08 Kick the Bucket

Blackthorn was a place where people took pokémon seriously. The gym leader, Clair Alexander, was the cousin of Lance Siegfried, pictures and standees of whom were everywhere: in the pokémon center, the gym, the Blackthorn Pioneer Museum, the California Mightyena Center.

Dragon-types were tough, and so was Clair, and it was generally recommended that trainers wait to challenge her until they had at least four badges; even then, challenging her was still a process, because a trainer had to take a written test before she would agree to battle.

And so, as a result, despite Blackthorn's non-bustling status, there were quite a lot of trainers at the gym, having caught snags in their badge-collecting either by failing the test or losing the match.

"Is Adam at the gym today?" asked Keanna Sherman the day before Delilah's badge match.

"No, not today," said Lydia Tracey, a slightly older woman who lived in Blackthorn. "I think he went home today."

"Really? Back to Kanto?"

"Oh, no, just back to where he and his parents are staying, in Olivine. I think he'll be back, 'cuz he didn't win a Rising Badge yet..."

Adam was training at the Blackthorn Gym too, and Delilah saw him sometimes. Sometimes he was mean to her and sometimes he wasn't.

She couldn't find it in herself to care.

"Well, anyway, it's good that he's not here," said Keanna, opening her bag. "My friend was in Kanto for a week, and he brought me back this magazine..."

"We know the devil is in him, but where in the devil is he?"

This question was asked for weeks of professional toyboy Adam Harlow, 21, who seems to have absconded to the States with a new hairdo.

Photographed here for the first time in months, looking like death on a cracker with his signature red locks freshly shorn Mohican style, handsome hooligan Harlow was finally spotted with a sneasel at his heels, looking luxuriously unfriendly in the southern California sunshine. This couple of weasels proves a sightly enough pair that the soigné scoundrel remains recognisable even with sunglasses, a new haircut, and 5,500 kilometres between himself and his homeland.

It stands to reason that Adam, who infamously arrived late to the 2006 trial when his Croesus father Giovanni Harlow, 48, was accused of affiliations with a gangster empire, should make his own time entirely, appearing for the cameras only as his notorious temperament permits...

"That's really not that bad," said Delilah. "Considering the kind of things they could say about him..."

"I just thought it was funny," said Keanna. "I think these magazines are so funny..."

"I don't really get the point of this article," said Delilah, looking it over. "I mean, what is it reporting? I'm surprised they didn't make up a story for it. It must have been a very slow week..."

Lydia walked with Delilah back to the pokémon center, which wasn't very far (Delilah wasn't sure why more cities didn't have the gym closer to the pokémon center, since it seemed to make the most efficient logistical sense), and they continued to discuss (mostly trash-talk) Adam. "Well, you know how men are," Lydia said. "Their minds work differently, you know? 'Cuz men, they have to process things one at a time, you know, but women are a lot more flexible, and can do more things at once. They just think in a completely different way."

This struck Delilah as a rather provincial and remarkably stupid thing to say, the kind of thinking that made her hate romantic comedies. "Um," she said. "Well, I think that's kind of...lazy. I mean, I don't think that's very fair..."

"Well, you can't deny that there are obvious differences between men and women," she said, seeming as if she was trying not to sound offended.

"No, of course I wouldn't deny that, but that is a HUGE generalization."

"Men have testosterone, and women have estrogen."

"But that doesn't simplify the question," said Delilah. "It's a lot more complicated than that. Women have testosterone too, and men have estrogen, not to mention there are a bunch of other important hormones as well..."

"But men have way more testosterone than women."

"Well, sure, but so what? Any two people of the same sex have different levels of testosterone too. In fact I bet the individual variation of testosterone levels is way higher than the average difference between sexes."

This was an impromptu and rather poorly-worded hypothesis, but it seemed she had stopped listening anyway.

Testosterone wasn't evil. She couldn't believe that this grade school battle-of-the-sexes mentality persisted, in this day and age, and in people who she thought should have been old enough to know better. Girls weren't better or smarter or nicer than boys just because they were girls. Men were not automatically inferior to women; women didn't have to "humor" them; men didn't need to be "tolerated".

Men weren't blind dumb bumbling helpless children who couldn't be held responsible for their actions because they just couldn't be expected to know any better because they didn't have the maturity and womyn-wisdom of the opposite sex. Girls were not made to take care of boys, and it actually surprised Delilah how angry it made her to realize that people actually believed that men couldn't help making bad decisions.

Oh, well, she thought as she got undressed. She had other things to think about, like her badge match tomorrow. If she won...she'd have enough badges to enter the Silver Conference.

Suddenly she burst into tears. She was so nervous and scared and she didn't feel like anybody understood or even wanted to understand. She felt alienated from other people and from herself. She didn't feel fit for this world and it wasn't a cute feeling. It just seemed like she couldn't relate to other people the way they expected her to be able to; what was wrong with her?

