Two Black Marbles

or alternatively: How to Win a Land War in Australasia

Tucker kept one eye on the new kid through all of Tuesday's English, CompSci, and French classes. He could tell Sam was doing the same in English–it was usually her best subject, but this time when she got cold called she actually had to fudge the answer for once. And they were studying Poe. Sam memorized Poe. Tucker vowed then and there to find a cask of Amontillado on eBay for her next birthday just so she could never live this down.

Anyway, between the two of them they were in five of Danny's six classes, so they had eyes on him practically all day. Here's what they'd learned by Tuesday afternoon:

1. No one had warned him not to eat the ominously pulsing sludge the cafeteria called "baked bean surprise."

2. He wasn't the sharpest tool in the shed, since he really shouldn't have needed a warning not to eat something called "baked bean surprise."

3. Math seemed to be his best subject, although neither of them was in his Chem class so they couldn't testify to his performance there.

4. In classes he was good at, he answered questions, but not, like, an unusual number of questions.

5. In the rest of his classes, he was mostly asleep.

6. Seriously, the dude could power nap.

7. He was really bad at keeping his shoes tied.

8. He was even worse at opening his locker. It took him almost three minutes between first and second periods and even longer between second and third, to the point where during mid-morning break he just sighed and dumped all of his remaining textbooks into the enormous space-themed backpack.

9. He wasn't very good at making friends. In fact, he didn't really seem to be actively trying. At lunch, he just picked a shady spot outside the school, facing the field, and listened to music while he poked dubiously at his beans.

10. The "surprise" in the baked beans probably merited suspicion and rigorous investigation more than Danny.

He seemed like a totally normal kid. A slacker, possibly a low-key druggie if his ridiculously long bathroom break the day before had been any indication, but not anything that couldn't be found in every typical high school across America.

And yet, every time he walked into a room Tucker's flesh crawled.

Which was really annoying him, honestly. He probably wouldn't have paid Danny any attention but for the way his spidey-slash-nightmare senses tingled every time the guy entered a room. Sam was invested in the serial killer angle probably because of her fascination with the macabre (her Netflix recommendations...really scared him, sometimes), but he'd promised himself after the phone call with Tristan that he wasn't going to get involved. And he would enthusiastically keep that promise, too, if his skin would just stay where it was supposed to around the kid he shared half of his classes with.

On Wednesday, Sam was Tucker's carpool to school (since her parents wouldn't let her drive what they called the "nice" cars, she was stuck with the boring old Maserati, and she didn't have access to it Mondays or Tuesdays because of whatever her mom's newest charity thing was). Pretty much immediately, Tucker noted with a cringe that her driving wasn't the only thing that was a bit more erratic than usual. The first thing she asked him after he'd heaved his backpack into the trunk (no worries about breaking anything; he was, as always, clutching his PDA to his chest like a baby) was "So what did your cousin say?"

"What?" He'd been really making an effort to put the incident out of his mind, and also he'd gotten about four hours of sleep the night before, so for a second he was genuinely confused.

Sam huffed and swerved violently out into the street without signalling. Tucker subtly grabbed that handle thingy on the ceiling at about head height on the passenger side (what his mom had, during his driver's training, called the "Oh-Jesus handle"). "You went to the hospital to visit him yesterday, right? Did he say anything about the attack?" Sam had apparently exhausted her rather limited reserves of sensitivity on the bleachers on Monday. Which was fair; Tucker was admittedly surprised she'd managed that as well as she had.

"Uh, I actually talked to him on the phone Monday night. He said some pretty crazy stuff."

Sam waited until the last millisecond to come to a screeching halt behind a red sedan stopped at an intersection. Several someones behind them honked loudly. Sam continued the conversation as if nothing had happened. "What?! Dude, why didn't you tell me yesterday?"

Tucker was still trying to control his breathing after the near-collision, so it took him a second to answer. "It was about my, ya know, feelings, and I know you don't believe in that stuff! Plus, he was high as a kite on pain meds, so in this case I might kind of agree with you."

"Okay, fair, I guess. But what did he say?" The light turned green, and Sam tailgated the red sedan until it very deliberately changed lanes.

