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Brian Potter was the kind of kid that never caught a break. Every time that it looked like he was winning, something happened and he lost.
He nearly won the relay race at last year’s field day, but he tripped on his shoelaces and fell, sprawling, inches away from the finish line. He came in dead last.
So, Pepper’s inevitable victory at Mario Kart should not have surprised him.
The Wii was open, mostly because the crowd at Temple o’ Toys was on the younger side. They must've gotten bored of a game system with three demos pretty quickly. The controllers were weird and there were only two of them.
“Who’s first?” Adam asked.
“Ladies first?” Wensleydale said.
“Yeah, alright,” Pepper said. “Play me, Adam.”
Brian laughed. “I’ll take winner.”
“Alright,” Adam said. “I’ll pick the level, and winner picks the next level.”
Adam loaded the demo and picked the basic level. Just a circle track around a grassy field. He was like that. He’d pick the level that they could learn on, and go from there.
Wensleydale and Brian watched. Pepper dominated, but that wasn’t particularly surprising. She won pretty much everything.
So Adam handed Brian the controller.
Pepper played with Yoshi. Good handling and great acceleration.
Brian played with Mario. Strong all around.
And Pepper picked out Rainbow Road. Because she was like that.
Brian tried to keep his cool through the flashy, looping track. The colors were dazzling, but the track was super hard to stay on top of. Proceeding carefully, cautiously, Brian managed to crawl to second place. He passed Pepper to obtain the lead.
He should have noticed that Pepper hit the brakes, but he didn’t.
The blue shell crested a hill just as Brian did, and took him out. Pepper cruised past for first place.
Adding injury to insult, one of the kids in the store snuck up behind Brian and hit him--hard--in the back of the knee with a wiffle bat.
Wiffle bats, for the uninitiated, are made of very hard plastic. They are unforgiving in the hands of a seven-year-old with an appetite for mayhem.
Pepper took the bat from the kid and stepped up at him. Some tow-headed little punk, with skin like skim milk and watery blue eyes. He ran away.
Brian had about enough of the Wii. Wensleydale wasn’t complaining. He looked a bit green in the face after watching Brian and Pepper play, and wasn’t interested in taking his turn. In fact, they all decided that they’d had enough Temple o’ Toys.
They didn’t like that they’d have to protect each other while trying out games.
“Leaving so soon?” Nero asked, as they passed the desk.
“Yeah,” Adam said. “It’s really crowded here right now.”
“You got something on your shirt,” Poppy said, pointing at Brian.
“Oh, that’s ice cream,” he said. “Chocolate.”
“Huh, so where you headed now?”
“Probably to Anathema’s,” Adam said.
“Gonna have some crystal visions?” Nero asked.
“Looks like a lot less punks are in there than are in here,” Pepper said.
“Actually,” Wensleydale said, “Brian was assaulted.”
“Someone hit me in the back of the leg while we were playing the Wii,” Brian confirmed.
“They had a wiffle bat,” Pepper said.
“Actually,” Wensleydale said, “he looked like one of the pollywogs.”
John Hastur, a very tall and very gruff albino who worked at the Hot Topic, lived in the same neighborhood as The Them. His family had a big house and a bunch of kids. Hastur was the eldest of seven. They were all a lot younger than John Hastur, because Mrs. Hastur had been hesitant to have more kids after having an albino.
Brian thought that was pretty sad, because grumpy Hastur had never been bad to The Them. He thought that it was wrong of Hastur’s parents to blame him for being different. Anyways, he must be pretty good looking. He modeled for a few ads that Lucifer Masters put out for the Hot Topic.
Brian didn’t think he was a good judge of appearances. If someone was mean to him, they started to become ugly. It was weird. He’d notice acne scars or that their eyes were a little too close together if someone was mean.
“Hastur’s on today,” Poppy said, punctuating the statement with a snap of her gum. “But he doesn’t bring his sibs to work with him.”
“Hang on,” Nero said. “HASTUR!”
The kid showed his face. “Yeah...”
“Which one are you?” Nero asked.
“I’m not sayin’.”
“Alright, look, you little shit,” he said. "We're gonna have a conversation, you and me."
Nero’s voice was calm, but he had a little tic at the corner of his mouth. He was Up To Something. Brian noticed a pimple on his neck, barely under the surface.
“These happen to be some of my best customers, and Pepper here is good friends with your brother’s boss,” he continued. “So you’re gonna get over here, or I’m gonna tell your brother when he gets to work. And he’s bound to know which one of the Hastur sprog you are.”
The kid gulped. He stepped over to the counter.
“Hands on the glass, punk,” Nero said.
Brian could see an old scar, shaped like a splat of pudding, suddenly very pale against Nero’s flushed forehead. His expression made him look like a gargoyle. A ghoul. When the kid assumed the position, Nero searched him.
“What’s this?”
He pulled a pack of Pokemon cards from the kid’s jean shorts. The kid looked at him with wide, lantern-like eyes.
“Where is your mother?” Nero whispered.
The kid tried to run. Brian had seen Nero work before, but this was the first time he’d been this close. Nero hooked his foot around the kid’s leg and sent him sprawling.
The kid yelped, but if the rest of the store heard him over the electronic noise, nobody said anything.
Nero stepped on his back and looked at the big display of summer toys. He chose a long black pool noodle.
“Here you go,” he said, handing it to Brian. “It won’t hurt him. Give him a few slaps until you feel better.”
Brian held the pool noodle in both hands. This was usually the kind of job he’d turn over to Pepper. But she’d enjoy it a little too much. She’d actually hurt the kid.
Grimly, he swung the noodle over his head, and brought it down. Once, twice. Just above Nero’s sandal-clad foot. That’s all he wanted.
