by Kim Zarins
“Swee-tie!” Blondie calls again, his voice as sweet as honey.
Alison groans. Then she gets a sly look on her face.
“It’s still dark,” she tells Nick. “I’m going to have some fun.”
So she tiptoes to the window. “Blondie, shhh. My husband is sleeping. If you want that kiss, come up, but let’s do it quickly!”
Blondie’s little squeal is so loud that both Alison and Nick can hear it all the way upstairs. He’s thinking this is his lucky-ducky day!
Nick props up his head on one elbow to see what Alison is up to. As Blondie starts climbing the rickety fire escape stairs, Alison leans her naked ass out the window. She winks at Nick, then calls out to Blondie.
“Quickly, my love!”
And Blondie kisses Alison. Just not where he thought he’d be kissing her.
Alison and Nick hear Blondie gasp. Then they hear the sound of his feet backing up and a yelp as he struggles for balance.
“What? What just happened? Alison? What’s going on?”
Alison laughs and claps the window shut. Then she snuggles back into bed with Nick, and they joke about where they should kiss each other next.
Meanwhile, Blondie may be stupid, but he’s got enough sense to hear them laughing inside and to remember the feel of the thing he’d kissed.
He’s going to get even. Oh yes.
Blondie runs to the church. The fence was being soldered by a repairman, who was already at the job to avoid the heat of day. Blondie carefully picks up a red-hot poker, and off he goes, hell-bent on revenge. Back to the window.
“Ooo-ooou, Aa-li-son!” he sings. “Sweeee-tie pie!”
The honey in his voice is gone, but he sings as sweetly as a heart cracked and filled with rage possibly can.
“He’s back!” whispers Alison. “He can’t seriously want more?”
“Maybe he’s weird that way,” Nick says. “Let me have him this time. I want him to kiss my ass too.”
So this time, Nick leans his ass out the window. “I’m ready, baby!” he crows in a falsetto, and he lets out a fart to help Blondie find him in the darkness.
And Blondie gooses him. With the poker. Nick never saw it coming, but you can believe it’s damn hot.
The scream that erupts from Nick wakes the whole street. It’s an apocalyptic sound, piercing every wall, every nook, every cranny—down, down, down into the basement. Down, down, down, through the dirt in the plastic pool. And John hears.
And John knows the end of the world has come.
Still buried under the dirt, he presses a button on his phone that he’s saved for this very moment. A small, but monumental act.
His Twitter feed posts: Farewell, Earthlings. We who survive will find each other here and build a new nation.
And 3.7 million people retweet.
@HallMonitor is the number one trend that day on Twitter.
You see, when John first learned about the apocalypse, he had set his feed to post audiovisual footage of his basement, living room, and bedroom every ten minutes. It would continue to do so until he deactivated the autofeed. Or until the world would be destroyed. His hope, he had tweeted, was that if he was trapped in his home, he would be found and rescued.
This means his twenty-three original followers read his warning about imminent radiation outpourings and his intention to entomb himself in his basement for safety. Then they watched Nick and Alison screw each other all night long.
He’d gained a lot of followers by morning.
So, while Nick mourns his roasted ass and applies cold compresses, someone pounds on the door. There is nothing for Alison to do but throw on some clothes and answer it.
A man in a suit stands there with a clipboard. “I am here on behalf of Proximus Power Management to see John Hall, our employee . . . for the moment.”
Alison doesn’t know how to explain this one. “He’s . . . uh . . .”
“In his basement in a tub filled with dirt,” finishes the man.
Alison’s jaw drops. “How did you—”
“Know? Everyone in the world knows what went on here last night.”
The suit hurries downstairs, clipboard in hand. Turns out that when you work for a nuclear power company, you shouldn’t tell the world that poor radiation handling is causing a world disaster. And that’s it. John gets fired and becomes an international icon of stupidity, Blondie does time for ass branding, Alison becomes a reality show star, and Nick sells pics of his ass and does interviews on talk shows, in a standing position.
That’s the end, and you’re welcome.
The applause is wild. Bryce slaps his pecs like a gorilla, Kai high-fives Rooster, Briony rolls her eyes but giggles madly, and Alison starts a bus-wide body wave.
