Birth Right

by Lewis, D. C.

  “Be cool,” he said to himself as a poor excuse of a pep talk and answered the phone, hoping his voice didn’t waver with excitement.

  And just like that, the phone call was over and she would be there in 45 minutes. He frantically scanned to room making sure it was presentable and went around straightening up a few books and putting some dirty clothes in the hamper.

  Looking in the mirror, his eyes immediately rested on the white patch in his hair. How he had hated the source of his teasing but Kiera never seemed to mind. In fact she rarely if ever acknowledged it. Even with her jokester personality, she knew that they were boundaries and that this was something he was sensitive about.

  Getting back to the task at hand, he gave himself a once over, making sure his clothing was clean, hair combed, and that he didn’t smell like a locker room. Satisfied, he went upstairs to await her arrival.

  His excitement at seeing her caused him pace back and forth in the hallway leading to the front door and at each circuit, he would peek through the blinds to see if she had arrived yet. He knew he could never tell her this secret but something in him wanted to be able to see her as soon as she pulled into the driveway. He didn’t understand this compulsion but didn’t fight it. He liked to watch her . The time she took to check her vanity mirror to make minute adjustments to her appearance that only a woman would understand. The way she so gracefully got out of her car.

  She was simply captivating.

  The closer the time came for her arrival, the faster the pacing and the more frequently he was peering out the window.

  Until he saw headlights.

  Taking a deep breath, he promised himself he would play it cool this time. He wouldn’t get discombobulated when he was around her. He would be smooth. He would be cool. He could do it.

  Opening the door, he tripped over the threshold and almost fell but was able to catch himself before flesh met concrete.

  Thankfully, Kiera would not have been able to see it and after a silent beratement, he straightened himself and laughed to himself.

  He was who he was. And apparently there was something about him that Kiera enjoyed being around. What if it was his awkwardness? She accepted him as he was and he needed to learn to accept himself and stop worrying about things that didn’t matter.

  Besides, now wasn’t the time to worry, she had just gotten out of the car and the sight of her caused him to lose all train of thought. She was as beautiful as ever and excitement coursed throughout his body.

  How he had missed her.

  Three

  Desperately needing to get out of the house, Kiera called Brandon after dinner to see if he had any plans for the evening. “Nope, I am just sitting here working on a project,” he said, “Come on over.”

  “I’ll be there in about 45 minutes.”

  Feeling soiled by the events of the day, Kiera hopped into the shower. The warm water rushing over her body seemed to wash away all the cares and worries that the day had heaped upon her. Washing her golden hair in her favorite herbal shampoo, she enjoyed the smell of cucumber and watermelon. It soothed her mind and helped her become “centered.” Aromatherapy had always been very effective in helping her release stress and Kiera was always burning incense in her room. Due to dorm policy, she hadn’t been able to do it since leaving for college. She had forgotten how much she missed it and promised herself that she would go to the local herbal shop to pick up some because she knew she was going to need it.

  Hopping out of the shower and feeling like a new woman, she quickly toweled off and dried her hair. Normally she would let it air dry but since time was of the essence, she pulled out her trusty blow-dryer from under the sink and started the lengthy process of evaporating water. Humming to herself, she finished drying her hair, put the dryer back under the sink, hung her towel up and went to pick out her clothes for the evening.

  A favorite pair of faded blue jeans would be her first and easiest choice, but she would run into a stumbling block trying to pick out her top. With time quickly ticking away, she closed her eyes and grabbed something, swearing to herself that whatever she picked, she would wear. Opening her eyes, she looked down at her choice. The black, long sleeve, thermal shirt looked right back at her. Even though it was almost nine o’clock in the evening, the temperature was still in the mid-80s and would most likely not fall below that even during the coldest part of the night. “OK, OK, one more try,” Kiera said. This time with one eye open, she grabbed a white t-shirt with Jim Morrison plastered on the front. Looking at herself in the full length mirror in her closet, Kiera smiled, “I really like how my butt looks in these jeans,” she said. Giving her hair one final brush and slipping into her flip-flops, she grabbed her cell phone and car keys and rushed downstairs. Bolting out of the door before Katrina could ask her where she was going, Kiera is in her car and out the gate headed into town to see Brandon.

