Shards

by F. J. R. Titchenell

  “Done.”

  “I see him,” said Haley. There was a crackling sound as she dropped her Bluetooth into her purse, out of sight.

  “Now ‘Customize Alerts,’” said Aldo.

  “Mr. Smith!” Haley exuded her usual theatrical society abundance of enthusiasm. “I’m so glad I ran into you!”

  “Oh, hello, Haley!” Alexei greeted her with his usual excessively lengthened vowels. “Are all things alright-ing?” he gave one of his skin-crawling Splinter chuckles at his own poorly constructed half-rhyme.

  Haley giggled along. “Oh, everything’s fine. I just wanted to talk to you about the spring production! We’re still doing Measure for Measure?”

  “Yes, yes, it will be great fun!” There was a shuffle of footsteps as Alexei tried to pass Haley and she blocked his way. The GPS froze for a moment while I fiddled with its settings, and my breath caught until it moved again.

  “But I had an idea about casting Mariana!”

  “Oh, Haley! You knoooow I cannot show favorites! You will have to audition like always!” By the way her Bluetoothed purse knocked against her, it sounded like he’d thrown a conspiratorial arm around her shoulders. “And that is not the whole problem! How am I to have Measure for Measure without you for my Isabella?”

  “No, I don’t mean me for Mariana!” Haley assured him with another giggle.

  “Oh, good!” Alexei sighed with exaggerated relief. “But we will talk about the others later, okie dokie?”

  Another shuffle of feet.

  “It’s kind of important,” Haley stopped him. “I have a friend—”

  “Oh, Haley, you know how you and your friends are planning too much these days!” There was a tiny edge under his unnatural geniality. “Life is most easy when you can let things happen.”

  Haley’s voice lost all trace of giggle. “Humor me,” she said.

  It was the closest the drama teacher and his star student had ever come to breaking character, dropping pretense, acknowledging their opposing sides, and for a moment I was afraid the effect would snowball until she was screaming about how she’d trusted him before he’d been party to her replacement, until he was dragging her back into the woods to repeat the process just to quiet her.

  But then there was another set of steps, longer, more in tandem, the heavier ones following just behind the lighter ones, meaning that Haley had pulled Alexei around the corner, just one more short turn from his home street, but also directly across from Ben’s vantage point and into the second ambush.

  “This is Abby,” she introduced the girl waiting there. “We’re old pen pals, and she’s visiting because her parents are thinking of moving to Prospero, but only if I can prove there are enough activities around here for her to get really involved. It’d mean a lot if you two could just talk a bit today. I know she’d be perfect for the troupe!”

  The party line went dead silent, all seven live mouthpieces catching a sudden absence of breath while we all waited for Alexei to smell a rat and call Haley out.

  But the ploy worked, and the friendly, odd drama teacher façade clicked instantly back to full power for the human stranger’s benefit.

  “Oh, of course! Why did you not tell me so? Hello, Abby! It is a treat, always, to meet Haley’s friends!”

  “Didn’t think so when you voted to stick me in a pod, did you?” Ben muttered.

  Abby gushed convincingly for a while about her theatrical experience, and Alexei interrupted with bizarre irrelevancies with his usual regularity.

  With a small purr on the line, Kevin started the van.

  Just as Aldo finished talking me through the parental controls settings, there was an extra-long, awkward lull in Alexei, Haley, and Abby’s conversation. “How soon is your mom expecting you?” Haley asked, tapping her purse, right on the microphone, asking for a sign.

  “How’s it looking?” Ben asked me.

  “Shit,” said Aldo. “Send the validation email again. Screwed up the ‘are you human’ code. Letters were too distorted. Looked like it was asking for gamma, epsilon, and the ‘Artist Formerly Known as Prince’ symbol.”

  “Sending,” I said, and started another agonizingly long progress bar.

  “Milk Duds it is,” said Ben, and I heard the slightest breath of recognition, disguised as recollection, as Haley saw him press the “more time” candy box signal to the gas station window.

