Shards

by F. J. R. Titchenell

“Teenagers,” Aunt Christine said with a theatrical roll of the eyes before shooting me a wink.

  My mom laughed softly. “It’s just been so tough for him—”

  “Mom, do we have to have this conversation?”

  She shushed me with a raised hand. “It’s just been so tough for him here, with all the stories going around, that I’m just really glad to see he’s got friends like all of you.”

  The table was silent. Only Aunt Christine took her comment for the sweet remark it was intended as. Haley looked at Mr. Todd furiously. Mina was tensing up. Mrs. Todd choked a bit on her wine as if suppressing a laugh, but composed herself before she could make a mess.

  The beeping of the kitchen timer couldn’t have been better timed.

  “That sounds like us,” Aunt Christine said.

  “Need any help? I’m pretty handy with a knife!” Mr. Todd offered.

  “No thanks, we’ve got it,” Mom said, leaving for the kitchen with Aunt Christine, leaving the three of us with Mina’s parents. sMr. Todd drummed his fingers on the table distractedly, clearly hoping for one of us to fill the silence. He looked to his wife, then to Mina, then to me, clearly unsatisfied with our enthusiasm for casual Thanksgiving conversation. Finally, he looked to Haley.

  “So, Ms. Perkins, I hear you’re quite the actress,” he said, conversational.

  “Yes,” Haley said, taking a bite of mashed potatoes. “Almost as good as that Splinter bitch you replaced me with last summer.”

  He dropped his fork. It clattered loudly against his plate.

  “Wait, we’re telling the truth now?” Mina asked, surprised.

  “Seems like it,” I said.

  “I’m fine with the truth if you guys are,” Haley said, continuing on without even asking for our approval. “I can’t keep this act up anymore.”

  “That’s fine with me,” Mina said.

  “Me too,” I said.

  Mr. Todd tried to clear this problem up. “I really don’t think this is the place—”

  “You didn’t wipe her memory?” Mrs. Todd asked. “Isn’t that what you got that blonde bimbo for, whatsername?”

  Mr. Todd was flustered. “First, her name is Marie, and for the thousandth time, dear, she’s a respected colleague, and there is nothing going on between us, nor has there ever been. Second, it was deemed imprudent to ‘wipe her memory’ given the fact that Mr. Pastor and our daughter were watching her like hawks after freeing her from the Warehouse and would have gladly refreshed her on whatever memories we removed.”

  “And you couldn’t break that up?” Mrs. Todd asked. She looked between me, Haley, and Mina, all our pretense of being anything but solid friends and allies shattered. I couldn’t tell if her smirk was irritated or amused. Probably both. “No, it certainly seems you couldn’t.”

  “Actually, I’m glad you didn’t remove my memories,” Haley said firmly. “No, I’m glad I could see what you were doing with my body while you’d stolen it. I’m even more glad to remember how she felt when Ben killed her. Do you want to know how she felt?”

  “I’m sorry. It’s going to be a few more minutes! We got a really big bird this year! We’ll have it out soon, I swear!” my mom called from the kitchen.

  “That’s okay. We’re having a fine time in here!” Haley called back. Then, dropping her voice so only those of us at the table could hear, “It hurt. A lot.”

  “Look, Ms. Perkins . . . can I call you Haley?” Sam asked.

  “No,” Haley replied.

  “Okay, Ms. Perkins, I know you’ve been through a lot lately, and I—”

  “Did you choose me?” Haley asked.

  “It’s not that—”

  “You’re on the Splinter’s council, you guys run everything in town, choose who gets taken over, right?”

  “That’s one of many things we—”

  “Then were you the one who decided to steal my life? Who should I thank for that?” Haley said.

  Mr. Todd sighed, exasperated. “I didn’t nominate you, and I’m not going to tell you who did, it’s not my department. But if it gives you any feeling of vindication, I did vote for you to be a vessel for one of my people, as did the rest of our council. Does that make you feel any better?”

  Haley started to stand up, and I pulled her back into her chair again, trying to change the focus.

