loser magnet
Kenny still pretty much lived with his parents, in the sense that he lived in his van and his drums, couch, and a little cubicle bathroom lived in his folks' garage. She'd told him once when they were high that he should try moving the drum set into his van, too, put some speakers on top and take his act on the road, and he'd snorted beer out of his nose, and they laughed much longer than it was really funny, because they were high. Kenny's friend in the band, Rick or Rich or Dick or some Richard variation, the bass player, always had fucking awesome weed. Nobody knew where he got it from, either. It was like it just grew in his pockets or something. Kenny's van was big and ugly and blue on the outside and little and ugly and full of crap on the inside. It smelled like guy, and cigarettes, and dust, and pot, of course. She spent most of her time there these days.
Kenny didn't want to go out much, and sometimes she ragged on him about it, saying his parents made him get home by eleven, sometimes until he got really pissed. But she didn't miss clubbing a lot, especially not since that night and those guys with weird faces, and the crazy English chick who talked about them being vampires. It was stupid, but that shit had really freaked her out, and she kept thinking she saw the woman places. On the T and downtown and stuff. Just kinda watching her. Weed wasn't her favorite way to spend Friday night, and neither was Kenny's van, but right now she'd rather be there than out where maybe-vampires and crazy English chicks were running around.
Parents and drums and getting pissed aside, Kenny was pretty all right. Kind of a tool, but pretty all right. He was hot, but not in a way where he had to let you know it every five minutes, and even if he didn't have a real job, at least the band didn't suck. They even got money sometimes. And a lot of free beer. The rest of the guys were mostly losers, but Kenny had even been going to college for a while, before he dropped out. He said it stifled his creativity, which she figured meant he'd been flunking. That was almost five years ago, anyway. He was twenty-four. She was sixteen, but who gave a shit about that?
Well, the social workers did, but they were assholes.
But Kenny'd always been pretty okay and kind of a tool, and so that was mostly why she was having trouble processing the fact that they were sitting upstairs in a loud bar and he was dumping her.
"You what?" she said again, just in case she'd really heard wrong.
"I think we should see other people," Kenny yelled back. Again. They were both yelling, or else their voices would get lost crossing the foot and a half of table between them. The light was squinting-low on all the university kids crowding up to the bar, all well-scrubbed and multi-colored.
"You're shitting me," Faith said, and Kenny gave her this look that made her want to break something on it. "What, you mean, go in for a three-way?"
"You know what I mean," he said. Yelled. She considered the possible connection between her beer bottle and the bridge of his nose.
"I can't believe this."
Kenny sighed, and scrubbed his hands over his face. His hair stuck up in little blond spikes above his forehead. "Faith... look. What were you expecting this to be, anyway?"
"Oh, screw you." She glared. A few people were dancing, now, mostly just the ones with some metal in their faces, which maybe kept them from noticing the music was crap. "You don't get to do that. I'm not clingy, you're a dick. You screwing around on me, or what?"
"No!" She noted with distant satisfaction that he'd put the elbow of his corduroy jacket down in a puddle of beer. "No. Look, I'm just saying... Really, it's been fun, it's just -- "
"Fun?"
"-- it's just, Jesus, Faith, you're a kid. You should be going back to school. I dunno..."
It was hard to get words out for a minute, like her throat was all crammed up. Then they wouldn't stop. "Screw you. Screw you, -- "
"Faith -- "
"-- screw you, screw you, I am not a kid." She was halfway to her feet already, and a few people were looking at them. Probably would have been more if it weren't so loud. "Look who's talking! Yeah, you're living with your parents and in a van, for Christ's sake, you're the king of mature." Kenny was trying to say something, or his lips were moving, but she couldn't even hear him. "Screw you. Asshole. Go see other people. Christ."
His lips kept moving while she yanked her jacket off the back of the chair and threw it around herself, and he was even getting up, but she still couldn't hear him. She couldn't hear much of anything; the music didn't even sound loud anymore. It was like someone had stuffed cotton in her ears and all she could hear was her blood.
Outside the air was clear and cold, and she took big gulps of it, throwing her head back to look up at the sky. It was low and bruise-purple, a few dim stars stuck on it as an afterthought. Everything was suddenly so quiet.
She heard trash cans rattling behind her on her way home, and what kind of sounded like growling noises once. She didn't even look around.
