Aborting her plan, the masked Shannon began turning over Clara's house looking for where the snake had gone. She was being careful to look inconspicuous whenever possible. Moving random furniture, and often times simply knocking it over proved to be oddly unnoticed. And by the time she got to the snack room, she figured out why.
In the wake of the mass of partiers, every room had been transformed into a destruction site. There were broken pieces of chairs and smashed lights, enough to pile in the middle of the floor and start a bonfire-and with how rowdy the crowd had become, it didn't seem that far fetched.
She still hadn't really recovered from what had happened back in the closet. So she was caught by surprise when she saw a familiar, tall figure in the doorway of the room. The black haired, black jacketed boy asked someone near the front of the room if they'd seen a robot Frankenstein's Monster and some other short kids. When Shannon dared a look, she couldn't believe she was looking at Socks Morton. Robot hadn't been kidding back in the closet about his best friend's transformation-Socks looked ridiculous. And there was no way he picked out the new look by himself.
Shannon resented Clara for this, not just because she cared about Socks, but because Robot did. They were both such innocent, well meaning guys, it was wrong to put turbulence into their friendship, no matter what Clara was gaining from it.
She remembered something weird about Robot's speech back there, when he had said if Socked loved Clara, he couldn't possibly love Shannon-which kind of nauseated her. How had Robot gotten it into his head that Socks and herself were ever interested in each other like that? Socks was practically like a brother to her, or at least used to be. Although, recently, she wished he could acted like he'd even considered that she was a woman. Maybe she wasn't attracted to him, but Socks was a man, and it hurt to have an old friend like that unable to call her pretty. Even if it was a lie.
Shannon had slipped behind the downstairs couch, on her hands and feet-wincing, as her bandaged palm beneath the glove still stung with cuts that had barely had twenty four hours to heal. There, a thought occurred to her: If she and Socks were interested in each other as more than friends, what did Robot care?
Unless-
Something icy and cold splashed over Shannon's head, derailing her train of thought. She chocked back a yelp, straightening her back and looking right into the eyes of a giggling partier with an empty cup. Another high schooler? How many were there?
"Ooops!" the tube top wearing girl said, "I thought you were a trash can back there! Sorry, dude, but don't be weird and creep up on people like that!"
Shannon glared at her silently through the eye holes in her mask until the partier became so uncomfortable that she got up. From there, she wandered over to her friends on the other side of the room as if nothing had happened. "This one's just fruit punch, too!"
Shannon. Snake. Focus, she told herself, shaking off the ice cubes from her shoulder and back and letting them roll to the floor, like soggy dice.
When she found nothing in the snack room, she went down the hallway and began checking the other first floor rooms. She was overhearing a lot of the middle schoolers now, too, whispering about drinks that the party was allegedly supposed to have. Did Clara start a rumor that there was going to be booze at her own party? Is that what all the high schoolers are doing here? What did this have to do with what Robot was trying to tell her in the closet?
If the goal was to get rid of Clara by flooding her house with bodies to the point that it sank through the foundation and straight to China, then it was working pretty well. Shannon grunted as she slipped through the hallway, careful to make it sound masculine. Some partiers stopped and asked her to take a photo with them, or shouted a random name her way, hoping that she would turn around. Nobody was even close to guessing who she was. In fact, not only did they not suspect she was a middle schooler, but everybody seemed confident that she was a boy. The disguise was working perfectly.
Even Robot, the guy who knew Shannon better than she wanted anybody to know her, couldn't tell that it was her. If he could, he wouldn't have stood there in the closet while he ranted about everything in his life, herself included, like she was the vacuum cleaner back at school.
It was funny. Ever since the accident that had taken her leg, Shannon had wanted nothing more than to blend in. To become the most average girl she could be. And whether or not this was made worse by the attention Robot sent her way, she was beginning to realize that maybe this was never going to happen. She was an amputee-a mechanically assisted human being. A person who's scar not only was never going to go away, but consumed one fifth of her entire body. And even if something about this hadn't fascinated that annoying robot so much, she was never going to be treated the same as everybody else. Random strangers holding doors open for her, cleaning up her messes for her, offering her help where she didn't need it. Treating her like she was disabled. That was the life she was given, no matter if Robot was around to emphasize it.
