My Marionette Lover novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Snag
At the showcase Hazel's marionette snags a silver thread on Arlen Redfern and he is dragged on stage, then he stomps her grandmother's prince to pieces; that night she ties him on purpose and makes him apologize, and a black thread answers in an old woman's voice.
A silver thread was hanging from Arlen Redfern's chest, and nobody in the theater could see it but me.
It was the Friday showcase of my junior year.
Two hundred people sat in the dark of the Wexford fine arts theater, watching my grandmother's wooden prince cross the stage.
I stood on the catwalk above the stage with the control bar in both hands.
I had worked the prince for ten minutes without a mistake.
His cedar head turned, his painted eyes lifted, and he bowed to the princess.
Arlen sat in the front row with his friends, one arm over the seat beside him.
He was the richest boy at Wexford and the most famous.
His name was on the new library, and his scandals were on everyone's phone.
He had a lazy smile and he was wearing it now, because he thought a puppet show was funny.
His friends had their phones up, filming.
Then the prince's left string swung out over the first row, and the silver thread on Arlen's chest caught it.
I felt it catch in my fingers.
I had never seen a thread on a stranger before.
Puppeteers can see them, but only on puppets.
"Oh no," I whispered.
I tried to lift the bar free, and the thread pulled the other way.
Arlen stood up.
His smile fell off his face.
He climbed the three steps onto the stage with his arms swinging.
The audience laughed.
He walked to the prince and took its wooden hand, and the two of them began to dance.
I tugged the bar left, and Arlen turned left.
I tugged it right, and he dipped.
"Stop," he said through his teeth, to nobody.
His eyes found me up on the catwalk and went wide, and I saw that he knew.
I dropped the bar.
The thread went slack and slid off him, and he fell to his knees in front of two hundred people.
His friends were howling.
One of them shouted, "Do the spin again, Redfern!"
Arlen got up slowly.
He didn't look at his friends.
He looked at the prince, hanging from its strings with its painted smile, and his face went hard and cold.
"Freak," he said, loud enough for the back row.
He grabbed the prince by the waist and tore it off my strings.
I screamed his name from the catwalk.
He threw it down and stamped on its head.
Cedar split, and the painted face cracked down the middle.
My grandmother had carved that face with a knife I still keep in my pocket.
She carved it the winter before she died.
Arlen dropped the pieces and walked off through the curtain, and his friends cheered him out.
I climbed down the ladder with my hands shaking.
The prince lay in three pieces on the boards.
My phone buzzed in my back pocket.
It was an email from the dean, sent a few seconds after Arlen's shoe came down.
The Redfern Foundation has withdrawn its funding of the puppetry program effective immediately.
I read it twice.
Birdie, my roommate and stage manager, came running with her headset around her neck.
"Hazel, I saw it, I saw all of it, you didn't do that, did you do that?"
"I did it by accident," I said.
"Okay," Birdie said. "Okay. And now?"
I gathered the three pieces of the prince in my coat.
"Now I do it on purpose."
I found him at midnight in the courtyard of Redfern Hall.
He was sitting on the rim of the fountain with Brad Amesbury and six others, passing a phone around and laughing at the video.
The silver thread still hung from his chest, dull in the lamplight, trailing on the stones.
I took the jester out of my bag, the small one with the bells.
I tied the end of the thread to the jester's wooden hand.
Birdie stood behind me, saying, "This is a terrible idea."
"Everyone, watch," I said.
I lifted the bar.
Arlen rose off the fountain.
His friends stopped laughing.
I walked him up onto the rim of the fountain, where everyone could see.
I made him stand straight with his hands at his sides.
His grey eyes were furious.
"Say it," I said.
His mouth opened.
"I'm sorry, Hazel Pemberton," he said, and his voice cracked.
"I broke the thing you love, and I shouldn't have."
No one moved.
Brad lowered the phone.
I dropped the jester on the stones, and the thread went slack, and Arlen swayed.
Then the quiet changed.
A second thread came out of the dark, black and thick as a bootlace.
It ran from Arlen's back up toward the top window of Redfern Hall.
It pulled tight.
Arlen's head turned slowly toward the tower, and his lips moved in a voice that was not his.
It was an old woman's voice, dry and amused.
"Little puppeteer," it said. "Who taught you to pull?"
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