Snow White Sorrow (6 page)

“Nah, he’s a doofus,” the other owl replied.

Loki didn’t bother checking if he was hallucinating. He heard Lucy trot closer.

“Loki Blackstar,” Lucy stood in her devil outfit, her hands on her hips “How can anyone be as pathetic as you?”

Loki said nothing. The last thing he needed was someone to remind him of his failures.

“You know why I asked you to kill Dork Dracula?” Lucy said. “Because some people in my town think that you’re the only one who can kill the Snow White vampire, but you turned out to be a real loser.”

“You’re from the same town Igor called from?” Loki frowned.

“Yes,” Lucy said. “He is like our town’s council representative. He insisted on calling you even when I told him that you failed the test of killing Dork Dracula.”

“This was a test?” The hits kept on coming.

“Some ancestors in our town wrote a prophecy claiming that a fifteen year old vampire hunter would kill Snow White. Clearly, it couldn’t be you,” Lucy said. “If you want my advice, forget about vampire hunting. Stick to wearing that stupid kilt of yours.”

Loki was speechless. Lucy knelt down and pulled a small card from her pocket. She wet it with her tongue and plastered it on Loki’s forehead. “It’s our town’s address. Our town’s council still thinks you should give us a visit,” she held Loki’s head between her hands and looked at him, “Loki Blackstar,” she sighed. “What a waste of a cool name.”

Lucy left and Loki didn’t bother standing up. His time in this Ordinary World was painful. Even though he thought people were stupid and mean, there was no denying he was a total failure. When Lucy’s spit dried, the card fell and he picked it up. It read:

Welcome to the Island of Sorrow

East of the Sun West of the Moon

3

A Town Called Snoring

Loki didn’t have the luxury to return to a house or a family like other teens. He spent nights sleeping in his Cadillac, one of the few gadgets the Council had provided him with on his journey in the Ordinary World.

In the beginning, Loki thought he’d be able to park his car in the suburbs and sleep in it, but he was wrong. House owners mistook him for a creep or intruder and woke him up in the middle of the night, prompting him to leave. A ninety-year-old woman once accused him of being a peeping tom. She tried smashing his window with a frying pan as the rest of the neighborhood threw eggs at him. He had lost his money to a hole in his pocket that day so he didn’t mind the raw eggs. They tasted good as long as he licked them from his face and not from the ground.

Loki couldn’t afford parking lots for his Cadillac, and he didn’t have friends who’d let him sleep over and park in their garages. For weeks, he ended up guarding his car at night instead of sleeping in it. Carmen was old, unregistered, had broken headlights, and out of the ordinary plates, which read:

H… is Where the Heart is.

The space after the letter ‘h’ was worn out, and Loki thought the missing letters would make the word: home.

He thought it was such a clichéd phrase. To him, home was Heaven where he came from and belonged to. This awful Ordinary World wasn’t home, and was never going to be. Home had nothing to do with the heart. It was just a place where he could be treated with dignity, get some decent sleep, and remember who he really was.

Loki also avoided the police. Almost sixteen, he hadn’t applied for a driver’s license yet, and the police usually suspected Carmen of being a stolen car. Also, the police didn’t believe vampire hunters existed, so Loki didn’t know how to explain the stakes and hunting tools in the trunk of his Cadillac. To the police, everything about Loki had ‘lunatic’ written all over it, and he didn’t want to end up in jail. His life was a bad joke already, and a night in jail was a night wasted without trying to kill a vampire so he could leave this stupid world and go back to Heaven.

At some point, he decided he’d sneak into the garages of abandoned houses. He thought he’d roll up the windows, lock the car from inside, and hide under a blanket until the morning sun came.

He was wrong again.

The houses were ghost carnivals, and they wouldn’t let him sleep. He was used to ghosts, but not to girl ghosts. They were no different from demon girls.

He ended up driving away and hiding his Cadillac in the thick bushes in the forest. It was a shaky ride, but he’d finally found a place where he could sleep. Well, only until the frogs started croaking.

Loki’s biggest fear was frogs. When they croaked, he felt as if a giant monster was roaring at him. The croaking sound was the scariest thing Loki had ever heard, and he wasn’t talking about the
ribbet, ribbet
part. He was scared of the other sounds frogs made:
crooock, crrrrooock
.

