Raiju: A Kaiju Hunter Novel (The Kaiju Hunter) (3 page)

Then I shook my head to clear it, and the moment passed. “Um…hi.” I glanced back at the closed office door. “You’re not…um, next, are you?”

I’m not my articulate best standing before ultra-hot chicks.

She narrowed her exquisitely painted eyes and tilted her head so her purple-streaked pigtails were crooked. She looked as if she, too, had experienced that sudden strangeness. “No…I cut homeroom. I just wanted to see you, to thank you for before. That was really great of you to do,” she said, blinking in a totally seductive way. “Taking care of Troy, I mean.”

“
No problem,” I said, trying to sound casual about it, like I did this everyday. Kevin Takahashi: Savior of Gothic Girls Everywhere.

We instinctively moved away from the danger of the front office and down the empty hallway. Slowly the familiar school smells of chalk dust, books and industrial cleaner closed in around us—it wasn’t great stuff but anything was better than the stinky potpourri smell of the VP’s office. The girl narrowed her eyes with concern. “Did you get in deep with the Cinnamonster?” she asked.

I tried to answer but there was something that felt like a walnut stuck in my throat. I mean, the Gothic girl was beyond beautiful—glamorous, surreal, like a teen actress on the WB. It took me two whole tries before I was able to get the words out. “Nah,” I finally answered, trying to play it off like nothing and proud of the fact that I wasn’t stuttering like a moron. “I’m cool. But…
the Cinnamonster
? I mean, is she for real? I just kept staring, and…” Real slick, I thought and decided to shut up before I made a total fool of myself.

Her black eyes blinked up at me, and her lips, painted a moist, glittering sapphire, turned up at the corners like she found me amusing. I felt my ears burning and I wanted to die—or, at least, melt through the floor and out of sight. “Yep, that’s our Cinnamonster, and believe it or not, she’s for real. The council is still out on what planet she’s from, though. Most of us think Uranus.”

I laughed at that.

“
I’m Aimi Mura,” she said as she stopped to face me. “That’s Aimi with two I’s.”

It took me a moment to catch on—I wasn’t used to girls who looked like Aimi talking to me. I wanted to look around the empty school halls to see if she was addressing some other dude. I mean, I’d gone out on a handful of dates, of course, but they were always “study dates” at the local library with fat, desperate chicks that I had nothing in common with. “Kevin,” I finally muttered, “with one.” I was starting to think my truncated responses were making me sound mentally-deficient, so I added “Takahashi,” like my fantabulous, non-American, utterly un-apple pie, impossible-to-spell surname should impress her.

Evidently, it did. “Kevin Takahashi-san,” she said like she was tasting my name. She dipped her head in a little formal bow and said something in Japanese I didn’t understand at all.

I shook my head in confusion; I’d never had much interest in my dad’s native language. So Aimi leaned in close to whisper to me, which was totally worth not knowing Japanese, because I got a whiff of her dark chocolatey-cherry perfume. “I said…Troy is going to be majorly pissed with you tomorrow.”

“
No problem,” I repeated. “I can handle him.” Worried? Who, me?

“
You’re very brave, Kevin,” said Aimi, shifting her books around in her arms. The lace of her dress made hissing noises as it rubbed together, which was kind of distracting.

“
Not really. I mean…um…thanks.”

“
And really
kawaii
…that means cute.” She kept staring at me in a totally absorbed way. Finally, completely embarrassed by her scrutiny, I looked around at the posters and activity boards with paper fall leaves stapled to them like they were the most amazing things I had ever seen. Bullies? No problem. But pretty girls were impossible for me to look in the eye.

I was literally saved by the bell—a nasally, impatient noise that made us both jump in the moments before the doors of all the homeroom classrooms opened up, dumping their load of students into the hallway of the school. My brain and body rebelled. Was I really clamming up in the face of a gorgeous girl who wanted to talk to me? Was I really
this
lame?

