Free Parrotfish by Ellen Wittlinger Page B

watch my sorry butt retreating down the street like a whipped puppy.
    I sauntered around the corner. Damn you, Sebastian Shipley .
    Danya’s face pulled itself in tight as if I had a skunk in my pocket. “What are you doing here?”
    “I live here. Over there,” I said, pointing in the general direction of Peace and Joy.
    Zoe sucked in a big breath. “Oh, it’s the Christmas House! You live in the Christmas House?”
    I nodded.
    “I always loved that place,” she said, smiling. Until she caught a glimpse of Danya’s glowering mug.
    “Are you speaking to it?” she asked Zoe.
    Zoe’s face turned white. “No! I was just surprised! I didn’t know—”
    “Well, shut up,” Danya ordered. Zoe clamped her lips together and looked down at the sidewalk.
    “I always loved Grady’s house when I was a kid too,” Sebastian said, as if we were all having a normal conversation. “I always thought, Wow, whoever goes to all that trouble just to make kids happy must be really great. I bet a wonderful family lives there .”
    Danya glared at him. “Are you under the impression that we give a damn what you think?”
    But Sebastian babbled on. “See, it’s this thing about you calling my friend Grady a pervert, when really he’s just a transgendered person. Which is not all that unusual, actually. If you were interested in doing some research, there are lots of sites on the Internet—”
    “Believe me, shorty, I’m not in the least interested. Get lost, both of you.”
    “But what really bothers me,” Sebastian continued in the same calm voice, “is you telling Grady’s friend here that she can’t talk to him. As if you’re in charge of everybody.”
    Eve had been keeping her eyes carefully focused on the picket fence around her house, but when Sebastian said that about me being her friend, her head twitched and she looked up at Danya. “He’s not . . . she’s not . . . I mean . . . we aren’t friends anymore! We really aren’t!”
    I wasn’t sure if I was saying it to save Eve or to save my own self-respect, but I said it loud enough for the entire neighborhood to hear. “She’s right, Danya. We’re not friends. I would never be friends with anybody who hung around with a soul-sucking bitch like you.”
    Right then I wished I had those muscles Sebastian had mentioned earlier, because, pacifist though I’d always been, at that moment I really wanted to bounce Danya Seifert on the sidewalk like a basketball and see if the crap would fall out of her head.
    Sebastian must have realized I’d hit my boiling point. He took me gently by the arm and pulled me away from the girls.
    “Must be going,” he said. “Nice to chat with you.”
    Danya was snorting like a bull, but I was only looking at Eve. Just before I turned around and walked away she looked up at me, and there in her eyes I could see that scared kid lurking, the one who could never stand for anyone to be mad at her, especially me.

 
     

Chapter Nine
    I managed to wait until we’d put a block of houses and a row of tall maple trees between us and them before I lit into Sebastian. “For Christ’s sake, why did you do that? I told you I didn’t want to talk to them!”
    “Well, I did ,” Sebastian said. “You can’t just ignore people like Danya. She won’t stop being a creep unless people call her on it.”
    “You think she cares what we think of her? Besides, she probably likes being called a soul-sucking bitch.”
    “Possibly. Still, you can’t let her walk all over you.”
    “Maybe she’s just saying what everybody else is thinking.” I wondered if that was really true; were there other people who thought I should off myself so their world wouldn’t be soiled by my presence? I hunched up my shoulders the way I used to when I first started getting breasts and didn’t want anyone to notice. Eventually my neckand back would start to hurt, but in the meantime, I felt invisible. “I should never have told anybody. There’s no