Dark Streets, Cold Suburbs

by Aimee Hix

  “So, you’re, like, what, Ben’s aunt or something?”

  I cocked an eyebrow. Aunt? Or something?

  “Or something,” I said, trying not to smirk. Her mangling of the English language didn’t deserve the encouragement and I’d already embarrassed Ben badly enough. I’d let him decide what he told these girls.

  “Aunt? No way. She’s way too young to be his aunt. She’s his sister and she’s totally a badass PI,” Aja said.

  “Shut up.”

  “No way.”

  “Oh my god, that’s so cool.”

  I didn’t dare look at Ben. Showing up in spandex was bad enough, but to be outed as a PI was an especially painful blow. He harbored his own spy hero fantasies and no teenage boy, no matter how evolved, wants to be shown up by his sister.

  “You needed to meet the assistant wrestling coach, Willa?” Ben asked, his teeth close to gritted.

  I handed Fargo’s leash off to Aja and allowed Ben to drag me toward the building. After we were out of sight, I pulled my arm out of his grasp. “Ow, dude. I said I was sorry. You don’t need to yank my arm out of the socket.”

  “This is my world. I don’t jump in the middle of your cases, do I?”

  I stopped and raised an eyebrow. “Yeah, you wouldn’t do that. It would be wrong for you to insert yourself into a case or even worse my boyfriend’s job. How’d that ATF internship go, Ben?”

  He looked away from me, down the hall. He’d forgotten I could go toe-to-toe in the You Got Your Chocolate in My Peanut Butter routine.

  He continued stomping down the hallway looking entirely like a pissed off flamingo. Which meant one of the accumulated girls was one he was interested in. Poor timing considering they were all running off to different colleges in six months. Unless … I texted Aja.

  I’m deputizing you. Figure out which one Ben’s interested in.

  She replied with a laughing emoji.

  I had followed Ben through the large gym and then back through a hallway with a set off series of classrooms and offices.

  We arrived at the door of a room full of equipment, a desk shoved in a corner. The room was empty. That was a bust.

  “Can I help you?” A tall, balding man was standing at the opening of the hallway, coming out of the gym.

  “Yeah, we’re looking for the assistant wrestling coach. I have some questions about the MMA club he was sponsoring this past summer.”

  Another moment a badge would have come in handy.

  “Well, ma’am, you don’t have to worry about your son joining. The club wasn’t approved.”

  Okay, I’d only missed a night of sleep. I wasn’t looking haggard enough to be mistaken for the mother of an eighteen-year-old.

  “Yes, I understand, but I wanted to talk with him about why he applied for one.”

  The man sighed, like I was deeply wounding him for even wanting to talk to another human being about something.

  “The administration understands it was ill-advised.”

  I thought I’d recognized him when he sighed, but his use of the phrase ill-advised confirmed it. He’d been my ninth-grade gym teacher. The guy who kept us outside while it was sleeting because it was one degree above the limit for what was too cold for outside gym. He’d said it had been “ill-advised” when my mother came barreling down to the school, demanding to speak to the principal, the vice principal, my counselor, and all the gym teachers. That had been one crowded meeting. People could not apologize fast enough.

  He didn’t recognize Ben, which meant he hadn’t been Ben’s gym teacher. That wasn’t a coincidence if I had to guess. I decided to torment him.

  “Mr. Hayes? Wow. Willa Pennington. I was in your freshman gym class. Man, that would have been fifteen years ago.”

  He literally cringed away from me. He remembered. My mother is a lovely woman but if you put one of her kids in danger, she was going to verbally flay you alive.

  He regained his composure, likely honed through two decades of working with teenagers and their parents, and smiled. “How is your mother, Miss Pennington?”

  “She’s great. My brother here wanted to talk about the MMA club because he wanted to see if that group would be willing to take a class at a local dojo. If they get enough interest, they’ll add MMA to their roster.”

  Ben was used to my methods so he just nodded, sullenly, as I gave the man a bright smile.

