A Girl's Guide to Guns and Monsters - Martin Harry Greenberg [46]
Apparently, she made an unusual list of demands before she agreed to come. Raj is trying to meet those demands before her arrival tonight.
All of his running about makes me nervous, and I’m just sitting in my chair, typing random thoughts in my student laptop as the rest of the class arrive.
They’re carrying a variety of things: the laptops, hardcopy manuscripts covered with their inept scrawls, and various poisons from lattes to regular coffees to donuts to apples to leftover pizza.
We don’t have a lot to say to each other any more except Shut up or Move your ass, I need some room here or Were we supposed to read Steve’s story for today?, so there’s a lot of rustling without a lot of conversation.
That’s okay. It gives me a chance to figure out, once and for all, who is going to die.
That person has to have no redeeming characteristics. This is the person we all love to hate. When that person dies, we’re all going to be relieved he’s dead. We’ll just wonder why someone hasn’t killed him sooner.
As the class wanders in, I contemplate the possible candidates.
The three likeliest victims arrive in a clump. These three are miserable and proud of it, because they believe (erroneously, in my opinion) that misery begets book contracts.
First through the door is Hamlet Thorshov who deserves the Most Miserable Person of the Workshop Award just because his horrible parents decided to name him Hamlet. He’s an underdeveloped twenty-something of very obvious Russian lineage. His white-blond hair matches the color of his white-blond skin and fails to accent his pale blue eyes. He has somehow managed to find T-shirts that are too small for him, and he wears a watch half the size of his arm.
His watch is where the trouble begins, every single workshop. The damn thing can probably fly an airplane on its own. And he toys with it in the middle of the first critique, pressing buttons as if he were setting the stop-watch for his mid- morning run (if he ever exercised, which he most clearly does not).
No one tries to get him to stop any longer, although two days ago, Carlotta Sternke—one of the other three troublemakers—tried to cover the thing in bubble wrap, just to silence it.
That was probably the only time the workshop cheered for her. Carlotta Sternke was the workshop goat long before we decided to pick on Hamlet.
Carlotta is chubby and shows way too much skin through fishnet stockings, tops that deliberately leave her stomach bare, and leather skirts that are both too short and too tight. Her lips are always covered with black gloss and she outlines her eyes in late season raccoon.
Her hair is black with a white streak that might be deliberate, although with Carlotta, it’s impossible to tell. She’s as unpleasant as her clothing, with a high-pitched nervous giggle that makes me long for fingernails running along blackboards.
She feels like she needs to police everyone—hence the bubble wrap on Hamlet’s giant watch. And the person she loves to police more than anyone else is the third in our nasty triumvirate.
Norman Zell makes a good first impression. He’s tall, lanky, and reasonably good-looking. He’s embarrassed by the name “Norman,” so he insists that everyone he meet call him Zell, which, I have to admit, is an improvement.
The problem is that Zell has the attention span of a gnat and the energy level of a hummingbird. He’s in constant motion—either one knee jiggles or an arm or every single finger (and not in unison). In the first week, he managed to sleep with or proposition every woman here (I said no with probably more enthusiasm than I needed to express), and made it clear by the end of the week that he considered every woman who tumbled into his bed to be a conquest.
A conquest that he had the right to write about in Margarite Lawson roman-a-clef style. Only he wasn’t nearly as good at changing the names or the events. The instructor in week two actually made Zell stand in front of the group and apologize to everyone.
Zell burst into tears in the middle of his apology and yet somehow didn’t