F I F T E E N
Being fourteen years old is never easy, even for artificial humans. It’s the age where biology takes over, and even when the fourteen-year-old in question is more interested in clinical biology than the sort more popular with his classmates at Ponce de Leon Junior High, it still rules with an iron hand.
One of the categorical imperatives of puberty that applies even to young monsters is that nobody over the age of twenty knows anything. And since Harry was well over twenty at this point, I had gone into a brief period of rebellion against his unreasonable re-straints on my perfectly natural and wholesome desires to hack my school chums into little bits.
Harry had laid out a wonderfully logical plan to get me squared away, which was his term for making things—or people—neat and orderly. But there is nothing logical about a fledgling Dark Passenger flexing its wings for the first time and beating them against the bars of the cage, yearning to fling itself into the free air and fall on its prey like a sharp steel thunderbolt.
Harry knew so many things I needed to learn to become safely and quietly me, to turn me from a wild, blossoming monster into DEXTER IN THE DARK
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the Dark Avenger: how to act human, how to be certain and careful, how to clean up afterward. He knew all these things as only an old cop could know them. I understood this, even then—but it all seemed so dull and unnecessary.
And Harry couldn’t really know everything, after all. He could not know, for example, about Steve Gonzalez, a particularly charming example of pubescent humanity who had earned my attention.
Steve was larger than me, and at a year or two older; he already had something on his upper lip that he referred to as a mustache.
He was in my PE class and felt it his God-given duty to make my life miserable whenever possible. If he was right, God must have been very pleased with the effort he put into it.
This was long before Dexter became the Living Ice Cube, and a certain amount of heated and very hard feeling built up inside. This seemed to please Steve and urge him on to greater heights of creativity in his persecution of the simmering young Dexter. We both knew this could end only one way, but alas for him, it was not the way Steve had in mind.
And so one afternoon an unfortunately industrious janitor stumbled into the biology lab at Ponce de Leon to find Dexter and Steve sorting out their personality conflict. It was not quite the classical middle-school face-off of filthy words and swinging fists, although I believe that might have been what Steve had in mind. But he had not reckoned with confronting the young Dark Passenger, and so the janitor found Steve securely taped to the table with a swatch of gray duct tape over his mouth, and Dexter standing above him with a scalpel, trying to remember what he had learned in biology class the day they dissected the frog.
Harry came to get me in his police cruiser, in uniform. He listened to the outraged assistant principal, who described the scene, quoted the student handbook, and demanded to know what Harry was going to do about it. Harry just looked at the assistant principal until the man’s words dribbled away into silence. He looked at him a moment longer, for effect, and then he turned his cold blue eyes on me.
“Did you do what he says you did, Dexter?” he asked me.
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JEFF LINDSAY
There was no possibility of evasion or falsehood in the grip of that stare. “Yes,” I said, and Harry nodded.
“You see?” the assistant principal said. He thought he was going to say more, but Harry turned the look back on him and he fell silent again.
Harry looked back at me. “Why?” he said.
“He was picking on me.” That sounded somewhat feeble, even to me, so I added, “A lot. All the time.”
“And so you taped him to a table,” he said, with very little inflection.
“Uh-huh.”
“And you picked up a scalpel.”
“I wanted him to stop,” I said.
“Why didn’t you tell somebody?” Harry asked me.
I shrugged, which was a large portion of my working vocabu-lary in those days.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.
“I can take care of it,” I said.
“Looks like you didn’t take care of it so well,” he said.
There seemed to be very little I could do, so naturally enough I chose to look at my feet. They apparently had very little to add to the discussion, however, so I looked up again. Harry still watched me, and somehow he no longer needed to blink. He did not seem angry, and I was not really afraid of him, and that somehow made it even more uncomfortable.