Shattered

by Amanda Valentino

  Callie did her best to ignore them by flipping open her French textbook and feigning interest in a picture of soupe à l’oignon.

  I was just about to broach the topic of the curious eye logo, when I felt someone’s hand press down on my shoulder. I turned to look.

  Heidi was there.

  “Aren’t we the regular Three Musketeers?” she asked.

  I shooed her hand away. “Oooh, up to three syllables today, Heidi—and in a foreign language?”

  Heidi rolled her eyes. “I have two reasons for coming to your table,” she began, keeping her voice low. “First, I think it goes without saying that Callie’s recent social suicide makes her ineligible to lip-synch with us on Friday.”

  “And as you can see, she’s brokenhearted about it,” I said, giving Callie a reassuring smile.

  “Well, she should be,” Heidi said hotly. “Because everyone’s been speculating why she continues to hang out with you. At first we thought she was doing some charity work.”

  “And now?” Callie asked, lifting her chin and making direct eye contact with her.

  “Now they simply think you’re a charity case, too.”

  “You mentioned you had two reasons . . . ?” Hal asked pointedly.

  “Right.” She smiled meanly. “Word is that you’re all looking for Amanda. Any luck with that yet? I mean, beyond what’s on your lame-o website?”

  “It’s hardly lame-o,” Hal said. “Like you would even care about our search. Everyone knows how much you hate Amanda.”

  “Hate is a strong word.”

  “But I think it’s fairly accurate.” He gave her a pointed look.

  “Whatever,” Heidi said, with a toss of her bottle-blond hair. “So, have you guys had any luck?”

  “Let me assure you that you are NOT on our need-to-know list,” I told her.

  “Well, don’t look too hard,” she said, picking an invisible piece of lint off Hal’s sweater. “Endeavor has been a far more peaceful place in Amanda’s absence. No more wig-wearing weirdos roaming the hallways with their dime-store junk and ugly trinkets.”

  “There’s no vice principal around either to thwart your quest for power,” I said, checking for her reaction.

  “Maybe you guys should mind your own business,” she snapped.

  “And why would we do that?” I asked, encouraged by her anger.

  “I think I’ve wasted enough time here. God knows I don’t want to commit social suicide as well.” She stormed off to join Kelli and Traci, still scrambling to finish their work.

  “What was that all about?” Hal asked, once she was out of earshot.

  I shook my head, wondering if maybe Heidi Bragg knew more about Amanda’s disappearance than we did.

  CHAPTER 5

  The whole confrontation with Heidi made it nearly impossible to concentrate in French class. While Madame Booté (actual last name: Bouton, but renamed by students for obvious reasons) droned on about le conditionnel passé, I couldn’t help thinking back to a conversation that Amanda and I once had about Heidi.

  We were at Play It Again, Sam’s, the thrift shop where we had discovered Amanda’s box. Amanda said she needed a belt to go with her 1950s poodle skirt. But all she wanted to do was shop for me. And so she started pulling dresses, pants, and sweaters off the racks. Putting together outfits I’d never even dreamt of: a pencil skirt with a ruffled top; a long tube dress with a pair of knee-high boots.

  Frilly scarves paired with basic T-shirts.

  Leggings with a short jumper.

  A fur vest over a sequined dress.

  “I can hardly wait to see you in these clothes,” Amanda said, setting me up in a dressing room.

  “I take it you’re not enamored of my style.” I looked at myself in the full-length mirror. Wearing a black, boxy sweatshirt with a pair of sweatpants snatched from Cisco’s dresser, I had to admit I wasn’t exactly enamored of my style either.

  “I’m enamored by all styles,” she said, handing me a wide snakeskin belt. “The trick is to match the style with the occasion.”

  “And for what occasion does someone like me have to wear all this stuff?” I asked, glancing at the plethora of try-ons.

  “Thrifting with a friend, for one.” She laughed. “School for another, a day at the movies for a third . . . a stroll through the park, lunch by the pond, an afternoon at the museum—”

  “I think I get it,” I said.

