There was no escaping it. Aunt and Uncle Macaslin intended to plug Orlando into the local Louisiana high school, and on a Monday, right smack in the middle of the term. He didn’t see how it could get worse. Late—it was already nine in the morning—uncle Conall escorted Orlando out to the Lexus and installed him in the front seat with his empty, bookless backpack in his lap, his blue bubble jacket over a black T-shirt. Cousin Sean, a silent enigma, crowded the backseat.
Why is he here, to manhandle me to class?
“Tomorrow you’ll walk to school,” Conall said. “It’s only a mile. Assa rides a bike.”
Better than a school bus.
Conall spelled it out. “But this first time, I have to be there.”
Thinks if he just sent me, I’d never get there.
He drove them to the school, whipped into the lot, and parked in the teachers’ row that huddled by the building. Sean heaved his way out of the backseat and tramped around the edge of the cinder-block corner. He’d never said a word.
“Where’s he going?” Orlando asked of Conall.
“To see a girl, I imagine.”
The forty-year-old building had been constructed on a universal school template. Thrown up in the Seventies, it held long corridors of gray polished concrete and banks of lockers with classrooms hunkered behind them. Orlando noted a flat roof and walls of windows made out of one-foot squares. Didn’t the school board guess that hurricanes could happen by?
Conall walked him to the principal’s office and coached him through the paperwork. The folks behind the counter treated Orlando with kindness, even as their slow accents dripped out. Their words held all the charm of a Civil War movie. But slow words didn’t mean slow thought. By now—Orlando imagined—they had sized him up and stuffed him quickly into the right boxes. California attitude and average grades. Borderline kid. Mother dumped him. Damaged goods.
Orlando wiggled his way into Louisiana remedial math, with geometry to follow. Last year, he had aced through California’s intro algebra, but now he was lying and claiming that algebra on the transcript didn’t mean real math. “It was the new California math, see.” English, civics and social studies, and American history were on the list. He could show up on test day and fake his way through those. The school required PE for freshmen and sophomores. He hated PE. It was bad enough the harassment he would face on the gym floor. Worse by far would be the tyranny in the showers, the animal food chain of the bigs at the top and the new kid groveling at the bottom. He figured he would change under the bleachers, except for his briefs, and skip the shower.
At the book supply, they filled his backpack. The beefy woman who worked there grumped at first, then gave him her yellow pad and a BIC pen after she discovered he had zero school supplies.
English was second period and first up for him that day. Orlando fully expected the material to be heavy with dead White men from across the Atlantic. A teacher’s aide accompanied him to the door, bumped him through, bobbed to the teacher, then sauntered off. He glanced around the room and spotted a desk in the back. Before he could slide into it, the old coot who taught the class seized his shoulder and steered him to a chair in the second row. Already high school was playing out like the usual stupidity.
In the open killing fields of class, the teacher and Orlando started with the question-and-answer bit.
“Here’s the paper they gave me,” he said.
“Tell us a little about yourself.”
“My name’s Orlando. I’m from LA.”
“I’m Mr. Meagles. Welcome, Orlando, to the class. I’m sure you’ll fit right in. We’re working through Mark Twain and A Connecticut Yankee.”
He knew that one from Classics Illustrated. The hero was a time-travel twit with a sword, who invented electricity for King Arthur. Classics Illustrated had set Orlando up for low-labor Cs in California, and so it would work here. He could slip along with this class just fine. In fact, he had puffed up pretty good about how he could manage this.
But then Orlando peered down the row and spotted her. She enjoyed every quality that life had robbed from ugly cousin Assa. She was small, with a thin face and high cheekbones, a thin sculpted nose. He knew right away her genetics. She was Native American, one of the beautiful ones. He couldn’t check out her body. Some fat kid blocked his view.
Maybe he stared too hard. The old geezer who ran the class planted his pasty hand on Orlando’s desk and leaned over his new student. His teeth shone yellow—a smoker—and he had missed shaving below one of his sideburns. In a rough whisper, he said, “Orlando, I wouldn’t go there if I were you. These things always end badly.”
Orlando guessed that the advice originated from the teacher’s need for control. For some reason, the old boy wanted to get the step on Orlando by knocking him down. Orlando whispered back, “I don’t have any idea what you mean.”
