Shards

by F. J. R. Titchenell

  I’d burnt out a few bugs in the counselor’s office before with varying levels of success. Courtney volunteered there, even after school sometimes. She had full access, codes and keys for systems we’d never broken into, and now we had her ear, or Ben did.

  I knew it was going to be a hard sell, but Ben’s a good salesman. It only took him fifteen minutes of that reluctant, excellent charm routine when we found her after school.

  “You’re sure you two will be okay?” Ben asked three separate times once she had finally agreed to help, when I told him to go enjoy the carnival.

  “We’ll be fine. And no one will come looking for me. People will notice if you’re not there.”

  That was true. It was also true that I needed to keep having a good sanity day if we were going to pull this off, and once we had, when it was too late to screw it up, Ben and I were going to have to spend some intensive, probably very uncomfortable time together, thanks to four monosyllabic words.

  Bring the new boy.

  Just like that, after all the trouble I’d gone to keeping the secret, Ben now had permission to know about The Old Man, right at the most inconvenient possible time. I wanted to tell him, yes, but I’d missed the window when he might not take it too badly, and if I’d ever felt tactful and charming in my life, it certainly wasn’t now.

  Aldo and Julie sat within view of the hallway intersections on either side of the counselor’s office, “studying.” They were both bluetoothed and ready to sound the alarm, and, in Aldo’s case, ready to talk us through any unforeseen technical problems.

  “I do this under extreme protest,” Courtney reminded me yet again when she’d let us into the office and immediately pocketed her spare key, as if it were a beacon of guilt that she could contain with the signal-blocking power of her delicate cashmere sweater.

  “Noted. Now, first of all, what files were the Splinters you saw looking at?”

  Courtney fished another key out of the counselor’s desk, as if it were a tiny venomous snake, and stared at all the drawers it fit, lost, by the look of her, in recollection as well as doubt.

  “I’m not sure. Here,” she said, opening a drawer and pointing to a ridiculously large section of it. “I think it was here.”

  “Great,” I said. “So, the Slivers might be interested in looking up a junior whose name might or might not begin with A through M.”

  “Sorry, I wasn’t exactly paying attention to the files at the time!”

  I left her there doing her panic-control deep breathing and started unscrewing the panel over one of the electrical sockets, focusing hard on the feel of my shoes’ rubber soles beneath my feet. Aldo had made this process as quick and idiot-proof as possible for me, but the risk of electric shock is one I’ve always found difficult to measure rationally.

  No miraculously useful recollection had struck Courtney by the time I finished planting the new bug, so I straightened up, shook the computer mouse, and cleared my throat.

  “Password,” I prompted her.

  She balked as if we hadn’t discussed this.

  “You’re here,” I reminded her. “I’m sure you’re very uncomfortable and conflicted. Being difficult about it isn’t going to cancel out what you’re doing, so you might as well make it as quick and easy and productive as possible.”

  “I’m here because you and your friends claim to be enemies of the things that tried to kidnap me!” Courtney hissed at me. “Or at least, Ben says so, since apparently I’m not worth your time to talk to yourself!”

  “Would you have agreed to help if I’d been the one asking?”

  “You never know,” said Courtney. “Maybe I would!”

  This didn’t help her case any.

  “Ben gets me better odds than that,” I said, and she made a noise of irritation that didn’t seem to have anything to do with the solidity of my argument.

  “If you’d just tell me what you know and what your plans are, if I could think about the problem without one hand tied behind my back, if I could understand what we’re looking for, maybe I could be a little more useful!”

  “I know you haven’t been studying them long,” I said, “but you have to realize how much you sound like one of them right now.”

  “What do you want me to say? That I prefer being kept in the dark? Are you telling me you wouldn’t find that suspicious?”

  “Ahem,” Aldo pronounced dryly over the line. “Not that I don’t like a good catfight as much as the next guy, but I feel obligated to remind you that the program will take at least ten minutes to work its magic, depending on the precise specs of the lovely state-budget-provided computer in there, and I’m sure neither of you feel like hanging around for the sheer thrill of it.”

  I looked pointedly at the computer and then back at Courtney. She took the keyboard.

  “Don’t watch,” she said.

  This time I gave the disbelieving stare.

  “Tick tock,” Aldo reminded us.

  “Fine.” I turned around and covered my eyes while she logged in.

  I plugged in the flash drive and clicked through Aldo’s instructions. Courtney and I waited for the spyware to load in a silence that was quite awkward, but not particularly silent with all her sighing. At last, he announced, “I’m in.”

  We both turned to the computer and watched the cursor moving spastically across the screen by remote access.

  “Let’s see what we have here.”

  “Can we go now?” Courtney asked.

  “I wouldn’t,” Julie told us. “Mrs. Whannell’s headed your way.”

  “Is it a problem?” I asked.

  “No, I think she’s just getting something from her office. You’ll be fine if you stay still a moment.”

  “I got a problem for you,” Aldo said. “Half the activity on this thing is in Outlook, and it’s got an extra password on it.”

  I stepped aside and gestured for Courtney to take over again. She folded her arms stayed where she was.

