Candy-Sticks, Chapter Three

“Why do you keep calling me that?” demanded Mini-Flash Juniper, openly suspicious now.

The cotton-candy essence was intensifying. Mini-Flash Robin, wide-mouthed at the best of times, gradually began to push a new limit even for him.

It was the young man from Mini-Flash Juniper’s drawings.

For the first few seconds after she had spoken, nobody had been standing by her chair. Now however it was as though some projector was warming to life, its flickery luminosity describing with ever more vividness the slender manly frame, definition blossoming to a smooth pale cheek and eyelids demurely downcast. His moth-wings were a huge silhouette behind him, darkly spanning the bar-room.

He wasn’t a charcoal sketch anymore. This was glorious technicolor for the first time. And you felt that if you gave him another minute, he’d be real.

Juniper, her own eyes lowered, took slowly to her toes. Though tall for a Mini-Flash, she was still a head below the youth. Robin knew then why Juniper had danced to those quaint coy lyrics as though they’d meant something, although what smouldered beneath her alabaster skin proclaimed no little tomboy.

It was painful for Robin to watch them, standing only a little apart, shy of each other in the cloying candyfloss smell.

Juniper’s damp lips formed three noiseless words which were for one listener alone.

Then she turned the seat of her panties on Robin, on the other boys, and on the world, to enfold herself artless and vulnerable in the young man’s embrace.

Her heels, her tiptoes, her shining hair stretching down, and that wide, wide expanse of white. Robin might have guessed what it would be for him to watch her give everything she was to another. He just hadn’t reckoned on a sight so beautiful hurting so much. Nor could he understand why it didn’t seem to be within his power to look away, but not even this, together with the troubling mystery of how it was happening at all, could stifle the voice within which cried out it wasn’t right.

Robin swallowed hard, determined to say something.

It wasn’t like he was impartial though. And Mini-Flash Pseudangelos was Juniper’s friend. And he was the smallest boy here and had a skirt on.

Yon occupied the periphery of his vision, still silent. Once more copping a good eyeful.

That decided Robin. Let them tease him as much as they liked about being jealous. Friends shouldn’t do things like that to other friends, not in front of people they’d only just met.

“Erm, Mini-Flash Pseudangelos, I know you mean well,” Mini-Flash Robin began. “But…”

What in the name of Plomonoog was stopping him averting his eyes? Juniper’s young man was more and more there, tipping his wings toward her as though to swaddle her up.

The young man’s hands were looking solid enough too.

Moving busily about Juniper’s T-shirt, her bare lower back…

At last a voice fell on Robin’s ear, but it was not that of Pseudangelos.

“C’mon, c’mon.” An impatient whisper. “Bring it on home for your bros.”

Then Lasser hissed irritably back:

“So quit putting me off. I’d like to see you do any better.”

That was when Robin finally tore his gaze from what was going on at the centre of the floor, and turned.

Mini-Flash Pseudangelos had passed out. Her chocolate head rested atop the table’s slats. Directly alongside, Lasser pointed his fingertips with a look of intense concentration. Gorm, who had spoken first, was no less absorbed but on his features sat keen anticipation too. That went double for thuggish Huraeas and sinister Hamaunji, while Yon, as ever, just watched.

Yet insensible as Pseudangelos was, all that her bikini left uncovered maintained a sizzly red, and she smelled more than ever of those vapid infernal bowls.

“Hey,” said Robin at once.

The boys ignored him.

“Hey, she doesn’t like that!” Robin yelled again, but he was already on his feet, overturning his chair which fell with a crash. Never in his life had Robin cared less whether anyone saw his pants, and with tunic blooming he ran great-mouthed for Juniper, arms dashing wildly without the least notion of what this was supposed to accomplish. Swatting a big moth, perhaps? Nevertheless, either that or the sudden racket did the trick. Robin caught a glimpse of Lasser throwing both open hands aloft, his lips tightly compressed, his eyes glaring. By the time Robin reached Mini-Flash Juniper, no-one but Mini-Flash Juniper was there.

They clung together.

“One frisky little bunny-rabbit,” Hamaunji growled at Robin. “Go for the tail in just the right way and you can make them scream and scream. First thing I’ll do to you is demonstrate.”

END OF CHAPTER THREE