Raiju: A Kaiju Hunter Novel (The Kaiju Hunter) (2 page)

I reached up and fixed the shades I wear whenever I go out. I have a huge collection of them. It’s something my dad picks up for me whenever he sees them, like how some girls gain those ever-expanding unicorn collections (mostly parent-started), except I’m okay with the glasses. I used to wear them back in San Francisco to hide my mom’s electric blue Irish eyes in my dad’s Asian face, except that now they’d become a symbol of the reborn, impervious Kevin. The ones I had chosen today were artsy round frames with rose-tinted lenses, like something Ozzy would have worn in his trippier days. They worked great with my ragged black jeans and leather jacket and the crazy anime hair I have that needs trimming at least once every two weeks.

“
Eh, I’ll be all right,” I said as we pulled into the parking lot behind Thomas Jefferson High, a boxy red-brick building that looked about as friendly as a penitentiary. “It’s a few fucking classes. I can handle it.”

Right after San Francisco I had developed a swearing problem. At first my dad let it go. Then he told me to cut it out, that I sounded like a punk. He didn’t say anything now. He just sat there in the parking lot, hands resting on the steering wheel of our idling, oh-so-clichéd delivery van, looking at me. He looked older, more shrunken somehow, like a turtle in a shell that wanted to draw in its head. He didn’t look like my dad anymore. “Do you want me coming in?” he said. “Or do you want to make up an excuse?”

He and I have always been close, able to read each other’s minds. He knew I wanted to go this alone, that it was important to me. But I loathed to say that to him; he might think I didn’t need him anymore.

“
If you want to come in…” I shrugged, leaving it at that.

“
I really want to check out that squash,” he said.

He never uses squash in his stir-fry dishes.

“
No problem. I’ll cover you.”

He slapped my knee.

I slid open the van door and jumped down, my backpack over a shoulder. “See you at four,” I said.

“
Can you handle registration? Do you want me to pick you up?”

“
Yes to one, no to two. I don’t know if there’ll be an orientation or if they’ll make me take tests or whatever, so lemme handle it, okay?” I shrugged. “I’ll catch the bus home.”

He smiled, a little. “Good enough. See you at four. And good luck!”

I waved him off, feeling oddly like our roles had been reversed—like I was sending
him
off into unknown territory, never to return. It was a feeling that made me feel old. An old, bad fit to the school system. Like I didn’t belong here. Like I ought to just take off. Yet I was just practical (or maybe stupid) enough, to turn around and start off toward the building anyway.

As things turned out, it was that great and wonderful practicality of mine that changed my life forever.

2

I felt a childish stab of nervous energy as I headed for the school.

Kids were climbing the steps, shoving each other, catcalling, referencing games I hadn’t seen and teams I didn’t know. They all looked like they fit together—they had that perfect cohesion you only ever see with kids who grew up together in the same neighborhood. New York kids. A tough crowd. I thought about metal detectors at the doors, cops in the hallways, guns in lockers. I wondered if all the horror stories I’d heard were true.

Gradually, I picked out the various cliques: skinny jeans and reversible jackets on the skate guys, a few tough-looking pusher types at the fence, and the jocks jaunting around sans jackets to show off all their gym muscle. Geeks and Emos on the fringes. Don’t think generalizations stand true? You haven’t been in high school of late. The girls looked pretty normal in jeans and tees or those short plaid skirts and funky jumper dresses that were all the rage—except, as usual, the cheerleaders had
way
more energy than anyone should at this ungodly hour.

I squinted at the bright sunshiny sky, hating it, wanting it to rain, feeling old, feeling like I needed more coffee, or a cigarette, or
something
. For the hundredth time that morning I wished I had my bike; at least, if I screwed up so badly I couldn’t show my face around here anymore I’d have an escape route. As it was, I was stuck here till four. Can you say groan?