Evidently so. It should have been awesome. Every guy’s dream to have a fantastic girl like Aimi talking to him. Instead, it made me feel sad and anxious in a way I had never felt with any of the fat, desperate chicks.

“
Kevin,” she said, and I finally looked at her. “
Dōmo arigatō.
That means thank you. For everything.”

“
Okay.”

I saw her little clique of Goths zeroing in on her through the sea of students. And as they moved to surround her like a small, impenetrable army, she added, “Maybe I’ll see you around?”

“
Sure.”

Of course not. I had no idea why she was still talking to me when it was obvious I was a complete loser. Still smiling, she waved to me in the moments before she was swept away by her friends.

I didn’t wave back. Instead, I turned and hurried down the hall in some random direction. I felt Aimi’s eyes on my back the whole way, but I didn’t look back. She was just being polite. Nice to the new kid who had helped her out.

I almost hoped it was true. Because I was much too afraid to imagine otherwise.

4

After Troy, the Cinnamonster and then making a fool of myself in front of Aimi Mura, I expected the rest of my morning to go downhill fast. But Algebra II went easily enough. The room was big, the desks rawboned with age, the environment familiar. Best of all, the students were busy with a pop quiz when I finally found it.

The teacher, Mr. Russo, was a young guy who couldn’t be more than a year out of college but had somehow managed to go all grey. He shook my hand, gave me a textbook, then sent me to an empty desk in the back corner of the room. My hero.

For the next half-hour I kept my head down and listened to the busy scratch of pencils on paper. Aimi wasn’t here, and neither were any of her Goth friends. I wondered if I would see her later today. I wondered if we shared any classes. I paged idly through the textbook, which looked about as challenging as a first-grade reader. At least I’d be able to ace the tests without having to study or even pay much attention in class.

Unfortunately, Algebra II had given me false hope in the Remaining Invisible department, because when I got to Biology, Mrs. Rodriguez pointed me out to everyone in class and asked me how I liked New York, like I had a choice being here. Even worse, it turned out the class was studying Introduction to Kaijuology. I knew right then and there that Mrs. Rodriguez and I would never be friends.

In Latin, a tall, chunky Hispanic girl with wild red hair sat next to me, then followed a few tentative steps behind me in the halls before speaking up. “You’re Kyle, right?” she said. Unlike most of the girls with their designer teen wardrobes, she was dressed tomboyishly in distressed jeans and an element vest over a button-down shirt. I had no idea if she was trying to hide her extra weight or if that was just her style—and not much interest in finding out right at the moment.

“
Kevin,” I said, sticking my hands deep in my pockets as I ambled along. I was trying to ignore the fact that a couple of girls were standing at their lockers, laughing about me behind their Trapper folders.

“
I heard you gave Troy a broken nose, his first,” she said. She sounded pleased. I noticed she walked with a lot of confidence for a big girl. “No one’s ever stood up to him before.”

“
Really?” I said, trying not to sound too crabby and failing miserably. “And I thought this school was full of wannabe gangstas.”

She gave me a challenging look, like it would take a lot more than a scowling Kevin Takahashi and a few insults to chase her off. “Don’t believe all the ghetto movies. We don’t boost cars or knock over convenient stores—at least, most of us don’t. My name’s Michelle.” She smiled, broadly. She had clean but crooked teeth, and her nails were rimmed with work grease. She so wasn’t Aimi—was almost the antithesis of Aimi in every way, All-American, imperfect, girl-next-door, whatever you wanted to call it. Then I wondered why I was comparing the two of them like that and felt a little ashamed. It wasn’t like Aimi was ever likely to talk to me again after I ran away from her.

I had Michelle in English too, and as we made our way to the cafeteria at lunch she took great pains to warn me about the free school lunch, the horror of which would haunt me forevermore. I had to give her points; she wasn’t at all deterred by my sulking or silence. She went on about her friends and what teachers she hated and her dad who ran a custom body shop in the Heights. She said she helped him out on the weekends. A girl who liked cars. Who woulda thunk it?

