Miscreated Read online

  “You must like art.”

  “Not really. I just draw and make things.”

  “Is that not art?”

  “Not when I do it.” Jimi looked at the river.

  “You could still jump in and die,” said the girl. “I promise not to stop you.”

  Jimi felt a sharp pain in his back. “She doesn’t want me to do it in front of you. She’s jealous. She is now—she didn’t used to be. Her dad was right; she is what my selfishness has created.”

  The girl in white laughed for some reason, but the sun didn’t come out of hiding to shine upon her, the way he’d thought it would. As if the kind of thing she was preferred the darkness of storms, the darkness beneath bridges.

  “I’ll do it when you leave. When I see Dez, I’ll try to convince her I’m not worth all this fuss, and hopefully she’ll let me get on with my life.”

  The girl slapped her hand to her head, and said, “This is why I hate people. First of all, unless the water is frigid like Antarctica, you can’t survive without air more than five minutes before brain damage sets in, and I don’t see any paramedics on standby to help you ‘get on with your life.’”

  “Sugar Lynn’ll revive me.”

  But five thirty had come and gone. Where the hell was she?

  “Second of all,” the girl in white continued, “even if you could find her, what would you possibly have to say? You have nothing in common anymore. Your dead girlfriend’s moved on in ways you can’t imagine.”

  “Moved on? She’s haunting me.”

  “Nope.”

  “Don’t tell me nope. What makes you such an expert?”

  “Ninety percent of everything I know is about dead people,” she breezily informed him.

  “Because you are the dead!”

  “Nope.”

  “A ghoul? Ghouls eat people.”

  “I don’t eat people.”

  “A troll, then. And you live under that bridge!”

  “Don’t be mean just because I ripped your little Dez fantasy apart.”

  “It’s not a fantasy. Dez’s folks, my friends, my family, the Catholic goddamn Church. Everybody knows I’m haunted.”

  “Because you say so. You seem like the convincing sort. A manipulator. I can tell by your mouth. The way it curves and dips all twisty like. So that lies and truths get mixed and matched until it’s hard to know which is which. I bet you could make anyone believe anything. Do anything.”

  Jimi was struck dumb. Temporarily. “That’s the most awesome thing anyone has ever said about me.”

  “It’s the truth. You see me, somehow, but I can see you too, and what I see is a boy who wants to fake his way into eternity so he can play kissy face with his dead girlfriend. That ain’t happening, son. Unless a shepherd carries you over, the only way to see eternity is to die for real.”

  “A shepherd?”

  “That’s rare.” She stopped speaking, as if she’d said too much.

  But Jimi wasn’t done listening. “How rare?”

  The girl in white gave him such a bright smile, he would have sworn on his life the sun had surely come out this time.

  But it was still raining.

  “As rare as true love,” she said.

  Jimi splashed back in the mud, defeated.

  A car stopped on the red road above the embankment. When Jimi sat up, he could just see it through the dripping cypress leaves: a white Rolls-Royce. A Phantom V—the kind that looked like a fancy hearse.

  “That’s my ride.” The girl in white all but leaped to her feet. “See ya.”

  “Wait.” Jimi stood.

  The girl in white only came to his chest, but she wasn’t short; and though he was covered in mud, she remained pristine, the fairy blue ink gone from her hands. “What’s a shepherd, and where do I find one? Especially the rare ones?”

  “Don’t worry about it, and don’t focus so much on dead people. It’s unhealthy.”

  “I’m not the one feasting on corpses under bridges!”

  But when he looked beneath the bridge, the body was intact. No bite marks. No torn flesh. If the corpse hadn’t been blue and dead, it would have looked perfectly normal.

  He knew the girl in white was something. And she knew he knew, but she kept that annoying smile plastered to her face, mocking his confusion as she easily climbed the embankment, despite the obstacle course of overhanging branches and slick mud.

  “Who are you?”

  The girl opened the back door of the Rolls. “If you keep rushing down the road you’re on, I guarantee you’ll find out.”

