Chapter 1

Video for this edit is in the chapter 0 post.
DIFFERENTIAL EDIT

PART 1

November 4th, Grayson High School, Sillas Maine

1.

Freya Jokela sat at the furthest table in the lunchroom and no one sat next to her. That was ideal, she was sick of people asking her if everything was ok. She hated all the awkward glances and unsolicited advice. She was too pale and too thin and she looked exhausted no matter how much she slept. That was just how it was, but everyone felt like they had to comment. Alone was better.

Freya turned the pages of a yellowed paperback and picked at her salad. Voices boomed around her, hooting and laughing. People were shouting from table to table. Nothing had been thrown yet but it seemed like it could happen at any moment. There was meant to be a teacher keeping an eye on things, but Mr. McCallahan hadn’t shown up to his lunch monitor shift all week. The volume in the cafeteria had doubled every day.

Freya remained in her small pocket of serenity as more students filed in. Finally all the other tables were full and a group came to sit down at hers, scanning first to make sure there were no other options. Freya kept her eyes in the book to avoid them, but she was running out of pages.

The paperback reached the exact conclusion she had guessed two chapters in, and she set it on the table face down. The back cover copy was garish and overenthusiastic, much like the novel itself.

"Darkness has fallen over the once-peaceful kingdom of Crysterra. The evil Lord Sentros has stolen princess Tansy and the king is powerless against his Fel Magicks! When all hope seems lost, John Good, a simple orphaned stablehand discovers the legendary Sword of Song. Can this unlikely hero and his ragtag band of adventurers defeat the Dark Lord and save Crysterra?"

Freya felt fairly sure that they could, if she was willing to slog through another four thousand pages split over seven books. If she wanted to, she could buy the second volume tonight, Blackwater Books was just a short walk down the hill to Bridge Street. They had about a dozen used copies of The Sword of Song II: The Scions of Sentros. She could trade this one in, they'd probably give her a dollar for it.

Freya pushed the book away. She didn’t want to read the sequel, she hadn’t even wanted to read this one. She’d found it on a park bench and made the grave mistake of thumbing through it, thinking “how bad could it be?” Then she was trapped, she always finished a book after she started it.

Trapped.

She'd spent so many days at home, watching daytime TV that was just commercials for pills and judge shows where people yelled at each other over nonsense. Days that felt yellowed and thin, with an unshowered sheen of grime, everything wasted. Grayson was just as bad, but if she went to school Lassa talked to her less.

Freya stood abruptly, gathering her half-eaten salad and the vanquished paperback. She’d made up her mind to skip the last three periods and walk back to the house. Lassa wouldn’t be home until late if she came back at all.

At her side, there was a tchip of outrage, for a moment she was afraid she’d knocked over someone’s drink.

Malcolm Lewis was glaring at her. He was so tall he could stare eye-to-eye with Freya while sitting down. Malcom was almost nineteen, he’d been held back a grade in elementary. He was sort of attractive if you didn’t know him well.

For a second Freya couldn’t tell what he was pissed about, then she realized he’d said hi to her when he sat down. She hadn’t responded. Now he thought she was leaving because of him.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t recognize you.”

It was the wrong thing to say. Malcom inhaled sharply, and the three other girls with him joined in a low “oooooh.” They thought Freya meant it as an insult. Freya and Malcom used to date and it hadn’t ended well.

"I was leaving anyway," she mumbled. She couldn’t deal with this right now. They were laughing at her as she walked away, she could pick out Tammy Daud’s voice through the crowd. Freya was pretty sure Tammy was calling her a stuck up cunt, but it wasn’t important. She wasn’t coming back here. At the trash cans Freya threw away the half eaten salad, and her eyes fell on the book. The cover was a sword-wielding woman wearing armor that seemed to have been designed to expose as many of her vital areas as possible.

Freya threw the book in the trash, and left the cafeteria. It was cold out and looked like rain. If she walked home she was going to get caught in it. Staring at the sky, she wavered. What would hurt more, walking home in the rain or three more periods of this? If the school called Lassa and told her Freya was skipping class, she would have to explain why. That would be the worst possible outcome.

Trapped.

Lunch wasn’t even over, there were fifteen more minutes. Freya walked around to the side of the cafeteria without windows, she didn’t want to have to see anyone. She sat on the edge of a planter and stared out at the valley, watching the fog rolling down the Sillas river.

Grayson High School was built on a hill, the teacher parking lot was on a terrace below. There were already raindrops glittering on windshields. If Freya wanted to go, she should do it now. She tried to convince herself, but she couldn’t even muster the energy to stand.

The fog was coming in thick, soon she couldn’t even see the river. The sun was absent behind a wall of clouds. Freya was caught between gray and gray. For a moment, she visualized the clouds flowing down as the fog rolled up, the two fronts closing on her like an eyelid, blotting out everything. When the cloud’s eye opened everything would be new, this would all be fixed. What if she could just do that every morning? Blink her eyes and jump forward a day in time. How many times would she blink before she stopped? Could she blink her whole life away?

"HEY!"

Tammy Daud shouted at her from a few feet away, trying to startle her. But Freya was too deep in her pit, she didn’t flinch. Instead she shut her eyes to try and blink this away too. When she opened them, Tammy was standing right in front of her. She felt a flutter of fear but it died on the wing. What did she have to be afraid of? Not Tammy. Tammy was stupid.

Tammy Daud waved her hand in Freya’s face and snapped her fingers. She probably thought it made her look tough. She probably thought all that makeup was hiding that her eyes were too close together. Freya stared right through her.

"Yo! You in there stupid?"

The others from the table had gathered around Tammy, Malcolm still looked angry. Flora and Regina were keeping their distance, they looked like they didn’t want to be there.

“Me either,” Freya said, to no one in particular.

“What the fuck did you say?” Tammy demanded. Being ignored only made her angrier.