Tucker opened his window so he could be ready to apologize to irate motorists. It'd become a sort of system: Sam cut people off and Tucker yelled "Sorry!" if it looked like they were going to get road raged. Which happened a lot. When Sam wasn't doing the road raging, that is. He stuck his head out the window to try to see around the next car, a blue jeep, as he called back, "I don't know, weird crap!" Satisfied that they weren't about to cause a pile-up at the next intersection, he settled back into his seat. "Apparently he and my aunt both have the same premonition-y thing that I do, and if you get a bad feeling about something big it means the universe is going to, like, make you fix it. And since he got stabbed, now he gets to lay on a bed completely blitzed for like two weeks while I apparently have to stop a serial killer? Or the universe will, like, give me a wedgie or something."

Sam glanced at him quickly in the rear view mirror. "You know, he has a point."

"What? Uh, no, he really doesn't."

She licked her lips, slightly fading her grey-purple lipstick. "I mean, we do live in this neighborhood. We're tapped in. We're connected to two of the victims and one attempted victim, you're, like, one of the only living witnesses, and you've got your premonition thing…."

Tucker felt an intense need to cut her off right there. "Sam! There are people who actually get paid to do this stuff. The only thing I've ever gotten paid for is working a cash register at Walgreens, and I was barely even qualified for that." When he gave her his full attention, he could see the way she was holding her jaw: rigid, like she couldn't wait to respond. Suspicion slithered its way along the dome of his skull. "Wait, is this your whole government thing again?"

Sam started gesturing wildly with her hands the way she always did when she got defensive (pretty rarely) or when she got argumentative (quite frequently). This meant that she was not holding the wheel. This meant that the car swerved violently. This very much didn't help Tucker get less panicky as she wound up for a good long debate. "Okay, but bureaucratic incompetence coupled with a culture of secrecy, of–of power-mongering, and declining trust in individual intelligence and agency–if you would just read Ayn Rand–"

"Dude, the government isn't some, like, faceless, shady alien entity! It's a bunch of people for the most part"–he glared at her to make sure she had caught the qualification–"doing their best to make good decisions."

Sam kept her eyes fixed on the yellow lines running down the center of the street. "I know. That's why it scares me."

Tucker paused for a second to gather his thoughts. Sam always seemed to want to argue, but Tucker was terrible at it. He didn't understand how someone could enjoy being in conflict with others. He'd rather crack a joke, break the tension, spread some smooth peanut-butter banter over whatever was awkward or whatever he disagreed with and steer the conversation in a more fun direction; wasn't it natural to want people to like you?

So he didn't know the joys of debate. He did know Sam, though: She tended to think in high-minded ideological terms, so the best way to make her see reason was to force her to reconsider her points from a more down-to-earth perspective. "Okay, so what happens when we catch him?"

"We...call the police."

"And how do we prove who it is in the first place? I mean, I've seen cop shows, dude! Sneaking around, probably snooping on some whack people's private lives–what do we do if he catches us?"

Sam's hold on the wheel got a little more stiff. She was wavering. "That's a real hypothetical if."

"And?"

She huffed through her nose like a bull and pushed some of her flyaway hairs, freed by the open window from ponytail captivity, back behind her ears. "I dunno, kick him in the balls and run?"

Now Tucker was the one wildly gesticulating, because she had to know that was ridiculous. "Sam, that is reckless well past the point of ordinary stupidity! You're, like, trespassing into insanity there, dude!" He'd been trying for a while to catch her eyes, and at this she snapped her head over and glared at him. Tucker gave her what was probably a weird little panicky half-smile and tried to calm down. "No offense. But, I mean, this is a serial killer. We are high schoolers. Not only that, but we are shrimpy, untalented, weak-ass high schoolers. I, personally, have never taken a self-defense class in my life! My mile time is over ten minutes, dude! This body is a finely tuned instrument of love, not death; the one time I tried to hit someone I ended up punching my own—!"

"Okay, Tuck, I get the picture. It was a dumb idea, I know."

She focused back on the road and stewed in silence. Tucker hated silence. It almost made him regret winning the argument. The road narrowed to one lane on either side, then one lane period, and they entered a roundabout surrounded by tidy, upscale white adobe houses with red terra cotta roofs and stylized bars on the windows. They were almost to the school.

