I guess it doesn’t hurt that I’ve always kinda liked Twit.
It’s her anger. The beauty of it. The purity. No apologies. No excuses. No hemming or hawing. Piss her off, and she just lets fly. Maybe it’s easier to explode when the whole world expects you to. But when you’re half the size of everybody else and you’restill the one people tiptoe around—how can younot love that?
Maybe there’s a part of me that feels just as betrayed as Twit. Just as angry. Maybe there’s a part of me that’s glad she did what I can’t. I’m not saying that’s the case. I’m just saying I don’t know—and killing someone with a Maybe that big just hanging out there…no.
So what I do is this: I paint her blue.
I’ve already mentioned how humiliation plays a big role in the vampire legal system. Stockades are popular again. Ditto, tar and feathers. Stoning, but with dildoes. Scarlet letters spelling out whole scarlet words, complete with 800 numbers to call if the troublemaker starts making trouble again.
So yeah. Blue. That’s the color of Twit’s future.
I got the idea from those dye packs they use to discourage bank robberies. They ran a photo in theFree Press the night before Twit needed killing—two clown-white wannabe crooks, their hair blown back and stuck with dried dye, their faces freckled with the stuff. Something like that should do the trick, I figure, but in spray form. Something I can aim, get a little creative with.
But when I get to the hardware store, I can’t find anything as simple as plain blue spray paint. Cornflower—that’s what they’ve got. Robin’s Egg. Cerulean. Cobalt. Midnight…
But no Smurf. No Oompah Loompah. No Choking Victim.
“What’s the project?” a helpful hardware guy asks out of the…well, you know. He’s peering over my shoulder, just a teenager, with greasy jet black hair hanging in front of his jet black eyes. A tattooed hand reaches up from inside his shirt, its tattooed fingers permanently wrapped around his paper white neck. He wears his collar unbuttoned, displaying all that blue-green angst to a world that could care less.
I wonder whether he got it done before—or after.
“What we looking for?” he adds—still helpful, still strangling in that cartoon grip.
And so I tell him.
“Justice,” I say.
The helpful hardware guy lets out a smile. It’s a smile that knows—that’s been there, done that. Still smiling, he reaches past me and grabs a can from the shelf. “Here you go, my man,” he says. “The perfect blue for the blues.” He flips the can in the air, catches it one-handed. He nudges me, one broken heart to another.
“Give ’er an extra coat for me,” he says, handing over the paint like a loaded gun.
And so it is I find myself sitting on top of Twit, shaking a can of Azure Sky, the perfect blue for revenge. Twit’s just about given up squirming, and I’m still listening to the ball bearing rattle, giving my little Screamer plenty of time to close whatever she doesn’t want painted blue.
“Ready?”
“Fuck you…”
“Cool.”
I hold her hair back and start with the forehead. Hsssst. Hsssst. Hsssst. The paint sounds like snakes coming out. I do the cheeks next, then one side of the nose, followed by the other. I give her an extra coat for the hardware guy. Her hands are spread out on the floor, pinned, one under each foot. I give the left a shot. The right. By the time I’m done, she’ll look like a sky blue Al Jolson with fangs.
Shake. Rattle. Spray.
Still sitting on top of her, waiting for the Sky to dry, it occurs to me that this is the first time we’ve been alone together. It occurs to me that it’s probably the last, too.
“Twit?”
“What?”
“Can I ask you something?”
“ ‘What was it?’ ” Twit guesses. “What kind of disease had to be cured by turning me into what I’ve been turned into?” She says this slowly, like an idiot or robot, letting me know thatmy something is the same somethingeveryone asks people like her. Eventually. When they can get a word in between the screams.
I nod before realizing a nod’s not the easiest thing to see, what with me sitting on top of her. And so I say, “Yeah,” clearing the path for the story she’s either never told anyone or told a thousand times.
“It was a nasty case of still being alive,” Twit says. “That’s what I had. That was my disease. This was right around the time my sister and mom caught a nasty case of being dead, which made my condition stand out all the more.” She pauses, assembling the blocks of her story, or maybe just catching her breath, what with me pressing down on her tiny lungs.
“My dad had just gotten the gift from one of your vampirellas at one of his after-work watering holes,” she continues. “Some down-river dive called Teezers. I think your girl Rose still works there.” I wonder if Twit can feel me clenching. “Hell, could’ve been her for all I know,” she continues, and so do I. “She’d’ve been Dad’s type—skinny, tiny tits, a smirk so fulla fuck-you it ain’t even funny.”
She saying this to torture me, I’m pretty sure. What with me pinning her down, her voice is the only weapon she’s got.
“I’m saying this because that’s what my mom was like,” Twit goes on, as if reading my mind and deciding to set it straight. “Before she got killed with my sister, that is.” She pauses, moves her bones around.
