Chapter Text
There are three kinds of students: ones who put up with school until that promised day of freedom, ones who generally don’t mind the whole business, and ones who have gone so completely off the script that it’s hard to call them students at all, at any meaningful use of the term.
Jimmy was, as such stories go, the latter.
It was a Tuesday afternoon of no particular note, except that Jimmy had for once arrived on time and was expected to leave on time as well. It was geometry class. His cheek had been pushed up on one hand to such a grotesque point that he appeared to have no eye socket to speak of, and he was idly engaged in the task of carving phallic symbols into the desk top with an illegal penknife.
Jimmy liked to think of himself as a bit of a badass.
They’d graduated from talking about triangles to talking about the daunting and esoteric topic of dodecahedrons today, which was a bit of a problem since he’d missed all of the prior triangle days and was still blurry about the whole topic of angles in general, tri or otherwise.
He finished one obscene symbol and, wrinkling his nose, carved an uncertain triangle into the fake wood. Now, the angles were here, here, and here, he knew that, but how did you know the little numbers that went with them without physically pulling out one of those mortifying plastic doohickies to measure it?
After a moment of sullen contemplation, he carved question marks at each vertex and a bigger how??? into the surface beside them.
He considered his handiwork for a moment before shrugging, quietly setting aside the excess of enthusiasm for maths, and single-mindedly returning to the rote inscription of dicks. The day passed, and the equation was forgotten.
By a miracle of bus routes, parental avoidance, and astoundingly good weather, Jimmy happened to be in school two days in a row. He stumbled into the geometry room again, a day later, trying to shake off the wad of gum someone had deliberately spit into his path, and fell into the only open seat available. Possibly because of its age, or model, or the fact that it had recently been laboriously sculpted into a bas-relief of human genitalia, this turned out to be the same seat as the day before. Jimmy dropped his bag with its single underfed binder into the walkway between desks, dug for his pen knife, and came up instead with a pencil he’d found on the floor a month ago. Was the knife still in his locker? He’d managed not to get kicked out of school so far just by sheer dint of being beneath faculty notice, but if they did one of those randomized searches while that was in his stuff, there wouldn’t be any more skating under the radar.
He was contemplating this when he noticed the graffiti. It was small, pencil lead, across the top of his desk, and it started just below the one word he’d carved before. He squinted down at it, trying to make out the cramped but utilitarian style.
You don’t start from nothing, it said. They give you the first number & you work out the rest so they total 180.
Somebody was trying to teach him math. Unless they were just making fun of him, which was always a possibility. He chewed his pencil uncertainly. On the one hand, math was a tool of the bourgeoisie to build up impossible ideals of intellectual success in order to crush the proletariat under their elitist heels. On the other hand, the fact that he couldn’t understand a goddamn triangle really fucking smarted.
He drew a 90 on two of the angles, tapped the desk, and finally left an irritated underline at the third angle’s question mark.
-x-
No, split it three ways if you’re going to do that
60 60 60??
Sure
90 45 45
Yes actually
U some kinda nerd?
That’s an awfully rude question to ask a person
Nerd
Nerd
Hey nerd
Come on I’m sorry this class is dead boring talk 2 me
My name isn’t nerd
Ok whats ur name poindexter
Edgar
What kinda name is that were u born 200 years ago
Cause I mean if u were a vampire or something that would be p fuckin sweet
If I were a vampire why would I be in highschool?
2 lure cool kids into the sultry embrace of death
That sounds like the least useful thing I could possibly do with my afterlife
Did you skip class today? There’s a test Monday, you’re not going to be well prepared
Relax poindexter I won’t pass either way
You can Just 2:30 library don’t be late
-x-
Jimmy was not comfortable in libraries.
That many books in one room made his skin crawl, and the librarians. Oh the librarians. Evil dictators of the literary world. Can’t chew gum, can’t rearrange the books, can’t smoke behind the stacks, what a bunch of effin witches.
He eyed the front desk and its resident harpy distastefully. The old woman returned his a baleful look. Jimmy sniffed haughtily and strode past her, but before he could round the corner to the tables beyond she called out to him.
