"What'd you think of the movie?" Craig asked his convulsing friend.
"You've got to be shitting me, dude."
"Aw, you didn't like it?"
"Didn't like it?! It was the fucking scariest thing that the earth has ever seen! Polar bears would shit their pants! And they don't understand English!"
"Nor do they wear pants."
"My point exactly! So goddamn scary that polar bears grow themselves pants out of their, their, goddamn minds! And then you just wait! Soon their shit will be feeding thousands of cockroach-"
"You're out of your mind..." Craig mumbled and questioned; "Cockroaches?"
"You didn't know?! Oh, man, dude! Dude!" He scoffed all knowingly. "Cockroaches are gonna take over the whole world! If we keep blasting our limbs and brains with radiation and bombs and all that shit, heart juice everywhere! Thirty fucking feet, dude! Did you know that? Shoot a human heart and blood goes thirty feet! Imagine how awfully messy it'd be! Not to mention painful! What the hell would we do then, man!?"
"Roaches." Tweek puckered his brows. Craig rolled his eyes. "Cockroaches."
"Huh? Oh, right. Cockroaches! Dude, they're scary little fuckers! They're the only things that'll survive the nuclear war!"
"They'll just have to eat themselves."
"Wait, what?"
"Polar bear shit can't last forever. No food around, they'll ea-"
"Dude, I know what you said! But, cannibal cockroaches?! Dear god, I never thought, I mean, like, dude!"
"Yeah, it'll be a hoot. 'Specially since we'll all be dead and why the hell should we care?"
"Because! Because, I don't know...what if we don't die? Like, what if we're just stuck forever unmoving but feeling all those disgusting bugs crawling in us?!"
"And eating our eyeballs, too." Craig smirked and waited for his friend's reaction.
"Dude! Shut the hell up!" Tweek pulled back his sleeve. "Look what you're doing to me, man!" The skin around a blue rubberband; the kind grocery store broccoli grows in, was red and raw. His wrist was a warzone. Tweek pulled back the rubber band. "iwontthinkabouteyeballssmooshing" Snap.
"I thought you had carpophobia." Tweek, obviously freaked and annoyed, took off the rubber band. He sat on the sidewalk and slid off his sneaker, stretching out the rubber band over his foot. He didn't wear socks, as they were "little cages for your feet" and he often feared; "the office of podiatry will send out achilles welfare agencies and take my feet away".
"Germs." Craig reminded and Tweek bolted up with one shoe on, accidentally flinging the other about five feet into the road. He hopped around for a minute, red-faced and muttering to himself. Craig laughed at his friend's expense and walked into the road.
"No!" Craig was slightly startled as the 'no' was directed towards him. He stepped back, raising his hands.
"What?"
"The bus! I-it, it could hit you...and then you'd get all your organs everywhere...and I'd have confess to the cops, even though I would hate you being dead and I'll get depression and schizophrenia all account of you walking into the street for my goddamn shoe." Tweek was still at a loss of one foot. He hobbled in a circle, barely keeping his balance. Craig eyed his friend's pathetically contorted face and raised a brow. "I already see shadow people…" He muttered and his shoulders fell with a familiar jerking.
"You must be so tortured." Craig sighed and jumped in the street, ignoring Tweek's constant yelping. On a good day (the 'green' days), he would've walked in the street himself. He wouldn't have made a big deal about it; it's just a shoe, for pete's sake. But on days like this, with no Prozac or Ritalin to even the world out and missing Kenny's pot, he would spew spouts of so-called-wisdom. His advice was usually best applied to feet (because of course) and blackmailing meth abusers, like; "you've got to keep them happy and they won't send the cops". But this was how it'd been for a while and Craig was never used to it. He pretended to be bored, shelved off and distant, but he in truth enjoyed how unpredictably predictable his friend could be. "Here's your goddamn shoe." Craig handed the pristine, blue, 80's looking sneaker off to Tweek. He took it with spidery fingers reaching for the shoelaces.
"Thank you." Tweek muttered, defeated, as Craig waved him off. He sat back down on the sidewalk and prepped his foot for the shoe. The whole process took a mightily unremarkable seven minutes. Craig stood away and stared at the houses across the street. They were all dust ridden from all the cars and the paint was peeling, but they still had an unforgiving charm to them. He would've liked growing up in one of those houses. They were the kind where your best friend lived right next to you. And you could sneak out together to play in the backyard at midnight. He looked back at his own friend, full of flesh and blood and boldly alive yet never truly living, and wondered briefly whether they would still hang if they met today instead of five years ago. He sniffed at the cold and pushed the thought as far away as possible. He frowned and out of pure guilt for thinking of it at all, reached down to pat Tweek on the back.
"Germs," Craig reminded Tweek. Tweek screeched, forest-eyes wide like saucers, and walked lamely down the sidewalk with his shoe flopping madly around, waving like a white flag. He hissed when his foot accidentally brushed the sidewalk. Craig walked at a soothing pace after his paranoid, carpophobic and obsessive compulsive friend. "So how weird are serial killers?"