The Ugly Kids
By Renée Adams
Published by Renée Adams at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 Renée Adams
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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Lily frowned at the scene in front of her.
There was a boy in her locker.
Well, that wasn’t entirely right, she realized. He was only half in her locker, knocking down her stack of schoolbooks, tearing up the posters of fish she had tacked to the inside of the locker—there went her clown fish—and strangely enough, laughing as if he was having a great time. The problem was that he was a very small boy, and it was easy to see how he could fit in there.
Two hulking football players were shoving him inside it. Lily recognized them as Scott and Dan. They were always tormenting smaller students, but normally they shoved them into their own lockers. Not other people’s.
Lily stepped up to them.
“Excuse me. What are you doing to my locker?” she demanded.
The two of them stopped pummeling the boy into Lily’s locker and looked up.
Yes, up.
Lily was a good six inches taller than either of them, and twice as large. The only thing delicate and beautiful about her was her name. She was six feet and three inches tall. Her weight was due to her hiding indoors with her fish most of the time. She tended to get stared at outside, so she stayed at home. She was well muscled though from lifting tanks of fish to move them or clean them, and hauling enormous buckets of water from the garden hose. Her face was like a pug in some ways. It folded in on itself in odd ways around the brows and cheeks, and her nose was as big and red as an apple. Her eyebrows were bushy and wiry, meeting in the center of her brow like old friends. Her teeth stuck out slightly, and her ears were too small for her head. Acne was scattered liberally over her face. Her eyes were bright blue and perpetually watery, and her hair was straight, frizzy, and brown. She kept it loose to hide her face most of the time.
When the two nitwits had finished staring, Dan managed, “Your locker?”
“Yes, my locker,” she said. “I need my books, and you’re wrecking my pictures.”
The geniuses looked down at the torn photos.
“We thought it was his locker,” Scott said. Scott’s face, unlike Lily’s, was perfect. He was tall, but not too tall, husky, blond, and popular. He dated a cheerleader.
“Yeah, he had it open and was going through it, so...” said Dan. He was slightly taller with dark hair and a boyish face, and right now, he was shuffling uncomfortably and smiling up at her...like that was going to help.
Lily shouldered them aside, grabbed the boy in her locker by his collar, and lifted him off his feet. He was also surprisingly skinny.
“What were you doing in my locker?” she demanded.
She kept her lunch money in there, along with her sketchbook, and some other things she wasn’t keen on having anyone else see. A strange boy opening her locker was cause for concern.
The boy was smiling brightly up at her with an oddly wide grin. His nose was small and came to a sharp point. His chin was also very pointed, and his cheeks were bordering on gaunt. He had a mop of black hair that jutted out in all directions and bright green eyes. He was very tan for a kid who looked like he spent most of the time with his books too. But otherwise, he wasn’t very remarkable. He wasn’t handsome, but he wasn’t ugly. If you ignored the tan, he looked like one of the kids who sat around at lunch playing Dungeons and Dragons or that card game with all the pictures of elves and stuff on them. He wore clothing that looked three sizes too big for him, which wasn’t surprising given his diminutive frame.
He reached out, and clutched in his fist was a tiny bouquet of dandelions and their fuzz-ball seeds.
“I wanted to give these to Lily. The teacher told me Human girls like flowers.”
Lily stared at him.
Dan and Scott broke down laughing, hyena-like.
“The...tiny...little...” gasped Dan.
“With...the huge...” gasped Scott.
The boy just grinned at her. “I’m Gohber.”
“Goober is more like it,” Dan choked out between laughs.
Lily had had enough. She wasn’t a violent girl, but often, with her size, she didn’t need to be. She stepped forward with Gohber’s shirt still clutched in her hand and his feet dragging the floor until she towered over the two of them.
“Was there anything else you wanted?” she demanded in a low tone.
The laughter stopped, and they took the hint.
“What a freak,” Scott said as they turned and walked down the hall, still chucking to themselves and genially shoving each other. The words “Goober” and “the Giant” could be heard.
Lily looked after them, shaking her head to herself, then rounded on Gohber.
“Consider this a reprieve,” she told him firmly. “But if I ever see you anywhere near my locker, I’m not going to be happy. Got it?”
Gohber nodded vigorously, his bright green eyes staring up at her.
Lily just grunted, set him down gently, and set to fixing her locker as best as she could. She grabbed the books she needed for her next class, slammed the locker shut, and froze.
Gohber was still there.
“Don’t you have somewhere to be?” she asked pointedly.
He thrust the bouquet of yellow weeds at her again.
Lily just groaned. “You’re kidding. You have to be kidding me.”
“I didn’t bring any kids,” Gohber said, appearing to be at a loss. “Do girls like those too?”
Lily just snatched the dandelions from him, half embarrassed and half suspicious that this was all a cruel joke.
“Just stay away from me,” she snapped and stalked off to the laughter of other kids in the hallway, tossing the weeds into a trash can before she got to class.
Lily peered through her hair and over her shoulder as she walked home from school.
Gohber was following her.
Or at least, it looked like he was following her. He was running from telephone pole to mailbox, to bush, to fire hydrant, keeping pace behind her. He even crouched behind a woman’s Great Dane until she started shouting at him and hitting him with the handle of the leash. “Pervert!” had been screamed at least twice.
Lily tried not to think about what the other girls at school had said about Gohber, but of course, the first thing that popped into her head when she tried not to think about something was that exact topic.
She had been sitting in class, when Dana, her best friend, had leaned over her desk across the aisle to whisper to her, “I heard Gohber likes you?”
Lily had nodded, keeping her eyes on the teacher. He didn’t like whispering in class, but just then, he had been nodding off in his chair while the students read from the textbook.
