Queeroes

by Steven Bereznai

  Amazing.

  And unstoppable.

  Their lips parted, and Chad nestled deeply against Troy. The blond no longer felt hunted. He felt found. He felt safe. The sharp teeth, claws, and pointed ears were gone. He looked like himself again. Troy could sense Chad’s comfort as he fell back asleep, but what Troy felt was another matter. For just a second it was like they’d been one, and now a huge chasm spread between them. Troy retreated slowly, and crept off into the shower. He scrubbed himself under the hottest water he could stand.

  It took him a long time to fall asleep in his sleeping bag on the floor.

  Chapter 5

  Dear Diary,

  What happens when a brother betrays a brother? When someone stabs his best friend in the back? When an outcast and the head cheerleader become bosom buddies? I’ll tell you what happens. Drama—with a capital D!

  “Devon, my love, I am so sorry for being late!” Lyla Dedarling proclaimed as she bustled through the door of her expansive mansion on her sprawling estate. Under one arm she carried a gleaming black portfolio case. In her other hand was a brown takeout bag with a stapled receipt from Wong’s Chinese restaurant. The smell of soya sauce steamed out from the edges.

  “There was some terrible thing at the mall tonight,” she continued, releasing a huge sigh. “It was an utter nightmare getting out of there.”

  Devon Dedarling heard his mom, hidden away though he was. Her voice carried. He silently kept typing away on a goth vampire message board.

  He flicked the wisps of black locks hanging over his eyes. In the back, his hair was buzzed down to the scalp. His features were delicate, matching a slender build wrapped in skintight black jeans and a Marilyn

  Manson shirt.

  Lyla Dedarling’s heels clicked across the marble floor of the circular foyer and into the kitchen. There was the pop of a cork from a wine bottle, the clatter of a glass, and the gurgle of liquid being poured. The clickityclack of her heels resumed.

  “Dinner’s getting cold!”

  He let her wander past the indoor pool, movie room, and pilates studio.

  “Devon?”

  The alive are dead. So to be undead is to truly be alive, he typed.

  She finally found him under the stairs that led to the sunken garage. His laptop monitor bathed him in a blue light. She twirled her glass of wine.

  “There was some terrible thing at the mall tonight…” she began again. Like any performer she knew the show must go on, whether the audience wanted it or not. “But never fear,” she said excitedly, “I brought Chinese!”

  It was too early for the interesting vampire freaks to be logged on, and Devon’s slender stomach rumbled, so he followed his mom into the kitchen. Mrs. Dedarling’s squat body busied about, her jacket pushing her ample bosom into a canyon of cleavage. Selling other people’s overpriced consumer art to banks, hotels and lawyers’ offices took sweat, tears, and, apparently, a hefty rack.

  “What a day. The gallery was a beehive, I tell you,” she made little bzzz noises while pinching repeatedly at the air. “Just when I think it’s all about online sales, charge ’em up and ship ’em out I say, bam!” she clapped her hands. “Mega-sale for that new condo going in along the river.”

  “You mean the one that’s going to be little rat cubicles stacked one on top of the other for aging urbanites wanting to reconnect with small-town life while at the same time choking the charm out of it?” Devon inquired.

  “Devon,” she said coyly, “that sounded suspiciously like an opinion.”

  “Pass the lo mein,” he grunted.

  She shrugged perkily, spooning out beef, rice, and sweet and sour pork.

  “It’s going to be sheer elegance, I tell you, very boutique. Finally someone’s

  got the vision and the…” she hesitated, searching for the right word. In a fit of daring that told Devon it must have been quite the sale indeed, she gave herself permission to say, “…the balls to break away from the dreary country chic this town is drowning in. I mean don’t get me wrong. I didn’t just ride that wave, I practically made Trisha Romance into a household name, and it paid for a good chunk of this.” She gestured around the kitchen, at the granite counters, European appliances, and designer taps. “But the past is past!”

  She wiped a piece of bamboo shoot from her mouth with a cloth napkin.

