Post by PERCY YEATS on Jan 30, 2012 16:54:42 GMT
[/color] he demands, looking back at Percy. Smiling. Percy sinks back a little further into his mother's skirt; Alexa Yeats is having none of that, of course. She admonishes him in a low voice to be friendly and Percy clutches his teddy bear mutinously, glaring.
He meets Perry Buchanon for the first time when he is just entering kindergarten; his family has just moved in to a new neighborhood. His mother takes him by the hand in her brisk, no-nonsense kind of way, and Percy is led across the street to the sweet looking blue house where his mother says another little boy lives.
Percy has his reservations from the start. He doesn't really like playing with the other boys his age; they play stupid games, and they're rough. Percy is small. He is shy and his blue eyes are very cold even for a five and a half year old. He likes to play pretend games that exist mostly just inside his head, and he plays them by himself in a clubhouse he's constructed from his closet or the secret place under the slide when he's at the park. He clutches on to an old teddy bear at all times; he never goes anywhere without it. He doesn't have many friends and that's the way he likes it; he plays with his teddy bear and sometimes with his mother and he is perfectly content that way. He grips teddy tight to his chest as they approach the blue house with the white door and white window shingles, tucking his chin down, glaring in the shy frightened manner typical of children meeting other children for the first time.
The door opens; a squat woman with a tall ginger colored beehive hair do appears, beaming. She has thick pink cheeks and bright pink lipstick and she buzzes with welcoming glee upon seeing the new young mother and her quiet blue eyed son. "Oh honey!" she cries delighted. "You must be the new neighbors! I'm Beatrice Buchanon, just call me Beatrice!"
Percy is of course immediately bored.
He peers warily around the woman's dumpling legs as the two women chat, a feeling of dread rising in him when he hears the tell tale sounds of small feet running down the stairs.
"Mama!"
The voice is clear, loud, full of demanding energy. Beatrice turns slightly at the sound, just enough that Percy has an unobstructed view of the speaker. He draws back against his mother's leg, his survivor's intuition telling him dangerous things about the wild looking boy who is now curiously approaching the front door.
He's older than Percy by a few years; he's tall for his age, a strong boy with dirt under his fingernails and twigs tangled up in his long unwashed hair. He grins widely and he has a few teeth missing; there are scratches on his scabby knees and elbows, holes in his denim shorts and high top sneakers.
But what Percy notices most of all is those eyes.
He's never in his short life ever seen eyes like that, eyes that make him freeze midmotion like a startled deer before the gun sounds; bright green, green like forests and deep envy and wicked sin. They are probing, intense, and they stare at Percy with wild enthusiasm like he wishes he could just gobble the smaller boy up, consume him right where he was standing, his curiosity is that insatiable.
Beatrice rattles on about running in the house, but neither Percy nor her son is listening. Percy stares coldly over the top of his teddy bear's head, gripping the worn fabric in his small fists, narrowing his eyes when he sees how he is being watched. Perry observes him, first calmly, then with growing interest; he grins hugely, eyes full of dangerous mischief. He has seen something in small, pale, icy cold Percy Yeats that has grabbed his attention. He turns to his mother, fixing her with a bright and adoring smile.
"Mama, who's this?"
"It's your new neighbor, honey, his name is Percy. Why don't you two go play in the backyard while me 'n Miss Yeats have some tea?"
Perry lets out a whooping noise of excitement, jumping on his heels and shooting forward out of the house to grab Percy's arm. "C'mon!"[/color] he says, and Percy senses an ugly challenge in his words even as he hisses and flinches away from the rough grip. "Let's go!"[/b]
Percy huffs out, "Don't grab me!!!"[/b] and "Mommmm!"[/b] But Alexa is already stepping through the threshold of that terrible blue house, and the front door closes as Perry drags poor defenseless Percy around the side of the house to the backyard. He squirms eel-like until he is able to slip out of Perry's hand and scuttles warily away; Perry grins at him, sticks his tongue out with a mocking "Nyahhh"[/color] noise, and then turns and goes running towards the swing set that has been hazardously set up behind the house.