“I hope I don’t catch you lighting up them cigarettes, young man,” she said, voice menacingly soft but still perfectly intelligible in the unnatural quiet of the library. “If I do I’ll have to ban you again.”
Jimmy felt a cold shiver run down his spine but rallied his courage. He wasn’t gonna let some old bitch get the better of him, even if she did look like a sinister guardian from the seventh Circle of Hell.
“I’ll have you know I’m here for legitimate scholastic purposes,” he snapped. He stalked off, quietly adding, “bitch,” when he was sure he was far enough away to escape notice.
“Alright, dearie, just let me know if you need help finding anything.” Her voice floated ominously after him. Jimmy flinched. He couldn’t help it. She’d probably heard that last part too. She’d be watching him, strolling with her little squeaky cart along his peripheral just to psyche him out. Like a shark she’d circle, peering at him through the books. Creepy-ass bitch.
He pushed on. The more distance between that front desk and him, the better. The library was mostly empty, he noted, except for that one corner where somebody was hunched over a table. That ought to make his mysterious tutor easier to find, unless of course he’d just been outright ditched in which case he was gonna—why, he’d just—well he would be mad as hell, anyways.
He took a closer scan of the place. It wasn’t all that big. Nobody but him, the librarian, and whoever it was over there with the undercut up in the corner—
He hopped up a couple times, trying to get a better look. Was that who he thought it was? Oh sweet merciful antichrist it was, it totally was. Jimmy grinned a positively Jurassic grin and set course for the corner.
“Heeeey, uh, you,” he called, throwing his bag up the stairs as he went. It landed in an empty chair, swoosh, goal, nothing but net. “You’re Nny’s friend aren’t you?”
The boy looked up. He was an unassuming upperclassman with a long face and wire-rimmed glasses, but Jimmy knew that behind that ordinary appearance was the heart of a stone-cold killer. Had to be. Birds of a feather, right?
The guy narrowed his eyes—it wasn’t exactly a cold expression, but it was shrewd. He closed his book. “I assume you’re talking about Johnny.”
“Right, right,” Jimmy said, “but you call him Nny.”
“At his request.”
“So you are his friend.”
“Yes,” Edgar said, “and you’re the chronic eavesdropper from the cafeteria.”
Jimmy examined his nails modestly. It was nice to have your efforts appreciated. “So,” he said, “you, uh, you’re into all that book stuff?”
“Sometimes.”
“Huh. Did not expect Nny’s buddy to be a geek.”
The guy raised his brows. “I have a name, you know.”
“Yeah?”
The guy looked at him for a long moment, like he was trying to riddle out the punch line of the joke, and then his whole expression sagged into something halfway between a smile and a grimace. He dropped his cheek into one hand, offered the other in a handshake. “I’m Edgar,” he said, “Edgar Vargas.”
Jimmy briefly imagined himself as a shaken can of soda blasting its cap off in a foam of frothy overload. Metaphorically, he busted a cap. This metaphor was appropriate on multiple levels.
“Oh,” he said. “Cool.”
He grabbed Edgar’s outstretched hand and shook it like an earthquake shaking a china shop. He didn’t let go until Edgar firmly grabbed his wrist and lifted him off. Jimmy leaned in as close as he could manage and tried for a conspiratory grin. “How’s the bomb coming along?”
Edgar betrayed absolutely no flicker of recognition. What a stone cold boss. “…Excuse me?”
Jimmy bit his lip. “No, no, it’s cool, I shouldn’t have asked, right, you don’t know if you can trust me yet.”
Edgar blinked a couple times. “I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t require your nose to touch mine.”
Jimmy reeled back and topped into a chair on his side of the table. “Don’t worry, I am a secret keeper extraordinaire, subtlety is my middle name, I know when to stop!”
“I seriously doubt that,” Edgar observed. “Has anyone ever told you that you come on awfully strong?”
“Just,” Jimmy carried on, leaning in again—less this time, “whenever you’re ready to trust me, I will be so ready and waiting.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. Now, I’m pretty sure we came here for a reason…?”
“Right.” Jimmy sat back, sheepish.
“Good. So let me just show you a couple practice problems—”
“Does he ever talk about me?”
Edgar looked up from his binder, startled. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Nny, does he ever talk about me.”
