The Last Suburb, a Serialized Novel

Episode 1: Firsts (6)

If they’re this bad with me, Dirk thought, what’s it like if a Wolf and Dirtbag are in the same class? If whoever wrote the schedules in this place had any sense, Dirk thought, they’d make sure that never happened. There’d been two weeny gangs in his middle school, back in the city, and while their rivalry was nothing like this one (for one thing, none of them could turn into a walking, furry chainsaw, at least not as far as Dirk knew), there had been a concerted effort among the teachers to keep the Future Gangstas of America separated, lest they stab each other with ballpoints.

Still. There was only so much grownups could do, and most of what they did was trying to convince kids that they could do more. Dirk could see the fault lines, the dynamite cables running through this school. Either the other kids just couldn’t see it or, more likely he thought, they’d been dealing with it plenty for however long this had been going on, that they just weren’t bothered by it anymore, like veteran soldiers in a warzone.

The block went by fast enough, particularly fast for the requisite intro to class bullshit, reiterating school policy for the fourth time that day for Dirk, handing out syllabi (which Dirk, for some reason, always thought of as a vampiric sort of word), and going over the list of materials and books they would need. The last ten minutes of the ninety-minute block – that was another thing Dirk would have to get used to, as he’d always done forty-minute periods – were ‘waste time until the bell rings’ time.

“Hey,” said the guy Dirk was sharing the cold black plastic table with.

“Hey,” Dirk said.

“You new? Don’t think I recognize you.”

“Yeah, I’m fresh fish. Dirk. San Francisco.”

“San Fran, huh? Cool.”

“Eh, it’s alright.” Dirk decided not to wince at the awful nickname the city had somehow acquired however long ago. “It’s different.”

“I bet. James Hartford.”

“Hey.”

“So, did you piss on Dwayne’s lawn, or something?” James cocked one double-ringed eyebrow, and nodded towards the Wolf.

“Ah, it’s kind of a long story.”

James shrugged. “Non’a my beeswax. Just wondering why he keeps looking over at you like…”

“Like a bull that sees red?” Dirk resisted the urge to look over his shoulder to see if Dwayne’s gaze was focused on him again.

“I hope not, my friend,” James said. “That particular bull has some nass-tee horns. I tell you, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near him if I were carrying a football.”

“You a football aficionado, James?”

“Nah, just your average documenter of atrocities, brother.” He grinned, and Dirk saw that the boy’s teeth were a strange color – not one of rot or plaque, but with a pink tip on the sharp chompers, his gums bluer than anyone’s Dirk had ever seen outside of a horror movie drowning victim. “I run the student paper. Social condor, that’s me.”

“A gentleman journalist,” Dirk nodded. “Your, uh, your teeth?”

“Oh, that,” James said, clacking his teeth together thrice. “That’s nothing. You know your boyfriend Dwayne, there, he-”

“Yeah,” Dirk nodded. “I know. I’ve, uh, seen.”

James’ eyebrows both went up, and he gave Dirk a nod of appreciation. “Man, you don’t waste any time, do you Dirk?”

“Would if I could.”

The bell rang, and the kids started packing up to head for their fourth and final block class. James scribbled something in his notebook, tore off a jagged strip, and handed it to Dirk. It was a phone number, with the town’s area code. “You ever feel like doing a ‘hi, I’m the new guy in town and I piss off Wolves for fun’ interview, gimme a call, right?”

“Gotcha,” Dirk said, and slipped the paper into his shirt pocket.

“Stay breathin’,” James said, slung his backpack onto one shoulder, and headed for the door.

“Workin’ on it,” Dirk said under his breath, as he went for the door himself.

He noticed Dwayne was staying behind, and had moved up to the front row of desks. He and Mr. Lugosi were having a silent starting contest, even unbroken as it was by students passing by on their way out the door.

That might have been the last Dirk thought of the Wolves and their coach for that day, but as he left, he noticed something.

Mr. Lugosi’s phone light was blinking, indicating a text or a missed call. Dirk, like almost all 21^st Century Americans, was well-attuned to such stimuli, and his eyes ticked over to the phone for just a second, as instant and involuntary a compulsion as following the course of a cute girl or a cool car. He almost looked away, but then he saw the keychain sitting next to the phone. Wouldn’t have left that there, if it were mine, Dirk thought. Way too easy for someone to reach out and…

The keys were all on a single ring, and the ring had a little blue and silver ornament on it. Etched into a cobalt disk was a stylized set of Texas longhorns, the word “Maverick” stenciled around the horns.

Maverick. As in Ford Maverick. As in the car that had tried to run Dirk and Pheruna off the road the first night he’d spent in this town. He’d almost forgotten.

Dirk didn’t trust himself to stay a second longer. He grabbed the straps of his backpack in both hands, pushed forward into the crowded hallway, almost trampling a fat girl who looked lost in her own little world, and hoped that Brit Lit was on the complete opposite end of the Truman High.

Episode 1: Firsts (5)

The bell rang, and Andre Lugosi waved his hand toward the door. “Door’s that way, get outta here,” he said, and got a few laughs for it. Chem II was almost always a good class, because it was the kids who didn’t have to take it for a graduation requirement, just the ones that wanted to. It beat the crap out of Scientific Principles, and even his Chem I classes. This semester was looking like it would be just as good, though Andre had been doing this long enough to know it was still too early to call.

He went over to his desk, checked quickly to make sure none of his superiors or nosier colleagues were walking past his room, and checked his phone. The rules were that teachers could have their phones in the calssroom, but they had to be left in the desk, and checked only during free periods, but the only teachers who followed that rule that Andre knew were the real old-school crowd who didn’t have cells in the first place.

He slid the phone’s face open, and brought up the text he’d somehow known he’d be getting.

Md it back to Stanfrd. Strting to forgt. Prob wont even knw what ths text is abt inan hr. love you. E.

