Page 25 of Shaped to Be Yours
Mom and Ms. Greystone snickered.
“So the whole town already knows about me?” I asked.
“Not everyone read that article,” Mom said, “and most care more about being in a tester town at all. The past few weeks have been a little tense.”
“And there are going to be monsters at the middle school? And one at the high school?”
“Yes. But no one was licking her to get high!” Mom scoffed. “We don’t think.”
At least that would be a fun monster to hang out with. “Areany monsters coming to the elementary school?”
“Eventually, it’s inevitable,” Ms. Greystone chimed in. “But whenever that does happen, the dissenters will have to get used to it. Thank you for handling that, Sandy. It’s good to have you here, Jason.” She went back to her office, and the vice principal wasn’t glued to the other side of his door anymore.
“I am so sorry, Mom—”
“Don’t be sorry,” she stopped me. “Be better. You are the one who will get in trouble if something happens.”
“I know. And I will be.Better. Not in trouble.”
“Thank you.”
“Seriously, though, Mom, what did McDickhole expect you to do if thereweremonsters being enrolled?”
At least my apt nickname for him got another snicker out of her. “Beef up security to keep an eye on them? As if they were criminals,” she muttered. Her eyes met mine just as we took our seats again, and she had to be reminded that I was basically being treated that way now. “I suppose it could come to that, couldn’t it?”
“It won’t. I’m an exception. I’m… an anomaly. Those monster kids know what they are. What did the article say I was?” I asked.
“You don’t need to worry about that.”
Which meant I was absolutely going to look it up. Now. In a separate browser from my data entry. The fact that I found it super-fast on the paper’s website because the title read “LOCAL MONSTER HIDES IN PLAIN SIGHT” did not bode well.
I just hoped Ricky was having a better day than I was.
Chapter 6
RICKY
Iwas having the best day.
“And a TrollRatteforLicky,” Zinnia said, in her curiously purring accent that sometimes meant her Rs and Ls got flipped. Every word involved a tongue roll or click, making it weirdly pleasant to listen to, whether she and her husband Beck were speaking English or hushed to each other in their native tongue.
“TrollLatteforRicky,” Beck corrected her.
“Oh! Yes!”
They had insisted I call them by their first names instead of both Dr. Q’ah-la-khan, since that would get confusing and they preferred to be informal—which I told myself was true and not their way of avoiding hearing me butcher their surname.
“Thank you!” I said, accepting the to-go cup. When they’d said they’d still pick coffee up for me, I’d found this on the online menu and couldn’t resist. It was based on some type of troll mead recipe and had coffee with cream, honey, and cinnamon. “You didn’t have to go out of your way for me.”
“But we did!” Zinnia said. “We promised to treat you, even if not in person at BeastlyBluehouse.”
“Brewhouse,” Beck corrected and leaned over to kiss her cheek.
They were that kind of disgustingly cute couple that you hoped to grow up to be part of someday. Every correction was met with an appreciative giggle from Zinnia, and complete adoration from Beck.
They were a beautiful species too. Since they were aquatic, they had no hair but fins along the top of their heads like mohawks. They also had fins along their forearms and the backs of their legs. I assumed some were down their spines too, but they wore very normal human clothes and lab coats, they just couldn’t wear long pants because of the length of their leg fins and the size of their feet like giant frogs.
Their ears were frilled like fins too. They had flat noses, almost no nose at all, but I could see slits for nostrils. Their teeth were all sharp points as carnivores, and their eyes were entirely black.