This wasn’t the first time with Tammy and Freya had given the problem some thought. Randall’s pistol was in a black plastic case on the top shelf of Lassa’s closet. It was next to the box with all of his uniforms, and the flag, perfectly folded in its triangular case with the glass window. Freya was a good shot, she’d gone to the range with Randall often.

The gun was still on the shelf, it was all just stupid daydreaming. Freya wasn’t really going to shoot anyone. The whole time she was thinking about the gun, she had known exactly what she would do about Tammy.

Nothing.

“Too good to sit with us, huh?”

Freya didn’t take the bait.

"Answer me bitch!" Tammy was working herself up. She was having a hard time with this. Freya was giving her nothing back, and it made Tammy uneasy. For a moment, it seemed like she might just shout some more and go away. Then Tammy glanced at Malcolm, and Freya could see something shift.

It had been three months since the first time Freya told Malcolm she didn’t want to see him anymore. Since then she’d had to block his number and exit all the group texts with him. It hadn’t helped. He kept talking to her after she asked him to stop, popping up between classes and surprising her. Now this. Had he put Tammy up to this or was it her idea?

Freya tried to remember what she had ever liked about Malcolm, and she was drawing a blank when Tammy socked her in the eye. Everything flashed white and there was a sound in her skull, like a muffled explosion. The punch knocked her backward into a black chokeberry bush. She rose to her feet, expecting to feel furious, or hurt, or anything. But there was nothing. She just wanted to lie down.

"OH!" Regina shouted. Tammy was backing up, bouncing back and forth with her fists raised, like they were in a boxing match. Regina and Flora were chanting “Fight! Fight!” and it all seemed so stupid.

Freya didn’t fall, she just sort of stopped trying to stand. She slumped to the ground. The grass was wet against her back, and mist was drifting onto her face. She stared up at the sky, offering no resistance. She wasn’t afraid, she just didn’t want to be here anymore. They were all looming over her.

“Bitch got knocked out!” Tammy crowed, but she was the only one. The others looked worried.

“What’s wrong with her?” Flora asked.

“Crazy bitch,” Tammy said. Even from the ground Freya could hear she was worried.

The pain in Freya’s eye was a distant and irrelevant throb. She expected to feel more pain, feet stomping her into the earth or stones smashing against her, but nothing came. She was almost disappointed. They were running away, she could hear their footsteps and their clothes rustling but she didn’t look. She stared straight into the sky, up at the perfect gray. It began to rain.

They were tiny drops at first, easy to ignore. The rain grew heavier and it stung in her eyes at first but that passed. Soon it was a steady rainfall and she thought she ought to get up, but what good would it do? Wet, dry, it was all the same. Nothing really hurt, nothing really mattered.

Freya was in the rain for a a long time. Later someone saw her from an upstairs window and a rush of people came down to get her. She was soaked and very cold. A dozen people were asking her at once what had happened, and she was shivering too hard to answer them.

They marched her towards the school and all she could think was she should have gotten up. Now everything would be harder.

Chapter 6

Video for this is in the chapter 5 post

Chapter 6 Differential Edit

6.

Freya biked as hard as she could to stay warm, full of sudden purpose. The binoculars banged against her chest and the case swung at her side as she fought to get up the big hill. All she could think about was the meteorite. At the summit, she realized she’d stopped shivering, and she rocketed downhill. There was no fear this time, only tremendous speed and wind howling around her ears. 

At home Freya put her bike into the garage and saw she'd left Randall's bike off the rack. She lifted it back up against the wall, wondering again why she'd pumped up his tires.

To sell it. To get rid of all of this stuff. The house was full of little knives, digging into her everywhere she turned. They had to go, or she had to go. Freya wanted to talk to Lassa about it but Lassa was in jail. 

She should have gotten out of her wet clothes immediately but the desire to look at the meteorite was all-encompassing. Instead she grabbed a bathrobe and wrapped it around herself, then rushed to the kitchen table with the binoculars case. 

The lights were brightest here. Freya took off the binoculars and set them on the table, then she opened up the case. The meteorite was still there. It hadn’t been a dream. 

Freya put a dish towel on the table so the meteorite didn't scratch up the glass and peered at the orb under the halogen lights. It was about the size of a baseball, the exterior was singed black. She took a piece of string, encircled the ball and then extended a tape measure. 75 millimeters. Then she took the kitchen scale and weighed it, 1.96 kilograms. 

The meteorite had to be mostly nickel or iron to be so heavy. Freya tried to do the math to figure out if it could be a pallasite, but she didn't know the density of olivine. She got her phone and after a few minutes of tapping and plugging things into the calculator she decided it was probably just a big chunk of iron. It was exceptional though, almost perfectly spherical. 

It was a shame Randall didn’t own a bandsaw. Freya would have loved to cut the meteorite in half and take a look at its core. She wondered if she should bring it to someone first. Did they x-ray meteorites, or was there some other kind of imaging they used? She scraped at the fusion crust with a fingernail, but it was too tough to give. She picked up the meteorite and held it. 

This was in space an hour ago. 

Freya set the meteorite back down on the dish towel. 

An hour ago she’d been in the river. 

She finally stripped off her damp clothes and got in the shower, turning the water as hot as she could stand. She kept ratcheting up the heat until she couldn't take it anymore. When she emerged in a cloud of steam she was red as a lobster. The mirror was all fogged off and she swiped at it with her towel and stared at herself through the smudgy moisture. 

Too thin and bony. Breasts too small. Zit off-center on her forehead. Hair a mess from being toweled off. One eye blacked, the other with a dark well under the eye, both red. Missing two toenails. She tried to picture what she would look like if she had drowned, deathly white from the cold, slowly turning green then black in the river. 

I can never tell anyone. 

They would lock her up for sure. She’d be thrown in a padded room at Spring Harbor Mental Hospital and pumped full of thorazine. She couldn’t even tell Betty. Betty might tell her mother, and then Huifang would call Lassa. No one could know. 

