simbeline:
mamacita u guys are out of ur minds. u crossed the line like a hundred miles back. it’s not cool when it gets so personal
mrs.j.cadmus:
whatever its what they deserve!!!
murklurk:
Maxie, do your job. Ban her already.
Miss Maxima:
hey_mamacita, this is your FINAL warning. Not to defend the horror that is Brandon and Abel, but this Hell Bells thing is hella creepy and you know it. I know where you live and if you and your minions don’t stop cluttering my community with your utter psychosis I swear I WILL MURDER YOU IN YOUR SLEEP.
“Oh my fucking goodness,” says Abel.
A shiver slides up my spine.
“What is this?” says Bec.
Abel explains the reference. The ring of silver bells Xaarg rattles when he’s launching a new nightmare for the castaways doesn’t technically have a name, but most fandom geeks call them the Hell Bells. “I don’t know what it has to do with us, though,” he says.
“You’ve never seen them talk about it?” I scan the comments again.
“Nope. Why would I?”
“You’re on here more than I am.”
“Just to laugh at the fic. Never seen word one about this.” Abel taps his lip and studies the screen. A slow smile stretches across his face. “I don’t want to alarm you guys, but this might be awesome.”
“I don’t like it,” I say.
“Why not? I bet it’s a secret snark community with some hilarious vendetta against us.”
“God, no.”
“Virtual voodoo dolls. Desperate plans to overthrow us. ‘We’ll blow up the RV! Assassinate them at the ball!’”
“Don’t say that.”
“Relax. It’s a joke.”
“Then how come they’re freaking out?”
“They’re being drama queens, I guarantee you. It’s fandom, Bran. Getting butthurt over nothing is practically a sacrament.”
It’s a sign, says Father Mike. God’s telling you something.
“It’s probably nothing.” Bec touches my arm.
“Yeah, I mean who cares if they’re talking shit about us?” Abel pops more cinnamon jellybeans. “Least we got ‘em talking.”
“Right. Yeah.”
“We should get in on the trivia game or something.”
Pearl is over; a new album starts. The Beatles. The party’s loud and the music wafts in and out of my consciousness, like in the morning when the song on your alarm clock drifts into your dream.
“Bran,” Abel says. “You want to be on my team?”
The aisle feels hot and narrow. Rubber Soul. I’m ten again, riding home from Disney in the Sunseeker, sitting up in the cab with Dad while Mom reads an Agatha Christie with her Mickey ears on and Nat broods in the loft scrawling postcards to potheads. Dad’s St. Christopher medal dangles from the rearview, scattering splinters of light on the ceiling. Somewhere in North or South Carolina the CD changer calls up “In My Life” and Dad turns all sad and tender like when he watches Field of Dreams or drinks too much Miller Lite at the Donnellys’ Super Bowl party. “Someday you’ll be sitting here behind a wheel, and your family will be back there,” he says to me, just the thought of my future making him smile, “and you’ll feel like this, like everything is exactly the way it’s supposed to be.”
I look up. Bec and Abel are staring.
“I don’t feel good, you guys,” I say. “I think I need to go.”
***
I sit in the Home-N-Garden lot where we’re stealth-parked for the night, sipping Dad’s generic antacid on the pull-out metal steps of the Sunseeker. A warm wind sifts through my hair and skips a crushed beer can across the empty parking lot; in the distance, it rustles the tarp on the garden center’s koi pond and the white rose bushes that look like my father’s.
On the ride back from the bookstore I made my first I’m-fine call to Mom and Dad.
Liar.
Down the street, a church points its sharp white steeple at the moon. I’ve never been inside it, but I know what it smells like on a summer Sunday—old-lady perfume and new-baby powder and the sweet creamy scent of memorial carnations. I miss a lot of stuff about church. Strumming “Morning Has Broken” at the 6:00 Folk Mass, flipping pancakes with Dad at Sunday socials, laughing with everyone at the jokes Father Mike would crack as he read off the weekly announcements. I feel bad that the stuff I miss doesn’t have much to do with God, that I don’t miss the prayers or the psalms or that quiet time after Communion when Father Mike said the Big Guy Upstairs could read our hearts. I never liked that idea, even when I was younger and the idea of God seemed simple. I’m not optimistic enough to trust in a kind and merciful higher power like my mother does, so it’s almost more comfortable to doubt one exists at all. In my strongest moments I become Sim. Programmed for poetry and logic, destined for a scrap heap, no Bible verses rattling out of context in my head and no possible reckonings or afterlives to worry about. And then I pass a church or see a priest on TV and I’m back where I was when I was twelve, sweating every swear word and boy crush and offering up a guilty rushed prayer. Just in case.
“The android felt himself slowly awaken.”
Behind the RV door, Abel’s reading Bec a bedtime story.
“Desire surged through him, flooding his processors. He remembered the day he and Cadmus jumped into the Red River, the current making helpless marionettes of their bodies.”
“That’s…actually not bad,” I hear Bec say.
“It’s murklurk,” Abel says. “So tragic, when bad pairings happen to good writers. Listen to this…”
I make my arms a nest and rest my head inside. Father Mike finds me in the dark, like he did when I was thirteen and he caught me and Mark Tarrulo coughing on cigarettes in the church basement. He’d pull out the same I-am-calm-yet-concerned voice he used on me then.
You’re worried, aren’t you? Operation Hell Bells? C’mon.
Abel reads, “Cadmus released the remnants of his fear. He pulled the android close in the dim amber light of the cave, searching his face for the sign that said yes, our time is now, I want you too.”
Brandon, God sends us signs. It just takes courage to read them.
“Sim felt his features respond, arrange themselves into the happiness he had seen so often on the faces of others…”
Do you really think He’s happy with you? You spend all year doubting Him, and then you run off to nowhere with a boy?
“’I want to stay here with you,’ Cadmus whispered. ‘The two of us. Here together. Alone.’”
Come home, bud. Just come home.
I choke down the last swig of antacid. It tastes like chalk and the cherry cough drops at the bottom of Gram’s purse. I think about Lester and Gladys. What their house must look like, a queen-size bed that’s always made and a dinner table with a clean white tablecloth and walls hung with history: science fair ribbons, woven crowns from old Palm Sundays, framed photos of their sons at every age.
You won’t have that now, says Father Mike. Don’t kid yourself, kiddo.
I go into a windup with the drained antacid bottle, aim at a wood-slat wastecan. I want contact, a Louisville Slugger crack.
I miss by a mile.
Chapter Five
“Fellow Casties: We have arrived.”
We stand on the amazing technicolor carpet of the Fairlee Hotel in Cleveland, in front of a life-size cardboard cutout of Bree LaRue and a pull-down screen with a fanvid flickering on it. Abel’s costume of the day: Cadmus shades, skinny jeans with sky-blue hightops, a red puffy vest over a tight black shirt he stole from Kade.