Grendel's Guide to Love and War

by A. E. Kaplan

  She drew back an inch and then laughed. “How about if I just kiss you instead? Since you no longer smell like swine.”

  It wasn’t what I wanted, not really, but I wasn’t going to turn it down, either. “Okay,” I said. So she leaned in and kissed me. I tried to remember what she’d said about this not being a booty call, so when I wanted to kiss her again, and maybe find out if there was anything under her tank top, I leaned back and breathed.

  “Not a booty call,” she said in this breathless voice that really made me wish I hadn’t stopped.

  “Nope,” I said. “No, um, booty. God, I hate that word. Okay. I think I’m going to bed now, because it’s like three in the morning and it’s actually quiet. Do you need anything?”

  “Um, maybe a pillow? Or a blanket?”

  I stared at the bare couch. “Right. Of course.” I grabbed both from the linen closet and brought them back to her, then hesitated. “Willow,” I said, “what do the rest of your bracelets say?”

  She lay down and covered herself with the blanket. “I may tell you someday,” she said. “But I probably won’t. They’re just for me, you know? Messages I keep for myself.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Good night, Willow.” I turned on my way out of the room. “Do you have a middle name?”

  There was silence for a good thirty seconds. “O’Connell.”

  “Okay. Good night, Willow O’Connell Rothgar.”

  “Good night, Tom Grendel.”

  “Oh. And, um. If you need something in the middle of the night, my room’s the last door at the end of the hall. On the right.”

  She laughed at me in the dark. “I do not plan on needing anything in the middle of the night, Tom. But thanks for the offer.”

  I hadn’t meant that. But now that she’d brought it up, I did kind of hope that maybe she would need something.

  (Spoiler alert: She didn’t.)

  I awoke the next morning with Zip standing over my bed. By the light streaming in through the window, it looked past ten or so. It was the longest stretch of sleep I’d had since the Rothgars had come to town.

  “There’s a girl,” she said. “On the couch.”

  “That’s Willow Rothgar.”

  “Is it? The one you may or may not have a thing with?”

  “I don’t think there’s a thing.” I thought about that for a minute. “Well, maybe there’s a thing. But yeah. She came over last night because her house stinks, which is kind of our fault, and everybody was yelling.”

  “Also our fault.”

  I sat up, and she sat down on the end of the bed. “Why do you suppose she’s interested in helping you?”

  I hadn’t really thought to put words to that. “Well, her brother’s a douche canoe, and her cousin is a psychopath or something. Also, I am dead sexy and in close proximity.”

  She laughed. “Sure, stud. Just remember who she’s related to, okay?”

  “If I’m very lucky, maybe she won’t remember who I’m related to.”

  “Ooh,” she said, tweaking my nose. “Bam.”

  I got up and put on a shirt and a pair of shorts, brushed my teeth, and found Willow splitting a pot of coffee with Zip. It was an unnerving image.

  “You have ants in here,” Willow said, getting a spoon out of the drawer.

  “I’m aware.” I wiped down the counter, a little annoyed that Zip was too lazy to do it herself. I nodded toward the window. “Do we know if they came and got the pigs yet?”

  Willow stirred way too much sugar into her coffee and sipped it slowly. “I woke up when there was a lot of yelling and snorting this morning, so I think Shultz got them.”

  I took a mug from the cabinet and poured a cup for myself. “Well, nobody came to arrest us, so that’s a bonus.”

  “I thought you were sure Shultz’d keep quiet, because of all the pot,” Willow said.

  “We were pretty sure. But nothing’s ever set in stone, especially when you’re dealing with a boutique pork dealer,” Zip said, sipping her coffee with her spoon.

  “Artisanal,” I said. “He prefers artisanal.”

  “So,” Zip said, turning toward Willow. “Sorry about the house.”

  She shrugged. “The boys’d already trashed it anyway. It’s just the smell that’s a problem. And the mud.”

  “How bad was the smell?”

  “On a scale of one to ten? Maybe a nine? The pigs were soaking wet, so, like, there’s muddy pig slime everywhere. I don’t especially want to go home and get conscripted into cleaning it up.”