  “So what is your department?” I asked. “Strong-arming and extortion?”

  “I’m a lawman,” Mr. Todd said.

  “Not a very good one,” his wife muttered. He ignored her.

  “I’ve kept order in this town since before your great-­grandparents knew how to walk,” he continued.

  “So siccing Madison on me, is that how cops work where you come from?” I asked.

  “A little help, dear?” Mr. Todd said, looking to his wife.

  “You dug your own grave on this one, dear,” Mrs. Todd said, tipping her wineglass in his direction in a mock toast and then topping it off yet again.

  “Madison may take too much enjoyment in her job at times, but only because she is very, very good at it. I think we have explained ourselves more than adequately as to why her presence is necessary,” he said.

  “Bullshit!” Haley exclaimed. I half-expected her to jump out of her seat again. She didn’t.

  Mina did.

  “You didn’t have to take it out on Ben!” she said angrily. “He didn’t want this life. I practically forced him into it. Your problem is with the hunters, and Ben is not a hunter.”

  “He did kill me, kinda,” Haley corrected.

  “Well said, Ms. Perkins,” Sam said humorlessly, without taking his eyes off Mina. “You may not think of him as a hunter, but whether you like it or not, you have introduced him into the lifestyle. In the eyes of my people, he’s just as bad as you, or The Old Man, or any of the others after what he did to our Haley.”

  “What Old Man?” Haley asked.

  “It’s a long story,” I said, trying to keep his secret protected.

  “We’ll explain it to you later,” Mina said firmly. Now that was a surprise.

  Mrs. Todd gave her daughter a sharp look at the mention of that name. “The Old Man is dangerous, Mina. I can’t believe you still spend time with that lunatic.”

  Mr. Todd’s eyes narrowed when Mina didn’t immediately deny this, and he seemed to do some very quick thinking. “Believe me, Ben, Mina, Ms. Perkins, we don’t want this situation to be any more inconvenient for you than it already has been. If you just turn The Old Man over to us, I can offer all of you protection.”

  “Turn him over to be killed, you mean,” I said. “Like you killed his family?”

  This comment got a brief look of surprise on his wife’s face.

  “He didn’t tell you he burned The Old Man’s family alive?” I asked her.

  She shook her head. She didn’t look very surprised anymore. Surprise had given way to anger in the blink of an eye.

  I continued. “So would you kill him, or would you let Rob—”

  He pounded his fist on the table angrily. “LOOK! There’re a lot of things I’m not proud of in my life—”

  “You mean Sam Todd’s life?” Mina said firmly.

  That one hit him like a punch to the gut. He looked at Mina, hurt, almost begging for forgiveness.

  “Go on, though, you were saying there’s a lot you weren’t proud of? Which were you less proud of, ruining Ben’s life, or letting a super-powered psychopath into my head so he could get at The Old Man?” Mina asked, voice full of acid.

  Now it was Mrs. Todd’s turn to interrupt. “What was that?” She looked at her husband angrily. He tried to keep calm, but had a hard time not letting a little fear through.

  “Now, Diana, after the incident this summer, we needed to bring someone in to help deal with the hunter problem.”

  “And you let him into her head?” Mrs. Todd said, trying very hard to keep her voice low.

  “He got a little overzealous. I have told him to stay away from
our daughter!” Mr. Todd said.

  “I’m not your daughter,” Mina said, angry.

  Mrs. Todd glared at him. “We’re going to have a talk about this later.”

  Again, he sighed. “That, my dear, I don’t doubt.”

  “Turkey’s ready!” my mom called cheerfully, bringing the bird out with a smile.

  In a flash, we all pretended to be happy and smiling, as if the rather unorthodox holiday fight hadn’t happened. My mom and Aunt Christine sat at the table, completely unaware. Mr. Todd tried to look cheerful, doing his best to ignore the anger coming from his wife. Considering how much of our plan to take down Robbie revolved around having him on our side, I realized that we maybe should have been nicer to him, but at the time it felt liberating to let loose on a Splinter responsible for so many of our troubles.