Andre’s heart dropped, reached out to grab onto his ribcage, and held on for dear life.

He folded the phone up and set it down next to his keys and coffee mug, leaned on the desk, and sighed. Already, kids for his second Chem I class, the last class of the day, were filtering in by ones and twos, and those who knew him were offering more or less pleasant glances. He returned them, and did his best to forget all about Erica, at least for the moment.

Dirk came in seconds before the bell rang. The boy looked pale, but not sick. Andre noticed that Dirk was doing a very good job of not looking at Dwayne, one of Andre’s linebackers. Dwayne wasn’t bothering to pretend he hadn’t noticed.

“Afternoon, everybody,” Andre said, clapping his hands together twice. “How’re we doing today?”

Mostly silence, a few shrugs, a few smartass replies. Standard-issue high school response. “We’re gonna talk about chemicals,” Andre said. “And we’re gonna do things with chemicals. Might blow something up, who knows?”

That, at least, got a few laughs out of the kids. Most of them had probably heard of Mr. Lugosi’s infamous class rocket project, the one that exploded on the launch pad nine times out of ten.

“There’s gonna be a lot of math, but this is not a math class. You will be graded on your understanding of the principles at work in chemistry, and basic knowledge of the elements themselves. Now, some of you probably think chemistry is mixing green liquid with white liquid and getting pink liquid, there’s gratuitous amounts of smoke involved, and everyone wears funny goggles.” Andre reached over to his desk, pulled out a pair of translucent safety goggles, and fitted them neatly over his forehead. “Well, congratulations. You’re right.”

More chuckles. “When do we get goggles?” one girl in the front asked.

“When you’re older,” Andre replied. “Chem’s more than that, though. Chemistry is about… stuff. All the stuff that exists is a collection of elements, from hydrogen, the most element common in the universe, to uranium, which I did not get clearance to use in any of our experiments this semester. Sorry, guys.”

“Aw, man!” a few replied.

“Admit it, coach,” Dwayne said, “you used the last of it up to power your house.”

Andre held a conspiratorial finger up to his lips and shook his head. “Eee pee ay!” he mouthed, then pointed to the camera dome on the classroom’s ceiling. “They’re listening!”

Once the class had calmed down from that bon mot, Andre continued. “I mean it, though. Chemistry is in every other branch of science, from meteorology, to geology, to paleontology. It has been pointed out that we have a whole branch of chemistry devoted entirely to the chemicals that make up life – it’s called biology.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “So if you’re also taking Bio with Mrs. Phillips, rub that in for me, will ya?

“We’re going to start with the basics, of course, which means the elements – what they are, what makes them different from one another. We’ll learn what a noble gas is – hint, it’s not the Duke of York’s farts – and we’ll learn what an atomic number means. This is a lot like learning a foreign language. There’s vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. It’s also like getting to know someone. You’re never going to learn everything about them the first time you meet them, so don’t expect to know all there is to know about chemistry in just this class. Trust me, I barely understand chemistry – it was either teach this class, or go to work on my uncle’s farm in Idaho. But you can learn it, even if you’re not a ‘science person.’ So kick back, relax, it’s all going to work out just fine, things will be positively effervescent – we’re gonna learn what that means, too. Alright?”

He got a few “alrights” back, and some of the kids didn’t look quite like they were being lined up for the gas chamber anymore. Dirk had smiled once or twice, but he still looked like there was a large, hairy spider crawling up his pant leg.

“Alright,” Andre said. “Oh, hey, guess I should introduce myself, huh? I’m Andre Lugosi, and the first one of you who calls me Bela get’s an F for the semester. Mr. Lugosi, Mr. L, Coach, Hey You in the Bowtie, all of those are fine by me. I’m gonna take attendance now, so raise your hand and let me know if you go by anything other than what it says on my clipboard here. Tamika Anderson? Great… Shawn Azzarello?” And so on down the line.

“Dirk LaRoche?”

“Present,” the boy said. Dwayne’s eyes narrowed a bit, and Andre fixed the Wolf with the briefest of glances. Dwayne eased back in his chair, but his expression didn’t change.

He held the gaze a moment longer than maybe he should have – the students noticed. That didn’t worry him as much as he knew it should have, not nearly so much as Dwayne’s indifference worried him. I’m losing them, Andre thought. Losing my boys. He continued with the role.

Episode 1: Firsts (3)

“That was him,” Reg said, once the guy had disappeared down the hallway toward the gyms and cafeterias. “That was Dirk.”

“Huh,” Sita said, spitting her gum into a trash bin. “So it was.”

“So he is involved with the Wolves and ‘bags,” Reg said, holding up a finger as if awarding himself a point in a debate. “Enough for them to gang up on him like that, so he’s got to be in deep.”

“Oh, please, don’t get started on that,” Sita said. “Phroo’s obsessed enough for all three of us.”

“She’s exactly who I’m worried about!” Reg said, louder than he’d meant to. “I don’t want this guy dragging her any deeper into-”

“Reg,” Sita said, and for a second Reg had the crazy idea that someone else had just spoken. It sure hadn’t sounded like Sita. “Just stop it.”

“What? I’m just-”

“Stop.” Sita put a fist against his chest, not a punch, but far more forceful than poking him with her finger would have been. “Right now.”

To Reg’s surprise, he did.

Sita removed her fist, folded her arms, and leaned against the lockers, making sure first that she wasn’t leaning against Nuka Jeanie’s locker – nobody wanted to get too close to anything she kept in her backpack and purse. Her tongue poked the inside of her cheek as she thought, then she said: “My brother is a ghost hunter.”

“Yeah? What does that-”

“Z-zzt!” Sita said, and Reg shut up again. “Sid’s got a hard-on for the weird in this town. So does my best girlfriend. You and I both know that half the kids in orchestra are part of that weird strings cult, and I quit the softball team last year because they’re cursed worse than the Chicago Cubs. Back when we went to LeMay, the Janitor’s Closet almost got me. Twice.”