*
She looked old; she'd seen it in bathroom mirrors in clubs, reflected back in older men's eyes when she danced with them. Dark lipstick helped, and so did a lot of eye makeup, made it so she could pass for a trashy twenty. If she didn't tell them how old she was, it was never a big deal.
Bars, clubs, parties. She'd worn through two different fake IDs before this one, and those suckers weren't cheap, either. Her mother didn't have much stuff that looked like it might be worth anything, but most of what there was she'd sold off by now. Ma wasn't about to care; Ma wasn't even about to notice. Faith wasn't sure Ma qualified as a human being anymore. Maybe more like some kind of half-intelligent fungus, growing out of the furniture and absorbing booze. Other times Faith would pick up a guy and get his wallet while he was asleep, clean him out and then leave. Only if she was sure she wouldn't see him again, though. That could get real socially awkward. If she was seeing the guy more than once, though, she could usually get some cash out of him of his own free will, and that was better. She could always get money someplace, was the thing, at least enough for IDs and cover charges and a few beers, and some new clothes to wear there. And she'd find a guy, and she'd screw him or she wouldn't, and the whole thing would start over again.
Faith didn't have friends. She didn't need them. Guys were endless.
One time she'd been at a party on the university campus, danced up to a college boy and wound up going back to his dorm room. He was in a double and his roommate had been asleep in the next bed, and she'd made as much noise as possible just to wake the kid up, just for laughs. Finally he'd gotten up and turned on the light, and started cursing them out. She'd been pretty loaded, and she thought it was the funniest fucking thing ever, this freshman in his boxers and t-shirt and glasses, standing there sporting a giant hard-on and cussing. Naked except for the ball-chain necklace she'd been wearing those days, shaking laughing, she'd leaned a little out from under his pissed-off roommate and asked the little freshman if sucking his dick would shut him up, and his huge shocked look cracked her up so hard she thought she'd puke.
They'd ended up taking turns with her on the floor, in the tangle of sheets dragged off the first guy's bed, for hours, it must have been, almost till dawn. Turned out the little freshman was hung like a horse. Typical.
In the morning the guys sat around looking sleepy-eyed and incredibly uncomfortable while they waited for her to get her clothes back on. They barely even talked to her except to kick her out. Apparently they'd both had a chemistry final at 8, while she was still passed out, and they'd probably both flunked it now, and they were pissy about it. She blew them both kisses when she left, and teased that they'd been more into each other than her, because some things you can't let a bitch of a hangover get in the way of.
She'd only been dropped out for a year or so then, and before that she'd been thinking about maybe trying to get back into school and finish up, maybe even get a scholarship or something. But walking down the dorm hall in her vinyl pants and her smudged makeup, she'd realized she was never going back to school. Christ, who wanted people like that around you all the time? It was like school crap was just the end of the world to them. They had no clue about the stuff that really mattered.
Really, they were the kids. Not her.
*
Faith and her mother lived in a shitty first-floor apartment you could pretty much cross in twenty paces, with cardboard and tape across one of the windows where they'd never managed to put new glass in. She'd thought about saving for her own place, but she couldn't keep a job. She always just got bored of them and stopped showing up one day. Which meant the two of them pretty much lived on her mom's welfare, when Faith could get her clean and dressed enough to go pick it up. But screw it, money was what guys were for.
Kenny. The total bastard.
She banged in the door and right away stepped on a roach; it squished harmlessly between her boot and the spongey carpet and skittered away, and she chased it with a half-assed kick. It was late, but it wasn't like anything she did was going to wake her mother up anyway. At least the light in the little kitchen nook was still on. She was hungry.
Well, she was until she got into the kitchen. Dishes stacked into the sink up above the level of the counter, bits of macaroni and cheese stuck and crusting on the top layers, a solid wall of down-to-dregs liquor bottles covering every inch of counter space. And her mother, sprawled face-down on the cracked linoleum, her face in a puddle of puke, a big white beached balding manatee wrapped up in a stained gray robe. There were a couple of roaches inspecting the puddle.
"Oh, for God's sake," Faith muttered out loud. "Ma? Wake up, Ma." She prodded the flabby white fold of an arm with her toe, but there was no sign of movement. "Ma."