  “Driving them through the lake was an inspired decision,” Zip said to me.

  “I wish it’d been on purpose. My legs are still sore from running away from them.”

  “They chased you?” Willow said.

  “I had peanut butter. Apparently it’s like pig crack.”

  “Huh,” Willow said, and then we all drank our coffee in silence.

  Through the window, I could see that the Rothgars’ backyard was a muddy, chewed-up mess, but the house itself was dead silent. I hoped it would stay that way.

  “By the way,” said Zip, pointing at Willow with her spoon. “Where exactly does your brother think you are right now?”

  “In my room, I guess. I have a lock on my bedroom door, so it’s not like he could go in there and check.”

  “You have a lock on your door? Like, with a key?”

  Willow pulled her keys out of her pocket and waved them around before putting them back.

  Zip said, “And he won’t think you’ve died or anything?”

  “I don’t think it would occur to him. Not much does.”

  Just then, there was a knock on the door.

  “Damn,” I said. “There are any number of people that could be who want me dead or in jail.”

  Whoever it was knocked again. “You should answer it,” Zip said.

  “Why don’t you get it?”

  “I just poured milk on my cornflakes. They’ll get soggy.”

  I looked at Willow. “I don’t live here,” she said.

  I groaned and went to the door. To my relief, it was Ed. “Why aren’t you still asleep?” I asked.

  “Manners,” he said. “I wanted to see how everything played out.”

  “You could have called,” I said.

  “I could have.” He peered past me into the kitchen, and I realized that I was not the person he really wanted to see. I wondered what had gone on after I’d left for the movies to meet Willow.

  “Kitchen,” I said, by way of explanation. “There’s a pot of coffee.”

  “Many thanks,” he said, brushing past me. “Glad to see you aren’t dead, by the way.”

  “Likewise.”

  He backward waved at me from the kitchen, where he grabbed a mug from the cabinet, poured the last cup of coffee, and sat down next to Willow.

  “Zipora,” he said.

  “Edward.”

  I got up and made another pot of coffee. It occurred to me that this was the most people that had been in my house at one time for…I didn’t even know. At least a year. For a split second, I almost felt jealous of Rex, who knew enough people, even superficially, to invite a hundred people to a party. Everyone I’d want to invite to a party was already drinking coffee around my kitchen table.

  Zip’s phone rang, and she went down the hall to answer it. “Hello,” she said faintly from the other side of the house. “I…What? No. NO! Ah-ah-ah shut up.”

  She came back with her phone hanging from her fingers as if she’d dropped it in the toilet.

  “Pasha?” I asked.

  “Obscene phone call,” she said. “Second one in the last hour.”

  “From the same guy?”

  “No. Different one, I think. Must be my lucky day.” She dropped the phone in the middle of the table.

  “I could make eggs,” I said.

  Zip gave me a dubious look. “Since when do you know how to make eggs?”

  “I know how to make eggs. I just don’t know
how to make anything else. I got Dad to teach me how to make an omelet.”

  “Ah,” she said. “Forced bonding time. How did it go?”

  “I got shells in the bowl. But he didn’t say anything.”

  “Reticent Dad. What a shock. So let’s see this egg-making prowess.”

  I got the carton of eggs out of the fridge and went about breaking them into a glass measuring cup. I’d tried to convince Dad to teach me to cook last fall, and this was the sum total of our success. I was sloppy and clumsy and unsure of my hands, and I felt like I was occupying his private space the whole time we were in the kitchen. And while he’d never exactly let on, there was a palpable discomfort to the whole thing, as if he were thinking, If I teach this kid to make pancakes, I will never be allowed to make a pancake alone again for the rest of my life. So after the omelet lesson, I let the matter drop.

  There was some too-old cheese in a baggie in the fridge, and I grated it over the top of the omelets before folding them in half. They were all overcooked except one, which I gave to Willow as a peace offering. As we ate them, Ed said, “We should celebrate.”

  “I have to mow Mrs. Brown’s and Mrs. Herman’s,” I said. “But I think I can push those until tomorrow.”

