by Mike Leon
“Yeah, this place is great!” Trevor says, feeling the need to express some positivity to keep Jenny from detecting his disinterest.
“Aw, really?” Jenny squeaks, rubbing his arm. “Thanks, babe.”
“Yeah, Jenny,” Adler says. “I mean, when you said your dad has a ranch, I thought it would be some like creepy banjo shit, but this place is off the chain!”
The double hinged cedar wood door to the next room swings open and Gavin walks through, followed by Summer and a reluctant Karen.
“Dude,” Gavin says. “There’s a hot tub in the other room.”
“I told you there was,” Jenny says with a hint of annoyance. Trevor really likes the yellow shirt she’s wearing today. Her tits look great in that shirt. It is much preferable to the high cut romper she wore at the coffee shop last night. That outfit inspired him to reinstate his online dating profile.
“Why are all the windows barred though?” Gavin asks.
“Oh.” Jenny rolls her eyes. “My mom saw a bear once and she freaked out and stayed in a motel for like two weeks until my dad had bars put on all the windows. Well, not all the windows. Just the first floor.”
“My phone doesn’t work,” Karen says, fingering a cheap looking black touch screen phone.
“Yeah.” Jenny rolls her eyes again. “The reception out here is crap.”
“What the hell are we waiting for, bro?” Adler shouts. “Let’s rage!” He pops the top from a Bud Light and begins chugging down the foamy contents at an aggressive pace. The notion of that troglodyte getting girls to have sex with him is absolutely revolting to Trevor, and an example of everything inferior about the female mind. Women are animals wired to spread their legs for the biggest ape. The ones who aren’t busy sucking every pea brained alpha male’s dick have been too heavily socialized by the religious right to be anything but repressed freezers.
“Come on.” Jenny pokes Trevor in the arm. “I wanna show you something.”
“Alright,” he says. “Sure.”
Trevor follows Jenny up the stairs in the den to the second floor and down a short hallway. She stops at a finished hardwood door and takes a little bronze key down from its hiding place on top of the doorframe.
“So is this your room?” Trevor asks as Jenny unlocks the door.
“No, baby,” she says. She opens the door into the room ahead and steps inside smiling back at him. The first thing Trevor notices beyond the door is a set of massive and startling fangs. They belong to a mounted bear that towers over Jenny’s head. “This is where my dad keeps his hunting stuff.”
Trevor takes a longer look at the huge stuffed animal. It doesn’t impress him. He looks around the rest of the room at some other smaller trophies, some antique hunting rifles lining the walls, a shiny six-shooter on a shelf with some bullets, a photograph of Jenny’s father holding a fish as big as a grown man. None of this stuff interests him. It’s all just cheap redneck crap.
“Oh...okay,” Trevor says, half feigning enthusiasm with his uncertainty. “So why did you bring me up here?”
Jenny raises her shoulders into a coy shrug. “Boys just always think this stuff is cool, I guess.”
Trevor puts his hands on Jenny’s hips and slides them slowly to her back. “Are you sure you didn’t want just a little privacy after that long drive?” He draws her in close and rubs his nose against hers.
“Maybe,” she whispers. She closes her eyes and presses her wet lips against his. They are sticky with gloss and taste like cheap artificial cherry. Her distasteful perfume overpowers the smell of his Le Zob™ by Ralph Pierre. These are annoyances he must overlook for now to get what he wants. Trevor slips his fingers into the back of her denim shorts and grasps a handful of Jenny’s firm young ass. “Hey!” she yelps, slapping her hands around his wrists and jerking them away. “Don’t make trouble!”
“It’s all good, babe.” It is not all good. “I’m just playing around. You know I would never push you to do anything you don’t want to do.” But he wants to do just that more than anything. He’s been putting in his time with this ignorant bimbo for months and has seen nothing out of it.
Jenny tickles her fingers across his chest. “If you’re good you can sleep with me instead of the boys, but no funny business, Mister.”
