Because You Love To Hate Me Page 3

  Really, what are you going to do with that? Why? Whatever you said in response is wrong.

  Home remedy to try: Work toward acquiring total leadership over your local zumba classes, a real challenge for your mind and body, without all the hassle of war and politics.

  •YOU DON’T LIKE THE BEATLES.

  Why don’t you like the Beatles? You’re wrong. Try listening again. Listen until you like them.

  Home remedy to try: Why don’t you like them? You like them. If you still disagree, refer to bullet four.

  Happy not being evil! You’re welcome! Be vigilant and get vaccinated! Please note the evil vaccine is 53 percent effective and may cause loss of your nose and/or the ability to frown.

  Love,

  Real, Almost Life Coach Christine Riccio,

  aka PolandbananasBOOKS

  JACK

  BY AMERIIE

  The thing is getting them to trust you. The animals.

  Dad swears they taste different when they die fearful. Sharp, acidic. He insists that the butcher soothe them before bringing down the ax, though I’m not sure it makes a difference—to Dad’s taste buds or to the animals. But then, my motto is “I don’t eat anything with a face.” I don’t care that it’s cliché—and it is, just as much up here as it is down there—because after hearing enough bleats and squawks and screams and last words, it’s easy to stick to the vegetarian side of things.

  I think about where these animals come from, the world far beneath the clouds, and how I’ll never see it. How if the magick holding this stretch of cloud winked out and I fell into the vastness below, I’d explode into nothing—all nineteen feet four inches of me—and since I probably won’t ever do anything great, it’d be like I was never here, was never even born.

  I think about stuff like this all the time when I’m in the basement of our castle and I’m staining and stamping leather, doing everything I can to memorialize a life that ended on my parents’ plates. Mom thinks I’m being dramatic and that it’s the animations, westerns, and romances I watch on our flat-screen (magicked for size and reception, of course), and Dad thinks I’m fighting my nature and going through some teenaged rebellious phase, but I can’t help thinking about the animals’ last moments. My theory is, at the end, they smell their own blood before it’s spilled no matter how you try to lull them. And I’m talking loads of animals. Do you know how much livestock have to die to feed even one family of giants? Seems to me there’s something sacrilegious about taking a life and leaving nothing behind except for what comes out of your . . . well, behind.

  There was a time, ages ago, when humans looked to the sky and just knew there was something powerful up here. Dad likes to talk about the glory days—how our royal line was up to our ears in gold and how things were When Giants Roamed the Earth—not that he’s ever going to do anything about it. And this isn’t a judgment; when he dies about a hundred years from now and I’m Empress of the Northern Hemisphere, I won’t do anything about it, either.

  I know humans like to think they’re special, but it’s galling that they’ve forgotten about us. There are rumors, but all are chalked up to fairy tales, myths, and fables. Still, people are curious, which I was counting on when I dropped the beans.

  I hurled two tiny satchels of magicked beans over the edge of our cloud (careful to stand far enough away from the cloudline, of course) and knew they’d find their way to the right people, because magickal things have a way of being found when they want to be. Turns out one satchel ended up burrowing itself in the beach before it was picked up and the other tossed itself into the undercarriage of a delivery truck, eventually dropping onto someone’s feet. (I know this because I see the sense in paying extra for the little tracking slip that magickally appears upon delivery, otherwise who knows where your packages end up?)

  Yes, the beans were expensive, and yes, my parents would probably blow two gaskets if they knew, but what else could I do? Take another walk around the castle and observe the practically nonexistent change of season? Visit the market and maybe catch a urine-soaked whiff of a new shipment of humans rolling by? Perhaps watch a jetliner roar past in the distance?

  Safe. Boring. And no one around to complain to.

  Not much came of the first bag of beans, so I admit I had high expectations for the second. Those beans were supposed to bring up a friend, an ear, a confidante. Someone to tell me about the world below, since I was too scared to see it for myself. You know how people in those old movies share their lives with one another? I guess I was expecting that. I was not expecting a beanstalk-riding thief. Especially one who thought it was a cool idea to shoot up the magick beanstalk and steal the Golden Goose Dad had won in the PowerGlobe raffle, which we sorely needed because even if you’re royalty, do you know how much it costs to magick a five-mile cloud in place?

