The Music of Razors (24 page)

“Don’t look so concerned.” He smiled. “I feel so good.”

Sunlit leaves and fresh air. Pollen and birdsong.

Hope watched Suni sip his coffee, peacefully, and wondered who Suni was. Who had he been and who he might be now.

While inside her head his voices raged.

Hope walked home from Suni’s around two, sunshine on her face and breeze through her hair. Her mother worked days so going home now wouldn’t be a big deal. Between her working part-time and Hope’s being at school, Hope’s mother had to accept that there would be times when Walter would be left alone. He’d lived almost twenty years comatose with relatively little incident, barring one close call with what might have been pneumonia, so it wasn’t like either of them really believed Walter was going to be kicking off anytime soon.

Hope unlocked the front door and walked in, dropping her bag onto the wall hook the way she’d done all her life, even at the old house. Once she’d squirted some nutrient down Wally’s tube and gone over him with a damp cloth she’d make a cup of coffee, lie on her bed, listen to a few CDs, and watch the sky through her window.

The house was empty. As she walked into the kitchen, she saw the note. A foolscap page written in green pen, from her mother, waiting on the table.

No accusations of Satanism this time, no outrage at Hope’s latest piercing or haircut undertaken without consent. No threats about burning Hope’s journals. No pleading for reason. This time was a straight edict: Hope was grounded. Indefinitely.

Just before sunrise this morning, someone had turned up on the doorstep. Someone tall, and thin, and pale, and worn looking. Someone dressed in a long black coat. He had asked for Hope by name, and when Hope’s mother, no doubt half sheltering behind the open door, had told this weirdo that she wasn’t home, he had nodded and left without a word.

Hope’s mother explained, in green scrawl, that Hope was obviously going bad and that this would not continue. Hence the grounding. Where did she spend last night? Was she doing drugs? Was this decrepit-looking degenerate her dealer? How dare she just sneak out in the middle of the night? She was to watch Walter until she got home.

Like he was going anywhere. One little blockage in his breathing tube and it’d all be over. God, how often had she chewed on that.

Hope supposed it was only a matter of time before her whole family-thing just collapsed.

When he was still around, her father used to come home, ragged looking and sweaty, say nothing, and shamble to the shower. Then he’d turn on the TV in the bedroom and she wouldn’t see him again until the following afternoon. It was pretty much the same with her mother now. Sometimes Hope would see her just before she left for a morning shift. Even back then she knew her family was never going to last.

It had come too far for anything else.

She used to go to a private school. It was her parents’ idea. But they couldn’t afford it, not with both of them working two jobs to keep Walter breathing. Which was why she’d transferred to State High.

Hope had no idea what her mother was raving about this time, but one thing was certain: she wasn’t staying here tonight. She packed a few unread books, three CDs, and some fresh clothes into her backpack and thought about calling Kristian. He’d be glad to see her, but wouldn’t be able to put her up. Suni would. But she couldn’t go back, not yet. She needed someone to hold her.

At the front door she looked to the stairs, and Walter’s room at the top. Screw it. Her mother could wash him for once. She slung her pack, heavy with the combined weight of her things and the silver box, and immediately thought of what Suni had said about the owner of the ’scope, and what if they came looking for it.

She went to Kristian’s, just for a little while.

Walter stood in the yard, shaded from the moon by the expanse of a drooping tree, listening. Hope had returned to Suni’s house just before nightfall.

“I’m not letting you in.” Walter’s posture was shifting. His eyes were darkening. A harsh sound was being born somewhere inside him. In the hedgerow between the yard and the street, crickets sang.

“You know I could take you,” Henry said, reasonably. “You’re not what you used to be. People her age don’t have monsters and you’ve got no claim over her anymore.”

Walter dropped forward, back hunched skyward. Foot-long moonlight claws shot from expanding hands. The insect-song was like a thousand people clicking fingers, each to their own tune.

