Part 13 ~ The Good Sort

Sidonie soon found out why Pretty was not concerned by the presence of Dan’s gang.  Instead of heading back into the music filled main area, she pulled Sidonie along toward the opposite end of the hallway.  An Exit sign glowed above the door, making her intentions clear.

She pushed open the door, and Sidonie followed obligingly out into the night.  She found herself not in another alley, but a small enclosed back yard.  There were empty crates and broken down cardboard boxes near a dumpster a few feet from the door.  A small shed stood against the tall wooden fence that surrounded the area.  Pretty took a couple long strides over to an old, seedy looking couch that slouched up against the wall.

“Cozy, isn’t it,” she observed wryly,  watching Sidonie’s face as she took in the sight.  “I used to work here.  We put the couch out so we could take a break, have a nice quiet smoke.”

“You don’t work here anymore?”

“Nah.”

Sidonie waited for some sort of elaboration, but it didn’t come.  She stood awkwardly, hands in pockets, not sure she wanted to sit next to Pretty on the dodgy couch.

“I can tell you’re a good sort of person,” Pretty declared, resting her head on one hand as she surveyed her guest.  “It’s a gift of mine, you could say.  I don’t know a thing about you, but I can sense it, you know?”

“You’re psychic?”

Pretty snorted.  “Eh.  I’m attuned to that wavelength, I suppose, but it’s not like I’m going to tell your fortune or anything.  It’s just I don’t have to bother with getting to know people before I’ve got a sense what they’re like.  What they’re capable of.”

“What am I capable of?”

“What you aren’t capable of, is the thing.”

“Oh?”

Pretty nodded.  Her casual demeanor shifted, slightly.  She leaned forward, resting her elbows on her knees, and said, “You found my brother’s body.  Someone murdered him.”

Sidonie nodded.

“Since I don’t know you, don’t know what you were doing there, don’t know where you came from, I might be suspicious of you.”

“I can see that.”

Sidonie couldn’t see herself beating a boy to death and then stringing him up – for one she was small and weak – but she supposed a stranger was a stranger, and you probably shouldn’t underestimate what a strange new slip of a girl was capable of.

“But you’re not the type.”  Pretty shrugged and settled back.  “So.”

Or you could, if you were Pretty.  Apparently.

“So?” she prompted, feeling curious why Pretty wanted to talk to her if she wasn’t a suspect.

“You’re new to the Ghetto.  You’re from Rivalie?”

She nodded.

“How’d you get mixed up with Danior Maianzel’s bunch?”

“Parentage,” Sidonie said.  She took her hands out of her pockets and went over to sit down, deciding that the couch was probably safe enough.  This girl, with her claims to not-psychic powers, might have a lot of answers to questions about Dan.

“Parentage?” Pretty echoed.

“Rian Maianzel was my father.”  She looked down at her hands, folded in her lap.  “Apparently.”

Pretty made an intrigued humming noise.

“What about you?  You seem to know them.”

Pretty shrugged.  “The Ghetto is small.  Everyone knows everyone.”  She looked at the ground and scuffed a discarded cigarette with her sneakered foot.  “Everyone knew Bravo.”

“I’m sorry about your brother.”

“Yeah.  It hasn’t really sunk in yet.  I don’t know.  We’re having a funeral for him tomorrow.  I guess I’ll fall apart and get all weird then.  Right now I’m just . . . pissed.”  Pretty turned a crooked smile on her as she spoke candidly.  It might be a grimace.

Sidonie offered her a mirrored smile in return.  “I know how you feel.” Pretty snorted again.  The maybe-smile disappeared.  “That’s what everyone says.  No one does.  You can’t know what it’s like till it happens to you.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Sidonie agreed, and let it drop.  She thought about Calvin Ardash, in his housecoat, sipping from a cup of morning coffee, telling her to have a good day at school, and then let the thought pass away.  She couldn’t even recall the last image of her mother.

“I need you to tell me about it.”

“What?”

“Old Bromia.  When you found my brother.  I need to know what happened.”

“I just found him in the tree,” Sidonie said, shaking her head.  “I didn’t see what happened to him.”

“Why were you in Old Bromia in the first place?  You know that it’s forbidden, right?”

Sidonie looked away, scratched her arm, thinking about that night.  The memory didn’t seem real; it seemed like the foggy after impression of a dream, and she didn’t know how Pretty would react.  She didn’t have the so-called gift of knowing what sort of things a stranger was capable of.

“What do you think happened?” she asked, avoiding the question.

“I don’t know.”

“Do you suspect my brother?”

It was an odd phrase for her to say, and she still hesitated over the words “my brother.”  She’d never had cause to use them in 17 years of living.

It was Pretty’s turn to look uncomfortable.  “It’s complicated,” she said.  “I know him.  I used to know him.  I don’t think he would . . . he would do that sort of thing.  But then I remember that I don’t really know him anymore.  He changed after Rivalie.”

“After Rivalie?”  Sidonie frowned.

Pretty raised an eyebrow, but explained, “The time he went to Rivalie, and came back in a wheelchair.”

“What happened?”

Pretty shrugged.  “He didn’t say.  I think Alex knows, but he might be the only one.  Everyone just accepts that it happened, because things like that happen in Rivalie.  To broms, anyway.”  That inquisitive eyebrow shot up again.  “I’m surprised you lived there all your life and were fine.  I mean, you’re a brom, even if you weren’t born and raised Ghetto-side.”