  “Good.” She met my eyes in the mirror. “Because brilliance like yours is wonderful, but there are so many other layers to a star. Why just stop at the photosphere?”

  “Well . . . ,” I stammered, curious as to where she was going with all this.

  “Not well, and,” she corrected me. “A star is also radiant, so let’s work on getting you to express that radiance, too.”

  I waited for her to let out a laugh. But her expression remained serious. Apparently she meant it. I felt my face grow warm, glad when she finally shut the curtain so I could be alone to change.

  It’s just that aside from my mother—whose job by definition, among her many other parental obligations, is to boost my self-confidence as often as she can—no one had ever said anything like that to me before.

  “Ready?” she asked after only a couple minutes.

  “Not quite,” I said, still struggling with a sleeve.

  While Amanda saw style as something that helped illustrate her mood—a blond wig one day, a ballerina tutu the next—I saw it as something that detracted attention from what was on the inside.

  “The problem with that theory,” she said, once I’d tried to explain it to her, “is that by shrouding yourself, it’s nearly impossible for anyone to get close enough to actually see the inside.”

  My jaw tensed, but I couldn’t really argue. And so I man-euvered my way into my outfit: a formfitting sweater dress that came to the knee.

  “Holy Hepburn,” she said once I’d opened the curtain. “Audrey Hepburn, that is. You do realize how much you resemble her, right?”

  “You don’t think it’s too purple?” I asked.

  “Are you kidding? It’s actually more plum than purple, plus it makes your brown eyes pop. Coco Chanel said, ‘The best color in the whole world is the one that looks good on you.’”

  She removed my clunky brown glasses and took out my ponytail so that my hair fell down around my shoulders. “Audrey had a pair of chic cat-eye glasses that I think might be really striking on you.”

  “Really?” I asked, almost wanting to believe it.

  “Well, what do you think?” She spun me around so I could look in the dressing room mirror.

  I couldn’t help but admit that I actually liked the way I looked, nor could I help the tiny smile that inched across my lips, even if it was a tad blurry without my glasses.

  “‘The nature of this flower is to bloom,’ right?” she continued.

  “Alice Walker,” I said, giving credit to her quote.

  While Amanda continued to shop around, I tried on the rest of the clothes and even ventured to pick out a few things on my own, ending up with a whole pile for purchase.

  “Will your parents be okay with all this?” she asked.

  “Are you kidding?” I said, gesturing to Cisco’s sweatpants. “My mother will be thrilled.”

  I handed Louise my credit card. My mother had given it to me for just this purpose, though I had never used it before.

  “Just remember that fashion is your friend,” Amanda said, pulling on a newsboy cap.

  “Your very best friend,” Louise chimed in, handing me my receipt.

  “It has nothing to do with impressing other people, or showing everybody how much money you have,” Amanda continued. “So don’t be afraid of it, or take it too seriously. Just enjoy it.”

  “Well, thanks,” I said, wanting to tell her more—how much the whole shopping expedition meant to me. “I feel really . . . it’s just that this really means . . .”

  “You’re welcome,” Aman
da said, paying for her newsboy cap with a ten-dollar bill, and still getting change back. She wrapped her arm around my shoulder, as if she knew just what I was trying to say. “You’re going to be simply smashing in these new clothes of yours. Just wait until Heidi sees you in that color-block dress. I mean, hello, Jackie O. No greener is the eye of envy.”

  “As if I’d even care,” I said, surprised that she would bring up Heidi. “Plus, I doubt she’ll even notice.”

  “Make no mistake,” Amanda said with a squeeze. “Heidi notices everything. Don’t underestimate her for a single second.”

  “Meaning?”

  She stopped on the sidewalk and let her arm drop from my shoulder. “Just promise me you’ll be wary of her, okay?”

  Though I appreciated the warning about Heidi, it wasn’t exactly necessary. Heidi and I had been major enemies since middle school. In retaliation for my turning her and her friends in for cheating, she’d concocted a scheme having to do with my crush: Keith Harmon. They created a fake email address for him, and used it to start writing me, making me believe that I was actually corresponding with him, and not them.