Henry shifted stance. “I took care of you, dammit.”

Walter’s head snapped up, elongated and lupine. A thick string of drool dangled from one hitched black lip.
“Didn’t you ever.”

Henry remained still. Then, gently, persistently: “You got no claim on her. You missed your chance, Wally.”

Silence. Crickets.

Walter launched himself from the top step.

FIFTEEN

BETTER

N
OT FOR THE FIRST TIME HOPE WAS HAPPY SHE HAD
never given Suni’s address or phone number to her mother. Going to Suni’s was the same as going to the moon as far as being tracked down was concerned. It was a little after dark when she had climbed back through his window.

Suni hadn’t touched his sketch of the clockwork box. He spoke and listened more intently as she told him about the note.

Now they had adopted their usual positions—Hope on the floor, back against the spare bed, and Suni on the floor, back against his own. Oolric was dozing on the sofa bed.

“Face it,” Suni was saying. “She’s bent. After all you’ve been through who can blame her? By rights you should be a prize nutbag yourself.”

“Ow,” she said, flatly.

Suni shifted, sitting up with his legs folded under him. One corner of his drawing crinkled under his knee. “I’m sorry,” he said. He leaned forward and looked her in the eye. “But, well, in light of all you’ve been through…”

A pit opened up in her stomach. “Can we not talk about it, please?” Faces, smells, a string of associations appeared in her mind, dragging her back two years. She breathed deep and made it go away. She was a tiger. “You’re crushing your drawing.”

“Oh.” He shifted his weight, freed the paper, and laid it on the bed. Suni weighed his thoughts, and then said, “I mean…sure she’s messed up right now, but so are you. Your matching set of emotional baggage comes from the same place.” His hands found hers. They were warm against her own, his artist’s hands. “She shouldn’t be harassing you, you’re going through this together.” It was only now Hope realized how long it had been since she had actually touched Suni. They had reached a point in their post-relationship friendship where they could now hug good-bye, but they never actually
touched.
Suni was always too bent out of shape over the breakup, and Hope didn’t want to reopen all that. They had a good thing going as friends. So why was her heart double-timing? Because his hand in hers threatened that friendship, she told herself.

“It’s not as simple as telling her that, Suni.”

She didn’t like talking about her mother, either. There was too much associated with it, it led in directions she had carefully steered herself away from, learned from experience that it led to a dark place two years past, a dark place with teeth and eyes and knives…

“It should be. She’s your mother.” He reached out, let his knuckles graze slowly down her cheek.

She pulled her bottom lip from between her teeth. “You know what I said yesterday, about strong feelings?”

Suni nodded.

“Have you ever reached inside, found the switch for whatever you’re feeling, and turned it off?”

Suni was about to say something, then stopped. “I think I have,” he said, finally.

“And found that, sometimes, you can never turn it back on again?”

“Yes.”

She moved her fingers, feeling his. Oolric was up on his hind legs, staring out the window.

She thought of the Anxietoscope resting in her bag and wondered if she should tell Suni exactly what had happened last night.

“The fact is,” she said, changing the subject, “that someone turned up this morning asking for me.” Her fingers flexed a little within his, savoring the feel of his skin, wondering if it was something she could become used to again.

“Ex-boyfriend?”

“What ex-boyfriend? You’re it. Well, barring that Jeff guy from the year before last.”

His hand tightened a little in hers. “You know, you’d be fending guys off with a flamethrower if you just gave yourself half a chance.”

She swallowed, still looking at their twined hands. “You said I should be a nutbag.” Faces, smells, associations…dragging her back. She fended them off. She thought of something else, something she liked, something white…

“Hope…,” Suni said reasonably, his free hand moving to cover their locked pair.

Don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it…

He said it.

“You killed your father.” His hands tightened on hers. “That would be a very big deal for most people.”

