Missing Pieces

by Carly Anne West

  “Yup,” Aaron mutters, still staring out the window.

  “So then you’ll help me?”

  “Huh?”

  “Become an alien-human double agent.”

  “Man, what are you talking about?”

  “What’s up with you? You’ve been out of it ever since we left the factory,” I say.

  Aaron looks back out the window. I’m about to give up and go home when he says, “Have you ever thought that maybe you were … ?”

  “What?”

  “Nothing, never mind,” Aaron says, looking down.

  “What? Like … a merman? No, no, I’ve never thought that maybe I was a merman. I mean, I like to swim and all. I’m not half bad at it, either. There was this lake near—”

  Aaron chuckles despite himself. “Weirdo.”

  “Now that, yeah. I’ve thought I was a weirdo before. Often, actually.”

  Aaron finally looks at me.

  “Have you ever thought you were … bad?”

  It sounds like such a simple question. I know it should have a simple answer. But Aaron and I both know it’s not that simple.

  “I mean, we play pranks on people. I think that’s probably not upstanding-citizen good,” I say, Mom’s refrain of using my powers for good once again pushing its way into my mind.

  “No, but I mean really bad,” Aaron says, looking back down at the floor.

  My dream washes over me, the one I have practically every night but try not to let myself remember during the daytime, the one in the store surrounded by food lined up on the shelves. The room is dark. I’m alone.

  And even though I have no idea why, I know beyond a doubt that it’s my fault I’m there.

  “I think I did something bad once.”

  I say it before I know I’m saying it. It’s like I’m hearing myself talk from across the room.

  “You don’t know?” Aaron asks, looking hard at me now, searching me for a lie.

  “I don’t remember,” I say, a truth I’ve never admitted to anyone before. “It’s just this dream I have. It changes sometimes, but I always wind up in the same place, like I was put there or something.”

  “So how do you know you did something wrong?” Aaron asks.

  I think about it for a minute, and when my brain quiets to a whisper, all I hear is my grandmother’s voice. You stop that wandering, or one day, you won’t make it home.

  “Because sometimes I go where I’m not supposed to,” I say. “Sometimes, I go too far.”

  Now we’re both looking out the window, and I wonder what Aaron’s bad dreams look like, if he feels as alone in his as I do in mine.

  “I don’t think just because you do bad things, it makes you a bad person,” Aaron says after a long stretch of silence.

  All of a sudden, it occurs to me that I still haven’t found out why Aaron was so weird about the Golden Apple Amusement Park last month. My mind is racing with thoughts of a prank gone awry. Could Aaron have done something to the roller coaster that made it crash? But I stop myself before I get too far—pulling a prank is one thing, but bringing down a roller coaster at nine years old? It’s not possible. But if he’s not talking about that, then what is he talking about?

  “What does make a person bad, then?” I ask.

  Aaron shoves his hands in his pockets like he’s embarrassed. Then, so quietly I can barely hear him, he says, “Being happy when bad things happen.”

  I watch Aaron’s face for any clues into what he could mean, but his expression is as flat as his tone.

  Then he looks at me and smiles, and it’s the old Aaron again, the one who planned a mission just for me to get a sign with my name on it, who carved a safe path through the town of Raven Brooks just so I could get home safely with a two-by-two-foot tin treasure.

  He’s my friend. An actual friend. Whatever he did or thinks he did, I’ve got his back.

  “I’m hungry,” I say. “Let’s go get some tacos.”

  That night, I lie in bed waiting for sleep to come, but my stomach is churning. I don’t know if it’s the tacos or the fact that my conversation with Aaron brought my brain back to the Golden Apple Amusement Park. I just can’t seem to stop imagining what it was like when that roller coaster car went rocketing off the tracks into a tree. I must be the only twelve-year-old in the world who keeps a newspaper clipping of a tragic accident by his bed. It’s become a habit to reread the same half article at night, skimming it for clues I may have missed before. I haven’t had a good excuse to get back to the library at the university since I hitched a ride with Mom last time, so the second half of the story is still a mystery.

