by Steve Vernon
Chapter Two – The Truth About Being Sixteen –believe it or not
All right.
So I lied about where this whole thing about the end of the world all started.
You might as well get used to me telling you lies.
Remember, I’m sixteen years old.
The thing you ought to know is that sixteen year old teenagers DON’T always tell the truth.
I know.
It’s a shock but I’m being truthfully honest here.
We learn to lie early in life.
It is a necessary skill.
If you don’t believe me just try asking the nearest sixteen year old if they’ve really done their homework, completed all of their household chores and if they really and truly like coming to school.
We’ll lie.
Even if we have to lie to ourselves.
That’s the truth about being sixteen.
We learn to lie because it was a survival mechanism.
The truth is this whole thing began with the truck. Just this morning a large cube van, painted black enough to lose a bucket full of midnight in, was parked directly in front of our school in the exact same spot where the propane truck delivers the gas for Mrs. Mabel’s lunch room kitchen.
I can see it like it happened just this morning – which it did.
There was a large black metal folding table set up beside the big black van. Two men in black business suits that were nearly as black as the van itself were standing there beside that table – which was completely covered with a towering stack of small black boxes.
These guys were tall.
We’re talking skyscraper tall.
Harlem Globetrotters tall.
In fact tall was way too little of a word to use on these guys. They kind of looked as if each of them could have stunt-doubled as a cell tower.
Of course they might have been drug dealers or hit men or serial killers – but we figured that they were okay because Principal Feltspur was standing right beside the two men in black – and he was smiling.
I didn’t know it then but these guys were what we would come to call Black Masks.
Remember that word.
You’ll be tested on it later.
And you get an extra point if you noticed that Black Mask was really two words, not one like I said.
See, I told you that I lied.
Now these two Black Masks weren’t wearing masks at first. They were just bare faced but for the life of me I can’t tell you just exactly what they looked like. They looked plain – like every recognizable feature had been belt sanded from off of their faces. It was like nothing about them stood out or was the least bit noticeable. It was like looking at a pair of twin brothers whose middle names were most likely Anonymous Nothing and Beats The Heck Out Of Me and whose last names were absolutely and totally forgettable.
Then the two Black Masks each reached into their pockets – like they had practiced in a shaolin temple getting that pocket-reaching movement together simultaneously for their entire life – and they each placed a very large pair of dark black sunglasses over their eyes.
“Cool,” Jemmy Daniels said. “It’s the Blues Brothers.”
Like I told you in the last chapter – or was it two chapters back – Jemmy Daniels is the closest thing to a best friend that I’ll ever have.
Which makes him awfully rare.
You see - I just don’t have too many friends in the first place – and some of them are dead or worse now – but that all comes later.
“The Blues who?” I asked Jemmy.
“Never mind,” Jemmy said. “The important thing is these guys are getting ready to give away samples. Stacks of small boxes on a table ALWAYS means free samples.”
He had a point – but I argued with him just on the principal of the thing.
“They could be salesmen,” I said. “Maybe those boxes are for sale.”
I took a look at the two Black Masks. I tried hard to remember just what their faces had looked like before they had put on the black sunglasses but for the life of me I could not remember. It was as if their faces had burned into a single white spot in my memory and then faded out to nothing.
All trace of it was gone.
“How many kids do you see here that are carrying money with them?” Jemmy asked. “It’s not like this is a shopping mall.”
He was right again.
You see, our school was a little school in the middle of a little town in the middle of nowhere at all. Don’t even bother looking for it on the map. Map dots are way too valuable to waste on the likes of our town.
It has always been a real kind of mystery to me why anyone living anywhere even close to their right mind would even bother building a town this far out of anywhere-worth-being. The fact was our town had been nothing worth talking about for so long that the sign at entrance to the town read WELCOME TO WHATEVER YOU WANT TO CALL THIS TOWN WHICH DOESN’T REALLY MATTER BECAUSE YOU WON’T EVER REMEMBER IT’S NAME BY THE TIME YOU DRIVE THROUGH AND OH YEAH - THANKS FOR LEAVING.
Would I lie to you?
There wasn’t a city near to us for at least a hundred miles – and the closest McDonald’s restaurant was almost twice as far away. Most of our parents worked on pickle farms except for the forty or so adults who worked at the local guitar pick factory.
I swear to God it’s a guitar pick factory.
My Dad was foreman at the factory and let me tell you - there isn’t a whole lot of profit in guitar picks. He sometimes sat up at night worrying what I-pods, Guitar Hero and Facebook were going to do to the guitar pick industry.
I’m not saying the man had much of a life.
“Oh my God,” Jemmy said.