She spent a while rinsing all her cuts with peroxide, the toes hurt so bad she nearly started crying again. She slathered them in triple antibiotic ointment and wrapped them in band-aids. 

Wound up in a towel, Freya scurried across the hallway leaving damp footprints on the hardwood and put on some pajamas in her room. If her mother saw her doing that she would go insane. 

Freya's room, like the rest of the house was a part of Lassa's domain. Her mother decided what could be on the walls, what furniture she had and how it could be arranged. It had to be kept perfectly neat at all times, everything had to be organized, even places you couldn't see like the dresser drawers and the closet. Freya had complained once, that she felt like she lived in a hotel, and Lassa had smacked her hard enough that she never said anything like that again. 

There was a money tree in the corner of the room Randall bought the same week Freya was born. She was responsible for watering it every week and turning it. It had been repotted seven times, and now stood taller than Freya. The trunk was braided and Randall had always called it Yggdrasil, but he was the only one. To Freya it was just a plant that she had to take care of. She wasn't a green thumb like Randall and neither was Lassa. 

Randall had loved myths and legends, but no one else in the family had. Freya had caught Lassa's aggressive disbelief in anything superstitious at an early age. They'd never told her there was a Santa Claus or made her go to church. When she was older, Freya started to sense that Randall might have liked to do things like have a tree with presents at Christmas or paint eggs at Easter. There was no way Lassa would ever allow it. Still, he always seemed to do something nice for them all at the end of the year, a trip somewhere wonderful that would end up on pinned on the big map, or the bicycles. 

Freya wondered if there was anything in the fridge. Lassa seldom shopped. She usually worked late and ate at the cafeteria at Hiidenkirnu if she wasn’t out for dinner with one of her new boyfriends. It hadn’t mattered because Freya was never hungry enough to bother with dinner. She was hungry now though, nearly drowning had worked up an appetite. She padded out to the kitchen in a set of thick socks, careful to avoid the wet footprints.

The fridge was a stately moon gray, and inside it was just as desolate and barren. There was baking soda in a special glass container so that Lassa could be spared the horror of having a box of Arm & Hammer in her refrigerator. There were cans of the Ensure Lassa drank for breakfast each morning, but Freya hated them, they tasted like chalk. There was literally nothing else except for Pellegrino, some withered lemons, and a jar of mustard. 

It was so strange to be hungry! Tonight was the first real exercise she'd gotten in months. Freya guessed she could choke down an Ensure, but even with her stomach making demanding noises, the idea seemed repugnant. 

It dawned on Freya that she could have food delivered. Lassa wasn’t around to give her a hard time about eating junk. She could even order Chinese food and there would be no lecture about MSG or unfair labor practices or anything. 

How much of her problem was just living with Lassa? 

Freya was used to dealing with her mother, she hadn't really stopped to consider what life would be like without her. The last time she had seriously wanted to run away she was eleven years old and Randall was still around. She’d just sort of surrendered, told herself she was too sensible for that kind of thing and accepted her place in the flock. 

Freya was torn between not wanting to download the ordering app and  not wanting to talk to someone on the phone. Not wanting to talk won out, but then she found they didn't have the Pu Pu platter on their online delivery menu. She had to call Panda Pete’s anyway. The woman on the line didn’t speak English well, and it took about four tries to get her to understand that Freya needed the delivery driver to have change for a hundred. 

After the call Freya wondered if she’d done the right thing for her lost toenails. As she was searching on her phone, she heard a loud crack. Her first thought was that a window had broken, and her mind flashed forward to the gun in Lassa’s closet. Her eyes darted around the living room to the front door, but no one was trying to break in. 

On the kitchen table, her meteorite had vertical crack in it. As she watched, it split into two silvery halves and came apart. Each half settled onto the dish towel with the broken face pointing upward.  

At the center of the half to her right, there was a gleaming violet sphere embedded in the nickel, about 25 millimeters across. The opposite half had a depression, perfectly centered. It was like an avocado pit. The sphere caught the light, it was the slightest bit translucent so that it seemed to almost glow in the bright halogen lights. The shell looked like nickel. Freya looked closer, wondering if she might see Widmanstätten patterns, but then she remembered they only appeared after a meteorite was acid-etched and polished.

Freya reached out to touch the violet sphere. She was surprised when it yielded slightly to her fingertip, as if it were a grape. But when she pressed it again, it was as hard and rigid as glass. 

Very carefully, Freya pulled the orb from its shell between two fingers and held it up to the light. It came loose easily. Now it seemed completely opaque, had it grown darker? Just barely, she thought she could feel it vibrating, and she set it down on the glass tabletop to observe it closely, but it didn't visibly move. 

She was so excited she could barely breathe. She couldn't identify the mineral. The unusual, round meteor that had split perfectly in half. The polished, spherical core. What if it wasn't natural? What if this was a relic of an alien civilization? 

She snapped a hundred pictures of it on her phone from every possible angle. If only Randall were here! 

She was searching on her phone, trying to find any other meteorite that had a core like this one and found nothing. While she was searching she turned up an article about a meteor that had been observed in 2006 that had been going at 300 kilometers per second when it struck the earth's atmosphere. Its trajectory was so abnormal, the astronomer who'd observed it thought it was possible it had come from another galaxy!

She picked up the sphere, her mind reeling with the thought. Another galaxy! Millions of light years away! Of course it was far more likely this was meteorite had come from within the solar system.

As she held the sphere, Freya felt a sharp prick against her palm, she nearly dropped it in surprise. Thankfully she held on, and set it carefully back on the dishcloth. When she looked at her palm, there was a minute dot of blood. 

How had it done that? The sphere was smooth and round. Prodding it with the eraser end of a pencil, she turned the sphere over, looking for any sign of a protrusion or jagged edge, but it was featureless all over. 

Her empty stomach twisted with fear. She was toying with a rock from outer space. She'd picked it up with her bare hands. What if it was radioactive? What if it was alien technology? She set it back on the dishcloth. 

