“I can be!”
“No, you can’t. Trust me.”
The next store we checked out was all about gadgets, which I wasn’t really into. Wade and I moved from one table or shelf to another, picking up stuff, yakking on and on about whether or not Peter would like it, and then putting it back down. If that place were a crime scene, we’d both be busted, considering how many fingerprints we left behind. Nothing struck us, anyway, because we both figured that Peter, being a total nerd, would’ve put something totally badass together like the communication watch he gave me because he was, you know, like a gay teenage Batman when it came to gadgets. Buying something off a shelf wouldn’t even come close to what he liked or what he was capable of fully enjoying.
The clerks didn’t look too happy with us, either. We took our sweet time to go through their merchandise, and we didn’t even buy one. When we walked past the counter, both guys glared at us, and I pulled the old hat trick on them: a dimpled smile.
Well, it kind of worked on one of them, anyway. The cute geeky guy’s frown wavered when I slapped him with my magic dimples. He must be gay.
By the time we reached the last store, we were both tired, hungry, and daydreaming about all kinds of bling we desperately wanted. Nothing for Peter, of course. It was like shopping for someone who didn’t exist because we couldn’t figure out what would work for him. Even Wade, whose girly instincts I depended on, came up short.
She made a face as she rubbed her belly, looking around and scanning the rest of the shoppers around us. “Man, I’m glad he’s your boyfriend, not mine,” she said. “I’d go nuts if he were.”
“How about if I gave him something practical?” I said, rubbing the back of my neck, which was starting to feel stiff from all that craning and bowing and whatever else we did, checking out merchandise from two billion stores.
“Like what?”
“Dunno. My ass. Won’t cost me anything but my virginity.”
Wade gave me a dull look. “Let’s eat. I’m starving,” she said, turning around and linking her arm around mine again. I was starving, too, in more ways than one, but I decided that I’d gone way overboard in the TMI department. So I let myself be led down to whatever eating joint Wade was in the mood for, though I secretly hoped it wouldn’t be a jumbo hot dog place because I was going to die if it were.
Turned out to be Mexican. I ordered a super burrito with the works—you know, the kind that needed to be held up to my mouth with two hands firmly wrapped around it and that I needed to open my mouth really wide in order to take a bite. I couldn’t help myself.
Chapter 2
Considering the trauma Mom went through during the recent Debutantes attack on Vintage, I figured it was a good thing to show her my paycheck and make her feel proud of me. I was right.
“Oh, my lord, my baby’s a working man now!” she pretty much squeed. Yeah, squeed. The way her words came out of her was definitely not a squeal. She also glomped me. Yep. Glomped. Had I known that Mom was a total fangirl, I’d have given her the good news from about fifty miles away, yelling through a gigantic über bullhorn.
By the way, when mothers glomp their sons, it goes like this: spread your arms out as wide as possible (try to reach opposite walls with fingertips); make a total batshit crazy face with eyeballs popping out of sockets, mouth wide, wide, wide open so that your terrified son’s staring at your tonsils; crouch for a second or two for maximum impact and ignore the growing wet spot on terrified son’s jeans; jump back up and then forward, closing your arms around half-dead son and crushing him against your chest while screeching in his ear. By the way, listen carefully and make sure that every single rib he was born with breaks in your hold. That’d be, like, the icing on the maternal cake.
Oh, and ignore his garbled screams for his dad.
“I’m so proud of you,” Mom kept saying, jumping up and down while she kept her iron embrace. I thought I heard bits of my broken ribs crumble and impale the rest of my organs. “I shouldn’t have kept you back before, honey. I wanted you to stay home and stick with schoolwork, but you’re proving me wrong.”
My face was blue. I couldn’t even talk very well at that point, as I was sure that my insides were all shredded from my broken up skeletal system. I think the only part of my skeleton that stayed safe was my skull, but that meant nothing if all I wanted to do at that moment was double over and puke all over Mom.
“Hekksh whohm.” That was supposed to be “Thanks, Mom.” It was a little hard being coherent when your tongue was hanging out and turning as blue as your face.
