“Steven fucking Spielberg could not have made props like that and you know it! It wasn’t you!”
“It was! And I would’ve gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for you med—”
“Liar!” She clutched his neck and shoved him into the wall, shattering some tiles with the back of his head.
One of the baseball talkers entered the restroom at that moment and stopped dead at the sight.
On the left, standing, Andrea “Andy” Rodriguez, 25, in big military boots and a white tank top, turns to camera as she lifts a squirming old man two inches off the floor.
“Fuck off,” she growled, and the intruder obediently retreated.
Wickley was gagging, writhing, kicking the air. Andy turned back to him, face slashed by the obstinate bang of hair, a furious and not fully devoid of self-satisfaction smile in her lips.
“I was twelve years old in ’seventy-seven and I beat you; now I’m twenty-five and you’re old and weak; just imagine the ways in which I can humiliate you. Tell me, why did you confess?”
“I did it.”
“Bullshit. Why did you take the blame?”
“I did it. I made my costume out of a diving suit. It was a good costume.”
“No, it wasn’t, really.”
“I set everything up. I made the lights fade and the house shake.”
“No, you fucking didn’t!” (She slams him to the wall.)
“I did, and you were terrified. (Sniggering in pain.) You pissed your pants.”
“That was Nate, not me! And it wasn’t you! (Her grip hardens, closing shut his windpipe.) Why did you take the fall?”
“Ack! G-g-g—”
“Tell me or I swear I’ll throw you in my trunk, drive to Blyton Hills, and dump my car into Sleepy Lake!”
“Ng…ng…”
“Why?”
“Ng’ngah…ng’ngah’hai!”
“WHY?!”
“Iä fhtagn Thtaggoa! Iä mwlgn nekrosunai! Ng’ngah’hai, zhro!”
Andy banged him against the wall and released her grip, gaping at the echo of the odious words that had made the hair on her arms stand and the sun dim, shocked by the blasphemy.
Slowly daylight returned, and a silence punctuated by dripping water pipes. The old man slid to the floor, leaving a little smear of blood from the back of his skull along the way.
“I wanted to go to jail,” he moaned, panting, clinging to consciousness.
Andy stood, full of hate, fists clenched, adrenaline trickling down her temples.
“I wanted them to lock me away,” Wickley sobbed. “I had to get away from that place. I can’t go back. I don’t want to go to that devil house ever again! Never!”
And he sank his head in his palms and broke into tears. Sitting on the floor in a public restroom, crying grown-up sobs.
Andy snorted back the fury, panting, and flushed the urinal for him.
“You won’t. Good-bye, Mr. Wickley.”
And she stormed out, feeling not the least sorry for the pathetic old man left crying on the floor. Because he was right: he would never have to go back to that house.
Lucky bastard.
PART ONE
REUNION
She flung the door open to clamorous nonreaction, silhouetted down to a bulky jacket and a baseball cap, the blue wind blowing away the title card. Dramatically opening doors was one of Andy’s few natural talents, one she had perfected in the last thirteen years while roaming over the country. She could push or pull or even slide a door open and either go entirely unnoticed or make all heads turn and music stop, at her will. She even succeeded in causing the latter effect in a concert hall, during a Van Halen gig. It’s all in the wrist, really.
This time she’d gone for incognito: the country singer continued to wail in the jukebox, the beer-drinkers didn’t sense her, a couple of pool players hardly glanced in the direction of the EXIT sign in the second it took her to canvass the place. She had to step forward—Insert close-up shot of military surplus boots abusing the floorboards—to locate the person she’d come to fetch behind the counter, blocked by a group of cough-a-chuckling workmen.
In profile, Kerri Hollis, 25, bends over to retrieve two beers from the icebox while mindfully ignoring the appreciative growl the workmen address at her posterior, where the orange lavafall of her hair ends.
