The Unfortunate Story of Roddy Mayhem, Julie Steimle [i can read book club TXT] 📗

One

My favorite spot used to be on the beach. Not anymore. Not since she came in the mornings and surfed.

Who is she?

What is she?

I’ll tell you. A demon.

All the little imps tell me so. She is the most dangerous demon in the western hemisphere. I can’t say in the world, because I don’t know about the world.

Yeah, demons. They’re everywhere.

I know what you’re thinking.

‘He’s crazy. He’s lost it. I don’t see any demons.’

Well, duh. They’re invisible.

…Now you really think I’m nuts.

That’s ok. Everybody does, until I make something move without touching it. Or when I suddenly end up with your wallet while standing five feet away. Or when I walk through walls or go transparent. Then you believe me.

You also scream, and call for the police and say I’m a demon.

Well, I am. Sorta. Half, really.

My mom was human. Or so I heard. My father was some guy, they said, that she met at a party one Halloween night. He had an awesome costume, she had told them. She got drunk. One thing led to another and well…you know. It was bad.

But she didn’t believe in abortion, which I am grateful for—believe me. But she was delusional, they said. She was a crazy brainwashed evangelical, some other people said. She had initially decided, in fact, to keep me. That was the plan. She was a romantic, they said. Not very practical. In fact, she had all the blue baby clothes picked out, little squishy footballs, and colorful Noah’s ark crib bumpers and baby carriers. But then she gave birth to me. And they saw me for real.

Deformed, they said.

Irregularly shaped skull, they said.

Weird appendages on my back, they said. Possible extra arms, they said. It could be removed with surgery, they said.

And I was possibly blind.

My mother sobbed uncontrollably when she heard this awful news. And when she saw me, she screamed.

I was a child of the devil, she said. Demon spawn. After all, she had been raped that night.

I had orange eyes. Reddish orange fuzz coloring the top of my mostly bare scalp. Olive skin. And those bumps on my head, and those things coming out of my back, were unnatural. Horns and wings, you know.

Well, she was partly right about me. I was demon spawn. Kind of. More like minor-demon spawn. Imp-spawn.

I figured it out ages ago—after she had abandoned me at the hospital. After the hospital tried to set me up for adoption. After I was put into an orphanage since clearly no one wanted to adopt an orange-eyed freak who could see and hear things no one else could and had extra wing-like appendages coming out of his back, and could slip through solid objects.

After some moron named me Rhodes Smith.

What kind of name was that? Really?

I go by Roddy, by the way. Roddy Mayhem.

I chose it myself. It sounded like a rock band somewhere. And I thought it was cool.

Anyway, I’m not schizophrenic, I swear. Highly distracted, but not schizophrenic. The invisible things I hear and see are real. In fact, I figured it out around the time I was kicked out of my fifth foster home for dropping my foster brother’s pirate ship Legos into the toilet while playing Maelstrom (I should have used the bathtub drain with the grate—I see that now. Too late, of course). I was five.

But anyway, around then I found out all those little flying shoulder devils were in fact my relatives on my dad’s side. I never met him, of course. But I had asked all those little invisible dudes all about themselves. And they didn’t just tell me, they demonstrated.

Imps, they explained (with acrobatics and lots of things flying around the room so that people thought I was possessed), loved mischief. Those little invisible devils fed off it. Imps literally did not eat anything else. This is why they constantly shouted tempting things for people to do. If they can get people to do naughty things, they eat. If humans don’t listen to them or ignore them, they starve. I can usually tell a straight-shooting human being from a crooked one pretty easily by how fat or thin the imps that follow them are. Goody-goodies have starving imps. A lot of foster parents had fat imps. And they scared me.

I ran away a lot.

Here is another fascinating fact: imp’s tiny wings (which I inherited and did not get removed in an operation, thank you very much) made them lighter than air—which is why such tiny bat-like wings could carry such short evil cherub-looking things so easily. Their wings also make it so they can be (and usually are) invisible, walk through solid objects, and move wicked fast. I had inherited those traits too.

Another one: Their orange eyes (which I also inherited, and is not a sign of blindness) made it so they can see all sorts of invisible, supernatural things…. Things like elves trying not to be seen, little goblins, redcaps, and even angels of death (which give me the willies and make we want to pee my pants as they are freaky-deaky weird).

I asked them about the horns though. I had them. And they said very few ‘halfs’ like me got them. I was special, they said. Those little nubby horns in my scalp were a blessing, they swore to me. However, they refused to tell me why some imps had huge curling ram-sized horns while others had tiny nubs like me. I later figured it out though. The larger the horns, the older the imp. But also, the more dangerous the imp. Besides, what I really got out of that conversation was that there were other half-imps like me.

