Read The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled for Free Online Page B

inside.
    Like everything else with Amanda, we probably didn’t just “happen upon” the tattoo place. Later, I wondered if the club date’s sole purpose was to situate us there.
    “Who gets these?” I said. The idea of being marked by something, permanently, of never being able to change that . . . I’d never understood the appeal.
    But then Amanda, who changeseverything about herself from day to day, lifted the sleeve of her biker jacket to show me her henna tattoo, a coyote design on her inner arm. “Want to pick something too?” she asked. “For the show?”
    “Okay,” I said, reminding myself that these tattoos wash off. I pointed to a canary. “How about that? You know, a music maker?”
    Amanda shook her head. She was wearing a platinum blond wig that hungdown past her shoulders, red velvet leggings, and sneakers with platform heels. With the biker jacket, she looked, frankly, like the lead singer from some kind of screamer band.
    That afternoon, through her music, I’d kept feeling her almost tell me something and then hold back. She would start phrases with a lot of weight to them and then she’d end them softly. Chords got complicated, and neverquite resolved. I liked what she was doing musically, but it made me feel worried.
    But now, in the tattoo parlor, she was smiling widely, like something was funny, and I followed her finger with my eyes to a crescent-moon of an animal with short legs and a long tail that always made me think of the southwest.
    I laughed.
    The chameleon. Master of camouflage. A lizard who can go anywhere withoutbeing seen, and pass as anything—a leaf, a dried stick, a pile of sand. They fit into their surroundings so well, they seem to disappear.
    “I guess that’s perfect,” I said.
    “It is,” she answered back. “But not for the reason you’re thinking.”
    “Huh?” I said.
    “People used to think the chameleon changed for camouflage, but we know now there’s a lot more to them than just hiding.”
    “Then what’sthe hiding all about?” I asked. “They do it just for fun?”
    “Scientists now think it’s all about communication,” Amanda said. “Chameleons change color to send messages to each other.”
    “Really?” I said. “But how could that even work?”
    “You tell me,” she said, staring with her large gray-green eyes at the animal etching on the wall.
     
    “Hiding in plain sight is something Amanda taught me,” Iexplained to Callie, Hal, and Nia now. We were still hiding in the shade of the maple tree across the street from the heavily guarded Orion College of Pharmaceuticals. “Or sort of taught me. When we were little, we used to practice.” They were staring. “Together.” Still: stares. “For fun?” Hopelessly not getting this. “We’d pick a stranger at the library and follow them around town as they did theirerrands.”
    “Wow,” said Hal. “That certainly is an unusual form of entertainment.”
    “It was,” I insisted. “You see, there were tricks we started to learn and I’ve kind of gone on to perfect them on my own. Like I was telling you: lockers. In school you can do a lot with lockers.”
    “You hide inside lockers?” Callie asked.
    “No,” I said. “I can’t fit inside a locker. Plus I don’t know the combinations.Plus other people’s lockers probably have old food and nasty gym socks in them. But all I need is one open locker to keep a teacher from seeing me when I’m in the hallway and not supposed to be.”
    “Wait,” said Nia. “You can be walking down an empty hallway and pass a teacher and they seriously will not see you?”
    “It’s not so much that he hasn’t seen me,” I said. “It’s more like he doesn’t knowthat he’s seen me. Or he doesn’t remember that he cares.”
    Nia, naturally, needed evidence. “So . . . how? How exactly do you do it?”
    “I slow my pace,” I began, “but almost imperceptibly. Then I kind of—I don’t know—I hold my breath in a certain way. I sing