The first day of school…
Guido Mista banged on the door of the only bathroom in his family's tiny 1950s tract house, "C'mon, hurry it up!"
The door swung open mid-knock, revealing the shortest of his three youngest sisters, the ever crabby Bella Mista.
"I'm straightening my ruff. Can you hold it for five minutes?"
"What ruff?" Guido exclaimed, "I gotta piss. Can't you wait for five minutes?"
Like any other twelve year old girl, Bella fought back, saying, "Ew. Of course I have a ruff. Look at this rat's nest!" while pulling her collar down to reveal a soul patch of fur on her collarbone.
"That ain't no ruff!" Mista shouted, "Now THIS, is a RUFF!" He yanked up his undershirt.
"GROSS!" Bella shrieked, slamming the door while screaming, "It's your fault the shower drain's always clogged!"
Mista intercepted the door with one dark, hairy-knuckled hand, "Is that my sweater? You are so grounded!"
"So?" Bella growled.
"That's my favorite sweater!" Guido said, "What did y'all do to it?"
"Cropped it."
"You WHAT?"
"Yeah, I did," Bella said, "It looks better on me!"
Guido's mouth flapped, too flabbergasted to say anything.
"Now get out of the bathroom, a girl needs her privacy." Bella slammed the bathroom door in his face
"Hey!" Guido shouted through it, "That's still my sweater!"
"Too bad, so sad," Bella said, "I gave the other piece to Stella to make a dog bed out of."
Snarling with frustration, Guido punched a hole in the door.
"You're in big trouble, buster!" His mother shouted behind him, "Stella! Bella! Both of you. Out here. NOW!"
"Ow ow ow ow ow OW! Ma, stoppit, I'm almost 18, not 8!" Guido hollered when she grabbed him by the ear before he could flee in a trail of white-painted splinters. Stella and Bella nervously slunk out of the tiny bathroom, reeking of scorched hair.
"Stella, we don't HAVE a dog! Bella, give your brother back what's left of his sweater!" Still in scrubs, Mrs. Mista stood with a mug of Joe in one hand and her oversized son's ear in the other, watched Stella scurry to retrieve her piece of the red, white and blue loot from the sewing room.
"But Mooooooom, it looks BETTER on MEEEEEEEEEE!" Bella whined.
"Off. NOW."
Bella glared at her mother.
Her mother growled back. It had been a long night in the ER.
Bella whimpered.
Guido sniggered, and then yelped as his mother clamped down harder on his ear.
"That's enough from you, cub!" Mrs. Mista snapped, "Next time, pay better attention to your things!"
Guido knew better than to fight back as Bella pulled off the sweater, leaving her in a white cami. Guido wondered why she'd even bother straightening what little ruff she had if it would be covered by HIS turtleneck anyway.
Bella appeared at her mother's side, nervously offering up a red band, the one matching the knitted cuffs on Guido's sweater, saying, "I unraveled the rest to make a scarf."
Guido howled. His mother yanked his ear AGAIN, so he shut it.
"I can work with this, Guido." she said, letting go of Guido and taking what was left of his new-to-him Goodwill sweater and walked through the kitchen past Mr. Mista who was pounding down three slabs of bacon and twelve sausages with a black coffee chaser in his oil stained-coveralls and onto the closed-in back porch which had been converted into a sewing room, and snapped the folding door shut behind her.
Shirtless, in his Sex Pistols beanie, and wearing tiger striped jeans because that's as far as he'd gotten before the call of nature, Guido stood fidgeting and uncomfortable outside the sewing room's door because Stella and Bella were still hogging the bathroom.
After what felt like forever, a sweater was thrust at him.
"What?" He yelled putting it on and seeing how stupidly short it was, ending just at his ribcage, "I can't wear this – they'll laugh at me!"
"Well, either wear it or get rid of it!" His mother groused. "We don't have the time or the money right now to replace it!"
"Are you at least gonna come out and see how stupid it looks?" He asked through the door.
"I have a headache!"
And that was the end of the matter.
Grumbling, Guido stomped to his shared room and tossed it onto his bed and found a random green button-up that didn't smell too much like motor oil and armpits and hurried outside where he tossed his school bag into the back of his beat up white truck, climbed into the rusty-streaked cab, and turned the key.
