Chapter Eight
Possessive Ogres
Vice Principal Krinkle was organizing his pens when they knocked at the door. “Can I help you?” And with the way the man said it, the words sounded more like, ‘I wish you weren’t here right now.’
Hilary took a breath. “Mrs. Ermhart sent us to speak to you.”
Krinkle slipped the last pen carefully into its sleeve and let the flap fall closed over them, a doting parent wishing his children goodnight. “Ermhart? You were late then.”
“A little.”
Krinkle reached into his desk and pulled out a second pen roll. “Wait in the hall for a few minutes before going back to class and try not to be late again—for both our sakes.”
Trenton turned to leave, but Hilary caught the boy by the sleeve and said, “Sir, she didn’t send us here because we were late.”
Trenton looked at him, and Hilary knew what the boy was thinking because he was wondering it himself. What the hell was he doing?
Krinkle was irritated into looking up, “What was it then?”
Trenton wasn’t going to say it for him. The boy was looking at him, amused, as if betting internally to see if he’d go for it. Hilary took another breath and unclenched his teeth. “Someone ruined our textbooks.”
“Ruined?”
Trenton’s mouth twitched. The idiot was having the time of his life.
“They…used their body fluids.”
Krinkle didn’t understand but knew enough not to ask. “What do you want me to do about it?”
“Nothing. I’m just telling you why we were sent here.”
“I see.”
Krinkle touched one of his pens, a navy blue with silver trim. He seemed to be regretting coming into school that day. Well, he wasn’t the only one.
“Do you know who did it?” the man asked.
“I know the person behind it, though not the particular…donors, in this case.”
Krinkle moved onto the next pen—a chunky fellow and a deep red. “You’re the new boy, right? The one who transferred in this year?”
“Yes.”
“Unfortunate. That’s unfortunate.”
Hilary had heard those words before—enough to know what they meant.
“So you’re not going to do anything?” It was Trenton, making a reappearance now that the entertaining part of the confrontation was over.
Krinkle fiddled with the flap on his pen pouch. “Situations like this are delicate. It’s easy to make them worse.”
“Then you’re letting us handle it on our own?”
The words alarmed Krinkle like nothing else. “I don’t want any violence.”
Trenton’s look had the man shriveling a little, though it seemed neither had much more to say to the other.
“Come,” Trenton said to Hilary, “we’re done here.”
They spent the rest of the class on the window with the heater. When the bell rang, Trenton took a moment to finish his paragraph, then looked up at Hilary and offered the usual hand out to take his bag. “Ready?”
They were halfway to their place in the parking lot when Trenton got the call, though he made no move toward it until he was nudged to pick it up.
“I’m not going today,” was the way Trenton answered the phone. The boy really needed lessons in human interaction. There was a brief pause, and then, “I don’t know. I’m busy.”
The person on the other end was still trying to speak when Trenton hung up.
Hilary was almost impressed. “That’s got to be the worst thing I’ve ever witnessed.”
“I told you I was rude.”
“Who was that? A friend?”
“Someone from the dojo.”
Dojo. It was a strange word, and one he probably hadn’t heard before in real life. Still, it stirred a vague reminder. “You do martial arts, right?”
“Aikido.”
Hilary didn’t know what that was, but it sounded impressive. “Like kung fu?”
“It’s Japanese.”
“Fancy.”
Trenton’s lips curled a little. “You’re cute.”
That might have flustered him. “Don’t patronize me.”
“I wasn’t.” And he hadn’t been. That was why Hilary was flustered.
He tried to get the conversation back on track. “Have you been skipping out on the dojo, then?” But the answer was obvious. Between work, tutoring, and following him around, Trenton didn’t have time for anything else.
“I can go whenever.”
“Then you should go now,” Hilary decided.
“Is this your way of getting out of math?”
“FUCK math.”
Those lips curled again. “I put both our textbooks in my bag this time just in case of another defenestration,” the boy said.
It was another word Hilary had never heard before, but he wouldn’t give Trenton the satisfaction of asking what it meant. “You shouldn’t skip. If you stop doing something involving physical skill, even for a short time, it becomes hard to—”
“I want to be with you.”
Hilary somehow managed that one without a heart attack. Maybe that was what left him cocky enough to say, “Then I’ll come with.”
Trenton stopped. And it made the surrounding air stiffer, heavier all of a sudden. When Trenton realized it, he grabbed for Hilary’s hands. “Yes.”
But it was too late; the embarrassment was already terminal. Had it sounded like he was inviting himself along? Like he was a loser who couldn’t occupy himself otherwise.
But Trenton’s expression had changed again, very serious all of a sudden. “You’ll come, won’t you?”
It made Hilary even shyer. “You want me to?”
“I always want you.”
Fucking hell. “You really don’t know how to speak to humans, do you?”
“That phrasing assumes I’m better with some other species.”
