Minnie & Kathleen o1

Austin Crowley, an executive of his family's failing oil company, has been on the search for years for an alternative form of energy none of his competitors would have thought of: magic from mythos.

“We need to leave.” 

Her friend’s fingernails drove into the fabric of her jeans. She was biting her lip so hard it appeared as if it was going to start bleeding at any second. Though Kathleen always sat slouched, this time she was leaning forward even more, having her badly dyed, horribly cut orange hair shield most of her face from those sitting on the left side of her.

“This isn’t our stop,” her friend on the right responded, crossing her arms across her chest and staring ahead at a man’s curly brown hair in front of her. “It’d be a couple miles to your house.”

“Another bus will come in thirty minutes,” Kathleen lowered her voice, as if anyone around them would bother listening in on their conversation. “We have to leave now.”

“Nope. Sorry.” 

This wasn’t unusual behavior. Instead, this was quite the norm. Any moment of discomfort, and Kathleen would try to flee from the situation. It was her responsibility, as a friend, she thought, to have Kathleen face her fears and not let them overtake her. 

Especially when everything in the world scared Kathleen. 

“Minnie--” 

“No.” 

“It doesn’t feel right,” Kathleen murmured, finally letting her hands free from her thighs and running one through her hair while biting the nails on the other. 

“What about it?” Minnie took several seconds to respond to this, trying to sense the atmosphere around her. Something she was afraid to admit was Kathleen being right. There wasn’t anything unusual in the air that could be felt right away--but there was a sound that drove into Minnie’s ear that didn’t seem to grow fainter as time grew on. 

A constant beeping. Faint beforehand, but now that Minnie was acknowledging it’s existence, it was loud and painful in her ears. Wincing, she brought up one hand to cover up the ear closer to the noise--the left one, and she twisted around in her seat to glance behind her.

The back of the bus was empty besides two people sitting in the very last row, right in the center. One was older--a male, black, with hair twisted into long dreadlocks and yet wearing a business suit. He kept glancing out the window every few seconds, while having his right leg bounce awkwardly. If she were to guess stereotypically, Minnie would say that he had a Jamaican accent. 

Next to him was a girl that looked to be around her age (appearance wise) and Kathleen’s. It was hard to put a pinpoint on her ethnicity--she was tanned with black hair cropped stylishly just below the chin with side swept bangs. She was wearing a school uniform that Minnie didn’t recognize, like those that belonged to Catholic school girls. Definitely not a school from the area. In her hand was a flip phone, looking to be several years old. 

Turning back to stare at the man’s head, Minnie was quick to conclude that was where the beeping was coming from. 

“Are you bothered about the people behind us?” 

The bus was stopping. The man in front of them put his hat back on, grabbed his briefcase, and walked slowly to the front to leave. 

Kathleen nodded. 

“Okay. Let’s go.” 

Both girls tried to get up from their seats as normally as possible, but Kathleen ended up rushing towards the front holding one of the straps of her backpack instead of putting it on over her shoulder. Minnie tried to look normal for the both of them, slipping her arms through the straps of her light backpack and walking to the front exit of the bus. 

Something made her twitch as she walked. Her eyes glanced to the side and met with the blue eyes of a girl with blonde hair. Decidedly Scandinavian. She nodded and winked, then glanced back to her companion, a male about her age. “Of course I’m being honest.”

The air was heavy. Minnie dashed the last couple steps off the bus, down the steps, and almost ran into Kathleen, who was staring at the bus schedule screwed into a piece of metal.

“There better have been a good reason for that,” Minnie said to her friend. 

“Something wasn’t right…the people on the bus…” 

“It’s fine, it’s fine,” Minnie sighed, watching the man that had been on the same bus as them cross the street into a café. She wasn’t going to admit the uneasiness she felt as well those last few seconds in their seats and as she was leaving.

It wasn’t her position to lose face in front of Kathleen. 

“How about we get something to drink before the next bus comes?” she suggested, waving her hand awkwardly towards the café. “Calm your nerves a bit?” 