“I remember,” Reg said, and one of his hands balled into a fist.

Sita didn’t tell him to shut up this time, but she pushed on. “I’m not a fan, Reg. I don’t hate this place, not exactly, but I can’t wait to get out of here. I refuse to believe the rest of the world is like this. But, before I can find that out for certain, I have to make surenot to get eaten by this place. That means staying the hell away from the weird.” She took a breath, let it out, took another one. “You don’t have to be part of the weird. You’re not a monster, Reg.”

“Neither is Pheruna.”

“No, but she… it fits her, you know? And she’s always been really good about keeping that stuff away from me. That’s why she’s still my friend, even though she knows how I feel about all this. With a few exceptions, when we’re hanging out, she keeps that shit to herself, and I am incredibly grateful for that.” She leaned forward, and put her hands on Reg’s shoulders. “It fits her, Reg. But it doesn’t fit you. You don’t have the right… armor, I guess, for it. And I don’t want you getting eaten by this place, either.”

“I’m just trying to look out for her,” Reg said, but he mumbled the words and looked at his shoes when he said it.

“She can look out for herself. If she needs help, she’ll ask for it.” They both knew that wasn’t true, but Reg didn’t dispute it. “Meanwhile… I want someone to talk about music with. Or homework, or TV, or whatever. I need a friend. And ever since Phroo barely mentioned this guy, you haven’t been that awesome of a friend.”

Reg tried to open his mouth to argue, but didn’t quite know how to do it. His hands made gestures that didn’t mean anything.

“I’m going outside for a smoke.” Sita said, and reached inside her jacket. “Think about it, okay?” She headed toward one of the doors facing the woods behind Truman High, and Reg stood alone in the hallway, and watched her go, her red and green trainers making shushing sounds on the faux-marble hallway tiles.

Episode 1: Firsts (3)

“Hey! Dirtbag!”

Dirk glanced around, trying to identify which of the gang was being called out, without looking like he was looking. He was putting so much effort into the ruse that he was caught completely by surprise when four hands grabbed him and slammed his back against the lockers, his own padlock digging into his ass. “The fuck!” he yelled, instinct overriding the “no profanity” signs posted in nearly every hallway in Truman High.

“You lying fucking Dirtbag,” the owner of one set of hands snarled at him. It took Dirk a second to realize it was Fred.

“Hi, Fred,” he said, trying to stay calm. A teacher would be along any second now, he just had to keep shit from escalating.

“If I’d known what you were when we met, I would have gutted you in your own fucking garage,” Fred hissed.

“I’m not a Dirtbag,” Dirk snarled back, and tried to lunge forward, to break the grips. One of Fred’s hands let go of the plaid shirt Dirk was wearing, but the other guy, who looked like a Mac truck and an oak tree had been set on puree and then frozen in a mold of King Kong, held onto him as easily as a crocodile clamping down on a gazelle’s neck.

“No?” another guy, a little bigger but not quite as crazy-eyed as Fred, said from Dirk’s left. “Then why’d you come riding to their rescue that night?”

Dirk was about to tell them that he’d just been with Pheruna, but that probably wasn’t going to fly with these guys, and besides, Dirk didn’t want to get her in any more trouble with them than she already was. She had proven amply that she could take care of herself, but a pack of psycho-freaks like the Wolves might be more than she could handle. He knew it was more than he could handle, and was getting a very good illustration of that fact right now. “My sister was there,” Dirk said. “I don’t know why, but she was caught in the middle of your stupid gang war, or whatever this is, and I wanted to get her out. Best way to do that was to stop the fight.”

“We had them!” Fred snarled.

“We? You weren’t even there that night,” Dirk said, and then instantly regretted it. Still, neither that regret nor the sudden murderous look in Fred’s eyes stopped him from finishing the thought. “You said so yourself. You couldn’t help out your boys because you were grounded.”

Fred let go of Dirk, cocked his right fist behind his ear, and Dirk prepared to lose a few teeth.

When the hit didn’t come a few seconds later, Dirk opened his eyes. There were more Wolves surrounding him – even having never seen them in human form, and even if they hadn’t been obviously there because of the not-quite-fight, Dirk felt he could have picked each and every one of them out of a crowd as Wolves – but one of them, a skinner, thin-nosed kid with the beginnings of a respectable goatee, had his hand on Fred’s shoulder. Fred looked ready to deck him instead, but no matter how much he might have wanted to, Dirk knew he wasn’t going to do it. “He’s telling the truth, man,” the Wolf said. “His sis was there. Couple other kids, too. We shouldn’t have moved on them, not with kids around.”

“One of those kids stabbed you with a knife, Reid!” Fred hissed. “That little punk, Taco’s brother.”

“Yeah, and I don’t really blame him,” Reid said. He let go of Fred’s shoulder, and crossed his arms. “I was in howl-mode. That kid had one of two choices, either fight me, or piss his pants. Kid’s a trooper for doing what he did, and what the hell, it healed right back up.”

“We still got this fucker to deal with,” the not-quite-as-crazy guy said.

“I ain’t forgot,” Fred said, looking back at Dirk, narrowing his eyes.

“Look,” Dirk said. “You picked me out, and then all your boys melted out of nowhere to help you out,” he said, though he spared a glance to Reid, giving him the briefest of nods. He hoped that wouldn’t get the kid in trouble later. “Let me guess – it works that way for you guys a lot.”

“So what if it does?” Fred asked.

“So, I’ll bet you euros to yen that it works the same for the Dirtbags, too. Tell me, how often do you get the chance to fuck with one of them when they’re all by themselves?”

That got their attention, so Dirk forged on. “I’m guessing if you ever do find a ‘bag all by themselves, you get about one minute before the whole gang shows up to save their bacon.”

