Meredith McCardle - The Eighth Guardian

I shrug, like, I’ll think about it, even though I’d be foolish to try to leave. I step back into my new bedroom. “Thanks for your warning. I’m sure it comes from a place of love and concern.” And then I shut the door.

A quick glance at the clock tells me it’s four in the morning. Ugh. I can feel the physical exhaustion straining my limbs, even though my brain feels as if it’s been shot with adrenaline. I yawn.

I flop down onto the bed but almost immediately sit up. I want to look around before I pass out. For kicks I open the rest of the dresser drawers. Shirts, jeans, sweats—they’re all there. My old, dingy workout pants are hanging on the left side of the closet, which makes no sense—who hangs up yoga pants?—while the right side is full of a bunch of clothes I’ve never seen in my life. There’s a lot of pastel, a long tweed skirt that looks like it would make me itch for days, and a bunch of fabric that doesn’t seem very breathable. Maybe that’s Violet’s leftover stuff. Whatever. I’ll burn it as soon as they give me match privileges.

I wander into the bathroom and sit on the edge of the tub. I turn the knobs on the tap and let the warm water spill down over my fingers. There’s a faint smell of lavender in the room.

I rip off the Peel tie that’s still hanging around my waist and pull the torn dress over my head. I slip off my shoes and socks and kick them and the tie into the bedroom. The dress gets stuffed into the trash can under the sink.

The water is bordering on being too hot, so I turn the cold water knob a little more as I sink down into the tub. I’m probably still in Boston, unless I somehow passed through a vortex in the stairwell that unknowingly whisked me to, I don’t know—Utah? But I bet I’m in one of those brownstones on Beacon Street, probably one of the few that hasn’t been converted to condos or apartments. This place must have cost a pretty penny.

It’s good to know where I am, to have a handle on my location in case I want or need to escape. And I know Boston. I could disappear here in a second. Of course, not with this tracker in my arm.

I look down at my right forearm. There’s a puffy lump just below my elbow. I touch it, then immediately wish I hadn’t as pain spirals down the entire right side of my body. Dear God. There’s a tracker in my arm. For the rest of my life, someone is going to know my location at every second of the day. I plunge my head under the water and let my mind wander to Abe as I come up.

Maybe I should put him out of my mind. Maybe that would make this easier. Let me focus. But I can’t. Abe is a part of me, just as I’m a part of him.

Abe and I got off to a bit of a rocky start. We met the first day of freshman year, in the auditorium. Classes were pretty standard fare—we were all put in the same math, government, computer, and science classes, and we’d already been to Practical Studies (which is just a fancy word for a class that teaches you how to spy on people, shoot sniper rifles, and dismantle bombs); but when it came to combat training, we got to choose. I’d scanned the options and picked Krav Maga. I’d never heard of it, but the subtitle of “Israeli hand-to-hand combat” sold me. The Israelis are pretty badass.

After I’d circled my selection, I’d leaned over to the guy next me, who happened to be Abe, and seen that he’d circled karate.

“Karate?” I’d laughed. “What are you, seven? Going to work on your orange belt?”

Abe had stood and stormed off, clearly upset; and then his roommate, Paul Andress, had taken his place.

“Way to be an asshole,” Paul had said. “He’s a second-degree black belt already, and his sensei just died.”

I’d swallowed a lump in my throat, but then Paul put the icing on his cake. “His grandmother was his sensei.”

So yeah, my first interaction with Abe was to make fun of his dead grandmother. That’s one for the scrapbook.

I apologized the next day, and Abe forgave me because he’s the most wonderful person in the world. And that was that. Abe and I became an “us.” I went home with him for holidays. His family opened their arms and invited me in. They became my family because my real family is the definition of dysfunctional.

I shake my head, like my brain is some sort of Etch A Sketch, like it will rid the image of my mom that’s flooding my mind. But there she is. And right behind her is the guilt.

My mom was a pretty crap mother by any standard, but for some reason I’m the one who feels guilty. As if it’s my fault. I breathe and squeeze my eyes shut. Here we go. Anger, bitterness.

Anger because “not sacrificing her art” is more important than getting better for me. Bitterness because I’ve known proper lithium dosage levels since I was seven. Anger because all the good memories from my childhood have faded away into fuzzy nothingness, to the point where now I can’t remember if they really happened or if my mind invented them as a coping mechanism. Bitterness because while most kids my age were memorizing multiplication tables, I was taking it upon myself to scour the Internet and learn the brand names for drugs such as valproate, lamotrigine, and fluoxetine.

And mostly anger because my mom refuses to get off the damned roller coaster. Because every time I get my hopes up and think my mom will finally stick to a treatment plan, she calls it quits in less than two weeks.

I ball up my hands into fists, then grab both edges of the tub and stand. Abe. Think about Abe. He’s waiting for me. And I’ll find a way back to him. Somehow.

There are fresh towels hanging on the bar. Big, fluffy, white towels that smell like fabric softener. I wrap one around my wet hair, pull on purple fleece pants and a T-shirt, and tumble into bed. Abe. Think about Abe. But an image of Tyler Fertig flashes in my mind right before I close my eyes, and then my body shuts down.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

I gasp and bolt up in bed. Someone’s knocking on the door. I push out of bed, and my palm lands on the towel.

Dammit, did I fall asleep with wet hair?

I pull open the door. Yellow stands before me. Of course she does. She’s wearing a cardigan, a miniskirt, tights, and boots. Huge diamond studs hang from her earlobes. Her blond hair is perfectly coiffed again, pulled back with a wide headband. And I’m wearing pajamas and have a major case of bedhead.

Yellow wrinkles her nose when she sees me and shoves a folded note into my hand. “Breakfast is at seven sharp. Alpha doesn’t like it if anyone is late. It completely slipped my mind until now that I was supposed to tell you that. Oops.”

I glance at the clock on the dresser. 6:58. Seriously? Doesn’t anyone believe in a good night’s sleep?

I slam the door in her face and throw open my dresser drawers. The note gets plunked on top of the dresser unopened. I grab the first sweater and pair of jeans I see, then spend all of ten seconds brushing my teeth with such force I’m surprised my gums don’t start bleeding. I shove my feet into my sneakers, stepping on the backs rather than taking the extra second required to slip my heels into them.

I pull my still-damp hair into a messy bun as I fly down the stairs. I’m pretty sure it’s 7:00 on the dot, but I’m the last person to arrive in the dining room. Everyone else is seated, and a man dressed like a waiter is pouring coffee at all the place settings while a woman follows behind him with orange juice.

It’s clear there’s a hierarchy here at the table, too. Alpha sits at the head, and then it trickles down from there. Epsilon is absent, but Zeta sits on Alpha’s right, and Red is on his left. Then it crisscrosses from there, from Orange to Yellow, all the way down to the one empty seat at the very end of the table.