Guy in Real Life

by Steve Brezenoff

  LEVEL THIRTY

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  …………………………………………………………

  CHAPTER 25

  SVVETLANA

 

  It’s cool in the foothills outside the dwarven capital. It always is. In her thin robes, Svvetlana shivers and takes a long pull from her skin of spiced wine.

  “Drunk yet, Svvet?” asks Stebbins, settling next to her on the dry grass. Any farther up the hill, and they’d both be sitting in snow.

  She shakes her head, the skin still at her mouth.

  “Lol, she’zh just getting shtarted,” says Dewey. He’s seated on his ram mount, fully clothed in Bavarian drinking garb. With his bold red beard and gleaming bald head, he is the quintessential dwarf at festival time.

  The priestess pulls away the skin, and the deep, deep red wine drips from her lips, making them redder and darker. She pouts at Stebbins the hunter, and his jaw falls open.

  The paladin laughs as he climbs down from his mount. He’s had quite a few tankards of ale, and when he hits the ground, he stumbles his way into a traditional dwarven dance. It’s not the most graceful rendition, though, and Svvetlana—fuzzy inside with spices and wine—giggles.

  “Laugh now,” says the dancing dwarf, “but shoon you’ll be danshing too, I’d bet. Then we get to watch your—”

  “Shut it, Dewey,” says Stebbins. A gallant interruption, and the priestess beside him laughs and knocks his shoulder with hers, then swoons and lies back on the cold, dry grass.

  “Whoa,” she says, pressing her palm against her forehead. Her silver filament headdress slides back and off her head. “I don’t feel so good.”

  “Lol,” says Dewey, sitting on her other side. “How many of those did you drink?”

  Stebbins stands and regards the sun. It’s late. Even Svvetlana knows this, but the spinning in her head and the sloshing wine in her gut make it hard to care.

  “We should get her to the inn,” Stebbins says. “Help me get her up.”

  The dwarf stands as well, unsteadily at first. “Lol.”

  Each man takes an arm, and they manage to get her on her feet. Once she’s standing, though, Dewey can’t offer much help; he’s half her height.

  “How about thish?” he says, and he puts both his stout muscular hands on the elf woman’s backside.

  Svvetlana stiffens, and for an instant her head clears. She pulls her right arm free of the hunter’s grasp, spins on the dwarf, and slaps him across the face.

  As drunk as he is, he falls on his armored bottom. “Lol.”

  “Honestly, Dewey,” the hunter admonishes, and the exertion has been too great for the priestess. She collapses again, this time a few feet up the slope toward the city, face-first in three inches of snow.

  “I’ll just rest here,” she says. Her voice is muffled by the earth and snow, and in seconds, she is asleep.

  There are moments of clarity. Svvetlana can’t be sure how long it is between these spells, though, and remembers only being lifted from the ground, placed on her belly on Dewey’s ram, quite a lot of bouncing, and quite a lot of laughter from her dwarven host. Stebbins must be with them, she knows, because he’d never leave the priestess so helpless with the paladin. Though it is an honorable class, this paladin cares naught for that trait.

  These thoughts only fritter in her mind, foggy as it is, for the briefest moments, punctuating blackness and dreams, and always full of the smell of wet ram fur. When she comes fully to, she is lying with her knees pulled up, under a heavy wool blanket, and atop the white fur of a polar bear rug. She is quite warm, and soon aware of the fire in the hearth near her feet.

  She squints against the new heat and dim lights. The sound of loud, jovial conversation and clinking tankards fills the air. It smells still of ram, but now the meat is roasting, not bouncing under her belly and breasts.

  “She’s waking up,” someone says. It’s not Dewey, and it’s not Stebbins, and the priestess is certain they’ve left her here to thaw and sober, among the practically heathen dwarfs who live and drink in the capital city. It’s not a safe place for a beautiful elf priestess on her own, especially one who is only level thirty, and lacks the skills to defend herself.

  A boot presses against her shoulder. It’s gritty and cold, and she’s sure it’s left mud on her gown.

  “Oi,” says a voice close to her ear. “Get up, lass.”