  The whole thing was humiliating. I’d confessed to “Keith” how cute I always thought “he” was; that I’d love to go on a date with “him” sometime; and that, yes, I’d definitely sit with “him” at lunch. My friends at the time (those I subsequently ended up pushing away out of sheer mortification) had tried to warn me that this was all likely part of one big fat joke. But unfortunately I didn’t listen. And so began my crash course in Stupidity 101.

  “All I’m saying is to be careful who you trust,” Amanda continued, avoiding my eyes, “especially when it comes to Heidi and her family.”

  “I get the message . . . Now, where are you taking me?” I asked as Amanda all but shoved me down the sidewalk and into another store: the eyeglass place, where we shopped around for new cat-eye frames.

  “Nia?” Madame Booté asked, snagging me out of my reverie. “Qu’est-ce que c’est le conditionnel passé du verbe donner, pour le pronom tu?”

  “Tu aurais donné.” I yawned. Honestly, what was the point? We’d been reviewing le conditionnel passé for weeks. Why wasn’t there an advanced Advanced Placement French course for people who actually study?

  “Excellent!” she said, turning back to the board, where she’d listed a bunch of irregular verb stems.

  I scanned the list, still stuck on Amanda’s warning about trust. Because who was she to even talk about trust in light of all the lies she’d told us?

  CHAPTER 6

  At lunch, Callie, Hal, and I parked at what had become our usual spot in the cafeteria, close enough to the exit doors, but still far enough away from the kitchen so we wouldn’t have to endure the scent of overly processed poultry.

  “So, any ideas what we should say to that Waverly woman today?” I asked.

  “Do you think it’s crazy if we tell her we have the box?” Hal began. “And if we say we’ll only give it to her if she answers all of our questions?”

  “And what questions would those be?” Callie asked.

  “First of all, we would never even consider giving that woman the box,” I told them.

  “Not even if we keep the real one and give her a fake one that we fill ourselves?” Hal suggested.

  “Are you serious? Brittney has seen the box—tried to open it, remember? Maybe this Waverly did, too.” Callie unraveled her tuna sandwich from its wax paper wrapping.

  Hal shook his head. “No, it was a bad bluff. Too much TV. Sorry.”

  “We need to be careful about what we reveal to her,” I said. “Because way too many people seem to be interested in our search—way too many of the wrong people, I should say. People with ulterior motives.” I reminded them that even Thornhill, when he first hauled us into his office before he was attacked, kept grilling us about Amanda’s whereabouts.

  “Exactly,” Hal said. “Why didn’t he go to the police or call her parents right away?”

  “Are you forgetting that her mother’s dead, and her father’s a dead-end mystery?” I asked.

  “Not dead-end,” Callie said, ever optimistic. “Just a mystery.”

  “How about her older sister?” Hal asked. “I mean, she’s the one who supposedly has custody of Amanda.”

  “Try to even find Robin Beckendorf,” I argued. “We have no idea who she is, or where she is. Not to mention that a Google search offered up nothing.”

  “Right, so maybe Thornhill had no other choice than to ask us,” Callie said. “Maybe Amanda’s files were all a bust, and he had no other leads.”

  I took a deep breath, knowing she had a point. Prior to finding all that stuff in Amanda’s box, none of us had been quite sure what the true story was with Amanda’s family. Because we’d all been told something different.

  While Amanda had told Callie that she’d been living with her grandparents in Orion (because the UN had posted her father in Latin America and her mother was studying gorillas in Uganda), she’d told Hal that her father was deceased, and that she and her mother had been living in some new condos downtown. Mean-while, the story I got was that her parents were going through an ugly divorce, and that she and her mother were staying in a local hotel until they found more permanent housing.

  “Let’s also not forget all the bizarre questions that Officer Marciano asked me about Thornhill’s attack,” Hal continued.

  “Or that doctor’s questions at the hospital when we tried to visit Thornhill,” I said, remembering how some of those questions had sounded curiously similar to Officer Marciano’s. “Plus, why was Heidi’s behavior even weirder than usual earlier? Since when does she care enough about Amanda to inquire about our search? On one hand, yes, people should be asking questions. Someone is missing, after all. But I feel like they’re asking the wrong questions.”

