Venomous

by Christopher Krovatin

  I smile. “I wonder why he was so cautious.”

  She winks. “You know it.”

  I tip back my glass until all I’m getting is the grainy chocolate mix sludge. Mom balls up the dish towel in her hands and throws it at me. It slaps across my unsuspecting face damply.

  “Now be a good boy,” she says with a chuckle, “and wash that.”

  “You want me to wash…a dish towel?”

  “No, the glass. Jesus, we send you to all these nice New York schools and listen to you….”

  THERE, ONtop of the El Dorado. I could see it. Whatever it was.

  I leaped through the air, and soon the wind was rushing past me as the powers of the city’s sorrow sent me sailing into the night like a god. Flight—arguably the best part of the job. A moment later I was fourteen stories off the ground, hovering over the left spire of the El Dorado apartment building, where the creature hung apelike from the roof, an oversized gargoyle dressed in a nightmare. My costume shuddered as I hovered closer. This thing was disrupting the flow of its energy. I had my work cut out for me.

  “Don’t move,” I snarled, reaching out to the creature. “I mean you no harm. Your mission seems to be the same as mine. I only wish to know what you are. Can you speak?”

  The tentacles at the beast’s mouth reared up, and from them, there came a mighty roar, like a soul spewed out of the depths of the pit. It pointed one taloned finger at me, calling me out, and gibbered at me in a language that might have been spoken on the ocean’s floor. Every tentacle on its body vibrated in my direction, its whole body targeting me.

  And then it froze and quivered. The tentacles at its mouth spread wide, flesh spreading back from it, like water or smoke, and suddenly a human face, the pale, terrified face of the bum from the park, appeared amid the mess of its body.

  “Blacklight, Locke, for the love of God, stay back!” screamed an all-too-human voice. “I can’t keep it from attacking you! I only have so much power over it!”

  I floated closer, the core of my being running cold. “How do you know my name?” I hissed. “What manner of monster are you? Who are you?”

  “Please, you have to get away! It knows what you are, how it can hurt you! If you don’t—oh GOD!” The face wrenched its mouth wide, as though to scream, and then the black fleshy tendrils swallowed it back up. Where the face had appeared, those two eyes, insectoid, cold and dead, focused in on me with clinical resolve.

  “Release him!” I said, raising a crackling hand. “I only want to speak to your host! I repeat, I mean you no harm—”

  The beast gurgled again, and then sprang through the air and tackled me. The wind left my lungs, and suddenly the city went silent. My suit flickered, sputtered. Lightning exploded from me; my head became a blur of horrible thoughts and sweaty panic. We spiraled downward toward the sidewalk, a collage of emotional electricity and putrid squirming meat.

  CHAPTER SIX

  AWEEK OR so later, when Casey calls me and tells—not asks, tells—me that we’re going shopping, I find myself saying yes before I have time to think about it. It’s like instinct. Shopping isn’t my thing, but a shopping trip with my first gay friend I’ve ever met? Too perfect. Hell, I might be able to get some leather pants out of the whole thing (note to self: keep the immature gay jokes at a minimum around new gay buddy).

  When I emerge from the Union Square subway station, I see Casey, wearing a large, puffy North Face jacket and talking to a boy dressed to kill with stringy black hair and sunglasses. There’s an argument going on, but a jovial one, where no one’s worried about what might come of it. Casey throws up his arm a lot and yells out his answers between cackles, while the other kid uses his cigarette as a classroom ruler and growls out his parts of the argument with a clever little smile on his face, which lets me know that he’s very nice and not to be trusted.

  As I approach, the stringy-haired boy points at me and says something, to which Casey turns around and waves.

  “Locke! This is Brent. Brent, Locke.”

  Brent puts his hand out and I shake it—warm, steely, a businessman’s grip. “Ah, Locke, you’ve been mentioned. Casey tells me you were molested by him.” Casey smacks him in the arm and swears laughingly under his breath. My face ignites with blood and timidity, and I pull out a cigarette of my own, which Brent willingly lights. “Nah, just fucking with you. You’re Randall’s friend, right? He calls you ‘Stockenbarrel.’”

