Of Delicate Pieces by A. Lynden Rolland Page A

I think she’s only sixteen or seventeen.”
    Alex fought off a grin. She wasn’t used to seeing Kaleb so uncomfortable. It only increased when Rae moved closer to him, grasping the rungs of the railing and poking her head through it to look at the crowd. After a moment, she tugged at Kaleb’s jersey and pointed downward.
    He followed the path of her gesture, and then he looked back at Rae in surprise. “Thank you.”
    “What?”
    “She found the girl I was talking about. How did she know?”
    “Told you the Lost Ones are smart,” Gabe said.
    “She could come in handy.” Kaleb patted her shoulder. “Gabe, I told you that my stalker would be waiting down there.”
    Alex wanted to get a glimpse. The girl’s light brown hair matched her skin, and when she spoke to the person seated across from her, her bright white teeth rivaled Skye’s. “Wow, she’s hideous,” Alex joked. “How exactly does she stalk you worse than the other girls around here?”
    “That’s the thing. She’s not like the other girls. She shows up in every one of my workshops and sits next to me, smiling , and asking me to show her around.”
    “Sounds like a monster.”
    “It’s annoying.” Kaleb bolted upright before spinning around to crash to the ground. “She saw me.”
    Alex caught Chase’s eye, and they both began to laugh.
    Kaleb scowled. “Don’t you guys have a workshop to go to?”
    “Yep.” Chase tried to stop smiling, biting his lips together, but it only made the humor more contagious.
    Alex squatted down to Rae’s level. ”What do you want to do?”
    Rae took one last look at the vestibule and turned to head back down the hall.
    “Guess she’s going to the room.”
    “This place gets stranger every day,” Kaleb noted.
    Alex couldn’t agree more. Her brain was beginning to feel like an iPod shuffling after only playing five seconds of a song. Each time she wanted to focus on one thing, her mind would shift to the next before she felt ready. Additional workshops didn’t help. If she considered one word, her unbound mind would keep sorting and sorting through the remnants of knowledge it contained, and then it would shift over to Chase’s mind. From definitions to root words to Latin derivatives to movies, songs, and books; it was enough to drive her mad. Struggling to manage the reins of her thoughts exhausted her, but she worried if she let it go, her mind would take off and never come back to her again.
    Today, through each of her workshops, her brain kept reverting back to one word. Legacy. It was like typing the term into Google; her brain would erupt with connections to the word like her own personal search engine.
    A page with highlighted words: “A gift of property”
    A Webster’s Dictionary
    The Lasalles discussing college sports recruiting
    Keys
    Another page with highlighted words: “Anything handed down”
    And trees. There were thousands of images flashing through Alex’s mind, but trees appeared with each one.
    The clock ticked slowly leading up to the midday recess, but it was time to see what this legacy fuss was all about. Tess’s directions led her to a room nestled deep in the west corner of the learning center. When she found the green door shaped like a keyhole, it swung open before she could reach for the tree-shaped handle.
    It was like stepping into the forest. Or a coloring book. Large trees, bonsai trees, painted trees, scribbled drawings of life-size trees—they all inhabited one strange room. Some existed as artwork on the walls or freestanding paper while others were rooted to the ground. The room couldn’t decide what it wanted to be.
    It felt like being stuck in the children’s book, Where the Wild Things Are . For a moment, Alex pictured the monsters hiding in the trees, and an image of Jonas flashed across her mind. Sitting crisscross in the Lasalles’ old living room, he crawled toward her with his mischievous grin, cackling, “I’ll eat you up I love you so.”
    His