“Thanks.”
“Wow. Sorry I didn’t get the door, the baby was having a moment and I had to get her binky.” The baby. I can’t even find the words. “Would you like some tea? Coffee? Soda?”
“Got any chocolate milk?”
She gives me a sly smile and says, “A sweet tooth. Just like your father.”
I didn’t think hell would be this well decorated.
Next thing I know, I’m sipping Nesquik next to Millie around the glass table I’d found her at, wishing she wasn’t so fucking nice. If she were cold and uncaring, I could at least walk away from this experience feeling vindicated. Since this isn’t the case, I’m answering her questions about high school and New York City life. My ego is melting and turning into a pool of boiling bitterness. The venom is like a heartbeat, persistent, grinding into my mind at high speeds. I can’t drink the chocolate milk fast enough; every sip cancels out a pulse of unfiltered hate.
After a while, I can’t take the suspense any longer, so I finally decide to ask. “Is, um, my dad around?”
She gets an almost hurt look in her eyes. “No, I’m sorry, honey. He’s at work. He wanted to be here, but it was one of those days.” I let her think that this is a big bummer for me and look at my shoes. “But he did leave what you needed out for you after you called this afternoon. Hold on….” She gets up and exits the room, leaving me to finish my chocolate milk and look around. It’s nice. I remember them having a nice home, but nothing like this. The more I stare, the more comes back to me, and the more disgusted and outraged I feel. Christmases in itchy sweaters. Helping Lon with his tie the day of our great-aunt’s funeral.
How much do you think this place set him back?
Please not now.
You can “not do this.” Me, I’m pissed.
I’m begging you. The room closes in, and my head swims in contempt. Please, not now.
You never wonder why your family had to be the test run?
I don’t know. I don’t want to talk about it. Fuck off.
It’s because I’m right, huh?
Maybe.
“Hi.”
I turn around to face the little voice and see a girl who let me in. She stands half-hidden by a decorative umbrella stand, her eyes fixated on me with rapt fascination. This time I summon the stones to smile at her and be at least somewhat welcoming and brotherlike.
“Hi,” I coo. “Bethany, right? I’m Locke.”
“Oh.”
There’s a moment of staring at each other, the awkwardness obviously not exclusive to me.
“How’s having a baby brother?”
She stares for a second and then whispers, “Okay. Brian’s nice. Sorta.”
I bite my lip to keep from laughing. Brian. Bethany and Brian. Brian and Bethany. I always forget about it until it slaps me back in the face. Ten dollars says the next one’s name is Bridgette or Bonnie or Blake or something. Dad with his stupid fucking letter hang-ups. If he’d had another kid with Mom, their name would definitely start with an L. Is there some process to choosing what letter? Why’d we get L and they get B? Is there a woman out there, waiting for my dad to stuff her womb full of A children? I wonder whether he’ll keep leaving wives and taking new ones till he has an entire alphabet, but then I tell myself to shut up, because that’s venom talking; talking and talking and kicking and screaming—
“Is he?” is the only thing I can think of.
“You’re one of Dad’s other kids, right?”
I snap back to reality and try being polite. “Right. We’ve met before, you’re just too young to remember. I came for Easter.”
Bethany squirms a bit and finally says, “Why’re you here?”
“I’m borrowing a suit from my—from Dad.”
“Oh.”
“Yup. For a party.”
“A fancy party?”
“Sssssort of.”
“Does Dad know?”
“Yup.”
“Okay.” She cocks her head to the side and frowns a bit. “I like your hair.”
“Uh…thanks.”
“My mom says you’re in therapy.”
Oh, DOES she?
“Yup.”
“Me too.”
“Really?”
She nods a bit, smiling. “I talk to myself a lot, and sometimes I talk about things that aren’t nice. Mom heard me.”
Just as the venom can’t take it anymore and is about to suggest that my half sister is one of the Children of the Damned, Millie comes striding back into the room with a complete coat and tails, all wrapped up and ready to go. She sees Bethany and smiles. “Hey, sweetie. Did you say hello to Locke?”