“You and her. Maybe you think it’ll be like a white-hot flame, but I predict not. Her brother would most likely rough you up for your pains.”
So that’s it. This fart was just a sad old teacher coming off as a fortune-teller. Freaking strange!
Teach tapped the desk with a nicotine-stained forefinger. “I’m not kidding, Orlando. It’s not just you and Angela. Both families will get tangled up in this, and you’ll be the loser.”
When he turned back to his desk, Orlando shot another glance down the row. Angela. Now he knew her name.
She leaned forward, noticed she was being watched, propped her face up with her hand, and considered Orlando gravely.
Orlando was hooked. English stood out as his new favorite subject, as long as Dr. Doom minded his own business.
###
No one had to tell him what would be at stake next. Orlando had changed schools often enough to have screwed it up before. He had to find a tribe. Flop sweat broke out under his arms, puddled in his crotch. But just like any school, the other kids wouldn’t be a cohesive bunch of drones standing together behind a moronic nickname like Mighty Tigers or Squishy Turkeys. They would be busted up into little gangs.
Orlando had already spotted two geeks toting laptop bags, and they smelled like victim, the redolent odor of look-over-your-shoulder fear. The geeks in this high school tended to be pitiful, not the hooked-up brainiacs Orlando had known in California. Orlando couldn’t picture these soft, furtive nerds engaging in marathon hack sessions, or any other cybergang ritual.
The White cowboys could be dangerous, and the jocks the usual self-involved cult. Orlando figured he had no choice but to link up with the bikers and the car kids. Or the Blacks. Forget about partnering with the school’s three or four Latinos; they wouldn’t be able to look after themselves, much less him.
Third-period social studies set Orlando’s path toward Blackdom. He had been assigned the chair beside a kid who called himself Delmont. Delmont flashed out in huge sunglasses with eighth-inch gold surrounds. The lens tint floated in and out, smoky in dimmer light and black when he faced the windows. Orlando admired the old-time zigzag Delmont had razored in above his right ear, the lightning bolt that showed off black skin ripping through the close-cut hair.
Not long after calling the class to order, the social studies teacher disappeared into the hallway, leaving them with a film that buzzed away on the flatscreen set in the wall, flanked by whiteboards. Probably he was off to grab a smoke in the parking lot or a coffee in the teachers’ lounge.
Delmont leaned over to Orlando and spoke out the side of his mouth like a Thirties movie. “California, huh?”
“Los Angeles.”
“Cool. Could be very cool.” He didn’t sound convinced.
Orlando’s next words threw the dice, the risky make-or-break. “It mostly sucked. LA isn’t like TV, you know.”
Delmont riffed out a bit of a grin, and a silver tooth gleamed, one back from his incisors. “It sucks here too.”
Now they shared a common refrain of how bad everything could be. “There’s got to be something here that doesn’t bite,” Orlando said. “Do you rap?” A pretty good guess, given Delmont’s showy boots, the red rayon shirt. Only thing dude’s missing is a gold chain.
“Shit, yeah. That’s the only thing keeps me together. I got a DJ I hang with, and we score a gig or two down in the Bottoms.”
Orlando flared up his eyebrows and appeared as impressed as he could. “Wow!”
“What about you? You play anything, rap or sing yourself?” He sounded like he said “Yousef,” but Orlando twigged it.
“Not me. I spray some, had a crew I ran with. Started as a paint sniffer, but that poison will eat your liver quick.”
“Spray some? You mean tagging?”
Now Orlando needed a bit of cred. “More than that. We did boxcars and the sides of buildings, but the monster event was spray-painting the big ditches. Painted one that ran fifty feet long, twenty high. Took ten of us. I laid out the left end, a naked Eve with stars on her titties and a snake around her hips.”
“What’s a big ditch?”
Orlando shrugged. “Big concrete drains, really. Feed into the Los Angeles River. You’ve seen them in the movies, like Terminator.”
“Fifty feet? How long that take?”
Their talk dawdled on like this until the end of the film, an animation shot for grade school kids about how a bill travels through Congress.
Orlando dropped the bomb. “So I don’t sniff paint anymore, and meth is for fools. But I do like to drink. How can I hook up here, buy a bottle now and then?”
Now Delmont played the big man, the guy with connections. “No problem, bro. Got you covered. My cousin Portland be twenty-two and can make the run for you anytime. He charges a quarter. You let me know.”
