Venomous (14 page)

“It’s not funny.”

“I know.” He chuckles. “I know, I’m sorry, it’s not funny.”

“Just drive.”

“Okay. Sorry.”

He starts the car, and then, the minute we pull out of the driveway, we nearly die.

Our car and the one barreling toward us both screech to a sudden halt. Randall hits the brake, and we both lean forward painfully, the seat belts cutting into our shoulders. The other car honks at us as it backs slowly up, and I stare blankly at the man behind the steering wheel.

Again the venom fills me, swells up in me, and like on the phone with Renée,
guides
me. There’s no dam about to burst, just a quick, clean shot of wit and rage balled into one. Maybe I am in control or maybe it’s controlling me; either way, it feels wonderful and right. Destiny.

“Stop for a second. Roll down your window.” Randall glances at me funny and does as he’s told—my voice has the urgency of a police officer’s. Once the window’s down, I lean forward and grin politely at the dapper man with the shaggy blond-gray hair, his face curled into a sneer of contempt. “Sorry ’bout that, Dad, us kids all hopped up on goofballs, you never know what we’re doing. Thanks for the tux. I’ll bring ’er back nice and clean. Nice seeing ya!”

I take just enough time to catch his stunned, stupid expression before I tell Randall to drive.

Five minutes after I get to the waiting room, Dr. Yeski walks out with Shelby Waters, a girl who hangs out with a lot of guys from my school. She’s in my grade and runs with a crowd that loves Randall but cringes when I stop by (Randall calls them “vintage T-shirt kids,” which I think refers to their tight garments with badly screened images of crappy old cartoons on them). She’s obviously been crying furiously: Her eyes are bright red, her nose is running, and there are twin rivers of eyeliner coursing down her cheeks. She sniffles a little and mumbles a thank-you to Dr. Yeski, who just smiles and says, “That’s what I’m here for, Shel. Take care until next week. Call me whenever you want to if something comes up, okay?”

The older woman next to me clutches her cakelike cap to her head as if it might fly off, and leaps to her feet. Just as they’re about to leave, Shelby spies me and turns pale in recognition. In a soft and terrifying voice, she mutters, “Don’t tell anyone about this.” And then the old woman is pulling her away, her arm wrapped around her in an ominous fashion.

Dr. Yeski beckons for me, smiling. I trudge into her office, trying to ignore the fact that the last person who walked out of here was crying like a baby. It’s a typical shrink’s office: desk with a PC, leather couch, chair, potted plants, lots of books, and of course, five, count ’em, five boxes of tissues strategically placed throughout. What surprises me the most is a huge Clash poster on her wall with a scrawled signature reading, “For Laura—Death or glory!—JS.” In the lower left-hand corner, there’s a doodle of a trout nailed to a cross. I point at it and ask what it’s doing up there.

She doesn’t smile. “I got it signed by Joe Strummer back when I was about your age.”

“What’s with the aqua-crucifixion?”

“I asked him to draw a Jesus fish. He’d been drinking.”

“I have to tell you, the crying girl and the drunken punk rocker doodles? Hell of a first impression.”

“Understandable.” Then she plants herself in her swivel chair and picks up a yellow legal pad, and we start talking. Or she starts talking, and I get distracted….

“How’re you doing? How’s your week been?”

I snap to attention and move my eyes upward, to her face. “Sorry? It’s been okay. I dunno. Large. I mean, strange.”

She doesn’t seem to notice my piggish snafu. “How so?”

“I had to go to my dad’s to borrow a tux for a party. It was kind of surreal, being in his house and with his family. We’re not very…We don’t really spend a lot of time together, so it…threw me off, I guess.”

“Why don’t you spend more time together?”

I shift in my seat, feeling warmer than I should. Easy. “I think my mom could tell I hated being there, around his new family, and my dad just…” Deep breath, one step at a time. “He kind of considers me a bummer, I guess. Always unhappy, a little crazy, and so on and so forth. Every so often I’d start having a venom moment and would just go out and sit in the car.”