  “Right. You know Randall?”

  “Met him here and there through this fag over here.” Another playful arm slap. “Does he call you that ’cause you’re named Locke?”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  Brent grimaces. “Randall and I shall have words.”

  I bet he’s told them about me.

  He wouldn’t dare.

  Randall is proving himself surprising. Talk to him or I will.

  Sadly, it’s got a point. There is something massively discomforting about finding out that there’s a body of people out there who you’ve never met, and that this body knows who you are and what you’re like.

  “We’re heading out,” says Casey, giving Brent a pat on the back. “Tell Sam I’ll give him a call, okay?”

  A knowing nod. “He’ll really appreciate that. Have fun, kids.”

  “I bet. Later.” Casey and I start walking slowly toward Broadway, our hands in our pockets, the wind blowing our hair back. “Brent’s cool. He’s the devil in our tarot deck.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  Casey nods, beaming. “No one is. You probably wouldn’t like him. He and his friends can be a bit intense. They party really hard. He’s going a little crazy now, though.”

  “Why?”

  “One of our friends just had a nasty breakup. Long story. C’mon.”

  “Where are we going, anyway?”

  “I wanted to go to Leather Man on St. Mark’s. They have an adorable pair of chaps that fit me like a goddamn dream. I was thinking about buying a cowboy hat, too.”

  “Oh, wow. Really?”

  “No, of course not. Man, do I seem gay enough to pull off leather chaps?”

  Have I mentioned I’m a towering rube? I’m a towering rube. And now I seem like an ignorant fool of a towering rube. Splendid. “Sorry. I’m, uh, still a little…” What, you moron?

  He puts a hand on my shoulder. “Worry not, young Jedi. We’ll teach you the ways of the pink lightsaber yet.”

  Now that was pretty fucking gay.

  I swallow the venom and walk.

  Shopping is a nonstop blast. We rip through the Virgin Megastore like a swarm of critical locusts. I never knew I could get so invested in a conversation, but our argument about the Strokes proves me wrong—I posit they have drive and energy that sets them apart from most of the other bands in their genre, and Casey thinks they’re “utter hogwaste.” After that, it’s ripping on Emily the Strange clothing and flipping through horribly pornographic manga. It’s stuff like this that makes me happy, things that I spend most of my time being paranoid about getting laughed at for. Randall is too straight and cool to appreciate things like this: He has somewhere to be, someone to impress, something to uphold. Casey doesn’t seem to care in the least about wandering around for the sake of doing so, and instead points out horrific images in the comics we’re reading and cracks jokes like, “That girl is having her period of the black” and “Oooh! venom orgy with huge eyes!” And it’s nothing more than fun. My eyes don’t glance worriedly around at people near me. The room isn’t squeezing the air out of my lungs. The burden is, maybe momentarily, lifted. The venom works in mysterious ways.

  Halfway through a collection called Ultra Gash Inferno, Casey’s head turns with a smile and he says, “Sssoooooo, how’d things go with Renéeeee?”

  I glare at him. “Shouldn’t you know already? You people seem to have this little conspiracy routine going on.”

  “Okay, point taken, but I want to hear about it from you.”

  I bite and relay the en
tire meeting, give or take a juicy detail. When I get to my sudden revelation about Andrew, Casey nods knowingly.

  “Oh, Andrew,” he says, sighing, “constant proof that caveman still exist. Honestly, don’t worry about him, he’s basically harmless.”

  “You don’t have to go to school with him every day.”

  “No,” says Casey in a harder voice, “I’ve just had to deal with that idiot’s bullshit every day I’m over there since I came out. Andrew always sort of liked me, but the minute I told Renée and she told him, he’s let me know what Middle America thinks of me. But in all honesty, it’s a lot of hot air. Just forget him and think of her.”

  “Well, at least you don’t pose a threat. You’re her gay guy friend. There’s no problem.”

  “That may be true,” he says, “but you’d think that getting tormented for who I am is a lot worse than for what I could do.”