  And taking the Golden Goose and a bag of gold? That was just plain greedy. For folks like that, nothing’s ever enough.

  Which is why, as I run sandpaper for the hundredth time across this bare wood frame that I’m going to transform into a child-sized leather chair and I hear the window latch, I know that it’s Jack.

  He’s come back.

  The basement windows near the ceiling have old latches, which I’m assuming is how he slipped in last time. I hear his tiny feet hit the stone floor, and he takes a few steps but then freezes.

  I turn. This is only the second time I’ve been this close to a human before—I mean, one who is here of his own free will and not dirty and scared and confused.

  In my best grim voice (because that works on TV), I say, “Jack.”

  I don’t even know if that’s his name. Probably it isn’t. I just call him Jack because after he stole the bag of gold and the Golden Goose, all week long Dad couldn’t stop yammering about that little Jack shit who broke in. Mom actually ran after Jack during his getaway and saw him climb down the beanstalk and rub it three times, after which it shrank down to the earth below and out of reach.

  “Don’t tell me the goose has stopped laying those twenty-four-karat eggs.”

  “She’s gone,” Jack says. “I swear it.”

  Jack has a BBC accent. British news, not Oliver Twist. Don’t know what he’s doing on the coast of Massachusetts.

  “You took a big risk coming back up here. My mom said she’d skin you alive if you showed up again. You get caught and you’ll end up on someone’s plate by morning.”

  “So—so it’s true, the stories. That you . . .”

  “Eat people? I’m a vegetarian. Never ate a face and never will.”

  “But the other giants . . . do they really eat babies?”

  “Yeah, baby chickens, baby sheep, baby cows, baby whales—”

  “You know what I mean,” he says. His gaze darts all over the basement, over the wicker baskets and the stone floors and damp walls, like I’ve got a bag of babies tucked away somewhere like a bunch of onions.

  The thing is, giants do have a thing for babies, including baby humans. It’s something about the meat. Succulence.

  Not that I want to kill the guy. First off, I’ve never actually killed anything before. Secondly, killing him seems wrong, not so much because he’s an animal, human or whatever, but because we’re the same age and so, somehow, we should be on the same team. Thirdly, he knows stuff and I can ask him questions, which was the whole point of me tossing down the magick beans in the first place.

  But I do need to set precedence. “You’re addressing the Princess of the Northern Hemisphere. Don’t deign to think you know what I know . . . about . . . what you are meaning.” Lines like this sound so perfect on TV, but Jack looks more doubtful than respectful, confirming my suspicion that I flubbed it. I move on. “Are you sure the Golden Goose is gone?”

  Jack hesitates. I bet he’s wondering if his walking out alive is contingent on telling me what I want to hear. “I know how to get it back, if that’s what you want.”

  “You bring her back,” I say, “and I’ll give y
ou something else in return.”

  Jack’s eyebrows furrow; he’s gotten suspicious. Give folks easy and they think you’ve just slipped something by them. This happened to our cook last week, when Sally Groper brought over a fresh arrival of oldies but goodies from below, about thirty or so senior citizens who got nabbed from Atlantic City or somewhere. The cook haggled with Sally, who was fine with it because everyone knows humans get tougher and less tasty the older they get—I don’t know firsthand but I’ve attended enough barbecues to hear the talk—but then the cook made the mistake of smiling too soon. Next thing you know, old Sally raises the price by 50 percent.

  I can see how being so close to a giantess whose parents eat humans for lunch and dinner and brunch on occasion would, you know, unsettle Jack a little. So I put on my best earnest look and I say, “Just turn around and climb back up those little boxes and crawl out that window and get down your magick beanstalk and bring me back the goose, and I promise I’ll give you something really good.”

  He takes a few steps backward. “For instance? And how do I know you won’t kill me when I bring it back?”

  And eat me, I know he wants to add. It’s a good question, I admit.