It took her a minute to realize that her mother couldn't possibly be breathing like that. She squatted down and felt for a pulse, grimacing a little. It was like touching the mushrooms that grow on old rotten logs. Cold mushrooms, too.
Probably Ma'd been dead for a while. How many days had it been since Faith had come back to the apartment? Two?
She stood back up, and stared down at the corpse for a long time, thinking absolutely nothing at all. Her head felt empty, like the wind could blow right through it. Water dripped from the sink faucet onto the dishes, rolled down them before getting stuck in the bits of food.
"Bitch," she whispered, suddenly, and her lips peeled back from her teeth. "Bitch. Stupid fucking drunk bitch." Ma's side gave and jiggled when she kicked it, like a waterbed would. She kicked harder and the body almost rolled over. Her whole face felt numb. Kick. "Fucking drunk stupid cunt," kick, "what the hell's the matter with you?" Kick. "What the hell? Why the fuck -- " She went for Ma's head this time, like punctuation, faintly heard something crunch. "I hate you fuck you stupid selfish whore fuck you fuck you!"
Overbalanced. Fell on her ass, banging her hip on the cabinets on the way. Head between her knees and puked, once, in thin pinkish strings. Shook. Didn't cry.
*
There wasn't much money around the apartment to be scrounged, but she did the best she could. She didn't call anyone, or even turn the light off in the kitchen. She just went.
*
She slept that night on the floor at a subway stop, head on her beat-up leather bag, and woke up around dawn from restless ugly dreams. She had to get a move on; if a cop picked her up here, it was over. So she sucked up her pride, got on the T, and went to Kenny's.
Kenny's parents had a modest place in a pretty nice part of town. When she got there the garage door was open and Kenny's van was inside, and he was messing with the drums, doing whatever you do to drums. It wasn't like he had to tune them. She stood outside with her arms hugged around her chest until he looked up. His forehead creased, and she hated that look; it made him look like a whiny little five-year-old with that scruffy blond haircut. He stood up, dusting his hands. There was grease on the knees of his jeans.
"What are you doing here?" he said. She almost turned around and left right then, told him to screw himself if that was all he had to say to her, but something else ended up coming out instead.
"My mom's dead," she said. "I need a place to stay."
At least the whiny little crease smoothed out, but she wasn't sure that shocked look was any better. It made her uncomfortable. "What? I... what? Faith, that... Jesus. What happened?"
She shrugged, scraping at her hair. She hadn't showered and her skin felt greasy and prickly. "I dunno. Came home and she'd keeled over."
"Christ." You had to give Kenny a little credit, there was concern there, even though he was still reeling. "Are you okay? ...Okay, dumb question. Did you... did you, uh, call the cops, or an ambulance or something?" She glared.
"Kenny, I can't call the cops. I'm a minor and the frigging social workers have been breathing down my neck for years anyway. I call the cops, they stick me in a foster home, that's why I need a place to stay."
"What, you mean here?" Kenny said, and her stomach started to twist up even while he was saying it.
"Oh, for God's sake, Kenny..."
"Faith -- " He struggled. "Look, I'm sorry about your mom, I really am. But you can't stay here. I mean, I'm in the van, and it's my parents' house, I can't just -- "
"So ask them!" But she knew it was over as soon as Kenny recoiled.
"You think I want my parents to meet you?" he said. And almost immediately he looked thunderstruck, as if someone else had been moving his mouth. She barely noticed; she was already turning away.
"Go to hell," she said. It didn't sound anywhere as tough as she'd meant it to.
"Oh, crap, Faith, I didn't mean it like that..." She turned back on him, staring.
"How the hell did you mean it?" Kenny's mouth worked like a fish's, and she hoisted up her bag and started walking again. "You know, fuck it. Forget it. I wouldn't stay here if you begged me."
"Faith!" he yelled after her, but she wasn't listening. She walked as fast as she could, fast enough that her hair swirled out behind her shoulders. It was funny how you could go so fast with nowhere at all to go.
*
There wasn't much money left, so she skipped the T and just walked. It wasn't like she was trying to get anywhere in a hurry, anyway. She walked past houses and storefronts, finally ducked into a grocery store to warm up. The sky was starting to white out overhead, and it'd gotten colder. What the hell was she going to do if it snowed?