“How about I give you twenty for vodka, and tomorrow we meet where you say? We can even do a little taste.”
“Deal.” Delmont slapped his thigh, palming the twenty Orlando had dropped onto his jeans.
“Smirnoff okay? Stretch your dollar.”
“Sure. Pints, though, okay?”
Delmont snickered. “Easier to hide in that shitty jacket of yours.”
###
Orlando climbed up the bleachers to Delmont and thumped down in the seat beside him. Today, Delmont wore sharkskin pants, a Levi jacket, a burgundy shirt, open down to his sternum. Orlando hated to admit it, but in spite of the racial clichés, Delmont ranked as one of the best-looking guys in high school.
“You sharp dressed, man,” Delmont said.
Orlando glanced down. His T-shirt bore a hole close to the left nipple. His jeans were coated in dust halfway up the shin from the death march to school. “It’s my incognito look.”
“Well, you got it down, man.”
Down below them, in one end of the gym, White girls lined up and pranced smoothly through some kind of line dance. Orlando couldn’t hear what redneck song they boomed off their box, because closer in, four Black girls were jiggling their butts to some loud, dreadful hip-hop.
He pointed out the women to Delmont. “Twerking.”
Delmont sniggered, shoved Orlando’s shoulder so hard he fell over. “Ignorant mofo. That’s the Bounce. Bounce bring a lot more than twerking. They doin’ the Shoulder Hustle right now. Now, see, they switch to the Booty Pop.”
“It all looks like ass to me.”
“Riiiiight. I got a full DJ hip-hop routine called the Twurk, spelled with a U.”
They watched the women, White and Black, for a bit.
Orlando dropped his next bomb. “Say, I wanted to ask you…”
“Damn, dog, you out of vodka all ready?”
“Well, yes. But what I really need is some ID. Age eighteen, a driver’s license, with my uncle’s name on it, not mine.”
Delmont reared back, inspected Orlando up and down. He started to ask, gave a look like he changed his mind. “Hmm, hmm, hmm, ain’t you the thing?”
“Do you know anyone?”
“I got a cousin.”
Something about the way he said it implied a story there. “And?”
“My cousin works in the Louisiana Office of Motor Vehicles. I’ll call her. We drive over to Choudrant in Lincoln Parish this afternoon; she’ll fix you up after work. Official photo and all.”
“How much?” Orlando could excavate the cousin story on the way over.
“Choudrant’s a fair distance. Two hundred for her, fifty for me.”
All too simple. LA was that much closer.
Angela and high school. Orlando needed something to do besides fill himself up with misery. Focus on the girl; forget Mom. Like I could do that.
Angela didn’t walk so much as she glided. Orlando trailed around behind her in the halls at school as much as he could and failed to speak to her in class. For a Native American, she didn’t dress Native. Mostly, she wore these insanely tight jeans and red Converse high-tops. He investigated the color of her skin. The computer world specified 72 percent red, 45 percent green, 20 percent blue. Even he could tell that added up to more than 100 percent, but he took that as a sign in itself, emblematic of the girl.
The day of the Angela face-off, Orlando trailed her down the main hall, wove around the damn Louisiana Pelicans, and hung back. Every kid in this state seemed padded in fat compared to him, including a lot of the girls. Keeping Angela in sight worked out more like peekaboo than constant surveillance. She gestured at a friend to the left and turned right into the hallway that led to the gym. A dozen steps, and Orlando pivoted around the corner. Then another six steps. The hallway held only a few kids, none of them Angela. She had vanished.
“Don’t you think you should start saying hello?” She lay in wait behind him, tucked into a doorway.
Orlando wrenched his neck as he whipped around. She wore this smirk, amused and more than a little superior. The thing was, it looked good on her. That coppery-colored skin, those pencil-thin eyebrows were dynamite. And her dark-brown eyes. “A-Angela.”
“O-O-Orlando,” she stammered.
If she actually snickers at me, I might have to kill myself. “I guess you caught me.”
“Every time I look around, there you are. Kind of pervy.”
“I just hadn’t gotten around to the talking stage yet.”
She considered. “Well, I figured you could talk, even though you never open your mouth in English. But your grades are good, so you’re no dummy.”
Trapped like this, just like a dummy. “According to the test postings outside the class, you’re the one who’s killing it.”
