by Laura Preble
“Hey.” Becca nudges me slightly. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah.” I smile, a pale, anemic smile.
“My parents are divorced,” she says bluntly as she plops back down on the bed. “It just happened. That’s why we moved here.”
I don’t answer her. I’m not really sure what to say. It’s always awkward, that conversation where you have to talk about what happened—
“Your mom is dead, isn’t she?”
Dead. Nobody ever says that word—it’s always “she passed away,” or “we lost her,” as if she just read a map wrong or something. I like Becca even more for using the word.
“Yeah. Okay,” she says, sensing that I’m not ready to go into details. “Let’s go get something to eat, huh? Maybe your robot lady can whip us up an appetizer like on Star Trek, where they have a food replicator and you just tell it what you want.”
“I told my dad to invent that . . .” And we walk off to the kitchen, the small shadow of the idea of death tucked back in its little box where it belongs.
Dinner with my dad is not like eating with other human beings. For one thing, as I’ve said, he cannot concentrate on anything that’s normal. Eating, I think, reminds him of Mom, and so he tries to get it over as quickly as possible. This is why we don’t usually have people over. In fact, I don’t think anyone has been over for almost three years.
We sit at the dining room table, something that hasn’t seen much use lately. We usually eat alone, and we get whatever we want: He takes his to his workroom; I take mine to my bedroom or to the den to watch TV. If it weren’t for Euphoria, I’d eat baked beans out of a can seven days a week. Of course, that would also solve my dating excesses, wouldn’t it?
But tonight, in honor of Becca Gallagher, Euphoria has set the table with a linen cloth, nice china and glasses, and silver. Dad comes rushing in from the workshop, still in his white lab coat with his goggles nesting in his hair. I suspect Euphoria has had to nag him to come in.
“Well, I can’t help it that I have to leave in a few days and I’m supposed to have this design at least workable,” he grumbles to no one in particular. “You must be Becca. Hi.” He extends a hand and she shakes it, checking to see if it too is a claw.
“Hi.” Suddenly, Becca seems kind of shy. I guess my dad is intimidating, what with the mad-scientist lab coat and the total lack of social grace. “Nice to meet you.”
“Yes.” He pulls a chair out and eases into it, so Becca and I scramble to sit too. Euphoria clicks and whirs disapprovingly. “Well, well. A formal dinner. I had no idea our guest was a V.I.P.” He picks up a crystal goblet, turns it in his hand, and then sets it down quietly.
“Becca just moved here from Los Angeles,” I offer.
“Los Angeles? Really? Which part?” Dad is slicing angrily into a stick of butter on a blue china plate.
“West Hollywood.” Becca is looking tense. I don’t blame her. Most people’s parents don’t attack dairy products with sharp knives. “My mom and I just moved here—”
“Euphoria!” Dad has officially turned into Dr. Jekyll, or Mr. Hyde—whichever one was crazy, I can never remember. He has stopped slicing the butter and is now onto the ham glistening on the platter in the center of the table. “I need the electric carving knife!”
“The dinner looks really great,” Becca says nervously. “It’s been a while since I’ve had a really good home-cooked meal. We’ve been packing and moving for—”
“Euphoria! Where is my carving knife?”
“Keep your pants on, Mr. Chapelle.” Euphoria has rolled up next to him, holding this huge electric knife. It’s like, Come see the Jetsons’ maid star in Psycho: Revenge of the Appliances! If it weren’t my life, I’d think it was funny.
“Thank you very much.” He’s calmed a bit, and he takes the knife, thumbs it into action, and begins carving up my map of terrorist activity in the greater Cleveland metropolitan area, also known as the cloves on the sham ham. “This does smell delicious.”
“Yes, it does.” Becca, great freakishly tall tattooed Becca, looks scared. I could almost smack my father with a dinner roll. The first friend I’ve had in forever and he’s going to scare her away!
