David Nickle - Monstrous Affections

But I barely heard him.

Because I did recognize somebody in the picture. Not any of the five kids — they could have been anybody. But standing just in the background was a boy, wearing oversized jeans and a baseball cap.

And he was moving.

I leaned closer. The kid was far enough back that he was just a collection of pixels — I couldn’t make out his face or even what was written on his baseball cap. I certainly couldn’t see his teeth. But I could see that he was sort of moving from side to side, like he was walking. He was also getting bigger.

“You do recognize someone,” said Mr. Natch. “You can identify him.”

The kid walked past the kid with the lighter, patted him on the shoulder, and came up right to the camera. He smiled — right at me — with those shark teeth in his mouth that looked just so cool on Mr. Natch’s laptop screen — and he opened his mouth, and whispered, like it was right in my ear:

“ Dude. Use the water .”

“Which one,” said Mr. Natch. “Which one is Fezkul?”

“ On the power bar .”

Those teeth… They were so cool.

“Him?” said Mr. Natch.

“ It will totally rock .”

That was when things got kind of foggy. I remember grabbing the water bottle, which was about half full, and sort of pouring it — yeah, probably on the power bar that was right beside the laptop. There were some sparks, and some yelling, and the air smelled sharp. I remember being under the desk for a second, then opening a door, then running up stairs. I might have been in a kitchen for a second and I might not have. The next thing I knew for sure, I was leaning against the dumpster out back of the grill house. I was laughing and grinning and I don’t think I’d ever felt better. It was like I was a little kid again, with the summer holidays and Christmas and Halloween — especially Halloween — all spread out before me.

“You rock, kid.”

“I’m not a kid,” I said and looked up.

The kid with the shark teeth was looking back at me. He was standing not two feet off, hands in his pocket and hat cocked high on his forehead. He was grinning.

“Fezkul?”

“Maybe not,” he said. “Maybe sure. Whoever I am, one thing I know: you want to get out of here. Soon as old Natch finishes up with his fire extinguisher, he’s going to be after you.”

I pushed myself off the dumpster and it made a bong and a rattling sound.

“That dumpster hasn’t been right for a good year,” said Fezkul appreciatively. “A propane explosion can do a lot of damage.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “C’mon, kid. I like your style.”

And then he took off for the trees. Without even thinking about it, I followed him. Sure — part of me was worried about leaving my sister and her boyfriend without saying anything. About following this shark-toothed kid who’d talked to me from a JPEG on a computer screen. But you know what? That wasn’t the part of me that was in the driver’s seat. It was the part that was responsible for my curiosity attacks.

He was hard to keep up with. He scrambled up a tumble of bedrock like he was a mountain goat, then took off through some low ferns at just about a sprint. The woods got dark quickly beyond the Fun-Park, and the closeness of the trees made it very quiet. Soon we were running over bare earth, with just a couple of rocks here and there to trip me up. Fezkul finally stopped, in a little circle of trees. I pulled up, gasping for breath.

“I like your style,” he said again, nodding as he spoke. “You’re big… big for a kid .”

That, I have to admit, got me going. He was starting to sound like my sister Lenore, who wouldn’t tell me about The Sopranos or let me ride in the front seat. I glared at him. After all, Oliver Natch had just got finished strongly implying I was too old. “Don’t call me a kid. I’m going to be in Grade Nine tomorrow.”

Fezkul grinned, put his fists on his hips. “‘I’m going to be in Grade Nine tomorrow,’” he mimicked, making his voice all high. “Maybe tomorrow you will. But today—” he smirked at me “—today you’re here. You heard me, and you saw me. So live in the moment, Sammy: you’re a kid. Yet—” and here, his grin got wider, “you’re big. Big as I got, today.”

He started walking around me, nodding and nodding, and I kept glaring at him until he got behind me and I couldn’t see him. “Yeah,” he said. “You’re big.”

“All right,” I said. “so I’m a big kid. Who are you? What’s with the teeth?”

I waited for him to come around in front of me. “What’s with the teeth?” I looked over my shoulder. Fezkul wasn’t there. I looked around in front of me again, in case he’d hurried there, then back again.

“Fezkul?” I hissed. “Kid? Whoever you are? Where are you?”

There was nobody. He’d taken off. Where, though? My curiosity was getting seriously cranked. The trees here were huge. I counted, and saw that five of them made a circle around this space that would have been a clearing if it weren’t for the long branches of those five trees. They made kind of a dome in here.

“So the thing you got to wonder,” said Fezkul, who suddenly appeared at my elbow, “is what can you do before you stop being a kid?”

“How did you do that?”

Fezkul wiggled his fingers in the air and said, “‘What’s with the teeth?’” in that high voice of his. Then he laughed. “So you’re big — you’re also bright enough to ask me questions. This I like. See most of these kids — you show them the way, they just get all giggly and stupid. Do what they’re told. Cut loose.”

“You tell those kids to cut loose. You take me to this place. What are you—” I looked around, putting it together “—some kind of a forest spirit?”

Fezkul snorted. “You watched Lord of the Rings one time too many, kid.”

“Well—” I motioned at his freaky teeth, waved at the canopy “—come on! Look around you.”

Fezkul put his hands in his pockets and sneered. “‘Some kind of forest spirit.’ How imaginative . Ummmm — no. Look. Let’s cut to the chase. You’re big. You’re smart. You were good in there with the water and the power bar and you’re pretty fast on the run. I repeat my question: what can you do before you stop being a kid?”

It’s funny. The first time he asked me that, I just let it roll off me. The second time, though, got into me:

What was I going to do?

Tomorrow, I’d start Grade Nine, which was at the end, really, of my kid-ness. The teachers in Grade Eight at William Howard Taft Elementary School were forever reminding us of this: You get to Grade Nine, boys and girls, it’s a whole different world. You’re going to be expected to start acting like young men and women. You’re going to have more homework and you’ll be studying for exams, and the things that you do will have consequences that will carry on for the rest of your lives .

Consequences. The rest of your lives.

They didn’t even get to the whole question of cliques, and already most of us were pissing ourselves with fear.

And for all that, they never asked us the basic question:

What will you do with the rest of your childhood?

And when you’re done with it, what will you be left with? A world like Lenore’s? All your days spent tense and fretful, thinking about getting married and having kids, believing Up With People is cool, finding the trouble with everything ?

“Makes you dizzy, doesn’t it?” said Fezkul. “It’s like a — what would we call it? A tween-life crisis. But it’s not like middle age. You can’t exactly buy yourself a sports car and get yourself a mistress, can you?” I swore at him, and he said, “Oh, very adult, in an NC-17 way. That won’t cut it, but this might.”