by Bryn Roar
Looking at Josie O’Hara, Tubby began to wonder if maybe his priorities weren’t seriously out of whack.
Chapter Six:
Fires, Ritalin, and All That Jazz
Josie dropped back alongside Tubby on the edge of the bank, walking backwards so she could look at his face while they talked. She chattered away as if she had eyes in the back of her pretty head. Rusty’s head barely cleared the quackgrass in front of them. It bobbed up and down out of the buttercups, like a prairie dog reluctant to leave its hole.
Leading the pack was Bud Brown, his arms held out by his sides, tightroping the crumbly ledge. For such a big fellow, Bud was uncannily graceful. The side of the bank was almost vertical and fell about seven feet down to the surface of the lake. Tubby peered over the side as he listened to Josie.
“You see, Ralphie, like most schools, I guess, the Academy has its share of cliques.” She paused to pick up a stone and skip it across the water, counting to five before it dove beneath the surface.
Rusty said he could beat that, and his stone proceeded to dive underwater with a single clumsy Ploonk!
Tubby reflected on what Josie had said. He was well acquainted with the social caste system she had referred to, having always been in the public-school equivalent of the “Untouchable Class” himself. Side by side with the booger eaters and the pee-pants.
“You got the Jocks and the Cheerleaders, even though our school sucks at team sports,” she said, snorting. “Then there’s the science and math geeks, which often go hand-in-hand with the Warcraft gamers and the Audio-Visual dorks.”
“AV, that was me,” said Rusty, smiling wryly.
“He was the little weenie who always wheeled in the AV equipment during class. We saved him from being a doofus the rest of his life. Then there’re the working stiffs. Great guys for the most part. Me dad was one of ‘em. Ham was too. Ain’t that right, Gnat?”
Rusty nodded and smiled.
“Those are the fellows who work for their fathers on the fishing boats, Ralphie. Passing time in school until the day they turn eighteen.”
“Which is what my old man wants me to do,” Rusty sighed, clearly distressed at the prospect.
“Then you got your Assholes,” said Josie. “With a capital A. The Academy’s most predominant clique. ”
“Let me guess,” said Tubby, “their C.E.O. and President being Lester the Molester.”
Bud turned around and stared hard at the three of them, laughing their heads off. “What’s so damn funny?”
“Nothing, Bud,” said Josie, innocently. She gave Tubby a warning look. “You’re right, Ralphie. Lester is the biggest A-hole on Moon. That title, passed down from his brother, Charlie.”
Tubby paled. “Lester has a brother?”
“Don’t sweat it, tiger. Bud took care of him; didn’t you, Buddy boy?”
Bud acted as if he didn’t hear Josie. Or maybe the question just didn’t interest him. His entire focus was on tightroping the ledge.
“Besides,” Rusty said, “ever since Bud whupped his sorry ass, Charlie’s been living on the mainland.”
“That’s right,” said Josie. “Now, where was I?”
“Assholes,” said Rusty.
“Oh, yeah. Like I was saying, Ralphie, this clique of Lester’s includes his odious Toadies and their female equivalent: The rich bitches from the West Side.”
“Tansy Wilky being the Queen Beeyatch,” Rusty said, shuddering. A look of disgust wrinkled his light brown face. “That mean-ass girl is the biggest slut on Moon. Heard tell she even does it with Lester! Can you imagine that? That poor child must have no self esteem.”
“Amen to that,” said Josie. “Then there are the Freaks, which most everybody includes us under—”
“They’re full of shit, too,” Bud shot back.
Startled at Bud’s reaction, Tubby blinked in confusion. Josie and Rusty waited for the rant to pass; they had weathered them often enough.
“The Freaks don’t give a damn about nothing or nobody! They aren’t a whole lot better than the Assholes in that regard.” Bud put a period on this declaration by hawking a gluey loogey into the lake. Tubby watched dismayed as minnows hungrily attacked it.
Josie dismissed Bud’s outburst with a roll of her green eyes. His temper did not give her pause. “The Freaks have all sorts of subsets, Ralphie; they include the Goths, those kids who wear only black and daydream about dying someday. They’re not so bad, but Jaysus pleezus!” she groaned. “They can be sooo tedious! They claim to love the horror genre, but I don’t believe they understand it at all. They’re into torture porn.” She saw the puzzled look on Tubby’s face. “You know…the Saw movies, Hostel. Anything with torture as its premise. Horror movies that take the imagination out of the equation. ”
Tubby grinned. “Oh, yeah! Buckets of blood, that’s all they are! Any thirteen-year-old boy with a personality disorder could write one of those scripts. Mind you, I don’t have anything against a good slasher film—like Halloween, for example—but for the most part they’re so uninspired. Everything is blunt force trauma with those filmmakers. It’s like they don’t respect their audience at all.”
