Before I begin, I just want to say that this story is just a copy of Paper Towns the book by John Green. But this story is JUST like the book except the characters. They're Lab Rats characters. Ok, Here's the list:
Quentin Jacobsen = Chase Davenport
Margo Roth Spiegelman = Bree Skylar Henderson
Ben Starling = Adam Ferrygan
Radar = Leo Dooley
Lacey Pembertom = Danielle Reena
Rachel Spiegelman = Jackiline Henderson
Mr and Mrs. Jacobsen = Tasha and Donald Davenport
Mr and Mrs. Spiegelman = Jack and Maria Henderson
I don't own anything XD. So on with the story
The way I figure it, everyone gets a miracle. Like, I will probably never be struck by lightning, or win a Nobel Prize, or contract eat cancer, or spotaneously combust. But if consider all the unlikely things together, at least one of them will probably happen to each of us. I could have seen it rain frogs. I could have stepped foot on Mars. I could have been eaten by a whale. I could have married the queen of England or survived months at sea. But my miracle was different. My miracle was this: out of all the subdivisions in all of Florida, I ended up living left door to Bree Skylar Henderson.
Out Subdivision, Jefferson Park, used to be a navy base. But then the navy didn't need it anymore, so it returned the land to the citizens of Orlando, Florida, who decided to build a massive subdivision, because that's what Florida does with with land. My parents and Bree's parents ended up moving next door to one another just after the first houses were built. Bree and I were two.
Before Jefferson Park was a Pleasentville, and before it was a navy base, it belonged to an actual Jefferson, this guy Dr. Jefferson Jefferson. Dr. Jefferson Jefferson has a school named after him in Orlando and also a large charitable foundation, but the fascinating and unbelievable-but-true thing about Dr. Jefferson Jefferson is that he was not a doctor of any kind. He was just an orange juice salesmen named Jefferson Jefferson. When he became rich and powerful, he went to court and made "Jefferson" his middle name, and then changed his first name to "Dr." Capital D. Lowercase r. Period.
So Bree and I were nine. Our parents were friends, so we would sometimes play together, biking past cul-de-sacced streets to Jefferson Park itself, the hub of our subdivision's wheel.
I always got very nervous whenever I heard that Bree was about to show up, on account of how she was most fantastically gorgeous creature that God had ever created. On the morning in question, she wore white shorts and a pink T-shirt that featured a green dragon breathing fire of orange glitter. It is difficult to explain how awesome I found this T-shirt at a time.
Bree, as always, biked standing up, her arms locked as she leaned above the handlebars, her purple sneakers in circuitous blur. It was a steam-hot day in March. The sky was clear, but the air tasted like acidic, like it might storm later.
At the time, I fancied myself an inventor, and after we locked up our bikes and began the short walk across the park to the playground, I told Bree about an idea I had for an invention called the Ringolator. The Ringolator was a gigantic cannon that would shoot big, colored rocks into very low orbit, giving Earth the same sort of rings that Saturn has. (I still think this would be a fine idea, but it turns out that building a cannon that can shoot boulders into a low orbit is fairly complicated.)
I'd been to the park so many times before that it was mapped in my mind, so we were only a few steps inside when I began to sense that the world was out of order, when though I couldn't immediately figure out what was different.
"Chase," Bree said quietly, calmly.
She was pointing. And then I realized was was different.
There was a live oak a few feet ahead of us. Thick and gnarled and ancient looking. That was not new. The playground on our right. Not new, either. But now, a guy wearing a gray suit, slumped against the trunk of the oak tree. Not moving. This was new. He was encircled in blood; a half-dried fountain of it poured out of his mouth. The mouth open in a way that mouth generally shouldn't be. Flies at rest on his pale forehead.
"He's dead," Bree said, as if I couldn't tell.
I took two small steps backward. I remember thinking that if I made any sudden movements, he might wake up and attack me. Maybe he was a zombie. I knew zombies weren't real, but he sure looked like a potential zombie.
As I took those two steps back, Bree took two equally small and quiet steps forward. "His eyes are open," she said.
"Wegottagohome," I said.
"I thought you closed your eyes when you died," she said.
"Breewegottagohomeandtell."
She took another small step. She was close enough now to reach out and touch his foot. "What do you think happened to him?" She asked. "Maybe it was drugs or something."
