Splinters of Light (33 page)

D
ylan was being a gigantic asshat. Yeah, the Incursers were on the run and the Healers were suddenly on top of the social strata, but they’d talked about that potential universe switch a million times—the game turned on a dime, and by next week the Velocirats could be calling all the shots and they’d all be doomed, Incurser and Healer alike. It didn’t matter what plotline Ellie wrote, or how many people chose to play it, if the game’s creators hit the override button on the universe.

Don’t pick that,
Ellie typed as Dyl attempted to grab a flame from a low blue tree.

He ignored her, lifting out the flame and then doing a pain dance as it blackened his arm to his elbow.

I told you so.
Only Healers could carry the flame. She had a ball of fire now under her cloak that she hadn’t even told him about yet.

Let’s go skinny-dipping!

Fine. It was silly, but he loved going there, so she would walk with him through the glade to get to the hot spring. If you walked right at it and at the last minute hit a jump sequence, then your character’s clothes would disappear as you cannonballed into the water. Not that you could see junk or anything—the game makers blurred out the genitalia—but it was still kind of funny.

Four other “couples” were already in the springs. How many of them actually knew each other in real life? She wondered if any of them had actually met and actually liked each other. They couldn’t possibly be the only two players to ever get together in real life. The game was already huge—there’d been a con dedicated to it in Houston just the month before. There must be other couples in the world who owed their relationship to this purple and green world where Healers couldn’t swim but, given the right plants, could fly when necessary.

Hey, what’s wrong?

What?
Ellie made Addi tuck a Lopi flower behind her ear.

What’s up with you?

Nothing.

Seems like more than that. You want me to call?

No, she didn’t.

Ellie hadn’t seen Dylan for three weeks, not since she’d met him and his band at a recording studio in Emeryville. He’d been different. Yeah, they were recording a demo and she knew it was important—maybe it was even the equivalent of her applying to
colleges—but she still wanted to be . . . looked at. To be seen. He’d practically acted like she wasn’t there, just kept fiddling with his guitar, even when they were on breaks. And afterward, when he’d driven her to BART (instead of across the bridge and home), he’d kissed her differently. Like she was . . . something he expected.

They’d had sex three times now. Once at the hotel, which was the best time. Once in his car, which was uncomfortable but okay, and once in his bed while his roommates were chilling in the other room completely baked out of their minds.

Had she done it wrong? Was she bad in bed? Did she not know how to do it right? How would she know if that was true? He was sweet, of course. Dylan was always sweet. And he’d seemed happy; it was pretty obvious he’d been satisfied. (Had she been? She wasn’t quite sure. Why was it so confusing? Wasn’t it supposed to be a big bang followed by giddiness? Instead, it was kind of awkward and then awesome and then awkward again. God, she really must not be doing it right.)

Dylan had been supposed to come over tomorrow for Thanksgiving—they’d planned it weeks before—but he’d IM’d her that morning and said his brother was coming to town and was taking him out to dinner.

Ellie hadn’t even known he had a brother. She knew about his sister, but not a brother.

In the game, Dyl ran up the side of the riverbank (his clothes miraculously reattaching as he went) and kept going. Addi followed him. Dyl ran past the edge of town toward the Hinters. His avatar paused as he juggled two swords.

What are we doing?
she typed. Maybe they’d be the first to ever have a “talk” in
Queendom
.

Running.

No. I mean you and me.

Nothing, Ellie.
He rarely called her by her real name in the game.
We just ARE
. Dyl ran faster, Addi at his heels.
Tell me a story about where we’re going now.

She could do that. That was, maybe, the only thing she was good at.
Once upon a time,
she started as she hit the command to keep Addi running (she’d pass Dyl eventually; she was just a little bit faster than he was),
at the end of the world, there were two runners on a mission to save the Dragon Queen.
The sky went red over their racing avatars, getting more orange the closer they got to the edge of the game.
Every night, as the sun fell, a great spell would fall on the land . . .

Wanna go back to the springs?

Hey. It’s my story.

Yeah, well, Josh just texted me and he’s going to try to find the Queen’s eggs, too.

No!
The fewer people looking for the eggs the better.
Did you tell him that’s what we were doing out here?

Not really . . .

The motion detector went on outside the living room window. Ellie jumped and leaned to look. Her mother wandered past, in the direction of Harrison’s house. Shit. She hadn’t even heard her leave the kitchen. Ellie didn’t type to tell Dylan where she was going—she just raced to the back door. The door was unlocked, the screen door standing open.

Ellie watched while her mother walked across the grass under the moon. She opened her mouth to call her, to say something, but then she saw Harrison’s porch light go on. He stepped into its yellow pool and opened his arms.

Her mother folded herself into them.

