Page 42 of The Deer and the Dragon
“One with chocolate strawberries, please and thank you. And make it close to downtown. We’re going to be in the arts district, just past the university.”
I arched a brow at Fauna’s knowledge of the city before shouting to my friend, “Sorry. She’s pushy. You don’t have to look up the address of a—”
Kirby had already found a location and begun to give detailed destructions.
“You’re an absolute treat,” Fauna cooed. “Thank you, peaches. I hope we get to meet soon. Now I have to hang up before Marlow commits deicide.” She ended the call and beamed at me from the passenger seat.
“Were you really just trying to get my phone to look up candy shop addresses?”
“I have a sweet tooth,” she pouted. “Plus, I’m doing you a favor. And you hit me.”
“I barely touched you.”
She ignored my rebuttal.
“Now,” Fauna said cheerily, “without being the rudest person alive and sharing a birth name, how did that doll come across the name Kirby? I’m still tickled. The only Kirby I’ve heard of was that round cutie from the show? Or the game? You know, the human game—”
I smiled sadly at the memory. “Yeah, that’s why they got their name.”
I changed lanes and appreciated Fauna’s uncharacteristic patience as she waited.
“It’s kind of a weird story. Are you sure you want to hear it?”
“We have time before our exit,” she said, “and what’s time for if not to collect stories?”
I made a face. I waited for a long moment, listening to the hum of the engine, the whir of the tires, and monitoring her perfectly still form from my peripherals before I released a weary breath. Eventually, I said, “It was my eleventh birthday, and it was a shitshow. I don’t want to go through all the details, but I wasn’t very popular growing up. I don’t know why I’d thought it would be a good idea to invite all the kids in my class, but only ten showed up.” I chuckled darkly, thinking of the seventy-two invitations I’d made on construction paper. I’d spent the entire day before decorating cupcakes with my mother and helping her clean the yard so we could play red rover or have balloon fights, with the naive optimism that the entire class might come.
“And you played the game?” she prompted, voice softening as she observed the slump of my shoulders.
I sighed. “Kind of. This girl, Nancy, she’d gotten me a present—well, her mom had gotten the present—and when I opened it, she decided she wanted it. It was a stuffed bear, and I told her she’d given it to me for my birthday and couldn’t have it back. It was mine.”
“Sounds like Nancy was a little bitch,” Fauna mumbled.
I agreed, “Yeah, but that didn’t stop my dad from spanking me in front of all of my friends while in my party dress for being selfish. Anyway, it freaked nine of them out so much that they called their parents to come pick them up. The party was over. I never celebrated my birthday again.”
Fauna’s jaw dropped. “Fucking gods and goddesses, Marlow. When you said it was a shitshow, I didn’t realize you were about to traumatize me.”
I urged the car to the right-most lane and shook my head, keeping an eye on the green exits. “It ended up being okay. Kirby was the only one who stayed. They’d brought their gaming system to the party, and we played that cartoon fighting game. I kicked their butt as ten different characters. As the princess, as the fox, as the spaceman—almost all of them. They chose the Kirby character over and over again. They had no fighting strategy. They’d just wiggle to the edge and try to spit me out. It was the only thing that made me laugh all day. And the next day when they called the house phone and my mom picked up, they said to tell me that Kirby was calling. Their nickname stuck.”
It was the longest I’d ever witnessed Fauna be silent. She remained perfectly still for a long moment before she said, “I’m sorry that happened to you.”
I shrugged as I’d been trained to do. One had to slough off tragedy quickly in order to keep conversation moving. “Pain builds character. Plus, we ended up dating a little in high school. Swapped v-cards and all that. But, it’s better this way. We’re more than friends now. We’re family.”
The skin around Fauna’s eyes crinkled as she smirked. “Of course, your best friend is an ex. I love queer culture.”
I kept my eyes on the traffic, smirking all the while. It was hard to argue. Staying friends after a breakup was something of a cliché. “Now, are you going to tell me where we’re going? Right now, I’m just angling my car toward—”
“Oh, shit, that’s right. Your trauma was distracting. Take the next exit. We need to pay a visit to a friend.”
I was surprised and confused when she told me to wait in the car, until I realized she’d tricked me into taking her to the sweets shop first. I narrowed my eyes at the box in her hand, but she wrinkled her nose at me and informed me that grouchy car companions don’t get strawberries.
The drive from the 1950s-style confectionary to her second destination wasn’t long. Ten minutes later, we were hunting for a parking place. Fauna enjoyed how easily traffic made me curse, delighted by each new obscenity as I searched for a place to parallel park, yelled at assholes in luxury vehicles, and told one man exactly what I thought he could do with his own mother. Finding an open place on the street in the arts district was impossible, and she still hadn’t told me why we were here.
Fauna practically leapt from the car before I’d even taken it out of gear.
“Grab the box!” she shouted as she took off.
I scrambled to unbuckle my belt and pour myself out of the car to yell at her, but she was already halfway down the block. I jogged to catch up just as she yanked open an aged, wooden door to what appeared to be a metaphysical shop. I paused just long enough to read the glass.Daily Devilshad been stenciled over the window in large, gothic lettering. The shop had popped up over the summer in my searches for answers, but it had no online presence and hadn’t listed a phone number. I might have visited it on my own, given enough time and frustration. Now I trailed behind Fauna as the tinkling of an antique bell sounded our arrival.