She swiveled back toward the main hall. “True. See you in English. You can talk to me there.” She stopped, gazed over her shoulder. “But stop tagging along behind me. Otherwise, my brother and his friends…”
###
Six in the morning brought a pounding on Orlando’s door. He staggered to his feet, turned the knob, and squinted at his older cousin, standing in the flat light of the hall, lit by high-up ceiling bulbs. His gray eyes were like polished metal and he wore this flat gaze, like the muscles in his face had turned to ice. “Come on. Shannon says we’re nearly out of milk, and I figure you should earn your keep.”
This has something to do with those giant rabbits he keeps. He kept getting volunteered. Orlando plodded along behind him, through the house and out to the rabbit pens. It was an hour until sunrise, but the yard lights flicked on automatically. Sean had sheathed his legs with something black.
“Why don’t the rabbits just tunnel under the fence?” Orlando asked.
“The fence dives down six feet. A guy in town dug it in with a backhoe. Still, I have lost a couple.”
“Oh.” Homegrown mutant rabbits, on the run. “I hope they were both females.”
“Pay attention. I’ll show you once, and then you can pick up for me.” Sean unlocked one of the enclosures. “This pen has the new mothers.” Striding in, he seized a monstrous rabbit sleeping in the grass, picking her up by the scruff of the neck and the middle of her back. “This is Tilly, number C24. Watch her. She’ll rip you up if she gets a chance.”
Tilly kicked, a real frenzy of back legs.
Sean held her out from his body so the back claws couldn’t catch him. “They have to be nursing a litter. We steal milk from them in rotation. There’s a list on the wall inside, sorted by the ear tag numbers.”
Tilly jerked her head, trying to tear herself loose.
“What next?”
“We grabbed the doe. Now we carry her into the lab.”
Under the lab’s lights, Orlando spotted black rubber chaps on his cousin. Orlando trooped across the lab behind Sean, to a small squeeze gate. It was shaped like two fences side by side, hinged at the bottom, and connected with some levers. Sean dropped Tilly in between and stepped on a pedal. It squashed her so she couldn’t wiggle. Her lips drew back, and Orlando stared at inch-long buckteeth as Sean began to milk that rabbit. Her titties protruded like pencil erasers, about half the length of Orlando’s pinky finger. Thick milk, tinged yellow under the lights, squirted into a bucket.
“Here, you try.”
Orlando flipped over into nausea as he touched a teat. The queasiness eased off after a little practice. Still, this is so perverted. Pink titties. Milking didn’t seem difficult, but Orlando must’ve pinched her too hard because Tilly growled, a grinding that shot up the scale to a scream.
“She’s angry with you. Pull down more than you squeeze.”
The milk squirted out thick, nearly like a gravy. Sean carried the small bucket over to the bench and poured the milk through a funnel into a plastic gallon jug. He saved the last of it, splashing two inches into a beaker, and drank off half. “Here, try some.”
Orlando sniffed it before he sipped it. Earthy. It was nearly hot. Sticky. It was the fattest thing he had ever dripped into his mouth. The tang bloomed across his taste buds, wild super-cream, but the milk coated the inside of his mouth like he had chewed warm Crisco. “God, that’s freaking awful.” It oozed out of his mouth onto his lips, like greasy suntan lotion.
Sean knitted those eyebrows and gave Orlando a glance of exasperation. “The texture grows on you. It’s the taste, as addictive as chocolate. Got more protein and fat than polar bear milk. We drink gallons of the stuff, eat it on cereal, blend shakes out of it. Make custard.”
“Surely you thin it out, water it down?”
“What would be the fun in that?”
Orlando ripped off a paper towel and swabbed away at the inside his mouth. “Not me, man. I’m not drinking crap that feels like glue.”
“Suit yourself. Go catch the next rabbit, and we’ll do this again.”
His rabbit was tagged B18 and weighed in at about forty pounds. Picking up the black-and-white doe stirred his panic, but Orlando could handle her if he used great care. He grasped her by the scruff of her neck and her haunches. Sean helped with the pen’s gate and demonstrated the bump switch on the lab door so Orlando could traipse in and out by himself. B18 knew what the milking station did, and she flipped out the moment Orlando held her over the V wedge.
