Gil Watts’ hours at the fire department were meant to be nine to five, but he worked a lot of weekends and more than a few evenings. He was a systems inspector, which meant that he went wherever he was sent and stayed as late as he had to. The upside of this was that when he needed to borrow a couple of hours in the middle of the week he could usually swing it.
He was there waiting for Fran when she came out of school, leaning against the passenger side of the car so he could open the door for her and give her a heel-clicking bow as if he was her butler.
“Okay, Frog?” he asked her as she shoved her school bag down between her feet and strapped in. She waited a couple of seconds before closing the door so that Jinx could jump in and clamber over into the back of the car.
“Yeah,” Fran said. “Fine.”
Gil wasn’t making small talk, and neither was she. He meant: did it come on again during the day? Had she had any hallucinations? And she was telling him that she had stayed within spitting distance of normal the whole day through, so yay!
Jinx curled up on the back seat. It occurred to Fran to wonder, just for a moment, why Jinx insisted on using doors and windows as though she was real but was content to ignore gravity and acceleration if they became a nuisance. Just because, she assumed. All of Lady J’s rules had exceptions, and she herself was the exception to almost everything. She was a secret Fran shared with nobody, not even Gil. The cherished symptom that she needed just in order to function, so she cheated and didn’t think of her as a symptom at all—even though Jinx came and went as she pleased and was only ever nominally under Fran’s conscious control.
Maybe you’re my symptom, Lady J said prissily.
“Pretty sure I’m not a fox dreaming I’m a little girl,” Fran whispered, too low for her dad to hear. The thought made her smile in spite of herself.
Jinx snorted and curled up on the seat, pretending to be asleep. She was just being cranky because she didn’t like Dr. Southern and hated when Fran had a session with him. Fran thought Dr. S was a good guy, pretty much, and did a tough job as well as he could. Jinx saw him as the enemy, which was only natural when you thought about it. He prescribed Fran medication that sometimes made Jinx not be there anymore. They were never going to be friends.
Gil had booked her a 5:30 p.m. appointment—her usual time, which she had agreed with Dr. Southern a long time ago. Dr. S put a lot of store by the healing effects of routine, as though sanity was something that could rub off on you. Fran was well positioned to see the flaw in this argument: she didn’t spend a whole lot of time with the sane people at her school, or even with the other weirdos. She was the cat who walked by herself. But she appreciated not having to miss lessons and then play the enervating game of catch-up.
“Do you want me to sit in?” Gil asked her as he eased out of Negley Run into the heavier traffic on Washington. He made it sound like he didn’t mind either way, although Fran knew how much he agonized about this stuff. He had been with her through the worst times, right after her abduction, and then again when she fell to pieces after her mom died. He had suffered along with her, hating that he couldn’t protect her against all the horses that had already bolted and the stable doors that had hit her in the face. He often joked that he was a pencil pusher at the fire department, not a hero with a sooty face and a fire ax. “I’m not in the rescue business,” he would say. But it killed him that it was always already too late for him to rescue his little girl. He would have died to do it, Fran knew.
But since he couldn’t, it did no good to either of them to make him sit through her sessions. “Nah,” she said as casually as she could. “It’s just same old, same old. I guess he’ll bump up my meds a little bit, and we’ll be out of there.”
“Yeah,” Gil said, watching the road. “I guess.” The corners of his mouth tugged down a little.
The waiting room at the clinic had exactly the same magazines it had had on their last visit, and the one before that. Gil picked up the May 2015 issue of Car and Driver, not for the first time, and read an article about a big, gleaming object called the Lambo Centenario. It probably cost more than he’d earned in Fran’s whole lifetime.
Everyone sat together at Carroll Way in the one big waiting space, so there was nothing to indicate to anyone else that Fran was there to see a psychiatrist. Even so, she felt exposed and anxious, as she always did. She leaned back as far as she could in her chair so her dad and her dad’s magazine shielded her from the outside world.
That usually worked okay, but today the outside world got a little pushy. Sitting right across from Fran was a boy she knew from school. Skinny. Sandy-haired. Paler than the average white dude by about three or four color swatches. He wasn’t in any of the same classes as her but she had seen him around the playground and they had once been in the semi-finals of a citywide public speaking competition together. Neither of them had made it through to the final.
Zac. Zachary Kendall.
With the name came a few more memories. A Clock Reads T-shirt that he wore for a while after everyone else had stopped, which probably meant that he actually liked their music. A stupid joke he told in her hearing once. “You see all those ‘Keep off the grass’ signs, right? How do you suppose they got there?” His ride, which was a beat-up old thing that looked as though it would fall apart if you farted too loud. Only it was his mother’s ride, of course, because he’d only just started driver’s ed. And that was his mother sitting next to him.
Fran stared at her hard. Then she stared a lot harder.
There was nothing that remarkable about Zachary Kendall’s mom. She was a short, slight woman with close-cropped black hair that looked pretty good on her. Her eyes were vivid green, with a little blue in one of them which was freaky but also quite cool. She wore a gray sweatshirt, faded jeans and brown leather ankle boots that were either meant to be vintage or had just gone bald in places. On her wrist there was a bracelet that flashed every now and then when it caught the light. None of which mattered at all.
What mattered was that Zac Kendall’s mom was changing. Nothing else was. The rest of the room looked fine. The rest of the people in it looked fine. It was just this one woman who was acting up.
As Fran’s hallucinations went, though, this was a fresh twist. Normally when she was seeing changes in the world around her, it would be a specific detail that was altered: red into blue, metal into plastic, old into new. If the woman’s hair had grown longer or her brown leather boots had turned into high heels, that would have felt like familiar ground.
With Zac Kendall’s mom, though, something different was happening. It was like there were two of her at the same time, overlapping each other and holding the exact same pose, but not quite in sync when they moved so you caught the lag if you were looking at the right moment.
Fran tried hard not to stare but her gaze kept being dragged back. She couldn’t help herself.
It’s a monster, Lady Jinx said. But it hasn’t seen you yet. Run away!
Fran shook her head, keeping the movement as small and subtle as she could. It’s okay, Lady J, she said inside her mind. Lying. Actually it was another assault on the normal world, bubbling up out of her rucked and twisted brain. Another reminder that nothing about her life was ever going to get back to being okay.