The upperclassman made absolutely no expression for the better part of a minute. Finally, he replied, “Honestly, I’m not sure he knows you exist.”
Jimmy’s stomach dropped. Impossible. “Pre-school camp?” he demanded. “1995? We had the same bus home for three years.”
“Mmm,” Edgar said, “no, don’t think so.”
Impossible. Sure, maybe they weren’t officially friends yet, but Johnny was the only person in the whole world who was capable of understanding the complex, delicate layers of Jimmy’s blackened soul. That was fucking destiny, man, that’s got to count for something.
“He probably just doesn’t want to make you jealous,” Jimmy said, after a moment. He smiled. “We’re soul mates, you know.”
Edgar pushed a worksheet across the table. “I’m beginning to regret this already.”
-x-
Jimmy skidded into the cafeteria, elated at the prospect of finally being able to sit in the seat. He paused at the door, and craned his head above the general chaos until he spotted Edgar and waved. His time had come.
Edgar did a double take, glanced around a bit before waving back, hesitant and narrow-eyed. If it were anyone but Edgar, Jimmy would have been insulted. Jimmy basically lived in a whirling whirlpool of dismissal, and after getting it from all sides day in and out you started to really hate that kinda shit. But Edgar was a nerd, or at least had nerd-like tendencies, and nerds were shy, right?
He darted between the students leaving the chaos of the immediate area around the cafeteria entrance, zeroing in on Edgar and —YEP— there was Johnny! Anticipation bubbled in his gut until it was a churning vortex of terror and absolute joy.
Nny was hunched over the table, scribbling on some paper. Jimmy slid into the seat diagonal from him, to the immediate left of Edgar. He’d been eyeing this chair for the last year and a half, to sit so close! Jimmy was jittery with excitement. Across from him Johnny –THE JOHNNY—was focused on what he was writing… Jimmy leaned forward across the table to take a look, the edge digging into his stomach. Beside him Edgar sighed.
“Jimmy, how did those problems last night go?” His tone was carefully neutral, face impassive. “Was there something on the worksheet you wanted to ask about?”
“Nah, I didn’t finish them.” It looked like a list of some sort, or a set of instructions. He contemplated what deliciously dark things Johnny may have been listing when it occurred to him that it may not be the best idea to write off Edgar, his ticket to the table he’d been dreaming of sitting at for so long. He pulled back from trying to decipher Johnny’s scrawl and looked over at Edgar. “I mean, I talked to Mr. Mendoza and told him I was getting help on the work and he gave me an extra day to finish.” It was a lie that he carefully metered with a half innocent, half bored expression. Worked on all his teachers, when they took the time to hound him about finishing assignments, which was almost never.
“Oh,” was all Edgar said. He turned in his seat and faced Nny. Jimmy would have felt offended but, again, Edgar was a nerd, and nerds had ADD, right? He was probably just distracted. Classic nerd.
“I’m going to get my prescription updated after school on Friday. Do you want to come?”
Jimmy smirked, amused at what he assumed was code-speak for one of their super secret meetings. He wondered if prescription was the secret word for a special bomb formula, or mustard gas cocktail. Oh wow, he was with the top dogs now!
“I’ve got shit to do.” Johnny muttered distractedly. Jimmy felt a delightful shiver at the sound of his voice. His old seat meant he could only hear Nny’s voice when he was mid-rant. He huddled closer, curious once again about the mess of papers that were crinkling under his arm as he wrote furiously.
“Well, I just thought I’d ask,” Edgar leaned over the table and ducked his head until he caught Nny’s eye with a sardonic little smile. “I’d hate for you to feel left out.”
He would’ve been offended on Johnny’s behalf if the guy himself had not just noticed Jimmy was at the table and reacted rather unfavorably. He pushed back away from Edgar and Jimmy, who were both leaning uncomfortably close to his face.
“Who the fuck are you?” he demanded. He looked over at Edgar whose head had dropped to the table with a breathy chuckle. Jimmy felt his scraped up wad of happiness drop into his stomach like a brick.
“He’s been sitting here for nearly a full two minutes,” Edgar said, voice muffled, “and you just now noticed.”