She nods. There’s sympathy there, although impartial. It feels strangely okay—I’m not being humored. “I bet that’s hard. What happened when you went there this week?”

“Well…I dunno. My dad’s new wife…Well, hold on. Is she my stepmom?”

“Not if you don’t want her to be.”

“I mean, yeah, sure, that’s deep as shit and all, but really. Technically.”

“Technically, yes. She’s your stepmother.”

I grimace. “That’s what I thought. Anyway, my stepmom was really nice, which was off-putting. She was all huggy and talkative.”

“That’s a bad thing?”

“It’s just a weird thing. I like to vilify them a bit, my dad and Millie and their family. But instead, she was just really amiable and kind to me, and it was a bit of a weird experience.”

“Do you expect her to dislike you?”

Okay, here we go. I feel venom whirl around in my heart, ready for the fight. “She’s my fucking stepmother. I feel that I have sort of an inherent right to dislike her, and vice versa.”

“Why do you feel that way?”

I raise an eyebrow. “Well, that’s your job, right? To figure that out?”

She folds her arms in front of her. “If that’s how you feel.”

“Now we’re just going in circles.”

“Okay, then let’s move forward. What about your stepmom upsets you?”

“I mean, they haven’t…It’s not like she did anything, it’s what she sort of left out.” I try to hold ground, but I’m losing it fast. She’s good. “It’s fine that they went off and had their own family. But there weren’t two Christmases or group gatherings. He…” Deep breath. Drop your shoulders. Calm. “He
left
, and all they knew about it was that he left
us
for
them
. There was always that underlying feeling, like we were something that happened once, y’know? You can hear, in those little kids’ voices, that we’re people they
have
to see sometimes.”

I’m expecting her to hit me with another tough one, but instead she nods and looks at me. “Did you see your dad?”

“Just as we left. He nearly ran into me and Randall, and I was a bit of a jerk to him. I just smiled and thanked him for the suit, and then had Randall drive off.”

She smiles, finally. “Like a thief in the night, right? Keep the mystery and all that around you.”

I hadn’t thought of that. That was it exactly. “Well, yeah. I didn’t have much to say to him, anyway…y’know?”

She nods and leans back a bit. “What’s the tuxedo for?”

“Um, what do you know about ‘Weimar’?”

She laughs, and I feel okay, which makes no sense.

H
OW DID
it happen?”

The time traveler (he refused to give his name) looked thoughtful. “What? Your death, or becoming Tyrant?”

“Both, I guess.”

“Well, you became Tyrant about five years or so before your death,” he says, as though he’s recounting a story from his past. “It was around Halloween or so, a little after, in 2015. November. Yeah, definitely November; I remember it was broadcast during the marathon. You’d been around—you were a fucking superhero, for God’s sake, so everyone knew about you—for a while before that. But still, you were a legend, so no big deal, right? And then, one night, you killed the mayor.”

“I WHAT?!”

“You killed Mayor Rothchild on national television, as well as the guards, the security, the cameramen…pretty much everyone who could’ve posed a threat to you. And then you got in front of the camera and declared yourself Tyrant of New York City, and said that if anyone thought otherwise, they could happily take it up with you.”

I sat down on the cold concrete of the rooftop and rolled a pebble between my fingers. This was madness. I was a protector. “Why? Why did I declare myself Tyrant?”

“The venom,” he said. “It took control. You realized that things would never change, no matter how much you fought, and you let the venom take control. You performed all these acts, yeah, but you weren’t really the one driving the bus, if you know what I mean. Don’t get me wrong, the city was still safe, but in a Machiavellian sort of way. An iron fist, ruling through fear. You let down your morals, and it took advantage of the opportunity.”

“So how did…” I pointed at him. This was an awkward transition.

“You were killed five years after you declared yourself Tyrant, but the venom left your system before they got to it. You hadn’t really been part of the show for a while, so they just put a bullet in you and continued hunting for the venom.”

