The End of FUN (12 page)

“They've got FUN
®
in Canada now?” I said.

“Apparently so. It's seems like it's everywhere now….” Sam put his face close to mine. “
You're
not on, are you? But then why do I see a faint flicker around the retina?”

Oops.

“You're on FUN
®
?!” said Evie.

“Well, they say ‘having FUN
®
.'”

“Since when? Who said it was OK? How exactly are you
paying
for it?!”

What was there to say? I could feel my forehead breaking out into a sweat. I sat there wishing I had some SweatBlok
®
Clinical Strength Forehead Wipes as seen on Classic Rachael Ray (YAY!), or better yet, a way to tell her everything and just get it off my chest—but I knew that if I told my sister everything, my life as I knew it was over. So instead I just told her a little bit. I told her I'd started having FUN
®
, yes, but that it was totally manageable. I was earning my way, even making some extra money on the side.

She wasn't convinced.

“What about school? What does Mom have to say about all this?”

BOO! for those questions, and YAY! again for good old Sam, who leapt courageously to my defense.

“Well, but Aaron appears to have control over it. My Canadian friend most certainly does
not
. There's a difference. You don't play games, do you, Aaron? Mr. International spends all day playing
games
. What's that one everyone's always talking about?”

“
Murder Driver
?”

“No.”

“
Flower Stomper
?”

“No…the one with the exploding panda baby.”

“
Tickle, Tickle, Boom!
That's a great game.”

“Great? It's like a
drug
. He's on it
all
the time. He wants me to have FUN
®
, too, but there's no way I'm ever letting anyone mess with
my
eyes. They're the only ones I've got.”

“Me either,” said Evie. “FUN
®
is dangerous!”

The tide had turned. Now it was my turn to take some abuse. Sam and Evie lectured me on the corroding forces of modernity and the value of everyday reality, and I gave them both the finger and told them they'd be having FUN
®
within a year. There was no way around it. In the same way that people used to swear they'd never get a television, or a cell phone, or a wristphone, or goggles, or whatever. It was only a matter of time.

We blabbed for a while, and then it got late, and everyone was tired. Out of pride I'd decided not to ask if I could crash that night on their couch—I would wait for them to ask me. But they didn't, and it got later, and finally I decided to leave. Before I left I got up and rifled through the drawers in my grandpa's cabinet, just to see what was there. There wasn't much. But in the bottom drawer, I did find something kind of cool. Two things, actually. A pair of old-timey snowshoes—the leather ones that look like tennis rackets—and this little silver harmonica.

“I'm taking this harmonica. And these snowshoes.”

“Go ahead!” said Evie. “Take it all! Drag the cabinet back to Sacramento if you want.”

“I just want the harmonica and snowshoes.”

“Take some cookies with you, too. I'm sick to death of snickerdoodles.”

Sam wrapped me up a plate, and Evie reminded me to return the plate, and I ate almost all of them on the way home and fed the last two to Bones, who was curled up on my bed with my shoe. She ate the cookies, but she wouldn't trade me a snowshoe for my Osmos
™
IV—she growled every time I went to make the swap. She did let me sleep on the bed with her, though, so that was good.

“Sweet dreams, Bones,” I said.

When I woke in the morning Bones was gone, and so was my shoe, and so was my dad.

There was a note in the kitchen:

I was kind of hungry, so I tried scrounging up some breakfast, but it was a pretty bleak scene. No toast, no orange juice, no eggs. Nothing.

“Yay.”

But no, none of that, either.

I took a bottle of ketchup, a box of taco shells, and a jar of unopened pickles, and combined these ingredients as best I could, but when I was done it didn't look very appetizing, so I left it on the plate. I was hungry, but not that hungry. I was gonna have to get a little more hungry before I ate that thing.

Alone in the empty house I wasn't quite sure what to do with myself. I'm no amateur at pissing away a morning, but the present circumstances threw me off. The snow had left a strange silence and I felt uneasy in my old home. I got up to check out the record player—
my
record player, if you wanted to get technical about it.

I put on a record and laid the needle in the groove. It had a cool sound—not so much the music but the fuzz and pop of the needle, like radio static. As I was listening to it, something occurred to me. A solution to a problem that I'd been turning over in my mind. I stopped the player and lifted the arm thing with the needle on it. It was a tiny, tiny needle, and it took me a second to figure out how to get it off the arm thing…and then I figured it out. I took off the needle and slipped it into my pocket.

I was still sleepy, so I cranked up the thermostat and got back into bed, but just as I was drifting off, a phone began to ring. Dad's phone. He'd left it on top of his dresser. I silenced it and got back into bed, and this time I fell asleep, or almost did, but not for long because then the phone was ringing again. No—more like buzzing. The doorbell. I let it buzz, but it kept on buzzing, so I got up to answer it.

There was a woman standing on the porch. I didn't recognize her at first because of the hat. Or actually, it was more like a bonnet: this gray-blue cloth thing, like what a Pilgrim might wear, with her hair tucked into it so that her ears stuck out in a nice way. In addition to the bonnet, she had on a long gray dress with an apron and lacy shawl thing. A strange getup, especially considering it had to be 10 degrees out, but she was looking at me like
I
was the odd one out.

