Fangboy

by Jeff Strand

  Then they played card games. The sisters taught Nathan how to play Hearts, and he taught them how to play Exploding Nines, which he made up on the spot and which lacked a logical endgame but was a lot of fun for everybody.

  They offered Nathan a bar of chocolate for dessert, but he declined.

  He slept on the couch under a clean, thick blanket, feeling warm and happy.

  * * *

  Nathan woke up to the sound of a sizzling pan and the smell of eggs cooking in the kitchen. He immediately knew that it was going to be a wonderful morning, until he remembered that the sisters were going to send him away.

  He didn’t want to leave. He liked it here.

  He tried to think of ways to make them keep him around. Were there any handcuffs in the general vicinity? If so, he could handcuff himself to something, swallow the key, and they’d be forced to let him live with them at least through his next digestive cycle.

  Or he could make an absolute pig out of himself at breakfast, eating so much that the sisters would be physically unable to lift him from the couch. Nathan wasn’t sure how many eggs were required for such a thing, but he was prepared to eat as many as it took.

  Was he overthinking this? Maybe a good old fashioned temper tantrum was the answer. He could kick and scream and wail “No! No! I’m not leaving!” until they finally gave up and let him live with them forever.

  Or he could just ask.

  When should he do it? After breakfast? When would they be most receptive to having a child stay in their home? Should he do it right now, before he accidentally did something bad that might make them want to get rid of him?

  “Good morning, sleepyhead,” said Mary, walking into the living room. “Admit it, that couch was more comfortable than the cold forest dirt, wasn’t it?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Do you like eggs?”

  “Yes! Even when they’re cooked strangely.”

  “Well, then, let’s have some eggs.”

  Nathan ate enough eggs to exhaust two hens, along with some buttered toast and orange juice. And then without thinking about it much, he blurted out: “May I stay with you? Just for a while longer?”

  Penny gave him a sorrowful look. “Is nobody worried about you?”

  Nathan shook his head.

  “If it were up to us, you could stay as long as you liked. But there are legal procedures that must be followed. We can’t just let a strange little boy live with us without first contacting the authorities. We could be arrested for kidnapping. And for all we know you have an aunt who has cried herself to sleep every night for the past year. You understand, don’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  He understood. The sisters could not be expected to risk spending the rest of their lives in prison for him.

  They assured him that everything was going to be all right, and then drove him into town. Nathan had only been in an automobile a couple of times, and never gone far, so the fourteen mile trip into town was filled with awe and wonder, and when they got out of the vehicle Nathan found himself making silly car noises as they walked into the police station.

  They waited for nearly an hour before a uniformed police officer welcomed them back into his office. There were only two chairs, excluding the one that Officer Danbury sat on behind his desk, so Nathan stood.

  Penny cleared her throat. “We’d like to report the finding of a Mr. Nathan Pepper.”

  “Nathan Pepper, hmmm?” Officer Danbury looked up at the ceiling, as if the answer to his fleeting thought might be dancing around up there. “Name doesn’t sound familiar. How long was he missing?”

  “About a year.”

  “That long? I need to warn you, in missing child cases that take so long to resolve, the parents have often procreated a replacement. You’re not the jealous type, are you, Nathan?”

  “No, sir.”

  Officer Danbury opened a thick, dusty book and began to flip through the pages. “Let’s see…ah, look at this, I turned to it on the fourth try. Nathan Pepper. Apparently you’re dead.”

  “But I’m not,” Nathan insisted.

  “Well, you know that, and I knew that the moment you walked into my office, but according to my official Missing Children Cases logbook, you were reported as deceased by a Bernard Steamspell of Bernard Steamspell’s Home For Unfortunate Orphans. It lists your cause of death as ‘Eaten.’ I assume that was meant to indicate that you were eaten by some sort of animal, and not that anybody is confessing to cannibalism.”

  “But I wasn’t eaten.”

  “Obviously. I may not be the most perceptive cop in the department, and in fact I’ve been told time and again that my skills in that area are inadequate, and it tends to be a sticking point each year when it’s time for my performance review, which is frustrating because it has a negative impact on my pay raise, and even with a generous raise I’d still be just barely scraping by, what with my wife and three children, and though I try to raise my awareness of the world around me much of it remains a blur, something that actually got worse with medication, but despite this lack of perceptive abilities I can clearly see that you were not eaten.”

  “Good.”

  “Is it? When I was your age I would’ve loved to have everybody think I’d been eaten. I would have milked that for weeks. Then I would have twisted my arm behind my back and said ‘It’s okay, they only got one limb!’ Have you ever seen that trick where you can pretend to shove your thumb into the soft spot in the back of somebody’s head? Sorry, I’m getting off the subject. Look at that, you were from the original Bernard Steamspell orphanage. You’re a long way from home. That was the village of Hammer’s Lost. This is the town of Giraffe Pond, a town which those into trivia have often noted contains no pond and few giraffes. There’s a goodly distance between the two.”

  “The original orphanage?” asked Penny. “There are others?”