But in this costume, Shannon felt the closest thing to invisible. There were at least three other sports-mask killers wandering the house that she'd seen already-all of them shouting, whooping and wearing far more scary, decked out versions of her own costume. She was totally unremarkable.
Too bad this movie slasher was also a snake wrangler, and a pretty lousy one at that. She tried to remember what Chester had said about where loose snakes tended to end up. They were attracted to water, so maybe she should check the bathroom next. Short of Ms. Perfect running out screaming and tripping with her panties around her ankles, Shannon didn't exactly take pleasure in the thought of some innocent partier going to use the toilet and finding Smiley giving them the raspberry.
Just as she was thinking that, she noticed a trickling noise familiar enough to the sound her own bathroom made when... the tub was on? Although she herself was too old for baths, Shannon did hear the tub filling up when her grandfather liked to play with his toy navy boats, and needed a wet battleground. Hastily, she swam back through the crowds, totally ignoring every person she bumped into along the way to the hallway bathroom.
"What are you doing?!" shouted Cubey.
While Shannon was having no luck finding her own tiny plague on Clara's party, the boys had found theirs. Robot joined Mitch and Cubey in the back yard, just in time to witness a terrific glass-shattering noise coming from the front. The conspirers then rounded the right side of the house to the front yard. There, they found Clara's undead guards long gone, and Justin and the other three football players throwing rocks from the neighbor's cobble stone garden at the front windows.
Justin had just stepped back to wind up for a touchdown-throw. It was then that he noticed the puny vampire boy coming for him, looking ready to tackle-as if that half pint could tackle Justin. "What does it look like we're doing?" he asked. "Trashing the place."
"Ey, Justin!" Nose called from around the left side of the house, "Ten bucks says I can get that bird's nest in the cross bar of the porch there!"
"Twenty bucks says you're full of it!" Justin shouted back.
Justin's friend, standing off to the side of the porch, wound his arm back and launched a smooth, fist-sized stone at the gallow-slanted beam between the roof of the porch and the pillar before the stairs' left railing. The stone missed its mark, and instead of going through the hole and knocking the nest out, hit the slanted beam and broke it in half, causing the nest to come crashing down, and its contents-two tiny, unhatched blue eggs from springtime, cracking open on the porch with a gooey, yellow splat.
"Ha!" Nose shouted, "Nest is on the ground! That's thirty bucks you owe me!"
Justin calmly wandered over to Nose and punched him in the shoulder-hard enough to make him wince. "Thirty dollars? Anthony, where'd you learn how to make bets?"
Nose, or 'Anthony', scowled at Justin. "I said ten dollars, you raised it to twenty-ten and twenty make thirty dollars!"
"That's Poker, nimrod!" Justin told him, laughing at his friend's stupidity. Apparently, Anthony was used to this treatment, and started laughing along himself.
"You're supposed to be ruining the party inside!" Cubey shouted at him. "Clara isn't gonna notice this mess until tomorrow!"
"Oh, would you shut up, shorty?" Justin said, snappishly. "I know what I'm doing!"
"Hey, bro," interrupted the fourth football player, a black guy with dreadlocks pulled back neatly with a rubber band, looking pained and worried as he held his stomach. "I don't feel so good, man... Let's blow this place and go home already."
"Thomson, don't be a wuss," Justin said over his shoulder flippantly. "You're always going on about something."
"No, I'm serious," Thomson yelled back at him. "Anybody else feelin'-Oh-" he groaned, looking down at the ground. "Forget this noise!"
Without warning, Thomson pushed Anthony aside and stormed through the front door. With no one to turn away unwanted guests, nothing but the door itself stood in the way of the high schooler and the nearest bathroom except the screen door, which Thomson flung open with such force, it was a surprise it hadn't broken off the hinges.
The player's friends were anything but sympathetic, both Anthony and the redhead, still presumed 'Cali', laughing at the site. "Haha, Thomson can't handle a little booze!" Cali mocked.
"Hey, when he's done in there, let's see if we can make one of those fountains out of the toilet next!" Anthony said, turning to Justin. "Dude, what you think?"
But the leader of the pack didn't answer right away, eyeing the door to the house suspiciously. He licked his lips, as if the strange lemony taste he'd commented about was still there. "Hey... shorty," Justin finally spoke in an quiet voice, slowly turning to Cubey. "Where'd you say you got those bottles, again?"
