by Ryan Schow
“Right.”
“What if I want you to stay while I take your place hitting the clubs with Netty and our former besties?”
“Is that what you want?” I ask, hoping she’ll say no.
“Actually I want to see Mom and Dad and Rebecca,” she says, causing me to sigh with relief. “So if you want to head down tonight, we can switch.”
“So I’ll come to you then?” I ask.
“Yes. Just text me when you’re here and where you’re parked and I’ll switch out.”
“Why don’t we just tell Netty there are three of us?” I ask.
“She’s got too much on her plate already,” Raven tells me. I sense a sadness in her voice, something about her that’s holding back. “I think she’ll be excited to get out and dance her woes away.”
“Are you worried about her?” I ask.
“I’m worried about all of us, about this world, about this Aloysius creep.”
“Have you talked to Liz about it?” I ask, hoping to get a laugh from her. She graces me with a giggle at the shortening of Elizabeth’s name.
“You know she hates it when you call her that, right?” Raven says.
“That’s what makes it so funny.”
“Yeah, she knows,” Raven says. “But she’s too busy getting dicked by Sebastian to want to think about this.”
“It’s a good place to be,” I say.
“Yeah,” Raven says, reminiscing. “Well I’ll see you in a bit then?”
“I’ll call you when I get there.”
When my friends get to town, I ask my father if I can borrow his car. He asks which one and I tell him the R8 of course.
“No way,” he says.
He’s cleaning up from dinner and preparing to romance Orianna. Rebecca is watching TV and I’m bothered that he thinks I can’t handle the car’s horsepower.
“Is it because you don’t want the miles on it?” I ask.
“No,” he says, washing a stack of plates. “It’s because it’s mine.”
“Let me try this again,” I say. “I’m taking your car and I’ll have it back in a few hours, with a surprise no less.”
He dries his hands, reaches into his pocket, takes out a key and hands it to me.
“Did I just make you do that?” I ask, taking the keys.
“Not that I’m aware of,” he says.
I reach up and kiss him on the cheek.
“You’re the best.”
“If you bring it back with so much as a scratch, I’ll turn from the best into the absolute worst.”
“Your daughter loves you,” I say, smiling.
“Your dad loves his daughter,” he says.
“And your mother loves you both,” Orianna says behind me, her hand reaching for my hand, nothing but love in her eyes.
“And your new sister loves all you silly goofballs,” Rebecca says. We get into a four person hug that’s pretty funny, but actually quite nice.
“This girl loves her goofy ass family,” I say, my head next to Rebecca’s head, next to Orianna’s head.
“I’ll see you clowns later,” I say with a smile.
I want to be with my friends, have some fun and see Netty, but in this moment I feel such a profound love for these people, such a connection, I almost change my mind. But Raven needs to see them, too. Which is me, I guess.
Who am I to screw myself out of family time?
The drive into the city is exhilarating in the R8, and true to my word, I don’t so much as lay a scratch on it, hit a pothole, or run through a puddle. When I find a place to park outside Netty’s house, I text Raven, tell her I’m downstairs. She shows up a few minutes later. I get out of the R8 looking at her and seeing myself.
I give her a hug because even though she’s me, she’s also like my sister, which is super twisted if you think about it.
“Miss you, bitch,” she says.
I kiss her cheek and say, “If I told you that you look fucking hot, would you believe me?”
She laughs and says, “You know I would.”
“Well you do.”
“Dad said he’d kill us if we scratched the car,” I tell her, “so be careful.”
She takes off and I head upstairs, walk inside and see Netty and her mother and my heart soars. Netty looks at me looking at her and says, “Okay, this is weird.”
“What is?”
She walks up to me, looks at my eyes, sees them watering for her and says, “Wow, freaking unbelievable.”
I give her a hug even as she just stands there. “Slide those bean poles around me woman, I missed you.”
She does and then she says, “So who are you?”
“It’s me dummy,” I reply. “Just…different.”
