Chapter Seven, how long is too long?
"Just when you think it can't get any worse, it can. And just when you think it can't get any better, it can."
Chapter Seven
Morning couldn't come soon enough for Missy, it never could when one's sleep was punctuated by dreams of vampires followed up by the Frog brothers swooping in like badly dressed superheroes to save the day from the bloodsuckers. She thought she would say something to them about how their little obsession was affecting her sleep when she finally got around to going downstairs, but first, she realized, she would have to address the shouting that was coming from across the room, jostling her right out of slumberland and back into the loud, bright world of the waking. Missy sat up, and whined softly because it was the last thing in that moment that she wanted to do. Sitting up, she glared at the boys standing in her doorway and called out to them. "What are you two bickering about? And do you have to do it in my doorway when there are plenty of other, perfectly adequate ones for you to argue in front of?" Edgar and Alan glanced at her, then turned their backs to her and continued in softer, more urgent voices. "Excuse me?" Missy cried, and their eyes shot in her direction again. "What's the matter with you two?" Not that there wasn't always something the matter with the Frog brothers, she thought, just that it was too early in the morning for her to be dealing with it already.
Edgar glared at her for a couple of excruciatingly long seconds, and while Missy could see the war of indecision going on behind his eyes, she couldn't tell who was winning. "School." He said at last, and it was so much the last thing she was expecting, that she laughed.
"You're serious? You're arguing about school? What for?" It never occurred to her, as she was asking, that as much as living on the boardwalk made things seem like an endless vacation, the school year wouldn't be over for another three months. It wasn't like she had attended school regularly in the other life, anyway.
"It's Monday." Alan told her, and Missy's face was colored by surprise. Had it been two days since she had left Seattle already? She had forgotten all about her old teachers and old school, and for a moment, she wondered what her classmates would be saying about her. No doubt they had by now seen Renee's charming television interview, and the gossip would be worse than the truth. "We have to go to school today and I was telling Edgar that it would probably be better to close the store today."
"And I," Edgar interjected, frowning. "was telling Alan that it would be stupid to lose a day's business just because he doesn't think you're capable of running the shop alone."
Missy's face was incredulous, and she frowned at Edgar. "And you think I'm capable?"
"Of course I don't." Edgar grunted. "But you're going to have to learn eventually." Missy didn't want to tell Edgar that he was right, partly because knowing how smug it would make him made her want to prove him wrong out of spite; but mostly because she wasn't sure that she wanted or could handle the responsibility of running the store alone.
"I'll manage." She said at last, and they stared at her, faces stunned. "Just show me how to work the cash register." Edgar and Alan were silent for a long time, and Missy could see in their faces that they didn't trust her half as far as she could throw the both of them. She wasn't sure she trusted herself any more than they did. With her luck she'd end up giving someone the wrong change or selling one of the brothers' "Rare, don't touch. Don't breathe on it." comics for a dollar and they'd skin her alive.
"We've always closed the store when we had school before, it doesn't make any sense to change the way we do things now." Edgar glared at his brother, and before Missy's eyes, they slipped back into their argument like she wasn't there and they weren't standing in her bedroom.
"We closed the store because we never had someone to keep it open while we were at school." Missy sighed, propping her head up with her hand and waiting for the two of them to include her again.
"Then let's just close it for a couple of days, and we can teach her how to work the register. If we just throw her out there on her own and expect her to swim she's going to drown." The analogy made her wince, and Missy cleared her throat loudly.
"Guys, listen," She tried.
"It isn't that hard. An idiot could do it." Edgar said.
"I still think we should wait a few days." Alan said.
"Hello?" It was like she hadn't spoken at all, and neither of them even glanced at her.
"So what?" Edgar continued, getting louder by the second. "I'm supposed to just let her sit around because you've got a crush on her?"
"I don't! I just don't think it'd end well if we-"
Missy reached behind her and grabbed her pillow. She pulled it around her body and in one smooth motion, threw it at her door. It bounced off Edgar's face, and he whipped around to glare at her. "Enough! Ugh!" She slid off her bed, and she glared at them so hotly she felt like her anger should have physically burned them. "You're acting like children, both of you. Look, close the store, don't close the store, but don't squabble." She turned her head at Alan and frowned. "Edgar's right." She told him. "If I go down there and try to run the store, I'll probably mess up. I can almost guarantee it. But that's no reason not to try, and there's really no sense in losing business when I'm not doing anything but sitting on my tail all day. " She glanced at Edgar, and because he had his smug face on, she pointed a finger at him and glared. "That doesn't mean he's wrong, Edgar. Just remember when I screw up, that you were the one who advocated my going down there in the first place." She gestured for them to move out from in front of her door, and they did, and she left her room and went down the hall to the bathroom; wondering, as she went, if there would ever be a morning that she lived with the Frogs where she woke up normally. Stupid Frog brothers.