The world narrowed to a point between her eyes where scenes replayed, in a space small enough that only she could see. Hope closed her eyes and tried not to think.
It had been so easy.
She shut out the two-year-old howl she knew so well, felt it pressing against the thin wall of her will.

“You never saw anyone about it, after the hearing. Someone professional, I mean. I don’t think you’ve really dealt with—”

“I’d like to go to sleep now,” she said.

It had been so easy.

She was a tiger.

Henry had disappeared before Walter’s claws could find his throat. Instead Walter had connected with the tree—a tree as unyielding as the cord he’d spent years trying to pull from his own life-support system—and two of the claws had snapped off at the root. He could affect nothing. He could beat himself to death against the real world long before his actions would influence it.

Regret had been a constant companion for years. Walter could have spoken to his sister when she was a child, warned her, protected her, but he hadn’t. Walter had allowed himself to be seduced, and now it was too late.

From somewhere nearby, somewhere unseen, Henry said, “There’s a lot of common ground between me and that girl…” But Walter wasn’t listening. “We both killed to get away from what we were. She’s hurting in a way I know…” Walter hadn’t even been able to save her from their own father. “I’ll give you time for your goodbyes, but I’ve got to come for her eventually.”

“I know why you picked us,” Walter said to him. The pain in his hand was blinding, but he’d had worse. “I touched the Anxietoscope, Henry.”

The doctor was gone. A simple cessation of presence.

So Walter sat against the tree, a little boy clutching his bleeding fingers, and smiled.

She spent the night on Suni’s spare bed, swept through oily black dreams of knives, hands, of her father’s face close to her own.

Hands.

She dreamed herself onto the back of her white tiger, dreamed herself much smaller, dreamed herself riding it out of the blackness.

When she woke it was instantaneous, as if she’d never slept. The covers were scattered, her Gunsmith Cats T-shirt riding almost too high. Suni was crouched by the bed. She pulled the shirt down, remembering dreams of

Hands.

“Time for school.” He smiled.

Her first thoughts were of Kristian. Of needing to find him and hide inside him for a while.

She checked her copy of his timetable and intercepted him as he stepped out of first-period English. They stepped around a corner, nestled into the corner of a brick wall and concrete pillar, and she told him that her mother was never letting her out again. His hands were hard around her, his lips wet. She didn’t feel like it but didn’t refuse. She walked him to second-period geography, stopping to use the fountain and wash the sourness from her mouth. It was at moments like these she felt uncomfortably like her mother, being with the wrong person for the wrong reasons.

Suni was walking toward them, down the sunlit hallway. Her stomach clenched, the way it did every time Suni saw her with Kristian. Then, in a moment of inspired antagonism, Kristian took Hope and kissed her neck, lips cold from the fountain, leaving a wet patch just to the left of her larynx. Hope tried not to look at Suni. Eye contact would be a knife.

With the half-lidded expression of the confident Casanova, Kristian bade Suni a sidelong “Hey, champ.”

Suni stopped, looked straight at Kristian, and said:

“She hates sloppy kissers.”

Hope stopped halfway through wiping a discreet hand over her neck as Kristian punched Suni full in the face.

She grabbed his arm, held it back, said, “Stop it!”

Kristian turned on her then, the new threat. “What?”

Suni took his cracked glasses off and pocketed them as a small rivulet of dark blood began to slowly trickle from one nostril. He turned to Hope.

Kristian wrenched free of her grip and hit Suni again, sending him stumbling back three steps.

“Stop it!”
And before she could think about it, Hope drove her foot into the back of Kristian’s knee, buckling it from under him. It didn’t do much but tip his center of balance for a second. He spun on her, teeth clenched, fist still balled, and stopped himself.

Hope recognized that. Behind her eyes she ran through the catalog of pointed objects she had on her: pen, hairclip, keys…

Suni stood and smoothed back his hair. A smear of blood kept it there, before a wing broke loose and fell over one eye.

Kristian turned back and drove one fist up beneath Suni’s rib cage, lifted him off the floor and dropped him, winded, gasping, puking air.

