Silver and Salt(23)

“It’s like they’re not speaking English. I mean, I know the words, but I don’t understand what they mean when they say them or why they say them. I don’t understand what they’re doing or why they do it. I think there’s something wrong with me,” I’d added hesitantly, sliding down in my chair. “Besides, I’m fine with just you.” That had been true and it stayed true. As long as I had Nik, I didn’t feel alone. I was happier. I understood him. In the entire world, he might be the only person I did understand.

That had been that. Back then, he’d picked up a pen—funny that I remembered two or three years later that it had been purple like Melanie’s pony. “You think differently than they do. There’s nothing wrong with that.” From the twitch in his jaw, I had had a feeling he wasn’t writing back anything to the teacher that she’d think too nice or helpful.

“Than people do?” I’d asked.

“Not all people,” Niko had responded, “but most.” He’d kept writing, moving to the back of the note and filling it all with small script, squeezing as much as he could into the space.

“Because I’m only half a person?” And half a monster.

He had reached over the table to lightly smack the back of my head. “You don’t think right or wrong. You think practical, like a lion.” I’d told him that a long time ago, that I was practical and practical meant doing what you had to do. And doing it in the fastest and most efficient way possible, letting nothing get in your way. Nik hadn’t understood that at first, but after I’d been practical enough to set an abandoned trailer on fire as a distraction to steal antibiotics for a bad, bad case of pneumonia and a fever that made him too hot to touch, he’d seen. And that was after I’d blackmailed another neighbor, a drug-addicted ex-nurse, into treating an infected dog bite that had swollen his arm to three times its size.

Practical equaled survival.

I liked surviving.

I liked Nik surviving even more.

“The kids in your school think like squirrels,” he’d explained. “Hopping here and there, running back and forth, seeing everything at once, and that’s why they are the way they are. They see four things that need doing at once or that they just want to do. It’s like someone divided their brain into four parts, each thinking something different, but one part always holding the limits for the other three. Their parents’ limits, society’s limits, limits they were born with.”

“And I don’t?” I’d questioned, curious but not upset.

“Some, I think. My limits…when it suits you or you remember or when you think not breaking them will upset me instead of help us both.” He hadn’t said, but I’d thought then that he was thinking that I hadn’t been born with any of my own, not like the kids at school. “Unlike the kids in your class who focus on everything like the squirrels, you think like a lion. Remember what I told you when they wouldn’t let you take gym anymore? About how they told you to win the games and then gave you rules that made winning harder? It was conflicting, them telling you to win then telling you how you couldn’t.” I’d remembered. Bite off a chunk of some kid’s ear and people get upset for no reason. But I had won. I’d gone with their first assignment there: win. I’d ignored the second: rules. Rules screwed up winning.

Screwed up everything.

“It’s the same here,” Niko had said, shaking the pen for more ink. “You see one thing and you focus on that one thing. That’s why you always win. Lions don’t have to understand squirrels. They eat them.” He’d smiled then; I remembered it plain as could be. “But try ignoring them first instead, all right?” He had given me a comforting squeeze of the shoulder. “Don’t worry about them or the teacher. You’re fine the way you are. If everyone was the same, life would be boring. And I told your teacher that we’re Rom, we worship Sara-Kali, and our religious beliefs require we keep our hair long.”

“Is that true?”

“I have no idea, but neither will she.” He’d ruffled my too-long hair. “Besides, lions need a mane.”

A long time ago that had been, but nothing had changed. I knew I didn’t need friends, couldn’t have friends really, and rules still pissed me off.

“Marcus isn’t my friend. He’s in my class, that’s all.” I finished up the popcorn in the bag on my lap. “He said he left his skateboard on the stairs of their house and his grandfather tripped over it, fell, broke his neck and died.” Sad and tragic. That didn’t fail to get to Nik, and I was an * to use it…but I did. “Now he sees him all the time. He thinks his grandfather blames him. And Marcus is okay. He’s not a very good liar”—all of Sophia’s get would know a bad liar from minute one—“and he seems the kind of scared you can’t fake.”

I swiveled on the couch, threw my legs across Nik’s lap, leaned back against the ratty pillow, and crossed my arms. “What if they are real? What if someday we have to kill someone bad”—could be a murdering child molester who hadn’t learned to leave kids alone, particularly leave me alone—“and they become a ghost? You always say better safe than sorry and cover all our bases.”

And when it comes to killing, like monsters, there can’t be enough base covering.