“He’s so weird! Did you know that Kelly Gordon saw him eating the mice in Mrs. P’s science class? When Mrs. P saw him, he thanked her and said they were delicious snacks! Ben Spakowski saw him going through the trashcans and pulling things out. I saw him doodling big knives in his notebook. Lily, you’ve got to get rid of him. He’s already been down to the principal’s office more times than I can count! He shoves pencils up his nose for God’s sake!”
Lily winced at the memory, then peeked behind herself again.
Gohber was shimmying down through the hole of a sewer grate in the curb to get out of sight.
She shuddered. Gohber had a screw loose. She was sure of it. Was he going to murder her in her sleep once he learned where she lived? He had a face like a cartoon devil after all (sans pointy mustache, but in a few years, who knew?). Or was he just going to hang around and try to make her his girlfriend?
Lily wasn’t sure which was worse. Either way though, she decided, she didn’t want him following her home!
Lily turned the corner at the end of the next block, then quickly went through the gate of the first house there. The woman who lived in that blue and white ranch owned two black Labradors who were very fond of Lily. They barked a greeting and loped up to her, tails wagging.
“Shhh!” Lily hissed at them. She knelt down behind the hedge that surrounded the yard and let them lick her face while she scratched their tummies and behind their ears. Whatever it took to keep them quiet!
There was the quiet slapping of bare feet on the sidewalk, and Lily frowned to herself. Bare feet?! He was running around the neighborhood without shoes?!
The slapping sound stayed where it was, as Lily assumed he twisted in circles, looking for her, then flapped off past her. From the sound of things, he had enormous duck feet.
Lily waited until the sound was gone, then stepped back outside the gate, careful not to let the dogs escape.
She trotted down the road to her own home, huffing with the effort of it. It had been a while since she had run, but she made a valiant effort and got there pretty quickly, opening the chain link fence and hurrying past the tiny front yard into the house.
She breathed a sigh of relief as the familiar bubbling noise of her fish tanks greeted her. There were several tanks in the tiny home she shared with her father. Her father enjoyed having the fish around as long as Lily kept them clean and fed the fish, so she was permitted to pursue her obsession without objection. He wasn’t home from his accounting office just yet though, so Lily had the house to herself.
She passed the piranha tank, the shelf of small globes that held beta fish, and the tanks where she bred snails and bottom feeders just to keep her fish tanks clean before she reached the couch and collapsed on it. She stretched out her legs, heaved a sigh, and started relaxing to the familiar sound of bubbling.
She smiled down at the orange, black, and white clown fish that was kept on the coffee table.
“Hi Alice,” she said fondly.
Alice just hovered there, but that was something fish did when they were content anyway. Lily wasn’t sure if Alice was a boy or a girl, but it was fun to pretend. She had long ago run out of neutral names like Robin or Sandy. Now she just named them whatever looked like might fit them. She was certain they wouldn’t mind. She had never met a gender-confused fish before.
Bonk, bonk, bonk!
Lily froze.
Bonk, bonk, bonk! it came again.
Slowly, very slowly, Lily’s eyes turned toward the window.
There, perched precariously on her windowsill, was Gohber, grinning at her like some eerie fanged ghoul. His canines were strangely longer than the rest of his teeth, and his grin was so large, the corners of his mouth nearly crossed over his eyes. She felt like she was looking at a very disturbing cartoon or a Halloween mask.
Lily leaped out of the couch and yanked the shade down so hard that the entire thing crashed to the floor, narrowly missing a tank full of hundreds of tiny neon fish that was perched on an end table.
Gohber was still squatting there, grinning at her.
Lily untied the heavy curtains and threw them into place over the window. She was breathing hard now, and her heart was pounding. The kid had found her?! How?! Had he followed her without her noticing?! Was he going to murder her?!
The front door banged open, and the blood drained from Lily’s face.
She picked up a little fish net. It wasn’t the best weapon, but Lily figured she could poke him in the eyes with the wire handle...or something.
Cautiously, she crept forward, the fish net clutched in front of her.
“I’m warning you,” she called out. “Get out of the house now, or I’ll—”
“Lily?”
A pale, stubbled face poked out of the doorway and regarded Lily with watery blue eyes behind thick glasses with thick black frames. Those eyes were wide in astonishment. He was balding, and the comb-over didn’t quite hide it. He was one of the few men taller than Lily, but he was rail-thin and often sickly looking. Probably because he fretted about most things and only picked at his food.
Lily quickly dropped the net.
“Dad! Sorry, I...there’s this boy from school. He was following me.”
Her father frowned, concerned, and stepped into the room, ducking under the door frame and dropping his briefcase under the shelves of beta fish.
“A boy?” he asked.
Lily nodded. “I thought I lost him, but—”
“Sit down, Lily,” her father interrupted, patting the back of the couch. “I’ve been putting it off a while. It just didn’t seem as easy with your mother gone off somewhere, but there’s a talk I’ve been meaning to have with you. About boys and girls...”
Lily stared at him, then covered her face with hands that were like enormous slabs.
“Dad, the school gave me the talk years ago!” she protested. “And they’ve repeated it every year since, just in case it wasn’t embarrassing enough the first time around!”
“Oh,” blinked her father, looking tremendously relieved. “Good, good. Things have certainly changed since my day. As long as you know.”
He breathed deeply, rubbed his stick-thin hands together, and forced a smile. “So how about Chinese food tonight?”
Lily glanced at the window. She opened her mouth to tell her father about Gohber again, but then shut it. She didn’t need more of his fatherly dating advice...or as he called it, “courting.” In his day. Also, in the neighborhood he had grown up in, there had never been such a thing as “stalking.” There had just been a few “aggressive” boys.
