HEYA, PEEPS, WHUT UP, LONG TIME NO SEE LMAO! XD Yeah, I'm sorry about that, I've been sucked into the black hole that is tumblr, discovered the joys of Second Life, and am STILL trying to work on writing what I'm hoping will one day be my debut novel. (And as I just discovered this morning, apparently the lead singer of Panic! at the Disco looks nearly identical to how I picture my male protagonist, except for Brendon Urie has brown eyes and my Leo bb has blue, but yeah, what are the odds of that happening, amirite?)
OKAY, so I have been a fan of the Odd Thomas books for quite a while now, and I had attempted fan fic for Oddie a couple times before but it never really got anywhere.
UNTIL MY MOM ORDERED THE MOVIE OFF AMAZON AND WE WATCHED IT THE OTHER DAY.
PERFECT MOVIE IS PERFECT.
The casting could not have been more perfect (plus adorable Russian puppy baby Anton Yelchin!), and while I do admit that, yes, there were a few flaws (for example, they cut Terri out and seemed to just mush her and Karla into one character, and there definitely could've been some more Ozzie in there), they were all minor enough that I was able to look straight past them. It stayed UNBELIEVABLY true to the book, which was thrilling in and of itself, but what REALLY made me want to explode with sheer happiness was the fact that a lot of the narration voice-overs and even dialogue was immediately recognizable as being taken STRAIGHT OUT OF THE BOOK.
Oh, and the special effects were amazing, let me tell you. The bodachs? While they weren't black like they're described to be in the book, or nearly as shadowy and formless and vaguely hyena-like as I had always pictured in my mind, THEY WERE MINDBLOWINGLY FANTASTIC. Now that I think about it, to be totally honest here, there WERE a couple shots of them where, since it lets you get a pretty good look at what in the book Odd refers to as their "snouts," I think that there may have been a bit of resemblance to a pig's nose. Not necessarily in shape so much as in the nostril...things and the surrounding area, you know? Ok, like, if you don't have it on DVD yet or you haven't had the chance to watch it online, go to google images and type in "odd thomas movie bodachs" or something like that, because you seriously have GOT to see these things.
But, anyway, Addison Timlin could not have been a more perfect Stormy if she'd tried, and she and Anton were just adorable together, at the end when he had to let her move on into service, I seriously think I may have cried harder than I did when I first read that part in the book, plus the way they had her "vanish" was absolutely beautiful and it was, I think, the perfect way to have a girl like Stormy Llewellyn depart from this world into the next. And the final shot and the last thing that's said in the whole thing, just...god. Also, even without any lines, Shuler Hensley's performance of Fungus Bob was like WOAH. (I mean, yeah, ok, I admit I'm a bit biased towards him because I have a West End production of Rodgers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma! on DVD where he plays Jud Fry and Hugh Jackman is Curly McClain, and I've basically grown up watching that (lmao poor Jud is daid in the Odd Thomas movie too XP), but like, think about it, he had lines and sang in that, in this, he never even speaks a single word, let alone grunts or makes any other kind of sound, and I was still amazed by his portrayal of Fungus Bob, so what does that tell you?)
WATCH THIS MOVIE ONLINE IF YOU HAVE TO, BUT IF YOU HAVEN'T GOTTEN TO SEE IT YET, DO WHATEVER IT TAKES TO MAKE IT HAPPEN, I SWEAR TO YOU, YOU WILL NOT BE DISAPPOINTED, ESPECIALLY NOT IF YOU'RE A BIG FAN OF THE BOOKS LIKE I AM. I HONESTLY CANNOT THINK OF A SINGLE OTHER BOOK-BASED MOVIE THAT STAYED AS TRUE TO THE BOOK AS THIS ONE DID, EITHER DEAN KOONTZ MUST HAVE HAD SOME VERY SERIOUS INVOLVEMENT IN MAKING THIS HAPPEN, OR THE PEOPLE DOING IT WERE MAJOR FANS OF THE BOOKS.
WATCH IT.
RE-LIVE YOUR FIRST EXPERIENCE WITH THE BOOK.
BE AMAZED.
