The First Day needs to Die

It wasn’t every day that I was called into the antechamber of an Archies plus Lucy session, so when Tash slammed the memo down on my desk and stomped off, I couldn’t refuse. Like everything to do with the angels and demons that I worked with, the walls in the chamber where white with the ceiling a midnight blue and the carpet charcoal black. Mickey was standing next to a cherry wood desk holding the only thing in the room that didn’t whisper of eloquence; a small manila folder. I walked up to him and sighed, “Hello Michael, what brings you out of the meeting and calls me to your side?”

Mickey was flipping through the contents of the folder, “Hello, Cassandra. I have a personal assignment for you.” He closed the folder and handed it to me. The title made me blink.

“Homo Sapien Vulpine? What do I have to do with shape shifters?”

“There are three different kinds of shape shifters that can turn into foxes that have survived to this day and age. The Kitsune’s of the Orient, The Foxwomen of the Native American’s, and the lesser regarded werefoxes of southern Europe. All of these sub species may only pass on the gift of shifting to their children. The Kitsune’s have yet to become endangered because they can have many children who posses the gift. Werefoxes are next, with their numbers being few due to their reckless behavior throughout the ages, yet they are not endangered either. Foxwomen, on the other hand, are all but extinct. Due to the Native Americans being herded onto reservations, Foxwomen went from being very abundant to having maybe 10. Now, there number is only one. The young kit has yet to realize what she is.”

“And this has to do with me how?” I asked, wanting to see if their was a point to the Vulpine history lesson, vague as it was.

Mickey smiled and tapped the folder I was holding, “It’s all in there. Now…”

“MICHEAL!” Mickey and I looked towards the door leading to the antechamber. The two oak doors were almost blown off their hinges as a whirlwind of fire, ice, stone, and smoke came through. I flipped open the folder and looked down. Mickey and I said in unison, “Hello, Leo.”

Leo looked at Mickey and screamed, pointing at the folder I held, “I wanted that assignment! I told you I wanted it!” He was so angry that fire burst out of his finger and I lifted the folder up closer to my face to avoid it being caught on fire.

The first paragraph almost had me with Leo screaming at Mickey. “What the f**k do you mean by this? High school?”

“I see you two should probably work together on this. Have fun.” Mickey gave us a smile worthy of a demon and walked through the doors on the other side of the antechamber to continue on with his meeting with the rest of the Archies and Lucy.

Leo looked down at me, grabbed the folder and flipped through it. “I’ll take the werefox, you take the Foxwoman.”

 

“Hello, sweetheart, you must be the new girl, Cassandra Blake.” My homeroom teacher welcomed me with a hug when I walked through the door to the class.

“Please, call me Cassie.” I hated this, I hated this and both Mickey and Leo were going to pay for this.

“Okay, Cassie it is. Right over here, towards the front. I’m sorry about that, but all the more enjoyable seats to the students have already been filled up, so the less enjoyable right up in front where the teacher can see everything seats are the only ones available.” She led me to a seat that was in front, but farthest from the door.

“That’s okay, I like being in front, that way I can actually see the blackboard.” Mickey was going to get disemboweled. I would rip out his angelic intestines one inch at a time and feed them to Cerberus.

The boy that I ended up sitting next to turned to me, “Hi, Cassie, I’m Mark. Why don’t you meet me in the commons so we can eat together? I know how hard it is for new students to find their way through lunch the first day without feeling awkward. I can’t guarantee that you will be sitting with the coolest crowd on campus, but my group and I are a bunch of big softies that can point out the other groups and help you get yourself into which ever you feel you will be most comfortable with. What do you think?”

I shut off my ideas of revenge against Mickey for sticking me into high school and turned to the boy. My angelic senses picked up that he hung out with the Foxwoman that I was supposed to find. This assignment was turning out to be a bit easier than I thought it would be. “Sure, Mark. Are any of your friends vegetarians? Is there a vegetarian group at this school? I’m not a hippy or anything like that, but my parents raised me that way and I find that I tend to get better with people who are vegetarians than those who aren’t.” I hated that I had to act cute and whatnot. I hated the body that I decided to use for this.

Where my normal body looked like a Latina-Irish girl with auburn hair and sandstone colored skin and turquoise eyes hovering near closer to 6 feet than most angels and demons, this high school child’s body was anything but that. I had given myself a golden brown hair color and the healthy glow of a barely tanned skin tone. My eyes were two smoky quartzes, big and wide with innocence. To top off the cuteness that my eyes gave me, I made my voice sound innocently ditzy.