And here the country music faded out a little, at least in Andy’s ears, triggered only by this: Kerri turning to serve the beers, her curls swinging around and cheering gleefully like kids on a carousel. It was a minor entry in the list of Kerri’s innumerable talents. Her hair had this joyful quality about it, in the way it trailed after her as she rode her bike downhill or dove off a rope swing. Andy used to admire it even when they were kids; it had already reached the border between her back and the end of her back back then, though it needn’t be too long for that, and it breathed and moved like it had a life of its own, or many. Andy used to imagine each individual strand with tiny cartoon eyes and a perennial kawaii smile, happy to participate in Kerri’s adventures, to witness every moment in the life of that promising child. When she stood in the rain, her hair welcomed the water. When it was sunny outside, it kited behind her as she ran, sparkling, greedily storing up solar energy like it planned to run a plane factory. When she sat down and read a book, which she did more often than any child and most grown-ups Andy had met, you could see her hair glowing with stored sunlight, humming quietly, shushing strangers. When they last saw each other five years ago at Kerri’s university, she had bound her hair in a ponytail while they toured the campus. She released it only briefly in the cafeteria, and Andy could have sworn she heard a collective gasp as she shook it loose. Those must have been four tough years for her hair. Now it was free at last, and Andy heard its happy song even through the depressing country music and the orcish grunts of the ape-men surrounding her.
It took another minute for Andy to notice a second novelty: Kerri wasn’t wearing her glasses. That was strange. Merriment and catastrophe ensued whenever Kerri lost her glasses during an adventure. She used to be defenseless without them. Now, however, she looked ready to battle.
She looked like she was halfway through the battle, actually. And losing.
Andy watched her in the mirror behind the bar, talking to the last man in the pack. “And for you?”
“I’ll have a beer too.”
A silence like a tropical cyclone formed above them, Kerri glaring at the guy with glasses-less, hateful eyes.
She turned and bent back down to the icebox, and the ogling and sneering through munched cigars resumed: “Oh yeah”…“There you go”…“That’s what I’m talking about.”
Andy claimed a stool at the other end of the bar, head low, left hand toying with the charm she carried in her pocket. Discreet as her entrances could be, she often had trouble keeping a low profile for too long, especially in crowded places. To counter this, she used this security blanket of sorts.
A second, completely unnoticed bartender materialized from the shadows, slapping Andy’s claimed acre of counter with a cloth. “Name your poison.”
“Coke.”
“Coke?”
“Make it Diet.”
The bartender left, an unfocused mustached blur.
“How about something to eat,” one of the men croaked at Kerri.
Kerri’s reflection stood in the mirror, dirty rag over her shoulder, arms akimbo, orange hair hushing expectantly. “What would you like, Jesse?”
“I don’t know,” said the alpha male. “Something hot.” The pack punctuated the jape with a timely snigger.
Don’t engage, Andy attempted to telepath forward.
“Some hot wings?”
“That’d be nice.”
“Any sauce?”
“More than you can swallow, honey.”
The gang laughed with fat, bearded, smug-faced laughter. Andy risked a side glance at Kerri’s face. She was holding her stance, unfazed, hatred steadily growing towar
d a boiling point.
“You’re revolting, Jesse.”
Something, probably the nondescript bartender, went hey.
Andy squeezed the last drops of magic out of the charm in her pocket. The country singer continued to babble his own notion of romanticism like an idiot.
“I’ll check the kitchen,” Kerri said, departing for the door. A man leaned over the counter as she retreated.
“Some well-buttered buns would be nice too!” he said, and the comment was celebrated with mirth.
“Good one, Neil.”
“You know, because ‘buns’ as in ‘ass,’ right?”
“Yeah, gotcha. Clever.”
“Excuse me.”
The whole pack turned.
Andy had stolen the five yards from her stool and was now standing in front of the gang, her jacket left behind, folded neatly on the bar next to her Diet Coke. She flipped her cap aside to show her face. Mm-hmmed comments of sexual appreciation were quickly mitigated by squinting eyes and rising eyebrows—the usual mixed feelings a five-foot-six brown-skinned woman with boots and an attitude tends to stir.
The alpha male, previously identified as Jesse, took the lead. “Yes, how can we help you, miss?”