ALSO, THERE IS A PLOT TWIST THAT WASN'T IN THE BOOK THAT THEY PUT IN THE MOVIE AND I'M NOT TELLING WHAT IT IS YOU'LL KNOW IT AS SOON AS IT POPS UP IN THE MOVIE YOU'LL JUST HAVE TO WATCH IT AND FIND OUT FOR YOURSELF TROLOLOLOLOLOL
Being a fry cook, I have always enjoyed flipping pancakes, and I admit that yes, I can be a bit of a show-off while doing it in front of others, which is often because of where I work and because in my small home town of Pico Mundo, my pancakes have made me a bit of a celebrity, which is the only claim to fame that I need, thank you very much. But the one person who I enjoy showing off my skills for more than anybody else in the world is Nova, my six-year-old daughter, who I love more than anything or anyone else on the planet, even though I am not actually her father. The way she came to me was through her mother, Stormy Llewellyn, my soulmate who died two years ago in a mall massacre when Nova was four. Forty-one were wounded that day, and nineteen, including Stormy, were killed. Hundreds, if not thousands, would have been killed along with her and those other eighteen had it not been for my actions, not all of which I have ever been proud of, and though it has died down drastically in the past two years, people still sometimes tell me that I am a hero for what I did.
I am no hero.
What I am, however, is a short-order fry cook with a connection to the spirit world, and the father of a little girl who would have ended up in the system just like her mother if I hadn't stepped in and adopted her after Stormy's death. Adopting Nova was, in my mind, the only logical thing to do, not only because Stormy wouldn't have wanted her daughter to end up in the system like she herself did and not just because it was what Stormy would have wanted, and not even because it was what Nova had wanted, but because it was what I had wanted, as well. When you already love a child as if they were your own and that child finds themself with no where else to go and nobody else to care for them, what sense is there in letting him or her slip away and get adopted by complete strangers, or worse, end up bouncing from foster home to foster home like Stormy did? It was because she bounced that Stormy had Nova in the first place, having been sexually abused by one of her foster fathers, and while she had been grateful to have gotten Nova, she had been even more grateful to get out of that home.
I am the only father that this child has ever known in life, having been present at her birth, and she has been calling me Daddy ever since she could talk. So while she is not mine in the traditional sense, she is mine in every other way. And besides, it's not as if it would make much difference even if I was her biological father since she's always looked just like her mother, anyway, right down to having the same enchanting smile.
And when she sits at the counter in the Pico Mundo Grille and watches me flip pancakes, that's when her smile is the widest, and that's why it's one of my favorite things to bring her in with me while I work my shift. Lucky for both of us, Terri Strambaugh, the owner of the Grille and my surrogate mother of sorts, doesn't mind in the least and is always just as thrilled to see Nova as she is to see me during the big rushes.
"Did you ever make pancakes for Mommy?" Nova asked me one day while watching as I cracked two eggs and began frying them on the griddle. I smiled at her. "All the time," I said, and she smiled back. Since she was only four when Stormy died, Nova's memories of her, while numerous, are rather blurry, and it breaks my heart to think that in another two, three years or so, she may barely have any memories left of her at all and will know her only through pictures and what I tell her, because Stormy Llewellyn was the bravest, most beautiful and amazing woman there ever was, and one of my favorite memories of her is the way she used to loop a strand of hair around her finger and smile at me in a way that only she ever could and say, "Loop me in, odd one."
I was broken from these thoughts by the sound of my friend Viola Peabody, one of the waitresses, shouting an order at me over the noise using our typical diner lingo. I looked at Nova and quirked an eyebrow, and she sat up straighter and beamed at me. "Fried bacon and sunnyside up eggs with hashbrowns!" she said, translating what Viola had said from diner lingo into normal English. "Perfect!" I said, pulling a quarter out of my back pocket and flipping it into the air, then watching as Nova reached up and caught it before shoving it into her own pocket. She's spent so much time in the Grille that she understands diner lingo just as well as I do by now, and we've invented a game of sorts where every time she translates an order correctly, I'll give her a quarter as a reward. She's made quite a bit of money off me that way.
The door to the Grille opened, and I didn't even look up to see who the newcomer was. It was the rush hour for us, so people were coming and going at a rate of about every five minutes or so, and it was crowded, and I know most of the people who come in, anyway, because the Grille has a lot of regulars, like Wyatt Porter, the chief of police and the closest thing I have in my life to a father figure, so it was natural that I thought absolutely nothing of it to hear the door open. It was only as I was setting a dish down on the counter for Viola to come and get so she could take it to the person who'd ordered it that I ended up doing a double take at the girl who had just come in.
I did not stare at this girl because of the deep auburn hair cut into a swing bob that made her look like Velma Kelly out of the musical Chicago. I did not stare because she was wearing a Union Jack bandeau in place of an actual shirt or blouse, and I did not stare because of the red skirt with black polka dots that came down to her knees, or the red Converse that laced up to her calves, or even because of her unusual eyes, which were vaguely pixie-like in shape and a sort of grayish-violet color.
