White Space

WHEN EMMA WOKE up yesterday morning, life had still been pretty normal. Well, as normal as it got for a kid with a head full of metal, killer headaches, visions that appeared more or less at random, chunks of lost time, and nowhere to go over Christmas break.

Heading north hadn’t been the plan. The stroke over a year ago turned Jasper into a zucchini—on June 9, to be exact: her birthday, and Jasper’s, too. They always had two cakes: ginger cake with buttercream frosting for him, dark chocolate with velvety chocolate ganache for her. She’d been jamming candles into Jasper’s cake—try fitting fifty-eight candles so you didn’t get a bonfire—when, all of a sudden, something right over her head banged so hard the cottage’s windows rattled. Racing upstairs, she’d found Jasper, out cold, sprawled in a loose-limbed jumble like a broken, discarded doll. These days, Jasper languished in a dark room, his head turned to a white sliver of window hemmed by coal-black shutters. He wore diapers. He was mute. The entire left side of his face looked artificial, like a waxen mask melting under too much heat. His left lower eyelid drooped, the eye itself the color of milky glass, and his mouth hung so wide she could see the ruin of his teeth and the bloated dead worm of his tongue. The last time Emma ventured in to read aloud—she and Jasper used to make a game of trying to finish Edwin Drood—Sal, the lizard-eyed, pipe-puffing live-in, shooed her away. When Jasper had been boss, Sal behaved. Now, with the old bat out of the attic, Emma felt about as welcome as a case of head lice.

Best to stay in Madison. The Holten folks had paired Emma, on full scholarship (which translated to smart and weird but poor), with Mariane, a Jewish exchange student from London who was big into decorative art. Seeing as how Emma worked glass, that was all good. So she and Mariane would eat Chinese and see a movie, which, apparently, Jewish people all over the world did on Christmas. Maybe chill with a couple Beta boys at the university, drink beer, eat Christmas brats. Binge on X-Files and Lost and watch the Badgers get slaughtered in the Rose Bowl. All-American, Wisconsin stuff like that.

She could use the time to throttle back, too. Head over to the hot shop and work a pendant design she’d mulled over for months: a galaxy sculpted in miniature from glass, encased in glass, yet small and light enough to wear around her neck. When she mentioned her idea, the gaffer cracked, Maybe we’ll start calling you Orion, like that cat. She’d laughed along with him and the other glassblowers, but Men in Black and that cat’s amulet had given her the idea in the first place. Not everything had to stay make-believe.

So that was the plan, anyway—until that asshole Kramer called her to his office, shut the door, and said, “Ms. Lindsay, we need to

3

HAVE A LITTLE chat about that last assignment.”

“Okay,” Emma says. She watches Kramer withdraw a mug of steaming Mighty Leaf green tea from his microwave. A little alarm is ding-ding-dinging in her head. He hasn’t offered her any. Not that she minds: green tea tastes like old gym socks, and the Mighty Mouse brand, no matter how swank, probably does, too. For him not to offer, though, she must be in deep doo-doo. “Is something wrong, Professor Kramer?”

“Is … something … wrong?” Kramer gives his tea bag a vicious squish between his fingers. He sets, he chucks; Mighty Mouse goes ker-splat against the far wall. On a corner of Kramer’s desk, a radio mutters about the continuing investigation into a young girl’s gruesome discovery of eight …

“ ’Orrible murders and ghastly crimes,” Kramer grates in an angry, exaggerated cockney, and stabs the radio to silence. “These screaming twenty-four-hour news cycles are as bad as Victorian tabloids.” He fires a glare through prissy Lennon specs. “Well, yes, you might say there’s something wrong, Ms. Lindsay. I’m trying to decide if I should merely flunk you out of this course, or get you booted out of Holten, despite your circumstances. Just what kind of game do you think you’re playing?”

She’s so flabbergasted her jaw unhinges. “P-Professor Kramer, wh-what did I do?”