by Red Tash
Anyway, my point is, among the children’s stories and the romantic teen fiction, and even in a lot of the comic books, there’s some truth. Mostly fiction, but if you look hard enough, you can see through the tall tales, and find the common thread within. I’ve always been good at that sort of thing. Figuring stuff out.
The one thing I wish I’d figured out sooner was what to do about my uncle Jag.
Why? Well, for starters, my uncle killed my parents, and my fairy godparents. It was immediately after the bonding ceremony between their baby daughter and me. The Wheelers had pledged to protect my parents, and by extension, me. My parents were to protect Deb, and I was, by extension …
Well, I jump ahead of myself. I told you I’m not good with stories.
I should start with an introduction, shouldn’t I?
My name is Harlow Saarkenner. I am an American Troll living in rural Indiana, and this is the story of how I met a kick-ass rollergirl, rejoined a rock band, and lived happily ever after.
In a landfill. Did I mention that?
But there’s more. Stay tuned. I’m just going to tell it like it happened, best I can. Deb will fill in the rest.
Chapter Two
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Deb
Taking care of Gennifer has been a full-time job for as long as I can remember. Even before high school, when her friends started openly calling me “freak,” “queer,” and other charming things, my big sister resented me for having to watch her all the time.
Mom gave me no choice. She drank a lot and spent most of her time asleep on the living room couch in our trailer. I stopped worrying about her sometime in elementary school—someone called Child Protective Services once, and we were taken away to a children’s home for a few days. Gennifer got smacked around and I got beaten pretty badly by the other kids. I think we were both relieved when Mom came to pick us up, freshly-pressed and sparkly clean, swearing up and down to the group home Matrons that the whole thing had been a misunderstanding.
We’re related to someone—a judge, I guess—and the whole thing was swept under the rug. Ever since then, I just look out for Gennifer and me and figure Mom can fend for herself.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve kept Mom out of trouble best I can. If all she does is drink herself numb every day, and doesn’t spend all the Social Security before the bills get paid, I don’t consider her such an awful parent. There are worse ways to live. In a town as small as Bedrock, Indiana, I know plenty of people who have it worse than a drunk for a mom.
Drunk or not, she was probably going to beat my ass for what had happened to Gennifer in the fire. If I was the town reject, Gennifer was the closest thing Bedrock had to a debutante. While I was hanging out with the other rink rats or skating around on my outdoor wheels, Mom was putting together scrapbooks of Gennifer’s achievements. You know, Laurents County Pork Festival Queen, winner of the most inventive nail decal competition in the 4-H fair, and runner-up in the Girl Scout dance-off. That was before she started sneaking off with Dave, but Mom hadn’t caught up with reality just yet.
Next to my sister, I felt like a troll. I guess when she started getting drunk (or crunk, or whatever they called it), I felt like she was coming down to my level a little bit—you know, where us real people live. People who make mistakes and don’t have to look perfect all the time. But, whatever—drugs are for idiots and I hate the way she started acting, whether she was high or not. I didn’t want to see her turn into Mom, sleeping on the couch and griping at someone to take care of her, all blobbed out like Jabba the Hutt.
The Emergency Medical Center in Bedrock barely qualifies as a hospital, but that was where they took us after the fire. Gennifer was unconscious for a couple of hours. The nurses asked me for our home number, but Mom wasn’t answering the phone.
It was Homecoming Night, and I was pretty sure she’d be at the salon getting her hair and nails done to match Gennifer’s get-up. In fact, it was kind of weird that Gennifer would have skipped an afternoon of pampering with Mom to do drugs with Dave, but I guess that’s how far she’d fallen. Surely being crowned Homecoming Queen was going to get her higher than Dave’s meth, right? But what do I know about how junkies think?
Even as she lay bandaged in the next bed, she was so beautiful it hurt. I knew there was no way she’d make the ceremony, but I thought Mom should probably be there with her when she woke up.
