Out of This World

  Tall Boy hoists a beer bottle as I put the bike on its stand.

  “Yo!” he calls over to me. “You hanging with us tonight?”

  “You bet,” I tell him. “I just need to get something from my crib.”

  He grins, then turns to say something to Shorty, standing beside him. I go into my crib, knowing that in two minutes they’ll have forgotten all about me. The last thing I want to do is party. I just watched Josh die when I was supposed to have his back. My girl turns out to not be my girl anymore. I’m planning a drive-by on some über-cousin and there’s a good chance I won’t survive.

  What the hell do I have to party about?

  Then I realize I’m not alone. I’ve been so in my head coming inside that at first I don’t notice Cory sitting on my couch. But the cousin ping hits me, and when I turn on the light, there he is, hands behind his head, feet up on my coffee table.

  I flex my fingers. Finally, something to hit. I know he sees it in my eyes.

  “Before you come at me swinging,” he says, “I want to tell you that I agree with you. We need to take Nanuq down and I’ll help in any way I can.”

  I stand there by the door processing what he said, looking for the angle he’s playing. I come up shooting blanks.

  “What happened to doing things the way the elders want?” I ask.

  He shrugs. “It’s what they wanted to hear.”

  “Yeah, and you’re so rebel now?”

  He sits up, puts his feet on the floor.

  “We can be pissy all night,” he says. “You can even take a shot at me. But in the end, we’re both after the same thing and all you’re doing is wasting time.”

  “What about your beef with me about the dog clans?” I ask.

  “Truth is, I’m still pissed at you for that. But you heard Lupe. Nobody’s going after you for payback.”

  “Yeah? What about your beef? You’re coyote, not dog. You don’t have to answer to her. And who says I can trust her? Maybe she just wants me to put my guard down and sic that dickwad Jimmy at me.”

  “She made him and his sister pledge to back off. The difference between cousins and five-fingered beings is that our word is everything. Once upon a time we didn’t have possessions or territory, or any of the other crap that the five-fingered beings brought to the table. But we had our word. It’s like sacred coin and no one abuses it.”

  “Nobody?”

  He shrugs. “We’re not perfect,” he says. “Cousins mess up just like people do, or they get sucked in by things that they shouldn’t. But when they do, there are repercussions.”

  “What, you guys have your own police?”

  “There have to be some rules—even if they’re unwritten—or you end up with complete anarchy. When that happens it means the stronger you are, the more you can run roughshod over others.”

  “Like, what kind of rules?”

  “Like, cousins don’t eat cousins.”

  I just look at him for a long moment. “You’re telling me that some cousins are cannibals?”

  “Look, if they’re in animal shape, a cousin mouse doesn’t look that much different from an animal mouse.”

  “Huh. So who enforces these rules?”

  “It’s not like that,” he says. “Cousins talk, and nothing stays hidden forever. If you’ve messed up, it gets out, and you cease to exist to us.”

  “Meaning?”

  “You can’t interact with any cousin. And you’re fair game for anybody who wants to take you out. No clan feuds. No reparation to be paid.”

  “Paid in what? You just told me that none of you care about possessions or territory.”

  “We didn’t. Things change. But our word is still sacred. In the long ago, payment was in favours, or alliances.”

  “So where does Nanuq fit into all this honour and crap?”

  “We don’t know that he lied to anybody,” Cory says.

  “No, but you’re saying he enslaved all these cousins.”

  “He bound them, yes, but initially, at least some of them went to him. And let me tell you, the elders are looking into this right now. But they need to be careful. The Polar Bear Clan isn’t big, but they’re extremely powerful. The elders are going to make damn sure they have things right before they start tossing around accusations. That’s why Auntie Min wants us to be patient.”

  “But you’re not.”

  “Are you?” he asks.

  I don’t bother to answer. He already knows where I stand.

  “I’m not from your world,” I finally say. “Where I come from, people have to earn your trust. You don’t put your life in the hands of anybody just on their say-so.”

  He nods, then looks right at me. “You owe me your life.”

  “I can’t argue with that.” “So you could say you owe me the favour of us working together.”

  “I can’t argue with that, either.”

  He rises, both palms held open, facing me.

  “Theodore Washington,” he says, “all debts between us are paid in full and I have neither the will, nor the right, to harm you or any of your clan.”

  His tone is formal, like this is supposed to mean something. He holds my gaze without blinking. And waits.

  I sigh. Well, I was looking for a cousin to help me, wasn’t I? And whatever he thinks of me, I know he was tight with Josh. And even if he says I don’t owe him anything now, he did save my life.

  “That stands whether I work with you or not?” I ask.

  He nods.

  “Well, fuck,” I tell him. “Why didn’t you say so in the first place? Where do we start?”

  He gives me a feral grin.

  “I’ve already got friends looking into where Nanuq’s holed up,” he says. “It shouldn’t take long, but it might be a day or two.”

  “That’s not a problem,” I tell him. “I need time to get my hands on some decent firepower. Though J-Dog might have something stashed away.”

  “Why don’t you ask him?” Cory says.

  “You mean, right now?”

  “The sooner you get what you need, the sooner we can go.