  “And,” she continued, “they aren’t falling into that über-sleek nonsense. Even the homosexuals are over that, Allah be praised!”

  So that’s her god of the week, Devon noted, dipping a chicken ball into bright orange sauce. She filled a glass from a water cooler in the corner. Not once did his mom even pause for breath. “It’s all about old nouveau,” she prattled on. “The cutting-edge gays—not those Pottery Barn castrations—are already leading the way, and as usual, the rest of the world will follow.”

  She wasn’t even looking at Devon as she spoke. She stared off into the air, twirling her water between sips. “Picture a dandy in couture, mixing quotes from Oscar Wilde and Irvine Welsh, then buying an oil portrait in a stainless steel frame from an online auction. That”—she jabbed her bright red fingernail into the air—“that is the future, and the future is now!”

  She finished off her glass of water. He loaded his plate with moo goo gai pan, tucked his computer under his arm and got up to leave. Most teens dreaded the inevitable parental question, “How was your day,” as if it were an Abu Ghraib interrogation. Devon never had to worry about that query. His mom was still talking about herself, and didn’t notice he’d left until he reached the doorway.

  “Devon!” she called after him. Normally he’d have ignored her, but from the corner of his eye he noticed she was staring at her glass of water.

  He began to smile. He had to force the expression from his lips before

  turning around to face her.

  “Yes, mother?” he inquired with mock innocence.

  “Devon Dedarling, did you take the bottled water back to Food Depot and exchange it like I told you?”

  He gazed at the chrome Etienne water cooler next to the fridge. Listening to her coo over the bull-necked deliveryman “with the most piercing green eyes” as he installed it had been worse than her going on about the gold earrings she’d just received from a Saudi paramour after a monthlong Internet correspondence.

  “He has the sexiest mustache,” she’d bragged about the sheik, insisting on showing Devon his profile pictures.

  Now she stared at her half-empty glass like it was a rattling snake. “Devon…”

  “Yeah,” he piped up, “I totally exchanged it, just like you said.”

  To prove his point he marched past her, poured himself a glass of Etienne water from the cooler, drank it in three gulps, refilled his glass, drank that too, refilled again, and drained that also. He went back for a fourth time.

  “Okay, Mr. Dramatic, you’ve proven your point,” she conceded. “It’s ridiculous you know. I pay for pure spring water, only to be told it’s been contaminated at a processing plant.”

  She drank her glass down, and so did not see her son’s crooked smile.

  He wasn’t exactly sure why he’d lied to her, except that it was more fun than not lying to her. The media said that whatever got into the bottled water was benign. The recall was just a precaution. So it gave Devon great pleasure to know his mom thought she was drinking different water that was safe, instead of the same water that was also safe.

  He poured himself another glass, and drank it down.

  Chapter 6

  That night Devon flipped between various goth message boards while sitting at his desk. Most teens’ rooms were rife with self-expression. Not Devon’s. There was not a single poster anywhere. His furniture consisted of other people’s discards, painted sanitarium-white—a snub to his mother’s attempts to Ikea-fy his life.

  “Well at least let me get you a Tulpan lamp!” she’d insisted.

  The bulb hanging from his ceiling remained defiantly bare. It
matched the clean surfaces of his desk, chest of drawers, and even his empty bookshelf. Books, CDs, and school bag were all stuffed into the closet.

  “I could have them padded,” his mom had offered, gesturing at the white walls with her glass of red wine. “Maybe have a straitjacket in a display case. You know, really invest in the Clockwork Orange theme you’ve got going.”

  He hit CTRL+TAB on his keyboard, flipping through his message boards. Message boreds were more like it. Bunch of losers sitting at their computers pretending to be anti-establishment instead of actually doing it, he raged inwardly.

  That included himself, he hated to admit. If I had the power, I’d turn this town of hicks and wannabes inside out. The clock on his screen read half past midnight. And so it was that he knew the exact time his life changed.

  His free hand tapped idly on the desk. He prayed for inspiration. His fingers stopped tapping. He crooked his slender eyebrows.

