Dark Dragons (27 page)

Rocket shot!  “Hi.”

Allison shook her head and gave Darren a sideways
glance.  “He always gets hyper and horny when someone new comes in the
house.”  Vanessa’s grin faded, and she turned to look at Allison. 
Darren as well shot his mom a dark look and felt the testosterone level drop.

Awkward pause . . . and suddenly the two girls were laughing
hard.  Vanessa struggled to keep Elvis’s weight from toppling her over,
Allison struggling with his collar.  The black lab barked a couple of
times, apparently getting the joke too.  Darren breathed in deeply.

Allison said, “I meant the dog, honey,” and off they went
again with their Girl Moment.

Darren shifted his weight to the other foot, put on a fake
smile and let it fade quickly.

Allison finally managed to pull Elvis and his exposed “red
lipstick” off Vanessa and led him away into the living room.

For the love of Christ, Darren thought, wanting to crawl
into the keyhole next to him.  “Sorry about that,” he said.

“That’s okay.  Dogs will be dogs.”

Darren nodded.  “Yeah.”

Vanessa let out another chuckle.  “Um . . . I think you
know me, right?”

“Yeah . . . Vanessa Vasquez.  We had speech class last
semester.”

Vanessa nodded her head, and Darren could tell by her sly
grin that she knew something he didn’t.  “Yeah, right”——pressing her
tongue tight against her teeth——“speech class.”

Darren again re-shifted his weight back to the other foot.

“You remember that debate that Mr. Andrews gave me a shitty
grade on?”

He thought for a moment and then nodded his head, knowing
where she was going with this.  “You knew that note was from me?”

“Yeah.  I watched you slip it in my locker between
classes.”

He raised both hands.  “Guilty.”

In Introductory Speech, Vanessa had given a passionate,
10-minute debate with the zeal of a slick senator condemning a recent
California proposition banning Mexican child immigrants from health care and a
free education.  When it came time to debate with the class afterwards,
everyone couldn’t say one thing or another about it, either agreeing with her
or too disinterested to give a crap.

The exception had been Mr. Andrews who quickly revealed
every conservative bone in his body with a pompous drool of blatant statistics
and bombastic rhetoric designed to protect him from any counterpoint. 
Vanessa, of course, didn’t have the lofty bravado to rebut.  Andrews thought
he was some goddamn armchair pundit on
Meet the Press
.  Any other
person would have broken down, given up, even nodded in agreement just to get
it over with.  Not Vanessa.  She stood there and took it,
occasionally slinging the shit back at him when she could get a word in. 
When Andrews finally slipped, she moved in for the kill with the best smart-ass
retort in class that day.

“If you’re so adamant in keeping Southern California
strictly American,” she began, “maybe we can get a proposition on the ballot to
rename Los Angeles ‘Joe Smith.’”

Everyone in class cracked up.  Darren liked her even
more from that moment.

After her speech, Darren had managed to get a look over her
shoulder to see what grade she received:  “Although you displayed ample
material and dialogue to back up your claims, you failed to effectively support
these convictions during the concluding debate with the class——B for
presentation, C for point/counterpoint.”

Unbelievable.  For the remainder of the class, Vanessa
just stared at her desk, one deservedly pissed off Puerto Rican.

During Bill Seaver’s big snore-fest about capitalism versus
socialism, Darren decided to write Vanessa an unsigned letter complimenting her
steadfastness and the crack about Joe Smith, a letter he suddenly couldn’t
remember the words to.  Which made him nervous.  After the last bell
had rung and the hallways jammed up, he slipped the note through the
ventilation slot in her locker door.  Darren remembered checking the
crowded corridor for her before slipping in the note, but apparently he hadn’t
checked very well.

“I was standing on the other side of Amy Coffel’s locker,”
she said.  “You obviously didn’t see me.”

“Figures,” Darren said.

“Thanks, by the way.”

Darren smiled, shrugged.  “Andrews is an ass hat. 
You didn’t deserve it.”

Vanessa nodded.  “I still have it.”

“What?”

“Your note.”

Awkward Pause Number Two.

Vanessa looked into the living room and slipped both hands
into the back pockets of her rather tight blue jeans.  She had her shiny
black hair tied back in a ponytail, and Darren could detect just the slightest
whiff of perfume.  Something fancy, he could tell, like those fold-out
sample pages in his mom’s
Vouge
’s.  In fact, she looked rather
decked out for a Sunday afternoon.  She had the first three buttons of her
yellow blouse undone, showing the top of some decent cleavage.