  “Oh, well, I suppose that would be okay. Ramsey will be here in a few minutes.”

  He scampered off, probably before any other family members arrived, and we lounged against the wall.

  “I really am sorry, dude.”

  “I know,” he said, sighing. “It’s just there’s a girl and she was there and Daniel … .”

  I suppressed the urge to inundate him with questions. I’m genetically nosy and this PI thing isn’t a coincidence. I did always try to be my best self with my brother, though. He’d earned it being my sibling, a rough gig by any standards.

  A stocky, muscled guy shorter than me came around the corner and stopped. He scowled at us.

  “You’re not supposed to be back here.”

  Nothing gets my back up faster than someone being hostile for no reason. I shifted into a more assertive posture.

  “Mr. Hayes said otherwise.” An exaggeration of the conversation but let’s call that a gray area.

  “Oh.”

  He still hadn’t moved.

  “We’re waiting for Ramsey.” I had the sneaking suspicion the man before me was going to turn out to be the man in question.

  “Yeah?”

  What the hell was up with this guy’s attitude? He worked at a high school. He should have been well-used to dealing with people, yet he acted like he’d been in the joint for a decade.

  “Yeah. We wanted to talk about the MMA club.”

  “Yeah?”

  Was I speaking English?

  “Yeah.” Ball back in your court, dude. I can do this all day.

  “Well, there isn’t an MMA club so there’s not much to talk about.”

  “Look, my brother is interested in getting an MMA class added to our dojo and wanted to contact the kids who were interested. Can you help us?”

  I could see Ben out of the corner of my eye, he’s adopted my stance and was staring the guy down. He could get mad at me but no one was going to give me crap. He might have been a decade younger but he was typical brother from the toes of his Chucks to the very top of his shaggy head. He was also too many pounds shy of intimidating but it was sweet.

  “Where?”

  Ugh. Pulling teeth would have been enjoyable compared to questioning him. Even if they were my teeth.

  “Carson’s.”

  “That’s the girly martial arts place, right?”

  I gave him my not-so-nice smile, bared teeth and go ahead and piss me off eyes. “I go there so if that’s what you mean by girly then yeah.”

  “He teaches little kids how to pretend to fight,” Ramsey said.

  He was one of those. The people who think martial arts should be all about kicking someone’s ass in a bar fight like something out of an eighties action movie.

  “He teaches lots of things and all different ages. Listen do you have the names of the kids interested?”

  “What do you take there?” He was smirking now.

  “I’m in private training. We do a little bit of everything.”

  I wanted the information but I had a feeling this was just him getting his ego stroked.

  “Maybe I have the list. Not sure. Everything?”

  “Yeah, jiu-jitsu —”

  He scoffed. “You rolling around on the floor in pajamas. Worthless.”

  What the hell? He was the assistant wrestling coach and he … nope, he was fine with rolling around on the floor. For guys. I knew i
f he had the list he wasn’t going to give it to me. Sometimes leads panned out like that. It was time to cut my losses.

  “Okay, well, thanks.”

  “I thought you wanted the list.”

  “Yeah, we’re not really interested in MMA anymore.”

  I turned away, Ben hiking up his backpack.

  “What? All of the sudden?”

  I turned back to find him smirking at me. I gave him full-force cop face and his arrogant smile slipped a bit. “Yeah, all of the sudden.”

  I pushed Ben ahead of me and we walked back out of the school the way we came in, Ben muttering under his breath about rude guys and one day doing something about it. I hoped that girl, the one hanging out with Aja and Fargo, liked him too because he was a good kid.

  Chapter

  16

  I knew I was right. It only made sense based on the behavior we’d seen. If Damian had been abusing steroids, and I was convinced now that he had, he’d have been a powder keg, strapped to C4, and wrapped in a thermite coating ready to be set off. So who’d been there when the fuse was lit? Who was the bigger bomb?

