Of Breakable Things (31 page)

“A glitch? Can that happen?”

Duvall’s face twisted into a hint of a sneer. “Only if the person who wrote it didn’t know what they were doing.”

***

That evening, when the door to her room swung open with a resounding bang, Alex wondered whose presence needed to be announced so violently. After spending most of the evening staring daggers at the unyielding black box and cursing the blank paper inside, she didn’t feel like having company.

She stepped out into the hallway and faced the engraved caption of Kender Federive. In place of the mirror, the large frame displayed an image of Kender fighting the banshee in the clearing. It had appeared to Alex after the night of the attack. She glanced downward, and the last person she expected to see was curled underneath the empty copper frame of Sonja F. Rellingsworth.

“Jonas? What are you doing here?”

He looked up, and when his eyes reached her they seemed to soften. “Hey,” he murmured. “I just wanted to see you.”

Alex was blunt. “Why?”

“Why not?”

She was too distracted to care about tact. “Because you’re Jonas. And you haven’t really spoken to me in weeks.” She took a seat on the floor beside him. “Why is that? Why do you always have to put on such a tough act?”

He remained quiet for several moments. “I’m not so tough. I just don’t wear my heart on my sleeve.” He leaned his head against the wall. “Like some other people.” He reached for her hand and flipped it over to run his finger along her palm.

Alex stared down at it, remembering how she used to analyze the lines, wondering why her life line was so long if her future was so bleak. Seeing it now, she knew it was only a projection her mind had created, but it was funny how the lines of her palm were frayed, a warning that life would try to rip at her seams.

“Do you remember that day we skipped school and went to the carnival at Earleigh Heights?” Jonas asked.

Alex nodded. All five of them planned to cut class that day, since it was the final day of the fair. Gabe, ever studious, opted out to take a quiz that morning; Kaleb’s flavor-of-the-week had convinced him to go elsewhere; and Chase couldn’t slip past the school’s strictest teacher. Alex and Jonas had been the only ones to escape to the carnival.

Alex stretched her legs in front of her. “I remember you let me drive. You were the only person who would ever have let me do something crazy like that.”

Jonas fought a smile. ”You’re a horrible driver.”

“No kidding.” Alex had barely been able to reach the pedals of the station wagon. The massive steering wheel had blocked her view of the rain-slick road. To make matters worse, they’d taken a twisting back road to avoid getting caught. Unfavorable odds, even for a good driver.

Alex had been tentative until Jonas barked at her: “Quit living like you’re already dead!” No one spoke to her like that. “Just live.”

She’d pressed her foot against the gas pedal as hard as she wanted to kick Jonas, and the car roared in response. With the windows down, the rain soaked them, but they didn’t care. Jonas never scolded her when the tires squealed. He never told her to slow down. He merely turned up the music. Alex had never felt such freedom before.

“Remember that funhouse?”

Alex nodded again. It was full of mirrors that made them look skinny, wiggly, chubby, all sorts of distorted. “I remember being scared,” she admitted. “It was disorienting.”

“But you know, I remember standing in front of those mirrors and thinking that no matter how warped my image was, yours always seemed clear. And your hand in mine just felt right.”

Alex watched him in bewilderment. “Jonas, you’ve had people trying to reach for your hand your whole life, and you smack them away.”

“You wouldn’t understand.” His tone was so hostile Alex could taste his resentment in her mouth like she’d bitten into a lime.

“Then help me to. I’m listening.”

“Anything I do, they do it better. Anything I want, they get it first.”

“What do you mean?”

Jonas shook his head and stood up. Alex followed suit. Arguing with him was a lost cause, and she was too tired to unlock the chains around his ego. But for some reason, the door to her room didn’t open. Evidently, she wasn’t supposed to go in yet. Then she noticed that Jonas had stopped in the middle of the hallway, staring back at her. “What?” she demanded.

