Troll Or Derby, A Fairy Wicked Tale (4 page)

“You just can’t wait for roller derby to get yourself all banged up, can ya, kid?” he asked. He smiled, as if passing out in the middle of the Homecoming ceremony was the funniest gag he’d ever seen. Maybe it was. I laughed, too.

Once it was clear I wasn’t going to choke on my own vomit, go into an epileptic fit, or anything else that might have entertained the ruffians, the crowd around me dispersed, and the Homecoming ritual went on. Since Gennifer wasn’t there, someone else was crowned Queen.

Mom cried, as the spotlight honed in on second-place beauty queen Confectionary Schmidt, the heavily tattooed daughter of Mom’s high school rival, Confession Eckart-Schmidt. I knew Mom was going to be impossible to live with—talk about adding insult to injury. I liked Confectionary “Call me Candy one more time and I’ll punch you in the throat” Schmidt. She was pretty, and cool.

Coach and Derek supported me, despite the fact that I told them repeatedly I was fine. They loaded me into Derek’s car, and Coach instructed Derek to take me home. “And as for you, little lady—you need to learn when to quit sometimes. You can’t push yourself forever.” He laughed again, and pushed the door shut.

Something about Coach, when he laughs—his underbite makes his face look kind of funny. Not exactly human. Not really scary—but it’s not right.

When I opened my eyes again, the police cars lit up the trailer park.

“Somebody’s busted,” Derek said.

I sat up as we pulled onto our street. The police were at my house.

“How’d you get hurt, anyway?” Derek asked, as he pulled the car into his driveway.

“You don’t really want to know,” I said. Were the cops there to question me? Would they actually do anything if I told them about Dave and his drug ring?

I slunk down in the seat of the car and adjusted the rearview mirror so I could see what was going on at my house. Two uniformed cops stood on the front porch, knocking.

“Derek, you’ve got to get me out of here.”

“Don’t you want to go home and see what’s going on?”

“I think one of those cops is Dave’s cousin.”

Derek twisted around, painfully obvious as he checked out the two police. “Yeah,” he said. “And the woman cop is his aunt.”

“Fuck. You gotta get me out of here, man,” I said.

Derek backed the car out of the driveway a little too quickly, and I slid further down the seat, hoping the cops weren’t going to jump in their car and follow us. Peeling out in the trailer park might be an everyday occurrence, but in this instance it had to look suspicious.

They didn’t follow us, and we were five miles from the park before Derek asked me where we should go.

“
We
aren’t going anywhere—but you can drop me off at the rink,” I said.

“Coach isn’t there. He said he’s going to The Barn for some drinks after the game.”

“Crap. Got any other ideas?”

“Well, my mom’s at church. We could stop in there and beg for gas money.”

It wasn’t my first choice of destinations, but it looked like I was out of options. We were there in minutes.

“What’s she doing at church on a Friday, anyway?” The plastic flapping banner across the entrance to the cinderblock building read, HOLIDAY BAZAAR THIS SATURDAY. “She selling her ornaments at the church?”

“Oh, yeah. Doilies, stuff she hot-glues—you know it. There’s a potluck tonight, then they’re setting up the booths.”

The smell of food inside the church hit me like a baseball bat. I hadn’t realized how hungry I was until that moment. When had I last eaten? “Think they’d care if we had some of their food?”

“It’s a church, isn’t it?” Derek said.

He had a point.

The Fellowship Hall was lined with folding tables and pegboards bearing Christmas and Thanksgiving crafts. Halloween hadn’t passed yet, but Christ Covenant Brigade wasn’t really big on monsters and witches and such, as far as I could tell.

At the end of the room was a buffet table at least twenty feet long. I found an empty table, pulled out a folding chair, and felt what was left of my energy drain away. If I were a character in one of Derek’s video games, I’d be in dire need of more hearts.

“Just stay here. I’ll say hi to my mom and get you something to eat,” Derek said. He was never going to succeed with his Mac Daddy act at this rate.

His mom was so excited to see him at church that she even made a fuss over me—usually she didn’t even look me in the eye. Derek and I stopped hanging out when she realized I was probably going to grow up to be a lesbian, so…you know, around fourth grade or so. At least a year or two before
I
even knew.

Yeast rolls, hot from the oven and dripping butter, appeared in a basket before me. Meatloaf, mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, sweet potatoes with marshmallows, mac and cheese with a potato chip crust, and a tiny cup of Coke followed shortly. Starving, I ate too fast.

“I’m going to be sick,” I said.

“You want to go outside?” Derek asked.

I nodded, and he handed me his keys. I tried to stand, and I really thought I’d make it, but then a sign reading FRIDAY NIGHT MEATLOAF FELLOWSHIP swam before my eyes, and I was falling. The cowboy hat barely cushioned my head against the hard tile floor, and I think I managed to croak out “I’m sorry” to Derek.

Not again. Please, God. Not in the company of holy rollers. I’ll wake up in a dress at Camp Pray-the-Gay-Away.

And then all was black.

Chapter 3.5

Paranoia Will Destroy Ya

Harlow

I’ve never done anything illegal short of stealing a goat now and then, but I’m related to too many criminals to consider myself safe. Drug dealers are nasty people—even worse when they’re trolls.

I’d followed my cousin enough the past few years to realize that he was completely unconcerned for his own safety. I guess growing up under the wing of McJagger gave him false confidence. Or maybe since the Wheelers and the Saarkenners were dead, he and his dad thought nothing could touch them. I don’t know, but he didn’t even seem to notice that I tailed him all over Laurents County.