  I went over the whole sequence of events while I’d showered and my theory held up. I grabbed new workout clothes and dragged them over my body. Aja had to prep for an AP exam and Ben was still bubbling like a lava pool so I dragged him with me to the dojo. The afterschool classes for the littlest kids were still going on. We sat in the car for a minute and I shoved a handful of almonds into my mouth while Ben went on and on about how glad he was he’d be leaving behind all the “idiots and losers at that stupid school.”

  “Even Aja?” I asked around a mouthful of almond paste.

  He sighed. “Why do you always have to ruin a good rant? You get to do it all the time. Why can’t I just once get a nice rage going?”

  I swallowed. “Because you’re not me. You’re you and you don’t rage. So some stupid kid made a trashy remark. It’s not a big thing.”

  As the voice of reason, I wasn’t terrifically experienced but if some guy getting mouthy was the worst thing he had to deal with, he was going to do pretty well in life. People hated me enough to try to kill me. Granted, I’m pretty annoying but I work hard at it.

  “Willa, it’s wrong and it’s sexist. Sheesh, you’re a feminist, right?”

  I stopped digging in the bag of almonds and stared at him. I had clearly not given him the benefit of my years on the force and all the crap I endured. I loved him in all his idealistic earnestness, but he was veering into mansplaining and needed to be smacked down.

  “Yup, I am a big ole card-carrying feminist but I’m also a realist and the day men stopped saying stupid shit because they’re hot for some woman is the day the last man on the planet dies. Don’t do it in the workplace, don’t do it on the street, don’t touch people without their permission, don’t ever think you can berate a woman for turning you down. And don’t think for one second I believe that this violates your feminist principles. You’re squicked out because this kid wants to have sex with your sister. Your much older sister.”

  He shuddered, opening his mouth and closing it like a fish on a hook. Mission accomplished.

  “If it makes you feel better, I remember guys at seventeen and they’re not particularly picky so … .

  I saw in the rearview mirror the toddlers and their moms emptying out of the dojo. We had a two-hour window between now and the after-dinner classes to work out and get some of the emotional unrest out of Ben. I needed the physical release. My muscles were bunched from too many days away from my regular workouts and poor sleep.

  I jumped out of the truck and hauled my bag out of the backseat. Ben dragged himself out of the passenger seat like a kid going to the dentist.

  “Do I hafta work out?”

  For a health nut, he sure hated exercise. “Yes, you ‘hafta’ work out. It’s good for you. Plus Boston has some rough areas. You need to learn some more self-defense before you leave for MIT.”

  “MIT is in Cambridge,” he said, walking as slowly as possible, stopping for every minivan waiting to back out of a parking space.

  “Which is kissing distance from Boston where I know you and the other geniuses will go to listen to that crap music you love.”

  “It’s called nerdcore and it’s very popular.”

  “White guys rapping about video games, super heroes, and Game of Thrones is literally the opposite of very popular.”

  I stood, hand ready to pull on the handle, and watched as he managed to appear as if he was moving in slow motion.

  “You get your ass in here right now, Benjamin No Middle Initial Pennington, or I will tackle you and embarrass you in front of all these people,” I yelled, as loudly as I could.

  He laughed, like he always did when I used his lack of a middle name as a middle name, and picked up his pace. Adam pushed the door out from the inside, laughing, as well.

  “No middle initial?”

  “Our parents thought Benjamin Pennington was pretty long and couldn’t come up with a short middle name they both liked so they didn’t give him one. On forms, though, you have to indicate NMI ‘no middle initial’ because they all want it and you can’t leave it blank. That’s how the joke came about. He’s Benjamin NMI Pennington.”

  Ben slung his arm over my shoulder, good mood restored, and ruffled my hair. I hated it as much as he did and he knew it. I was definitely not letting him leave the dojo without putting him in a headlock.

  Adam looked at us, correctly gauging the level of sibling nonsense he was witnessing, and smiled an indulgent smile usually reserved for the littlest of his students. “You two are ridiculous. You squabble more than the kids in my classes.”

