Visual Kei

Let's pretend for a brief moment that my life is normal. Never mind the fact that I was sitting in a dimly lit café with my shape-shifting, ass-kicking best friend across from a fifteen year old psychic schoolgirl. The sad thing is; this is nowhere near my typical day.

We weren't sitting in the café brooding over the latest dark poetry; we were discussing how to infiltrate a government-operated high-security facility to break out our vampire friend. It just happened to be over a cup of chocolaty coffee-mix.

"Hello…?" she called, waving her nearly-albino hand across my field of vision. "Anyone in there? Anyone?"

"Yeah, and they're about to go Chuck Norris on you," I replied, moving my face safely away from her "delicately" sharp nails. "There's this great new invention that you could try. It's called a nail file for your talons."

She pouted, inspecting her pink and ivory nails after throwing me an icy gaze.

"If you're done throwing a temper tantrum, let's hear your plan."



Do you think your friends are hard asses? If so, then think again. Zeus has badass friends, Batman has badass friends, Hell even Bill Gates has badass friends, but no one had friends quite like mine. Can't touch this. How many humans do you know that could honestly say they were friends with a vampire, a soul-eater, a psychic, and a shape-shifter? I only know of me. But in your defense, I'm not most people.

I am a freak alright. I've liked it pretty well, I guess, it has its benefits. People tend to steer clear of you and stay out of your business for the most part. And that's exactly what I've always been going for. It works out in my favor most of the time.

In all honesty, I've never really had too difficult of a life. Nothing I can really get into bitching about. Sure, I had a lowlife dad and an apathetic mom, big whoop. There's a lot worse that could happen in today's world. I haven't been raped or beaten or anything. But drunken daddy plus nonexistent mommy equals freaky kid with trust issues, but a lot of people have trust issues; I wasn't particularly special. I had no real friends. I had no need for them. All I needed was the basics: air, water, yada yada and I could survive.

Let's cut the crap, I did get lonely at times, but there was just this thing that sucked about having friends: drama. I hated the mind games that people played with each other. I hated every aspect of social life, really. I guess you could say I had friends; they just weren't really that close to me, but that changed… everything did.

The part of town that I lived in wasn't exactly the safest. Okay, so I lived in the ghetto. Shootings were normal, Hell, all gang-related violence was normal. Pedophiles galore. So it really shouldn't have shocked me much when I saw huge holes in my apartment room door. But it did. I stepped inside carefully, my senses on overdrive. I couldn't hear anything, no breathing, no footsteps. My parents were gone. There was a yellow sticky note on the table, and I flipped the switch to read what it said. Pale, unnatural greenish light flooded the shabby room that served as a kitchen. The note read:

Mom left. I'm at the bar. Won't be back until late tonight.

Dad

Well, isn't that a cause for celebration? I sighed, crumpling up the sticky note and throwing it into the wastebasket. I always knew she would be the one to leave first. The sad part was, it really didn't hurt too much. I mean, I never got to know either one of my parents as most kids did. They were almost always gone. Now that I thought of it, the part that surprised me was that I was sober, clean, and still a virgin. Then again, I had other things to worry about than drugs and sex. Not that I never thought about that last one.

"Well," I thought blandly, "I might as well go get Dad." I grabbed my pocketknife off the countertop, slipped it into my back pocket, and headed outside. It was still light outside, I had come back home from school less than an hour ago. I wondered how long it had been since Mom left, but the thought made my eyes sting a little, so I shoved it to the back of my mind.

The neighborhood where I lived was crammed with buildings, mostly small, cheap cracker box houses. There was white trash across the street on his driveway smoking his cigarette. His eyes followed me with interest. I knew what he was thinking. It repulsed me, but it also flattered me a little. Just a little. A few blocks down, there was a little gas station across from the bar. I knew that my dad would be there. He was too lazy to travel too far to drown his sorrows away. As I passed an alley that cut through an adjacent row of houses, I saw two men quarrelling. I continued walking until I was covered by one of the houses. Then I stopped and listened, for some reason.

"...and yo' freaks best be stayin' out our territory, y'hear? This belongs to the Wolves and we don't like the look of yo' punk ass. You and yo' faggy girl-man chinks," one of the guys said. He had a heavy "gangster" accent (if you could call it that). I could barely make out his words. I didn't think that gang-related violence was this prevalent in my neighborhood, though I shouldn't have been quite so surprised.