Orlando knelt on the concrete slab, dragged on B18’s nipples, and filled the bucket. He was nearly done when Sean jammed his knees into Orlando’s back, leaned over him like a vulture, pressed his fingers into Orlando’s forearms, and dug in. “Orphan, I hear you’ve been chasing around Angela Brasseaux. Not a good idea. Back off. She’s over your head, her and her brother.”
“Hey, quit it. That hurts.” Orlando tried for eye contact, but Sean’s arms locked his head down.
“No, it doesn’t hurt. Not yet.”
“I haven’t done anything but look at her!”
Sean snorted. “Right.”
“What’s it to you, anyway?”
Sean cast Orlando away so that he crashed into the squeeze gate. “I dated her a few times. But she broke my rules. Make sure you don’t break ‘em.”
You think you still own her? Orlando guessed he’d get no other warning. He’d check out the ten bruises later, each a sign of what Sean wanted. He levered himself off his knees, leaned over the squeeze chute, and rubbed his forearms. I’ll find a way around this jerk.
B18 growled.
###
If it hadn’t been for sniffing around Angela, Orlando would’ve sloped off at lunchtime with one acquaintance or another who owned a car. But she had him by the metaphorical balls. Angela ate in the cafeteria, policed by her big brother, Johnny. Orlando invented a simple scheme. He sucked up to Brother and ignored Little Sister, until he could plunk down at their table anytime.
The long tables were housed in the gym, where they could fold up and lock into the wall or be rolled out by the janitor for each institutional meal. On the whole, Orlando appreciated the junky character of school district food. He ate the pizza most times, but occasionally, he’d even eat the rubber-chicken étouffée. Lunch in the gym meant everything smelled like sweat and floor polish.
Angela’s brother wasn’t a bad type, except for his flashpoint about being an Indian, or a Native American, as he preferred. Orlando avoided the boil-over by pretending race didn’t exist. As he manipulated his way into friendship with Johnny, Orlando peeled away a couple of Johnny’s layers. Johnny dreamed of marrying his sister to a rich White man. But the Native American’s greatest desire in the world lay in accounting. The sparkie actually wanted to be a CPA, and that’s all he wanted. Orlando figured the Houmas Indian village was a real dead end. Like South LA.
Orlando’s moments with Angela appeared in shards—tight, quick glances he prayed weren’t caught by others; sentences that slanted off to imply something else. In class, they were wading through A Farewell to Arms, and he always talked class with her over lunch.
“Hemingway was cool to have his main man in love with Catherine,” he said. He rested on the bench beside her, a greasy pepperoni pizza slice before him.
Angela sniffed. “He’s all wrong for her.”
“Tenente Henry? He’s all right. He loves her.”
She dug into her fruit cup and flicked her eyes at Orlando. “It’s all wrong. They shouldn’t make commitments in the middle of a war.”
Orlando reached over and fished a grape out of her cup.
She slapped at his hand.
He created a show out of popping the grape in his mouth. “No better time. Life’s short.”
“What about their families? They have responsibilities to their families.”
“Their families aren’t there.” Orlando said. “They’re not even mentioned. Frederic and Catherine make their own family.”
Angela grimaced. “He makes her pregnant. Everybody dies: the soldiers, the baby, Catherine. All but him.”
Orlando hadn’t read that far. Perfect. He’d chosen Catherine’s death as the symbol for his indecent lust. “What’re we talking about?”
She twitched out a grin, like she knew he was scrambling to fake his way out of it. “Nothing much. Just a book. You have a new family, don’t you?”
“New place, new family. My uncle and aunt. My weird cousin Assa.”
“And Sean. Sean’s your new, like, brother, isn’t he?”
Orlando lied like an evangelist. “I thought I wouldn’t get along with him, but he’s great. Said he knew you.”
Johnny jerked his head up toward Orlando, his eyebrows scrunching together like two hairy caterpillars fighting. Or mating.
Orlando snapped all his attention to him. Diversion time. “Johnny, can you give me a ride home today, after your basketball practice? It’s raining, and I hate the mile walk home.” Orlando figured this might allow him to steal an hour with Angela while her brother ran up and down the b-court.
###
For a week, Orlando enjoyed a free run at Angela, if he could call it “enjoy.” There was even a sham date in the library, surrounded by their classmates.
Angela’s subdued laugh confided, “Johnny can’t see us here.”
