A Powdery Tattoo


Jessie Terwilliger



One

It’s not like it’s hard to get from my house to my school in the mornings, it’s a simple point A to point B bike ride. It’s hard to get lost when you only have one left turn and then a long straight line down the boulevard, I’m not saying that I can’t do it, or that I don’t do it most mornings. It’s just that if it were a job with a paycheck, the paved road beneath me with the empty fields full of dry brush and the rounded tops of Crafton Hills, the churches and parking lots would all just be a part of society that I belonged in and could relate to.

The little fast food restaurants, the drug stores, those ugly little box houses that they mowed down several hundred acres of orange trees to make room for.

But I’m 16. I don’t have a job, except that school is my job. The gas station and the car wash and all the traffic whizzing past me is all part of my path to something that I don’t particularly like to end up at when I’ve completed my regular morning journey. It’s not like it’s hard to get lost going from point A to point B, but let’s just say that I occasionally get distracted and miss first and second period to go sit and be by myself at the park.

The dry cleaner’s, the grocery store.

I have no defense, really, because I should be in school and I should be making things a little easier on Gran. How I hate upsetting Gran.

Gran takes care of me, or…we really take care of each other now that she’s getting older and the roles are starting to reverse. She took me in when I was little after my parents died. She taught me that creativity is one fluid motion, whatever that is supposed to mean. She’s a sweet old lady, and I do mean old. She’s 83, but she says that I’ve kept her young. Yeah, especially when you’re thrust back into being a mother in your 70’s. I remember watching her try to mingle with the hip young moms with their yoga pants and Blue Tooth headsets at the school, maybe thinking she could relate to the young loner mom knitting by the flag pole only to be smiled and nodded at like she was an escaped convelecent home patient. Poor Gran.

So I guess that I take care of her now that I’m big enough and she’s getting smaller by degrees from ostioperosis or whatever is attacking her weak frame. I don’t have a job though, except to go to school is what she says. Why I ride a bike is because I don’t feel right using my Gran’s money to put myself through driver’s ed, also it’s better for the environment. It’s not exactly a sure fire way to pick up chicks, me on this yellow framed dealy that I call The Hammer for no reason other than to amuse myself, but it’s quick and I don’t spend any money on gas.

That’s another thing, I don’t have a job and I hate asking Gran for spending money even though she’s more than willing to give me some, so I earn cash by recycling bottles and cans for their Cash Refund Value. I usually find a lot of recyclables at the school or on the side of the road. Sometimes if I really need money I’ll reach into the trash cans at the park to see if anyone threw away any bottles or cans carelessly, but I really don’t like to do it if there are people around. Not only because I don’t want to be seen as a “trash digger,” but because there are some homeless guys around here who will kick your ass if you take stuff from their “territory.” I had a guy once tell me that he was actually hired by some company to clean up Flag Hill Park and if I took anything from there I would be stealing and he would have me arrested.

I am not about to get into a fight with a bum over a few quarters worth of cans. I’ll sink to some pretty low levels, but a bum fight isn't really very high on my to-do list.

I also try to avoid digging through the trash cans because it’s unsanitary. I generally find stuff on the ground, sitting on top of the trash cans, or left next to benches or tables. It’s not glamourous but at the end of the day I end up with a couple bucks. I would have more money if I could work up enough guts to sift through the trash cans at school, but I have a bit of a persona to protect, plus I’m pretty sure that the janitors take it all with them when they leave at the end of the day. Like a bonus. A nice perk. Besides, I don’t want to piss those guys off, they can be cool sometimes. And at the end of the day the only important thing is that those cans and bottles aren't ending up in some landfill. That’s the only real reason to recycle, the money you get from it is only a little reward.

Who am I kidding? I do it for the money and that’s the end of the story. But between you and me, let’s just call it my way of saving the planet since I’m still pretty far off from taking over the world.

“Dana,” my grandmother calls from the other room, “are you up yet?”

It’s 6:53 AM and I’ve overslept again.

“I’m up,” I answer, trying not to sound groggy.

By the way, don’t ever call me Dana. My name is Dagger to everyone but Gran.

I’m not as callous as you think.

I tell everyone to call me Dagger because it makes me sound like maybe I’m a guy who you shouldn’t mess with. It makes me sound dangerous, doesn’t it? And maybe I am! Gran thinks it’s silly and she just shakes her head and says “Oh but Dana I love your God-given name to pieces!” I’m all right with her calling me by my real first name, she’s not the one I’m trying to intimidate. I really just don’t like people at school bothering me, which is pretty much the whole reason why I dress the way that I do. Well, that and I found these perfectly good Doc Martins in a trash can and I liked them so much that I needed some wicked Goth looking outfits to match.
Lucky for me, a few days after I found the boots, someone thought that they had ruined this $200 London Fog leather trench coat by accidentally getting French fry grease on it and just threw it away in the trash can outside Wienerschnitzel. I didn’t even have to dig for it because it was right on top. I took it home and asked Gran what to do to get the stain off, and she said to sprinkle it with cornstarch and let it sit overnight. By morning, the cornstarch had soaked up the stain and I had a perfectly good leather jacket to match my boots.

Again, I am not a trash digger. I am a recycler. I am very concerned about landfills and global warming and all that crap and if I happen to find some good stuff while I’m out doing my good deeds I consider it a reward.

Finders keepers, no matter where you found it.

Before I leave for school I make sure that Gran’s dog Elvis is fed and I check with her to see if she needs anything before I go, even though I’m running pretty late. Gran is able for the most part, she’s just old, and lonely without Gramp. Gran looks up from her knitting and smiles at me appreciatively and tells me that I’m her favorite grandson. Not to mention her only grandson, but the sentiment is there. I’m sure that she’s knitting a sweater for me, at least I hope that she is. My Gran makes kick ass sweaters.

“I’m all right sweetheart but I think Elvis needs a chewie,” she tells me.

Elvis is a 25 pound Pomeranian, practically a football on toothpicks. But she loves the little creature, and he always sits at her feet like a loyal companion. I grabbed a rawhide stick out of the pantry and tossed it over to him as he looked at me with his big, pathetic, hungry eyes.

“There ya go Elvis, that ought to hold you for a while.”
Not bloody likely. I’ve seen him turn one of those rawhide sticks to mush in less than an hour. I’m pretty sure that the dog is venomous. His focus on chewing these things until they’re little more than a pile of goo is more intense than any human trying to solve a calculous equasion in their head. I’ll never understand it.