"Desist," the other man warned in a calm, wintry voice that carried a deep and matured roughness. I pictured Bruce Lee kicking some guy's ass, and I struggled not to smile. The man who had been pressing the matter began yelling some more racial slurs. I looked carefully around the corner, watching the spectacle.

The two men stood very close to each other, the shorter of the two looking to be of Japanese descent. I could not make out much more than the clothing he was wearing, which happened to be Visualesque. His pants were neither tight, nor baggy, with zippers and chains crossing his thighs. He wore multiple belts, although there were no belt loops on his pants. He had a black man-tank top on, the kind with wide straps that seemed versatile enough to work for pretty much anyone. The other man, much taller, wore a similar tank top, but it was white. He was dark, almost a shadow himself. Many things that he wore suggested the norm: his sagging pants, his shoes, and he even had bling-age. He wore some type of bandana around his bicep, marking himself affiliated with a local gang of some glorious nature.

"Desist." Repetition though it was, the throaty, rich voice of the shorter man stayed etched in my head, turning around and around as if wanting me to dissect every part of it. My breath caught in my chest as I continued to stare at them.

The taller of the two slid the other up higher along the side of the house slowly. "You aren't too bright, are you?" Suddenly, the hostile man was on the ground and the other was standing over him. It was so fast, I didn't understand what had just transpired until I saw that the gangster was on the ground. Then, the funniest thing happened. He got up and ran. He ran for his life, like I had never seen a grown man run before. I didn't laugh, but I wanted to. I smiled, watching the victorious, slender Japanese man carefully before turning around to catch my breath.

"You enjoyed that, didn't you?" he asked, halfway through my breath-catching, turning toward me with his hands relaxed at his sides. His sunglasses were not even a little bit out of place, just like his hair.

"Yep," I answered, stepping away from my hiding place, toward him. How had he known that I was there?

As I came nearer, I noticed as he took a step back, clenching his fists slightly and pressing himself up against one of the houses. "Please stay where you are." His eyes were hidden by his brownish-purple sunglasses, but I could feel discomfort coming from him.

After seeing how he handled the black man, I held up my hands in surrender. "Alright, I won't come any closer." There was an awkward silence between us, but I was compelled to stay. He didn't move at all. "Are you okay?" I asked finally.

"I am fine," he answered, his lips moving into a smile. I smiled, too, for a different reason. I blushed, noticing his appearance fully for the first time. Let's not be subtle: he was man beauty.

He was taller than me, but not by much. The shadows of the alleyway hid the finer features from me, but his face was smoothly defined, bisected diagonally by a thin lock of hair. It fell over the nosepiece of his glasses, past the bridge of his nose, but did not cover his eyes. The hair itself was crazy and spiky, flying out in many different directions, away from his face with two thick locks board straight framing his face. He had plump lips; a strong and masculine jaw line with a thick, muscular neck. He had his ears pierced in several places, too. He was thin and pale, but retained a light tan complexion. He was super hot. Thank you, teenage hormones.

"Do you live around here?" I asked.

"I live in the closest apartment building."

"I do, too." His head tilted a bit, but I couldn't discern his expression with his glasses hiding his eyes.
There was a long pause and he relaxed a bit, and asked, "Where are you headed, alone?" A note of something like concern tinged his tone. "This doesn't exactly seem to be the best place to take a walk," he added after a moment of thought.

"I'm headed to the bar," I said flatly.

"The bar?"

"Yeah, want to get hammered with me?" I asked sarcastically, rolling my eyes. I smiled, though. "Long story."

"I have time."

"I would tell you, but I really have to go right now."

"I see," he said slowly. "I suppose I will see you around. Take care of yourself."

I stared openly at his back and the fluid grace with which he walked. Every motion he made carried the same poise. I took in a deep breath, amazed that I had met someone so cool, but somehow disappointed that I couldn't spend more time with him. I wondered if I would ever see him again, but I realized how stupid I was for thinking those kinds of thoughts.

Shaking my head to rid myself of such things, I walked in the opposite direction, toward the tiny bar, to meet my drunken father.