“No, we’ve got total privacy.” He waved his arm across the room and the twenty kids in there. Going great. I overestimated Sean. He even thought a little less about his mom that week, before Sean sought him out by the lab.
###
Orlando had been loading the rabbit feeders. Once he’d topped up the hoppers, he leaned over the fence, staying off the hot wire, and watched the vermin springing around in the grass.
As part of his Frankenstein science, Sean spray-painted a spot of color on the rabbits when they were born—right between their front shoulders, a particular color per generation. He also clipped a plastic tag into the rabbit’s left ear. For special litters, Sean added a second spray-paint tag. Orlando recognized the ugly green that marked the rabbits born the week he had arrived. This litter traveled as a pack. They ranged across the enclosure and sliced past the other rabbits. They weighed in, as promised, heavier than any bunny had a right to expect, already forty to sixty pounds at five months. Their front legs had sprouted out like baby stilts, and they trotted as much as they hopped.
Orlando knew what dismayed him: the two extra buckteeth that flanked the normal front two. These rabbits had so much chopper going on, their lips couldn’t cover their biters.
For a two-hundred-pound brute, Sean could glide like a ghost. As Orlando turned away from the fence, Sean loomed in like a storm front, seized Orlando’s collar, and dug into the scruff of his neck. He marched him around the back of the lab and slapped him hard twice. He picked Orlando’s skinny body up under the arms and held him against the weathered wall, pinning him up at the edge of the tin roof. “Angela,” he said.
Through his slap-rendered tears, Orlando peered into Sean’s face. No tight muscles, no bared canines. The lack of expression, the flat stare as if Sean were contemplating some small rodent—that caused Orlando’s heart to drop and the sweat to pump out of him.
“You broke my rules,” Sean said.
There’s those rules again. Snark wouldn’t work. Denial might piss him off. “Okay, I get it. I’ll back off.”
“No, you don’t get it. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here. Her brother is trying to plant her on me, squirreling her into my family through you.”
“Plant?” Johnny wasn’t smart enough to game Orlando like that. “But Johnny doesn’t know about the rabbits, does he? Otherwise, he wouldn’t be so eager.” Stupid! Keep your mouth shut.
Sean blinked at the rabbit crack. “I’m the rich, successful White. You’re the scrawny orphan from out of town. You’re even as brown as the Houma Indians.”
Is Sean a psycho? Orlando had to find a way out of this, a way down off the wall. “So maybe it’s good I keep them busy, so you don’t get trapped.” Even in Orlando’s ears, that sounded thin and desperate.
That unblinking stare continued to bore into him.
“They don’t know me, or they wouldn’t bother.” Nobody in the parish knew this family. Hard to breathe hung up here.
“I warned you, and now you have to pay.” Sean dragged him downward a few inches. Splinters were everywhere, digging into his back, peeling his shirt up. Sean calmly explained, “I’ll handle it without your help. You’ll do what I want. Say it.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” This can’t be happening.
“Say you’ll do what I want.” Sean dragged him down another foot.
Crucifixion on half-inch-long needles of wood. “I’ll do what you want.”
That blank face. “Again.” Sean roughed him down another foot.
Orlando could smell the sharp oxide of blood. “Jesus! I’ll do what you want!”
Sean jerked Orlando down the rest of the way. The wall delivered its gift clear to the bottom. Orlando dropped forward onto his knees. His back burned as if he were alight with kerosene. I’ve met my first psychopath, and he’s my cousin.
Sean stepped back and jerked his head as if they had reached an agreement. Calm as a rock, he turned, strode off. He never glanced back.
###
Orlando hung with Delmont during the free period. The geeks shuffled off to the library, and the hoods let security chase them around the parking lot. Delmont and Orlando lounged on the top seats in the gym, sometimes with Delmont’s friends, sometimes not. They would single out the best and the worst of the anthill below. Orlando’s back had improved enough that the climb to the top didn’t bother him much if he took it slow. The noise in that box of a gym deafened him, wrapping him in a nice, loud numbness. The boys and girls circulated, pretending to do homework, preening in some kind of mating dance.
Out in the fields, the farmers were burning sugarcane again, and the top of the gym ran next to no ventilation, only a couple of tiny outside exchangers. Orlando didn’t mind the smoke, even though he coughed. The thin gray haze hung there, like they poked their heads into the clouds.
