Something I Don't Know

9: there's no place like home (no, like, there really isn't)

My first thought upon meeting my uncle, or re-meeting him, I guess, is that he's kinda...small.

Not the average person's idea of small. A human or someone who has spent a lot of time around humans might look at my uncle Ozamon and figure he looks about the size he should--six feet or so, with normal-width shoulders and a natural physique. But after, you know, looking at my seven-foot-tall (and that's not counting the horns) father with shoulders about the width of the Great Wall of China, I cannot shake the thought that Ozamon is small.

I am half human, thus I have an excuse to be way smaller than my dad. Ozamon is all-demon. He does not have this excuse.

Despite his size, I can tell right away that he's indeed my dad's brother. Even though he's stockier and more shadowy--literally, shadows follow him around like his own personal cloud of mist--and his horns are a bit more curly than Dad's, their gaping, black eyes are the same, as are the fangs, which, I guess, is one commonality between all three of the demon men currently in Sybil's subway tunnel house. He's also just as hyper as my dad. As soon as I walk in, he bolts from his seat and shakes my hand, "Oh my, what a son you're raising, Al!" he exclaims, as if I'm still a kid, as if I don't have my own place and my own job and my own life. "Oh, you were just a small fry when I last saw you, Grey, just this tall..."

I return his handshake, suppressing the urge to cringe. "I'm sure I was," I say, and when Sybil shoots me an acidic look, I fake a smile as best I can. Ozamon doesn't seem to detect its inauthenticity, so mission accomplished.

"How old are you now?" asks Ozamon, as he takes a glass of iced tea Sybil offered him. "Seventeen, is it?"

The cringe I'd been suppressing resurfaces. I meet Dad's eyes, squinting accusingly at him. "Uh, no. I'll be twenty-one this coming April, Uncle Ozamon."

"Oh, call me Ozzie!" he exclaims, clapping a hand down on my shoulder for the forty-fifth time since I arrived. "And sorry. You just look so young."

"Sure."

"Why don't we have a seat in the living room?" suggests Sybil, adjusting the fit of her sari. I'm ninety-five percent sure she's just wearing it because we have guests. On normal days, Sybil dons a pair of massive sweatpants and one of Dad's old T-shirts, so I can't really imagine any other reason she'd put on a sari and paint her lips red and sweep her hair back.

She catches me looking at her, and glares. I glare back.

My dad and his brother lead the way into the living room, and I start to follow them, but Sybil catches my arm. "Behave," she orders.

"You always say that," I say, brushing her freezing cold icicle fingers off me. "It's like you don't trust me."

"It's not like," she says, tugging me by the ear until I open my mouth in a squeak of pain. "It is that I don't trust you."

"Thank you. Thank you so much for that."

She shoves me down the hall. "Now go on."

In the living room, Dad has occupied the entire loveseat, because, you know, he's large, whereas Uncle Ozzie has taken up about a quarter of the sofa, nursing his iced tea, because, you know, he's small. I suddenly wonder if there's a third sibling I don't know about, one that's intermediate.

Perhaps I am the intermediate demon man.

That wouldn't be so bad.

Uncle Ozzie pats the seat beside him, which I take, reluctantly. It's not that I don't like him. He's like a tiny version of my father; I can't exactly not like him. I just--I don't know him, really. Needless to say, since Rocco, my trust isn't something I allocate so generously anymore.