“All right, I’m off to school Gran,” I say to her as I head toward the back door.

“You be safe now, and don’t talk to any strangers dear. There are people out there who want to do very bad things to you. Don’t ever get into anyone’s car that you don’t know.”
Gran and her sage advice. She always has some kind of safety tip for me before I leave, whether it’s a refresher course on how to safely use a crosswalk or a reminder to wash my hands really well after using a public restroom. Strangely it makes me feel good, like really cared for. She’s just looking out for me, even though I’m now twice her size.

“Beware of stranger danger, got it,” I said understandingly as I closed the door.

My bike ride to school is where I would make the transformation from grandma’s boy Dana Wood to the mysterious and sinister Dagger, who probably practices witch craft or devil worship and who will probably kill you by going straight for your jugular. It’s difficult, because I’m not really a bad guy, I would never hurt anyone. But I want people to think that I would because I sort of use my whole “Dagger” persona as a smoke screen. Anyone who can see past the rough and tough exterior and who knows who I really am, not who Dagger claims to be, is a real friend. And it keeps the ones that I mean to intimidate away, which is part of my goal to begin with.

I had a rather sordid childhood, and I didn’t fit in at my old schools very well when I was a little kid. I was picked on for my red hair, mostly, but they also called me fat. I have a large frame and broad shoulders, so I was significantly taller and wider than the other kids.

That old adage, “I’m not fat, I’m big boned!”

Not bloody likely.

But nothing made me stick out like a sore thumb more than having a girly name. Technically the name is Danish, in fact the name means “Danish,” and it could be used for a boy or a girl. But more often than not, it’s used for girls. My middle name sucks too, and I wont even mention it here to you because it’s so embarrassing, so it’s not like I could go by that instead.
When I moved in with Gran I got to start all over again in a new school district. I moved from the city of Orange to Yucaipa here to live with my Gran. It was perfect because nobody knew who I was, nobody knew about the teasing, but I realized that I still couldn’t change my appearance on the outside. Not really. I still had this red hair and these broad shoulders. This girly name. I figured that if I could do one thing though, it would be to control what people knew me as. I had to create some kind of nick name for myself. That’s how I came up with Dagger. And with the name came this whole other person that I had to act like. You cant be all dweeby and skiddish and have a name like Dagger. If I could just act like how a guy named Dagger would act, I could scare off people before they could get close enough to make fun of me.

Either that or I would be made fun of for failing and look like a huge idiot in front of the entire school, but I had to take my chances.

Luckily it worked, and I didn’t run into anyone who wanted to pick on me for my size or my hair or even my name, because none of the kids really knew it. Middle school went just fine for me. I sat in the library at lunch and read 27 books that year.
But then I realized once I got to high school that it had worked too well and I got lonely, and I probably looked it too. Instead of sitting by myself at a table in the cafeteria, letting them all quietly make their assumptions about me, I just decided to hide. So off I went in search of a spot to hide when I came across this corner of the school that was under the overhang of the library and hidden behind rows and rows of unassigned lockers. The spot was obviously intended to be used by someone, because there was a single table back there in the shady part. It was the perfect secluded spot for me to sit in, and it was pretty the way that the hill behind the table was covered in these sticky purple flowers. Random grasses and weeds sprouting up just wherever they wanted to. Though the table stayed shady for the full 27 minutes of the lunch period the hill was always brightly lit by the sun. I realized that nobody wanted to sit there because it’s right outside Principal Taylor’s door. But I wasn’t doing anything wrong, so I had nothing to fear.
But one day when I got there, there was a girl sitting at my table reading an Anne Rice book. She looked up and I saw her too dark lipstick and the pewter necklace that hung down over her black velvety shirt. Rather than chase her away, yelling how this was my spot like some kind of angry bear, I was strangely compelled to let her stay.

This is how I met Grace.

Two

Grace is rounded, soft around the edges with smooth skin in a shade of brown that would be just as rich and softly colored as the same shade in grey. Grace looks up from her book and pulls out a cherry red sucker from her mouth and informs me in an accent that I cant quite place, “We were here first.”

“We? Who’s we?” I ask.

“My group.”

“Yeah, what kind of group?” I ask, getting a little hostile.

“A writing group, if you must know,” she replies with heat.

There’s that strange accent again.

“Listen sister, I’ve been sitting here for the last several months by myself, and your club isn't just going to come take over, all right?”

“It’s not a club, it’s a group, Clubs need teacher sponsorship, and no teachers on campus would want to sponsor us with the kind of stuff that we write.”

I was intrigued.

“Besides,” she continues, “this is private and it’s three against one so you’ll just have to find somewhere else to sit.”

“Well it’s one on one right now, I don’t see anyone else coming.”
This is of course when Jackie came walking up with her pale face and thin brown hair and mostly empty lunch tray. Quiet and shy. Thin and pretty. Grace tells me she’s a writer too, and then here comes Greg. Wait! I know Greg. We’re in math together and he sits behind me. He’s actually a pretty funny guy in a nerdy sort of way. When Grace sees Greg wave at me she just rolls her eyes and goes back to her vampire novel.

So they all write I guess, or something.

“I write too, you know,” I tell Grace defensively. She lowers her novel again but doesn’t bother to stick her bookmark between the pages to close the book.

“And just what have you written?” she asks me with a snotty tone of voice.

“Like six novels, or…12 half novels, but if you put the halves together you’d have enough pages to make six complete books that take a strange turn of events toward the middle.” I saw Jackie smile just a little.

“Okay, well this is a serious group so I suggest that you bring something for share day this coming Friday.”

“Share day is when we read samples of our work to each other,” Greg leans in to me and adds before stuffing a French fry into his mouth.

“If you guys are so serious then why don’t you already have a spot?” I counter.

“Lesbians,” Greg says. Grace glares at him hard. “What? That’s what happened!” He says. “We used to meet under the stairs of the M building but now there’s lesbians there who make out. It’s rather entertaining but it’s kind of hard to get any work done with that going on right next to you, especially for Grace.”
Grace’s eyes widen and she curls her lips into a snarl.

“Not that there’s anything wrong with lesbians,” Greg says, then digs into his potato salad.

Jackie just sat there the whole time watching the exchange without taking any part of it.