“We feel the same way, Ralphie! What those people don’t realize is that Horror isn’t about a love of death—it’s about the fear of dying! The visceral fear that makes you glad to be alive! But most of all I think it’s simply Good over Evil…which rarely relates to those kinds of films.”
Tubby listened in wonder as Josie spoke of a feeling that until that very moment he’d always assumed belonged solely to him—at least within the confines of the Public Schools he’d ever attended.
Realizing her mind had wandered, Josie laughed. Her throaty chuckle sent an arrow right through Tubby’s heart. “The Freaks includes the Stoners and…well, I’m sure you don’t need me to explain what their deal is. And lastly the problem kids—the Beavis’s and the Butthead’s. The little retards who get off on destroying private property. You know the type. Fires, Ritalin, and all that jazz.”
Tubby nodded. He’d run across all-of-the-mentioned in every school he’d ever attended, and several Josie hadn’t brought up at all. “You left out one group in particular. The Rejects. I should know. I’ve been a card carrying member of that club since I was in Kindergarten.”
Josie shrugged. “A creep is just another name for a reject. At least that’s how we define the label.”
Rusty patted Tubby’s shoulder. “I know what you’re thinking, man. You think we’re full of shit or maybe fucking with your head. Joe’s right, though. Creeps come in all guises. Fat, skinny, tall, or short. Black, white, brown or yellow. Shiiitt, man! We’re an equal opportunity employer! And we all have one thing in common: We don’t fit in. Call us what you will: Rejects, losers, outsiders, misfits…”
“Creeps,” Tubby said, getting it now.
“That’s right.Creeps.Me? I’m aCreep‘cause of how ridiculously runty I am. And because of my taste in the macabre.” Rusty gestured over at Bud. “That crazy motherfucker is aCreep because of his explosive temper and his likewise love of all things horror.”
They were approaching the huge rock pile, actually the remnants of some sort of cement structure that had long ago come tumbling down. Several boulder-size hunks of concrete lay scattered in a large, sprawling mound. Giving it the appearance of an outcropping of rock.
At least from a distance.
Bud skirted the pile of gray rubble and moved towards the rear of the mound. Everyone else took a breather. Tubby took the opportunity to surreptitiously study Josie O’Hara. She was watching Bud climb the rock pile, and by the dreamy glaze in her eyes it was obvious she had a thing for the brooding boy. Standing there, she pulled her copper colored hair, the shade of a brand new penny, into a ponytail, securing it behind her head with a rawhide strip she’d had tied around her wrist. Tubby admired the look. It framed her face and made it stand out very prettily. She had high cheekbones (apple cheeks, his mother would have said), which ro
se up on her face whenever she laughed or smiled, scrunching up her eyes into cheerful little slits. For the first time Tubby noticed a light spatter of freckles running across the bridge of her nose.
Jeepers! Just like mine! he thought, his fingers touching the ones on his face.
Her teeth, straight and white, hid behind the softest lips Tubby had ever seen. Full and naturally red. Lipstick would have been needlessly redundant. If you asked most guys, they would tell you that Josie’s big knockers were her best feature. The first things you noticed about her. Not so for Tubby. For him it was that heart-breaking smile, hiding behind that oh so kissable mouth. She was quite simply the most gorgeous creature he’d ever laid eyes on.
He could understand why Bud Brown and Rusty Huggins might consider themselves rejects (though, certainly not in his eyes). But Josie? That makes no sense!
And before he knew it, Tubby found himself voicing those exact thoughts. “How ‘bout you, Josie? How can you call yourself a creep?”
Josie spun on him. “Just ask those snotty bitches from the West Side why they think me a creep and they’ll be happy to clue you in, boyo!”
“Come on, Joe,” said Rusty. “Don’t get your panties in a twist. Hell, Bud and I ask ourselves the same thing all the time. You’re the prettiest girl in school, nearly smart as yours truly, and you don’t take shit off nobody! What, you think you’re a loser ‘cause you got big damn titties?”
Josie flashed her fiery eyes at Bud Brown, laughing on top of the tumbledown. His snickering ceased at once. If anybody besides Rusty had said such a thing to her she would have slugged him into next week. “All right, you crummy douche bags! So you don’t think I belong?”
“Damn, girl, I didn’t say that.”
“You might just as well! So you’re a shrimp! And Bud’s got a screw loose in his attic! So the feck what! You ought to try walking in my sneakers for a day! Besides having the cartoonish physique of a stripper at my age, and having assholes like Lester leer at me all damn day long, me mum is the town Otis! And to top it all off, we live on welfare! Isn’t all thatenough to make me aCreep?”
“Town Otis?” Tubby said, aside to Rusty.
“Town drunk,” whispered Rusty, right back.