Quick, asshole, she’s wandering.
  “Somebody told
me you were runner up for Miss Teen California last year.  That true?”

Vanessa rolled her eyes and let out a huff of air. 
“Yes, with my mother acting as drill instructor.”

“Ahh.  I take it your heart wasn’t exactly into it.”

“Hell no.  She’s the one who signed me up, parading me
around at all of the regionals like a damn poodle.”

“Best in Show, huh?” 
Shit!

“Something like that.  She wants me to be an actress or
a singer . . . I forget which.  Who knows.  I think she’s just sick
of selling insurance and trying to regain some lost opportunity from her youth
through me.  Don’t let the dreams go by, sweetie, she says.  Hell , I
just want to be a Foreign Service Officer for the State Department.  I’m
taking an internship this summer in Washing . . . I’m sorry.  I’m boring
the shit out of you.”

“No, you’re not,” he said truthfully.

“Yes I am.  I do that sometimes.  Anyway, the
reason I’m here——”

 
. . . is that I wanna make hot monkey. . . .

“——is to get the Cliffs Notes to
The Catcher in the Rye
for Todd.  He asked you Friday if he could borrow it, but you weren’t home
when he came over yesterday.”

“Oh yeah, that’s right.”

“He’s doing something with his family today so he asked me
if I could grab it for him.  I’ll probably end up writing his report
anyway.  It’s due tomorrow.”

“Yeah, right.  Let me get that for you.”  Darren
bounded up the stairs into his room.  The little yellow and black booklet
lay on his desk.  He snatched it up and leaped down the stairs, two at a
time, and landed like an Olympic vaulter.  He had his Nice Guy smile on
but it felt numb, forced.

“Thanks, Darren.  Todd really appreciates this. 
He says he’ll keep Marcus off your back.”

Darren gave her a quick nod, guts going soft, penis
shriveling.

Awkward Pause Number Three.

“Well, maybe I’ll see you at school tomorrow.  Bye.”

“Sure.  See ya.”

Darren practically moped back to the pool and helped Tony
nurse a bottle of Jägermeister.  An hour later, he was again floating on
his air mattress with his limbs splayed and dozens of empty beer cans trailing
away like so many sonar buoys.  Allison started ranting again——something
about contributing to the delinquency of minors——but Darren barely heard her
words.  Later that evening, she made taco salad for supper, but very
little conversation took place between the three of them while they picked at
their food.  Darren went to bed around nine with a raging hangover and cried
himself to sleep.  Tony likely did the same.

*

Around seven-thirty the next morning, they pulled up to the
corner of Sutton Canyon and Foothill on their bikes to wait for Nate and Jorge
who arrived three minutes later.  Darren had convinced everyone Saturday night
that they should go to school, an unpopular suggestion which they debated for
ten minutes.  Teachers and pop quizzes had been far from their minds
during their crazy weekend, but Darren thought it would be a good idea just to
show up.  They needed to forget their wild weekend and return to the real
world again for a while anyhow, to remind themselves that they were still
human, still teenagers.  High school sounded like a nice remedy even
though both Darren and Tony would be in detention, Tony for pulling a fire
alarm last Thursday.

As they turned the corner onto the street leading to Vergugo
Valley High, a high-pitched voice behind them suddenly shattered the
calm.  “Hey guys, what’s up?”

Darren winced.  That familiar, shrilling voice rung in
his head like a gong.

“Geils!” Tony said with mock gaiety.

Geils peddled faster to catch up.  “Hey guys, you’ll
never believe what I saw this weekend . . . a UFO.  Crazy, huh?”

Darren watched Geils’s head quickly swivel from face to
face, watching them for a reaction, waiting for the alarm to sound. 
Everyone had their poker faces on, though.

“I think it was the one that blew up over the city Saturday
morning,” Geils said.

“You mean the meteor?” Darren said.  “The newspapers
said it was just a rock falling out of the sky.”

“Yeah, right.  The government’s covering everything
up.  They know what’s goin’ on.  I’ve seen some other strange shit,
too.”

“Like what?” Darren sighed, trying to sound bored.  But
the alarms to Def-Con One were going off in his head.

