And you didn't hear one word I said, either. Now. If I help y' up, can you make it back to bed, or do you need to steady y' self a bit longer?”
“Unng...!” said Tess, leaning back over the water.
“Seems y' do...” said Maud, looking up at the sudden pounding on the kitchen door. “Mort!” she hollered “Let me get it!”
Tess had a look of blanched terror as Maud got to her feet. “Oh deary-do,” she said, “that can't be the coppers, unless you've had a skinny ball in here with us. You don't, eh?”
Tess gave a rigid shake of her head, and Maud stumped right out past Mort and Bart. She hooked the chain and opened the kitchen door against it to peer out at two teenagers. She closed the door, undid the chain and opened it wide. “Yeh?” she said with her fists on her hips.
The young man dug the gum out of his cheek with his tongue and looked her up and down from under the tattoos of his shaved head. “You're not Tess, lady,” he said, as his sister craned this way and that in her nose rings and Mohawk hair-do, trying to peer inside.
“Took y' long enough to figure it out, but I'm glad y' finally managed,” said Maud. “Now. Tess isn't up to company, so you two are going to have to leave.” And with that, she closed the door and turned the lock.
“Hey!” shouted the pair outside as they pounded on the door. “You can't do that! Children and Family Assistance sent us! We're Trent and Jasmine Warren, her new roomies!”
Maud hooked the chain and turned away. She found Tess still kneeling by the toilet. “What's wrong, dearie-do?” she said, when she saw that her nausea had been replaced by a look of dread.
“That was the Warrens?” said Tess. “They hate me.”
“Why on earth?”
“Well...they made me take my shots at school,” she said, frowning at her thumbnails. “But I'm just not at all ready for that. Trent knew about my shots and was after me all the time. Everybody always knows when a girl gets her shots. And I wouldn't have anything to do with him, in spite of how pushy he got. And Jasmine? She calls me 'earhole' all the time and makes ugly faces, but I think she hates everyone at school.”
“Aw dearie-do,” said Maud with a grunt, as she strained to kneel beside her with a brush. “I hate what's become of the schools. Y' know, they actually taught me to read, when I was in school.”
“Mom and Dad taught me,” said Tess, stifling a sob.
“You didn't let the school find out, did you? Something like that could very well have been what brought in the Children and Family Assistance.”
“Oh, they always told me that I had to keep my reading a secret.”
Maud nodded. “Well back to those two, I locked the door,” she said. “But if they do have orders, they'll be back and we'll have no choice but to let them in. Meanwhile, I can at least get a delay order in place until you've recovered enough to deal with them. Now if I can just get back on my feet, I'll help y' back to bed if you're ready.”
Once Tess was back in bed, she closed her eyes and wondered if there was any way to flee. “But where would I ever flee to?” she thought as she drifted into a deep sleep.
She had not been asleep very long when Maud opened the kitchen door against the chain and peered out the crack at a blond young man in denim, whom she recognized at once to be Drake Evans, but knowing better than to give him away to the stone ball on the table, merely said: “Yes?”
“Maud Baxter!” he said in wide-eyed alarm. “Why are you...? Nia! She's here, isn't she?”
Maud closed her eyes with a quiet shake of her head.
“No!” cried Drake.
Maud immediately closed the door. She would not have him overheard, blurting out something that would bring the police. There was not another sound from outside the door. She squeezed shut her eyes for a moment, and with a totter, shuffled to the table to sit with a tired sigh across from Mort and Bart.
* * *
Tess awoke to the smell of bread toasting on the griddle and talking in the kitchen.
“Would you mind if I waited until she's awake? I promise I won't stay too long or upset her.”
“That depends on how she wakes up,” said Maud. “She's been having quite a time with her medicine...”
“Maud!” cried Tess as she sat up. “I've got to puke and I've got the whirlies bad! Could Drake help me to the toilet?”
Drake was at her bedside at once, helping her to her feet. The moment he had her kneeling by the toilet, he let the door swing quietly to. He had long known that the bathroom had no skinny, but he waited for Tess to speak in case that they had just been forced by the authorities to add one.
