7. Practical Approaches
The classroom was filled with the sound of pencils scraping on paper. They were so quick, those scratches. Reno peeked at his closest neighbor out of the corner of his eye. Her pencil danced across the paper with short little rasps, so fast that it seemed like one continuous sound. He looked back to his own sheet and pressed out an "e" on it, followed by an "s" in a long, uneven scrape. The girl next to him must have written a whole sentence in the same time.
Reno glanced at the clock and swore under his breath. Had it really taken half an hour to answer three fucking questions? That was only half the short ones. After those he still had an essay question to go, and his index finger already hurt so much it was hard to hold the pencil. His whole damned hand was beginning to cramp. He set it down and flexed his fingers.
Tseng had told him he needed to pass his courses. All his courses. And to pass courses, he needed to pass tests. He couldn't afford to be so damned slow!
Reno labored through a few more sentences of the short story while he gave his fingers a break, then snatched up the pencil again and formulated his next answer. By the time he'd scrawled down the last letter, his index finger felt like it was on fire. He checked the time again. Ten minutes left. Fuck.
Reno's hand formed a fist around the pencil as he stared at the test sheet in front of him. Why had he even tried? He should have known he wouldn't make it. Slum trash never made it.
Fuck it. Just fuck this shit. What use was Lit class to a Turk, anyway? The bad guys he'd known didn't go around writing novels about the fucked-up shit they did.
Gritting his teeth, Reno moved the pencil to his left hand and put the paper to better use.
Cissnei glanced down her Lit test. A neat column of ticks ending in an A, with "Excellent work!" written underneath in red ink. Just as she had expected.
Mr. Nesbitt had finished handing out the corrected tests and returned to his desk.
"Settle down, class. We still have a few minutes, so let's spend them wisely." He took a moment to scan the class. "Mr. Reno. Page sixty-three, from the top."
Cissnei watched from the corner of her eye as the redhead dragged the book into his lap and cleared his throat.
"Once upon a time, there was a was an island out in the middle of nowhere. On this island was a volcano, that spewed fire and ashes at the smallest hint of annoyance." Muffled giggles spread in the classroom, but Reno continued unperturbed. "The locals worshipped the volcano as a god, but it was a false–"
"Mr. Reno," Mr. Nesbitt interrupted in a carefully honed tone of long-suffering patience, "what are you doing?"
Smirking, Reno leaned back and slung one elbow over the back of his chair.
"Tellin' a story, 'course."
"You're meant to read the one in the book."
"Mine's better, yo."
Mr. Nesbitt opened his mouth, but the ring of the bell drowned out his first word.
"Saved by the bell, Mr. Reno," he called, raising his voice to be heard over the scraping of chairs and desks. "We'll continue this next time."
Reno threw up his hand in a wave that was more like a dismissal than an acknowledgement, then gathered up his things. When he picked up his test, his sneer vanished. He scrunched up the paper into a ball and threw it in the trash by the teacher's desk on his way out.
Cissnei hurried to return her book to the teacher's desk with the main rush. As she leaned over the end of the desk to place the book on the stack, she knocked a pen into the trash can.
"Oh! Sorry, Mr. Nesbitt!"
She ducked down to retrieve it and handed it to the teacher. A few of the others giggled, but no one noticed the crumpled wad of paper in her other hand as she scurried back to her desk.
Two minutes later Cissnei sat in a bathroom stall and smoothed out Reno's test against the books in her lap. Half the page was filled with doodling. A bunch of chocobos raced down one side, barely avoiding a pair of brawling insectoid monsters. At the bottom, a volcano with a face that was remarkably reminiscent of Mr. Nesbitt spewed lava over a classroom full of terrified stick-figure students.
A few of the questions were answered, but the handwriting was atrocious. "I won't even try to decipher this mess," the teacher had written next to them in red ink. Cissnei squinted at the scrawls in pencil. Reno's spelling was even worse than his writing, but little by little she was able to figure most of it out. The sentences were stunted and he had only answered questions about the first third of the story. The replies were correct, though.
