Bad Seed 4

Odie was not gong to ruin this. He was not going to ruin his brother's birthday, his brother's 13th birthday, which was his first step into being a teenager, which was almost like being an adult. Odie was not going to let the fact that he was only 11 and already a head taller than his brother lull him into lording his physical size over the small, shy boy strapped next to him in the car. He was not going to make his mother put on the smile that told him, but somehow no one else, that she was going to lock herself in her room to cry when they got home. He was not going to make his father look at him with the determined but tired face that was always turned to Odie when he got up to mischief.

Except that Odie didn't really believe that.

Bad things always happened around Odie. It was just how his life worked.

Once he had been found snipping off a lock of his mother's hair to take with him to sleep, to keep his nightmares away, and when he had been scolded he'd gotten so agitated that he'd had little choice but to shave off the golden curls of his older brother in the dead of night. Another time, when his mother had been making a scarf for David, Odie had found himself dumping the length of fabric and all of the accompanying balls of yarn into the mud at the edge of their neighbor's garden. Then again, most of the bad things that happened around Odie just involved his climbing onto buildings or sneaking past fences where he wasn't wanted.

Today, he could keep from doing all of those things, if he concentrated very hard. They were his family, and he owed them that.

The zoo was bright and hot. It was full of happy people who were all very loud. Odie did not like things that were bright and glaring and loud, preferring the soft, cool corners where no one was likely to look for him. He did however like to see the animals held back in their "habitat" cages. It made him feel free seeing them stuck behind the thick, clear walls, much as it made him feel free seeing his parents and brother caught in the lock-step of their pre-determined existences. He also liked the chocolate ice cream that his father had gotten for everyone who was along on the trip.

The morning was manageable. Odie looked at the gorillas and maintained a studied distance from the things that made the serpent of impulse start to slither over the back of his skull, things like his father and his brother and his brother's stupid friends. He had to sit with the family at lunch in the zoo's restaurant, but he didn't speak to anyone other than his mother, and then only to tell her what he wanted to eat so that she could tell the too-happy waitress who had asked for his order. Odie didn't like people who smiled that much. It made the serpent itch.

Still. It was only a matter of time, wasn't it? That's always how it went for Odie.

In the afternoon, his mother shepherded the family to the reptile house, which Odie did not appreciate on account of having someone else trying to manipulate them even if they were his mother and therefore slightly less stupid than anyone else at the zoo that day, but which he did appreciate because it was cool and dark and quiet from all the people being a little afraid of the snakes and lizards behind lit panes of glass. It was the latter of those feelings that Mrs. Wilson had been working to create. She was not a foolish woman. She had, in fact, a very rightful claim the modicum of Odie's respect, a thing that he only grudgingly gave to anyone. It was only because of her close observation, informed intuition, and decisive actions that Odie and the family had lived in any kind of balance over the two years since Odie had started having his 'episodes', as they were called by whispering neighbors. She loved her nephew. She loved him as a son and as a fellow traveler along a road that was darker and more treacherous than anything that her son or husband were ever going to encounter, at least as long as she could keep them from it. She couldn't undo what had already been done to the boy, but she could give him the benefit of her years of learning to step out of the shadows. It was for him that she had stopped closing her eyes completely to the world she had run away from, but it was also for her love of him that she closed her eyes to how bad things were likely to become. Maybe if she had taken a more honest look at her nephew's behavior, things would've been different.

The lizards had fascinated the three boys, Odie, David, and a slight boy who David had invited from school, whose name they had all been told and all just as quickly forgotten. In the various inset tanks the snakes and lizards crawled over bits of wood and stone, sunning in patches of heat and stalking crickets that mindlessly followed the enclosure walls. David wondered why they did that. He wondered why they did the same thing over and over again, marching onward even as the crickets in front of them marched right into the path of a lizard's sticky tongue. He didn't ask though, not wanting to draw too much attention.

Odie had made his way directly, purposefully to the largest enclosure, at the back of the building. The snake inside was large and slick. He could see its muscles slowly tighten as it slid around a hanging branch, enough muscles and enough snake to have completely wrapped itself around and over his father, crushing the air out of him before swallowing him whole, Odie imagined. That's what he would do if he were a snake. This snake though was doing nothing, and his father and mother were at the back of the exhibit with his stupid brother and his brother's stupid friend.

Odie stared at the snake, wishing it would move. Wishing it would spill like black tar water across the floor of the cool, dark room and swallow up all of these people, swallow them while they were tired from the hot day and cowed by their fear into silent stillness. He wanted them all gone. He wanted them all swallowed away before they returned to the bright outside day and ruined everything all over again. He wanted them gone. He wanted to be the snake. He wanted to make them gone.

And he knew that he could be the snake.

“What's that?”

It was the boy who had come with them in the car, riding in what was normally Odie's seat so that he could sit next to Odie's stupid brother and forcing Odie to sit in the very back where no one ever sat, because it was stupid. Odie ignored him. He was thinking much more pleasant thoughts, of crawling through over the cool, dark tiles.