  Wouldn’t you rather be out looking for Nanuq yourself than sitting on your ass waiting for the information to come to you?”

  I nod. “Wait here,” I tell him.

  I find J-Dog in the kitchen after running a gauntlet of high-fives and beers pushed at me. By the time I get there, I have a beer in each hand. I sit down at the kitchen table and push one of them over to my brother, sitting across from me.

  There’s nobody else in here. No surprise, really. J-Dog looks to be in full brooding mode and nobody’s stupid enough to interrupt that. Except me.

  “You’re not celebrating?” I ask.

  He twists the cap from the bottle and tips the top of it in my direction. “Whoop-de-doo.”

  He guzzles half the bottle, gaze locked on mine, then bangs it down on the table.

  “None of this bothers you?” he finally says.

  “Hell, everything bothers me, depending on my mood. What exactly are you talking about?”

  “Take your pick. Otherworlds. My brother’s a Wildling. There’s all these heavy-duty animal people living alongside of us. How do you deal with it? I mean, I thought I knew the freaking world and where I fit in it. Now I have no clue, except I figure I’m way down the food chain.”

  “I know it seems messed up at first,” I tell him. “But you get used to it. Pretty soon you’ll see it’s no different than growing up in the Orchards, or dealing with Kings. It looks different, but it all boils down to the same damn thing.”

  “Huh.”

  “And maybe you don’t have their strength or speed,” I say, “but so far as they’re concerned, you’re still a player.”

  “How you figure that?”

  I tap my head. “You’re a tactician and you’re smart. They know that.” Then I bang my fist against my chest. “And you’ve got heart. You don’t back down. You don’t quit.”

  “That’s how
you see me? The guy you’re describing sounds like some kid’s wet dream about his big brother.”

  “You’re telling me I’m wrong?” I ask, my voice a notch louder.

  “—The fuck would I know? I only see myself from the inside, looking out. How the hell would I know what people see?”

  “I’m just telling you, don’t sweat it. Maybe the world’s a lot bigger than we thought, but the cousins are the same as anybody else.”

  He lifts an eyebrow.

  “They bleed, bro,” I tell him. “They can die.”

  He nods and tips the top of his bottle in my direction again before he finishes the other half.

  “Well, when you put it like that …” His gaze drifts for a moment before it locks back on me. “You know I don’t give a rat’s ass about what any of those Wildlings tools think, right? No offence.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “So are we done with them now?”

  “I’ve got one more little thing I need to do,” I tell him, “and then I’m done.”

  “For them?”

  I shake my head. “For me. One of those pricks sent the shooter that killed Josh, and that’s the guy I want. But I’m going to need some serious firepower.”

  He gives me a considering look. “How serious?”

  I remember joking with Des a million years ago.

  “Like a rocket launcher.”

  He laughs. “Aw, bro. I was saving that for a rainy day.”

  I don’t know why I’m surprised.

  “You’ve got one?”

  “Got two,” he says. “But there’s a catch. If you’re going into that kind of a firefight, we’re riding with you.”

  “You,” I say. “Nobody else. And where we’re going, they don’t necessarily have roads.”

  “What, you want to hump those things around on your back?”

  “Are you in or out?”

  “You really need to ask? Who are we hunting?”

  “A polar bear.”

  “Are you shitting me?”

  “Word.”

  He grins. “Dibs on the pelt. When do we leave?”

  “How soon can we get the artillery?”

  “It’s in the shed—under the floorboards.”

  “Then let’s haul ass.”

  I come in the front door and before I can say anything, Mom rushes down the hall from the kitchen and throws her arms around me.

  “Oh, God,” she says. “I saw it on the news and I was so worried. Were you there with him? Are you okay?”

  I’m confused. Why isn’t she yelling at me for being gone all night?

  I look over her shoulder and see my little sister Molly standing in the kitchen doorway, her eyes big. Then my dad steps into view. He’s wearing an unfamiliar worried look, which slowly changes into the more familiar one of being a little exasperated and a lot pissed off with me.

  “So, you decided to come home,” he says.

  Mom steps back, but keeps an arm around me. “Ted. His best friend just died.”

  Dad’s face softens. “I’m sorry,” he tells me. “That was a brave thing Josh did.”

  Mom steers me toward the kitchen and sends Molly to her room, so that it’s just three of us sitting around the table. And then the barrage of questions starts. Where was I last night? How long did I know Josh was a Wildling? Didn’t I understand how dangerous that was? How could I bring him here and put Molly in danger?

  Mom keeps touching my arm, like she has to assure herself that I’m really there. Dad sits, back straight, arms folded across his chest.

  I tell them the truth—or at least as much of it as makes sense. They know Wildlings are real, so I start there. I tell them about Josh, how Marina went missing and we were out looking for her, that we all went to the rally and Josh stopped the congressman from getting killed. I don’t tell them about cousins, the otherworld, crazy-ass snipers, old Mexican hawk uncles, or Donalita, who’s in my pocket in the shape of a pebble.

  “You should have called,” Mom says.

