Supernatural Noir

And she’d made quite a bit of it, actually, in her almost twenty-three years. She kept working on self-improvement, but overall she was down with how her life was going. Even before she got her degree she was making more of a diff than most people did in their whole entire lives.

Sometimes she felt sorry for the perps, though. Pitiful dudes, once in a while chicks, a lot of them looking for what they called love. Some people would call just about anything love. Others didn’t have “love” at all, even in what they believed was private vocabulary. She herself had no clue what love was, but most of the time it was fun trying to figure it out.

Like spring break with Lourdes. When they’d walked on the beach holding hands people’d probably thought they were mother and daughter. Like every other social worker, Lourdes talked a lot about “boundaries,” so holding hands was just about all they did in public. It’d be fu

It was a syndrome, what fools called a birth defect. Fools like her egg and sperm donors. They could have at least put something on her birth certificate other than “Baby Girl.” Their loss. No way did the word “defect” have anything to do with her.

If she’d ever known the name of the syndrome, she didn’t now. Some people with it were normal height, but she was short enough to be almost but not quite an official “Little Person,” a cutesy label with not nearly the coolness of “Little Shit.” Tendency toward hip dysplasia. Crooked little fingers and toes that worked fine and curled like macaroni in lovers’ mouths, in Lourdes’s mouth. Streaked hair auburn and strawberry blond and almost black, which she used to dye all one color but now she made sure to brush it so all the colors showed, gleamed. Lourdes had a thing for long hair. She also had a thing for fuzzy shaved heads—actually, for fuzzy shaved anythings.

The ability to screw with other people’s thoughts was probably part of the syndrome, too. Lourdes didn’t know about that, and it wouldn’t be in her records even if she had any. That probably wasn’t why she’d been thrown away, either, unless she’d been seriously precocious; when she used to try to figure it out, she’d usually decided it was because of her weird little fingers and short legs.

In the days after the perp on the swing, she and Lourdes had one of their big dramatic fights and big dramatic reconciliations. Both would’ve been easier if she’d poked around to find out what Lourdes secretly wanted from her, but that would be cheating.

When she got an A- on her policy paper, though, she did a quick intervention. First she shifted a few things around in the teacher’s pathetic OCD mind, and let that sit for a day or two. Then she challenged the six lost points, and the teacher couldn’t quite remember why he’d deducted them. It was really sort of embarrassing to watch, so she conceded two points and the plus, but she won back four, which made it the A she deserved.

When Raul texted her JOB 4 U, she was working with her group on the case presentation and then they went for tamales and beers. She texted back LTR but it was almost nine before she could call him. “What up?”

“Where the hell you been?” The sound of the baby crying receded and she heard a door shut.

“Um? Studying?” She’d give him that much.

“Um? This is your job?”

“My bad.”

He wasn’t letting it go. “You don’t take six fucking hours to get back to me.”

“Hey,” she said, “dude. You could always find somebody else.” They both knew how valuable and rare her particular skill set was, and there were other cops and lawyers and PIs in this town who might have an interest in what she could do. Also that she needed the money and she loved the job.

For somebody in such a hurry he didn’t seem to mind wasting more time. During the pause she did dishes, banging as much as possible without breaking something.

Raul finally got over himself enough to tell her, “Looks like we got us a social-worker perp.” She could hear his smirk.

“You’re smokin’ crack!”

“Not today.”

He always said that when she said that. This time she didn’t laugh. “I meant, ‘really’?”

“Yeah, really. Hits on underage males and females she’s doing therapy on.”

“What do you mean, hits on?”

His voice got weird—husky, a little breathless, raggedy. She felt a stirring in her own groin. Normal, she knew; occupational hazard. Still, it bothered her, made her vigilant about her own motivations. She hoped Raul was watching his. “Gropes minors,” he explained. “Tells them bullshit like it’s part of the treatment so they’ll ‘learn to trust.’ ”

“This one’s mine.” In her minuscule kitchen space, balancing a plate in both hands to keep from dropping it, she held her breath and focused her mind.

“Thought you might say that.”

“Fer shizzle.”

“Come again?”

“Oh, sorry, old dude. Yeah, sure, you’re right.”

“Any reason you can’t speak English?”

“Gotta be hip, Raul, my man. Gotta be cool.”

“High on my list.”

“Who’s the slimeball? Hopefully nobody I know.”

“Name’s Lords something.”

She went very still and repeated it the way he’d said it. “Lords?”

Audibly shuffling papers, he spelled it. “Lourdes Malone. You know her?”

“No,” she said.

She made lists and flow charts and went through the steps in the social-work problem-solving process up to “implementation.” She did not think about Lourdes’s hands, Lourdes’s laugh, Lourdes’s tongue.

The first thing she had to do was pick a fight and stage another breakup. That wouldn’t take much. The hard part was that if Lourdes was doing this stuff, they’d never make up.

Having to take a semester off school would have sucked even worse, so she was totally relieved to find out about the online option for three of her four classes. Good thing they didn’t use video, or even audio, because if she could get her voice to change enough she’d have to keep it that way until this was done. She recorded herself using higher and lower pitches, various bogus accents, a lisp, a horror-movie whisper. The cartoon squeak would be the easiest to keep going but it was also the most obviously fake. Finally she found a website with audios of voices and accents, played around with the kids’ ones until she came up with one that sounded kind of real and that she could manage, talked aloud to herself in it for days, and was happy when Raul called and thought he had a wrong number and she had to say code before he was convinced it was her. He was both pissed and impressed. Cool beans.

She dug out the rose cologne and the ginger lip gloss. In real life she didn’t love all that girlie stuff, on principle, but the job gave her an excuse and it was kind of cool, like Halloween, like a kid playing dress up.

Next was the hair. Without looking in a mirror she whacked it off—scraggly would be in character—and then dyed it what the box called “Mahogany Brown” but came out Carrot-Top Red. She told her reflection, “You are uuuuuugly, girlfriend, you know that?” She looked so different that she tried messing with her own mind, and couldn’t really tell if it worked or not, if she even got in. Could there be such a thing as autotelepathy? Probably—so far in her life she hadn’t run into very many totally impossible things.

Voice, hair, posture, gait, tics, breathing patterns, gestures—by now she knew how to do all that. A few hours’ practice to get them down, a little more time and effort when this was over to get rid of whatever she decided not to keep as part of her ever-evolving self.