Fred snarled, growled really, but Dirk knew he was on the right track. “So,” he said, shrugging as best he could with Pike’s Peak holding him up against the lockers, “where are the Dirtbags, Fred? If I’m one of them, how come they’re not riding over the ridge to rescue my ass?”

Reason, Dirk guessed, was not Fred’s strongest area, but he got the idea, and the rest of the Wolves did, one by one. The one holding his shoulders let go, and to Dirk’s surprise the giant actually smoothed out the wrinkles he’d made on his shirt’s shoulders. “Sorry, bro,” the boy said.

“Come on, guys,” Fred’s second – Dirk thought this might be Chase, just less furry – said. They congregated around Fred, and walked off down the mostly-empty hallway.

What were the chances, Dirk thought, that he just happened to have a free period the same time as every member of the Wolves? Far more likely that they’d all made some excuse, or just slipped out at a convenient time, to jump him. How had they known what his schedule was? As much as Dirk thought of that kind of thing as his own private information, it probably wasn’t that hard to get ahold of, if you really wanted to. The idea scared him far more than the actual encounter had. Dirk had been hunted, tracked, and cornered, by the Wolves. They had planned this encounter, and that plan had gone off without a hitch – at least, up to the part where they beat him into tomato soup.

Only, how conscious had that plan been? Did they get together before school started, and mark out the hallway where they were going to get him? Or had Fred happened to see him, and the others had all happened to be free and headed in the same direction? If Dirk had been right, in addition to desperate, then it wasn’t at all impossible that this really had been a coincidence.

He fixed his collar, sighed a little more shakily than he would have liked, and decided to go spend the rest of his free period in the lunch room. Somewhere where there were lots of witnesses.

He spun the tumblers to open his locker and get his math book and notebook out, and this time he checked over his shoulder when he heard footsteps.

A boy and a girl were walking past him, both looking at him as if he were more than just part of the scenery. Maybe they’d heard what had happened from around the corner, and had wisely waited until now to pass – that would make him a person of interest, he supposed. They looked at him like they knew him though, or at least like he reminded them of someone, and Dirk was rapidly getting sick of that look.

He got the materials for his geometry homework out, and left to go do it. Math had never been Dirk’s favorite, but right now, he found himself relishing the idea of answering a question with just one, definitive answer, which at the end of the day didn’t impact his life much one way or the other. Graphs and proofs sounded pretty good, right now.

Episode 1: Firsts (2)

“Phoebe!”

The halls were so packed and loud that Phoebe at first thought she’d imagined her name being called the way you sometimes did, your brain picking two or three or more different noises and stringing them together into something familiar. Then she heard it again, though, and turned around just as Howie caught up to her in the halls.

“Hey!” he said. “You, uh, you remember me, right?”

Phoebe nodded and pointed her finger at him. “You know, you do look sorta familiar. Didn’t we get stuck under a car in the middle of a gang fight together?”

Howie grinned, but lowered his voice as he spoke. “Yeesh, shout it to the whole school, why don’t ya?” He fell into step next to her. “So, welcome to the LeMay Home for Wayward Youth.”

“This place is crazy,” Phoebe said, looking up at the ceiling, which was at least fifty feet high. She was used to schools being cramped, cubical affairs. This one looked more like a church on the inside, complete with stained glass windows, though these were just random triangles of red, blue, yellow and green, with no saints of learning nor angels of lunch schedules to inhabit them. “How do you not get lost here?”

“You do,” Howie said. “At least at first. Do you know how to find your classes?”

Phoebe pulled out her folded-up schedule, with the useless map of the first floor printed on the back. “112, East Wing… this school has wings. I thought only castles had wings. This place is like if Hogwarts and Castle Dracula had a baby. A building baby.”

Howie snorted at that. “C’mon, chica, I’ll show you to your room.”

“My hero,” she said, and stuck her elbow out for him to link his arm through. When Howie stared at it, confused, she rolled her eyes and just put her arm around the boy’s shoulders. “So,” she said, quietly, as they walked, “I took a few pictures, that night.”

“Like, photos?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

Phoebe glanced around. She didn’t know why anyone would be listening to them, or how they could possibly be overheard in this din, but she hadn’t seen June yet, and if Phoebe was going to see her today, she didn’t want it to be while they were talking about June’s family. Seeing no one she knew, she said “Sometimes my camera shows me weird stuff. It didn’t used to, but every since I moved here…” She told him, quickly, of the picture she’d taken of Mrs. Jones.

“No freakin’ way,” Howie said, scared and impressed in about equal amounts. They walked up a short set of stairs, into what might have been called a mezzanine if it were smaller, and Howie turned them left into a narrow tunnel-like hallway. Where the main entrance had been cavernous, the hallways looked barely high enough to let the teachers through – indeed, Phoebe saw many adults had to duck their heads to avoid braining themselves on the overhead lamps. “I’ve never met her before, but Sid says she is weird, weird-weird-weird.”

“Whole family is,” Phoebe said.

“Dad’s pretty funny, at least,” Howie said. “My mom and dad listen to his radio show. He was on this morning when they drove me to school.”

“Yeah, I’m sure he’s a real hoot,” Phoebe said, “but he’s the creepiest of the whole lot.”

“Really?” Howie asked. “What did his picture look like?”

“I didn’t take one,” Phoebe said. “And I really don’t want to. But anyway, we should look at the ones I did take. Even Sid might think they’re cool.”

“Yeah. You know, Sid’s really an okay guy,” Howie said. They emerged out of the tunnel into another big room, lit with more stained glass. The floor here was painted to look like a great big compass, with the needle pointing east. Phoebe could only assume that West and South Wings had similar decoration. “Once he chills the eff out.”

“Sure,” Phoebe said. She spotted room 112, and gave Howie a chuck on the shoulder, like her brother gave her sometimes. “Hey, what lunch do you got?”