With a frown, Cissnei folded the paper and slipped it between her books.
She spotted him just by the school house exit, standing before Troy Domino and his goons. So, the bro squad had returned. She couldn't make out what they were saying to him, but she heard his reply loud and clear.
"Blow me."
Reno tried to move around them, but Troy stepped out and smacked into him with his shoulder. Reno needed a couple of hasty steps to keep his balance. A wild-eyed grimace contorted his face into something nigh demonic. Cissnei held her breath, waiting for the explosion.
"Stay the fuck away from me!"
He pushed past Troy and practically fled through the front doors.
Cissnei had to take the long way around to avoid the snickering trio. By the time she was outside, Reno was nowhere to be seen.
The hush of a library full of students was still too loud for Cissnei. Even the crinkle of a sharply turned page was enough to break her concentration and send her thoughts adrift. Drifting to Reno, mostly, and the previous day's altercation in the hallway. She hadn't seen him since.
She thought of his remarks about the Turks, her dad, herself... How did he always manage to jab at her weakest spots?
Reno was so averse to the Turks, yet he wouldn't give her his reasons. Maybe he didn't have any. Maybe he was just angry at the world in general, and the Turks were the latest ones to earn his ire by catching him.
They didn't seem so bad to her. While she still couldn't think of Tseng without tightening her jaw, Balto seemed nice. He'd told her he spoke three languages, and encouraged her to pick up one or two while she was in high school. Cissnei liked that idea. She'd been fluent in Costan once, but had neglected the language after her mother died. She'd had no one to speak to.
The Turk had also talked of missions abroad. Frequent ones. The guy spent more time out of Midgar than in it. She could do the same, if she joined. Get away from this place.
The sudden yearning took Cissnei by surprise, but the intensity of it could not be denied. It coated the gray inside of her like a film of oil, shimmering in all the colors of the rainbow, until it had seeped into every inch of her. She didn't want to live in Midgar, where the smog sucked the life out of everything. She wanted sun, and beaches, and... and living. Not this mere existence, floating on a metal plate under a dead gray sky.
So selfish, that wish. It wasn't what her dad would have chosen... but he was gone, and if Reno was right, he wouldn't have chosen a soldier's career either. This was what she wanted, and the Turks could give her that.
She wanted.
Something shifted in her. Something so deep that it didn't reach the surface, but Cissnei could sense it. Was it good or bad? She didn't know the answer, only that it was there, that it had happened.
The distant thump of a book hitting a desk knocked Cissnei out of her reverie, and she realized she'd been staring at the same sentence for the past five minutes. With a huff, she stuffed the book in her bag and headed for the exit.
She stopped just outside the front doors, at the top of the stone staircase. The air hung still and quiet over the yard. At this hour most students were at the library or in their rooms, doing homework. Cissnei had just fled the former, and had no desire to join Shalua in the latter.
She let her gaze drift across the quadrangle, watching the buildings painted orange by the evening sun. A cloudless sky was rare in Midgar; she had never before seen the strange, elongated shapes the shadows cast across the yard. Cissnei studied them for a while, then dug out her camera from her bag.
The thought of going down behind the school building made her stomach churn, though. She headed in the opposite direction.
The administration building was dark, as she expected at this time in the evening, and the small lawn behind it was empty. The emaciated apple tree was bathed in golden light, and its branches created an intricate mesh of silhouettes on the ground. She strolled around the tree and snapped a few pictures of the shadow-play, then scanned the buildings around the lawn for more subjects. A deep alcove in the wall of the administration building drew her eye. The angle of the sun cut it diagonally into two halves of light and dark, leaving the back of it obscured in shadow.
Someone sat in the dark corner of the alcove. Their upper body was hidden in the shadows, but she could tell it was a man, the red glow of a lit cigarette between his fingers. Cissnei tensed, but when he leaned forward to lift the smoke to his lips, the lower half of his face came into view. She let out her breath and made her way over to him.
