Now that I had a real weapon, I could learn to defeat villains more skillfully. But I was not very good at sword-fighting yet. According to the sword-fighting videos on YouTube, there are three ways to attack using a sword.
I practiced each of them in the basketball court outside of the apartment until it got dark, pretending that Grendel, who is the most monstrous villain in the Viking story Beowulf, was in front of me. One of the things I’ve learned is that Grendels can hide inside people, pretending to be human beings until they decide to attack.
All of the VILLAINS on my list probably had Grendels inside.
For example, Uncle Richard, who Gert and I used to live with, was a complete shit-heel, and Gert defeated him in combat and could have probably ripped Uncle Richard’s head clean off, but I asked him to be a hero and he did not rip Uncle Richard’s head off, even though Uncle Richard was a villain who deserved it.
Uncle Richard was the first person I met who had a Grendel inside. He looked like a regular person, but sometimes, especially when he was drunk, he became villainous. When he was the most villainous, he hit Gert with a beer bottle and cut the top of his head.
The other villains on my list were also Grendels. I practiced defeating the man in the red hat from the poker game, and also Toucan, and also Sarah-Beth, but I stopped battling her, because I decided she wasn’t actually a villain. She was just annoying.
Dr. Laird once asked me to describe the Grendels. He told me to talk about them in whatever way was most helpful.
“What they look like, what they sound like, what happens when they come. Whatever.”
He even gave me a pad of paper to draw them. The problem was most of the time I could only hear them grumbling. Sometimes they came in my dreams, or I would turn very fast when bad things were happening and I could only see their tails or hairy legs.
In high school, before he dropped out, Gert read a book called Grendel. He said it was the one book he actually liked in English class.
“I’m familiar with the novel,” Dr. Laird said. “Is that the first time you read about Grendel?”
I nodded my head and told Dr. Laird that Grendel is a villain and gets what he deserves. Dr. Laird asked me what I meant by that.
“Grendel attacks the Vikings and eats one of them, like a villain,” I said.
“Did you read the novel?”
I shook my head. “Gert read it and told me about it, and then I read Kepple’s Guide to the Vikings.”
“Well,” Dr. Laird said, “it’s sort of a backward interpretation.”
He told me that you’re supposed to read the book and feel sorry for Grendel, even though he does bad things. “He can’t help it. It’s in his nature.”
I did not like that version of the story, because it made the Viking hero a villain and the monstrous villain a hero.
“Sometimes good people do bad things,” Dr. Laird said. “And sometimes things aren’t as simple as good and evil.”
“The Grendels are evil,” I said.
“Well,” Dr. Laird said, “maybe the Grendels you’re talking about are pure evil. But regular monsters are more complicated.”
After vanquishing Grendels with my Viking sword on the basketball court, I went back home and turned on my computer and began typing.
Dear Dr. Kepple,
I have more questions.
First, I know that Beowulf defeated Grendel in the most famous Viking epic. But are there more than one Grendel? Dr. Laird says that whenever I hear Grendels coming they aren’t the real Grendel. Is it possible the real Grendel survived Beowulf’s attacks and hid for all these years?
Second, I was recently given a Viking sword for my birthday. It has powerful runes that I would like your opinion on, but the Contact Form on your website does not allow me to attach pictures like an e-mail. Is there a way I can send you a picture of the sword?
Skál,
Zelda
I clicked SEND and saw that it was getting late in the evening. I texted Gert asking him where he was and what time he would be home. We have a rule that if he is going to come home late, he texts to tell me.
I made myself dinner using a very special Waffle Pizza recipe that belongs to Gert and me. First, you have to take the can of tomato sauce, pour it into a bowl, and microwave it for one minute. While it is microwaving you put frozen waffles into the toaster. If you do it correctly, the sauce and the waffles will be ready at the same time. Then you put the tomato sauce onto the waffles, and then cheese slices onto the tomato sauce, and meat onto that.
Gert texted while I was making the Waffle Pizza to say that he would be home very late and to not wait up. It was getting late and I began to worry about his Midterm. A warrior needs to be rested before facing a challenge that big.
After Waffle Pizza I did my routine of brushing my hair, brushing my teeth, and changing into my pajamas. I smelled under my armpits and decided I did not need a shower.
Before going to sleep I made sure I set my alarm clock so that I could wake up early and wish Gert happ on his Midterm.
I had not been asleep for very long when a noise outside of my room woke me up.