“B,” Howie said, shoulders slumping. “It sucks. A and C get to eat outside on the bleachers if they wanna, but they do soccer for gym during B, and I guess they don’t want us yelling how much the gym kids suck at passing.”

“Well, look on the bright side,” Phoebe said. “I got B, too.”

“Cool,” Howie brightened instantly. “Sid and I sit in the corner, at one of the circle tables, by where the kids play Magic cards and stuff.”

“Gotcha, circles by the trading card dweebs,” Phoebe said, fully conscious of the quite-dweebish Dr. Strange collection she had tucked into her bag between her textbooks. “Seeya then!”

Howie said something similar, but the first bell rang just as he did, and the ambient volume went up a couple of notches. He waved, settled his backpack higher on his shoulders, and dove back into the churning mass of soon-to-be-late kids and teachers.

Room 112 wasn’t a rectangle. Instead, like all the other buildings in the East Wing, it was a kind of fat crescent, with the tables curving around, almost penning in the poor teacher behind her desk. The blackboard was on a rolling frame, as it couldn’t be mounted on the curving wall, and with the exception of a few lonely posters and a thin strip of marshland animals-themed wallpaper just below the ceiling, the walls were the barest Phoebe had ever seen in any school. The walls themselves were painted a bright, buttery yellow that made Phoebe think of the beach, and all the desks were wood, not metal, and the wooden chairs weren’t bolted right to them like they had been at her old school. The chairs and desks looked old, chipped, and in dire need of that lemon-spray stuff her mom put on the good furniture every month or so, but they also looked comfortable and damn-near indestructible.

The chalkboard had a diagram of the desks, with initials over each one. Phoebe found hers, learned that she shared it with a boy in a Chargers hoodie and a girl with the brightest orange freckles Phoebe had ever seen. A few kids talked, but most had that first-day silence that Phoebe understood all too well. She reached into her backpack, pulled out her notebook (making sure her hand covered up Dr. Strange, just in case anyone here was a Philistine or, worse, a DC fan), and opened it for the first time since her mother had bought it a few days ago. The blank, blue-lined paper was intimidating, exciting, inviting, and practically demanding her to doodle something in the margins. The front of the notebook had just been purple, with a big “200” in the corner to remind her how many pages she had, but Phoebe suspected that before the week was out she was going to take her eraser to that cover and paint little pink-white clouds of rubbed-off ink on it, the way she almost always did.

The second bell rang, and the conversation in the room quieted, though it didn’t go away entirely. The teacher, whose named was written over the diagram and identified her as Ms. Dunney, made a final, apparently decisive tap at the space bar of her computer, an ancient iMac with a translucent teal case, and stood up. “Hello, everybody,” she said.

A few brave souls offered greetings of their own, and that seemed to make Ms. Dunney smile. She was pretty, and Phoebe wondered just how long she’d had her teaching license for. “Welcome to Homeroom. You’ll start every day here, this year, and you’ll come here after assemblies and rallies. Most days this will be like a study hall, a place for you to do your homework or, since you have yours first in the morning, I hope you’ll use this time to go over the homework you did the night before.” She smiled, and Phoebe smiled, too – Ms. Dunney was under no illusions of when most kids did their homework, if they had anything to say about it.

“If you had sixth grade here last year, then welcome back.” It sounded like a legitimate welcome, too, and Phoebe noticed some of the kids exchanging incredibly quick, incredibly warm, smiles with Ms. Dunney. The girl with the radioactive freckles was one of these. The boy in the hoodie leaned back in his chair and stared at the desk like he couldn’t be more bored if his life depended on it. “If you’re new go ahead and raise your hand – we’re all going to go around and introduce ourselves, I just want to know who’s brand new.”

Phoebe raised her hand, and looked around. She was the only one.

“Okay,” Ms. Dunney said, nodding. “Phoebe, right?”

“Yes, ma’am.” It would appear she was getting introduced a little early.

But Ms. Dunney just nodded to her, and continued, going around the room and having everyone stand and say their names. None of that “your favorite movie” or “what I did for summer vacation” silliness that Phoebe always found awkward, either, just say your name and say hello. In Phoebe’s experience, you learned most of what you needed to know from a person from just that, and maybe Ms. Dunney thought the same thing.

The freckled girl turned out to be named Amy, and the boy was Tom, only it might have been Dom, or Phoebe supposed it could have been Todd. Amy was drawing an intricate knot pattern in her notebook, and Phoebe started watching her. Amy noticed, and moved the notebook a little closer, and left her pen on the notebook.

Phoebe tentatively picked up the pen, as the rest of the class said their name with varying degrees of enthusiasm and volume. She didn’t want to ruin the girl’s design with her clumsy fingers, so she sketched a little nine-pointed star on the page’s corner. She passed the notebook back.

Amy examined the star closely, and made a few small dots around it, then connected the dots like a constellation. Then, she scribbled something, her handwriting far looser but no less elegant than the knots she’d been drawing.

Ms. Dunney was talking about assemblies, and Phoebe listened for a little while. Then Amy passed the notebook back, and Phoebe risked a glance at it.

You lucky star says don’t fear the house. Don’t be afraid. Grandmother can’t watch out for you forever.

Phoebe looked up at Amy, clamping her mouth shut so it wouldn’t hang open.

Amy shrugged, as if to say “your guess is as good as mine, sister.” Then she went back to drawing her knotwork design. Phoebe realized after a few more seconds that it was a crown over another nine-pointed star.

Phoebe shut her eyes, took a breath, and filed this fresh-off-the-press mystery for later. She was in school, now – she could deal with the important stuff later.

Episode 1: Firsts (1)

LeMay Middle School, or at least it’s architect, had gone through a variety of personality phases before its final completion, Vanessa decided. Maybe that made sense, considering what was going to happen to the children who would spend three years in this building. She’d never seen a middle school (or any pre-college school, for that matter) with Ionian pillars, which for some reason seemed very East Coast to her, and while she had seen schools that looked like they were trying to be Spanish missions, she certainly hadn’t seen the two schools of architecture on the same building before.