“I heard one of the cops say that Nia was going to the capitol,” said Tess with an unexpected sob. “And the last thing she said was, she'll always love you. And poor Mom and Dad! It doesn't look like I'll ever, ever know...” And with that, she threw back her head and wailed with despair.
Drake had her in his arms at once, tears streaming down his cheeks. He looked away, struggling to hide a sob of his own. After a time, he turned to study her. “What on earth did they do to you?” he said. “You've got two black eyes that I can see...”
“Oh, one of the coppers whacked me on the back of the head with his e-stick...”
“The back of your head! Not your eyes? He must've damned near killed you...”
“I don't know,” she said, closing the lid and sitting on the toilet. “But they've got my middle all wrapped up tight. Do you suppose they broke a rib or two? That same cop was kicking me. Nobody's said a thing.”
“Do you know where the capitol is?”
“I don't think anyone knows,” she said, feeling of her middle. “Well, I reckon the coppers would have to know, wouldn't they?”
“Yeh, but they aren't people. Nobody ever talks to them, especially not the ones working for Children and Family Assistance. No one ever talks to any of those things...”
“And what I can't figure out is why that old lady out there in the kitchen is so nice. She's working for them. She said so.”
“I know why,” said Drake. “She and old Mort out there lost a daughter who'd be our age, had she lived. And they've not been able to have any more. They're 'way younger than they look, but they were living out in the country with all the spray for quite a while after the World Alliance took over.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Maud and Mort knew us. When Children and Family Assistance took Mom and Dad, Maud got assigned to me, so they helped me through my transition, just like they're doing for you. And I don't understand them taking Nia. Children and Family issued the license for us to be married in two more months and everything...” he said, coughing out a great sob in spite of himself.
He was dragging an eye down his sleeve when Maud pushed open the door. “If Tess is over being sick, it's time we got her back to bed,” she said as she shuffled in with a towel.
When they had gotten Tess settled in bed, Maud saw Drake to the door and stepped outside with him. “I'm afraid Children and Family Assistance is only giving her a week before she has to let those Warren kids move in,” she said as she pulled the door to behind her. “And if I read her right, I can't picture her managing with a pair like them, particularly not with the boy after her skirt.”
“That wouldn't be Jasmine and Trent Warren, would it?” said Drake, turning about on the bottom step and looking up at her.
“It was Jasmine. I wasn't sure about his name.”
“Oh I've got medicine for them,” he said. “Just a chat if you need me to.”
“Right away would be good.”
Drake gave a nod, came back up the steps, pecked her on the cheek and hurried on his way to supper, unaware that Trent and Jasmine were right above them in the spreading branches of the great burr oak by the steps.
As Tess got settled, the skinny on her dresser turned bright blue. “Tess?” it said.
“Give me a moment,” she said as she labored to sit up and throw aside her covers.
“How are you Tess?” said the man.
“I'm not sure I feel like talking...” she said.
“You were well enough for time with Drake.”
“So he could help me in to puke. It's a lot of fun, vomiting for company...”
“Tess,” said the man. “Have you any idea why it was necessary to resettle your parents?”
“I can't imagine how anything like that could ever be necessary...”
“They've allowed you to become sarcastic and defiant when you should be expressing your respect and gratitude. The teachers and counselors at your school have been concerned. Your parents weren't managing...”
“No!” she cried out in hoarse anguish, “No! No! No!”
Chapter 2
Drake vanished down the walkway. The door below the big oak gave a lazy squeal and a bang as Maud stepped back into the kitchen. A breeze rustled through the spray-shriveled leaves of the burr oak.
Jasmine popped her gum. “You look happy,” she said, swinging her legs back and forth from her perch. “Don't you want his advice?”
“Do you?” said Trent. He smacked the branch they were straddling. “If he comes at us with his idiot 'medicine,' I'll take him out.”
“You wish. I'll handle him.”
“Like you did when he dumped you?”
