The Taking (The Taking 1)

Austin exhaled, running his hand through his hair. I knew the gesture. He thought I was overreacting. “Yeah. I thought my girlfriend was dead, and now here you are. I’m confused, but I want us to be . . . friends.”

I didn’t know what to say. Nothing, I guess. We weren’t friends, not anymore. We hadn’t been for a really, really long time.

Shrugging and shaking my head, because what else could I do, I turned on my heel and left him standing there.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Day Four

I SAT IN DR. DUNN’S EMPTY WAITING ROOM, MY tongue running over the chipped tooth I was here to have fixed while I continued to rehash my confrontation with Austin yesterday. I’d been replaying it in my head over and over all night, but worse was the fact that I also couldn’t stop thinking about Tyler, and the look on his face when he’d come home from school to find the two of us standing there together.

None of it should matter to me, mostly because it really didn’t matter. I was nothing to Austin, and now that I’d seen him again, it was clear Austin wasn’t anything to me either. We were so over.

Besides, on top of everything else, Tyler was still just Austin’s little brother. Too young to be anything more than a friend.

So why had my already-fractured heart shattered a little more when I’d stepped outside this morning to leave for the dentist only to discover there was no new chalk drawing for me, only the birdcage from the day before—a little more smudged and worn?

Because if I stopped lying to myself for even a second, then maybe there was a part of me where Tyler mattered more than he should.

I watched as my mom’s son ate a corner from a page of the Highlights magazine he’d been maniacally flipping through, pretending he knew how to read. I thought about asking my mom if there was something lacking in his diet that made him crave paper pulp as he chewed off a second piece, but I’d already offended her and The Husband that morning when I’d implied that, perhaps, he needed more practice with a spoon as more of the oatmeal had fallen off it than made it to his mouth.

To be fair, my exact words were something along the lines of a suggestion that they put him into physical therapy.

Considering that The Husband had given my mom a terse look, I decided it probably wasn’t worth the effort to bring up her son’s nutritional deficiencies too.

As if reading my mind, the kid looked up and grinned at me, his teeth all pulped out with mushy bits of newsprint. Disgusting.

“Kyra.” A woman in faded pink scrubs read my name from the file in her hands, as if the waiting room was teeming with patients all clamoring to get in to see the dentist on this busy Wednesday morning. I made a point of glancing at all the empty seats. Nope, still just me.

I got up and followed her. Behind me, I heard the door from the parking lot open and a voice I recognized said, “Sorry I’m late. I—uh—I overslept.”

I turned to see my dad standing in the doorway. He had the same unshowered look he’d had the first day I saw him, like he’d just rolled out of bed.

“I told you, you didn’t have to come. It’s just a dentist appointment. I can handle this.” My mom’s voice was pinched and high-pitched, the same way it had been when she’d reminded me that “my brother” had a name. I just kept walking and ignored all of them.

I couldn’t remember Dr. Dunn not being my dentist, but now, like everyone else—well, everyone but me, it seemed—he looked older. Fatter, too, like my dad, but cleaner, something I only just now realized that I appreciated in a dentist.

I watched him out of the corner of my eye as he washed his hands. He was whistling off-key to the music that played overhead. I remembered that about him, the way he whistled and sang beneath his breath like no one could hear him.

“So your mom says you chipped your tooth.” He straddled the small swivel stool next to the examination chair I was reclined on, and he ducked in close. He nodded once, my signal to open wide. I did, and he asked, “What happened?”

His fingers were already in my mouth, probing over my molars, so I tried to talk around them. “A hee o’ hang-ee” were the sounds that came out of me, nothing like “A piece of candy” should have sounded. I might as well have been a two-year-old with a mouthful of mashed-up magazine.

“Candy, huh? That’ll do it,” he answered cheerfully, his latex glove finding the broken spot on my tooth. His glasses had special magnified lenses on them that made him look like he was wearing miniature binoculars. He sat back and told the lady in the pink scrubs, “Let’s get a quick set of X-rays to make sure everything’s A-OK.” He turned to me and winked with one of his giant eyes. “Then we’ll get you all fixed up. Sound good?”

I shrugged. Okay.

She took the X-rays, and he came back in to check them, holding them up to the wall-mounted white box. I watched him disinterestedly as he scrutinized them and then asked his assistant to get my old X-rays, the ones I’d had done just last week. Or, rather, the last week I remembered.

He looked at those, too, and now I was more interested in what he was doing because he was more interested. I could tell because it wasn’t a casual glance; it was a long, drawn-out perusal, the kind that you give to something curious or strange, something requiring a second or third look. He kept his back to me, so I couldn’t see his face, but I imagined him squinting behind those giant-eyed lenses. Squinting and biting his lip and concentrating.

Then he left the room, both sets of X-rays in hand.