But not everyone cheers Rooster on.
Reeve splutters and thumps his pen on his clipboard over and over. “That was . . . how shall I say it? That was deeply offensive. Deeply. But you got the details all wrong. Why don’t I tell the next story, and pay you back for all your lies?”
“Remember, this is fiction,” Mr. Bailey interjects.
“Yeah, don’t stand in the way of art!” Bryce calls out.
Reeve waves his clipboard and whines about inflammatory storytelling while Mr. Bailey unsuccessfully tries to calm him down.
Meanwhile, I hold still like a frightened animal to see what Pard will do. While I love Rooster’s story, it was mean to give that pathetic character Pard’s nickname and voice. Even the poker seemed to be added with Pard in mind. Pard is all sugar voiced and platinum haired, but he’s made of steel.
“You,” he says softly. “It was you, wasn’t it?”
Rooster looks confused, and Pard mouths My hat.
Besides loads of bottles, pizza boxes, and a bra, Mr. Bailey has one special memento from the senior prank that happened at his house not two weeks ago while he was stuck at that teacher conference: one gray fedora, punched through the middle and hanging as if by a perfect Frisbee toss on a cuckoo clock out of reach. It might still be there, for all I know.
Rooster holds out his hands like he’s pushing the thought away. “No way, dude! Like I’d really want Mr. Bailey to start questioning you and risk you telling on us. It thought it was Fr—”
“It wasn’t me,” Frye practically snarls. “I’m not taking shit for something I didn’t do.” Frye is legendary at ultimate Frisbee, so we all thought he did it, but the accusation blew over without any proof.
Pard glances at Frye but settles on Rooster. “I’m just trying to figure out who doesn’t like me, and you’re the type to find pranks funny. You know, wild party, and I take the fall. Wild story, and I take the fall. Is this your way of bragging?”
Rooster holds out his flat palm like a traffic cop. “Dude, we’re cool. I only used you because I wanted to do your voice. That’s it.”
“Oh, fine. All is forgiven, then,” Pard says drily. “The ridiculous thought of me being in love and squeaking lyrics just could not be passed up. Very funny, my voice.” Pard looks at Alison without the worship she must be used to getting. “Made you laugh.”
And, with that, he turns in his seat, conversation at an end.
“Aw, come on,” Rooster whines. “It was just fun.”
“Yeah, but not for him,” Alison replies. She sighs.
Pard ignores them and pretends to take an interest in Mr. Bailey and Reeve, still carrying on about slander.
Five seconds later, Alison has a hand on Pard’s shoulder.
“I suppose you’re here to kiss and make up,” he says, voice flat.
She raises an eyebrow. “Not exactly kiss.”
“Shame, because by reputation we’re both great kissers, even if sexual orientation keeps us tragically apart. I could lay all that aside, though, this once.”
A collective murmur disapproves of Pard praising his own erotic charm and flirting with the most desirable girl at our school, but he’s ballsy, talking to Alison like that, and she rewards him with an amused s
mile.
“I’m sorry I laughed,” she says, “but I would never trick you into kissing my ass.”
“That’s only because me kissing any part of you has never crossed your mind,” he says cattily. “Which is a disappointment, frankly, coming from such an open-minded person like you.”
“Is that so?” She gives him this hot look I can’t describe, like she’s accepting a challenge.
And then things move really fast. She pushes her way onto the seat and, before I know it, they’re kissing. Not a little peck, but a hard, hungry kiss.
People gasp, and a few whisper-shout some variation of What the hell? because Alison is known for doing whatever strikes her fancy, but this time she may have gone too far. She surely hears the shocked murmurs all around, but doesn’t seem to care.
“Get under,” she says into Pard’s mouth, and I think she means get low so that Mr. Bailey won’t see them—although, at the moment, Mr. Bailey is on the receiving end of a core dump of all the injustices Reeve has ever faced at Southwark High. But maybe she means getting under literally, because she’s on top of him suddenly. They need their own room, but there I am, pressed against the window, and it’s not enough space for them or for me.