The store manager started giving her the evil eye after fifteen minutes or so, and finally she went back outside. She was in the parking lot squinting up at the wall of clouds when a voice behind her said, "Faith?"
She wasn't really surprised to see the crazy English chick, but it didn't exactly make her day, either. She didn't look very threatening, though -- Evelyn, had she said her name was? Except she said it with a long E so it was like two names, Eve Lyn, but maybe that was just an English thing. Long-Evelyn's tidy knot of silvered dark brown hair had slipped a few strands, and she was wearing a long black coat and a small apologetic smile, and juggling two take-out coffee cups and a paper bag in her hands.
"Good afternoon," she said, with a sheepishness so disarming that Faith let her approach. Didn't say anything, though, and eventually the woman kept talking. "I suppose you think me quite mad, following you about the city like this."
"Crossed my mind," Faith allowed, and Evelyn smiled. She had really bad teeth, but somehow that just made you want to like her.
"I don't blame you. Certainly you have no reason to trust me. But I understand..." She paused, probably thinking of how to phrase what she wanted to say. "...that you're in a bit of trouble."
Faith snorted, and scraped hair out of her face. This was just the only thing this day had needed, wasn't it? "Yeah," she said. "You could put it that way."
"Well," Evelyn said, gently, "questions of my sanity aside, I wonder if perhaps you could use a friend just now."
"I don't really do friends," Faith said, and then didn't know why she'd even said that much. But Evelyn just smiled, and held out the bag and one of the cups in her direction.
"There's a first time for everything," she said. "Would you like a croissant?"
So that was how, about an hour later, Faith found herself on a couch in the living room of Evelyn AKA Crazy English Chick's apartment, freshly showered, with a blanket around her shoulders and waiting for the tea to be ready. Her life had gotten pretty surreal sometimes before, but this pretty much won the grand prize.
There were clanks and bangs from the doorway the little kitchen was behind; Faith got the impression Evelyn didn't completely know her way around her place yet. "Do you take anything?" her voice called from the doorway. "Lemon? Sugar?"
"I don't even know if I take tea yet," Faith called back, and faint laughter answered. It was a really nice apartment, all white nubbly ceilings and thick beige rugs. The couch she was sitting on was brown suede, and there was a bunch of weird crap on the coffee table in front of her, most of it African-looking: a squat, marbled metallic pot, and what looked like a pair of rough-cut wood maracas, each on either side of a tall, sleek statue, a thin stylized faceless woman with pointy breasts and a long upraised arm, holding a short wood spear. She picked up the statue carefully around the waist, looked it over, put it down again. Was she supposed to be hunting, or an Amazon, or what? There was a big painting of a really huge flower on one wall, and a couple of Egyptian tapestry things on another. A few cardboard boxes were still stacked in the corners. "So... what am I supposed to call you?" she called after a minute. "I mean... do you have a last name? Or should I just stick with Crazy English Chick?"
There was another dry chuckle behind her shoulder, and Faith turned just as the woman came up behind her and put a silver tray down on the bit of free space on the coffee table. "Evelyn will suffice," Evelyn said as she put it down. There were lots of other silver containers on it, and a few wedges of lemon for good measure. Faith blinked at it, and Evelyn sat in the chair across from her and started pouring. "I suppose some of my associates would think that overly familiar, but if we're to be roommates until I can speak to the Council about a living stipend, it would be absurd to have you calling me Ms. Holladay." Faith finally noticed the amused look she was getting then, and stopped dumping sugar cubes into her tea.
"Cool." She shrugged. "Council? What council?"
"The Watchers' Council," Evelyn said, watching her fingers squeeze a lemon wedge into her teacup. Faith took the opportunity to try her tea, and then quickly put the cup down. "It's our responsibility to look after and instruct each Vampire Slayer -- or, whenever possible, girls like you, who have the potential to become the next Slayer."
"Vampire Slayers," Faith repeated. Evelyn gave her a look she'd never really seen on a grown-up before -- somewhere between amused, embarrassed, and patient.
"Yes." She picked up a little spoon from the tray and stirred her tea. Faith had no idea how you could need so much crap for two cups of anything. "I realize this is a great deal for you to absorb. But I assure you that vampires -- and many other things -- are quite real. Fortunately, so is the one young lady in each generation capable of destroying them."