Mom finally let me go, and she clapped her hands on each side of my head, forced my head down, and planted a loud kiss on my forehead. I was so dizzy I could barely stand. When she let me go, it was a good thing that she turned around to dig out her favorite coffee mug, so she could celebrate with her new French Roast blend. I stumbled back and plopped down on a chair when she wasn’t looking, my paycheck crumpled in my fist.
“You’ll have to open up an account,” she said. “I’ll go with you since you’re only sixteen, and they’ll need a signature from me.”
I nodded, blinking away the fog and waiting for my brain to stop somersaulting. “Okay.”
“I’m not sure if a savings or a checking account would be good for you. On one hand—oh, never mind. The bank rep can help us. Now you have to make sure to leave a certain percentage of your paycheck alone, okay? That’s the idea behind your opening an account. It’s all about learning responsibility early on, and who knows? You might even save enough for your own car if you want or, even better, for college. Isn’t that great?”
And so on and so forth. My brain pretty much shut down after that, and I’d no idea what she kept yammering on and on about. For my part, I liked imagining what she was saying to me.
It went something like this: “Save enough money, so you can marry Peter and buy a fabulous house or cabin somewhere in the wilderness, where no one can ever find you even after you die. Over there you’ll be surrounded by miles and miles and miles of forests, mountains, and waterfalls—where you and your husband can skinny dip any time as long as you do it at the bottom, not the top, of a waterfall; otherwise, you’d be crossing that great rainbow bridge together before you’re even satisfied whether or not you’ve really, fully consummated your marriage. Oh, and there’ll be lots of gorgeous meadows where you can have picnics and hours of uninterrupted sex while deer look on. Then you can learn how to fish and order your groceries and occasional dinner or lunches online, so you won’t have to leave the comfort of your home. By the way, your online connection will be the best and most powerful wireless kind, seeing as how you’re tucked away in No Man’s Paradise. And since Peter’s so good with gadgets, he can invent an electric fence that spans leagues around your wilderness, and it’ll be smart enough to fry humans who’ll try to cross but keep all animals safe. Though you’ll need to make sure that delivery trucks won’t be affected, or you’ll starve to death.”
I love you, Mom. Happy face.
“Eric?”
Totally happy face.
“Eric, are you listening to me?”
I blinked and sat up straight. “What?” I looked around in a minor panic and saw that I was still in Mom’s kitchen and that I was still single. WTF?
Mom rolled her eyes and blew at the thick pillar of steam coming out of her mug. “I said that I’m off on Monday, and I can take you to the bank after you get out of your tutorials.”
“Oh. Okay. Cool. Thanks, Mom.” I stood up, walked over to her, and kissed her cheek. “I gotta take a shower and get ready for dinner. It’s been a pretty busy day for me.”
“Did you find something for Peter?”
I shook my head and shrugged. “No. Wade and I even went through every shop in that urban fashion section on 9th Street and couldn’t find anything.”
Mom frowned and cocked her head. “Urban? Is that something that Peter’s into?”
“Well—gadgets, mostly
. But he’s always been the jeans and T-shirt kind of guy, and we figured that there might be something new and cool that would work on him, but most of the stuff we saw were too edgy and hip-hop for Peter.” I still thought that going the practical route and offering my virtue to him would be the best birthday gift ever, but as always, it wasn’t a good suggestion to bring up in front of one’s parent. I never got my poor old gay porn anthology back from Mom, in fact. I’d like to think that she at least recycled it somehow. Maybe using the torn-out pages for Christmas wrapper for my presents would be a good way of doing it, but it was also something that parents were universally too fuddy-duddy to consider. Meh.
“Don’t worry, honey. You’ll figure something out,” Mom said, grinning and ruffling my hair.
I thought things over as I bounded up the stairs to my good ol’ attic room, and every possibility I could come up with still fell short of my practical gift idea, i.e., my virginity. Hey, I could even argue that it was green and very eco-friendly! I was recycling old towels, which I’d wash myself using fragrance-free detergents that had organic ingredients! Who the hell would say no to that?
