The scene opens in the suburbs, awash in early sunlight, as optimistic guitar music plays in the background. A young girl is running to catch her bus. Over the scene, the voices of the Midnight Society can be heard narrating.
BIDEN: All right. Look, there were these two kids, Kacey and Emma. They both lived in Transylvania, which is the scariest of all cities.
DAVID: That's a country, dork!
BIDEN: Dude, go home. Nobody wants you here. Does anybody want David to listen to my story? Show of hands? So Emma and Kacey were both about twelve, which is the scariest age. Emma had brown hair with claw bangs and a pink t-shirt that had a drawing of a Mickey Mouse glove giving a middle finger on the front of it. Everyone at school liked Emma better than Kacey because, uh, Kacey was starting to get boobs.
TUCKER: Gross!
BIDEN: But Kacey was pretty talented. She was going to grow up to be a world famous author, writing books about all kinds of stupid crap. She had a million ideas for books, but the problem was she didn't have a typewriter.
DAVID: Why couldn't she just use a pencil?
BIDEN: Because she wasn't retarded, David. Do you think Jesus wrote the Bible with a pencil? Now shut up and let me tell it.
Kacey was late for school, and it wasn't the first time.
She jogged down the sidewalk toward the bus stop with her backpack slamming against her shoulders, huffing breath, as if being chased by a pack of wild clowns. That was her latest story idea—Wild Clowns. Kacey was a budding storywriter, and last night she had seen a commercial on TV for a new Zeebo ride that would be coming to the carnival in the summer. It had sparked a thought: what would happen if clowns got out into the wild and started to breed amongst themselves? A subspecies of clowns could arise and evolve right alongside human beings! Kacey had spent all night jotting down ideas for Wild Clowns and had only got to bed at around 5:30 in the morning. When her alarm went off she missed it, and now she was running late for the millionth time.
The bus rounded the corner onto her street and began to slow. Kacey screamed and ran harder.
"Hurry up!" her friend Emma shouted. Emma was already standing at the bus stop with a small cluster of badly dressed children. Many of them were wearing propeller beanies and rigid vinyl windbreakers with one red arm, one green arm, and a blue middle. Emma herself was dressed in her traditional Mickey Mouse Middle Finger t-shirt that her aunt had given her for Hanukkah last year.
"I'm coming!" Kacey shouted. She got to the bus stop just in time.
"That was close," Emma told her with relief. "I was afraid you were going to miss the bus again and get expelled and end up having to transfer to that school downtown with all the MS-13 graffiti."
But the downtown school controlled by MS-13 wasn't Kacey's main worry on that particular morning. As she and Emma found an empty seat and slid in together, Kacey heaved a sigh. She wanted a typewriter. She knew you can't write a real story without a typewriter, but there was no way her meager weekly allowance of $2 was going to enable that dream anytime soon. There was a real stupid and ugly kid at school named David who had offered to lend her a pencil to write with, but Kacey had turned him down. Nobody wanted David's pencils. They were always warm and slightly moist, and the erasers tended to leave weird yellow smears on notebook paper. Even the teachers hated David.
"You're thinking about that typewriter in the pawnshop again, aren't you?" Emma asked, nudging Kacey. Kacey looked up in surprise.
"Yeah," she admitted.
"Why don't you just show your awesome tits to Mr. Sardo and get him to pay for it?" Emma suggested.
Kacey frowned. Vice Principal Sardo was the most terrifying man she had ever laid eyes on, and that was mostly because he laid eyes right back on Kacey. He was a portly babyfaced Cro-Magnon with a wiry curtain of hair in the back that was done up in obscene little curls. He breathed very heavily, and was always sweating, and his breath smelled like poisoned meatballs, and you could tell he masturbated a lot. Kacey would rather never write again than face the fact that she probably could show her boobs to Mr. Sardo in exchange for a typewriter.
The bus went past the pawnshop. Kacey gazed longingly at the typewriter in the front window. It was an older model with lifted circular keys that you had to press harder than fuck. It was perfect. If only she could get ahold of that thing, she would be able to write Wild Clowns and The Weirdest Cat and Jimmy Vs. Bimmy and Mom's Magic Bottle of Pills and The Haunted Nintendo and all the other cool stories she'd thought up but hadn't been able to yet put down.