  “Oh, I forgot!” said Haley. “She wanted to know if the troupe counts for any school credit, right?”

  Such bland formalities wouldn’t hold Alexei long. Greg raised an eyebrow at me.

  “Start picking,” I told him. He nodded and knelt by the door that led from the garage into the house. I still didn’t like the idea of going inside, but the way things were going, we were going to need every possible escape route open. “If you can’t, don’t break it until I give the word,” I warned.

  Greg snorted. “You seriously overestimate this freak’s taste in locks.”

  “I am so sorry, girls!” Alexei finally exclaimed. “But I really must be gone. It is almost story time! You know missing one minute of Search for the Sun means never catching up!”

  “Seriously?” Aldo moaned. “He watches soaps and he doesn’t have a DVR?”

  “How bad?” I asked, and thankfully, Aldo didn’t answer with an analysis of daytime television.

  “Transferring data,” he said. “You’re done pushing buttons. I just need you to keep it online a few seconds more, maybe thirty.”

  “Just one more question!” Haley tried.

  “But we will talk so soon! I must insist!”

  “Got it,” said Greg, propping the door open to a view of a perilously dark, narrow, and paper-strewn path of maroon carpet.

  “Two houses from the corner,” Ben warned us. “One house. Around the corner, six houses from you. He can see the front walk.”

  “Done,” said Aldo. “Get out of there.”

  Greg cut the engine, fumbled the wires back into place, and shut the hood.

  “Two houses, perfect view of the front,” Ben said, struggling to keep his voice neutral and factual. “Mina?”

  “Get under the car,” I whispered to Greg. “I’ll keep him off you, and the first chance you get, you run to the pickup point.”

  He paused just a moment before nodding and stepping back to let me into the house.

  “Was it enough?” Haley’s voice got louder as she hitched her Bluetooth back onto her ear.

  “Get to the pickup point,” I told her.

  “Was it enough?” she repeated.

  “Mina, what’s going on?” Ben hissed in my ear “Are you two out of there?”

  “Should I move?” Courtney asked. “What are we doing?”

  Greg rolled all the way under the car just as Alexei’s legs came into view on the driveway, the last thing I saw before closing the door on myself.

  The smell inside the house was overpowering: years’ worth of mold and fermenting dairy and backed-up drains. The junk was packed so tightly against most of the walls and windows that even now, in the middle of a sunny day, there was barely enough light to maneuver by.

  I tiptoed across to the one unobscured pane of frosted glass set into the front door and watched Alexei’s silhouette coming closer through the front yard, right between the two entrances.

  This way, I thought at him, for all the good it would do. Not the car, don’t check the car, this way.

  But Alexei’s silhouette veered off in the garage’s direction anyway.

  So much for getting away clean. I took a steadying breath and pounded on the front door from the inside.

  That changed his course pretty quickly.

  He made straight for the front door, and I ran back toward the garage and skidded to a stop when the door refused to open under my hand. I turned the latching mechanism in the center of the knob, and it moved with too little friction, broken and disconnected somewhere inside. Maybe Alexei only used this door for coming in, or maybe i
f I wiggled the latch just right it would catch the inner workings, but I didn’t have time to figure out how because the front door’s knob was already moving. I opened the nearest interior door and scrambled through it, closing it behind me just as the front door opened.

  Footsteps pounded distant pavement. Greg, I hoped.

  “Picking up Courtney,” Kevin said in my ear. “Headed your way, Mina. Where are you?”

  The low information stream of the Bluetooth felt like a siren signaling my position.

  “Pickup point,” I whispered once more into it with the softest possible breath. Then I hung up and stuffed it into my bag.

  In the dim light, judging by the raised, soft-looking free space in the middle, I guessed I was in Alexei’s bedroom. There was a window high in the wall, covered only with a stack of books and overlooking the backyard.

  I stepped slowly toward it, choosing the quietest-looking sections of floor coverings, listening to the creak of floorboards back in what passed for the living room. They progressed too quickly in my direction along the hallway toward the bedroom door, and I had to stop and wedge myself out of sight, four feet up the wall, between two overflowing boxes of paperwork.

