Slice Of Cherry (16 page)

“And out of,” said Kit, coming up behind her, watching the men with great interest. “Who’re they?”

“I dunno. Minions. Isn’t that what you call a person who does your bidding? A minion? Minions, bow to my sister.”

They bowed and Fancy laughed. “See?”

“Your
bidding
?” Kit said, mockingly. “Look at the little raja.”

“Rajas are boys. You must address me as maharaja, if you please.” Fancy looked around the garden, counting the bodies scattered here and there in the warm sunshine. “There’s one missing,” she said. “Where’s the one with the tattoo?”

“Through those hedges, I guess,” said Kit. At some point during her wild ride with Longhorn, she must have lost the aviator glasses. She bounced in place like a sprinter before a race starts. “Wanna go run him down?”

“No need. Minions!” Fancy snapped her fingers. “Find the tattooed boy and bring him here at once.”

The minions disappeared through the hedges that separated the garden from the rest of the happy place, and Fancy grinned ear to ear. “How cool is that?”

Kit seemed to find it more freaky than cool—she had stopped bouncing. “Who
are
those guys?”

“Happy-place people. And happy-place people have to do whatever I want. Watch.” Fancy stared hard at the hedges, and moments later people entered carrying armchairs and a pail full of ice and drinks. They weren’t dressed in white like the minions; they were just ordinary people, women and men and even a small kid, who looked pleased at the chance to offer Fancy any assistance they could. As she directed them to set up the chairs on the headless statue platform, she noticed that, unlike her and Kit and the dead bodies lying upon the ground, none of the happy-place people cast a shadow. Neither did the statues.

“You can go now,” Fancy told them, trying not to feel spooked as they hurried silently past her and left the garden.

“Wow,” said Kit, looking gratifyingly impressed as she sat with her bottle of lemonade. “This is the life.”

Fancy sat in her own chair and clinked bottles with her sister, glad to see her in such a good mood after all her whining
about her inability to “connect” with other people. Whatever that meant. “Did you get any more ears?” she asked.

Kit gasped and nearly choked on her lemonade. “I forgot! Wait here.” Kit hurried off the platform, switchblade in hand, and Fancy watched her flit from body to body collecting ears like a bee collecting pollen. Kit returned with four ears stacked in the palm of her hand.

“I don’t wanna put them in with
him
,” she said when Fancy removed the jar from her pocket and unscrewed the lid. She wagged her finger at the old man’s ear. “You’d like being surrounded by the flesh of young boys, wouldn’t you?”

Fancy grimaced at the stench rising from the jar. “We gotta bury this thing. It’s disgusting.”

“I considered preserving it, but decomposition has its own beauty. Don’t be such a girl.”

One of the elevated, stone-bordered circles of earth that separated each statue drew Fancy’s eye.

She walked to it and sat on the stone, trying to shake the old man’s ear out and onto the dirt. The ear, however, was stuck tight to the bottom of the jar, so she buried the whole thing, lid and all, pressing it into earth so spongy she didn’t need to dig.

She looked for her sister, and then rolled her eyes. “Kit, stop molesting that statue and bring the ears over.”

Kit poked her head out from under the loincloth of one of the male statues. “You know these things are anatomically correct?”

“Kit!”

“All right, all right. I’m coming.”

She gave Fancy the ears and watched her bury them in a ring around the spot she’d buried the jar. Moments later the minions reentered the garden.

“Lemme go, lemme go!” screamed the tattooed boy as the minions hauled him forward. He was battered and bruised as though he had put up quite a struggle, but he was otherwise unharmed.

The sisters left the platform and joined the minions on the ground.

“Lemme go!” he screamed again.

“Let you go where?” asked Kit. “Back home so you can beat up other people just because they’re different? What did you call that boy at the park? A freak? You wanna shake hands with a real freak?” She showed him her switchblade.

“I’m sorry!”

“I bet you are.”

“I mean it. We grew up hearing these stories about y’all.” He was talking fast, eyes on the knife. “We didn’t know they were true!”

“Stories?” Kit exchanged a look with Fancy. “About us?”

“About Porterenes. About Portero. About how there’s monsters and doors to other worlds.” He looked around and the fight seemed to go out of him all at once; he started crying. “I didn’t know it was true. Please let me go. I’ll go back and tell everybody I know it’s the truth.”

