by Pratt, Tim
“Sit down,” she said, and his butt hit the curb. She leaned over, the rose curtain of her hair almost touching his face. “I call you Rocko because that's what the Boy calls you."
Rocko heard the emphasis she put on the word “Boy,” knew that she meant it as more than a generic term. “This is about the Boy, and the Girl, so I'll call you by the name they do."
Rocko was trying to move his arms. He wanted to lash out at her, knock her over in a tangle of legs, skirt, chrome, and chain. He thought about his psychiatrist—"testing boundaries"—he'd never had boundaries as tight as this, trapped in his own body.
“But you can have a place in this, too, Rocko. You can be the Rival. You do like her, don't you? The Girl?"
Rocko growled—or tried to. He didn't make a sound.
She laughed. “She snubbed you, didn't she? And for that dogshit, that Boy you hate without reason."
Without reason? Rocko always had reasons, and that kid, that Cory...
What? Well, he was a piece of shit, always had his nose in a book, he slouched around, stank of cowardice, thought he was better than everyone else ... There. Lots of reasons. A whole truckload of reasons.
That girl, though ... she was something else. He had no doubt she'd have used that stick today, if she'd needed to. She was pretty, but not snotty, not afraid to get sweaty and play hard. Not like Cory, who'd probably never sweated in his life.
“Yes,” the woman said, nodding. “You can be the Rival. You are the Rival.” She crooked her finger and he jerked upright. It felt like a rope wrapped around his chest, pulling him to his feet.
She's a witch, he thought, with that same, intellectual fear.
“Would you like to kill the Boy, and win the Girl?” she asked.
Kill? Rocko had a certain interest in the subject, but killing anyone would be so messy in the particulars. Just like beating someone up—he didn't much enjoy that, though he often desired the consequences. That was so often a problem; to achieve a certain end, he had to resort to ugly means. If only he could skip those intermediate stages, wave his hands and have someone die, or put them on the ground writhing in pain.
He looked at the woman (he had no choice, he couldn't even blink, but now he looked). She'd pithed him like a frog without even saying a word, and he suspected that she didn't need to hear him speak, because she could read his mind. Maybe he could learn power like that from her. The power of ends, and the circumvention of clumsy, inelegant means.
“Kill?” he said, and now his voice worked. The idea of killing lacked emotional color, too. He could kill someone easily, if he felt like this while doing it. “Sure. I could do that."
She grinned. “A will to kill is a wonderful thing. It means you always have a last resort. But you really just want the Girl, yes?"
Rocko grunted. He didn't want the girl to think he was nothing, that was for sure, and he couldn't stand to see her with a dogshit like Cory.
“So the best thing to do would be to humiliate the Boy, somehow, and let her find out about it, maybe even witness it. Then she'd know he's nothing, and that you're clever, and brave, and much more worth her attention. Yes?"
Rocko could feel her eyes boring into him from behind her black glasses. “Yeah. Yeah, that would do it."
“You and your little friends can come up with something, can't you? Something suitable?"
“Something suitable for a shit like him,” Rocko said, getting an idea. Of course. Everyone had to use the bathroom sometime, didn't they? “I think so."
“Good,” she said. “It's better than murder, at least for now. If you've never buried a body, you don't know how much trouble it can be."
“Cory!” his mom called. “You have a visitor!"
Cory looked up from his homework—just a worksheet on ecology, boring as mud—and frowned. Who could—
Oh. His throat tightened a little. Could it be Heather? Already? “Coming, mom!” He stopped in front of the mirror, raking his fingers through his shaggy brown hair, then gave it up as a bad job. Heather'd seen him at very nearly his worst this afternoon, and she'd seemed to like him fine then.
He hurried downstairs, into the living room.
He hardly recognized the girl he found there. Heather had been sweaty, grass-stained, red-cheeked and mussed before. But this girl—she could be one of the prettiest girls in school. She had blue ribbons braided into her hair, and wore a plain white t-shirt tucked into khaki shorts. Her sneakers were clean, too, not the scuffed ones she'd been wearing before. He could faintly see the lace of her bra under the shirt, and he looked away, blushing.