“What kind of snake is it? Does it say?”

The boy wouldn't be quiet and still like all things should be. The rocks were still. The branch was still. This boy should be still but he was talking. He was talking, but Odie was a snake.

The boy tapped the glass. “I think he's asleep... I mean, if it were awake it would be moving right? Hey! Hey, Snake!”

And the tapping, plunking and hollow in the dark room was an affront. It pounded against Odie's eyes, and he felt himself not free as he has presumed but trapped, like this animal was trapped. He could wander around the house where he wanted to go and wander through the neighborhood in the dusky grey of twilight, and he could hide, as many of the lizards here were hiding, but he felt it now. Their eyes were all on him, the neighbor's eyes, his father's eyes, his mother's eyes. He, the snake, was powerful and strong, and although the walls of his cage were clear glass they were still walls that allowed these lesser objects to gawk at his ferocity when he just wanted them to leave him alone.

His hands were tightening around the branch. His muscles were flexing in their coils, beneath cool, dark scales

Something was screaming.

It wasn't Odie. Snakes never screamed. And it wasn't the branch either, the stupid, pointless branch, with its red hair and its stupid freckles that no one remembered, not Odie or Odie's mother or even Odie's stupid father who was always in the way. Odie thought about wrapping his coils around his father and smiled as he constricted tighter.

No one had seen how it had happened.

Mr. Wilson was still at the front of the exhibit, watching a bearded dragon with his oldest son. Mrs. Wilson had just noticed that not only was their youngest missing but that that other boy was gone too. She had been wondering how she could contrive to subtly get his name again without letting anyone else know that she'd forgotten when she heard the scream.

Odie was on top of him. His hands were wrapped around the older boy's neck, and he was pinning him to the floor. Odie was two years younger and a full head taller than his brother, and the little red-haired boy was slighter even than him. Odie was staring down at the boy with a fixed intensity as his face turned blue. When the little girl, who was only a yard away with her mother, started screaming, he didn't move his eyes away from the boy's face, but he did start working his arms and shoulders to rhythmically beat the smaller boy's head against the tiled floor.

The moment of shock that overtook the rest of the bystanders did not impede Mrs. Wilson. Knowing that if she was not the first to intervene that others, who did not love her nephew, would do it for her, she surged forward to kneel behind him and shove her arms behind his. He was too big now for a cradle-hold, but she had prepared for the day that he might need to be held to keep from hurting himself, even if she had thought it wouldn't come this soon. Her hands slid behind his back, crossing so that each hand could grip the opposite forearm. She threw her weight backwards, yanking Odie's hands away from the boy and pulling them both onto their backs. She wrapped her legs over her nephew's legs and angled her face away to keep him from butting his head back, as she feared he might. He wasn't going to though. He didn't put up any struggle. This was his mother, and once he had known that it was her behind him, he had relaxed his grip on the boy beneath him. He relaxed against her, knowing that somehow, even though they had come from different worlds, even though she had brought him into her home from some other, distant place, that they were the same. He wouldn't hurt her.

An ambulance was called for the boy, who didn't seem materially injured but who everyone knew, and key people voiced, should be checked out just to be safe.

Odie had ruined his brother's birthday.

Laying in the back of an ambulance, which Mrs. Wilson had insisted be sent for to take her 'son' who was 'clearly having some kind of nervous break and needed medical attention' to the hospital as well, Odie had some time to think. He couldn't be sure what time it was or when he would be going home. He had been strapped down, much as he saw his brother's friend being strapped down, so he couldn't have a good wander to think it over.

He'd lived for ten years with his adoptive parents. Mr. and Mrs. Wilson had been good to him since his real parents had disappeared, and he really did love Mrs. Wilson as his mother. He didn't see her like he'd started to see other people, as pieces of very annoying furniture. She was like him, if not completely than at least to some degree. Sometimes he didn't think of her as his mother though. Sometimes, alone in his thoughts, he called her what he heard his 'father' call her. Penny. Odie loved Penny. Penny was the only person who had ever tried to watch out for him, and he regretted, on some level, that she had made her feel upset.

Odie sometimes had dreams where Penny would wake him up in the middle of the night to leave the confining, bright space inside their awful house in the suburbs, but by now he knew that this was unlikely to happen. Whatever there was inside of her that Odie felt he knew as he knew himself, she was also one of the things that made the house so bright and unpleasant. Even if she maintained dark corners of the house, even as she liked it cool and quiet as he did, she was one of the glass walls in his enclosure. He was going to have to accept that eventually.

He felt the same sympathetic twinge at the base of his spine at other times too though. Sometimes he felt it in public, bright places, like the supermarket, but the light in those places shut the feeling out before he could examine and define it.

Odie wanted to be away from the awful, bright house and from his awful, bright family, but he wasn't ready to leave his mother behind.

He supposed he would just have to try harder.

Except that Odie didn't really believe that any amount of trying would fix this.

That just wasn't how his life worked.