Shadows

  That his shadow is too big for him and there was something out of a bad science-fiction movie on the wall behind his chair at dinner? Not to mention that shirt. I shook my head.

  “Well, give him a chance, won’t you?” she said.

  “Sure,” I said.

  She stared at me a few seconds longer. I could see the thought bubble forming over her head. It said “teenagers.” I smiled, and she relaxed a little and hugged me again, and moved off toward the stairs. “You’ll lock up after you take Mongo out,” she said, which was Mom-speak for “It’s a school night, go to bed.”

  “Mom,” I said. Mongo had appeared at the sound of his name, but I waited till Mom had gone upstairs and I saw the bathroom light go on. Then I put Mongo’s lead on like we were going out as normal. Our dining room used to be a garage. Now it’s a dining room, Mom’s office, and a coat closet. I paused at the dining room door and then flung it open and flicked the light switch on as if I was expecting to catch somebody at something.

  There wasn’t anything there except a (mostly cleared-off) table and some chairs and the corner cupboards with Mom’s china and stuff, and a piece of Ran’s parka sticking out through the closed closet door. The space alien(s) had gone home with Val. I guessed that was something.

  Mongo and I had a nice little cruise around the block while he examined every inch of the sidewalk, fences, trees, patches of grass, and the Watchguard call box on the corner and chose precisely the right six(teen) spots to pee. I locked the door behind us when we came in again, took his lead off—and went back to check that I had locked the door. I always lock the door. I didn’t need to check. I spent a minute staring at the floor, like I was watching for jagged-edged, wiggly shadows to eel under the locked door. For the minute I was watching they didn’t. Then I shut Mongo in the kitchen, where the official dog bed was (plus 5,214 dog toys so he didn’t have any excuses to eat chair legs), and went to bed myself. And dreamed about alligators and space aliens. But that’s my problem, right?

  • • •

  You already know how chapter one has to end: they got married. I told myself he was not my stepfather, maybe he was married to my mother but that doesn’t make him my anything father. (He even tried to adopt us. Ran said yes and I said no. I managed not to say “you must be dreeping kidding, no bugsucking way.”)

  I was Mom’s attendant and I’d like to say I got a great dress out of it but we were broke. Actually it was a pretty good dress because Mom’s sister Gwenda brought their own mom and grandmom’s party dresses from her attic and told me I could pick one. Gwenda lives in their old family house, way upstate from us in Station. I like vintage as well as the next teenage girl with cash flow problems and wearing dead people’s clothes isn’t usually a problem but there was something a bit buggie about these. Maybe because I knew Great-grandmom had been a magician. It was Grandmom’s generation that got gene-chopped, and they’re still checking in case they missed something. You get scanned at birth and then you get another scan and they give you a blood test some time during adolescence—with girls you’re supposed to go back when you start menstruating. The scan made me pretty sick the second time, which is supposed to mean that I would have had the gene if it hadn’t been chopped. It must have been really, really rough for Great-grandmom and her daughters.

  Or maybe I wasn’t hot-wired by the dresses because I was dreading the wedding. By heroic self-control I didn’t choose the black one with the grey lace and sequins although it was seriously electric, and picked out a pink and maroon one instead that looked a little less like the wicked fairy who’s come to curse the princess. Jill was helping me and pulled out a beigey-cream one that would have made me look like I had died (speaking of dead people) but looked terrific against her dark skin.

  “Hey, babe, utsukushii,” I said, which is Japanese for “beautiful.” Mostly we insulted each other with the (approximately ten) Japanese words we’d looked up on the webnet to annoy Takahiro with. We only knew a couple of nice ones.

  Gwenda laughed. “Okay, you have that one,” she said to Jill. Jill by special perk was invited to the wedding to keep me company; other than her it was just Mom’s family and friends. (Val didn’t seem to have any friends, and if he had any family they were still back in Whatsit-kan.) “And you can keep the black one too,” she said to me. “None of this has been out of the attic in thirty years. Nobody’s going to miss it.”