Ugh. Sam was actually driving with a modicum of caution now, which meant she was in a really bad mood and was probably planning to sulk all day. He offered her a hesitant, goofy smile. "Hey, if you want, in the free time left over from not hunting serial killers today we could go sabotage Nasty Burger's deep fryer again. You know how much of a sacrifice of ideals that is for me."

She snorted, and one corner of her mouth twitched up. "Nah, my parents will probably take the car if I get in trouble with the police again. Nice try, though."

"Hmm." He considered. "Yeah, on second thought, today's not actually a great day for me either. I'm feeling pretty fried."

It took her a moment. Then, at the next light, she slammed on the brakes and gave him the most disgusted, dead-eyed look he'd ever seen on a human face.

Tucker grinned shamelessly at her and hit the button on the side of his seat that slowly reclined it back out of range of her poisonous glare. The "whirrrr" of the seat's motor was too much for Sam, and she snorted out a laugh and banged her forehead against her hands on the top of the wheel, shoulders shaking visibly. When she raised her face, more flyaway hairs had come out of her ponytail to frame her face like a wispy, dishevelled lion's mane. "Tucker, whyyy?!" Tucker just kept grinning like a dog who'd eaten all the towels as well as the shoes.

Internally, he was hearing his own personal pom-poms-and-ponytails cheer squad. Crisis averted, and a pun had won the day. As it should.

~(*0*)~

Tucker should have known that Sam wouldn't truly be diverted from her course by something as insignificant and trifling as logic. Everything was fine through all six periods, even his in-class tingles of premonition (which he'd decided to thenceforth refer to exclusively as "the uh-oh feeling") having died down a bit since the day before. Then came lunchtime. That was when he let Sam march him into the cafeteria and toward an empty table at the back of the hall, only to startle and punch her hard on the arm when she suddenly called, "Hey! New kid! Danny!"

Alone at the next table over, Danny looked up and quickly checked behind him, just in case Sam might have been referring to another new kid named Danny. He quickly fumbled out out one earbud and motioned with the hand holding it toward his chest. "Me?"

"Yeah, you. Come sit with us!"

Danny looked a little panicked for a second, but then he sort of shrugged and started gathering up his lunch tray. "Thanks. But, uh, don't you guys need to get food?"

Sam grinned and held up her purple bat-themed lunch bag (it'd come with her backpack from ninth grade, and even though she'd ditched the backpack sophomore year she couldn't bring herself to throw the lunch bag away). "Brought mine from home. Tucker, you gonna go get lunch?"

"Uh. Right." With one last meaningful glare at Sam and a slightly sickly-looking smile at Danny, Tucker headed toward the end of the lunch line, adjusting his beret on the way. He had to squeeze past Danny and gritted his teeth when the expected shiver ran down his spine and back up again like the slider on a zipper. There was a weird smell, too, like lemons soaking in chlorine. If it was cologne, the kid needed to get his nose examined.

The cafeteria was a large room with white walls and big windows that let in a good amount of natural light. About fifteen plastic tables with office-style chairs were set up on the hardwood floors, and basketball hoops hung halfway folded up toward the ceiling on both ends. About a quarter of the way from one wall, a giant white curtain separated the kitchen from the eating area, and along that curtain was the gleaming chrome counter that serviced the lunch line. The cafeteria was usually pretty empty, since the kids had permission to take their lunches and eat anywhere on the school grounds; currently only ten of the tables hosted chattering students or the occasional loner staring off into the abyss while mechanically chewing his or her sandwich. In Tucker and Sam's freshman year there had been one centralized cafeteria where all students had been required to eat, but that building had collapsed in a freak earthquake the day after Sam had gotten her still-infamous pet project of an ultra-recyclo-vegetarian menu implemented (she was just vegan now, thank god), and the money had never come in from the city to rebuild. Two and a half years later, the school was still using this repurposed gym that couldn't even fit an eighth of the student body at once.

Tucker glowered his way back across the hall to their table to find Sam and Danny laughing so hard that Sam visibly almost choked. He set down his tray of mystery-meat-and-limp-lettuce-on-whole-wheat sandwich with ill humor. Jeez, you leave Sam alone for three minutes and apparently she befriends the possibly-supernatural serial murder suspect.