  I say, “There’s no guarantee you’ll find the goose and come back with it, if you even plan on coming back at all. If I wanted to kill you, I could’ve done it already. You’re here, I’m here, fire’s blazing.” I shrug.

  He keeps walking backward until his heel hits one of the boxes. “You said you were a vegetarian.”

  “I am. Mom’s another story, and she’s an early riser.”

  That does it. Jack whirls around and pushes himself up the first box and scrabbles up the second and the third and all the rest and he’s out the window, and I imagine he’s running through the fog to the beanstalk.

  I turn back to my wood chair and run my hands over it, checking for splinters, because nobody likes a pain in the ass.

  Jack doesn’t come back for another two weeks. It’s around midnight and I’m sitting in the basement, sanding the seat of the wood chair even though I’m going to put a cushion and leather over it anyway.

  The window’s latch clicks, and there’s a rustle of feathers and a low honk. Goldie the Golden Goose ruffles her feathers and finds a corner to hunker down in, glaring at Jack and shaking herself as if to get off all of his human stink.

  Not that Jack stinks one bit. In fact, he smells a little different than he did the first time. I can’t quite place it . . . water, sharp mint maybe . . . He smells the way I imagine a glacier waterfall might. Jack sits at the roaring hearth with his muscular arms propped on his knees. The fireplace is so large he could do a few cartwheels in there without grazing its stone walls, but he doesn’t look scared at all. I mean, one nudge of my foot and he’d be in, headfirst. His dark hair is thick and would fill every nook and cranny of this basement with that gross burnt hair smell. The fire’s big and Jack’s brave.

  “So,” he says, “what do you have for me?”

  “First, tell me about life down there. But you have to answer honestly, Jack.”

  He’s yet to correct me when I call him Jack, and I’m starting to wonder if maybe it’s his name. Or maybe he thinks he’s safer with an alias.

  “Be descriptive,” I say. “Let me see it in my mind’s eye.”

  Jack smiles.

  It really is a nice smile.

  “How about you answer a question for me?” he says. “I passed a fenced-off area and there were thousands of sheep grazing on something that looked like clouds, but that can’t be right. Is it some kind of grass?”

  “Something like that.”

  “But they’re real sheep from below, aren’t they?”

  “Just because something isn’t from down there doesn’t make it any less real.”

  “Agreed,” Jack says. He looks away from the fire and gazes around the room. His slack expression says Nonchalance but his eyes scream Greed.

  I say, “We don’t keep treasure in the basement.”

  Jack turns to me. “What did I do?”

  “It’s more the gleam in your eye.”

  “I’m too small for you to catch any gleam.”

  “You have a dog?”

  “My uncle has a cat.”

  “You ever catch it slinking around, looking suspicious?”

  Jack doesn’t answer.

  “Exactly. And it’s smaller to you than you are to me. But still you see.” I lean back, satisfied. “So don’t think I don’t see you, Jack.”

  Jack stares back at me for a few moments. “You don’t sound like a princess.” He starts to glance around the basement again but catches himself. “This castle is a bit . . . empty, isn’t it? I thought royals had staff everywhere.”

  I don’t dignify any of this with an answer. It’s not like it was in the old days, when there were plenty of gold bars and jeweled treasures to hoard. There are banks now and high-tech security, and all the valuable stuff isn’t tangible, just information and 1s and 0s. What did he expect?

  “I, uh . . . I passed . . . a pen . . . There were . . . people inside. Human beings.”

  “So?”

  “I don’t mean to sound judgmental—”

  “Then don’t.”

  I sigh. Wood and leather don’t talk back. People, on the other hand, are exasperating.

  I sit in silence, questioning the efficacy of the magical beans’ law of attraction, and Jack says, “So how do giants get below the clouds? Do you climb down beanstalks? What if you run out of beans?”

  “We go down with the rain, and when it gets really hot, we rise back up with the vapor.”

  He looks at me like he doesn’t know whether to believe me. “And if it’s too cold . . . if there isn’t enough water going up?”

  “We’re screwed.”