“But you just left,” she says, pulling back to study me again. “And in different clothes no less.”
“It’s a long story,” I say.
“You already told me a long story,” Netty says.
“It wasn’t long enough.”
We go into her bedroom and I give her the details about us. I tell her Raven wants to be with her in this time, just as I want to be with her.
“So there are two of you?” she asks. “That’s it?”
Taking a breath, looking at her, I see myself smiling, acting so honest while I’m telling a total lie and I hate myself for it.
“Actually there’s three.”
“What?!”
“Remember when I said I went down south and met Sebastian?” She nods, slowly, hesitantly. “Well Elizabeth is the version of me that’s down there smashing ass on the beach.”
“Lucky bitch,” Netty mumbles.
“Right?”
“Listen,” I say taking her hand. “We’re going out and we’re going to have some fun tonight, so if you have something sexy, dust it off, and if not let me know and we’ll go shopping.”
She brightens up at the idea of going out. “Really?”
“For sure.”
“I’ve got some stuff,” she says. “What about you?”
“I need to check Raven’s closet.”
“Do you still have your fake ID?” I ask. She nods her head. “Good, because we’re going to Monarch, the nightclub on 6th and Mission.”
“Monarch?”
“Yeah. It’s this sexy little Art Nouveau, Steampunk, Victorian-Inspired hotspot. We’re talking concrete bars, expensive drinks, acrobatics on the bar, an elevated DJ booth with a downstairs nightclub. That’s just downstairs. Upstairs it’s super cozy if you want to engage in some mild to moderate debauchery, which we might.”
“You sound like a commercial,” she says, laughing.
Acting extra mechanical, like a human robot, I say, “Monarch San Francisco is where you go to drink, dance and grind your problems away.”
“Sounds amazing,” Netty says, making dreamy eyes.
“The only problem is the five hundred pound bouncer outside. Some animal with a ponytail and a keen eye for posers. You’re not twenty-one and you’re small, so if he harasses you, let me handle it.”
“What are you going to do that I can’t?” Netty asks, flippant, her Russian attitude showing up.
“C’mon now,” I say, laughing.
She makes two fists and shows them to me. “This one’s for crowd control,” she says, her accent heavy and her eye on her right fist, “and this one’s for whichever mouthy bitch wants to flex her tits on me.”
“Are you for real?” I ask, a little less laughter in my voice, “because you’re like a hundred and five pounds and even though you may be able to take down some mouthy, rancorous slag—as you claim—you’re going to want to holster those weapons against someone five times your size.”
She drops her fists, frowns. “But you can handle him?”
“You know I can.”
“Well alright then,” she says, the frown falling away, giving way to a sly smile. “Looks like it’s time to find something slutty/sexy.”
“Never have more truer words been said,” I say.
Netty and I are the bright and shiny dick magnets of the world. We exude sexuality. Our faces are gorgeous, our makeup spot on, our nails and toenails freshly polished. I look her up and down, then I look myself up and down and love what I see. Her breasts are pushed up; so are mine. She’s got a half shirt on with her midriff exposed; so do I. Our skirts are short, our legs are tanned and our shoes look like something you’d wear to a Hollywood after party if you were dying to have all eyes on you.
“You ready?” I ask.
“I am.”
“Good. Time to be different people. Time to see if this town can take a punch.”
Netty and I hit the SoMa district, find a place to park at the corner of 6th and Market, then walk to the club. The night is cold on our skin, but we’re warm inside. The anticipation alone is worth the night out.
And me?
I’m keeping an eye out for my friends. I’ve had psychic tethers on them all day. I’ve been making sure they got to town okay, got their hotel okay, got the idea in their head that Monarch was the club they wanted to come to. Monarch. Ha! The irony of the name is not lost on me. The kid that killed me when I was Abby, he was a product of Monarch Enterprises, a company that Holland, Heim and my father bought clones and bodies from. It’s also where they hired their child assassins from.