  I didn’t need Robbie nearby to make me feel the skittering movements of vermin in the refuse beneath me.

  The door opened, and I watched through a pencil-width gap between boxes as Alexei entered the room.

  I half expected him to start tossing boxes this way and that, searching and digging for the obvious intruder, but he simply pulled his jacket off, the pasty white arms underneath Splinter-cracking into whatever inhuman, elbow-less shapes made this process easier, and threw it on the space I’d taken for a bed.

  “Kit-ty-cat?” he called out, pronouncing each syllable as if he didn’t know where the gap went between the words. “Kit-ty-cat? What did you knock over? It’s okay, I still love you!”

  With my slow, quiet breath of relief, I examined the stench in the air a little more closely. Of course there’d be a cat or two in here somewhere.

  Alexei stood there, looking around, for twenty seconds, twenty-five, before he wandered back down the hall, leaving the door open behind him.

  That relief slipped away when I heard the mewing in the box beneath me.

  Go on, I thought at the cat. Go find him. Don’t make him come to you.

  “Kit-ty-cat?” Alexei called from the other end of the house, turning back.

  With the tightest fist I could form, trying not to imagine what I was about to get stuck under my fingernails, I punched through the layer of cardboard beneath me, into Kit-ty-cat’s hiding place.

  There was a yowl, two claws grazing my wrist, and a ball of long, patchy grey fur rocketed out of the front of the pile to meet its owner at the far end of the junk canyon, past the living room, in what I guessed was the kitchen.

  I watched for a few seconds, more out of an irrational inability to look away than fear of being noticed, as Alexei formed his left leg into some twisted shape in the dark. A cat’s scratching post, I realized, when Kit-ty-cat leapt up into the newly formed tunnel where his knee had been.

  During the last few wood snaps of the transformation, I found the sense to shift the stack of books behind me away from the window. If Alexei noticed, Kit-ty-cat would have to take the blame for that too.

  There was a tearing sound from the kitchen, like cardboard or very thick paper, and I realized what Alexei was ripping into and turning over—a bag of cat kibble—just in time to wrench the stiff window open under cover of the sound and hoist myself and my bag through.

  I was back over the fence and sprinting for the pickup point on the street behind the gas station almost as soon as my feet hit Alexei’s back lawn.

  Kevin pulled the van forward to meet me, the side door sliding open.

  Ben and Haley pulled me in by one hand each.

  “What took you so long?” Greg was very conspicuously wiping motor oil off his shirt as he asked me this.

  “Minor detour,” I said. “Mission accomplished.”

  Haley squealed with delight and Ben insisted on high-fiving me, though it looked like he was suppressing a stronger gesture of relief.

  Even though I’d known she would be there, I did a double-take when I glanced into the back seat and saw the utterly unmemorable, unrecognizable, nondescript “Abby,” just before she pulled off the plain brown wig, gratefully shook out her black and orange hair, and leapt into Greg’s lap.

  “Still freaks me out when you do that,” he said when they broke off an adrenaline-heavy kiss that briefly forced me to look away.

  “Yeah, me too,” she agreed, pulling out her compact and black lipstick and urgently repainting all the features that distinguished her as Julie. “Has its uses, though. I mean, other than not embarrassing my mom at Temple.”

  Aldo had the GPS records open in eight separate windows on his laptop when we joined him in my room to review them as agreed upon, all at once, all together.

  He was still busy cross-referencing them with my records of Dad’s movements to create a list of likely Splinter Council meeting places when Courtney asked me to “help her upstairs,” as if she had anything to do upstairs in my parents’ house.

  The front door opened and closed while I followed her to the kitchen in the hopes of getting whatever problem she was having out of the way. Someone must have gone outside. I made a mental note to check the bushes for the remnants of joints. That was the last thing I needed to explain when my parents got home.