Minnie watched the back of her friend’s head bob up and down as she kept staring at the bus schedule. 

“Come on, then,” she grabbed Kathleen’s wrist and dragged her across the street before any cars could screech into them, though having to endure a couple frustrated honks from drivers. Opening the door into the café, Minnie let her friend inside first, glanced outside into the dimming early summer air, then closed the door as the bell announcing their arrival dinged post humorously. 

“You’re always so fast,” Kathleen commented, breathing, glancing up at the menu under the register at the cramped café. 

For some reason, Minnie spotted the man from the bus almost right away. There was an air around him that was indescribable. Not safe, but not dangerous either. He was just there. A human on a different level like Kathleen was, sitting at a table, sipping a coffee while looking over a stack of papers. 

“Do you have money?” 

“Huh?” 

“Do you have money?” Kathleen repeated hesitantly, pulling out a small wad of one dollar bills from her pocket. “I mean, if you don’t, it’s alright…” 

“Just get me a water, those are free,” Minnie took Kathleen’s backpack away from her hand. “I’ll grab us a table.”

As far away as possible from that man, Minnie added on as an afterthought. No need to get involved with other people that have unusual living frequencies. 

Sitting herself in a corner, she tilted the chair at the ridiculously small table towards the counter to keep an eye on Kathleen without making it look unusual or creepy. Minnie set her bag on the table while leaving Kathleen’s on the ground, and glanced up to stare at Kathleen for a few moments before unzipping the bag and digging around for her phone. 

She brought it out and slid it open. No texts, no missed calls.

Dangun wasn’t becoming impatient. Huh. 

It would probably be best to text him anyways, considering how intolerable he became if he wasn’t constantly updated about Minnie’s whereabouts and activities. 

@ a place w/ kath gettin drinks. Will be home l8r.

She closed her phone, but almost a split second later, there was a reply. 

Don’t drink anything contaminated.

“Who you texting?“ Kathleen asked in a quiet tone as if she was intervening on a personal conversation, placing a plastic cup full of ice water in front of Minnie. She sat in the seat across from her, taking a sip of some horrible bright pink and white iced drink. 

“Grandpa,” Minnie responded, glancing up from her phone for a second then back down to compose a quick message. 

Got tap H2O.

That’d give him a heart attack. 

Kathleen was already contently sipping her drink when Minnie put her phone away into her pocket. She was staring off into space, in fact, past Minnie’s shoulder straight at the blank wall of the café. 

“What’s that called?” Minnie asked, pulling the lid off her tap water and picking ice out of it, popping them into her mouth to bite down onto with a satisfying crunch. 

“Strawberry-Mango-Coconut Mocha Smoothie,” Kathleen answered. 

“You can fit that much into a drink?” 

“Sure,” Kathleen said with a shrug, her eyes focusing back to Minnie. “Tastes good. Want to try it?” 

Her phone vibrated against her thigh just when she popped another ice cube into her mouth. “I’m fine. Sounds filthy.” 

“Filthy?” 

“Yeah,” Minnie noticed Kathleen’s questioning look, but she was soon distracted by the two people that just entered the small establishment and were looking around. “Don’t worry about it.” 

It was the girl in the school uniform and the black guy in the suit from the back of the bus. After a couple seconds of grazing the cramped seating area visually, the man waved his hand absently towards their table while speaking to the girl. With a nod, the girl said something to him, and he headed to the counter while she made her way over to Minnie and Kathleen.

“Mind if we sit here?” her voice was smooth and crisp. 

She smelled of peaches, money and the dying earth. 

“We?” Minnie asked, trying not to make eye contact with Kathleen. She was freezing up, lips around the edge of her straw, eyes growing wide. 

“My associate and I,” the girl explained, reaching over to a nearby table to take a chair and dragging it over. Sitting down in it. Crossing her legs at the ankles, setting an elbow on the table. Using the hand connected to that arm resting on the table to support her chin, as if it would do her favors. “So cramped in here.” 