There were, of course, bullies. A couple of big ones in varsity jackets were loitering at the doors, doing what bullies do, eyeing up the girls like the daily specials and making obnoxious comments in the direction of the pansier-looking boys. No matter where you go, a bully is a bully; they all came from the same Bryce-mold, it seems, created in the same Bryce-universe.

I realized I had to get up the stairs and through the front doors and still somehow remain invisible, and the next few seconds were critical. I regretted wearing the shades. If the bullies spotted them, they might peg me as a hippie tree-hugger, which would probably get me killed in this school. So I lowered my head slightly so my jawcut hair flopped forward to both sides of my face like a curtain and started climbing the steps casual-fast.

A small group of kids in black fishnet and leather were going in ahead of me, making scary faces at everyone. Maybe, I thought, they would be enough of a distraction that the evil bully-force from the evil bully empire would never notice me. I could dream, anyway. I slipped in ahead of the skate guys and took up my place behind the group in black. I saw funky short funeral dresses on the girls and outrageous black poet shirts and chain jeans on the guys. What an eclectic mix—we even had Goths.

Well, it turns out that New York produces an even meaner bunch of kids than I was used to, because one of the bullies stuck out his foot, tripping up the Goth girl in the lead. That annoyed me. Not the foot-thing (that’s an ancient tactic that’s whispered around primitive fires on Planet Bully) but the fact that he was going after a
girl
. Even Bryce and his band of Troglodytes wouldn’t have tried that shit. I mean, come on, weren’t there any rules or codes of honor on Planet Bully, however unfair and haphazard?

I saw it happen. I didn’t think much about it. I dropped my pack and reached through the wall of taffeta and lace and caught the girl at the elbow, steadying her on her monster plats. She was tiny and it was a long way down the school steps. She would have achieved free-fall longer than a military paratrooper. She fell back against me, catching my toe under her heel, which hurt. But right then I was too pissed about the lack of rules to notice the pain.

“
Dayum,” said the bully who had tripped the girl. He was huge, hulking, and fingering his football letter-jacket to emphasize his
jockness
, even though it had probably been bought by his mommy. “Hey, Zack, man, lookit this: the Goths are
multiplying
now.”

Zack, the other jerk blocking the door like a muscle-bound gargoyle, sniggered like his friend was a regular cut-up. It never failed to amaze me what kinds of kindergarten humor amused these types. I’m pretty sure most of them were deprived of oxygen at a critical point in their development.

I stood there and glared at the first bully, the one I had mentally tagged “the Hulk”. “You wanna tell your buddy to move before I do some multiplication on his face?”

Yeah, it shocked me, too. It just popped out of my big fat mouth, and I felt a strange commingling of pride, arrogance and sweating, heart-rending fear. It was kind of like swatting a wasps’ nest with a stick just to see if you can outrun the wasps. Except I wasn’t running.

“
You little fuck!” the Hulk growled. “I’d like to see you fucking try it!”

Pro tip: Bullies use a lot of unnecessary swear words just to show you how big and tough they are, and often enough they shout them, like you’re completely deaf. We eyed each other for a cold, brief moment like gunslingers in a spaghetti western waiting for the other one to go for his six-shooter. But when his little show of testosterone garnered no reaction from me, he lunged forward and grabbed at the front of my jacket.

So I did what any normal punk would do. I punched him square in the nose.

3

So much for staying invisible, I thought.

The Vice Principal of Thomas Jefferson High, a frighteningly overweight, middle-aged woman with a face that could have stopped a fleet of trucks, glared at me accusingly, and I looked blankly back at her with a
Who, me? I’m innocent
look on my face. This was my first time IDS (In Deep Shit), so it was a new experience for me. I didn’t know what to expect.

I glanced around the front office, at the cheery potted plants, the motivational posters that obviously came from some other universe where everything was butterflies and unicorns, and the VP that was seriously creeping me out. I wasn’t sure what was more useless, trying
not
to concentrate on the constellation of moles on her face or trying
not
to squirm around on the ultra-hard plastic Chair of Doom. Every school has one, and all of them are hard and cold for the hard, cold criminal sitting in them, waiting for sentencing to be passed.