Instead of the boys? What does she think this is, a Catholic school dance? Jenny is absolutely unreal. She can’t possibly keep this virgin thing going much longer. Trevor has tried everything to get her past it. He has bought her gifts, gotten her drunk, sent her flowers—none of it got her to go all the way. “It’s enough just to hold you, smoochy,” he says.
“That’s sweet. Let’s see what Gavin and those guys are up to.”
Fricking Gavin. Trevor hates that low rent stoner more than any of them. He has seen the way Jenny and Summer look at him. Even that frumpy waste of space Karen wants Gavin. What does he have that Trevor doesn’t? The guy is a middle class dimwit. But that’s the story of Trevor’s life. He has more money than all the other guys. He’s smarter. He’s better looking. He’s the perfect and ultimate gentleman. But what does every pea-brained animal female want? An inferior ape.
And that’s why frat boy ignoramuses like Adler and Gavin get all the beautiful girls while Trevor is a twenty-year-old virgin.
“Love you, smoochy,” Trevor says.
INT. DARK CELLAR - DAY
Lily coughs herself awake. She looks at the mulch of undigested cheeseburgers covering her blue jeans on the floor beside her head and begins to vomit again, but there’s nothing left to come up.
She feels hollowed out and weightless, like a ghost. What that monster did to her was the worst thing she has ever been through. She would have her filthy raping stepfather on top of her again before that. At least her body has a mechanism to accommodate that terror. This cannot be accommodated. It cannot be mitigated. It cannot be reasoned away. Watching it happen to Addison did nothing to ready Lily for that torment and the sum of all its parts: the monster’s suffocating fingers pinched around her nose, the dry paper taste of ground cartilage filling her mouth, the aching, burning, scraping sensation like a tennis ball traveling down her throat, desperately trying to breathe as the next ball of artificially flavored food product blocks off her supply of air, the sound of MEAT MEAT drowning out all other noise when her ears are not clogged by the pounding of her own racing heart and burning lungs. When he finally left her lying on the floor she thought she was going to die. Visions of five double cheeseburgers bursting from her belly like alien spawn flickered in her mind as the Ghoul closed the door behind him. She doesn’t even remember barfing it all back up. She was out for that part and more. She doesn’t know how long. A few minutes? Hours?
Lily pushes herself up from the floor. She finds her boots where she left them and stuffs her feet back into them. She’s leaving. She’s getting out of here. She’ll tear that vent open even if she wears her fingers down to the bones prying it away. She doesn’t care where it goes. She doesn’t care if she makes it out. She’d rather die than go through that again.
She creeps along the wall to where the vent is framed. She finds one of the corner screws and picks at it with her thumb and index finger. She squeezes and twists, but her fingers just run around the tiny rusted head abrasively. She tries another. Nothing. She works her way around the vent cover, trying each of the screws, but none are loose. She tries them again, this time digging her fingernails into the old flathead slots like makeshift screwdrivers, but that works about as well as asking the vent to loosen itself. She goes back to plying and turning at them until her fingers begin to blister. All the while she attempts to concoct alternate methods, as if she might magically turn into MacGyver and craft a set of power tools from nothing but the contents of this room. It’s a laughable thought made more absurd by the emptiness of this place. Although MacGuyver often crafted his crude inventions from things he carried on his person, and not necessarily found objects.
After pulling at the screws
until her fingers bleed, Lily begins to lose hope. If only she had some kind of tool. Anything with a small tip would work: a key, or a pocket knife, maybe her belt buckle. She picks up her belt from the floor and attempts that very thing, but the prongs are round and won’t fit any of the flathead screws. She drops the belt aside and wonders what else she might have on hand that could work. She considers trying her teeth. The thought of snapping and grinding them against the metal is beyond disturbing, but her desperation is such that she would try it if the angle weren’t impossible. There is simply no way to get any one of her teeth into the grooves of those screws—not while the rest of her head is still attached.
Lily drops the belt on the cold floor next to Addison’s disembodied jaw. She flinches on reaction at the sight of it. She forgot it was even there until now.
The jaw has teeth. The jaw doesn’t have a head. The jaw doesn’t care about the pain. What would Sid do?