Serious. What does Grace mean by serious? I mean it’s cool that I’ve had a writing group just happen upon me, or wanna-be writers anyway. We’re all just kids. But I am really happy that Greg is a part of this─group, or whatever it is. I like Greg. He told me quietly later while the girls were talking quietly about something over by the sticky purple flower bush that he’s not interested in becoming a “real” writer, that is to say that he’s not working on a novel or anything, just a bunch of short stories. He wants to get hired by one of those technology junky magazines and write off the wall reviews of the latest gadgets, gizmos, and software. He says he’s a huge Douglas Adams fan, and he’s secretly drawing a comic strip that contains mostly robots. That’s Greg. All robots, and outer space, and technology of the future, and saying emotions out loud like “Gasp!” and “Startled!” like he’s narrating his own ongoing comic in real life.
Greg’s the only other person on campus who wears a trench coat. His is army green and shorter than mine, and he says he got it at an estate sale for $2, which is way cool because I found mine in a trash can. In this post Columbine world wearing trench coats in high school makes you a kind of mark, and as that is what I’m partially going for, Greg’s just doing it because it’s his favorite jacket. Greg was actually the original trench coat guy, he’s been wearing it for three years now. Since sixth grade, he says. I never noticed him around back then, probably because he blends in so well. Better than I do.

Greg pulls a warm foil wrapped hamburger from his trench coat pocket, followed by three more. He offers me one.

“Don’t they only let you buy one hamburger at the cafeteria?” I ask him.

“Didn’t buy them,” he tells me with a wink. “Try one, they’re delicious.”

Surprisingly, he was right. It was the best damn hamburger I’ve ever had in my life. That’s saying a lot considering it’s cafeteria food, but it’s one of the lunch items that they offer daily. I’ve never actually had one up until now since I usually go with the pizza or just nothing and a book, but my god. That was a damn good burger.

“How─” I begin to ask, but he stops me.

He opens his trench coat and shows me that there is a hole going through the outside pocket, and that inside he has sewn a bag. While he’s standing in line for his free lunch, which he takes full advantage of by piling as much curly fries as possible onto his tray and taking his chocolate milk and fruit salad cup while smiling at the lunch ladies politely, he’s reaching through the hole in his coat with one hand and grabbing hamburgers from the big pile and dropping them into the bag inside his coat.

“On a good day,” Greg tells me, “I can get ten. But I don’t like to push it.”

Greg also claims that there are microchips and listening devices ground into the meat, and has informed the rest of the student body of this fact by writing about it in his weekly underground newspaper that he distributes throughout campus which is simply titled “Conspiracy Theory.”

I like Greg.

Between our casual guy talk, I’m glancing over at the girls, or…at Jackie, more specifically. She’s too pail, and her hair is too thin and too straight. Her eyes are too doey. Greg nudges my arm and tells me they’re lesbian vampire lovers, and that Jackie writes really neat poetry but I’ll never get to hear it because Grace rarely lets her share it.

Seriously?

Okay, so how he explains it to me is that Grace believes that she is a vampire, so she and Jackie break scabs and make small cuts on themselves in order to suck each other’s blood. Why Jackie’s even involved is Grace needs a donor and Jackie’s too shy to stick up for herself really.

Oh, and they’re not lesbians, he tells me. They’re “dark sisters,” and they─or Grace rather, states that their relationship is strictly plutonic.

“They suck each other’s blood, what’s plutonic about that?” I ask him in increduality.

“I’ve tried asking Grace the same thing, she doesn’t really give me an answer. I figure that to Grace the word ‘plutonic’ refers to any relationship that is formed through passionate hormonal rages and consistent kidnappings.”

“Kidnappings?”

He just shakes his head and says, “You don’t want to know.”
“I do want to know! And I want to know why you hang out with them!” I say.

“It’s entertaining. Besides, I do enjoy writing, so it’s not like this isn't where I could try to fit in. Hell man, I’m glad we swooped in on your spot, now I have someone to actually talk to.”

“Must be awkward for you,” I suggested.

“Well, we all have our weird little hang ups, and Grace is actually really interesting. Her mother is from Haiti and she was brought over by Christian missionaries who essentially made her a bat-shit crazy fundamentalist. Grace acts out quite a bit here at school, I mean, what with the whole lesbian vampire thing and all. She’s an interesting person to watch. Plus it’s hot in a sick and twisted way, I guess, if you’re into that sort of thing…which I am not.”

“Sure Greg,” I chortled.

Greg bit into his sandwich and I contemplated the idea of a plutonic relationship where you would still be expected to guzzle bodily fluids and where one member would act as an obedient non-anthropomorphsized pet to the other. The whole thing strikes me as odd, but if there’s one thing I appreciate it’s being original enough that you stand out for something. I think that Greg though, he definitely sees this as more than just merely interesting to watch.

What I later found out through our conversation is that Grace writes novellas, which are books that are longer than a short story but shorter than a novel. They’re mostly about demons who take vampires as their sex slaves. Greg tells me that she has really good prose, and her stories are detailed enough to be interesting…well interesting in the sense that you’ve got a plot that revolves around an undead being getting butt raped by a mysteriously forceful dark cloud in the form of a super human. And Grace, according to Greg, sings beautiful opera, but she refuses to join the Madrigals because she not only hates Mrs. Beatty but she can’t stand to sing songs about angels and rejoying in the name of the Lord, since she deals with enough of that sort of thing at home from her religious zealot parents.
Greg, if I’m not mistaken, is a little more than what you’d call fascinated with Grace. And I still don’t know more than three simple things about Jackie.

She likes girls, or Grace at least, and she likes the taste of blood.

She writes poetry but hardly ever shares it.

She’s pale and small and she looks cold to the touch and when she looks at you it makes you shudder like a prisoner whose cell door had just been thrown open.

So this is essentially what my new lunch routine is. Routine; as if I were performing something. Really it’s more like this is how my obscurity changed because here are all these people sitting in my hiding spot. We gather here and eat Greg’s stolen hamburgers and bounce plotlines off of each other. We recommend books to each other, and I’m told that on Fridays we read bits and pieces of our scribe out loud to get opinions.
I wouldn’t call it productive. Or even fascinating.
Well, I suppose in our own ways we’re all fascinating. Grace with her accent and her opera and her metalloid cross bearing zombies come to destroy mankind with slow gentle kisses. Greg with his glittery butterfly berets and his underground newspaper about the octagon shaped buildings and their direct coorelation to certain galaxies and visible constellations. Me with my “I’m Dagger and I’ll probably stab you for all you know” thing. Jackie with her scars and her powdered makeup and her too thin lips. Lizard lips. Braces. Brace face. Thin hair and thin lanky arms. Her existence.