I stared because trailing behind her was Lucille Ball, the star of the old TV sitcom I Love Lucy, who had died in 1989.
"Odd!"
I blinked as my head instinctively snapped in the direction my name had come from. Terri was grinning at me from over customers' heads. "Wreck 'em and stretch 'em," she called, "two Porkies sitting, and a side of grits!" Turning to Nova, I said, "And that means?"
"Add an extra egg, scramble, and two fried hams with grits," she said, already grinning proudly and showing off the gap where she'd lost a tooth recently. I pretended to be upset about having to give her another quarter, but Nova, of course, saw right through my charade and called me out on trying not to smile, at which point I couldn't keep it in anymore and had to do just that. From the corner of my eye, I noticed the auburn haired Velma Kelly sit a few seats down from Nova and I at the counter, where she only had to wait for a moment or two before Helen Arches, the third woman who waitresses during my shift, came over and gave her a menu. Even though there are only five of us working during rush hour most of the time—those five being myself, the sole fry cook, along with Helen, Viola, Bertie Orbic, and Terri, three waitresses and one waitress-slash-owner—we make a fast and efficient team, maybe because we're used to it by now and we've got some kind of unofficially established system with unspoken rules to make things flow as smoothly as possible. Or maybe it's just because we're all really good at what we do and we enjoy doing it, as well as each other's company. Whatever the reason, however, the three women I work my shift with never seem stressed or rushed as they hurry around taking and delivering orders, handing out menus, and all the other things that come along with being a waitress, and they always have smiles on their faces when talking to customers, especially Terri, who smiles a lot, anyway, being as kind and friendly as she is not just as a waitress and business owner, but just as a person in general. The world needs more people like Terri Strambaugh, if you ask me. Things would be much better off for humanity if more of us could just adopt her live-and-let-live attitude and warm, friendly generosity and openness.
As I work (and carry on conversations about all sorts of various things with Nova, like always), I notice Velma Kelly glancing up from her menu every so often and looking in my direction. Sometimes it's at what I'm doing with the food on the griddle, which is nothing I'm not used to having people look at and watch and be curious about, but sometimes it seems like she's glancing at something over my shoulder. Elvis, perhaps, if my suspicions about her are true.
Elvis Presley has been following me around since high school. He splits his time between haunting the local church and trailing me around as I go about my life. I have a life-sized cardboard cutout figure of him at home that was once part of a theater display promoting the movie Blue Hawaii, where he's wearing a lei of orchids and smiling and pointing one finger at me, or Nova, or anybody else who happens to be looking at it. Occasionally it gets moved during the night, and I'll have to put it back in its usual place when I get up in the morning. Like the rest of the dead, Elvis—the one who follows me, not the cutout—does not speak (though neither does the cutout, for which I am thankful, because if it did, then there's no telling what that might possibly mean).
"You're good at that," Velma Kelly said to me, lowering her menu as Lucille Ball, who had until then been wandering around the diner and looking around, came and placed herself on the counter stool beside the girl. "Thanks," I said. As I spoke, I began working on the side of grits for the order Terri had called. "Pancakes," I added, "are my specialty, though I'm pretty good with other stuff, too."
"My daddy makes the best pancakes in the whole wide world!" Nova said proudly, throwing her arms out for emphasis on the "whole wide world" part. I grinned at her. "Well, I wouldn't say the whole wide world," I said, "but definitely here in Pico Mundo." I put the small bowl holding the grits onto the plate beside the ham so that the scrambled eggs wouldn't get on it, then set the whole thing down on the counter so Terri could come and get it when she was ready.
"So that's your dad, huh?" the girl said to Nova, who nodded and smiled at me. "He's been taking care of me all by himself ever since my mommy died," she said. Terri, who happened to be coming over to pick up the food I'd set on the counter, heard her. "I beg to differ, young lady," she said. "I've helped, haven't I?" She smiled, mussing up Nova's hair playfully as she took the food off for delivery. Turning back to the Velma Kelly girl, I said, "So, do you know what you want?"
She looked down at her menu again, biting her lower lip thoughtfully. "You know what," she said after a moment, "I think I'll try some of these amazing pancakes of yours. AAAnd...some bacon, too."
