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

about to be played. It was just ordinary breakfast.

Some halfer had given me breakfast.

It had to have been a halfer, because who else could have put it into my locker?

I unwrapped all the food and scarfed it down fast. Who knew how long it would stay warm and delicious. But in the bottom of the bag, as I was balling it up for the trash, I found a store gift card—one of those you take to a shopping center with money already on them. This one was worth a hundred bucks—with a sticky note attached to it in feminine handwriting. It said: Stealing is a bad habit. Do you need a job?

In this moment I knew that this was not from one of the halfs that I was acquainted with. When I first grabbed the bag, I thought maybe one of gang had bought it for me. Like a peace offering or bribe. Bait. You know. Or maybe a pity offering, which considering the behavior of the imps around me seemed most likely. Someone like Piranha or that bow-tie fanatic kid Spastic. They’ve secretly slipped me stuff whenever Dervish and Jester aren’t looking. But there was no way they had a hundred bucks to throw away. No way. And there was definitely no way they would have said stealing was a bad habit. They stole all the time. It was how they survived. Someone else was watching me.

I hurried away from the beach.

 

But first I stuffed that store card in one of my inside pockets. I had about fifty of them—pockets. Not gift cards. One can never have enough secret pockets.

And I finished my breakfast at a walk.

I decided that maybe it was some do-gooder weirdo who had given me the card and breakfast. But I still had no clue how they had opened my locker. I hadn’t tried to see if someone had actually fixed the lock and had opened it the natural way. Perhaps I should have.

Sand was in my shoes when I marched in toward the boardwalk where all sorts of beach things were on sale and early beach-goers were strolling about. As I walked past, I told one imp to steal me a pair of beach shorts and some flip-flops. I slipped both on when I turned a corner into an alley between buildings, yanking off the tags. And when I marched toward my favorite crab shack where they always tossed out the leftover all-you-can-eat fish for the cats, I snatched a crab leg and couple fish fingers and slipped off toward the parking lot where lots of cars were waiting to be ‘visited’.

Ok, I am not proud of this, but people leave the stupidest things in cars, and I have no need to bust open windows or even set off car alarms to get what I want. I got a really nice cell phone charger from one. I have a pretty cool iPad that was left on a back seat of another. I can always get loose change from the ashtrays, of course—but I can pick up all sorts of things from these empty vehicles, including wallets, shoes, umbrellas, cell phones, and sunglasses. I’ve even picked up canned and boxed stuff from grocery bags—usually picking one when there are multiples in the bags. It is how I get most of my food. I’ve gotten so much bottled water and cigarettes this way. This morning, I reaped one basket of strawberries (they left a whole box in the back seat, so they don’t have the right to complain), a donut from a box of them (never be greedy), this funky Bluetooth earpiece thingy (which was way cool tech) from an expensive hybrid car, and a pair of galoshes (You never know when you will need galoshes).

In fact, I think I just want to say that word.

Galoshes.

Galoshes, galoshes, galoshes.

But anyway, I stuffed them all (except for the strawberries, which I was eating) into an eco-friendly bag I picked up from the back of a truck on my way through, and attempted to head on in toward the city park.

Attempted. Because that was when stupid Mutton and Skunk showed up—one converging on my right and the other on my left. Both of them were nasty halfers which I generally avoided on all days.

“Dervish wants to see you,” Mutton said in his deep meat-head voice.

OK, first off, Mutton is a mutton-head. The dude was seriously older than Dervish, a halfer built like he was nothing but huge hams from his thighs to his biceps. Solid, you know. The kind of guy who can crack walnuts in the crook of his arm, and sometimes did. And he had thick, uneven horns, which in public he kept covered with a stupid fedora. He was basically an evil dude. He kicked cats for fun.

 I tried to slip through, but Skunk latched onto my arm and made sure I could get no farther than a step. The problem with Skunk was that he was such a skunk. He wasn’t only just stinky—from his breath to his body odor—but the dude looked like a skunk who had fallen in a vat of rainbow paints, then in a bin of nails and chains, was blow-dried upside down, hung by his ears. I don’t think there was one part of his body that hadn’t been pierced. He was addict for piercing—among other things. Also his eyes were often dilated and bloodshot. His nose always looked inflamed. If he could snort it, breathe it, or shoot it up, he’d do it. It was a wonder he was still alive.

“Ah, come on, guys,” I moaned, wriggling to get out of their grips. “I’m all paid up. Jester took all I had yesterday.”

But they just laughed.

And they dragged me between them to the basement entrance of the club where they hung out.