  “Mr. Steamspell is the most successful owner of orphanages around! He opens a new one every month! If I knew the secret of his cost efficiency, I wouldn’t be working in this dump of a law enforcement station, I can tell you that much.”

  “Is he a kind man?”

  “Steamspell? I think the majority of his success comes from other attributes besides kindness, but you can’t argue with his results. You’re in luck. He has a brand-new facility not ten miles from here.”

  Nathan felt as if he’d been gored in the stomach by a rhinoceros. The eggs he’d eaten for breakfast immediately threatened to spew from his body in a yellow-and-white waterfall of terror.

  “Isn’t there another option?” asked Penny. “Foster care, perhaps?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m afraid there isn’t.”

  Penny looked over at Nathan. “I don’t think the orphanage is the most enriching environment for a boy like him.”

  “I agree with you completely,” said Officer Danbury. “There are countless better places for a child to grow up, but the other options are all based on the assumption that the child’s parents aren’t dead. If one parent is alive, then the options increase by about fifty percent, but in this case there’s really nothing else we can do.”

  “What if…” Penny cleared her throat again. “What if we wanted to keep him? Just for a short while?”

  “Oh, no, I’m afraid that isn’t possible. You could be an unfit parent. If you want to adopt him, you’ll need to get him from the orphanage. We can’t just hand him over to you—I mean, I’d be a pretty shabby officer of the law if I just said ‘Want a child? Here you go.’ You needn’t worry about his safety, though. I’m sure Steamspell will be so elated that Nathan here wasn’t eaten that he’ll put him under his own personal protection.”

  Nathan felt as if the imaginary rhino that was currently goring a hole in his chest had begun to move its head in larger and larger circles. Should he flee? Should he quickly commit some sort of crime so that he could live in jail instead of the orphanage?

  Penny glanced at Nathan, and then at Mary. The si
sters exchanged a look that Nathan couldn’t quite decipher. And then Penny’s expression transformed into one of rage, and she grabbed Nathan painfully by the ear.

  “You awful child! How dare you impersonate a dead boy? I should have known that this was another of your lies! I shall take you back to the house next door where I found you and tell your parents all about your disgraceful deception!” She stood up, not letting go of Nathan’s ear. “Officer Danbury, I apologize for not discovering the lie until just now. Sometimes my sister and I are very slow. I assure you that he’ll be dealt with and that it will never happen again.”

  “That’s quite all right,” said Officer Danbury. “I don’t like having my time wasted, but this actually saves me time because I won’t have to make arrangements with the orphanage. The whole process would have taken a good half hour or so, and you barely wasted five minutes, so I believe I may go out and have a smoke.”

  Penny said nothing as she dragged Nathan back out to the car. But as soon as they drove away, her expression softened. “Are you okay? Did I stretch your ear too much?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “We do not promise that you can live with us forever. But until such time as we feel the need to end the arrangement, we would like to invite you to be our son.”

  Nathan said yes.

  EIGHT

  They went home—home!—and had a delicious lunch. And then Penny stood up, folded her arms over her chest, and looked quite serious.

  “In this household, we do not tolerate those who wish to wallow in the warm mud of their own laziness. You will be expected to work. I do not mean that you will have to get a job in a cannery or anything like that, but you’ll have to help keep the house and the yard clean. At mealtime, you will eat everything on your plate, unless one of the adults declares it unsuitable for consumption. And you’ll have to go to school when the new term begins in the fall.”

  “School?” Nathan was horrified. “But the other kids will make fun of me!”

  “And so what if they do? I won’t have people think that we’re raising an uneducated hill child. It’s never enjoyable to be ridiculed by others, but you’ll learn to cope.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  The next day was Monday. Penny worked as a librarian and Mary managed a small restaurant, and though they were both scheduled to work, they took the day off in order to take Nathan shopping. They bought him seven new sets of clothes, a brand-new pair of shoes, and a toothbrush that they promised him wouldn’t be stolen. He was given his choice of any stuffed animal at the toy shop (except those on the top shelf; they were too expensive) and picked a friendly looking orange bear that he named Cartwheel, for no reason except that he thought a bear like that would be inclined to do a cartwheel.

  “One more stop, and then we’ll go home and play Exploding Nines again,” said Penny, as they got back into the car. Nathan was so happy to have Cartwheel on his lap that it didn’t occur to him to question why Penny had not identified the actual location of the stop.

  “No!” he said, following that word with a gasp, when the moment of revelation finally arrived. “Please!”

  “Nathan, you have to go to the doctor. Who knows what kind of germs or parasites you acquired while living in the woods? We’d be irresponsible parents if we didn’t make sure you had a clean bill of health.”

  “What if he gives me a shot?”

  “Then you’ll thank him for his concern about your well being. Many boys who need shots don’t get them.”

  “What if he wants to take out my teeth?”

  “Don’t be silly. He’s not going to try to remove your teeth. We’re not going to let him hurt you. And by that, of course, I mean we’re not going to let him cause any damage that has no long-term benefit. The shot itself may sting a bit.”

  Though Nathan wanted to protest some more, he also didn’t want Penny and Mary to decide that they were caring for a bratty child, so he said nothing else.