Robot and Mitch looked at Cubey worriedly, while the nerdly vampire boy started to stammer. "Well, I-I... found them. In my neighbor's yard-I mean! M-my neighbors are total party people, a-and they leave a stocked bar out in the their backyard-there's no fence, you see. I just... went there at night, and took some. They have so much, they'd never know it was missing."
Robot and Mitch exchanged cautiously impressed looks.
Justin cycled through a handful of different expressions as he thought about what Cubey had told him. Robot found it awfully similar to the kinds of expressions shifts a robot would make while trying to process a giant mathematical equation. If he was like his friend Anthony, however, anything above second grade math was sure to cause Justin's brain to crap out.
It ultimately didn't matter if Justin didn't buy the explanation, as a long, rude honk from down the street dragged his and everybody else's attention away. A beat up, rusty sedan with only one working headlight came to a screeching halt, just two fences down from Clara's house. The driver's and passenger's side doors popped open, and two tall, young men emerged. Whereas the passenger was a skinny, greasy-haired guy with a goatee and an overcoat, the driver couldn't be any more different, sporting jet black hair, a beat up leather jacket that looked passed down from generations, and wore a look of confidence that could make the coolest 8th graders shiver.
An excited grin spread across Anthony's face. "Heyyyy! It's Pauly!" he shouted at the top of his lungs.
"And he brought The Stink!" Cali chimed in. "Always those two!"
"You losers didn't think I'd miss a party, would ya?" said the one called Paul, slamming the door on his side of the car. His voice was deeper than any of the football players', and had a loud quality that made it perfectly audible from the street, speaking at a normal volume.
"Oh, no, not him..." Cubey murmured.
Robot leaned in close to Mitch's ear. "Who are these humans?" he whispered.
Mitch groaned. "Paul's the highschooler's party boy. Steve used to go on and on about him."
"For what?" Robot probed.
"This place is deadsville, bro," Justin shouted to Paul from across the lawn. "Liquor is all gone." He turned and glared at Mitch. "'Enough to make your eyeballs float away.' Yeesh."
Paul only laughed, his voice booming though the neighborhood, like some unkind God. "I knew this dump'd be dry." He slammed the driver's side door closed and thrust open the backseat one. "Which is why your boy came prepared."
Paul reached into the back seat, grabbing something large, but cast in a shadow from the car's interior roof. When the young man proudly thrust it above his head, however, it was clear to everyone what it was. "Corona, anyone?"
"Real beer?!" Robot asked Mitch in a hushed shout.
The boys stared at the box of bottles, and watched 'The Stink' produce a second box just like it. And then a third. "We're dead," Mitch said at last.
Before the middle schoolers could even think of how to stop this from happening, Anthony and the remaining players ran to the car and helped Paul unload his stash, with Justin following pretty quickly, but beginning to look queasy. The group then charged back into the house, carrying a total of five cases of beer.
Not sure what to do, Robot, Mitch and Cubey doubled after them, all flying through the doorway, one after another, before the screen door even had a chance to close. But with their longer legs and the excitement of getting buzzed, the high schoolers kept a steady pace ahead of them.
Robot's head was spinning with questions. "How could that Paul human possibly have obtained all that alcohol?"
Between catching his breath, Cubey answered: "I don't know! Steve said Johnny would pay homeless people to buy it for him since he's underage."
"Yeah, right," Mitch said sarcastically. "Probably makes him sound more gutsy. My neighbor Martin says his uncle works for the company that makes the stuff. Either way, he's got access to it, and a lot of it."
"What are we gonna do?" asked Cubey. "Ms. Popular's gonna know there's something up once her guests start getting drunk!"
"What can we do?" Mitch asked.
The boys all slowed to a stop, just in front of the kitchen. Like longstanding friendship had given the pair psychic abilities, Mitch and Cubey gave each other knowing looks.
"Bail?" Mitch asked.
"Bail," Cubey echoed, in a sigh of relief.
"But we can't just leave now," Robot said. "This has all gone too far! Our plan was to get Clara upset enough to cancel her party-not get half of Polyneux and an assortment of high schoolers inebriated! Besides, what will Socks think when we have disappeared?"
"Come on, Robot," whined Cubey, "Unless Justin blabs, nobody is going to trace this back to us."
