Shards

by F. J. R. Titchenell

  “I thought that Prospero would be good for us. Would be good for you. That clearly isn’t the case. We can go back to San Diego. I can beg for my old job, our old apartment. We could try to put things back together, back the way they used to be. God knows you’ve followed me every time I wanted a change. I think you’ve gotten old enough to have a say in whether or not we do it again,” she said.

  It sounded tempting. More tempting than I ever thought it could. Before we’d moved to Prospero, I would have said that I wanted stability more than anything else in life. Now I would have given anything to escape, to leave Prospero, the Splinters—even Mina—behind.

  But here, with this treaty in place, escape was not an option.

  “It’s just high school stuff. I’ll survive,” I said.

  “You’re sure?” she asked.

  “Sure enough,” I said, forcing a smile. I knew she didn’t buy a word of what I was saying, but she backed off anyway.

  “Just let me know if you need anything,” she said.

  “I will,” I replied.

  I hated lying to my mom, but I had to do it a lot these days. She was such a gentle soul; I didn’t know what the truth would do to her.

  Kneeling back down, I began to sweep up the glass. It was hard not to see that glittering mess of shards as what my life had turned into over this last month.

  If only it were as easy to clean up.

  I had no trouble calling it the second-worst month of my life, though with three days to go, it could still make a run for the top spot. The last month of Dad’s life—watching him waste away from the vital, strong man who raised me—was still number one; though I was sure the Splinters had a few ideas left.

  It started after the party with a barrage of hate online and on my phone. Those were easy enough to ignore. I could change my security settings. I could block numbers.

  It’s when I got back to school that things really started to go to hell.

  Wherever I went, people were quiet, whispering terrible things, looking at me like I was the scum of the earth. Most of them were content to pretend I didn’t exist whenever I entered a room.

  Then there were those who decided to act on Madison’s lies.

  Like Patrick.

  When nothing happened during that first gym class, I thought I was in the clear. It was when we were changing afterward and most of the class had already left that he, Robbie, and a couple of his other large, scary-looking friends pinned me to a locker.

  “You really are a piece of work, you know?” he hissed. “You make like you’re the good guy, but you’re hiding that you’re a real sick son of a bitch.”

  I tried to protest, to explain. Before I could, he sucker-punched me in the stomach so hard it felt like I’d been hit by a sledgehammer. My knees gave out, and I fell to the floor, retching.

  He grabbed me by the hair and forced me to look him in the eyes. “You stay away from Madison. If I hear about you bothering her again . . . I’ll kill you.”

  I told them I would, but I took Patrick slamming my head into a locker to mean he didn’t entirely believe me.

  A few days later, I was called into the principal’s office, and told that the police wanted to speak to me. At the time, I was thankful when it appeared to have nothing to do with Madison. Apparently someone had given the police pictures of me drinking at the party. They said there would be a fine if official charges were filed, but that I would get some leniency if I gave them some names. I knew Mom would support me no matter what happened (her views on underage drinking were quite liberal), and not wanting to make any more enemies, I said nothing. I told myself I’d get a job if I had to repay Mom for the fine.

  In the following days, twenty more people from the party were called into the office by the police. They all got marks on their record and fines; two of them were even arrested. Word got out that I had named names, and much as I protested this accusation, I was now a snitch in addition to a monster.

  A week after that, right in the middle of a calculus test, I could hear the skittering sound of a Splinter in the room. I looked around fearfully, trying to find the creature.

  Then I looked up.

  A small Splinter-drone, a severed hand by the looks of it (though all the extra insect-legs and tentacles it had grown made it hard to tell for sure), crawled across the ceiling until it was above my desk. Though I wanted to cry out in surprise, I couldn’t make a sound. It waved two fingers at me tauntingly, then opened a slit-like mouth on its back, dropping a small, densely-folded piece of paper on my desk. Curious and more than a little afraid, I opened it up. It was covered in mathematical formulas and diagrams.

  A voice behind me. “Ms. Velasquez? I think Ben’s cheating.”

  Again I was called into the principal’s office with my mom. I failed the test and was told I was lucky not to be kicked out of school, as they have a zero-tolerance policy on cheating. Only the fact that it clearly wasn’t in my handwriting saved me.

  Add cheater to my growing list of unenviable titles.

  Not long after this, my cell phone went missing for a day. I wasn’t surprised when it magically appeared back in my gym locker, nor when I was called into the office once again and told to hand the phone over. No, it wasn’t particularly surprising that my phone was now full of pictures of girls in various states of undress in the locker room.

  To the office. Again.

  Police called in. Again.

  Mom called in. Again.

  Extra counseling sessions and a mandatory sensitivity class next semester. These were new.

  Every time something like this happened, I was sure to see Madison not too far away. Smiling, smirking, but still looking oh-so-wounded and afraid from what I might have done to her. No matter what was done to me, they did an excellent job of ensuring that it was something that could be undone if I were ever to surrender. She never had to say a word, she just had to look at me and nod.

  I wanted to kill her. I wanted to kill her, and every other Splinter in town, slowly. I wanted to see Mina’s dad die in flames. I told myself that I wouldn’t break; I repeated it every day, and every day it got more difficult to say.