“Yeah, okay,” she said, plopping back onto the couch. Its springs squeaked under her weight.
Not long after that, Lily’s father got in his car and drove off to pick it up.
Lily had waved him off from the front door as an excuse to check the street. Gohber wasn’t in sight, and the sidewalks were quiet.
Furtively, she ducked back inside and threw open the curtains. He wasn’t there either.
She let out a sigh of relief and plopped back into the couch, just listening to the sound of bubbling aquariums. Gohber had given up. She didn’t have to see the creepy little kid for a whole day.
She looked down at the coffee table. “Kind of strange, wasn’t that, Ali—”
Alice wasn’t in her bowl.
Lily sat up and leaned downward, peering through the glass and into the little castle the clown fish sometimes hid in. Not there. Not stuck in the filter either. Or behind the fake plants.
“Alice?”
“Is that what it’s called? Alice is delicious!”
Lily let out a scream and spun around, knocking the empty bowl onto the carpet and spilling water everywhere.
Peering over the top of the couch was Gohber, grinning widely at her. He waved. “Hi, Lily!”
“Y-you ate my fish?!” Lily demanded.
Gohber looked uncertainly at her. “Not all of it. I saved half for Lily.”
He held up the tail-end of the now deceased clown fish.
“That fish was not for eating!” Lily shouted. “It was a pet! And what are you doing in my house?!”
Gohber looked down at the fish tail, then hid it behind his back.
“I wanted to...’hang out?’” he paused, thinking. “Yes. Hang out is the right word.” He beamed proudly at remembering it.
Lily stared at him in shock, then shouted, “YOU HAVE TO BE INVITED FIRST! GET OUT!”
“Oh.”
Gohber’s face fell. “Can I hang out with Lily?” he asked hopefully.
“NO! How did you find me anyway?!”
“I followed Lily’s scent.”
“Well then follow it back where you came from! Leave!”
Gohber’s face somehow fell further. Lily almost swore it was made of rubber the way it stretched.
He plodded to the front door, squishing across the wet carpet with his enormous bare feet. He pulled open the door.
As if the knob had somehow turned red hot, he let out a yelp and slammed it shut again.
Lily scowled. She wouldn’t have minded if Gohber had been on the other side of the door when he slammed it, but...there he was back in her home.
“Get—” Lily started to say, but the expression on Gohber’s face stopped her.
The boy was terrified. His face was sickly looking and pale now, some of the tan gone. He was shaking.
“Lily! Hide! Quick! Hide!”
“What are you talking abou—”
“HIDE!”
Lily waddled back into the kitchen and fished around in the drawer of odds and ends that she and her father kept there. As Gohber freaked out in the living room, she pushed aside bits of string, old twist ties, a pair of scissors, forgotten keys that they were nervous about throwing away, a few screws and a screwdriver, an unused bicycle lock, and a couple cans of fish food.
Finally, in the back of the drawer, her hand closed around the little canister she had been looking for. Her father had said it was only for use in emergencies. Well, she decided, a strange boy following her home and breaking into her home definitely qualified.
It was only in case Gohber went completely insane on her. She was planning to pick up Gohber and put him outside, but you never knew who would try to kill you these days, and Gohber was anything but normal.
There was a loud CRASH from the living room, and Lily huffed her way back out there.
“What did you do?” Lily demanded.
Gohber was standing with his back pressed tightly against the front door, his fingers clawing at the door frame, and his feet stretched far in front of him, like he intended to hold up the door. His elastic face was contorted into an expression of terror.
“Lily! Hide! Lily has to hide!”
“I’m not hiding in my own—”
CRASH!
Something behind Gohber slammed into the door, throwing the strange boy to the floor.
Lily’s eyes widened. That hadn’t been her father. Her father was less capable of violence than Lily herself. It simply didn’t happen. Besides, he would have used his key. The door opened outwards.
Lily placed herself in the doorway instead, pressing against the door.
“What is outside?” she demanded of Gohber. “What did you do?!”
“N-n-n-nothing,” Gohber stuttered, pacing and tearing at his hair. “They found me!”
There was another crash from the other side of the door, and even Lily was almost thrown forward. The door splintered. She wasn’t sure how long it would hold.
“Then let them find you and go away!” Lily shouted at him. “Your friend is wrecking my—”
The last word turned into a scream as the door finally exploded behind her, and Lily was thrown onto the carpet next to Gohber.
Lily struggled to sit up and push her hair out of her eyes.
There was silence for a moment, then, “Me see food?”
“NO! No, no, no, no!” Gohber shouted. “Not food!”
“Look food.”
“Not food!”
It was at this point that Lily finally managed to get a look at what was going on.
Gohber was standing with his arms spread wide between her and the thing standing in the shattered ruins of the doorway, but the little boy didn’t block her view of the creature at all. Gohber was just too skinny.
The thing in the doorway could have perhaps been called a man, but only if the man were enormous, disfigured, and so grotesque that he made even Lily look appealing. It was at least eight feet tall and had to duck to stand inside the house, its shoulders hunched against the ceiling. Its wide frame had broken through some of the wall on the way in. It was vaguely gray in color, like the hue Lily imagined a corpse might turn. Smallish eyes peered out at Lily from a deep brow, regarding Lily slowly in a dim-witted sort of way. It had a snout that quivered about and moved slightly in each direction, picking up scents. The nose reminded Lily of the way a bear could almost lift their nose up and away from the teeth. Drool trickled down its chin, and the creature didn’t seem to have any discernible ears, except for two holes on each side of its head. All it wore was a loincloth and strands of what looked...and smelled...like rotting seaweed of some kind.
“I’m not f-food,” Lily said finally, finding her own voice. “Get out of my house!”