I like people, I’m no misanthropist or anything.


Three



I have learned one thing that I know for sure about Jackie, and that is that she is deathly allergic to peanuts.

I also know that she is left handed and she likes to wear more blues and greys than blacks even though she tries to go for a Goth look like Grace does.

She has braces and pale skin and her braces have these annoying pink rubber bands on them, which almost seem like a joke on a girl like her.

I know that I’ve never met another girl like Jackie before.
Most girls these days reveal too much about themselves to the world and there is nothing left to discover about them. Most girls wear too much eyeliner and not enough clothes, and they’re all just their outsides. Okay, so I’m not going to lie, there are hot chicks on campus. I swear to you, one time this girl, this blonde girl, I think her name is Courtney, she walked into the classroom on the first day of school and walks over to where I’m sitting. And she had the most perfectly shaped ass in the whole universe. I’m not really a butt guy but this girl had on these tight little jeans, and I think for a minute I fell in love.

Then she opened her mouth and she had the most annoying nasily shrill voice I had ever heard in my life. And the things she was talking about; “I test drove the Cellica?” (as if that were a question) “and I really liked it but my dad made me pick a Hummer. So like yeah…”

Jackie, she’s different. Jackie, I know nothing about her. And yet I feel like she’s always known everything about me, even though she’s never said more than a few words to me. She only ever talks quietly to Grace and her laugh is diminuitive but sincere.

Jackie, she could never love me back.

I’ve wanted to know her since the moment I met her. Met her, figuratively speaking. She only ever smiled shyly at me but never properly introduced herself. She sits next to Grace every day and clutches a small journal.

And Grace, she’s not exactly mean to Jackie, or that she’s forcing her to do what they do, but she is quite domineering. I can only imagine what it would be like to have Jackie slide up next to me on the lunch table bench, leaving Grace’s side for only a while just to say hello.
In the same thought, I can just imagine Grace patting her leg and expecting Jackie to return to her, to heel like a dog.
It’s probably better that Jackie is taken anyway, lest I be distracted by her presence. I’m too young to have a girlfriend, and I’m too busy to have girlfriends. I’m sure Gran would agree with me, though it has never come up. I want to try to focus on my writing for the time being, and I can’t have a girl like Jackie crowding me…even though she has pretty much all but crowded my brain with her skin that would be milk white if someone hadn’t of spilled coffee in it. I feel like if I squeezed her hard enough dust would cough out of her lungs and her skin might flake off.

Me squeezing Jackie, like that would ever happen. Regardless of whose blood is on whose tongue.

Everyone is quiet today in the group. Grace and Jackie are reading a novel together, their heads cocked toward each other, reading the pages silently. Greg is drawing something in a sketch book, a bunch of octogons or something. I take my casual gaze off of Jackie to start a conversation with him about his strange doodles.

“Greg, what the hell is that?” I ask him.

“Oh, it’s for next week’s Conspiracy Theory. Remember how I was telling you about the shape of the office and library building, how it’s an octagon? And how that just so happens to match up with─”

“Right, the constellations, you were telling me…”

“Plus, see this circle in the center of this octagon,” he says and points to it. “Those are satellite dishes that sit on top of the roof of the building. Interesting that there would be satellite dishes anywhere on this campus, I mean, do we have satellite television in the classrooms? No! And even if we did, modern day satellite dishes are significantly smaller than the ones that they have up there!”

“So what do you think is going on Greg?” I egg him on.

“The office is obviously a landing pad for space ships, and the dishes are used for communication with those ships.”

“Now wait a minute Greg, I thought you said the Yucaipa Y on the hill behind the school was for space ships…what’s up with that?”

“No no, what I said about the Y was that the three points match up to a constellation that we are unable to see from Earth, and it only matches up wo these points for a meer three minutes every one hundred and fifty seven years. When that happens, the Y glows green, and signals for the space ship that is supposed to land on the office to make its move.”

“Sorry,” I said, and I couldn’t help chuckling, “I forgot. And what year are we on?”

“One fifty nine. It’s two years late. Who knows what will happen,” he shrugged and looked at the backdrop laid out beyond the walls that surrounded our spot, painted golden yellow and green with the hill and the wispy curls of white clouds against the too blue sky. The Y painted white on the highest foothill penetrating the serenety of the view.

“So do you have this week’s issue written?”

“Sure do. Pigeons, a second look at the hamburgers that hear, and more speculation about Dr. Nussbaum.”

I patted Greg on the shoulder. “You keep up the good work, buddy. But I hear that the teachers are supposed to be really cracking down and destroying every copy of your paper that they find in the hands of students, so you had better make extra copies.”

“They don’t scare me,” he scoffed. “If anything they’re just adding fuel to the fire and proving my points. It’s not like they can stop me or anything, I’m not littering or handing out a bunch of printed profanity. They really have bigger problems on this campus to deal with than my crummy little newspaper, like the asbestos in the E building and the low standardized test scores. The fact that they’re stepping up forces to take down my publication just shows that they have something to hide.”

“Yeah no kidding,” I said just before the bell rang. “Oh, well I guess I’ll see you all tomorrow,” I said loud enough for the girls to hear. And then I did something very brave.

“Jackie,” I said directly to her before I could think to stop myself, “are you going to share one of your poems tomorrow?”
She looked almost as terrified as I was. Softly and barely audibly she said “Maybe a haiku.”
Her voice. That was the first time I had really heard it.

“I’d love to hear it,” I said, but I had to get out of there before I made a jerk of myself somehow. “All right, I’ll see you then,” and I turned quickly to leave, walking nervously and as fast as I could to fourth period. I couldn’t help but notice that Grace was glaring at me for some reason when I spoke to Jackie, and I wasn’t sure if I should just laugh it off with an obscene hand gesture or if I should be frightened. I ignored it and decided just to move on. It wasn’t that big of a deal.



Fourth period is usually where I can just breeze my way through by napping. I’m underachieving this year, on purpose. I wanted a break so I signed up for a few easy classes, like Tech Prep Math. This is one of those classes that teach you arithmetic and checkbook balancing and review fractions. A cinch, considering I was in trig last year. This is one of those classes where I’m like “Yay, nap time and basic life skills,” and seniors are like “Yay, last chance to graduate!”

The girls in front of me, they all smoke. I smoked for a while, back when I used to drink beers in the shower. I’ll explain where I got the beer from later, but for now you need to know that I’ve stopped all that and I’ve decided that I can’t ruin my life until I hit 20 at least. It’s my unspoken promise to Gran. Then again if she sticks around for another decade or so I’ll probably find myself married and fathering children and composting and driving a mini van.