“He kept you to himself for sixteen years, Alex. And he never even acted on it.”

So that’s what this was about.

“Have you ever even considered the possibility of someone else?” he added.

And then, the door to her room swung open with ease. Alex stumbled into the darkness, half expecting Chase to be waiting there. The lights came on to reveal an empty room, but she could have sworn she saw a figure disappearing from her balcony. A new pillow waited on her bed, and the room she’d neglected to clean that week was now free of feathers. She ran to the balcony but found no one. And Chase never came back to her room that night.

***

As children, the Lasalles would frequently gallivant around town playing out their own rendition of cops and robbers. Although the boys adopted interchangeable roles, Alex was typecast as the damsel in distress. The dramatic theatrics of screaming for help and pretending to faint were exciting at first, but one day she changed her mind. Following a debate during which Kaleb failed to convince Chase that Alex couldn’t be a robber, Gabe finally swayed the vote. Jonas had scowled, and Kaleb had thrown his hands into the air while Chase and Alex shared defiant grins.

In the midst of the heist, the plan went awry. Officer Gabe apprehended and arrested Kaleb in the Parrish shopping center, and Officers Jonas and Chase were detained by batty old Mrs. Morrison in the Hallmark store for waving their toy guns outside her window. Alex seized the opportunity to retrieve the loot from the trash can where Kaleb had stashed it. The filthy sack of “treasure” reeked of rotten onion rings and mayonnaise, but it was gold to Alex, and she clutched the neck of the bag so fiercely that her knuckles turned bleach white.

She was going to win.

She reached the old grandfather tree that Kaleb had designated to be home base and searched for something to hang the bag from the thick trunk. It was then that she felt a cold object jabbing her in between her shoulder blades.

“Pass over the loot, you crook,” Jonas commanded, pushing the barrel of his Nerf gun into her back.

Alex cursed loudly and spun around to face him with her hands in the air, still gripping the treasure tightly.

“Not smiling now, are you?” Jonas said. His cheeks turned pink with excitement.

“How did you know we’d take the treasure here?” Alex choked out in an attempt to buy time.

“Kaleb hasn’t won here yet,” Jonas replied, pointing to the old tree with his free hand. At that point, the trunk bore the tattoos of only three sets of initials: GML, JML, and CML. The Lasalles always marked their territory.

It was then that Alex heard a click.

“Put the gun down,” a new voice ordered. The barrel of another toy gun appeared from behind the grandfather tree. Jonas’s eyes widened first in disbelief and then in anger when Chase emerged from behind it.

“What are you doing?” Jonas gasped. “You’re supposed to be my partner!”

Chase smiled. “I’m secretly in cahoots.”

“Those aren’t the rules.”

“Since when do we follow rules?”

Jonas’s jaw jutted out and swayed. His cheeks flushed.

“Come on. You always find loopholes when it comes to boundaries. You should have seen this coming.”

Jonas pouted. “But I should win. You’re going to choose her over me?”

“Yes,” Chase said matter-of-factly. And he handed Alex his Swiss army knife to mark her victory.

Since both Chase and Jonas were avoiding her, Alex was hesitant to spend so much time at the ball fields, but when she wandered around campus, she’d find herself there anyway. She remained on the outskirts of the stands with her homework, looking up occasionally to watch them. It was the perfect hiding spot until Jack Bond showed up one night.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

“Detention. Duvall punishes me at least once a week. Believe me when I say this is much better than scrubbing the floors of her classroom.”

Alex was mortified. “Does she make you do that a lot?”

Jack nodded and extended his arms to either side like an airplane, balancing on one of the benches. He pivoted and began to walk away.

“Where are you going?”

“To get an Ex. Then I’ll go to the far end of the fields by the skate park. Reuben should already be over there.”

“Your little sidekick,” Alex said, standing up and gathering her things. “I’ll come help you.”