Those Punks

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two

 

 

OK, I need to tell you all about this club.

It is a two level sort of place. The building was old, or looked it. The façade was brick, but I knew it had been seismically refitted in the nineties so it really wasn’t. The upstairs establishment was this run-of-the mill bar. They don’t serve kids under twenty-one there, and they cater to the crowd that just wants to be mellow, drink and watch sports, or to play pool. Pretty dull, if you ask me. I avoid it. But the underground establishment where Dervish reigns is something else. First off, only members or would-be members of the Unseelie Gang are allowed in the club—not counting those folk Dervish does business with. His bosses, Speed (another halfer jerk in the gang) calls them. Our bosses, Ricotta calls them. And when they dragged me down to the basement, I was dreading it.

You see, I don’t wanna be in the Unseelie Gang. I liked my independence. And though all of them are half-imps like me, their gang was nothing but a bunch of back-stabbers and bullies. Control freaks of the annoying kind—if I was being nice. If I want to be accurate, they were the nastiest pieces of half-imps I had ever met. And that is saying something.

Mutton and Skunk set me in front of the chief back-stabbing bully, Dervish, as soon as we were inside.

Dervish was this dude in his twenties. I don’t know exactly how old, and I really don’t care. The guy’s sneaky, lanky, fast, and freaky. His black hair hardly hid his small thin curling horns, which was why he always wore a hat in public—often a fedora, though he also liked baseball caps worn backwards with holes for his horns, pretending they were additions to the hat rather than part of his head. I never dared tell him his hat was stupid. Currently he was playing air hockey with Thug—another one of those older but brainless halfs with stubby horns.

“Roddy, Roddy, Roddy,” Dervish said, gazing on me as if I had done something naughty and he needed to discipline me. “What have you been doing lately?”

“Nuttin,” I replied, gazing back at him strongly. It never paid to kowtow to Dervish. He saw ingratiation as weakness and he exploited it whenever he could. I had seen a number of poor halfers suffer under his heel to know this.

“Nuttin?” Dervish laughed. He paused in his game, plucking up the game puck in his fingers. “You say ‘nuttin’ when some dude gives you twenty bucks yesterday?”

I rolled my eyes. My shoulders sagged. “I wasn’t beggin’. This college dude just handed me the twenty and said I looked hungry.”

Dervish snorted, so much disdain in his looks as always “A guy willing to hand out twenty dollar bills to messed-up ‘hooligans’ like you has got to have a lot more money to throw away.”

I paled. I could already hear their imps shouting, suggesting we all go to that guy’s house and rob him. The worst part was, Dervish often took advice from those imps.

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “Bad idea, man. I just glean from the streets, you know.”

“Glean,” Dervish murmured with a laugh, trying to look cool. He glanced to Ricotta, who was this girl in her twenties who looked like she could be my sister. I mean, she and I have the same imp-orange hair and dark skin. But Ricotta dressed like tattered rag doll with frizzy curls and jeans about as ripped as they can get without falling off.

“Are you hearing this guy? Mr. Dictionary. Where do you get words like that?” Dervish laughed more.

“Library,” I muttered, my cheeks feeling hot. “It’s free.”

But Dervish’s laugh continued, almost painful on my ears. The guy was a tyrant. Plain and simple. You did what he said, you laughed at what he thought was funny, and you pretty much gave him everything he wanted. And why not? He was pretty nasty. He would take his (or your) smoldering cigarettes and burn your arm with them. I’ve got plenty of Dervish burn marks. A few cut marks too. He also believed that educating yourself was a waste of time. Pretentious. Halfers like us did not advance in the world among the humans. We were trash, you see. The only way to advance was to ingratiate yourself to the Unseelie Court by messing with as many human lives as possible.

Honestly, I had no clue what this Unseelie Court was. A bigger gang, I had assumed. Dervish talked about joining them all the time. The Unseelie Court this. The Unseelie Court that. They partied all the time in the Unseelie Court, he said. They rode on the winds of Halloween, he said. They were feared on at least two continents was the rumor. And they wanted to expand. Dervish wanted to become an honorary member of the Unseelie Court, just like the infamous halfer Trouble, who was a favorite of the Unseelie Court and all imps. It was Dervish’s ambition in life.

I never met this famous Trouble. He was a halfer was all I knew. But Trouble was Dervish’s idol. He said he had seen him once riding with the Unseelie Court on the Halloween Highway. And the imps bragged about Trouble incessantly. They loved him. They doted on him. Trouble was real fun. He knew the true heart of all imps, they all said. Funny thing was,