  His black-painted nails had landed in something gooey. He expected to see it in leftover moo goo gai pan. But the plate was on his other side.

  Instead, where his skin touched the desk, it looked as if the white-painted wood had been turned into melted white chocolate. He pulled his fingers away, and stretchy white strands that resembled taffy stuck to the tips. He flicked his wrist and the white bands flew back, squelching onto the desk.

  His chair toppled as he took a frightened step back. There was a clatter as his laptop crashed to the ground. He gazed at his right hand, which had been resting on the keyboard. Gooey strands of black plastic reached up from the keys like umbilical cords, one attached to each of his fingers.

  From downstairs he could hear his mom snoring as the Golden Girls theme song blared from the flat-screen TV in the living room.

  He knelt down beside the fallen computer and struggled to catch his breath. He gripped the monitor with his left hand and pulled back with his right. The plastic strands stretched and then gave an elastic snap, landing on the keyboard like spaghetti tossed from a sieve. He tried letting go of the monitor, but now his left hand was stuck, the thumb embedded in the screen.

  The computer’s built-in speaker made a bleeping noise.

  You still there? BloodThirstyVixen995 asked him in a chat window.

  He grabbed the monitor with his free hand, and that became stuck too. The more he struggled, the more enmeshed his fingers became. To his horror, the computer began to warp. He bent it into a semicircle, and still the monitor worked. A flashing porn banner featured a pair of buxom redheads making out. Their breasts and winking faces adopted a lurid funhouse-mirror quality as the monitor took on a convex bulge.

  He looked towards his bedroom door.

  “Mom!” he called. The desperation in his voice made him clamp his mouth shut. He squeezed his eyes closed.

  “I don’t need her, I don’t need her, I don’t need her…”

  He was panting. His shirt was soaked in sweat. He was starting to tremble. He looked back towards the door as the opening theme of Mary Tyler Moore rose from below.

  “Mom!” he yelled, no longer caring how scared he sounded. Still no answer.

  To hell with her, his mind seethed, and yet he hated that she didn’t sense he was in trouble, did not come running, that he was forced to beg for his unhearing mother to save him. He stared at his hands encased in his computer. Tears streamed down his cheeks.

  “Please!” he cried one last time.

  Chapter 7

  Devon Dedarling felt more alone than ever before. His eyes were bloodshot as he stared at his once state-of-the-art laptop. It now looked vaguely like a lava lamp, with the keyboard forming the base. The keys still worked. A bouncing skull-and-crossbones screensaver flickered on the rounded monitor. His clock read 5:33 a.m.

  His throat was hoarse from calling for his mom to help—an act of such desperation it left him with the stillness of death inside, and anger, for she was passed out on the couch with her second bottle of wine and her damn old-woman shows, leaving him completely at the mercy of events beyond his control. As the hours ticked by, and his attempts to pull himself free failed, he sat at his desk panting. Slowly, exhaustion took over. His chin lolled forward. Sleep descended upon him. As he dreamed, his fingers slid free.

  An hour later his mom came bustling in, without a hint of a hangover, thanks to the can of Energy Xtreme she was drinking. Her cleavage fought against a low-cut red blouse, and her ass was barely contained in a formfitting skirt.

  “It’s a brand new day, darling. You don’t want to miss the bus,” she gushed.

  His head snapped up, eyes wide with fright, remembering all too clearly the nightmare of the past few hours.

  Get out of my room was what he wanted to shout. Now that she was here the last thing he wanted was for her to see him so helpless. But when he held up his hands, he stared at them in awe and relief. They were free of his computer!

  “It was just a dream,” he whispered, until he looked at the twisted remains of his computer, and knew the experience had been all too real.

  He got to his feet quickly, blocking his laptop from his mom’s view. She fussed with a bit of lint on her collar.

  “No problem!” he said.

  “I know what you’re going to say, that you hate being stuck with that rabble of zombies, and quite frankly I don’t blame you…” She hid the piece of lint in her pocket and looked up in surprise. “Did you say no problem?”

