Splinters

3. The Perks of Being a (Local) Hero

3. The Perks of Being a (Local) Hero

Ben

We were only supposed to be in Prospero for another two days after the memorial service.

One week later we were still taking up two of Aunt Christine’s guestrooms. Mom had already called her office saying that she would need to take an indeterminate amount of time off due to a family emergency.

She said they were okay with it. I didn’t entirely believe her.

Same old, same old, really.

I’ll say this though, if you’re going to be stuck somewhere, and you don’t know for how long, it helps to be a local hero.

Those first few days were just one long stretch of people coming in and out of the house dropping off congratulations and more baked goods than I imagined were possible. Some of them were even good.

Since Mom spent most of her time with Aunt Christine, and Aunt Christine spent most of her time at the medical center with Haley as she recuperated, I was pretty much left to my own devices. For the first few days I hung around the house, taking in gifts and messages for Haley from well-wishers, Skyping and texting, or reading by the pool.

Three days of this kind of nothing will give you a case of cabin fever quick. And so, as much as the town weirded me out, I began to wander.

At first it was strange when people on the street would thank me for saving Haley, especially given how little attention her disappearance or reappearance had gotten in the media. After the first few handshakes though, it started to feel pretty awesome. Especially when they started giving me free stuff. The diner cook at the Soda Fountain of Youth, this burned-out surfer dude with a grin on his face that said he never graduated high school and a pair of drumsticks jammed in his belt, gave me a bacon cheeseburger and fries on the house.

BILLY, his ketchup-splattered nametag read.

“The world doesn’t have enough cute cheerleaders in it. Good on you for saving one of the last of ‘em, Superman,” he said.

I tried to pay for it, I really did, but he wouldn’t let me. The same thing happened later when the guy who ran the hobby shop, Foxfire Collectibles, sent me on my way with a model kit for a P51 Mustang and some comic books. And when I stuck my head in The Prospero Museum of Unnatural History just to see what it was like, they wouldn’t let me leave until I’d signed their guestbook and taken a complimentary t-shirt. I grabbed “PROSPERO—PROUD HOME OF ‘THE HOOK!’” with a picture of a metal hook hanging from a car door. Compared to the other t-shirts of urban legends that Prospero claimed to be the “Proud Home Of,” it seemed the most benign.

The attention was fun while it lasted, I won’t try to be noble and say I had to suffer through it, but when I heard that they were finally going to release Haley from the medical center, I was glad to pass the torch. She was the survivor, she deserved the attention.

According to my mom, Haley barely remembered what had happened to her. The best the police could figure, she had sleepwalked out of her room and had probably gotten lost in the nearby woods. She survived off of whatever she could find, probably finding an abandoned hermit’s shack—if the blanket was any indication—before wandering back to town. They said it was a miracle, but they sounded unsurprised.

After all, Prospero’s supposed to be a town of miracles.

***

The night she was released from the medical center, we all went out to dinner at The Grey Lodge, which was the nicest restaurant in town by default since they served steaks and were known to have lobster on occasion. While I wouldn’t exactly call a place with faux-log cabin walls covered in taxidermy animal heads and 19th century brothel art fancy, it did have pretty decent food.

Of course, since Haley was the latest town miracle, what felt like the entire town showed up to join us.

The week in the med center had done wonders for her. Though she was still underweight and had some odd cuts and bruises, she looked less skeletal than she had when I first found her and had a nice glow whenever she smiled. Wearing a new sundress, she was actually quite pretty. Though a little jumpy, she kept a pleasant smile on as she talked with everyone who came to see her. Every so often she would shoot a nervous glance my way, as if asking me if I’d been getting the same treatment. I would respond with a slight shrug of confirmation.

With a line of people trying to catch her attention, I guess I should have figured that those who couldn’t reach her would come to me instead.

On my way back from the bathroom, a powerful arm wrapped around my shoulder and pulled me off to the side. The arm belonged to a short, wiry, middle-aged man with a mane of greasy black hair that fell below his shoulders and a pale, perpetually uncomfortable-looking face, who looked up at me with a smile that lacked any trace of sincerity. Even if he hadn’t been wearing sunglasses at night, his breath loudly proclaimed that he’d been drinking heavily.

“Oh, hello!” he said in a thick, strange accent. His vowels stretched out too long for me to guess exactly where he was from. “You are the hero boy? That is so fantastic! How are you? I am Alexei Smith, the drama teacher. Please, let me buy you a drink!”

“I’m sixteen,” I said. I tried to get out from underneath his arm, but he was surprisingly strong for his size.

“Oh that is too bad! I used to be sixteen once! Haley is such a gifted and beautiful girl, I was afraid when she was gone that she would not audition for my show!”

I took the bait, “What show is that?”

“My Youth Shakespeare program show! We do it in the park at the end of every summer. This year is Titus Andronicus, it will be a laughing riot! She is a good actress, one of my best, I think. It would not be complete without her there. You should try out, too, you would make fantastic Demetrius! Very handsome you are; you must be a great actor!”

He twitched faintly, darting his head to the side and whipping me in the face with his hair. He then looked at me with an apologetic smirk.

“I am sorry, I must flee so I can talk to a man about a mustache!” he laughed.

I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I just said, “Well, I hope that goes well.”

“That’s the idea!” he laughed as he wandered away into the crowd.

“Welcome to Prospero,” I muttered to myself. Before I was certain whether I meant that as a joke or an insult, another hand grabbed me by the wrist.