The next morning she couldn't remember why she had been so upset, and it all just seemed incredibly stupid.

It was only April but it was very hot, since they were so far inland. Her match was at eleven o'clock, and when she got there she still had half an hour and one last slip to fill out. Gabrielle Varnham sat next to her as she filled it out and said, "Good luck today."

"Thanks," said Delilah, making the conscious effort to smile before going back to the form.

Gabrielle seemed to have expected more conversation to blossom, but she didn't object when it didn't, and they both sat there listening in on the dialogue in front of them as Delilah finished her paperwork.

"You should come," Keanna was saying to Art Christiansen.

"Of course I'm going to come!"

"Emily's going to be there."

"Ooooh, and who's Emily?" asked Tom Joyner.

"She's a friend of mine," said Keanna.

"I have been pursuing this girl for, like, months," said Art.

Delilah put the paper in front of her face and murmured to Gabrielle, "I love how he says he's been pursuing her for months, which obviously overlaps with the time you guys went out."

"I know, right? What an idiot..."

"You're going to ask her out, right?" said Keanna.

Art shrugged with a self-consciously smug smile. "Maybe I will," he said.

Gabrielle scoffed. "Are you fucking kidding me," she laughed under her breath.

Delilah couldn't tell if Gabrielle's feelings were hurt or not, but she laughed too.

As she gave her form to the receptionist, she saw that Keanna's binder had been left out. It was the kind with the clear plastic cover, in which could be slipped pictures or important papers. Hers was decorated with magazine clippings of Lance Siegfried, mostly without a shirt. Well. Hadn't Keanna said that Lance Siegfried was her "really good friend"? If he was her "really good friend", why did she have shirtless pictures of him on her binder...?

There was a local school on a fieldtrip to see the match, but truthfully Delilah wasn't sure if a pokémon match was really a good idea for a field trip. Was pokémon really that exciting, to keep a large group of children entertained for such a length of time? Delilah really thought it was quite boring, and when she watched other people battle she always ended up thinking about other things.

She couldn't tell if they were rooting for her or for Clair. Either way, they were very loud, so she assumed they were bored. At the half-point there was an intermission, and she sat on a bench on the court eating a lemon bar she quickly bought from a coffee cart. One of the fieldtrip girls in the bleachers asked her, "Do you think you're going to win?"

"That's hard to say at this point," said Delilah. "I might, I might not."

"But do you think you will?"

She shrugged. "I really don't know..."

Obviously Delilah wasn't answering the question the way she wanted her to. "But do you think you will?"

"I think...I could..."

After the match she ended up surrounded by children in matching neon green shirts who all smelled quite bad, like candy, and sneezing. Some of them asked for her autograph, which was kind of funny.

One girl asked her, "Can I pet your vaporeon?"

"Oh, I don't think that's a good idea," said Delilah.

"I want to pet your togekiss!" said somebody else.

"Nnnoo, I don't think so," said Delilah. "I think they'd get scared, there are too many people..."

"Delilah."

Adam appeared next to her. "Oh, hi," she said. "I didn't know you were here..."

"Are you busy?"

She looked at him, and then at the group of restless kids, and then back at him, and then at the kids again. "Well," she said.

"Never mind, I'll wait," he said.

She whatevered, but the kids were pretty much done with her at that point anyway and their teachers led them out to the buses when they were done.

Adam said, "I want to talk to you."

"Okay...do you know what time it is?"

He took his BlackBerry out of his pocket. "It's 12:30 and I'm not drunk yet?" he said. "What's going on?"

"Delilah!" Tom called to her. "Nice job! Congratulations!"

"Hey there, Delilah!" said Gabrielle, smiling at her witty pop culture reference. "Great match!"

"Never heard that one before!" said Delilah, and they laughed. "Thanks!"

As she and Adam crossed the street outside the gym in the subjugating heat he said, "'Hey There, Delilah'...do you get that a lot?"

"Why...yes. Yes, I do."

"How about...beautiful Delilah, bathing in the sun...audience of seventeen, and noticed not a one..."

"No, I've never had that...it's a little more awkward to work into a conversation, isn't it."

"It's a little closer to the truth," he said, and discreetly gestured behind them with his shoulder. "Those men were definitely talking about your breasts."

She wasn't really sure what to say, so she just laughed a little.

"He did a proper double-take, literally gawking," he said, playing out the scene for her. "And then he sort of said to the other, 'Do you see that?' And then they were definitely waiting, for us to walk in front of them." Then as an afterthought he added, "Not that I want to make you uncomfortable or anything."

"Nah, that's okay," she said. "I love that kind of awkward stuff. Especially when it's these Wall Street types in ties, instead of, you know, homeless crackheads, which is what it usually is."

