by Holly Black
Janet nodded. “I tried, but Dough stopped me and Kenny stopped her and Fatima came over and started saying how it was a big misunderstanding and all that, even though she didn’t see what happened. She just didn’t want her house to get fucked up.”
Looking down into the cup, Kaye recalled the dark, still water of the stream. Her heart was suddenly beating triple-time even though nothing at all was happening.
“Are you listening to me?” Janet asked.
“Here’s your coffee,” Kaye said, stirring sugar and powdered cream into Janet’s before handing it to her. “I’m listening.”
“Well, have you ever seen an uncircumcised dick?”
Kaye shook her head.
“Me neither. So I say, ‘Sure, we’ll give you a dollar apiece if you show us.’ And he says, ‘That’s only ten bucks.’ ”
Kaye smiled and nodded as Janet spoke, but she still saw Roiben in her mind’s eye, drenched with rain and blood, shot nearly through the heart with a gnarled arrow.
The hinges screamed their protest as Corny opened the door and stomped into the trailer. He glared at both of them, stalked to the refrigerator, opened it, and then swigged Mountain Dew out of the bottle.
“What’s up your ass?” Janet said.
A white cat, her belly swollen with kittens, had slunk in when Corny opened the door. Kaye dropped her hand to pet the little head.
“I just worked two shifts, so don’t fuck with me.” Kaye could see that the patch on the back of his jacket was a devil’s head. In his back pocket, the outline of his wallet was connected to a chain that ran to his front belt loop.
“Mom hates it when you drink out of the bottle,” Janet said.
“So what?” Corny said. He took another deliberate swig. “You going to tell her about that? How about I tell her how you need your own Roman vomitorium.”
“Shut up, fuckfist.” Janet picked up the phone in the kitchen and started punching in numbers. She walked toward her bedroom as she dialed.
Corny glanced at Kaye. She looked away from him and pulled the heavy, soft cat onto her lap. It purred like a hive of hornets.
“You’re that girl that believes in faeries, right?” Corny said.
She shrugged. “I’m Kaye.”
“Want some soda? I didn’t backwash into it.” He wiped the side of his sleeve against his mouth.
Kaye shook her head. Something—like a small stone—bounced off her knee.
The windows were closed. Kaye looked at the ceiling, but the overhead light looked intact. Maybe something from a shelf. When she looked down at the floor near her feet, the only object she saw was an acorn. They were abundant outside this time of year, scattering from the nearby tree all over the lawns of homes with room for trees and grass. She picked it up and looked toward the window again. Maybe it was open after all. The acorn was light in her hand, and she noticed a tiny strip of white sticking out from under the cap.
Corny was dampening a towel and wiping off his face. She didn’t think he’d thrown the acorn—she’d been talking to him when she’d felt it hit.
Kaye pulled lightly on the acorn cap, and it came loose. Inside the nutshell, all the meat was gone, leaving an empty space where a slip of paper was coiled. Kaye removed it carefully and read the message written in a pinkish red ink: “Do not talk to the black knight anymore. tell no one your name. everything is danger. Gristle is gone. We need your help. meet you tomorrow night. LL&S”
What did it mean, Gristle is gone? Gone where? And the black knight? Could that be Roiben? She hadn’t been talking to anyone else that fit that description. What did it mean, that everything was danger?
“Kaye,” Janet said, leaning out of her bedroom, “you want to go to the mall?”
Kaye fumbled to tuck the acorn into the pocket of her leather jacket.
“I suppose that you are expecting me to take you,” Corny said. “Y’know, most people that go shopping actually have money.”
“Shut up, geek,” Janet said, and ushered Kaye into her bedroom.