"And I'm gonna be a Slayer." Evelyn shrugged slightly, tapping her spoon on her cup and setting it aside.
"Possibly. Many girls around the world are capable of containing the Slayer's power, but only when, heaven forbid, the current Slayer dies is a new one activated."
"So there's just one of these Slayers at a time?" Faith still wasn't buying this, and she stuck by that, but it sure as hell was a cool story. At least the chick was the fun kind of insane.
Evelyn paused in mid-sip at that, and lowered her cup again. "Well," she said, "usually, yes."
Faith frowned. "What do you mean, usually?"
*
That was February. The rest of February was Evelyn on the phone with England half the time, and finally getting a monthly check out of them, taking Faith out hunting for a cheap motel room nearer the edge of town. March was endless hours of practice, learning how to punch and how to kick, Evelyn bracing herself behind a foam-rubber shield and Faith slamming her knee into it again and again. April was old musty books and looking at pictures of demons, cracking up at some of them, Evelyn's lips twitching even while she was saying to be serious. April was seeing her first real vampire when she knew what it was, and hating to have to run like hell.
May was waking up one morning from a freaky dream and feeling weird all of a sudden, headachey and like her body had moved around under her skin, and nearly taking the door to her tiny bathroom off its hinges before realizing she had a lot more upper body strength than she was used to. And the rest of May was Evelyn getting a lot more serious about things all of a sudden, saying this was deadly important now, this was where her training really began. May was the start of patrols, of tactical strikes, of knowing what it felt like to stick a stake in a guy's chest and get a cough from his dust. June was the start of traveling, of Evelyn showing up at her door in the morning with plane tickets and news of a big node of activity somewhere, of pretty much covering the eastern seaboard by herself. And June turned into July, and July was celebration and gratitude, July was more and more people telling her she was special and important and making a difference in the world and would never be forgotten. July was a giddy, unbelievable high that never came down. July was being a superhero. July was being a star.
July was standing waiting and sweating in the dead heavy air, outside the backstage entrance to a club up by the university, where a local band that had gotten pretty popular lately had been playing tonight. Watching the crack of light that spilled out across the pavement kept her from thinking too much about what she was doing here. She waited for almost an hour before the loud thumping and shrill screams inside died down, and then the door swung open and the band came out, laughing and talking and carrying their crap, and then loading up their cars and driving off. The drummer came out maybe ten minutes later, after they were all gone, cigarette stuck to his lip. The drummer always came out last.
"Omigod, can I have your autograph?" she mock-squealed, and he turned to squint into the dark, his forehead creasing up. God, did she hate that look.
"Wha -- " Kenny started to say, and then it broke off in a grunting squeal when her fist hit the middle of his face, a noise like a pig would make. His cigarette fell smoking on the asphalt. "Aaagh!" Kenny said, instead of what he'd been starting to, and he was staggering back, clutching his face, blood squirting in between his fingers and staining his big dumb silver ring. "Aaagh, my face! Jesus! My -- " So she hiked her knee up into it, to really give him something to bitch about. It caught the middle of his hands, and she heard a bone crunch in one of them. He screamed like a girl, and that made her laugh, laugh so hard she thought she'd puke. Except she was working so hard kicking him it didn't really sound like laughing.
An elbow in the middle of his back brought him down, and when he tried to turn his head to scream she grabbed his little-boy-spiky blond hair and slammed his face into the ground. It seemed like he lost consciousness then, or maybe just went limp, but he didn't scream, so either way was cool. She sat on his ass with his arm jerked up behind him, and drove her fist into his kidneys a few times. Then something in his arm finally snapped under the strain, so she let it go and got off him. Watched him for a few seconds, but he didn't move.
Why hadn't she ever known he was so fragile, so easy to take apart? Sixty seconds or so and he was lying bent up with his messed-up face spluttering into a pool of blood. It was hardly even worth it.
"Asshole," she said, and kicked him in the side for good measure. He made a thin groan, but she was pretty sure it wasn't voluntary. Then she bent down and gave him a big smacking kiss on the forehead. It left a nearly perfect red lip-mark.
She headed for the street, walking fast, absently scrubbing at the blood smeared on her knuckles. His cigarette was still burning, and it had rolled up by the wall of the club, but she just left it like that. Wasn't her problem if the place caught fire. Let it burn, you know?
Let it burn the fuck down.