  Soon people started blaming me for any little thing that went wrong at school. Freshman got beat up? It must have been Ben! Someone stole five dollars from the cafeteria cash register? It must be that new kid with emotional problems! The pizza guy is late? It must somehow be Ben’s fault! It chipped away at me a little bit every day, and much as I wanted to be strong, I knew that one day I would fall.

  I wasn’t completely alone, no matter how much I wanted to be. Kevin and Haley did their best to stand by me. They wanted to help. I didn’t want them to. If they did, the Splinters would only turn their attention to them too. I wouldn’t drag them down with me.

  Mom was there for me, of course; Aldo even tried to talk to me once before I sent him away; and Mr. Montresor, my counselor at school, did his best to provide a sympathetic ear. I couldn’t be honest with him, not with all the listening devices planted in that room.

  Never once, in this time, did I hear from Mina Todd. I don’t know if I wanted to hear from her after everything that had happened with The Old Man, but being so easily cut off by her hurt terribly.

  I winced in pain as a sliver of glass from the window cut into my finger. I pulled it out, tossing it into the trash can. I didn’t want to think about Mina Todd being right across the street and that she probably hadn’t thought about me once in the four weeks we’d been apart.

  I didn’t want to think about how much her disappearing from my life made me want to take Madison’s offer, if just to make this all go away.

  “I love what you’ve done with the place.”

  Haley stood in the doorway, a couple of shopping bags in one hand, a large pumpkin held under her other arm.

  “Get out of here, Haley. You don’t want to be here,” I said.

  She tossed the pumpkin and bags on my bed. “Yes, I do.”

  “
I’m dangerous to be around. If the Splinters find out, they’ll—”

  “They’ll do what? They stole three months of my life. Honestly, what could they possibly do to me that’s worse?” she asked.

  “Are you here to give me some motivational ‘buck up and power through it’ speech? That if I just let you guys help me, we can all make it through together?” I asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “Are you here to tell me you guys have come up with some half-cocked scheme to try and get me out of this that will probably backfire horribly?”

  “No,” she repeated. “Not that killing Madison hasn’t crossed my mind.”

  I looked at her, dubious.

  “Hey, I thought she was my friend. When I found out she was one of the people who might’ve taken me . . . At least Mina talked me out of it,” she said.

  “Don’t say that name,” I spat back, too harshly. Even hearing her name hurt.

  “Sorry, I won’t,” Haley said softly.

  “Why are you here?” I asked.

  As if in answer, she pointed to the pumpkin on my bed.

  “I’m here to carve a jack-o-lantern,” she said.

  I looked at her, silently.

  She continued. “Your mom knows the kind of pain you’re in now and that you won’t accept any help from her, so she called me. Now I don’t know if what you need is a shoulder to cry on, or someone to vent to, or someone to be around who just doesn’t hate your guts. You may need all of that, you may need none of that. But if there’s one thing you do need, it’s a jack-o-lantern. Your house is seriously lacking Halloween spirit, and I know that is something I can help with.”

  Her smile was confident and firm.

  “There’s nothing I can say that will get rid of you, is there?” I asked.

  “Nope,” she said, almost perky. I wanted to hate her for staying here when I wanted to be alone, but it was hard to say no to her.

  “Then you should probably grab a knife and some garbage bags. Let me clean up this glass first?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she said.

  I cleaned. She gathered supplies. I was numb, angry, and confused, but feeling slightly calmer with her there.

  The floor clean of glass, Haley spread out a few trash bags as a makeshift operating area for the pumpkin. She gave me a marker and tasked me with the design. I’m not an artist; I can barely draw stick figures, but I did my best to make an appropriately fierce jack-o-lantern face. As I did this, she looked for Halloween music in my iPod. She was less than thrilled at what I had loaded.

  “Styx? Crowded House? Derek and the Dominoes? Don’t you have anything from this century?” she asked, skeptically.

  Dad’s music. I tried to play it off casually. “I’m a sucker for the classics.”

  Dissatisfied with my selection, I saw her pick at random, clearly wanting something in the background. The opening guitar chords of “Layla” filled the room.

  “Sad song,” Haley said, listening to the lyrics.

  “Then change it,” I said. It was a personal favorite of mine, but its words filled me with a sadness I wasn’t quite prepared for.

  “No, I think I like it,” she said.

  “So, what’s in the bags?” I asked, trying to distract myself.

  “Some fake cobwebs, a couple plastic tombstones. Can’t have the jack-o-lantern alone out there, can we?” she asked.

  “No, I guess not,” I said.

  “I even got you a costume,” she said, a little bashful.

  “That was a waste of money,” I said.

  “I figured you’d say something like that,” she said, sitting down beside me. “First, I got it on sale, so I didn’t waste that much, and second, I know you don’t want to go out because you don’t want to be seen, but this is Halloween. Everybody gets to be somebody else, and if you wear this, nobody has to know who you are.”

  I looked into the bag skeptically, saw the elaborate werewolf mask and gloves and knew that she lied about getting these on sale. Not that her offer didn’t sound tempting in the back of my brain, the part of me that still remembered how to be Ben Pastor.