Only other person in there, besides the girl with a nose piercing working at the counter, was the man that had gotten off at the same bus stop as Minnie and Kathleen.

“I’m sure,” Minnie said coolly. 

“I’m Rachel,” she smiled slightly, her dark eyes glancing at Kathleen for a moment then focusing back to Minnie. “May I ask who you two are?” 

Kathleen’s response shocked Minnie for good reason. “Kaeja.” 

Kaeja. She hadn’t heard that name used in over six months.

Minnie thought they had both gotten past that. 

“Kai-yah?” Rachel pronounced with extra emphasis on the last syllable, her perfectly manicured eyebrows drawing together in what Minnie thought to be an attempt to seem cute. Or maybe she was just condescending. “I can’t say I’ve heard that name before.” 

“It’s unusual,” Minnie spoke up. 

“I could have guessed that,” Rachel’s eyes sent Minnie a hard look that probably scared most people. “What’s your name?” 

“Minnie.” 

“What are you?” 

To most other people, it would have been a question of her ethnic background. 

She was obviously Asian in her features. Minnie had the issue of otakus walking up to her and speaking broken Japanese, and though she did understand the language to a certain extent, it was quite pleasurable to tell them in English to, “Think again, jackasses.” To older Chinese women who spoke to her in Cantonese, she didn’t have the heart to correct. She’d speak to them with the minimal vocabulary of the language she knew, and they’d then move on with their lives into opposite directions. 

A mystery to other people, even other Asians, when it was concerned with what she was exactly. 

“Korean.” A passable response. One that most anyone would believe. 

“Hm,” it wasn’t the answer Rachel was looking for, and Minnie knew it. 

It wasn’t a question of ethnicity. 

It was a question of true, not completely human identity. 

“And you, Kaeja?” Rachel wasn’t even bothering to glance towards Kathleen now, her eyes focused on Minnie with considerable interest. 

“Uh…American?” Kathleen had to let go of the straw between her teeth again, answering in a way of an uncertain contestant on a trivia TV show. 

Wrong answer. Not the one Rachel was looking for. 

“I see,” Rachel tilted her head to see how her associate was doing, right as he was taking two drinks handed to him by the barista, a cheerful smile on his face. “I’m American as well.” 

“Seem to have something else in you,” Minnie was hoping it sounded nice, but it came out cold. 

“Something else?” She laughed. “Scottish, Irish…maybe some French…but other than that, no. I assure you. Nothing else.” 

“Native American?” Minnie guessed. 

“Of course not,” Rachel waved her hand dismissively as the man with the dreadlocks set down a rather plain looking latte in front of her. “Thank you, Gach.” 

“You’re welcome,” Gach flashed a smile showing unbelievably white teeth, holding the coffee in his hand without taking a drink of it. Unlike how Minnie expected, there was barely a trace of an accent in his speech, and it certainly wasn’t Jamaican. 

“And what are you?” Minnie asked him as he pulled up his own chair, but positioned it slightly behind Rachel, so he wasn’t sitting directly at the table. 

“Hm?” Gach appeared to be amused at the question, though his face quickly turned serious. “Congo.”

“What an inconsiderate question to ask,” Rachel pouted before putting her lips to the lid of her latte. “You should watch your words, Minnie.” 

“I--” Kathleen blinked, having been frozen this whole time. “Minnie, I’m going to go to the bathroom--” 

“Just go,” Minnie cut across her, looking at her to show it was okay. 

Kathleen nodded, then fled, weaving through several tables until she dashed under a doorway that was generously labeled Bathrooms. 

Rachel sipped her drink through a small opening in the lid while eyeing Kathleen’s with curiosity. Gach kept his composure near unreadable as he kept a hold of his drink, not even pretending to have an interest in drinking it. Minnie wasn’t sure what to do, noticing the rest of the ice that had been left in her cup of water had melted. 

