Blimpo: The Third Circle of Heck (28 page)

“Yeah, it almost sounds like an order. Get a load of this: ‘Whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.’”

Virgil crinkled his freckled nose.

“I don’t like the sound of that one.”

“But wait,” Milton continued feverishly, “it makes overeating seem like a weakness, an addiction, almost. A
venial
sin more than an absolute one that hurts other people.”

Virgil stared at his friend with eyes devoid of comprehension.

“A veal sin? Like eating baby cows?”

“No,
venial,”
Milton explained. “It means forgivable. Something not worthy of, in our case, eternal darnation.”

Virgil mulled over this theological nugget.

“So being fat maybe isn’t so bad after all?” he said, his chest puffing out slightly, giving his belly a run for its money. “I’m not … evil. Just a little weak-willed?”

Milton smiled at his friend, so wide that Virgil could actually see Milton’s teeth through his grinning meat mask.

“Why would I rescue someone evil? I only rescue the best!”

Virgil leaned in close to Milton, his eyes darting about guiltily.

“So,” he whispered, “have you and Annubis thought of a way out of here?”

Milton, through his borrowed Pang eyes, stared at the snoring teacher.

“No,” he murmured. “Not yet. But he’s got some ideas cooking.”

Virgil stared off into space. His eyes glittered as if he were wearing diamond contact lenses.

“Maybe it isn’t
just
about escaping,” Virgil said in a voice deeper and surer than Milton was accustomed to. “Maybe it’s about something
more.”

27 • SOME ASSEMBLY
REQU
i
RED

LYON, HER POM-POMS
shaking softly in neutral, sneered at the crowd of overweight boys, girls, and teachers perched upon the Gymnauseum’s bowed bleachers.

“Hey, Dijon!” she shouted in her silver satin, two-piece cheerless-leading outfit. “Do you know why Blimpo is like a candy store?”

Dijon smiled, her teeth sparkling like pearls chemically whitened at great expense.

“No, Lyon. Why
is
Blimpo like a candy store?”

Lyon jutted out her hip in sassy defiance.

“Because it’s full of so many big, fat
suckers!”

The five girls laughed wickedly, then assembled in a V-for-vain formation.

“Hey, Bordeaux!” Lyon called out, twirling like a top. “Do you know what time it is?”

Bordeaux furrowed her eyebrows at her watch.

“I, like, so don’t know!” she replied with a dopey curl of her lip.

“It’s time for a Nyah Nyah cheer!” Lyon screeched.

Milton and Virgil wriggled uncomfortably at the very top of the bleachers.

“Wow, and I thought these things were bad when I was alive!” Virgil said.

Milton stared at one of the many banners strewn across the Gymnauseum:
CHAMPIONS ONLY BELIEVE IN THEMSELVES IF EVERYONE ELSE DOES, AND TRUST US: YOU’RE NO CHAMPION
.

“Yeah,” he replied softly. “This bites … mega bites.”

“Giga
bites!” Virgil added as the cheerlessleaders hopped atop one another to form a pyramid.

Milton thought he recognized two of the girls, Lyon and Bordeaux, from the time that he was led—bound and gagged—to Mallvana, right after his second death (not that he was counting). He couldn’t be completely sure, though, what with the sack he had been forced to wear over his head and the fact that he had always found it difficult to distinguish one cheerleader from another. Across the auditorium, he saw an immaculate woman watching the cheerless leaders’ every move. The woman’s bearing
was both fussy and sinister, sleek and scaly. For some reason, Milton visualized a python full of Persian pussycats.

Milton gazed at the other boys sitting several bleachers below. Even though they had had only a few servings of Hambone Hank’s new recipe, they seemed …
different
. Lighter. More carefree and childlike. Thankfully for Milton and his not-so-secret identity, Hugo seemed to be satisfied with his altered soul food. Heck, the boys were even smiling at the squad of conceited girls brought here to Blimpo for the expressed purpose of berating and humiliating them.

“So, you think Hollow Wean is the night?” Virgil whispered, though no one besides Milton could possibly hear him over the din of debutants debu-
taunting
. “You know, for escaping?”

Milton nodded. “Yep. I think even if the principal rears her ugly, ugly head, it’s our best, maybe our only, chance to slip away. Annubis and I have been trading some ideas back and forth on napkins.”

The self-centered pyramid crumbled, girl by girl, with the Nyah Nyah Narcissisters falling into a fiercely perky line. Marseille took the lead—pried it away, more like—from Lyon.

Out of the corner of his eye, Milton noticed something crawling on the back of Thaddeus’s head. He stared at the boy and realized that there wasn’t anything crawling
on
his head but that the crawling
was
his head: for a split second, his thick, dark hair rippled—becoming a hazy light purple and nappy, like a child’s worn toy. Thaddeus tipped back his head
and giggled at nothing in particular, his eyes gleaming like black buttons, and—with that—he was his same old self.

