“Awesome!” Lucy whispered. “This is like the best job imaginable! And I’ve got all summer…”
She stepped through the door and fell right into conversation with the ginger kitten. Michael Stein felt a great deal of relief, though he also knew that he had changed more than just what she was going to do with the summer. The gift would be with her for life. He’d have to talk about that with her sometime. But today he was just pleased to have her back.
Lucy turned around and mouthed the words, “I love you, Michael Stein.”
Michael Stein couldn’t help it. He started to purr. He realized that his relationship with Lucy hadn’t ended with his death. Instead, it was just beginning.
A voice beside him startled him. It was Pax. He had a way of sneaking up, all silent like. “So,” he said, “I reckon this means you’ll be staying around. Told ya.”
For once, Michael Stein didn’t try to have the last word.
I have a soft spot for minions. Lackeys. Henchmen. The sycophantic underlings who make a good villain great. Who would the Joker be without his flunkies? Hans Gruber without his crack team of gun-toting criminals? Sauron without his Uruk-hai?
And, in my debut novel, Struck, the villain, Rance Ridley Prophet, would have been a lost and lonely soul without his twelve adopted Apostles, particularly the twins, Iris and Ivan.
In recent years, we’ve gotten to delve into the origin stories of some of pop culture’s favorite villains. Darth Vadar. Magneto. And now Norman Bates and Hannibal Lecter. But we rarely get to go behind the scenes with their trusty minions.
For this reason, I decided to more closely examine the origins of Iris and Ivan, fiercely loyal followers of Rance Ridley Prophet. Who were they before Rance adopted them? What was it about their lives, their experience, that primed them to become his true believers?
And, most importantly, what is in the heart of a minion?
— Jennifer Bosworth
STRANGE RAIN
Jennifer Bosworth
Iris knew her mother didn’t love her, had maybe never loved her, not the way a mother is supposed to. There was something broken in Anita Banik. Maybe it happened when Iris’s father left Anita for another woman (or several) while she was hugely pregnant with twins, her stomach extruded three feet in front of her, the skin stretched taut as a balloon about to pop. Or maybe it had more to do with the complicated birth that nearly killed Anita, and had ravaged her body so that she could never have another child. Not that she seemed to want the ones she already had.
Iris and her identical twin, Ivan, had once been more than identical. They had been joined, literally, at the hip, and down the thigh as well. Conjoined twins, separated at birth. They were a cliché, but Iris didn’t care. She loved looking at the pictures of her and Ivan as newborns, before the surgery that sliced their fused flesh and removed them from one another. Iris had asked Ivan once if he ever wished the doctors had left them how they were. Nature had intended them to enter the world as one body. Maybe that’s how they should have remained.
Ivan had thought she was kidding. He laughed and said sarcastically, “Oh, yeah, that would have been great. Life would be one never-ending three-legged race.”
Iris laughed along with her twin, and then excused herself to go to the bathroom so she could wipe at her eyes before Ivan noticed she was crying. With the door locked, she unzipped her pants, pulled them down, and examined the soft, pebbly scar that stretched from her hip to the top of her knee. Sometimes she imagined she still felt Ivan attached to her, a phantom limb amputated against her will.
When Ivan laughed off her question as too ridiculous to be considered, Iris should have taken it as a sign of things to come. She should have been prepared for the day when her twin would tire of her company and need…more.
Iris knew her mother didn’t love her, would probably never love her. But she expected her brother to love her forever. Her, and only her.
Ivan made his pronouncement the spring before they were to start high school. They were fifteen, but Ivan was already six foot two, and Iris was hot on his heels at five foot eleven. With their pale skin and colorless eyes, Iris was already dreading how inconspicuous they would appear in a new school. Sometimes she stared into the bathroom mirror and spat the word “freak” over and over again to get used to the sound of it being hurled at her. To build up a tolerance.
“I’m going to try out for football,” Ivan told Iris one afternoon, leaning against the wall across from her bed, his arms crossed defensively over his chest as though anticipating her reaction, an involuntary burst of laughter she immediately regretted. She couldn’t help herself, though. The idea of lanky, bookish Ivan with his delicate, almost feline features and his porcelain skin playing football was a joke.
A joke Ivan didn’t think was funny.
“Oh, come on,” Iris said when he scowled at her. “You can’t be serious.”