The cold outside was like a slap to already-stinging cheeks. It still smelled like iron, the way a penny tastes when you suck on it. I walked with my head down, my boots crunching frozen weeds, my nose immediately running.
What a choice. Skip school and freeze your ass off, or go back inside the building where it’s warm and get bored literally to death.
“Hey! Hey, you!”
I ignored the voice, swiping at my nose with the sleeve of my sweatshirt jacket. Footsteps crunched behind me. I didn’t hunch my shoulders—that’s a dead giveaway that you’ve heard someone. If it was a teacher, I was going to have to come up with a reason why I was out here, and I began to think about exercising my creative lying muscle.
They should have a class for that. Who would teach it? I wonder if it would grade on a curve.
“Hey! Anderson!” The voice was too young to belong to a teacher. And it was male.
Shit. Just my luck. The bullies don’t usually mess with me, but you never know. I set my heel down in the gravel and whirled, my head coming up and my hair falling in my eyes despite being mostly stuffed under my hood.
It was the half-Asian goth kid from American History class.
He was too tall, and the long black coat flapped as he skidded to a stop. He’d pushed his collar up again, and the cold made his cheeks and nose cherry red under his mop of dyed-black hair. He wheezed for a second, his narrow chest heaving under a Black Sabbath T-shirt, and peered at me through strings of hair. His eyes were an odd pale green, but his hair managed to keep them from doing more than peeping out every once in a while. In a few years he’d probably be a real looker, with those contrasting eyes and the thick wavy dark hair.
Right now, though, he was in that funny in-between stage where every part of a guy’s body looks like it was pulled out of a different parts catalog. Poor kid.
I waited. Finally, he got his breath back. “You want a cigarette?”
“No.” Jesus, no. He had the type of baby face most guys would curse at in the mirror, at war with its own nose and cheekbones. The kind of face some half-breeds get stuck with if they don’t draw the pretty card. It made him look about twelve, except he was so tall. The hair was maybe an attempt to look like he really was “sixteen, honest.” He had nice boots, steel-toed combat numbers laced up to his knees. To top it all off, an inverted crucifix dangled from a silver chain, against his bony sternum.
I backed up another step and took another look at him. Nope. Nothing of the Real World on this kid. I didn’t think so, but it’s better to check. Better to check twice and be relieved than only check once and get your ass blown off, Dad says.
Dad. Is he gone already? It’s still daylight, he’s probably okay. I didn’t like the way my chest was getting tight.
The kid dug in a pocket and fished out a crumpled pack of Winstons, the corners of his eyes crinkling. At least he hadn’t drawn the really slit-eyed card a lot of half-breeds have to play, where they look like they’re squinting to beat Clint Eastwood the whole time. “You want one?” he asked again.
What the hell? I stared at the crucifix. Did he have any idea what that meant? Or how quickly it could get him in a lot of trouble, in some places?
Probably not. That’s why the Real World is the Real World: because the normal world thinks it’s the only game going.
“No thanks.” I want a cup of coffee and a club sandwich. I want to sit down someplace and draw. I want to find some place where the sunlight doesn’t get in and I don’t feel like a total alien. Leave me the hell alone. I should have told Dad about the owl. My conscience pricked me. “Sorry about Bletchley.”
He shrugged, a quick birdlike movement. All of him was birdlike, from his beak of a nose at war with his caramel-skinned baby face to the restless way his fingers moved. He tapped a cigarette out of the pack and produced a silver Zippo, lit the cancer stick, exhaled a cloud of smoke, and promptly went into a coughing fit.
Jesus. Here I was freezing my ass off with Cool Goth Boy. Some days were so much worse than others it wasn’t funny. “It’s okay,” he said when he could talk again. “She’s a bitch. She does that all the time.”
Glad to know I didn’t interrupt anything. I stood there with no real idea of what to say. I settled for a shrug of my own. “See you.”
“Are you skipping?” He fell into step beside me, ignoring the fact that I was walking away. “Off to a good start.”
Leave me alone. “I don’t want to deal with it today.”
“Okay. I know a place to go. You shoot pool?” He managed not to choke himself on another drag of cigarette smoke. “I’m Graves.”
When did I invite you along? “I know.” I looked back down at my boots, marking off time. “Dru.” And don’t you dare ask what it’s short for.
“Dru.” He repeated it. “You’re new. Couple of weeks, right? Welcome to Foley.”
State the goddamn obvious and bring out your suburban Welcome Wagon. I couldn’t see any way to ditch him just yet, so I just made a noise of assent. We crossed the soccer field in weird tandem, him shortening his stride out of respect for my lack of grasshopper legs. I sized him up as we walked. I’d give myself better odds in a fight, I decided. He didn’t look very tough.
Still, I was walking into the woods with a kid I didn’t know. I stole quick little glances at his hands and decided he might be okay. At least I could kick his ass if he tried anything, and the greenbelt wasn’t very big.
He tried again. “Where you from?”
A planet far, far away. Where nightmares are real. “Florida.” The question always came up, sooner or later. Sometimes, mostly when I was younger, I lied. Most of the time I just pretended like I’d always lived in the last place we’d come from.
People don’t really want to know anything about you. They just want you to fit into their little predetermined slots. They decide what you are in the first two seconds, and they only get nervous or upset if you don’t live up to their snap judgments. That’s one way the normal world’s like the Real—it all depends on what people think you are. Figure that out, play to what they expect, and it’s clear sailing.
“Yeah, you sounded a bit down-South. Big change for you, huh? It’s going to snow.” He announced it like I should be grateful to him for telling me. The strap of my bag dug into my shoulder.
I tried not to bristle. I do not sound Southern. I sound like Gran a little bit, but that’s all. “Thanks for the warning.” I didn’t bother disguising the sarcasm.
“Hey, no problem. First one’s free.”
When I glanced up at him, he was smiling under his hair. It almost threatened to eat his nose, that hair. The proud, bony nose was putting up a good fight, though, and he looked miserably cold. He didn’t even have any gloves.
For a second I toyed with the idea of telling him something. Hi. I’m Dru Anderson. My father went way-out wack after my mom died and now he travels around hunting things that go bump in the night, killing things you only find in fairy tales and ghost stories. I help him out when I can, but most of the time I’m deadweight, even though I can tell you where anything inhuman in this town is likely to hang out. I’m skipping school because I won’t be here in another three months. None of it goddamn well matters.
Instead, I found myself almost smiling back. “You should wear some gloves.”
He peered at me, shaking his hair away. His eyes turned out to be green with threads of brown and gold, thickly fringed with dark lashes, change-color eyes. Boys always get the best eyelashes; it’s like some kind of cosmic law. And half-breed kids get some kind of extra help there from genetics, too. Once he grew into that nose and his face thinned out a bit, the girls would like him a lot. Maybe it would even go to his head.