  “You said you needed to get into the office computer. You never said anything about Mr. Montresor’s accounts.”

  I folded mine too and made myself smile a little, for purely communicative purposes, even though the situation wasn’t at all pleasant. “So you do know his password, then.”

  “I—no!” But she must have realized it was too late for the lie to stick. “And supposing I did, that’s not just school security. Mr. Montresor uses that account for personal stuff! That’s why it’s locked!”

  “If there’s anything useful here, it’ll be in there,” I explained as reasonably as I could.

  “Think of it as practice,” Julie coaxed in our ears. “You’re an investigative journalist, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. Let’s say I’m practicing protecting my sources,” Courtney countered.

  “We don’t have time for this,” I said. “The next teacher who passes by could be headed here. You have my word, we’re not interested in his credit card numbers or porn collection or secret unpublished romance novels or whatever else he has in there that’s so ‘personal.’ This is strictly Splinter related. Are you going to help us or not?”

  Courtney’s arms stayed folded. “No. He trusted me with that. We’re not even supposed to share passwords, but it was the only way I could get any real work done when he’s never around!”

  I knew already that I was going to regret whatever happened next.

  I lie a lot. I spy, I coerce, I trick, I steal when I have to. There are reasons not many people trust me. But I had never betrayed anyone’s trust once I’d willingly accepted it. I respect that boundary and other people who recognize it.

  And I’d never forced a Network member or another ECNS to do anything. Strongly encouraged, maybe, but not forced. I’d never found it necessary. People were either cut out for membership or they weren’t, and those who were appreciated the stakes.

  Courtney wasn’t a member, and she wasn’t an ECNS. Under the old system, I probably never would have selected her
, and if I had, there would have been time to help her see how things were, to come to an understanding. This was exactly why I’d dreaded all this business of working with people who couldn’t be kept entirely uninformed, but couldn’t be trusted either.

  “Is Mrs. Whannell still in her office?” I asked, even gladder than I’d expected that Ben wasn’t on the line this time. He didn’t need to hear this.

  “I haven’t heard her leave,” answered Julie.

  I could practically hear Aldo craning his neck. “Yeah, she’s still there.”

  “If I screamed right now, would she hear me?”

  “Definitely,” said Aldo. Then, “Um . . . what?”

  “Mina?” Julie added her apprehension.

  “On the count of five, then,” I told Courtney, “I’ll appease your conscience and turn us in. One.”

  Courtney’s arms stayed folded, but her face tensed with shock and, in spite of her politician’s restraint, an easily detectible quantity of panic.

  “Nice try,” she said with artificial confidence.

  “Two.”

  “You won’t get yourself expelled just to spite me!”

  If I’d been in a better mood, I might have laughed at her. Perfect students, people who toed the line right down the middle, always imagined such a ridiculously narrow margin of error around it.

  “No, I’ll get in trouble. I’ve been in trouble before. You, on the other hand, stand a decent chance of being deposed. Three.”

  I didn’t know if that was true, if the line for student government was that thin. By the look on Courtney’s face, she believed it might be.

  “Please. I can’t.”

  “Four.”

  Courtney released her arms, narrowed her eyes, and said, as if it were meant to be the most devastating piece of news ever delivered, “I don’t like you, Mina.”

  I pushed the keyboard a little closer to her.

  “That’s a big club,” I told her. “Do it. Now.”

  She never took those dark brown, reprehensive, very possibly human eyes off me while she typed a hybrid of Mr. Montresor’s three favorite candies right into Aldo’s waiting key capture program.

  I didn’t seek the pointless, artificial comfort of looking away.

  10.

  Homecoming

  Ben

  I didn’t want to think about Splinters.

  I didn’t want to think about Mina Todd’s crusade.

  More than anything, I just didn’t want to be afraid.

  I just wanted to be Ben Pastor, ordinary high school student, for one day of my life.

  We only had a half-day of classes, letting out early so we could enjoy the Homecoming carnival on the soccer field. Though I wanted to look out for Mina, she said I’d be more useful enjoying myself.

  She didn’t need to tell me twice.

  Like everything in Prospero, the Homecoming carnival was small but enthusiastic. Most of the faculty participated, either sitting in on the dunking or pie-throwing booths, or supervising activities. Mr. Finn stood by a catapult he had built, wearing a garishly striped jacket and a straw hat like an old carnival barker, promising to launch a pumpkin all the way to the football field.

  Nearly every club hosted a fundraising booth, and with allowance money saved up, I made sure to check out almost every one of them. (I was brave, but no way was I going to stop by the drama club’s massage booth and listen to Alexei Smith giving his students tips on proper massage techniques.) I won a few cheap trinkets at the dart throw and ring toss booths and gave Kevin a run for his money at the obstacle course, though his years on the soccer team left me in the dust during the final stretch.

  I had to buy him a frozen lemonade after that loss—a price I was willing to pay. Hanging out with Kevin was refreshing. He knew about Splinters, but he wouldn’t let them rule his life. Though I didn’t agree with his decision not to fight them, it was good to be able to spend time with someone I could talk to about them without having it steer every conversation.