"Uh... hello?" she asked the rock, but of course, nothing happened. She waited a few moments to see if she would suddenly keel over from poison, but no such luck. 

This was a big deal. Freya realized she should take the meteorite to the authorities. But then she would have to explain why she was at the Sillas River Park in the middle of the night. If she did, Lassa would get the full story out of her, it was inevitable. She could sense when Freya was lying or holding something back, and she never stopped prying until she ferreted it out. 

Freya wondered if she could anonymously send it to a scientist, but would they even know what they had? It might lie forgotten in a box forever. She wished she had a microscope here to take a closer look at the orb. Tomorrow she could go back to school and use the biology lab. Then she remembered she was supposed to stay home.

Forget that. 

Freya decided she would go back to school with the rock after she bailed Lassa out. She hadn't done anything wrong and Mr. Evers had only suggested she stay home, it wasn’t a demand. She would still have a black eye and people would gawk at her but she didn't care. She would use the microscope in the biology lab and get a better idea of what she was dealing with, then she would decide if she wanted to tell Lassa about it. If it was radioactive or poisonous or made her sick, what did it matter? Two hours ago she was about to drown herself. 

The doorbell rang, it was her dinner. She tipped the delivery man ten dollars. It was kind of a ridiculous thing order for dinner, and hungry as she was, she could only eat half of it. The Pu Pu Platter wasn't as good as she had remembered it being with Randall. 

But nothing was. 

Chapter 8

8.

Freya woke up with the chills. Her sheets were so damp with sweat that for a moment she was afraid she’d wet the bed. She was lightheaded and her joints had a distant, sweet ache. Like an idiot, she’d given herself a fever, swimming in November. 

She remained stuck in the tangle of covers, trying to remember what she’d been dreaming about. It had been so long since she’d had a dream she could remember. The Lunesta obliviated them and left only a metallic taste in her mouth. Freya had been waking up out of a black hole every morning since she began the prescription. 

Today was different, whether it was the near-death-experience or the fever, the night had been full of strange dreams. She’d dreamed of tall spires, needle-sharp violent triangles pointed at a pure black sky. Beneath her feet, pulses of light were firing across an endlessly branching network of lines. It had all made sense in the dream, but the significance was melting away in the light of morning.

The fever pendulum swung while she was chasing the dream, and she was suddenly burning. She scrambled to escape comforter and walked naked through the hallway. Freya used the bathroom without turning on the light, she didn’t want to see herself. She thought about changing the sheets on her bed and trying to go back to sleep but it wouldn’t work. She knew she couldn’t fall back asleep. No matter how sick she felt, she had to go bail out Lassa today. 

Another strange thing, she was hungry. Freya never ate breakfast anymore. Was that a sign she was building up a tolerance to the Lunesta? It was an awful thought, sleeping was the only thing she had to look forward to. She didn’t even want to think about it. 

As she was pushing the thought away, she remembered she had leftovers in the fridge. Finally she could find out if Chinese food was actually better the day after. She’d never had a chance before, to bring back leftovers from her secret dinners with Randall would be tempting the dragon. But as far as she could see, there was no truth to the idea, the dumplings were cold and greasy, the beef tough and chewy. Still she finished everything, and carefully hid the containers at the bottom of the trash. As she ate, she stared at the meteorite’s shell, waiting for the purple orb to do something.

It didn’t. Freya felt much more clear-headed after eating. She decided she wasn’t really that sick, probably she just didn’t want to go bail Lassa out. She turned her attention back to the meteorite. She’d half expected it not to be there this morning, that the whole thing had just been a fever dream. She ran her fingers over the cold metal shell, it was real. More than anything she wanted to just leave her mother in jail. She could take the meteorite and the purple core straight to the biology lab at Grayson and spend the morning examining it under a microscope.  

The violet core had pricked her once, but she couldn’t resist picking it up again. It was warm, as if it had been sitting in the sun. Freya took a closer look, rolling it over in her palm and she could see no sign of any crack or protrusion. She looked at her palm, there was no sign of a puncture.

She set the orb down again.

Did I die at the river? Is this hell? 

She had to really give it some thought. It didn't feel like hell. But an effective hell would have to feel real, wouldn't it? As much as she didn't believe in god, the idea of hell was not so easily dismissed. 

She glanced over to the memory wall. Beside the corkboard map, there was a framed black-on-green playbill. GRAYSON HIGH PRESENTS, A ONE ACT TRIPLE HEADER - NO EXIT - THE LOTTERY - THE GIRL WHO WAS ASKED TO TURN BLUE.

For freshman year drama, Freya had played Estelle Rigault in No Exit. The whole thing was a mire of terrible angst, the girl who played Inez, Saria Jefferson had a terrible crush on Freya, and Freya had a worse one on Peter Berl, who played Garcin. Peter was of course, hopelessly infatuated with Saria. They all hated each other by the time for the performance, and it seemed the whole play would be a disaster. 

Instead, it had been a triumph. The weird thwarted love triangle fed right into the play. Mr. Sales, the drama teacher was forever yelling "use it!" at them every time they showed frustration, and the performance was electric. The spring production was a triple play of three one acts, and after the first night Mr. Sales moved No Exit to the finale, because they far outshone the juniors in The Lottery and the seniors in Blue. 

Freya had never been in a play that was so good before. There was tension singing in the air with every line, and the audience hung on every word. The performances got stronger as the weekend went on, not weaker. The standing ovation for the Sunday night show seemed like it might never end. There were tears in Randall's eyes, even though it was his third night seeing the play in a row. Even Lassa seemed moved. 

There was a gushing write-up in the Sillas River Sentinel. In a delicately worded sentence they'd managed to call Freya perfectly cast in the role of a lascivious child-murder. There had been some talk about them taking the play to the state drama competition that summer, but when Randall died, the plans were quietly forgotten. She hadn't tried out for the fall play. 