“Heather tells me you met at school today,” his mom said.
“Yeah,” Cory said. “She just moved to the neighborhood."
“Welcome to town, Heather,” Cory's mom said. “I'll have to go meet your parents sometime."
“Sure,” Heather said. “My dad's not here yet, he's driving in another truck full of stuff. He'll be around next week, though."
“I'll make a point of introducing myself,” she said. “There's brownies in the kitchen, if you guys want a snack. Would you like to stay for dinner, Heather?"
She glanced at Cory. He shrugged. Heather rolled her eyes at him. “Sure. That'd be great!"
“I'll leave you two alone,” Cory's mom said, glancing at Cory with a small, secret smile—a smile that meant she'd be asking him about this nice new girl later on. She went into the kitchen.
“She bakes brownies and she makes dinner?” Heather said. “What, did you win the mom lottery? We eat Chinese and pizza most of the time at my house."
“Chinese and pizza sounds pretty good to me. Mom's a research assistant for a lawyer, and she works from home about half the time. She usually makes something for dinner on the days she's home."
“How come she doesn't pick you up from school?"
He shrugged. “She says just because she's home doesn't mean she's not working."
“Well, that's too bad. It means you get to keep me company on the bus, though.” She twirled around, an impromptu ballerina. “How do I look?"
Cory had never dealt with a girl his own age in such proximity before. How did you answer that? What would she think if he said she looked pretty? Would she think he liked her? Did he like her? “You look fine,” he said cautiously.
“Aren't you a charmer?” she said, but it was good-natured. “I was just going to come right over, but my mom's big on making good first impressions, she said I shouldn't meet the neighbors for the first time looking all grubby. She braided my hair and made me change—she wanted me to wear a dress! I don't even like wearing dresses to church."
Cory wouldn't have known what to think if Heather had shown up here in a dress—he certainly would have felt uncomfortable in his own jeans and t-shirt, even if this was his house.
“Want to see my room?” Cory asked.
“Sure.” She followed him up the stairs. “You'll have to come to my house sometime, and check out the woods out back. They're really cool."
“I go back there a lot, actually. There's some really nice, quiet places. The woods are pretty big, too, bigger than you think at first."
“Ever get lost?"
He hesitated, always unwilling to make himself sound foolish. “Yeah, once. I finally came out of the woods about a mile away on the highway, and walked back from there."
“I haven't gone far enough to get lost yet, but I'm sure I will.” It sounded like she relished the idea—like it would be more of an adventure than an embarrassment. Maybe, for her, it would be. And maybe if he went exploring with her, he could learn to look at getting lost in the same way.
He showed her his new computer, and the Bogart poster he'd gotten for Christmas. She really liked his microscope, sitting dusty on a shelf—seemed a lot more interested in it than he'd ever been, truthfully. “Oh, good books!” she said, looking over his row of Charles de Lint and Orson Scott Card. She tapped a copy of Ender's Game with her forefinger. “I read this in school last y
ear.” She pulled down one of his Sandman trade paperbacks. “I've never read these. Are they any good?"
“They're awesome."
“Let me borrow them sometime? You can raid my shelves, too, if you want."
“Sounds good.” So what if she liked bad movies? She had good taste in books, at least.
They talked about books for a while, then played video games. She was better than him at killing zombies, but he excelled at racing futuristic cars through decaying cityscapes.
Cory's dad got home right before dinner. He was nice to Heather—he was always nice to everyone. His parents mostly talked to Heather during dinner, asking about her old hometown, what her parents did, and so on. Cory learned a lot about her that way, and Heather seemed perfectly at ease around his parents. Dinner was chicken parmesan with salad and some kind of sun-dried tomato bread—a nicer meal than they would've had if they didn't have company over, Cory suspected.
After dinner, Cory walked with Heather out in the yard. “Sorry about that,” he said. “My parents playing twenty questions with you that way."