Bethany nods her head slightly. “I like his hair.”
“Isn’t that nice?” Looking back to me, she hands me the tux. “There you go. It should fit you well enough. Rick wore it to a costume party once or something, I mean, no one really has a coat and tails anymore. Well. Anyway. All yours.”
I smile and take it and, making the excuse that my friend is waiting for me, slowly back toward the door. Millie keeps smiling and says a good-bye and that she hopes to see more of me soon, while Bethany trots over to her and hugs her around the waist as if her mother is a life preserver in the ocean. The whole place seems irritating, jagged. I feel dizzy. The venom sends shocks and strains down the cords of my neck, through my shoulders, down into my fingers. I’m somewhere between enraged and ashamed.
Fucking bitch, with her big, stupid smile and her long hug, fucking athletic blond-haired rugrat, fucking McMansion—
As I’m almost out of the kitchen, Millie says, “I’ll tell your dad you said hi.”
I nod, and then wave to Bethany. “Later, kid,” I say, a little too desperate to get out the door.
Have a good one, kid. Hope you don’t grow up to be Ophelia.
I exit the front door, and the fresh air hits me, washing away rage, nerves, and the nonstop buzzing in my head. I let it wash through my coat, my T-shirt, under my armpits and into my hair. Thank God I got out of there when I did; I was beginning to sweat and shake a bit between Millie’s niceness and Bethany’s therapy talk. Whatever you want to call it. I just felt like I walked onto the set of some weird TV show about the darkness that lives within the typical American family. Or something. God, it’s nice out.
Wonder if Dad knows crazy comes from his side. Wonder how it’d make him feel to know that you—and thus I—were spawned from his genes.
As I get into the car, Randall hands me a cigarette, and I spark up. He glances at the suit and smiles. “Shit, a full coat and tails. You’ll be the life of the party. Go, Rick.”
“Yeah, lucky me.”
“The visit wasn’t a memory you want to cherish, I take it?”
I shrug. “Millie was too nice, their little girl is in therapy, and both the kids have names that begin with B.”
Randall raises a hand to cover his smile. “Sorry.”
“It’s not funny.”
“I know.” He chuckles. “I know, I’m sorry, it’s not funny.”
“Just drive.”
“Okay. Sorry.”
He starts the car, and then, the minute we pull out of the driveway, we nearly die.
Our car and the one barreling toward us both screech to a sudden halt. Randall hits the brake, and we both lean forward painfully, the seat belts cutting into our shoulders. The other car honks at us as it backs slowly up, and I stare blankly at the man behind the steering wheel.
Again the venom fills me, swells up in me, and like on the phone with Renée, guides me. There’s no dam about to burst, just a quick, clean shot of wit and rage balled into one. Maybe I am in control or maybe it’s controlling me; either way, it feels wonderful and right. Destiny.
“Stop for a second. Roll down your window.” Randall glances at me funny and does as he’s told—my voice has the urgency of a police officer’s. Once the window’s down, I lean forward and grin politely at the dapper man with the shaggy blond-gray hair, h
is face curled into a sneer of contempt. “Sorry ’bout that, Dad, us kids all hopped up on goofballs, you never know what we’re doing. Thanks for the tux. I’ll bring ’er back nice and clean. Nice seeing ya!”
I take just enough time to catch his stunned, stupid expression before I tell Randall to drive.
Five minutes after I get to the waiting room, Dr. Yeski walks out with Shelby Waters, a girl who hangs out with a lot of guys from my school. She’s in my grade and runs with a crowd that loves Randall but cringes when I stop by (Randall calls them “vintage T-shirt kids,” which I think refers to their tight garments with badly screened images of crappy old cartoons on them). She’s obviously been crying furiously: Her eyes are bright red, her nose is running, and there are twin rivers of eyeliner coursing down her cheeks. She sniffles a little and mumbles a thank-you to Dr. Yeski, who just smiles and says, “That’s what I’m here for, Shel. Take care until next week. Call me whenever you want to if something comes up, okay?”