  Pulling her hair back in a pony tail so that it doesn‘t get blown, Kiera rolls down the windows to feel the breeze on her face. Enjoying the hum of the big V8 engine, Kiera blasts down the highway, headlights cutting a swath through the darkness, enabling her to see deer and other creatures of the night as they raise their heads in fear as she passes by. Speeding up to 60 mph. The bugs hitting the front bumper and hood of her car sound like rain as they enjoy the oncoming brightness, not knowing with that light comes death in the form of a large automobile racing towards them.

  A stoplight was the first sign that she had hit town. Looking around, Kiera was surprised at how much has changed in the small town in the last nine months. Everywhere she looked, there was a new store, one of seemingly endless franchises that litter the country. Video stores, supermarkets, and the all encompassing Supercenters, seemed to wash away the small town aesthetic that she had always known and loved. Taking a quick detour, she turned into the shopping center that housed the record store in which she spent so much time browsing through the vinyl section looking for old records. Over the years, she had gotten to know the owner and his family. They were good people, barely making ends meet but doing something they loved. Her heart sank when the windows full of CDs, t-shirts, and posters were replaced by vacant glass. The store was completely empty, literally a shell of its former self. It seemed as if she couldn’t escape change. Inside and out, her world was changing and it seemed as if she were powerless to stop it.

  Turning her steering wheel to its extreme right, Kiera hit the gas pedal and screamed with glee as the car did a complete 180, whipping the back end around with the utmost precision. The back tires squealed and produce little puffs of blue smoke as they fought to find traction. Finally, getting a grip, the car thrust forward, slightly pushing Kiera back in her seat as inertia tried its best to keep her still. She noticed several people who were walking out of the supermarket, staring at her and her crazy display. She didn’t care though, to her they were traitors, people succumbing to the appeal of large business and not supporting local mom and pop shops that are the backbone of the small town. She wondered how the record store owner was making ends meet now.

  Coming up to the stoplight out of the shopping center, Kiera made a right turn and continued onward towards the downtown area and Brandon’s. With relief she noticed that the further she got into historic downtown the less had changed, and the small town feel that she has come to know and love oozed from the buildings. Her drive took her to the waterfront, where old men sat on benches and whittle by day, and by night kids came to embrace each other in back seats of cars, exploring the differences between boys and girls as windows fogged and cars rocked back and forth.

  Making a hard left, Kiera drove the final few yards to Brandon’s house. Pulling up into the driveway, Kiera gave him a call to let him know she had arrived but, before she is able to utter an entire sentence, she could see Brandon’s tall body silhouetted against the porchlight, headed towards her car. She secretly guessed that Brandon had waited by the door since her first phone call, in anticipation of her arrival.
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br />   “Sorry to keep you waiting,” he said, “I was putting the last few touches on a project”.

  “No problem,” Kiera said smiling, as she took a look at her oldest friend.

  He hasn’t changed in the past nine months. Tall and skinny with blue eyes. His brown hair is shaggy with the white patch on the right side of his head. The white patch that caused so much grief for him and has been the source of teasing and ridicule his entire life. The doctors diagnosed him with having some form of "blaze" as a young child but this diagnosis didn’t prevent him from being called “Spot” or “Patch Phelan” or any other number of derogatory terms designed to erode the self-esteem of the target. And as always, Brandon was in his customary long-sleeved shirt and jeans. Regardless of how hot it got during the year, Brandon always stayed covered up. Kiera can't remember the last time she has ever seen him wearing anything else.

  “Aren’t you hot?” she said playfully, pinching the front of his shirt.

  “Huh? What? Oh. No, not at all. You know people in the desert walk around covered up more than this to protect themselves from the sunlight and to keep themselves cool,” he explained.