Hadn't tried out for the fall play, or for the swim team. Hadn't done a thing but go home every night and read and practice guitar. She only kept up the practice and the guitar lessons because Lassa made her. Also because Randall was the one who’d gotten her lessons with Mr. Mathis, who had once been famous. It was supposed to be therapeutic, but it was just music. She played it and felt nothing. One hour a night and back to reading, and at 9 o'clock every night she could take the Lunesta. 

You couldn't kill yourself with Lunesta. She'd looked it up on the internet. Even if you took the whole bottle, it would just knock you out and you would recover. Lassa hated pills, there was nothing else in the house but Advil, and that was another thing you couldn't kill yourself with. You would have to take a whole pile of it. It wasn't how Freya would choose to go.

Apparently the river wasn't either. She wasn't sure how her thoughts had gotten here again, it hadn't even been a full day since she almost drowned. It felt like it was just a matter of time. 

She was alone, in the empty house with only the quiet humming of the refrigerator, the whispery sound of the heat pump in the vents. She didn't want to go to the jail, but more, she didn't want to see Lassa. If only there were a way to leave her in there. 

She shook her head. 

It was better to just tear the bandage off all at once.

Chapter 11

Video in Chapter 10 Post

Chapter 11 Differential Edit

11.

NOVEMBER 8TH

It was three days after the glass broke. Freya had been completing her classwork, practicing guitar, reading, and doing very little else. She never made it to the biology lab. Her curiosity for a closer look at the Starball was weaker than her desire not to be seen.

By the third day, she was completely sick of the house. After Lassa left for work she rode her bike to the Sillas River Park with Randall’s hip waders in a backpack. She probed the sandbar with a long stick and found nothing but rocks. She walked to look for the spot where she’d crawled up the bank, but the river had erased everything.

Freya kept the Starball with her all the time now. It was always slightly warm, and she wondered if it was radioactive. She envisioned all her hair falling out, angry red cracks spreading across her skin until she broke apart completely. If it happened, it happened. She kept the Starball in her pocket anyway, it was something just for her.

When she returned from the river, there was white Ford Fiesta in the driveway, two women from Child Services were inside. After Freya met them, she put her bike in the garage and texted Lassa as she’d been instructed. She let the women into the house and showed them around as she waited for Lassa to show up. They had a lot of questions.

Did she get enough to eat? Of course. Her appetite had been much better since she’d almost drowned. They looked in the refrigerator, there was plenty of food now. The house was spotless.

Was Lassa around enough? Yes. Freya saw more than enough of her.

Was Lassa concerned about her schoolwork? Yes. Very.

Did Lassa ever hit her? No, she lied.

Was she afraid of Lassa? No, she lied again.

Two cars pulled up outside, Lassa’s silver BMW X5 and Lynn’s mocha Mercedes S-Class. The older of the two child services women drew a deep breath when she recognized Lassa’s lawyer. Lynn Harris was a well-dressed, wiry woman who wore her in a short, almost military haircut. Her hair was silver, and she never let go of anything until it was dead. Patricia Daud’s first lawyer had dropped the case shorty after he learned that Lynn was representing Lassa. She had a reputation.

Lynn Harris asked a few questions of the women, somehow managing to be at once, polite and threatening. The women answered carefully, they stuck to their scripts, and they quickly vanished. Freya felt certain they wouldn't be back.

Afterward Lassa grilled Freya on exactly what they'd asked and both she and Lynn seemed happy with the answers given. Then they all sat around the kitchen table while Lynn gave them their legal prospects.

The worst case scenario for Lassa was a year in jail, but Lynn scoffed at the idea. The Dauds had no money and the case was a bad bet. Patricia Daud had screwed herself out of a payday the moment she hit Lassa while she was in handcuffs. There were recordings of everything, both the confrontation in the Principal's Office and the attack outside the cafeteria. Lynn's strategy was to try to push the trial back until it was clear that the lawsuit couldn't succeed, then they could offer Patricia a tiny amount of money to drop the whole thing and play nice in court.

Lynn Harris was alit as she detailed her plan. She lived for this, to beat people. Lynn and Lassa were very alike in some ways. They were sitting close to each other at the table, and it made Freya wonder.

It wouldn't surprise her.

“As for the daughter, it looks like she’s going to dodge being expelled this time. The school board is giving her another chance. She’ll be in in-school suspension for 20 days.”

Lynn turned her eyes on Freya, and it made her feel uncomfortable. She had an intrusive hunch that Lynn might forget what side she was on, and take a bite out of her. But it was only a weird intuition. The strange look was swept away by a flat professional smile.

“When you go back to Grayson if she speaks to you at all, do not talk to her. Go to a teacher right away and call me immediately. Literally any contact at all and I can have her yanked right out of Grayson and locked up in Long Creek Youth Development Center.”

“What about the window at TacoTime? Will anything happen?” Freya asked.

“Realistically, nothing will happen. We have the call recording, but the camera angles aren’t good, and you told the police you didn’t see her throw the rock.”

“Well I didn’t.”

“That’s fine. It’s just if you had, or if you had called me before you talked with them, I would have had more to work with.” Freya nodded her head, feeling the criticism sting. “The police aren’t going to go crazy over third degree criminal mischief. For the time being, I’d suggest you don’t go downtown alone.”

Freya nodded, and sank into her chair. Lassa and Lynn began to talk about the specifics of the battery case and she could only follow for a few minutes before she lost interest. She reached into her pocket and ran her fingers over the Starball, wishing she were in space. Just shooting through the nothing, with the stars creeping by impossibly slowly, slipping into the void forever. Never hitting anything, just flying until there was nothing left. Freya noticed Lynn Harris catch Lassa’s eyes and look in the direction of the bedroom. Lassa had the slightest frown, so minor most people wouldn’t have noticed.

Freya sighed. She wasn’t wondering anymore.

After a little more talking, they both got in their cars and drove off, leaving Freya in the empty house. She wondered if they were driving off to shack up somewhere or just going back to work, but it didn’t really matter.