How I hate to upset my Gran.

The girls in front of me, the ones who smoke, they’re cutting their split ends with the crappy metal scissors that come in class sets for art projects. The whory trinity. One girl, the chubby sandy haired one, cups her hands under the falling bits of the too skinny girl’s blond hair and runs them to the trash can. And on her way back, the one named Brittney with black hair and freckles rolls her eyes at me as the sandy haired one walks at a faster pace when she passes me as if she doesn’t want to be in my space for more time than she has to be. As if I’m tainted.
Not really, it’s just that she thinks that I have a bomb, or a gun, or something like that.

Once upon a time two boys wearing trench coats killed twelve students, one teacher, and themselves, and 1,500 miles away here I sit in this classroom in this trench coat in this society where we blame people for doing things they haven't done just because they look like people who did things that were deplorable.
But then add to that all the time it’s been copied, Virginia Tech and what not, and you see that there are no consequences, just patterns that keep repeating themselves.
They seem to see some kind of pattern repeat when they look at me.

I just stretch my arm across my desk and balance my checkbook, which has such fake transactions in it as paycheck, gas bill, grocery store, etc. All stuff I don’t really have. I wanted to track real expenses, and I suppose I could do that on my own, but the teacher said that for most of the kids in this class tracking how much money they spend and earn is way too difficult, so the assignment is to add and subtract the numbers on the page. Plain and simple. Just like second grade.

Greg sits behind me and pokes me with his pencil.

“Grace has got to be pretty mad at you dude,” he says.

“Why because I spoke to Jackie?”

“Well it would have been fine if it weren’t for the fact that Jackie has been making eyes at you every time you have your head turned.”

The thin little hairs at the end of my spine stood up and there was a rush of panic to the top of my head.

“And judging by the way you perked up just now,” he added, “I’d say that you’re probably willing to take a beating for her.”

“A beating?” I asked.

“Grace is…somewhat hostile.”

“Well I can guess that but what does she care if I speak to Jackie?”

The girls of the whory trinity turn around. They all have a look on their face like they’re trying to hold back laughter.

“Um, hey,” the sandy haired one says behind stifled laughter.

“You like have something in your shoe or something,” she said while pointing the end of her pencil toward Greg’s shoe. We look and there’s a dryer sheet sticking right out of the back of it. Nice of those bitches to tell him, truly, what a nice gesture.

“How’d that get there? Huh. Must have gotten stuck to it in the dryer. Didn’t notice when I put it on. Weird that I didn’t notice it. Huh…” Greg said in his calm alto voice. The girls all laughed weirdly at him then turned back to their circle to whisper about something, probably about how stupid Greg looked with a dryer sheet sticking out of his shoe. Greg’s not bothered. Greg takes everything in stride and doesn’t really care what people think. Not that he received a whole lot of criticism since people just accepted that he was a nerd and he was confident in what he was, plus his reactions to anything said were just as calm as the one witnessed here. But he would be a much easier target if he didn’t have facial hair.
Yes, Greg was one of the few guys in school to have a mustache and sideburns and a little goatee going on…since the sixth grade. Seniors still had bald spots and peach fuzz, and Greg had five o’ clock shadow at 10:00 in the morning.

He tells me that his first day of school when he set foot on the Yucaipa High School campus his sophomore year (since freshmen stayed at the junior high due to lack of room for them at the high school) he made the mistake of shaving the night before, so a group of seniors noticed his stubble and baby-talked to him saying “is the wittwe man twying to gwow him a beaod?” Without skipping a beat Greg pulled out his wallet and said “Nope, I’m growing it back!” and showed them the previous four years worth of his student ID cards which all had him with at least a full mustache if not a tuft on his chin.

Greg didn’t much like to shave.

I wish I could say the same thing, but it’s more like I have no need to shave. Nothing going on there, really. It’d probably grow in bright orange like my hair anyway and I don’t think I could pull off a look like that.

“Wait, you never answered my question,” I said. “Why is Grace so protective of Jackie?”

“She owns her.”

“What does that even mean Greg? You cant own a person!”

“They’ve…got a thing, like an agreement. Actually I’m glad you talked to her, Grace needs a little competition in her life. She cant be the queen bee forever.”

“I’m still not understanding the arrangement they have, are they lesbians? Are they master and slave? I mean, what is really going on?”

“Lesbians…well, yes and no. I mean they take the whole blood sharing thing very seriously, more seriously than any kind of relationship they have in that sense. I guess you talking to Jackie is like sniffing around the alpha wolf’s kill when you’re just a beta wolf. Not only does Grace probably not appreciate you trying to steal her dinner but you’ve offended her greatly,” Greg said as he waved his hands in the air dramatically. “But good for you for taking one for the team.”

“One for the team?” I asked quizzically.

Mr. Gobi asked us all to switch papers so he could read us the answers and grade each other.

“Grace is just vicious is all, she needs to be taken down a notch,” Greg whispered with a hint of wickedness.



Four



I usually stop by the 7th Street park on my way home after school. It’s my usual hangout, and Gran knows I go there, plus it’s just across the street from my house, or catty-corner from it anyway. I like to go there just to sit and do a little reading and people watching. Before I head over to my spot on the hill by the big gazebo I casually ride my bike by the trash cans near the parking lot to see if I spot any recyclables lying on top. Today there is a Gatorade bottle and a few cans of Sprite with liquid still in them. I collect them and empty the liquid onto the cement before putting them into my backpack.
My backpack is one of those ones that people usually use for hiking, and it sticks way up over my head when it’s full, and it kind of resembles a big garbage bag…which is practically what it is.

There are probably more cans and bottles where these came from if I dig down into the trash, but a mother and her two toddlers are not too far away at the playgrounf, an I don’t like to look like too much of a creep. I’m not really hurting for the money right now, so I’ll leave whatever is in there for someone who needs it more than I do.

I ride up the hill on the sidewalk till I reach my spot, then I walk my bike through the grass before sitting down. I like my spot because I can see the entire park, and I will know if anyone is coming toward me from any direction. Not that Yucaipa is like full of thugs or anything, but there are a few character types that I wish not to associate with. Skaters, mostly. But I’m on the grass and dirt here, and they cant really ride their boards on that so I’m okay.