Both of Hope’s hands clamped onto his arm, tried to turn him around, but Kristian was on a roll and thudded a kick into Suni’s ribs, keeling him over.
“Stop it!”
Then he turned, took Hope by the arm, and walked quickly away before a teacher came.

On the hallway floor Suni was trying to rise to his feet, one arm wrapped across his gut. The best he could manage was getting to one knee. “Hey…,” he rasped. “Hey…” He took a breath. “Teeth.”

Kristian turned, his expression hard.

“She likes them dragged up the line of her throat. Not hard enough to bruise but enough to feel dangerous.”

Kristian let Hope go and came at Suni at a dead run, one meaty hand clutching for Suni’s throat. Suni stabbed him with a small shard of his shattered glasses. Not a big piece, just enough to stain Kristian’s white shirt with a little pink blood. Kristian shrieked, clutching at himself, almost tripping over Suni.

Suni gripped both hands together…

“Hey…”

…rose quickly…

“…champ.”

…and swung upward, connecting hard with the underside of Kristian’s jaw. There was a clack as teeth smashed together, and a thin squirt of blood as they nipped his tongue. Kristian swung out wildly, collecting Suni across the side of the head with a flailed forearm. Then Suni got what might have been a lucky shot just below Kristian’s heart. Jammed a fast thumb right in there and blew the air completely out of Kristian’s lungs. Sent him to the floor, a light spot of blood on his shirt where the glass had cut him.

In the moments afterward, someone from the anonymous crowd slapped Suni on the back, stumbling him forward a step. He didn’t seem to notice, holding his stomach as he was.

Hope could only stare, fixated by Suni, like a child locked in the gun sights of his eyes. He looked like a zombie having second thoughts about what it was doing.

One hand around his stomach, breathing low and dry, he crept away.

Once Kristian had been taken to sick bay and the vice principal had begun demanding answers, Hope had slipped away and caught Suni just as he was walking out of school.

“Hey,” she said. He stopped in the street, looking over his shoulder. He wasn’t looking too good. From the frozen expression on his face breathing must be hurting. They crossed the street, standing out front of a rack of old, pastel-colored houses for old, floral-print people. Behind an iron fence an old lady watered a brown garden of tortured, flowerless plants begging for a quick death while her toy-sized dog looked up as if to ask what the hell kind of sick game she thought she was playing.

“You finally did it,” Hope said.

“I finally did.”

“You feeling okay?”

“All things considered.”

Hope found herself in one of the rare situations where she couldn’t tell what he was feeling. Somehow she thought he’d be giddy and rambling after what just happened. There really was something missing inside him. “Doesn’t look like he’ll need stitches.”

Suni nodded.

“The VP was looking for you. He didn’t look too happy.”

“I’m going home.”

“Feel like getting something to eat first?”

They made their way to the Esplanade. Sitting under some prehistoric tree with a massive trunk that looked like the fossilized sinew of some long-dead Titan, they ate a couple of burgers and worked a few things out. Hope was checking her face in the mirror of a cracked Hello Kitty compact. “I spend a fortune on that natural eyeliner,” she was saying. “That kohl stuff, and it just smudges everywhere. Makes me look like a strung-out drag queen.” A gust of wind picked up, blowing in off the brown sea, smelling of mud and salt. “It was the ’scope, wasn’t it,” she said, snapping the compact shut, putting it back in her bag. “Made you do that.”

“This morning I told my mother I wasn’t going to college,” Suni said around a mouthful of burger. “She was angry, which doesn’t make sense because she never wanted me to go in the first place. She tried to hit me with a sawn-off curtain rod. I took it from her.” His eyes were clear. “The ’scope didn’t make me do anything,” he said. “What happened today, with Kristian, was something I wanted to do. I wasn’t afraid. Of anything.”

Hope didn’t know where to start, so she seized on the least complex issue.