"One plate of pancakes with two Porkies lying, coming right up," I said. Nova lit up and opened her mouth to speak, but I cut her off before she could say anything. "That one doesn't count, Pipsqueak," I said. "You actually heard the order being made in regular English, so I'd have to call foul on you and you wouldn't get anything, not a cent." Nova didn't even bother to let out a disappointed "awww," instead just skipping straight to the part where she stuck out her bottom lip and pouted adorably at me, folding her arms on the counter in front of herself and setting her chin down on them, putting a bit more drama into her sulking than was necessary, as most six-year-old girls often do.
"So," Velma Kelly said, "do you have a name, or do people just call you Captain Pancake or something?" I could tell that Nova was trying hard not to laugh so she could keep up her pout, but just as I knew would be the case, she couldn't fight it for very long and dissolved into giggles. "Odd Thomas," I said, flipping a pancake into the air, then catching it and setting it back down on the griddle so the other side could burn for a bit. "And Little Miss Giggly over here is Nova."
"Josie Zarzycki," the girl said.
Ah, so she hadn't stepped out of the Cell Block Tango, after all.
"Zarzycki," I echoed thoughtfully. "Isn't that...Czech or something?"
"No, but you're close. It's Polish, actually," she said. "You know, like Kowalski, as in Stanley?"
"As in that guy who stands there and yells, 'Steeeeeellaaaaaaaa!' at the top of his lungs, right?"
She nodded her confirmation as she took a sip of the water that Helen had brought to her earlier along with the menu. "Well, yours is...a bit more complicated than Kowalski, isn't it?" I said. She grinned at me. "I dunno," she replied, "Odd Thomas is quite the name if you ask me. Is there a story behind that, or what?"
"Daddy says," Nova interjected before I could respond, "that his mommy and daddy were really weird people with really messed up lives who were really funny in the head, so they named him Odd."
"Actually," I said, "my mother claims that I'm named after a Czechoslovakian uncle who was married to her sister, my Aunt Cymry. My father claims that while Cymry does exist, she's never been married and that I have no uncles at all, Czechoslovakian or otherwise, and that I was supposed to be named Todd, but there was a misprint on the birth certificate. Like Nova said, though, my parents are both really messed up people, so I have no way of knowing which of them is telling the truth, or if either of them is at all."
"So why not just change your name?"
"By the time I was old enough to have figured out that 'Odd' wasn't a normal name, I'd gotten used to it, so I've never seen any point in changing it."
"He lives up to it, that's for sure. Every damn day, too."
"Morning, Chief," I said, and Chief Porter nodded at me. "Morning, Odd. And good morning to you, too, Miss Nova." Nova grinned widely at the chief, not saying anything. "Something," he said, "is different than the last time I saw you, but I can't figure out what. Let's see. Is it...a new haircut?" Nova giggled and shook her head, still grinning. Chief Porter became mock-thoughtful, pretending to study her closely. "No? Well, then maybe you're wearing new shoes. No, wait, I've got it! That's a new necklace you're wearing, isn't it? That has to be it, right?"
"No, Chief!" Nova said through her laughter. "I lost a tooth, see? It's all gone, and now I can poke my tongue through it, watch!" And then she proceeded to do exactly that. "Well, look at that, you did loose a tooth!" the chief said. "Did the Tooth Fairy come?"
"She gave me a whole dollar!" Nova announced to him.
"I don't believe you, show me."
"I can't, I already spent it, right, Daddy?"
"She convinced me to take her to the candy store at the mall and then talked me into letting her use it for one of those giant swirled lollipops," I said. "She still hasn't finished it, it's in one of those big Ziploc baggies in one of the cupboards below the kitchen counter at home, and it took her about two days just to suck the top edge thin enough to start gnawing on, so it's got a few small bite marks in it, but that's about it so far. I tried to tell her how long that thing would take to finish off, but she wouldn't listen, she was absolutely determined to have it, so now I'm gonna have that thing sitting around in the kitchen for who-knows-how-many-more-weeks until she finally manages to get it all off the stick."
"Odd, gimme two orders of blueberry pancakes, burn a British and send it to Philly, then clean up the kitchen!"
"English muffin with cream cheese and some hash!" Nova blurted out, then grinned this smug little grin she's got that only comes out when she's especially proud of herself for something, which in this case was the fact that the quarter I slid across the countertop in her direction was the tenth one she'd gotten out of me that morning; the child was on a roll, and she knew it. Chief Porter laughed as he sat down beside Nova, who was now humming gleefully to herself, no doubt with her legs swinging back and forth beneath the counter.