"Seriously, look it up on Wikipedia. It's actually the best thing I've ever read," Danny wrapped up, snickering.

Sam finished chewing a giant bite of her veggie wrap and swallowed with some difficulty. "I'll do that. Yo, Tuck, have you heard of the Great Emu War?"

"I'm sorry, what?"

"Yeah, in, like, the '30s Australia had a military operation to deal with the emu infestation—and they lost." Danny's grin was bright and mischievous, which sparked some weird, jarring cognitive dissonance seeing as the only emotions he'd seen Danny exhibit thus far were "tired," "bored," "tired," "mopey," and "exhausted."

It surprised a snort out of Tucker. "Wait, I was gone for, like, five seconds. How did you guys get from small talk to emu infestations?"

Sam shrugged. "I asked him what his favorite military conflict was. It's a surprisingly good icebreaker."

Danny washed down a bite of his own mystery meat sandwich with a swig from one of the only-slightly-spoiled cafeteria boxed milks and glanced at her in interest. "Wait, really? People usually have an answer to that?"

"Mhm, i'sh pre-y fummy," Sam confirmed around the leafy end of her wrap.

"Heh, and here I thought I was special. That was a fun forty seconds."

Sam inclined her head toward Tucker. "What about you? What's your favorite war?"

"Uhh...what's that one 300 is about?"

Sam raised one disdainful eyebrow at him. "The Persian Wars?"

Danny raised one hand. "Is that the same as the Peloponnesian War or not?"

Sam turned the look on him. "Danny, you're in my World History class."

"I know, that's why I'm asking."

"We talked about the Peloponnesian War yesterday."

"I have a massive sleep debt and a general lack of motivation." Danny shrugged and took another bite of his sandwich.

Tucker saw an opening. After all, if they were going to kinda-sorta investigate Danny, they might as well do it. "Yeah, you totally zoned through English." (And CompSci and half of French, but it would be kind of stalkerish to mention he'd noticed what Danny was doing in all of the classes they shared. Hey, it was hard to ignore the source of your paranormal heebie-jeebies.) "What do you even do all night?"

Danny shrugged, avoiding their eyes for the first time since they'd broken the ice. He dropped the half-eaten sandwich on his plate. "You know, the usual. Netflix, video games."

Huh. Well, that was vaguely suspicious, but Tucker could always use someone else to one-on-one in Doomed when Sam was busy, like, organizing a bake sale to to save the blue-speckled giraffe. Consider his interest piqued. "Any recom–"

"Hey, Foley."

Tucker's blood auto-transmuted into frozen sludge for an entirely mundane reason. He did a slow swivel, and sure enough, Dash was looming over him horror movie-style, Kwan a few steps behind. Sure, Dash hadn't been all "let's get physical" since he'd messed with the wrong senior's kid brother and some actual gang members had kicked his ass right into the hospital midway through sophomore year, but Tucker couldn't exactly help the way his lizard brain reacted. His Pavlovian conditioning meant he automatically associated that blonde, slicked-back '60s hairdo and those oddly contrasting black eyebrows with moderate pain and immoderate humiliation.

His usual policy when he was humiliated was "return to sender," but all of his smart comments seemed to have run for the hills. They'd probably taken the way his heart had jumped into his throat as a signal to vamoose, and boy, did Tucker wish he could follow. Luckily, Sam had his back this time around. "What the fuck do you want, Dash?" Short, sweet, and to the point: Tucker approved. Danny mostly looked confused.

Dash shuffled his feet in their Yeti-size definitely-bought-them-on-eBay Yeezys. "We're not talking to you, Manson," he muttered. There was a weird look on his face. Like he was about to hurl or something. Maybe he was really hungover. Or—uncomfortable? Kwan elbowed him hard, and the human incarnation of the Minotaur from every crappily animated fantasy game cleared his throat. "Uhh, Foley. We just wanted to say...sorry about what happened to Tristan. He's a pretty great guy, and he's thrown some epic parties, so, like...yeah."

