by S. J. Adams
“Ramona!” Emma greeted a girl who was wearing a halter top and earrings about the size of her whole neck.
“Emma!” said Ramona. She hugged Emma and kissed her on the cheek, then pulled back. “Holy quest?”
“You know it!” said Emma.
“You sure do a lot of holy quests that end up at the bowling alley,” said Ramona.
I’d been a bit surprised to see her face, but hearing her voice was even worse. She sounded like a forty-year-old diner waitress.
“What can I say?” said Emma. “This place is like a portal for holy energy.” She turned around and put her hand on my shoulder. “This is Debbie. Debbie, this is Ramona Morale, Queen of the Bowling Alley Skanks.”
“Snugglepuppies, if you please,” said Ramona. “We like that better.” She smiled, then reached out and shook my hand. I could’ve sworn it was sort of slimy.
“How can I help you guys?” she asked.
“We need to know where the Fellowship of Christian Athletes were going when they left,” said Emma.
“You just missed ’em. They usually go from here to the king,” said Ramona.
“Don the Carpet King or George the Chili King?” Tim asked.
Ramona raised an eyebrow. “Why would they go to a carpet store?”
“Hey, don’t ask me what those guys do in their spare time,” said Tim.
“So that’s where they are?” I asked. “They went to the chili place?”
“No,” said Ramona. “They usually going there, but they didn’t. That Norman guy said he had a date so he didn’t want to be farting all night.”
“That’s who we need,” said Emma. “Norman. He has Debbie’s backpack, and there are some very important documents in there. You have any info on him?”
“Sure,” said Ramona. “Norman Hastings. Creepy guy who always wears a tie. I hear he gave a speech in Biology saying evolution couldn’t be true because there was no such thing as a croco-duck.”
“A croco-duck?” chuckled Emma. “What the hell?”
“It’s a theory he got from Kirk Cameron,” I said.
“Who?” asked Ramona.
“He was a teenage actor in the ’80s,” I said. “Now he’s all grown up and making videos that are supposed to prove God exists.”
“What does a croco-duck have to do with anything?” Emma asked.
I shrugged. “He says that if evolution was true, there should be these half duck, half crocodile mutants out running around or something. I wasn’t really paying attention.”
Kirk’s sister, Candace Cameron, played D. J. on Full House. If she wasn’t all grown up and totally Jesused-out now, too, I’m not sure Lisa would have been so enthusiastic about that show. Her parents might not even have let her watch it when she was younger. I mean, it was about three guys living together in San Francisco, the gay capital of the world. And I swear to God that Uncle Jesse gets spanked by a chimpanzee in one episode.
“You’re an Active Christian Teen?” asked Ramona.
“She just joined because of a girl,” Emma said. “The one Norman’s dating now.”
“Lisa Ashby?” asked Ramona. She really did have all the information about everyone.
I nodded. Seriously, the way everyone was all casual about this just astounded me.
“Bummer,” said Ramona. “But I don’t blame you. Ashby’s a hottie. She’s funny, too.”
“She’s hilarious,” I said.
“Anyway,” said Emma, “do you know where Norman went, if he didn’t go to George the Chili King?”
“No,” said Ramona, “but I can find out, if you want.”
“Please,” said Emma.
“I’m on it.”
She pulled our her phone and started typing out texts and making very short phone calls. She’d say, “I need Hastings,” wait half a second, then hang up.
“What’s she doing?” I asked Emma.
“Calling all of the other skanks,” said Emma.
Ramona looked up and said “Snugglepuppies,” then went back to working her phone.
“Having an in with the local snugglepuppies is about the next best thing to having flying monkeys acting as spies,” said Emma.
Ramona must have gotten ahold of someone who knew something, because the conversation with one person got beyond the first line.
“Did she talk to you?” she asked. Then, “What did you tell her?” and “Did anyone else talk to her?” Then she hung up without saying “thanks” or “good-bye” or anything. I guessed that the bowling alley skank network dispensed with those sort of manners when there was an emergency.
All of a sudden, Ramona put her phone into her purse.
“Got him,” she said.
“You found out where he went?” Emma asked.
“Sure,” said Ramona. “Do you guys have seven bucks in quarters?”
“In quarters?” I asked.
“For the cigarette machine,” Ramona said. “They won’t give change to minors here.”
“You don’t just take information like this from one of these girls,” Emma explained. “You have to trade something for it. It’s only polite.”
I pulled Emma and Tim aside for a second.
“I’m not buying her cigarettes,” I said. “She already sounds like someone’s grandma.”
“Don’t worry, it’s a moot point,” said Emma. “All we have is five bucks and we owe four-fifty of it to the bar for the coffee.”
“What else can we give her?” I asked.
“Well,” said Emma, “there was that one time … ”
“No way!” said Tim. “Not doing that one again!”
“What?” I asked.
“One time she gave us the name of a good hot dog joint in exchange for Tim kissing her for sixty seconds,” said Emma.