She wished it was time for bed, it wasn't even noon.

Chapter 13

13. November 9th. 

The next morning Freya woke up early as the first rays of dawn shot through her window. They reflected off the emerald leaves of Yggdrasil and painted her ceiling green. She stared upward and watched the blotches of light shift as the sun rose. Freya needed to pee, but she didn’t get out of bed. It was too early, she didn’t want to leave her room until Lassa went to work.

A thread was fluttering at the back of her mind and she tugged at it, tumbling into the ghost of a dream. She’d dreamed of going blind. The world had slowly retreated into an indistinct blur, and all went dark. She was left sliding through the void, anticipating a crash. The falling-in-place feeling had jolted her awake, and she immediately regret waking up. 

Freya wondered why she’d dreamed of being blind, or why she was dreaming at all. Was the Lunesta becoming less effective? That had to happen at some point, she would build up a tolerance. She shrank from the thought, what if she stopped being able to sleep? Everything was so hard already. 

Freya looked over at the desk where the Lunesta bottle was, and noticed her laptop was missing. She blinked, wondering what had happened. Had someone broken in and taken it? If so they wouldn’t get anything out of it. She hid everything that mattered on an encrypted partition. She checked to make sure her phone hadn’t been taken, it was charging on her bedside table. Next to it was the Starball, resting in the center of an old Robert Johnson CD so it couldn’t roll away.

Curiosity was enough to get her out of bed and she turned on the light and looked around her room. The laptop was definitely gone and now she really had to use the bathroom. The mystery was short-lived. When Freya emerged from the bathroom, she found Lassa sitting at the kitchen table. She’d taken Freya’s MacBook and she was frowning at the screen.

“This is so slow,” Lassa complained. No apology for taking Freya’s stuff without asking or going in her room while she was asleep would be forthcoming. It wasn’t the first time either. But Freya was ready for the theft, she had paid very close attention in Computer Science.  

Lassa was poking around on her desktop, unaware that it was all a facade. She didn’t know about the linux partition, or how to boot into Dracos. To complete the Potemkin OSX install, Freya had seeded the desktop with a clutter of pictures and homework assignments. She’d even spent a few hours browsing innocuously to create a believable history in Safari. 

It had taken a while to set that all up, but it was so very worth it in this moment. Freya would pay any price to never hear Lassa comment on her porn choices ever again.

“Sorry,” Freya said automatically, and Lassa shot her a look, somehow sensing her mirth. Lassa’s eyes lingered on Freya, her gaze intensifying. If she were ten years old, that stare would have been enough to get her to give herself away. But Freya was an old hand at this now. She refused to crack.

“I guess it’s just old,” Lassa said. She paused a moment to see if Freya leapt on the excuse, but Freya knew it might be a feint. She gave Lassa nothing. 

“When was the last time you used this?” Lassa asked.  

“I haven’t turned it on since I got the new phone.”

“Don’t you need it for school?” 

Freya shook her head. “I do everything on my phone.” 

“Well something is wrong with the internet. It’s really slow. I’m just checking to make sure you don’t have a virus.”

“Do Macs get viruses?” Freya asked, pretending to be stupid. When Lassa fell for it, she felt both elated she’d tricked her mother, and outraged Lassa thought so little of her.

“Yes, it’s just uncommon. If this has been turned off, it’s not the culprit. Let me see your phone.”

Freya went back to her room and got her phone, trying to remember if there was anything on it she didn’t want Lassa to see. But there wasn’t much. Freya hadn’t texted anyone in almost a month. It had been over three weeks since the last email she’d sent to Betty, she still hadn’t gotten a reply. 

It was only as she was surrendering the phone to Lassa that she realized there were about a hundred pictures of the meteorite on the phone, and she struggled to come up with an explanation. But Lassa was only thumbing through system preferences and checking the network settings. She didn’t look at the pictures. 

“It’s not your phone, you barely use any data at all. It’s not my computer or my phone. Someone must have broken into our network. Let me check the router.” 

“Do you need me for anything?” Freya asked, and Lassa shook her head. Freya showered, brushed her teeth and got dressed, slipping the Starball into her pocket. When she came out Lassa was still frowning at the screen.

“Someone broke into our network and downloaded a ton of stuff. This is the list of connected devices.” 

Lassa turned the MacBook screen towards Freya. She was logged into the router interface and looking at a list of active DHCP leases. There were entries for Lassa’s work computer, Freya’s MacBook, and each of their phones. There was an entry for SONYTV also. The final row was a MAC address with no device name. In the DATA TRANSFERRED column, it said 262.75GB. As they watched, the number climbed to 263 and kept going.

For a moment, Freya was afraid the final entry was her Dracos install, that she’d somehow been owned. But the computer really had been turned off for months. She was clear.

Lassa tried to launch the calculator on Freya’s laptop but it was taking a while to load and finally the cursor turned into the spinning beachball. With an annoyed sigh, Lassa pulled out her phone and started typing in numbers. 

“We have a 10 megabit line. That can download about four gigs an hour. It looks like they’ve been maxing out the line for about three days.”

“Why would they do that?” Freya asked, feeling relieved. For once Lassa didn’t think something was her fault.

“It’s probably some kid in the neighborhood running torrents.”

“Can we see what they’re downloading?” Freya asked, still feigning ignorance. Lassa was really smart about a lot of things, but Freya was sure she’d never run Wireshark in her life. She enjoyed a few minutes of schadenfreude watching her mother fumble around in the router’s web interface.

“I don’t know if there’s a place to see that,” Lassa concluded, and her mouth became a tight line. She didn’t like to admit defeat. “Maybe the ISP knows. I’m going to change the password to something stronger.”

Lassa changed the wifi password to an unwieldy string of characters and reconnected all of their devices. Then she logged back into the router and the weird entry was gone from the DHCP list. She browsed on her phone a bit, it seemed much faster.

“I guess that’s it. I’ll contact the company just to make sure we’re covered in case someone was doing something illegal.”