Euphoria has taken a bowl of potatoes to our guest, and Becca is serving herself. Dad has moved on to the casserole dish of green beans, and he’s digging at it as if he expects to find hidden treasure. For a few minutes, the only sound is the clank of serving spoons on porcelain, then the metal utensils on the plates as we all start to taste the food. It does taste good, by the way; I hadn’t really realized how much I missed real dinner. Mom used to cook.
Dad seems to have chilled out a bit; he breathes heavily and sinks into his chair. He deliberately lays his fork down and turns to Becca. “So, what brings you to sunny San Diego?”
She pauses a moment. “Mom and I came alone. Dad stayed in Los Angeles.” She hesitates again. “For work.”
“Did you mind moving?” I ask, finally glad for a conversation that isn’t about my family.
She shakes her head and reaches for a roll. “I sort of did, but I really didn’t have any good friends there. Nobody there likes to think.” She smiles at me; it’s our first inside joke!
The rest of dinner goes about the same way, but Dad is uncomfortable the whole time. He doesn’t even stick around for dessert. The pecan pie, though, is amazing, and I have three slices. Euphoria clucks at me; she likes to help me watch my weight.
“So,” Becca says as she collects all remaining piecrust crumbs on her plate and scrunches them together with the flat of her fork, “what are we going to do tonight?”
“What do you want to do?” I try to be very sneaky about plucking an exposed pecan from the remaining pie, but Euphoria grabs it and pulls it away to the opposite side of the table. She has fast reflexes.
Becca considers as she licks the fork. “What do you usually do for fun?”
“You really want to know?”
“I think I do. Unless you tell me you go shopping. I hate shopping.”
“Me too.” I nod. “I usually just read, or I work on projects I have, and I do usually date a lot. Of course, Dustin has sort of stopped that for the moment.”
“Right.” Becca stretches. “Want us to clear the table, Miss . . . uh . . . Euphoria? Should I just call you Euphoria?”
“That’s my name. And yes, you can clear the table. Miss America over there thinks she’s too good to do that, so maybe you can influence her a little bit.”
I make a face at Euphoria, who ignores me.
I discover that Becca shares one of my favorite hobbies: watching bad science fiction movies and talking back to them. We decide to do that for the evening, and we choose one of my favorite bad sci-fi films, Plan 9 from Outer Space. If you’ve never seen it, you have to find it because it is an absolutely unplanned riot. It’s about this guy who looks like Count Dracula (well, it’s the same actor, Bela Lugosi, from the old black-and-white Dracula, but half the time it’s not him because he died right in the middle of the movie) and he hunches all around a graveyard and a UFO lands, and some lady who looks like Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, floats around for no good reason.
It feels so amazingly good to do this normal thing (okay, I know you’re thinking it’s not that normal, but normal for me) with another person. We turn off the lights and huddle up on the big purple velvet couch in our pajamas. Mine are flannel with rubber ducks and hers have retro coffee cups on them. Euphoria rolls in with a vat of popcorn.
“I’ve never watched Plan 9 here in this house,” I say as I grab a handful of fluffy kernels.
“Oh. I thought you grew up here.” Becca fishes in the bowl and scoops out the largest handful of popcorn I’ve ever seen. It’s because of her freakish big hands, which go with her freakish tallness.
“Nope. We lived in a different house for most of my life. We just moved here a few years ago.”
“Hmm. Did your dad get a different job or something?”
; “No.” I don’t feel like talking about What Happened. It’s nice to have just a normal conversation that doesn’t involve that. Since it’s been mostly me and my dad, it seems like What Happened just hovers there between us all the time, like a third person in the room that never says anything. But right now I don’t want to deal with that. I want to watch crappy science fiction like any other normal geek. “Let’s watch the movie.”
For those of you who have never seen Plan 9, let me explain the point, or nonpoint, of it. It’s about a bunch of aliens who come to earth to raise an army of dead people to do their evil bidding. Their best secret weapon is a dead bald police detective who weighs like three hundred pounds, and who, when he died, got white contact lenses. The aliens go around in flying aluminum pie plates and terrorize people by walking so slowly their victims fall asleep while being pursued. The aliens, who meet in their spaceship in a room made of black curtains, use laser electron guns to control the dead people.
