Tirek looked in the mirror and rubbed his hand across his slicked back hair, not liking it. What he disliked even more was the v-neck sweater he wore. At least Chrysalis let him wear black jeans and a black leather jacket, though that didn't have as many silver studs as he would've liked. The undercover extraordinaire told the big guy that he shouldn't come off as being too intimidating.
"So no nose ring then?"
"Oh, yeah, that would really go over well with the teacher." Chrysalis laughed sarcastically. "Trust me, I know how to blend in."
"Golly! You look like a cool nerd!" Cozy Glow laughed, hugging her self-proclaimed best friend tightly around his neck. To quote Chrysalis, she looked 'darling' in her strawberry dress.
"Shut up, brat. I'm supposed to be your dad."
The small terror nuzzled his neck and giggled.
Tirek looked at their reflection. They had no genetic relation, but there was no mistake that they were family.
"Let's hurry up and get this over with."
At the elementary school, a short—compared to Tirek—blue-haired woman greeted them in front of a small classroom. Tirek couldn't tell if she was young or not. He was leaning towards not.
"Mr. Tirek, I'm so glad that you were able to make it. We have much to discuss."
"Hmph. Yeah." Why's this woman being so polite? The letter the school sent to his temporary residence said it was all but mandatory to attend.
"Please, have a seat." The woman said, indicating a seat in front of her desk.
It had not been five seconds since Tirek had sat on the chair before the teacher started in on him.
"Sir, what is your occupation? Cozy Glow haven't exactly been forthcoming with that information."
Tirek pulled at his leather jacket. "I'm a trucker."
"Really? I imagine that you're often separated from Cozy Glow then?"
Tirek looked down at his small partner in crime. "Sometimes, but we're usually inseparable." Unfortunately for me.
The teacher adjusted her glasses. "Who watches her while you're gone?"
Tirek hadn't been prepared for this.
"Y'know," he shrugged his broad shoulders, "daycare."
"But she's in school for most of the day." The teacher furrowed her brows, not quite buying what the ridiculously large man was selling.
Tirek looked down at Cozy Glow again and mouthed, 'What's with all these questions?'
His ward shrugged her shoulders.
The teacher cleared her throat. She was getting annoyed with the man's blasé attitude.
"Daycare, nightcare, all that matters is she's being taken care of, right?"
"I would like to know the name of this daycare centre, Mr. Tirek."
"What are you? The police or something? Geez."
"The name..."
"Like I'd remember that... it's just a–"
"It's called 'Chrissy's Daycare Centre.'" Cozy Glow jumped in, bailing Tirek. "It's really fun there." She added, giggling.
"Oh, what's so fun about it?" The woman asked, turning her attention back to her troublesome student.
"Well, we get to tell stories and Chrissy lets us play dress up with makeup and everything. Sometimes Sideburns– I mean Sombra hire our services."
"Come again?"
"BUYS US TOYS! Sombra buys us toys and lets us keep them!"
Tirek nodded his head and smiled encouragingly, though people who didn't know him well would say it looked utterly menacing.
"Is Sombra a nice lady?" The teacher asked.
Cozy Glow's expression turned serious. "Golly, no."
The teacher leaned towards the girl and cocked her head. "If she isn't nice, how is it that you like it there?"
A brief laugh escaped Tirek before he played it off by coughing.
Cozy Glow rolled her eyes in exasperation. "What I'm saying is Sombra's not a girl. He's a guy!"
The teacher's eyes widened. "Really now? That's very interesting." She got a pen from her desk organiser and began jotting down notes. Tirek observed her for a moment, wondering what type of crap she was writing. He didn't feel like sitting there, being judged or having any of his associates judged for that matter—at least she's judging Sombra, he's a dick. Some folks in the criminal underworld tried to pull the same stunts and look where it got them. A beat down, or killed.
The bulky brute knew he couldn't go around breaking people's necks, especially not teachers who are instructing the little criminal mastermind in the making. Well, he could, but then he'd probably be sent to prison and Chrysalis said she wouldn't break him out the next time he gets caught. The less time he has to sit on the other side of the annoying woman's desk, the less chance he had of giving into temptation.
"I'm a busy man, I have to make a delivery in a few hours. What is it you need to discuss with me?"
The teacher put down her pen and clasped her hands over her desk calendar. "Well, Cozy Glow is very popular with the other children. She is also a very bright and clever child... Almost too clever to be child."