Pard has his head in my lap, but mostly I see the back of Alison’s head, her hair falling and exposing the back of her neck. His hands move up and down her back, her hair. All I can hear are those wet, sticky, slurping noises I’ve known only in dreams. And all I can feel is Pard’s head shifting in my lap as he gives and gets in this porn-star kiss.
Mace and I meet eyes, and then I look back to the scene raging in my lap.
“What’s going on back there?” thunders Mr. Bailey.
Alison detaches herself, and a string of saliva stretches and then slaps Pard’s lower lip. She sits up fast but pinches his thigh as their legs untangle.
“Nothing, Mr. Bailey. Just looking for a contact lens.”
“Well, it’s my turn,” whines Reeve.
Alison laughs a derisive, oh no it’s not laugh and gets up. Unfortunately, Pard is still in my lap. It’s like his muscles have deflated. She mouths Later, which might mean he’ll get another chance, and with a wink she’s gone.
I really don’t care if he gets another chance or not. I just hope that, if he does, it’s back at her hotel room when we get to D.C. I don’t think I can survive another rerun of this scene.
Mr. Bailey’s voice sounds distant to my ears, like he’s in an echo chamber. “Now, now, Reeve. It’s Cookie’s turn.”
“But I have to go now—otherwise my story won’t make sense,” Reeve insists.
Pard just lies there, and his voice, all husky, rises from my lap, which voices should never do. “By God, it’s possible,” he says to no one in particular. I hope all he means is that it’s possible for a scrawny guy like him to make out with a hot girl like Alison, but I’m afraid he means something entirely different.
With Alison gone and people busy commenting on what just happened, it’s just me with this guy who used to like me, which made me flee, but now we’re hanging out with his head in my lap, and he has this soft, dreamy smile on his lips. I’m looking at those lips, and our eyes lock.
“Get up,” I tell him. My voice comes out strained.
He tips up his chin, looking me over. I don’t know how he can look so relaxed, so in command. His lips are thin and wet and uncharacteristically smiling. I don’t know how to process this smile. There’s no Balrog anger left in his eyes, but he’s still made of fire.
“Enjoyed that, didn’t you?” he says.
I’m not about to answer that, because anything I say would be sort of undercut by the fact that his head has been right there rubbing against me the whole time, and so I turn without responding and stare out the window, pretending to be mesmerized by the flicker of metal guard rails rushing past. Pard’s head, still heavy in my lap, shifts when he laughs at me.
When Pard came out of the closet sophomore year, he came out wearing the fedora. His posture changed, and his walk changed too. More and more often, he let his hips move and let that slinky side of him show. But he kept his fedora defensively angled as if to protect his eyes from the looks he was getting in the hallways. Or looks from me. Half the time when we sat at our anti-PE library table, we didn’t make eye contact. It was easy not to.
Pard sits up, and his hair sticks out in the back from all that friction in my lap. He smiles ear to ear without the brim of a hat dimming the unguarded pleasure written all over his face. Alison’s fairy-tale kiss has transformed him. He’s in bliss. It doesn’t seem to bother him that everyone’s whispering and rolling their eyes, or even that Frye took pics with his phone. Sitting way too close, he studies me as if my face had changed by the kiss.
I kind of wish I were wearing a hat to hide behind.
REEVE’S PROLOGUE
Meanwhile, Reeve’s whiny voice drones on. He whips out notes and reports on who was smoking this morning, who was drinking. I, of course, am on that list.
“You’re all headed to mediocrity,” he says, grinning over his clipboard. “But especially meatheads like Rooster.”
Meatheads. Rooster picks up on it right away. He slaps Alison on the thigh and says with mock hurt, “Ouch. He called me a meathead. I have a boo-boo on my heart.”
Alison laughs her sexy laugh. “Awww, Roo.” And she kisses him—not on his mouth, but on his left pec, where the boo-boo is.
Rooster is not a meathead. I mean, he’s a dumb jock, but he knows how to play the moment. He kept his cool when Alison jumped Pard’s bones. I could hear him trying to make light of it with Kai and again when she sat back down, even though it must have killed him to see his crush crushing against Pard, of all people.