“You just score with little point-ear,” she said pausing to curl her lip. “Time you did. She's no better than the rest of us, particularly now.”
“Drake is a point-ear, sweetheart.”
“Yeh? Well your virgin earhole is a greenhead as well as a point-ear.”
“You're a greenhead...”
“Out of a dye bottle. Hers is real.”
“Right,” said Trent, scooting along the limb toward the trunk. “And his dumping you was real. And you're trying again?”
“No way,” she said, carefully standing up to teeter along behind. “It's payback time. We'll see if he remembers his advice for us when I'm through.”
* * *
Tess had been asleep for some time when she awoke from a terrible nightmare about the man in the skinny and sat up with a gasp. She could see by the utter blackness that it had not been daylight for hours. There was not even a crack of light from the door to the kitchen. She lay back with a sigh. “Did the school really turn me in?” she thought as she stared at the ceiling which was too dark to see. “Did Children and Family really come for Mom and Dad and Nia because of me? If I were like the other kids would they still be here? And if I start acting exactly like everybody else, would they let Mom and Dad come home?” She threw back her covers and sat on the edge of the bed. “There's nothing for it. I'm going to Broadstreet.”
Maud would be a problem. She would be in trouble if Tess disappeared. There would be no going out through the kitchen. She grabbed up her bedclothes in a wad, heaved them over the skinny on her dresser and tiptoed past the creaking floorboard for the bathroom where she stood in the tub, carefully inching up the sticking window sash in spite of her sore ribs. A little blue bottle on the sill toppled outside with a clink. She drew a breath. “I really must be medicated,” she thought as she returned to her dresser for jeans and a tank top. In short order she was clambering down to the chain link fence and into the yard below the bathroom window with a painful bound. A dog barked somewhere beyond the far end of the compound. A car down the roadway changed gears. Here and there were crickets, but otherwise the world was silent under the waning moon, sliding along through the clouds.
Broadstreet was only five blocks away, but it was quite a place indeed for a young lady to be going by herself in the middle of the night and wasn't really a street at all, but was the troll ward, a great chain link compound that encompassed the abandoned buildings of what was once the financial district of metropolitan Gollsport. She could see a well-lit guardhouse at the main gate when she got there, but she knew better than to go that way. Instead, she sought out a collapsed building a couple of blocks distant and stepped into the echoes of the brick sewer which led the long way from its basement to the rubble in the bottom of an old bank building inside the fence. From there she hurried down the moonlit streets littered with pieces of brick and trash, pausing here and there in hushed silence, trying to make out the sounds which had startled her.
Tess had not quite given in to being lost when she came upon a huge department store window, smeared with great swirls of tempera paint, glowing from the fires inside. The door had been gone for years, but when she stepped through the open doorway, she collided with a string in the dark which rang a dangling bell. A great hulking troll in plaid shorts glanced up at her and went right back to the customer he had in his barber's chair, while another troll in sunglasses, ropes of beads and plaid shorts of his own sat astride a tall stool, languidly stirring his pair of rattles in time with the great troll's work on the customer in the chair: shick-sha... shick-sha... shick-a-shick... shick-sha... shick-sha... shick-sha... shick-a-shick... shick-sha...
“Hey Maxi,” said Tess demurely.
“Ayewatta-dowah... ayewatta-dowah...” said Maxi in time with the rattles as he gave Tess a deep nod and went right on working. “Ayewatta-dowah... ayewatta-dowah... ayewatta-dowah... ayewatta-dowah...”
Shick-sha... shick-sha... shick-a-shick... shick-sha... shick-sha... shick-sha... shick-a-shick... shick-sha...
“Ayewatta-dowah... ayewatta-dowah... ayewatta-dowah... ayewatta-dowah...”
Suddenly, he was done. “You finished, Dyrney-punk,” he said, jerking away the customer's sheet with a pop like a whip. “That tattoo enough better than you be that it make you girlfriend jump like ice-cube goose.”
“Hey Tess!” said Maxi, turning to her with grand outstretched arms. “What my baby girl do be in this neighborhood by her only self?”