“They were just doing errands,” she says. “They were just coming back from the mall when some guy whose cocktail hour started at nine in the morning T-bones ’em at an intersection.”
I say I’m sorry, and Twit lets me.
“None of us were night people when it happened, not that it would’ve helped much, the mess they ended up.” Twit pauses, reconsiders. “Well, maybe they wouldn’t have been driving around for that asshole to kill in broad daylight, but…” She pauses again, what-iffing herself into temporary silence.
“Woulda, coulda, shoulda,” I whisper, to pry her loose.
“After it happened is when my dad starts acquiring after-work watering holes, and ‘after work’ just starts getting longer and longer. Eventually, it happens. He gets recruited. He doesn’t come home all night, or the following day, and the baby-sitter starts going ape shit around midnight, calling all the hospitals just like she did when my mom and sister didn’t come back.Not again —that’s what she’s thinking. Her mom and her end up doing shifts with me, until Dad finally stumbles in looking like he’s seen a ghost and wearing a pair of sunglasses. The sitter gets a hundred in twenties from a wallet I don’t recognize, and my dad understands when she says she’s not going to be available anymore, ever.
“It’s after the door closes that my dad says he’s not losing anybody else,” Twit says. “He says he doesn’t have to, and so he’s not. And that’s when it happens. I was just eight. I didn’t know. And my dad was a brand-new night person, so he didn’t really know, either. This was before—before being short and vocal was a recognized thing. We—me and my dad and the whole rest of the world—we kinda learned together.”
“So, what happened to your dad?” I ask, perhaps a bit more urgently than I should, seeing as I’m a dad in the middle of a dad thing, semiavenging my semidaughter.
“Well, you know,” Twit says, as if I do.
I don’t. I say so.
“He brought me stuff,” Twit says, “like a momma bird. I was a virgin to the hunt, and his little girl, and he was going to keep it that way. But then I got older, and curious, and started sneaking out.” She sighs. Remembers. Smiles. Stops.
“He got suspicious when I never seemed to be hungry anymore. ‘Annie’—my dad never called me Twit; he always called me Annie—‘Annie,’ he says, ‘how old are you?’ And I tell him. ‘Nineteen,’ my eight-year-old face says. And he says he figures that’s old enough. So we start hunting together. Start hunting, and stop talking. I think it was the sight of me, his little girl, killing. Sentences became phrases became one-syllable words. And then he starts leaving me notes, groundi
ng me for one made-up crime or another. So I wrote my own note, telling him what he could do with his rules and roof.”
I don’t mention the pink puddles between Twit’s blue hands.
“I tried going back once,” she says. Sniffs. “It was just a pile of black lumber. My house. Our old house. I asked around. Got the same answer a couple of times. Some freelance Buffy. Some son of an entree, getting even.”
I’m sorry, I say, and Twit lets me.
Thanks for not killing Isuzu.”
I’m still sitting on top of Twit when I say this, even though she stopped squirming a long time ago. I try getting up, but she starts all over again, just enough to force me back down. And I can feel her bones welcoming it, this poor excuse for human contact. It’s pressure, at least. It’s the weight of a body on top of hers. There’s no desire in it, just deadweight and a couple of butt cheeks, but you know what they say about beggars.
The pink puddles—by the way—have gotten a little bigger.
“You could have done a better job raising her,” Twit sniffs.
“Yeah,” I say, shaking the can of paint just to hear the ball bearing rattle a little more. “Woulda, coulda, shoulda.”
Twit sighs and I sigh back.
I toss the can at a wastebasket and sink the shot.
“Thanks for not killing me,” Twit says.
She rubs a blue hand under her blue nose before adding, “I guess.”
29
Little Bobby Little
Imagine your daughter—your angel, your sunshine—coming home one night, deflowered. Imagine that the same time you learn this, you also find out she’s been having an affair with a dwarf half her size. Imagine that prior to this, your big concern vis-à-vis your daughter was that she was involved in an unhealthy relationship with food, her finger, and the toilet. Imagine that after the bloodletting (both figurativeand literal) everybody more or less makes nice. Imagine that you—you lucky stiff you—are about to meet the boyfriend/deflorist for the first time.
Imagine really needing to vomit, but having all the wrong plumbing.
“Do I look okay?”
This is Rose, to me, but looking in the mirror. Oh yeah, there’s that, too. Imagine that the rapist/future son-in-law is something of a celebrity. Several celebrities, in fact, ranging from famous to infamous and back again. Imagine that your maybe-wife has been acting all girlish and starstruck for the last two nights, preparing for your little tête-à-tête.
Seevomit, comma, inability to.
“Is that a gray hair?”
“What?”
“Kidding. You look fine.”
“Really?”
We’re old-school vampires. We’re all products of unnatural selection, survival of the cutest. We’re all young and beautiful.And we all look fine.