The truck started on the first try, yes!
Guido grinned; at least ONE thing was going well today - tinkering on the motor over the summer had paid off. Now the 1979 hulk with the rusted out bed ran smoother than honey.
He shifted into reverse and slowly, carefully backed it past the multiple array of cars and trucks in various states of repair filling their driveway at the end of the cul de sac of tiny tract houses they'd move in last June.
All he had to do was pick up Giorno and… but he had the sneaking suspicion Narancia would need a ride too and turned left instead of right at the intersection.
Scooping up his worn school bag in one smooth motion and shouldering it, Narancia flicked at a cowlick poking from under his neon orange headscarf.
Only to have another cowlick spring out on the other side of his head.
The skinny dark-haired boy narrowed his violet eyes in the cracked piece of mirror beside the toolshed door, grinned and then shrugged. Life was too short to mess with hair that had its own agenda.
Brushing off the dog and wolf hair from his favorite Aerosmith tee, he slammed the toolshed door shut, padlocked it, and glanced in passing at the sagging doublewide behind the large house where his younger half-siblings lived. They too, were getting ready to go to school, judging by the arguing and whining coming out of the dirty open windows.
Oh yeah, back to school!
Almost dancing, Narancia happily breathed in the crisp Autumn air; back to regular meals even if it meant he had to sit in the back of class totally confused by what was going on at the front when he wasn't falling asleep in the wonderfully clean, sweet-smelling spaces that school contained.
He even looked forward to going to Miss Nix's class to help the kids in Special Services again like last year. Blonde Ms. Nixs was a genuine real-live WITCH; she always wore black velvet, funky pointy shoes, and all sorts of pretty shawls and big earrings and smelled like patchouli and cinnamon and sometimes burning sage. Best of all, Ms. Nix never yelled at Narancia when he didn't understand his homework when he was done helping the other kids not fall out of their wheel chairs or stick pencils up their noses? She even gave him the headscarf after seeing how much he liked it.
Worn sneakers flopping, Narancia slunk past the dilapidated hulk of a trailer, stepping over broken toys and well-gnawed rawhide chews, carefully avoiding eye-contact with his dad and step-mom who were wrapping it with heavy plastic, grumbling: they had to fumigate for fleas AGAIN or CPS would step in AGAIN and then there'd be a lot of bad yelling and hollering and slapping AGAIN - which meant his little brothers and sisters would be allowed to sleep in the house tonight even if Narancia wasn't.
Without asking, Narancia already knew that step-mom wasn't too fond of this. "The Bitch" was happy to squirt out litter after litter, but she was damned if she'd let any of them dirty her house unless it was really cold – this included Narancia who generally made his own arrangements by couch-surfing or sleeping in the slowly collapsing tool shed, maybe sneaking in once in a while to shower in the house when The Bitch wasn't looking.
Safely around the side of the house with its peeling paint and patchy toy-strewn lawn, Narancia then realized that he'd forgotten where the school bus was supposed to stop.
Oh crap, he'd have to walk to Merston High, which would make him late, which meant NO breakfast – and all he'd had the night before was that last slice of pizza he'd stashed in the cooler he'd hidden under a pile of old tires so the pups wouldn't get it.
Stomach grumbling, Narancia stopped by a big hole one of his half-siblings had dug in the remains of the lawn. Well, start hoofin'…
Hey, no. Wait!
Narancia's slow, broad grin spread across his face, problem solved!
Mista lived just a half-block away in the gated community where a lot of RADs lived - an easy walk. Mista could drive.
(And maybe Mista's folks would let Narancia stay for a while. Last night had been miserable even with the blankets he'd snuck out of the house. Anyway, the nearby overpass would soon be getting too cold to sleep under, and a new, outstandingly crazy hobo had moved into Narancia's squat down by the river!)
Plans for the next ten minutes firmly in place, Narancia happily trotted in the general direction of Mista's place.
And then stopped, face-palming. How could he forget?
Joyfully flipping an unseen bird at The Bitch as she struggled to manage the plastic sheets and a sudden explosion of small children underfoot, Narancia jogged back to the trailer's back door, reached under the steps and pulled out a shiv and a pair of taped up drumsticks.