  “Yeah, but it’s nighttime,” Kiera retorted, hoping to fluster her friend.

  “Uhhhh, ummmm,” Brandon replied, doing his best to come up with a suitable answer.

  Knowing that she had won this round, Kiera decided to let him off the hook and gave him a big hug, wrapping her arms around his torso, pinning his arms to their sides. Surprised at this sudden display of affection, Brandon stood there, unmoving, with a look of shock on his face. “I just won round two as well,” Kiera thought jokingly to herself. Reflecting on her friendship with Brandon, she realized that is part of why she enjoys his company so much. His awkwardness and strange idiosyncrasies all come together to form a friend that is always there for her, that is nonjudgmental, that genuinely cares about her, and will always have the ability to make her laugh, just by being who he is. Standing there holding his 6’4” frame, she does realize that he is indeed the best friend she has ever had and that she has really missed him. Releasing her grip, Kiera took a step back and looked into Brandon’s eyes, noticing the range of emotion sweeping across them.

  Quickly looking away and clearing this throat, Brandon walked towards the aqua-colored door that is the eyesore of the house. It stuck out like a sore thumb, not flowing with the rest of the colors of the exterior, posing there defiantly in its solitary hue. Entering Brandon’s house, Kiera once again was comforted by the lack of change. There was a tidiness about the place that one wouldn’t expect from a house where two men dwelled. Brandon and his father, Irving, had lived alone in this house for as long as Kiera had known them. His mother having died during childbirth, Brandon never knew her and his father never spoke of her.

  In this respect, Kiera and Brandon shared a common bond, Kiera had no clue as to who her father was, since her mother had engaged in multiple one-night stands in hopes of getting pregnant and carrying a baby to term. As her mother so enjoyed reminding her, Kiera was the first child Katrina had been able to have in over 200 years of trying. With the disappearance of all the male Lycoans close to 500 years ago, females were forced to breed with humans in order to have any chance of having a child. Females like Katrina would venture out into society with the intent of having a one-night stand and getting pregnant. While this behavior would be frowned upon by the general populous, there was no shortage of men willing to engage in these short-lived couplings, thinking that they were just engaging in sexual relations with a loose human woman, never knowing whom they were actually sleeping with. These trysts also enabled the female Lycoans to avoid having to deal with relationships with human men and the inevitable questions that were sure to follow. Due to the nature of Lycoans, immune to sickness and disease, there was no fear of STDs so females were able to have as many partners as they wished in order to become pregnant.

  The only issue was with the human DNA code being weaker and not on the same evolutionary plane as Lycoan. Due to such a weakness, the vast majority of Lycoan births were stillborn, the human DNA being unable to survive in the inhospitable Lycoan womb. Another result of breeding with male humans was that even though the Lycoan gene bred true, all that were born were females. No males had been born alive or dead since The Disappearance.

  “Where is your dad? Upstairs?” Kiera asked.

  “Yeah,” Brandon replied. “He is watching the game, I think. Come on down to my room.”

  Taking the stairs two at a time, Brandon disappeared around the corner as Kiera followed slowly behind. The basement was not only where Brandon slept but is also where he worked doing freelance web design. The room was dark, illuminated only by the flickering of multiple computer screens.

  “I feel like I am in the computer lab back at school,” Kiera said.

  “Oh yeah? What kind of machines do they have?”

  “Brandon, how long have you known me? You know I don’t pay attention to things like that. The extent of my knowledge is how to turn it on, type a paper, make song playlists, and order the occasional DVD. Other than that, I am computer stupid.”

  “Oh,” Brandon replied. “Just wishful thinking on my part. How are you liking school?”

  “What can I say, it is wonderful. The freedom is amazing, I don’t have my mother looking over my shoulder at all hours of the day. I can come and go as I please when I please. All in all it’s been really good but a tough first year academically, classes are hard.”

  “What classes are you taking?”