As the black sunglasses touched their faces the black plastic of the lenses – or whatever it was - began to spread out and widen and roll completely over the two Black Mask’s faces. It was like they each grew a separate black fish bowl directly over their heads. They got done and the two of them looked as if they were something that looked something along the lines of a deep sea diving helmet crossed with a crystal-clear jet black bowling ball.
“How’d they do that?” I asked.
“Maybe it was CGI,” Jemmy suggested. “Or Photoshop or something like that.”
“We’re not watching a movie and this isn’t the internet,” I pointed out. “This is freaking real life.”
“Children,” Principal Feltspur called out. “Children!”
Now let me tell you - there is nothing that a sixteen year old boy hates more in this world then to be called a “children”. It’s demeaning. We’re people – real people – and there isn’t anything CGI or Photoshop about us and you adults really got to get over yourselves and stop referring to us as kids, students or even teenagers.
We’re people – just the same as you.
Or at least then we were.
“These two gentlemen,” Principal Feltspur said. “Are representatives of the mumble-mumble corporation.”
That’s just how he said it. I was watching and I saw his mouth move when he said what was supposed to be the name of the company that these two black suits represented – but his lips moved one way and his mouth the other and all I seemed to hear coming out of them was “mumble-mumble-mumble” give or take a mumble or so.
“As part of a nationwide promotion these two mumble-mumble gentlemen,” Principal Feltspur continued. “Have come to our school to give everyone a free sample cell phone.”
Right away Jemmy stuck up his hand.
“Do we get free cell phone service with that?”
I thought it was a pretty good question.
So did a lot of the other kids.
One of the Black Masks swiveled his gaze directly at Jemmy. It was a little like watching the turret of an armored tank swivel to aim its cannon in our direction.
It is a cellular telephone.
That was what he said but he actually didn’t say a freaking word.
What actua
lly happened were the words sort of projected across the black fish bowl that covered his face. I’m saying that the words “it is a cellular telephone” scrolled over both of their faces – like one of those digital advertising signs that you sometimes see on buildings that tell you what time it is, what temperature it is and that you should buy a certain brand of television set – at least once a day or so.
It is absolutely free.
The same thing.
Those four words – it is absolutely free - scrolled across both of the Black Mask fishbowls.
And the weird thing was that I heard those words in my head like they had some sort of a microphone built into my brain cells.
It is absolutely free.
“Okay,” Jemmy said, shaking his head like he had water in his ears. “So when did I wake up in the middle of The Matrix?”
“Did you hear that too?” I asked.
Jemmy nodded.
“Up here,” he said, pointing to his forehead. “I heard it inside my brain.”
Weirder and weirder.
A lot of other kids were looking confused and shaking their heads too – so I figure THEY must have heard the Black Masks in their heads as well as me and Jemmy.
“I told you that you should have taken the blue pill,” I said. “This whole thing is way too CGI for my liking.”
“Me too,” Jemmy said.
“It has to be some sort of an advertising gimmick,” I said.
“Yup,” Jemmy agreed. “A freaking advertising gimmick”
But I guess those Black Masks heard us talking. Or maybe our words flashed inside their fish bowl heads – the same as what they were saying showed up in our heads.
It is gimmickless. It is absolutely free. It is a cellular telephone.
“Gimmickless?”
I didn’t even think that was a real word.
“Who cares?” Jemmy said. “They’re going to give us a free cell phone. I can get used to a CGI fishbowl for anything free.”
“Nothing is free,” I said. “There’s got to be a catch.”
It is absolutely free.
I stared at the fish bowl.
I couldn’t tell if he – or it - was staring back.
It is without catch.
It felt as if I were listening to a dictionary unravel, syllable by syllable. It was like those two Black Masks were pulling words out of the Manual of Modern English and fitting them together in a way that was almost right. What they said kind of made sense – if you squinted – but you could hurt your eyes if you listened to them for too long.
Their words just didn’t quite fit together.
Almost.
It is a cellular telephone.
Right.
Still, Jemmy had a point.
Who in their right mind was going to argue with a free cellphone – fish bowl helmet or not?
Not me.
So we all lined up – Jemmy and I being careful to stay behind Billy Carver and Lonnie Tarkins and Bigfoot Hansen. I had already received a perfectly good wedgie this morning when I first got to the schoolyard and I knew full well that I would need to use the janitor’s bathroom if I needed to go – on account of Billy and Lonnie and Bigfoot would be waiting for kids like me in the regular boy’s washroom.
I just didn’t want to risk any further complications.
So we all took one of the cell phones.
I guess that’s when it really all got started.
The end of the world – and what came next.
You just wait and see.
It is coming right at you – absolutely catch free.
And gimmickless.