Ellie’s shoulders dropped, and her stomach did, too. She was glad—truly—that her mother had Harrison.

But her mom also had Mariana.

And Mariana had Luke.

Who did that leave her with?

Inside, she typed,
Hey, it’s late. I’m going to bed.
She sat at the dining room table and crossed her fingers on both hands. Sometimes he liked to go to sleep at the same time she did. Dyl came into Addi’s hut and stood as near to her as his avatar could. Then, with the violins softly playing, they’d sleep as close to each other as two
Queendom
players could.

K. Night.

That was it. Not even an
XO
. Nothing else.

Ellie’s back ached with something that felt dull and heavy. Her knees were stiff as she walked up the stairs. On the landing, she looked at the series of twin pictures hung on the wall. The simply framed pictures showed her mother and Aunt Mariana at various ages, draped over each other, laughing. Always laughing. Sometimes they wore matching clothes ironically, and sometimes they were just themselves. But they were together in every single photo, and they had a story for each one, too.
That was the year we had chickenpox. Remember how itchy those sweaters were?

In the school pictures of Ellie that hung farther down the hall, chronicling her most awkward ages, she was alone. Just like she was now.

In her room, Ellie set her closed computer on her desk. She tried to rub the muscle in her neck that ached, but she couldn’t quite reach it.

Automatically, she brought up the
Queendom
forums page. She could plunge into talk about the game, and that would make her feel better. It always did. She wouldn’t be alone if she were in
the computer, bouncing Healing recipes off other people, helping newbies figure out how to transform.

Ellie looked down at her hands, the fingertips poised on the enter button.

For the first time in months, she turned the game off. She didn’t need the game to take care of her, just like she didn’t need her mother to be home or her aunt to watch out for her. She could handle it on her own. She’d sleep with no music tonight, with no soft glow from her Healer’s hut to bathe her. Ellie pulled up the covers and shut her eyes resolutely, as if she could will herself to rest. Maybe when she woke in the morning she’d feel different. Stronger. Older.

Maybe she’d feel less alone.

She crossed her fingers again even though they didn’t have a good track record and squinched her eyes more tightly closed.

N
ora said, “Shit,” the word deep and completely heartfelt.

The turkey was rotten. The goddamned Thanksgiving turkey was rotten to its core.

“Shit, shit,
shit
.” The word was also an apt description of the way the turkey smelled. She’d put the turkey in four hours before and she’d been smelling something bad for two. She’d blamed Ellie’s shoes at first. Seventeen-year-old girls normally smelled like many things—Abercrombie perfume and Maybelline Baby Lips—but Ellie had legendarily bad-smelling sneakers. She didn’t seem to care, either. When she was Ellie’s age, Nora had been horrified by the very idea of any natural smell emanating from her body. She’d fought her underarms with the spray deodorant from the dollar store and, with her babysitting money, she’d bought extra cans that she tucked in her school locker and kept in the bottom of her backpack. Both Nora and Mariana had argued over the baby powder in the mornings before school, tipping it into their plastic flats, hoping that that day would be the
day it worked. Instead, they’d only left sweet-and-sour white footprints on the locker room floor as they padded to the gym showers they pretended to take.

Ellie, since she’d gotten old enough to fight body odors, had seemed blithely unconcerned. “Mom! Smell my feet! Aren’t they
rank
?” She would take off her shoes when her feet got hot whether she was in the Prius or in the kitchen. Nora knew that Samantha and Vani teased her mercilessly about it, and still Ellie just smiled and shrugged. The Odor-Eaters Nora bought her sat encased in plastic on her desk.

Even on the days Ellie forgot to wear deodorant—which were more days than Nora could honestly understand—she seemed strangely thrilled with her animal scent. “Can you smell me, Mom? I’m
so
foul. I smell like this guy in my seventh period named Jim Wells on a hot day after he’s done lacrosse
and
basketball practice.”

The Thanksgiving turkey smelled like Ellie’s feet and old roadkill and cat shit and, possibly, Jim Wells.

And apparently, a smell that offended her daughter
did
exist. Ellie entered the kitchen with her blue scarf pulled up around her face.

Her voice was muffled. “What
is
that, Mom?”

Nora hadn’t been prepared to admit that it was the turkey. It couldn’t be. Not this year. “I thought I’d used too much rosemary . . .”

“Rosemary smells nice. Whatever
this
is”—Ellie made a one-handed gesture in the air—“is toxic. I think it might kill me.”

Nora snapped, “Then get out of the kitchen.” She heaved the turkey out of the oven, appreciating its heft. She’d spent almost forty dollars on this freaking thing. “Maybe the egg in the stuffing is bad. Or maybe it was the bread I used?”