The older woman next to me clutches her cakelike cap to her head as if it might fly off, and leaps to her feet. Just as they’re about to leave, Shelby spies me and turns pale in recognition. In a soft and terrifying voice, she mutters, “Don’t tell anyone about this.” And then the old woman is pulling her away, her arm wrapped around her in an ominous fashion.
Dr. Yeski beckons for me, smiling. I trudge into her office, trying to ignore the fact that the last person who walked out of here was crying like a baby. It’s a typical shrink’s office: desk with a PC, leather couch, chair, potted plants, lots of books, and of course, five, count ’em, five boxes of tissues strategically placed throughout. What surprises me the most is a huge Clash poster on her wall with a scrawled signature reading, “For Laura—Death or glory!—JS.” In the lower left-hand corner, there’s a doodle of a trout nailed to a cross. I point at it and ask what it’s doing up there.
She doesn’t smile. “I got it signed by Joe Strummer back when I was about your age.”
“What’s with the aqua-crucifixion?”
“I asked him to draw a Jesus fish. He’d been drinking.”
“I have to tell you, the crying girl and the drunken punk rocker doodles? Hell of a first impression.”
“Understandable.” Then she plants herself in her swivel chair and picks up a yellow legal pad, and we start talking. Or she starts talking, and I get distracted….
“How’re you doing? How’s your week been?”
I snap to attention and move my eyes upward, to her face. “Sorry? It’s been okay. I dunno. Large. I mean, strange.”
She doesn’t seem to notice my piggish snafu. “How so?”
“I had to go to my dad’s to borrow a tux for a party. It was kind of surreal, being in his house and with his family. We’re not very…We don’t really spend a lot of time together, so it…threw me off, I guess.”
“Why don’t you spend more time together?”
I shift in my seat, feeling warmer than I should. Easy. “I think my mom could tell I hated being there, around his new family, and my dad just…” Deep breath, one step at a time. “He kind of considers me a bummer, I guess. Always unhappy, a little crazy, and so on and so forth. Every so often I’d start having a venom moment and would just go out and sit in the car.”
She nods. There’s sympathy there, although impartial. It feels strangely okay—I’m not being humored. “I bet that’s hard. What happened when you went there this week?”
“Well…I dunno. My dad’s new wife…Well, hold on. Is she my stepmom?”
“Not if you don’t want her to be.”
“I mean, yeah, sure, that’s deep as shit and all, but really. Technically.”
“Technically, yes. She’s your stepmother.”
I grimace. “That’s what I thought. Anyway, my stepmom was really nice, which was off-putting. She was all huggy and talkative.”
“That’s a bad thing?”
“It’s just a weird thing. I like to vilify them a bit, my dad and Millie and their family. But instead, she was just really amiable and kind to me, and it was a bit of a weird experience.”
“Do you expect her to dislike you?”
Okay, here we go. I feel venom whirl around in my heart, ready for the fight. “She’s my fucking stepmother. I feel that I have sort of an inherent right to dislike her, and vice versa.”
“Why do you feel that way?”
I raise an eyebrow. “Well, that’s your job, right? To figure that out?”
She folds her arms in front of her. “If that’s how you feel.”
“Now we’re just going in circles.”
“Okay, then let’s move forward. What about your stepmom upsets you?”
“I mean, they haven’t…It’s not like she did anything, it’s what she sort of left out.” I try to hold ground, but I’m losing it fast. She’s good. “It’s fine that they went off and had their own family. But there weren’t two Christmases or group gatherings. He…” Deep breath. Drop your shoulders. Calm. “He left, and all they knew about it was that he left us for them. There was always that underlying feeling, like we were something that happened once, y’know? You can hear, in those little kids’ voices, that we’re people they have to see sometimes.”
I’m expecting her to hit me with another tough one, but instead she nods and looks at me. “Did you see your dad?”
“Just as we left. He nearly ran into me and Randall, and I was a bit of a jerk to him. I just smiled and thanked him for the suit, and then had Randall drive off.”
She smiles, finally. “Like a thief in the night, right? Keep the mystery and all that around you.”