“I’m not by myself,” said Tess. “You’re here and nobody’d mess with me with you around.”
“That not was all what, baby girl,” he said, taking down his sunglasses for a dubious squint. “I no did brought you here...”
Suddenly she was in tears. “They took them, Maxi!” she wailed as he grabbed her up in his big arms. “They took my whole family!”
Maxi offered his barber's chair to her as she talked. The moment she was seated, he knelt in the most respectful troll fashion, slipped off her sandal and licked her foot.
When she told him how the police had beaten her mother and father senseless, he shot to his feet thumping his chest with his knuckles. “Ooot! Ooot!” he cried, flinging his arms as he tramped about the room, for her father Kellen had long been a good friend of his.
“So you see why I had to come,” said Tess. “I need your help, Maxi. I don't have any money, but...”
“Whoa baby girl!” he cried, tramping right up to the chair. “I be always any help, but when the government took all Dyrney from the Jutwoods and keep us here, I not know enough Dyrney-brutes to get you family back. You father and I scratchy-scratch and scratchy-scratch and scratchy-scratch and scratchy-scratch all both our heads and still not know where be capitol. Not even.”
“I know you would if you could, Maxi. But I’m not asking for that. What I need is a complete make-over, and I know that you can do that like no one else.”
“Make-over? Poop! You pretty pretty pretty thing. You no need.”
“Yeh Maxi. And all the kids at school call me a freak. And the ugly face on the skinny told me that the school turned in Mom and Dad to Children and Family Assistance.”
“They be the freaks with not no any backbone,” he said from under his beetling brow as he drew his hand over his face with a sigh. “Backbone give you extra pretty pretty. And Dyrney threw gnydy ball and gnydy ball and gnydy ball katoomp, katoomp, katoomp into the echo deep sewer poop. We no have ugly face on the skinny.�
�
“My! They'd come get anyone who did that.”
“Yeh,” he said. “And we did all sudden once. And daylight people be too many not no any backbone freaks. Don't you try, baby-girl.”
“I promise. All I need is a make-over.”
“You need big hug from stead.”
“I can't pay you, so I suppose I really ought to do it myself, though I’ve never cut it before,” she said with a sigh. “Do you think my dad’s electric razor will do to shave the sides of my head?”
“Cut? Shave? What you want that for? What be wrong with pretty pretty head?”
“Well my hair’s long enough to sit on. No one at school wears it that way. And I think Nia and I were the only ones with naturally green hair.”
“I like long and green,” he said, folding his arms with a decisive nod. “And don't the daylight people kids have all any kind of color for hair?”
“Yeh. They dye it.”
“You want dye?”
“Nah. I want everything off the sides and the hair that's left looking artificial...”
“Like some young Dyrney-punk?” he said with a look of astonishment.
“Yeh. With real troll swirls in the fuzz on the scalp on either side.”
“And I knitty-think you really-secret do-do want this,” said Maxi as he rolled his big eyes. “All right. You pay me the hair I cut. And then I owe you. By-cause you get free do-job for losing daddy and mamma by you own self. But I have to dance this out.”
And with that, the troll on the stool (who had not been asleep after all) took up his rattles at once: shick-sha... shick-sha... shick-a-shick... shick-sha... shick-sha... shick- sha... shick-a-shick... shick-sha... as Maxi picked up his comb and scissors and began shuffling in a slow circle around Tess where she sat in the barber's chair. “Ayewatta- dowah...” he chanted in time, “Ayewatta-dowah... Ayewatta-dowah... Ayewatta-dowah...”
After some hours, Maxi dropped his pitch to a conclusive “Dooo-waaaaah,” gently patted the rose he had just tattooed above her hip, and set about rummaging in the wavering shadows for a mirror. No troll ever needed one, so it had been set aside, but a mirror was simply required for a beautiful young lady out of the light. He found it leaning against the wall where it had become hopelessly streaked with splatters from the sink and hurriedly waddled through the flotsam of the room to plant it reverently before her.
Wham! Page 2