“Who the fuck is he?” Johnny pointed one of his skinny fingers at Jimmy’s forehead. If Jimmy leaned forward just a little more they’d be touching.
“This,” Edgar put a hand on Jimmy’s shoulder to stop him from trying to impale his head on Johnny’s hand, “is Jimmy. We met in the Library.” Edgar ticked an eyebrow at the tiny angry hiss Jimmy leveled towards his hand.
“I am such a major fan,” Jimmy said, shrugging the hand off.
“Of what?”
“Well, of… you.”
Johnny turned a face white hot with murder on Edgar. “What the deep fried fuck did you bring to our table, Vargas?”
“I was there that one time you pounded the football guy into hamburger meat,” Jimmy carried on, “Oh, oh, and I saw the chair fight last month, that was really something else.”
Johnny’s stare at Edgar hardened.
A black girl with a series of mismatching band aids across her fingers dropped down onto a seat at the far end of the table. She looked curiously back and forth between the two sides.
“Soooooo,” she said, “who’s the white boy?”
“White boy?” Jimmy echoed, breaking concentration. He sat back, squinting at her.
Johnny sniffed. “Some braindead jerkoff Edgar invited over.”
“What do you mean white boy?”
“Look, I didn’t invite him, he invited himself. There’s not exactly a security gate around the table.”
“It’s not like I’m the only white guy—”
“I don’t care who the fuck invited him, I want him gone!”
“Eric is—wait, no, he’s Mexican.”
“Nny, you’re breaking your spoon.”
“What about David, he’s—no, shit, he’s from southside.”
“I’m giving you fuckheads the count of ten before I break this guy’s nose.”
“Holy shit,” Jimmy said, staring out into the crowded cafeteria, “I’m the only white person in this school.”
Another tray dropped onto the table, followed by a narrow-eyed girl with a smudge of paint across her cheek. “Who’s having the existential crisis today?” she asked, nodding towards Jimmy.
Her friends threw up their arms, exasperated. Jimmy leaned across the table and shook her hand with only slightly too much force. “I’m Jimmy,” he said. He smiled. He continued smiling, teeth locked together, even as he added, “and I’m watching you.”
“Ohhh kay,” the girl said. She stood up again, picked up her tray, and stepped back over the bench. “I’m going back to the art room. I can’t handle this today.”
Johnny whirled in his seat, snatching up his own tray and lifting it like a club. The second the girl had disappeared into the crowd, he fixed his bloody-eyed glare on Jimmy. Jimmy's heart stuttered. Holy damn he was intense in person, like a storm system locked in a flesh prison, like a force of nature winding back a low-budget lunch tray and aiming its corners forward.
“You,” he hissed, “are on my shit list, kid.”
The sound of tray colliding with human bones could barely have been heard at the other end of the cafeteria.
-x-
Jimmy did not skip school the next day. Jimmy showed up to class with a black eye and a swath of bandage around both of his hands, looking about as happy as anyone had ever seen him. The general consensus was that it was kind of eerie, and so for most of his classes that day there was at least one empty seat next to whichever one he had picked out.
Jimmy sat down at Johnny’s table, again, and made cheerful conversation with anyone who would listen. Johnny and Edgar stared at him in total silence for a long time. He spent ten minutes explaining to Tenna that the world was a hologram run by lizard people and a secret compendium of tyrannical matriarchs. She was pretty into it. He could tell.
Finally Johnny turned to Edgar. “You befriended Lassie from Hell.”
Edgar shrugged. “He certainly does bounce back.”
“He gives me a fucking headache!”
Edgar propped his chin up on one fist. “I kind of like him.”
Johnny scowled and jerked his fist involuntarily. His plastic fork was wedged so far into his plate it was scraping the metal tray underneath. “What. The hell.”
“Oh come on,” Edgar said. “Look, he’s just like you were. You went through that, what, reptile kings phase in eighth grade.”
Johnny reeled back.
“And you still think the universe is a hologram.”
“It’s a simulation,” Johnny snapped. “There is a huge difference.”
“Oh yeah. You two are nothing alike.”
-x-
“So!” Jimmy said, “what was your hazing like?”