Though his reasoning was decent, based on the way he was looking over his shoulder every other second, Robot decided Cubey wasn't certain about this at all.
The automaton watched a bunch of six foot tall teenagers push his friends out of the way to get to the basement. He was well past the point of being intimidated by these idiotic, hormonally controlled humans, glaring at every one of them as they passed. "Listen, I was just as excited as you two about getting back at Clara for making us all look like fools, especially Socks," Robot added, looking pained as he said his best friend's name. "But this situation has the potential to get someone really hurt. You can head home if you like, but I'll never forgive myself if something happens to Soc-."
As if on cue, another crash from somewhere in the basement cut Robot off, making all three of the boys wince. They turned to the door of the stairs leading to the basement, and then at each other. "Me either," Mitch admitted.
"Fine," Cubey said, "We'll get Socks out of here-then, we run for it."
"So, what's the plan?" asked Mitch.
Robot tapped his chin thoughtfully. "We're going to have to tell him some of the truth,"
"That a bunch of high schoolers broke in with beer and this place is about to get real crazy real quick?" Mitch said.
Robot grimaced. "I was hoping that we could be a little more frank about our involvement than that. But it's a start."
The three of them hurried for the staircase to the basement as Robot mentally estimated how much time it would be before Clara approached the increasing noise on the opposite end of her home.
Meanwhile, Polyneux's cheerleading captain had just left her room again when she heard the sound of a mass of bodies passing through the house all at once. She quietly ignored guests clapping and congratulating her on the 'awesome' party. She stood motionless in the narrow, carpeted hallway after a dozen boys cornered her just to whooping her name-a bunch of which looked unfamiliar and almost too old to be from Polyneux, but they might have just been nobodies who didn't make it into Clara's mental record. Between the increased noise and the sensation that the house was suddenly too full, Clara felt like she had definitely lost control of what was going on now. The question was, what was going on?
"Your house is rad, Clara!" shouted a voice from the top of the staircase. It was one of Socks' basketball teammates-someone with a hideous premature mustache Clara couldn't be bothered to remember the name of. She was never a fan of the sport, focusing more on her cheerleading routines whenever she had to attend one of the Polyneux games. Likewise, she was never a fan of the boys who played it. Football players where were the status was at, and she would have gladly gone out with one of Polyneux's very own, if they had only asked her out before Socks had.
Losers.
It was only then that Ms. Doppler remembered that same boy who identified as her boyfriend. Part of her wanted to find him and make a quiet, romantic spot for themselves somewhere in this house, and try and pack away her increasing suspicion that something wasn't right.
Or at least she did, until another one of Socks's teammates added to that remark. "Yeah, you got some sick light setup downstairs," the skinny, un-mustached player said, leaning against the stairs railing, "And I don't know where you get your decorations from, but I swear the blinking skull on the back of the toilet was staring at me. And don't even get me started on the snake in the laundry room."
Clara's eyes widened just to the point that the top of her irises were visible. "Snake?"
"That little snake dude you got slithering around the house! Freaked us out. Man, I wish my parents were as loaded as yours."
"Come on, let's get some munchies," the mustached boy said.
And with that, they hurried down the stairs to the first floor with all the snacks, leaving the cheerleading captain standing there with her heart pounding. She knew all about her parents' Halloween decorations, because she herself was tasked with putting up a lot of them, as well as other chores. She knew about the blinking eye skull in the downstairs bathroom, the sinister neon eyes that hung from the ceiling upstairs, and the cackling rug in the second floor hallway. There was even a big spider in the that came down from the ceiling when an unlucky guest walked under it.
But she didn't have a pet snake, and neither did her parents. Nor was there any sort of prop that could be mistaken for one. Clara pinched her palms with her manicured nails, holding in a breath. Maybe the boys were just messing with her. After all, it wasn't hidden knowledge that she had a phobia for snakes. It would also explain this undeniable sense that she was getting played with.
She made a slow, calculated walk back down the stairs, determined to find out what was going on once and for all.
At the same time that Paul and 'the Stink' had pulled up to Clara's home, Shannon had just finished clearing every inch of space in the first floor bathroom, right next to the staircase, and just before the hallway to the kitchen. As it turned out, it not only was furnished with a bathtub, but it had been left with its water turned on and no obvious culprit. No snake, however.