  Her vision is blurry, but she can just make out the gruff, dark-bearded face of an iron dwarf. He’s standing over her, a tankard in one hand and a leg of roast strider in the other. His friends recline—their chairs back on two legs, or their drunk forms slumped forward—at the table behind him. One chair, an empty one, is pushed back—his chair—as he’s gotten up to harass her.

  “Stebbins?” she says, but it comes out like a cough. Her head spins at the ragged sound of her own voice. Pain fires across her forehead, circles her crown like a bolt of lightning, striking hard against her temples.

  The dwarf is squatting beside her now, leaning in close. The food and drink are gone; in one hand, he now holds a dagger by the blade, and he uses its hilt to push up the skirt of her dress, exposing her ankle, her calf, her knee, her thigh. She has almost no strength, but she bats at his hand and knocks the dagger to the floor. The dwarves—even the lecherous one beside her—laugh.

  “What are you doing here, lass?” he says, and his breath is so strong with ale that Svvetlana’s thoughts swim again, back to the festival outside. Did Stebbins bring her here? Did Dewey?

  “Leave me alone,” she says. “I’m very ill.”

  More laughter, and the dwarf’s rough, thick hand is on her leg, squeezing it, playing with the fabric of her dress.

  “Sap her,” someone calls from the table. The place is filthy with laughter now, and the smell of alcohol is overwhelming. Svvetlana rolls onto her side and pushes herself into a sitting position, but it only makes her head scream in pain. She covers her eyes with both hands.

  “You know what you need, lass?” says the dwarf beside her, and now his voice is right there, right at her ear. She can feel the heat of his breath on her skin, and it makes her shiver. “You need the hair of the dog that bit ya.”

  As the bar goes eerily silent, a flood of ale pours down from above her, running down her face and her dress and into her mouth and eyes. She gasps and coughs as tankard after tankard is emptied on top of her. The laughter in the room is deafening, and not far off a chorus of dwarven men bursts into song. She doesn’t speak the language, and is glad of it, for the words are undoubtedly as sickening as the bath she’s been given in ale and rum and the backwash of these disgusting cretins.

  She gets to her feet and summons the energy to cast one spell—a protection spell, enveloping herself in a bubble of holy energy. The dwarves stand around her in a half circle, laughing and slapping their knees. “She looks like a wet rat!”

  “A wet rabbit, you mean,” says another, holding his fingers at the sides of his head like rabbit ears.

  “Aye,” says a third, barely able to speak through his laughter, “but a wet rabbit with tremendous tits!”

  The place explodes with laughter, but it all cuts off when a great roar bellows from the entrance to the inn. The dwarves startle and turn, cowering. An arrow thwaps into the room and strikes their table.

  “Ach!” says one, the drunkest one—the one who’d put his hands on her. “Yer boyfriend here to rescue you!”

  The dwarves sulk and sit, pick up their empty mugs and thump the table, or else head to the bar for a refill.

  The hunter—twice the height of every other man in the place, and accompanied by his great striped cat—steps toward Svvetlana. “I’m sorry,” he says.

  She looks up at him, her silver eyes shining, his golden eyes dull and faraway.

  “I left you,” he says. “I didn’t mean to. I didn’t mean to leave you here with th
ese … these …”

  “Jerks?” she offers.

  “Worse,” he says.

  She nods. “A lot worse, actually.”

  “Come on,” he says, and he wraps an arm and his cloak around her soaking-wet shoulders. “Let’s find someplace a little safer and quieter.”

  “And free of dwarves?”

  “Definitely,” he says, and they both smile as they move through the crowded streets of the dwarf capital. An inn near the fountain is friendlier to their kind, and they pause at the doorway. Svvetlana lets the hunter hold her by the shoulders. She lets him kiss her lips and her forehead as she looks down at the shimmer of magic in her slippers. Where was that magic a moment ago, when she quivered on the sticky inn floor, waiting to be rescued? Wasn’t it there the whole time? “I have to go.”

  “Right now?” says Stebbins. His cat pushes between them, rubbing hard against her knees and thighs.

  She nods and turns away, skips down the inn’s front steps. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I really have to go. But thanks. I mean, for rescuing me from that whole thing.”

  “Sure,” says the hunter as he runs a hand across his cat’s head and under its chin. “Bye.”