  Gwenda herself was wearing this sharp emerald suit for the wedding, totally looking like the no-nonsense lawyer that she was, even if she was as broke as the rest of the family because she specialized in defending people accused of practicing magic. (I’m not talking about big evil-magician-with-electrodes stuff. Just a charm to cure warts or make hair grow, if it worked, the government would come after you.) She usually got them off (she usually managed to prove it was science really) and almost none of them could afford to pay her.

  The problem with the green of her suit was the way the shadows seemed to like it. Bugsuck. Also shimatta. (Japanese for “damn.”) They liked my second aunt, Rhonwyn’s, blue dress too, but not as much as the green. Jill was busy twirling and maybe they didn’t like cream and beige and taupe. The pink and maroon in my dress was in panels, plus this lacy pink shawl Jill loaned me to hide that my dress didn’t quite fit (I’m hopeless with needle and thread) and I was telling myself they liked solid colors, although it was probably just that I couldn’t bear thinking of them crawling on me or my best friend. Although I had the feeling there was one particular shadow that was kind of following me around. It writhed along the ground after me. Uggh. If I’m not imagining you, Go. Away.

  The shadows were particularly bad that day. I’d figured out by then that the shadows were worse when Val was tensed up about something. He was tense about having dinner at our house that first time. He was majorly tense on his wedding day.

  Jill cried. Well, somebody should cry at a wedding, and I wasn’t going to. What bothered me the most—besides Val’s shadows—was that I was beginning to forget what having Dad around had been like. I remembered the loneliness, how tiny and broken our world felt when there were suddenly only three of us. Sometimes it was like there was only two of us because at first, before Tennel & Zeet hired her, Mom was working three part-time jobs and got home late every night. Our poky little suburban three-bedroom house felt enormous when I was the oldest person in it. I still remembered feeling tiny and broken. But I was forgetting Dad.

  And now my world was full of shadows.

  I was having some of these thoughts for about the six-hundredth time that day when Val turned around and caught my eye and smiled. I wasn’t anything like ready at that moment to be nice to my mother’s new husband and it must have showed on my face—and then Val’s shadows went crazy and I stared straight over his shoulder and I probably twitched or something and I may have taken a step back. Val went so still that that was as eye-catching as the stuff on the wall behind him and I looked back at him and he was staring at me and he wasn’t smiling.

  And then Jill came up and put her arms around me and her head on my shoulder and bawled, and I could put my arms around her and my cheek against her hair and not look at Val although I didn’t like turning my back on him (and the shadows) either. But what was he going to do with twenty-five other people in the house? Turn me into a space alien or an alligator? Call his creepy minions and have them carry me away to his secret lair?

  The woman who said the legal words over them had come to our house and we had the reception there too. It was just food, there wasn’t an official wedding cake, but there were several cakes, and one of Mom’s friends had made a cake in a fancy pan with a hole in the middle and Gwenda put a little vase with some white roses out of Mom’s garden in the hole, so that’s the one they cut like a wedding cake while almost everybody but me took pictures. Mom did look gorgeous in her gold dress, and Rhonwyn had made her a sort of cap of yellow roses that should have
looked totally woopy but was fantastic. (There’s a fourth sister—Blanchefleur—but no one’s seen her in like twenty years, and a half brother, Darnel, but he’s in a cobey unit, and on the wedding day was off being deployed somewhere saving Newworld from gaps in reality.) But Val was there all the time too, wearing a suit that fit him about as well as a horse blanket on a goat (his trouser legs were rolled up. He couldn’t have got them shortened for his wedding?) and he was pretty much glued to Mom’s side so that kind of ruined photo ops for me.

  Mongo was totally thrilled by all the people (in Mongo’s opinion we didn’t entertain enough) and since these were nearly all friends of his too no one said anything about getting long black and white hairs on their good clothes. But after I stopped the third person trying to give him a piece of cake—sugar is so not a good idea with a dog who’s mental to begin with—I hooked my hand through his collar and dragged him out. He was all stiff-legged and resisting on the way to the kitchen door but as soon as I got him over the sill into the back yard he collapsed and turned into a sad hairy forlorn dog blob. I looked at him and laughed. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed. He raised his head and thumped his tail hopefully.