Flipping the last pancake off the griddle and onto the plate where the rest were waiting with the bacon, I then took said plate and slid it in Josie Zarzycki's direction, watching her hand dart out to catch it while I started on another batch of pancake batter, this time with blueberries in it. "You want your usual, Chief?" I asked, but he shook his head. "Just gimme some fries for now, Odd," he said, "I don't have much time before I've gotta get back to the station. The force is stretched a bit thin right now with the parade coming up." I nodded, rather than giving him what was my more typical reply of, "Yes, sir." I was trying not to think too much about what had been happening the last time he'd said those words to me a little over two years ago, not long before Nova's fourth birthday, and how Stormy and I had ended up racing to save her friend Sherry Sheldon from a lunatic named Kyle Bernshaw who had kidnapped her and taken her to an abandoned slaughterhouse just outside of town with the intent of killing her after spending months stalking her and sending her, as Stormy would say, "creeptastic" notes.
So after pouring the batter onto the griddle to let it start solidifying, I moved on to start the hash and the cheif's fries. "Want me to make 'em twice in Hell?" I asked, grinning innocently and knowing full well that the cheif didn't understand a word of diner lingo. He immediately lowered his newspaper, which made a loud rustling sound, and sighed as he gave me a look and raised an eyebrow. "So is that a no to the extra crispy?" I said. Chief Porter let out another sigh as he wordlessly shook his head slowly and went back to the paper. "You guys are pretty popular, huh?" Josie said, leaning over slightly to look at me with a bite of pancake on her fork hovering in the air.
"Because of Odd's pancakes," the chief said matter-of-factly from behind his paper at the same time that I said, "It's rush hour." Josie glanced between us and cocked an eyebrow. "They're both right," Terri said. Turning her attention to me, she added, "Two cows, make one cry and give the other a blanket, double spuds."
"Two hamburgers, one with onions and one with cheese, two orders of French fries! Gimme my quarter, Daddy!"
"Sorry, baby, you're gonna have to wait until we get home, I already gave you my last one," I said.
Terri laughed and rolled her eyes. "Here, sweetie," she said, reaching into her apron pocket and pulling out a handful of coins, going through them until she found a quarter, which she gave to Nova. "Oddie, you're gonna be off a bit early today," she added, "Poke's coming in 1:30 because he's been needing a bit of extra cash, so I told him it'd be okay to work a longer shift than normal. I'd have told you sooner, but I haven't had the chance 'til now since things have been so hectic today. Hope you don't mind." I shook my head as I put the chief's fries onto a plate and handed it to him. "Nope, not a bit," I said. "I promised Nova I'd take her to the movie theater at Green Moon to see that new Muppets movie today, this'll just let us catch an earlier show than we were planning on."
"When's 1:30?" Nova asked impatiently. Terri laughed. "About ten minutes from now," I replied, then turned and, with the spatula I was holding in my hand, pointed at the clock on the wall behind me. "When the big hand gets to the six, that's 1:30," I told her. Nova looked at the clock for a moment, then let out a sound that was half-sigh and half-grown as she threw her head back dramatically. "But that's gonna take for-eveeeeeeeeeer-uh!" she cried.
"It will if you sit there and look at the clock every three-and-a-half seconds like I know you're going to," I countered.
"Hey, kid," Josie called, and Nova turned in her direction. I glanced up at her briefly, but then turned my attention back to what I was doing with the food on the griddle and stovetop almost immediately afterwards. "You ever heard of a TV show called I Love Lucy before?"
My head snapped up.
So did Lucille Ball's.
"No," Nova said, "who's Lucy?"
"Lucy was this crazy red-headed chick who used to be on TV when it was still in black and white. She was married to this guy from Cuba named Ricky and he had an accent and their best friends were named Fred and Ethel, and the four of them had all kinds of crazy adventures and stuff together. They play re-runs of it all the time on this one channel. There was this one episode where they went to Italy, and Lucy went to this place where they picked grapes and made 'em into wine by putting them in these big wooden buckets and stomped all over 'em until they turned into mush, and then they turned the mush into wine, right? So Lucy goes to this place without Ricky or Fred or Ethel going with her, and she ends up stomping the grapes with this Italian lady, and then they get into a wrestling match, and Lucy goes back to the hotel, no kidding, covered from head to toe in grape mush, and it's absolutely soaking her clothes and hair and everything, and Ricky was like, 'Luuuuucyyyyyyy, what did you do, where did you go,' and he starts yammering in Spanish, and it's one of my favorite episodes."