Delmont had just let him in on the big secret. “Nobody here likes the Macaslins.”
What does a sixteen-year-old say when his family is attacked? Orlando picked at the knee of his jeans. “I’m not too hot on them myself.”
“No, I mean it, man. They moved in here from back East, talking that funny talk. The dad, he on the school board for two years, then just walks away. The mom, she terrorized the Catholic Church.”
Orlando stared across the room. “Yeah, yeah.”
“And that cousin of yours, Sean. He’s quiet but he badass. He march down the hall, and the biggest man in the school step aside.”
“Huh.” Orlando should have stepped aside.
“All kind of rumors about what happen in that house. Shit about cults, incest, voodoo, packs of Mexican kids.”
“Can we just drop it, okay?” He grasped both his knees and hunched over.
Delmont bumped Orlando’s knuckles with his fist. “Didn’t mean to frost you, man.”
“You don’t know the half of it. Weighs me down.” Under his feet, below the bleachers, he caught sight of a pair of seniors they knew, making out on the floor. But they were both dating other people, so this cheered him up. Their lives were about to be screwed over too.
Delmont’s finger pointed at a woman Orlando thought far too heavy. “Damn. She the bomb. I’d like to see her twerking.”
“You know her name?”
“Jewel. Everybody know everybody. It’s a small parish.”
Maybe for Delmont, growing up here. But hardly anybody knew Orlando or wanted to know him. That’s fine by me.
Delmont said, “You hardly been around. Missing lots of school.”
“I’ve been busy, tearing up my back and then healing.”
Delmont let out a hoot. “Well, you be caught, sooner or later. Even though Louisiana got only two truant officers, or maybe three.”
Orlando indicated a clot of males, Black and White, near the double doors. “Jocks are about to brew up a shoving match again.”
Delmont gazed down, an anthropologist surveying a lesser species. “Bucks got to show who has the biggest dick, the most women. There’s your Angela, coming straight across the floor.”
“She’s not my Angela.” He hadn’t picked her out of the crowd at first, but now… his pulse leapt in his throat, his face burned, his temples stretched tight and thin. All simultaneously, the body went on alert and the fear built in the chest. Maybe lust too.
She slipped through the crowd, climbed the bleachers, and ascended straight to Orlando.
He couldn’t see her, the hair, the eyes, as much as he saw his want for the girl. And the memory of the wall of splinters.
“Delmont,” she said. “Good to see you.”
“Let me introduce you to a friend, Angela,” Delmont said. “This be Orlando.”
“I know Orlando, you fool.”
Delmont smiled. “I’m not the only fool here. But I’m the best-looking one.”
Orlando bobbed his head, a semaphore for her attention. He hoped his voice wouldn’t crack. “How’ve you been, Angela?”
She shifted her attention away from Delmont and turned to Orlando. “I’ve been good. We miss you in Honors English.”
“Right.” Orlando wasn’t booked into any classes with her this term. All the safer.
“Maybe next semester, you’ll take French with me.”
“You already speak French… Houma Indian French.”
“We could study together. Some at my house, some at yours.”
My house. Sean had been right. Angela had the thing for Sean, not Orlando. Since Sean seldom left the house, maybe she saw Orlando as her best chance at him. For some reason, Sean had ditched on the Berkeley idea in the spring, had confined himself to Magnolia, to his mad scientist life.
“Just come over and see Sean,” Orlando told her. “No need to work so hard at it.”
“What?” Her eyes flared huge, her mouth clenched.
“Only you better like rabbits.”
She stared at him like he harbored a bleeding gash in his brow. “What?”
###
No one asked Orlando about school, and the fact that he didn’t attend anymore. Is Delmont right? Is Louisiana short on truant officers?
Nobody approached the house except Angela, taking his advice about Sean. When Orlando saw her drive up alone in her brother’s car and get out at the steps, he experienced a wave, like something had journeyed full circle, but not like it began again. He even swayed a little. The skin on his back ached.
The trees wore their winter rags of yellow and brown leaves, like a backdrop for her appearance on stage. She had donned skintight jeans, her high-top Converses, a turquoise shirt with the top three buttons undone, and a Levi jacket. Her face was made-up like a CD cover for a debut album. Wispy Girl Takes Over the Charts. She’d worked hard on her eye shadow, a mauve underneath dark Egyptian outlining.
