The Revelation Part 3

Previously on the Revelation: After Sarikah’s basketball game, Humayra and Aleban hide from Mrs Piddlebe (the town gossip) in the locker room staircase and overhear Sarikah’s friends bullying her. Sarikah stands up for herself but refuses to say anything more on the subject. Humayra is still mad at Aleban for going into Sarikah’s room and taking her stuff without her permission and hasn’t really looked at what Aleban stole (a small bundle of papers). Humayra believes that with some space, Sarikah will be more willing to talk, an idea Aleban doesn’t share. 

She wasn’t. More open or talkative, that is. In fact, if anything, Sarikah was even more secretive over the next few days. She avoided talking about what her former friends had said, and while she didn’t exactly hide herself in her room, she didn’t make it easy for us to talk to her. She was eating, or reading a really interesting book, or studying for an important test that she just remembered was happening. And then, nearly a week after the bullying incident, Sarikah and I found ourselves in the living room together. Just as I was about to casually sit next to her and thoroughly interrogate her, as only a mom can, a car beeped outside. Suddenly Sarikah had to go, because she was going with some of her friends to the mall: she’d forgotten to tell us that they had invited her before school yesterday. And then she essentially leapt out the door before I or even Aleban could say anything.

“Are you going to sit there staring at the door for the next four hours, waiting for our daughter to come home so you can try and fail to question her, or are you finally going to admit that something’s up and look at what I took from Sarikah’s room?” 

“I did look.” I respond, not taking my eyes off the kitchen door. “At her game. Then I looked away once I saw her name on the top sheet, like you should’ve done since you’re the one who suggested privacy as a core family principle. And I’m not saying that something’s up. Sarikah is definitely hiding secrets. I’m just not going to resort to stealing to find them out. I am going to sit here and succeed in questioning my daughter once she comes home. There is no way I could fail. I’m so good at interrogation that I should work for the government. The tricks I use are infallible.”

“First, she knows your tricks won’t fail which is why she won’t let you get near her, because if she does, she knows she’ll talk. Second, I just realized I haven’t said sorry about breaking a core principle—and I know I should be saying sorry to her, not you—” he adds when I open my mouth to say just that. “But I am sorry for showing you the papers at Sarikah’s game instead of at home and not giving you a heads up that I broke a core family principle. I should’ve told you that first and then led with what was on the papers. I was scared of your wrath and shocked by what was written on them that I handled the whole situation badly. ”. I peel my eyes off the door and narrow my eyes. “Is this an attempt to get me to read those papers?” 

“No,” Aleban rubs the back of his head. “This is an honest apology.”

“Good,” I say, one stress gone and turned back to stare holes into the door.  

Aleban sighs. “Come on, Humayra. Sarikah seriously isn’t going to open up to you anytime soon. Just look at what I took from her room. It's already stolen, and you know that, so there’s no harm in taking a look.” He takes the sheaf of papers and waves it in front of my face. “Please?”

“Fine,” I sigh, reluctantly tearing my gaze away from the entrance. With a flourish, Aleban sets the papers beside me, and with only the slightest bit of guilt, I grab the top one and look at it–really look at it.

At first glance, I’m puzzled. Why would Aleban steal this from Sarikah’s room? There’s nothing extraordinary about it. There’s a very lengthy English assignment written on the top page and—I feel the paper between my fingers. It’s standard copy paper; the kind you buy in bulk at Staples. I glance at the assignment again, wondering why— and then suddenly, I see it. Now I understand why Aleban was willing to risk Sarikah’s and my wrath. The paper looks normal, yes… and there is an English assignment written on it, but the letters in all the words are… scrambled. Somehow, at first glance, the words look normal, but they’re really not. 

“Why would an English teacher do that?” I ask, confused. 

“They wouldn’t” Aleban replies. “It’s not a real English assignment. It’s code. It took me a few hours to decode it, but—” He takes the next page, a half-sheet with only a few lines on it and hands it to me. “I did it. Look.” I do. In Aleban’s neat handwriting are the words: Rook top X  1 6 4 9  Next Kill 3. “I’m not sure exactly what each letter or word means, but I think the gist is that it’s some kind of homework assignment. Underneath it were more assignments, all using the same code, and some of them had Sarikah’s writing all over them.” 