Mark smiled at my voice and his eyes took on an “awe, she is so cute” look, which made me positive that everything I had done to make me look cute had worked. “I’m a vegetarian from birth as well. So is my friend Mariposa. I have a feeling that we are going to become good friends.” Mariposa was the name of the Foxwoman. Mark had just handed me a silver platter. This assignment was going to be over before I had to take a single math test.

 

“So, how did your first day go? I’m in a few of Riley’s classes, but didn’t have the chance to talk to him, but still, if we ever do group projects, I’ll try to get the chance to talk to him then. You meet Mariposa?” Leo and I were walking home, since we were posing as siblings for this little assignment. Mickey had set us up in a house that wasn’t far from the high school campus, so we able to walk instead of taking the bus or go through another fiasco of trying to drive. Neither Leo nor I had yet to master driving and didn’t want to try after the twentieth time of ramming the car into a tree or another car. 

“We had lunch together. She is very sweet and a vegetarian. She does swimming, cross country, and track. I found out something very intriguing about her that wasn’t in the report we got on her. She was adopted after going through foster care for five years. Her parents were killed in a car crash when she was three. She has no memory of them, but she does have memories that she claim are just dreams. They are of her running through the forest as something with eyes closer to the ground then they should have been. She says that the something had four legs and a tail, but she says they are just dreams from childhood. Ironically, her favorite animal is a saluki.” I picked up a stone that was on the dirt path we had turned onto that wound around a pond. “Also, her group of friends wouldn’t stop talking about the rival high school. It got annoying after a while, especially since it seems that the big news this year is the German foreign exchange student. He’s done sports and theatre, excelling at both. I wasn’t all that interested.” Looking at the pond and spotting a small catfish, I hurled my stone at it so it landed right in front of the fish, scaring it away.

Leo nodded his head, “Sounds like you got some good stuff. I just need to see if I can get in touch of Riley’s group. I couldn’t find them at lunch.”

“Should have sat with me. Even though we are in different grades, we’re supposed to be siblings and can look out for each other. This guy, Mark, told me about all the groups of different people. Riley hangs out with the artists and they take their lunch up on the school roof. I saw him walk past us and asked Mark the usual questions that a girl with interest in a guy would ask. He’s not an artist, but his dad is an art critic, so they like having him bring home pictures of their stuff so his dad can take a look and tell them what he thinks.”

We got to the small townhouse we were renting. I pulled the key from the chain I had on my neck and let us in while Leo digested what I had told him.

“So your telling me I should take up painting so I can get in touch with Riley?” He sounded amazed and shocked.

I wrinkled my nose, “No painting, I don’t want this place reeking. Take up something like sculpture. Find pieces of junk on the side of the road or in people’s trash and make things out of it. Do a whole environmental impact thing with it; make a statement that will shock the school.”

“Sculpture, hmmm.” He walked up the stairs and went to his room, shutting the door behind him. Probably to think about what he would make and what he would use. I almost felt sorry for the guy. Asking an assassin to be an artist was like asking a fish to take a walk on land.

Pulling out my cell phone, I found Mariposa’s number in it and dialed. She had invited me over to her place to help me get caught up, and I couldn’t wait to see what other memories she had from childhood. “Hey, Mariposa, it’s me, Cassie. Can I come over today, or would this weekend be a better time?”

“Hey, Cassie! Today would be great. I’m making a black bean pie that my parents and I love. You have got to try it. We can go over homework before and after dinner, if your parents wouldn’t mind you staying over.”

Trying not to snort I replied, “My parents have a curfew for my brother, but not for me. As long as I call them once an hour, they normally don’t mind me staying out late on weeknights. But given that I would like to go to swim practice tomorrow morning, I’ll put my own curfew on that I want to be home by 9:30.”

“Get over here then, sweetheart! Daylight is burning and you have five weeks of work to make up for eight classes! I can probably get you through two weeks for one subject tonight.” She gave me her address and directions on how to get there.

A boy at least two years older than my body looked answered the door. He looked me over a few times before biting his lips. “He there, sexy. I don’t remember seeing you before.” I wanted to smack him between the eyes, but Cassie couldn’t be an a*s kicker. So instead of taking him down, I blinked innocently and bit my own lip.

“I’m sorry that you don’t remember me. It’s probably because we have never met. I just started at Jenkin’s High today. I’m Cassie.” I held out my hand for him to shake.

“And I’m totally available.” He said with both eyes on my chest. I was about to make a smart remark that would have turned Cassie from ignorantly innocent to bad a*s when Mariposa showed up at the door.