LeMay had that, and more. A castle turret stuck up from the main building’s northeast corner, which even had a set of nice drapes behind the windows. Vanessa decided that was probably the principal’s office. The brick alternated between red and mustard yellow, seemingly at random, though Vanessa had an idea that if she crossed her eyes and looked for a while, she’d see a 3D Magic Picture emerge from the building; of what, she had no idea. A smaller, more recent addition to the school seemed a bit more conservative, but as if the older building had infected the new one, the side of the addition which fell in the main building’s shadow played host to a Frank Lloyd Wright-style overhang, with vines of a species Vanessa didn’t recognize hanging off the ledge. The gymnasium, the third and final building, looked like a converted aircraft hangar, so much so that the parking lot in front of it had a long gap of parking spaces running down the middle. Vanessa decided this was a runway for ghostly barnstormers, and was surprised when the idea didn’t amuse her. She realized that it wasn’t entirely impossible.

“You okay, Mom?” Phoebe asked her from the passenger seat.

“Just checking out your new digs, kiddo,” Vanessa said.

“Digs?” Phoebe wrinkled her nose at the archaism.

“Oh, please, you just wait until you have kids of your own and they laugh when you say ‘wicked.’”

“I don’t say ‘wicked’.”

“You gonna be this difficult with your teachers?”

“I guess you’ll find out.” Phoebe fluttered her lashes in a way she must have thought was cute.

“Uh-huh. Go learn stuff.” She leaned over, gave her daughter a car-hug, and called “Have a good day!” after Phoebe as she hopped out of the Corolla.

“You too!” Not I will, or, okay, Mom, or a half-hearted wave. Vanessa watched her daughter climb up the steps, her backpack heavier than any Vanessa had ever had to carry to school, her little camera probably hidden away somewhere in there.

Vanessa smiled. She had a good kid.

Autumn

You know, I have puberty rights
And I have puberty wrongs
No one understood me
All my teeth were so long
And no one made me stop

-The Cramps, “I Was a
Teenage Werewolf”

But what the hell, let’s dance
It may not be a sure thing, but at least it’s half a chance
Another cold hand-shake, a car crash ballet
Another suburban romance
Another suburban romance

-Alan Moore, “Another Suburban Romance”

Slow down, don’t fuck with my high
I want be left alone
here with my monsters

-Mike Doughty, “Tremendous Brunettes”

Summer: End Titles

And for a moment I lose myself
Wrapped up in the pleasures of the world
I’ve journeyed here and there and back again
But in the same old haunts I still find my friends
Mysteries not ready to reveal
Sympathies I’m ready to return

-Smashing Pumpkins, “Thirty-Three”

Summer: Scene 56

Downtown could have fit, Dirk was pretty sure, in the back of a good-sized moving van. The strip mall, the park, the ice cream shops and the library, the whole thing could have been packed up into boxes and shipped away, then relocated somewhere else by three guys in blue uniforms and farmer’s tans. Granted, moving trucks were maybe at the forefront of his mind right now, having spent most of the morning helping those three guys in their blue uniforms unload the last of their old home into their new one, while his mother had taken Phoebe shopping for new school supplies. Dirk had most of what he’d needed already, and he’d driven into town after the movers had left to finish off the rest.

In the daylight, especially in this little hub of light commerce, with jazz music from a trio practicing in the park, this town didn’t seem like the Twilight Zone. Dirk knew it would again, later if not sooner, but for the moment at least, it wasn’t so bad. Slow, quiet, and a little too bright and shiny, but that was to be expected with any suburb. That’s what the place was, he thought, under all the weirdness – just another suburb. Nothing scary about that, right?

Dirk sat on the Nova’s hood, looking down at his phone. His mom had sent him a text reading simply “rmembr what we tlked about ths mrning.” She was far worse about text-language than either he or Phoebe. Dirk sighed, blinked against the sun, and looked across the park. There weren’t any Now Hiring signs, and he didn’t know the first thing about finding a job – not legitimately, anyway. The garage back home in the city (or maybe it was just “back in the city,” now) had spared him all sorts of the nonsense he knew would eventually come with a real job – they hadn’t cared what hours he came in, he’d gotten a lunch or a pee break whenever he’d asked for one, and the nature of what he was doing meant he hadn’t had to actually deal with any of the garage’s customers.

“Yeah, well,” he said to himself. “Just remember to call it ‘volunteer work’ on the application.” He set off across the park, to see who looked like they might need a little help this coming fall.

He tried at two coffee shops, neither of which was looking for barristers or cleaners. There was a Maid-Rite, but he didn’t even bother applying – the place was dead, and there were already five kids his own age or older goofing off behind the counter. He wondered if he would recognize any of them if he saw them in the halls at Truman High. The library apparently only hired you if you were female, over 50, and could locate a book blindfolded by employing echolocation. Staples, Panera, and the Shanghai Moon Chinese Restaurant were all bust as well.

“She didn’t say ‘go and get a job’,” he mumbled to himself, walking toward a McDonald’s. “She said go look for one. Not your fault if you back empty-handed on the first day.” Dirk had no intention at all of applying at Mickey D’s – that was a last resort of the most desperate kind – but he was hungry, and even if he was too proud to work there, he was not too proud to eat a body bag’s volume of chicken McNuggets.

With the purchase of the golden-fried lumps of gristle, one of which would undoubtedly resemble a mushed rendering of North America or Australia, Dirk realized his wallet now contained a grant total of twenty-two dollars and assorted change which, if he was lucky, might add up to another two bones. The credit card was really more of a shamanic talisman at this point, containing nothing on it but the possibility of wealth, and he wasn’t sure how much was on the Best Buy and Gamestop gift cards he’d gotten for his birthday months ago. That, far more than his mother’s request that morning, hit home his need of a job.

