Charles Bock - Beautiful Children

“Friendly wager,” said the skeleton, his poker face now fully in place. “Everything in my hat against everything in your cup.”

Newell willfully avoided another one of Kenny's looks, a trick that was starting to get on Kenny's nerves, to tell the truth. Kenny noticed that one end of a shoelace had been tied to the overturned baseball cap that the skeleton and the pregnant girl were using for their begging. He followed the shoelace's other end to the skeleton's far wrist, where it was tied and looped. The shoelace once had been white but now was a filthy gray, in some places black. Kenny was vaguely aware of tourists passing behind him, of the pregnant girl, bored out of her skull, staring out into the stalled parade of headlights and chrome and aerodynamic plastic. He watched the mongrel dog licking at a small open wound at the base of its tail. Watched a couple of punks on their knees, using condiments from a casino coffee shop to draw on the sidewalk.

“BULLSHIT,” Newell cried.

“Read it and weep.”

“Fucking BULLSHIT.”

Lestat's shirt cuff was rolled up to his elbow and his hand was in the air. Just his wrist, small thin lines appeared, imprinted on the soft, stained flesh of his inner forearm:

YOUR NAME

“You know that homeless people in front of the Pick'n Save make hundreds of dollars a day asking for change,” said Newell. “You know that, right? Dude. those two probably aren't even homeless. Look at them. I bet they just threw the dirt on themselves to make themselves look bad and shit. Fuck this. The whole thing's bogus.”

Kenny asked if he believed what he was saying. He told Newell to look at those two, and reminded Newell that the money had been the casino's, and was just nickels anyway. “What's it matter?” Kenny asked, his voice soft but with an edge, a limit. He had a hand on each of Newell's shoulders and held the boy in place and looked deeply at Newell, locking in on Newell's eyes. It seemed to Newell that Kenny was pleading with him and at the same time telling him something warm, something intimate.

Newell's face felt hot with anger. He started to speak but quieted, and stared back at Kenny and opened his mouth just a bit. Nothing came out and consternation remained on the boy's face. But slowly, visibly, the venom dripped away. For a moment Newell seemed to consider what he'd said, and more.

“It's a pretty good trick,” he admitted. “If you stop and think about it.”

A step now, taken in the manner of a high chair infant trying a new food for the first time. The skeleton waited, watching, amusement smeared across each angle of his dirty face. Now he extended his hand, as if waiting for a high five. “You all right, li'l man? No hard feelings, right?”

When Newell did not meet his offering, Lestat nodded. “Tell you what, just to show my heart's in the right place, I got a good one for you. Double or nothing says you'll dig it.”

“Maybe we should just—” Kenny began.

A fangy smile from Lestat. “Okay. Freebies, then.”

“Not another trick.”

“Tell you what, li'l man, you like the way I roll, maybe you'll hook me up, help me out with a little something. I see you're cool like that.”

The boy stared at him, dubious. Both of his hands remained wrapped around the fun cup, which stayed tight, held to his stomach.

Lestat paid no attention, but coughed twice, clearing his throat. Now he wiped his nose, began rubbing at his eye with his palm. The rubbing became insistent. “Damn,” he said. A forceful blink, his eye now tearing.

There had been a rumpled sweaty kid with heavy clothes and a pierced eyebrow. There had been a black girl with a prosthetic arm and large, scared eyes. Kenny used to see them, at the vocational high school.He used to see a palsied, thumb-sucking humpback — whenever they made eye contact, she'd go into a little convulsion, her smile spectacular for all its drool and spittle. Faces appeared in the hallways, showing up with enough regularity to become vaguely recognizable. Kenny always meant to approach them, but there had been complications. Never a right moment.

The filthy one with the fangs, Kenny decided, was too hard for any of this, too much of a hustler. If he ever let his guard down, it had to be to work some kind of angle. Still, there was something almost familiar about the way these homeless kids embraced their awkwardness, the way they seemed to have created personas from their outsiderness, advertising the same social deficiencies that Kenny tried to hide.

Lestat was cocking his head to one side now. His eye problems taken care of, he was settling into the cadences of ghost stories and campfires and friends confessing embarrassing things late at night, saying, “Okay, up in Hollywood? There's this place called Oki Dog—”

Kenny stepped back. Almost instinctively he looked back down the length of the row, as if searching for one particular face.

—

Because, without a doubt, he used to see the dude every once in a while. Too infrequently to put a timetable on, but amid the high school's listlessly matriculating bodies, every now and then, he'd catch a flash of colored bandana wrapped as a head scarf; that brittle body rattling around inside a T-shirt that had faded to the purple of a soft bruise. Kenny would notice that limp, so dramatic he had to stop himself from gawking, the way the right knee collapsed with each step, how the rest of the dude's body would go stilted, all of his weight transferring through his shoulder and down his arm and pouring down onto a makeshift crutch — this skateboard, a beat-up old long board, the kind you use for speed, only without wheels.

The dude would limp unassumingly through the hallways like this, pretty much staying out of everyone's way. But, as it happened, Kenny'd also seen this same dude at Amazin’ Stories. Three times or so. Maybe a few more. It was a little weird, because each time Kenny'd seen him in the comic book store, this dude had been leaning against the New Arrivals bin, examining the same issues Kenny had been interested in reading. He'd be concentrating real hard, the dude — almost to the point where it looked like he was struggling with the pages, like he was trying to understand the reasoning behind the narrative, or maybe to figure where the story was going. Like this dude was unsure whether he should suspend disbelief and give in to the story and its flow, or just put the issue down, go and reap vengeance on the morons who'd perpetrated this fraud.

Not a huge deal, these crossings. A couple of ten-second intervals. A few awkward blips. Kenny might have thought about going up and finding out what was pissing the dude off so much. He might have thought about remarking in a way that showed he too recognized the numerous and fairly obvious deficiencies with the Mutant Skinheads artwork, the fundamentally played-out concepts in Wendy Whitebread. But Kenny didn't do stuff like that. He simply wasn't the type to go and interrupt some perpetually pissed-off-looking crippled dude: Hey there! Don't you recognize me? We go to vocational high school together! Yes, not only am I unfit for standards of normalized education, I'm so dumb I'm gonna drag you straight into the moron spotlight with me. Let's talk comics!

So Kenny stayed back and said nothing, and the dude took his issues and limped up to the register, and life went on, every bit as craptabulous as before, the whole thing a nonevent, a not-amazing nonstory. Certainly not the type of thing that stays in your mind enough to distract you from a rollicking yarn about pastrami hot dogs and sundry uses for napkins. Definitely not an incident of a heft or importance that would suck you away from the momentary particulars of the physical world. Yet in spite of a situation that had its own demands and dangers and responsibilities (Newell listening to that ongoing hot dog stand thing, a punk or two seeming to gather around as well, also being sucked in by the tale), Kenny had indeed returned, in his mind's eye, to the auditorium that passed for his second-period classroom; to the third-to-last row; an aisle seat and a swivel desk, rickety and loose, all but unhinged from its station.