Chimney Oaks Middle School.
Chapter
NINE
I opened my eyes to a scene I wasn’t entirely convinced was real. On the ceiling was a poster with seventy-seven different ways to say no to drugs. It was yellowed and faded and looked like it was maybe older than the school somehow. Most of them seemed like they were exactly the sort of thing a kid who needed a poster to tell them how to refuse drugs would say. My favorite was “No, I don’t talk to strangers, stranger.” There were so many things just basically wrong with that. First of all, who the fuck talks like that? I mean, just what a weird fucking thing to say to another person who is, presumably, your age. You’re not in an Old West saloon, you dimpy virgin. I mean what do you do after that? Tip your cowboy hat and suggest they mosey on home? Who would tell a kid to say that? It’s like a road map to getting shitkicked and put in a trashcan.
Second, and don’t think this list is short, is the baseline fallacy that you don’t talk to strangers. You’re doing it. You’re saying a sentence to a stranger. Moreover, you’ve responded to their offer vis-a-vis drugs by saying no. So not only are you talking to them, you’re actively participating in the conversation. Don’t talk to strangers. Fuck you, little kid. Not talking to strangers means ignoring them. This whole thing breaks the first rule they teach you about not talking to strangers, which is to just make an excuse to make them leave you alone. This is basically the exact opposite of that. You’re giving them a smarmy “bet you can’t rape me in your van” sort of answer. Cocky little prick. I hate this kid. I really hate him. I can picture him, too. He’s wearing a tucked-in, plaid, short-sleeve button up shirt with a front pocket that he uses and tan shorts. And he walks around with his chest out like he just got named a blue ribbon mathlete.
Third. That’s right. That’s right, there’s more. Who is this stranger that just offered you free drugs that you don’t know? If it’s an adult rapist, as I suggested before, then what the fuck are you even doing in that part of town? Probably a fucking boy child named Chelsea because his dad just does whatever his mom wants and she liked the way it sounded. Just like she likes votive candles and the idea of someone breaking into the house while he’s away on business and ravishing her on that four-poster bed hubby couldn’t afford because things at work weren’t going his way. But enough about Chelsea, the boy who dared to be pathetic, and more about Stranger. This is, presumably, another kid. One who doesn’t think Chelsea is so insanely pathetic that he was going to offer up the line he offered up. This little morally superior bag of shit just strangered a fucking class mate because he was raised by the sort of parents who complain about how the competitive children aren’t including him. It’s like the sort of kid who gets confident about all the bullshit teachers feed kids to keep them from hanging themselves with an extension cord from their bedroom door. His friends call him a lame ass for telling on them any time they do something wrong and he goes “Well, you’re not true friends of mine then.” A fair world would see that sort of kid drowned in the bathtub when his mom got a message from the angels.
Fourth…
The anger was getting to me and I tried to grab my thigh so that the rage could form a nice loop around my body instead of building up in my extremities. Instead of a firm grip, I just felt a searing pain. I sat up and looked at my hand. Ah, son of a fucking bitch. I’ve got a stump. A fucking stump!
I started screaming. Mostly things like “my fucking hand” and “what the fuck happened to my hand” and generally things along that theme. The curtains ripped open and a woman with an electronic cigarette came in, eyes narrow with purpose. She slapped me hard across the face. Her boobs shook when she did but I only saw the first half of it as I had shut my eyes from the slap.
“Shut the fuck up you little asshole. It’s school hours.”
I looked back at the woman. She had red hair and ruddy skin and dark lipstick. And giant tits. She wasn’t really that fat though. Sort of a surprise. But she was wearing scrubs so I wasn’t really sure of that. I have a theory that some sort of sex-hating genius designed scrubs, honestly. They manage to make everyone look like this amorphous blob of sexlessness.
Sorry. School hours? She turned and pulled a chair over to the side of the bed, which I now noticed wasn’t a hospital bed but something much more plain and far less comfortable.
“Didn’t expect you to be up for another hour, at least.” She took a drag from the banned-in-all-territories adult vapor producing entertainment device and the tip lit up green. She blew the vapor away. “Lemme see that.” She said the words past the cigarette and grabbed at my arm, pulling my wrist over. I winced and groaned a little when she did it. “Don’t be such a faggot, it’s numbed up.”
The hell it was. “Well you did a shit job.”
She stopped unwrapping the bandage and slapped the end of my stump.
“Ah! Cunt!”
She slapped it again. It was the first time I realized that it didn’t actually hurt. I pulled a deep breath and thought of that fuckface little brat with the earth tone plaid shirt to direct my rage.
“Okay. Alright. I’m up.”
“What? This stump slapping getting you off?”
“No… maybe. But… what happened to my hand? Where’s Marine?”
The nurse went back to unwrapping my stump. It was an oozing mass of disgusting tissue, the skin missing in splattered bits where the black demon spunk had hit it. I was remembering it now.
She took another drag and blew the vapor away. “Got lucky. Nerves’re still mostly there, ‘specially through the core.” She pulled the cigarette from her mouth. “The fuck were you two doing that they pulled the goo on you?”
“The goo?”