Edgar and Alan followed her, and they stood outside the bathroom and watched her put toothpaste on her brush, and turn the faucet on. "I can show you how to use the register." Alan told her, and she glanced up at him in the mirror with her mouth full of toothpaste, and smiled around her toothbrush. She washed her face next, and when she was finished, the rumbling of her stomach bade her into the Frog parents' bedroom, into the little sort of kitchen.
Naturally, Edgar and Alan were watching her as she rooted through the cabinets, and she shook a box at them, smiling. "Oatmeal?"
"Huh?" Edgar asked, and she turned the box so he could see the logo.
"Breakfast." Missy explained. "Most important meal of the day? Comes before lunch and dinner?" This was going to be one of many battles over meals that Missy saw herself having with Edgar and Alan in the future, she was certain.
"No time." Edgar said. "We have to leave in," he lifted his arm and looked at the watch on his wrist. "twenty minutes."
"That's plenty enough time to make breakfast!" Missy frowned. "How about eggs? I think I could do eggs in the microwave. We'll need to get a toaster eventually, eggs aren't really eggs without toast."
"It's fine." Alan told her. "We wouldn't have time to eat anything anyway. We still have to open the store up and show you how to work the register."
"Well, hold on." Missy pried the fridge open and took two pieces of fruit out of the bowl she'd stashed in there, handing one to either of the brothers. "Pears." She smiled, and it was only a little sheepish. "They're my favorite. They're good for you, and they only take a couple of minutes to eat." Edgar opened his mouth like he was going to argue, and she held up a hand to stop him. "Edgar, right now, I only want to see that mouth of yours moving if you're chewing." Edgar glared at her for a couple of seconds, and then took a giant, loud bite out of the fruit. She beamed, and although he rolled his eyes, he took another bite.
As it turned out, working the cash register was a lot more involved than Missy had thought, and as much as Alan was trying to be patient with her, she could see that having to stop and bring her attention back away from watching Edgar roll the racks out was making him frustrated. "When you're finished ringing up their purchase, press this button, and it'll tell you how much they owe you. If they give you exact change, press this button, and the drawer will open and you can put the money in." Missy nodded, and tried not to watch the people, already up and about at this ungodly hour, walking past the door. "If they don't give you exact change, just punch in how much money they did give you, and then press this button to find out how much change you need to give them." Missy wasn't feeling very confident, but Edgar and Alan were trusting her with their livelihood, so she would do her best for their sake. "Do you think you can do it?"
No, Missy wanted to say, but she didn't. She smiled at Alan instead, and shrugged. "If Edgar can do it, it can't be that hard." The older Frog hid a grin, somewhat unsuccessfully, and Edgar glared at her from across the store.
"We have to go soon, go get changed." Missy looked down and realized that Edgar wasn't just being Edgar, she was still in her pajamas.
"You couldn't have told me that before?" She grumbled, but she hurried back up the stairs to her room. She tugged on a pair of jeans under her sleep shirt, buttoning them and pulling her nightshirt up over her head and dropping it on the floor. She made another note in her head as she slipped her arms into the sleeves of a thinly knit, aubergine colored cardigan and buttoned it up the front, to go shopping for some more climate appropriate clothing. She rolled up her sleeves and tied her sneakers onto her feet.
"Hurry up!" Edgar's voice came from the bottom of the stairs, and she rolled her eyes and grabbed a scrunchie out of her toiletries bag.
"Keep your shirt on!" She shouted back, holding her hair up with one hand and twisting the band around her ponytail with the other as she walked. Edgar and Alan were waiting in front of the store with their bikes when she got down the stairs, and she took a deep breath to get her courage back when the truth of what she was doing hit her again.
"You can do this, right?" Edgar asked her, and for a moment, Missy thought he looked sincere. She just smiled, waving them off.
"Go on, before you're late. Try and have a good day, learn lots." She told them, and it was a couple of seconds before either of them moved.
