Raiju: A Kaiju Hunter Novel (The Kaiju Hunter) Read Online Free Page A

interest in finding out right at the moment.
    “ Kevin,” I said, sticking my hands deep in my pockets as I ambled along. I was trying to ignore the fact that a couple of girls were standing at their lockers, laughing about me behind their Trapper folders.
    “ I heard you gave Troy a broken nose, his first,” she said. She sounded pleased. I noticed she walked with a lot of confidence for a big girl. “No one’s ever stood up to him before.”
    “ Really?” I said, trying not to sound too crabby and failing miserably. “And I thought this school was full of wannabe gangstas.”
    She gave me a challenging look, like it would take a lot more than a scowling Kevin Takahashi and a few insults to chase her off. “Don’t believe all the ghetto movies. We don’t boost cars or knock over convenient stores—at least, most of us don’t. My name’s Michelle.” She smiled, broadly. She had clean but crooked teeth, and her nails were rimmed with work grease. She so wasn’t Aimi—was almost the antithesis of Aimi in every way, All-American, imperfect, girl-next-door, whatever you wanted to call it. Then I wondered why I was comparing the two of them like that and felt a little ashamed. It wasn’t like Aimi was ever likely to talk to me again after I ran away from her.
    I had Michelle in English too, and as we made our way to the cafeteria at lunch she took great pains to warn me about the free school lunch, the horror of which would haunt me forevermore. I had to give her points; she wasn’t at all deterred by my sulking or silence. She went on about her friends and what teachers she hated and her dad who ran a custom body shop in the Heights. She said she helped him out on the weekends. A girl who liked cars. Who woulda thunk it?
    We sat near the windows and she introduced me to her “little” brother, Terry, who despite being a freshman was allowed to sit at the sophomore table—mostly, I think, because anyone who challenged Michelle was likely to get smacked. Michelle told me not to mind Terry, since the doctors had dropped him on his head as a baby.
    Terry was absolutely huge, bespectacled, and actually had the guts to wear a Star Trek TOS tunic to school and a belt that contained just about every Radio Shack device you could imagine, which made me want to run screaming from the school. I had hoped to avoid the whole geek squad entirely, but it seemed they were determined to suck me in no matter what I did. I thought about changing tables, but every one in the cafeteria was occupied by a clique that I was not a part of.
    With a mental sigh (which is harder to do than it sounds) I turned my attention on the bench against the back wall, just under the bell, where a bunch of guys and girls in black were slowly amassing like a long row of human-size crows in fluffy black lace. I assumed this was the outlaw bench, the place where the weird and unwanted perched. Like the Chair of Doom, there’s one in every school.
    I spotted Aimi immediately. Besides her were the other Goths, three boys and one girl. Two of the guys were African-American—twins, I think—with coordinating tuxedoes and Baron Samedi makeup. The other one was white and dressed in a black priest’s cassock with a froth of lace at his throat and cuffs. Somehow, he managed to stand out even more than the twins, partly because he was one of the few all-white guys at school, mostly because he wore his bone-white hair down to his shoulders and his face powdered as pale as a corpse. I think he was looking for an elegant, almost effeminate Gothic look, but he had the naturally muscled body of a track-and-field guy and looked like he could put another guy his size through a brick wall, especially if they made fun of his fancy outfit. His attention was riveted on Aimi, hanging on every word she said. Ugh.
    Aimi didn’t seem to notice, though, engaged as she was in a lively debate with the other Goth girl—an Indian girl with fiery red Raggedy Anne dreads and