“Well, um…” Andy’s hands moved nervously, her eyes searching for the right words somewhere on the floor. “Uh, God, I’m sorry; this is awkward…”
“Not at all,” he said with a smile of many-colored teeth.
“The thing is, I am legally obligated to respectfully ask you to stop behaving like inbred dicks before I go on to beat the shit out of you.”
Silence. The kind upon which comedians would shoot themselves onstage.
“Are you now?” Alpha calmly said, his surprise concealed behind his Ray-Bans.
“Yes, well, you see, because I’ve had military training, and lots of experience gathered here and there, I’ve become so proficient in battle that on one occasion, after a brawl in a bikers’ joint in Sturgis, South Dakota, a judge dictated that I should not engage in a fight without giving a fair warning. In particular, my nut kicks are astoundingly accurate.” She waited for some feedback from the other side, then chose to continue. “Because, you know, when you get kicked in the balls, as I imagine you know from personal experience, your ballsack just gets squashed into your pelvis. Soft tissue and your clothes absorb most of the impact while the testes themselves are pushed to safety. Because testicles are some slippery little rascals,” she said, pulling her left hand out of her pocket and showing her lucky charm to the rest of the class. The men stared blankly at what very unambiguously looked like a plastic penguin.
“See, if you examine your scrotum,” Andy went on, “you’ll notice you are able to locate the nut, but if you try to pinch it, which is kind of painful…(She roughly squeezes the toy, making it squeak, and the lower half of the penguin bloat-pops out of her fist.)…it always squirms out of your grip.”
“Yes, mine do that,” one of the men said, wildly interested.
“Yeah, right? But here’s the thing: my nut-cracking kicks are literally nut cracking. The testes cannot escape the impact. At least one of them always bursts open, and sperm pours into your bloodstream and it’s a disaster area all over your netherlands. And you’ll never get that teste back, so your reproductive ability is lowered fifty percent for life. Not to mention it reportedly hurts like giving birth to a sea urchin through your pee hole. But I wouldn’t know that, of course.”
Alpha had been rubbing the bridge of his nose for a full minute already. “Sorry, I’m missing the plot; your initial point was…?”
“Yeah, my bad, I get carried away. My point was, seeing how you guys were harassing that waitress and being very vulgar, I wondered if you could stop behaving like…well, being inbred dicks.”
She paused, and then finished with a candid appeal:
“Just give me an excuse to thrash you.”
Alpha sighed, faking discontent. She stood still, chest and crossed arms swaying gently with her breath, full lips shut tight, repressing the joyful anticipation while she mentally captioned the whole gang. First row, sitting down, Alpha, six-four, black-and-red leathers, Ray-Ban aviators; second row right, Beta, six-two, jackknife under the belt; left, Gamma, six-foot, broken nose, pool cue; in the back, Delta, five-nine, grabbing a beer bottle.
“You see, sugar,” Alpha began, raising a slow, ominous hand toward Andy’s cheek. “I would love to fulfill your request.”
His fingertips stretched dangerously close to Andy’s skin.
“But you forgot to say the magic word.”
Atoms away now.
“Which is…”
—
Any passerby to the conversation would have mistakenly concluded that the magic word was “CRUNCH.” For that was the incredibly loud sound Alpha’s fingers made when Andy pulled them apart by five inches, measured from the ends of the middle and ring, virtually disabling those extremities for any purpose other than effusively greeting Vulcans.
Alpha attempted a hopeless slap in midscream with his left hand that she easily blocked with her forearm, and she was already driving energy to her right leg to launch the much-hyped semicastrating kick when the rest of the thugs forced her to abort.
Beta charged, making her lose her step, and threw a punch at her face. She dodged it, kicked him in the knee, and, as he bent in pain, grabbed him by the parts of the human skull most resembling an ergonomic handle and smashed his head against the counter, making room for Gamma to attack.
Except this one swung a pool cue, which she didn’t dare block. Instead she rolled to the floor, waited for the cue to swing back, and dodged it again, letting a chair slow it down, then grabbed it by that end, snatched it out of Gamma’s hands, and swung it all the long way around back to him. That gave Gamma time to duck himself. Not Alpha, though: the cue whacked him as he was tending his dislodged fingers, whiplashing head spraying spittle as far as the mirror.