Kaye sat down on Janet’s bed. Janet’s room was full of mismatched furniture: a wooden dresser with glass knobs, a white pressboard vanity, and a dented black metal daybed. The room was as messy as Kaye’s, with clothes hanging out of open drawers and littering the floor, but the disarray seemed glamorous here. While Kaye’s clothes were all T-shirts and retro attic finds, Janet had red skirts with feather fringe, and shirts that shimmered blue and gold like fish scales. Pots of eyeshadow, glittery barrettes, body sprays, and tubes of hair goo covered her vanity and the top of her dresser. On the walls, posters of bands competed with messages written in multicolor markers on the white walls. JANET & KENNY TLF was written in glitter on the back of Janet’s door. She wasn’t sure, but she thought she saw traces of some other name underneath Kenny’s.
“What should I wear?” Janet held up a pink, fuzzy cropped sweater that came to just under her breasts. “Will I freeze?”
“You need a poodle miniskirt.” Kaye sat on the bed and leaned back against the pillows. Her hand went to her pocket, pressing the tiny point of the acorn hard enough to indent her thumb.
“What are you going to wear?”
“This.” Kaye indicated her faded T-shirt and jeans with a sweep of her hand.
Janet sighed and made a face. “Boys all think you’re exotic. I’d kill for that.”
Kaye shook her head morosely. What too many white boys liked about Asian girls was weird. It was all mail-order brides and kung fu at the same time.
“How about you wear this?” Janet held up a shiny black shirt that had no back at all. It tied around the neck and waist like a bikini.
“No way,” Kaye said.
This time Janet just laughed.
They walked into the mall through the movie theater entrance. Boys and girls were gathered in packs on the steps, waiting for rides or having a cigarette before their movie started. Janet walked past them like a goddess, not looking at anybody, perfectly curled hair and glistening lipstick appearing effortless. It made Kaye wonder where she’d learned this skill with beauty—as a kid Janet had a perpetually woolly perm and unlaced sneakers.
Kaye caught her own reflection in a window and grimaced. Her T-shirt was a bit of thin, faded cloth that even sported a couple of holes from Laundromat abuse. Her jeans were hand-me-downs from her mother, and they hung low on her hipbones, forcing her to hitch them up occasionally when she felt like they were going to fall all the way off. Maybe she should have taken Janet up on her offer of borrowed clothes after all.
“Okay,” Janet said. “Want to show me those skills you bragged about?”
Kaye grinned. One thing that they’d emailed about for a while was the audacity of the things they’d shoplifted. Kaye’s all-time greatest heist had been her two rats. They might not have been expensive, but pocketing a squirming animal and then keeping it in your pocket was harder than it sounded.
She nodded. “Here are Kaye’s Principles of Thieving, okay?”
Janet folded her arms. “Kidding, right?”
“Listen. No mom-and-pop stores. Just chains or megastores—they can afford it, and the people who work there don’t give a shit. Oh, and no places where the employees are actually nice.”
“I can’t believe you have rules.”
Kaye nodded solemnly. “Minimizing my karmic damage.”
A few hours later they were sitting on the curb outside the Wiz divvying up their loot. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, far enough from the mall to be entirely safe, but they were feeling untouchable. Kaye was trying a new, heavy stick of smoky eyeliner, smearing it thickly under her eyes. Janet was drinking a raspberry smoothie—the only thing she’d actually paid for.
Kaye dug through her jeans for matches and lit a cigarette. Taking a deep breath of smoke, she leaned back and exhaled, letting the smoke whorl up and away. She reached up lazily to change the pattern. It shifted at the touch of her fingers, and she could see figures dancing in it—no, they were
n’t dancing, they were fighting. Swordsmen dueling in the rising smoke.
“How long are you going to be in town?” Janet asked.
Kaye dropped her hand. She’d forgotten where she was. “I figure at least a couple of months.”
“It’s weird, you know. Us being friends after all this time and you being so far away. I’ve been thinking about last night.”
“Yeah?” Kaye asked warily.
“He was hitting on you, wasn’t he?”
Kaye shrugged. There was no way to explain what really happened. She certainly couldn’t have explained why she’d let him run his hand up her thigh, why she hadn’t minded in the least until she’d suddenly remembered who they were and realized what was really happening. “A little, I guess. But I honestly fell. I guess I drank too much or something.”