Oh. That’s right. Peter would. Damn spoil sport.
* * * *
I went online after dinner and decided that it’d be a cool thing to clear my head by destroying cheesy-looking cheap monsters via the usual video game that came free. Of course, now that I was loaded with cash—in check form, anyway—I could always go for a paid account and end up with better games. Unfortunately all those sweet, sweet mental images I made up earlier about me and Peter lost in the wilderness for the rest of our lives kind of kept my feet on the ground, and I decided not to turn my thoughts down that road.
I suppose I could use the cash for more important stuff than video games.
My favorite cheesy online game was “Troll Warrior,” where I got to be an awesome troll that went around slaughtering pixies and sparkly fairies, though I left unicorns alone. They were still horses under that totally phallic horn, anyway, and I loved animals. I carried with me a kickass broadsword and a crossbow whose bolts not only penetrated those nasty fairies but also burned their insides slowly, and I’d watch them expand like ticks did when you dumped them on a hot plate before exploding in a tidal wave of nature-themed blood, which also sparkled.
I pretended that those fairies and pixies were all the Mary Sue fanfics involving Calais that had been posted online, which made my battle scenes all the more awesome. If anything, I’d yet to lose to those little buggers. Ha.
Okay, okay, so I told Peter before to ignore fangirls as there was absolutely no way we could stop them from indulging their fantasies. What I didn’t tell him was that no one could stop me from indulging my fantasies, and that involved utter carnage and blood-soaked revenge on their fanfiction.
It was in the middle of a particularly grisly pixie massacre when an idea struck me, and I toyed around with it while hacking a perky little pixie into two. I might not be good at multi-tasking in the practical sense, but when I was in The Zone of hack-and-slash video gaming, I was totally on.
“Hmm,” I muttered, frowning, while idly swinging my sword at the mass of pink-and-gold pixies that flew down to meet me with cutesy little voices and happy colors everywhere. “I guess I can get him a video game. Peter’s a geek, and he kicks my ass all the time when we play.”
A teal-themed pixie lost its head when my well-aimed bolt shot through its neck. Sparkling teal blood filled the screen as head went one way, and body went the other.
“Die, Diagnosed-With-Cancer-Heroine-Cliché-Romance-Fanfic! Die!” I snarled. Yeah, I could look around for a cool game to get for him. It might not be much compared to what he was bound to receive from his super rich family, but it’d come from me, and that should be good enough, right?
A pixie whose colors were hot pink and sky blue got chopped up by my pocket knife, which was pretty easy to do because the stupid little shit flew too close, and I was, like, “Oh, God, I hate hot pink! Eat this, Perfect-Vampire-Girl-Next-Door-Cliché-Romance-Fanfic!” Slash, slash, slash, kick. I couldn’t help it. A piece of cut-up pixie floated down too slowly after the carnage, and I had to make my troll kick it out of the way. And then crunch it under its massive boot for good measure.
Man, that game was total therapy for me. By the time I finally came up with a solid gift idea for Peter, my troll had leveled up three times, and an entire island of cutesy pixies and fairies was a wasteland of twitching body parts. I made sure to hop into a boat and sail across the sea till I hit the next island of sparkly sweetness before exiting the game. Oh, I also took care to chop up the boat into a pile of colorful splinters before setting it on fire because the damn thing was a magical size-shifting boat that the stupid fairies built. It was fun watching rainbow-hued smoke rise up, while my troll yelled, shook its fist, and kicked at the pile of burning wood before breaking out in a triumphant dance over the metaphorical slaughter of Calais-centric Mary Sue fanfiction.
The downside, though, is that this was a really easy game. I mean, sure, my troll was swarmed by legions of gross fluff balls, but they never fought back because they were so into being cute and perky and crap. I should find a game where my character could at least be challenged by a pissed off fairy. The resulting slaughter would feel more complete.
The next couple of hours were spent with me scouring the ‘net for unusual games that I could buy. I found a few, which I was dying to try out, but I decided to bookmark their pages and then share them with Althea to see what we could do before I spent my hard-earned cash on them.