She was still inside the bathroom when a tall, muscular African American boy poked his head through the crack, saw that the toilet was not in use, and then pleaded to use the bathroom. With the door slamming in her face, Shannon was left to stand exposed at the front of the first floor hallway.
She didn't even have time to analyze what had just happened before she heard the front door slam open yet again, and witnessed the stampede of a new batch of partiers going to make the house even more packed. They brushed past her as if she was nothing more than wallpaper, one of the larger new partiers with a crudely repaired nose charged through the narrow clearing to the kitchen, carrying a box with something glass-like and clanking inside.
Along with them came two of the tallest guys Shannon had seen yet. One was skinnier than Shannon herself, who looked weighed down by his long hair and heavy clothes. The other, sporting a mustache and black leather jacket, Shannon was positive was not only a high schooler, but old enough to pass for an adult.
"Now the party's really starting!" shouted the voice of the person carrying the box of bottles, as he stood before the basement staircase. "Any of you fellas twenty one?"
One of the boys, blond and slightly more muscular, behind him thumped him in the back of the head. "None of them are, bone head!"
Anthony cringed, but did not drop the beer case. "Ooops, sorry."
While the others were strangers to her, Shannon recognized this guy-it was Justin, the most popular member of the high school football team. A ton of girls at Polyneux had a crush on him, or at least brought his name up in the bathrooms. Seeing him for the first time now herself, Shannon admitted he was probably pretty handsome in photographs. But there was nothing attractive about the sweaty, nauseous expression on his face as he looked back down the hall, as if worried he was being followed.
Justin and the other was followed by two fairly homely boys roughly his size that Shannon guessed were on the team too, one of which spoke in a Californian accent and also looked mildly sick. From what, she could only guess. For Shannon, it was nauseating enough to think of Justin about to unleash Pandora's box on an already anarchic party.
Just then, she noticed three familiar boys following after the beer-bearing high schoolers. Not only were they short, but they were all wearing their costumes from last Halloween.
Shannon swallowed a stone-sized lump in her throat. Whatever they did to contribute to all this, they were in so much trouble. She couldn't stand the thought of it, especially for someone as good as Robot. She had to get them out of here.
Downstairs again, bottles were being passed out. Cuss words broke the surface of the music like bouys on water when some of the partiers tried opening the bottles with their hands, and cut themselves open on the caps in the process. Someone shouted for a bottle opener, and then another, before someone got impatient enough to get creative. Shannon watched a figure smashed the neck of their bottle against the corner of the doorway, leading into the laundry room. She cringed as she watched someone else catch onto the idea, and then another, and then another. Whoops of celebration filled the room until Shannon couldn't make out the lyrics of the music anymore.
Her back hugged the wall as she tried her best not to get noticed-and avoid the shards of glass that were quickly filling the air. At once, she realized a snake was probably the least of Clara's concerns, if she ever even realized it was here. Never did Shannon feel such an instinct to flee from an impending punishment bomb before it hit.
Further into the dance floor, Robot raised his head above the crowd, his pupils growing as he narrowed in on a target. He dropped his head, disappearing beneath the wall of humans. Baffled, she turned and focused as best as she could on the place Robot had been staring at. She had no idea what or who he was looking for, but she had to get to him first.
Shannon darted for him like a bullet for a target. She shoved shoulders aside to get through, the scrawniest of girls and the brawniest of guys no match for her adrenaline. She didn't who griped at her for it or threatened to make her flat as the carpet. There was sweat running down her forehead behind the mask and pooling on her upper eyelid, and the black eye makeup was starting to irritate. She blinked it away and kept making her way closer to Frankenbot.
"Socks!" Robot called, his voice defined but low beneath the cacophony. "Socks?"
Though he may have gone by a different name now, young Mr. Morton appeared at the sound of the robot's call. Robot was still so used to him being blond and acne covered that it took him a moment to register that he had found him. "Robot, what's going on?" he asked.
They were closer to one of the blinking party lights, and Robot could see for the first time how worn out he looked. Like being taken under Clara's wing and social circle had snatched away a week of his sleep. Despite this, he still looked concerned. Socks could recognize the tell tale signs of distress in Robot's computerized voice.
In the distance, something else that sounded like glass shattered, and Socks and Robot both looked off into the dark of the basement. "Is it me, or are things getting a little crazy?"
