Curse of the Kissing Cousins
Page 4
By the time she’d done all that, what Tilda really wanted to see was Mercy’s contact information, but none of the lines she’d set out had caught anything useful. She might have come up with something useful to do, like laundry or grocery shopping, but the phone rang, rescuing her from practicality.
“Hey, girl.”
“Hey, Cooper. How was work today?”
“Don’t ask! Nicole was in fine form, trying to get information about that dead TV star, and naturally she took it out on me and Shannon.”
“Did she make Shannon cry again?”
“No, but not for lack of trying. I swear, that woman is using Anna Wintour as a career model.”
“You think Nicole is hoping to work with Wintour at Vogue someday?”
“As if! She doesn’t have the fashion sense of a gnat—instead of The Devil Wears Prada, it would be The Devil Wears Nada. No, I think she wants Jillian’s job. If that ever happens, I am so out of here!”
“You and me both. Speaking of witches, did Jillian get my article?”
“She did, and I watched her read it. She nodded twice, and I’m almost certain I saw a tiny smile.”
“Two nods and a smile? Bitching! My last piece only got two nods.” Jillian was not known for enthusing, but then again, she wasn’t a tin tyrant like Nicole either. “What are you and Jean-Paul up to tonight?”
“He’s working an anniversary party up in Revere.”
“Why don’t you go with him? You could be his roadie. Or better yet, a groupie.”
“He asked me, but it’s an Italian couple. I don’t mind the doo-wop, but I can’t stand all the Rat Pack music. Not to mention the fact that they specifically requested the Electric Slide and the Chicken Dance.”
“I shudder in sympathy.”
“Anyway, since I know you don’t have plans—”
“Are you implying I can’t get a date?”
“No, but if you were dating anybody, I’d know about it, wouldn’t I?”
“Almost certainly,” she admitted.
“Then, as I was saying, since you don’t have plans, why don’t you come over here? I’ll order calzone and we’ll watch a video.”
“That’s the best offer I’ve had all day. I’ll be there in an hour.”
“Ciao, bella!”
After they hung up, it only took Tilda a few minutes to change to a nicer top, pull on her battered Doc Martens, and run a brush through her hair. She was heading for the door when she thought of something, so she went back into her room to pick through her disorganized collection of videotapes until she found what she was looking for.
Tilda wasn’t sure if the Red Sox were in town or not, but even without pregame traffic, she didn’t care to try parking near Cooper and Jean-Paul’s apartment on Commonwealth Avenue. Instead she hopped the T, and thanks to some luck making the switch from Orange Line to Green Line, pushed the doorbell a full ten minutes earlier than scheduled.
Cooper buzzed her in and was standing at his open door when she got off the elevator at his floor.
“Come on in. The delivery guy buzzed right after you did.”
“The cute one?”
“It sounded like him.”
She tossed her satchel into the apartment and waited with Cooper for the elevator door to open. When it did, out stepped as buff an example of college student as Tilda ever expected to see, wearing tight jeans and a knowing smile. Like most people who worked in Boston’s Italian pizza joints, he was Greek.
“Hey,” he said. “How you guys doing?” He handed over the bag of food, and Cooper handed over the money.
“You want change?” he asked.
“Keep it,” Cooper answered.
He smiled even wider and slowly tucked the bill into his pocket, his body language implying that much greater treasures than a twenty-dollar bill filled his jeans. Then he was gone.
“He is so gay,” Cooper said as he closed the door.
“Straight,” Tilda insisted. “He was checking me out big time.”
“Please. He wants me so bad he can barely stand it.”
“Yeah, he wants you to make yourself scarce so he can come after me. Besides, what do you care? You’ve got Jean-Paul. I’m the one who needs to get laid.”
“You sure as hell do!”
“Hey! It hasn’t been that long.”
Cooper just looked at her.
“Okay, it has been that long. Maybe I should order more calzone.”
“Forget that—I’ll order Chinese. I know Ming is straight.”
“He’s also married, with four kids.”
“Then he must be straight, right?”
They went into the kitchen for Cooper to unpack the sausage calzone and side of mozzarella sticks he’d ordered and for Tilda to get glasses out of the cabinet to fill with Dr Pepper. Then they went back to the living room and spread their food on the coffee table in front of the TV.
It never ceased to amuse Tilda that Cooper and Jean-Paul’s was the stereotypical gay couple’s apartment. Invariably neat, it was stylishly decorated with furniture that went together, in direct contrast to her own digs, which could be charitably described as bohemian and more accurately described as furnished with Tilda’s mother’s castoffs. Less stereotypical was the sizable comic book collection Cooper stored in a spare bedroom, but very few people ever saw that.
“Did you pick out a movie?” she asked him.
“I couldn’t make up my mind between X-Men and Pride & Prejudice.”