  Times like this remind me how utterly naive I am. Jesus Christ, Locke, wake up, the playing field has changed. Casey’s honesty, though, lets me know that he’s the person who I have to ask, who’ll answer the question that’s been eating away at the back of my head.

  “How’d Renée’s parents die, Casey?”

  Casey won’t look at me; he just nods and pulls his lips tight and looks up and down the comic-book shelf. “How’d you find that out?”

  “Randall told me.”

  “He shouldn’t have. It’s not his story to tell. It’s Renée’s.”

  “He thought it would be important for me to know, but Andrew was there, and he couldn’t…Please, man. What happened?”

  His mouth flaps open and closed again and again, but eventually he just shakes his head. “Not right now,” he grumbles, flipping through more graphic novels. “Now’s not the time. I don’t really want to dive into that yet.”

  “Please, Casey.”

  “Locke, this isn’t a joke,” he snaps. “Let me think about it. She should tell you, ’cause…” He trails off, waving his hands.

  “It’s bad, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  There’s a flutter of venom. “How bad?”

  “Worse than you think.”

  In the New York Milkshake Company on St. Mark’s, I take my mind off this afternoon’s craziness by informing Casey that he has no friggin’ idea how to drink a root beer float.

  “What’re you doing?”

  He looks up. “What? What do you mean?”

  “I mean, what are you doing?” I ask, jabbing at him with my still-dripping spoon.

  He glances down at his cup and then back at me. “I’m eating my ice cream. What does it look like?”

  I sigh dramatically. “Bad enough you get chocolate ice cream in your float—”

  “I hate vanilla, I told you.”

  “—but you’re eating it wrong.”

  Casey puts up his hands in defense and leans back in his chair, saying, “Elaborate, sensei.”

  “Well, it’s okay if you eat a bit of the ice cream and drink a bit of the root beer”—I take a sip to illustrate—“but then you have to let it sit awhile, y’know, stir it every few seconds, until some of the ice cream melts.”

  He looks focused but perplexed. “But then you just get this ice cream–root beer mixture.”

  “Now you’ve got it.”

  He shrugs and starts stirring his float. I watch him and think about what he told me before in the comics section until I feel like my brain is going to burst, so I go for a new subject.

  “So, any boys lined up?”

  He sighs. “No, not yet. Still a little sore from the last one, y’know, Catholic boy.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “No worries, it was as much my fault as it was his.” He stares into the swirling float, zoning out. “Honestly, I’m not going to worry about it too much. Love has never really treated me well.”

  “How so?”

  “I’ve got a thing for boys I can’t have,” he says quietly, never moving.

  “Straight boys?”

  “Yeah, but…Well, it doesn’t matter.” His eyes meet mine, and I realize this conversation is over. “Can I drink the damn thing already?”

  “Sure,” I say, and we both chug.

  Casey licks the last of his drink from the end of his straw and looks up at me with amazement in his eyes. “Damn, Locke,” he says in awe, “you’re the man.”

  Even with the float, the thought won’t go away. The venom keeps scratching at it like a rash, until I have to ask again. “How’d they die?”

  “You ready?” he asks.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m serious, man. This is really bad, and I feel pretty fucked-up being the one to tell you. Are you ready for this?”

  Obviously not. “Yeah.”

  There’s a pause, and then he monotones, “Renée’s dad stabbed her mother to death, and then he cut his own wrists and died with her. Renée was thirteen.”

  Oh Christ.

  “Renée’s dad had all sorts of problems with drugs and started getting violent, seeing things, making up conspiracy theories, the whole nine yards. So one day her mom scooped her and Andrew up and left San Francisco, meth, and her husband behind. For a couple of years, everything was fine; Renée was eight when they left, so they’d had a chance to start a new life, until one day out of the blue, Andrew gets a phone call from his dad, who apparently sounded totally coherent and reformed. He doesn’t tell anyone, he just talks to his father, who he hasn’t seen in years. And a week later, Renée’s mom’s boyfriend comes home and finds them there, bled to death.”

  Oh God, no.