She spun around in her chair and pulled open a drawer behind her. She hit a switch inside it and a section of the wall hissed open, spilling fog out of the refrigerated interior.
“Yeah,” she said, standing to pull a bag from it and plopping back into the chair. She hit the switch again and the panel hissed closed, disappearing seamlessly back into the wall. “Dissolves organic mass. Old version spread like wildfire. You got lucky.”
She opened the bag and pulled out a mesh with a pattern printed on it. She pressed a button on the thing and it beeped and writhed once in her hand. She brought it over and put it on my skin. It quickly vacuumed down to a thin outline. A warm wave poured through my body and my head went a bit mushy.
“What’s this?”
“Stabilizes your flesh, cutie.” She put the cigarette back in her mouth and kicked her feet up onto the bed. “So, you fuckin’?”
“Like… right now? I mean, if you want. No stump stuff.”
She stood up and started to pull her scrubs over her head. The door sounded somewhere across the room and her face went grave. She yanked the curtain shut and walked over. I heard a relieved sigh.
“S’just you. Good god, girl.” I heard the cigarette whine and a steady exhale. “He’s up.”
The curtain opened and Marine stared at me like she’d just stomped a kitten to death. She looked down at my new stump and stared at it for what felt like an uncomfortably long time.
“I’m sorry.” The words came out of her sheepish and quiet. “I knew this sort of shit would…” She bit her lip and looked away. “I’ll fix it. I promise.”
“It’s fine. Nurse Slut was going to do stump stuff with me, so really, everything’s coming up aces.”
Nurse Slut came back to the edge of the bed. “Doctor. And that tissue stabilizer’s only good for six hours. So whatever you plan on fixing, do it in a hurry.” She took another drag on her cigarette.
“You’re a doctor? At a middle school?”
“I know.” She blew the vapor in my face this time. “Crazy. Almost like maybe I’m the sort of doctor who sees one-handed little limp dicks without asking questions.”
She turned and went a
way again. Marine was still staring at my wrist. I looked down at it myself. The electric mesh was glowing a dim glow everywhere the skin had been missing. I could still feel it. My hand, I mean. It was bothering me more than I wanted to let on. I mean, two ladies present? And one clearly eager to get beavered? Is that a saying?
“Don’t worry about it. I can jerk off with both, so it’s fine.”
She stifled a laugh in spite of her attempts to remain serious. “I know where we can get a new one.”
She said the words strangely quietly considering we were in the room with a woman who was fairly blatantly a mob doctor. Well, blatant now. Now that she’d basically said it. Marine was beginning to say something else when the doctor came back.
“Whispering doesn’t make me stupid. If you two want to fuck, just close the curtain.” She was flicking through things on a foldable tablet, though not a particularly nice one. “Only two places got that goo. Considering you came to me and not that hack fuck Sanchez, I’ll guess it was Vircore.” She turned to Marine and pulled the chair under herself, talking as she sat. “Stupid of you going in there at all, let alone dragging a second.”
“I don’t need a lecture on it, Doc. I already feel like—”
“Like this kid’s missing a hand?”
Marine turned her head away and Doc continued.
“I had no choice. And he agreed to go along. He’s an adult. He knew where we were going.”
Doc’s face went skeptical and she pulled a drag from the cigarette. “Did he really?”
“I know that this is a mating display to help me choose which of you is the better mate—” Thanks, animal documentaries. “—but I’m really not too keen on the suggestion that I’m so stupid that I didn’t know what Vircore was. Or what they do to extremely winsome men of action who break in and almost immediately get caught through no fault of their own.”
“So you two aren’t fucking?” She eyed Marine who shook her head a little too quickly for my liking.
Doc looked at me and raised her eyebrows a few times suggestively. I felt conflicted. A knock came at the door and it was opened a second later.
“Nurse Colleen?”
Doc shoved Marine onto the bed and pulled the curtain closed as she walked casually toward the door. She’d also tossed her cigarette onto the sheets. She welcomed the girl in as Marine froze herself in place across my legs. A conversation ensued about the menstrual issues of girls that I checked out on mentally the second time I heard the word “menarche.” The terminology around women bleeding from their crotches just really doesn’t lend itself to being brought up in polite conversation. I think that’s a really large part of the problem as a whole. You know? Boner and hard-on are both extremely comfortable terms. There’s something sort of jolly and inoffensive about the idea. Erection is where you start to get into weird territory, but then that also means building something so it doesn’t really even cause problems there. Semen sounds a little gross, but no one really calls it that outside of a health class. See, periods just have marketing problems. Period is okay on its own, but then you refer to a girl as being “on” her period which just brings up images of riding a horror-pony made of coagulated blood. Not ideal.
I’m just spitballing here, but maybe like… fruity time. “Oh, she’s on her fruity time.” Right? Sounds fun. Festive, almost. It’s not visually inaccurate, but people love fruit! So now it’s not a horrible cycle of uterine unsheathing and it’s more like… you know, jams and jellies and stuff. It even sort of excuses women who like to pretend their vagina sends them into flights of bitchiness that they just can’t seem to control, like a panty diaper wearing alcoholic on her week-a-month bender. You know, I’m really liking this idea. Maybe make a mental note to e-mail some tampon manufacturers later. Marine shifted slightly on my legs and I got a notion.