* * * *
The following day was Sunday, which was always a really “bleah” day for me. My family didn’t go to church, being damned-to-eternal-burning heathens, and we usually just kicked back and went our separate ways—or at least Liz did with Scanlon, anyway, while Dad and Mom either puttered around the house or went out for a “parents only” meal or something. I didn’t care. I wanted to be left alone and recharge in ways that were completely off-limits to my family. I mean, really off-limits. Mr. Happy was very, very happy by the time everyone came home.
Monday was Mom’s free day, and I was back in the “classroom” with Dr. Dibbs. As usual, he was on time and very efficient with his work. As usual, I did everything I could to delay the inevitable with small talk.
“So how’re the heroes coming along with their training?” I asked while pretending to dig around my bag for my books and notes. Too bad I didn’t own a magical bag that had a secret portal to an alternate world, where I could “accidentally” lose my school stuff. That way I’d have a legitimate excuse since my family didn’t own a dog that I could train to eat my homework. Or at the very least, pee all over it.
“Oh, they’re all coming along well, thank you, Mr. Eric.” Dr. Dibbs brought in a gigantic mug. He wasn’t a big coffee drinker like Mom, but he was Mom’s alter ego in the tea department. Every time he carried his mug around, I always saw a couple of those tea bag string thingies with the tea tags attached hanging off the rim. So he liked his tea really potent. “Quickshield, especially, is showing a lot of progress, and he’s pretty much caught up with the others. He just needs some fine-tuning to do and a bit of work on his confidence. He still seems shy and a bit confused when placed in a do-or-die situation.”
I nodded, still messing around with my bag. “That’s good. How about Freddie? Did you put a ban on those inanimate objects masks that he uses sometimes?”
“There is—in a way. Sometimes it’s necessary for him to take on that kind of a mask for undercover work.”
“No water coolers, though,” I said, grimacing. “That was, uh, sort of gross, to be honest.”
“Yes, that was going a little too far, I think, but that wasn’t Mr. Freddie’s fault. The police department happened to tap into his weakness for sugar, and things went haywire. Mr. Eric, are you missing your books or something?” Dr. Dibbs narrowed his eyes at me.
I grinned. “Oh. No, I’m sure they’re i
n here somewhere. Look! I was right! There they are!” Damn. I wanted to draw this one out for as long as I could. All day would’ve been nice. I sighed as I pulled them out and set them down on my desk. What a stupid hassle school was.
“By the way, the next search-and-rescue practice will be on Friday. We figured that the heroes can go without an extra day of these practice missions, considering how advanced they are now with their powers. We might be keeping a weekly schedule for good, unless something happens that requires a bi-weekly one.”
“Cool. Got it.”
The universe must’ve been feeling sorry for me that day, considering what day of the week it was, and it was time to go home before I knew it. Even lunch turned out to be a blur, though I remembered Mom’s sandwich, chips, and a bottle of water. I guess my head was too full with thoughts of Peter’s gift to pick up on anything else. I ate in the classroom because Brenda’s antique shop was swarming with two customers, and I didn’t want to get in the way of big sales for her.
Then bim, bam, boom, and I was in the bank with Mom, nearly falling asleep in my chair while the grownups talked on and on about financial responsibility among teenagers and whatever the hell kind of options I had as a newbie bank user. I let Mom figure stuff out for me since I just wanted my money safe but accessible when I needed it the most. Paperwork was filled out, and I was let loose in the world with a brand new savings account and an ATM card. Sweet!
Mom celebrated this rite of passage by treating me to a late afternoon junk food fest at her favorite burger joint. On our way home, I dragged her to one of the nearest game stores to check up on the availability of the games I zeroed in on the previous night. Turned out they had three out of five in stock, which was pretty good.
Mom frowned at the boxes I was examining. “Are these what you want to give Peter for his birthday?”
“Well—they’re all options at the moment. I have to do more research online to see which one’s best.” I couldn’t help but feel a surge of pride when I said that. Research—wow, how official was that?
Dr. Morbid's Castle of Blood (Masks) Page 2
