Authors: Alice Degan
“Yeah? Maybe not, you know, because maybe you just lie around watching anime and playing Playstation all day, and so really, why would anybody tell you anything important? I mean, you’re supposed to be looking after Yiannis, so how come he’s coming to me to ask where his dolls are?”
“Because that is his game. He has hidden the doll somewhere very clever and he wants you to look for it. He has played it with me already all day yesterday. Now he wants to play it with you, but you are too important, you are studying for your important alchemy test, and you are too busy showing girls around the house. Yes.” He dropped back onto the couch and pointed the remote at the television. “Go away. They are about to find Naraku’s castle.”
The younger boy grabbed up one of the cushions and made what looked like a determined attempt to smother Takehiko with it. The Japanese boy pushed him off easily, but he upset the Tupperware in the process. Rice crackers bounced and rolled over the carpet.
“Yahh! Now you make a mess! Stupid!”
Takehiko swung the cushion by one corner and thumped Nick in the head with it. Nick staggered and threw a wild punch that connected with nothing.
“Maybe we should go, Nick?” Clare called from the doorway. “You should show me the rest of the apartment?”
“Oh, yeah—sorry!” Nick clumsily warded off another blow from the pillow. “I’ll deal with you later!”
Takehiko dropped the pillow onto the couch and swept his hair back with one hand. Leaving the room, Clare looked back over her shoulder to see that he was still staring after her with a frown. He was almost onto her, Clare thought; or at any rate, he was suspicious. He was obviously smarter than Nick. She needed to get her information and get out of here.
Only what information was she actually looking for now? This whole business had gone well beyond strange already. She had no idea how she was going to put any of it into a report for her supervisor.
Nick was now discovering, to his annoyance and obvious embarrassment, that all the doors on the left-hand side of the hall led to Takehiko’s bedroom.
“I don’t get it—my room has to be here somewhere. And Yiannis wasn’t in his room, which means that he was probably in mine, downloading some shit onto my computer—”
“I tell you what,” said Clare, taking pity on him and thinking of a way that she might use this to her advantage at the same time. “What if I go into Takehiko’s room, and while I’m in there, you open the next door. That way, Takehiko’s room can’t move—right?”
“Brilliant!” Nick beamed at her. “Wow, Clare, I think you’re really going to fit in here.”
Ugh, thought Clare. Perish the thought. She stepped inside Takehiko’s room and looked around. It wasn’t any of the things she had hoped for. It was full of shelves of Japanese comics and elaborate electronics, with posters of spaceships and cartoon samurai neatly arranged all over the walls. A futon was folded tidily in one corner of the room, and next to it a lacquered breastplate, rather like the ones that the cartoon samurai in the posters were wearing, only real and old-looking. And propped next to it was a sheathed sword.
“Clare! I found the room!”
She came back out into the hall, and the door to Takehiko’s room swung shut behind her. Nick was hanging out the doorway two doors down. That must mean the one in between was his own room. She guessed it wouldn’t look much different than Takehiko’s. Probably just messier.
“So … here’s your room—I mean, the room that … The spare room. It’s kind of full of stuff right now. Some of it’s Cristina’s, that she’s just storing here, and some of it’s Rose’s.”
There wasn’t much to be seen here. It was an ordinary room, cluttered with the sorts of things that people leave in spare rooms. Since she was supposed to be interested in living here, Clare made a pretence of looking around. Someone—Rose or Cristina—seemed to have a penchant for sunflowers. There were sunflower curtains folded in a pile, and a really awful sunflower clock on top of a rickety chair.
“So how much is the rent?” Clare realized as soon as she had said it that she shouldn’t have. Nick had already said something about that.
She doesn’t literally mean renting
.
He gave her a funny, worried look. “Rose didn’t … really tell you very much at all … did she?”
“I meant to ask—but she was really busy.”
“Yeah. Um … well, she doesn’t charge us rent. Me and Tacky, I mean. He’s been here longer than I have, and I don’t know exactly what his arrangement is—he sort of takes care of things around the house. Not that he could really
do
anything else, because he doesn’t actually go out. I work for the bakery—that’s my arrangement. Cristina too. I mean, she still works there, but now she just gets a paycheque. I don’t work in the kitchen—I’m no good at cooking or anything. I do deliveries.”