  Maybe I’m waiting for it all to make sense; maybe I don’t actually want to know how the story ends. I think about how scared that little girl must have felt, what the other people on the roller coaster thought when it detached, if they even knew or just kept rolling along wondering what everyone was screaming about. I think about what my parents would have done if it was me. The only time I’ve ever seen my mom cry was when Grandma died. I wonder if she’d cry that hard if I died like Lucy Yi.

  I’ve just accepted the reality that I’m probably going to throw up, when a scream cracks the night and launches me from my bed.

  I rush to the window and press my forehead against the glass, looking for what could have made such an anguished sound. It came from across the street, I’m positive of that. And though it sounds totally nuts, I’d swear it sounded like Aaron’s voice. I’ve never heard him scream, and anyway what would make him do that at two in the morning?

  But there was something in the tail end of that wail that sounded so familiar.

  I stare out the window for so long that my breath starts to fog the glass. Nothing follows that one unearthly sound but a swath of silence not even pierced by a yowling cat or skittering leaf.

  Maybe I did fall asleep, I tell myself. I’d been so wrapped up in thoughts of morbid accidents and crying moms that I dreamt the scream.

  I’m not satisfied with that answer, but my stomach is starting to churn again, and I’m getting sweaty with my breath bouncing off the window onto my face.

  I open the window to get a little fresh air, and the silence of the night is once again interrupted, this time by the faint but undeniable sound of music.

  Ice-cream-truck music.

  Across the street, light glows from the crack under the Petersons’ boarded-up basement door. I start to have flashbacks of that night I eavesdropped on the side of Aaron’s house—the night Mr. Peterson lurked outside my window in wordless warning—but a memory more powerful than that is driving me now. The memory of that scream that woke me up, but somehow didn’t stir the rest of the neighborhood, just like the music doesn’t.

  I fight back the voice of logic begging me to stay in my room and not pop the screen from the window frame. The trellis is beginning to get rickety from all this climbing, but I don’t care about that now. All I care about is getting close to the Petersons’ house. Maybe I can just get a sign from Aaron that everything is okay, that whatever is going on in his basement is totally innocent. The drilling, the music, the screams—they’re all just …

  Just what? A play rehearsal? A murder mystery party? All just some comical misunderstanding invented by the short kid across the street with the grubby shoes?

  The dew from Aaron’s lawn soaks my feet, and I stand underneath his window, the crooked oak tree releasing tiny droplets onto my head. I scour the yard for a small pebble to chuck at Aaron’s window, and after a few failed attempts, I land one right on the glass. I flinch at the sound, then wait for him to wake up and tell me to leave him alone. Nothing would be more comforting right now. Instead, Aaron’s room remains dark, and the music from the basement cuts in and out like skips on a record player, setting my nerves further on edge.

  “C’mon,” I plead with Aaron under my breath, giving his window one more try, but this time, I throw the pebble a little too hard, and instead of a pinging sound, I hear a pop, then a c
rack, and I realize with horror that I’ve splintered Aaron’s window.

  The music in the basement cuts off, and the footsteps don’t just fall evenly on the stairs like they did last time; now they pound up the steps, thundering the shortest warning before the jingling of keys signals the furious unlocking of the dead bolts securing the door.

  Frantic, I realize that this time, I won’t have a chance to get across the street undetected. The house offers no place to hide, no bush for cover or garage for shelter. The only place to go is the backyard.

  I regain movement and bolt for the backyard with the kind of adrenaline you hear about in moments of crisis. Evidently, I have more power in my skinny legs than I realized. I lunge for the only cover I can see—a pair of oak trees directly behind the house that make for the worst hiding place ever, but I don’t have a choice because the keys are rattling faster now and the door is starting to move from its frame.

  Just as I pull myself behind the trunk, a loud bang on the basement door makes my heart catch in my throat. I peer through the leaves and realize that one lock is still in place, and rather than patiently unlock it, whoever is behind the door has given up trying and is instead throwing himself against the wooden door.