The little girl smiled at this.
"But sometimes, her imagination can lead to very... interesting stories. Stories far beyond what the other students come up with."
Tirek nodded his head in a way that said, "And the problem is?"
The woman coughed delicately. "When I say interesting, I meant disturbing. For example, here is a piece of work that Cozy Glow turned in for last week's assignment in which students had to create their own version of a bedtime story covered in class."
She handed Tirek a thin homemade book made from a ripped out notebook paper that was folded in half and then stapled. The coarse man recalled Cozy Glow lying on the floor, colouring furiously the previous week. This must've been what she worked on. He didn't see what anything the little girl did would deserve the red F emblazoned on the top right corner.
"Lemme take a look at this." He noticed that Cozy Glow was looking up at him and appeared somewhat ancious.
The title read, "The REAL Goldilocks and the Three Bears." The word 'Real' was fully capitalised, underlined twice, and written in red. Beneath the title was a drawing of a blonde girl yelling—"AAAHHHHH!!" was in a speech bubble—surrounded by three bears. One bear was significantly smaller than the other two and had red smeared on its mouth. Tirek had a feeling it wasn't meant to be strawberry jam.
He flipped through the pages, taking in the story as it unfolded in a style that could only be Cozy Glow's.
When he got to the line, 'The dumb girl had the nerve not to like the food she found in the house she broke into.' his mouth quirked.
The teacher cleared her throat in disapproval.
When Tirek got to the end of the story, he returned the papers to the teacher.
"What's the problem?"
"'What's the problem?'" She repeated. "The question you should be asking is 'What isn't the problem?'"
Tirek shook his head in irritation, not understanding what was wrong with the story. He just didn't get it and voiced as much. "The colouring is good and the story is finished, that's what's on the assessment criteria, yes?"
"Yes, that's true, but Cozy Glow's take on the tale was not very conventional."
"And that's good, right?" Tirek asked. "Thinking outside the box and all that cra– jazz." He patted the girl on the head and that made her perk up like a drooping plant that received the sunlight and water it needed.
The teacher sighed. "Thinking outside of the box is all well and good, but in a situation like this, I don't think that it is necessarily a positive thing. It hints that something could possibly not be right in Cozy Glow's life. Why would she turn the story in this direction?"
Because the brat is a fucking criminal and she's seen some shit.
Right about now, the teacher thought that Tirek was one of the worst parents she's ever had the displeasure of encountering.
"I'm not really familiar with the original story she based this on. What goes on with this blonde and the three bears?"
Cozy Glow started laughing, not helping Tirek's case at all.
"The hell– I mean the heck are you laughing at?"
The teacher was so stunned with Tirek never hearing the overused bedtime story that she didn't reprimand him on the way he spoke to her student. "You've never heard of Goldilocks and the Three Bears?"
Tirek closed his eyes momentarily and opened them to give the woman a harsh look. He didn't feel like counting to ten like Chrysalis suggested for him to do when people got on his nerves during undercover missions .
"That's pretty much what I just said, isn't it?"
The woman quickly gave a rundown of the original story and Tirek listened quietly whilst making a couple of annoyed expressions here and there.
When it was over, he scoffed and said, "That's a dumb story. I like Cozy's much better. It made more sense."
Cozy Glow jumped out of her chair in excitement that her best friend understood her vision of the tale.
"Yeah, that was my inspiration. When we read the story in class, I thought it was real stupid. How is this girl going to walk into three bears' house and not get gobbled up?" She looked up at her teacher and shook her head. "Golly! I remember when Tirek– I mean Dad took me to the zoo. I wanted to play with the bears because they were so cute, but the safari guys said I couldn't because the bears would try to hurt me. I figured if they would try to hurt me, then they would definitely eat the dumb Goldie girl. She ain't nothing special."
Tirek nodded his head. The girl was no fool. Crazy, but no fool. He turned his attention to the work on display around the classroom and found himself unimpressed. And Tirek was one to speak his mind.
"I'm looking at the other students' work you got posted on the boards and stuff, and it's not even that good. They got stick figures and Cozy's got bears with fur and," he tried to think of one of those artsy-fartsy words, "depth. Hell, she even stayed in the lines, which is more than I can say for half of these children."
Tirek took Cozy Glow's work from the desk and flipped to a page that featured Goldilocks. "Look how she added all that detail on her hair. It's like she's implying the sun is shining on the girl's head."
