Rob Thurman - Slashback

He caught me watching him from the corner of his eye and gave me a look of his own as he kicked a small chunk of concrete down the sidewalk. “You should slump more,” he suggested. “You still look too tall and too. . um. . ninja-ish. Badass.”

Right then I gave up on the language. His school was the educational version of Pulp Fiction . Mine was a teen version of a supermax prison, metal detectors, police, and all. If we made our way through with only foul mouths, we would be doing well. There also might be a serial killer and there were monsters. All that was enough to worry about. So I let it go and took his advice. I slouched more, aimed for a pained expression, and slowed my pace.

We talked to Mrs. Spoonmaker first, Cal remembering to cough once or twice for that flu I’d told her he had the day before. We didn’t pull the cookie scam on her. I thanked her for calling our schools and casually asked if she knew David Kithser? If she’d seen him around lately. We went to school together and he owed me money for doing his homework. That she would believe. If I said I was his friend and she knew him, she wouldn’t talk to me at all. He was a bad guy. In our world minding your own business about bad guys was good business for yourself.

Cal perched on her couch covered in faded orange and red roses. Covering him were her seven cats. Cats liked him, loved him really. The moment they smelled him they would swarm. Now wasn’t any different. They draped over his shoulders, lap, and feet. If they happened to have a dead mouse tucked away, they’d present it at his feet like an offering. Cal didn’t mind. Affection from anyone but me was rare. He knew when to appreciate it-even in the form of a dead rodent. He stroked the cats, surrounded by a cloud of purring and flying fur. Each one took a turn bracing on his chest to stare into his eyes. I didn’t know what they were hoping to see, but they always seemed satisfied when their turn was over.

Mrs. Spoonmaker knew Kithser. “No better than he had to be,” she’d said with pursed pink lips that matched the pink tint in her short curly white hair. She also said that she hadn’t seen him in months and good riddance. We moved from house to house after that. Five houses down Cal stopped on the sidewalk, several feet away from the porch. “Dog,” he warned. “Big dog.”

I couldn’t smell him like Cal could, but a second later I heard the barking. Loud, ferocious, and absolutely crazed. Big dog was right. Big and wild to attack. Unlike cats, dogs did not like Cal. Not some dogs, not most dogs. All dogs. They had two reactions: fight or flight. And when the reaction was fight, it was instinct that ran back to their prehistoric ancestors-to the death.

Dogs were good for howling their lungs out when the Grendels were around too. We didn’t talk about that, Cal and I, but he knew. Dogs hated him because dogs hated Grendels. Man’s best friend hated monsters and man’s best friend hated Cal. There was nothing to be said about that because it didn’t mean anything. It didn’t.

“We’ll take the next house,” I said.

Cal stood silently behind me as the dog next door continued to bay the invisible moon down from the sky. This door, boiled cabbage green, opened to a hugely tousled mane of platinum blond hair with glossy black roots, long red fingernails with a rhinestone at each tip, and an impatient expression. “I’m running late. What the hell do you kids want? And what the hell is that damn dog barking at?” Beyond the yellow, crimson, fake diamond glint and irritability, there was a woman. She was dressed in a skintight miniskirt, thigh-high boots, and a glittering bikini top that, while extremely skimpy, NASA must’ve helped engineer to hold up an enormous cargo load. She was holding a shirt in her hand as well, but that didn’t seem quite as important.

How did they stay up? Physics had never been so interesting or useful until now.

“Mrs. Breckinridge,” Cal said, surprised, moving up beside me. “Nik, she’s a substitute teacher at school.” I cleared my throat. He was never going to be the male equivalent of Miss Manners, but there were some requirements I expected of him, behavior that helped us blend into average society. “Um. . sorry. Mrs. Breckinridge, this is my brother, Niko. He broke his ankle. He’s helpless and pathetic and won’t rob you.” He was curious at her presence, but he was also a Leandros when he had to be, there with the story. “Hey, I didn’t know you lived on my street.”

“I’m never home long enough to really live anywhere. Too many bills to pay.” Thick, fake eyelashes blinked. “You’re the kid with the weird name who always sits in the last row? Haliban. Caliban. Something from Shakespeare, right?”

His teacher but obviously not a very good teacher.

Cal said flatly, “Cal. My name is Cal.” Sophia had told him long before school ever would about Caliban, Shakespeare, and The Tempest . She wanted him to know why she’d named him after the shambling monster-child of a bitch sorceress. The only part she’d gotten right was that about the bitch.

“Well, Cal”-she fished a five out of her pocket and passed it to him-“my new favorite student. How about you forget you ever saw me and what I do for a second job. The principal is the stick-up-her-ass kind. All sorts of morals- her morals, the judgmental old witch. She’d fire me like that”-she snapped her fingers-“if she knew I was stripping. Dancing, I mean. Dancing. You think you can do that? Keep your mouth shut?”

Cal gave her a “no skin off my nose” shrug, the five-dollar bill already a mere afterimage in the air, before grinning cheerfully. “You know me and rules, Mrs. B.”

She grinned back under a thick layer of scarlet lipstick. She looked as if she’d broken more than a few rules in her life too. “You walk to the beat of a different drummer, there’s that for sure. You spend more time talking to the principal than her own damn husband does, which he’s probably happy as hell about. And, sugar, I’m forty. You might want to look me in the face, appreciate me for my brain because when this top comes off my brain is still in the same place but my tits will be four inches lower.”

It took me a second to realize that last part was directed at me and I could feel my skin flush hot and mortified. I read about Buddha, Nietzsche, Sun-Tzu, Jung, poetry, physics, chemistry, advanced mathematics, and I trained to kill Grendels, to be ready if they came looking for a fight, but I couldn’t do anything about the fact I still had normal teenage hormones.

“Hold it in,” Cal whispered. “Virgins live. Horn-dogs die.”

“ Horn -dogs? You’re eleven . Do you know how much trouble you are. .” I swallowed the rest and asked Mrs. Breckinridge, while looking directly at her face this time, politely, “We were wondering if you knew about David Kithser.” She worked at Cal’s school. The cookie excuse wouldn’t work on her. I might as well come out with what we actually wanted. If our neighbor was a murderer, I doubt I had to worry about her spending any time with him-droopy and pitiful as he appeared, and definitely not enough time for them to discuss our interest in Kithser.

“Cecily? Cee-cee? Who are you screwing around with now? Every time I turn my back, there you go.” The man, once big and athletic, now just big and fat, appeared out of the gloom of the tiny house. Graying hair stuck up on end, small ferret eyes shied away from the light. He was shirtless and needed Mrs. Breckinridge’s structurally improbable bikini top more than she did. He was in boxers, splitting at the seams, but still fighting the good fight. “Look at him. What is he? Sixteen? Seventeen? You’re into jailbait now because a real man’s too much for you? I oughta-”