“I guess I’m lucky,” Sidonie observed, and was sure that the irony would be lost on Pretty.  She knew nothing.  She didn’t even know why Sidonie had suddenly, after 17 years, come to the Ghetto.  Sidonie wasn’t about to tell her; not unless she asked.

“Maybe you are.  Bobby and Alex are that way.  They’ve been to Old Bromia and Rivalie more than anyone else.”  Her face darkened and she fell into a reflective silence.  Sidonie wondered if she was contemplating Bobby or Alex as the murderer . . . or murderers.  Something made her balk at this idea.

“I don’t think they’d hurt anyone,” she said, voicing the thought out loud almost unintentionally.

Pretty smiled briefly.  “Not Bobby.  Alex, maybe.  If it was someone he didn’t know.”

“But everyone knew your brother, you said.”

She nodded.  “I don’t really suspect them.  I should; they are the ones everyone else suspects.  Alex and Bobby, carrying out Dan’s orders.  It’s what they do, right?  And if Bravo was going to Old Bromia, he was directly disobeying Dan.  My family won’t dare to say it but they all believe it in their hearts.”

“But you don’t.”

Pretty sighed and slouched back against the sofa, her back curled into a perfect little back shaped indent.  “If only it were that easy.  But I know what my intuition tells me.  It’s never been wrong before.  What happened to Bravo was far too . . . brutal.  Too extreme.  Dan wouldn’t do that just because a little boy was breaking the rules.  If Alex or Bobby caught Bravo in Old Bromia they’d grab him by the ear and take him back home, and Dan would give the whole damn family a stern warning.  This is something different.  This is . . . I don’t know what this is.  I don’t know anyone in the Ghetto who would do this to Bravo.”

Sidonie didn’t say it, but she had grown up slightly in fear of the broms.  Even as the daughter of the one woman who had lived among them and written about them, she couldn’t ignore the rumors that circulated about them.  Wild, crazy, dangerous.  Exactly the sort who might do what had been done to Bravo, if given a reason, or were simply high on Bleeding Flower.

“You still haven’t told me what happened,” Pretty said, breaking the silence as a look of remembrance passed over her face.

Sidonie leaned back into the twin back shaped indent next to her, and worried her hands together inside her jacket pockets.  Finally, she decided to tell Pretty just how it had happened.  Not why she had come to be staying at the One and Only – not that much – but how she had felt compelled to go out into the night and been led by the phantom boy and the not-ruined bicycle towards Old Bromia.

Pretty did not look surprised, or even skeptical.  She listened with a flat line of a mouth and dark, unreadable eyes.  But it was the stoic silence of someone who might cry if she spoke.  Whose strong façade would break if she let herself really think about what she was hearing.  Sidonie didn’t need to have any uncanny sense to understand that look.

She didn’t describe Bravo’s body in detail.  Chances were that Pretty had looked at his corpse already.  She got to the end of her story, when Bobby and Alex met her on the road, and then mirrored Pretty’s silence.  They both stared at the door to the Bleeding Flower, where yellow light leaked from the bottom and the faint noises of music floated as if from miles away.

Finally Pretty asked, “Do you still have the bike?”

Sidonie nodded, then said, “Yes,” because Pretty was not looking at her.  “I was out last night, again, but it wasn’t the same.  It was just a smashed up bike, no one could possibly ride it.”

Pretty sat up straight, shook her head, said slowly, “It means his spirit is gone.  He led you to his body, and now he’s at peace.”

“Would you like the bike back?”

“No.”  She shook her head again.  “It’s just a fucking bike.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.  I just . . . I was out looking for him.  I don’t know why he didn’t come to me.”

Pretty stood up abruptly, nearly leaping from the couch.  Sidonie looked up in surprise, wondering how she could go from slouched to standing so quickly.

“Do you want to get out of here?” Pretty asked, zipping up her hoodie as if in preparation for an adventure.  “This place is lame tonight.”

“I, um . . . .”  Sidonie got up more slowly, and scratched her head.  She was still unused to feeling short little hairs there instead of reaching through long stringy locks.

“I can show you parts of the Ghetto those killjoys in there would never take you.”  She jerked her head towards the club.

Sidonie was tempted.  She had been cultivating a new habit of saying yes to anyone who invited her to go anywhere, and of deserting her new “family” to go exploring, but something stopped her this time.  She looked down at the wristwatch that Bobby had given her; she was wearing it now, not because she needed to know what time it was, but because it made her feel . . . something . . . to have it on her arm.  She didn’t know how to explain it, not even to herself.

“I can’t.  Not right now,” she said.  “It would upset them, and it’d get back to Dan, and well . . . .”

“Yeah.  Dan.  He can be a real pain in the ass.”

Sidonie smiled.  She realized it only a moment after it formed on her face.  How unusual.

“Come to the One and Only later tonight,” she said on impulse.  “The side exit in the alley.  After midnight.  I can be out until 4am.”

Pretty cocked her head to the side; evaluating, it seemed.

“You sneak out every night, then?”

“Well, I’ve only been here for two nights.  This one makes three.”

“Every night, then.”

She gave another shrug, as if to say, “So?”

Pretty quirked a brief smile that, like most of her smiles, didn’t quiet reach her eyes.  It didn’t make Sidonie distrust her, though she knew that unsmiling eyes were supposed to mean dishonestly.  They could also just mean sadness, she thought.

“Ok,” Pretty said.  “I’ll come by.”

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