  “Yeah,” he said eagerly, “I’ll be down in a second.”

  Her eyes narrowed. She shifted left a bit, and Devon mirrored her.

  “What are you hiding?” she demanded, her heels clicking forward.

  “Nothing!” he insisted.

  “I will not have you frying your brain with drugs. That’s what college is for,” she said, briskly pushing him aside.

  Her lashes stood on end and her eyelids opened so wide it was a wonder her thick layer of rose-colored eye shadow didn’t crack.

  “What have you done!” she gasped.

  She was pointing at the computer. Her brightly painted fingernail shook. He waited for her to shriek at him, and shriek she did.

  “It’s brilliant! Allah be praised! My son is an artist! I knew it!”

  Her hands were pumping the air as if she were a cheerleader.

  “Oh Devon.” She hugged him tightly. “I still remember you coming home from kindergarten with your finger paintings and I’d ask you what they were, and you’d say an elephant, and I’d say it was the best elephant I’d ever seen and you’d tear it up in a rage and say in the most sullen voice, ‘It doesn’t look anything like an elephant’ and you’d slam the door

  in a huff. An artist’s temperament, I told that no-good father of yours!”

  Tears bubbled in her eyes and she wiped them with a lace hanky stenciled with the letter D.

  “I am going to stop blubbering, I am going to stop blubbering,” she chanted, and a moment later she did, suddenly all business again. “Let’s get a proper look at this masterpiece.”

  She turned on his white desk lamp, angling it at the computer.

  “Bold,” she said. “I can honestly say I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  For a second Devon thought it would get him out of school today, but when he suggested it, her response was “You’re an artist, not a deadbeat,” before shoving his bag into his arms and pushing him out the door.

  Less than an hour later, Devon sat in homeroom class, surrounded by rabble. Everyone else was blathering on about the mall exploding—or being hit by an earthquake, depending on which news report you believed. But the real news, that six members of the Nuffim High student body had been forever changed, did not make a single supper-hour show, newspaper headline, or Facebook profile.

  What’s happening to me? Devon wondered as he sat at his desk, or, as he liked to call it, a cubicle to prepare him to become an office drone— like that was ever going to happen. But right now all that was forgotten. For most of the night his hands had b
een stuck in his computer. They must have slipped free when he fell asleep. For just a moment he worried this was a result of too much masturbation.

  “…Leonardo was not just an artist, he was also an inventor.” His teacher, Mrs. Cordial, began the day’s art lesson. “He designed wings, in the hopes of letting man fly. But one of his greatest obsessions was the human anatomy.”

  She put up a transparency of a naked man superimposed on himself, making him appear to have four arms and four legs, encased in a circle and a square.

  “I’m sure most of you recognize this. The Vitruvian Man. In this drawing, a study of human geometry, Leonardo combines art and science.”

  “Science,” Devon whispered, quickly pulling out his chemistry textbook. He flipped to a page with a diagram of a water molecule, next to a hydrogen atom.

  “Most matter is actually empty space,” it read.

  He gazed at the images of charged particles and how they interacted with each other to create the semblance of solidity. He recalled how it had felt having his hands inside his computer, like there were tiny magnetic hooks on his palms. He felt hot and cold at the same time. His fingers began to sink into the textbook, and he pulled them out quickly before anyone could notice.

  I have to learn how to control this, he thought, whatever “this” was. The normal thing would be to go to a hospital, but he’d be damned if he gave his mom the satisfaction. Nor was he the only one in the senior class plagued by the need to master a new power.

  “You look rough,” Markham said to Mandy.

  “You try doing your hair and makeup when you can’t see yourself,” she snapped, snubbing his look of confusion. She was too focused on trying to catch Chad’s attention. He was wearing an Aberbombie shirt, which was weird, because he hated Aberbombie. Too conventional, he claimed. But more importantly, he’d ignored Mandy’s panicked calls after the mall blew up last night, and now he was too busy casting glances at Troy to notice her.