Lily crouches down to the floor and pokes the slimy red mass sitting there. It is cold and wet. It feels like grocery store meat that way. She tries imagining it belongs to a cow or a pig, but she knows better, and that wouldn’t do much anyway. She wraps her hands around the ends of the bloody bone and picks it up. Torn, sloppy flesh dangles and squirms in her hands. It is disgusting.
With some grim trepidation, Lily fits one of the screws to some of the smaller teeth in the front of the jaw. She applies pressure and turns, but it doesn’t budge. She decides to try another corner. That screw turns. It only moves half a rotation, but it moves, and that is enough to set her heart racing with excitement. She loosens it enough to get it spinning with just her fingers, then continues to the next screw, and the next. Two go without incident. A third breaks an incisor with a fibrous crack that stabs at Lily’s nerves. Only three more remain. The rest of the teeth are fat molars or fangy cuspids which will not serve her purpose. Worried she will break more teeth on that screw, she tries the next one with the next tooth in line. It turns. That makes three. She chips another tooth into uselessness on the next screw, and manages to turn another without incident. With two teeth left and only the two screws which refused to budge remaining, she tries them again. Neither moves, but she tries anyway until the teeth are worn to jagged little nubs.
Finally dropping the disgusting jawbone, Lily begins turning the screws she was able to loosen. As she withdraws each from the panel and drops them to the floor, she sees the vent cover rise from the wall just a bit more, until there is enough give for her to pry up one end and cram her fingers underneath it. She yanks on the cover, then pulls, straining her arms but getting nowhere. She grabs the edge of the vent and pulls again, this time planting her feet on the wall and using her legs for power. When something finally breaks, Lily can’t be sure if it was part of her or part of the vent while she tumbles toward the floor.
She finds most of the flimsy broken vent cover in her hand as she sits up from the ground. A small remainder is still affixed to the wall by the sole immovable screw, but there looks to be enough of a gap for her to squeeze through. Lily grips the bottom of the vent opening and attempts to crawl inside. It is a more difficult endeavor than she expected, even for a girl of her considerable pole dancing upper body strength. It would help if she had something to stand on.
Lily doesn’t have to look around the room to know there is only one object in here that could possibly be used as a step stool. Yesterday she would have been bothered by it, but now she hardly cares. She goes to the corner of the room, dumps out the reeking bucket of human waste, and sets it on the floor upside down beneath the vent opening.
On account of the short ceilings and the boost from the shit bucket, she’s able to reach into the vent armpit deep. Bracing herself on the oily walls of whatever duct this is, she is able to hoist the rest of her body off the ground and up to the level of the vent shaft. She meets resistance when her wide hips fill the opening but she continues pulling, grabbing at the little seams inside the duct with her fingernails for traction. She grunts and strains as it feels like her body is being squeezed through a sausage grinder. She clenches her teeth as broken bits of the vent cover bite into her, scraping flesh away from her body and leaving a bloody streak. Finally, she clears the cover and feels her legs sliding through the opening. Exhausted, she lies motionless within the darkened duct without room to maneuver, crawl on her knees, or even roll over. The duct is so compact that she is crunched into an entirely prone position. Going forward she will only be able to slither at a worm’s pace, and she can see nothing.
At least she’s out of that room.
EXT. BRUNSWICK RANCH - DECK - DUSK
Karen watches as Gavin rotates the head of a little stainless steel cylinder cupped in his hands. She thinks it looks like a pepper grinder, but it is not a pepper grinder. He stops and looks over his shoulder, momentarily distracted by the woo-hoo of Summer in the distance.
“Whooooo!” Summer hoots from the back of a four-wheeled all-terrain vehicle driven by Adler at the far end of the property. Her spectacular naked tits wobble like water balloons as the four-wheeler speeds across the lumpy grassland. Karen is surprised they can hear her over the engines all the way over here, but the skank is just that loud. She didn’t even make it all the way outside before the boys convinced her to take her top off, and of course all of them except for Gavin followed her from the house to watch her bare breasts in all their swinging glory. The only one who showed any reservation was Trevor, who seemed to go simply because Jenny was going. Even now, Karen can see him leaning against a tree away from the others, outside the creepy maroon barn at the edge of the property where the four-wheelers were stored. He’s the only person on this trip Karen might ever want to speak to after it is all over. It’s a wonder why a guy like that would waste his time with a pea brained bimbo like Jenny.