"I like the one where she had those eggs inside her shirt and they got smashed into oblivion," I said. In her seat beside Josie at the counter, Lucy seemed to perk up a bit, and I was fairly sure that I saw a smile playing at the corner of her lips, where she had on lipstick just as red as any she'd ever worn in any photo taken of her during her lifetime. "You know, I read," I continued, directing the words at Josie, "that the laugh the egg thing got out of the audience? Apparently it holds the record for being the longest laugh from a live studio audience, which makes the egg thing arguably the best gag ever used on the show. Also, apparently the show hasn't been off the air once since it first premiered. Even after it stopped running, they picked up with doing the re-runs almost immediately, so strictly speaking, it's never been off air in all these years because it's just always been that popular."
"I knew about it not being off air," Josie said, "did not know about the laugh thing, that's pretty cool. If you know Lucy, how come you've never showed it to her before?"
"Oddie doesn't have a TV," Terri explained. "He's always kept things very simple, doesn't even own a car. He owns a Vespa that used to belong to Nova's mother, they use that or they walk."
"Nova, kid," Josie said, "you are being deprived, if you ask me."
"I watch TV when I stay with Ms. Terri," Nova said, "or with Mrs. Porter or when I go over and spend the night with Levanna and Nicolina. But I don't mind not having TV at home. I'm used to it. Besides, I like my coloring books. I got a whole bunch of Disney ones. Lots of Brave and Tangled and Frozen. I also got a bunch of Rise of the Guardians ones. I like coloring Tooth and Baby Tooth."
"Well, next time you're with Ms. Terri or Mrs. Porter, you should ask if you can watch some Lucy. Or, next time you have a sleepover with Levanna and Nicolina, see if they'd want to watch it with you, and if they're interested, you guys should ask their mom if she'd mind putting it on for you."
"Hey, Viola!" I called, and her head turned in my direction. "You'd be alright with the girls watching I Love Lucy, right?"
"Oh, yeah, absolutely!" she said. "Yeah, my grandma adored Lucy, she got me hooked on it when I was like fifteen, sixteen years old and I've got most of the seasons on DVD at home, she gave 'em to me for Christmas one year, I'd love to share that with the girls. Why you ask?"
"Nova might try to talk 'em into it at the next slumber party, that's why."
"Nova Roxanne Thomas, if you do that, I will cherish you for all time!"
By this point, Lucy was positively beaming. She was sitting up very straight on her stool, her face all lit up with delight, and her hands primarily in her lap, but occasionally with one moving up to her breast, and when that happened, she would sort of move her head from one side to the other in a way that, combined with the way she put her hand against her chest and her facial expression, seemed to suggest that she was flattered by all the things that were being said about the sitcom that had defined her career and made her such an icon.
Once, not long after the whole mess with Kyle Bernshaw kidnapping Sherry and everything while she had still been recovering from the whole ordeal, she had asked Stormy and I if we would mind coming over and spending the evening with her, just as a sort of moral support thing to help her with the whole recovery process. Of course, we hadn't minded in the least, so we'd dropped Nova off with Terri at her apartment above the Grille (along with her overnight bag stocked with colored pencils, a pencil sharpener, two of her favorite coloring books—one Brave and one Tangled—PJs, a clean change of underwear and clothes for the next day, toothbrush and toothpaste, hairbrush and barrettes, and last but not least, a stuffed Golden Retriever toy named Trixie that she'd had since she was little and could never get to sleep without), then gone over to Sherry's house and stayed there late just sort of hanging out with her.
At one point, we had decided to put on an I Love Lucy DVD that Sherry had sitting around, and it was one of those things where, like they had been doing more recently with Shirley Temple stuff, the episodes were fully restored not only in black and white, but color, as well, and we had thought it would be interesting to see what everything and everyone on the show looked like in color, so that was how we'd watched it. I had known prior to that evening that Lucille Ball's hair was a really bright shade of red, but I had not known until watching the first episode on that DVD just how bright it truly was.
Now that her ghost was sitting at the counter of the Pico Mundo Grille as I worked, that hair was every bit as bright as I remembered it being on Sherry's TV screen that night, if not more.
Not only that, but I was almost positive that I recognized the clothes she had on as something she'd worn in one of the episodes I'd watched that night with Sherry and Stormy, and that was something I was sure that my brain wouldn't have been able to put together if I'd never gotten to see the show in color that night. It was a dark blue dress with white polka dots all over it with a white collar and what were best described as white cuffs where the sleeves ended at her elbows.