Icy fingers caressed the back of my skull and sent chills through my blood. “And the venom found you.”

“Not quite,” he whispered. “First it found Renée.”

B
EFORE THIS NIGHT
, “Weimar” was eternally linked in my mind to one image—a swastika. Knowing my friends, I assumed that I was in for a history lesson.

I show up at the apartment building and am immediately given a cavity search by a massive doorman with a name tag reading
BRAWN
. I swear to God, his name is actually Brawn (silently, I pray the tired-looking guy behind him, staring at a stack of security screens, is wearing a tag reading
BRAINS
, but sadly, his name is Colin). The entire time I’m there, Brawn, good ol’ Brawn, gives me a look that lets me know that he’s the type of guy who will be necessarily polite to me right up until I step out of line and he tears out my larynx with his bare hands. You’d think that if enough kids show up in tuxes, he’d assume all of them are going to the same place. The whole thing makes the venom sneer and pant and pound its fist on the table of my mind, livid with contempt. However, seeing as Brawn makes Andrew Tomas look like a mosquito, the venom seethes, letting the rage rush through me without breaking open like a boil. It knows this isn’t a battle worth getting into. It’s wicked and arrogant by nature, yeah, but the venom isn’t stupid.

Finally, after checking out his clipboard, Brawn consents to let me upstairs, noting that he doesn’t want “any craziness or such” (
Too bad, too—I LOVE craziness or such!).
I choke down big mouthfuls of verbal razors and let the elevator door shut behind me.

The door opens again, and my hatred takes a backseat to awe. Whoever the host is, he’s rich. Like, buying-your-kids-out-of-any-trouble-they-might-someday-get-into rich; Trump money. Because the elevator door does not open to a hallway like a normal person’s would. It opens to the apartment itself, to a massive white foyer full of girls in flapper dresses and boys in tuxes. I recognize a lot of them from the party in the park, but not enough. Immediately my coat and shirt become itchy, stuffy, way too uncomfortable.

Oh, for fuck’s sake, first Brawn, now this. Let’s just go home.

This is important. Casey and Renée are counting on me. We need this.

We?

A man in a tux grabs me by the collars and giggles maniacally in my face.
“Guten abend, mein kleiner Schnurrbart
! May I take your coat?”

Staring hard at him, I realize it’s Casey and start laughing. “You crazy bastard! This place is utterly amazing! Whose is it?”

“One of zese beyutiful people,” he says, his accent somewhere between German, Russian, and Rastafarian. He sweeps his arms across the room. “Look at zem! All such beyutiful people! Even ze orchestra es beyutiful.”

“Casey, you’ve been drinking.”

“No, YOU’VE been drinking!”

“No, I haven’t!”

“Why the hell NOT?!”

“Good question. Better go remedy that.”

“You better believe it.” And with a shriek, he disappears into the crowd.

I filter through the mass of people, in awe of pretty much everything. The clothes, the makeup, the house, fill me with utter amazement. It’s a loft apartment, obviously, but it’s been divided up into different rooms using curtains hung from the ceiling. Normally a house like this would just piss me off something terrible—Manhattan decadence at its worst—but considering how the party’s set up and the type of people in attendance, the whole place just seems magical and hilarious. One room is the bar, where boys in tuxes and suits are yelling loudly while drinking beer, another a ballroom full of kids dancing to music that sounds somewhere between hardcore punk and big-band swing. There are some others, too, but the bar is really all I care about right now. And lo and behold, standing behind the bar is Tollevin the Tower, shooting me the biggest shit-eating grin I’ve ever seen. I smile back at him, resting myself on the bar and taking my handkerchief from my breast pocket (I figured since I get sweaty when I’m nervous, it was the ideal accessory) to wipe my brow.

“What’ll it be, Locke?” he yells above the din.

“What’s good?” I ask, glancing at the rainbow of bottles behind him. If there’s a time to learn about liquor, it’s now.

Tollevin grabs a bottle reading
GLENLIVET
and pours some into a tumbler glass for me. “You seem like a Scotch kind of guy. Try this.”