He laughed. "Really? Homeless crackheads?"

"Of course," she said. "That's who I get the most. So these stockbroker kind of guys in suits are the funniest, because usually, you know, they're too polite."

"You know," he said, "I think most girls would be insulted."

"Well, I won't deny the whole process of objectification, but it doesn't really bother me."

"How awful it must be sometimes to be a girl," he observed philosophically.

She shrugged. Delilah was aware that she was generally attractive to men, and she understood the reasons why, but she didn't really see what they intended to accomplish by flirting with her. The logical goal, she supposed, was sexual intercourse; but why did they even bother, really, if their best attempts for her attention were as weak as "hello gorgeous"? How did they expect her to reply to that? She could not conceive of what a man could possibly hope to hear in response.

Perhaps they believed that she sought out their attention. Perhaps, if she did not want their attention, she would not be so attractive. But that wasn't really fair, was it? It wasn't something she found particularly validating. Delilah had quite large breasts and hips and a comparatively rather absurd waistline, all points conspiring to make her look somewhat cartoony. Maybe she didn't look convincingly like a real person, and so nobody felt the need to address her as one, resulting in trite and stereotypical expressions of sexual arousal.

The cafeteria in the pokémon center was sort of empty, despite the air-conditioning and the time of day.

"Well, I look like the end of a misspent life," said Adam, scrutinizing his reflection in a spoon. "Isn't it a comfort to know that even when you're out of school you'll still get spots." He had left his Mohawk hairdo uncharged. She imagined David Attenborough showing up to say that it was a communication behavior signaling that he was not posing a threat.

"What did you want to tell me?" she asked, shifting through the old magazines on the table.

"Well...about all that Team Rocket stuff," he said. "Did you...ever tell anyone about it...?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Who would I tell?"

He raised an eyebrow. It was like being whipped. "The police, maybe?"

"Oh," she said, and hoped she wasn't blushing. "Well, I don't know, I guess I just never really understood what was happening, so how could I report it, if I wasn't even sure what it was? I mean, I don't want to sound stupid..."

She thought he might make some sort of barbed comment, but he didn't. He seemed to be making an effort to get along with her. "Right, well, I talked to my dad about it..."

While leafing through a prom dress catalogue he told her that when his father pretended to break up Team Rocket, he had taken the opportunity to prune the organization of undesirable branches by having it communicated to them that the disbanding was real, this particular group of delusionists in Johto having been one of them.

"He planned the whole bloody thing," said Adam. "All that time, we were helping Team Rocket."

He was clearly very angry, but she wondered if he was embarrassed. The idea made her uncomfortable, so she tried changing the subject: "I wonder, how old is Team Rocket?" she asked. "Is it as old as, like, the mafia?"

"No, it's not that old," he said. "It was his mother who started it. My grandmother."

"Oh. Is she...dead?" she asked insensitively, imagining a crime movie involving self-serving and dynamically rendered matricide as only an edgy and glamorous film noir could pull off, maybe shot with Chantilly lace over the lens to make it look mysterious and dramatic, the mother in a velvet dressing gown and a jeweled turban, her cigarette in its filigree holder still smoking in her dead hand as Giovanni Harlow put on a fedora and replaced the pearl-handled revolver in his mother's handbag (almost certainly Hermès, in a reptile's skin) on the wraparound desk.

"No, she lives in France," said Adam.

"Oh."

"We have a house on the Riviera."

That was just as good, she decided.

"Ugh, look at this," he said, showing her a page in the prom catalogue of a model in a sparkly mermaid gown. "I mean, the model is very attractive, but her body is sort of straight-up-and-down and the shape is very unflattering to her."

"Oh. Yeah, it does make her look kind of...stocky..."

"At least some of these models have got tits," he said casually, turning the page. "Not a lot of bottoms...but at least they look like girls, and not Daniel Radcliffe in a georgette bustier..."

She laughed. "Well, I can't believe that dress actually exists," she said, pointing to another one. "It looks like a Barbie dress from 1994."

"It looks like an all-lesbian production of The Great Gatsby," he sneered, turning another page.

She burst out laughing. "You are such a catty bitch...!"

"It's only recently my dad's been the boss, the nineties or something. Before that he was just a gym leader." His pedigreed lip curled imperiously. "Of course, he was beaten by a thirteen-year-old kid," he said with impressive disdain.

"Well, Red was very talented," she said.

"Red was very thirteen," he insisted. "Your brain doesn't even stop growing until you're in your twenties."

"Some people are really smart," she said. "Red was very talented. Red was like the Mozart of pokémon. I mean, who knows? Maybe he had high-functioning autism or something. Or, maybe he was just really good at pokémon, like you are, or like I am."