"We'll be back around three thirty. Good luck." Edgar said, and then they were gone, peddling out of sight, and Missy was watching them go, wondering what she had been thinking when she told them not to close the store. Idiot.
It is a difficult thing to accurately describe an experience that one has not had the opportunity to take of. A person who has never worked a day in their life would find it hard to sympathize with someone who has, just as one who has never been beaten about the head by something heavy cannot understand the sensation thoroughly until he has been bludgeoned repeatedly, until at last he wipes the blood from his brow and says: "Oh, I see what you mean." Missy had never had to work for any reason before, though after dealing with the sort of patrons that the comic store catered to, she figured that it must be remarkably similar to having someone hit you over the head with a brick for several hours. Granted, the only time she'd ever been hit by anything, it had been a phone and not a brick. The mark it had left behind, the physical one, at least, was already lightening on her jaw, and before long, she knew, it would be gone with no more permanence than the pain that working retail caused her now. "Have a nice day." She thought she must sound like a robot. A robot trained to smile and accept money and thank people for their patronage.
The first time that she hit the wrong button on the register, and it beeped angrily at her, she'd panicked. She'd had to press the button that Alan had showed her to open the drawer and figure out the math in her head. She fumbled with the money, and dropped a handful of coins on the floor. She had whimpered then, and apologized to the customer as she scooped up the fallen change. She thought that if she had gone to a store, and the cashier was as inexperienced as she was, she would have been more understanding. Her customer wasn't, and he snapped at her to hurry up, and snatched the change out of her hand when she held it out to him. She thanked him quietly for his patronage, told him to have a nice day, and waited until he was gone before she broke down. She sat down on the floor behind the counter, leaning against the wall and trying to tell herself that she was too old to be getting upset because one stranger had been short with her.
Then she was angry, because it was only a comic, and she didn't know what the man had gotten so upset for. Then she realized, as she stared up at the cash register on the counter, that standing up when all you want to do is stay down, is a hard thing to do. She was fighting that particular battle within her then, and she thought about the difference between someone who gets up when they've been knocked down, and someone who, when they're on their back, instead of getting back on their feet, rolls over. She wasn't the rolling over type. If she was, she wouldn't have smashed a vase over her stepmother's head and gotten on the bus in the first place. People underestimate their personal strength so frequently that it always comes as a surprise when you find the courage to do something you never thought you could, like stand up instead of rolling over.
That said, all Missy really wanted was to get up off the floor and slink back to her bed, and maybe read Wilde until her eyes stung. But she wouldn't go upstairs, no, she wouldn't.
She reached up and planted her hands on the edge of the counter, sighed, and pulled herself back up. She smiled at the next customer like the one before him had never come in, and when she dropped his change, she was careful to make sure it was in his hand instead of on the floor.
When Edgar and Alan rolled up on their bikes in front of the store, she smiled at once, and found it hard to finish with the customer she was with instead of running over there and, well, she wasn't sure what she would do when she got there. She was torn between hugging them for coming back, and thrashing them within an inch of their lives for leaving her alone. "How did you do?" Alan asked her, after he and Edgar had locked their bikes up, and all Missy could do was looked at her like she was crazy, and as she laughed harder, she thought, just maybe, she might be. Just a little. She came out from behind the register, walked over to the stairs, and stopped at their base, sitting down. "I don't think I'm cut out for the comic business, fellas." She said, setting her elbows on her knees and holding her head up in her hands.
Edgar opened the register drawer, and Missy thought he looked concerned, almost panicked, as he counted the money. There must have been more in there than he expected to find after leaving Missy alone with it for so long, because his eyes got wide and then his face was stony again. "Well, you didn't bankrupt us. I'm happy."
"Really." Missy said, absently. "You look tickled."
"Did you have any problems with the register?" Alan asked her, and although answering him meant that she had to think about her almost breakdown again, she did it anyway.
"Some." She told him candidly. "I kept forgetting which buttons were which, but I think I did alright."
Missy was careful about what she told them, she didn't want to encourage them to leave her in charge of the store again. "How was school?"
"SSDD." Edgar said from behind the register, and Missy tilted her head to look at him, her brow puckered.
"What was that again?" She asked, and Alan sort of grinned, though she thought it looked a bit like he was snarling.