Orlando startled her when he jerked the door open. Her hand hung in the air. “Orlando!” Strung-up like a tuned guitar, she jittered a little shaky two-step.
“Angela.”
They faced each other as if in a posed scene: he in the hall dimness, she on the porch, backlit by the winter’s sun.
“You haven’t been in school.” She tossed her hair back, first over one shoulder, then the other.
“Surprised you noticed.”
“Is anything wrong?”
If she was affected by his snark, he couldn’t tell. The hair flip thing, the way she held her hand to her collarbone… She had turned so fake, so arranged. He disliked her, right then, for this imitation Angela. “Come to talk to me? Or here to visit Sean?”
She blurted it out. “Sean.” She threw her glance down to the right, maybe aware of her rudeness. “But of course, you’re always nice to talk to.”
This must have been torture for her, the awkwardness and the hidden purpose. And she’s not even talking to Sean yet. Orlando eased forward and closed the door behind him. He felt a little woozy. Couldn’t guess how this would play out. She could get over Sean. She could have her feelings stomped flat. Sean could physically hurt her. But would she be safer coming out on the other side, after her gamble?
Angela hadn’t moved back as he came out on the porch. Standing close, Orlando could smell the shampoo in her hair, the scent she had dabbed on.
She wrinkled her eyebrows. “Aren’t you going to ask me in?”
“It’s okay, you know. I’m taking you to him.”
She rocked back, surprised. “He’s not in the house?”
No way I walk you through the crazy house. “Nah, around back. His experiments are all in the pasture. You know he breeds rabbits, right?”
Orlando marched her around, past the rabbit pens to Sean’s lab. She stared on every side, frog-eyed, like the world astonished her. Then she paused beside the chain link fence, goggling at rabbits the size of pit bulls.
Orlando lined her up at the white painted door. “Go ahead. Knock.”
Her fist reached up, eased closer to the door, and fell back in doubt.
“It’ll be okay. He’s in a good mood today. Leave the door cracked, though. I’ll wait here, in case you want to call me. And when you’re done, I’ll walk you back to your car. You might want to talk.”
She knocked on the door, and the Hulk dragged it open. She took that step forward, close to him. Her hand inched up, touched his top shirt button. The door swung nearly shut.
Orlando inhaled hard. He could imagine her wide eyes staring at Sean, her adrenal jumps and jitters, and the unmet expectations, there in the lab. I know the feeling, but the cause is different. His chest flew light and free. They were all three revealed now, their cheesy undersized desires and motives on stage. I’m over it. Orlando picked up a shovel and leaned up against the wall by the door. He gazed out over the bunny horrors as they lolloped around in their pens, maybe for half an hour, trying not to eavesdrop. He heard the door squeak and turned to discover Angela slipping out through the narrow opening, tugging it shut behind her. Can’t read her face.
She marched toward the house. He had to jog a couple of steps to catch up with her. A muddy red color underpinned her cheekbones, but no tears clouded her eyes. A twitch of her head acknowledged him. “What the hell is wrong with Sean?”
Orlando held out his hands like a preacher calling for prayer. “What’s wrong with anyone here?”
Angela jerked to a stop, her eyes wild. “There is something really, really wrong with him.”
He shrugged. “Or not. Maybe that’s who he’s always been.”
Her voice was flat. “God.”
Orlando didn’t know if she begged God’s help or had seized a realization. “Better get used to it. Maybe he’s not the guy for you after all.”
It was a day of shocks for her. She stuffed her hands into her jean jacket and dropped her head. “Maybe not.”
They dawdled, silent, down the side of the house and out to the drive. He opened the door of the car, and she slipped in. With his hands on the car door, he leaned to look in the window. She was staring through the windscreen. At what? “Go home,” he said, trying to fix it. “Give it some time. There are other people out there who won’t disappoint you.”
Scott Archer Jones is currently trapped in his eighth novel. He lives in northern New Mexico, after stints in the Netherlands, Scotland, and Norway, plus less exotic locations. He has four award-winning books out, through Southern Yellow Pine and Fomite, and a fifth on the way this spring. What’s more important? Scott cuts all his own firewood, lives a mile from his nearest neighbor and writes grant applications for the community. He is the President of Shuter Library of Angel Fire, a private 501(c)3, and desperately needs your money to keep the doors open.