I always know when Gert is drunk because he runs into things and makes a lot of noise. Lying down in my bed, I could hear him laughing, and then laughing in a weird way until I realized that his weird way of laughing was someone else.
A woman who was a stranger and not AK47.
The Vow, which in Old Norse is called a heit, we have is that whenever one of us wants to bring someone the other one doesn’t know into the apartment, we tell the other members of the tribe, which right now is Gert and me but it used to be AK47 too.
After Gert and AK47 broke up, Gert was bringing all kinds of strangers into the house late at night. I couldn’t sleep and many times the strangers and Gert were very drunk. I do not like people who are drunk in general and especially not Gert, since Mom was drunk when I was in her stomach and that is why I am different, which is a better way of saying retarded. Gert did not drink very much when he and AK47 were together.
Now he drinks a lot.
It was 1:23 a.m., even though it was less than five hours since I had gone to sleep and sent Marxy text messages about kissing videos on YouTube.
I walked to my door, turning the handle really quietly until a line of light came in.
From my bedroom I could only see half of the living room. The other thing I could see was the hallway and the bathroom door. Gert was in his jeans and his sweatshirt, falling around, going from the kitchen to the living room and saying things under his breath.
Then I saw another person, who had a lot of long black hair and a short skirt and before long those ingredients added up and there was a woman standing in our living room.
Gert handed her a glass of something yellow. She drank a big gulp. He drank some too. They kissed and Gert whispered something in her ear and she laughed.
I watched him walk by my door and into the bathroom. The woman ran a hand through her hair and took out her phone. She pressed the buttons and her face got bright from the screen. She was wearing a lot of makeup.
She also broke the rule that said she had to take off her shoes.
I could hear Gert peeing in the bathroom.
This was the time to confront the intruder to the house, while she was alone and did not expect to be confronted. This was a battle tactic that Vikings employed—attacking at night so that they caught their enemies unaware. I jumped out from the hallway and stood behind her and said, “WHO GOES THERE,” in a booming voice.
She dropped the glass that she was holding and said, “Oh my God!” The glass bounced on the ground and spilled all over the carpet.
“Identify yourself,” I said.
“Jesus,” she said, and called out Gert’s name, putting her hand over her heart.
“You cannot pass!” I told her.
The toilet flushed and Gert came in, pulling up his pants. He saw us, me and the woman, standing on the other side of the living room from each other.
“Sorry,” the woman said. “I just, she scared me and I wasn’t expecting—”
“No, it’s fine.” Gert turned to me. “Zee. What are you doing up?”
“You have been drinking,” I said. “And you have your Midterm Exam tomorrow.”
The woman bent down and picked up the glass. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I can clean this up,” and Gert told her that it was fine and not to worry about it.
“It’s not fine,” I said. “You are breaking the rules.”
The woman’s mouth opened and then it closed. “Maybe I should go,” she said.
I told her that was exactly what she should do. Gert did not ask permission and what’s more he was drinking and the longer he stayed up the less sleep he would have. In order to be your strongest you need to be rested.
“Hold on a second,” Gert said. He turned to me. “What’s the problem here? I had a couple drinks. Big deal.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “You have to get up early tomorrow for your test.”
“My test isn’t early. And it’s my test, not yours.”
The woman was standing behind Gert. She was touching his arm in a way that AK47 used to touch it, moving her hand up and down his arm, which I could not stand to look at.
I turned and walked back to my room to show him that I was angry.
Once I got into my room I sat there and crossed my arms, waiting for him to come and apologize. Instead of that happening, I heard them talking more and then they started laughing, and then they got quiet. I knew that they were going to have sex, so I turned on my Viking music as loud as I could. The person who lived above my bedroom in another apartment bonked on the floor, which made the ceiling shake. I put my head under the blankets and closed my eyes and wanted it to stop.
I had seen Gert having sex before, when we were living with Uncle Richard in his house. Gert had a girlfriend named Charlene who came in through the basement window very late at night and Gert took her to our room. I was asleep when she came in and thought that I was dreaming and that she was a monster. We slept in a bunk bed. Gert’s bed was on the bottom, since he was so heavy and would probably fall through the top bed if he slept there. I slept on the top bunk. I liked being up there. I could see everything and if something wanted to get me it had to go up the metal ladder.
Gert told me to be quiet when I woke up and asked who was out there in the dark. The night-light was on the ground and did not show enough light for me to see properly.
