A Kiss With Teeth by Max Gladstone Page A

easy: Paul cares about baseball, recites statistical rosaries, tells Dad his hopes for the season every night when he’s tucked into bed. Vlad repeats these numbers in the break room, though he does not know if he says the right numbers in the right context.
    From his cellular telephone, outside, he calls the number on the report card, and communicates in short sentences with someone he presumes is human.
    â€œI would like to schedule a conference with my son’s teacher.” He tells them his son’s name.
    â€œYes, I will wait.”
    â€œSix-thirty will be acceptable.”
    â€œThank you.”
    *   *   *
    Afternoons, on weekends, he and Paul play catch in a park one block up and two blocks over from their apartment. They live in a crowded city of towers and stone, a city that calls itself new and thinks itself old. The people in this city have long since learned to unsee themselves. Vlad and his son throw a baseball, catch it, and throw it back in an empty park that, if Vlad were not by now so good at this game of unseeing, he would describe as full: of couples wheeling strollers, of rats and dogs and running children, strolling cops and bearded boys on roller blades.
    They throw and catch the ball in this empty not-empty field. Vlad throws slow, and Paul catches, slower, humoring his dad. Vlad sees himself through his son’s eyes: sluggish and overly skinny, a man walks and runs and throws and catches as if first rehearsing the movements in his mind.
    Vlad does rehearse. He has practiced thousands of times in the last decade. It took him a year to slow down so a human eye could see him shift from one posture to the next. Another year to learn to drop things, to let his grip slip, to suppress the instinct to right tipped teacups before they spilled, to grab knives before they left the hands that let them fall. Five years to train himself not to look at images mortal eyes could not detect. Sometimes at night, Paul’s gaze darts up from his homework to strange corners of the room, and Vlad thinks he has failed, that the boy learned this nervous tic from him and will carry it through his life like a cross.
    Vlad does not like the thought of crosses.
    He throws the ball, and throws it back again: a white leather sphere oscillating through a haze of unseen ghosts.
    *   *   *
    The teacher waits, beautiful, blonde, and young. She smells like bruised mint and camellias. She rests against her classroom door, tired—she wakes at four-fifteen every morning to catch a bus from Queens, so she can sit at her desk grading papers as the sun rises through steel canyons.
    When he sees her, Vlad knows he should turn and leave. No good can come of this meeting. They are doomed, both of them.
    Too late. He’s walked the halls with steps heavy as a human’s, squeaking the soles of his oxblood shoes against the tiles every few steps—a trick he learned a year back and thinks lends him an authentic air. The teacher looks up and sees him: black-haired and pale and too, too thin, wearing blue slacks and a white shirt with faint blue checks.
    â€œYou’re Paul’s father,” she says, and smiles, damn her round white teeth. “Mister St. John.”
    â€œBazarab,” he corrects, paying close attention to his steps. Slow, as if walking through ankle-deep mud.
    She turns to open the door, but stops with her hand on the knob. “I’m sorry?”
    â€œPaul has his mother’s last name. Bazarab is mine. It is strange in this country. Please call me Vlad.” The nasal American ‘a,’ too, he has practiced.
    â€œNice to meet you, Vlad. I’m so glad you could take this time for me, and for Paul.” She turns back to smile at him, and starts. Her pupils dilate a millimeter, and her heart rate spikes from a charming sixty-five beats per minute to seventy-four. Blood rises beneath the snow of her cheeks.
    He stands a respectful