It was a ridiculous feeling. Lily had never been the smaller person in a confrontation before. She wondered if this was how other people felt when she intimidated them.
The thing scratched its bare head ponderously.
“Snack?” it tried.
“No!” Gohber almost screamed. “Lily! Lily is my girlfriend!”
Lily started to say she wasn’t, but Gohber slapped a hand over her mouth.
The creature frowned with confusion, and Gohber sighed.
“She me girl,” he clarified.
The thing’s face brightened, and its smile was like despair made visible, revealing a row of surprisingly healthy, pointed teeth. Lily could see a buckle stuck between two fangs, and she hoped that her father hadn’t met the creature.
She shivered at the thought, her stomach fluttering with butterflies.
“You, she, come,” the thing said, and with that, it scooped Lily up under one arm like she weighed nothing at all and pinched Gohber between his fingers, carrying them carefully sideways out the front door again. “Ma, Pa, sad. Want whelp.”
“No! No! No!” Gohber was screeching.
“Let me go!” Lily cried, trying to wrench the arm from around her. The thing’s muscles were like steel though, and she nearly fainted from the stench coming from its armpit.
The creature didn’t go far though. It carefully juggled the two of them around in the yard for a moment, then pulled a bone from inside its loincloth and snapped it in two.
The world spun around Lily, and just when she thought she couldn’t get more nauseated, a stench like none she had ever smelled before reached her nostrils.
She couldn’t help it. She retched all down the side of the creature.
It didn’t flinch, or even seem to mind for that matter, and dropped her and Gohber on the ground.
Lily looked up.
They were surrounded by mountains...of trash. Styrofoam cups, broken appliances, empty cereal boxes, puddles of who knew what kinds of chemicals, waste, rotting food, and who knew what else. There was too much for Lily to ever list out completely, and her attention wasn’t currently on that.
Instead, she was focused on the two people standing in front of them. In some ways, they looked like Gohber, but Gohber was more Human-like than either of them. They both had faces that were like melted rubber. Bright green eyes peered out at Lily from beneath heavy brows.
The one that Lily guessed was female was short, tanned, stick-thin, and had copious amounts of black greasy hair, and more of it appeared to be streaming from her armpits. She wore a stained and torn T-shirt that said “I <3 NY.” It was more brown now than the original white it had once been. A bed sheet had been tied around her waist in what Lily supposed was supposed to be an artful fashion, and it dragged the ground behind her. On her feet were bright red shoes with the heels torn off. These were actually impeccable, Lily noticed with surprise.
The other was as tall and wide as Lily herself, if not moreso. His warty belly protruded from beneath a shabby, hairy, dirt-smeared coat. He wore spandex pants and mismatched boots too. His mouth was as wide as a frog’s.
Both wore rusted crowns, and both were looking at Lily and Gohber with a mixture of annoyance and surprise.
“A Human?” The female asked.
“Gohber obviously thought that bringing us dinner would appease us,” the male replied, eyeing Lily and smacking his frog-like lips. “He might be right.”
The big thing that had brought Lily there pointed at her. “She he girl.”
“What?!” demanded the frog-man. “You can’t be serious! This is an outrage! She’s not even a Goblin, Gohber!”
“I want to court Lily,” Gohber explained helpfully. “She’s pretty.”
The creature just shrugged, obviously confused by the conversation, but not caring enough to ask for an explanation.
“What is going on?!” Lily finally demanded. “I want to go home!”
The female...Goblin, Lily assumed by the sound of things...stretched upward on her toes and smacked her husband hard on the back, which didn’t appear to bother him much.
“Introductions, dear,” she snapped in a firm way.
“Introduce myself to dinner? Are you mad?”
“Then she can appreciate the one who eats her,” the female suggested.
That seemed to mollify him. The male cleared his throat.
“I am Grom, Goblin King of the Americas,” he said importantly.
“And Canada,” said the female helpfully. “And Mexico. But not Hawaii. That’s my sister’s kingdom.”
“And this,” said Grom, gesturing toward the shorter female, “is Queen Hoge.”
Queen Hoge nodded at Lily.
He pointed at Gohber. “You already know our eldest son, Gohber.”
He pointed at the creature. “And the Ogre is Dug, a friend of the family.”
At the mention of his name, Dug grinned with that mouthful of pointed teeth. The buckle was still firmly lodged there.
“Goblin King?” Lily asked stupidly. “Aren’t you supposed to have a castle in the center of a huge maze and be incredibly handsome?”
King Grom sputtered. “Did Dinner just call me ugly?!” he asked his wife.
“Now now,” Queen Hoge soothed. “Humans have quite different ideas of beauty. I think she was paying you a compliment.”
“Oh, right.”
He turned back toward Lily. “This is something of a maze. It’s impossible to find your way in or out easily. That’s why we use spells to travel. Now, about Gohber. It’s just not possible for our son to marry a Human. It just...isn’t done!”
“But I don’t want to marry anyone!” Lily protested. “I just want to go home!”
“So you’re not officially courting Gohber?” the King asked.
“No!”
The King smiled nastily. “Dug, please prepare Dinner while we reprimand our son?”
“Uh?” Dug asked.
King Grom sighed and pointed at Lily. “Make Din-Din. Me Gohber smack.”
“Oh.” Dug nodded and made a grab for Lily.
“NO!” Gohber screamed, madly batting away at Dug’s enormous hand. “I want to court Lily! Won’t eat her!”
Dug understood the word “No,” so he held back and looked at the King.
King Grom sputtered again and whirled on his wife. “Did—did you hear what he said?! A Human?!” He loomed over Gohber menacingly. “Would you marry a roast cat? Stewed fungus?”