“Like Scrooge,” said Kit, amused. “You’ve seen the error of your ways and now you’ll do nothing but good deeds all the rest of your days?”

“Yes, I swear!”

“What do you say, Fancy?” Kit gave her a strange look.

“Stab him.”

“Really?” The strange look deepened. “You don’t wanna set him free? Like with Franken?”

“I said stab him!”

The strange look was replaced by one Fancy knew all too well—annoyance. “I’m not one of your minions,
maharaja.
You stab him.”

“I’m sick of stabbing things.” Fancy threw the steak knife, and the tattooed boy yelped as it landed between his feet. “I know.” Fancy smiled at the boy and snapped her fingers.

Half a dozen happy-place people entered the garden, rolling a huge and colorful circular contraption on a stand. A wheel of death, like knife throwers used to entertain people at the circus.

Kit laughed and put her switchblade back in her pocket. “You are so
twisted
, Fancy Pants.”

Fancy had the minions strap the boy to the wheel, and one of the happy-place people presented Kit with a metal box full of knives with handles as pink as cotton candy. After Fancy sent the happy-place people away, she said, “Age before beauty,” and gestured for Kit to make the first throw.

Kit chose one of the knives and expertly skewered the tattooed boy’s thigh.

“Good throw!” Fancy exclaimed, and then took a turn. Both sisters were very good at this game; despite their spinning target, very rarely did they miss.

“You know why people scream when they’re in pain?” Fancy asked at one point, after her knife buried itself in the tattooed boy’s hand.

“So that if there’s friends nearby, they’ll come to the rescue,” said Kit reasonably, hitting him once again in the thigh—she had made an almost perfect line from the top of his thigh down to his shin.

“I don’t think so,” said Fancy. “I think screaming’s a self-destruct mechanism. The person who’s causing the pain gets so irritated by all the noise that she’ll do anything to silence it.” Fancy threw the knife, and it was a perfect throw. “Anything at all. What do you think?”

“I think you’re right,” Kit said, watching the boy go round and round on the wheel, silenced by Fancy’s knife in his throat. Instead of throwing her own knife, she gave it to her sister and grabbed another bottle of lemonade from the pail on the grass.

“Five bucks says I can get him right between the eyes.”

“I think he’s dead, Fancy.” The strange look was back on Kit’s face.

“So? It’ll still be a neat trick.” She threw the knife, but it stuck, quivering in midair several feet before her. She felt a moment of confusion until she saw the knife wasn’t in midair, but in the dashboard. Just as she recognized what was happening, as she felt an inescapable pressure folding her, forcing her
to sit, the dashboard became more solid and the knife became less so until it disappeared completely and the Escalade reappeared around Fancy, the kinetoscope in her lap as it had been before. The truck was now empty of boys, but Kit was beside her in the backseat attempting to look unaffected, as if she popped in and out of the world every day.

In the kinetoscope the minions stopped the wheel and let the tattooed boy drop to the ground. The flamingos converged on him and began pecking around the knives poking out of his body.

“Bird food,” Fancy said. “Such a sad way to go.”

Kit laughed and swiped at her sister’s face. “Real sad. You look like you’re crying blood.”

“What?” Fancy scooted forward and looked at herself in the rearview mirror. “Crap!
Evidence!
” The sisters scrambled out of the truck.

“It’s their blood, not ours,” Kit said as Fancy fished out some wet wipes and scrubbed the door handle free of prints. “People’ll just assume something vicious climbed into the truck and wasted ’em.”

“I don’t think you’re vicious.”

The sisters whipped around and saw the scrawny boy still in
the handicapped space, bleeding and sweating in the sun, his face swelling like a balloon even as they watched. He tried and failed to pick himself up off the ground; it looked like he had been trying and failing for a long time.

“Great,” said Fancy. “A witness.”

“Not a witness.” Kit went into bubbly-mode and helped the scrawny boy to his feet. “More like our best friend, right? Seeing as how we just saved your life.”

He seemed slightly dazed, possibly due to having been kicked in the head several times. “I didn’t dream that, did I?”

“Nope.” Kit let him lean on her as she helped him into the shade near the Escalade. “You got your ass kicked in real life, son. You should know better than to walk around town all alone. What if those transies had been a pack of cacklers?”