“Arnold? What are you doing here? Where's Jim?”

Arnold?
Oh, right.

“Hi, Katie.”

Again, I thought about telling her the truth, but then OTOH I was doing pretty well so far as Arnold, so why change it up now? Instead, I told her half the truth:

“Yeah, um, Jim is my, uh—uncle. It was his dad who passed away—my grandpa.”

“Jim is your
uncle
?” She gazed at me for a moment, processing the information.

“That's a cool dress,” I said. “Very retro.”

“It's from wardrobe.”

“Never heard of it. Do they sell men's stuff, too?”

“
Wardrobe
—for the play. Don't you know about the play?”

“What play?”

“
Taming of the Shrew.
They changed the final run-through time—didn't he hear? He's the only one with a key, and he won't answer his phone. Right now as we speak twenty people are standing around in the snow in period costume.”

“Wait. Slow down. My—
Jim
is in a play?”

“Yes.”

“Does he
play
someone in the play?”

“Yes, of course. Tonight!”

“Who does he play?”

“I really don't have time to discuss all this.”

“And who are you? Is there like a Pilgrim in the play?”

Katie drew the shawl thing tighter around her shoulders. Her eyes were all icy blue. “I'm the
Shrew
,” she said. “Where the hell is your uncle?”

The truth is, I didn't know. He'd just said
errand
. So I invited her inside. She could wait here in the warm. I had the heater going and everything. We could listen to Bob Wills on vinyl and snuggle together on the couch. I didn't actually tell her about that last part, about the snuggling, but it didn't matter. She didn't want to come inside anyway.

“Just tell your uncle to get his butt down to the theater!”

She headed to her truck. Her hand was on the door when I called out to her.

“Hey! Wait! You know those riddles you gave me? I've got two of them figured out already!”

And the woman, the Shrew, Katie—she wheeled around, and it seemed for a moment like she was about to say something—but she didn't. Instead, she got in her truck, slammed the door, fired up the engine, and went rolling down the street.

Dad and Bones showed up maybe five minutes after that. I was sitting at the table contemplating my meal again.

“The hell is that?”

“Pickle taco.”

“What's wrong with cereal?”

“You've got cereal?”

“Of course.” He rooted around in the cupboard. “Or maybe I don't. But here. I got you something else.” He dug into his pocket and pulled out a baggie of white powder, and I was gonna make a crack about it being cocaine, but then he said, “Baked fresh from the mortuary,” and I knew what it was.

“Grandpa's ashes.”

“It was in the will, remember? He wanted half of him buried and half of him cremated and then shot out of a gun. And by the way, this is the last thing I do. I'm now officially done with the old goat. If you want to shoot him out of a gun, that's on you. Here. Catch.”

YAY! for color-coded triple-lock Ziplock
®
FreshLock
™
locking zip bags, which may be tossed and dropped without bursting into a powdery cloud. I picked it off the floor and hefted the strange weight. Half of my grandfather. Weird.
Then a question occurred to me.

“Wait—so did the funeral people just, like, saw him in half?”

Dad gave me his one look, the one that says,
What are you, an idiot?
“No—they cremated him and
then
divided him.”

“Oh.”

He plopped down on the easy chair and grabbed his canteen. “Just gonna catch my breath, then I gotta get ready to go—got another little errand to run.”

“Yeah, I think you may be a little late on that one.”

I told him about the time change and the key situation, all those actors standing around in the snow, and he popped back out of his chair like a video in reverse. He ran around grabbing different things, swearing and cursing, and just as he was about to fly out the door, I reminded him I needed a ride to the train station.

“Get your stuff, then!”

“Well, I still got an hour.”

Dad shoved some papers in a bag. “That's OK! You can be early!”

BOO! for that. Who wants to sit in the cold waiting for a train? I took my time packing, and my dad climbed up and down the walls like a mad spider, and then we got in the car. He backed it out of the garage and we got about three feet before the wheels started spinning in place. Right. The drive hadn't been shoveled. He slammed the pedal to the floor and the car rocked and shuddered, and finally the old Mazda powered through the drift and went sliding into the street.

We skidded to a stop in front of the Amtrak station. Dad threw me out of the car and shoved my bag in my arms.

“Take care. Have a good trip back. Keep up on your schoolwork.”

Standing in the snow in my dad's moccasins, I realized something. “Crap! My shoe!”

But he was late and he didn't want to drive me back to the house and he was already getting back in the Mazda.

“Keep the moccasins and I'll mail you the shoe later! I really gotta go, OK? Say hi to your mom and what's-his-name.”

He left me in the station in the freezing cold, and I wasn't happy about it. All these questions kept rushing through my mind. Did I want to leave home again just like that? Did I really want to go back to the hivehouse? What about the inheritance? What about that book,
True Tales of Buried Treasure
? What about
Look behind the portrait of Mary
? Maybe there was
another
portrait. Maybe I could find it. Maybe there was a whole mother lode of money and treasure just waiting for me. And then everything would be OK. I could pay back my dad and get out of
FAIL
and everything would be cool. It seemed like a reasonable solution.