  “Don’t worry,” said Mary. “If he seems overly fixated on your teeth, we’ll tell him that you, being unintelligent, glued joke teeth into your mouth, and that our next visit is to the dentist to have the adhesive removed, with great physical discomfort to be endured on your part.”

  “Okay,” said Nathan.

  Nathan was not good at judging people’s ages, but the doctor seemed to be the oldest man who had ever existed. He was gray and wrinkled and frail, with a neatly trimmed mustache and beard.

  “Dear me,” he said, as Nathan sat down on his examination table. “Such malnutrition! A wider array of blisters I’ve never seen. I should think that he was kept locked in a basement, with nothing to do but pace day and night.”

  “He is the son of our cousin,” said Penny. “He was sent to us when his parents moved to an island that did not allow children.”

  “Well, I would discourage them from returning to the mainland, because I would have a word or two with them, and they would not be words that they wanted to hear. They would be stern, menacing words. This is disgraceful, simply disgraceful. I would weep if I were the type of person who believed that it is okay for a man to weep.”

  “Can you help him?”

  “Yes. His body has not yet degenerated to the point of no return, which is why he is still alive. I’ll give him a shot to cure his obvious case of Deadly Forest Plague, another shot to replace six of the eight vitamins his body is sorely lacking, another shot to cure the mange, another shot just in case, and, finally, a shot to tame his urge to kill.”

  Penny looked shocked. “Does he really have an urge to kill?”

  “All children do these days.”

  “Are you sure you’re not trying to sell us an unnecessary shot?”

  “I’m not going to lie to you,” said the doctor. “I very well could be and probably am. But it’s not an expensive shot, and now that I’ve instilled that sense of unease about the boy’s possible murderous impulses, it will be well worth the purchase price to remove the fear.”

  “You’re right,” said Penny.

  The doctor smiled. “Tell me, Nathan, do you want the shots in your arm or in your eyes?”

  “My eyes?” asked Nathan, horrified.

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t want a shot in my eye!”

  “Good. For that was a test. If you’d said that you wanted me to stick you in the eye with a hypodermic needle, I would have known that you were deranged, and would have discretely suggested that you be sent to the care of a sanitarium. So, put out your arm, and we’ll get started.”

  Nathan put out his arm and the doctor gave him the shots, one after the other. The doctor actually gave him six shots instead of five, looked confused for a moment, seemed to recount in his mind, and then chuckled at his own foolishness. Nathan didn’t enjoy the shots, but he’d spent much of his time in the forest stepping on sharp twigs and accidentally poking himself with branches, so the pain was minor.

  “Very good,” said the doctor. He took a wooden tongue depressor from a jar and held it up to Nathan’s mouth. “Say ahhh.”

  “Ahhh.”

  “Actually, I wasn’t interested in hearing the noise itself. It was really just a ruse to get you to open your mouth. So let’s try it again.”

  “Ahhh,” said Nathan, opening his mouth and sticking out his tongue.

  The doctor held the tongue depressor in mid-air. “Is this some kind of joke?”

  “Do we look like the kind of people who would play such a joke?” asked Mary, believing it to be a suitably evasive answer.

  The doctor looked wistful. “My entire life, I’ve been ashamed of the normalcy of my teeth. Each night as I brushed I thought about how wonderful it would be to be a shark or a barracuda, swimming around in the ocean with a mouth full of jagged teeth.”

  “Wouldn’t the other kids have made fun of you?” Nathan asked.

  “They did! In a moment of poor judgment, I told one of my classmates about this fantasy, and he thought it was ever-so-amusing. ‘H
ey, everyone, let’s ridicule the warped boy who wishes he had razor-sharp teeth!’ Those were dark times for me. But I had the final laugh, because now I am a rich and successful physician, with a huge house and a thin wife, while he has a small house and a huge wife. Did you want another shot?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Good. You passed another test.”

  * * *

  “See, now that wasn’t so bad, was it?” asked Penny, as they drove away. “Doesn’t it feel good to be healthy again?”

  “It does,” said Nathan. “It really does.”

  * * *

  If one were to draw up a comparison chart between any two months of the year that Nathan spent in the forest, and the two remaining months of his first summer with the sisters, the line for the months in the forest would be drawn near the bottom of the page, indicating sadness, while the line for the months with the sisters would be drawn near the top of the page, indicating happiness. The bottom line would be drawn in an unhappy color, perhaps dark blue, while the top line would be a bright yellow or purple.

  Nathan’s bedroom was small (they’d converted a room in the back where Penny used to like to sit and read) but comfortable. He stayed at home while the sisters went to work each day, since they supposed that a boy who’d lived by himself in the forest could stay by himself in a locked house during the daytime. He was given a list of chores to do each day, and almost always did them.

  Each night they played games. Mary would usually win, and Penny would pretend to be furious and storm off, and everybody would laugh. Sometimes Penny would win, in which case Mary would also be furious and storm off, except that she wasn’t pretending. When Nathan won, he would do a dance, which would be adjusted in scope and intensity depending on whether he’d won by a little or a lot.

  The sisters would scold him when he did something wrong, and even punish him when necessary, but he always felt loved.