  “It’s because they have the wrong motives,” Hal said, untwisting the cap from his bottled water.

  “Maybe we’re looking at it all wrong,” Callie suggested. “I mean, the goal is still the same . . . to find Amanda.”

  “The goal should be the same,” I corrected her, “but I’m not convinced it is.”

  “Agreed,” Hal said. “Amanda isn’t sending us all of these clues for nothing. She obviously doesn’t feel safe enough to come out.”

  “I just want to find her,” Callie whispered, taking a halfhearted bite of her sandwich.

  “We all do,” I agreed, “but we have to be smart here. Amanda is counting on us.”

  “And we can’t let her down.” Hal nodded. “That’s why, aside from calling that Waverly person, we should also check out the address we found for Dr. Joy’s rehab facility.”

  I took a bite of my chicken salad wrap, wondering if that’s where Thornhill was right now. Callie and Hal found the address in Mrs. Bragg’s safe-room-turned-office. The address was printed on her prescription bottle.

  “Wait, didn’t your friend Frieda say that Joy’s clinic had been shut down?” Callie asked.

  That was true. A few days before, Hal had taken a train to Baltimore to meet Frieda, one of Amanda’s old artist friends. According to Hal, Frieda was acting “cloak-and-dagger-ish,” requesting that he meet her at an old abandoned train station, and ordering him not to tell anyone about the visit. Apparently Frieda had been in touch with Amanda, though she wouldn’t elaborate one iota. Instead she warned him about the dangers of the three of us being together, and then told him that Dr. Joy had gone into hiding.

  “His clinic in Baltimore has been dismantled,” Hal said, correcting her. “But not the rehab facility in Orion. It’s definitely worth checking out.”

  “I’m game,” Callie said.

  “Me too,” I said, suddenly wondering why I hadn’t yet talked to Louise at Play It Again, Sam’s to see if she might have any information about Amanda’s sister, Robin. “Where should we meet?” I asked.

  Just then, Traci of the I-Girls appeared at our table.

  “We need
to talk,” she demanded. “In private.”

  I looked back at the I-Girl table, shocked that the invisible force field that seemed to surround it hadn’t zapped her back into place. Kelli sat by herself, picking all the evil, carb-infested croutons from her garden salad with a pair of pink chopsticks that matched her sweater.

  Traci flicked back her jet-black hair, awaiting my response. I would rather not chat with her at all, con-sidering our recent run-in at the drama cast party. She’d made the mistake of calling me a freak and saying that I wasn’t welcome, even though I’d done costume design. Thanks to Cisco’s iPhone, however, I was able to text an invitation to the two hundred residents of his address book, thus mass-crashing the I-Girls’ formerly exclusive event.

  “Talking to you might be difficult considering that I’m trying to digest food,” I told her.

  “Yeah, well, I won’t take up a lot of your digestion time.” She smiled at Hal.

  “State your business. I’m not going anywhere,” I told her.

  Traci looked irritated. She glanced over her shoulder to make sure that nobody was listening in and then took a step closer. “Okay, well, I just wanted to say that it was pretty lame of me to treat you like that at the cast party. I seriously don’t even know what got into me.”

  “Seriously?” I said, half-mocking. Still, I nearly choked on my mother’s Waldorf chicken salad at the sheer idea that Traci would even attempt an apology.

  “Yeah, I mean, you had every right to be there. It was stupid of me to say that the party was just for the cast. I mean, just because it’s called a cast party and doesn’t include the word crew . . . I guess I get a little carried away sometimes. So, no hard fees, okay?” She faux-pouted.

  “‘Hard fees’?” I asked her.

  “Um, hard feelings,” she explained with a roll of her eyes, obviously frustrated that I wasn’t fluent in I-Girl.

  I felt my forehead furrow, wondering if this was a joke, if at any moment someone might pop out of the soda machine and tell me I was on some hidden-camera reality show.