“Mrs. Breckinridge,” Cal said, surprised, moving up beside me. “Nik, she’s a substitute teacher at school.” I cleared my throat. He was never going to be the male equivalent of Miss Manners, but there were some requirements I expected of him, behavior that helped us blend into average society. “Um . . . sorry. Mrs. Breckinridge, this is my brother, Niko. He broke his ankle. He’s helpless and pathetic and won’t rob you.” He was curious at her presence, but he was also a Leandros when he had to be, there with the story. “Hey, I didn’t know you lived on my street.”
“I’m never home long enough to really live anywhere. Too many bills to pay.” Thick, fake eyelashes blinked. “You’re the kid with the weird name who always sits in the last row? Haliban. Caliban. Something from Shakespeare, right?”
His teacher but obviously not a very good teacher.
Cal said flatly, “Cal. My name is Cal.” Sophia had told him long before school ever would about Caliban, Shakespeare, and The Tempest. She wanted him to know why she’d named him after the shambling monster-child of a bitch sorceress. The only part she’d gotten right was that about the bitch.
“Well, Cal”—she fished a five out of her pocket and passed it to him—“my new favorite student. How about you forget you ever saw me and what I do for a second job. The principal is the stick-up-her-ass kind. All sorts of morals—her morals, the judgmental old witch. She’d fire me like that”—she snapped her fingers—“if she knew I was stripping. Dancing, I mean. Dancing. You think you can do that? Keep your mouth shut?”
Cal gave her a “no skin off my nose” shrug, the five-dollar bill already a mere afterimage in the air, before grinning cheerfully. “You know me and rules, Mrs. B.”
She grinned back under a thick layer of scarlet lipstick. She looked as if she’d broken more than a few rules in her life too. “You walk to the beat of a different drummer, there’s that for sure. You spend more time talking to the principal than her own damn husband does, which he’s probably happy as hell about. And, sugar, I’m forty. You might want to look me in the face, appreciate me for my brain because when this top comes off my brain is still in the same place but my tits will be four inches lower.”
It took me a second to realize that last part was directed at me and I could feel my skin flush hot and mortified. I read about Buddha, Nietzsche, Sun-Tzu, Jung, poetry, physics, chemistry, advanced mathematics, and I trained to kill Grendels, to be ready if they came looking for a fight, but I couldn’t do anything about the fact I still had normal teenage hormones.
“Hold it in,” Cal whispered. “Virgins live. Horn-dogs die.”
“Horn-dogs? You’re eleven. Do you know how much trouble you are . . .” I swallowed the rest and asked Mrs. Breckinridge, while looking directly at her face this time, politely, “We were wondering if you knew about David Kithser.” She worked at Cal’s school. The cookie excuse wouldn’t work on her. I might as well come out with what we actually wanted. If our neighbor was a murderer, I doubt I had to worry about her spending any time with him—droopy and pitiful as he appeared, and definitely not enough time for them to discuss our interest in Kithser.
“Cecily? Cee-cee? Who are you screwing around with now? Every time I turn my back, there you go.” The man, once big and athletic, now just big and fat, appeared out of the gloom of the tiny house. Graying hair stuck up on end, small ferret eyes shied away from the light. He was shirtless and needed Mrs. Breckinridge’s structurally improbable bikini top more than she did. He was in boxers, splitting at the seams, but still fighting the good fight. “Look at him. What is he? Sixteen? Seventeen? You’re into jailbait now because a real man’s too much for you? I oughta—”
“You oughta get out of my face, Virgil, or the next time you’re sleeping off a drunk, I’m taking the shotgun out of the closet, loading for bear, and sticking the barrel up your fat—” The door slamming in our face cut off the last word, but I didn’t think either of us had to guess at what it was.
Cal, again, checked the cookie box, hoping against hope a sympathetic universe had magically refilled it. “Mrs. Breckinridge is my favorite teacher,” he announced with a more than slightly evil smirk. “She never gives homework. She knows everything about everything. And she tells us.”
“I’ll bet she does and she really shouldn’t do that.”
“And she said you shouldn’t look at her tits but you did.” His expression was pure and guileless as a baby on Santa’s lap at Christmas.