“I love Lily,” said Gohber, dreamily looking up at her.
I’m in Hell, Lily thought to herself. The only thing standing between me and becoming “Dinner” is this tiny Goblin kid who stalked me, broke into my house, and ate my fish!
King Grom let out a shout of anger and turned away from his son, pacing back and forth.
“Dear,” suggested Queen Hoge, “She is very beautiful and Goblin-like. Perhaps we could make her an honorary Goblin.”
“I will not have half-Human grandchildren!” the King nearly screamed at her.
His wife just smiled. The effect was like watching the garbage piles themselves bare teeth. “To become an honorary Goblin, she must pass three trials,” his wife continued. “If she succeeds, she may court our son. If she fails, we can eat her, and Gohber cannot deny that we gave her a chance.”
“I love it!” cried the King.
“Wait!” Lily cried. “I don’t need to be an honorary...anything! I just want to go home! Let me go home, and I’ll never bother you again!”
“We used to in the Old Days,” Queen Hoge sighed, “but as concepts like honor became more and more foreign, we found ourselves again and again regretting those decisions. You must either leave here a Goblin or die. Besides, Humans make a lovely meal, especially children these days. I don’t know what they put into your food, but children are bigger and more tender than ever.”
The King had put a whistle to his lips by now and blew a sharp blast on it. A tiny Goblin, smaller even than Gohber, appeared, bowing and scraping to his King.
“Get my sons,” the Goblin King ordered. “The law calls for neutral witnesses and an impartial judge. They’ll do. They’re easily swayed by promises of wealth and food and family values.”
The little Goblin ran off on cricket-like legs to obey the King’s orders.
“Hey! That’s not impartial at all!” Lily protested.
“Of course it is!” the King said cheerfully. “I never do anything partially. I’m pulling out all the stops for you today, Dinner.”
They waited for several moments, during which Lily got up and paced around the clearing they were standing in. They were surrounded by mountains of garbage with passages and corridors running between them all in what truly was a maze. The only unusual bit was a large tunnel with a door that led directly inside one of the garbage mountains. The mountain, strangely enough, was shaped vaguely like a castle.
Lily tried to climb a pile to see above the mess, but it was so loosely packed that she slid straight back to the ground again, covered in something slimy and rotted. Her bottom had landed in a rancid puddle too.
“Ooooh! Father, where’d you find such a pretty Gobliness?” asked a voice behind her. There were murmurs of assent.
Lily turned around and looked.
Nine other Goblins had appeared from the garbage mountain doorway. Each one was more hideous than the last, all of them brutishly large, muscled, and warty things. Gohber seemed to be the only one who had taken after his mother.
“She’s not a Goblin. She’s a Human!” King Grom snapped. “Now all you have to do is watch and make sure she follows the rules of the trials. Understand?”
“Yes, Father,” chorused the Goblins.
“Our sisters are coming too,” said the largest. “They think it’s romantic.”
The Goblin King lifted his eyes heavenward as if asking why he had been cursed with such liberal offspring.
Lily paled when one of the brothers grinned widely at her behind his father’s back and waggled his stubby fingers in a flirtatious wave.
Gohber growled from next to her.
“How did Gohber land a girl like that?” one of the brothers muttered. “He’s not even handsome! Bet she’d rather have a real Goblin.” The Goblin let out a belch that rattled several items off a garbage pile, then grinned proudly at Lily.
Lily tried not to turn green. After all, these Goblins were going to judge her trials. Or eat her. She forced a tenuous smile and hoped it was enough.
Gohber bristled.
Just at that moment though, several more Goblins emerged from the garbage palace. These, Lily guessed, were female. It wasn’t that they looked particularly different from their brothers that gave her that idea. On the contrary, many of them were just as hairy, muscular, and grotesque as their brothers. What tipped her off was the colorful, feminine clothing they wore, and the longer black armpit hair that matched or surpassed the Queen’s, probably because they had little or no hair upon their heads, Lily guessed. Several of them had short skirts that showed off knobby or enormous knees. almost all of them were showing off a little bit of their enormous, warty bellies too. Each one wore a rusted tiara upon her head.
As they approached, they all whispered and giggled in croaky voices. Several of them were looking at Lily, and a few were waving at Gohber and giving him encouraging gestures.
“Alright!” King Grom bellowed once the princesses had settled down. He was clearly annoyed. “The three trials are for Dinner to prove that she is a Goblin at heart. The first is...”
He looked down at the smaller Goblin. The little one whispered something to him, and the King pulled a face.
“Beauty.”
“She passes!” cried one of Gohber’s brothers, and the others hooted and catcalled their agreement. Even the princesses had to agree.
Gohber was cheering with the rest of them.
Lily felt her cheeks turning red when she saw what some of the Goblins were gesturing at her, and quickly looked away, just happy that she wasn’t being roasted on a spit yet.
“ENOUGH!” roared the King over the noise. “The second trial! Dinner has to prove that she’s mean enough to be a Goblin!”
“What?” Lily asked in disbelief.
“Mean-spiritedness,” King Grom repeated. “You don’t think we got this far in life by being nice, do you?”
Lily glanced around at the garbage surrounding her. “Of course not,” she said dryly.
“Well?” the King demanded impatiently. “Prove it already. I’m hungry.”
The Queen smacked him again. “Patience, dear. This is all new to her.”
King Grom grumbled under his breath.
Lily looked around herself a little blankly. What might a Goblin consider mean-spirited?
“Five more minutes, Dinner. I haven’t got all evening.”
That decided it for Lily.
She turned and kicked the Goblin King hard in the shin.
“OW!” the King yelped. He hopped up and down on one leg, clutching the injured one to his enormous belly. “That wasn’t fair! She cheated!”