Edgar looked up from the contents of his backpack, which he’d been rifling through determinately for the last few minutes. They were at the junior parking bowl, on the edge of the asphalt, while Edgar looked for his keys in the multiplicative pockets of his backpack.
“My what?” he replied.
Jimmy pointed to his swollen black eye, which was against all odds even worse than it had been the day before. “You know, your intro to the club.”
“That wasn’t—” Edgar started, and then seemed uneasy with prospect of finishing his sentence. “Oh look,” he said, instead, “found my keys.”
The keyring jingled faintly, swinging a little pewter cross from one loop.
“Johnny isn’t here yet,” Jimmy pointed out.
“He’s not coming,” Edgar replied, unlocking his battered minivan. It looked like it had been used to demolish a house at some point. “He never comes. Groceries aren’t interesting enough for him.”
“But I…” Jimmy said, “but… you invited him.”
Edgar tossed his backpack into the seat behind him and managed to make the motion look more like a shrug than ought to have been possible. “He just likes to be invited to things. If you try to do something without telling him, he’ll show up out of nowhere to spite you. Best way to get him out of your hair is to tell him exactly what you’re planning in mind numbing detail. You coming?”
A blue beetlebug zoomed past them on its way to temporary scholastic freedom. Jimmy hesitated briefly, and then sullenly loaded up into the passenger seat. He threw his underfed bag into the back seat and ignored the sound of something crunching.
“This was going to be our first time hanging out,” he mumbled.
Edgar glanced over at him for just the flicker of a second before returning his attention to the vehicle. “Don’t get so down. You’ll have plenty of other chances to be snubbed by Johnny before the year's out.”
Jimmy sniffed. “I had this whole story worked up to tell him.”
A truck punched past the nose of the minivan so fast it could have been rocket propelled.
“What,” Edgar said, preoccupied with getting out of the parking lot in one piece, “you were gonna read him Nancy Drew?”
“No. I got in a fight this weekend. I was gonna tell him about it.”
“A fight. You.”
“Yeah, me. You saying I don’t have what it takes?”
“Well…” Edgar shot him a look as they rolled to a stop at the parking lot exit. “Mostly you just seem to talk a lot.”
“I did get in a fight!”
“Did you win?”
Jimmy sucked his bottom lip. “Not… exactly. But winning isn’t the point! Johnny never worries about winning.”
“That’s because Johnny is a piece of mindless berserker trash,” Edgar replied, matter of fact. The car squealed into a precise left turn.
“What?”
“So,” Edgar pushed on, “who was this terribly formidable opponent?”
They grumbled into motion, coasting into the outside lane of the highway that ran around their school. Edgar drove precisely, more algorithm than driver. It was so exactly up to the prescribed vehicular law codes that it seemed to infuriate everyone else on the road into a horn blaring frenzy. Jimmy counted four people shooting them the bird.
“Oooh,” he said, “just this chick from my neighborhood.”
Edgar carefully slowed his car in preparation for a turn lane two intersections away. “Has anyone ever told you you’re not supposed to hit girls.”
Jimmy scowled. “That’s what the conspiracy of matriarchs wants us to think. People like me, we know how the real system works.”
“Jimmy,” Edgar said, “you are less of a person and more of a conglomeration of terrible ideas loosely held together by sheer dumb determination.”
“Hey, can we stop at the burger place?”
“Sure, why not.”
-x-
Jimmy arrived at the lunch table just in time to see the painter girl slamming her tray onto the tabletop. She looked like she was about one fraying nerve away from flipping the whole thing over. Something told him that she could do it, too.
“What are you gonna do about it?” she was snarling, “Hit me?”
Johnny was sitting across from her, his eyes wide and—possibly—a little bit watery. “Devi,” he said, “You know I would never—”
“You already flipped out on me once, I’m not taking that chance again!”
“It wasn’t like that, I keep trying to—”
The girl slammed her fist onto the table top. It barely registered over the din of the cafeteria, hundreds of students chewing and messing around, but in the tense little bubble around their table it seemed to hang like the toll of a church bell in the air between them. Jimmy was a little fuzzy on her, to be honest. She’d been around, now and then, since the beginning of high school, but he’d been so distracted by Nny that he had never really stopped to give her any thought. After all, once Nny finally realized that they were soul mates she’d be yesterday’s news, right?