“It’s okay,” Gert said, standing on the edge of his bed so his head was where my head was, on the top bunk. He put his hand on my mouth and when he took it away I asked what was going on.
“Nothing. Go back to sleep.”
I asked who was in the room. The smell had changed from Gert’s deodorant and Uncle Richard’s cigarettes and the pot Gert smoked to perfume of girls at school.
“Charlene,” Gert said.
“Hi, Charlene,” I said. I turned on the clip-on lamp that stuck to the wall beside my head, and when the light came on it was so bright that Gert told me to shut it off.
Charlene looked at Gert and said it was too weird, doing it while I was in the room.
“She doesn’t care,” Gert said. “Right, Zee? She can sleep through anything.”
I asked what I was going to be sleeping through and said that, actually, I do not sleep very well if I know something is going on in the room and that a person who is not me or Gert can see me sleep.
“I don’t like to be watched either,” Charlene said. “Maybe this was a bad idea.”
Gert came over to my bed again and whisper-asked if I would go to the bathroom for a little while. “Or the living room.”
“But it’s my bed,” I said. “And my room.”
“It won’t be for that long.”
“Oh yeah?” Charlene said. She was leaning against the desk, her arms crossed against her chest. She was tapping the back of her heel against the wall. Gert put his hands on my shoulders. “Better be longer than that.”
“Ha ha. Very funny.” Gert put his chin on my mattress and whispered, “Please? What do you want? I’ll do anything.”
“It’s getting late.” Charlene was chewing gum and made it snap in her mouth.
“Anything,” Gert said to me.
There was nothing I wanted that Gert could give me. For example, I wanted Mom back alive, and I wanted to be more than I was, and I wanted to go to regular classes in the school, like Gert could.
“Can you tell me more stories about Mom?” I said.
“Right now?”
“Tomorrow after school. For at least an hour.”
Charlene’s gum snapped again. “I don’t have all night,” she said. “I’ve got kids too.”
“Fine,” Gert said.
“Pinky swear?”
He looked back at Charlene, who was picking cat hair off her tank top and letting it fall to the carpet. Gert stuck out his pinky and our fingers wrapped around each other before snapping apart to make the promise unbreakable.
In the living room I put the pillows under my head and pulled the blanket up to my chin. Uncle Richard’s house was not very clean and the food from dinner that he hadn’t eaten was still on a plate. Sometimes he slept on the couch after watching TV and going to work, his stomach sticking out and his legs spread apart. If this happened we were supposed to shut off the TV and put a blanket over him so that he would not be angry when he woke up in the morning, or be too tired from being cold and waking up in the middle of the night to find a blanket.
He was not on the couch so I made myself into a burrito and squished my pillow under my head, making it twice as powerful to sleep on. The television was on mute and I flipped channels. There weren’t many. Uncle Richard thought that cable was a rip-off and used antennas to try to get more channels. Sometimes the channels worked but mostly they didn’t.
The only channel that worked was a show from a long time ago about a family from the frontier who drove in wagons and raised cows. The women looked like nuns and had big dresses and the men were always shooting things and getting into fights before drinking beer at the end on the front porch of their house, in chairs that rocked back and forth.
I had just started falling asleep in front of the settlers on TV when I heard footsteps coming from Uncle Richard’s room down the hall.
“What are you doing in here?” Uncle Richard asked. “Shouldn’t you be sleeping in your room?”
I pretended to snore and not hear him. He said he saw me move a few seconds ago and that he knew what fake snoring sounded like.
He pointed at the TV. “I can’t believe this is the best we can do.”
On the TV, the settlers were in Church. Uncle Richard went over to the TV and moved the antennas around. He was very used to the antennas. Uncle Richard did not work very much, since he had hurt his leg after getting hit crossing the street by a postal truck. They gave him a lot of money after and he bought the house and opened a bar for a while, until it closed from the people working there cheating him out of money.
The TV got fuzzier and he changed the channel to sports, which hadn’t worked when I first turned the TV on. He moved my feet out of the way and we started watching boxing.
“I think I know how this one ends,” I said.
“Well, don’t spoil it for me.”
One of the fighters was a lot better at first. I already saw the end of the fight and knew that the fighter who looked crappier ended up winning by knocking his opponent out three times in a row, very fast.
Uncle Richard scratched his chest and said he was going to get a beer. “Do you want anything?”
“No thank you,” I said.