“Hugh Jackman or Matthew Macfadyen. You in the mood for beefcake tonight?”
“It’s not for me. I thought you needed all you could get.”
“Meow. I’ve got another idea.” She retrieved the video from her satchel. “How about Kissing Cousins?”
“Are you kidding me?”
“It’s research,” she said, reaching past him to slip the cassette into the VCR.
He made a face, but didn’t object, and as the show started, she heard a low sound. “Are you humming along with the theme song?”
“What? You think I don’t watch seventies TV? How do you think I come up with my pop psych quizzes?”
“I bet you’d sing along if I weren’t here.”
“Please! The lyrics are so lame they make the Gilligan’s Island theme sound like Gilbert and Sullivan.”
“God, yes.”
By the second stanza, they were both singing along. Tilda figured Cooper couldn’t very well rat on her if he was singing too.
Though the episode she’d picked wasn’t the first she’d seen, it was the one that had hooked her on the show. The plot, variations of which had appeared in countless sitcoms before and since, was about Mercy getting a crush on a new student and enlisting Sherri’s help to get his attention. Sherri decided she wanted him herself, and gave her Cousin advice designed to make her look like a fool.
Since the boy was from Kentucky, Sherri got Mercy to adopt a Southern accent, dress in red gingham, and spout horse-racing statistics. Naturally, the guy decided Mercy was brain-damaged and asked Sherri to the dance instead. Mercy then realized what Sherri had been up to and immediately changed back to her usual ensemble of lacy black blouse, long skirt, and dark lipstick to attend the dance solo. Because the show was a sitcom, Mercy got the last laugh when she ran into Sherri and the guy at the refreshment table; he was entranced by her and blew off Sherri.
The moral, which the Cousins’ grandfather pointed out in case either the Cousins or the audience were too dense to figure it out, was, “To thine own self be true.”
“Shakespeare,” Cooper said. “How terribly profound.”
“I know it’s hokey, but sometimes hokey strikes a chord.”
He looked at her. “There’s a story here, isn’t there?”
“Yes,” she admitted, “but it’s even more hokey than the show, which at least has the excuse of being fictional.”
“Spill, or I won’t share the ice cream.”
“Did it come from Toscanini�
�s?”
“Chocolate Number 3, Dark.”
“I’ll spill. Do you remember high school?”
“Sadly, yes.”
“Then picture this. The summer before I started high school, my mother divorced my father and moved us from Waltham to Medford. That meant I knew absolutely nobody.”
“That’s harsh.”
“Harsh, hell—it would have been major trauma even if the divorce hadn’t already thrown me for a loop. As it was, I was terrified that I’d be consigned to the geeks and nerds zone, so I decided to make myself into the perfect, perky freshman. And I used my big sister, June, as a model.”
“Your half sister, who is as different from you as Sherri was from Mercy?”
“That’s the one. Not that she was pushing it on me. In fact, I think she was freaked when I suddenly started wearing clothes like hers, buying shoes like hers, fixing my hair like hers, and even using the same colors of makeup.”
“With your skin tone? June is blonde!”
“I would have been too, had Mom let me dye mine.”
“Thank the Lord for small favors. Did the makeover achieve the desired results?”
“Let’s just say that on a Friday night in September, I was sitting at home watching Kissing Cousins rather than going out on a date or hanging with friends.”
“Wait a minute. That was a seventies show. Were you even alive in the seventies?”
“Just barely, but there is a magical gift known as reruns.”
“More of a curse, if you ask me.”
“Sometimes,” she allowed. “Anyway, I was channel surfing and ended up on a low-budget indie channel and came across that episode of Kissing Cousins we just watched. Afterward I went into the bathroom and took a good, hard look at myself in the mirror.”
“Did you cry?”
“Are you kidding? I laughed my ass off. I looked ridiculous. I washed all the gunk off of my face and took the headband off and threw it out the window. The clothes went to Goodwill the next day. By Monday morning I was back to my usual self.”
“And you became wildly popular?”
“Of course not. My usual self was a geek. But I did make new friends—other geeks of course—but my kind of geeks.”
“It’s hard to imagine you as a geek.”
She laughed. “Are you kidding? It’s Friday night and I’m dateless and watching Kissing Cousins. Nothing has changed.”
“Ah, but now you’re watching it with me. That raises your coolness rating significantly.”
“True enough,” she said. “So where’s my ice cream?”
They adjourned to the kitchen to divide the pint into thirds: one for each of them and a share for Jean-Paul when he got back from his gig.
Once they were back on the butter-soft leather couch, bowls and spoons in hand, Cooper said, “So that’s why you’re obsessed with that show.”
“Not obsessed. Just very, very interested. Back then, my buds and I would watch the show each week just to see the popular Cousins get their comeuppance—it was cathartic. We only wished we could do something similar for the popular crew in our school.”