He was beginning to really wish he’d paid more attention when he had the chance.
“You’ve got problems, Nny,” she snapped, “and maybe Vargas doesn’t care what kind of shit you pull, but I’m not going to sit by—”
Jimmy briefly considered coming to Johnny’s rescue, but the last time he’d gotten in the middle of Devi and Johnny he’d gotten a face full of tray, and he was slowly starting to figure out that irritating Devi in any way was a good way to get more of that. Johnny, apparently, did not want to be rescued. So he just tried to make himself as small as possible and took a seat next to Edgar, who was watching the proceedings with a detached kind of amusement.
“So, uh,” Jimmy said, “what’s going on?”
Edgar gestured lazily with his fork. “Johnny’s been stalking this one freshman kid for the last couple weeks. Devi caught wind of it.”
Ah. Events started to settle into a sort of comprehensible narrative. Jimmy nodded. “Right, right okay. Yeah, I get that. If I was dating Johnny and I caught him following around some other kid, I’d be pissed too.”
Edgar blinked. “That’s not what… Devi’s not jealous, Jimmy.”
“Oh." His understanding shattered. "Then what’s her problem?”
Edgar turned his attention back to the static center of the conflict. “The freshman kid is a little, hmmm, skittish? Devi’s worried he’s going to get hurt.”
A heavy crack of tray on skull—intimately familiar by now—caused the two of them to spin back around to the center of the table. Devi had smashed her tray into Johnny’s head, and the two were frozen like a tableau across the top of the lunchtable; Johnny knocked down over the tabletop with one arm underneath him, Devi with one foot on the bench, breathing heavily.
“I’m leaving,” she said, at last. She dropped her tray onto Johnny’s head and stepped down from the bench. “Get your shit together before someone you care about gets hurt.”
She left Johnny, still frozen, on the tabletop like so much leftover chicken dinner. Jimmy turned back to Edgar with as small motions as possible, so as to avoid drawing any attention to himself.
“What a crazy bitch,” he whispered.
“Well,” Edgar said, sipping his coke, “he probably was going to strangle her. That’s a pretty solid defense.”
Jimmy shot Johnny another look. That was his hero, now flipped over and lying across the table with a carton of milk in his hands, crying onto his bendy straw. He felt something in his gut puncture a little.
“He doesn’t look like he was…”
Edgar waved him off. “The rages come and go pretty fast. Maybe one day he will kill one of us.” He seemed to contemplate this for a moment before adding, “Maybe it’ll be me.”
Jimmy frowned. Getting beat up a little was one thing, but dying? Like, totally ceasing to exist? Not on his to-do list. “You… don’t mind?” he asked.
“Mmmph,” Edgar answered, shrugging.
Jimmy watched Edgar for a long time, after that, with an unsettled sensation that he was trying to parse an algebraic equation much too advanced for his paltry training.
-x-
The freshman was a little squirt of a thing, and as Jimmy slipped up behind him he was pretty sure he saw a teddy bear in the kid’s locker. He’d been tailing him for most of the morning, between classes, and not only was the hype not being lived up to, it was being downright bubble-wrapped and buried.
“Soooo,” he said, leaning over the kid’s shoulder, “you’re Nny’s pet project.”
The boy let out a squeak and clutched at the door to his locker like he was about to climb inside it and pull the door shut on himself. He didn’t turn around.
“Kinda scrawny,” Jimmy observed, wrinkling his nose. “Wimpy too. I guess you’re, what, like a fixer-upper?”
The kid let out a high-pitched whine like air escaping a tortured balloon.
“Well,” Jimmy carried on, cheerfully, “you just watch yourself buddy, ‘cause if you think I’m gonna let some scrawny little upstart ruin all my hard work you’ve got another thing coming.”
Jimmy paused. Another boy had appeared in his periphery, moving as if he were aiming for the center of this little orientation. Jimmy broke concentration on the squeaky one and turned his attention to the new one, who was walking with something of a modified stalk. He had one deeply disconcerting eye, pale blue in his otherwise dark face. His mismatched vision settled directly on Jimmy with all the malevolent interest of a butterfly collector on an insect. It had a force all its own. Jimmy found himself taking an unexpected step back.