At the Ex kiosk, the vendor slid the cups across the counter, avoiding Jack’s touch. The boy regarded Jack with the same disgustful expression Alex had received when she was dying. In the final months of her life, she became a skeleton. Even the other loony patients at the institution stared in revulsion at her sunken appearance.

“Thank you.” Jack said, either oblivious to the rude treatment or ignoring it. He ordered an Ex for Reuben, as well.

“What did Reuben do to land cleanup duty?”

Jack frowned. “I think he volunteered.”

“Why would he do that?”

“I think he does it just to get out. He doesn’t have a lot of friends.”

“Maybe he should resign as president of the ‘I heart Jack Bond’ club, and then more people would want to hang around him.”

Jack handed her two cups. “He’s trying to fit in.”

“The only things he’s trying to fit in are
your
shoes.”

Jack always denied the worship that Reuben exhibited towards him. “People would like him if they tried.”

“You might be right—that is, if he’d actually talk to someone besides you and Calla.” Earlier that week, Alex had attempted to sit with Reuben at the Ex House. He’d regarded her scornfully, swept up his books, and stomped away. He’d left Alex sitting there, dumbfounded.

When they reached the skate park, a small maze of half-pipes, railings, and ramps, Alex was happy to find that from this area of the fields she had a clear view of the games. If she couldn’t be there with the Lasalles, at least she could watch them. The game of choice that night was soccer, Gabe’s favorite, and no sooner had she begun to search the faces of the players when she saw him skidding across one of the fields, sliding to save a ball from the goal. Her stare must have nudged at him because Gabe stopped to glance over his shoulder in her direction. She spun around and faced Jack.

“So, what are you supposed to be doing?”

Jack pointed to a ball of paper on the ground. “Cleaning. We take care of any littering or sticks or leaves.”

“That sounds easy enough.”

Alex searched for a place to set down the drinks and spotted Reuben on the ground, crawling around on all fours like a bloodhound sniffing for clues. He certainly seemed to be taking his job seriously. He noticed Alex, but didn’t acknowledge her until he found Jack.

“Hey!” he shouted a little too enthusiastically. It was like he’d been caught doing something wrong. He itched his neck furiously.

“We brought you a drink,” Jack said. “And stop scratching.”

Reuben scrambled to his feet. His round cheeks puffed into a grin. He grabbed the drink from Alex without a word to her.

She gave Jack a sardonic glance. “Do you guys ever play the games?”

“I’ve never really been one for organized sports,” Jack admitted, lifting a hand to shield the lights from the stadium. “I was always picked last in gym class.”

“But that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t be good at it here.”

“And give those guys an excuse to pound me into the dirt? No thanks.”

Her eyes were drawn to a vacant area of the field moments before Chase appeared from nowhere, using his body as a roadblock to send a boy and the ball catapulting through the air. She wondered about the legality of such aggression, but the referee didn’t blow his whistle. No wonder the Lasalles loved the games. Kaleb leaped up to retrieve the ball, scissor-kicking it downfield to another teammate.

Alex leaned down to pick up an empty cup and tossed it into a trash bag. “You’re a mover, Jack,” she realized aloud. “Why don’t you just pick up all this trash with your mind?”

“I can’t because Calla isn’t here.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

Jack’s brow furrowed. “It’s a twin thing, I guess. I can’t really do much without her.”

“Is that why your sister is so quiet?”

“I wouldn’t call her quiet so much as … ” He searched for the right word. “Cautious. She’s paranoid about what people are going to do to her. Spirits around here are lemmings and just follow the Darwins. We have to watch our backs.”

“But you aren’t afraid of the Darwins,” Alex said. “It seems like you ignore them pretty well.”

“The Darwin family has a substantial history here, a history with powerful spirits who still hold office in Eidolon.”

“Aren’t you a multigenerational family too?”

“Sure, we’re as blue blooded as they are, maybe even more so, but you don’t see them inviting us to their little get-togethers, do you? We have much different histories.”