Right, there probably wasn’t an animal alive the boy couldn’t reduce to a puddle of embarrassment.
That stupid mouth twitched again. “If you won’t come, we can go to the studio instead so I can see you dance,” Trenton offered.
The Shitheap was nearly at hand, but it wouldn’t rescue him. He was between a rock and harder rock. “Maybe if you ask in a less embarrassing way.”
“Then teach me how not to be embarrassing.”
“If that were possible, I would have done it already. Stop pulling.”
But Trenton didn’t stop pulling—seemingly urgent, like it all required a great hurrying. “When I introduce you to the others, can I call you my friend? Or should I only use that word between us?”
“What does it matter? It’s not like it’s private.”
“Isn’t it?”
“Stop being weird.”
But Trenton was even better at being weird than he was at being embarrassing, though the kids at the dojo were kind of weird too.
“Are you the dancer?” was the first thing one of them—a boy named Casey—asked. He was almost pathologically friendly, and also had far too much energy.
So much for Trenton’s offer of privacy. “He told you about me?”
It was the girl, Savannah, who explained. “He’s been like Fort Knox, mostly, but we know he ditched us for ballet recently, and that there had to be an instigator. You’re really handsome.”
Well, at least she’d said handsome. Only his dad ever called him handsome. “You can have him back.”
Trenton didn’t like any of that. “Don’t flirt with him.”
Savannah rolled her eyes. “I’m a lesbian, jackass.”
“That didn’t stop Aspen.”
“Who the fuck is—”
It was time to cut in. “Are you going to do your Aikido or not?” Hilary demanded. He never liked being the center of attention, and certainly not when he was sure Trenton would only continue to heap on more embarrassing garbage.
“I told you,” the boy said, proving the prophecy true, “I’d rather be with you.”
Casey solved it by pulling Hilary physically into the action. They even got him a uniform, though Trenton told him he didn’t have to wear it.
Aikido was different from what Hilary thought it would be. It didn’t seem like fighting at all, and he accidentally impressed the others a couple of times.
“You’re like a rubber band,” Savannah said. “I didn’t know joints could stretch that much.”
And this from a girl who could kick straight up into the air.
“It’s just from stretching.”
“If I stretched like that, my leg would crack off.”
Trenton wasn’t helping, puffing his friend up every chance he could get. “You should see his fouettes.”
“His what?”
They tried pushing Hilary to demonstrate, which only made him shyer. “I don’t have my shoes with me.”
It was a bluff someone called with an offer to make a run to the studio.
And so Hilary was forced to show them, cheeks flushed and hoping he could blame it on exertion—exertion that turned out to be real when he found himself encouraged by the cheers and Casey’s ridiculous whistles, to do at least five revolutions too many, a little dizzy when he finally stopped.
Trenton was crabby. “You showed them so easily.”
“I showed you too, didn’t I?”
“Not when I asked.”
Hilary could have grumbled at that but found himself capitulating instead. “We’ll go to the studio tomorrow. Don’t sulk.”
Hilary thought that would be the end of it, but when Casey was trying to demonstrate something to him, Trenton appeared from nowhere and wrenched the boy’s hand off his shoulder. “Don’t touch him.”
Trenton wasn’t quite all the way to angry, but there was something almost savage about the set of his mouth that had Casey truly apologizing. It was all a load of crap.
“Are ogres always this possessive?” Hilary asked once they were back in the car.
Trenton was driving again, as the Shitheap seemed to like him better than its true owner. “When it’s important.”
“And this was important, was it?”
Trenton was so insulted, Hilary had to take his hand to placate him. “Don’t be so prickly.”
Trenton liked having his hand. In fact, he liked it so much he refused to let it go even once they were back inside, but no one at the house seemed to find it strange, even when the boy kept dropping his food into his lap because he was trying to eat with the non-dominant one.
Albert wanted to try Aikido too. “You know, I had some great moves back in the day.”
Hilary called the bluff. “Are they the same moves that threw out your back last week?”
“That was from changing the light bulb in the bathroom.”
“I thought you left that kind of thing to Mom.”
“That’s what I like about you, Hilly. You always use both hands to crush my manhood. You never half-ass it.”
Hilary decided he’d let Trenton drive the Shitheap home. It made more sense than letting the boy freeze to death waiting out in the parking lot for him every day. But Trenton made him bundle up properly to see him off, even when he was only walking him out to the car.
“Can I do this at school too?” Trenton asked, holding up their still-linked hands through the window.
“If you don’t mind having our lockers drowned in spunk.”
Trenton seemed to debate it, and for so long that Hilary wrenched his hand free. “Don’t be dumb.”
Trenton was too big to look so bereft, so after only a few moments Hilary sighed and gave the hand back. Trenton was very pleased.
“I liked showing you off today,” the boy admitted.
“I’m not your pet.”
“Even so.”
Hilary should have pulled his hand back again, but it really was chilly out and Trenton was a little too warm to give up.