We’d been in the ER for about two hours, waiting in that hospital version of purgatory when a slew of car accident victims poured in—an Amish buggy had collided with a hayride full of middle school kids, driven by a seventh grader. Blood and flannel and black hats were everywhere. Every time they moved someone off a gurney, bits of straw flew through the air.
With all that noise, no one was trying to get ahold of our mom anymore, so I grabbed my backpack and left. Despite the burns, I felt fine. I should have been exhausted, and aching, probably—but I wasn’t. I thought I was just tough, you know? That was before I understood about the fire sprites, and the magic.
Anyway, I snuck down the hall and found a public bathroom away from the ER corridor. I didn’t realize how much gauze had been wrapped around my head until I saw my reflection in the mirror. There was no way I was skating across town looking like a mummy. As I pulled the gauze off, I found several cuts in my head. Guess I’d done that getting Gennifer out of the fire.
“Yuck.” Too much blood and ooze. I put the dressing back on.
“Guess I’ll have to walk to school with this crap on my head,” I said to my reflection. For a second, I thought I saw my reflection smirk. “Must have lost some blood, too,” I said. I didn’t feel dizzy or anything, though, so I figured I’d be okay.
As luck would have it, I passed an older man sleeping in the waiting room. He’d left a rather large cowboy hat on the coffee table, and I slipped it onto my head. It was loose, but felt okay over the bandages.
All I need now is a snap-front flannel plaid shirt from the Big Blue Farm Store. As if everyone doesn’t already think I’m a total dyke.
The thought of walking into the gym and all its golden high school Homecoming glory, bleeding from the head and wearing a cowboy hat, gave me the giggles. I imagined myself in stiff, shiny leather cowboy boots, and sporting an enormous belt buckle.
Maybe I should have been more shaken up over the fire—or maybe I was, and this was what shock felt like—but it just struck me as hilarious. I could practically see it—the clothes weren’t really there, but my eyes played tricks on me, images flickering on and off. “I’m a Rhinestone Cowgirl,” I sang. One of Mom’s LPs had that song on it. Country Gold. Why do I remember things like that?
Outside the hospital, I took my skates out of my backpack and put them on. There was no sidewalk for most of the way, but people around Bedrock were used to my skating on the side of the road. I’d only ever been hit by a car once, and not hard. I always wore my helmet and pads, so it hadn’t even hurt that much.
Usually the worst thing that happened when I skated on the street was the harassment. Skateboarding might have been more socially acceptable, but once I heard about roller derby making a comeback, I made up my mind to stick to skates. Besides, the skating rink was pretty much the coolest place to hang out on weekends, and quad skating was definitely the way to go. Rollerblades were so 1990s.
I was about a mile from the hospital when I felt something wet my back. A beer can rattled into the gutter in front of me. A red Ford Mustang swung toward me, and I jumped the curb and fell into the grass to get out of its way. I looked up in time to see Laurence Yoder laughing out of the passenger window of his girlfriend’s car. He mouthed the word “lesbian” at me, but, really, was that supposed to hurt my feelings?
I got back to my feet and realized that I was only another block from a real sidewalk. I wouldn’t have put it past Yoder and his friend to circle around and have another go at me, so I skated for the sidewalk as fast as I could. At least it would be a little more
of a buffer between me and the traffic.
I’d just made it when I heard a car slowing to pull beside me.
“Nice hat!”
Nothing flew at me, so I stole a look. Brown sedan. Ancient, stinky, booming hip-hop music. I’d know that broken down jalopy anywhere.
My neighbor Derek reached over and opened the passenger side door. “Get in.”
Chapter 2.5
I Always Feel Like Somebody’s Watching Me
Harlow
I hadn’t meant to spy on Dave that afternoon, but I had a gut feeling that he was up to no good. There’s never any doubt that my tyrannical idiot of a cousin is committing dirty deeds, dirt cheap & 24/7. What was odd was that I felt compelled to find out what exactly it was this time.
