Action Figures - Issue Three: Pasts Imperfect Page 15

  “After the Archimedes thing last year, I started going to the gym near my house before school. The guy on the morning shift used to be a semi-pro boxer, or so he says. He saw me working the heavy bag one morning and offered to show me how to throw punches that don’t suck.”

  “Put that man on your Christmas card list, because he taught you well. How bad is the bruise?” Natalie says, tilting her head to better present the welt rimming her left eye.

  “I can’t tell,” Matt says. “These stupid sodium lights turn everything the same color. Sorry about that.”

  “Never be sorry that you gave as good as you got. Anything less and I’d have been insulted.” Natalie presses a button on her key fob, popping the locks on her car. They climb inside with no shortage of grimacing and groaning. “All right, bud, let’s get you home.”

  “No. Drop me off somewhere else. I don’t care where.”

  Natalie settles into her seat. She doesn’t push or prompt, she simply waits for Matt to continue. She waits for a long time.

  “My dad had an affair. Mom threw him out of the house.”

  “And you don’t want to go back home because why? Did your mom do something to —?”

  “She didn’t do anything,” Matt snaps. “She didn’t do anything. It’s just that...she’s a mess. I can’t stand to see her crying like that. I can’t deal with it.”

  “Matt, I’m sorry about your parents. I am. But you need to man up,” Natalie says gently. “I get it, it’s hard to see your mother in pain, but you running away isn’t helping her any, and she needs you. She needs someone who understands what she’s going through and is on her side. I won’t lie, it’ll be hard for you, but if it makes things even a little easier for her, isn’t that worth it?”

  “I take the hit so she doesn’t have to,” Matt says.

  “Yeah. Something like that.”

  “...Take me home.”

  SIXTEEN

  Generally speaking, I’m not a big believer in psychic phenomena — by which I mean stuff like precognition, communing with spirits from beyond the grave, junk like that. I know, the cognitive dissonance is strong with this one, considering that I count among my circle of friends two psionics, several genetic mutations, a sorceress, whatever the heck the Entity is, and my own powers derive from technology I got from an extraterrestrial, but I somehow can’t buy into things like precognition as anything other than a weird feeling people get sometimes. Talking to ghosts? Yeah, right, like my dead grandmother would choose to talk to some random stranger with an alleged “gift” than to her husband or daughter. It makes no more sense to me than horoscopes, Mercury in retrograde, or dopes who think that wearing a specific pair of socks during the playoffs will help the Bruins win another Stanley Cup (although, I confess, I for one would jump on that particular bandwagon in a hot second if I thought there was a shred of validity to it. Go Bruins).

  And yet, as Han Solo might say, I’ve got a bad feeling about this day.

  It’s so much more than a vague, nagging feeling of dread; it’s a distinct sense that a bomb is going to go off at any second, and I’m going to be standing at Ground Zero when it does. My hands tingle fiercely, which I tell myself is nothing but nerves, or maybe I didn’t sleep as well as I thought I did and exhaustion is putting me on-edge, but I’m not buying my own story.

  I head downstairs. Mom is in the kitchen, sipping coffee and munching on toast. She says good morning to me, I say good morning to her. I fill a travel mug with coffee and grab a couple of strawberry Pop-Tarts to take on the road. Mom says goodbye, have a good day, I return the platitude, and off I go.

  The Pop-Tarts are gone by the time I reach Sara’s place. I knock on the door and Sara’s dad answers. He greets me pleasantly enough, invites me in, calls out to Sara to let her know I’m here. Sara trots downstairs, exchanges bland pleasantries, throws on her coat and announces she’s ready to go.

  We’re halfway out the door when Mr. Danvers stops us, and my stress levels skyrocket when he asks, “Sara, where are you going after school?”

  “I don’t know. Coffee shop, probably,” she says. Mr. Danvers gives her an exasperated sigh. “What? It’s a public place, Dad, what kind of trouble could we possible get into?”

  Boy, there’s a loaded question.

  “Where are you going for homework tonight?” Mr. Danvers says.

