One (One Universe)

where I hid my cash. I would have stuffed it in my sock drawer, like a normal kid, but Michael and Max would have found it there in five seconds — they’d never think to look in the family closet. As soon as I open the door, Dad’s work bag falls out, and his gigantic key chain clinks against the ground. I suck in a breath, waiting to hear him stir upstairs. After a few seconds, he doesn’t.
    I stand on a folding chair, almost collapsing it when I step too close to the back of the seat. I curse, then regain my balance and stick my arm to the back of the high closet shelf, letting loose a sigh of relief when my fingers brush my old beat-up wallet.
    When I pull my arm back out, my fingers brush a box. I curse at Mom for shoving boxes of junk all over the place in the name of keeping a clean living room. The folding chair creaks, and as I reach down to steady myself, I knock the box off the shelf, spilling its contents everywhere.

TWENTY-TWO
    I scramble down from the chair and start to put everything back. There’s a bunch of random stuff — a faded movie ticket, a worn out twist-tie, a hospital bracelet so tiny it can only be from one of our births.
    Then I spot the crinkled edge of a photograph — an old-fashioned print. It’s of me as a little kid, sitting on the grass in a cotton summer dress, fine hair still faintly curly, my fingers bearing a hint of baby pudge.
    In the photo, preschooler-me tosses an apple in the air. On the back of the picture, Mom’s handwriting says, “Apple picking, Merrin, 4 years old.”
    Mom has every picture ever taken of the three of us printed, catalogued, and filed in albums that line the bookshelf in our living room. It’s something my grandfather, who was in the internment camps, made her promise to do, she told me once. The government seized all the Supers’ computers when they shoved them into the camps, and most of them never recovered the files.
    When we were little, we loved to leaf through the albums. I could narrate my infancy and toddlerhood just from having seen the snapshots. But I have never seen this picture. I look like I’m two instead of four, so miniature next to Dad’s shoe planted on the ground beside me.
    The grass pokes up around my bare legs, and the path behind me stretches on and on, out of frame, lined by thin-trunked trees. It’s the apple orchard, I realize, the one we’ve gone to every year, except this one, when I made excuse after excuse why I couldn’t go. Why I had to hang out with Elias instead.
    Mom must have taken this photo. She’s the photographer in the family, or at least, she was until we all pushed our indignant palms into the lens — me first, and then, more quickly, the boys. The oval leaves of the apple trees, browned at the edges, flutter down diagonally in the background. Even that young, I must have been so happy to feel that wind on my face.
    In the photo, I’m tossing an apple in the air. Mom’s gotten such a clear shot that it looks like the apple’s not even moving. I lean in to take one last look and realize — there’s no movement to that apple. None. No blur at all. Which would mean that Mom had a really fast shutter speed. Except for how blurred the wind has made the leaves in the background.
    My thumb senses a little bump in the back corner of the picture where I’m holding it. I lift it and see a tiny rectangular sticker: “Hub submission 497870c.”
    What would the Hub have wanted with this? And why would Mom have given it to them? I shove it in my bag.
    I pick up the box, which lays overturned and empty on the floor, and start tossing the stuff back in. My nails hit the inside base in my rush to stuff everything back in there, and the solid surface shifts down, ever so slightly.
    There’s a false bottom to this box.
    I wedge my nails into the sliver of an opening, breaking one of them. It still doesn’t pull up. I swear and suck at my fingertip, then try again to wedge it into the gap and pry up the false bottom. The space underneath is so shallow that it would be impossible for the casual looker to realize that any of the box’s space was missing. Inside is a single file folder, about an eighth of an inch thick. The top tab is labeled, “Grey, M — 497870.”
    It’s a damn paper file.
    My hands shake so hard now. I will them to steady so the papers inside won’t fall out onto the floor. Every paper reads in stark black-and-white.
    Mom must have made a copy of this folder and smuggled it