  “I have to get home,” Willow said. “I need to sneak back in before Rex and Wolf realize I’m not in my room.”

  “How are you going to manage that?”

  “Window,” she said. “Door’s locked, but the window isn’t. I just have to climb up the back deck.”

  “Well,” I said. “Good luck with that, Spider Girl.”

  She slurped the rest of her coffee and gave us an uncomfortable wave before she snuck out the front door. I passed her empty coffee cup from one hand to the other before I got up and put it in the dishwasher. Ed and Zip exchanged a knowing glance, and I said, “What?”

  “You,” said Zip, “have a thing.”

  After Ed and Zip helped me load the rest of the dirty dishes, we decided to celebrate our victory with a trip into Tolerville because Zip wanted crepes. The consensus was that Ed’s car had been through enough, so we climbed into my ancient Corolla; Ed sat next to me and did that annoying thing where he changed the radio station every three seconds, while Zip sat behind me and poked me in the back of the neck every time I had to stop the car.

  I headed for I-15 South. It was the middle of the day, and the only signs of life were a couple of horses grazing in the pastures as we drove by. Unfortunately, a few years ago some company put up a bunch of billboards along the side of the road, which kind of spoiled the bucolic effect, and the latest ones were those horrible digital LED kind that light up at night and make it hard to concentrate on the road.

  Mostly I don’t pay attention to billboards, but as the second or third one loomed over us, I had to slow down to get a better look, because Ed was pointing at it and saying, “No no no no no…”

  I pressed on the brake and turned to look at Ed, who was pinching the bridge of his nose and hyperventilating. “This cannot be happening,” he said. “There’s no freaking way.”

  Behind me, Zip let out a stream of swearwords. “I’ll kill him,” she said. “I’ll kill him twice.”

  On the billboard was a picture of a little girl in a colonial-era bonnet, wearing a lovely pink-flowered colonial-era dress and carrying a basket of bread.

  Her face was Ed’s.

  Below was printed ED PARK: A FIFTY STATES GIRL.

  “That’s quite a memorial, Ed,” Zip said. “I didn’t know they had bake sales back then.”

  “Shut up, Zipora,” I snapped.

  “This. Cannot. Be. Here,” Ed wheezed. “Everybody I know takes this road to Tolerville. Oh my God. They’ve all seen it. They must have all seen it.”

  “It’s not that bad,” I lied. “Who even looks at these things? They’re mostly just Cracker Barrel ads.”

  Ed pointed viciously out the window. “That is not a Cracker Barrel ad! That is me with blond ringlets in Violet from Virginia’s colonial-period morning dress and IT HAS MY NAME ON IT!”

  “Look, Park’s a pretty common name—”

  “NOT IN MASONBERG, IT’S NOT!”

  “They must have hacked it,” Zip said. “This digital billboard thing. God.”

  Just then, Zip’s phone rang again. “I am not answering it this time,” she said.

  “What if it’s Dad?”

  “When has it ever been Dad?”

  The ringing stopped for a second and started again. “Just turn it off,” I said.

  “Yeah, fine,” Zip said. She pointed up at the billboard. “Who owns these? Maybe we can call the company and have them shut them down.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll just turn around up here—” I was cut off by the sight of the next billboard. It was a photo of a girl giving the camera a sultry, come-hither glance. Underneath was printed FOR A GOOD TIME, CALL 555-998-0512.

  I glanced behind me at Zip, who was staring goggle-eyed at the billboard. “That bastard,” she said. “Turn the car around, Tom. I’m going to kill him. TURN IT AROUND SO I CAN KILL HIM.”

  Instead, I pulled over. “Who owns these billboards?” I asked. My voice was not as loud as I meant it to be. It’s like the volume had been sucked out of me at the sight of my sister’s sexy-face on a ten-foot LED screen. After I parked underneath Zip’s giant chin, we got out and stared.

  Ed was furiously typing on his phone. “Got it,” he said. “Garner-Grey Advertising.” He dialed and paced. “Shit. It’s one of these automated-operator thingies.” He paced some more. “Come on, come on, come on.”