  She ducked into the car and Jimi watched as she sped away.

  Chapter 5

  Jimi’s phone rang as soon as he entered his mother’s house, but he couldn’t tell who was calling. The symbols flashing on the screen weren’t numbers—not on any numbering system he recognized. His phone hadn’t been right since that day at the river, either because of how rainy and muddy he’d gotten it or from prolonged exposure to the troll girl.

  Jimi was sure it was the latter.

  “Soooo,” he said into his phone as he climbed the stairs to his room. “Look who decided to call somebody seven days later. What happened to you meeting me at the Nudoso? Backstabbers punctured your kidney, huh? Did being punctured in the kidney somehow paralyze your fingers? Is that why you couldn’t take two seconds away from your precious emergency surgery to make a phone call? Enough of your lame excuses, sophomore! Do you have any idea how long I waited—”

  He halted in the doorway of his room, and all the words dried up.

  “Jimi?” Sugar Lynn said, in his ear. “Jimi, are you there?”

  He disconnected the call as Alexis turned and looked down, paintbrush in one hand, ladder rung in the other. A white face mask bulged below her dark eyes.

  “Ma…where’s my stuff?”

  “At the end of the hall.” Her voice echoed in the empty space.

  “In the guest room?” Jimi said. “I’m a guest now?”

  “This is going to be the baby’s room, since it’s closer to mine.”

  “What baby? Giselle’s baby?”

  “My baby, you idiot. I’m pregnant. I told you last week.”

  Beneath her ubiquitous black diamonds, Alexis wore an oversized, unstructured blouse, so he couldn’t tell anything from that.

  Thanks to the new paint job, a manic glow suffused the room, as though the flaming August sun had drifted through the window and exploded onto the walls.

  Jimi’s head felt detached and floaty, and only partly because of the paint fumes. “How long have you been…”

  Alexis managed to look down her nose at him, despite being shorter, even while on a ladder. “Three months.”

  “So you and Paul create some unholy spawn, and that gives you the right to steal my room?”

  “Don’t call the baby ‘spawn’. She’ll hear you.” Alexis waited, one hand over her belly, the other dripping yellow paint onto the drop cloths spread across the floor. But when her belly didn’t explode in fetal outrage, she went back to work.

  “It’s a girl?”

  “I hope so. I always wanted a girl; someone I could finally get along with.”

  “Did you tell me?”

  “Yes!”

  Jimi scuffed down to the guest room, fumes and ill will chasing him the whole way.

  Alexis’s house was big in general, Italianate and boxy, but the space she’d moved him to was cramped with all his stuff, and either his furniture had swollen over the weekend or this room was twice as small as his old one.

  The one he’d been kicked out of.

  He set his duffle bag by the door and clambered over and around neatly labeled boxes. games. books. art supplies. He could take some things to his dad’s house. He’d call him—

  He’d call Giselle. That would really piss Alexis off, having to see his dad’s prettier, younger wife.

  Well, younger.

  Alexis was pregnant?

  “Jimi?”
>
  She stood in the doorway without the paint brush, but still wearing that freaky face mask.

  “You change your mind about the guest room? You want me to sleep on the driveway instead?”

  “Don’t be juvenile.”

  “If I can’t remember, it’s because of Dez, because she’s in my head and there’s no space for other things. Like information.”

  “That’s the real reason you haven’t completed the ritual, isn’t it? Anything you manage to screw up, well, it’s Dez’s fault. That must be so convenient.”

  Jimi went to one of the Venetian windows, anything to put distance between them. Emerald lawns glistening in the late afternoon light, families down in the black water of the Basin swimming, boating, enjoying the last days of summer.

  “I doused the letter. Did I tell you?”

  “Yes, but then I always listen when you say important things. You weren’t paying attention when I told you about the baby, so I can only assume you weren’t paying attention about the new living arrangement.”

  Jimi didn’t say anything, but his blank face spoke volumes.

