Jack_ Secret Vengeance - F. Paul Wilson [7]
2
“What an awful religion,” Karina said at Jack’s side as they left Mr. Kressy’s class.
“I’m sure there are worse.”
The Thuggee cult he’d seen in Gunga Din and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom seemed lots worse.
The Beirut suicide bombings had come up in Mr. Kressy’s civics class and someone had asked what Islamic Jihad was all about. Mr. Kressy hadn’t known anything about the group, but explained that jihad was an Arabic word for “holy war.” And then he’d had to explain what he knew about Islam—which he admitted was very little.
“But their treatment of women,” Karina said. “I mean, they’re like little better than slaves.”
“Slave girls!” said Matt Follette, moving up beside them in his trademark slouching walk. “I want to be a maharajah with a whole harem of slave girls.”
He’d become the class’s unofficial comedian. His humor tended toward black, which suited Jack just fine.
Karina said, “They’re called ‘wives,’ but that’s what it sounds like a harem is—nothing but a bunch of female slaves to cook, clean, feed, and pamper the man while having his children.”
Sounding totally sincere, Matt said, “And the problem with that is…?”
She gave his arm a playful slap.
From what Jack had heard about Islam, it sounded like it had been dreamed up by someone like Matt Follette.
They ambled along the echoey tiled hallways toward the caf. SBR’s class building was a one-story box with an open quadrangle at its center; the caf was a connected square without a quadrangle. Once there they shuffled through the lunch line. Jack picked up a couple of burgers and added a slice of cheese to each. He noticed Karina making a salad.
“Aren’t you going to be hungry?” he said.
She shook her head. “This’ll hold me.”
“A burger’d hold you better.”
“I don’t eat meat.”
“No kidding?”
She smiled. “No kidding.”
He realized then that he’d never seen her eat meat. He’d heard of vegetarians but had never met one. Truth was, living in Johnson, he hadn’t met a whole lot of people in his fourteen years.
They found a table and Eddie joined them—physically, at least. He had his Walkman running into his ears.
Matt must have overheard the no-meat conversation because he turned to Karina and said, “So, are you, like, a Hindu or something? Cows are, like, holy?”
He said it with his usual sardonic tone, but Jack sensed genuine curiosity.
“No. I just don’t like the idea of animals being killed just so I can eat.”
“But that’s sort of the way nature works,” Jack said. “One thing dies so another can live. Plants die to feed deer, deer die to feed wolves. What’s left of the dead deer feeds insects or seeps into the ground to feed plants, which other deer eat. And around and around it goes.”
Matt grinned. “Where it stops, nobody knows.”
Karina pointed to her salad. “It stops right here.” She looked at Jack. “Does that make me weird?”
Jack had to smile. Not eating meat weird? He didn’t get it, but so what? He’d hung out with Weezy Connell for years and years. Karina had no idea what weird could be.
“Not to me. Now, if you were eating worms or dirt, that would be weird.”
She made a face. “Ew-ew.”
“But it still wouldn’t be any of my business. It’s only my business when you try to keep me from eating meat.” He grinned. “Or worse, start eating it off my plate.”
She glanced at his cheeseburgers. “No way, José.”
“I should bring you home for dinner.”
She reddened, hesitated a heartbeat or two, then gave a noncommittal, “Hmmm?”
Jack realized that hadn’t come out quite the way he’d intended.
“Uh, yeah. We could be an eating team. I’d take your meat and you could have my vegetables.”
She smiled. “Yeah. That’d work—as long as the vegetables didn’t touch the meat.”
“Oh, you’re one of those.”
“Yep.” Her brown eyes sparkled. “One of those.”
They laughed. Yeah, Karina Haddon was pretty cool. So was Weezy, but in a different way.
Weezy … he wondered how she was doing.
3
They had the same lunch period on Mondays, so after finishing his burgers Jack looked for Weezy in the caf. They’d never