His first stop was The Barn, a huge Amish-built structure that served watered-down drinks to rednecks while they played pool or darts and ignored women. He bought everyone a couple of rounds—no doubt so they would be his alibi.

Even though he owned the county peacekeepers and had every judge in the tri-county area in his pocket, those Staties could be a nuisance, every now and then. The last one who’d stumbled off the main road onto Dave’s field of pot in the northern part of the county got turned into a small, yet fashionable, valise.

Dave wasn’t at The Barn very long before he and a younger fellow—surely not even legal drinking age—exited the bar and hopped into Dave’s caddy. I followed them on foot to the hospital. I could have outrun the car, no problem, but moving through a heavily populated area when you’re a seven foot tall troll was a bit problematic. I glamoured myself into my usual “homeless guy” look, and took my time.

As I cut through a parking lot, a wee girl outside the Beehler’s Buy-Lo caught a glimpse of me and screamed from her seat in the shopping cart. By the time her mother would have turned her head my way, I was gone. Little ones almost always have The Sight.

In another ten minutes, I was outside the hospital, watching Dave’s friend enter the double doors under a brilliant blue
Emergency
sign. So, he was there to pick up the poor girl and finish the job, huh?

The boy came running out of the ER, gesturing back toward the doorway and waving his arms. Dave backed the car up, trunk to the ambulance doors, and in a moment, a glamour cascaded over the car, making it look like an ambulance.

Two nurses wheeled the chubby girl with the long, blonde hair out on a stretcher. The scrawnier, tougher girl who had saved her life was nowhere to be seen.

I didn’t want to let Dave take this girl—no good could come of that, for sure—but it was the other girl who concerned me the most. I couldn’t explain it at the time, but I had to find her—and find her now.

Chapter Four

You Don’t Have to Go Home, but You Can’t Stay Here

Deb

My mother screamed from the living room. I opened my eyes. From my bed, I could instantly tell the daylight streaming in through my window was far from fresh—it had to have been midday, at least. I wondered how bad this head injury was, after all.

“I want my daughter back, you son of a bitch! I don’t care what you think I owe you! I want Gennifer back and I want her back in one piece!” She took a deep breath, and I could tell she’d been sobbing, the way her breathing faltered through deep gasps. “Don’t you—don’t! Do NOT hang up on me!” Another beat, then “Son of a bitch!” I heard the phone slam down into the receiver, and Mom crying.

Two seconds later, the door to my room flew open. I sat up quickly.

“You better jump!” she said. “I don’t know what the hell you are trying to pull! Where is your sister!?” She flew at me from the doorway and shook me by the shoulders. “Tell me! Tell me!” Her eyes were wild, her fury and fear driving her further from sanity than I’d ever seen her.

“Mom! Mom! Stop!” She let go, and I drew a deep breath. “Hospital,” I said.

“No, she is goddamn well not at the hospital, and she’s not here, and you goddamn well know it!” She drew back and slapped me, and before I could react, her hands were covering her face in despair. For a second I thought she was sorry she’d hit me.

“My only child,” she moaned. “My baby, my only baby …”

I was numb with shock. I’d never been Mom’s favorite, I knew, but was she going to disown me now?

“Mom?”

“Don’t call me that—don’t do it! Don’t call me that, ever again. They told me I had to take you, that you were the only one who could keep her safe, but I’ll be damned if you did! Damn lot of good it did me, all these years! I fed you, I clothed you, I changed your filthy diapers, and you were supposed to be the big hero or something, the Escort—no, the
Protector
, they said. And what did you do? Nothing, that’s what!”

The room was spinning, and her words were gibberish. How to interpret this babbling? She’d gotten drunk and hit me plenty of times, but I’d always been able to understand why. She lost at Bingo. We were out of gin, or cigarettes.

“Me? An escort?” The only escorts I’d ever heard of were big-city call girls or hookers or something like that. I wasn’t for sure—I’d only ever heard the word in movies, or in the ads of that free newspaper that’s put out by some group in Bloomington.

She breathed deeply, and looked at me as if she were seeing me for the first time. “Debra,” she said, “I need to get Gennifer back. It is your job to guard your sister and
protect her
.” I could see the rage rising in her face again.

“It’s okay, Mom.”

She held her hands up, turning her face away from me. “It’s not okay!” The words exploded out of her, in a tone I’d never heard from her. Gutteral. She drew another deep breath, and looked me in the eye. She forced a smile. “I wasn’t allowed to tell you—it went against the agreement—but, no, you are not my daughter. You’re a foster child. You are insurance! It was part of the prophecy.”

“What prophecy? What are you talking about?” So many questions—and my entire life suddenly felt like a lie.

“I protected you when you were unable to protect yourself,” she said. “I may not have been the best mother, but you owe me. Find my daughter. Find Gennifer, or your life is mine.”

She stormed out of the room and out of the house. I was still sitting on my bed in shock when I heard her car pull out of the driveway.

A tornado might as well have hit our trailer again. Everything I’d ever known about my life was tossed into the air. There was no truth, no way to tell which way was up or down.

I looked at myself in the mirror over my dresser. A large crack had run through it for years, and suddenly it seemed so fitting, a diagonal slash through my face. I brushed the dried blood from my hair, and only winced a little at the tender spot on my head left over from the fire. I took off my shirt, and found bruises in the shapes of stars up and down my torso. Where the hell did those come from?