It must be the Make-Believe Play-fellow souls
, Milton speculated.
The souls affect the boys like the Lost Souls did—mixing with their energy as they’re “digested”—only they seem to cycle through fainter, faster, and more … fantastical
.

“Do you have any idea where we’d go?” Virgil asked. “After the escape?”

Good question
, Milton thought. But he didn’t want to discourage his sensitive friend.

“Annubis said he had some friends who could help us,” Milton fibbed, rationalizing to himself that the dog god more than likely had friends and that some of them, statistically speaking, could probably help them. “He didn’t go into specifics,” he added, which
was
true, as Annubis had not gotten into specifics whatsoever. “He wants to keep it on the down low, just in case.”

And with Bea “Elsa” Bubb dropping by
, Milton continued to himself,
anywhere is bound to be better than here
.

Across the Gymnauseum, Madame Pompadour scrutinized her Nyah Nyah Narcissisters with the deep green liquid pools of judgment that were her eyes. Suddenly, her clutch bag began to hiss and purr. She pulled out her compact and flipped it open.

Of course I know who it is
, Madame Pompadour thought.
Who else would have a profile pic so ugly that even a bowl of Rice Krispies wouldn’t talk to it?

She sighed and reluctantly texted a response.

Madame Pompadour was so mad she could spit imported venom.

I don’t want Bubb scratching in my kitty litter
, she seethed to herself.
Not now. Not ever
.

Madame Pompadour’s pads worked furiously on her compact’s keypad, as if she were tenderizing a freshly seized mouse.

Madame Pompadour sighed. Even on the best of days, she hated emoticons.

She clenched her pearly white teeth together.

;-)

Madame Pompadour shut her compact and resumed her critical appraisal of her Nyah Nyah Narcissisters. The formation of sleek, snobby girls parted, creating a row down the middle. Strasbourg sprinted down the aisle, tumbled, and then executed three back-to-back handsprings. Lyon regained possession of the microphone from Marseille and skipped around the gym floor in a wide circle, goading the front row.

The girls turned up their noses with their index fingers behind her, oinking.

The squad swiveled their hips while pretending to fry bacon in a pan.

Lyon rejoined the other girls, who were now parading in a tight circle in the middle of the floor.

Like a fireworks finale, the Nyah Nyah Narcissisters leaped in the air, their hands touching their toes, and ended their abusive routine by performing a series of cartwheels, aerials, and round-offs. The girls beamed contemptuously, their NNN jerseys heaving with each breath, and eyed the crowd under the mistaken impression that they were about to bask in waves of wild adulation. Bordeaux—thinking that the crowd needed one last stunt before detonating in a riot of noise and acclamation—jogged to the edge of the mats, turned on the pad of her foot, then made a mad dash for her “sisters” before soaring in the air. Unfortunately, as Bordeaux had failed to inform the rest of the squad of their need to catch her, she landed face-first upon the mat. Finally, the audience applauded and whooped in delight.

Two demons wheeled King Tantalus and his woeful wading pool to the center of the gym floor.

“Charming!” he commented into a microphone strapped to a peach branch. “And what a punch line! Okay, boys, girls, faculty, demons, and everything in between, it’s the time you’ve been waiting for: our pie-eating contest!”

One of the demons, a walking eggplant overlaid with a mesh of muscle, walked over to a table covered
with a white cloth and surrounded by four chairs. He yanked away the cloth, revealing a mound of pies. The small crowd roared.

“Now all I need are four volunteers,” King Tantalus announced. “Please look under your seats. If you find a wad of chewed gum, then come on down!”

The crowd looked under the bleachers. Two students from Girls’ Blimpo—an enormous Asian girl and a sturdy German girl with blond braids piled on top of her head like a hunk of hair strudel—squealed, gum in their fists, and waddled down to the stage.

“Gum!” yelped Gene as he popped an uncovered nugget into his mouth and tumbled off the bleachers.

Milton felt beneath his seat and plucked off a hunk of gum.

“Wow,” Virgil said with awe.
“Lucky.”

Lucky
, Milton reflected sadly.

When Milton had escaped from Limbo, he had done so at the expense of his etheric energy—the spiritual glue that kept his body and soul fused together. After his pet ferret, Lucky, had inadvertently interfered with Milton’s attempt to harness the life force from a swarm of bugs, the two had shared a peculiar energetic bond.
I haven’t felt his energy in weeks
, Milton recalled.
I still feel somehow connected to him, but it’s so dull, so sluggish, so … un-Lucky
.

Milton noticed the longing in Virgil’s eyes as his
friend stared down at the festivities brewing on the Gymnauseum floor.

At least I can pass a little luck on to Virgil
, Milton thought.

“Here,” he said, tossing his friend the disgusting, still-sort-of-squishy wad of gum. “Eat your heart out.”