"What?!" Kyle unleashed, exasperated and indignant. He wasn't quite certain if he'd stumbled into this parallel reality or everyone conspired against him in some grand prank, but he felt like a rocket-powered pendulum, swinging from one extreme to another.
Undaunted by Kyle's ire, Jason grabbed an apple from his lunch and crunched noisily into it, chewing thoughtfully while Kyle glared expectantly for him to continue. Jason, paradoxically, wasn't actually enjoying the spectacle, and internally he cursed the next few minutes he'd spend laying out the law. But there was no avoiding it; Kyle had a right to know before it was too late and he got involved.
"Look, Kyle... I know, she's a dame. We dig. I'd date 'er myself if not for..." he nodded at Sam, who jogged his head in return. "It's just, well, her pals suffer, ya know? Things happen to 'em. Weird stuff, like gypsy spells an' junk." Yeah, and junk. Jason felt lame and powerless to explain the full gravity of the situation. Truthfully, everyone still considered the reality almost laughably contrite, as if they lived the definition of melodrama by merely acknowledging the theory. "An' it gets worse, right? Until ya get 'way from 'er, shit goes down. One dude actually got hit by lightning. That's Zeus shit! Lightning! 'course that was after he broke 'is leg, 'is dog got mangled by a thresher, his ma had a miscarriage..." he threw up his hands spreading them wide as if to encompass the world. Only the tip of the continent, my friend.
Kyle stood silent, a crawling chill spreading through his spine and making him slightly sick to his stomach. Something was vaguely familiar about Manny's suppressed tirade. Each teen watching Jason's oration nodded grimly as he recounted each terrible calamity—a rousing yarn, to say the least—yet everyone already knew the implicit lesson: stay away from Adriana.
But Kyle was a city-boy; a good ol' Yankee, though he hated that particular baseball team, and didn't understand the term itself. The dread churning in his belly quickly faded, forgotten and unimportant. Kyle scoffed. Preposterous. If he were older, he might even deem it: poppycock. Sam and Jason aimed a significant look at him, each waiting for him to acquiesce to the inevitable truth; for them, there was no other alternative. The standoff continued unabated until Kyle finally rolled his eyes, looked at the floor and pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration. These people are insane! he thought to himself. Each one of them a raving lunatic sprinting toward a long encounter with a padded cell, where his days would consist of drooling and babbling incoherent prophesies of doom and apocalypse.
Kyle's reaction stirred a mumbling among the teenagers. Sam and Jason exchanged a concerned look. He doesn't get it. It was too late, though. New kids always seemed to balk at "the talk," no matter how carefully they chose their words or who explained the coincidences that weren't coincidental. Neither Sam nor Jason could rightly blame Kyle; only massively superstitious kooks would readily accept the phantasy; for those folk, crazy theories were as abundant and drinkable as water. Jason silently wished Kyle was such a kook, but no such luck.
"Look," he said, "I don't know what you guys are trying to pull, but this isn't funny. That girl," he swings his arm toward Adriana, "is not cursed. I'm not going to be hit by lightning, and nobody's gonna get hurt. You people yap like little yippie-dogs spoiled skirts tote around in their purses in Detroit. Craziest thing I ever saw a couple years ago, but this? This is a whole new level of weird." He added a laugh. This is surreal, guys, don't you get it? The only response from the group, a sober and unoffended stare.
"Kyle, I ain't kiddin'. Youse ma hero, dig? Beat me at ma own game. I ain't pullin yo leg!" said Jason, trying his best to overemphasize his already terrible impersonation for comic effect. Unfortunately, Kyle wasn't laughing.
Kyle smiled, "Yeah. Hey, I believe ya. Insane, probably kill me one day in my sleep, mistake me for a demon or somethin', but I believe ya. I'm from the city, so maybe I don't get it. But ya know? I think I'm the only normal person here. Dr. Z would probably say, 'I am, in this instance, the only objective party capable of reacting calmly to the hypothetical situation,' right?" A few heads nodded, leary. Yeah, he was right, or at least wasn't wrong. Kyle knew the difference, but didn't care; right or wrong, he wasn't yet caught in the cult of believers.
"To prove it to you guys, I'm gonna walk over there, right now, and talk to her. I wasn't gonna until you said somethin', but hey, I hate to see people suffer, and now that I know you're ignoring her 'cause you're scared of the monsters under your bed... what other choice have I got?" He had them. Sam tilted his head toward Jason, guilty at being caught. Jason chewed his lip, unable to express how wrong Kyle was, without sounding even more off-kilter. Yeah, he had them alright, scared of being ridiculed for fearing Adriana, nobody dared rebuke him.
The upperclassmen, teams, and other echelons long since reverted to previous conversations, Kyle abandoned his seat and sauntered calmly toward Adriana's bare corner, pausing only once to fire a wink back at his waiting comrades. Man, they look serious. It didn't matter, Kyle stalked on, fearless. Being a new-kid in Detroit taught him a valuable lesson: do what you want, or you're a coward, and cowards deserve no respect. Lacking respect in Detroit, a dangerous career in the best case, led to frequent fights before Kyle learned the game. Kyle didn't fear such a repeat at this sleepy burg, especially after his highly visible and inadvertent triumph over Jason.
But Kyle still needed to prove their theory—the kind spawned only by fevered imaginings of children and teenagers—wrong, and invalid, and laughable, for his own sanity at the very least. Proving a curse was easy enough with a few tricks and coincidences, but the opposite? He carefully concocted a foolproof situation, should he fail to die or erupt in boils, to irrevocably settle the matter.
A tiny sliver hidden deep in the confines of his mind, the part which remembered the dream, pondered if Sam and Jason might be right.