  Flinching with each violent knock, I watch as the door bends behind the weight of the attack, the tiny crackling of splintering wood sending a chill through my paralyzed body. With one more vicious thrust, the last stubborn lock falls to the grass, and a hulking Mr. Peterson falls through the doorway, red-faced and sweating, with a foam of white spittle gathering in the corners of his mouth.

  I hang on to the trunk of the oak tree and plead silently with my heart to stop pounding for fear that the animal that has taken over Mr. Peterson will hear it with his supersonic hearing. I’m quaking so hard, I can see the leaves above me trembling, and I pray not a single leaf drops.

  I watch in terror as Mr. Peterson skulks across the yard in search of the sound that interrupted his work. I can hear him panting from here, and I begin to think the craziest thoughts:

  How my last meal will have been tacos.

  How disappointed Mom will be in me for using my powers for eavesdropping.

  How I’ll never have gotten to test out my audio manipulator.

  How through this entire horrific episode—through the drilling and the window breaking and the door destroying—Aaron and his family have managed to stay quietly tucked into their beds, unaware that the boy across the street is about to be annihilated by their psycho dad.

  I watch as Mr. Peterson crouches to the grass and examines what I can only guess are the footprints I left in the dew. And that’s when I notice that there’s a grave. Well—I’m not sure it’s really a grave because there isn’t a dead body in it—but it definitely looks like a grave. Mr. Peterson stands slowly, tromping his way across the lawn, and now his demeanor has calmed a bit, as though the animal inside him has been suddenly tamed. He picks up the shovel and starts filling in the grave, even though I swear there’s nothing in there. Just an empty, grave-shaped hole that I assume he buries trespassers like me in.

  Ten minutes pass, then twenty, then thirty as my legs feel weaker and weaker. Suddenly I come back to my senses as the shoveling stops and Mr. Peterson steps to the sidewalk and then to the middle of the street, staring up at the window to my room, looking for signs of life there instead of behind him in his own tree.

  I swallow to wet my dry throat, but it’s no use. I’ve sweat every ounce of moisture from my body. I’d pee my pants if I wasn’t already as dry as a desert.

  Then, just like last time, Mr. Peterson satisfies whatever compulsion he had in staring down my bedroom window, and once again, he cuts a path through his lawn, stopping one more time to stare at the dented grass by the side of his house.

  I’m positive he’s about to see me. Even with the trunk providing cover, there’s no doubt he’ll spot my stupid teal shirt through the camouflage. I brace for my fate, the adrenaline no longer providing me strength. Now all I can do is wait in paralyzed silence to be discovered.

  But Mr. Peterson doesn’t look up. Instead, he walks calmly, almost serenely, through the basement doorway, closing the door with care and methodically locking the bolts that remain in place after the carnage.

  I wait until I’m sure it’s not a trap. I wait for the music that doesn’t start up again, for the sound of shoes that don’t touch the basement steps, for the cracked window in Aaron’s room to open. I wait for a single sign of life in the house that was moments ago alive with the fury of a single hulking monster.

  Then I come out. I dread climbing the trellis and consider sleeping in my backyard just so I can hide. When I do make it to my room, I push my dresser in front of the window as a barricade.

  When I wake up the next morning, I feel braver somehow. Maybe it’s the light of day creeping in around the sides of my dresser or the soreness in my arms that reminds me I had enough wits about me to hide behind the tree. Whatever the reason, I lean against my dresser and return it to its place, staring at the house that had terrified me so badly under the cloak of midnight.

  “You’re not so scary,” I tell the house and the man inside it, and I almost believe myself until I flinch a little too hard at the sound of scratching just below my window.

  There, tucked into the trellis propped against the exterior under my bedroom window, is a folded piece of yellow notebook paper, its edges fluttering and scraping the siding in the morning breeze.