"Didn't see you in Lit class this morning."
"Lit class sucks," Reno said, with no particular emotion.
"Well, not for long. Just a couple of weeks until next quarter."
"You ask me, that's about two weeks too long."
He sat with one leg propped up close to his chest and the other stretched out before him. The smoke he breathed out rose in lazy tendrils and pooled in the alcove.
"Smoking is banned on school grounds," she commented, for want of something better to say.
"Tell that to King Bro. He's the one I got 'em from. Want one?"
He pulled out a flattened pack from the back pocket of his jeans and held it out toward her. Nine cigarettes remained. She eyed them, wondering if the taste was better than the smell. Something had to make people want to do it. Even her dad had picked up the habit while he was deployed.
Don't ever start, he had told her whenever she had caught him. Be a smart girl. They're bad for you.
Cissnei shook her head.
"Troy gave them to you?" she wondered.
Reno snickered. "'Course he didn't give 'em to me. Maybe next time he'll think twice 'bout crashin' into me like a two-ton truck made of asshole."
"You stole them? What if he..."
She trailed off as she realized what she had been about to say.
"...Tells someone I nabbed the smokes he ain't s'posed to have?" he finished for her with a smug grin on his face.
"Yeah. I get it."
He kept his cigarette between his lips while he worked the pack into his back pocket. His movements disturbed the still air and sent some of the smoke her way. Cissnei wrinkled her nose.
"Those are bad for you, you know."
"Now you sound like my ma." He took the cigarette from his mouth and raised the lit end toward his face, his lips curling slightly as he watched the thin wisp of smoke rise toward the ceiling. "She woulda kicked my ass if she'd caught me smokin'."
"Clearly you're not worried about that right now."
"You're right about that," he mumbled, and took a slow, deep drag as if to prove it.
"What if she hears about it and takes a train above-plate to kick your ass?"
He huffed softly and turned his face away to stare at the wall.
"What?" she wondered.
"Take a wild guess, Miss Top-of-the-Class."
His voice had gone flat, and Cissnei belatedly realized he had spoken of his mother in the past tense.
"She's... gone?"
"Bingo."
She should have guessed. Of all people, she should have been able to guess.
"What about your dad?"
He shrugged. "Must've had one, I guess."
"What does that mean?"
"It means that's all I know 'bout him, and that's A-okay by me. I ain't gonna give a shit about some useless fucker who couldn't even stick around 'til I was born."
Cissnei frowned. She knew what it was like to lose a parent, but to have never had one at all? Would one miss them? Was it even possible to miss someone you'd never known?
Reno didn't seem inclined to answer such questions, that much was clear.
"Mind if I join you for a bit?" she asked.
"Suit yourself, yo."
Cissnei placed her camera in her bag, then pulled out the textbook she had tried to read at the library.
"Heh. D'ya ever stop studyin'?"
"Of course I do," she said, rolling her eyes, "but the biology exam is this week."
"Eh, whatever."
He leaned back against the wall, one arm propped up on his bent knee. His hand dangled down, so loose and relaxed that she wondered how he was able to keep the cigarette wedged between his fingers. Cissnei sat down on the sunlit side to his right, next to his outstretched leg. She made sure not to touch it as she settled into a cross-legged position with her book on her knees.
A folded sheet of notepaper marked the start of the chapter on arthropod physiology. Cissnei leafed forward a couple of pages and sought out the passage she had struggled with before.
It wasn't exactly quiet, but the sounds of traffic were so muted by the tall concrete walls of the grounds that she could hear Reno's slow inhale and exhale. Out here, warmed by the embers of the setting sun, she found the peace and focus that had eluded her in the library. It was only a matter of minutes before she turned the page.
"Hey, I know that thing."
She glanced up. Reno was looking at the page with half-lidded eyes.