“What did you do?”

Nowadays it was always her. It was always Nora screwing
things up. This time it wasn’t her, though. “No, it has to be the stuffing.”

“But I helped you make that. It didn’t stink.”

What Ellie meant by helping was that she had stood near her mother, her cell phone in her hand, texting furiously to Samantha while she snacked on the toasted focaccia Nora used to start the stuffing. Some things didn’t change.

Ellie pulled the scarf tighter around her face. “It smells like death.”

Nora bit her lip and, with it, the retort she wanted to spit at her daughter. It
was
death—that was the point. Americans celebrated being thankful for life by butchering something, cutting it down in its full-breasted happiest prime. “It can’t be the bird,” she said. “I won’t let it be.” Surely she’d be able to pull out whatever the offending thing was and throw it away. “Oh! Maybe I didn’t pull out the giblets.”

“You did.”

“No, I don’t think I did.”

“Remember? You said you wished we still had Buster so you could give him the heart.”

“I did?” Nora felt a spasm of fear low inside her. She set the turkey carefully on the wooden cutting block of the island. “Sure. Right. But maybe I didn’t get it all.”

“Are you sure you didn’t leave this on the doorstep for, like, a week?”

“Don’t be silly.”

Ellie’s voice was softer. “No. Really. Did you . . . maybe . . . buy it last month? Or something?”

Nora held up one oven-mitted hand. “Just stop. Let me figure this out.” She
hated
that she couldn’t remember when she’d bought the turkey. Or even where she’d bought it, for that matter. She knew how much she’d paid . . . or was that last year’s bird that she remembered?
Shit.

Ellie hopped up on the counter next to the sink, even though Nora had asked her approximately seventy thousand times not to—the tile would get weak eventually—and watched. “I don’t know why I’m even staying in here,” Ellie said through her scarf. “But it’s like I can’t turn away. I have to know the disgusting end of this. This is worse than when you hit that mama bird with the car. Remember?”

Of course she remembered.
Not of course. Never of course, not anymore.
“You are
not
helping.” Nora took her biggest wooden spoon and jabbed it into the bubbling, noxious cavity. “It’s got to be the stuffing.”

“If it was the turkey itself, wouldn’t you have noticed after you defrosted it? Like, it wouldn’t go into the oven and just start stinking.”

Nora closed her eyes. She couldn’t remember defrosting it. Goddamn it, she was
good
at this part of being a mother. The home-baked cookies and the healthy banana bread with the flaxseed oil snuck in and the caramel apples at Halloween and birthday cakes in any and every shape—Nora was good at doing it and good at helping other people to do the same. Thanksgiving was her high holiday, the most holy of all shined-silver days.

Not this year. The stuffing was in a large yellow bowl, reeking of bloody mayhem, and the stench was only getting worse.

Nora’s eyes watered, and from her perch on the counter Ellie choked.

Taking her favorite, sharpest knife from the block, Nora held it over the bird’s breast. This was a moment to be savored at a table where your loved ones were gathered around you. Carving was the best part of Thanksgiving—the moment that everyone watched, salivating in appreciation. She should carve into the meat at the long dining table, candles flickering, wine sparkling in her wedding crystal.

Not under the compact fluorescent glare of the kitchen lighting. Not while her daughter gagged.

She held the knife for a moment in the air and then plunged it into the bird.

The turkey fell apart with a wet groan. The breath of it rushing out was enough to make Nora stagger backward.

“Oh, no! Mom!” Ellie’s scarf was almost wrapped around her head now and she pulled her knees to her chest.

“Get your feet off the counter!” The demand was automatic.

“Jesus. Do you have a nose? How are you not dying right now? Who
cares
about my feet? My toes smell like roses compared to that nightmare.”

“You’re right. You’re totally right.” Nora picked up another oven mitt and picked up the pan, all twenty pounds of bird and metal. She nodded to the kitchen door. Ellie hopped down and opened it for her.

Outside, the afternoon was warm, one of those gifts the Bay Area doled out liberally in the late fall. The big-leaf maple that hung over the backyard had turned a glorious red and orange, seemingly overnight. Through the wooden fence Nora could hear her other neighbors—the not-Harrison neighbors—enjoying their three-o’clock gin and tonic, in which they indulged every day, holiday or not. The familiar clink of ice in their shaker didn’t calm her—the sound just rattled her nerves more.

“Get the garbage can lid,” she said.

Ellie, still barefoot, danced around her to open it. While she held it open, Nora dumped the whole thing.

“You’re not even saving the roasting pan?” Ellie said incredulously.

“We can buy another one.”

Then, without a single word, Nora walked back inside the house and slammed the door, leaving Ellie outside alone. She had to get used to it sometime.