“You mean that bakery actually gets orders from people?”
“Oh, sure. Rose does a good business. There’s something about her baking that’s irresistible to all kinds of Others. You can tell, right? She doesn’t know what it is—it’s just like a talent, or whatever. She told me a story about how when she was a little girl she used to make cakes for the fairies in the parking lot behind her apartment building. It started as just a game, only there really were fairies, and they couldn’t get enough of her cakes.” Nick stopped talking suddenly, and looked at her for a moment with a new, wary expression. “I don’t—I don’t want to sound like Tacky, or anything, but … You
did
talk to Rose, right?”
“Of course. Yes. I mean—” Clare decided to go out on a limb. “I couldn’t have got in here if I hadn’t, could I?”
Nick gave a relieved laugh. “Yeah! You’re right! How could you have got in here? Sorry about that! Um … do you want some tea or something?”
Oh, not tea again, Clare thought disgustedly. What was it with these people and tea?
“Sure,” she said. It seemed like the best excuse for lingering in the apartment.
Others. That was what he had said:
all kinds of Others
. You could tell it had a capital O, just from the way he said it. Was that what they called themselves, then? Well, obviously, Clare thought, they weren’t going to call themselves “targets”; that was just Stake’s terminology.
Something else was bothering her—something that Nick had said. No, she realized, it was what
she
had said, and then Nick had just confirmed it:
How could you have got in here?
How
had
she got in here? She hadn’t actually talked to Rose. Except that Rose was presumably the pregnant woman in the bakery, so actually she had … But somehow that didn’t seem right.
Clare sat at the kitchen table while Nick put on the kettle and fussed about looking for clean mugs. She tried again to catch some sort of scent. The kitchen would be the logical place, she thought, if it was the only bit of the apartment that didn’t shift around. Sure enough, the kitchen was full of scents. Too full, in fact. There was a bright thread of the green scent from the potted plants by the door, and a hint of a sort of old wood smell from the hallway with the moving bedrooms. There was a fairly strong animal smell that she could not quite identify, and there was something else: an old smell, a smell of ink, and rice, and something that she could only describe as magic.
“Tired?”
Clare’s eyes popped open. Nick was smiling at her sympathetically as he set a pair of mismatched mugs on the table.
“No, no—well, maybe a little bit.”
“I know how it is,” he said, looking at the table. “I mean, trying to find a place to live, and … everything. It’s pretty hard. Oh—let me get that stuff out of your way!” He reached across to gather up the math homework that was spread out next to where Clare was sitting.
“I guess you’re in high school,” said Clare. She thought it might be a good idea to remind him just how much younger he was than she, before he tried to take this misguided camaraderie any further. She was beginning to find it tiresome.
“Yeah.” He closed the math textbook and began rummaging in a drawer for the tea. “I bet you’re wondering why I’m not in class now, right?”
“I suppose you should be.”
“Actually it’s one of my days off. I go to this alternative school. You only have to go in three days a week, in the morning. The rest of the time you have to study on your own, and stuff—it’s hard work. But it’s better than a regular school—well, it’s the only thing that works for me. At a regular school, you can’t pass your courses if you keep missing class, and … if you’re like me … you end up missing a lot of class.” He had stopped searching for the tea and was now just staring into the drawer. The kettle began to whistle, and he recalled himself to his task with a little start. “Do you want jasmine tea, or Earl Grey, or … something that doesn’t seem to have any English on it at all, or—”
“Earl Grey sounds fine,” Clare said at random.
“Cool. I’ll have that too.” He dropped tea bags into the mugs and filled them up. “Anyway, Subway—that’s what the school is called, because everybody’s always coming and going—anyway, it’s great, because this way I can sort of do my own thing when I want, and I still have time to work for Rose, too. I do deliveries mornings and nights. Bread in the morning, cake at night. Here’s your tea.”
“Thanks.”
Clare had been only half listening to him. She had spotted what she thought must be the source of the old ink and rice smell: a painting hanging between two windows on the opposite side of the kitchen. It was one of those long, Oriental watercolour paintings, but it wasn’t
of
anything. There were a couple of sprigs of grass in the foreground and a miniature snow-capped mountain with stylized clouds at the very top, but the middle ground was blank, as if it were unfinished. Only it wasn’t that, Clare decided. It was as if something had been removed.