The kid screamed like he was being murdered.
Nero hauled him up by the collar. “Get out of my store,” he said.
The pollywog ran, just as soon as Nero released him.
“I don’t know how many of them are out there,” Nero said. “Their mom let’s ‘em run the mall when she doesn’t feel like watching them. But,” he held up the foil-wrapped pack of cards, “the little jerk didn’t unwrap the cards, so I’m willing to let him go. With a light noodle flogging.”
“You’re so generous, Nero,” Poppy said. “I guess we’ll catch you kids later.”
“Mucho later,” Brian said. He was learning Spanish at school.
Adam led them out into the mall. “I didn’t think you were going to do it.”
“I didn’t think I was going to do it, either,” Brian agreed. He grinned broadly in the dappled light that filtered through the greenery, streaming from the mall skylight.
“How did it feel?” Adam asked.
“Good,” Brian said. “Pretty damned good.”
“Hey, kids. Why are we swearing?” Anathema asked.
Brian laughed. “Temple o' Toys was crowded and lame.”
“Actually, some boy hit Brian with a wiffle bat,” Wensleydale added.
“We were just minding our own business, too,” Pepper said.
“Without a doubt, that is the most dangerous thing to do,” Anathema said.
Anathema Device was a very nice adult who was very pretty and wore weird clothes and read their palms. Brian liked her very much, and he had some idea--at just past eleven years old--what it meant when Adam stared at her stiff-legged and flushed. Adam liked her. Liked liked. Like Pepper, who never shut up, could just stand in complete silence and stare at Beelzebub. Like Wensley, who knew every word ever, would forget them all when the sun broke over Dagon’s auburn hair.
Liked.
Anathema’s shop was full of a bunch of weird stuff. Crystal skulls and shiny rocks and incense that smelled like trees or flowers or perfume. Bottles of oil and windchimes and magic sigils and pendants that could tell you where to find anything at all.
“Here,” Anathema said, and held out a bucket of candy crystals on wooden sticks. “What’s up today?”
Brian picked out blue, Pepper took red, Wensleydale selected a yellow one, and Adam shyly drew out a green one.
“Oh, stuff,” Adam said.
There were more words. A lot more words, but Brian stopped listening. He was looking at the small white person who was browsing the magazine racks.
Even on the busiest days in the mall, Anathema only seemed to attract a few people. She said she didn’t mind, because her customers bought a lot. She didn’t need heaps of customers, just customers who bought heaps.
There was something...different...about the white person. Brian couldn’t tell if they were a boy person or a girl person, but that really didn’t matter. This was New Orleans, after all. Men dressed like women and women dressed however they damned well pleased. And there had always been people in the middle or outside or whatever.
And that was their business.
The white person was not white. They were Asian. But that wasn’t a problem. Brian knew a bunch of Asians at school and through his parents. That wasn’t what was weird.
The white person had white hair and blue eyes, but Brian was cool with Hastur, wasn’t he? Hastur was only a partial albino. It didn’t affect his eyes. This person’s skin was olive, but their eyes were that light blue that some albinos had, and their hair was shining white. It wasn’t that.
It wasn’t even the moto jacket and riding leathers. They looked old. Maybe they were white once, but now those leathers were stained around the neck and arm holes and leg holes. The hem around the bottom of the jacket was brownish-yellow with something, and (even at this distance) Brian could smell exhaust and cigarette smoke clinging to them.
The white person, small and dangerous as a razorblade, whipped around and met Brian’s eyes. Blue eyes, empty as an August sky before the hurricane falls, settled on Brian’s. They held him in place, and Brian felt his friends, Anathema’s shop, the whole mall, and all of New Orleans fade around him. All that was left was this stranger, watching him the way the pet shop snakes stared at the dead mice that they were fed. The way that dragons must stare.
And maybe then, in that moment that lived like long-dead insects in the amber light of Anathema’s shop, maybe then...
Maybe Brian understood what Adam felt when he looked at Anathema. What Pepper felt when she stared at Beelzebub. What Wensleydale felt when Dagon smiled at him.
There was no bright affection in this feeling. No love. No longing.
No, what Brian felt was something stronger. He felt gravity. He felt inevitability.
Part of what his friends felt for the beautiful and kind adults in their lives was tinged with what Brian felt now. Beyond the sweet longing and the affection, beneath it, there was a relentless pull. Not towards a person, but towards a time when The Them would scatter like marbles across pavement. When they would fall away from each other and into the arms of other people.
Brian was falling into inevitability with the white person.
Growing up and away. That was the undercurrent of the others’ affections. Brian felt that now. And, unlike the others, Brian didn’t feel any warmth or love or longing with it. All that Brian could feel was this pull, the pull of a black hole. He was standing at the event horizon.
This person, small and clad in dingy leather, this human looked like the bluest shell that Brian had ever encountered.
“Is that true?” Anathema asked, her voice breaking the spell that the white person had laid over Brian.
Brian looked over at Anathema and the others, having completely lost his place in the conversation.
“What?” he asked.
“Did you seriously flog one of the pollywogs with a pool noodle? Is that what happened?” Anathema asked. "I'd expect that from her," and Pepper made a face, "but not you, Brian."
“Yeah,” Brian said, and blushed. “I guess I did.”
“What were you staring at?” Anathema asked.
“Oh, there’s someone in the magazines--” Brian said, but he knew.
He knew even before he pointed a thumb at the magazine racks, before the words left his lips. He knew.
That the white person would be gone, and he’d be watching his back.
He’d be watching for the blue shell, the bluest shell, connected to him by some invisible string. He’d be waiting for the white person, who was on his tail, who was streaking towards him, who was coming.
Coming to destroy him.