  After my loss at the obstacle course, I wasn’t going to let him take the day unchallenged. Looking for a victory of my own, I led him to the most popular part of the carnival: The Poettes’ Wrestling Ring of Doom.

  Really, it wasn’t so much a ring of doom as it was a section of lawn near the faculty parking lot that had been roped off so kids could wrestle each other in padded sumo suits, but it looked like a lot of fun. Top it off with most of the Poettes themselves standing on the sidelines cheering the fighters along in their warm-weather cheerleading outfits, and it looked like a good time all around.

  I had a good thirty pounds of muscle on Kevin, but it didn’t make that much of a difference once we were both strapped into the sumo suits. We toddled and hopped toward each other, getting laughs from the audience and particularly loud cheers from Haley and Madison. Kevin pushed me flat on my back once. By the time I was helped back to my feet, I had figured out how these suits worked and knocked Kevin down the next three times. I yelled triumphantly as the student referee declared me winner to the applause of the small audience that had gathered, which probably would have been bigger if this hadn’t been when we finally heard the cursing and screams preceding the sound of breaking glass as Mr. Finn’s airborne pumpkin destroyed the windshield of a car in the faculty parking lot.

  That night, the Prospero Poets went up against their bitter rivals, the Braiwood Tigers, packed bleachers on both sides of the football field. While the Braiwood side was mostly full of students and parents, it seemed like anyone from Prospero who could show up did, with plenty of Prospero pride to go around.

  If only Prospero pride were a little less creepy.

  The problem came from our school’s mascot, the Prospero Poet. From what Haley had told me, the Poet had been chosen sometime in the mid-seventies because the school’s previous mascot had been deemed politically incorrect. Apparently, the matter had been put to a popular vote in the school, and the rather vocal minority in the drama club had won out in getting the Poet adopted.

  The main problem with the Poet was that it was, well, rather horrifying. The Poet’s costume was a giant head, split down the middle with white on one half and cracked gray on the other, representing the comedy and tragedy masks. The cotton fire coming from its mouth, I’m told, was supposed to represent the “breath of inspiration,” while its giant ruffed hat came about because someone probably realized that a big ruffed hat made a giant disembodied head with tiny arms and legs sticking out of it less terrifying. While Braiwood’s idea of showing off pride in their football team involved dressing in orange and black, Prospero one-upped them by selling cheap plastic comedy and tragedy masks for audience members to wear.

  Looking into the sea of blank, staring faces, half of them laughing, half of them crying, all of them cheering and waving Prospero High flags, was as unsettling as anything non-Splinter related Prospero had to offer.

  I could have tried to distract myself with the game itself, but true to their reputation, the Prospero Poets were a pretty pitiful team. Kevin and I sat in the third row, not too far from the fifty-yard line. Even his perpetual kindness faltered when it turned into a contest between the two of us trying to crack each other up as we commented on their play.

  The Poettes did their best to keep spirits up from the sidelines. During a particularly long time-out, Haley looked up at us and smiled. She lingered on me for a moment, biting her lip slightly and turning a little too quickly to face the field again. It brought a warmth up in my chest that I wasn’t sure I could properly define.

  Kevin didn’t have that problem.

  “God, she’s beautiful,” he said.

  “Yeah, she is,” I replied.

  He sighed sadly. I felt for him. I knew he still loved her, and that he still hoped to salvage something with her. I also knew she still cared for him, just not in the same way. Ever since we’d gotten the real Haley back, she’d made it clear to everyone who would listen that the breakup had had nothing to do with Kevi
n being less than a good person. Their renewed friendship, awkward as it often was, had helped him regain much of the natural popularity he’d lost while the town had thought him a kidnapper.

  “She still doesn’t want to give you another chance?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “She’s made it clear that she would like to remain friends, but a future romantic relationship is out of the question.”

  “Completely?” I asked.

  “Completely,” he said. This didn’t make me feel good, necessarily, but it didn’t make me feel bad either. Yeah, you could say I felt like a terrible friend.

  “You know, I’d never been in love before I met Haley. I thought I had bigger things to worry about, but then she came barreling into my life like a freight train, and I was lost. We were good together; I brought the patience, she brought the passion,” he said.

  “I thought because we thought a lot alike that we wanted to live the same lives. I was wrong. I stand a good, and I mean real good shot at getting into Berkeley next year. I told Haley that she could get in, too, if she wanted. She’s so damn smart, but she would never admit it. I just knew that if she applied herself—” he said.

  “And that didn’t go over well,” I said.

  “It didn’t go over at all. She said she didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life, that she didn’t want to plan that far ahead, that she wanted to live life one day at a time and enjoy herself. It got heated after that. I raised my voice—I’m not proud of that—I said that if she didn’t start getting her act together now, she’d stay in this pitiful town forever. She said, ‘What if I want to stay here?’ I told her she was better than this place. She called me arrogant, and she stormed off. We made up after that, tried to make things work, but the damage had been done. She broke up with me a few days later,” he said.

  He looked down at her again, waving when she looked over her shoulder at us. She waved a blue pom-pom back.