“Do you have to tell your work?” Freya asked, watching Lassa closely. Her mother blinked. Freya had suspected the question would make her feel uncomfortable.

“Normally I would. But after the incident at your school, I don’t need more attention on me. It’s probably nothing. We’ll see what the ISP says first.”

“How many more times do I have to see Dr. Garbuglio?” Freya asked, trying to capitalize on the moment of vulnerability. 

“Three more times, if no more problems at school, I think we can stop then. I won’t let him give you any drugs, don’t worry. Are you still sleeping ok?” 

“Yes,” Freya replied. Lassa was paying much more attention to her since the fight, she wasn’t used to it and didn’t like it.  

“From now on Garbuglio will be on Thursday nights, he moved someone to fit you in yesterday. Your first Krav Maga class will be on Wednesday. Give it your best, it may save your life.”

“Ok.”

“Don’t look so miserable about it. Maybe you’ll meet some nice boys there. If nothing else, at least they’ll be fit.” 

The pendulum of discomfort had swung fully to Freya. She couldn’t wait until Lassa was gone. Hopefully she wouldn’t come back home tonight. When the BMW pulled out of the driveway, Freya looked at the clock. 9am. 12 hours until she could go back to sleep.

Chapter 15

Video is in Previous post

Chapter 15 Differential Edit

15.


“So,” Doctor Garbuglio began.

Freya was imagining an arm reaching around his neck and choking him out. She was pretty sure Dr. G wouldn’t know to turn his chin toward the elbow. He’d black out with his eyes bulging and that insufferable look wiped right off his face.

“Your mother tells me there was a problem at your Karate class.”

“Krav Maga,” she corrected, and he made a motion with his hand as if it was no importance. He waited for her to go on and she stared back at him.

“So there was a problem at Krav Maga,” he amended. “Can you tell me what happened?”

“Lassa didn’t tell the instructor about Randall. So they were doing a drill with fake knives, and I started crying. It was fine. It stopped after a few minutes and I went on with the class. One of the guys from school filled Vitko in after class, he was very apologetic. It wasn’t his fault.”

“Your mother tells me you were upset when she picked you up.”

“Of course I was upset. She was the one who made me take the class. She should have told Vitko. I looked stupid in front of everyone.”

“What did she say when you told her how you felt?”

“She said ‘I didn’t think you would have a problem.’ Like it was my fault. Now I have to go back there, and it’ll be even more awkward. I’m the only girl in the class, and now they all think I’m some snowflake. It’ll be much harder to make any friends.”

“Do you want to make friends in the class?” Dr. Garbuglio asked. She gave him a look, it was a weird question.

“I’d like to have the option. I didn’t want to take this class in the first place. I wanted to g—“ Freya halted, realizing she was about to say something stupid and tell the man who could put her in an asylum she wanted to get a gun.

“What did you want?” Garbuglio honed in on the evasion. He was very good at that.

“I just wanted to stay at home,” she said, realizing too late that that would give him another angle for attack. She saw him consider it, but he didn’t press the point and chide her for hiding in her room the way Lassa would have. Instead he just nodded.

“Other than that, how did you like the class?”

“I don’t want to go back,” she said.

“Because of what happened?”

“No. It’s stupid in the first place,” she said.

“How so?”

“I weigh 95 pounds. I’m literally half the size of some of the boys in the class. I could study this every day for the rest of my life and any of those guys could still beat me up.”

“You’re probably right,” Dr. Garbuglio said, surprising her. “Does your mother know you feel this way?”

“It wouldn’t matter. She would still make me go.”

Dr. Garbuglio nodded in agreement.

“Let’s talk about that and assume that you’re right in both cases.  Assume you have to go to this class. What’s the best case scenario?”

“Um, I take the class and don’t get injured? Eventually I don’t have to go anymore?”

“Is that really the best possible outcome?” he pressed, giving her doubtful look.

“I guess I could get in better shape. There’s a lot of running and push-ups. I didn’t mind that.”

“What about the people in the class? You said it would be harder to make friends now. Were any people in the class you would like to be friends with?”

“Well, it’s the youth class, so everyone goes to Grayson. One of the guys there was in drama last year, he played Joe Summers in The Lottery. He’s a good actor when he isn’t being a clown.”

“What’s his name?”

“Dan Gregulus,” she said, immediately wishing she hadn’t mentioned him.

“Did you talk with Dan?”

“No of course not, we just all ran laps together at the start of the class before everyone showed up.”

“Why do you say of course not?”

“Because he’s a senior and on the track team. He probably doesn’t even remember my name.”

“Oh I see. So you’re not allowed to talk to him?”

She rolled her eyes at Dr. Garbuglio, but he only inclined his head, indicating he was still waiting for an answer.

“Just generally seniors don’t really talk to sophomores. He’s like, thinking about graduating, applying for colleges. All of his friends are track people and other seniors.”

“Well it’s been a while, but when I was a senior in high school I didn’t have a problem with talking to sophomores, especially girls. I suspect that hasn’t changed.”

Her cheeks got hot with embarrassment at the implication. She didn’t want to talk about this at all, especially not with Garbuglio.

“I mean, I don’t really care if I talk with him or not. He’s just the person there who I recognized.”

“When entering a new social group, that’s what people do. They start with the people they recognize and they branch out from there. Let’s think about best-case scenarios again. Even if you and Dan have little in common, Dan has been taking this class for a while, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Well, consider Dan to be the door through which you can get to know the other people in the class better. Try and talk with him, and if he is in fact, unwilling to talk to a lowly sophomore, then you can just disregard him and find someone more open-minded. If you have to be there anyway, you migh as well try to make friends.”

“That’s all ruined though,” Freya said, feeling a tug in her chest.

“Why is it ruined?”

“I cried in front of everyone. I made a fool of myself.”

“OK. I’d like you to try something. Think about your own friends. Have they ever cried in front of you?”

“That’s different. We already knew each other for a long time before that.”