We’re watching the scene where the astronaut’s wife is scared when Bela Lugosi comes into her bedroom to terrorize her by pacing with a cape over his face. He has a cape over his face because the guy in the movie is really not Bela Lugosi, who, in a fit of good planning, died before the movie was finished. So anyway, this lady is hysterical with fear, so she covers her mouth with her hand and runs past the slow vampire dude and runs into the graveyard. What else would you do?
“Why didn’t she take the car?” Becca asks between munches.
“I think the astronaut has it. They never had two cars back then.”
“Hmm. So, let me get this straight: The guy in the cape, who was short and is now tall, is chasing the woman, but she runs much faster, and he still catches up to her? Is that possible given the laws of time and space?”
“It is if you buy the fact that aliens would pick dead obese people and old guys to be their army of choice, I guess.”
Now Vampira, the cheap ancestor of Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, is stumbling around in the graveyard too, with her impossible teeny-tiny waist and ripped-up black shroud. “Who would get buried in a black Elvira dress?” Becca asks.
“I guess Vampira.”
“God, she’s got the tiniest waist ever. What is that, like five inches?”
“I think she had her ribs removed.”
“The fat guy probably ate them. They had a barbecue. Hey, got any hot chocolate? I love popcorn with hot chocolate.”
We go to the kitchen to forage for the gourmet powdered chocolate, and while we’re microwaving the milk, Becca says, “So, tell me about school. What’s it like at Green Pines?”
“Hmm. Hard to describe.” The microwave dings and we take the mugs out. “It’s a good school, I guess. Kids are kind of snobby, rich. I don’t really have any friends there. I mean, I get along with everybody, but I just don’t know anybody who’s—well, who’s—”
“Like you?” She grins as she spoons heaps of chocolate into her warm milk.
“Exactly.”
“You said you date a lot.” She sips the cocoa. “Mmmm. Perfection.”
“Yeah, I do. I did. Before the lesbian thing.”
“Yeah, what’s that about?”
We pad back into the living room, where Plan 9 is flickering, time stopped for the moment on the alien invasion of the overweight cue-ball heads. “Okay, so here’s the story. Dustin asked me out, and I went, which was stupid.”
“Why? He’s cute. Obviously a jerk, but cute.”
“Yeah, well, not so obvious before I went out with him. Anyway, we went to a movie and when he brought me home, he wanted to hook up, and I didn’t, so he pulled some lame wrestling move on me.”
“Which you obviously broke out of,” she comments, taking another sip.
“Of course. But then, I’m walking to the door and he yells my name, so I turn around and he’s, like, draped across the car with his shirt open.”
“Ewww. Chest hair?”
“Oh yeah. Like the stuff that clogs up the bathroom drain.”
“Yuck.”
“So I Silly String him.”
She chokes on her hot chocolate laughing. “Huh?”
“Silly String. I keep it in my purse as an emergency tool. Day-Glo pink.”
“That works? Crap, my mom spends money on pepper spray!”
I set my mug down on the coffee table. “It works on high school guys because they don’t expect it. I also have a mini air-horn canister and a cell phone for more pressing emergencies. Dustin was low-level. Definitely Silly String. The problem is now, because of his amazing inflated ego, he thinks I must be gay because I wouldn’t give in to his ‘charm.’”
“I could see that. Anybody else worth pursuing?”
“I don’t know.” I sigh. “I’ve gone out with a lot of guys, but most of them are either really shallow and self-absorbed, like Dustin, or they’re boring, or they’re hormone-addled idiots who don’t see me as anything other than a walking pair of boobs.” I’ve switched the movie back on.
“Hmmm. Maybe you could get a date with the aliens. I bet they have some interesting stories.”
We watch the rest of the movie and then decide to go to bed. Dad has not resurfaced, so I take Becca out back and show her the swooshy lab door. “Are you sure we should go in there?” she asks.
“It’s just my dad. He’s not crazy or anything.”
She says nothing. I don’t blame her.
“Look. I think he’s just . . . uncomfortable . . . because we haven’t really had company over since . . .” I let the thought trail off, unable to finish it. Even after time has passed, I can’t say the word.