  It felt even better to no longer pretend that the three of us were on good terms with each other, and actually just be on good terms with each other. We laughed together, we shared our family-friendly stories, and we ate until we were stuffed, content with this minor moral victory.

  It was a happy Thanksgiving after all.

  23.

  My First Christmas Party Invitation from Hell

  Mina

  There was a time when I truly dreaded my bi-monthly counselor’s appointments, the professed pity and disappointment, the thinly-veiled threats, the subsequent lectures they inspired from my mother.

  Over the years, as I’d come to realize how little power and interest Mr. Montresor really had, and as Mom had come to accept a plateau rather than a spike in my accumulation of write-ups as cause for celebration, the appointments had become just one more of the many minor inconveniences hampering my work.

  As usual, the countdown calendar was on his desk when he called me in, a set of tear-off sheets with descending numbers under a picture of a terrified-looking kitten in a party hat.

  Two hundred and eighty-two.

  Almost Christmas now.

  Two hundred and eighty-two days until my eighteenth birthday.

  Two hundred and eighty-two days until the record goes blank and all the new blotches stick for good.

  Two hundred and eighty-two days left to straighten up and fly right. As if that had ever been an option.

  As little consolation as it would be to Courtney, I was glad that the bug in this room had finally allowed me to confirm that he did in fact keep such a countdown for a few people other than me.

  “Shall we go over the record again?”

  I shrugged. Mr. Montresor adjusted his wire-rimmed glasses, tidied the almost spiky haircut that tried and failed to conceal a few of his thirty-four years, and opened the file with the list of my known transgressions—the fresh ones he hadn’t yet covered marked in neon pink highlighter. He began the usual ritual with tired eyes, looking almost ready to join me in acknowledging its pointlessness.

  “Seems you’ve had a quiet year.”

  I didn’t offer him the clue of laughing at him.

  “Getting nervous? Just six counts of trespassing since May? One of breaking and entering, four of theft—”

  “Three,” I corrected. Mr. Montresor likes to combine all the complaints against me, substantiated or unsubstantiated, made to the cops or directly to the school, into a single list to make the numbers sound bigger. He also sometimes inflates the numbers further, hoping I’ll lose track, mix up what I’ve been caught doing with what I’ve actually done, and confess to something extra. It’s never worked, but it does force me to pay a little attention.

  “You’re right,” he pretended he’d misread the number. “Three. Five counts of attempted fraud.”

  That’s his way of making it sound serious when I get caught logging someone else into the computer lab to make it less obvious I’ve been there. Other people log their friends in all the time to make it look like they have been there when they’re ditching. None of my counts of successful fraud ever make the list.

  “One of harboring a runaway.”

  I put a hand automatically to the bridge of my glasses for a moment to hold in the discomfort of that one. I’d never thought Aldo’s parents would get the authorities involved.

  “He wasn’t exactly a runaway,” I said.

  “He?” This was clearly a thrilling surprise to Mr. Montresor. “It was Miss Perkins’ personal physician who expressed concern that you might have endangered her life by indulging her delusions after her second episode, instead of alerting her mother immediately.”

  Keeping Haley long enough after her rescue to get her ready for an hour with a personal physician instead of a night in the med center had probably saved her life.

  “Is there a young man we should be concerned about as well?” Mr. Montresor asked, and to my own shock more than his, I hesitated three whole seconds.

  “No.”

  Mr. Montresor tried to stare me down, but after only a few seconds, a sudden, sharp yell from outside startled us both.

  “Oh my God, oh my God, you gotta see this!”

  Then, Patrick’s voice. “No, it’s some kind of mistake!”

  Laughter. Squeals. Hooting.

  Mine was one of the last counseling appointments of the day. The last classes had let out, the lawn and sidewalk out front were crammed with people, and something had them very, very excited.

  There was a short burst of a police siren.

  “It’s not mine! I’ve never seen it before!”

  Madison. Scared and furious. I left my chair and reached the window just in time to see the officer tighten the cuffs behind her back.