Geils shrugged, smiled.  “I’m not tellin’.  You’d
think I’m crazy.”

“You?  Crazy?”

“I could be mistaken.”  Geils was enjoying his
moment.  “Well, I guess I’ll see you guys during lunch hour.  Later
days.”  He took a turn onto another street and rode off, trailing foul air
behind him.

The boys stopped their bikes at a corner to let the traffic
go by.  Everyone’s radar had been activated.  Danger was coming.

“You think he knows?” Jorge asked.

Darren thought about that.  Geils was a profound
storyteller, but why make up a story about a UFO?  Darren weighed the
equation and said, “Yeah, he knows.”

“Great,” Tony whined.

“Looks like we’ll have to cack him,” Nate said.

Everyone snickered.  Everyone but Darren.  He was
silent the rest of the way to school.

*

A quiet corner of the library served as the school’s
detention, but it wasn’t all that bad, being just forced Study Hall
anyway.  Boring, but at least Darren didn’t have to put up with classes
and Marcus for a week, who happened to be sitting on the other side of the
library reading a book. 
Horton Hears a Who
probably, his finger
moving slowly under each painful sentence.  Tony sat two tables over, his
nose buried deep in
Intermediate Chemistry 3rd Edition
.  Darren
didn’t know any of the others here, nor did he care.  He recognized some
of the faces, most of who cruised around town during lunch hour smoking
grass.  Tony’s crowd.

He went back to his algebra book, and when he did, he heard
a ringing begin to build in his ears.  He stuck his fingers in and wiggled
but the ringing persisted.  Suddenly he felt daggers pierce his eyeballs
and a terrifying pain shoot through his head.  He bounced in his seat when
the ache took the breath from him, and he pushed in his temples, squeezing his
eyes in reflex.  It tore down through his spine, and he saw his
Dragonstar, the alien moonship, his dad’s funeral last year.  Memories
poured out of his subconscious, images he hadn’t seen in years.  It was
like an electric surge overloading a computer, and everything exploded at once in
a tangling mess of confusing images.  He dug his knuckles into his
temples, hoping he wasn’t drawing attention.  Just when he thought he
would pass out, the pain and whatever triggered it, faded away.

He buried his head face down in his algebra book and hoped
he wouldn’t have another spell.  Apparently there were nasty side-effects
to being a brainwashed pilot of alien war machines.  The withdrawals
Kalaar had warned him of in his dream had come true.  The electro-junkie
inside him would need a fix soon.

“Damn.”

For the rest of the day, Darren just stared at his books
without deciphering a single word.  While others around him were tackling
trigonometry equations or the significance of Greek democracy, Darren ran
through the internal mechanics of his Dragonstar.  Right now Vanessa was
sitting in class somewhere and unintentionally making guys nearby think naughty
thoughts, while Darren poured over battle strategies and defensive maneuvers in
his head.  Todd was probably dreaming of his girl in gym class, as Darren
scribbled alien internal organs and physical weak points in his notebook. 
Todd’s little brother Marcus was shooting spitballs through a straw over in the
corner of the library when Darren was asking himself if he had the guts to go
the distance.  Along the margins in his notebook, Darren wrote, “We have
to be right the first time.  If we get it wrong, we lose. 
Hit
them before they land——a foothold is defeat.”

Darren looked up and spotted Marcus throwing wads of paper
at Bobby Samuels, a freshman and a pretty small guy.  Bobby gathered his
books and things and got up to leave the desk in front of Marcus.

He heard Marcus whisper, “Fagot.”  The current
detention monitor, Mr. Kerns, sitting just twenty feet away, did not move one
bone of his body or even take notice of Marcus’s insult.

Darren couldn’t help but feel the quiet storm in him grow
louder.  He had slugged it out with extraterrestrial invaders across the
moons of Jupiter, and here he was a day later still quivering from the school
jock.  He could take Marcus, and he didn’t need pulse rifles and
Dragonstars either. 
Time to turn the tables on this prick.

*

Just after two, Darren knocked on the door to the
custodian’s office and opened it, prepared to say, “There’s puke all over the boy’s
bathroom next to the art room,” but Stuckey and his four guys were not
here.  He stuffed the wooden bathroom pass into his back pocket and opened
the red notebook marked “Locker Log” on the desk.   Locker #377,
combination 45-62-18.  “Thank you,” Darren said with a grin.