  She cocked her hip. “Well, to bring you up to speed, I’ve talked to César and we decided to reverse things for a while. You’ll stay with him during the week and with me on the weekends. I don’t like the idea of you and whatever’s infecting you or possessing you being around the baby, in case it’s like radiation and can affect her development. With you out of the way, there’s less risk.”

  Such a bad idea, standing by the window. Each word out of her mouth was like a deliberate shove; a few more sentences and he really would be on the driveway, splattered across it. Alexis would like that—with him dead there’d be more air in the house for the baby to breathe.

  “But you like taking risks, Ma. Old women like you having babies. Isn’t that a risk? What if it comes out retarded or mutated?”

  “There are worse things to give birth to.”

  He wished she had simply pushed him out the window. It would have been one-hundred percent less painful.

  Chapter 6

  Jimi made it to his father’s house in time to see César and Giselle bound in a lecherous knot on the living room floor. It wasn’t the first time Jimi had caught César with Giselle. Or César with any number of women pre-Giselle. Catching his dad balls out with some woman was like the corpse Jimi had stumbled upon beneath the bridge last week—tragic, but inevitable.

  César uncoupled from his pregnant wife and joined Jimi in the front hall, fastening his slacks, straightening his tie. A tendency to overdress was the one thing he still had in common with Alexis. “You’re early.”

  “I’m late. It’s...” Jimi’s phone was telling him that it was 57:182. In Aprilember. “Whatever. Apparently time no longer exists, so ‘late’ and ‘early’ no longer apply to me. Also, Mom kicked me out so I’m never going back there ever.”

  “Nonsense.” Alexis had divorced César when Jimi was eight, but to this day César couldn’t stand to hear anything negative about her. “Is it the custody change? It doesn’t start until Monday, and it’s only temporary. Didn’t she explain?”

  “Explained her way right onto his shit list,” Giselle said, tugging her inside-out Dr. Who T-shirt over her burgeoning belly and shaking out her long skirt.

  “Giselle,” said César in that same dad-tone he pulled on Jimi all the time. Not even Giselle was allowed to bad-mouth Alexis.

  Giselle bought her way out of César’s disfavor with three unnecessarily wet kisses. Then said to Jimi, “Did you bring some gazpacho?” Giselle hated Alexis, but not enough to turn down her leftovers.

  Jimi fished the chilly, gazpacho-filled Tupperware out of his bag and tossed it on the tortoiseshell table Alexis had brought back from Paris the summer before she and César had divorced. Giselle’s panties rested there now.

  Giselle popped open the container and inhaled blissfully. “Go get some spoons,” she told Jimi. “We can share it.”

  “I’m not hungry.” Jimi distanced himself from her and her underpants. “I may never be hungry again.”

  “Where the hell have you been all day?” César shouted, dad-tone in full effect now that his coital glow had finally worn off. “It’s almost two in the morning!”

  “Went to Smiley’s, met some people, drove around, talked about how much our lives sucked. I won. I doused one of the items last week. I meant to tell you. Did I?”

  “Alexis did.”

  “Of course she did,” said Jimi and Giselle simultaneously. Jimi said, “I would have told you, but my brain took a one way ticket out of the country, to Tibet or Taiwan. Some Asian-y type place.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “I was, but watching the two of you go at it sobered me right up. No worries.”

  “Go on to bed,” said his dad, chastened. “Don’t stress yourself out over the living arrangements. They’re temporary.”

  “So is everything about my life.”

  Jimi closed himself in his room at the back of the apartment. If it was too suddenly cramped at his mother’s, here it was the opposite. Ceiling tall, windows tall. Bed big enough to hold five people at once and knowing his dad, it probably had. The furniture was white and so were the walls now that the floor to ceiling images of Dez in her Blue Fairy costume had been painted over. So much white. Whenever Jimi slept here, fifty percent of the time he awoke numb from dreaming he’d been lost in a blizzard. But then he’d feel Dez pressed against his back and would warm right up again. She didn’t often visit him here though. Not even when she’d been alive.

  Whenever he’d brought Dez over, his dad had always acted too lasciviously understanding, so they’d preferred going to Dez’s house or to Alexis, who’d told Jimi once that she liked the person he became when he was with Dez.