Delta managed to do nothing before Andy stepped forward and bashed his head with the pool cue. Because you can’t just wait for every bad guy to come at you.
She moved toward the pool table as Gamma retreated and grabbed a new cue by the midsection. The healthy ratio of broken bones per second fell for a minute while he swung the cue in midair, windmill style like the purple-masked Ninja Turtle. The improvised staff whooshed loudly through the tobaccosphere of the room like a gigantic hornet from outer space.
Andy stood through the demonstration, a skeptical Little John look messing up the angle of her perfect frown.
“That’s not how you grab a pool cue.”
She grabbed hers properly, point forward, and Gamma wasn’t able to block before she jabbed his sternum, pushing him off his stance. A side hit to the temple put him on the ground.
Beta and Delta were ready for battle again when she jammed the cue in one of the table pockets and snapped it in two. She took the resulting clubs and went on to do her own exhibition of audacious stick-wielding.
Delta stayed put, clearly impressed at this point. Beta took avail of his position behind her to whip out a jackknife and charge. Sadly his warcry, inspired by the Hong Kong movie overtones the fight was taking, betrayed his strategic advantage.
Andy spun on one foot: right club straight to hit the blade-carrying arm, left club to the inside of his elbow, right to the torso, left to the temple, right to the face of Delta joining in from behind, left heel to Beta’s shin, right to Delta’s crotch, and simultaneous strikes with both clubs on two different heads, in time to face the enraged Alpha charging like a mad buffalo and throw both clubs away and at last fling up her left foot.
The music stopped. And conversations ceased. Among dogs. In a two-mile radius. Their ears pricked up at the piercing ultrasonic howl coming from a small bar far away.
Alpha dropped to his knees, then to all fours, finally down into the fetal position, his hands cordoning off the devastated area.
“Andy?”
Andy turned on her
feet, fists raised, and that’s how Kerri saw her for the first time in five years.
That wasn’t the plan. Andy swiftly blew the bang of hair off her face and smoothed her top. “Hey.”
Kerri came hopping over the counter to hug her, ignoring the nondescript mustached blur of a bartender (and possible employer) offering his unsolicited opinion about the whole mess.
The last thing Andy ever remembered from that scene was being smothered in happy, cheering orange hair, pouring over her own shoulders like streaming confetti, mind overwhelmed by the mob of excited questions, taut muscles caught in the unexpected embrace. And the red cells inside her body, still drunk with adrenaline, gazed up in awe, dented shields and blood-dripping axes in their little hands, wondering where in the world did all this peace come from.
Then there was some heated dialogue between Kerri and the nondescript bartender, among threats to call the cops and the whimpering of neutered thugs crawling on the floor, and Andy later recalled hearing Kerri say “fuck this job” somewhere in the background and yank off her apron and throw it at her ex-boss’s blurry face, but all those bits were blurry themselves.
—
Next time she checked her surroundings, they were in another, louder bar having shots and peanuts, and Kerri wore a black-sleeved raglan shirt and smiled the loudest girl-smile ever.
“God, you were awesome!” she said. “I’ve been playing out violent scenarios with Jesse in my mind for months, and you just improvised that? It was so much better than anything I’d come up with!” She finished off a drink, then her grin narrowed into a proud smirk. “Girl, you’ve grown to your full potential. You’re everything I wanted to be.”
“Shut up,” Andy whispered, trying to hide behind the very tiny glass. It was becoming a night full of experiences she wasn’t used to. Alcohol. Praise.
Kerri signaled for another two shots in a gesture that seemed too vague and aimless to be of any consequence, but proved effective in under five seconds.
“So, apart from cleaning up the gene pool one asshole at a time, what are you up to?”
Andy shifted in her seat. “Well, not much. I hitchhiked for a while after I saw you at your alma mater. Took some jobs. What about you? I thought you’d be a biologist by now.”
Meddling Kids Page 2