There was an O’Reilly’s Auto Parts that he’d seen over on Coolidge, but he doubted they’d even take sixteen-year-olds, no matter how much experience he had working with cars. He thought maybe if he could convince whoever did the hiring there to look at the Nova, to show off his skill, but he had a feeling that while that might have worked in the city, it wouldn’t work here. Maybe that had something to do with this town, or maybe it was all towns of this size. One way or another, it probably wasn’t going to work.

He took his lunch back to the park, locking the Nova up and taking a seat on a bench not too far from the car. He glared balefully at the scratch they’d taken the night before last, knowing that he didn’t have the right paint to fix it up, and he couldn’t afford that, either. Sooner or later, something would need fixing or tuning up on the car, and that would require money, too. That was ignoring completely the supplies or books or whatever else he was going to need for later in the school year, or have anything to give his mother if she needed help with the bills or anything else. Not even counting anything resembling fun that he might have wanted to do. Taking Pheruna to a movie, maybe.

That, at least, made him smile. It made the bench more comfortable, made the sunlight softer, and if he were barefoot rather than in his father’s old pair of dress shoes, Dirk would have bet every remaining cent he had that the grass would feel softer between his toes. Pheruna. Punk Rock Girl Genius, Science Princess. Girls like that didn’t exist, so much so that he’d never even been aware of their impossibility enough to wish that they did. Then he’d been one second, one mis-placed overhead footstep away from kissing one last night.

“You mind?” someone asked him.

Dirk looked up to see an older guy, maybe in his fifties or early sixties, gesturing to the bench.

“No, go ahead,” Dirk said, scooting over to give the man a bit more room.

“Thanks,” he said, sitting down and taking something that looked like a veggie wrap and smelled like what Dirk had imagined the spice markets of Baghdad smelled like when his father would read Arabian Nights to him. “Don’t mean to bother you, it’s just this is the closest bench, and my damn leg’s acting up.” He gave the culprit a kick with the other, apparently perfectly-functioning, leg.

“No problem,” Dirk shrugged. “What is that?”

The man looked at his meal, wrapped in waxed newspaper, then at Dirk. “Just something my wife used to make for me. She was Persian.” He took a bite, apparently quite happy with it.

“You mean Iranian?” Dirk asked after a second. Guy couldn’t be that old.

“Not to hear her tell it,” he said. “Her father was an advisor to the Shah himself. He got him and his family outta dodge in ‘78 when he saw the writing on the wall, moved ‘em here. Well, to New York, anyway. Fatima came out west later.”

Dirk closed up his cardboard box of chicken, somehow feeling like eating while this man talked would be sacrilege of a kind.

“Never did meet her dad, or any of her family. For all I know, she made the whole thing up to impress me. She was a kidder, a joker.”

“Your own personal Scheherazade,” Dirk suggested, thinking again of the old, falling-apart collection of tales that his father had loved as much as he had.

The man made a noise of approval. “A man of letters. I can appreciate that.”

“Not really,” Dirk said. “Think the last book I read was almost a year ago.”

“But you remember what you read,” the man said, around a mouthful. “That’s just as important. Maybe more. Karl Hayes. I’d shake, but I really do need two hands with this thing.”

“Gotcha. Dirk.” Dirk decided not to say his last name unless the man asked. He was getting sick of being recognized by people he’d never met.

“Dirk. Good to meetcha. So, what do you do, Dirk?”

He shrugged. “I, uh, work on my car, and help my mom take care of my sister, and I go to school. I guess.” He opened his lunch again, selected a nugget. He hadn’t found any continents yet, which was something of a disappointment. “Nothing too exciting.”

“That’s good,” Karl said. “Believe it or not.”

Dirk had an idea. “In this town, I can believe it. Exciting, I’m finding, means monsters.”

“So you’re new around here?” No surprise, or attempt to change the subject. “Yeah, I try to just avoid all that shit, pardon mon Français. Got enough to worry about without getting involved with the Wolves or the ‘bags, or Tom Jones and whatever he’s up to. Trying to keep my damn job, for one.”

“What do you do?”

Karl shrugged. “I guess it is my turn, isn’t it? I run a theater, only one in town. The Flying Carpet.”

“Movies or plays?”

“Movies, though I guess you could call the Rocky Horror freaks play-actors.”

“Can’t be doing that bad, if you still get people up on stage for that.”

“Hah. Spoken like a man who’s never tried to run a business. No offense.”

“None taken.” Dirk hesitated for a moment, but decided finally that it couldn’t hurt. “You need more money, or more help?”

“Both, and therein lies the trouble, my young friend. I need more help, I need ushers, concessions, someone new in the box office, and I’d love another projectionist so we could start doing midnight shows again. On the other hand, I don’t got the money to hire anybody else, not even for eight bucks an hour. I can’t even get new film anymore – the Flying Carpet is a strictly cheap-seats, second-run business now.” Karl sighed and finished off his lunch, as if the act of talking about such unpleasantness meant he needed to replenish himself.

“How about seven-fifty an hour?” Dirk asked.

Karl looked at him, licking the last of the white-pink sauce off his fingers. “You cruisin’ for a job?”

“Trying to. Not much luck yet.”

“Yeah. Shoulda been here at the start of summer, everyone was hiring then. Now they’re all battening down the hatches – school’s starting, and when that happens, everybody downtown takes a hit in the wallet.” Karl pointed at Dirk. “You, at least people your age, are what keep this town alive, economically. You’re our best market, and you’re our best workforce. This town might be run by grownups, but it belongs to you young Turks. And the sad fact is, I can’t bring them in anymore, and frankly I can’t even hire any of ya’s.”

“Seven bucks,” Dirk said. “I can work nights during the week. Done it before.”

“Ah, you got school to worry about.”