  And the priestess, just before she reaches the edge of the fountain, vanishes.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  …………………………………………………………

  CHAPTER 26

  SVETLANA ALLEGHENY

 

  The club is dead. I’m flipping through my summer’s work and sitting at my sewing desk. My phone’s speaker is on, and I’m listening to Roan. Well, I’m listening to her sister, Flannery, actually, I think. This happens a lot when I talk to Roan on the phone. The activity in the Garnet house takes over the line, her phone gets inevitably set down someplace, also with its speaker on, and I just listen to the bustling life of that giant clan of red-haired bons vivants. I really sort of love it. It’s almost like being there.

  “Lana!” says a voice, much louder, so someone’s picked up the phone, but it sounds like …

  “Reggie?” I say, lowering the papers onto my lap. “What are you doing over there?”

  “Roan wasn’t answering her phone, and I was desperate to get out of my house anyway,” he says, which means he’s still trying to take up smoking. He thinks it’s hilarious and charming, but really it’s revolting. I think he secretly likes it when I tell him so too, or when we’re walking out of doors and he takes out a cigarette, so I ask for one too, and then he gives me one and I break it in half and ask for another. “Oops,” I usually say. But he keeps giving them to me. He’ll come around.

  “So what’s up?” I say, staring down at the open page of the campaign. It’s a castle, or a palace, with dozens of tall, skinny spires that reach up into the top of the page. The tallest one, off center, is more slender than seems possible, like it’s made of glass and spiderwebs.

  “You need to run a game,” he says. “Right now.”

  “The new campaign? Now?” I say. “Reggie, it’s almost nine. My phone says so.”

  “Lana!” he says. He must have had a couple energy drinks on the way to Roan’s too, because his voice is extra excited, like Reggie-plus. “We’re seniors.”

  “Roan’s not,” I point out. Roan’s our baby.

  “Which is why I am here, and why you will be here soon, and why Abraham is already on his way: so Roan can stay in and still have an excellent Sunday night with her dearest and closest buds.”

  “This is okay with Roy and Ginger?” Those are Roan’s parents, but Reggie’s gone, and the phone’s back on a table someplace—I’m beginning to think the kitchen counter, because I just heard Gary call out something about his missing Neapolitan ice cream, which—I suspect—one of the twins finished. I tap “end call,” slip the phone into my tote with the stacks of campaign papers, and scurry down the steps and the hall. Mom and Dad’s bedroom is open, and the light from the TV flickers through.

  “Knock, knock,” I say, poking my head in. “Um, I’m going to Roan’s house for a couple hours.”

  Mom sits up and Dad sighs like I just asked him to pay for college this instant.

  “It’s Sunday night, Lana,” Mom says. “And it’s … nine. It’s after nine.”

  “It’s eight fifty-three,” I point out, and she points at her clock, which shows 9:03. “Your clock is fast.” Because it is.

  “It’s the clock with my alarm on it,” she says, “and my alarm wakes me up, which means for me it’s nine-oh-three, which is after nine.”

  “That has nothing to do with me,” I explain.

  “Ah, but we”—she thumbs at herself and Dad in rapid succession—“wake you up. So it has everything to do with you.”

  By now I’m actually in the room, which I’d hoped to avoid, and I sit on the edge of the bed. “Yeah, about that,” I start, “you can stop waking me up anytime now. I have a clock too.”

  “When you start getting up on your own and showing up at the breakfast table for breakfast on your own,” says Dad, “we’ll stop waking you up.”

  “Fine, fine, fine,” I say, closing my eyes to reset my brain, because this conversation has taken a severely wrong turn. “Listen. It’s not late. I’ll be awake up there past midnight anyway, sewing or drawing or chatting with Roan, because I always am.” And I have to start talking louder now, because they won’t shut up long enough for me to finish a sentence, putting in their little grievances like, “Why are you staying up so late?” and “If you can’t maturely handle a room away from your parents, maybe we need to move you down to the second floor with us and Henny.” I’ve heard it all before, and it’s ridiculous, not to mention irrelevant to this conversation.