Her mind wandered to the name Kathleen used to introduce herself. Kaeja. A name that she knew Kathleen by when she met her a couple years ago, by force. A name that she knew wasn’t Kathleen’s real name. However, it was a name she had crafted together to protect herself from the outside world. She made everything up around her in a world that was near perfect in order to escape the things that scared her from the outside world. 

It was also a way to make the voices seem slightly more normal. 

That was why Minnie had to be close to Kathleen. The voices. To get them under control, to understand how they worked, and to see if there was any way Minnie could hear them herself. 

There wasn’t. But Dangun, the crotchety old man she lived with, kept demanding that she tried. 

“So, what are you?” 

Minnie’s thoughts were thrust back to the depths of her mind by Rachel’s question and a loud beeping. She noticed the flip phone on the table, with a red light flashing on the tip of the antenna. Wincing, Minnie tried to clog up her ears mentally, but it was hardly effective. 

“I told you,” Minnie said. “Korean.” 

Rachel rolled her eyes in an over exaggerated manner. “Besides that. Some kind of ghost in a corporeal form? Goblin?” 

At the mention of goblin, Rachel’s mouth turned into a twisted grin. 

“Just human,” Minnie told her, finally deciding it was time to take a sip of the water.

“This little phone says otherwise,” Rachel tapped the phone with her finger, hard. “It tells me when I’m running into something that’s not quite human. I thought maybe it was Kaeja, but she just left, and it’s beeping quite strongly still. So it’s you. Just tell me. I’m on your side.” 

“She is,” Gach said, as if that was going to put Minnie’s mind any more at ease. 

“Though Kathleen was the reason I came all this way in the first place,” Rachel told Minnie, as if it was some huge revelation. “Hearing voices in the head isn’t exactly normal, is it? Though I was going to consider that with her not being human. But looks like she is, and you aren’t.”

“Hearing voices is completely normal if you’re schizophrenic,” Minnie said. “So I don’t know what you’re getting at with her not being human.” 

Gach let out a small laugh, which was quickly silenced by a glare that Rachel sent in. He glanced down at his coffee and finally took a drink of it, downing half of it in one gulp. “Schizophrenic is just the label they’ve slapped on her.”

That beeping was so loud. 

“I know that she’s able to hone in on spirits with different living frequencies, similar to that of any otherworldly creature,” Rachel continued, picking up from Gach’s side comment. “It’s a rare talent in humans. The last person able to do that went a bit crazy, according to history. Ever heard of Mary Todd Lincoln? Or are you too uneducated for that?” 

“I’ve heard of her,” Minnie said through clenched teeth. 

“Ah, good to know.” 

“I’m leaving as soon as Kathleen comes back.” 

“But I still want to get to know you two,” Rachel frowned, her hand returning to tapping the phone along with it’s constant beeping. 

Minnie’s skull felt it was going to burst any second. 

“Sorry,” Minnie rose from her seat, slinging her backpack over the shoulder and reaching across the table to grab Kathleen’s drink. “Can’t allow that.” 

“Out of curiosity, who’s your advisor?” Rachel said as if she was asking where she got her shoes from. “No one Chinese, right? They’ve all died out from what I can tell.” 

Minnie’s hand hovered over the drink for a moment, but then snatched to grab it. 

“Ah. So the Chinese are dead,” Gach concluded. 

“Told you,” Rachel smiled. 

Kathleen reappeared from the bathroom, seeming definitely more pale and sickly. Her knees were shaking and Minnie could barely pick up on her uneven breathing from over the sound of the beeping phone. “Kathleen, we’re leaving!” 

“Kae--Kaeja!” Kathleen corrected, her response catching attention of the barista and the man at his lone table. He looked up from the papers he was going through, marking up with a red pen, and the barista stopped cleaning up a glass with a washcloth. 

“Whatever,” Minnie bent over to pick up the bag, when something white and rectangular was forced in front of her face. Glancing up in disgust, she saw that Gach was reaching out over Rachel’s shoulder to present it to her. 

“My business card,” Rachel explained. “Take it.” 

