Chapter 11

“I sort of get the idea of protocol. In Goth circles, we have an unwritten protocol. Goth kids are mostly looking to be individuals and freethinkers, but in reality, we all adhere to certain behaviors. There are things you do and can’t do. You have to say you like bands like the Cure and Bauhaus. If you don’t, then you get ostracized by the outcasts. It’s totally a clique of people who think they aren’t in a clique. You have to smoke. Everyone does. I actually hate smoking.”

“Good, because you are done smoking,” I insisted.

Hope glared at me like the brat she was.

“Are you guys in charge of me while I am at school?”

“Yes,” we unanimously answered.

“Then you are going to have to hang out with Goths after school and MAKE me stop smoking,” my sister said it like it was a dare. Hope parked the car and started putting on her skirt.

“What if we tell you to stop hanging out with Goths?” I asked.

“What if I tell you that I will drown you in a pool of blood and curse your existence for a thousand eons with the blasphemous magic of the elder gods?” she replied in a deadpan fashion.

“Who is the boss?” I asked calmly. I wanted my sister to stop questioning my authority and take this seriously. If she was asking for us to take control, then she’d have to stop being a mega-brat. I felt like she I knew it was probably hard to change her snarky habits, but I couldn’t see this working if she didn’t at least try to meet us halfway.

“You guys are definitely the boss, but as I said earlier. I can’t be Misty. A snake can’t be a tiger. A Slytherin can’t just join Gryffindor,” she shrugged and pouted. My sister’s facial expression seemed less confrontational than usual as she told us this was just how reality worked with an example from a fictional reality.

“Bem changed from Gryffindor in the third movie and was Ravenclaw in the fifth!” Trent flexed his extreme nerd-like knowledge of Harry Potter trivia.

“That’s just an inconsistency in the movies, which was never in the books,” James argued with his brother. The two of them were missing the point being made and were easily distracted by nonsensical debates about fictional stories.

“Before I change my mind about who owns me, just say that I can’t be Misty 2.0. I know you want both of us to do some of the same things because it makes it easier just to say that we must follow the same rules. It also makes me feel like a Goth kid – convinced I am an individual when I am just like everybody else in my circle.”

“You ARE a Goth Kid,” James pointed out. I assumed we missed some important distinction because Hope’s reaction was to roll her eyes and scoff. It seemed to her that Goth kids were just posers that followed everybody else, and yet she was one.

Hope got out of the car and agreed with him. “Yeah, I am, I guess, and I hate being a trend follower, okay? I am having a hard time saying what I mean. I want you guys to think of me as a sickness, and you don’t treat every sickness the same. I know I will be doing this with Mom, and that kind of squicks me out, but I am as okay with it as I am with fucking my brothers. It’s done now anyway. We fucked already. There is no going back from that and saying we didn’t have sex. We got it out of the way on the first day.”

We nodded, although I wasn’t sure what “squick” meant. Hope explained it was her word for something that made her uncomfortable, like licking a dirty dildo clean.

“I have to get to class. Add me to your group chat you have set up to talk about this, and we can text during class if you get bored,” she suggested as she walked away. She pretended not to care one way or the other if we did or not. I knew my sister well enough to know that was yet another test of whether we were interested. She seemed to be holding her cards and wanting to see how eager we were to throw down ours. The wind blew her skirt slightly, revealing her ass crack slightly. She didn’t bother pulling it back down.

“Did you hack our phones? How did you know about our group chat?” I asked.

“You are predictable, Michael. I knew you would set up a group chat so you three could get your shit straight with Mom. It’s what I would have done, too. Add me or don’t,” she didn’t wave as she dashed off towards her class.

I was impressed with my sister’s keen powers of deduction. We created a separate chat just for the four of us. She figured out there was still a secret chat that didn’t include her. Her first message when she accepted the invite was “Did you guys JUST create this group chat so you could include me, but keep your old one private?”

Yes, we had. I didn’t respond to her question in chat.

“That’s fine. Keep your secrets,” she wrote back. She didn’t text us for the rest of the day, but I did try to get things started in chat. “Can all three of us can come to your Goth hang out?”

She didn’t respond to the question.

I noticed Hope around school. She’d look up and acknowledge me, but not much else. It was crowded and busy there. The Goth kids who hated me still gave me the evil eye, and the ones who approved of me occasionally nodded in my direction.