I reach into the front pocket of my backpack and pull out my book, the Tao Te Tsing by Lou Tsu and turn it to my bookmarked page. I sigh with relaxation. I’m sitting with my knees up to prop my book, and I just read and listen to the quiet sounds of nature; the birds, the leaves of the trees clapping above me with the wind.

After a few moments of peacefulness I am interrupted. This happens often. An SUV has pulled into the parking lot. I watch it drive up near the sidewalk and then stop at the trash can.

I love moments like these.

I reach into my backpack for a pair of binoculars to watch the show.

It’s usually old guys who do this, like retirees and ex-Marines. They drive their over-sized gas guzzlers around town to all the different parks and shamelessly dig through the trash cans to find recyclables. It’s obvious to me that these guys are in it for the money, I mean looking at the vehicles they drive I know they don’t give a crap about the environment, but these guys will get down and dirty with a trash can if it means a few more cents. The guy who runs the recycling place hates them. He says these guys will argue with them over eleven cents, or if they think that he took off too big of a percentage from their check because of moisture. “There ain't no moisture!” they yell at him, and he just laughs.

I bypass the whole moisture percentage by draining all my stuff. Plus he knows I’m just a kid on a bike collecting cash for books or whatever I don’t want my Gran spending money on…or whatever I’m too embarrassed to ask her to buy.

Like the condoms. In case I get laid.

Not bloody likely.

But I didn’t want Gran to know if I was or I wasn’t, either way. How I hate to upset Gran.

Through the binoculars I watch as the man digs his rough and cancer spotted arms into the trash can, knocking burger wrappers, old newspapers, and other disgusting junk onto the ground. I watch him pull maybe fifteen cents worth of cans and bottles out and throw them into the back sear of his big American-Made Chevy thing, and haphazardly scoop up the mess he made on the ground back into the trash can, leaving at least another armful on the ground as he pulls away. What a jerk.

I’ve heard cautionary tales from the guy at the recycling center about homeless guys who get poked with hypodermic needles while digging through park trash because of all the druggies around here, and I just hope to see it happen to one of these old SUV planet-destroyer types.

I put my binoculars away, chuckled to myself about the fact that the guy probably spent more in gas driving here than he found in the trash, and I go back to my reading. Suddenly there was another distraction; a shadow fluttered above my head for a brief second.

Besides having the student body find out that my name really isn't Dagger, I’d hate for this little hobby of mine to get out, so keep this to yourself please.

I looked up into the tree and got up fast, dropping my book on the ground. I searched the outside perimeter of the tree to see what had made the shadow, and as I walked further from the tree looking up at it, I saw a flash of yellow come out from behind the tree and glide toward me. A rush of excitement came over me as it passed me and it flew into the park. I squint hard at the black markings on the tiny field of yellow no bigger than a regular sized playing card, and I ran after it as it weaved through the trees. I would lose sight of it for a few seconds, but then I would find it again. Finally it slowed down to circle a cottonwood tree, and I darted toward it. It fluttered quickly before slowing down to rest on a low branch. I knew right away that I was looking at a Western Tiger Swallowtail, just basking in the sun and enjoying life as a beautiful butterfly.

What?

They’re beautiful, and I’ll ask you not to make fun. My name is Dagger and I might slit your throat and kill your family or something like that.

Not bloody likely.

So I’m a novice lepidopterist, which means that I study butterflies and moths when I don’t have my nose in a book at the park. It started when I was little, and I had found an old butterfly guide for Southern California in my Gran’s bookshelf, and it interested me more than you think a book like that would interest a young boy. I don’t know what it is…perhaps the metamorphisis, the changing from a caterpillar to a butterfly, it all fascinated me. I had no idea that there were so many kinds of butterflies, and that all I had to do to find them was look right where I live. The book I had of Gran’s was out of date, so I ended up spending some recycling money on a new Kaufman guide a while back so I could have an updated version that would include the new species that were added, including all of the mutations.
I spent a long time just looking at the butterfly, appreciating its beauty and marveling in its calming nature. I was stoked that I had gotten to see one up close like that, but it was getting time for me to get home for dinner so I packed up my stuff and took off back down the hill. I rode by the trash can and looked at the mess on the ground that the old man had made. The right thing to do was to pick it all back up, but to be honest, I’m actually a bit of a germaphobe and I don’t like to touch trash unless I have to. It pisses me off that the old man probably just expected someone else to pick up his mess, but then I saw what part of the mess was. There were ten or so condiment packets from local fast food joints, and hey, when it comes to touching trash I’ll overlook my fear of germs for two things: recyclables and condiments, which both translate to me as money!

Hey, condiments aren't free you know. I collect at least a pound of the stuff a day to be honest, and for Gran to actually buy that much ketchup or mustard or hotsauce at the store, you’re looking at a couple of bucks! It’s so wasteful, because these are still perfectly good to use, and I like a lot of mayo on my sandwiches anyway, so I reached down and picked them up and shoved them into my pocket before I rode home.




Five



It was finally Friday, and I was excited about this because I was told that on Friday the group would share with each other what we’ve been working on that week. Greg’s work was predictable, Grace’s was probably just a regurgitation of every vampire story she had ever read only with more “feelings.”

Feelings. As if Grace has any.

The challenge is that lunch is only thirty minutes, plus you have
to take away all the time it takes for everyone to get there, for Greg stealing those hamburgers and Grace and Jackie materializing out of whatever corner shadow or fog or mist or grave. Greg says you get about seven minutes…well, five minutes with me now being there, and that’s including the feedback we might include. Greg tells me to share the very best part, the best thing you think you wrote, either that or share the worst and everyone will help you figure out how to fix it.

It can be anything, is what he told me too. Even assigned work like essays or anything of that nature. Any writing. The point of sharing is to get feedback, because knowing what others think of your work is a very important to anyone who wants to write for others and not just for themselves. That’s why we call it Feedback Friday.

Today I’ve brought a manuscript that I’ve been working on to share, only it’s the spiral notebook version, not the typed out version since I haven't gotten a chance to sit and type it out yet. I always get distracted on the computer with emails and feeds and online comics. I’m in love with a comic called Drawing Under The Influence, and that is one of the main reasons that I’m just better off scribing the old fashioned way. This might upset Grace, since she likes to see everything we share with clean printed lines of type, but I don’t really care what she thinks.
I barely know her and I already have a small bit of contempt for her.

The way she hoards Jackie.

It’s as if Grace believes that a publisher will show up on campus one day and if she doesn’t have a formally typed manuscript on her she will have lost her chance at a huge book deal.
Not bloody likely.