I didn't want to leave Bree alone with a dead guy who might be an attack zombie, but I also didn't care to stand around about the circumstances of his dismise. I gathered my courage and steeped forward to take her hand. "Breewegottagonow!"
"Okay, yah," she said. We ran to our bikes, my stomach churning with something that felt exactly like excitement, but wasn't.
We got on our bikes, and I let her go in front of me because I was crying and didn't want her to see. I could see the blood on the soles of her purple sneakers. His blood. The dead guy blood.
And then we were back home in our separate houses. My parents called 911, and I heard sirens in the distance and asked to see the fire trucks, but my mom said no. Then I took a nap.
Both my parents were therapists, which means that I am really goddamned well adjusted. So when I woke up, I had a long conversation with my mom about the cycle of life, but not a part of life I needed to he particularly concerned about at the age of nine, and I felt much better. Honestly, I never worried about it much. Which is saying something, because I can do some worrying.
Here's the thing: I found a dead guy. Little, adorable nine-year-old me and my even littler and more adorable play date found a guy with blood pouring out of his mouth, and that blood was on her little adorable sneakers as we bikes home. It's all very dramatic and everything, but so what? I didn't know the guy. People I don't know die all the damned time. If I had a nervous breakdown every time something awful happened in the world, I'd be crazier than a shithouse rat.
That night, I went into my room at nine o'clock to go to bed, because mind o'clock was my bedtime. My mom tucked me in, and told me she loved me, and I said, "See you tomorrow," and she said, "See you tomorrow," and then she turned out the lights and closed the door almost-all-the-way.
As I turned to my side, I saw Bree Skylar Henderson standing outside my window, her ace almost pressed against the screen. I got up and opened the window, but the screen stayed between us, pixelating her.
"I did an investigation," she said quite seriously. Even up close the screen broke her face apart, but I could tell that she was holding a little notebook and a pencil with teeth marks around the eraser. She glanced down at her notes. "Mrs. Feldman from over on Jefferson Court said his name was Robert Joyner. She told me he lived on Jefferson Road in one of the condos on top of the grocery store, so I went over there and there were a bunch of policemen, and one of them asked if I worked at the school paper, and I said our school doesn't have a paper, and he said as long as I wasn't a journalist he would answer my questions. He said Robert Joyner was was thirty-six years old. A lawyer. They wouldn't let me in the apartment, but a lady named Juanita Alvarez lives next door to him, and I got into her apartment by asking if I could barrow a cup of sugar, and then she said that Robert Joyner had killed himself with a gun. And then I asked why, and then she told me that he was getting a divorce and was sad about it."
she stopped then, and I just looked at her, her face grey and moonlit and split into a thousand pieces by the weave of the window screen. Her wide round eyes flitted back and forth from her notebook to me. "Lots of people get divorces and don't kill themselves," I said.
"I know," she said, excitement in her voice. "That's what I would Juanita Alvarez. And then she said..." Bree flipped the notebook page. "She said that Mr. Joyner was troubled. And then I asked what that meant, and then she told me that we should just pray for him and that I needed to take the auger to my mom, and I said forget the sugar and left."
I said nothing again. I just wanted her to keep talking—that small voice tense with excitement of almost knowing things, making me feel like something imports was happening to me.
"I think I maybe know why," she finally said.
"Why?"
"Maybe all the strings inside him broke," she said.
While I tried to think of something to say in answer to that, I reached forward and pressed the lock on the screen between us, dislodging it from the window. I placed the screen on the floor, but she didn't give me a chance to speak. Before I could sit back down, she just raised her face up toward me me and whispered, "Shut the window." So I did. I thought she would leave, but she just stood there what hung me. I waned at her and smiled, but her eyes seemed fixed on something behind me, something monstrous that had already drained the blood from her face, and I felt too afraid to turn around to see. But there was nothing behind me, of course—except maybe the dead guy.
I stopped waving. My head was leaked with hers as we stared at each other from oposite sides of the glass. I don't remember how it ended—if I went to bed or she did. In my memory, it doesn't end. We just stay there, looking at each other, forever.
Bree always loved mysteries. And in everything that came afterward, I could never stop thinking that maybe she loved mysteries so much that she became one.
So! I told you guys that I would be writing Lab Rats: Paper Towns, using the actual plot, and words as in the book Paper Towns. Everything's the same EXCEPT for the ending and characters, as explained before I started typing it. :).
Should I continue or no? XD~Jay Heartly