Random Acts of Love (Random #5)

by Julia Kent

  My anus was like that little kid’s tongue in the old ’80s movie, A Christmas Story. You know, the kid who got triple-dog dared to put his tongue on an ice-cold flagpole and it got stuck?

  Only that kid’s predicament made sense. When someone triple-dog dares you, you do it.

  When someone dumps you and you eat drunk ice cream pie filled with a psychedelic drug of undetermined origin and you decide to immortalize your anus, you tend not to garner much sympathy when you find yourself stuck to a bathroom wall that was last renovated when your mama was still a virgin.

  I was fucked.

  Stucked, fucked and—wait. Stucked isn’t a word.

  “Yes it is,” said the clown, smiling with blood on his fangs.

  “Stop him!” I shouted, pointing to the mirror.

  “You mean Elvis?” Amy asked. “You don’t like his singing?”

  “That’s not Elvis!”

  “Yes, it is!”

  “No, it isn’t!”

  “Yes, it is!”

  “Look, I am the one stuck to the bathroom wall by my poop chute. If anyone gets to decide which man is hiding out in the mirror, it’s me! An evil clown with blood dripping off his fangs is standing there and now—oh, great. Thanks, Amy! Now he’s singing ‘Love Me Tender.’”

  “Clowns,” Charlotte said, grabbing Maggie for support. “I hate clowns.”

  “Of course you do,” Maggie soothed.

  “They’re too colorful,” she continued.

  “Right.”

  “And you kissed Tyler,” Charlotte added.

  Amy, me, and Elvis the Evil Clown all turned at once and gaped at Maggie.

  “You tongue fucked Frown?” I declared. Tyler, aka Frown, was the substitute bass player for Random Acts of Crazy whenever Joe was stuck in Philly at law school. He was tatted up, silent, and kind of brooding. Not at all the guy I’d pick for Maggie, but then again, what the fuck do I know? I’m stuck to a bathroom wall by my ass.

  “We kissed at your last concert,” Maggie said in a no-nonsense voice like Mary Poppins declaring we all need our spoonful of sugar.

  “Maggie tried to do more but Tyler was a gentleman,” Charlotte added.

  “I am too sober to talk about this,” Maggie groused, giving Charlotte a death glare.

  “Was he any good?” I asked.

  She turned red.

  “Your face answered for you,” I teased. My thighs started screaming again.

  She sighed. “I suppose I can talk about it now, because the three of you are so high you won’t remember a damn thing in the morning.”

  “Which is the criteria by which Maggie opens up to people,” Charlotte explained.

  Maggie gave her a laser-sharp look. Charlotte kissed her sweetly on the cheek.

  So did the evil clown. He left a smear of blood on her face.

  “We, um, hit it off,” Maggie started. “And I had decided it was time to just get over myself and sleep with someone.”

  Charlotte snorted. “You two hate each other.”

  “I hate him now. I didn’t that night after Sam proposed to Amy,” Maggie added.

  That’s right. I remember, after Sam proposed and we were partying on the rooftop, Frown came and joined us. Maggie, too. We got kinda shitfaced and the guys took me home for some awesome sex. We left the party early. A little too early, from the sounds of it.

  The guys.

  No longer my guys.

  Ah, shit.

  “Hate can be a great start of a relationship,” I said. “Joe hated me when we first met.”

  “And look at how well that turned out,” the evil clown muttered in a British accent.

  “It was really weird,” Maggie explained, eyes kind of glazing over like glazed donuts. Oh, my God, her eyes were glazed donuts. My stomach rumbled.

  “He’s such a calm guy—”

  “You wonder if he has a pulse,” Amy added.

  Maggie snorted. “Right. So I decided I needed to sleep with someone after seven years of not—”

  “Seven years!” Amy and I shrieked in unison.

  Maggie and the clown gave us a middle finger. “You want to hear the story or do you want to judge? You can’t do both.”

  “Sorry. What happened then?” Amy asked, breathless.

  “I touched his tats and kissed him.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Why did I kiss him?”

  “Why Tyler.”

  She shrugged. “I’ve caught him looking at me a few times at concerts.”