Becca just nods grimly. “I get it. My dad’s therapist would say it’s something like an avoidance technique.” I stare out onto the patio, and I can sense her watching me. Then she smiles, and says, “Then again, maybe he just doesn’t like my hair.”
I smile and shrug, thankful for the silly comment. “What’s not to like?”
Inside the lab, Dad is tinkering with some electronic components, and I have to admit it does look sort of mad-scientist in there: Something smells sort of burned, and there’s a small sheet of some kind of metal on the floor. It has a big black scorch mark on it. “Dad, did you blow something up?”
“Hmm?” He looks up, just noticing us. “Why are you in here?”
“Wanted to say good night. We’re going to bed.”
“Oh. Well, okay.”
Becca has hung back behind me, because I think my dad scares her. He’d scare me too if I didn’t know him. He weaves his way through the mess in his lab (and believe me, that idea of creativity being messy is sure true of my dad) and gives me a kiss on the forehead. “Night, sweetie.” He turns his attention to Becca. “Good night . . . uh . . . Brenda?”
“Becca.” She extends a hand shyly. “Nice to meet you too.”
“Right. Becca. I’m bad with names, ask—uh—” he gestures to me, looks confused and says, “What’s your name?” He hugs me, smiling.
“Dad—”
“I know, I know. No corny jokes in front of friends. Sorry. Anyway, see you in the morning at some point.”
Back we go through the space door, into the house, and to my room. Euphoria blinks to life and turns on the lights for us and Becca jumps, nearly hitting the ceiling. Literally.
“Holy crap! Does that thing just turn on by itself?”
“I’m sensitive to light and humidity,” Euphoria says, almost apologetically. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Does it—sleep in here too?”
“She’s not an it,” I whisper. “She’s very sensitive.”
“Would you like your music turned on, miss?” Euphoria’s voice barely masks her annoyance. This could be a long night.
“Sure. Classical, please.” The strains of Beethoven fill the room and Becca plops down on my bed, looking astounded.
“You have, like, this whole Disneyland life, Shelby,” she marvels. “It’s like a movie or something.”
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br /> “You want the right or left side?” I pull down the comforter of stars and moons. She hops in on the left and snuggles up under the covers. “Okay, lights, please.” Euphoria dutifully dims the room lights until they are out altogether, leaving only the glow-in-the-dark ceiling stars and my lava light to illuminate us.
“This is a cool room,” Becca says as she tucks the quilt up under her chin. “It feels very safe.”
I’m lying on my pillow with my hands folded behind my head. “I guess.”
“What do you mean, you guess?” She rolls sideways so she can see me.
“It’s safe. I just feel sort of isolated a lot of the time. I mean, like you said, my life is not ordinary. I couldn’t just bring anybody in here. Most people wouldn’t understand. They’d think I was a freak, and that my dad was an even bigger freak. Little Freaks don’t fall far from the Big Freak Tree, and all that. I guess maybe that’s why I haven’t really invited anybody over for a while. I just didn’t want to deal with the questions and the arched eyebrows.”
“Haven’t you brought your dates home?”
I snort. “Yeah. Can you imagine Dustin Garrett coming into my house? ‘Hey, meet my robot, Dustin. Oh, and this is my dad’s secret lab, so don’t touch anything or you might lose an arm.’ I’m sure that would go over real big.”
“Yeah, I see your point.” She turns over and stares up at the ceiling, arms folded over the top of the sheets like a mummy in a museum. “Why aren’t there more people like us?”
“I think there are. I just think they tend to keep to themselves.”
“Can you blame them?” Euphoria chimes in snottily. I think she’s jealous.
“Nobody asked you,” I reply.
3
PRETTY IN PRANKS (or Shopping for Trouble with a 10-Percent-Off Coupon)
Ever have one of those mornings where you wake up and something is really different but you can’t quite remember what it is? Like, maybe you won an award, or got a phone call from this guy you have a crush on. But right at first you just remember that it’s something good, and it makes you tingly, and like waking up is somehow worth it.