“Who is bothering you, Todd?” the creepy one asked. He leaned in closer to Jimmy, practically over the hunched back of his friend, who only made a terrified unintelligible noise. He patted Todd on the shoulder without looking down. “Amigo, you have got to start using your words.”
Jimmy drew himself up. “I’m the Darkness,” he announced, although he had only been toying with the nickname during an impromptu game of solo MASH last night. “Jimmy: your worst nightmare.”
The kid lifted his eyebrows. His eyes were as pitiless and empty as the void of endless space. “Oh, a nightmare are you?”
Suddenly, Jimmy was a little less sure. “Um,” he said.
“I’m Pepito,” the kid went on, leaning still closer. He hadn’t blinked since he arrived. “This is my friend Todd, and you have not yet learned the taste of the rot licked from the mouth of nightmares, amigo.”
“Um.”
Pepito grabbed him by the collar, still smiling. “Come near my friend again,” he said, “and I will feed you your own hands, comprende?”
Jimmy did not piss himself, but it was a pretty near thing.
-x-
Johnny left his house after barely an hour of fucking around the living room, gritting his teeth every time the phone started to ring. They were calling in droves the last couple days, two by the hour at least. She’d made him promise that he wouldn’t pick up the phone or unplug it. It wasn’t as if she answered them herself when she got home, so why the fuck he couldn’t just unplug the thing while she was at her shift was a riddle for the ages. He’d tried to ask a couple times, but she just sighed and looked at him like she was one faulty heartbeat away from complete comatosis, and she’d said “I’m tired.”
He wasn’t so far gone that he was going to spend the one lousy hour a week he actually got to see his mother shouting about the god damn phone. Not yet.
Edgar’s house on the hill looked empty no matter what time he showed up, no matter how many thousands of times he’d walked up the sidewalk. No cars in the driveway, no lights visible from the street—there was a perfect stillness that hung around the Vargas residence. Johnny stalked towards the side of the fence, wriggling past the propped up and still broken gate and into the neatly maintained backyard.
The bedroom light was on, not that it particularly mattered either way. Johnny clambered onto the ever-empty dog house and jumped into the lower branches of the tree below Edgar’s window. The closest branch to the second story window was still a good six feet away. Before he could second guess himself, he vaulted onto the window ledge, fingers scrabbling painfully against the painted brickwork as he landed.
He paused on the sill, contemplating the view. There was something neat and contained about the world boxed in the confines of a window frame, a manageability. Even when the figures within moved around, they were still frozen in a tiny world of their own. Inside Edgar was leaning over an open book and slew of handwritten notes. Homework probably. Johnny grimaced as he slid the squeaky window open and climbed inside.
“You must be in a bad mood,” Edgar muttered distractedly, not bothering to look up from his work. “I heard you when you first came through the gate instead of when you hit the roof.”
“I half expected you to still be out with your new buddy,” Johnny retorted. He said it with all the distaste one might reserve for a gangrenous infection. “If I’d known you were shopping around for charity cases—”
“You’re hardly one to talk,” Edgar interrupted gently, attention still focused on his history paper. “Todd Casil? It took a bit of prodding to get Devi explain what happened yesterday.”
Johnny sneered, slamming Edgar’s window shut and dropping onto the bed with a huff. A pillow puffed into the air from the force of his landing.
“Sweet kid,” he said, at last. “High school’s a fuckin’ viper pit. It’s a cruel cosmic joke how the decent ones get mixed up with the rest of them.”
Todd had a teddy bear in his locker. Todd had a house next door to Johnny’s, a place as still as the surface of a swamp where a body had been left to dissolve. It was a terrible stillness. Todd’s father—Johnny felt his face crunching into a grimace—
A kid needs a father.
“We’re really quite the philanthropists,” Edgar remarked. He still hadn’t looked up from his paper, but Johnny could hear the faint twist of a smile in his voice. His sense of humor, if you could call it that, was all kinds of screwy.
Johnny snorted. “That’s what they call bored rich people who like to jerk around needy kids.”
Edgar tapped his pencil against the table, just once. “Yeah,” he said. “That sounds like us.”