Clutching Lord of the Flies, Puck stood alone in the double doorway to the school cafeteria, the reek of mass-produced over-cooked nutrition wafting around her as the rain, which had been indecisive all morning, decided to become a downpour.
It'd been thirty years since she'd last set foot in a place like this, but some things never changed, only the names and the pretensions.
She walked past the vegan table.
Puhleeze! Wanna bet these sanctimonious twats eat Big Macs when nobody's looking?
She walked past the gluten-free table.
What the hell is a gluten, anyway? Some sort of cow?
Followed by the fish, peanut, and dairy-free tables.
Food is food. Just eat, damn you!
The jock table?
Really?
The mean girl tables. There were three.
She'd die before she joined traitor Maggie and kiss-ass Josie with the RAD girl…ew, is that a DUDE in a DRESS?
Grossed out, Puck did an about face scanning the crowded room… the band geek table?
Meh.
The orchestra dork table?
Feh.
The artsy table? The theater creep table?
Bleh. But the theater creeps are definitely in the "maybe" pile. If the world was ending.
The gamers? Stoners? Skaters? The goths, or whatever they called themselves these days now that the real thing was sharing a lunchroom with them?
No. Thanks. She could do without Cheet-o crumbs, angst, and shitty attempts at beards in her life, 'k?
The nerd table?
Not then. Not now. Not EV-ER!
Finally, the SJW table.
Can-you-are-not?
And because she'd rather not sit by Johnny, who was paralyzed from the waist down and his au pair Zeppelli or Dopey Doppio, the Grade-A weirdo who held conversations with one of his shoes held up to his ear like a cell phone at the unlabeled "special needs" table, Puck found herself and The Lord standing in the outdoor patio/classroom with its steel picnic tables and overhanging leaky roof, studying the clearly labeled "alternative diet" table, horrified.
Seated by herself was the weirdest looking kid Puck had ever seen– which was saying something, considering that she was the ghost of a murdered girl deliberately anchored in the fiberglass shell of an anthropomorphic Siamese cat.
She, (or was it "he"? It? They? You never knew in this freak show.) smiled down at Puck, eyeless head topped by a huge frill that may or may not have been a hat or part of the long skull shaped like a banana balanced atop a huge body that looked like a cross between a T. Rex and the remains of a black Camero.
There were two bicycle tassels duct taped to either side of its face, like… pony tails?
With… pink… ribbons?
"Hi!" giggled the unexpected inner mouth which shot out of it's jaws in a voice like Disney's Snow White's, "I'm Tina. Tina Morph. What's your name?"
Badly in need of a cigarette and another cup of coffee or two, nothing today felt real for Mike as he directed bus traffic at the end of the school day in the persistent downpour.
Rain, the body, the situation, the job, none of it.
He'd worked hard to stop compensating for hips and knees that were metal grinding on metal and a body with a low center of gravity.
Of hands that were human again.
Of having no sense of smell when now the world assaulted him nose first.
Of no sense of touch when now the slightest current of air felt like a slap.
Of vision which no longer came in through a twin set of miniature black and white cameras.
Of a voice that didn't sound like it'd come out of the bottom of a bucket detouring through a fan.
Of hearing that didn't fade in and out with static. (If Mike didn't consider himself already 7/8ths crazy, this alone would have been enough to push him over the remaining 1/8th.)
If he let it.
He had to keep reminding himself that he was incredibly lucky, starting when he looked in the mirror that Mrs. Stein held in front of his detached head and was startled to see a human face, not some goofy greasy plastic toy.
He had to hold it together.
He had responsibilities.
Raina, the girls, and Jeremy, who preferred to sleep on the back porch of the guest house in the sun when he wasn't chasing squirrels.
And oh God, what did all of this cost?
His rebuild. Raina and Maggie's slow piece by piece retrofitting even as Puck refused anything beyond basic repairs. Josie's incubation and programming. As for Jeremy, all Mike got for an answer was a bark - still, they couldn't live in the Stein's guest house forever!
Viktor, while tuning Mike's new central nervous system, casually mentioned that there were positions specifically for RADS opening in Salem's police department.
If Mike wanted to apply, he knew someone who'd put in a good word for him.
Without thinking it through, Mike said "yes" before going outside to mow the Stein's lawn.
Though still learning how to walk and talk again while picking things up without breaking them with hands instead of paws, Mike bull-shitted his way through the interview, wondering why they never asked for a resume— and who was that little dark guy with the strong widow's peak who sat silently to the side, fingers steepled, dark eyes glittering?
That evening, a request for a second interview came while Mike was trimming the hedge in front of the Stein's house - with the little guy, Tepes, in a posh office across the street from Salem's Municipal Court.
Tepes, who was some sort of RAD, wasn't happy about the RADs being outed. But there was no nailing the coffin shut now that the corpse had escaped and was running around in its underpants while newly won legal protections were only words on paper. Tepes, who considered himself king of all RADs, needed someone inside the school his daughter and her friends went to.
Someone with the right background who could pass as a Normie to keep an eye on things.
That was Mike.
Should Mike accept the position, there would be… compensation.
All Mike had to do was follow orders.
So Mike agreed.
Enter Dio Brando, openly vampire, openly gay, and total legal beagle. The flashily dressed lawyer in Italian dress-shoes built Mike's mixed family a legal identity, with Josie as third "niece".
All it took were a few signatures and a blatant reshuffling of reality and they were "real".
Yup. Real.
After thirty years in plain sight.
Soaked where his long black raincoat left off at the knees, the big man finished directing bus traffic in the rain in front of Merston High and lumbered dripping into the tiny office he shared with Abbaccio across from Ms. Good's and clocked out.
The day was finally over, leaving Mike with an hour to kill before delivering pizzas until midnight. Time enough for a smoke and a beer or two at the little working-class dive where a lot of off-duty cops hung out after work.
Maybe he'd watch the sports channel or read the newspaper.
Hell, maybe he'd go bowling.
And forget about life for a while.