The Magic of Missing Pieces

Missing piece #3: A Chunk of Sanity

Dawnie didn’t come back. Mrs. Shore stuttered through the homeroom announcements and didn’t use her favorite word, “sure,” once. Halfway through, the PA interrupted her with an announcement about Lounge 702. She stared at the speaker on the ceiling with such a ridiculous expression of hopefulness, I knew it could only be the lockdown code. She glanced at the door but didn’t lock it. For us, the threat was already in the room.
   
When we heard sirens in the distance, the class jittered. Mrs. Shore jolted as though struck by inspiration. “Rebecca, James,” she said. “W-will you go to the office for me? Dawnie hasn’t come back yet.”
   
They left, and so two random students were protected. Or two of her favorites.
   
I dug my metallic pencil case out of my bag, turning it in my fingers to catch a blurry image of the boy in the mask. If he moved, or reacted to anything Mrs. Shore said at all, I didn’t catch it.
   
“W-we need volunteers for the prom committee,” she stammered along. “The prom for this year is scheduled for April twenty-seventh at -”
   
She cut off. I lifted the pencil case. The mummified boy was standing, walking forward. I dropped the case to watch him. He moved closer and settled himself in Dawnie’s chair beside me.
   
He was so close I could see the edges of the cloths wrapped around him, the way the slips bulged as if layered far too deeply. The blades curved like the crests of waves, or claws, but they were hairline thin. The mirrored strip over his eyes glittered, but I could now tell that it was fabric. Not plastic, not glass. It shouldn’t have been possible. The fabric should have been keeping him blind. The layers were too thick, but his head tilted toward me as if his eyes were focusing.
   
“Tristan, Heath,” Mrs. Shore called. She had either decided saving me was too risky, or her favoritism had reached a whole new level. “Please check on the others in the office.”
   
They walked passed, and he turned to watch them go. A protective instinct rose up in me. I moved to the edge of my seat.
   
When he turned back to me, he turned with his whole body, hand raised. My heart stopped.
   
Instead of lashing at my face, his hand moved to my sketchpad and the pencil on my desk. He scrawled on the paper in thin doodles that almost looked like another language. Then he ripped the page and lifted it toward me.
   
For a moment I wondered at his terrible handwriting. Then I realized the letters looked like they were from some Middle Eastern language. Arabic? Sanskrit? Something like that.
    هل تذكر لي؟

My heart hammered. Somehow I’d landed myself in a top slot on my school psycho’s hit list. What action had he misunderstood? Did he go to my school at all?
   
He thrust the paper toward me, the way Mrs. Shore had thrust the pink slip at him only minutes before. His posture was more questioning than threatening. His head was low, and his shoulders curved back. What if this was a test, some kind of Columbine shit? Would he ask me if I believed in God, if I was happy, if we could have been friends? Had he already done it in some other language, to make my escape impossible?
   
“What do you want?” I asked.
   
He reached toward me. I flinched back so far, my chair dug into my spine. He grasped my hand. I couldn’t pull it back. My palm was folded over, forcing my fingers straight.
   
He reached toward my face and I thought Oh my god, he’s going to scrape my eyes out with those claws on his knuckles. His fingertips brushed over my eyebrows and my hairline. I watched the blades glimmer behind his  dark fingertips. His gloves were coarse, like jeans. Was he motioning toward my brain?
   
His hand drifted away from me, back to his chest. He said something I didn’t understand.

“I know you?” I asked. Something flashed in the window behind him - a policeman, I hoped - and my voice squeaked. I cleared my throat. “Why can’t you just tell me? Tell us all what’s going on?”
   
The door slammed open. A policewoman jolted through it, pistol raised. “Everyone silent. Hands on your heads, where we can see them,” she commanded.
   
I obeyed. Everyone in the class obeyed. The boy in black looked at all of us, and started to raise his hands to mimic the stance, then stopped.
   
The policewoman singled him out. Two backups appeared in the doorway as she turned the barrel of the gun his way - uncomfortably close to me. Her sharp eyes were coal dark, contrasting with her blond hair.
       
The boy in black glided out of the chair.
   
The policewoman lurched forward. “Don’t move.”
   
He turned his back to her, facing me. He crouched over my desk, tucked his head down, and screamed.
   
I was frozen. For all of my preparation to move, my scooting to the edge of my seat, my readiness to jump to Dawnie’s defense, his scream paralyzed me. When my muscles kicked back into motion, I thought I was having a seizure. My hands pushed on the desk and my feet kicked against the floor, trying to propel me away from him.
   