Haley.

She looked up at me with a forced smile.

Through her teeth, she said, “Please, get me out of here.”

“Are you all right?” I asked.

“I won’t be if another person asks me that exact same question,” she said. “I’m tired of everyone wanting to talk to me. I just want to go home. Is that too much to ask?”

“No. No, it isn’t,” I replied. Relief flooded her face as she dragged me back to our table.

“Mom?” she said, “I’m getting real tired. Do you think it’d be okay if Ben and I walked home now?”

Concern flooded Aunt Christine’s face, “I’ll get the car ready.”

“No!” Haley cried. Catching herself in the outburst, she put a hand to her chest and giggled, “What I mean is, I’ve been cooped up in that med center room for so long, I could use some fresh air.”

Her mother looked skeptical; I couldn’t blame her. Haley had had quite a bit of fresh air recently.

Desperate, Haley took my hand in hers, “I just need to be out, and I’d like a minute to thank Ben for saving my life. I know if he’s there with me, nothing bad could happen.”

She was laying it on pretty thick, but her mother bought it. She smiled knowingly at both of us before waving us on our way through the crowd.

When we stepped outside, she let go of my hand. She smiled as she twirled around daintily, enjoying her freedom.

“Thank you, for that,” she said.

“No problem,” I replied.

“I’m just sick and tired of people asking me how I’m doing, telling me I can talk to them if I need someone to talk to, or asking me what happened while I was missing,” she said.

Putting my hands in my pockets, I laughed a bit, “Well, since I was gonna ask you the first and third things you mentioned, I guess it’ll be a pretty quiet walk.”

She laughed, “Well, at least it’s a short walk.”

The house was only five blocks away. She was a bit unsteady on her feet. I had to catch her once by the elbow, balancing her. This time her smile was real.

“Thanks,” she said. She looked at me, biting her lip, “So… the second thing?”

“Only if you want to,” I said. “I’ve been told I’m easy to talk to, so if you want to, the offer’s there. If you don’t want to, that’s cool, too.”

She wrapped her arms around herself protectively and said nothing. There was laughter up ahead. I could see a few men standing by a car under a light across the street, talking and drinking. As we walked around a fire hydrant on the edge of the narrow sidewalk, I made sure to switch sides with Haley so I was closer to the men. Just in case.

When she dropped her arms, she snapped with a ferocity I didn’t know she had in her.

“I’m tired of people telling me what happened. They’re just guessing, they’re just trying to put together a picture that fits in a situation that doesn’t so they can move on. There are two months of my life missing. I missed the last month of my sophomore year of high school, and nobody seems to care. It’s all just, ‘well, we’re glad you’re back. Now let’s pretend nothing happened and get on with our lives.’ I get the feeling that nobody wants to know what happened to me. They don’t want to know if I was kidnapped, or if I was crazy, or if….”

She was silent for too long. I tried to fill the void, “So you don’t remember anything?”

She shuddered, “Bits and pieces, but none of it makes sense. I’m not even sure if any of that is real.”

She fought through a sudden wave of tears, covering her face and breathing heavily. She was strong. Stronger than I’d have thought someone could be after going through whatever it was she had gone through. I put my arm around her shoulders. She looked up at me and started… laughing?

“Way to make a guy feel special,” I said, trying to cover my bruised pride.

“I’m sorry,” Haley laughed. “It’s just… if my mom saw us, she’d go nuts. After what you did, I think she’s already planning her grandkids’ names right now.”

I wanted to laugh with her, but a sharp exclamation followed by dead silence from across the street caught my attention. The three men had stopped laughing and were standing as still as mannequins, staring at us as we passed. Two were covered in shadow, one wearing a hoodie, another a postman’s uniform, their faces obscured. The third was unquestionably Alexei Smith. They made no move to follow us as we passed and began laughing again after we got a good distance away. It gave me the creeps.

Haley, thankfully, hadn’t seen them.

“I just don’t think I could handle that,” Haley continued. I realized that she’d been talking the entire time I was watching the men stare at us.

“I’m sorry?” I said.

“I don’t want to be with anyone right now. Before any of this happened, I’d just gotten out of a bad relationship, and the way I am right now, I really don’t want to try for anything. Does that make sense?”

I nodded, noncommittally. Haley looked at me nervously, quickly adding, “It’s not that I don’t think you’re a nice guy, it’s just—”

“Relax,” I said. “Don’t worry about it. I came up here to go to your funeral. It’s not like I was expecting anything more. I’m gonna be stuck here for a while, it looks like, probably in your house, and probably with both of our moms under one roof. Even if we did want to make a go of dating, it would be—”

“—weird,” she finished.

“Yeah, weird,” I agreed, not wanting to add, But not as weird as this town.

The lights of the house were coming into view. Our moms had probably driven back while we walked. This moment of peace would be over soon.

“Are you okay with being friends for now?” she asked, looking up at me hopefully. As if for dramatic impact, she pulled herself out from under my arm and held out her hand (though it was hard to miss the emphasis she had put on “for now”).

For a brief, fleeting moment that I couldn’t understand, I remembered that strange girl, Mina, I’d met at the memorial service. I thought about the words she’d written, “THAT ISN’T HALEY,” on the back of her thick, folded program. Thinking of that program, sitting somewhere on the desk of the guest room I was sleeping in, I vowed to throw it away once I settled in for the night.

I took Haley’s hand in mine and gave it a firm shake. “Friends.”