Lucille Ball, I knew, had died at age seventy-seven of an aortic dissection aneurysm, or simply aortic dissection. Aortic dissection is something that occurs when a tear in the wall of the aorta allows blood to flow through the layers of that wall, which then forces the layers apart from one another. In most cases, this is associated with severe chest or abdominal pain, characteristically described as "tearing," as well as other symptoms resulting from decreased blood supply to other organs. Just as you might expect of this sort of thing, aortic dissection is a medical emergency, and it often quickly leads to death, even when optimally treated, because of, again, decreased blood supply to other organs, cardiac failiure, and sometimes even a rupturing of the aorta. It's more common in people with a history of high blood pressure, another type of aortic aneurysm called thoracic, and a number of conditions that affect the integrity of blood vessel walls, such as two connective tissue disorders, one known as Marfan syndrome, and the other as Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, none of which I had any clue whether Lucy had or not.
In any case, the treatment of aortic dissection depends on which part of the aorta is involved. For dissection of the aortic arch, surgery is usually involved. However, for dissections that have occurred further away from the heart, only the lowering of blood pressure may be used, although ever since the 90's, there have been specific cases where something called endovascular aneurysm repair has been used, as well. Luckily, aortic dissection is relatively rare and occurs only at an estimated rate of about two to three-and-a-half out of one hundred thousand people every year, and is more common in males than females. Although any age group may be affected, the average age of diagnosis is sixty-three, and unfortunately, about fourty percent of aortic dissection cases lead to death so quickly that the person suffering from it is dead before reaching the hospital.
In the case of Lucille Ball, she had, I remembered reading somewhere once, been at home in Beverly Hills on the eighteenth of April when she'd begun to complain of chest pains. An ambulance was called to the house, and Lucy was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and checked into the ER, where they diagnosed her with aortic dissection. She then underwent a heart surgery lasting nearly eight hours, recieving a new aorta from a twenty-seven-year-old man who had died in a motorcycle accident. The surgery was successful, and Lucy began recovering, even reacing a point where she could get up and walk around in her hospital room with little assistance. Hollywood, of course, sent in a flurry of get-well wishes, and a place across the street from the hospital called the Hard Rock Cafe even erected a sign that read "Hard Rock Loves Lucy." Shortly after dawn, however, on the twenty-sixth of April, Lucy woke up with severe back pains, losing consciousness soon thereafter. Attempts were made to revive her, but they all proved to be in vain, and at 5:47, Lucille Ball was officially pronounced to be dead, the doctors having determined that she had suffered a second aortic rupture, this time in her abdominal area, though it was unrelated to the surgery she'd undergone for the first one. Her remains were cremated, interred in a Los Angeles cemtery, and later relocated by her children, Lucie Arnaz and Desi Arnaz Jr., to one in New York where her parents, grandparents, and brother were all buried.
Lucy's death had not been violent by any means. Painful, yes, I do not doubt that for a second. But in no way had it been violent, and she had died of entirely natural causes. She had lived a long life of seventy-seven years, and at the time of her death, she had been married to her second husband for over twenty-seven of those years. She'd had a long and very successful career in Hollywood, not only as the star of her own sitcom, but also in numerous movies, and she'd even, at one point, had a radio show, which, if memory served, had been called "My Favorite Husband," as well as having been on Broadway. She had been, and remains to this day, one of America's greatest icons. True, she'd gotten divorced from Desi Arnaz, a.k.a. Ricky Ricardo, in 1960, but up until his death in '86, they had still been friends, and she'd later remarried. Everything I knew about her showed a woman who had lived a long, successful, and overall very happy life.
So why, I wondered, would she be a member of the lingering dead all these years later?
And more importantly, why was she following Josie Zarzycki around?
But more than anything, I wondered exactly who Josie Zarzycki was, and what reason did she have to be in Pico Mundo?
My name is Odd Thomas, and when I see dead people, then, by God, I do something about it.
OKAY, SO KIND OF A FUNNY STORY HERE, ACTUALLY! See, I'd had the general idea of Nova floating around in my head for some time now, and I actually did try to write something with her in it once, but it was one of the ones that just sort of fell through after I lost interest in it, and so she's never really gotten as fleshed out or anything, but then my mom and I watched the movie after we got it the other day, and of course after watching it, I had all these Odd Thomas feels and stuff I had to get out, and then Nova suddenly popped into my head again, and I went, "Hell, why not give it another go?" so yeah, that's how she worked her way in here.