  “Which means you were lookin’ back.”

  “Right. Anyhow, I drank enough to start talking to him and kissed him and tried to have sex with him.” Her face burned redder than the clown’s cheeks.

  “On the rooftop?” I said with a low whistle. Or maybe that was the clown. It was getting harder to tell.

  “I was drunk and had made a decision to just get it over with and have sex after a long dry spell.”

  Charlotte started to cry.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, horrified because the clown in the mirror was crying, too, and it was coming out as cotton candy.

  “I’m just so happy for Maggie,” she explained as Maggie rolled her eyes.

  “You’re happy I got rejected by a guy who has a vocabulary of seven words?”

  “I’m happy you tried to have sex.”

  There was clearly a long story behind all this I didn’t know. Seven years.

  “So we’re all happy people are having sex an’ shit,” I summarized. “What happened with Tyler?”

  “I jumped him,” Maggie said with a shrug. “And he declined.”

  “He had a hot, liquored up woman ready to fuck him on a roof top in Boston and he turned you down?” I marveled.

  “Is he gay?” Amy asked.

  “Not gay,” Maggie said. “A gentleman.”

  “Oh, shit. That’s worse,” I said.

  “He said, and I quote, ‘You’re drunk. I’m not into necrophilia. Try me again some time when you’re sober’,” Maggie recounted.

  “That’s more than seven words,” Amy helpfully pointed out.

  “Shut up,” the three of us muttered. Make that four. A gnome revived and started talking out of my ass.

  “Whadja do?” I asked.

  “I stormed off.”

  “A guy you’re hot for kisses you and you leave?”

  “It’s not that simple.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “I’m not arguing with someone who is the human equivalent of a Post-it note, Darla.”

  “Yeah, um, speaking of that—I need to get down. My legs are killing me.”

  Amy grabbed one arm and Charlotte grabbed the other. It was like popping a knuckle only it was my shoulders.

  “OW STOP NO!” I screamed as they set my joints in place like orthopedic surgeons. “Jesus Christ, that hurt. I am never going to a chiropractor.”

  Maggie bent down and sort of squished her hand under my hip to where the wax began.

  “An inch further and two minutes of wiggling and I’ll need a cigarette,” I said.

  She snatched her hand back.

  “Amy! Charlotte! Get over here.” She got them to pull on me.

  Nope.

  “I am going to starve to death attached to the bathroom wall like one of those Facebook pictures of toddlers duct taped to a bathroom stall!” I wailed. By now, the edges of my skin around the wax were starting to burn. Gravity is a bitch, and it was pulling on my sensitive bits.

  The three of them just nodded.

  “What about nail polish remover?” Maggie suggested.

  I shrieked. The clown shrieked. A dead gnome in my ass came back to life and shrieked.

  “Okay, cancel the acetone,” Maggie mumbled.

  “How about a box cutter?” Charlotte ventured.

  “You ain’t cutting my ass off with no box cutter, you sick freak!” That’s the Jeffrey Dahmer meth
od of weight loss. He was from Ohio, too.

  “I’m just trying to be helpful.”

  “Use my fang,” said the clown. “Please.”

  “I can see the box cutter idea,” Maggie said, walking around me and evaluating me like I was a piece of IKEA furniture they were assembling. “We could cut the wallpaper and free her.”

  I perked up.

  “Could you hurry it up? ’Cause I need to pee real bad.”

  Charlotte rummaged around in a big duffle bag under the sink.

  “That’s Alex’s special doctor bag,” I explained. “Ain’t no box cutters in there.”

  “But he has scalpels,” Charlotte said. “Voila!” She held a shiny silver sharp thing up high, like a serial killer, and lowered it slowly.

  “Put your arms out,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Remember in kindergarten how you made turkeys by tracing your hands on paper?”

  “Yes.”

  “I want to make a Darla out of—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Maggie snapped, snatching the scalpel from Charlotte’s hand. “Let’s just get her unstuck.” And with that, she made a few quick slashes, tossed the scalpel in the sink, then reached around my ribcage and pulled.

  Hard.