  “Oh you know, the general stuff, Western Civ, Creative Writing, Freshman Seminar, stuff like that.”

  “They make you take a class on being a Freshman?”

  “Yeah, it’s kinda stupid. They want us to write journals and talk about our experiences as the new Freshman Class. It is an easy "A" but I hate going, it is just really silly. Not to mention that it is at eight in the morning, I really lack motivation to do anything that early in the morning other than sleep.”

  “So I take it you don’t attend it that much.”

  “No, I do, I have made a lot of new friends in that class so they stop by in the mornings and drag me out of bed.”

  “That’s good that you have met new people.”

  “Oh yeah, I have tons of new friends, it’s crazy at how many people I hang out with now.”

  And with that comment, Kiera saw the hurt flash across Brandon’s face. She had forgotten how sensitive Brandon could be, and berated herself for failing to censor some of her thoughts.

  “But of course, they are nothing like the friends I have here,” she quickly interjected. With that small reassurance, Kiera watched Brandon’s face soften and the full depth of the situation hit her like a ton of bricks. She was Brandon’s only friend, his only real link to the outside world. As this revelation became clear, tears formed in the corners of her eyes. Whether they were tears of sympathy or regret, she could not say. Oblivious to Kiera’s current status, Brandon walked over to a computer, sat down, and started furiously typing.

  “Any ideas as to what you are going to major in?” he asked.

  Quickly regaining composure of herself, Kiera wiped the tears away and pulled up a chair next to Brandon.

  “Well, I think I still want to be a Forensic Psychologist. The whole idea of profiling and investigating murderers is very interesting and something I think I would be good at. Not to mention that you get a chance to go to the Body Farm in Tennessee, I think that would be really cool.”

  “No thank you, not for me. The prospect of being around dead bodies in various states of decomposition holds no interest for me.”

  “You big sissy, it’s nature at its finest. The breakdown of organic tissue that will go to feed plants and other life.”

  “Yeah, but I can’t imagine how bad it stinks! You know how sensitive my gag reflex is. I would pass out from gagging.”

  Unable to suppress it any longer, Kiera let out a loud laugh, the kind of lau
gh that made her sides hurt. She recalled numerous times where a funny smell had sent Brandon into fits of gagging that had paralyzed his body with the violent heaves, the most memorable being the time he stepped in the freshly made pile of dog feces. Exploding with laughter, Kiera had had to go wash his shoe off for him, and let him lie down in the car with a cool rag on his forehead until he was able to compose himself.

  "Well, it makes no difference what I enjoy anyway, mother isn’t wanting me to go back next year. She has plans for me to take over the family business. This year of college was a ‘gift’ just to get it out of my system.”

  “So she is still beating that dead horse I see. What is so great about being an antiques dealer that she wants you to take over?”

  Kiera paused, appearing to be deep in thought. She hated lying to Brandon, he was the one person with whom she desired to share her secret. To tell him that her mother was matriarch for a pack of Lycoans, and that Kiera was being groomed to take over. How absurd that would sound to an outsider. How absurd did it sound to her! Yet this was the source of her conflict with her mother. Kiera didn’t want to become a matriarch of anything. She had tried to repress her Lycoan nature ever since she came fully into it at puberty. She lived as human, she desired to be human, but her mother refused to let her set aside her Lycoan side, instead attempting to force her to embrace it, to change, to become what she feared the most - a monster.

  “It's just that my family has had a history of being antiques dealers, it goes back hundreds of years,” she lied. “My mother just wants me to continue the line. Not to mention that I will make a lot of money in the meantime.”

  Over the past year, Kiera had come to realize that she had a passion for working with underprivileged kids. It was encouraged for freshmen to volunteer as part of their Freshman Seminar class. To give something back to the community. There were numerous opportunities and if someone asked her, Kiera wouldn’t have been able to explain exactly why she chose to work at the Riverbend Alternative Elementary School but she had quickly come to care about the children that attended.