  “No,” I said. “You may not go back in there and cruise for handouts.” But I did go back indoors myself long enough to grab a handful of dog biscuits and started running him through all of his tricks. He learned stuff really fast if there were biscuits involved but he forgot really fast too so you had to keep reminding him. I heard the kitchen door open as Mongo was dancing on his hind legs. I looked around warily but it was only Jill.

  “Your mom says to stop playing with your dog and come in and talk to people,” she said. Her eyelids were still swollen from crying. I wanted to know why she was crying at my mom’s wedding, but I wasn’t ready to ask her yet.

  “In a minute,” I said. “Go stand in the middle of the lawn and be herded.” She rolled her eyes but she went. It would be really useful if I could teach Mongo to fetch critters rather than just balls and sticks and towels with knots in them. Clare’s shelter had been a farm in her dad’s day before the town ate most of it, but she still owned several acres, and when someone wanted to adopt a wether or a goat or a pony you could guarantee they’d all be at the farthest end of their field. So I was trying to teach Mongo to herd. Jill did what I told her while I semaphored at Mongo. Uggh. Well, we’d get it one day. Maybe. I’d better watch the Teach Your Dog Herding vids again.

  Jill walked back to me with Mongo at her heels. He was very likely to follow her around anyway, but when he came to me and sat hopefully, I gave him his last dog biscuit. First rule: If your dog doesn’t do what you want, it’s your fault.

  I watched Jill look around our back yard. It was a corner lot, so it was pretty big. It was big enough for both Mongo and Mom’s flowers, if nobody was dumb enough to leave Mongo out here by himself for longer than he needed to pee (I’d like once asked Ran to put Mongo out when I was going to be home late from a school thing, Ran forgot to bring him in, and Mongo ate a rosebush. I have no idea why he didn’t cut his mouth to pieces. Special border-collie thorn-proof chromosome). And there was the old shed. It used to be Dad’s workshop. Mom had cleared it out really soon after Dad died—the only thing left was the old hammer that now lived under the kitchen sink. Since then it had filled up again and Mom had cleared it out again (Ran’s space station with the zillions of drone ships and the cheesy wormhole finally went to the charity shop to make some other family’s life miserable) because it was now Val’s office. I saw Jill’s eyes settle on the shed and stay there.

  I turned around to look at it myself. Dad had built it out of a kit so it was pretty buggie, but Mom had planted stuff around it, and some of the vines and things had covered most of it up. Val had started moving his stuff in this week and . . .

  . . . there were more of those kusatta shadows. Whatever was throwing them out here had just amazing numbers of legs unless it was several of them doing a synchronized team thing uggggh. . . .

  I looked down at Mongo. He was whuffling through the grass around my feet, hoping for dog biscuit crumbs. Val’s shadows had never bothered Mongo. Fat lot of good you are, I thought at him. Aren’t dogs supposed to be sensitive to the weird and the icky? In the absence of crumbs, Mongo began licking the grass. I took a deep breath and looked over at Jill. She was scowling at the shed but it wasn’t a holy-electricity-what-is-that scowl, it was a trying-not-to-cry-any-more scowl. “Does the shed look . . . funny to you?” I said carefully.

  Jill stopped scowling and looked blank. “No. Uh. What do you mean, funny? It’s a shed.”

  “Never mind,” I said, suddenly very tired. I put my arm around her. “Now tell me what you’re crying about.”

  She gave a drippy sniff. “Aren’t you supposed to cry at weddings?”

  I didn’t say anything and she sighed and said, “I broke up with Eddie.”

  “You—oh.”

  “Try not to cheer,” she said.

  I had never liked Eddie. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “No you’re not,” she said, but she put her head on my shoulder. “Oh, flastic, I bet your dress is silk. If I leave tear marks on it your aunt will kill me.”

  “Gwenda only kills plaintiffs,” I said. “And then only when they’ve had a chance to withdraw and haven’t taken it.”

  But Jill had stopped paying attention. “You know . . . there is something weird about—I think it’s the shadows on that shed. Is that what you mean?”

  I went cold. Maybe it was better to think you were imagining things.

  Jill was still staring at the shed. “Maybe it’s just the wind in the vines and stuff. Your mom sure knows how to make things grow.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  My best friend turned her head and stared at me. “Why do you dislike Val so much?”