Sometimes he dreamed of frogs wanting to kiss him.

“Yucccckk! I’m not going to kiss a frog!” Loki woke up screaming and drove away from the bushes, his hands shaking on the wheel.

Eventually, Loki decided to use a fortune cookie the Council of Heaven had given him through Charmwill; it was to help him when he needed to make a tough decision. It was an enchanted fortune cookie. Whenever Loki asked it something and crushed it open, an answer appeared written on a small piece of gummy paper from inside it. It turned back into a fortune cookie on its own afterwards, so he could question it again later. Loki loved the taste of the gummy paper, chewing the answer away—it tasted accordingly of the answer itself; bitter answer, bitter taste, and vice versa. The fortune cookie was Charmwill’s least favorite gadget, but Loki loved it. He named it Sesame.

When Loki asked Sesame where to park his Cadillac, he got the strangest answer. The small piece of gummy paper read: pet cemeteries.

Loki liked the idea; pet cemeteries were only occupied with dead animals. There were no humans, zombies, or sleepwalking dead girls to interrupt his sleep; just cats, dogs, and other pets. He’d heard about animals returning from their graves as zombies, but he knew he could deal with them. He loved zombies more than vampires; they were slow, funny,
brainless
, and easy to kill. Loki hoped people didn’t bury frogs in the pet cemetery.

His first night in the pet cemetery was the hardest. He didn’t mind that the dead animals woke up and played drums on the roof of his Cadillac, or that they killed each other in a zombie dogs-and-cats fist fight. What he didn’t expect was them to talk to him.

“Loki!” a cat meowed outside his car, scratching its nails on the window. “Open up!”

Loki opened one eye, still tucked under the blanket, thinking he was dreaming, but then he heard another sound.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

Loki lifted his neck from under the blanket and saw who was knocking. It was a squirrel.

“You’ll be alright, Loco,” the squirrel said. “Want a nut?”

“This isn’t really happening, right?” Loki squinted “I’m not going
nuts
, am I?”

“You’re not nuts,” the squirrel said, looking at him with its big curious eyes. “I’m offering you a
nut
in exchange for letting me sleep in the car because it’s really cold out here. Ignore the cat. It has nothing to offer you.”

Loki tilted his head to the side and saw a black scruffy cat nodding its head.

“Please, don’t speak,” Loki begged it with sleepy eyes.

“OK, I won’t…” the cat meowed. “Until you tell me to. But do you think it will be long? Can I sing a song to you until I’m allowed to speak, or is my voice up to your standards?”

“Oh, no,” Loki crept back under the blanket and stuffed cotton into his ears. There was nothing he could do. It was the only place where he could sleep, and it made him want to go back to Heaven even more. The Ordinary World was just horrible. “I swear I’m going to kill every vampire I see until I get out of this world,” he sighed.

Even though he loved squirrels he had grown weary of them calling him ‘Loco’ and telling him that he was going to be alright.

“I’m not alright,” he growled from under his blanket. “I’m a loser, and stop calling me Loco!”

In the morning, Loki crushed Sesame open and asked it where he should go next; sometimes, it knew where the next vampire would be, and if not, the gummy paper would at least helped ease his growling stomach—he was only allowed to ask Sesame one question per day.

The paper read:
go to Snoring.

Snoring was the town where Loki went to school, and where Charmwill Glimmer lived, disguised as his teacher in Boring High, named after Snoring’s founding father Snoring Von Boring; it was a mystery if that was his name or a grand joke.

Some people liked to call the town the Great Snoring as they thought the word
great
made it sound more important. Loki thought both names were horrible.

Charmwill had advised Loki to attend school and get good grades. He thought getting a proper education would be plan B for Loki in case he failed in his mission and couldn’t go back to Heaven. There was one catch though; that Loki had to pay for his school. To do that, he had to keep killing vampires for money just like he had tried to do yesterday.

The sun was shining high when Loki entered Snoring, reading the welcome sign by the entrance:

Welcome to the Great Snoring.

A little lower, someone had paint-brushed the words:

Where dreams come true….LoL

A little lower, someone carved the letters with a knife:

Zzzzzz!

“Yeah, right,” Loki said, steering the wheel.