The teacher sighed again. She was sure that this child and her father caused more sighs in the past fifteen minutes than anyone or anything else had... ever. "Yes, I can see that, but the head has been severed from the body and is lying in a pool of blood."
"And that's reality. You can't expect to walk into a bear's house, let alone three, and not get mauled, especially when there's a bear cub." Tirek noticed the teacher's disagreeable expression. "What? Was she supposed to go in and make friends with the bears, have dinner and laugh about it?" He rolled his eyes and turned his head away from the woman. During the turn, one of the pictures on the bulletin board caught his eyes because of the two gold stars stuck to it. "Oh, fuck me," Tirek breathed. That's exactly what that kid with the gold stars drew. "I thought school was supposed to teach their students to think critically. This just doesn't make any damn sense."
"These are lighthearted stories, Mr. Tirek. They are not meant to be horrific tales. They are supposed to foster a child's creativity."
"And that's exactly what it did for Cozy and you are punishing her for that. It seems to me that Cozy has a lot more common sense than these other children. Shouldn't you be talking to Double Gold Stars' parents about how their kid seems to think a person can play around three bears with no consequences? This is ridiculous! While I might not be familiar with Goldilocks, I know a lot of these stories, when you read the original versions, are bloody and gory and all that other good stuff. Cinderella's stepsisters cut off their toes and shit to be able to fit in those glass slippers."
Cozy Glow raised her hand and waved it around frantically. "Oooh! Ooh and the little birdies told on them! I remember that story Ti– Dad! Golly! That was a good one."
The teacher was taken aback. She knew that the Grimms' Fairy Tales were dark, but she wasn't expecting this man to have read them to his daughter. Based on his appearance, he didn't seem the type that would take the time to sit with his child and read. It was a good thing that Tirek didn't come to the conference wearing his usual gear because the woman might've gone into shock.
"The world out there isn't all..." Tirek tried to think of soft things, "friendship and sing-alongs, there's bad shit out there. It's true that we have to do our best to protect the little ones from that, but they need to know what's going on out there too. We might not always be around and you want the next generation to be able to fend for themselves." He looked down at Cozy Glow with a gaze full of affection that was returned in kind by the girl.
He returned his attention to the teacher. "Now, I'm not asking you to post the brat's work on the board because I know you're all living with your heads stuck in the sand. What I'm saying is you give her the grade she deserves because she's put in a lot of hard work into this assignment and she followed the instructions. She deserves at least three of those little gold stars."
The woman's mouth opened, it looked like she wouldn't be saying anything agreeable.
Tirek knew that he had been behaving pretty well. Maybe he would have to tone down the Mr. Nice Guy act a little.
He leaned forward in his plastic chair that didn't even have padding, and let some of the usual malice creep into his eyes.
"I'm not leaving until you do."
With a shaky hand, the woman added a red line to the right side of the F, turning it onto an A.
Tirek smiled, and as the teacher added more stars, his smile turned into a progressively wider grin.
"Don't you have to change what's in your record book too?" Tirek knew there was another step because of all the paper that he's seen Chrysalis do.
The woman pursed her lips and took out her grade book, making the adjustment.
Cozy Glow's jaw dropped. Tirek got the mean lady to change her grade. She knew that he was amazing, but she didn't think that he would be able to pull that off without bloodshed on top of that.
"May I have this?" Tirek asked the teacher, pointing to Cozy Glow's assignment.
"Yeah, why not." The teacher said. All the fight was out of her.
Tirek took the papers and got out of his chair. Cozy Glow jumped down from her seat, grabbing her best friend's free hand.
"Thank you. Have a good day." Tirek said as he turned his back on the woman that remained seated behind her desk, blinking her eyes in confusion. This particular parent-teacher conference did not play out as she thought it would.
Once he and Cozy Glow were in the hallway, he said, "This was a damn good story. I'm going to hang this up on the refrigerator."
"Yay!" The girl yelled as she jumped up and down. She stopped her celebration when she thought of a question. "What was your favourite part, bestie?"
Tirek cocked his head as he thought about it. "I liked the part at the end, when the papa bear said, 'I was tired of eating porridge anyway.' That was really funny!"
"I can't wait to show this to Chrissy! You think she'll like it?"
Tirek kept his gaze ahead. "I'm sure she will. Now, let's go get some ice cream."
"YAY!" Cozy Glow yelled again. She always had more fun when Tirek was around.