“She tasted like a chimney,” said Tim. “And she said I was a lousy kisser!”
Ramona walked up and tapped Emma on the
shoulder. “You guys don’t have seven bucks, do you?” she asked.
“No,” said Emma. “Sorry. Can you just kiss Tim again?”
Tim made a nasty face and Emma fixed him with a dirty look.
“I don’t need to kiss Clammy Lips again,” said Ramona with a smirk. “Her.” And she pointed at me.
“Me?” I asked, as I felt all the blood draining from my face once again.
Ramona smiled and nodded. “Thirty seconds. Or
fifteen with tongue.”
It was all I could do to keep from puking. I turned around and started to run away from the arcade alcove, thinking I could probably start walking and end up at the theater by 7:00 easily, as long as I didn’t mind the chance of getting stuck in a thunderstorm, but Emma caught up with me.
“No way!” I said. “I know it’s one of your holy quest goals, but I’m not kissing her!”
“No one’s asking you to,” said Emma. “We’d never ask you to do something you didn’t want to on a holy quest. We’ll think of something else, okay? Give her five minutes, and she’ll lower the price.”
Emma called back over her shoulder that we’d think it over, and she, Tim, and I walked over to the bar and sat back down with Moira.
This was one messed-up holy quest. I mean, it couldn’t be good to have Tim at a bar if he was supposed to be staying away from liquor. And if Emma was really trying to overcome nympho tendencies, surrounding herself with bowling alley skanks couldn’t possibly be wise.
But I guess I knew that she wasn’t really a nympho.
“No luck?” asked Moira.
I shook my head.
“Ramona found out where he went,” said Emma, “but she wants to kiss Debbie before she’ll give us the address.”
“Can’t she just t
ell us?” I asked. “As a favor?”
“She will if we wait around long enough,” said Emma. “She’s not that big of a bitch. But information about guys is the one thing she has of value. She feels like she has to trade it for something else of value.”
“But … why does she want to kiss me?” I asked.
Emma, Tim, and Moira laughed.
“Duh!” said Emma. “Because you’re the hottest girl here!”
I snorted. “No way.”
“With the possible exception of me,” said Moira.
“Look at those girls,” said Emma, pointing over at the skanks. “They all dress in skimpy clothes, but they’re not that attractive. The only people they ever really get to kiss is each other and some of the grubby bowling alley pedophiles. Any of them would love to get to kiss a cute girl for once.”
“Plus, you’ve got that innocent thing going for you,” said Tim. “They don’t run across girls like that very often in this world.”
“How long will it take to wear her down, do you think?” I asked.
“Not long,” said Emma. “She has a good heart, deep down. She’ll decide to be nice. Give it ten, twenty minutes tops.”
Too long. Every extra second was too much.
“Think I can talk her down to just, like, a quick peck on the cheek?” I asked. “Or even a peck on the lips?”
She was about the last person I wanted my first kiss to be with, but sometimes you have to make sacrifices.
“I’m sure we can bargain with her,” said Emma. “But are you sure you want to do that?”
“No,” I said. “But I’m sure I want my backpack back.”
I was just about to force myself off of my barstool when Emma shouted “Duck!”
Tim and Emma immediately jumped off their stools and ducked down on the floor. I sat there for a split second before deciding I’d better follow.
“What’s going on?” I asked, as I crouched down on the dirty, dirty ground.
“Heather Quinn just came in!” said Emma. “One of the other snugglepuppies must have known she was looking for us and tipped her off that we were here! We’ve got to get out of here FAST.”
“But I need to know where Norman went!” I said.
“I’ll take care of it,” said Emma. “Follow me!”
She got up and ran like hell back to the arcade alcove, and Tim and I followed close behind. I snuck a glance back to see that Heather was casually strolling through the alley, glancing around like she was looking for someone. Tim, obviously.
Back in the alcove, Emma grabbed Ramona by the shoulders.
“We’ve got to get out of here fast,” said Emma. “Can you please tell us where they went?”
Ramona paused just a second, then Emma grabbed her by the back of the head and kissed her—hard—on the mouth. With tongue. And groping. Ramona looked totally shocked, but she couldn’t have possibly been more surprised than I was at that moment.
After a couple of seconds, Emma let Ramona go and said, “Is that enough, or do you want to grab my ass?”
Ramona sounded stunned. “Church,” she said. “They were heading to Norman’s church.”
Emma looked Ramona in the eye. “Swear to me that you won’t tell Quinn where we’re going!”
Ramona paused. If you ask me, she was still too surprised to say anything.
Emma kissed her again, a bit softer. “Swear it?”
Ramona nodded.
“Good!” said Emma.
And she grabbed me by the hand and tugged. We ran like hell, holding hands, with Tim right behind us, out of a side exit next to a huge case full of bowling trophies.
“Keep running!” Emma shouted. We ran all the way to her car, and Emma and Tim climbed into the front while I wormed my way into the back.
We were halfway out of the parking lot before I even got my door shut.