At the end of the day, my sister texted. “You won’t be comfortable. They will definitely treat you like outsiders. There is no point in pretending you aren’t my owners around them. They all know. You can come but you will be bored. I will be home at regular time and before you ask, I will strip at back door.”

I texted the guys on our three-way boys-only chat to ask if they wanted to go anyway. Trent and James weren’t interested in being made to feel like douche bags “normies”.

“It may squick me to hang out with Emo kids, but I am on my way,” I wrote.

“Please don’t call anyone Emo there unless you want to have a fight, and don’t say squick either, It’s not the right context,” she wrote.

“What happened to calling me Sir?” I wrote it, and then I put a happy face on it but deleted it before pressing send. I added a frowny face and rewrote it. I decided not to send that text either because it made me seem needy. I liked it when she called me Sir, and it sounded like she meant it. Texting demands wasn’t the way to get respect.

The Goth kids line up outside in what we call the “Quad” around the lunch area after school ends to hang out. They reminded of black birds that gather on the same electric wire every day to chirp and sit quietly. They aren’t supposed to smoke there, which is probably why they do that instead of just walking 500 feet and leaving school property to do it hassle-free. About a dozen were in small groups, with a few standing by themselves.

I felt it spoke volumes about the ones who came to a group activity and then stood by themselves. It kind of summed up my opinion of their mentality.

Hope was standing next to Marceline and a tall guy with a mohawk that everyone calls “Lurch” because he is about 6’6 and has a peanut-shaped head. Edward was on the opposite side of the quad with a girl and two guys. It looked like he was giving a lecture on some pithy subject. He stopped talking and watched me cross the quad to my sister.

Marceline and Lurch glared at me.

“Hey guys, did I miss the Jack Kerouac spoken word portion of the evening?” I joked and snapped my fingers like the beatniks from the 1960s. I’d worked on that opening line since the moment I decided to join my sister outside. I thought it would kill (it didn’t. Her friends looked at me with flat expressions).

“What?” Marceline looked at me as if I was speaking vulgar nonsense. Lurch didn’t seem amused either.

“He’s just trying to ridicule us. Jack Kerouac was a beat poet from the 1960s counterculture. He thinks because we dress in black we’d probably be into that,” my sister explained and looked down at me. She took another puff of her cigarette.

I felt about six inches small.

“Cool,” Marceline asked. “Why are you here?” she asked me.

I suppressed the urge break into a rendition of a hep cat beat poet snapping his fingers and asking the big questions about why anybody is actually here and the meaning of existence. It wouldn’t have played well given the audience. I decided to change tactics and stop trying to break the ice with humor.

“I am here to make sure that my new pet is behaving,” I said. I realized that was a poor choice of words the moment I said it. Misty was a Pet – Hope was a “Beast”.

“I am not your pet, Sir,” Hope took a long sexy drag on her cigarette. As disgusting as that habit could be, there was something really hot about the way my sister smoked. She seemed to shimmer as she inhaled.

“I don’t think your friends want to know what you really are...” I tried to play it off as if I intended to call her a pet and was just being polite.

“They know. I have no secrets, Sir. You can’t humiliate me in front of my friends if that is what you are after,” she said as she dropped the cigarette and stamped it out. My sister had only smoked a tiny fraction of it.

Marceline and Lurch smiled in solidarity with my sister. They regarded me as a common enemy – an interloper in the unofficial domain of the Goth kids.

“Does Marceline know that you hate her guts and can’t stand her? You called her a backstabbing cunt because she wanted Edward and was happy that he broke up with you, so she could go after him?”

I took a real chance on what I had just said. That was probably uncalled for and totally out of left field. I was not thinking before I spoke because I had no idea what I intended to happen.

They both knew it was true before I said it. Marceline was a “Frienemy” – someone who pretends to be my sister’s best friend while plotting her downfall as her biggest rival. My sister had relationships like that with other girls since elementary school.

My sister glared at me but didn’t deny it.

Marceline may have known how my sister really felt about her, but she glared at her.

“You may smoke after school, but you will address Marceline as Ma’am, and Lurch as Sir, and light their cigarettes for them. You will only speak when they speak to you, and you will be polite to them. If I hear even one word from either of them that you were slightly disrespectful to them, or you made fun of Bahaus again then I will put you over my knee and spank you in front of all of your friends.”