His sons though were grinning. “You never said she couldn’t cheat, Father,” said the eldest. “She passes. Besides, what’s meaner than cheating?”
The Goblin princes were all back to leering at Lily, and she was starting to feel distinctly uncomfortable under their attention. She backed away until she was standing behind Gohber, but that didn’t help very much. Gohber kept trying to hold her hand or move sideways to show her off.
“The next trial is strength!” the Goblin King nearly shrieked. “And if the witnesses and judge allow Dinner to cheat again, they get no more allowances!”
There was a chorus of groans and muttering from the Goblin princes. On the sidelines, the Goblin princesses hissed and booed at their father. Apparently they still thought this was romantic.
The King ignored them and pointed at an enormous dumpster nearby. “Lift that,” he said, grinning evily. He was already tucking a napkin into his shirt.
“Father, even we couldn’t lift that!” one of the princes protested.
“Quiet!” King Grom ordered. “It’s her task, and she’ll do it or be eaten!”
Lily stared at the dumpster. It was filled to the brim with garbage! It was the Goblin King who was cheating! Not Lily!
Still, she had to do it, or as the King had made quite clear, they would eat her.
Squinting at the dumpster, an idea occurred to her. She began rummaging around for things in the trash heaps.
“What are you doing, Dinner?” the King called, his frog mouth split in a wide grin. “Hurry up and give up so we can eat!”
Lily ignored him and set to work. She had found a very long, metal beam which she dragged over to the dumpster. She hauled the rim of an old tire over to it too. It took her several minutes to fit the beam securely under the edge of the dumpster. Then she wedged the tire rim under it as closely as she could to the dumpster. She moved to the end of the beam and leaned all her three hundred and twenty pounds of fat and muscle into it.
The dumpster shrieked a rusted metal protest, then lifted a few inches off the ground, dumping some of its precariously balanced contents onto the ground.
“Long...enough...lever...and...fulcrum...” Lily panted. She had never thought science class would actually come in handy. She would be paying more attention to Mrs. P when she got back home. If she got back home.
Gohber was cheering for her from the sidelines, jumping around and waving like a pom-pom-less cheerleader.
King Grom, though, was scowling. “Judge?” he asked, taking a pouch out of his jacket and shaking it so it jingled.
The eldest prince eyed it greedily.
“She cheated,” he announced. “Didn’t do it herself!”
“What?!” Lily demanded, letting go. The dumpster crashed to the ground with a noise like thunder.
The eldest prince quailed under her glare. “Er...”
The King jingled the bag again.
“...Cheated...” the eldest said awkwardly, glancing at it.
“Lily did not cheat!” Gohber shouted furiously. He looked like he just might attack his own father for a moment.
“I think he cheated,” Lily huffed, jabbing a finger at the King. “He’s swaying the judge with that bag!”
“Yes!” Gohber shouted. “Father cheated!”
“Preposterous!” snapped King Grom, but he hastily stuck the bag back in his jacket.
With the bag out of sight, the eldest prince’s gaze was drawn back to Lily.
“Well...” he said slowly. “Maybe a do-over. Different trial!”
“Yeah!” agreed the other princes and princesses. They were enjoying the occasion so much that they were reluctant to end it just yet.
“This is just like one of those Human reality shows!” crowed one warty princess with clawed talons for hands.
Lily groaned.
No, not hell, she decided. This is worse. Much worse. I’m a Goblin reality TV star.
Vaguely, she wondered how they got cable, then decided she didn’t want to know.
This time the eldest prince opened his mouth before his father. “Let her fight the King!” he suggested, enjoying his moment in the spotlight. “If she wins, she’s an honorary Goblin. If she loses, we can eat her luscious form.”
Lily didn’t know whether to be outraged or embarrassed. She had certainly never been called “luscious” before. But then, she had never been told someone was going to eat her either.
“Fine!” the Goblin King snapped, shrugging out of his jacket. “If it means we can get on with dinner, so be it!”
King Grom was even more hideous to behold without his jacket. His grayish skin shone palely in the gathering dusk, and Lily could see every last boil and wart on his enormous gut. The only hair on his body could be seen in his underarms. The bright violet spandex pants he wore didn’t help either, and Lily tried to avert her eyes.
There was no warning before the fight. The Goblin King simply launched himself at Lily, all fists and teeth and boots, one of which hit Lily in the shin, and she realized it had a steel toe.
Lily yelped, then did what any sane person would do with a massive Goblin King attacking them: She ran.
There were disappointed groans from the princes and princesses, and she could hear Gohber trying to coach her.
“No! Lily has to turn around and fight! Lily! Close your hand in a ball and throw it at him! Kick! Bite! Scratch!”
Lily ignored Gohber and huffed her way around a mountain of garbage, hiding behind a large, broken refrigerator. She heard the King’s boots on the ground as he trotted toward her—and then past her.
Breathing a sigh of relief, Lily was just inching out of her hiding place when the Goblin King looked back. His eyes locked onto her.
Lily looked around wildly as the Goblin King charged again, and her eyes fell on the broken leg of a chair. She lifted it up, still attached to its cross-section, and swung!
The wood missed by a mile, but Lily had swung so hard, that she swung herself right out of the way of the King’s charge. He charged straight into the garbage mountain, banana peels and papers and splinters of wood flying out every which way. Lily spun rump-first into another rancid puddle.
She was able to scramble to her feet though before the Goblin King could pull himself out of the tangle of garbage he had created, and she huffed her way to the Goblin Princes and Princesses, feeling a little faint.