  The blood drains out of my face, and the room swirls purple and green. The air seems suffocating, full of dust or smoke to the point where I can’t see or breathe. Using every ounce of my willpower, I manage to climb out of my chair and stumble through the glass doors, spilling out into St. Mark’s Place. I hold myself up against a wall, trying to catch my breath, to regain my balance, to not throw up. A crew of punks jeers me, but I can barely hear them. It’s too big. Oh God, it’s way too big. It’s unbearable.

  Misery magnet, hisses the venom, I told you. It’s not just bad, it’s beyond horrible. It’s the principle of evil. One girl, hurt beyond anything you can imagine, and you found her. Bravo.

  Casey comes out and hands me a bottle of water, which I pound down my throat. Standing back up, wiping my face on my coat sleeve, I stare at him in horror. His eyes reflect back an understanding, a grasp of just how terrible the whole thing is. There’s no sense of patronization; neither of us is the bigger or little brother. This is just horrible in the worst possible way, and it happened to someone we both hold dear.

  “You gonna be okay?” he says, his voice shaking with worry. “It’s a lot to take at once, I know. That’s why she doesn’t like to talk about it.”

  “Got it…. So Andrew…”

  “Yeah. Andrew blames himself. Thinks if he’d only just dropped the phone…but yeah. Now you see how bad it is.”

  “How do I…What can I do to make this better?”

  He shrugs. “You can’t. You’re in no position to save anyone, Locke. Just be there when you can, do what needs to be done. It’s all she’s ever needed.”

  We take a moment to stand and feel beaten before moving back down the street.

  I come back home wearing a new shirt from a store called Search & Destroy. It depicts a black-and-white drawing of a man standing at the edge of a rooftop in an overcoat, exhaling a puff of smoke that drifts dramatically from his mouth and surrounds his head in a stringy cloud, as though his hair is on fire. Casey had brought it up to me and declared, which seems to be his way of doing things, that he was buying it for me. This was still taking some getting used to—not just being treated to random gifts and excursions, but the self-assured attitude all of these people have about, well, everything. Casey never asks or wonders—he declares or states. It’s both comforting and unnerving, like at the Milkshake Company today. The garment hanging fr
om my torso felt like a bribe to make up for sometimes treating me like an insect, and I don’t like to be bought. The venom despises it. Everything wasn’t what it seemed, and that left me feeling caught in the crossfire.

  Lon’s sitting on the couch watching TV as I walk in. He does a double take after glancing at me. “Wow! I like your shirt.”

  “Thanks,” I say, running my hand over the plastic printing for the millionth time in the past hour.

  “Renée called,” Lon says, going back to Samurai Jack, who is tearing art-deco robots to shreds. “She wants you to call her.”

  I’m in my room with the door shut in five seconds, and I’m punching numbers shakily into the phone in eight. For some reason, hearing about her twisted past has only made me want to talk to her more. This girl may not be normal, she may not be “okay,” but she cares for me, and all I want to do is let her know how amazing I think she is.

  The venom snorts. Always the superhero, Locke. Go ahead, try to face something this terrible. I can’t wait. Ignoring its voice is impossible, and I shudder. Blurting something out at the wrong time is not an option here. Don’t be toxic, Locke. Careful.

  A droplet of sweat forms in the center of my forehead and begins to trickle annoyingly down the bridge of my nose. After two rings, it’s hanging on the tip of my nose, and I’m about to wipe it off when someone picks up the phone, at which point the droplet sails down and spatters onto my pants.

  “There’s no excuse for you calling me so late, you know.”

  Caller ID. I hope. “Well…actually, there is.”

  “Oh, really? And that is?”

  “How’ve you been?”

  “Ha, yeah, that’s gonna work. Answer my fucking question, Locke, why didn’t you call me?”

  As my mouth opens, the venom screeches in the back of my head, louder and louder until it’s all I can hear. Even considering her parents up has sent it into a psychotic tantrum. My throat feels closed up, and I have to clench my eyes as hard as I can just to concentrate. No, no, no, not now. Think of something, Locke, something good and reasonable, something that isn’t the truth.