He came back and sat down. We continued watching and somehow while the fighters punched each other, Uncle Richard had put his arm around me and was touching my shoulder with his fingers. I could feel him drawing something with his pointer. Then I recognized the shape. It was a letter Z. I started to wiggle, and he asked me what was wrong.
“You need to lighten up or you’ll end up like your brother,” he said, and I did not like that and wanted to yell at him, but I also did not want to get Gert in trouble. Gert and I had made a pinky swear, which was like a Viking pact, only then I did not know that I was a Viking and did not call it that. I did not learn I was a Viking until Gert gave me Kepple’s Guide to the Vikings for Christmas. Gert and Uncle Richard were always fighting about something, ever since Gert got bigger than him. Uncle Richard used to slap Gert and call him “boy” and say that if he lived under Uncle Richard’s roof, then he would live under Uncle Richard’s rules too.
Even though we were related by blood, we were not the same tribe because of how he treated Gert.
While sitting on the couch, I tried to watch the television and prayed that Uncle Richard would not hear Gert.
Some sex noises came from the bedroom and to hide them I made a coughing noise and said that I was starting to get a cold.
“It’s going around,” Uncle Richard said. He told me to wait right there while he got some brandy. “An old family remedy,” he said, coming back with the small bottle that smelled sweet but also very strong.
He poured a little bit into the cap that he took off the bottle and handed it to me. “When we were sick as kids, me and your mom, we used to take a nip of this and it would heat us right up.” I told him it smelled bad, and he said that was sort of the point. “Trust me,” he said. “Just make it all go down in one gulp.”
I did what he said and the brandy went into my stomach, where it did warm it up. I made a face.
“It doesn’t taste very good,” I said.
“Yeah, but it feels good. Right?” Uncle Richard smiled, showing his teeth, which he had gotten whitened so that they were not so yellow anymore from the coffee and the cigarettes.
He put his arm around me again, and this time I felt his finger go from my shoulder to my arm and then his hand was between my arm and my body. Gert sometimes put his arm around his girlfriends like that. Then I felt his hand touch my chest, and I froze.
The sex noises got louder from Gert’s and my room, and this time I forgot to cough. The fingers stopped. Uncle Richard had heard them.
“Motherfucker,” he said, and got up to go to Gert’s room. I tried to hold him back and he pushed me down. “Not the time to be fucking around,” he said.
I threw off my blanket and ran and tried to stand in front of the door.
“Move,” he said.
“No,” I said, and like Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings said, “YOU SHALL NOT PASS.”
Uncle Richard pushed open the door. The lights were off in the bedroom but the light from the living room made everything bright. Gert stood behind Charlene, who had her arms on the chair at Gert’s desk. They were both naked.
Her face turned away and she ran to the bed and Gert asked what the fuck was going on.
“Get out of here, you little whore,” Uncle Richard said, throwing clothes at Charlene. “Your mother would be ashamed of you.”
There was a lot of shouting and Charlene started putting on her shirt. Gert stood up to Uncle Richard, who was wearing clothes while Gert had no clothes on.
“What’s the matter with you?” he said, and Uncle Richard slapped him across the face.
Charlene screamed and ran by me in her underwear, holding the rest of her clothes.
“You’re a piece of white trash, just like your father,” Uncle Richard said.
When Uncle Richard said that about our father, Gert punched him. It was the first time Gert had ever hit Uncle Richard, while Uncle Richard had hit Gert a lot. They started wrestling and I didn’t know what to do to make them stop. They knocked into the desk and knocked over a light. Uncle Richard’s leg bent in a weird way, and for the first time, Uncle Richard could not be more powerful than Gert.
So I started shouting, as loud as I could, until they stopped wrestling. Uncle Richard pushed himself off of Gert and stood between us, breathing fast and hard.
“Stop it,” he said.
Gert wiped blood off of his mouth. “Don’t yell at her,” he said.
And Uncle Richard threw up his hands and walked out of the room, saying that he regretted the day he ever took us in. Once he was gone I stopped screaming. Gert put on his underwear and sat on the bed, holding a T-shirt to his face to stop the blood.
“Fuck,” he said, hitting his knees. “Now everyone at school is going to hear about this. Why did you tell him?”
“I didn’t tell,” I said. “He heard you being loud.”
“Fuck,” Gert repeated, and threw the shirt on the ground and grabbed a sock to stop the bleeding.
We sat together on the bed.
“We need to get out of here,” Gert said, turning the sock inside out so that he could use the clean inside part to wipe his nose again. “By any fucking means necessary.”