“Did you stop being their friends when they cried and displayed vulnerability to you?”

“No. Of course not. It made us better friends.”

“Why is that?”

“Because they trusted me enough to cry in front of me,” Freya said. The memory of Betty’s face before she moved away was pushing to the forefront of her attention. Her eyes were all puffy and a wet line ran down from her nose. If only Betty were still here, this would all be so much easier.

“Well, you’ve done the same thing in front of that class. I think you’ll find they’re more sympathetic than you think. A lot of them will think you’re very tough if you go back to the class and keep trying. Many of them may even make an extra effort to be your friend because they know you went through something terrible.”

“I don’t want people to be my friend because they feel sorry for me,” Freya replied, bitter at the thought.

“You can think of it as people feeling sorry for you, or you can think of it as people showing empathy for something that happened that was beyond your control and is not your fault. Some of them may have suffered loss too. They may have experienced some parts of what you’re going through. If you don’t try you will never get to find out.”

Freya took a deep breath. Annoying as he was, Dr. Garbuglio was probably right. She was starting to understand why he was a therapist. He had changed his approach radically this session, she wondered how long he’d spent reviewing his tapes and thinking up a new gameplan.

“OK, time is almost up. I would like for you to have this,” Dr. Garbuglio said. He got up and got a copy of The Fragile Phoenix from his bookshelf and gave it to her.

“You don’t have to read this if you don’t want to, but I would like for you to have it. If you choose to read it, you can accelerate the course of therapy. You will have a better idea of what my method is, and if there are things you don’t agree with we can talk about them and save time.”

“OK, thank you,” Freya said, accepting the book. There was no way she would read it, but it didn’t hurt to be gracious.

“Good luck with the class,” Dr. Garbuglio offered, and she went through the door into the hallway with the blue leather volume in her hand. She thought about throwing it in the trash bin outside of the office like she had The Song of Sword, but that seemed childish. Besides, Lassa was late, the BMW wasn’t in the parking lot. Despite herself, Freya began to thumb through the book. An hour later, she gave up and called a cab.

Chapter 16

Video is in Chapter 14 Post

Chapter 16 Differential Edit

16. Playing Better

“Mr. Mathis says you’ve been playing better,” Lassa said. 

Freya had a moment of disbelief, as if Lassa had just said the earth was about to crash into the sun. They were actually driving to Grayson, there was very little danger of crashing into anything. Lassa was one of those drivers who almost never took her eyes off the road. 

“No way,” Freya said. 

Ezekiel “Miracle” Mathis had played Spanish and Blues guitar for longer than Lassa had been alive. In the whole time Freya had been taking lessons two things had never happened, he had never given her any compliment on her playing except “that’s right”, and he had never smiled. She remembered asking Randall why once, expecting some terrible tragedy had befallen him. But Randall had laughed, and he told her that Mr. Mathis had staked a month of lessons against five hundred dollars in a game of nine ball, and Randall had sunk the nine on break. He said Old Miracle had never been able to get the sour taste out of his mouth. 

Mr. Mathis long since made his five hundred back. Freya had been taking lessons with him for six years. For everything he lacked in charisma he was an incredible musician and teacher. He regarded clean fundamentals with the same life-and-death importance as a heart surgeon regarded clean instruments. He hadn’t softened a bit, the first lesson she’d taken after Randall’s death he had told her if she wasn’t going to bother practicing, he wasn’t going to bother coming.

Playing better. It wasn’t much of a compliment, but it was definitely true. She had been practicing more seriously, even though she was busy two nights a week now with therapy and Krav Maga. Dr. Garbuglio had been mostly right about the class, breaking down hadn’t made her an outsider, it had drawn her in. Vitko had offered to let her step out during any knife drills but she had said she wanted to just tough it out, and she didn’t cry the next time. She worked very hard in all the drills, trying to prove herself. When the boys groaned at the prospect of running laps, she kept quiet. She couldn’t afford to complain like they could. When she was really giving it her all, sometimes Vitko would give her a slight raise of his chin, letting her know he hadn’t missed it. It wasn’t much but it mattered.

She was back at Grayson now and the other Renanin students said hi to her in the halls, even the upperclassmen. But that was as far as it went, they only acknowledged her existence. She was still eating lunch alone in the corner of the cafeteria with her back to the wall, as alert as a gazelle at a watering hole.

Freya had the feeling that anyone tried to jump her again, she might have backup. Still, she found herself tense whenever she was alone. Again and again she thought she saw Tammy in a crowd of faces but it was always someone else. Tammy was still in In-School Suspension. Unknown groups of people approaching her made her nervous. 

Freya kept having flinchy thoughts that a fist was about to strike her out of nowhere and knock out her teeth. She had a dumb desire to wear the mouthguard while she was walking around, but it would make her look like a freak if anyone noticed. Dr. Garbuglio had smiled when she admitted that to him. He assured her that was all pretty normal after being attacked. He said talking would help a little, but mostly, it would just fade with time. Freya knew better. Things didn’t fade, they sunk into you and they stayed there.

She stared out the window as the hills rolled away, the words hung in her head. Playing better. That was all she was really doing, playing the role of someone who was better so they would leave her alone. She’d been to therapy three times now and it wasn’t helping. Nothing was really going to change. Graduation was almost three years away, there was no way she could make it. As long as she wasn’t brave enough to leave or end it, she would remain a prisoner here. Caught in this busy cage of going through the motions. She slipped her hand into her pocket and touched the Starball, drawing a deep breath and letting it out through her nose.

Today, the microscope. She told herself. She said that every morning for almost two weeks, but it always seemed to slip her mind, or seem like too much effort. But it was more than that, she knew when she got a closer look it was going to turn out to just be an ordinary rock. Probably just a strange olivine formation, unusual but totally natural. She wanted it to be something special. 

They pulled up to Grayson and Lassa told her to have a good day, and she said the same back, even though neither of them would.  

Playing better.