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

a frilly black dress. I stared longer than was appropriate. Aimi was explaining something to Raggedy Anne on a sheet of music paper. None of them seemed to be eating. All of them wore more powder and makeup than an ‘80’s hair metal band. With the exception of the white-haired dude, I wondered how they managed to survive in this school.
    Michelle noticed my looking. “Don’t even bother with them ,” she said with authority. “They’re weird .” She bit savagely into her Snickers bar. “You hang with them, you’ll look like them. Like Snowman .”
    “ Snowman was sooo pissed this morning he almost punched out the Cinnamonster when she caught him smoking in the bathroom!” Terry informed us. He grinned hugely as he jiggled his fat in his seat and worked a travel screwdriver into some poor little device laid out in pieces in front of him. I think it had once been a PDA.
    “ What happened? Did his hair not come out right today?” Michelle asked cattily. “Or is his corset too tight?”
    Terry made deep rumbling sounds that reminded me uncomfortably of Fat Albert laughing. “He wanted to be the one to knock Troy’s lights out this morning when he messed with Aimi, but then Kevin…”
    “ Snowman?” I interrupted them, looking at the white guy. I thought I hadn’t heard right. “You must be kidding me.”
    “ I wish.”
    I looked back at the Goths, Snowman in particular. He looked about as friendly as the plague. “How do they get away with, you know…” I waved my hand at the wall of black clothes and spiky, multicolored hair.
    “ Looking like freaks and not being skinned, gutted and hung over a fence by Troy and his fathead football friends?” Michelle finished (I thought rather colorfully) for me. She seemed to be an authority on everything at TJ High. “They play The Hole on weekends. It’s this dump all the losers hang out at in the Bronx. They take donations for refugees from the West Coast, bring in a lot of money, or so I hear, so they can dress any way they want.”
    “ So they’re allowed to dress like that to promote the band,” I guessed.
    “ The teachers are down with it. And anyway, it’s Aimi’s band, and no one tells Aimi what to do. If they did, her dad would just get them fired.”
    “ I don’t get it."
    “ Her dad’s got mucho dinero ,” Michelle explained while rubbing her first and second fingers together. “He’s Dr. Mura…you know, head honcho of MuraTech?”
    I blinked in amazement. I was certainly familiar with the name. MuraTech is one of the biggest corporations in the world involved in water treatment plants and cleaning up toxic chemical spills. You hear the name everywhere you go, even if you’re not a science geek; there are always news articles about the company in magazines and on TV, stuff about MuraTech vacuuming up oil spills off the coast of Alaska and generally promoting better living through green energy. As far as I knew, MuraTech was still mopping up the mess left behind by Karkadon. Not that I was going to let on that I knew that much. If I read Wired and Scientific American , Michelle didn’t need to know about it.
    “ If Aimi’s all moneyed up, why’s she going here ?” I said, glancing around the green cinderblock walls and dingy grey-tiled floors. I mean, Thomas Jefferson High looked like a prison both inside and out, not the type of place a girl like Aimi was likely to attend. “This place isn’t exactly Beardsley.”
    “ She was going to Beardsley.” Michelle rolled her eyes with just a hint of massive jealousy. “They threw her out after she displayed uncouth and generally slutty behavior. TJ High is the end of the road for Aimi before military school…or maybe jail.”
    I found that just a little hard to believe. Aimi hadn’t struck me as your typical poor little rich-girl Paris Hilton-type on the easy road to self-destruction. Back in San Francisco, before the disaster, my mom and dad had worked as a catering team and had