“It's okay. They're parents, they do stuff like that. I didn't mind. As long as you can play the same game when you come to have dinner at my house."
Cory felt warm. For the first time since school had started, he began to think that this year wouldn't be horrible. It was possible Heather would meet other people, find out Cory wasn't exactly at the top of the social ladder, and drift away from him ... but maybe she'd stick around and be his friend. That would make this year a lot better, even if they didn't have any classes together.
“Want to go down to the woods before it gets totally dark?” she asked. “There's this really cool spot by a stream, it only takes about five minutes to get there from my house...” Unselfconsciously, she reached out and took his hand, pulling him along. Her hand was warm, and Cory wanted to hold it forever.
Heather lived at the end of the street, and as they walked along, Cory noticed a woman riding toward them on a bicycle, moving in slow arcs, drifting from one side of the street to the other and back again, only incidentally making forward progress. She had long reddish hair, and dark glasses. She wore a long skirt, too, and Cory didn't see how she could pedal the bicycle without getting the fabric caught in the chain and the gears. The woman stared at them as she approached, slowing down. She rolled past them so slowly that it seemed like her bicycle should fall over from a lack of forward momentum. Her skirt matched the bike frame, and her boots seemed almost a part of the pedals—looking at her made Cory's eyes get blurry. The impression was hard for him to define, even to himself, but he had trouble telling where the woman left off and the bicycle began, like they were a single creature made of chrome and flesh, hair and leather.
Heather's hand tightened in his, and they stood still as she rolled past them, mere feet away. She grinned, and for an instant her teeth seemed to flash like chrome. Then she pedaled on, something in a bag clattering in the basket behind the bicycle seat, like pieces of metal clanging together.
Cory and Heather stood for a moment, watching her go. “Does she live around here?” Heather asked.
“Never seen her before in my life."
“Weird,” Heather said decisively, and then squeezed his hand and started walking again.
That night, Cory woke in darkness. He sat up, disoriented. Something had awakened him, but he wasn't sure what. Some noise outside, maybe? He went to the window and looked down into the backyard.
Someone was pedaling a bicycle around a circle in the grass, a girl in a nightgown. Was that ... Heather? It looked like her, still with the blue ribbon in her braid. He frowned, wondering what she was doing down there, wondering if he should go down himself. She just kept pedaling that big old-fashioned bike, going counterclockwise around the dogwood tree in the middle of the yard.
Cory pulled on his shoes, grabbed his jacket, and slipped quietly down the stairs, frowning. Was Heather okay? Just out for a middle-of-the-night adventure?
He went out the back door, closing it quietly, then down the steps across the grass toward Heather. “Hey!” he called softly, not wanting to wake his parents.
When he got within a few feet of the perimeter of her circle, he realized the rider wasn't Heather at all. He couldn't understand how he'd thought it was—she wasn't even wearing an nightgown, and she was an adult. That's when he began to think it might be a dream.
The bicyclist skidded to a stop in front of him. He stepped away, afraid, because this was the woman he and Heather had seen earlier, the one who seemed somehow blended in with her bicycle.
“Hello, my darling Boy,” she said, putting a funny emphasis on the last word.
“You shouldn't be here,” he said. “This is private property."
“I'm here to help you. But if you want me to go...” She shrugged, and put her foot on the pedal.
“What do you mean?” He was cold despite his jacket, the night wind blowing straight through him. Would he be cold, if this was a dream?
“There's a boy at your school,” she said. She didn't put any particular emphasis on the word “boy” that time. “You call him Rocko, yes?"
Cory nodded. It had to be a dream, but that didn't make it any more disturbing.
“He's going to do something nasty to you tomorrow afternoon, my Boy. He hates you, but that's not such a large thing—his kind is always full of hate, though he is rather more a monster than most bullies, I think. Today, though, he became jealous of you, too—he likes the Girl, the Girl who likes you. His jealousy is much more dangerous to you than his hatred. He'll want to do something about his jealousy, something to humiliate you."