I hadn’t thought of that. That was it exactly. “Well, yeah. I didn’t have much to say to him, anyway…y’know?”
She nods and leans back a bit. “What’s the tuxedo for?”
“Um, what do you know about ‘Weimar’?”
She laughs, and I feel okay, which makes no sense.
HOW DIDit happen?”
The time traveler (he refused to give his name) looked thoughtful. “What? Your death, or becoming Tyrant?”
“Both, I guess.”
“Well, you became Tyrant about five years or so before your death,” he says, as though he’s recounting a story from his past. “It was around Halloween or so, a little after, in 2015. November. Yeah, definitely November; I remember it was broadcast during the marathon. You’d been around—you were a fucking superhero, for God’s sake, so everyone knew about you—for a while before that. But still, you were a legend, so no big deal, right? And then, one night, you killed the mayor.”
“I WHAT?!”
“You killed Mayor Rothchild on national television, as well as the guards, the security, the cameramen…pretty much everyone who could’ve posed a threat to you. And then you got in front of the camera and declared yourself Tyrant of New York City, and said that if anyone thought otherwise, they could happily take it up with you.”
I sat down on the cold concrete of the rooftop and rolled a pebble between my fingers. This was madness. I was a protector. “Why? Why did I declare myself Tyrant?”
“The venom,” he said. “It took control. You realized that things would never change, no matter how much you fought, and you let the venom take control. You performed all these acts, yeah, but you weren’t really the one driving the bus, if you know what I mean. Don’t get me wrong, the city was still safe, but in a Machiavellian sort of way. An iron fist, ruling through fear. You let down your morals, and it took advantage of the opportunity.”
“So how did…” I pointed at him. This was an awkward transition.
“You were killed five years after you declared yourself Tyrant, but the venom left your system before they got to it. You hadn’t really been part of the show for a while, so they just put a bullet in you and continued hunting for the venom.”
Icy fingers caressed the back of my skull and sent chills through my blood. “And the venom found you.”
“Not quite,”
he whispered. “First it found Renée.”
CHAPTER NINE
BEFORE THIS NIGHT, “Weimar” was eternally linked in my mind to one image—a swastika. Knowing my friends, I assumed that I was in for a history lesson.
I show up at the apartment building and am immediately given a cavity search by a massive doorman with a name tag reading BRAWN. I swear to God, his name is actually Brawn (silently, I pray the tired-looking guy behind him, staring at a stack of security screens, is wearing a tag reading BRAINS, but sadly, his name is Colin). The entire time I’m there, Brawn, good ol’ Brawn, gives me a look that lets me know that he’s the type of guy who will be necessarily polite to me right up until I step out of line and he tears out my larynx with his bare hands. You’d think that if enough kids show up in tuxes, he’d assume all of them are going to the same place. The whole thing makes the venom sneer and pant and pound its fist on the table of my mind, livid with contempt. However, seeing as Brawn makes Andrew Tomas look like a mosquito, the venom seethes, letting the rage rush through me without breaking open like a boil. It knows this isn’t a battle worth getting into. It’s wicked and arrogant by nature, yeah, but the venom isn’t stupid.
Finally, after checking out his clipboard, Brawn consents to let me upstairs, noting that he doesn’t want “any craziness or such” (Too bad, too—I LOVE craziness or such!). I choke down big mouthfuls of verbal razors and let the elevator door shut behind me.
The door opens again, and my hatred takes a backseat to awe. Whoever the host is, he’s rich. Like, buying-your-kids-out-of-any-trouble-they-might-someday-get-into rich; Trump money. Because the elevator door does not open to a hallway like a normal person’s would. It opens to the apartment itself, to a massive white foyer full of girls in flapper dresses and boys in tuxes. I recognize a lot of them from the party in the park, but not enough. Immediately my coat and shirt become itchy, stuffy, way too uncomfortable.
Oh, for fuck’s sake, first Brawn, now this. Let’s just go home.
This is important. Casey and Renée are counting on me. We need this.
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