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Adventure on the High Seas

Her knees are small islands, around which a colorful armada of paper boats bob gently. "The dread pirate Georgia, by this time, had conquered the Sea of the Sun and 'bout half the Sea of the Moon. That other half was proving a problem, though, as wouldn't you just know it? Some crew calling themselves the Pear Tree Pirates had taken it over and were going out of their way to make things difficult on the Pirate Princess-To-Be." Her voice is hushed and thoughtful, but it carries clearly nonetheless, through the bathroom and bedroom beyond.

Adventure on the High Seas

In the bedroom, where he's finishing tucking pages away into folders--a careful filing system has been slowly taking over his desk--he grins, and even though there's no one around to see it he covers it with the back of his hand.

It's as well that she'd invited herself into his bathtub while he was still busy, as well that she can't watch him and see the adoration steal its way over his face before he trains it back. She should seem younger when she's like this and maybe she does, but she also stirs a fierce and quiet affection that if he took the time to examine it (and he doesn't, of course; he never does) he might recognize as the love of a man watching the woman he loves telling stories to a stranger's enthralled child while he thinks one day.

He tidies the last of the paperwork, and when he slips into the bathroom he's stripping off his coat, finally, hanging it on the back of the door, rolling up his sleeves as he kneels next to the tub and adds to her fleet another neatly-folded boat, this one shaky ballpoint letters and highlighter-blue and notebook stripes. He touches a freckle on her knee, or maybe it's an old scar. He doesn't ask or offer, he simply reaches to begin gently combing his fingers through her hair.

"And what sort of odious scheming," he asks her, playful and quiet, "could possibly make things difficult for the dread pirate Georgia?"

Scary Stories

It's the satisfying of an old, old curiosity. He tries not to think of it as the closing of a loop and everything that that would imply.

"They aren't like us," he protests, and he's not thinking of quiet students, little more than children, willingly submitting to weaponization. He's thinking of Lurks and Nest and Amrita. He's thinking of Aleria, all teeth and unsettling presence. "Not even a joke, probably. They feed on fear, right? It was hunting."

Mysteries

He was on his fourth pitch for a Three Investigators plot. The first he'd dismissed himself as implausible, the second and third he had been chagrined to discover, at America's too-enthusiastic education, had already been done.

"I'm being outclassed by a team of ghostwriters," he said, woeful. "I'll have to resort to shameless plagiarism. Has there been one about a burgled dovecote and thirteen missing birds?"

They were combing through a wall of lockers destined for demolition, looking, on America's insistence, for false bottoms and suspicious-looking panels. So far they'd found nothing beyond old pens and magnets and one irritated shadowling, readily dispatched.

"What kind of treasure are you expecting to find, exactly?" he asked, as he examined a scrap of crumbling paper, disappointed to find history notes rather than secret missives. "Although I expect the hiding place itself counts for you. Look," he added, holding a rusted matchbox car towards her. For all his disparaging comments about treasure hunting and drawled, sarcastic input on her enthusiasm, it was generally Taym who got excited about trinkets still hiding in the lockers, Taym who pocketed erasers shaped like monkeys and seemed delighted by ancient posters of ponies and movie starlets.

Adventure on the High Seas

There is the barest shiver at his touch, and she grins over at him, eyebrows arched high. "It was said," she began, flicking at several of the boats, "that wherever the Pear Tree Pirates sailed, that storms surrounded the sea, leaving only their ship safe from the terrible winds. There were even stories that," she leans in close to him, voice going low in a hushed whisper, " they had themselves some sort of ritual, a dance, that called down the storms. Dread pirate Georgia, well, she lost quite a few ships to that sea, but she wasn't about to back down. Folks say she herself was made up of thirty-seven tiny storms herself, all working together within her most comely shape. Dread pirate Georgia was possibly the one who started that particular rumor, truth be told."

She has always been a girl of quiet nonsense songs sung to herself. Of the particular sort of loneliness that makes toys and animals the most sought out confidantes. This was new. She gives him her past, her idle stories, and he holds them in his eyes and voice and hands of strange, stuttering eloquence. Through him they are given life and value, more than she would ever grant them on her own.

Scary Stories

Fingers tracing along his shirt, she loving draws a d**k on him in the dark of the tree house. "Don't have to be from some oogity other world to feed on fear. Doesn't mean they aren't people, just means they're terrorists of a sort." I L U eventually joins the rest of the invisible graffiti as she presses her face into his shoulder and can't avoid thinking about the gunshot wound there.

"Tell me about the worst date you ever went on."

Scary Stories

He doesn't think she means the "worst date" that ends with someone convulsing on the floor and everyone but Taym and Alex too scared to talk to the cops; probably doesn't even mean the kind of "worst date" that ends in his blacking out somewhere and pissing some poor girl's sheets. He isn't sure if she'd find it as funny as he does that he'd convinced one of the latter girls that she'd done it, making a great show of sympathy at her resultant mortification.

"That's hard," he says, because it is, not just for the above reasons but because Taym has not done much in the way of actual dating. His romantic interactions have been of a different flavor. Most of his "girlfriends" were just whatever girl he was regularly fumbling off to a back room or a stairwell with--some of whom he never saw outside of the parties where they met. It was a shallow pool to draw from. "Does drunkenly making rambling, poetic passes at a girl for over an hour only to find out she was a hooker and waiting for me to get to business count? Pretty sure she was gonna charge me extra for holding up her schedule with the compliment kink."

But he has been on dates. He thinks back further, a younger Taym, just before April, hellbent on making girls fall in love with him before he broke their hearts.

"I asked a girl out right before graduation," he said contemplatively, twisting her hair around his fingers. "Tasia. She was kind of a wild child--no one really hung out with her outside of school but in school she was the run-across-the-street-to-smoke-during-lunch type, the making-out-while-skipping-class type, but she was like me, she kept her grades up, flew under the radar. Our paths had crossed a little and I wanted to finish what we'd started before she ran off to college and I never saw her again. So I asked her out. And she sorta hesitated but she said yes."

A pause, while he mulls this over, savoring the moment in hindsight, the foreshadowing. "And then I found out why nobody hung out with Tasia outside of school. I go to pick her up at her house on Saturday, I've got pot and condoms and a couple of hits rattling around in my pocket and I'm feeling pretty great about the state of my weekend and she shows up to the door looking like a walking wet dream, this--filmy little dress, little sandals--" he makes a vague movement of his hand "--and I open my mouth to make some smartass hey, let's go ********> comment, this being my shithead M.O. at the time, and I don't even get the words out of her mouth before her dad materializes. And her dad's not a scary dude, this isn't one of those stories. Her dad is this, like, stern-faced old geezer with glasses, and she says: hey Taym, this is my dad. He's coming with us."

He shakes his head. "And what do you do? It's not like you can bail, that's a pretty great indicator of your intentions right there and this guy goes golfing with my dad. So I spent three hours walking around the neighborhood and eating fast food with Tasia and her dad. And her dad. Who interrogated me about my Catholicism--he was very strongly Baptist and I think saw me as a sort of heathen but he had the wrong idea; I was a different kind of heathen by then--and my earring and my haircut and my tattoo and what sort of career I was planning on pursuing to provide for his daughter. No s**t. Three hours. Felt like a ********' lifetime and I was sitting there with my hand in my pocket clapped around my gear in absolute terror that he'd suddenly demand to pat me down. Tasia said about two words."

He pauses, adding with satisfaction: "I ran into her again after she went to college. She apologized."