“I got money to worry about, too,” Dirk said. “Look, it’s kind of a long story, but I’m not just looking for pocket change to goof off with on the weekends. My family’s in kind of rough shape, money-wise. It’s the whole reason we had to move back here.”

“Back?” Karl asked.

Dirk bit his tongue.

After a moment Karl shrugged. “Ah, none of my business. So, you’re trying to help out your family. I respect that. I do.”

Dirk sighed. “Well, uh, you know anyone else who’s hiring?”

Karl thought for a moment. “You said you work on cars?”

“That’s right.”

“So you know your way around machines.”

“Could say that.”

“You know old machines? Ones that take a little work and elbow grease to get ‘em started?”

Dirk pointed over his shoulder. “See that black Chevy parked there?”

The man looked, squinted, then reached into his shirt pocket for a pair of glasses. He didn’t put them on, just held them, still-folded, up to one of his eyes. “Oh, yeah. Chevelle?”

Dirk resisted the urge to snort indignantly. “Nova. 1970. Had to mod or build some of the parts from scratch.”

“Nova.” Karl nodded, slowly, and Dirk knew he recognized the car. To the man’s credit, though, he didn’t say anything. “Alright. Think you could work a real film projector? I ain’t got any of those bullshit digital projectors.”

“You teach me, I’ll learn.” Dirk finished the last of his nuggets and chucked it into a garbage can nearby. Karl did the same. “Seven bucks an hour?”

Karl thought about it. “I can go to thirty bucks a night for late nights on Friday and Saturday, forty bucks for afternoons. You’ll get Sunday off for homework. Hundred bucks a week, you alright with that?”

“Sure,” Dirk said. “You do midnight showings, I guess?”

“Damn straight. Classics only. Got Casablanca lined up in a few weeks, you ever see that one?”

“No.”

“Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, my God, man. You ain’t lived.”

“Is it a good date movie?”

Karl thought about it. “Depends on your date. Alright, Dirk. I’ve got a show to run in half an hour, but you come see me tomorrow at seven, that’s seven a.m., alright? Theater’s back on Steinbeck Road, between the Christian bookstore and an empty lot. We’ll fill out the doublya-fours and whatnot, make you a real-life employee of the Flying Carpet Theater. You got a tux?”

“A what?”

“Tuxedo, Jesus Christ. Hmm. You’re taller than Larry freakin’ Bird, but I might have a shirt and coat you could use. Joel Howard, he used to work for me, he was a tall guy, too, and I got to keep the one he wore after he died.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“I’m not. It’s still a nice tux. You bring your own slacks and…” Karl looked at Dirk’s boots. “You keep those things polished, you’ll be good to go. First week will be training, mostly on the projector, then if I think you know what you’re doing, you can start Friday after next.”

“Deal,” Dirk said, sticking out his hand.

Karl wiped his hand on a handkerchief he kept in his pocket, and shook Dirk’s. “Not gonna flake out on me, are ya Dirk?”

“No, sir.”

“Alright, cuz if you do, I’ll tell everyone lookin’ to hire downtown not to even sell to a kid with a black Nova.” He smiled while he said it, though, and clapped his hands as he stood up. Sure enough, his left leg wobbled a little, but after a second the man seemed to re-learn the trick of walking.

“You want a ride back?” Dirk asked. “That way I can learn where the place is?”

Karl looked like he was going to refuse, but then he winced and reached down to his thigh. “Damn thing falls asleep if the wind blows cross-wise,” he explained. “You know, yeah, may not be a bad idea. Thanks, kid.”

As they drove back, mostly in silence except for Karl telling Dirk where to turn, Dirk realized that, without intending to, he’d become a citizen of this town just now. He’d interfered in the fight between the Wolves and the Dirtbags as an outsider, but if it happened again – and Dirk knew, somehow, that it would – it would be different. He might have to choose sides… or he’d have a side of his own. One way or another, he was home here, and he could make of his home what he wanted.

It didn’t scare him as much as he knew it should have.

Summer: Scene 55

One by one, all the lights in all the houses in town went off. The street lights flickered and buzzed, bug-zappers crackled, and the occasional dog barked. The stars came out, cold and distant and offering no signs or portents of what tomorrow might bring. Those who liked to sleep with the radio on did so, and those who habitually fell asleep in front of the news or Jay Leno promptly did that.

Pheruna made her way home, locked the door, watered the plants, noted all the numbers and Greek symbols that her father’s machines (the ones she understood, at any rate) displayed to her by the light of nixie and neon, showered, and fell asleep in bed with her towel still wrapped around her drying body. She snored, and ignored the creaking and groaning as the old Queen Anne settled deeper into Fool’s Hill.

Annette Jones waited until her husband was asleep, then went to check on the children that fate had allowed her to keep. Juniper was asleep, arms at her sides and hair splayed out on her pillow like a mermaid’s. Annette closed the girl’s window – it might get colder later, and she didn’t want her catching anything. Fred was playing video games in his room, and he declined Annette’s offer to bring him a glass of milk or water. He didn’t look at her when she spoke, but that no longer bothered her. At least he was there. She went to the bathroom that she mostly had to herself these days, opened the medicine cabinet, and dry-swallowed six pills, each from a different bottle, some of them prescribed by her doctor, some of them not. The last pill, which she got from one of the few of her old friends she allowed herself to keep, she let melt on her tongue, bitter and somehow foggy, but whenever she did this it seemed to work better.

Sid and Howie spoke with the Dirtbags long into the night.

The Wolves, most of them, stayed home, and slept.

Those who could not sleep read, or drank, or simply sank into the night like an ice bath, letting it numb their thoughts.

Those who were inclined to, made love, or fucked, or messed around.

The town was quiet, and dim, and cool.

And Vanessa LaRoche had no dreams of a house, black or any other color, walking the streets of her hometown. At least, none that she could remember.