We sat near the windows and she introduced me to her “little” brother, Terry, who despite being a freshman was allowed to sit at the sophomore table—mostly, I think, because anyone who challenged Michelle was likely to get smacked. Michelle told me not to mind Terry, since the doctors had dropped him on his head as a baby.

Terry was absolutely huge, bespectacled, and actually had the guts to wear a
Star Trek
TOS tunic to school and a belt that contained just about every Radio Shack device you could imagine, which made me want to run screaming from the school. I had hoped to avoid the whole geek squad entirely, but it seemed they were determined to suck me in no matter what I did. I thought about changing tables, but every one in the cafeteria was occupied by a clique that I was not a part of.

With a mental sigh (which is harder to do than it sounds) I turned my attention on the bench against the back wall, just under the bell, where a bunch of guys and girls in black were slowly amassing like a long row of human-size crows in fluffy black lace. I assumed this was the outlaw bench, the place where the weird and unwanted perched. Like the Chair of Doom, there’s one in every school.

I spotted Aimi immediately. Besides her were the other Goths, three boys and one girl. Two of the guys were African-American—twins, I think—with coordinating tuxedoes and Baron Samedi makeup. The other one was white and dressed in a black priest’s cassock with a froth of lace at his throat and cuffs. Somehow, he managed to stand out even more than the twins, partly because he was one of the few all-white guys at school, mostly because he wore his bone-white hair down to his shoulders and his face powdered as pale as a corpse. I think he was looking for an elegant, almost effeminate Gothic look, but he had the naturally muscled body of a track-and-field guy and looked like he could put another guy his size through a brick wall, especially if they made fun of his fancy outfit. His attention was riveted on Aimi, hanging on every word she said. Ugh.

Aimi didn’t seem to notice, though, engaged as she was in a lively debate with the other Goth girl—an Indian girl with fiery red Raggedy Anne dreads and a frilly black dress. I stared longer than was appropriate. Aimi was explaining something to Raggedy Anne on a sheet of music paper. None of them seemed to be eating. All of them wore more powder and makeup than an ‘80’s hair metal band. With the exception of the white-haired dude, I wondered how they managed to survive in this school.

Michelle noticed my looking. “Don’t even bother with
them
,” she said with authority. “They’re
weird
.” She bit savagely into her Snickers bar. “You hang with them, you’ll look like them. Like
Snowman
.”

“
Snowman was sooo pissed this morning he almost punched out the Cinnamonster when she caught him smoking in the bathroom!” Terry informed us. He grinned hugely as he jiggled his fat in his seat and worked a travel screwdriver into some poor little device laid out in pieces in front of him. I think it had once been a PDA.

“
What happened? Did his hair not come out right today?” Michelle asked cattily. “Or is his corset too tight?”

Terry made deep rumbling sounds that reminded me uncomfortably of Fat Albert laughing. “He wanted to be the one to knock Troy’s lights out this morning when he messed with Aimi, but then Kevin…”

“
Snowman?”
I interrupted them, looking at the white guy. I thought I hadn’t heard right. “You must be kidding me.”

“
I wish.”

I looked back at the Goths, Snowman in particular. He looked about as friendly as the plague. “How do they get away with, you know…” I waved my hand at the wall of black clothes and spiky, multicolored hair.

“
Looking like freaks and not being skinned, gutted and hung over a fence by Troy and his fathead football friends?” Michelle finished (I thought rather colorfully) for me. She seemed to be an authority on everything at TJ High. “They play The Hole on weekends. It’s this dump all the losers hang out at in the Bronx. They take donations for refugees from the West Coast, bring in a lot of money, or so I hear, so they can dress any way they want.”

“
So they’re allowed to dress like that to promote the band,” I guessed.

“
The teachers are down with it. And anyway, it’s Aimi’s band, and no one tells
Aimi
what to do. If they did, her dad would just get them fired.”

“
I don’t get it."