Read Online Soulprint by Megan Miranda - Free Book Online Page A

again.
    â€œHe used to leave me secret messages,” I say. I had my head in a book when he passed me a note on the first day, a slip of paper taped to the inside of my cup when he set it before me, so only I could see. I saw the paper before I saw him, and so I liked him even before I set eyes upon him. The paper said:
I’m Ellis
. I looked up at him then, and he was looking right at me, right into me, with half a smile—so unlike anyone who had ever worked there before. When everything is the same, the different can blindside you. And then another guard said to him, “Mark, take out the trash.” And it felt like a secret, a code, that he was giving just to me.
    â€œAnd?” Cameron says. He looks away again, I guess becauseI’m standing in nothing but a towel. “You had a fight because you found out he was pretending?”
    A fight? Oh, if only. When I don’t respond, he looks at me again. I smile at him the same way he looked at me over his shoulder when we walked into this place—like I know something more than he does.
    He notices. “How did you find out?” he asks, trying a different approach.
    â€œHe gave himself away,” I say. The notes had continued, every day, same as his smile. They’d say things like,
Where’s the junk food?
And I knew he could’ve just asked anyone, but it was like a game, or a test, maybe. So I’d go to the cabinet and grab the chips, eat half the bag, and then leave them out in the middle of the table when I left the room. We were communicating in code. Establishing trust.
    I’d hide the notes in my pockets, flush them when I was back in the privacy of my bathroom, something wild and hopeful running through my veins.
    â€œI found out,” I say, “when I caught him in my room a few days before the end of his assignment.”
    â€œAren’t there cameras?” Cameron asks.
    â€œHow did
you
get in?” I ask. “Same way, I assume.”
    Ellis—no,
Dominic
—acted surprised when I opened the door, with his hands still hovering over the keyboard of my computer. He froze. Then he hit a few buttons, turning the monitor to black. He put his hands in his pockets, and he smiled.
    It was the same way he smiled at me the first day—crooked and personal, as if he were talking to me without making asound. It was the way he looked at me, like I was a girl he saw walking by, not an assignment. But that was the moment I knew that he was pretending—that he had always been pretending. I guess maybe I had been pretending, too.
    â€œDo you ever think of getting out of here?” Dominic had asked, looking anywhere but at my computer. It’s not like the guards never go through my things. They do, all the time, but they don’t hide it. This was the first time I realized that maybe computer searches weren’t private. And I was thinking about the things I’d been researching.
    â€œNo point,” I’d said. I thought about it every second of every day. I thought about it as I looked at the sky, at the sea, at the blackness behind my eyelids, but I made a point never to say the things that were merely hope, things that might burst if I gave voice to them, stranded out in the air by themselves.
    â€œYou don’t want to?”
    I didn’t understand at first. I thought I did, I thought he was going to help. And then his eyes shifted from one electronic device to the next: the computer, the printer, the light fixture, the clock.
    I felt the truth seep into my bones, like acid.
    â€œAre there cameras in here?” I asked, turning away so I could mask my expression. Turn it to calm. How else would he know?
    â€œNo,” he said, “and you know that.” It’s true. The humanitarian groups are allowed to screen this island twice a year, to make sure I am treated humanely. Like an animal.
You can keep her forever, just give her the decency of some privacy
. What a