"Same shit, different day. Story of our lives." He explained, and Missy smiled. She liked that. It was a simple way of explaining something, that if you tried to do it properly, would cause you to go mad long before you ever got through with it.
"Learn anything interesting?" She asked, and Edgar snorted.
"What the inside of a frog looks like, and what school cafeteria pizza looks like partially digested." Missy thought about what he'd said, and realized that when she thought about a Frog dissecting a frog, it seemed sort of comical to her.
"That's um, that's pretty gross." Was what she said, and Edgar's smile almost existed, for a fraction of a second, and Missy was beginning to understand how difficult it was to make that happen.
Time flies when you're having fun, so is that to say that it walks when you're bored? Or crawls when you're excruciatingly bored? Either way, it passes, and Missy couldn't have said which she would have preferred if someone had asked her. On the one hand, as she sat on the base of the stairs, watching the sky get dimmer, she tried to think of ways to cajole the sun into going down faster. On the other hand, as she laughed with Edgar and Alan -well, she laughed, they just sort of watched her do it- she thought that time couldn't pass slowly enough for her to enjoy it. She wasn't sure why she wanted to get out on the boardwalk so desperately. It could have been because she wasn't jaded, and everything, all the loudness and brightness and stickiness that the boardwalk had to offer her was precious and new to her. It could have been because she was tired of looking at comics and listening to Edgar quiz her on vampire lore.
Whatever the reason, it wasn't David and his cruel eyes, or Marko and his sweet smile, it certainly wasn't Paul, who shook up her world and reminded her so much of Eden, and well…it might've been the dark haired one. She blamed her silly fluttering girl heart, and maybe it was his bare chest to blame, or the way that he could look at her and burn her with his eyes, and make her feel without him ever saying anything, that he absolutely hated her. She didn't even know his name. She wanted to hear him speak. She imagined that he could say more in a few words than she could say with a lifetime. She had the feeling that Paul said whatever was passing in his mind, closest to his mouth at the time, but she knew that sometimes, more could be said with silence.
The sun set, and with it took some of its warmth, and suddenly Missy's cardigan wasn't so stifling, and letting her hair down seemed like a good idea. She wandered by the carousel and watched it spin, and gradually, she made her way down to the beach, past a couple of bonfires, to where the sand was dark and cold, and the boardwalk was far enough from her that the sounds and lights were but a dullness in the corner of her mind. And as she sat, gazing out at the silver moon on the sea, she remembered what Edgar had said to her her second night in Santa Carla. "People and lights." She thought about it, and she glanced over at her shoulder, realizing how far she had walked. She could still see the boardwalk, but the bonfires in the distance burned no larger than a candle's flame from where she was sitting. In that moment, watching the fire flicker in the distance, and the moon in the sky and the one in the water, Missy couldn't have been bothered to go back to the boardwalk if the Count himself had flown down and landed beside her.
She leaned back until she fell, and her back hit the sand, and while she was certain that she would be shaking it out of her hair the rest of the night, the sand was so cool through her sweater that she didn't care. She counted the stars, and every time she got to ten, she started over. She thought she could lie on the beach forever, until the tide came in and swept her away. There was something serene about lying on the beach at night, you could hear people and rides in the distance, but all you were really listening to was the whispering sound that the water made as it reached out to you, and drew back into itself, disheartened, when you didn't reach back.
"Hey, you sleeping?" She rolled her head and the right side of her face pressed into the soft, cold sand. There was a boy standing on the sand beside her, and she was sure that she didn't recognize him.
"No, just lying here." He couldn't have been older than ten or eleven, and his face was dirty, like the faces of young children often were, and he was watching her. "What's your name?" She asked him, and he sat down by her head, drawing something in the sand beside his feet.
"Laddie. You're Missy, right?" He said, and Missy was so stunned, that if she had been more inside her head, she might have used the time to worry that her mouth was open.
"How do you know my name?" Laddie looked guilty, then, and he wiped away his drawing quickly.
"Don't be mad." He said, so pitifully that Missy's frown wavered. "Dwayne told me, and when I saw you down here I thought maybe you'd hit your head or something. Paul said you fall a lot." Missy rolled her eyes hard, and smiled. She was sure Paul neglected to mention that he was usually the cause of her klutziness, but that wasn't the part of Laddie's sentence she was focused on.
"Dwayne? That's the dark haired one?" She asked, and Laddie nodded, and Missy could see that he was smiling a little through his hair. "Is he your brother?" She asked, and Laddie shook his head.
