Tabbs

Prologue

A young woman, face sheltered from the blaring fluorescent lights overhead by a black hood, hunched over a dog-eared paperback. Purple nail polished fingers pressed tightly to her temples, elbows propped up on the flimsy library table. Her perpetually bouncing leg shook her entire body. But no matter how hard she tried, the parched words didn't sink in even an inch.

'Fucking Mary Shelley bullshit,' she thought. It was only a couple of weeks till graduation and of course her stick-up-the-ass English teacher would assign them a five foot thick tome to read while all the other teachers were phoning it in till graduation.

She drew her phone from the cavernous pocket of her hoodie and clicked the screen back to life. A web page appeared with a bold title reading Frankenstein in an oozing green font. She used the web-page's search function and jammed in a few keywords from the questions but nothing pinged in the wall of text.

She cursed as Mister Walton's smug smile surfaced in her mind. He knew that these questions wouldn't be on any cheat sheet and that the student would have to had read the material in order to answer them. She bet he thought he was so freaking smart. Him and that mile-wide bald spot he tried to hide with a stringy comb-over.

The girl paused, and a conspiratorial smile creased the edges of her mouth as a single name came to mind. "Dot!" She declared to the empty table before her. A handful of faces at the nearby computer terminals turned in her direction, but most ignored the weird girl in favor of getting the high score on their favorite flash game.

With the speed and accuracy of a professional bomb defuser, the girl minimized the web-page on her phone and scrolled through her contacts till she happened upon the tiny image of an orange tabby cat. She mashed the call option and listened as one ring lead to another... which lead to another. As soon as the sterile robotic voice picked up to inform her to leave a message, she hung up and slapped the phone hard on the table. She drew the drawstrings of her hood tightly till only a small hole was left to look through.

'Where the hell were they?' she thought through her growing migraine, her leg now bouncing high enough under the table that her knee grazed the gum-caked underside. 'Did they get lost or something?' She brought her watch to the tiny hole in her hood and clicked on the screen. Ten minutes... no, fifteen minutes till the bell? It was hard to think past the stabbing hangover from the night before. She had been sipping chamomile tea, something her bassist, Spacey Dave, swore by, but then again his parents were a couple of hippies that believed something as "unnatural" as ibuprofen was a step way out of line.

She felt a fisted knuckle knock on the top of her head and she nearly rocketed out of her chair. Grasping for the corner of her hood to pull herself free, she felt a powerful force pull the draw strings tight, keeping her head enclosed.

"The hell!" she shouted, throwing blows blindly ahead of her and hitting nothing but air. "Assault!"

"Hardly!" a throaty voice replied as she felt the drawstring pulled even more taught. In her self-contained darkness, she saw a crisp, folded bill slip through the narrow gap. "Doubt most attackers would pay for your company, Tabbs." Then the pressure suddenly let off and she fell backward onto the ground.

"Tabby!" a girlish voice snapped, and suddenly she felt a presence at her side. Foreign fingers probed the perimeter of her hood and liberated her face. Her sweaty forehead and cheeks stung as they were suddenly reintroduced to the cool, air-conditioned air of the library and its blinding florescent lights.

"Tabby, you okay?" asked the crouched girl above her. Her long, copper hair was pinned into a ponytail by a pink, bedazzled scrunchy, its ample access snaking over her slender shoulder. Though the fallen Tabbs didn't need the help of the other girl's looks to identify her. Her incessant use of her government name was enough identification.