  I shrugged, staring at the shadows snaking over the shed. “He gives me the creeps.”

  “Oh, Maggie,” said Jill, worried. “Not like—”

  “Oh, gods’ engines,” I said. “No. Nothing like Mr. Roberts.” Mr. Roberts had taught geometry at our high school till his stepdaughter had told her best friend that he was sleeping with her and she wished he wouldn’t. It was about the biggest scandal Station had ever had. Mr. Roberts went to jail and the stepdaughter and her mom left town. I hoped they were okay.

  “Like Arnie then,” she said, and all the life went out of her voice, and she leaned against me as if she was cold, although the weather was so warm I was only wearing the shawl because my dress didn’t fit. (Just by the way, Jill and I looked amazing. You’d never know my dress didn’t fit, and I’d bought these fabulous pink shoes on sale, and Jill’s mom had let her wear her grandmother’s gold locket.)

  “I thought you liked Arnie,” I said. Arnie was Jill’s mom’s live-in boyfriend. He ran the big hardware store in town: Porter’s: Everything for Your Projects. They had a good arts and crafts section, including lots of origami paper, even though the local origami crowd was mostly Takahiro and me, and Jill when she was trying to buy either of us a present.

  “I did,” she said. “But he’s gone all—weird.”

  “Weird how?” Arnie has always been weird. He’s the only person I’ve ever met who doesn’t have a pocket phone. But he’d been a tireless piggyback-ride giver when he and Jill’s mom first got together and Jill and I were eight, and he didn’t stop because he got bored with his girlfriend’s kid and her friend, but because we decided our third-grade dignity couldn’t take it. And now he always looked at me like I was me and not a teenager, which is a rare gift in adults.

  “Weird weird.”

  “That’s clear and helpful.”

  She was silent a moment. “You know that selling-you-something face he has? Smiling and smiling and—like Mongo watching the hand with a dog biscuit in it? It’s okay in the store. It’s probably why he sells so much
stuff. But he never used to wear it at home. He does now. It’s like—I don’t know what it’s like. It’s buggie.”

  Like Val noticing me noticing his shadows? “I’m sorry,” I said uselessly.

  “Well, I’m sorry you don’t like Val,” she said. “Doesn’t do either of us much good, does it? Hey, there’s a silverbug outbreak at Long-iron. Dena phoned while you were primping. It’s supposed to be pretty epic. Peak forecast is for tomorrow. Want to go take a look?”

  “Silverbugs?” I said. “Again? That’s the second flare this summer.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “It probably doesn’t mean anything.”

  There are always a few silverbugs around. If you see one you’re supposed to report it. If you didn’t mind stepping on them you were supposed to do that and then report it. If you did mind you were supposed to put a bowl or a bucket or your coat over it and then call your local Watchguard base and they’d send someone over to bash it for you. (There were silverbug buckets all over town, of course, like trash cans and mailboxes, but there was never one around when you saw a silverbug.) The auto-report buttons on pocket phones only came in a few years ago and that made it a lot easier, because you could snap the coordinates and run away. When I’d been a little kid you had to phone it in and wait. But if your Watchguard was having a bad day you could be there a while so mostly people like me who did mind stepping on them went and found someone who didn’t mind and let them deal with it.

  It’s not that I’m totally squeamish about killing things. I kill things like slugs and aphids in Mom’s garden (she pays me. She says it’s the only way to get me to stay home from the shelter occasionally). But silverbugs aren’t bugs, and they aren’t really alive. Nobody knows exactly what they are, but they may be some kind of tiny cobey—cohesion break. I’ve stepped on a silverbug exactly twice. The first time on a dare when I was seven years old and the second time two years ago when it was suddenly there too late for me not to step on it, although I tried. I only clipped the edge of it but it still went pop and I fainted, like I did the first time, and then I threw up like six times and was sick for two days afterward, which was also pretty much like the first time. But the nightmares were a lot worse the second time, although that may be because I hit my head pretty hard on the sidewalk when I went down. Us bug woopies are in the minority but there are enough of us around it’s not that big a deal, although I’m pretty sure Cobey Central keeps a list of us.