“Loud thing go fast. Girl have big boobs. Me like,” Karen imitates as Gavin empties the bright green flakey contents of his grinder onto a white index card. She holds the porch swing steady for now so he doesn’t spill any of the marijuana he labors over on the seat next to her. “Is that really all men care about?”
“Hey! We can’t help it,” Gavin says. “Big boobs make us all weak.”
“I have big boobs,” Karen promptly fires back with a caustic tone.
Gavin pours ground weed into the end of a rainbow colored glass pipe using the rolled index card. “Yeah. And if you put on a crop top once in a while people would know that.” Karen slaps his shoulder and Gavin lurches in his seat. “Careful! Don’t spill the weed!” he says.
Karen rolls her eyes. “I’m not wearing a crop top. I’m not a tween. I don’t get my clothes from Limited Too, and I don’t want a man who only wants me for my hooters. Besides, everybody would just be disgusted by my sad saggy boobs.”
“Are you kidding?” Gavin packs the pipe using his thumb. “You have a rockin’ pair of knockers.”
“Thanks.” Karen sighs.
“You want some of this?” he asks, flicking a Zippo lighter near the end of the pipe.
“No thanks.”
Gavin shrugs as he lights the weed up and puts the pipe to his lips. “Quit hiding your assets though. Seriously. You’ll be fighting dudes off with a stick in no time. You’re a cool chick.”
“Whatever. You only brought me along so I could buy you all beer. I’m a third wheel.”
“Fifth wheel, Karen. It’s fifth wheel.”
Karen laughs. “It’s a third wheel.”
“No. A third wheel still does something, like on a tricycle. A fifth wheel never does anything. No reason to have it there.”
“But you don’t actually need a third wheel. A motorcycle only has two.”
“Then you might as well say second wheel, because a unicycle only has one wheel. But that makes no sense at all, because you need at least two wheels in the analogy or you’re just talking about somebody who wants to be a hermit.”
“How long have we been having this argument?”
; “I don’t know, at least since seventh grade.”
“Yeah, that’s right. Because we were playing euchre at Phil’s house and you kept trying to call Emily Corrigan.”
“Oh yeah. She never did go out with me.”
“And I said she would be a third wheel. But there were four of us.”
“Yeah. I remember. Even when I was twelve I was chasing girls that were out of my league.”
“Please. She wasn’t out of your league. She was a skank. She blew Dirk Bender behind the bowling alley like a week after that.”
“Dirk Bender. Who has a name like that? That’s a serious afternoon television name.”
“Uh oh. I hear a high-dea coming.”
“Afternoon TV. It’s this theory I have. Everybody knows little girls can have names that doom them to being strippers. Like you never name your daughter Chastity or Jade. But with boys the danger is them becoming one of those ambulance chasing lawyers you see on daytime TV commercials. Need a cash settlement? Call Dirk Bender now! Whiplash? Call the law offices of Chase Butler now!”
“Bad credit? No credit? No problem! Call Blake Morgan now!”
“Insurance company got you down? Call Chuck Bradley now!”
“Brad anything! Every Brad is a sleazy weasel. You’re right. I never even thought about it. There’s nothing else that would scare me more about having to name a baby boy.” Karen rests her head on Gavin’s shoulder. “That’s what I like about you. You’re insightful.”
“Yeah. I wish Jenny would notice.”
“Whatever.”
“I just don’t get it. She’s all up that Trevor guy’s ass. What does she see in him?”
“He seems nice. He’s well read. He’s not a barbaric hooligan like your frat brothers. I think that Adler guy orders Rohypnol in bulk shipments.”
“He’s a little obnoxious, but he’s okay. Trevor is like, I don’t know. There’s just something off about the guy.”