“Hey…” I whispered.
She looked at me, eyes open as if to say “What the fuck do you want at this exact moment, you absolute shit?” Or maybe it meant, “I hope you have a boner because I find the word inoffensive but strangely sexy and I think we could make quiet hump on this bed. Come on. Be bold. Take me right here.” I assumed the former.
“Do you get periods?”
She pulled her fist back, clenching her jaw, but then thought better of it. Her eyebrows moved as she worked through alternatives before she clearly landed on pulling a finger back and flicking me on the balls. This was how I found out that my pants had been removed.
“Hnnwuack.” I made the sound of a duck having eggs forced from its egghole and then I groaned.
The middle-school period girl on the other side of the thin privacy curtain eeped and the room went quiet.
“Oh, nooo. I darn near forgot.” Doc’s voice was chipper and energetic. Nothing like the way she spoke to us. “A poor little boy hurt his wrist and so I’m letting him rest. He must’ve rolled over on it. Why don’t you come back later and we can talk about your little… visitor.”
See? Fucking disgusting. Visitor? Like some fucking uterus obsessed pervert climbs up in there every month and skins your baby bag like a fucking serial killer? Who in their right mind would call it that? That’s fucking bananas. Seriously, think about it. “Oh, it’s fruity time for her right now so she’s going to skip gym.” Way better. Way better.
The girl got sent away and Doc came back and yanked open the curtain.
“Seriously? Seriously? I needed five minutes.” She grabbed her cigarette and took an angry drag. “Swear to god.”
Marine was climbing off of me and Doc just stood there shaking her head.
I felt like her expectations of us were a bit high for a mob doctor who worked full time at a middle school. “Why even work here? I mean, considering…”
“Pay’s good. Unique benefits.” She turned around and grabbed my clothes from a cart behind her, throwing them onto me. “Get out. Both of you. You’re fine. And time’s wasting on that stabilizer. Tissue’s good for an implant. That’s what you’re after, yeah?”
She looked at Marine for an answer. Marine nodded.
Doc studied Marine for a second, taking another deep drag off the cigarette and talking as the vapor escaped.
“You’re not going to Graver, are you?”
Marine bristled. “I don’t see why it—”
“Fucking stupid little girl.” Doc walked off, past the curtain. I heard her sit in another chair, a creaky wooden one. “Take him and get out.”
I got dressed in a hurry since relations seemed to have deteriorated fairly thoroughly in the space of a few seconds. Marine left before me. I could see her through the glass on the door waiting in the hall. I stopped in the middle of the room.
“Thanks… Colleen?”
She sighed. “That’s not my name.”
“What is?”
“Doc. Don’t be a nosy shit. And get out.”
I walked to the door and before I grabbed the knob.
“If anything happens…” Doc’s voice was softer than normal. Not the chipper affect she put on for the kid, something realer. “Come see me.”
“Yeah…”
I opened the door and Marine turned to walk off down the hall without me, fuming from whatever the hell she and Doc had going on.
Whatever Doc’s objections, I guess we were going to meet Graver.
Chapter
TEN
Buses in the residential districts didn’t see a lot of use. Most could either afford to own self-drivers outright or at least take the car services. They were faster and, honestly, not incredibly expensive but most didn’t run to the parts of town Marine and I lived or frequented. I’d seen about a dozen CleanlyCars passing us. That was the budget line. They’d done the vinyl seat thing for a long time. Basically rolling pods with removable doors. At the end of the day, or if someone reported one of the cabs as too dirty, it’d roll through a w
ash center and get sprayed down with steam hot enough to melt a baby. The seats were modular now and they were upgrading them to cloth. What luxury.
I still spent nights lying awake sometimes trying to figure out exactly how we ended up in a financial situation where robots did everything but shit still costs money. The whole thing gets even worse if you put any thought into the whole deal. Most people held meaningless jobs, like being a smiley asshole pizza waiter. Even then, that was mostly something for slummy areas. Or half-slummy areas, like I was used to. The whole thing was a real bother, to be honest. Most of the chain places use touch screens or voice ordering and automated assembly. The recent trend was to just replace a storefront with a kiosk that sat on the sidewalk with a few benches attached for people to eat at. Delivery bots would load up the food cube whenever they needed it. More economic and there were a dozen districts around the city where there was technically no law against putting a giant burger cube in the middle of a sidewalk. The only thing that’d kept some streets from becoming a giant line of the things was this weird old law no one ever remembered to pay to have removed where standalone businesses had to have a certain distance between them. This got coupled with some technicality where two distinct programs— the voice recognition one and the one that made the actual burgers— counted as multiple employees and made it so they couldn’t count the cubes as a kiosk.
The one asshole on the bus was staring at my stump. A really gooby piece of work. The sort of guy with no chin who looks like his neck got circumcised when he was a kid but now it was coming back with a vengeance. I tried to find exactly where the skin flap was that was going to eventually cover up his mouth and drown him in neck smegma while he slept, but I couldn’t manage it. At least my disgusting body horror was the result of a conscious decision.
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