“Why do you have a painting with nothing in it?”
“Oh, that.” Nick turned to look at it. “That’s Rose’s. Sort of. It was a gift from a customer, a few years ago. It’s actually really old—like four hundred years. I think that’s why she keeps it.”
“There used to be something in it, before—didn’t there?” And Clare thought she could guess what.
“You got it. That’s where the bastard comes from. Just the smell of Rose’s baking broke the spell, and he got out. It’s kind of a shame, really.”
“Wow. Four hundred years inside a painting. He seems … well, he seems fairly normal.”
Nick laughed. “If you say so. Actually,” he added after a moment, more seriously, “I think he tries … pretty hard.”
Clare sipped her tea, and noticed that the mug said
Fountain of Youth Health Food
on it. So that was the story about Takehiko. She could picture him as a construction of sparse, Oriental brush strokes, looking really hot in a kind of stylized way. And he wasn’t a target—Other, whatever—after all. She wondered if the fact that he was really four hundred years old could be said in some sense to cancel out the fact that he looked like he was under twenty?
She snapped herself out of that embarrassing train of thought. What was more important than Takehiko’s age or relative cuteness was the fact that he didn’t seem to quite believe she was really here about the spare room. And when he was finished watching his cartoons (she was not
seriously
attracted to a guy who watched Japanese cartoons?) he would probably go downstairs and ask Rose why she hadn’t told him about the new prospective roommate—and that would be that. There was no time to waste.
“Nick, I … really think that I would like to live here.”
“Yeah? That’s great! You’d—We’d—It would be great.”
“Obviously I have to talk to Rose again, maybe figure out the terms and things. It’s just … there’s one other thing.”
“Yeah?”
Clare looked into her teacup, hoping she could pull this off. It wasn’t her usual style. With an effort she called on that special reserve of charm that she had used once or twice before, for quite different purposes and with quite a different type of boy than Nick.
“I guess I’ve got kind of a thing about secrets,” she said. “There’ve been too many in my life already—I’ve been hurt a few times too often by secrets.” Wow. That actually sounded good. “I know that Rose has that policy where you don’t have to tell each other things. It’s just … I don’t know if I could live like that.” She looked up, like a submarine releasing a missile at its target.
Ka-blam.
“You want me to tell you what I am,” said Nick. It was as if he had caught the missile in his bare hands and was just holding it, waiting for it to explode in his face. “Right?”
“I’ll tell you about myself. I—”
“You don’t have to, Clare. It’s okay. I don’t mind secrets. But I’ll tell you about me. So, um … where do I start?” He smiled awkwardly. “I guess it’s best to just say it straight out. Right?”
•
•
•
On the drive home she turned over in her mind the information she’d acquired, wondering what she was going to do about it. Not what she should do, but what she
was going
to do. This happened sometimes; she seemed to see two different possible Clares striding forward into two different futures. In this case, one of them impressed Seevers, showed up Jake and Laurence, got promoted. One was a success. But the other one, a quieter Clare who was fading into the background now, seemed to feel there was some strong reason not to do all that.
She remembered Jake talking to Kelly, one of the consultants: “Everybody thinks they’re a dime a dozen like vampires, but that’s bullshit. They’re actually pretty rare.” And wistfully: “Man, I’d’ve loved to of seen that.”
Yeah, she knew what she was going to do.
•
•
•
“All right, gentlemen—everyone pull up a chair and make yourself comfortable. This is Clare’s first pitch, so give her your full attention. She’s got something really exciting for us tonight.”
Seevers perched himself on the edge of the table in the conference room and winked at her. Jake and Laurence were there, both looking somewhat miffed. The clients, a father and son outfitted in every imaginable piece of Mountain Equipment Co-op paraphernalia, sat grinning delightedly at the far end of the table. Clare felt that the slightly sporty, slightly girly outfit she had changed into for the evening had been well chosen. She was going to do this right. There had been a brief period that afternoon when she had wondered again whether she could do this, whether she
should
do this—but it was past. The little voice that had said,
He’s a harmless kid, Clare
, had been silenced, and she was focussed on her goal.