Eleven
No one said anything for a second because we were all too busy catching our breath. I didn’t even stop to think that we’d pulled a dine-and-dash on the coffee, making me into a thief, until Tim brought it up.
“You know we didn’t pay for the coffee,” he said.
“Moira’ll cover it,” said Emma. “We can pay her back next time we see her. She knows it was an emergency.”
“I can’t believe you kissed Ramona like that!” I said.
Emma shrugged. “It wasn’t that big of a deal. It was just like giving CPR. Only with tongue.”
I couldn’t believe that she could kiss Ramona like that and survive. You’d think she’d transfer some gunk right into her lungs or something.
“I guess you can cross off the girl-on-girl kiss goal,” I said.
“No we can’t,” said Emma. “The goal was to have at least one of the girls be kissing a girl for the first time.”
“You’ve kissed girls before?”
“It comes up on holy quests now and then.”
Great. Even straight girls got more action than I did.
“Had you kissed her before?”
“No,” said Emma. “She’s kinda gross.”
“Thanks for kissing her anyway,” I said. “I really owe you one.”
“Matter of the heart.”
We cruised around, making a few more sudden bootlegger turns, before we ended up someplace deep in the heart of the near-west suburbs.
“We’re probably safe for now,” Tim said. “When Quinn makes it to the arcade, Ramona will probably distract her for us.”
“I hope so,” said Emma. “But she might be in some kind of snugglepuppy power struggle with whoever called Quinn when we got there, and that girl might jump in and tell her we left. And Quinn probably has smokes to trade for information on us.”
We had driven all the way out of Des Moines proper and back into the west suburbs now. On the stereo, some guy was singing about a boy and girl who were twin high-maintenance machines. We were almost all the way through Urbandale, the first suburb to the south of Cornersville Trace, when I had another small panic attack.
“Minor problem,” I said. “We didn’t find out which church they were going to.”
“I assume it’s the Methodist one in Clive,” said Emma.
“Why?”
“Because I know Norman went there, at least in sixth grade. He probably hasn’t switched.”
“How do you know?”
“In middle school, she was Little Miss Fundamentalist,” said Tim, with a bit of a chuckle.
“No way,” I said.
Emma nodded “Someone told me that the reason I was fat had something to do with God, so I started trying to get on his good side so he’d make me thin. Then I realized that thinking I was all righteous and everything all the time was turning me into a complete asshole, and not even a skinny one, so I gave it up. I don’t think I can be sent to hell for trying to be less of an asshole.”
“We figure that people who pick the wrong religion can change their minds after they die and get off with a stern lecture, if they weren’t too big of jerks about it,” said Tim. “So if we’re totally screwing this up, we’ll be happy to apologize.”
“The people at Lisa’s church say it’s too late when you die,” I said.
“Most churches say that,” said Tim. “But I think it’s only fair to let people change their mind after they see the answer sheet. If they’re not going to play fair up there, they’re definitely going to get us on something, anyway.”
“And it’s definitely not fair to expect people to think a religion that makes you a dick is the right one,” Emma added. Then she sang along with a line in the song on the stereo about feasting and dancing in Jerusalem.
I liked the sound of all this. Before I decided I was agnostic and didn’t really believe in hell, I’d
always kind of assumed I was going there. I figured that no matter what I did, I’d show up at the gates and they’d pull out a few new rules that I didn’t even know about. It was just my luck. By now, I believed that when I died, I’d probably just decompose and that would be it, but obviously I’d change my mind if I found myself heading into a light.
We rolled past Hickman Avenue, the border that separates Urbandale from Clive.
“I love this town’s name,” said Emma. “Clive. It sounds like a disease, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” said Tim. “Like, ‘Don’t sleep with that girl—I hear she’s got Clive!’”
“And don’t even get me started on Beaverdale,” said Emma.
I don’t know what it was, but something about that struck me as so hilarious that I started cracking up—so hard that I was afraid I was going to pee myself.
“Nice,” said Tim. “You broke Debbie.”
I can’t even say how weird it was feeling like I could think about that sort of thing in public—both the name and having to pee, in addition to all the stuff about Lisa. I wasn’t worried about Emma and Tim reading my mind. They didn’t seem like the type who would, even if they could. But if they were, I didn’t really even mind.
It was awfully liberating just to be able to think about having to pee. Even though I felt like all of the butterflies in my stomach had merged into one big mutant beast that was about to flutter right out of my skin, I also felt kind of great.
Committing crimes was sort of a rush.
“You know what?” Emma said, interrupting my reverie. “Moira was totally into you.”
“What?” I said.
“Totally,” Tim agreed.
“She likes girls?” I asked.
“Well, girls and guys who act like Clark Gable,” said Emma. “But there aren’t any of those kind of guys in town who aren’t gay, so she sticks to girls.”
“And you think she liked me?”
“Are you kidding?” asked Emma. “That girl was smitten. When she found out you liked girls, her face just lit up.”
“She’s probably thinking about you right now,” said Tim.
Just as she said that, I noticed an eyelash on my