Adam wasn’t handcuffed or tied down or anything, which was kind of odd. Usually if somebody is slicing up your chest with a pizza cutter, you try to get away.
His arms were at his sides, and he was shivering. He looked sort of paralyzed.
Kelley expressed my thoughts: “What the hell?”
“Excuse me, hello, you ever hear of knocking?” asked Donna. She glared at Kelley and me then addressed her parents, “I thought you were going to kill them.”
“Your father and I decided against human sacrifice for the night,” said Mildred.
“Well, that’s lame.”
“Let him go,” said Glenn.
“I’m not holding him down. He’s free to leave whenever he wants.” Donna scooted away from him.
“Uh-huh. And I’m sure you didn’t inject him with the paralyzing spider venom.” Mildred sighed. “What dosage did you use?” “The small one.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure! I know where to fill the hypodermic needle! Stop treating me like I’m a baby!”
“Well, put on your shoes. We’re going out.”
“To Chick-fil-A?”
“No.”
“We never go to Chick-fil-A anymore!”
“And we’re never going back if your attitude doesn’t improve,” said Glenn. “Your mother said to put on your shoes. We need to take these people to meet somebody very important.”
“You’re really letting them live?”
“Yes. I already said that. Your mother and I don’t like having to repeat ourselves.”
“But they’ve seen our faces! They know where we live! They’re looking at me right now with a pizza cutter in my hand! We can’t just let them walk out of here with their heads still on!” “They’re not walking anywhere. We’re driving them. Don’t make me tell you again to put on your shoes.”
“You cut off most of his ear! You can’t let somebody go after you cut off most of his ear! You guys are stupid!”
“Not that we owe you an explanation, but we didn’t cut off anything. His ear exploded. Exploded. From the power of voodoo. We taught you about voodoo, remember?”
“Yeah, you poke a doll and somebody’s leg hurts. So what?” “‘So what’ is that this young man has somebody holding a voodoo doll hostage, and that’s why his ear exploded. How popular do you think you would be in school if your ears exploded?”
“I don’t know. It might look kind of badass.”
“That’s enough!” said Mildred. “Young lady, as long as you live in our house, you will respect our rules, and when we say that there will be no human sacrifices tonight, well, that’s exactly what we mean.” She looked more closely at Adam. “He’s going to survive, right?”
“Of course he’s going to survive. You didn’t give me enough time to cut him deep.”
“Why aren’t you putting on your shoes?”
“I’m going to put on my stupid shoes! Jeez! Why are you guys always so testy? How come you never yell at Franklin to put on his shoes?”
“Because Franklin puts on his shoes when we tell him that we’re leaving the house!” said Mildred. “We never have to keep telling him over and over. You’re way too old for us to keep having to treat you this way. Keep up the attitude problem, and I promise we will take away the pizza cutter, the spider venom, the daggers—all of them, even the one with the hidden compartment—those special pliers that Grandma made for you, your TV, everything. All of it, gone into storage until you go to college! Don’t think we don’t mean it. Don’t think that for one single solitary second we’re kidding around, because I know exactly which storage facility we’ll use, and they’re open twenty-four hours a day, and I have never been more serious about anything in my life!”
Mildred and Donna stared each other down angrily. Then Donna bit her lower lip and nodded. “Okay, I’ll get my shoes.” Some more of my right ear exploded.
Again, not the whole thing, but at least another inch of it came off. I screamed (and though this wasn’t on my mind at the moment, thinking back, I do have to say that this house really did have some impressive soundproofing. How many times had someone screamed since we’d arrived? I’m not going to go back and count, but it was a lot, and nobody had come to investigate the noise. I’m no expert on soundproofing, but this was quality work. My most sincere compliments to the designer) and dropped to my knees.
It hurt worse this time. I guess the upper half of your ear has more nerve endings than the lower half.
As far as I knew, it was only my ear. But were there other parts inside your body that could explode without you knowing it? Maybe some crucial internal organ had popped too, and I was minutes away from death without even knowing it! This night sucked! Sucked! Sucked!
“It’s gonna be okay, Tyler,” said Kelley, using the bottom of her shirt to wipe blood off the side of my head. “You’re going to be fine. I promise. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
I was going to die!
It hadn’t been thirty minutes! Not even close!
I was going to die!
What had I accomplished in this life? Some good grades, a girlfriend.but had I done anything to improve the economy? Had I created any lasting works of art? Would anybody remember my high video game scores after I was gone?
I was going to die!
I’d never see my mom again. My dad. My grandparents. My friends. My teachers. The lunch lady who never openly judged me for unhealthy food choices.
I was going to die!
I didn’t want to die!
But I was going to die!
I didn’t deserve this. I deserved bad things to happen to me, yeah, but not this. Not death! I was too young to die! I didn’t want to die when people would throw themselves on my casket and say, “He was so young! So very young! What a tragedy!” I wanted to die when people would say, “Wow, we thought that shriveled old geezer would never kick the bucket!”
And then—
Hello. My name is Herbert Gellsteinner. I am a professional ghostwriter. This does not mean that I write about ghosts. It means that I write books for people who put their names on the cover but did not actually write anything. You know that reality TV star whom you secretly suspect can’t even read but who suddenly announces a seven-figure deal with a major publisher? I wrote that for her.
Sometimes there’s an “As Told to ” credit where I sit
in a room with a celebrity and they babble for a few hours and I turn the transcript into a book, and sometimes I do not get credit at all, and the celebrity goes around on his book tour, saying, “No, I wrote it. I wrote it all. I’m a good writer.”
Sometimes there are more tragic circumstances for my involvement, such as cases where the author really was writing their book but was not lucky enough not to die during the writing process. In those sad cases, it is my job to complete the book, because otherwise you would have to read a book that just ended with “And then—” and you would never know what happens.
However, that is not the case here. If the next part was “And then Tyler’s brain exploded,” well, how would he have written everything you have read so far?
No, I am writing this because I believe that teenagers are the future, and I believe that at least one of you reading these words right now will become a rich and famous celebrity, and you will sell a book for a lot of money, and you will need somebody to write it for you. Please consider me for that task. I work cheap. Very cheap. And you can yell at me all you want while I am writing. I don’t care. I welcome it. I really need this. I need it bad. Please become a celebrity. Please.