I take a sip and feel the fluid in my mouth. It’s tough, I suppose. Reminds me of the whiskey Casey gave me, only with an attitude problem. I swallow it and it burns all the way down. I open my mouth and could swear I’m breathing fire. The warmth burns down in my stomach into ball of slow heat that seems to resonate throughout my insides.

I cough. “Christ, that’s harsh.”

Tollevin laughs slightly. He pushes the Glenlivet to the side of the bar and pours me a shot of what looks like melted licorice from a green bottle. He hands it to me and smiles. “Jägermeister. The Devil’s Cough Syrup.”

“Am I about to die?”

“A little. It’s for the best.”

This one isn’t tough. It’s just a slap in the face, sugary-sweet syrup with an acidic aftertaste. Once it’s all down, I let out a gag that makes Tollevin crack up.

“That was awful! People actually drink that?”

Tollevin laughs a little more. Finally he pours me a glass of black fluid with a rising white head and pushes it slowly toward me.

“This is Guinness, right?”

“Right. Think coffee mixed with beer. And bacon. I’m not giving you any more than that; when that Scotch and Jäger kick in, you’ll be feeling pretty damn good.”

I can’t help but smile. “That’s sweet of you. Taking care of me and all.”

He shrugs modestly. “Renée would kill me if I got you drunk before you got your card.” Again with the card. Before I can ask what all this nonsense is about, I hear a familiar voice behind me squeal, “
Dah
ling!” Speak of the she-devil.

I turn around and swell with pride, lust, and adoration. Renée is dressed in a white flapper’s dress with intense makeup, black fishnets, heels, and one of those sequiny yarmulke-type things on her head with little strings of sparkles trailing down. While the dress is tight enough to fit a waifish flapper, Renée is built with curves, making her utterly seductive. Her nails are bright green. It hits me for a second that I’ve never seen her in white up until now.

I throw my arms up in a greeting gesture, expecting a hug. Instead, she leaps into the air, making me catch and hold her. She stares into my eyes, and her smile and smell tell me that I’m exactly where I should be. The next thing I know, her lips are firmly attached to mine, her tongue snaking swiftly through my mouth, which I mimic in turn. The extraordinary din around us dies in my ears, and I am living for this kiss and only this kiss.

She leans her head back and smacks her ruby red lips, now slightly smudged at the sides. “Mmm,” she whispers, “you taste Irish.”

I laugh. Already I’m beginning to feel that light numbness slip through me. The booze makes me feel warm and comfortable, but still edgy—it’s similar to the moments of controlled, confident venom I’ve had lately. “I have a taste for Guinness, apparently. Tollevin’s been finding out what suits me best.”

Renée leaps down from my arms and eyes Tollevin. “Tower, what have you been putting in my boy?” Before he can answer, she’s pulling me through the crowd. “I want you to meet people. There are so many here tonight.”

“Yes, there are lots of people here tonight…but honestly, you have people to see and shit, don’t sidetrack your evening of fun just ’cause of me….”

She stops, kisses me, and gives me a good, hard look. “You
are
my evening of fun.”

The next hour or so is a blur of names, faces, and hands. Renée yanks me through every room, introducing me to about fifty million indie rockers and crust punks. I get three “So this is Locke”s, seven “nice to finally meets you”s, and even about six “Renée’s told me a lot about you”s. Anyone else dragging me around a party and I’d feel kind of ill at ease. Not with Renée, though. Every time she presents me, there’s this laser-beam look in her eyes, as though, more than anything, she wants them to adore me as much as she does. And it works—the strange, booze-fueled, easygoing venom stays with me all night, and somehow I’m actually
charming.
At one point I make a comment about seeing Renée in white for the first time, and a whole circle of kids bursts into laughter, including Renée, who pulls me closer to her and snuggles her head into my neck. Locke Vinetti, life of the party—who knew?