The policewoman moved to grab his wrists, but her fingers went right through his cloth, and his substance, and I could not believe what I was seeing. Two more officers were reaching for him but their arms went through. He was a ghost, and he just kept screaming in my face, and one of the policewomen panicked. She lifted the gun and aimed at his legs.
   
It banged. He didn’t crumple. He kept screaming as though nothing had happened. The bullets had passed through him, too. The scream carried on, painful. Familiar. His blades ground against the desk and carved niches in the wood.
   
And then he was gone.

The silence was as loud as anything.
   
“Where did he go?” the policewoman demanded, lowering the weapon.
   

“How the hell did he get out?” Mrs. Shore said.
   
“It looked like he just, like, shattered and vaporized!” Oliver’s girlfriend cried.
   
The policewoman reached for a gadget on her belt and shouted commands to search the grounds. My knees shook. I fell back into my chair.

Everyone had started to relax, to cry, to ask each other questions, but I could barely move.

Could that have been the same thing I saw at the party Saturday night, with Teddy?

Still in a daze, I let the policewoman usher me to the nurse’s office. The stereotypical nurse, the one who’s actually good at caring about her patients, would have batted the police away with a reflex hammer whilst she went about torturing my upper arms and asking personal questions about my period. Our school nurse, Miss Frederick, was a cold-fingered bitch. So the policewoman and one of her two flanking officers hung out for the whole humiliating mess. Of course, they waited until I had a thermometer locked under my tongue to start asking questions.
   
Did I know who it was? Had I seen him before? What was written on the paper? Why had he chosen me to single out? What was the screaming about? Had I ever taken a class in Swahili? Was I sure I didn’t know who it was? Could you repeat all of that for us? And on and on and on.
   
I said “I don’t know,” so many times I eventually snapped and threw a “fucking” into the mix. So they said they’d contact me later, once I had calmed down.
       
I pulled out my phone at one point and thought about texting my dad. I found myself standing at the last few names in my contacts list, wishing Teddy’s number was among them.
   
All I wanted to do was go home and take him his freaking cookies.
   
Then classmates came looking for me. Dawnie wasn’t there. Rumors were flying. Someone had been killed. Someone had been shot. The second was true, but the first one wasn’t. Only I knew. When the police failed to find him anywhere on school grounds, and my classmates’ accounts were so strange, rumors of a gas leak sprang up.
   
They were going to blow it off as a group hallucination.
   
By the time the nurse let me go, my classmates had transformed the room into a vat of rumor-swilling grapevine grapes. I wanted to step on them.
       
But I let them guide me to the parking lot.

I couldn’t wait to get home.
   
   
I cranked on my 1990 Chevy Camaro - my mom’s car. It was screwy, but Dad had never been able to part with it. I slid into the soft worn seats and soaked in the scents of pine, old sugary stains, the cigars my dad hadn’t smoked since I was in middle school, and something perfumey that mystified me for years until I spritzed some of Estee Lauder’s Beautiful perfume on my wrist at the mall last year.
   
I drove on autopilot through the lunchtime traffic. When a car stopped suddenly in front of me, and the bright red brake lights blared so threateningly, my heart pounded against my spine. I hated feeling like this.

Dad wouldn’t be back from lectures until four. I didn’t want to spend time in the empty house. I didn’t want to be free to think.
   
Okay, then. Time to focus on seducing Teddy Mascon. With cookies.
   
 When I picked up the plate, I was shaking too hard to hold it with one hand. I rushed outside into the sun and hoped the warmth would help the trembling.
   
While I walked up his driveway, I smoothed down my hair, tugged down my clothes, and tried to put confidence in my step.
   
Knocking required a few deep breaths. I rapped my knuckles on the wood with a little too much gusto. It hurt.
   
The doorknob jingled. “Mom, could you please open the door for yourself? It’s not like I can -”
   
Teddy cut off when he recognized me, my bright clothing, my petite figure, and all the ways I wasn’t his mother. His teeth gritted, and I frantically searched him for a reason why. My gaze traveled down his thin T-shirt, which was a size too small and hugged his muscled torso, and his boxer shorts, which were too large and revealed nothing, and below them… He stood on one leg. The top of the other one hung below the boxers, and a gaping blank space separated it from the floor. Where the rest of it should have been, there was emptiness.