Minnie snatched it and shoved it into her jeans pocket with her phone, flung Kathleen’s bag over her shoulder and headed towards the front entrance. She was thankful that Kathleen seemed well enough to walk over, and she took her bag back from Minnie as she opened the door from her and Minnie ushered her out. 

The beeping stopped as soon as she slammed the door shut, without looking back.

“Minnie…?” 

It was foolish to just stand around there talking, Minnie grabbed Kathleen’s wrist and kept marching forwards. She’d lead Kathleen home if she had to, without the use of public transporation. In fact, it’d probably be the best idea to stay the night. Make sure that no one would get into the house that wasn’t supposed to be there. Dangun wouldn’t mind. 

Pulling out her phone from her pocket, she noticed the piece of paper flutter out onto the ground, but she kept dragging Kathleen along as she slid her phone open to view the response Dangun had sent her several minutes ago. 

Foolish!

“Minnie, you dropped something!” Kathleen broke free from her friend’s grasp and retreated back to pick up the piece of paper. “Rachel Crowley--was that her name--?” 

S**t. It was happening. 

“Come on!” Minnie yelled, rapidly pressing into the keys of her phone with probably too much force. “We don’t have the time for this!” 

“Why didn’t you like her?” 

“Because you didn’t like her!” 

“Oh…” Kathleen, who had been hovering behind Minnie at about ten paces, rushed to catch up to her. “Okay. Sorry if you liked her…but just aren’t liking her ‘cause I didn’t…” 

“Augh, she was a total b***h, don’t worry about it,” Minnie sent her a forced smile, slipping the phone back into her pocket. “She was just trying to ruin our start to the summer before our senior year!” 

Kathleen nodded hesitantly, and they walked the rest of the way home in silence, two miles, both of them absorbed in their own thoughts. 

Crowley. Rachel Crowley. Of course it was her. Of course it was happening, Dangun kept telling her that the catalyst point was about to happen any day now, but he had been saying that the last fifty years. It was only a guess that everything that had been predicted to occur held in the form of the Crowley family as the catalyst. Of the oil industry. 

Now, it made sense. Now it was happening. 

She was never going to hear the end of it from Dangun. 

“Can I come inside?” Minnie confirmed like she always did.

“There’s no car in the driveway,” Kathleen’s sign it was okay, and this time she led the way up to the front door and unlocked the door with a key she pulled out from her back jeans pocket. 

“Summer,” Kathleen sighed, opening the front door, turning on the light into the entryway. 

“What about it?”

“It’s weird,” Kathleen admitted, dropping her bag by the door, rubbing one of her shoulders. “It feels like the last summer of childhood or something. We have senior year and then…we’re going to be going onto college…” 

“Well you are with your grades,” Minnie joked. “I’ll be flipping burgers.” 

“You’ll get some kind of sports scholarship!” Kathleen argued. “I mean, you’re really good at soccer--” 

“Kathleen,” Minnie cut across. “Chill. It’ll be fine.” 

She wasn’t sure how fine it was going to be, but maybe if she pretended, it’d come true. 

“You sure?” Kathleen asked. 

“I’m sure,” Minnie took a step towards her and kissed her on the lips quickly. “Also sure I’ve been waiting for that all day.”

Her girlfriend was flushed bright red, though there was hardly a response besides some nibbling on the bottom of Kathleen’s own lip. 

Then, however, Kathleen reached up and kissed Minnie back for what must have been several seconds. “Been waiting for it too.” 

Human romance distractions. 

As Dangun would say, Foolish!

Author's Note

Austin Crowley, an executive of his family's failing oil company, has been on the search for years for an alternative form of energy none of his competitors would have thought of. After learning that magic is on everyone's fingertips to harness, Crowley becomes determined to find a way to translate this magic into electrical energy and fuel. Those that have been aware of magic become worried about Crowley's plans and attempt to stop him from gaining the power that magic can hold in a human.

Later on there will be some LGBT romance, violence, language and alternative spirituality ideas.

This part was actually pretty fun to write, though definitely longer than I intended. Oops.