  “The Gaming Club is finished because of Cole’s departure, and I want to see my friends, and everyone is over at Roan’s right now waiting for me,” I say, talking fast and loud so I can finish my argument before they find more items to nitpick. I stand up. They cross arms, look at me—glare at me. Mom’s mouth is so twisted I’m afraid she might spit venom the length of the bed and blind me in one eye.

  “So?”

  Nothing.

  “I’m a senior,” I try. “Honestly. I’ll be getting, like, ten college acceptance letters any day now.”

  “So you think you can goof off?” Dad says, so … wrong tactic.

  “I’m asking for your trust,” I say, and Mom’s twisted mouth settles down a little. We’re onto something. “I’m seventeen. I’ve shown myself to be a good student”—moving on quickly before the issue of math comes up—“and a responsible person. I promise I will get ample rest for school tomorrow and be up on time. But this is very important to me. Please.”

  Another sigh from Dad, but this one is less “college tuition” and more “twenty bucks for gas.”

  They exchange a glance. They do that a lot. I think it means they have a good marriage, honestly, because they can say more to each other with just an exchanged glance—and whatever level of telepathy you happen to believe in—than most people I know can say with their mouths open and yammering.

  “You can go,” says Mom. “But you will be home at a reasonable hour, and you will not drink—”

  “Mom.”

  “—or smoke! And you will be up on time tomorrow morning. And if I see you yawn even one time at breakfast, we are never trying this again. Is that clear?”

  “Crystal,” I say. I run to her side of the bed and give her a one-armed hug, and then blow Dad a kiss across the bed. “Enjoy Everybody Loves Raymond.” And I’m out the door.

  We haven’t talked about my car. There’s a very good reason for this, and I’m not proud of it, because I realize this is exactly the kind of problem that people like me—which is to say young white people of generally privileged upbringing—are typically accosted for complaining about. But I hate it. I hate my car.

  The reasons are threefold, and I’m going to make
a list while I walk downstairs and out the back door and across the backyard and into our garage, because it’s easier than continuing to worry about whether Lesh is going to speak to me again after the weirdness at lunch on Friday.

  1. It’s huge. It’s easily fifty feet long, and it’s brown. It’s got about eighteen corners somehow, and here I figured cars were supposed to be all smooth and sexy and aerodynamic. Not this car, which means this car is woefully inefficient. For such a huge car, you’d think a huge tank might mean lots of miles between trips to the gas station. Alas, it takes several gallons of fuel just to pull out of the garage. For this reason, and for reasons of my own personal well-being—spiritual, physical, and psychological—I nearly always ride my bike instead of take the car.

  2. It’s ugly. I covered some of this in 1, but here’s more. It’s still brown. On its rear are bumper stickers’ sticky, stained, rectangular remnants, as the last owner (dear old Dad) was kind enough to remove the top layer of each sticker before bestowing the thing upon me. Its interior is tan, which is of course a type of brown, and in many places torn, knifed, burned, chewed, et cetera. Some of these cuts have been properly mended with tan duct tape. Did you know they make tan duct tape? Now you do. Since I inherited the behemoth on wheels, exactly four people have been in this car aside from me, and I’m going to see three of them in about ten minutes. The fourth, barring a surprise reconciliation of the romantic kind between himself and Reggie, I will probably never drive anywhere again. That is because I do not want to be seen in this car, and I do not want people about whom I care to be seen in this car either. This is not me being snobbish, by the way. I’ll get to that in a minute. I simply appreciate things of a particular beauty, be they dragons, palaces, embroidered skirts, exquisitely inked tattoos (I have none, but I can appreciate the creative art), electronic ballads from Iceland, or Romantic orchestral dream sequences. You’ll notice “tan cars dying of rust and bigger than the QE2” was not on that list.

  3. The car makes me feel like a snob. This makes very little sense, since if I just shut up, it won’t be an issue. But my deep-seated loathing of this car sits in my brain like a walrus made of guilt. I know I should be happy that I have a car to use whenever I want, like late on a Sunday evening when I don’t want to waste much of my precious and carefully argued time on traveling via bicycle. But the fact is, I’m not. If I must have a car—and the truth is, no one says I must—I’d prefer something very tiny and very quiet, or at least very good-looking. Hence, I feel like a snob.