  Jack shakes his head but at least he stops with the questions. I hope he isn’t one of those astute people, you know, the kind you can never be comfortable around because it’s like they see through everything you do? Dad says people like that have only two stations in life: at your right hand or on the sharp end of a pike.

  The thing about giants dropping in on the world below is this: only a few ever go—from this cloud, only ten or fifteen, and I hear it’s the same elsewhere. I think that’s partly because it’s depressing, seeing how the world has moved on and thrived without us. That’s probably why the ones who go down terrorize small towns and villages and farms while they get our meat and produce and flat-screen TVs. It’s why they leave the occasional crop circle even though you aren’t supposed to do that anymore, just to let the world know WE ARE HERE.

  As for me, I’ll never leave this cloud. I know there’s more to life than golden eggs and leather crafts. I know I’ll never surf a great wave or hike the Grand Canyon. Because as much as I want to, it’s too scary to think New, to think Different.

  Jack says, “Would you mind showing me your castle? I don’t mean to be rude, but you can’t blame me for being fascinated.”

  Don’t mean to be rude, says the thief. Jack wants to see what else he can steal, more like.

  But I haven’t had anyone over in ages, and last time, well, let’s just say things didn’t go as planned.

  So I tell Jack it’d be best if I rub the edge of my cardigan over his body so that the human scent of him can be covered by lint and ozone. The last thing we need is Dad fee-fi-fo-fum-ing it down the stairs. (The battle cry fee fi fo fum translates roughly from the old giant tongue to “fight destroy conquer expand,” but it’s suffered an unfortunate downgrade and now just means “I’m really pissed.”)

  I look down at Jack, who at full height reaches the top of my knee, and there’s this awkward moment when he lifts his arms and extends them toward me and he looks so helpless and trusting . . . so human. I’m endeared to him and repelled at the same time. I wrap my fingers around him, and it could be my imagination, but I think I feel his heart thudding against one of my fingertips. I grip his warm body tighter.
His ribs feel fragile against the bones of my pinkie; his butt is soft against the meat of my palm. Muscle and bone and blood and water . . .

  “Ow!”

  His voice is so sharp I nearly drop him. “What?”

  “You were squeezing me to death.”

  Squeezing me to death. A dare, a challenge. It’s only a split second, but in this moment I feel electric.

  I don’t apologize, because it wouldn’t be right, a giant—and a royal one at that—apologizing to a human, but I loosen my grip and place him on my right shoulder.

  Upstairs, the moonlight reflects off heavy copper pots hanging in the kitchen, shimmers off great stone walls. I walk straight through and head for the receiving room to show Jack the paintings, sculptures, and artifacts (all crafted by humans) that our family has collected for generations. I hurry past the recessed, oversized nook just outside the kitchen. In the nook’s center stands a bigger-than-life-sized bronze bull. The silver light of the moon glints off its horns. I hate the oily, charred smell in there; it clings to the walls.

  “What’s that?” he says, pointing to the bull. “It’s huge. I’ve never seen an iron bull in a house.”

  “It’s bronze.”

  “I was expecting, I don’t know, stuffed men on the walls—human heads, maybe.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “Come on, bring me closer!”

  I know he isn’t going to shut up until I do, so I pad over to the bull.

  “This is amazing. Can I sit on it?”

  The last thing I need is Jack falling off. “Absolutely not. It’s not a toy.”

  “All the wood bits and ash on the floor—nice touch.”

  I pause.

  “Come on, just for a second.”

  I sigh and lift him off my shoulder and I get that feeling again, the urge to squeeze and squeeze. Power over life and death, here in my hand, a gift. But I just place Jack on top of the bull and watch him sidle up to the bronze animal’s neck.

  “I summered in Texas once,” he says. “There was a restaurant that served peanuts by the bowl. You crack them open and toss them onto the floor. The entire floor, covered in shells.” Jack does this gymnast thing as he talks, placing his arms straight down in front of him, his palms flat against the bull’s back as he stretches out his legs. “It’s brilliant. At least, it was. There was a lawsuit.”