“
Mr. Takahashi,” said the VP (making my name sound like a disease recently discovered to have the viral capacity to wipe out small continents), ”we do have counselors here at TJ High to address the troubles of our at-risk students, and we feel that you might benefit from…”

I tuned out her buttery-soft voice, which was completely at odds with her appearance; she wasn’t fooling anyone. She was wearing a dark, tight pea-green suit that positively screamed
I am the warden of this teen penitentiary and I will whip you with chains like Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS!
Unfortunately, she looked nothing like the actress who played Ilsa (who is totally hot—not that I would know anything about that). She did keep rubbing at the mondo-nasty mole growing on her upper lip. I thought the woman must weigh a metric ton, a lot of it pure muscle. I imagined her flinging metal protractors ninja-style at troublesome kids from down the hallway.

“
Mr. Takahashi…?”

My attention snapped away from the nameplate on the desk that read
Ms. Cinnamon, VP
—I was willing to bet she was made of
anything
but sugar and spice—and I centered it instead on her face, which reminded me of Boris Karloff, just not that attractive. “Yeah,” I said, trying desperately to backtrack and figure out what she was saying. “Yes, Ms. Cinnamon.”

There was a derisive glint in the woman’s yellow eyes as she pawed around her desk drawers for a class schedule and the rule book. I was another wounded refugee from the West Coast, here to clutter the halls and infest her school with my own particular brand of bohemian San Francisco mayhem. She rather haphazardly marked my classes for me, gave me a padlock to a locker, then handed me a student rules handbook and a brochure with a happy,
smiling
rainbow on it that read
Managing Your Anger the Right Way!

Was she for real?

“
We’re going to forego calling your father
this
time, Mr. Takahashi, but only because this is your first day with us,” Ilsa the She Wolf said as if she were doing me a huge favor. “However, should Troy decide to submit a complaint, we may need to re-address this issue in the future.”

I didn’t think that was going to be a problem. After I punched Troy (a.k.a., the Hulk) in the face, he staggered around in a circle with tears in his eyes, using both hands to cover the nose-leak I’d given him. He’d looked shocked and hurt; it was probably the first time anyone had ever hit him, including his parents. I had waited, fists clenched and upraised, for him to retaliate, but he and his brainless lackey suddenly turned tail and raced down the steps of the school like the hounds of hell were at their heels, Troy leaking blood the whole way. If I knew bullies, and I thought I did, Troy wouldn’t be making a big issue out of this, especially since half the school had witnessed him crying like a dorky five-year-old girl who’d skinned her knee.

“
Are you listening to me, Mr. Takahashi?”

“
Absolutely, Ms. Ilsa.”
Oops.

Ms. Cinnamon looked like she wanted to slap the yellow off of me. In retrospect, this probably wasn’t the best way to introduce myself to a new school. She narrowed her wolfish eyes and said, “You are dismissed…for now. But I
will
be watching, Mr. Takahashi, you can be sure of that.”

“
Thank you, Ms. Cinnamon!” I grabbed my backpack and scrambled my way out of that office. I was so relieved I was out of there that I wasn’t watching where I was going and nearly collided with a girl standing just outside the office door.

“
Hi,” she said, stepping back to give me room. Her voice was soft, breathy, and like the rest of her, it froze me solid in my tracks.

I stared with surprise at the pale, dark-haired Gothic girl I had rescued from Troy’s evil machinations and gave her a quick once-over. She definitely had some Japanese in her, I saw that at once. She stood there in her glittering black clothes and geisha whiteface, watching me shyly from behind the short stack of books in her arms. The air between us became electric, no lie. I had a moment when I felt I knew her from somewhere, as if we were connected in some way. It was a weird feeling.