  No wonder Alexis didn’t like him anymore. Without Dez, all he could be was himself.

  Jimi was exhausted after the roundtrip bike ride from his mom’s house and the three—four?—beers he’d downed in the back of Casey’s pickup truck, but despite his desire for bed, he searched his room for the second item: a bumblebee watch made of antique brass with a clock face between the shimmering wings, and a clip that attached to his keychain, a clip that had broken years ago after he’d thrown it against the wall in a fit of rage. He hadn’t meant to. It happened right after Dez had died and he had been in here looking for something lame like an eraser but, unable to find it, he’d begun smashing and throwing things. One of those things had been his keys, which he’d recovered almost immediately, but the bumblebee had detached from the broken clip, and he’d never found it again. Admittedly, he hadn’t looked very hard because it would have hurt to see it. But now…

  He searched everywhere, turning the formerly tidy room into a rat’s nest. If he had gone through with the drowning, Dez would have told him where the bee was; dead people always knew stuff like that. If that troll girl hadn’t derailed him with her infuriating logic, if Sugar Lynn didn’t have such appetizing kidneys, he’d have been asleep by now with the watch tucked safely beneath his pillow.

  Defeated, he gave up and fell into bed fully dressed.

  Awoke a few minutes later, pressure in his skull, a sound:

  Thudthudthud.

  Jimi groaned and pulled his pillow over his head. The way they went at it 24/7, the kid probably looked like Swiss cheese by now.

  Thudthudthud.

  “Shut up!” he yelled, and would have yelled again, but he realized the sound wasn’t coming from his dad’s room. It was coming from the window.

  He shot upright, the pillow clutched to his chest like a shield as he rolled out of bed. His room was black with the drapes closed and hard to cross because of the shambles he’d created looking for that bumblebee.

  Thudthudthud.

  His heart mirrored the sound.

  César lived in the square in an apartment above a photography studio. Nothing was outside Jimi’s window: not a tree, not a balcony, not a fire escape.
/>   Thudthudthud.

  Jimi threw the drapes wide.

  The bumblebee watch floated beyond his window, like an ember that had escaped a campfire, a lone pinpoint of light in a street full of darkness. He could hear it as he lifted the pane, ticking instead of buzzing. He reached for the bee and tumbled out of the window.

  Jimi screamed at first, but he fell for such a long time that he lost his fear of it. Besides, the bee was with him, and they weren’t falling. They were flying; the bee was teaching him how, and Jimi was an excellent student. When the bee landed on a branch, Jimi copied it perfectly.

  A huge moon hung above, slightly red from reflecting the molten cracks in the earth.

  Jimi had been here before, in this same tree, blackened and curled like the fleur-de-lis patterned rug in his mother’s sitting room, a tree taller than the Eiffel Tower. The only thing beneath Jimi’s dangling feet was a hundred miles of blisteringly hot air. Not a hundred, but his queasy stomach wasn’t in the mood to do the math. Though his brain was forever on vacation these days, he remembered this tree. He’d sat in it with Dez often enough in his dreams.

  The sky was dark purple and full of stars, an icy contrast to the land below. Thick fiery seas splashed over black rock, and the ground occasionally spat lava into the air, but never high enough to reach Jimi.

  Other trees, like the one he was perched on, towered above the volcanic earth. Some had cities nestled in the curly branches. At least, Jimi assumed the flickering lights belonged to a cityscape; the lights could have been eyeshine.

  Horrible thought, but there were living things here, black shapes hovering like flies above some of the skeletal treetops in the distance. He could hear them clearly, a miserable screeching that made him glad he couldn’t see them clearly.

  Something stabbed Jimi in the lower back and he cried out.

  It was the bee, glimmering against the purple sky. It had stung him, but danced out such a nice apology that Jimi couldn’t be mad, even though the pain was radiant.

  “Did Dez tell you to sting me?” he asked, unable to think of any other reason the bee would hurt him.