Bud looked down at Josie from atop the pile of rubble, his hands gripping a strand of rusty re-bar. Looking up at him, Tubby was reminded of a General addressing his troops. “Hell no,” Bud said, blunt and to the point. Josie looked as if he had just slapped her. She stepped back, her green eyes filling with tears. Then Bud smiled, which was such an uncommon thing for his face that it made him…well, beautiful. “None of that stuff makes you aCreep, Joe.” He glanced over at Rusty. “Same goes for you, Gnat. Your shrimpy little bod doesn’t make you one of us! All these years you two have had your own ideas of what makes aCreep. Whether it’s the notion we’re all misfits, or that we share the same obsession—both of which hold some water, I admit, ‘cause without them we wouldn’t have gotten together in the first damn place. But for me it’s always been about something else. The three of us…
Bud looked down at Tubby and studied him intently before coming to some decision in his mind. “Maybe the four of us now…we just belong together. It’s as simple as that. We complete an integral part of the puzzle.”
“Puzzle? What puzzle?” Josie frowned.
The preceding discourse was so out of character for Bud that both she and Rusty were looking up at him askew, wondering if he was suffering another breakdown. Tubby stood off to the side, waiting for the punch line. The four of us? Did Bud Brown just include me in that sentence?
Bud took a deep breath and sighed. He looked embarrassed by what he was about to share. “It has to do with my dreams, okay?”
Josie and Rusty smiled sympathetically. They had lived with Bud’s dreams ever since they’d first known him. Whether it was the Red-Eyed Man standing over his bed in the darkest part of the night, or the mysterious Cave that would save them all, when the quote, “Shit hit the Fan.” They had listened patiently, waiting for Bud to make some sense of it all. They looked at each other, wondering if finally some answers were about to be forthcoming.
Tubby, meanwhile, picked at the seat of his too-tight britches, pulling his skivvies out the crack of his ass.
Bud scowled, reluctant to go into any greater detail. Mostly because he didn’t understand it himself. And yet he’d known that Tubby was theLast Creep the moment he saw him crying on the steps of the school. Of course, he’d seen the fat boy several times before that, but it wasn’t until he saw Josie sticking up for Ralph Tolson that it clickedin his head. Now that theLast Creep had been found Bud wondered how long it would be before the rest came to pass. Days? Weeks? Maybe months? No. Not months.
Not that long.
The dreams had been intensifying lately, and more than ever Bud felt it was all leading up to something cataclysmic. Sooner, rather than later. He only wished the visions would be more specific or helpful. Most of the time all he got were fragments. Parts that didn’t fit with what he already had. Faces never fully formed. Fuzzy. Out of focus. It was like buying a puzzle, only to discover they didn’t pack all the required pieces. After all these years, all those nightmares, visions, whatever, he still didn’t have the necessary information! One thing he did know was that none of it would take place until after the lastmember had joined their group. A puzzle piece that until today had been conspicuously absent. TheLast Creep: Tubby Tolson.
It wasn’t as if theLast Creep was a Tolkienian character, rising above his lowly caste to put right the world. In Bud’s dreams, Tubby didn’t save the day or anything heroic like that. He was just one of the gang, along for the bumpy ride, his destiny as much in doubt as the rest of them. His Fate in mortal peril.
Bud looked down at his friends and saw the concern in their eyes. The anxiousness in Tubby’s.
Time to lighten the mood, ‘ol Buddy Boy. Maybe clue Tubby in to what had made the three of them such good friends. “Big Red, why don’t you tell Tubs what brought us together in the first place?”
Josie’s eyes drifted over to Tubby, crinkling merrily as she smiled. “The three of us, Ralphie, are family. We look after each other. You know what I mean? Hell, I spend more time with these bozos than me own brother…
She looked up at Bud, not sure if she should continue. “We also share the same obsession.”
Bud gave the dark cleft in the Bunker a long look before facing Tubby again. “Listen, man. We don’t know you, and you really don’t know us, either. Before we continue, we need to know—my friends need to know—if we can trust you.”
Josie picked it up from there. She gave Tubby a warm, yet distant smile that said it all: We like you…but that’s not enough, boyo. You’re not one of us. Not yet, you’re not. “What Bud’s trying to say, Ralphie, is that you might not even want to hang out with us once you know what we’re into. We wouldn’t blame you, either! Our tastes run counter to the Mainstream, as it were. That doesn’t mean we can’t still be friends, though.”
“The point is,” Rusty said, getting to it at last. “Before we take you into the bunker, we need to know if you’re one of us. I mean, really one of us! Not some poser who’s into the Genre just because he’s lonely and all. I know how Buddy boy feels, but I’m going to need a little bit more than his gut feeling.” He looked up at his large friend. “No offense, Gigantor.”
“Your vote’s as important as mine, Skeletor.”
“Well, just what is aCreep?” Tubby asked them. “Beyond the normal definition, that is.” He wondered if they could hear his stomach gurgling, telling him it was coming on lunchtime. Like most fat kids, Tubby didn’t like eating in front of other people who didn’t share his affliction or waist size.