  Retreating back to my room, I rummage through my box of gadgets until I find what I’m looking for, a handy little tool I invented after realizing the tangle of vines on the trellis was where Aaron would be leaving me all my secret messages. I finally find it, the grabber I customized using the extender from a pool broom and the lever from a pooper-scooper. Then I return to the window, carefully lowering the grabber and retrieving the paper from the vines.

  But when I unfold the paper to read its message, I feel even worse than I did when I woke up on the floor.

  I look out the window across the street and wait for the messenger to make themselves known, but I know it’s no use. It appears they left behind more than a note, though. From the ground, a glinting catches my eye. I squint to see what it is, but the sun reflects off its surface, and I can’t make it out.

  “Guess I’m climbing you again after all,” I say to the trellis, which groans under my weight.

  At the bottom of the trellis, tangled in a thick knot of vines, is a delicate gold chain, a tiny apple charm dangling from its links.

  A bracelet I’ve seen before.

  Something in my stomach hardens as I flash back to another apple, this one made of bronze, dancing in a fountain in the middle of the Square. Dancing around the picture of a smiling Lucy Yi, her wrist decorated with an identical golden apple charm bracelet.

  I turn the bracelet over in my hand and realize there’s an inscription on the back:

  GOLDEN APPLE YOUNG INVENTORS CLUB

  I look up and down the street, but it’s no use. Whoever left me the bracelet and the note is long gone.

  “You’re not far, though, are you?” I say under my breath.

  I look directly across the street at the Peterson house.

  “Something tells me you’re watching me right now.”

  I own one suit, which is one more than any person should own. The shirt is stiff, the collar itches my neck, the pants feel grandpa-high up to my chin, and the shoes are so slippery that I could slide off into the next zip code if I’m not careful. Plus, the suit doesn’t even fit. I’ve grown two inches since the last time my parents had it altered, and no matter what I wear it for, I’ll only ever remember it as the funeral suit because it’s what I wore after my grandma died.

  “Five minutes, Narf,” Dad says from the other side of my bedroom door, and I can hear his shoes tapping down the hall and back toward my fussing mom.

  “Here, let me get that for you,” my mom says.

  “It’s fine, Lu.
”

  “You missed three belt loops,” she says.

  “I’m trying to expedite my escape from this contraption later on,” he says.

  “Hon, would you please try to act like a normal human for three hours? These are my colleagues,” Mom pleads, and without even seeing him, I know Dad is looking at the ground and nodding. There’s enough guilt to waft in my direction, and I look down, too, even though they can’t see me. It’s for Mom. That’s all we need to know about tonight.

  * * *

  It’s obvious that Raven Brooks is proud of their university. The main brick buildings are old, but their trims are freshly painted, their landscaping tightly manicured and closely clipped. Tonight’s fund-raiser for a new sciences wing isn’t taking place anywhere near the current sciences wing. I guess the organizers figured jars of pickled animal hearts and emergency eye-wash stations didn’t create the right atmosphere for a gala. I’m disappointed, though. I’d been hoping to sneak to the library to read the rest of the article I pocketed.

  Instead, the fund-raiser takes place in the main library, the centerpiece of the university for good reason. Its ornate carvings and meticulously lined shelves are anything but small town. The crystal stemware and white cloth napkins only add to the formality, leaving little doubt about why I’m wearing a suit, even if it is a size too small.

  Mom is across the room wearing the purple dress that Dad likes because Mom feels good in it. She says it hides her lumpy parts, and Dad says he likes her lumpy parts, and that’s when I leave the room for fear of throwing up. But tonight, Mom doesn’t look like she’s worried about her lumpy parts, or worried about anything really. She looks like she owns the room. Dad is in a corner chasing a goat cheese ball around his plate with a fork and laughing with some donor Mom pointed out to him.

  I’m stuffed on goat cheese balls and sparkling grape juice, and I’ve scoured the shelves—unsuccessfully—for a single book that doesn’t look like it would put me in a coma. I’m on my way back from the bathroom, when I see the sign with an arrow pointing downstairs to the archives.