“I never said anything bad about Bauhaus, Sir!!” Hope skipped everything else I had said and focused on that one thing.

“You said it was for normie has-beens who didn’t know real Goth music, and only poser-trash listened to it?” I said. I looked at Lurch. He happened to have a Bahaus pin on his leather jacket. I touched it. Lurch looked genuinely pissed. I quoted my sister’s exact words about the Rolling Stones not Bahaus. I just wanted to get a reaction.

My sister had said NO such thing about that Goth band. As far as I could tell, she loved Bauhaus. I’d never heard of them before, but her room had plenty of Bahaus Posters and I think she even had imported vinyl records of some of their songs. It did sound like something she MIGHT say though.

Hope turned pale and was aghast. If she had any credibility to say that I was lying, she wasted it with her body language.

“Anything else, Sir?” Hope looked genuinely panicked, as if she were petrified to think about the consequences of what I just told them.

“Apologize to Marceline for what you said about her behind her back, and how you took Edward from her. Then offer to lick her boots.”

“No.”

Marceline seemed surprised by her friend’s reaction, and what I was saying. She loathed me earlier, but now she seemed to resent my sister more.

“You really want me to make you do it out here in front of everyone?”

“I am sorry Marceline for saying hurtful shit about you behind your back, and I did some rotten things to get Edward, which I do regret. I mean that, and I am not just saying it. Okay? But I am not going to lick your boots out here on the quad.”

“Would you lick them in private?” I asked.

My sister blushed. Marceline seemed genuinely interested.

“Why do I have to do that?”

“Anyone can say they are sorry. Whenever Marceline, Edward or Lurch tell you to lick their boots, I want you to take them some place private like a nearby alcove out here, get down on your hands and knees, lift your skirt up so your entire ass is seen, and slobber on their shoes until you clean them both or they tell you to stop. If they tell me you refused, then I’ll make you start doing It in the center of the quad in front of anyone for anyone who asks.”

“Why Edward? I didn’t hurt him. He hurt me, Sir!”

“Because you are a fat-ass slut beast, with no dignity that pretends her shit doesn’t stink. You have no secrets? You have thousands of lies on top of lies that you keep secret. Now, take Marceline by the hand over to that alcove next to the snack machines, and do what I told you or I will take you to the center of the quad and start the show.”

“Do you want me to lick your boots, Marceline?” My sister asked politely with a pout.

“Why not,” she giggled.

“Hold my purse, please,” she handed it to me and took her rival to the corner of the alcove. I heard them talking about the quality of each other’s boots and my sister apologizing several times, including saying sorry she had to do this.

I stood there with Lurch, and he said nothing.

I discovered through observation that most of the people that were hanging out said absolutely nothing. They either had ESP and were having riveting mental conversations with one another, or no one had anything to say. I wanted to fill the silence.

“Do you want my sister to lick your boots?”

“I wouldn’t say no.”

“You’ll have to tell her to do it, don’t ask. As long as she is not going to class or in class. I’ll give you my number. You can text me and let me know if she refuses to call you Sir or makes fun of you.”

“Your sister ridicules people because she likes them. She likes me a lot,” he observed. It was a dry joke, but it was a great observation and one that I knew to be true. My sister enjoyed insulting and teasing me, but that’s because she cared enough about me to do it.

It made me wonder if she thought when I ridiculed her back, it was because I loved her. I do love my sister, but the ridicule was never intended to be mean. I never really thought about why I teased her or played practical jokes on her. My sister always handled it well when I did.

“That’s a good point. I don’t want to change her completely,” I said.

“You’d just make it so that she talks about as much as I do, if your sister isn’t spitting insults, she generally got nothing to say,” Lurch said in a cockney accent.

I realized that Lurch was British. I’d never heard him talk until today. He was a man of very few words. He had a very obvious accent that made him sound a lot tougher. It kind of surprised me, but it made a lot of sense. He had many of the mannerisms and body language of people from the U.K. He also had funky shaped teeth and overbite like many British people do.

I decided that my Sister could still be rude. It may actually be fun, but if I insisted on making a change that was too big, then my sister would not come out to the Goth quad at all. I just wanted her to have to do something humiliating around her friends to see how far I could stretch her limits.