I raise an eyebrow. “This is a homework assignment? Aleban, it has the word kill in it. Kill. What if it’s saying she has to kill 3 people. That would—” I pause and take a deep breath. “Okay. Did you figure out why Sarikah’s doing mystery assignments in code that have the word kill in them? Or where she got all this?” 

“No. You guys were out shopping and came home before I could look at everything.”

I raise my eyebrows. “There’s stuff other than this?” 

“Yup.” Aleban looks at me hopefully. “The rest of it is in her room. Sarikah’s out. She probably won’t be back for several hours. Do you want to check the rest out?”

I hesitate, guilt twisting  my stomach. This was probably going too far. I mean, going against the family privacy rule once was one thing, but twice? Then again, Sarikah told us everything. We were a close- knit family. But she had kept two huge secrets from us: her former friends taunting her and whatever these papers were. What if this secret was dangerous? Or she was in over head, and didn’t want to tell us? I had to know. We had to know. 

 “Lead the way,” I tell my husband, locking my guilt away. 

Sariakh’s room was across from ours, with a queen bed in the center, a recently-painted gray wall, and a midnight blue ceiling with dark stars that were leftovers from Sarikah’s childhood. Aleban leads me to the closet and pulls out three gray boxes, each with a numbered padlock on them. Quickly, he unlocks all of them and flips the lids open. “I don’t even want to know how you found the codes,” I mutter. Aleban smirks. We bring the boxes next to the bed and crouch on the ground next to them, peering inside. Two of the boxes were stacked with papers. The other was filled with mysterious objects with unknown purposes: a small black sphere that made me think of a bomb (although that might’ve been because of the word kill on Sarikah’s ‘homework’ assignments), a metallic disk with the word Rook inscribed on it and a small, smooth oval object that reminded me of a pocket knife.  

“We’ll… save that box for last,” Aleban says, jerking his head towards the mystery-object box. “Oh, I almost forgot. Here’s the instructions on how I decoded the paper I showed you.” He hands me a sheet covered with his handwriting, with the decoded word circled at the bottom. I nod in thanks and grab the thick stack of papers from the box in front of me. Aleban grabs some from his box, and together, we spread the papers out around us, busily reading, decoding, and occasionally gasping in shock at the contents of the papers.

We’re so busy, in fact, that we don’t realize Sarikah has come home. We were so occupied searching through this secret life of our daughter’s, staring in dismay at the secrets that she didn’t trust us to keep, that we didn’t notice her until it was too late. 

“Mom, Dad! Where are you? I’m home!” My head shoots up as I look at Aleban in a panic.

“I thought she was going to be gone for several hours?!” I whisper. Aleban glances down at his watch and his eyes widen in shock. “She was. We lost track of time!”

Sariakh’s voice, louder now like she’s walking towards her room, momentarily interrupts our panicking. “Mom, Dad, where are you? You guys aren’t doing anything inappropriate, right?” Cursing, Aleban starts grabbing papers off the floor and gathering them in a haphazard pile. “What are you doing?” I hiss, pulling the pile away from him and spreading the papers to try to figure out their original order. 

“What do you think?” Aleban retorts, pulling several papers towards him before I can stop him. “I’m trying to put everything back the way we found it.”

“And you think piling them any which way is going to help?” I ask, swatting away his efforts to grab more papers. “Our daughter is as organized as they come. She’s never going to believe she left them this messy.” 

“Mom, Dad, you guys are here, right? You didn’t somehow manage to teleport to another—ohhh.” Sarikah’s voice abruptly trails off as she sees us sprawled on her bedroom floor, her papers about forgery and bombs and hacking and all sorts of other illegal stuff spread crazily around us. For a second, no one moves. Then Sarikah sighs. “Great. You guys know.”

“Know what?” I say hesitantly, even though I’m pretty sure I already know the answer. Our daughter pauses, taking a deep breath before she says the words I was dreading: “Mom, Dad, I’m a spy”.