“Cassie, come on in before big brother idiot says and does something stupid. I don’t want you to judge me by his poor example. Aaron, you knuckle dragger, go to your room and stay there until the dinner bell rings. Come on Cassie, let’s hide in my sanctuary and get you partially caught up in math.” She almost had a lightning bolt in her back at the word math, but that would have destroyed the point of me being here.

Mariposa’s room was covered from floor to ceiling in a collage of different pieces of artwork. Some parts were pictures, others were sculptures that protruded outwards, along with pieces of poetry and the rest was a mural of a pair of wolves howling at the moon. On the ceiling, she had hung a mixture of plastic branches, vines, flowers, and strange enough, wind chimes. I looked at the mural and went over to where one of the wolves had its eye opened well howling. The eye was a hubcap from a car, with black paint streaking it. I touched it and then looked around in awe. “Did you do this?”

She gave me a huge smile. “All of it. I wrote the poetry, took the pictures, made the sculptures, found the other pieces of junk that are attached to the wall and ceiling and spent a year on the wolves. But enough about the décor, let’s get cracking you over the head with the books.” I ignored her and took a slow circle around the room.

“Why do you hang out with Mark and rest of them when you could be with the artists?” I asked quietly. “Art seems to be something you enjoy doing, in every form.”

Mariposa sighed. “I love art, but I don’t like the artists at our school. They are just so suave and none of them are girls. I would be a major outcast from them. At least I have Mark.”

I looked at her, “Mark? He’s a nice boy, but if you’re an artist and he’s not, I don’t see how you two fit together.”

“We dated for a while, but then we broke up. Things are cool between us and I know he would understand if I decided to hang out with the other artists at school, but outside of school, there isn’t much I could really relate to with them. Sure, there is the art thing, but it’s just something I do from time to time. I’d rather swim then sit in front of an easel and paint a piece of fruit. Now, come on, we have an hour before I need to start making dinner, than we get another hour while it cooks, and another hour before I should send you home.”

Dinner at Mariposa’s house was like watching three different cultures clash. There was Aaron, who seemed like your average playboy, Mariposa and her school smarts along with love of sports, and then the parents, who were both quiet and didn’t say a single word. I asked Mariposa if that was how it always was and she said that she had yet to see a different pattern in the nine years she had been there. We were able to get through a lot more than she thought we would, covering four weeks of math instead of the two she predicted.

“How was dinner? Did you get anything else out of her? How much longer do we have to put up with this assignment? I’m getting antsy and it’s only been the first day!” Leo hounded me with questions when I walked past his bedroom door on the way to my own room to go to sleep.

“Dinner was great. Yes, she is an artist, but doesn’t seem like she wants anyone to know or care. I think we have a month to go before things should start to heat up.” I paused and looked at him hard. “You are a damn immortal, how the hell could you get antsy after less than 12 hours of your life has passed by when you have been alive long before time was discovered?” Leo moved and I saw into his bedroom. My jaw dropped and I looked at him, “How… what… how…. Leo, what the f**k did you do?” His room looked kind of like Mariposa’s, only without the beauty and finesse her art was. There was newspaper covering the entire floor and different colors of paint had sprayed the walls. Pieces of mud or clay were scattered on the ceiling and walls. There was also at least a hundred or more empty bottles of glass and plastic all over the place as well. Among the refuse, there was pieces of things that I wasn’t even going to start describing to myself.

“You told me to get artsy. I got artsy.” Leo defended himself and his mess.

“You didn’t get artsy, you turned into a Racine! Look at all of this. What did you do, pick up random things and then go heavy elemental on it? I do not want to even think about what that black thing on the ceiling is, let alone what could start suddenly moving all the newspaper. How did you do all this in less than six hours?”

“I have talent, sis.”

“I’m going to bed. I’ll see you at school tomorrow and I swear, if I don’t turn into a hyena, you will know I’m one on the inside.” I closed the door to my own room, set the alarm to go off with enough time for me to get to the school in time for morning swim practice, and fell promptly asleep.

 

“San.” A voice whispered over my head. I swiped at the face with my hand and moaned.

“San.” The voice whispered again. I gave a low growl and pulled my pillow over my head.

“San, please can I sleep with you tonight?” The voice hissed.

I sat up straight, “Leo, you crumbling piece of old dirt, can’t you see I’m trying to sleep?” I looked at him and saw that there were small tears of fire rolling down his cheeks. “Alright, bro, get on in, but don’t you dare tell me what is wrong or I will never let you forget it.”

Leo climbed into my bed, put his head against my back and sobbed uncontrollably. I fell asleep once the sobbing calmed down a bit.

Only to be woken up by my blaring alarm. I jumped out of bed and ran down the stairs to grab everything I would need for swimming, plus my school stuff and ran out the door to run to the school.