On the outside, at least.
But peel away a little of that stuff we grow over our skeletons—that stuff that stands between us and every day being Halloween—peel that away, and we’re all brats from hell. We all imagine ourselves immortal, and we’re right. We’ve created a world of divas and jocks, pretty boys and pretty girls with bodies that won’t quit and looks that’ll never fade, immune to the vengeance of time and its lessons, too.
But don’t mind me. I’m in a mood.
“So when’s our creep—I mean, guest, supposed to be here?”
“Suzi says midnight, which it almost is,” Rose says. “So get a move on.”
Ever since the Book of Revelation, Rose has taken to calling Isuzu “Suzi”—a development I donot endorse.
“You mean ‘Isuzu.’ ”
“Whatever.”
“Any ideas on what the guy’s moniker du jour happens to be?”
“Robert, Rob, or Bob—but not Bobby,” Rose says. “And really notLittle Bobby,” she adds, still preening, still primping, still pissing me off.
“Fussy little fuck, eh?”
Rose bounces a look at me from the mirror. “You’re getting it all out now—is that the plan?”
I love it when the other person comes up with the excuse you haven’t been able to come up with yourself.
“Yep,” I say. “That’s the plan.”
“Okay,” Rose says, turning to face me. “Let ’er rip.”
“Rip?”
“Have at it,” she says. “Here. I’ll even get you started. ‘He’s so dickless…’—blank.”
“Okay,” I say. “He’s so dickless…even a Ken doll’s better hung.”
“Again.”
“He’s so dickless…he’s got an inny.”
“Again.”
“The only way he can maintain an erection is with Popsicle sticks and duct tape.”
“Okay.”
“The only way he can get a woman wet is with a hose.”
“I said, ‘Okay.’ ”
“When he was born, he was so ugly, the doctor slapped his mother…”
“Stop.Finito. Cease and desist.”
“You started it.”
“Okay,” she says, gathering breath. “He’s a dickless, ball-less, gutless, spineless, goat-fucking pederast from the bad part of hell.But.” She aims her finger at me like a gun, like that means anything.
“Suziloves him, andthat’s that.”
“Isuzu.”
“Whatever.”
He comes in wearing black leather pants, a black silk shirt, black silk tie, and black leather suit coat. He’s also wearing wire-rimmed glasses with black lenses, and has a ruby stud in the earlobe I can see. He stands so his face is in three-quarter profile, the better to see the strong line of his jaw.
“Mr. Kowalski, I presume.”
Yes, you do,I think.You really fucking do.
“You can call me Martin.”
“Okay, Marty.”
“No,” I say. “I said, Martin.”
Rose pinches me strong enough to spring a leak; I ignore it.
“Okay,” Robert says. “Martin.”
“Have any trouble finding the place?” Rose asks, waiting to take his coat, to no avail. She stands there a second too long with her hands out, then feigns smoothing her clothes.
“Nope,” Robert says. “Been here before.”
Yes,I think,but you were actually invitedthis time.
“Well, that’s good,” Rose says. “Come in. Take a load off.”
“Suzi around?” Robert asks, doing a surveillance-camera sweep of the living room.
“Isuzu,” I say, “is in the bathroom.”
“She still doing that?”
“Urinating?” I say, feigning ignorance. “Yes. You know what pissers those mortals can be.”
“Tell me about it,” not–Little Bobby says. “I’ve got one of those new apartments? You know, like one that was built after? So, like, there’s no toilet, right? So, like, the first time she’s over, I gotta give Suzi a bucket she can take in the closet. And it’s like she’s peeing on top of a drum, it echoes so bad. She comes out and I go, like, ‘Jeezus, girl,’ and she goes, ‘You heard?’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah. Duh…’ ”
I look at Rose, whose lack of being impressed is impressive. I do a little thing with my mouth out of Robert’s view, a little smirk thing, and Rose does it back. Translation:Jerk? Yep. Jerk.
Cool. One crush down. One to go. And I didn’t even have to do any heavy lifting.
“So, Robbie,” I say. “Robbie” was not explicitly ruled out, and I figure I might as well exploit the loophole. “That’s quite some story, first thing in the door.”
And just like that, the EKG of his grin flatlines.
“Oh jeez,” he goes. “That was kinda gross, wasn’t it?”
Rose and I do not nod. We don’t have to. Robbie keeps going on his own.
“And…and personal and stuff. I shouldn’t…I don’t know what…I’m sor…” He regroups. “I’m just real nervous about this whole thing. Suzi…I mean, Isuzu, she’s told me all about you and how you found her and raised her and how you’re like practically a god as far
as she’s concerned and…”
Fucker. Cheap-ass, sneak-that-compliment-in-there-so-I-go-all-warm-and-fuzzyfucker.
DSosnowski - Vamped Page 33