I figure we’re all just kids here scribbling notes and pecking away at novels that we will most likely abandon by the time we actually start our careers as writers, if we ever start them. So many good books go unpublished because the real world eventually gets in the way. That whole job thing. That whole marriage and kids and life thing. To sit and pen a novel takes a lot of time and a lot of dedication if you want it to be good. Being a loser in high school with few friends is the perfect opportunity to crank out a bunch of half baked novels that you can sit and polish when you have the time once you grow up and start carrying a briefcase instead of a backpack. No time to sit and spend four hours a night coming up with plot lines but enough time to fix the plot holes you wrote when you were 16 and full of time but lacking the life experience to have any true depth to a story.
I could be 30 before I have my first manuscript all polished and smooth as silk.

And Grace, she’s such a control freak I’m sure she’ll never send anything off to be published. She’ll just keep picking at it and picking at it instead of letting the editors do their work.

Control freak.

Hoarder.

I’m told that Grace is a marvelous writer and I think it’s great that the girl’s got goals. She hasn’t told any of that to me herself, she doesn’t really talk much when she’s got Jackie in her grip. If she ever gets published her name will probably be three times bigger than the title of the book on the cover, like all those pretentious mass marketed paperback novels you see sold even in grocery stores. And I have a feeling that if faced with failure, Grace would snap.

I mean don’t take my word for it, I don’t know her that well, but it seems like she’s most comfortable, and most stable, when things go her way and nothing fluctuates. She seems like a bit of an OCD ridden…well…psychopath, if I had to be honest. She glares, and you just know she’s thinking about ripping your esophagus right out of your neck.

I could be wrong though.

Besides the whole blood sucking thing, Grace probably isn't that violent. She might just cut you a little.

Today I am the first to arrive at the corner, so I set my bag on the ground as I sit at the table. I have my spiral notebook out and I’ve turned it to the page that I want to read from. Just a little piece that I feel like throwing out there today. Moments later Greg comes bouncing in with his Styrofoam tray full of food for all of us. How much of it he stole and how much he got as a part of his “free lunch” was a mystery.

“Fifteen today,” he said as he pulled a foil wrapped burger from his inside pocket and tossed it underhanded in my direction. I caught it with one hand.

“You’re crazy,” I chortled as I unwrapped the warm orb of foil.

“No, just slick,” he replied.

Just as I took a bite the “dark sisters” walked around the corner. Grace hurried ahead of Jackie, who simply froze in place. Grace grabbed two hamburgers from the pile that Greg was making in the middle of the table.

“Big haul today,” she said to him with a smile. It might have been the first time I had seen her smile. Grace should smile more, she doesn’t look as damaging and hurty when she does.

“That’s not all. I got the regular stuff as well so there are curly fries, and whoever wants this fruit salad. Oh and they were out of turkey subs today so I grabbed peanut butter and jelly, and there’s plenty of─”

“You idiot!” Grace yelled and threw the burgers at Greg. One whizzed past him and the other smacked his chest with the crumpling sound of foil and the thud of warm meat hitting warm meat.

That probably didn’t come out sounding right.

“Peanut butter Greg, seriously? Now she cant eat any of this!” Grace scolded. Jackie stood in her place and clutched a small book and looked at the ground.

Greg slapped his forehead. “Christ! I’m sorry Jack! I totally forgot. I mean…are you sure she cant at least eat the─”

“It’s all contaminated!” She yelled, her voice high and loud.

“But the sandwich is in a different plastic than the fruit salad so─”

“Contaminated!” she repeated harshly. “What the hell is the matter with you Greg, cant you remember just one simple thing? Just one simple life-or-death matter?” Grace was really steamed over this peanut butter business, which I understand to an extent because of Jackie’s allergy, but she didn’t have to go all ape on Greg like that, it was an honest mistake.

“I could still eat the hamburger,” Jackie suggested hesitantly with her airy woodwind voice.

“I said it’s tainted!” Grace snapped at her, and Jackie’s gaze fell back to the ground.

“Grace, that’s a little extreme,” I interjected. “I wouldn’t recommend that she eat anything that was near the sandwich but the burgers were in his pocket, they’ll be okay.”

Grace narrowed her eyes and stepped toward me. “You want to see what happens when Jackie comes in contact with something that has been contaminated with peanuts? You want to see her tongue swell up and bulge out of her mouth? You want to see red hives break out all over her body while she struggles to breathe?” she asked me condescendingly.

“No, I don’t want to see that,” I answered. Grace turned from me, feeling satisfied. “Here Jackie, you like ketchup? I got ketchup, mayo, mustard, whatever you want. What will it be, huh?” I asked her playfully as I pulled a fistful of condiments from my trench coat pocket. I noticed a smile and a flash of curiosity when she looked at the large amount of condiments that I just pulled from my pocket.

“What in the hell are you doing?” Grace demanded. “Do you want to kill her?”

“Girl needs to eat,” I shrugged casually, the condiment packets still in my hand.

“She’s had plenty to eat today,” she said assuringly and stepped in front of the girl as if to block her from me.

“What were those doing in your pocket?” Jackie giggled from behind her. It warmed me inside to hear her sweet laughter.
I looked past Grace and directly into her dark eyes. “I pick these up while I’m out places. Condiments aren't free you know. So ketchup? Mustard?”

“Just ketchup,” she smiled. I smeared the sauce onto the meat and made a show of handing it over to her, stretching my arm out across where Grace was standing, maybe even bumping her a little bit.

“Thank you,” she said softly and took a bite. Grace slapped her forehead and rolled her eyes. She sat down and her face seemed to flush red with anger.

“If she gets sick,” Grace began, but Jackie cut in and stopped her.

“Grace, I’m fine. Don’t worry about it.” Grace whispered something to Jackie, but her head was turned so I couldn’t hear it. All I know is that it made Jackie frown. Before I could address it by calling Grace out on it, Greg interrupted saying that he would like to read first. I took a deep breath to collect myself. I wasn’t going to spend the whole lunch break fighting with this insane girl. At the end of the day, Jackie got to eat lunch and there was nothing Grace could do about it. It was a small victory.