  “Missy’s place,” Sara replies immediately, even though we technically haven’t made any such decision. Nevertheless, this mollifies Mr. Danvers and he lets us go without any further interrogation.

  I wonder if we’re going to see Matt today or if he’s hiding out at Coffee E again. I get my answer right away: We cross paths with Matt outside the school’s main entrance, although he doesn’t notice us until we call out to him.

  Matt stops and grunts in greeting. He looks like crap on a stick, like he hasn’t slept at all. Or he’s been crying a lot. Or both. Eyes don’t get that bloodshot without help.

  “Please tell me you didn’t stay out all night,” I say.

  “No. I went home,” he says. “Mom and I spent most of the night talking. Well, I did the talking. She mostly cried.”

  I hug Matt. He hisses in pain and pushes me away. “What? What’s wrong?”

  “Sorry. I bumped into Natalie last night. She took me to a gym to do some ‘ragework,’” he says, air-quoting the last word. “Apparently, ragework involves driving one’s knee into my ribcage. A dozen times. In as many seconds.”

  “Huh?”

  “We sparred,” Matt clarifies. “I lost. A lot.”

  “Oh,” I say, and that’s when Gerry Yannick appears, inserting himself into our little circle like he belongs there. He practically body-checks me out of the way, the big jerk.

  “Hey, Matt,” he says. “Your mom called Dad last night. I kind of overheard what’s going on...”

  “Don’t you dare,” I say, grabbing Gerry’s arm and spinning him around to face me. “I swear to God, Gerry, if you give Matt any crap about what’s going on with his parents, I’ll —!”

  “What? No! I wouldn’t — Matt, man,” Gerry says, turning away from me, “I wouldn’t do that. You know I’m the last person in the world to give you a hard time about that.”

  I feel like I’m missing something, I say to Sara over the brainphone.

  You are, she says. When we were little, we were friends with Gerry.

  I do a double-take. You were?

  Yeah, we were pretty tight once, us and our families.

  What happened?

  I don’t know. When we were in, like, seventh grade, Gerry’s mom had an affair and ran out on the family. After that, Gerry got all distant, started hanging out with the jock crowd.

  A picture comes together in my head. Gerry’s dad, devastated by his wife’s infidelity, latches onto the only family he has left. Gerry spends more and more time bonding with his old man, at the cost of spending time with his friends. The dutiful son, Gerry does whatever he can to bring a little happiness back into his sad, angry father’s life — maybe up to and including joining the high school football team, where he bonds with a new set of friends. The rift between his old and new lives grows over time, but not so much that he can ignore his childhood friend when he’s dealing with a familiar tragedy.

  Sadly, it’s not enough to remove the wedge between them. Gerry offers to lend a sympathetic ear but Matt rebuffs the offer. “I don’t want to talk to you, Gerry,” he says. “Ever. Shove off.”

  To his credit, Gerry withdraws gracefully. It’s almost enough to make me respect the guy. A little.

  The gnawing feeling that something big and bad is about to go down stays with me throughout the day, and I’m too nervous to breathe a sigh of relief when the day ends without incident. We meet up at my locker, where Matt informs us he won’t be joining the nightly homework jam tonight.

  “I’m going to stay home and keep Mom company,” he says, and I certainly can’t fault him for wanting to be there for his mother.
>
  After-school coffee is a mirthless affair; we spend the afternoon sitting in the corner, drinking coffee and not talking about much of consequence.

  I arrive home for dinner and find Ben’s car in the driveway. “Oh, joy,” I mutter.

  “First time seeing Ben after your little falling out?” Sara says.

  “It was hardly a little falling out, but yeah,” I say. “Might as well get this over with. Maybe I’ll finally shake this stupid Sword of Damocles feeling I’ve had all day.”

  “Good luck. Give me a shout if you need to vent.”

  Oh, there will be shouting, I’m sure, but it won’t involve Sara.

  The house smells super-yummy tonight — manicotti, if I know my dinnertime aromas, but my stomach is in such a knot I doubt I’ll be able to choke down a single bite.