He shoved the sticks into his duct-tape patched backpack before slipping the shiv into the bottom of one ratty Chuck. Waving at his siblings who'd stopped squabbling long enough to tear open a loaf of bread and then squabble over individual slices, Narancia bounded across the yard, dodging the gnawed remains of Barbies and other childhood casualties, happy to bum a ride off his best friend.
Giorno took one last nervous bite of waffle, snatched up his plate and left the ornate dining room, hurrying past his father Jonathan towards the kitchen where he sat at the other end of the newly restored Victorian mahogany table.
Jonathan grunted, acknowledging his son without looking up from his usual stack of invoices, finishing his own breakfast between entering Aztec masks recently dug up in Mexico in his laptop as Dio, Giorno's other father, unlocked the front door after working the night shift at Tepe's Law Firm.
Forgetting all about the dishwasher, Giorno nervously ran towards the front of the big, octagonal Victorian that his two dads were carefully restoring to greet him.
Closing the stained glass bejeweled door behind him, Dio wiped his feet while loosening his tie, giving Giorno one of his classic fanged grins before removing his sunglasses to let his red eyes adjust to the less harsh lights of his heavily curtained front hallway and its ornate double helix staircase, "Hey pup!"
His face spattered with an angry-looking rash.
Giorno frowned, "Did you forget your parasol again, Dad?" he scolded.
"It'll take me a couple champagne flutes of pig's blood and I'll be fine," Dio said fingering the angry red blisters that spattered his face, "I see you found the waffles I made last night. Like 'em?"
Giorno nodded, rocking nervously back and forth in his socked feet, absently rotating the plate in his hands. Dio stared down at him, a brief look of discomfort crossing his million dollar face, quickly hidden, "Do you need a ride to school?" he asked to break the tension. "I don't mind going out into the sun one more time before I take a nap?"
"No." Giorno shook his head, "Mista's picking me up in a few minutes."
"…good." Dio said, awkwardly patting Giorno on the shoulder in passing. Why couldn't the boy be content with homeschooling this year? Like always? Where they could protect him? "Ummmmmm, Mista'll be a senior this year. Right?" Uncomfortable, the normally flamboyant blond vampire in a perfectly draped Italian silk suit moved to the wall of family pictures he'd set up so that it was the first thing anybody coming in the front door would notice and began adjusting them. When was the last time he'd dusted them?
"Yeah," Giorno said, watching Dio straighten a large portrait of he and Jonathan on their wedding day, ten year old Giorno on Jonathan's lap.)
"Might as well make it legal!" Dio had said a few months after same sex-marriage was written into law. "We'd get a big tax break if we did."
Dad Jonathan, raised Catholic, was uncomfortable shacking up, agreed.
So they did. (The wedding had been the event of the season.)
"Nervous about starting… school?" Dio asked as abruptly began heading toward the kitchen, Giorno scurrying behind, still clutching his plate.
"Not really, it's just Marc… I MEAN… Marlena that I'm worried about." Giorno said as Dio found himself in the large, modern kitchen. Jonathan, putting food back into the fridge, turned and abruptly and flicked a strawberry at his husband. "She's mean!"
Dio caught it in the blink of an eye between one thumb and index finger.
"Nice catch." Jonathon smiled, that trick never getting old.
Dio tossed the red berry high into the air, catching it with a snap between his fangs before spitting it out as a gray, shriveled mass. "Do I finish eating the rest of these, or do I drink some pig blood?" he mused. "I know, I'll mash them up in the blood and make a smoothie!"
"I'll get the blood if you find the Band-Aids." Jonathan smirked, passing Dio while kissing him on the cheek that wasn't blistered.
"Don't worry GioGio, little Miss Marlena's just jealous we throw better parties than her STATE Senator daddy." Dio said, watching the blisters on his hands subside. "Yeesh, Republicans, the original, eternal party poopers."
Remembering Marlena's envious reaction to this year's St. Patrick's Day party, which, started out at 50 close friends, had spilled out of the house in an ever expanding flood of green and onto the street only to turn into brunch for 300 the next day after Dad Dio called in every food truck owner he knew, Giorno laughed, knowing the vampire was more than right.
There was the loud honk of a diesel horn outside, "Hey! That's my ride… wish me luck, Dads!"
Grabbing his school bag, Giorno ran outside, untied shoes flopping with each step.