  I swept past him into the empty room littered with pool noodles and force shields. Usually he made the kids clean up before they left, which meant either class ran long or he was making us tidy up.

  “Okay, you know what to do,” Adam said.

  We were cleaning up. Ben gathered the force shields and stacked them while I picked up all the pool noodles and smacked him a few times before putting them in the container. It took all of three minutes.

  “Way to go, you two. Nice teamwork,” Adam said. I resisted the urge to pull a pool noodle back out and beat him with it. Mostly because it was a pool noodle and about as good a weapon as you’d expect of something called a noodle and made out of foam.

  “Can you dial back the ‘hyper excited to work with kids’ persona, please? I can only deal with one personality crisis at the moment.”

  “Force of habit. And who’s having a personality crisis? Not you. You’re pretty much the most solidly formed person I’ve ever met.”

  I gestured at my brother who had pulled his phone out of god knew where and was texting.

  “Oh, Benjy’s a little stressed because one of the boys on his bus would like to take me to pound town,” I said, smirking, knowing the euphemism would crack up Adam and horrify Ben. Ben was indeed horrified but Adam was more sympathetic than amused.

  “Oh, Ben, man, I’m sorry. I dealt with that too. Kids are jerks.”

  “Says the man who’s devoted his life to teaching children? I didn’t know you had a sister.”

  Adam hemmed and hawed. “Well, actually it was my older brother. Gay teen, gay friends.”

  I had a hard time staying upright when I saw the look on Ben’s face. He desperately wanted to laugh but given his earlier outrage at the treatment I, and by that respect he, had received, it was difficult to laugh at someone else who had gone through the same thing. Check and mate.

  “Okay, enough with you both feeling feelings of outrage and confusion on behalf of older siblings. Can we get to hitting each other, please? It’s all I live for.”

  Probably because I was not sympathetic to either of their plights, I got stuck working solo running drills on Bob, the freestanding heavy b
ag with the human torso and head minus limbs. Bob was flesh-toned too … and only flesh-toned. Adam knew it creeped me out, so it wasn’t something he made me use often. The kids, on the other hand, delighted in Bob’s tough guy expression and Venus de Milo condition. I don’t think we give kids enough credit for their morbid little minds. I know I was particularly gruesome as a child due to lots of unsupervised reading and late-night television horror movie broadcasts.

  I hit Bob in the face a few times just because his beige-ness annoyed me. Then I hit him in the face a few more times because I was pissed at Damian for emotionally abusing Aja, a couple of jabs for the guy who’d beaten Damian to death, a great right hook for Ramsey’s smirky disdain for real martial arts, and I straight up pounded Bob in the face for that stupid kid who’d bullied my brother.

  I stopped punching Bob. “Okay, I’m a little angry about the kid making sexist comments.”

  Ben and Adam stopped their drills. Adam looked at me with as blank an expression as he’d ever given me. Ben didn’t feel the need for restraint and rolled his eyes. “Duh! Of course you’re angry. Did you just realize that? I thought you were just teasing me.”

  I shrugged. “Mostly. It’s just … .” I struggled for any words that would make it make sense.

  “It’s just nothing. You’re not an object, Willa. You’re a person. No more and no less valuable than any other person. Not to be used as fulfillment for someone’s desires or anger at the world,” Adam said. His tone was neutral but all three of us knew he meant Mark Ingalls and his cohorts from last fall.

  I gripped my hands tighter inside the boxing gloves. A sexist comment was different than a racial epithet and yet the same—it reduced me to a thing.

  I renewed my attack on Bob, striking blow after blow for all the slights and disrespect I’d endured. Putting my hip into the blows, I watched as Bob rocked on his base, threatening to tip over, weighted as it was for less serious combat drilling. Hard rock began to pulse from the speaker in the ceiling covering up the slightly tinkling strains of some top-forty pop hit from the dance studio next door. I recognized the song as the beginning of my hard run mix, the one I used when I needed the release of pushing my body and lungs to the brink of what I was physically capable of.