning to include Lanny. “This is something that would benefit both of you. Maybe after you two finish the dishes, we can sit down together and talk more about it.”

Just like that, Sam seems to have defused the situation. For now.

Dinner concludes more friendly than I’d hoped, and Lanny and Connor even do the dishes without bickering. But I don’t altogether trust the peace.

It feels like a real storm is coming.

2

CONNOR

As always, the first thing I do when I get home from school is head straight to the mailbox. Most days it’s all boring adult crap, but today there’s something else: a large brown envelope buried amid a pile of junk mail. My heart rate jumps, my mouth going dry as I tug it free.

The return address is one I recognize: a remailing service Mom set up when we went on the run after she was acquitted and the crazies started threatening us. She didn’t want anyone being able to track us down, and so she opened accounts at several remailing companies to route letters through enough mailboxes that they became untraceable.

But really, there’s only one person she was using this for: my father, Melvin Royal.

Even though Dad died years ago, his letters kept coming. He’d planned for his death, writing dozens of letters ahead of time and giving them to friends to mail down the road. I remember standing in the kitchen one evening earlier this year, pouring myself a glass of water when Mom told us she’d shredded his final letter without reading it. At the time I’d told her I was okay with that because I knew that’s what she wanted to hear.

Mom was done with Dad. She’d made that much very clear to us. She’d happily carve all traces of him out of our lives. Lanny would, too, for that matter.

But the same wasn’t true for me. I couldn’t carve Dad out of my existence without carving away a piece of myself as well. So when I found another letter from him in the mailbox a few weeks later, I’d taken and hidden it before Mom could destroy it.

Since then, I’ve made it a priority to sneak to the mailbox every afternoon as soon as we get home from school so that I can intercept any letters from him before Mom or Lanny can find them and shred them. They’re my last ties to my dad — my last chance to try to understand him in his own words.

I glance over my shoulder to make sure Lanny’s already inside and quickly stuff the envelope in the waist of my pants against my back, letting my shirt fall over it to conceal it. My hands are shaking, my senses on edge as I return to the house. Lanny pounces the moment I’m through the door. Before I can even rearm the alarm, she’s making some snide comment about how I’d forgotten to put the laundry in the dryer and my clothes were going to smell like mildew, which was probably why I didn’t have a ton of friends.

Normally I’d let it go, but Dad’s letters always leave me in a strange mood. Anticipation and fear and giddiness and indignation and above everything else: anger. I turn it on her, lashing out. She’s surprised by the vehemence of my response, her eyes already glistening with tears.

That doesn’t stop her shouting at me.

I don’t have the time or patience for her bullshit. I throw up a hand, rolling my eyes. “I’m going to Kevin’s,” I tell her, not even bothering to let her finish before I stalk back through the door, slamming it behind me.

As I walk the several blocks to my friend’s, I can feel the envelope chafing against the skin of my lower back. I’m itchy with the desire to pull it out and rip it open, but I force myself to wait until I get to Kevin’s. He’ll want to know what it says as much as I do.

I’m lucky to have a friend like him who understands. I’m used to my father being a liability — a reason kids have always ostracized and bullied me. But Kevin isn’t like that. He doesn’t judge me for who my father was.

Kevin isn’t like the other kids in my class. He reads as much as I do, and he likes to think about things. He doesn’t just take what teachers and adults tell us at face value — he questions everything. He does his own research for fun, and he can spend hours debating almost any topic. He’s who taught me to question the climate change alarmists.

He’s also the one who told me I should question my assumptions about Dad. He’d pointed out that everything I knew about Melvin was filtered through my mom or the media — people with their own biases and slants. He pointed out that maybe the reason Mom put parental controls on our phones and computers to block us from looking up Dad online was because there was information out there she didn’t want us to find. Information that might not fit the narrative she’d always told us.

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