Briony takes up Rooster’s cause and acts like she’s defending a child. “Reeve is so mean,” she says, and Mouse and Lupe and Reiko chime in.
Reeve stutters, as he does when he’s not working with a script from his clipboard. “I am n-not mean! Go ahead and attack me and then claim I’m the mean one. Outrageous. Absolutely insulting.”
Meanwhile, Pard’s watching me. Staring. I wish he were drawing as usual, which would keep him too busy to lob all these sticky smiles my way. Something has seriously shifted, and instead of Pard acting pissed at me, he’s acting . . . what? I don’t know and I don’t care. I pretend to be engrossed in my phone.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” he says, and I swear to God, his aura touches me. This thick, warm mess of an aura. If he thinks we’re going to have a heart-to-heart over my perspective of what just happened, he’s seriously delusional. So I slam the door on him in the harshest possible way.
“I just saw two girls kissing.”
I’m being offensive, but I need to stomp out whatever it is he’s trying to start.
Instead, he tilts his head and asks quietly, almost sexy-like (though obviously not sexy), “So . . . which girl turned you on?”
Maybe I deserve that, but I’m speechless. I mumble Alison’s name, of course, while his aura brushes up against me like one of those cats that rub up against your leg because it knows you hate cats.
I need to say something, anything, to beat off that fuzzy warmth snaking through me. “Maybe you should worry what Greg will do when he finds out you practically had sex on the bus.” Okay, that came off as something Reeve would say. Like, I’m telling. And saying “sex on the bus” out loud completely disturbs me. I don’t want to verbalize even remotely what happened in my lap. Pard having this sex life. Being good at it. Being good at it in my lap.
If anything, his predatory smile intensifies, and I brace for a comparison to Reeve, but it’s worse than that. “Is this your coded way of finding out if I’m still seeing him?”
I cradle my phone and text Cannon.
Save me. The only seat on the bus was next 2 Pard or Mace. Hell is real.
“I’m free,” he says, so close to my ear that I shiver. “Just so you know.”
I’m so shocked
I can’t move. I’m back in late summer after ninth grade, wanting to hide, deleting his phone messages, his texts asking where I am and why I won’t write back. I’m lucky I don’t crack my phone from squeezing it so hard.
Mr. Bailey unintentionally rescues me. “Pard? Reeve is trying to tell his story, if you’d care to listen.”
The moment has passed. I flip Pard off, and he scoots toward the aisle. He looks a little more like himself again. Angry.
“Exactly,” says Reeve. “Show some respect.”
A groan comes from the back.
“I heard that, Rooster!” Reeve shouts. “Time to pay you back for your story. Here’s your future.”
REEVE’S TALE
Very well. So, currently, Rooster seems like he has it all, but guess what happens before graduation? In his hubris he impregnates a fellow student.
“What’s hubris?” Rooster asks, turning to Alison. “Some kind of pubic hair?”
She shrugs. “Makes sense to me.”
“Huuubris,” Bryce sings.
But Reeve laughs like Bert on Sesame Street. An evil Bert with a similar unibrow, but much more of a beaky nose. Heh-heh-heh.
“Rooster, your lack of vocabulary speaks volumes about your future, as well as that of your compadres. In fact, hubris signifies pride, and you will lose all your pride and friends when you have the effrontery to impregnate the lovely Briony.”
Kai’s eyebrows launch up to his hairline, and Briony freaks.
“Ew, gross!” she screams, and Rooster, glancing at Briony’s and Kai’s reactions, looks like a dog that’s pooped on the carpet.
“Calm down, everyone. Reeve, change all the names, or your story ends here.”
“Certainly, Mr. Bailey.”
So, our protagonist, Cocky—heh-heh-heh—flunks out of school and has to work at the mini-market by the gas station. He moves into the basement with his girlfriend, um, Briana. They have a baby named, um, Allie, and later get married.
Alison raises an eyebrow, and I think she’s going to interrupt, but then she just laughs and caresses her “daddy.” Rooster purrs like a lion. They kind of settle into each other incestuously and listen to the story.