  My anus screamed. I screamed. Something ripped. Please, God, let that be the wallpaper.

  “I see blood!” Amy shrieked. “No, wait. That’s just the unicorn pooping.”

  “I’m going to kill Joe,” Maggie mumbled as she peeled me off the wall like a sugar dot candy on a roll of white paper.

  Except my ass wasn’t sweet.

  “There’s no way she’s getting her butthole molded now,” Charlotte wailed, sobbing hysterically and pointing. “Our plan is ruined!”

  “Oh, honey, your plan was ruined way before this,” Maggie said.

  I reached for my pants and bent down, my butt cheeks making a funny peeling sound, like a Star Trek holodeck door opening after being sprayed down with the jizz of a thousand Klingons.

  Slipping one leg, then another in, I felt my pants adhere to every little bit of cold wax left.

  And then, sweet merciful deity, the world went dark.

  CHAPTER 6

  Trevor

  I did not exist for three days.

  CHAPTER 7

  Darla

  The biggest gnome on the fucking planet was sitting on my head and screaming at me.

  Or maybe that was Josie.

  “What happened?” she screeched, her face inches from mine. Her cat, Crackhead, shot under my dresser.

  “Can I join you?” I muttered. My voice sounded like broken teeth sliding around in a kaleidoscope.

  “What are you talking about?” Josie asked. A warm, dry hand grasped my wrist gently but firmly. It went still for a few beats, then retreated.

  “Her pulse is fine,” I heard Alex say.

  “She looks half dead, and the apartment is trashed,” Josie said, fuming. Why was she hitting me over and over in the head with her shoe?

  I peeked one eyeball open.

  White light.

  I closed my eyelid and willed the world to go away, including the decaying corpse of the gnome that had lived in my mouth for the past two days.

  “How long have you been passed out?” Alex asked me, his voice soft like silk.

  “How long ago was Saturday?” I rasped. “And did you bury the gnomes or did the evil clown eat them out of my ass first?”

  I heard twin sighs, one frustrated, one amused.

  “What is she on?” Josie questioned.

  “Something that looks like it was a lot of fun,” he answered.

  “But the bathroom! There’s a four foot section of wallpaper that is just missing! And your medical bag is destroyed and the scalpel was embedded in the aloe plant.”

  “The remains of the aloe plant, you mean.”

  “All of our potato chips are gone and someone put a pair of thong panties on poor Crackhead’s little butt.”

  “That was the clown,” I explained.

  “You had a clown?”

  “Some party,” Alex said in an admiring voice.

  “What day is it?”

  “Monday,” they said in unison.

  “MONDAY?” My own shout made the white light appear in my head even behind closed eyelids. A slow, dull recognition of my body’s needs began to register.

  “Thirty-six hours or so, then, you’ve been passed out?” Alex guessed.

  “I need to pee.”

  Josie sniffed the air. “I think you already did.”

  I sniffed. Ugh. “Naw. That’s cat piss. Not human piss. I think Crackhead got her revenge.”

  Josie peeled back part of my covers and grimaced, gently setting them back down. “Um, she’s right,” she said to Alex. “Crackhead got her back for the thong thing.”

  “I would never put a thong on a cat,” I declared, suddenly indignant. “And I don’t appreciate being accused of such a thing.” I slowly moved my rubber band legs off the side of my bed, noticing I was still wearing the same pants I’d worn the night I’d had Amy, Charlotte and Maggie over.

  Oh, God.

  “Are they still here?” I croaked.

  “Who?”

  “My friends?”

  “No one’s here, Darla,” Josie explained. “We just got back from our trip. There is a giant English cucumber on the dining table, covered in a condom. Someone’s left what appears to be a pussy pocket filled with, um...”

  “Mayo,” Alex filled in.

  I gave him a look.

  “No, really. It’s mayo. And before anyone asks, that is not my pussy pocket.”

  “No one was going to ask,” Josie groused, shooting him the stink eye.

  “Well, anyhow, it’s not. Mine, that is,” he said in a tight voice.

  “And—” Josie’s words were cut off with a sharp inhale as I stood.