Others like me.

When I realized there were others like me—halfs as they liked to call them—I was intrigued. In fact, I started to search for them. I ran away from my last foster home in hopes to find the others like me. After all, someone like me had to be someone I could make friends with, right? Someone who understood my pain.

Right?

So you can expect how I reacted when I met my first half-imp ever and recognized him for what he was. I thought, Hey, maybe we could be friends! Hang out! Buddy up and watch each other’s backs, like family.

Nope.

That half decked me and then stole the last bit of money I had. Halfs are just like everybody else, only a little more dangerous.

So… let’s fast forward to now. Here I am, fifteen, living on the streets. I learned the hard way that half-imps were the same as humans in their slyness, prejudice, and cruelty. And the ones with the big round horns were darn near evil. I learned to avoid them like I avoid that surfing demon woman who now comes to my beach.

It was just not fair.

The beach had been my only home.

My favorite hangout is on the pier not far from the beach where the surfers regularly abandon their boards and little wallets. One, because there is a really awesome hotdog vendor not far at the end of the pier, and two, if I steal a dollar here and there from each of their wallets, they hardly notice they have lost anything, and I can get lunch.

Living on the streets isn’t so bad. Skid row is a bit stinky… but it is what I’ve got.

Well, was what I had.

Ok, I am going to rant about that demon lady again. Just for a bit.

First off, how dare she just fly in with a surfboard, all invisible like and just drop into the water? I mean really, how is it nobody notices?

Ok, I am being dumb. She is flying invisible. But her wings are HUGE. I mean, if anyone could see them, they would just get chills down their spines. And she honestly looks scarier than the local vampires. I’ve seen a few of those, and they are freaky-deaky—but not as freaky as her. Vampires, for starters, aren’t all that cool. They smell funny, can only come out at night, and they avoid me as if they know instinctively that I would be trouble for them.

And angels of death had started watch her.

Angels of death were these big scary winged angel guys. They were bad luck. They always showed up when someone gets killed. They didn’t kill anybody themselves, but they were bad omens. They terrified me—but they also kept out of her sight as if her seeing them would spoil something.

Ok, enough ranting.

The thing is, I have so very little in this life. Just the other day, Jester—a halfer from the Unseelie Gang—came looking for someone to push around, and it was around the time I was getting ready to sleep in a vacant doorway—and this guy, some blonde med student, had just handed me a twenty… which is like unheard of on most days. And Jester snatched up that twenty and said it was back taxes for sleeping on the gang’s streets without joining the membership. I mean, I am used to them taking money from me, though I’ve usually gotten my cash broken down into smaller bills so I could hide the majority of it and give them the pocket change I usually get from people who want to give ‘charity’. But man, that twenty… I had no time to go to a store to split it. And then later I saw that blonde dude hanging out with that little miss demon lady as if he had no clue she was a monster. It was depressing.

I went and looked for a different sleeping spot after that—this time under the pier. And that’s where I woke this morning.

I felt sandy and a little wet from the rising tide. It was a good thing I’m able to float a bit on the air so I could reach the land before the tide really got high and submerged me. But when I got to dry ground, she was already on the beach. She never brings anything when she comes—no bags, no wallets, no nothing. So, I quickly went to gather my own small collection of stuff, which I usually stash in a locker that I had actually broken the lock to so no one could open it. I am able to stick my hand through the solid door and pull out anything I grab. Inside this locker was my collection of Hellboy comic books, a small portion of my money (I have stashes everywhere around the city so it is not like I ‘put all my eggs into one basket’), and a change of clothes. So I kind of freaked out when I felt a paper bag inside my locker that morning.

And it felt warm.

I retracted my hand, fingers shaking.

This was unprecedented. Very few people I knew were able to put something into my locker. They had to have the same skill set as I did—you know, the ability to go through solid objects. And of those that I knew, none of them were aware I had this locker. I had made sure of it.

But, my curiosity got the better of me. I reached into the locker again and pulled out the warm bag. And when I saw it, I stared.

It was a fast food bag. Yellow and red writing on it.

I opened it.

Sure enough, inside was food.

I pulled it out, inspecting the contents of the paper wrapping. There was a warm sausage and egg sandwich with English muffins for bread. It also contained some hash browns. I hadn’t had those in ages. And the weirdest part of all, all the imps around me looked like they were not having any fun.

It sent a shiver through me.

That meant it was legit. Not stolen. Not poisoned or even spiked. No mischief at all. Imps always cackled when a good joke was