This was more exercise than she had done in a very, very long time. Not since she had babysat her neighbor’s bratty son and he had broken six of her fish tanks with a baseball bat. Lily hadn’t been able to catch him until he had accidentally run into the bathroom. She had yanked away the bat and locked him in there for the remainder of the evening with a chair braced against the doorknob while she cleaned up the mess and rescued as many fish as she could. She had refused to babysit the spawn of Satan after that.
Leaning her palms on her thighs, she panted for breath. She was so winded, she didn’t notice the Goblin King making another charge until he slammed into her from behind.
Lily went down hard. She tasted foul dirt mixed with garbage, and a little coppery blood.
Groaning, she rolled onto her back and struggled to sit upright.
“Finally!” said the Goblin King, taking a ratty towel from the little cricket-legged Goblin and wiping his brow. “Now we can get on with Dinner. Dug, do you still have that knife? If you want something done right, you just have to do it yourse—ARGH!”
Lily had found the can of pepper spray she had pocketed and shot it full into King Grom’s frog-face.
The Goblin King stumbled back. “My eyes! Help! Attack! Avenge me! I’m dying!”
He flopped backward into a rather large puddle, writhing in pain and flailing about like a fat, out of control spider, his purple spandex pants turning a dark maroon shade.
“Did she cheat?” one of the princes asked the eldest.
The eldest just shrugged, looking at Lily with a gleam in his beady eye. “Father agreed that she had to fight him and win,” he said in his rough, gravelly voice. “Looks like she won.”
The princesses let out cheers that sounded like murderous shrieks. The princes were all just as happy, though they were showing it by flexing their muscles and burping loudly whenever Lily looked their way.
Gohber started jumping up and down so fast, it looked almost like he was having a seizure. His grin stretched up to his eyeballs again on his rubbery, pointed face. “Lily’s a Goblin! Lily’s a Goblin!”
Winded, Lily slowly climbed to her feet and began brushing off her dirt-stained jeans. Gohber was having his excitement seizure in a misshapen circle around her, and it was distracting her from finding the King, who had disappeared behind his cheering daughters somewhere.
“Lily,” said a voice, and Lily looked upward to see the Queen looking up at her with a cautious acceptance. “The King is going to be quite...unavailable for a while. I formally recognize you as an honorary Goblin in his stead.”
“Can I go home now? My father is probably so worried!” Lily asked desperately, hastily throwing in a dubious, “Your...Goblin-ness?”
“He doesn’t even know you’re gone yet,” Queen Hoge assured her. “Time passes differently in the vicinity of our palace, primarily due to experiments one of my ancestors did with wormholes. Your physicists would probably hang themselves if they knew what we know about space and time, so we let them remain ignorant. Their theories are so entertaining sometimes.”
The Queen chuckled, then pulled Lily down so that the Queen’s rubbery face was next to Lily’s ear.
“Gohber is first in line for the throne and my favorite son,” she told Lily in a whisper that was borderline icy. The cheers of the princesses covered her words. “The only reason I supported you was because the moment he assumes the throne, his brothers will murder him. He’s small, and ugly, and an awful fighter. He will need someone strong, and beautiful, and cunning to protect him. Someone who doesn’t think like a Goblin.”
Her eyes narrowed on Lily.
“So your intentions had best be pure,” she said, then smiled hideously, all hardness gone from the expression.
She turned away and addressed Dug, who had been idly picking his snout up to now. She handed him two bones.
“Gohber stay with Lily. Lily go home,” she told Dug, using the simple language he could understand. Apparently Ogres had trouble with more than one syllable.
Meanwhile, one of the princes approached Lily now. He was the eldest after Gohber, Lily guessed, and he had been the judge of the trial. He leaned down and burped in her face with a smell that overpowered even the garbage heaps around them. Lily had never been a wishy-washy, weak-hearted girl, but the stench nearly made her faint.
“I’m Tog,” he said with a huge smile, displaying teeth that had been filed to sharp points.
Lily was too busy trying not to vomit again to reply, but that was fine. Gohber did it for her.
“Lily’s my girlfriend!” he shouted at his brother. He pummeled the Goblin’s stomach with tiny fists, but that didn’t seem to do more than make the bigger Goblin chuckle.
He reached down and picked up Gohber by the collar of his over-sized clothing. “Outta my way, Wormie, while I talk to this beautiful Goblin.”
Lily considered herself a patient person. She also considered herself a very non-violent one. But this had been a very long day, and she had had more than enough with burping, stinking Goblins trying to date her!
She hauled back and hit Tog squarely in the nose.
Tog dropped Gohber and staggered backward while Lily shook her hand and tried not to let her eyes tear up. Goblin noses were tough!
Tog finally gave a little wobble, then fell into a heap on the ground, snoring loudly.
Next to Dug, she saw the Queen nodding approvingly.
Lily sighed. She didn’t want to marry Gohber. Or date him. Or even be too near him.
Gohber grabbed Lily’s hand and stared adoringly up at her with big, bright green eyes.
Lily tried to block it out by pretending she was somewhere snorkeling in a Florida reef, watching colorful fish swim around her.
“Us go,” sang out a cheerful voice, and the vision disappeared when an arm hooked around Lily’s midsection and lifted her off her feet. She let out a yelp, but then the spinning was back when Dug broke the bone the Queen had given him. She was too busy trying not to throw up to say anything.
A moment later though, they were dumped back on the front yard of Lily’s house.
“Bye No-Snack! Bye Gob-Gob!” Dug said cheerily.
Gohber waved frantically at him as he broke the second bone and disappeared.
Lily groaned, her stomach protesting.
“Lily’s a Goblin!” Gohber was still saying excitedly, bouncing around the yard like his face wasn’t the only rubbery part of him. “Lily’s my girlfriend!”
“I am not your girlfriend!” Lily groaned, staggering to her feet.