  “Is that you, Carrie?” Mom calls out from the kitchen.

  “It’s me,” I reply. A couple seconds later, Ben steps into the living room.

  “Hi, Carrie,” he says.

  “Ben,” I say, as cordially as I can.

  An awkward pause follows, then Ben says, “Can I talk to you for a minute?”

  Here we go. “Sure.”

  Ben narrows his eyes thoughtfully, a How do I say this? look. “Carrie, I owe you an apology.”

  What the what?

  “I had no right to tell you you couldn’t spend your birthday with your father,” he says. “That was between you, your father, and your mother, and I was wrong to get involved in a family matter. My parental instincts kicked in, and I got carried away, and I’m sorry.”

  The apology alone stuns me into momentary silence, but the remark about parental instincts completely floors me.

  “You have a kid?” I say.

  “A daughter — about your age, but that’s where the similarities end; Lisa’s more of a typical teenage girl than you are,” Ben says, not unkindly. “Her mother got custody and moved to Florida as soon as the divorce went through, so I don’t get to see her too often.”

  Ben’s situation hits way too close to home, and I retroactively feel like crap for losing my temper at him — although my newfound remorse makes what comes next a little easier.

  “I’m sorry I flipped out at you,” I say. “I should have handled that whole thing a lot better.”

  “Thank you. What do you say we chalk it up to miscommunication and forget about it?”

  No, not good enough. “What do you say we don’t forget about it and both try to do better next time?”

  Ben smiles and extends a conciliatory hand. “Deal.”

  Another bullet successfully dodged, Ben and I sit down with Mom for what I must say is a very pleasant dinner — maybe the first sincerely pleasant dinner the three of us have had together.

  So why can’t I shake this paranoia?

  “Hello, you’ve reached Dr. Bart Connors. Leave a message and I’ll call you right back.”

  Right back, Edison grumbles to himself. Four unreturned calls over a half-hour...

  “Bart, call me,” he says. Edison waits a full five minutes before he makes his next attempt.

  “Jeez, Edison,” the real, live Bart says, “what part of ‘I’ll call you right back’ don’t you understand?”

  “If you’d actually called me right back...”

  “I was with a patient. I have a real job, you know.”

  “The Protectorate is your real job.”

  “No, the Protectorate is my other job, my real job is — never mind. What do you want?”

  “You near your laptop?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. Fire up your secure connection. You need to see something.”

  “Give me a minute.”

  Edison uses the time to lock his office door. Trina isn’t one to burst in unannounced, but better safe than sorry. He returns to his laptop and clicks on a desktop icon labeled PROSERV. A small black window bearing a single word, IDENT, appears.

  CONCORDE, he types, followed by his password, and a video chat window appears in the corner of the screen.

  “Connection secure,” Edison says.

  “Connection secure,” Bart replies.

  “I’m sending you the security footage from Byrne. It contains all of Archimedes’ conferences with his attorney.”

  An icon, a tiny image of a file folder, appears on Bart’s desktop. He clicks the folder and a half dozen new icons appear: stylized film frames, each labeled with the tag SEMLER A and dates ranging from December through the day before Archimedes’ aborted court date.

  “Okay,” Bart says, “what am I looking for?”

  “Watch the first recording.”

  Bart clicks the icon dated December 18. A new window pops up, its frame filled by an awkwardly tilted overhead view of a white room — one of Byrne’s small conference rooms, as seen from a corner security camera. The room sits empty for the first several seconds, empty save for a table and a trio of chairs. The door slides open and a guard enters, followed by a man in a suit.

  “The prisoner will be with you shortly, sir,” the guard says, addressing the man in the suit. The guard withdraws. Bart watches three minutes tick by on the video’s timestamp — dated October of last year, he notes. Archimedes arrives, a perplexed scowl on his lips.

  “Oh,” he says.

  “Pardon?” the man in the suit says.

  “I thought you...never mind,” Archimedes says, shaking his head.

  “I understand your irritation, Mr. Semler, and I apologize for the mix-up. These things unfortunately happen, but I want to assure you that I will be your representation from here on out.”