  I looked up at Zip’s enormous face. “Where did he get this?”

  “It’s my head shot,” she said. “I have no idea where he found it. I can’t believe this.”

  Her phone rang again.

  “I thought you shut that off!”

  “I thought it was off!” She shut it down again.

  “This is ridiculous,” I said. “Ed?”

  “Still on hold!”

  Zip said, “Do you know anyone who could hack into this? Change it to something else?”

  “Ed’s brother, probably, but he’s not home this summer.”

  She said, “Couldn’t we just unplug it?”

  I scanned the billboard. “I don’t see how. Do you see a power line or something?”

  She walked a circle around the billboard. “Nope.”

  Ed shouted, “Hold time: forty-eight minutes.”

  “We have to do something,” Zip said. “We could get some paint. Cover it up.”

  “We could go to prison for that!”

  Zip pressed her palms against her face. “I am so sick of this,” she said. Then she held up her phone, which was blinking even though the ringer was off. “This is not funny! Does he think this is funny? I’m not, like, a toy for him to play with when he’s bored. You know what he is? He’s like—like—a two-year-old. He thinks other people are just things!”

  “Why did you even go out with him?”

  “I didn’t know!” she shouted. “He wasn’t always like this. I mean, I guess he was, but he never let me see it.”

  She glanced at Ed, who was still messing with his phone, then turned back to me. “The first time I met him, I was sitting on the steps of the science building. I’d just gotten my geology midterm back, and it was really, really bad, and I was totally freaking out because that class met a gen-ed requirement and I needed it to graduate. And he was just walking by and he looked over and saw that I was really upset, so he sat down and asked me what was wrong. So I told him. And then he grabbed my hand and walked me upstairs to the professor’s office, and he told him he was my boyfriend and that he’d cheated on me right before my midterm, and that’s why my grade was so bad, and it was all his fault, and couldn’t I take it over or do some extra credit or something?”

  “Whoa. He just made all that up on the spot?”

  “Yeah. And he was so goddamn charming the professor said sure and then thumpe
d Wolf on the back for being such a great guy, and that’s why I ended up with a C+ in geology. And he didn’t seem to want anything back except to be friends. He didn’t even ask me out. I asked him, like two weeks later. And it was like he always knew what I wanted, in the beginning.” She rubbed at her forehead with the heel of her hand like she was trying to push something out of her skull. “He was only charming as long as I did whatever he wanted, and when I stopped, I mean, it’s not even like he dumped me. He wanted to teach me a lesson. He didn’t care about me, because I was a thing. He doesn’t care that the parties were bothering Dad, because Dad’s just a thing, too. Ugh.”

  “Zip,” I said. “What did he do?”

  “It’s none of your business. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  I balled my hands into fists. “Zipora, WHAT DID HE DO?”

  For the first time, there was a crack in her fury. “It’s not what you’re thinking.”

  “I’m thinking,” I said, “that I never should have let you pull that prank. I’m thinking that whatever Wolf did, it needed a response that didn’t involve filling his house with swine. I’m thinking that you need to tell me what happened, so we can fix it without making everything worse!”

  The sky was getting darker, and the telltale rumble of a summer-afternoon thunderstorm sounded.

  “That blew in fast,” I said as a raindrop landed on my arm.

  “I’m not leaving until that’s down,” she said.

  Ed screamed, “Damn it! It just dropped my call.”

  “Are you calling back?” Zip yelled.

  “Of course I’m calling back!”

  The thunder rumbled again, and the rain went from a drizzle to a downpour in less than a minute. Ed dove into the car, covering his phone with his shirt.

  “We can’t stay out here, Zip!”

  “I am not leaving until this is fixed!”

  “Don’t be stupid—standing here isn’t doing anything!”

  “I want to see it! I want to see them take it down and know that it’s gone!”

  “We can’t stand next to these billboards in a thunderstorm; they’re like freaking lightning rods!”

  We were both already soaked, and there was a flash and the clap of thunder somewhere close.