We take a break from the schmoozing and sit at a table in the bar, Renée ordering a gin and tonic, and me downing a glass of ice water. All that walking around and trying to appear cool can work up a thirst. As we imbibe, Renée beams at me. “You okay? I hope I haven’t been making too much of a spectacle of you….”

“No, it’s fine,” I say. “I’m really quite down with it. It’s incredibly sweet, hearing these people mention what good things you’ve been saying about me.”

“Are there any
bad
things to say about you, darling?”

“Well, I mean…you know, I’m, the venom is kind of…” I trail off.

“Hey.” She puts her green-tipped index finger to my mouth and gets a very serious look on her face. Not angry or upset, just
serious
. “Not tonight. Okay?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t say that. I’m just telling you.” Her expression softens. “Tonight you’re Locke Vinetti. Nothing else.”

The venom responds to the order strangely. Usually there’s a raised fist, a feeling in my gut as though the world is ending and I’m on the pale horse. But tonight it changes its tune.

It shrugs, shifts, and goes to sleep.

We’ll discuss this later.

Thank you.

Oh, I wouldn’t go thanking me just yet.

I smile broadly. “Okay,” I say softly, reaching out and squeezing her hand. “Not tonight.”

Her eyes go shiny, and we kiss.

“My dark boy,” she sighs. “My hero in black.”

“I’m the Vampire James Dean, baby,” I whisper back. “It’s all in the Marlboros.”

“Dean smoked Chesterfields.”

I love this woman.

A few minutes later, a boy wearing only tux pants and suspenders walks into the room and announces loudly that the presentation is being made in the main room. Renée lifts me onto my feet, and we walk side by side, arm in arm, into a massive ballroom with a stage occupying most of one wall. Casey’s standing onstage behind a microphone stand, next to a huge, veiled picture, smiling like a schoolboy. He lights a cigarette and takes a long, full drag.

As he leans forward and speaks into the mic, the room quiets.

“Good evening, children of the night,” he says, holding his arms out in greeting. “Has anyone seen the worst-dressed gay kid in the city around here?”

“THERE HE IS!” responds the crowd as one, pointing.

Casey paws his tux and sighs. “Oh, Christ, good. I was worried there for a second.” Requisite chortling ensues. “As you all know,” he continues, “tonight is a celebration of the Weimar, the scene to end all scenes, a time of freedom, beauty, and love.”

The crowd roars back. Casey mock-stumbles at the pitch of the noise, and then, laughing, always laughing, continues.

“The Weimar was many things. A performance movement, a historical era, and an escape for so many whose ways weren’t tolerated by the powers that be. We, though, celebrate the Weimar as a state of mind, an understanding of the need for personal freedom and release. Weimar, for us, is the experience of fun without limits, joy without rules, and life without those foolish boundaries set by little men with stupid ideas. After all,” he says, taking on a queeny lisp and standing in a pose that smacks of Prince, “I think we all have our little
differentheth,
don’t we, darlingth?”

Again, the room’s filled with mirthful noise. I giggle through the childish lump in my throat. Casey. We would go to war for him now, all of us. Our buddy, the gay Henry V.

“However, those little men have gained great power in this world,” he continues. “They feed on good things, pervert them, buy them up, and sell them back to the morons out there who didn’t think of them in the first place.” The black rings in Casey’s voice. The air crackles with anger. Something’s up. “And in the case of the Weimar, one little, monotesticular parasite decided to poison our expression of love, making the very word ‘Weimar’ synonymous with his campaign of hatred and cruelty.” Ooooh. “And so,
frauleins
and
leiberherrs
, I present to you: our guest of honor!”

Casey yanks back the sheet over the stand to reveal a massive portrait of Adolf Hitler, throwing the heil.

My hand tightens around Renée’s. Nazis. Nazi punk rockers. I’ve somehow fallen in with a crew of Nazis obsessed with tarot cards, and tonight they’re going to induct me into their white brotherhood. Tollevin’s just a red herring. It all makes sense. I need to leave, to get—

Casey takes one last drag and flicks his cigarette.