"This?" she asked, pointing at the picture of a green insect with shimmering wings and long segmented legs. "The kimara?"
"We call 'em spindlebugs below plate. 'Cause they're all, y'know, spindly."
Cissnei studied the picture, her eyes lingering on the wicked barbs at the ends of the forelimbs. The text said the kimara could grow as tall as a person.
"These things live down there?"
"We see 'em from time to time, yeah. Nothin' for months, and suddenly a whole bunch of 'em will crawl outta some hole. They never last long, tho'. They may be big and scary-lookin', but there's a lotta hungry people down below."
She turned her head to stare at him. He didn't seem to be joking.
"You mean... No. You didn't...?"
"They ain't bad roasted, y'know," he said, grinning. "Kinda like jerky that tastes like peanuts."
"You're kidding me."
"Hey, don't knock it 'til you try it, yo."
"I guess it can't be worse than the so-called 'stew' they serve here."
Reno chuckled and stretched forward to tap his ash into a stubborn thatch of weeds that sprouted by the side of the doorstep.
"You got that right."
Cissnei turned her attention back to the page and scanned through the rest of the text.
"There's nothing in the book about kimaras living in the slums."
"Really? That's weird."
"Yeah. It says here that they live in the Gongaga region. See?"
She pointed at a line on the page, and Reno leaned in for a look.
"Gon-ga-ga," he mumbled, then snickered. "Heh. Gone gaga. Where's that, anyway?"
"On the western continent. Down south, I think."
"Huh. That's a long way for bugs to fly. Hey, think some weirdo might've kept 'em as pets, and some of 'em escaped?"
"Pets? Those things?"
Reno grinned.
"I did say 'weirdo'. There was a guy a few houses down from ours who caught a Kalm fang pup and tried to raise it as a watchdog. It, uh, didn't go so well."
"It attacked him?"
"Yup, and a couple others. Had to be put down. Just so ya know, fangs don't taste that great. All tough and stringy."
He stuck out his tongue, grimacing. She gave him an incredulous look.
"Do you eat everything that comes your way?"
"'Course I do," he said with a shrug. "I wanna keep on livin', don't I?"
Cissnei dropped her gaze, at a loss for what to say to that. His right arm rested on his thigh, bare up to the sleeve of his t-shirt. A reddish line of scar tissue began just above his elbow and zagged diagonally up toward his bicep, maybe two inches in length. She could see other lines beneath his skin: tendons, ropes of muscle, blood vessels, the bones of his hand. In the evening glow, they formed a shadowy landscape of ridges and valleys.
"Hey," he said, rousing her out of her observation, "what else does it say 'bout these bugs?"
"Well, let's see..."
Reno shuffled a bit closer and craned his neck to look at the page. As she read out loud, she made sure to follow the lines with her finger.
"The kimara catches prey by spitting a fluid that is produced by silk glands in its mouthparts. The fluid congeals on contact into a sticky mass that immobilizes its prey."
"Congeals," Reno repeated, rolling the word over his tongue. "That's the word for going from fluid to somethin' hard, yeah?"
"Pretty much."
"And the mouthparts are, like, their fangs and stuff?"
"Yeah. These are called mandibles," she pointed at the lowest set of appendages on the bug's head, "and they're just for biting and holding. I guess the glands are in one of the smaller pairs."
"Huh. So, I'm guessin' the silk glands aren't used for shooting goo out of their butts?"
"Ew, they do that?"
"Yeah," he said, grinning. "Smells fuckin' awful, yo."
"Gods!" she exclaimed with a laugh. "I'm never going to Gongaga."
"Better stay away from the slums, too," he chuckled. "So, does it say anythin' about the butt spray here?"
It turned out to be a defensive mechanism for driving off large predators. Once they had finished the section on kimaras, they continued with the next bug, and then the next. Reno recognized several of them and often had more to say about their behavior than the book did – along with detailed tasting notes.
She found him in the same spot the next evening. This time, they went through the chapter on birds.