Emma saw Kacey looking at the typewriter and said, "Why don't we just steal it?"
And just like that, it was decided. A light went off in Kacey's head. For the rest of the day, she could think of nothing else. She squirmed her way through math, where Mr. Purnbong was trying to explain why anyone should care about fractions; through science, where Ms. Frood was preparing the class for the upcoming dissection of a human cadaver; through English, where Stephen King was supposed to guest lecture but couldn't because he had turned up drunk as shit with three days' worth of beard scruff and a pair of handcuffs attached to one wrist and Vice Principal Sardo had refused to let him into the building; through social studies, where Mr. Achtung kept showing them the Nazi salute; through gym, where David had hit her in the face with a basketball by accident; through health, where Ms. Kraftwerk told them that "man-root" was a slang term for the penis; and finally, at the end of the endless day, through drama, where Mr. Snodsen-Hunk had them reading through a script for a play he had written that was set in the Xena: Warrior Princess universe. Kacey and Emma met during lunch and decided they would get off the bus at one of the stops near the Transylvanian Jewelry and Loan, which was the name of the pawn shop where the illustrious typewriter lived.
"It sure is creepy in this part of town," Emma remarked as the two girls made their way along a cracked sidewalk. They'd just enacted the first part of their plan and gotten off the bus at the wrong stop. The pawn shop was only a few blocks away.
"I know," Kacey said. "Everyone here reminds me of David."
A grizzled old homeless man in a blue hoodie walked past them going the other direction. His eyes floated in his gaunt skull like bloodshot dinner plates. Kacey zipped her jacket up a little higher and crossed her arms over her breasts. Emma suddenly produced a crumpled pack of cigarettes from a side pocket of her backpack.
Kacey gawked. "I didn't know you smoked," she said.
"Everybody smokes. Wanna try one?"
"Sure," Kacey said. She selected a bent cigarette from Emma's pack and stuck it in her mouth. "Like this?"
"Yep." Emma gave her a light. Kacey took a puff, coughed, and immediately vomited on the pavement.
A fat policeman leaning against a nearby telephone pole burst out laughing. "Nice," he said loudly.
Emma clapped Kacey on the back. "Put out your cigarette and let's hurry up."
The two girls turned a corner and there in front of them, tall and foreboding as the monolith from 2001, was the Transylvanian Jewelry and Loan. Kacey cupped her hands around her face and leaned against the window, looking in at all the neat stuff for sale. There was the typewriter, of course, but there were also straight razors, black Fender Stratocasters with screwy aftermarket pickups, voodoo dolls, Colt revolvers, wedding rings, Japanese swords, vinyl LPs, and tons of other pawn shop essentials.
"Dang!" Emma cried from beside her. "Look at all that crap."
"There it is! I see it! The typewriter!" Kacey exclaimed. They went around to the doors and let themselves in. Almost immediately, before either girl could react, a mountainous hobbit sprang up before them.
"The name's Vink!" the man announced merrily, lifting his furry eyebrows and leaning back. "Pawnshop proprietor Vink!"
"Did you say 'Dink?'" Kacey asked.
"No!" shouted Vink. "I said Vink! With a vuh, vuh, vuh!"
"Get him!" Emma screamed. She hit Vink in the knees with a high-speed crouching tackle that knocked him off balance and sent him careening backward into a rack of sunglasses and t-shirts. Vink bellowed hoarsely and clawed at the rack with both hands, sending sunglasses scattering as he fell to the ground with Emma clamped around his legs like a rabid lemur. Kacey pranced to the front of the store and grabbed the typewriter off its pedestal.
"No!" Vink howled.
"It's ours now, bitch!" Emma told him, standing up and giving his belly a hearty kick. "MS-13 for life!"
The two girls fled the pawnshop, causing the bell above the door to ring hellishly as they went. Pawnshop proprietor Vink wailed in agony, more for the loss of his typewriter than for the new puncture wound in the lining of his stomach.