“Are you alright?” she asks me.
“Just thinking about this bouncer,” I say, turning my attention to him. “His name is Spanky and he’s extra irritable tonight.”
“How do you know that?”
“He ate a bad shrimp taco and now he’s got the kind of stomach pains you get if you’re about to give birth out of your ass. It’s a cramping that comes with sickness, gas and eventually enough diarrhea to make your entire life flash before your eyes.”
“You’re not going to make him shit himself to death, are you?”
I laugh, unsure of what I’m going to do.
“Let’s just chill. Act like it’s no big deal, okay?”
“Okay.”
“And don’t be a smart ass.”
“Do you know what you’re asking of me?” she asks, nervous delight in her voice.
“I do,” I say as we get in line. I see Spanky, see the pained look he’s working to keep off his face. His studded jeans look extra tight, his shirt straining at the buttons against his exceptionally large frame, his guns on display—a pair of well-defined biceps that have to be mid-twenties in circumference. The man is a good six foot seven, long braided ponytail, and right now he’s hassling a young guy and his girl.
“This ain’t you,” he says to the girl, handing her back her ID.
“Yes it is, oh my freaking God dude!”
“It’s not,” he says, hooking his thumb our way. “Beat it before I call the cops.”
“You can’t talk to her like that,” the boyfriend says, ever the protector.
“I can and I will!” he barks down at the guy, sending him reeling backwards.
To the kid’s defense, he’s maybe five-eight, five-nine, a buck seventy and not as exercised as he should be. His dick-sized arms and his bony legs fit in today’s fashion, but in a world full of men who’ve become pussies, this guy is the poster child for today’s feminized male.
“Let’s go, this place sucks anyway,” he says, talking tough.
“It does,” the bouncer says, waving the next person forward. “So take your little girlfriend and go.”
I feel Netty’s emotional butthole pucker.
“It’s cool,” I say. “Just stay cool.”
Now I’m thinking not only about me, but about Cicely, Tempest and Georgia and I’m wondering how they’re going to get in. We all have fake ID’s, but this guy has a perceptive eye, a short temper and the sort of shrimp taco cramps that are causing him to squirm.
We smell something like raw sewage waft by and Netty grabs her nose. The guy just totally creeped out an air brownie. This master blaster just grunted out a heinie hiccup and now everyone’s making those hard eyes that say, alright, who TF just did that?
“Good God,” she says.
Yeah, it’s like an opened corpse. At least he feels better. But then a gas bubble rolls and as he’s checking ID’s and we’re moving forward, he’s thinking with every moving bubble comes the promise of the eventual mudslide.
Right now he’s thinking there’s no one to do his job for him while he lets Polly out of jail and it’s got him sweating. I’m feeling inside him, fully feeling every distressing emotion. I feel his shins starting to sweat, his underarms getting damp. He takes a hanky from his back pocket, dabs his forehead, waves us forward. All he wants is a toilet and some privacy.
“ID’s, ladies,” he says, looking at us. He’s already thinking we’re full of shit, and he’s right. But not as full as him.
“You don’t look so good, Spanky,” I say.
“I’m fine,” he says, flashlight on the ID’s.
“Shrimp tacos?” I ask.
He looks up, studies me. “What about them?”
“I had some a couple of days ago. Felt like an angry badger crawling and scratching its way out of my colon.”
He gives a genial laugh, hands me my ID. Now he’s looking at Netty’s ID. He looks up at her and I say, “You know how you think you eked out that one trouser cough that’s just been kicking down the backside of your butthole and that was the relief you needed?”
He looks up at me and says, “What the hell, kid?”
“Yeah, but then what you did, you realize all that fart juice, it was like an air cushion holding back the landslide.”
“Do I look like I’m going to shit myself?” he says.
“I know you’re about to shit yourself,” I say. “Give her back her ID, let us through.”