“I know.” He looked chagrined. “I was supposed to meet my friends, but that’s not what I meant. You
disappeared
with those transies. I mean, where are they?”

“Someplace they can’t hurt anybody anymore,” Kit told him.

“Bill?” A group of people in tennis whites—or rather, tennis blacks—hopped the low fence separating the park from the parking lot. They were covered in scratches and blood and looked almost as bad as the sisters. But it was their friend they
seemed concerned about. “What the hell happened to you?”

“Fucking transies, man,” he said, holding his ribs as he toddled into his friends’ collective embrace.

“Better transies than cacklers,” said a girl with a blue head-band. “We got jumped by a whole pack of ’em on the way over here.”

“See?” Kit told Bill.

Bill’s friends looked at her and Fancy, at the blood coating them rather liberally. “They get y’all, too?” asked the girl with the headband.

“They’re such a menace, aren’t they?” Kit answered noncommittally as she grabbed her sister. “Well, have a nice day, y’all!”

The sisters left Bill in the care of his friends and pedaled home.

“What if he tells his friends the truth, Kit?”

“That we sent a gang of assholes through a door?”

“And came back soaked in blood.”

“Transy blood. Nobody cares about stupid transies, Fancy. And the people who will care, like their families, won’t believe the truth. That we took their kin to another world and stabbed them to death.”

“What’s wrong?” Fancy asked, baffled by Kit’s tone. Kit had
been so happy before, and now she clearly wasn’t. And that strange look was back.

Kit sighed. “What happened in the happy place . . . it wasn’t what I thought it would be.”

“Didn’t you have fun?”

“Yeah, at first, but then . . . it felt like we were the bullies.”

“Us?”

“That last guy? He kept begging us to stop.”

And now Fancy recognized the look. It was pity.
Pity
. For transies who had shown none to the scrawny boy in the park. “Next time we’ll use a gag,” said Fancy as pitilessly as possible, to show Kit how it was done.

Fancy scratched at her blood-caked inner elbows, feeling grimy and itchy all over. “
Look
at me. If you’re gone pity somebody, pity me. How disgusting am I?”

“You look fine,” said Kit. Pitilessly. At least she was learning.

“We gotta figure out a way to do this that’s less messy. I mean, how can you stand it?”

Kit regarded her, eyes big with surprise. “I’m not sure.”

Fancy sat on the back porch at Madda’s feet eating peach ice cream and staring at the pictures in
Budget Travel
magazine.
One photo in particular had caught her eye: a laughing woman splashing in the surf in Cancun. Fancy desperately wished she had a huge chilly body of water to splash in. It was so still and hot, she could almost hear the grass smoldering in the sun.

A handful of peas landed on Fancy’s magazine. She looked up and saw Kit working her way through a mountain of pea pods and scowling at her. Fancy brushed off the peas and turned the page. She saw an even better photo of a man ice fishing in Russia.

Another rain of peas interrupted Fancy’s reverie; little green dots peppered her ice cream. When Fancy just ate around them, Kit exploded.

“Why does she get to eat ice cream while I’m sitting here working like a slave?”

“You know she gets overheated, Kit,” said Madda calmly. “Don’t be mean.”

The phone rang inside the house, and when Madda got up to answer it, Fancy poked out her tongue at Kit.

“You’re such a faker.”

“I
am
hot,” said Fancy. “It’s frigging summertime in Texas, stupid girl,” Kit informed her, and then stole her bowl of ice cream. “Everybody’s hot!”

“Girls!”

The sisters went inside and saw Madda at the kitchen counter packing a picnic basket with food: peanut butter, her persimmon preserves, half a loaf of homemade bread, and leftover chicken and pasta salad.

“Kit, I need you to go to the square and deliver this food to the Darcys.”

“Why can’t the Darcys cook their own food?” Kit asked, eating the remainder of Fancy’s ice cream.

“Something crashed through their kitchen window.” Madda crossed herself. “They chased it out but not before it destroyed nearly everything, including their kitchen appliances. This is just until they get on their feet.”

“It’s too hot to ride our bikes to the square,” Fancy said.

“Fancy, you don’t have to go just because Kit is going.”

“It’s okay if
I
die from heatstroke, just as long as precious