“I know the feeling. Somehow a gay, black comic book fan wasn’t exactly mainstream in my school.”
Tilda took another spoonful of ice cream. “Have you ever noticed that almost everybody says they resented the popular kids in high school, that they were the geeks and nerds? Every movie and television star says he was the outsider or, at best, the class clown. What happens to the popular kids?”
“I’m guessing that a covert cadre of unpopular kids takes them out quietly after graduation.” He smiled at the thought. “Wait! Your sister, June, admits to having been popular, right?”
“True, and she’s okay. We didn’t get along so well back then, but we’re tight now. So there might be other ex-popular kids living among us, in hiding.”
“Like mutants?” Cooper said. “That sounds like a cue for X-Men to me.”
After that they concentrated on their ice cream and the movie, stopping the DVD occasionally to more thoroughly admire Hugh Jackman’s form and argue over whether Patrick Stewart or Ian McKellan had the greater stage presence. It was midnight by the time Tilda left for home, and she went to bed as soon as she got there.
Since the next day was Saturday, Tilda slept in, then got up to tend to some wholly uninteresting errands and make her weekly duty phone calls to her mother and stepfather, who had retired to Florida, and her father and stepmother, who’d retired to North Carolina.
Late that afternoon, Tilda’s phone rang.
“Tilda? Vincent. Have you been reading my e-mails?”
“Every one. But I try not to work on the weekends.” She couldn’t avoid it all the time, but since working at home meant she was always at the office, she had to draw the line somewhere. Vincent had no such compunctions. All day long he’d been sending her details about the continuing investigation into Holly’s shooting.
Either the town of Weldon was having a slow murder week, or Holly’s family had some political connections, because it being the weekend wasn’t slowing the cops down. Unfortunately, the legwork and forensics and whatever else it was they were doing didn’t seem to be leading anywhere. There were no substantive leads in the case.
“I just found out that Sherri’s body—”
“Holly’s body.”
“Right, Holly’s body has been released to the family. They’re having a wake tomorrow night, and the funeral will be Monday. Are you going to go?”
Tilda considered it. “Definitely not to the wake.” For one, it was still the weekend, and for another, she already had plans. The funeral was a different story. Some of the people she wanted to talk to for her article were bound to be there. Besides, she almost felt as if she owed it to the actress, after all the years of celebrating when her character got the short end of the stick. “I think I can make it to the funeral. Do you want to ride along?”
“I can’t. I’ve got a project meeting at work that I can’t miss. I thought I’d have a private memorial service at my house Monday night, just for us fans. I’d really like you to be there.”
“I don’t know, Vincent.” Vincent was okay, but spending the evening with a group of his fanboy homeboys didn’t appeal to her. “It’s a long drive to Connecticut. I’m going to be wiped by the time I get back.”
“Please? I think it would mean a lot, and you could tell people about the funeral. There’s going to be about a hundred of us. Wouldn’t that be good for your story?”
Tilda reconsidered. A photo or two of a hundred mourners would certainly add poignancy. One or two of them were bound to be photogenic. “Okay, if it means that much to you.”
“Great. Can you make it by seven?”
“I’ll do my best. See you then.”
Other than checking e-mail in the vain hope of something useful turning up, Tilda spent the rest of the weekend completing her list of uninteresting errands and jobs around the house, which made the prospect of Monday’s funeral almost appealing.
Chapter 5
Episode 5: The Death of Mr. Floppy
The night after Sherri’s beloved bunny Mr. Floppy hops into
the great beyond, Elbert sees a rerun of Frankenstein, and decides
to exhume the rabbit and revive it. He starts his experiment,
but when he has to leave the lab, Brad sees the corpse.
Horrified, Brad takes the body outside to bury it, but is interrupted
and stashes it behind a bush. When Elbert returns, he
thinks Mr. Floppy has risen, and tells Sherri the glad tidings.
Then Mercy’s cat Emily finds the body and drags it inside.
Mayhem ensues, followed by Pop’s carefully nondenominational
lesson on the finality of death.
—FANBOY’S ONLINE KISSING COUSINS EPISODE GUIDE, BY VINCENT PETERS
ONCE she was up and showered Monday morning, Tilda approached the problem of what to wear to Holly Kendric
ks’s funeral. As she rummaged through her closet and bureau, she realized that one advantage to having been a Goth was having so many choices. Admittedly she had to eliminate the miniskirts and artfully torn tights, but she quickly assembled an ensemble of a black thigh-length skirt, a purple blouse that was only moderately lacy, and a black wool jacket. The shoes were the toughest part—neither pair of her Doc Martens nor her Day-Glo sneakers set the proper tone. Eventually she settled for a pair of black patent leather Mary Janes she used to wear as part of a schoolgirl-from-hell outfit one ex-boyfriend had found alluring.