A Mirror for the Stars

by John Ploskina

8

  The Vespa engine whined like an asthmatic weed whacker as we pulled into the laboratory parking lot. There were no other half assed-chick motorcycles, cars or people visible in the faint light of the flickering yellow street lamps. I knew Karen was right, though. Charlotte was there. I could smell her. As I stepped off the Vespa I tightened my grip on the gun, a Glock .45. I would have double checked to make sure it was loaded, and that the safety was off, but I didn’t have the slightest idea what I was doing. No problem, though. All I had to do to win back my lost love was dust some circus freak government assassin and blow up a building.

  Easy peasy. Karen would be blowing me before the sun came up.

  It was late enough that it was starting to get early, and dew was starting to come down on everything. You could feel it in the air, cool and wet. It felt good on my skin. Something was nagging at the back of my mind, though, and I wasn’t sure what it was. I figured it was probably just terror and dismissed it.

  “So what do we do once we’re done here?” I asked, shouldering the messenger bag full of C4. “Lay low?”

  “They’ll send more agents after us. They have some worse than Charlotte. I know some people who live off the grid on a commune in Idaho. We can lay low there for a while. After that we’ll have to go into hiding, take on fake identities, maybe leave the country. Steve will know what to do.” Karen jammed a fresh magazine into her gun and chambered a round.

  “Who’s Steve?” I was careful with my inflection, making sure to say it conversationally, as if I’d never asked that question before. Just for shits and giggles.

  “My boyfri-” Karen stopped in mid-sentence and mid-stride, but she didn’t catch herself in time. I heard it.

  In an instant I realized what had been eating at the back of my head. I’d subconsciously I’d come up with an alternate interpretation of the events Karen explained to me. Hearing the panicked way she cut off the word “boyfriend” confirmed that interpretation, and it burst into conscious thought, shouting and waving its arms around.

  “So… at what point in your plan where I risk my life to help you blow up a government building were you going to tell me you’ve got a boyfriend?”

  Karen rolled her eyes. “I never said I don’t have a boyfriend.”

  “You clearly implied.”

  “I did no such thing.”

  “You gave me the look.”

  “What look?”

  “You know what look, and not only that you squeezed my hand.”

  Karen sighed and put her arms straight down at her sides. She was pissed, but so was I.

  “You already had that C4 ready to go. When did you decide to rope me into this little shindig? Don’t just glare at me, answer the question.”

  She glared some more, and then crossed her arms over her chest. “While we were on the phone.”

  “Wow,” I said. “Amazing.”

  “You’re such a fucking asshole.”

  “Ok, fine. I concede the point. I am an asshole. The loosest, hairiest, pimpliest, least wiped, stinkiest asshole in the world. Now, let’s talk about you. You are an emotionally manipulative douche bag.”

  Karen’s face twisted up while she thought about that. “Douche bag? I don’t know. I always thought of that as more of an insult for a guy.”

  “You’re right about that. Douche bitch? No. Douche cunt? No. I hate that word. Douche ho? Hey, I like that. That fits. It has a nice ring to it.”

  “Look, Jack, are we going to-”

  “Shut up, douche ho! She how well that fits? So why isn’t your boyfriend helping you?”

  Karen looked up over her right shoulder and inhaled. She was fucking livid. “Steven is a very peaceful man.”

  “Ha ha ha, he’s a fucking sissy! You’re a douche ho, and your boyfriend is a fucking sissy.” That broke open some kind of floodgate of madness in my head. I let out a big, rolling gale of laughter. Once it started, there was no stopping it. My stomach and chest ached, and I got a big stitch in my side. I could feel tears coming down the sides of my face.

  “Are you done?” Karen asked.

  “Oh, no. I’m just getting started. I’ve had an epiphany, and you’re probably the only other person in the world who will understand. I’m afraid I’m going to have to lay it all out for you.”

  “Proceed.”

  “This whole situation is just a big, exaggerated version of the same bullshit you’ve been pulling since the day we met. It’s just like any of your retarded causes. Remember that time you organized a show for Folk Rock Against Domestic Violence?”

  “That was wonderful! We raised over four hundred dollars for-”

  “For bullshit. A thousand rednecks got lit up and wailed on their inbred wives the day before your show, and a thousand more did it the day after. It was a bunch of bullshit and you know it. Meanwhile, you made a little speech and got your picture in the paper. Well, who called and threatened to make sure all those fuck-for-brains hipsters actually showed up with their guitars? Who fronted the cash to get the venue for the night? Who carried the speakers and took money at the door? I did. I did all the work so that you could feel good, while you accomplished nothing. Now I’m supposed to get clobbered by government agent with super powers while you plant some C4?”

  “For fuck’s sake that was years ago. And this is different. We can’t let the Establishment use my research to tighten their grip on people!”

  “This is exactly the same. Blowing up your old lab won’t do squat. You don’t think they’ll have offsite backups in some classified data center forty miles under the Earth’s crust? You don’t think they have three or four teams running all the same experiments? This is just how you make yourself think you’re special. It’s pure, 100% fuck all douche ho behavior.”

  I tossed Karen’s Glock into the basket on the handlebars of her Vespa and started walking away.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Somewhere other than here,” I said. There was a new and living energy pulsing through my veins, wholly unlike anything I’d felt before. The obsession, the longing, the constant malaise I’d found myself in since Karen dumped me was gone.

  “Jack, you should know. I really did think of you, because you made me laugh.”

  “I don’t care and I don’t care if most people really do walk around in some kind of trance.” I looked back over my shoulder and grinned. “I’m not hypnotized anymore.”

  Call to Action

  Thanks for reading!   I hope you had a good time with A Mirror for the Stars. I’m planning on releasing more free novellas with Jack and Karen very soon. Meanwhile, if you enjoy young adult adventure novels, or know someone who does, please check out my Perfecting Reality series. The Amazon Kindle version of book 1, The Far Unlit Unknown, is only 99 cents as of this writing.

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  Special Thanks

  Eli Horowitz, thank you for reading and for your in depth comments. They’re always highly appreciated.