Snoring was so boring that students went back to school on weekends. School was just as
boring
, but it made them feel somewhat alive in this forgotten two-story town. Other students sought adventure outside the borders by attending the masquerade parties in abandoned houses on the weekends, but only a few came back.

Loki parked his Cadillac in the school’s busy parking lot, and sighed.

“It’s only one week before I turn sixteen, and I haven’t killed half the vampires I need to go back,” he talked to Carmen who played a song called ‘We’ll Make Heaven on a Place Called Earth’ for him.

“Shut up, Carmen. I’m not going to spend the rest of my life here. What am I going to do?” Loki snapped.

The Cadillac shook momentarily and grey foam spread out at the front. It was Carmen’s way of shrugging her shoulders at Loki’s question.

“Fix the stupid car!” Loki heard a student shout from the distance. The others laughed at him.

Slouched, Loki reached for his backpack and got out, now dressed in his only white shirt and blue jeans with holes in his pockets. It was frustrating that Charmwill forbade him from kicking any students’ butt in school, so he played nice most of the time, clinching his fist behind his back and imagining this was only a nightmare.

Although Charmwill Glimmer’s history class was fun, Loki was late again. Charmwill didn’t believe in history books; he claimed they had all been forged. So instead of teaching history, he read fairy tales to the students, and they loved it. It was only Loki who didn’t believe in fairy tales, especially true love’s kisses, which reminded him of frogs.

No one knew Charmwill was Loki’s guardian, disguised as a teacher to stay close and watch over him in his journey. But Charmwill wasn’t always helpful. Sometimes, he was a little tough on Loki; at least he didn’t embarrass him by wearing a cloak. Charmwill wore modern clothes that fit with his teacher disguise in the Ordinary World.

“Late again, Mr. Loki,” Charmwill said without raising his head from the Book of Beautiful Lies he was reading from. Most of the girls in class had their chin rested on their hands as they listened to Charmwill’s tales. Boys fidgeted or secretly flew paper planes at the daydreaming girls.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Glimmer,” Loki said.

Girls turned their heads at him. Loki pursed his lips. Although he liked many of them, it was better to treat them like the flu than to fall in love with one and end up finding out she was a demon.

“‘Sorry’ is the worst word in history, and it’s a lame excuse for losers, Mr. Blackstar,” Charmwill said. “Will that be your answer to my next exam?”

“With all due respect, sir, you don’t teach us history,” Loki shrugged. “All you teach us is fairy tales. They’re all boring, clichéd, and easy to predict.”

“Is that so?” Charmwill turned to Loki, staring at him from behind his glasses. “Can you tell me then what the pigeons did to Cinderella’s stepsisters in the end of the Brothers Grimm fairy tale?”

“There were pigeons in Cinderella’s tale?” Loki’s eyebrows furrowed. “Hmm…kissed her and turned into a Prince Charming?” Loki guessed.

“I know the answer, sir,” a noisy girl with bushy red hair raised her hand while looking at Loki. Her name was Pippi Luvbug. She had that hazy aura about her, too dreamy, too enthusiastic, and very annoying. Loki knew she had a crush on him, and had tried to avoid her repeatedly. “I know the answer,” she stretched her hand as if wanting to go to the bathroom, not answer a question.

“Please enlighten Mr. Blackstar for me, Miss Luvbug,” Charmwill rubbed his beard, proud of his enthusiastic student.

Pippi stood up, fixed her dress a little, and brushed her teeth with her forefinger before talking. “The pigeons picked out both of their eyes, sir,” she said happily.

“Awesome answer,” Charmwill said. “Thank you, Miss Luvbug. You can sit down now.”

Pippi winked at Loki before sitting down. He found it rather creepy that the girl who was so happy with pigeons pecking out people’s eyes, winked at him. Deep inside, Loki felt funny about the strange fact he’d missed in the Cinderella story.

So fairy tales aren’t all about kisses, frogs, and princes? Why didn’t anyone tell me about this awesome tale of pigeons pecking out eyes when I was a kid? Oh, that’s right; I can’t even remember being a kid.

Charmwill allowed Loki inside, and continued reading. Loki sat next to Pippi who couldn’t stop looking at him and was sitting too close for comfort. Sometimes, Loki didn’t always think of Pippi as a bother, even if she was a little bit off her rocker. He could relate to that. What really aggravated him was that he actually found her attractive.