  Ben and Haley were in the crowd, close to the sidewalk. They couldn’t see me, but I could see that they were among the laughers.

  What it was that wasn’t hers and why the Splinters were allowing all this, I had no idea.

  Then the officer shut the squad car’s back door on her, cutting her off mid-sentence.

  “I didn’t do—”

  Slam.

  Ben’s voice flooded back to my ears, shouting the same words. “I didn’t do it.” The desperate, helpless awfulness of that day in the hills suddenly felt further away than it ever had, compared with his shocked, nervous, laughing face across the grass outside.

  And for one short, stifled breath, I laughed too.

  Mr. Montresor cleared his throat behind me.

  “Mina, I can’t help you if you won’t pay attention.”

  I forced myself back to the chair.

  “And that, of course, brings us to your grades. Now, I won’t say you’re the worst student we’ve got. I just can’t see what’s stopping you from being the best. Your standardized test scores are among the highest this school has ever seen, and we are quite an impressive school. You can tell me, Mina. I am on your side.”

  He gestured to the placard on his desk that read “Counselor,” as if that somehow supported this statement.

  “Would it really take that much extra effort to finish all of your assignments and turn them in on time?”

  I returned my usual shrug and waited for him to ask me three or four more times in increasingly helpful, flattering, and irritated ways, but he didn’t. He opened his mouth to ask for the second time when he turned his head sharply toward the window.

  I took the opportunity to turn and look again too, wondering if Madison’s scene had escalated to something that demanded even his attention, but she had already been hauled away, and whatever he had seen was already gone. There was nothing there but a few clusters of excited students catching each other up on the news.

  He snapped my file shut well ahead of schedule and stood up.

  “Give it some thought,” he advised me vaguely, eyes still on the window. “And remember you can come and talk to me any time.”

  “Okay,” I said, getting up as well. “Do you want me to send in the next appoint—”

  “No!” He recovered himself quickly. “No, I’m going to go sneak a quick bathroom break first. I’ll call him in myself.”

&nb
sp; Mr. Montresor grabbed his coat, without explaining why he expected to need it in the bathroom, and hurried out of his office through the small adjacent waiting room without looking back.

  I gathered my things and followed.

  The waiting room was empty except for one boy in the chair closest to the door, examining a “LOST DOG” poster on the bulletin board over his head. When he turned and I registered his face, I choked like an amateur on my own intake of breath.

  Robbie York smiled and held something long and thin to his lips—a Pixie Stick, I realized after a few surreal seconds.

  “Shhh,” he breathed, as softly as if I were a crying baby, shifting his backpack, a heavy, hiker’s one, casually in front of the door. “Shhh-sh-sh-shh. Not like last time, nothing like last time. I’m just here to talk. We’re just two people talking, okay?”

  He looked around as if afraid of being observed in the empty room, then offered me the Pixie Stick.

  I needed to leave. I needed to find Ben or Aldo or Haley, anyone who could call for more help if this became the night in my room all over again, or at least make it feel less like that night already. I needed someone to make my skin stop generating imaginary grime and my esophagus stop tying itself in painful, swelling knots simply by making me not alone with this monster.

  But more than that, I needed him not to see how much I needed a way out. He had seen too much of me already.

  I latched onto the first ridiculous greeting I could think of that didn’t involve screaming or crying or vomiting or clawing fatally slowly for the door.

  “You’re not supposed to eat in here,” I said.

  Robbie shrugged and ripped open the stick. “I’m trying to live fast.” He poured the whole tube of loose, acidic sugar into his mouth.

  I hope it stings, I thought.

  “I can still hear you, you know.” I felt the faint echo of his words, projected onto the back of my mind as well as spoken. “And it doesn’t matter if you’re home in your bed or hiding out in Florida, or Montana, or Madagascar. With a little extra peace and quiet and concentration, I can still hear you, and I can still make sure you hear me. I’m just trying something new.” He enunciated each word as if he weren’t perfectly proficient at speaking out loud already. “In fact, I’m trying a lot of new things.”