“How come you were up there in the first place?”
Kaye grinned easily now. “Just exploring. There was the most outrageously cool old carousel horse. Did you see it? The legs were gone but the rest of it was perfect—the paint wasn’t even badly faded.” She sighed wistfully. “Even if I had some way to bring that thing home, there is no way I could drag it from apartment to apartment.”
Janet sighed. It was obvious this was the sort of reason she could easily believe.
Kaye took another drag on her cigarette, wondering why that made her angry. This time the tendrils of smoke reminded her of Roiben’s hair, raw silver silk. Thinking about that made her feel even more restless and frustrated. She wanted to see him again. The more time passed, the more it seemed he had stepped from the pages of a storybook.
“Earth to Kaye,” Janet said. “What were you thinking about?”
“Robin,” Kaye said. That was something else she imagined Janet would easily believe.
“He’s for real? Honest?” Janet sucked hard on her straw, trying to draw out a chunk of frozen raspberry that was clogging it.
“Don’t be a bitch,” Kaye said without real heat.
“Sorry. It’s just that it’s so unlikely—meeting a guy in a rainstorm while you’re walking home. I mean, what was he doing out there? I wouldn’t have talked to him. Didn’t he have his own car?”
“Look, I’m only going to be in town for a couple of months, at most. The only thing that matters is that he is cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die beautiful.” Kaye waggled her eyebrows suggestively.
That at least brought a scandalized gasp. “You slut,” Janet crooned joyfully. “Do you even know if he likes you?”
Kaye ground out the stub of her cigarette on the rough cement, smearing ash in a roughly circular line. She didn’t want to go over the list of things to recommend her to a faerie knight; there wasn’t a single thing she could think of to put on such a list.
“He’ll like me,” she said, hoping that the charm of speaking words aloud would make those words come true.
That night Kaye let Isaac and Armageddon run all over the bed while the CD player blasted Grace Slick singing “White Rabbit” over and over again. A grown-up, fucked-up Alice suited her. Then she put on Hole and listened to Courtney Love grate out words about girls and cakes.
She cracked the window and lit a cigarette, careful to blow the smoke out onto the lawn.
The row of dolls watched her impassively from the bookshelf, their tea party propriety almost certainly offended. She caught both rats and put them up there with the dolls, to get to know one another. Then she turned back to the bed.
It was short work to drag the mattress off the box spring and onto the floor, where she was used to sleeping. It took up most of the space in the room, but at least her feet would be able to hang comfortably over the edge. And if she covered the box spring with one of her mother’s batik throws and lots of pillows, it could almost be a couch.
Putting out her cigarette and lying back down, she watched the rats crawl over the laps of the dolls—heedless of velvet riding coats or gold lace princess gowns—to snuffle plastic hair, and nibble at delicate, porcelain fingers.
4
All day and all night
my desire for you
unwinds like a poisonous snake.
—SAMAR SEN, “LOVE”
That Monday morning, Kaye woke up early, got dressed, and pretended to go to school.
She had been pretending for the better part of a week now, ever since her grandma had insisted she was going to march down to the school and find out what was taking them so long to enroll her. There was no way to tell her that the transcripts were never coming, so Kaye packed a peanut-butter-and-honey sandwich and an orange and went out to kill time.
When they had first moved to Philadelphia, she had transferred easily to a new school. But then they’d started moving around, living for six months in University City and another four in South Philly and then a couple of weeks in the Museum District. Each time, she either had to find a way to get to her old school or transfer to the new one. About a year back, the confusion had gotten the better of her, and she’d started working full-time at Chow Fat’s instead. Ellen and Lloyd needed the extra money and, aside from that, they needed the free food.
Kaye kicked a flattened soda can down the street ahead of her. Even she could see that she was going in no good direction, and not just literally. Her grandmother was right about her—she was turning into her mother. No, worse, because she didn’t even have an ambition. Her only talents were shoplifting and a couple of cigarette-lighting tricks you needed a Zippo to perform.