“How do you know that? How do you know I call him Rocko?"
“Because I'm the good witch, my Boy, and I want you to defeat your Rival.” She smiled, and the bag in the basket behind her shifted with a clatter.
“What's in that bag?” Cory asked.
She looked behind her, then back at him. “You'll find out soon enough. Have patience. I do. You won't need anything from that bag tomorrow. You'll just need a little bit of magic, a tiny spell ... a turnaround. I'll teach you how to do it. It takes a little blood to start with, but that shouldn't be hard—I bet there will be blood tomorrow afternoon, your own blood, if you're not quick. After the blood is spilled, it's just the matter of a gesture, and a word, and certain ... patterns ... of thought. I'll show you how.” She reached out toward his face, and he flinched away. “Shh, be a good Boy."
He wanted to turn and run, despite her claim to be a “good witch"—nothing about her reassured him, nothing made her seem good. He couldn't believe she had any human feeling, any more than ... than a bicycle would.
He couldn't move, not a muscle, though, and oddly, he didn't feel afraid. He thought frightened thoughts, but panic didn't sing in his veins. The witch touched his face with her fingers, and with her chrome rings.
“You won't remember any of this, my Boy. Not until tomorrow, when you need to."
School the next day was the usual, everything pretty easy except for biology, where Cory struggled to understand what mitochondria did, and why on earth he should care. He'd agreed to meet Heather down by the office when she got done with classes. Earth Science was his last class, and thinking about seeing Heather again soon made it hard for him to think about “the ecology of the microcosm” that his earth science teacher kept talking about.
He didn't think about Rocko all day, until he started reading after school. He sat on a bench near the office and read Good Omens, thinking it'd be pretty cool if he had the kind of powers the kid, Adam, had in that book. There were bullies in that story, but they were pretty harmless—you never got the sense the kids really worried about being beat within an inch of their lives by Greasy Johnson, like Cory feared Rocko and Curly and Angel. Maybe that was because Good Omens took place in England—maybe people just weren't as violent on the other side of the sea.
Cory stuck the book in his bag and wandered down the
hall toward the bathroom so he could pee before meeting Heather.
He stepped into the bathroom, and rough hands grabbed him, slamming him against the wall. Angel and Curly had him by the arms, and before he could even think of pulling away they stepped on his insteps, crushing his toes, pinning his feet so he couldn't kick or thrash. “Hiya,” Curly said. “No girls with sticks here to save you today, huh?
“We're still not testing boundaries,” Angel said. “So don't worry about that."
Rocko sauntered out of a toilet stall. “I didn't think you'd ever come to take a piss, kid,” Rocko said, zipping up his pants. “I figured the place to find a shit like you would be right here, in the toilet, but then you made me wait. I'm a busy guy. It's not right, me having to wait for you."
Cory thought about the old movies he'd seen, about Bogart's effortless aplomb, the way he'd casually disarmed the gunsel from The Maltese Falcon. But even Bogart got beaten up sometimes, especially when two or three guys came for him at once. And Cory was no Bogart. He wanted to spit in Rocko's face ... but what if they just planned to scare him? Wouldn't spitting make them do something much more nasty?
Curly ground his foot into Cory's instep, and Cory bit back a shout of pain. He could try to keep from blubbering like a baby, at least.
Rocko looked at his watch. “Are you meeting your girlfriend this afternoon, dogshit?"
“Leave her alone,” Cory said, without thinking.
Curly and Angel laughed, one right into each of Cory's ears.
“I think he's in love,” Angel said.
“I think he just wants to fuck her,” Curly said sagely.
“I thought that's what you wanted to do,” Angel said.
“True,” Curly agreed.
“Does this make you feel tough, three against one?” Cory said.
“No,” Angel said. “But it's more fun this way, and I usually feel pretty tough anyway. Do you think I couldn't kick your ass on my own?” He ground down with his foot, and Cory couldn't stop himself from yelping.