“She looks like she hasn’t even hit puberty yet,” he says, wincing, holding back a groan. He’s looking down at her tits and I’m thinking this guy needs a bit more pain.
“Both of you, beat it,” he says, handing Netty her fake ID.
“You can’t turn us away,” Netty says.
“The ID is good, but you’re not twenty-one and you know it.”
“Neither of us are, Spanky,” I say.
Netty steps forward, looks up at him and says, “You have no idea who you’re fucking with.”
Netty’s not afraid to drop the f-bomb, and it sounds good coming from her. Me? Not so much. But on her it’s kind of sexy.
“Tell it to the bouncer at the kiddy club,” he says, looking over us to the people behind us.
I turn and say, “Stay.” Then to Spanky: “There are three girls coming here tonight, girls so beautiful they hardly look real. They’re all my age, which is to say, underage. You’re going to let them in even though it flies in the face of everything you as the bouncing sort stand for.”
He laughs at me, then he looks at Netty and that laugh becomes a sour frown.
Jeez…
“I’ll make you a deal,” I tell him, snapping my fingers in his face. He looks down his nose at me. “You let us through and I don’t make you crap yourself. But if you tell us to leave one more time, I will wring your colon dry in less than ten seconds.”
“Are you threatening me?” he asks, his tenor sharp, but louder. “Because that’s the strangest threat I think I’ve ever had. I mean, people tell me they’re going to report me, kick my ass, kill me…”
“She could do all three,” Netty says.
“Perhaps, little lady,” he says with a grin made painful by the gas bubbles. Looking down at Netty, but pointing a meaty finger in my face, he says, “but she can’t make me shit myself.”
He turns and flashes the light in my face and in that minute, I roll hard into him, use my psychic hands to get a grip on his colon, just behind the fullest section. He startles because he watches my eyes bleed to black. And then he feels it: the boiling agony of me keeping my word…
“Those are my hands around your colon, Spanky.”
“Bullshit,” he s
ays, doubling over. “Just an air bubble.”
I start to squeeze, start to twist his colon, the pain escalating from moderately uncomfortable to downright distressing. A new layer of sheen maps his brow.
Beads of sweat trickle at the temples.
“This is not the kind of situation where you spit out a poo crumb, or maybe blow a diarrhea-bubble. See, if I twist a little harder”—and now he’s doubling over and really groaning—“I can move everything a little faster. Imagine I really give you a good squeeze...”
He lashes out, lightening fast, trying to grab my hair, my shirt, an arm, something, but I step back, grab his hand, flip it over and bend his wrist backwards so hard he takes a knee. This all happens too quick for most people to comprehend, yet I keep the psychic pressure on his colon. I realize I shouldn’t be doing this, that I’m becoming more of a jerk than I already am, but Draco said relax and I need to relax.
I need Monarch.
“This is what’s going to happen,” I say, standing over the top of him, “you are going get off your knees, you’re going to let me and my friend in and you’re going to let the three girls I told you about in as well. They are about ten minutes out. You’ll know them when you see them. And like me, they are not twenty-one, but tonight that won’t matter to you. At least it shouldn’t.”
“I’ll let you in,” he growls through gritted teeth, “but not them.”
“See now that would be really bad. It would be so bad that if you do that, I’m going to come out here and snap your wrist. Not this one,” I say, pushing back and cranking down harder, “your jerk wrist.”
I feel him cringe at the thought of what I’m suggesting.
When you can walk into anyone’s brain like it’s an open house, you see a person for who they truly are. Not the version of themselves they present to the world, or their mothers or their church. No, not at all. What I’m talking about are all the dark secrets we bury to protect the world from us and all our debauchery. I’m talking about all the shameful things they think and do when no one’s watching.
Our friend Spanky here isn’t called Spanky because he looks like a Little Rascal. He’s called Spanky because…well, you get it. He’s a chronic masturbator. Then again, so is half the male population, but not as bad as Spankadoodle-dandy here.