Kwan nodded emphatically. "Anything we can do, man? Could you tell him to let us know if he, like, needs help?"

Okay, had they phased into another universe or something? Was the LSD in the mystery meat making Tucker hallucinate all this while in reality he was passed out on the floor, foaming at the mouth? "Uhh...thanks? I'll...let him know, I guess."

He couldn't help side-eyeing the two probable steroid abusers as Dash shrugged uncomfortably and stuffed his hands in the pocket of his omnipresent red Letterman. He nodded once, looking somewhere over Tucker's head, and then started back toward his table with Kwan trailing behind like a really muscular sheepdog.

There was momentary silence at the table. Danny broke it by finishing off his carton of milk with one giant glug and then tossing it at a nearby trash can (he missed). "Well, that was awkward." He got up to go retrieve it and throw it away properly.

Sam grimaced. "Yeah, stay away from those guys. What you just saw was an outlier; they're usually total assholes."

Tucker started to voice his enthusiastic agreement, but the bell rang, cutting him off with the unnecessary staticky aggression characteristic of most public high school PA systems. "Ah, crap." They all hastily gathered trash onto their trays (or, in Sam's case, gathered up their biodegradable lunch wrappings and reusable thermoses made from recycled materials) while Tucker stuffed the last of his sandwich into his mouth and chewed quickly. Wow, that was terrible, he thought through the immediate wave of regret. Only the school cafeteria could pervert the natural order of things enough to make him hate meat. "I gotta get to Robotics. You have MUN, right?"

Sam nodded. Danny, who'd started to go back to staring into the middle distance (Tucker couldn't help thinking of it as his "I-can-still-smell-the-napalm mode"), perked back up. "Oh, yeah, my mom signed me up for that. You think you could show me where to go?"

"Yeah, sure." Sam was oddly cheery this afternoon. Was Tucker's company alone really that boring? "See ya, Tuck!"

Danny trailed a step or so in her wake, as one tended to do when confronted with the gravitational phenomenon known as Sam Manson's force of personality. "Yeah, it was cool meeting you!" Danny offered one last friendly, sideways smirk as they slid between Tucker and the next table, and Tucker caught another whiff of that weird smell (along with the usual goose walking over his grave). It reminded him of the family road trip where their car had broken down next to a forest after a thunderstorm. The sky had been unrepentantly bright, and the air'd smelled almost bitterly clean, like…ozone! That was what it was; they'd talked about it in one of his middle school science classes, about the way you could smell ozone after it rained. But there was something else underneath it, too, something almost sickly sweet. Like an old tree stump that had gotten wet during the storm and started slowly, surely to rot. He narrowed his eyes as he watched them cross the cafeteria and pass out of sight through its doors, talking the whole way. "So, Sam, do you have to, like, participate in MUN, or is it the sort of thing where no one will notice if you kinda drift off a little bit…."

Hmph. Tucker shrugged, pacifying himself with the way the physical motion reinforced his internal decision. He was just going to ignore the strangeness; if he didn't get involved, it couldn't hurt him. He shoved his own trash through the swinging door for garbage and deposited his plastic lunch tray on top the increasingly tall and haphazard red stack on the trash bin, then turned to head to Robotics with a skip in his step. Behind him, the stack teetered silently, unnoticed, ever closer to the edge.

~(*0*)~

That night, Tucker dreamt about the fox for the first time.

It was small and grey, and it padded quietly next to him everywhere he went. At first, he was walking down an empty street in the rain, and it trotted out of an alley to join him. The street became a mountain, which became a forest of charred trees like branching nerves exposed to the chilling breeze, which became his favorite Mexican restaurant with that same wind buffeting laminated pictures of enchiladas verdes and street corn. He took a seat, and the fox settled at his feet and turned its snout toward him, unwavering. Its black eyes were wet and terrible and blank. The lady at the counter smiled sunnily. She looked familiar, he thought, and then he thought it was silly that he should think anything because he didn't exist and hadn't ever existed, had he? And when he looked down for his legs, just to double-check, they were gone and all that remained were the wet eyes of the fox, hanging in the air like two black marbles next to an empty chair at an empty table in a Mexican restaurant whose posters flapped loudly against each other in the pitiless breeze.