  Standing on opposite sides of the kitchen’s glimmering white tile island, I waited for Courtney’s latest cutting ethics lecture.

  “That was sloppy,” she said finally.

  “It could have been tidier,” I conceded. “Thankfully, we succeeded, and everyone survived to go over notes on it for next time.”

  “Do that,” she said. “But I don’t mean them, I mean you.”

  That annoyed me, but I was confident it didn’t show. “Would you like to elaborate on that?”

  Courtney briefly unfolded her arms in a gesture of placation so graceful and dance-like that it looked like she practiced it in the mirror ten times before breakfast each morning. “I’m not here to usurp you, Mina,” she said. I tried to figure out if this was one of those times when people say the exact opposite of what they mean.

  I shrugged. “Good.”

  “And I’m not saying you’re a bad leader.”

  “But you could do better,” I finished for her.

  She shook her head. “No, I couldn’t. Not for this crowd,” she said. “But you could. They were looking to you, and you left them hanging.”

  “I knew they’d manage.”

  “You could have helped them manage better. You could have made them feel engaged, instilled them with a little confidence. I understand need-to-know, believe me, but your definition is severely limited. You have skills,” she said. “In fact, you must be pretty amazing to have this many natural loose cannons this loyal to you.”

  “I’m not, really,” I said, and Courtney actually looked surprised. She stopped and waited for me to explain.

  I remembered drawing the exact same conclusion about The Old Man and realizing much too slowly how wrong I was. I couldn’t exploit the same fallacy, not even with her.

  “Ben’s the one who knows how to talk people into things and make them get along, not me,” I told her. “I stumble my way through every single pep talk. I’ve never even had this many allies in the same place at once before. People only do what I tell them because they know I know what I’m doing, because I’ve been doing it for a long time. There isn’t a lot of competition in my field, and I happen to be the best.”

  Courtney accepted this explanation with a curt nod. “You may be right,” she said. “Doesn’t matter. Whether you deserve it or not, these people won’t accept any leader but you. You owe it to them to lead.”

  If I’d tried too hard to answer this somehow, I might have missed the door opening agai
n and the identifying set of footsteps returning.

  Ben.

  “Everything okay?” I called out to him.

  “Fine,” he called back. “Just thought I heard something.”

  20.

  Looking for Help in All the Wrong Places

  Ben

  The Prospero Public Library was on the edge of town, about as close to getting out as you could go without leaving the city limits. I didn’t know if he had gotten my message or if he would even be able to interpret it once he did get it, but I had a feeling that I was worrying about nothing.

  He would show. He couldn’t keep himself away.

  I continued pacing the library’s aisle on manufacturing and building books, occasionally pulling one from the shelf and flipping through it. I’d taken to woodworking quite a bit in the last couple of weeks with Mr. Finn. Considering that I would probably never leave Prospero, maybe I had a future to look forward to in carpentry, assuming, of course, I had a future.

  Footsteps nearby. I slipped the book I’d been looking at back on the shelf and looked for the source of the sound. Just a few girls—freshmen, middle-schoolers maybe. They’d been laughing, but as soon as they saw me, they got a look of disgust on their faces that would’ve hurt me deeply a couple of months ago.

  Things had slowed down slightly since Halloween. Maybe it had something to do with Mina making sure I had an escort almost round the clock, but Madison and whatever other goons the Splinters had on my case were laying low. The few new accusations that came my way were shot down pretty quickly since I had a ready supply of alibi witnesses. Patrick, especially, had gotten quiet after shattering his hand on Mr. Finn, with rumors of how he had broken it making him a laughingstock around school.

  Still, the old accusations were more than enough to keep most people avoiding me. You’d think that would have made the privacy I needed today easy to come by, but my constant escorts were nearly impossible to avoid unless I was in the bathroom or sleeping. To pull this off, I had to figure out when everyone would be most busy (Thursday afternoon when Mina, Aldo and Julie checked the GPS data, Haley had cheerleading practice, and Kevin volunteered at the rec center), deliver my message, show up, and hope for the best.