  “I guess we know what happened to the wallpaper,” Alex said.

  “WHAT HAPPENED WHILE WE WERE GONE?” Josie screamed at me, grabbing my shoulders as I stood.

  “Ow! Ow! Stop unleashing the flying monkeys, woman!” I grumbled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Cucumbers and pussy pockets and cats with thongs? You people are crazy.”

  Josie turned the color of a fire engine and craned her neck to look behind me as I shuffled away from her.

  “Darla Josephine Jennings!”

  My butthole puckered up instantly, because when someone calls you by your full name you know you’re in trouble.

  Except... my anus couldn’t pucker.

  It couldn’t move.

  “What the...” I reached behind me to feel my behind and encountered a wall of frozen sweatpants cloth and a two-foot long swath of some weird kind of paper poking up out of the waistband of my pants and covering the small of my back.

  It kind of fanned out, like a peacock’s feathers in full glory.

  “LOOK AT YOURSELF IN THE MIRROR!” Josie thundered. She’s this tiny little thing but her voice can carry. That woman is an electric bullhorn disguised as a human female.

  I shuffled toward the bathroom. And I do mean shuffled. My thighs normally smooch up against each other like two people on Ecstasy at a cuddle party, but right now they were superglued together. My short curlies were being plucked out every half inch I moved.

  “Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow,” I muttered until I finally got to the bathroom and pulled back the door, ready to look in the mirror.

  “Hey!” I called out, still half asleep. The wall had a huge four-foot white spot on it, the ancient wallpaper glue dried and nasty in spots, like a bad case of psoriasis. “What did you guys do to the bathroom wall?”

  “I’m going to kill her,” I heard Josie say. Then Alex spoke to her in a calm, soothing voice.

  “I mean it!” Josie shouted. She sounded disturbingly like my mama that one time when I tried to see if the cat would fit down the hole in the sink when I was five years old.

  I l
ooked at the wall, then felt my behind. The mirror cleared things up. It showed me wearing a big display of foil-covered wallpaper in a giant arch. It also showed a henna tattoo on my cheek. Was that...

  “Josie? Did you tattoo a picture of an anus on my face?” I bellowed. Outrage poured through me. How dare she do this to me?

  Alex came rushing in, about as flummoxed as I’ve ever seen him. Even worse than the time he ran into a No Parking sign in front of the apartment when he thought Josie was fucking Joe.

  (Was that really almost two years ago? What the hell happened to the time?)

  “Darla,” he said in his best calm, doctor voice, “please stop talking to Josie right now.”

  “But she tattooed her anus on my face! Look at it!” Sure enough, someone had tattooed a fucking brown starfish on my cheek.

  He reached out and stroked the offending tattoo with his thumb. It smeared.

  “Oh my Lord, it’s not a tattoo, is it?” I screamed. “Someone sat on my face and let out a wet fart!”

  Alex gave me a look not unlike the one I’ve seen him flash at Josie right after they get into a fight. It’s a mixture of What planet are you from? and How can I hide your body after I kill you?

  “It’s lipstick, Darla.”

  “Huh?”

  “Someone put on dark lipstick, puckered up, and kissed you. A puckered mouth and a puckered anus look remarkably similar.”

  “You learn that in medical school?”

  His eyes turned kinda angry. I’ve never seen Alex truly angry. It made a cold flush run through me, like I’d done something terribly wrong.

  His eyes combed over my face. My waist. The petticoat of wallpaper I wore. He planted his long-fingered surgeons hands on his hips, took a deep breath, and let the anger fade out.

  How in the hell did he do that?

  “Darla,” he said calmly, “You need to get rid of the wallpaper that is adhered to your ass, and then take a shower. Hydrate. I’ll take care of the nuclear bomb that is your aunt.”

  “She’s mad at me?” I said, tears filling my eyes. What the hell was wrong with me? I got all weepy like my period was coming. It wasn’t due for two more weeks, so...

  “She’s ready to rent a wood chipper and make you disappear.”

  I took a step away from him. “Oh, yeah. That’s pretty pissed. I hear you, Alex. I’ll get lost. But I have a question.”