23. This Wasn’t Supposed to Happen
Ben
The shot glasses were Mom’s idea.
She didn’t drink much, but she had a lot of them, collected because they were one of the most reliable souvenirs to grab, each from a different place she’d traveled to over the years. Some of them were silly (like the UFO and monster covered glass from the Prospero Museum of Unnatural History), some of them simply had a city’s name printed on them, but all of them now had half an inch of the capsaicin formula we’d mixed up so we could finally tell who was really human.
There were twelve of us gathered around my dining room table, staring at the shot glasses haphazardly arranged in the middle. All nine members of the Network, my mother, Mr. Finn and Ms. Craven; nearly everybody we almost trusted who knew about Spli