"Dwayne takes care of me." He said. "But he's not my brother."
"Are you here by yourself?" Missy went on to ask, already frowning, because the thought of a little boy running around on the boardwalk by himself terrified her.
"No." Laddie turned then, and pointed behind her, at a dark blur a ways down the beach from them. "Dwayne's here." Missy followed his finger, and for a brief moment, she imagined that she could feel Dwayne looking at her, so many feet away. "He was the one who told me you were down here, and he said it was okay if I wanted to meet you, because David said it was okay."
"Really." Missy wondered how he had known she was on the beach in the first place, and worried about what Dwayne had told Laddie. David was a charismatic person, even she could see that, and it was obviously that characteristic that pulled others to him, and allowed him to exude the subtle control over the others that he did.
"Marko said you were nice." Laddie added, and Missy turned her head to smile at him again.
"That was nice of him, considering we don't really know each other that well." Missy sat up, running her fingers through her hair and picking grains of sand out. "I only really met him last night." Laddie was moving his finger around in the sand again, and Missy leaned over his shoulder to look. "What are you drawing?"
"Bird." Laddie said, and traced a wing curve with his index finger.
"Do you like birds?" Missy asked, and Laddie pulled a face, and she laughed.
"Not really. Marko likes birds, he has some, and sometimes I wake up and they're sleeping on me." He smiled and smoothed the sand flat with his hand. His expression turned intense, and he started to draw again. He drew a building, and beside it, a long line that she thought looked almost like a bridge, especially when he began to create water lines beneath it. At the end of the line he drew a stick figure, and over the entire thing, lines, diagonally, as though it were raining in the sandy world he had drawn.
"What's that?" Missy asked him, and he shrugged.
"I don't know." Laddie said. "Something I saw in my head."
"Like a dream?" Missy asked, and he shrugged.
"Kind of, but I'm awake when it happens." He explained.
"Oh, well that's called a daydream, I think." Missy told him, and he snuck a shy smile at her.
"Laddie." A deep voice said, from somewhere behind her left shoulder, and it was so sudden that Missy cried out, her hand flying up to cover her mouth. Laddie's face lit up, and he laughed so hard that his face turned red. Missy lowered her head, glancing backwards through her hair at Dwayne, frowning. Away from the boardwalk, he looked entirely made up of the darkness that surrounded him, hair, eyes, skin. He was made of the stuff, and he was staring at her, his eyes boring tiny holes in her like the ones caterpillars left behind on leaves.
"Hey!" Laddie managed at last, his laughter gone, though the smile remained. Missy was glad that her social ineptness was so humorous, at least to people who weren't her. She thought the whole world must be conspiring against her to make her look stupid, or at the very least these four, strange boys were. "I want to go on the rides, can we?" He was staring up at the dark eyed, older boy, hope so blatant on his face, and he turned that same, pitifully yearning look on Missy. "Star doesn't like to go on the rides, she says they make her sick. You like rides, right, Missy? I'll let you pick one, too, I swear."
"He's lying." Dwayne said, so quietly that Missy doubted for a second that he had spoken at all, and when she looked at him, the look in his eyes was roguish. "He won't let you pick."
Missy smiled, and she felt like it must have looked ridiculous, how wide it was. "That's alright, I like most rides." She stood, brushing sand off the back of her jeans.
"Can we, Dwayne?" Laddie fixed Dwayne with a look that was so outrageously desperate that Missy laughed, and Dwayne smiled at the little boy.
"Okay." Laddie grinned big, and was on his feet, reaching out and snagging Missy's left hand before she knew that he had moved. A look of alarm passed briefly on Dwayne's face, and Missy laughed because she thought that he was upset that Laddie had grabbed her without asking. His concern vanished at her smile, and Laddie smiled up at Missy.
"Come on!" He tugged on her arm, and his little legs moved so quickly that Missy had to take great steps to keep up with him. Sand flew up around their feet, and when they reached the boardwalk at last, Missy stumbled into the railing, panting against it. Laddie didn't seem to be having any trouble, and she shook her head at him. She cursed children and their endless founts of energy. "Come on!" Laddie took up her hand again, and she had only time to look back at Dwayne and curse her strange luck before they were going again, and Missy couldn't help wondering to herself as she was dragged; didn't anyone in Santa Carla ever walk anywhere?
Thank you for reading.