He didn't say anything. She wondered if he objected to her grouping him with herself when it came to skill. He should have been flattered, she thought.

"You know how they say that only children grow up feeling comfortable around adults," she said. "I think he had some of that going on. Was that true for you? Did you have much interaction with people who were, like, twenty years older than you?"

He was smiling in a funny way. She remembered who he was.

"That's not what I meant," she said quickly. "I mean, I didn't mean to talk about that if you..."

He laughed. "I know that's not what you meant," he said, and she knew that was true, but she felt herself blushing and she was embarrassed of her embarrassment. He looked like he got a kick out of it. "I don't mind," he said. "I know I have a reputation, but it can't really bother me if it's true, can it?"

"I guess not," she agreed, wondering then if tabloid columnists even bothered making up stories about him, when there was already the truth at their disposal.

"I know what kind of a person I am," he said, looking at her severely. "I know what other people say about me. I know that any girl who goes out with me won't even tell her best friend. But there are always plenty willing, aren't there?"

He had an unsettling harshness in his voice, making her breath catch as she looked up at him and realized all of a sudden that he was probably close to a whole foot taller than she was.

"I am aware of my own reputation." His tone was sort of hard and bitter, like a jaded old movie star with gin breath lecturing a fresh-faced starlet about the state of the industry. Or something. "You all the time hear the whole thing about how monogamy is like eating one dish for every meal so you get bored of it no matter how exquisite a dish it is. But sex is not that exciting. Maybe it's different for girls, but it's really mostly the same."

"Hm," she said. "Well, I guess you could probably say that about anything. Like, the broader your horizons, the more you come to the conclusion that everything is really the same thing."

"Yeah, maybe you're right," he said. "I mean, I like it, but it's quite pedestrian."

Adam had apparently slept with so many women that he had transcended the point of comparing them to each other, and simply took them for what they were.

"Have you ever thought about what your life would be like if you were a boy?"

He looked contemplative, almost somber. "Once or twice," she said. "Never very seriously." She looked at him. "Why? Do you ever think about what your life would be like if you were a girl?"

"I mean, I've heard that every man will have one relationship with an older woman. As a learning experience, I guess. But I'm a joke! I'm a punchline. Have you ever read about me in a magazine article? I won't say I don't deserve it, but what a reputation I've got! And they crack jokes about Team Rocket—it's shocking!"

"Well," she said. "I think that people make fun of stuff that makes them uncomfortable. Because if you, like, acknowledge that something is potentially ridiculous, it seems like not such a big deal anymore, and it's easier to deal with."

"How British," he sneered. "Anyway, she was the one who came on to me first...I just thought it might be interesting. 'Cos I like to be good at things." He looked at her like a reptile. "I like to be the best."

A chill went up her spine and she felt repelled by the intensity of his icy gaze.

"I mean, I do have that association, that I associate that generation of people with my parents. So at first I was like, all right, this is a bit weird, but...you know...people are just people," he said. "My mum got upset last night, and my father just said, 'Ivy, go and cry somewhere else.' And I think you do reach a certain age where you realise your parents are just humans."

"You're, what, three years older than I am? 1987, right?"

"That's right."

"Huh. Yeah, like, when you're seven—eight-year-olds seem impossibly mature, right? But there isn't a lot of difference between someone who's fifty-seven and someone who's fifty-eight."

"Well, it levels out," he said. "Or even look at animals. You know, rapidashes can live to be thirty, but they're full-grown by around five."

"Yeah, but I mean...I have a sister who's two years older, and a brother who's four years older. So if I had met you before, you would probably have been one of their friends instead." She paused. "Well, never mind," she said. "I forgot, you don't have siblings, so it probably doesn't mean anything to you."

She couldn't read the look on his face. "What doesn't mean anything to me?"

"I don't know." She shrugged. "Just, like, when you're in school, most of your friends are in your own grade, right? If I had a friend, if my sister was around, they would try to be more mature and cool. And naturally my sister would be a lot nicer."

He laughed, and then looked at her kind of sideways. "Do you call me your friend?"

"Not to your face."

He laughed again. "Well, I know I'm no picnic," he said, "but really I think you probably know me better than anybody. I mean..." He stopped, with a strange, unfamiliar smile. "I mean, you don't mind, do you?"

She looked at him, unsure what to think. "How could I mind?" she said.

His smile brightened, and she felt something sharp in her insides that she recognized, not without some shock, as pity.

What a strange personality Adam had! Sometimes he acted like she was his best friend, and other times he was so frosty and standoffish.

She realized suddenly that people probably thought the same thing about her. She probably seemed indifferent and superior a lot of the time.

Well, maybe she was. After all, she didn't long for friends; she rarely chose to talk to people if she could avoid it. A lot of people probably did think she was a bitch or a snob. And maybe they were right.