She considered going to Red Bank and trying to find Sue and Liz’s store. She had some money and could use some new music, plus she might be able to sneak on the train for the couple of stops. Her biggest problem was that Ellen hadn’t said what they’d called the place.
It occurred to her that maybe Corny would know. He probably had another hour before the graveyard shift ended and the morning guy came in. If she bought him coffee, he might not mind her hanging around too much.
The Quick Check was mostly empty when she went in and filled two large paper cups with hazelnut coffee. She fixed hers with cinnamon and half-and-half, but she didn’t know how he liked his, so she pocketed little packets of sugar and several creamers. The yawning woman didn’t even look at Kaye as she rang her up.
At the gas station, Kay found Corny sitting on the hood of his car, playing chess on a small, magnetic board.
“Hey,” Kaye called. He looked up with a not-so-friendly expression on his face. She held out the coffee, and he just looked confused.
“Aren’t you supposed to be in school?” he asked finally.
“Dropped out,” she said. “I’m going to get my GED.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“Do you want the coffee or not?”
A car pulled up in front of one of the pumps. He sighed, sliding to his feet. “Put it by the board.”
She pulled herself onto his car and carefully set down his cup, searching her pockets for the fixings. Then she uncapped hers and took a deep sip. The warmth of the liquid braced her against the cold, wet autumn morning.
Corny came back a few minutes later. After a considering look, he started pouring sugar into his coffee, stirring it with a pen from his pocket.
“Which you are you playing against?” Kaye asked, drawing up her knees.
He looked up at her with a snort. “Did you come here to fuck with me? Coffee is cheap.”
“Geez, I’m just talking. Who’s winning?”
Corny smirked. “He is, for now. Come on, what are you really doing here? People do not visit me. Being social to me is, like, tempting the Apocalypse or something.”
“How come?”
Corny hopped down again with a groan as another car pulled up in front of the gas pump. She watched him sell a carton of cigarettes and fill the tank. She wondered if the owner would hire a sixteen-year-old girl—her last paycheck wasn’t going to stretch much further. Corny had worked here when he was younger than she was now.
“Corny,” she said when he cam
e back, “do you know of any small CD stores in Red Bank?”
“Trying to bribe me for a ride?”
She sighed. “Paranoid. I just want to know what it’s called.”
He shrugged, playing out a couple more moves without editorial comment. “My comic book store is next to some CD store, but I don’t know the name.”
“What comics do you read?”
“Are you saying that you read comics?” Corny looked defensive, like maybe she was leading him into some verbal trap.
“Sure. Batman. Lenore. Too Much Coffee Man. Used to read Sandman, of course.”
Corny regarded her speculatively for a moment, then finally relented. “I used to read X-everything, but I read a lot of Japanese stuff now.”
“Like Akira?”
He shook his head. “Nah. Girl comics—the ones with the pretty boys and girls. Hey, do you know what shonen-ai is?” His expression was dubious.
Kaye shook her head.
Corny frowned. “I thought you were Japanese.”
She shrugged. “My dad was part of some glam-goth band my mother worshipped in high school. I never met him. It was a groupie thing.”
“Wild.”
“I guess.”
A car pulled into the station, but instead of parking in front of the pumps, it stopped next to Corny’s car. A dark-skinned kid in a college letter jacket got out.
“Nice of you to show up today,” Corny said, tossing him a set of the keys.
“I said I was sorry, man,” the kid said.
Turning to Kaye, Corny said, “Where you going now?”
Kaye shrugged.
“You want to come with? You could hang out and wait for Janet to get home.”
She nodded. “Sure.”
They walked over to the trailer together.
He switched on the TV and walked back to his room. “I’m going to check my mail.”
Kaye nodded and sat down on the couch, only then feeling a little awkward. It was weird to be in Janet’s house without Janet. She flipped through the channels, settling on Cartoon Network.