  “Besides, I’ve got some ulterior motives with this,” she said.

  “Oh?” I asked.

  She nodded. “I’m working the ‘Ghosts of the Miracle Mine Haunted Hayride’ up by the old historical cemetery this year. You know, hide in the trees wearing scary costumes, jump out when the tractor comes by, and scare all the housewives and kids. We’re shy some bodies, and we could really use your help if you don’t have any other plans.”

  “You need a werewolf with your ghosts?” I asked.

  “Hey, I never said it was a good haunted hayride, but we make do with what we can,” she explained.

  “I’ll think about it,” I lied.

  “You do that,” she said, handing me the knife. “So, where do you want to start?”

  I looked at the knife. I set it down.

  I had to say it.

  “So you’ve talked to her?” I asked.

  She didn’t need me to explain who I was talking about. “A couple times. Mostly just checking in, seeing if there was anything I could do to help. I think she’s trying to dodge me.”

  “You’re not alone,” I said.

  Haley looked at me sympathetically. “You mean, you haven’t . . .”

  I laughed bitterly. “Not since I told her to get the hell away from me. I thought she might try to call me still, maybe try to apologize, and that I’d come to my senses and we’d be able to work things out. But she hasn’t. I told her to leave me alone, and in that goddamn compartmentalized brain of hers, she’s done just that. I only see her at school when it can’t be avoided, and she never says anything to me. At first I didn’t call her on principle, but now, I don’t even know if I could stand to talk to her.”

  The tears were coming. I didn’t know if I’d be able to hold them back.

  “You know, I actually started to think she was my best friend?” I said. “I haven’t had one of those in . . . forever, I think. The way we moved around, I never tried to make one because I knew it wouldn’t last, but with this, even as messed up as it is, I thought I could finally make a connection. I knew she was weird, but I thought I understood her. I thought that no matter how bad things got, I could get through it if I had her on my side. I thought that if she was here, she’d find a way to keep me from giving up.”

  The tears rolled freely down my cheeks. I should have been embarrassed, but I didn’t care.

  “I hate her so much right now, but there’s no one I want to see more. How screwed up is that?”

  I fell apart there on the floor, holding my head in my hands and sobbing. I could feel Haley wrapping her arms around me. I could hear her telling me that everything was going to be all right, but by then I was broken.

  They were winning.

  15.

  The Second Worst Night of Mine

  Mina

  It had become quite evident that Ben’s absence, even in large doses, lacked any quantifiable curative properties whatsoever.

  In the following weeks without him, the hallucinations continued unabated, and the pain in my stomach spread up to my chest and lymph nodes and settled there.

  Grief is my least favorite sensation, one notch below electrocution, even, but I have a lot of experience feeling it while maintaining maximum functionality.

  My weakened brain stung and shuddered when I clenched it protectively around the compromised part of itself, around my relevant memories and aching body parts like a layer of cast-iron armor, and for the moment, it held.

  It was my own fault. I’d known when I’d stayed in contact with Ben after the Warehouse that I was risking this again. And I’d gotten lucky this time. If things between us had become any more intense, the pain would have been more intense too.

  I directed my eyes and hands through ordinary tasks, waiting for them to become as effortless as they should be again. I sifted through the counselor’s comput
er files and did my best to compile a list of Shard suspects. It wasn’t easy to narrow. In fact, the inconclusive nature of all the evidence put Courtney pretty close to the top. There was Madison, too, of course. She’d been a Splinter for about the right amount of time judging by her records. The only problem was the way she’d been assigned to reveal herself to Ben. A Shard’s secret was likely to be better guarded than that.

  Cayden had been flagged for unusual mood swings recently, and he would be a smart choice if I was on the hit list, since he had always lunched almost within earshot of me. But then he’d been going through dramatic, moody phases for as long as I’d known him.

  Almost the entire theatrical society was worth watching out for, too, of course. They were always under close Splinter watch, and a few of them had had emotional outbursts at school recently, but with artistic personalities, that wasn’t too unusual.

  I also tried to figure out just what this Shard’s ability was. Based on the deaths so far, particularly the one with the barricaded freezer, my best guess was some form of teleportation, something that would allow the Shard to kill, dress up the deaths according to pattern, and be gone without a trace, even if there were witnesses seconds away.

  Unfortunately, there was still one more thing I had to do that required opening my mental armor enough to think about Ben, just a little.

  I thought once he’d separated himself from me, the Splinters would stop the smear campaign, leave him to what little peace could be found in Prospero, and spare me this one particularly daunting task.

  They’d done a lot of damage, so for a while I convinced myself that Ben’s relief was still coming. When it still hadn’t arrived on the evening of October 30th, more than a month after our separation and only one day from the second most vicious prank day of the high school calendar, I finally dragged together what I could of my strength and my mind and knocked on the open door of my father’s workshop.

  Mom was working late, so there had been no need for us to meet and make conversation over our separate, improvised dinners. He turned to look up from his workbench with convincing surprise.

  “Mina, sweetie, I can’t remember the last time you came to join me in here!”