The Amanda Project: Book 4: Unraveled by Amanda Valentino, Cathleen Davitt Bell Read Free Book Online

silently inside my head. Or sometimes I hum out loud if I don’t think it will be distracting. I pick a song I think is going to help me.Sometimes it’s something that distracts the person, sometimes it’s something that is so the opposite of them . . . it puts me in a rhythm that basically they cannot respond to. Like a modern and dissonant harmony for someone who only can hear pop melodies. They’ll tune the song—and me—out.”
    “I would definitely think the singing would draw attention to you,” Callie said.
    “If you do it right,they don’t notice. Think about music you hear in a store. You don’t think twice about it, right? If the store were quiet, then you’d feel weird.”
    “Um . . . okay?” Nia said. Obviously, this was going to take a little more explaining.
    “The trick with the locker,” I went on. “The other day I used that when Mrs. Mukoski caught me out of class during History without a pass. I saw her coming and Istarted to hum ‘Strangers in the Night.’ Do you know it?”
    “As a classic example of schmaltz, yes,” Nia said.
    “But not to Mrs. Mukoski,” I said. “She was probably in college when that song was popular. To her, it might be all about falling in love. So I looked not exactly at the teacher, not exactly away, more like at the open locker, so Mrs. Mukoski started looking at that locker also. She’swondering, Why am I looking at this locker? Why is it open? Has something been taken from inside it? And then she’s hearing the music, and it’s triggering a memory for her. She’s suddenly remembering some 1960s sorority dance or something. She wasn’t thinking about me, that’s for sure. And two seconds after I was gone, she wouldn’t remember that I was even there.”
    “That works?” Hal asked.
    “Ofcourse it works.”
    “You know,” said Nia, “what you’re doing has a name.”
    “It does?”
    “It’s called misdirection,” she said. “I read about it in this book about Harry Houdini. It’s how magic tricks work. Misdirection means you flick your wrist as you pull a quarter out of a kid’s ear so the kid thinks you’re maybe flicking a quarter out of your sleeve instead of guessing that you’re hiding it insidea closed fist. Misdirection is how pickpockets make it so you don’t feel their hand in your purse—they’re stepping on your toe, apologizing, directing your attention to something else. Psychologists have done studies—if someone wearing a red handkerchief in their jacket pocket tries to sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, you’re less likely to question them than if they pitch the bridge with no hanky.It’s like your brain gets distracted by the color. It breaks up your concentration, your ability to think logically.”
    “Wow,” I said. “What was that word?”
    “Misdirection,” Nia repeated.
    I felt a little stupid for not knowing that word, but when I looked at Callie she shrugged, and then Hal said, “Nice SAT word, Nia.”
    “Misdirection,” I repeated, trying out how the word sounded on my lips. Ididn’t say that what I was doing was misdirection times ten, that even Harry Houdini couldn’t disappear the way I had been disappearing lately.
    “So what do we do now?” Hal said. “How do we walk out from behind this tree and get into the campus without being seen?”
    “It’s just like I said,” I explained. “We walk in the opposite direction of the campus, and we walk like we’re late. We split up.They’re probably looking for a group of kids. If we each seem to be alone, the guards see us but they dismiss us right away. The most important thing is that we’re not threatening to them, and as guards, their brains are trained to focus only on what might possibly be a threat.”
    “Okay,” Callie said.
    “And Hal?” I added. “Don’t swing your arms. It doesn’t make you look purposeful. It looks toomuch like a wave. And the last thing we want to be doing is waving at these guards.”
    “Whatever,” Hal