  Bart pauses the playback. “What am I missing here?”

  “The suit’s a man named Fresch. He’s the public defender assigned to Archimedes’ case.”

  “Hm. I vaguely remember him. He was there when the Byrne detail picked Archimedes up from HQ,” Bart says, and that’s when the missing piece falls into place. “Wait. That was in October,” he says, checking the video file tags again. “Where’s the video of his initial conference?”

  “Missing,” Edison says. “Archimedes arrived at Byrne on October 28. Byrne visitor logs indicated Fresch visited his client on October 29, but I spoke to Fresch and he said he wasn’t there that day. There was some sort of administrative screw-up and he was removed from the case.”

  “So someone else, passing himself off as Fresch, visits Archimedes, who later that same day walks out of Byrne and vanishes,” Bart continues.

  “Along with any video record of their meeting,” Edison finishes.

  What was it Natalie said? Bart thinks. Too much coincidence to be coincidence.

  “So you and Ben are good now?” Sara asks.

  “I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say we’re good, but we’re better than we were,” I say, “so, hooray progress.”

  “Gerry acts like a human being, Ben turns out to be a decent guy...what next, Concorde pulls a one-eighty and inducts us into the Protectorate?”

  “One can dream,” I say as we reach the end of Missy’s driveway, a long, slightly winding path of crushed gravel, and from the end of the driveway I can hear the thrum of music blaring from within the house. I recognize the tune: the Foo Fighters’ Times Like These.

  “Someone’s rocking out big-time,” Sara says.

  Sara and I reach the front yard and, standing on our tip-toes, peer through the bow window. I’d expected to see Missy jumping around the living room Tom Cruise/Risky Business style, and she is — but the music isn’t coming from a stereo; it’s coming from an electric guitar hanging from Missy’s shoulders. She cranks away at the instrument with wild abandon, hair flying as she headbangs in time to the music.

  “No. Frickin’. Way,” Sara says.

  “You didn’t know she played?” I say. Sara shakes her head.

  It takes Missy until the final chorus to notice that she has an audience, and when she sees us, she shrieks and flails backwards, tripping and falling head-over-heels ove
r her amplifier. We rush in to check on her, and before we can get a word out...

  “OHMYGOD don’t do that why were you watching me through the window that’s so stalkery don’t tell my dad you saw me with this he’d freak out that was SO NOT COOL!”

  “She’s fine,” I say, and I help Missy to her feet. “Sorry about that, Muppet, we didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “S’okay,” Missy says. She cradles her guitar like it was a baby, checking it for damage from the fall.

  “Where’d you get that?” Sara says.

  “My uncle Seiji gave it to me, like, three years ago. Used to be his but he didn’t play anymore and he thought I might like it,” Missy explains as she puts the guitar back into its case. We follow her up to her room, where she stashes the case and the amp in the back of her closet.

  “How come you never told us you played?”

  “I don’t know. It’s just something I do for fun when Mom and Dad aren’t home. They don’t know I play either.”

  “Then how did you learn how to play?”

  “YouTube videos.”

  “Really? Wow,” I say, duly impressed. “Well, don’t worry, your secret life as a rock star is safe with us.”

  “Any other hidden talents you want to drop on us? Like, are you an experienced mountain climber or an ace fighter pilot or something?” Sara says. “Remember, we promised we wouldn’t keep secrets from each other anymore.”

  Sara means it playfully, yet Missy shrinks into herself, a guilty look on her face.

  “Um,” she says, but whatever pending confession she might have for us is interrupted by her phone going off. She pulls it out of her pocket, checks the number, rolls her eyes, and puts the call on speakerphone. “Konnichiwa, chichi.”

  “Konbanwa, musume yo.” I’ve never heard him speak Japanese before, but I’d recognize Dr. Hamill’s stiff monotone anywhere. “Missy, is your mother there? I’d like to speak to her.”

  “No, she’s working late,” Missy says. “She said she probably won’t be home until, like, nine, maybe?”

  “...I see. Then I need you to do something for me. It’s very important.”