I followed the scent of drugs and greed to a ramshackle mobile home in the sticks. A potent fairy drug called faeth wafted in the air. Any human who came upon the site would probably just think it was your typical backwoods meth lab, but I knew better.
When we were kids, Dave put drugs in my Kool Aid once. Didn’t get in trouble for it, either. Never did. Cousins, brothers, sisters—he didn’t care if we were family. If he could get you hooked, he’d pass out the pills like they were candy. Sometimes he even glamoured them to look and taste like candy. Troll kids aren’t much different from non-troll kids in that way. Easy targets, and faeth is way more addictive than anything he had access to back then.
Every sin was plentiful at McJagger’s house—if you could call it a house, at all. Who lives in an illegal casino with a bunch of fairies and trolls? Okay, so you could insert a joke here about where the next American Idol will be living in twenty years, but let’s skip that and cut to the chase.
Dave was a drug pusher, a bully, a rapist, and most definitely a murderer. He was my cousin, and heir to the throne of the crime family. Although I had no desire to be any sort of mafia don, myself, I did feel compelled to keep an eye on the guy, for my own protection.
What surprised me that day was that I felt the call not just to look out for my own interests, but for someone else’s as well.
Yes, it was a girl. A human girl. Sort of.
Oh, it gets complicated later on, but at the time, all I could see was a girl breathing fire—fairy fire, at that—and trying to break into a burning trailer, while Dave spun his tires in the gravel, racing away down a mile-long driveway. I wasn’t sure if he was just running from the scene of the crime, or running from her, to be honest. I’d never seen her before in my life, as far as I knew, but I felt as if I were watching myself in action. She was fierce, determined, and definitely not human, although she was certainly acting like one.
I considered glamouring myself and going to help her, although I have to say that I’d had so little experience helping other people that I really didn’t understand the impulse at all. I could hear a siren in the distance. Would I have time to get them out and get gone before Laurents County’s merry band of volunteers entered the scene? I hesitated, just for a moment—and in that moment, this not-human girl came crashing out of the blown-out end of that burning tin can, landing hard on the ground with another young woman on her back.
The mobile home collapsed to the ground, and tongues of fairy fire shot into the sky like a mushroom cloud. In fact, more like a mushroom than a cloud, with a red cap and white polka dots. I started out of the woods to make sure the girls were alright, when the fire truck pulled up.
I took a deep breath and focused on Dave’s scent, laced with fresh hot murder, and took off after him, instead.
Chapter Three
Daydream Believer
Deb
I didn’t really want to ride with Derek, but didn’t see much choice. I was so drained, and I had to find Mom as fast as I could, get her to Gennifer’s side before she woke up. The fact that I’d hated my perverted neighbor Derek since the fifth grade didn’t matter that much at the time.
“What happened to you?” he said, slinging his arm around my shoulders and trying to pull me across the seat to sit closer to him.
“Meth lab on fire—your big hero Dave,” I said. I pried his arm off me and slid as far away as possible. “Don’t touch me, you skeeze.”
Derek frowned. “You want to go to the hospital?”
“Just left there.” I pulled off the gaping hat and flashed my bandages.
“Damn, babygirl!”
Ugh. Is there anything more pathetic than a redneck high-school pimp-wannabe?
I cringed. “Don’t call me that, pervert. Just take me to school.”
“I’m not a pervert. Don’t you want to go home?”
“No. School. Please hurry.” I rested my head on the cool glass of the window. “And you are a pervert,” I said. “I know you watch Gennifer change from outside her window.”
He kept eyeing my bandages, and I hated him for it. I didn’t want anyone to think of me as weak, especially not this stupid neighbor kid. “Hey, my eyes are right here,” I said to him, pointing to my face.
He laughed. “You’re supposed to say that when I’m looking at your tits, you idiot. You’d know that if you had any. And I’m not watching Gennifer. I’m watching your mom.”
I gave him the finger, and closed my eyes.
The bass pumped from his stereo, vibrating my entire body. The car was warm and I melted into the shimmying ride. The last thing I saw before we got to school was a blurry red light turning violet through the top of the windshield tint. Derek was running the busiest intersection in town for me, no questions asked.