  I’m so tired of the third degree. I understand that they’re mad—I was totally expecting it—but I can’t really deal with it right now. How am I supposed to? Even with my eyes open, I keep getting flashes of Josh lying there so still on the stage, a big hole in his chest and blood seeping out from under him, his vacant face turned toward us. And his eyes. Those lifeless eyes …

  “We have rules in this house,” Dad says. “Like your mother said, you should have called.”

  I snap my gaze to him. “And you would have said what? You would have told me to get my ass back home.”

  “Language,” Dad says.

  I stop myself from rolling my eyes.

  “Look, it doesn’t matter,” I say. “You can do what you want— ground me, whatever—but I’d do it again. Marina got caught up with a rough crowd and she needed our help.”

  Mom’s eyes are a little wide. “What kind of rough crowd?”

  “I don’t know. She got on the bad side of some kind of a gang or something—and no, she wasn’t involved with them. She just got pulled in because she happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “You should have called the police,” Dad says. “They’re trained and paid to handle this sort of thing.”

  Yeah, dude, I think. Like that would ever happen. I’m sure they’d be all ready to head off into the otherworld and rescue her from some big-ass polar bear.

  “They wouldn’t have cared,” I say.

  “You don’t know that.”

  I want to bang my head on the table. I know they’re more worried than mad. I know that in a sane world, I should have called them, or let it all go and called the police. But there’s no way I could have done that, and there’s no way either they or the police could have helped.

  They couldn’t even keep the congressman protected. No, Josh had to die for that.

  “We’ve pulled you out of a lot of scrapes,” Dad says, “and put up with your antics at school, but—”

  “Josh is dead,” I break in. “Don’t you get that? My best friend’s dead. I can’t think about anything else. I can’t get that picture out of my head. What does any of the rest of this crap matter?”

  My head is pounding. I know that I’m starting to lose it, but I can’t seem to stop. It’s either get mad—even though neither of them deserves it—or fall down sobbing on the floor.

  “What did I say about lang—” Dad starts.

  “I don’t care!”

  I push my chair away from the table.

  “You sit down, young man,” Dad says.

  “I’m going to my room.”

  “I told you to sit down!”

  “Or you’ll what? If I sit down, will you bring Josh back to life? Because if you can’t do that, I don’t care about anything else you’ve got to say.”

  Dad stands up, his face getting redder, that little vein pulsing in his temple the way it does when he’s really mad. As we stand there facing each other, I realize for the first time that I’m actually bigger than him.

  “Last chance,” he says.

  “You want me to sit down?” I say. “Make me.”

  Dad’s chair clatters down on the linoleum and he starts for me, but Mom grabs his arm.

  “Ted, don’t,” she says. She looks at me. “Go to your room, Des.”

  I walk down the hall to my bedroom, go inside and slam the door.

  Well, I handled that real well, I think, as I fall down on my bed. Digging into my pocket, I pull out the pebble and tap it lightly on the bedpost. Donalita appears and falls across the bottom of the bed with her arms open wide. I reach over and clamp a hand over her mouth as she’s about to—I don’t know what. Sing? Laugh? Start talking in tongues?

  “You have to be super quiet, dude,” I tell her as she scoots up alongside me.

  From down the hall I can hear the soft murmur of my parents’ voices—arguing about what to do with me, I guess. A couple of times Dad’s threatened to put me in som
e military academy run by one of his pals from back when Dad was in the service. Mom hates the idea because she comes from old hippie stock and she’s a total pacifist. God knows how they ever ended up together.

  “I can be quiet,” Donalita whispers back. “I can be quieter than the quietest mouse you ever didn’t hear because it was so quiet.”

  She snuggles closer to me.

  “This probably isn’t a good idea,” I say.

  When she first insisted she had to come with me, I gave in because I needed the moral support, even if the friend I brought along was only a pebble in my pocket. But if they catch her in here now, I will end up in that military academy.

  “Were they mean to you?” she asks.

  “Depends on your perspective. Looking at it one way, I was mean to them first, by not coming home. They don’t get why I didn’t, and I can’t tell them everything—which bites—but if they knew all the details, they’d have a total meltdown.” I sigh. “This is, like, the worst day ever. I mean, Josh …”

  She gives my arm a squeeze. “I know. We should go away— just get away from everything.”

  “Except it’ll still be waiting for me when I get back, only amped up to eleven.”

  She frowns.

  “It’ll be worse,” I explain.

  We lie there awhile, listening to my parents’ voices.

  “I keep thinking about Josh’s mom,” I say. “She’s taking it so hard and she has to carry all that weight by herself, alone in a big empty house.”

  “I liked her,” Donalita says. “Maybe we should go stay with her. We could all comfort each other.”

  I turn away from her and push my face into the pillow and try to muffle my sobs. I can’t help it.

  Josh is gone and everything is a shambles.

  I walk aimlessly around my bedroom while I wait for Lupe, trying to decide what to take with me. In the end, I just shove some underwear and a spare hoodie into a backpack.

  I expect her to come tap on my window like Josh and Des used to when they wanted me to sneak out. Instead she just steps out of the otherworld, right into the middle of my room, which just about gives me a heart attack. She puts a steadying hand on my arm.

  “Sorry,” she whispers.