Silver and Salt(16)

Shit. The kid would talk to anyone. Had no one taught her anything about survival?

Stupid question. Obviously not, or I wouldn’t be in this mess.

“Nope.” I shook my head. “Some guy named Shakespeare made it up a long time ago. Then when I was born, that’s what Soph…that’s what my mother named me.”

Caliban, the monster, son of a witch, a lost and begotten creature. I wouldn’t have known that, especially word for word, if she didn’t say it every other week or so when she was around, softly sang it sometimes—like a particularly vicious lullaby. And if she said my name, she said it with a twisted smile of barbed-wire delight. My brother had not once called me Caliban, only Cal. Sometimes, if I’d been listening to Sophia too long, I couldn’t be like my brother, like Niko. Sometimes, after seeing too many monsters with hands and claws pressed to the glass of our bedroom window at night or across the street on other roofs or under cars, pointing at me with fingers so white they were almost see-through and laughing like rabid hyenas in the dark, I called myself Caliban. I called myself Caliban and not Cal because I knew it was true.

Maybe not a monster, but not human, either.

“But my brother calls me Cal. That’s close to as cool as Mels, huh?” I went on. “Or at least half as cool as your pony.”

“She’s purple,” came the instant reply.

“The most purple there is,” I agreed with a wide smile that was happy for her, happy for her pony, and happy purple existed as a color. My mother was a whore, a thief, and a con artist. I’d learned to take what I didn’t feel a long time ago and fake it with more talent than most adults, including the one who’d given Melanie the pony. “She’s the same color as a grape and Grape Crush is my favorite.”

Like I gave a shit about purple, but you can’t con someone if they don’t trust you. I wasn’t conning Melanie, but I was screwed-up enough that I knew I could fake her out and get her trust that way when I didn’t know if I could as my real self. Being honest would’ve felt faker than fooling her a little.

So screwed-up.

More screwed-up that I didn’t much care.

Hell, I didn’t care at all.

She considered what was practically my love letter to the color purple and a grape soft drink, stared into the pony’s tiny eyes as if it had an opinion, and nodded. “Mels and Cal. Both are awesome, and grape is the best.” She had said “awesome” as if was a magic word, like abracadabra. She’d probably heard her older sister or cousin say it with lots of hair-tossing as she tossed her ponytail with extra flounce the same time she said it.

“I think you’re right. Grape is best,” I replied before carefully letting the happy smile turn into a more solemn one, equally fake, but easier for me to pull off. Took less practice. “Mels, I have something to tell you. Can you listen and remember? Because it’s really, really important.”

She clutched the pony closer to her thin chest covered in a daisy-patterned shirt, put out by the serious turn to our fun. “What?” I could see her unhappiness in the pout that pulled at her lips and paled skin under freckles half the size of pennies and the same copper color.

I shifted on my backpack uncomfortably; faking people skills wasn’t hard, but I was out of the habit as no one had been too curious about us since we’d moved here. Plus, now I was fourteen, a teenager with a license to be surly. It was expected.

Until now.

I kept my eyes on hers, as friendly and innocent as I could keep them. When I looked at people, genuinely looked and for long enough, they turned away. Not my brother, not him, but other people did. They saw something there they didn’t see in a casual glance. I didn’t know what, but they didn’t look too long, the way you didn’t try to stare down a big junkyard dog. Friendly, innocent, shy, they were only extra things I learned to fake along the way. An hour or two and a mirror and it was no problem, but I had to remember to do it. Honestly, I’d rarely bothered even before the sanctified sullen teen years, just for special occasions. For Melanie, I would try my best. I needed her to believe me, completely and absolutely.

“The man who gave you your pony?” I said, and she immediately whipped the pony behind her back, away from me. “No. That’s not what I mean. You can keep the pony. You should. You should never give the pony back. That was a bad man and he might ask for it back, but you should never go with him. He might try to give you more toys, but don’t take them. Don’t let him get near you. You should run if you see him again. You should run and scream. He’s a bad man, an evil man. He’s worse than evil. He’s a monster.”

“The man who gave me my pony? The one who was right there?” She pointed at where I sat, close enough to touch, and her finger shook. “He was a monster? Like the boogety-man under my bed?” she asked, her breath caught, voice wispy and frightened, eyes wet and wide.

Who the hell let this kid wander around alone and so damn clueless?

“That’s right,” I grabbed onto her belief hard. If she already was a big believer in the bogeyman, that was easier to go with than explaining a child molester. “He is the boogety-man from under your bed, but he got loose and now he’s out in the world. He wants to steal little girls and boys, eat them up, and he could be anywhere.”

That was harsh putting on a kid, although it was no harsher than the reality of my own “boogety-men.” I didn’t feel guilty about it. No one knew quite like I did that some mental scarring was worth it to stay alive. Mels, unbelievably na?ve, needed all she could get to stay safe. The invisible man wasn’t the only human monster out there. “You should tell your mom and dad about him being in the park, giving you the pony.”