“Thank you, Derek,” I said, and then I was out.
When I woke, Derek was gone, and the car was parked on the sidewalk of the school. I took my skates off and ran to the gym. It’d been faster if I could have just rolled, but the principal was a real stickler for rules, and I didn’t want to get stopped at the door. I pushed through the outer doors just as the pep band wound down a medley of the band teacher’s favorite ‘60s tunes. Now, if they’d played something obnoxious and country, they’d have really inspired pep in our student body. The more obnoxious, the better.
Mom was a shining spectacle of shellac and sequins from coif to mani-pedi as she stood solo in her matching dress. The school, and the spotlight, waited for Gennifer, as the Homecoming Court waited on the other side of the gym floor with their own parents and escorts. Mom looked embarrassed and confused, craning her head around every few seconds to look for Gennifer. I couldn’t help but pity her. Telling her about the accident wasn’t going to be easy, either.
The band dug into a country pop hit that didn’t make a damned lick of sense unless you were semi-retarded, and the whole school went nuts, singing along from the bleachers. As they danced arm-in-arm and belted out the chorus, I ran across the gym, nearly fitting in for once in my cowboy hat. I could almost hear my imaginary cowboy boots clicking up noise despite the din. The spotlight operator must have thought I was part of the show, because I could feel the spot train on me.
All eyes were on me, and for a few moments, the music continued. Then Mom looked at me and screamed, and the singing stopped. I could feel the eyes of hundreds, as everyone in the gym stared at us.
“Where is your sister?!” She looked crazed, like something from a John Waters movie, with all that big hair and sparkle. She looked like Gennifer, fifteen years older, with the eyes of an old lady.
“Hospital,” I said. “There was a fire.”
I remember Mom yanking my hat off my head, and slapping me with it hard, right where I was bandaged. I don’t remember hitting the gym floor.
Derek held the cowboy hat, and his was the first in a ring of faces staring down at me. “Deb, Deb, wake up!”
My eyes were open, but I felt trapped in a dream, unable to move or speak.
The faces cleared, and there was Coach, lifting me up gently by the shoulders, as my Mom searched the crowd furtively for her important daughter. I hoped my message about Gennifer would eventually sink in through the layers of makeup and humiliation.
Thankfully there wasn’t anything else to entertain Coach in town that night. If the rink had actually been filled with kids, maybe no one but Derek would have been there.
Coach wasn’t actually my coach—he’d tried to recruit me to skate on his in-line skating speed team at the rink, but I wasn’t willing to make the switch from quads. He didn’t hold that against me, though.
“You just can’t wait for roller derby to get yourself all banged up, can ya, kid?” he asked. He smiled, as if passing out in the middle of the Homecoming ceremony was the funniest gag he’d ever seen. Maybe it was. I laughed, too.
Once it was clear I wasn’t going to choke on my own vomit, go into an epileptic fit, or anything else that might have entertained the ruffians, the crowd around me dispersed, and the Homecoming ritual went on. Since Gennifer wasn’t there, someone else was crowned Queen.
Mom cried, as the spotlight honed in on second-place beauty queen Confectionary Schmidt, the heavily tattooed daughter of Mom’s high school rival, Confession Eckart-Schmidt. I knew Mom was going to be impossible to live with—talk about adding insult to injury. I liked Confectionary “Call me Candy one more time and I’ll punch you in the throat” Schmidt. She was pretty, and cool.
Coach and Derek supported me, despite the fact that I told them repeatedly I was fine. They loaded me into Derek’s car, and Coach instructed Derek to take me home. “And as for you, little lady—you need to learn when to quit sometimes. You can’t push yourself forever.” He laughed again, and pushed the door shut.
Something about Coach, when he laughs—his underbite makes his face look kind of funny. Not exactly human. Not really scary—but it’s not right.
When I opened my eyes again, the police cars lit up the trailer park.