“Conspiracy Theory issue number fifteen,” Greg read from a yellow legal pad. “This is my favorite article for this week, it’s called ‘The Pigeons.’” Greg paused and took a sip of his chocolate milk. “Have you ever noticed the flock of pigeons that perch on the cafeteria building? They have a very distinct pattern that they follow day after day. Watch them for only a few moments and you will notice four pigeons sitting along the ledge. A white and brown one will fly in and perch on the right end. The birds then systematically shuffle until the white and brown pigeon moves its way down the line by switching spots with each bird. When he gets to the left end of the line of birds, he flies away. Then a jet black pigeon will fly in and land on the left, and shuffle through until he is on the right, and then fly off. Then the pattern starts over again with the brown and white one. The thing to remember here is that the pigeons aren't really there, they’re holograms. It’s a holographic video that is projected up onto the building and is looped. This is why the pigeons have the same pattern day after day. Why would the school create the illusion of birds? Because the truth lies in the chemicals in the soil that were left from the last alien visit. These chemicals are not only making the students more fertile, explaining the sudden increase in pregnancies on campus, but they are essentially bird repellant. Nobody really knows why the birds avoid it, but considering the fact that birds have been along longer than humans maybe you should avoid it too. But the staff of YHS does not want anyone catching on to the unnatural feeling of no birds at the school when normally they fly and flock so freely throughout the city of Yucaipa, so they create these holograms to make everything seem normal. After all, if people question the lack of birds, they might just question other things as well.”

Greg set his legal pad down on the table. “So what do you think?”

I raise an eyebrow at Greg. “Hologram birds.”

“Yes, holograms. Projected from the roof of the M building to the roof of the cafeteria,” he nods pointedly.
The edges of my mouth curl into a smile. “You’ve got this all worked out for yourself, don’t you?” I ask.

“Well have you ever read Conspiracy Theory?” he asked.

“I’ve read every issue. I didn’t know you were the one who was behind it, and believe me if I had known we would have been friends a lot sooner. It takes a good man to tell the truth to the awkwardly unaware masses that make up the student population of a suburban high school.”

“Staff too, you know” Greg adds and wags his finger at me. “Mr. Greene actually used one as a part of a lesson in his Government class from what I hear. And from what I’m told he was almost fired for it.”

“Mr. Greene would never be fired,” I scoffed. “The dude’s been here so long they made him sign a contract stating that he wasn’t a communist when he was hired with the district. You’re talking about the guy who stands on tables to get his point across and lights treaties the students have made on fire in the back of the room. The guy’s a legend.”

“Yeah, and he’s also the guy who drives around the campus during breaks smoking in his truck.”

“That is true,” I agree. I’d seen the guy do it.

“Can we move on?” Grace interrupted coldly. “His five minutes are up.”

“Oh, um…sorry Gracie, you go ahead,” Greg said apologetically while putting his legal pad away. I thought it was weird how he just folded to her like that, but I decided to bring it up later, maybe in 4th period. Ragging on her right here and now would just cause another major melt down, which was kind of funny but I feared that she would take it out on Jackie.

But I was feeling rather empowered from yesterday’s connection with Jackie, plus the hamburger thing, so before moving on to what would undoubtedly be Grace’s turn I asked her what she thought of Greg’s piece. Just my acknowledgement seemed to shed light on her pretty face.

“It was funny,” is all she said before taking another small bite of her burger. I smiled at her, but I was immediately brought back down to earth from where I was floating on cloud nine when Grace thumped her big folder on the table and said “I’ll be next.”

Well I didn’t doubt that.

“By all means,” I said, waving a hand in front of me as if I were pouring the opportunity to go next from the palm of my hand like it was wine.

She flipped through the neatly typed pages of her folder until she got to the page that was marked with a golden paperclip.

“This is one that I’ve been working on, I just sort of fiddled around with it this week, I’m not entirely sure where I will go with it yet but right now I think it may be part of a larger story.” Grace cleared her throat and began to give back story.

“All right, so you have Alexand who is a demon in human form, sort of undead human form, and he has taken a wildly young vampire named Jason in the night and taken him back to his dark mansion in Pacific Palisades. It’s an urban story, urban upper class sprawl, no dank dungeons or cemeteries. Anyway, listen to this part.”

Grace pauses for a second to adopt her read-aloud tone. “Jason awoke in the strange darkness of a room that seemed to be covered in ceramic tile. A bath was drawn in a large tub across the room. In the shadows he made out a figure, one that surely belonged to a powerful feind who wished to do him harm, and yet Jason felt safe but also very cold; a sensation which he hadn’t felt in many a century.

The figure came closer and touched his cheek with a large and gentle hand.

‘O but be calm, you. For you are in my protection and possession, and no harm shall come to you.’
The beast lifted Jason effortlessly, and he slumped there as if there was no frame to guide his skin to his form. He felt himself slip into the warmth of the bath water, and his eyelids drew heavy. In almost an act of a miracle, light shown on the wrist of the being which was clearly being offered to him for feasting.

‘Drink,’ said Alexand. ‘Your strength must come to you if you are to be of any use to me.’ Without thought, Jason sank his teeth into the flesh being offered, and suckled like an infant at its mother’s bosom.”

Grace set the page down and smiled at us, beamed at us even. Proud of herself. As if none of the previous drama had ever even happened.

“It’s a little different than what I’m used to writing but do you think it’s all right?” she asked with hope.

“How is it any different?” Greg asked.

“Well this doesn’t have any sex in it. Most of my stuff is dripping with sex scenes, and I usually put in a lot of homosexuality.”

I thought about the guy giving the other guy a bath.

“I mean there’s some affectionate touches and kisses, but mostly this slave is truly going to be a slave. A real slave, like one who does work, not like a sex slave,” she reasoned.

“Well it’s nothing like I’ve ever heard before,” I offered. “But if it’s supposed to be modern, then why is the writing style so, you know, oldish?”

“It’s how vampires and demons talk, damn it!” Grace laughed. Her sudden light mood surprised me. Sharing her work must have been like mental masturbation for her and now that she’s had her release all the bitchiness is gone. “I know it’s a little old fashioned for the theme I am going for but it’s all I really know how to write.”

“I think it will work,” I said agreeably. “Melding the modern with the post modern would be fascinating, particularly if there are characters in the book who speak more modernly and the old fashioned speaking have to interact. That’d be killer!”

“That actually sounds like a good idea!”
It was nice to see her smile. This might mean good things for Jackie, and good things for me getting to talk to Jackie without Grace bulldogging her. I decided to take advantage of the situation.

“So Jackie, you said you’d share today...are you still…” I swallowed, suddenly nervous, “up for it?”

The girl looked horrified, and she tucked her hands between her legs.