Wary, angry, reluctantly intrigued, Percy follows timidly behind.
By the time he approaches the swingset, Perry has already clamored up on top of the slide and is standing at the highest point, bravely testing his balance while Percy observes skeptically from the safety of the ground. "You're not supposed to be up there!" [/b]Percy whines warningly, frowning. Perry scoffs, tossing his desperately-in-need-of-a-trim hair back away from his grimy little gutterrat face.
"Shut up, no one likes a tattle tale! How old are you, anyhow?"[/b]
Percy straightens himself up to his tallest height and glares defiantly: "Five and three quarters!"[/b] But Perry just laughs and jumps suddenly from however impossibly high up his perch is, landing heavily in a heathen squat and grinning like a crazy person over at frail little Percy.
"You're not even six years old?"[/b] he crows, straightening up, laughing. "I'll be eight in a few months you know. You're practically a baby!"[/b]
Percy bristles immediately because no child of any age takes well to being called the B word. He scowls and grips his teddy close and stomps up to the older boy to shover angrily at his chest. "I am not a baby!" [/b]he yells.
Perry's wild eyes widen a little bit; Percy has caught him by surprise with the attack. His face slackens in shock, pink lips opening around the rest of his mouth, which looks like a black hole considering the lack of teeth there. He peers intensely at the younger boy before once again he cheeses so that Percy wants to hit him for it.
"Maaaaaaaannn!!"[/color] Perry hollars, hooting with amused laughter. He hops up and down on his heels, whooping with glee. He reaches out fast as a snake and grabs Percy's arm, and Percy immediately begins to twist and hiss like an angry cat as he's yanked over towards the back of the yard. It's shaded by trees there, and muddy, and Perry all but throws him down into the dirty, squelching stuff. Percy is not, like most boys his age, fond of dirt. He feels it sink into his shoes and reviles against it, only Perry's grabbed him by the shoulders and shoved him down so now oh god, he's sitting in it.
His blue eyes fill with cold angry tears but he doesn't cry, just sits there, stiff as a board, miserable and unable to move against Perry's stronger hold keeping him down. He clutches his teddy bear; the mud saturates his clothes and his socks and covers him with unpleasant goosebumps.
"Now," [/color]says Perry cheerfully. "This is what happens to stupid lil babies who mess around with big kids, ya know?"[/color] He leans over Percy's shoulder and dips his hand into the mud, pulling up gloopy handfuls and dropping them into Percy's lap. Percy whines, the sound high pitched and frantic.
"Stooooppp!!"[/b]
"Nope!"[/b] Perry laughs and it's the sound of cherubs from hell, innocent and cruel and delighted all at once. "First you gotta EAT it." [/b]
And then he shoves a handful of mud right into Percy's face, with his eyes and his mouth wide open because he'd been about to yell for his mother, but now instead he was just breathing in gulps of mud and he couldn't see or open his eyes, he could only flail, dropping his teddy in the muck while Perry laughed and danced evilly away, skipping a fence and running off through the maze of neighbor's yards to escape the consequences of having tortured his younger playmate.
Percy sits in the mud for a long time, breathing heavily, trying to peel off the layers of thick mud from his face, only crying when he sees that his teddy has fallen into the mud and is now ruined.
His mother finds him and they go home together, Beatrice's frantic apologies buzzing behind them. They cross the street back to Percy's new house where he takes a bath and lies in bed, waiting for his teddy to come out of the wash, knowing with infinite, soul-crushing sureness that it won't be the same once it does.
He tells his mother that he never wants to play with Perry Buchanon again.
He discovers as time passes that like with all things relating to Perry Buchanon, this is easier said than done.[/size][/blockquote][/blockquote]