Also, if you're not familiar with Sherry Sheldon and Kyle Bernshaw, that's just because you haven't read the Odd Thomas graphic novel that Koontz collaborated on with manga writer/artist Queenie Chan. It's the first of...three, I think, and it's called "In Odd We Trust," I highly recommend it not just for Odd Thomas fans, but also fans of Queenie Chan, who is also the author/artist of this amazing graphic novel trilogy published by Tokyo Pop called "The Dreaming, vol. I-III," which I also very highly recommend.
And yes, Lucille Ball. I am an ENORMOUS fan of I Love Lucy, and what Viola said about having most of the seasons on DVD after getting them for Christmas one year and about her grandmother getting her hooked at like fifteen, sixteen years old? Every word of it is based on true events from my own life. Also, if you want to see actual pictures of the dress Lucy is wearing in this, go to google images and type in "i love lucy dress display," and then for the best chance at seeing it really well from several different angles, click on the sixth picture, first row. While looking at various pictures for reference to help with my description of it, multiple times, I saw it referred to as being black, but take a look at those pictures for yourself and tell me that is not blue, because I swear, that is a blue dress, not black, though I can confirm, being an avid Lucy fan, that it definitely looked black on the show, but hello, the show was IN BLACK AND WHITE.
Also, anyone who knows the significance of Nova's plush toy being a Golden Retriever named Trixie will earn like a hundred gatrillion points and a free supply of Oddie's pancakes that will last until I finish this story, which could be quite a while since I'm such an expert procrastinator.
Also, you people had better effing appreciate that account of Lucille Ball's death and the description/explanation I gave of what an "aortic dissection aneurysm" is, because let me tell you, I put QUITE a bit of time into looking all of that up so that I could make this as accurate as I possibly could, so like I said, you had BETTER appreciate the history and medical lessons I gave you, because another thing about that, TELL ME THAT IS NOT SOMETHING YOU WOULD FIND IN AN ACTUAL ODD THOMAS BOOK. LOOK ME IN THE EYES AND SAY TO MY FACE THAT KOONTZ WOULD NOT HAVE DONE THE EXACT SAME THING. YEAH, THOUGHT SO. (Speaking of which, Ehlers-Danlos syndrome? I was surprised to learn that it's something that's been connected with Lucy's cause of death in the past, because by some weird coincidence, I actually have that, believe it or not. And Johnathon Larson, who wrote and composed RENT? He had Marfan syndrome and died because of a rupture in his brain, and while I don't know exactly how, I do know that the cause of that rupture was connected to the Marfan.)
Also, to kind of get an idea of Nova's appearance, it might help if you google Alexa Vega when she was really little (like, pre-Spy Kids era Alexa Vega), because she and Addison Timlin look a lot of like in the face, especially their noses and lips.
And so in conclusion, boys and girls, I hope you've enjoyed this so far, points and a cookie to anyone who understood the reference to "A Streetcar Named Desire," or who can guess why I named her Nova (yes, there is a reason, and it's partly connected to Cassiopeia!), please ignore the fact that Frozen, Tangled, Brave, and Rise of the Guardians all came out AFTER the publishing of the first book in 2003 and that my mentioning them therefore counts as a continuity error with the canon universe based on when I have this taking place (if Koontz and Queenie Chan can get away with doing it in the 2nd Odd graphic novel (all of which are prequels to the first book, I might add) by mentioning the Wii, then I'm pretty sure I can get away with it like this in a fan fiction, and I'm too lazy to fix it, so leave me alone and if you got a problem with it then too bad, you can just not read the fic), remember that reviews make the authoress happy and have the potential to make her write and publish new chapters more quickly, and more than anything, CRACK IS WHACK. DON'T DO DRUGS, KIDS.
(Also, if you're having trouble with Josie's last name, please don't hesitate to let me know, and I'll help you with it as best as I possibly can, alright? Polish last names can be really weird, anybody who's ever tried to pronounce Terrance Zdunich's last name before hearing it said aloud by Terrance himself or someone else who can properly say it like in an interview or something knows that. I am one of those people. Or at least I used to be until the first time I watched an interview with him, and now I can't ever say it enough. But anyway, yeah, Polish last names are weird and hard to pronounce, so if you need help with Josie's, just tell me and I'll help out as well as I'm able to over the internet without being able to send you a recording or something of myself saying it out loud, okay? I don't mind, honest, I'm more than happy to be of assistance if I can. In any case, I hope you enjoyed it so far, and I'm working on the second chapter, I'll have it up as soon as I can!)