Gohber froze, big green eyes turned on her. She was amazed at how enormous they could look.
“But Lily—”
“Did what she had to do so she wouldn’t get eaten by your family!” Lily shouted at him. “I don’t want to date you! We can be friends. Maybe. If you stop jumping around like that, and stop eating my fish, and stop stalking me and staring in my window.”
Gohber though just looked up at her, his eyes brimming with tears.
Lily wasn’t moved. After the day she had just had, all she wanted was to go to bed, wake up for tomorrow, and pretend it had never happened.
“GO!” she shouted, pointing away from her house.
Like a kicked puppy, Gohber hung his head and very slowly shuffled off. She watched him go to the sidewalk and plod away with his bare feet slapping the concrete.
Then she turned toward her house and froze.
The door was still torn off its hinges, and the frame was broken. Her father! What would he--
“Lily! What happened?! Was there a break-in?! I’ll call the police!”
She whirled around to see her father trying to pull out his cellphone while juggling bags of Chinese food and realized she couldn’t go to bed just yet. With a grimace and a sigh, she made a desperate dive for the phone.
Lily was in a very bad mood the next day. She had told her father that she had broken the door by trying to rush through it. The result had been that her father had put her on a diet. That morning, the only food she had been given was half a grapefruit, a glass of milk, and a piece of dry toast. Her stomach was growling, and she was cranky as she got off the bus.
Homeroom was no better as she listened to the announcements. She doodled fish in her notebook the entire time.
Gohber kept shooting her pitiful looks from his desk that she studiously ignored. She didn’t understand why he just didn’t go home. She wanted nothing to do with him!
She didn’t see the homeroom door open.
Nor did she see the nine sets of enormous feet stomp inside.
She did, however, hear the teacher say, “Class, we have some new students joining us today. They are cousins of Gohber’s, moved here from out of town.”
The point of Lily’s pencil snapped on the paper. She froze and scrunched her eyes shut.
Please don’t be there when I look. Please don’t be there when I look, she pleaded to whatever supernatural forces might be listening.
She looked up.
No supernatural forces were listening, and if they were, they didn’t like her.
Nine Goblin princes stood in front of the classroom, their eyes on Lily. Tog now had a broken nose, but he waggled his sausage fingers at Lily all the same. They had all apparently gotten lessons on Human clothing from Gohber. They all wore clothing that was three sizes too big for them, or three sizes too small. Lily could see the upper half of Tog’s bottom.
The class was staring at them in something halfway between disbelief and disgust.
No... she thought to herself, her stomach turning. Someone somewhere hates me.
“Please find seats. They are not assigned, so sit wherever you like,” the teacher was saying.
The nine brothers raced toward Lily, and for a moment, she thought they were going to tackle her! She ducked, covering her head with her arms.
They ran past her and all tried to pile into the desk behind her at once.
“I saw it first!”
“It’s mine!”
“Not a chance!”
One of them wisely withdrew and slid into a seat two rows to Lily’s left, but the others had a scuffle over the seat that sent three of them to the principal’s office right off the bat as the class either stared in horror or snickered.
Tog ended up bullying the others away. He slid triumphantly into the seat and promptly let out two enormous belches that smelled like something had crawled down his throat and died.
Lily buried her head in her arms and wished she was dead.
Halfway through the class, Tog leaned forward and whispered, “I heard you’re not courting Wormie anymore. Want to court a real Goblin?”
Lily’s eyes snapped wide open and she inched her seat as far forward as it would go.
As soon as the bell rang though, she whirled around.
“Who told you I wasn’t courting him?” she demanded, her voice covered by the noise of other teens packing their things into backpacks.
Tog shrugged. “Wormie told Mother. Mother told us. Said we were free to come here and court you if we wanted since you turned down the shrimp.”
Lily’s eyes widened. That manipulative Goblin! She had known that Lily was disgusted by them! There was only one way to get rid of them now.
She zipped up her backpack.
“Oh. Well, I think I changed my mind,” she said quickly, then darted out.
She caught Gohber halfway to the next class, passing Dan and Scott who were trying to stuff yet another boy into a locker, and quickly grabbed Gohber’s hand.
Gohber nearly fell over with shock, but then beamed up at her and all but clung to her side. Around them, students were snickering, but Lily no longer cared. She kept casting furtive glances over her shoulder until she saw what she was looking for.
The Goblin princes careened into view and froze when they saw her holding Gohber’s hand. Disappointment and annoyance passed over their expressions for a long moment, then they looked at each other and shrugged.
Their gazes shifted to the next most interesting thing and caught sight of Dan and Scott trying to shove a freshman into his own locker.
A moment or two later, they were having a blast trying to shove the two football players into the same locker together, cackling maniacally as the boys shouted for help. They were being crammed inside...somehow. Lily could only assume that the inner walls of the locker had given out.
Lily couldn’t help but smile a little. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad with them around. Gohber wasn’t too bad himself. At least, if you ignored his rubbery cartoon face, he looked mostly Human. They all thought she was beautiful, and she had certainly never had anyone fight for her like Gohber had.
She looked back down at the little Goblin and sighed.
There are worse things, she decided.
She looked back at the Goblin princes.
Much worse things.
With those thoughts, she hurried off to her next class with Gohber.
###
About the Author
Renée Adams lives in New Jersey with many pets who kindly share their home with her. Between dreams of one day becoming the local “crazy cat lady” and fantasies of ruling the world with an army of robots, she writes, draws, plays video games, and does martial arts.
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A message to the reader: If you liked this short story and would like to read more about Lily and Gohber’s misadventures, please let me know on Twitter, Facebook, or my blog. If there is enough interest, I may turn this into a short story series. Thank you for reading!
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