"Listen, something serious is going on," Robot summarized. "Mitch, Cubey and I are leaving, but we need you to come with us! We'll explain later."
Socks looked mildly confused. "Leave? But I can't go anywhere. Clara's coming back for me any second."
This was the moment that made Robot lose it. He turned to his best friend and gave him the most disbelieving stare. "Socks, Clara has not spent a moment with you since the party began. She is not looking for you. And she's not going to notice when you are outside with me and the boys. Now, let's go!"
Robot grabbed Socks' hand as he made visual calculations for a path out, but Socks effortlessly broke from his grip. "Hold on," he said, taking a step back. "What gives you the right to make calls about my girlfriend like that?"
Like a token inserted into a brand new video game, Robot felt his heart drop to the bottom of his chassis, and nearly heard the 'ting' it made. "Socks, this is not the time to talk about this."
"Well, I think it is!" Socks said. "I looked all over this place for you! Cubey, Mitch and you go running around this house without me for over an hour, and you think you have any right to say anything about Clara leaving me here by myself!"
"Socks, this is different!" Robot pleaded. "There's a lot you don't know-"
"Because I'm stupid, right?" Socks asked, getting angrier. "Mr.-Can't-Do-Basic-Essays? Mr.-Needs-His-Best-Friend-The-Robot-To-Fix-His-Math-Homework? Mr.-Toilet-Paper-Stuck-to-His-Shoe!" He grabbed chunks of his hair on the side of his head and yanked as he remembered that day at the library not too long ago.
"I never made fun of you for that," Robot said, earnestly.
"But you're still so sure you know more than I do. Newsflash, Robot! I was the one who introduced you to everything! Not you! I even introduced you to Shannon, and after all the time I spent trying to set you and Shannon up, did I ever once tell you that maybe she's just not interested in you that way?"
Robot narrowed his eyes. Of all living beings, man or machine, on earth, Socks was the last person he wanted to hear an 'I was right' from about that girl. "Don't drag Shannon into this," he said, his voice low and threatening.
"Why shouldn't I?" Socks shouted anyway. "All I've ever done is try to be supportive of you. I've known Shannon way longer than you, and I know her better! You wonder why we're not as close as we used to be? You don't even know what she was like before the accident! She's changed!"
Robot's jaw dropped. He didn't know whether to be furious, or crushed. "Oh... so you would throw that information in my face! I don't see why knowing Shannon longer matters now, since you're so convinced about Clara's rightness for you."
Beneath the anger, Socks looked confused. "Matters now? Wha-what are you talking about?"
"What are you both blabbing about?" demanded Cubey, as he and Mitch had finally caught up to Robot. "We have to get out of here!"
"What is going on?" counter demanded Socks.
It was at the end of their argument that he and Robot simultaneously noticed the music suddenly cut out. And it wasn't long before others noticed, too. Anybody who had continued to dance through the madness lost their groove without a song to move to.
Pushing her way through the dance floor, Clara Doppler emerged before the boys. The hostess of the party was suddenly the center of attention, and it was obvious that she was not happy.
In turn, Robot, Mitch, and Cubey backed slowly away, disappearing as best as they could. If this were a video game, Robot pictured a simple 'Game Over' screen appearing right at this very moment. But this wasn't a video game. They had lost, but there was no starting over.
"Baby, what's going on?" asked Socks.
He reached for Clara's hand, but she snatched it away. "Don't 'Baby' me right now. Someone's screwed with my party, and I'm going to get to the bottom of this." She turned away and did a half circle, looking everyone she could in the eyes. "And when I find out who did it, there are going to be consequences!"
Suddenly, just as Clara's rant had ended, a hand grabbed Cubey out of the darkness and hoisted him up into the air. The sudden motion caused a circle of gasps to spring up around the short vampire, followed by a chorus of laughter at seeing the puny vampire dangling helplessly from the collar of his costume.
Mitch and Robot, watching in shock from below, saw that it was none other than Justin. His eyes were bloodshot, and even under the party lights, he looked pale. "I don't know what you freaks put in those bottles, but you're going to regret the day you were born."
Robot rushed in just as Justin pulled back an arm to wallop Cubey in the face. "Stop!" he shouted, extending his arms in front of his friend. "This has all been a terrible misunderstanding!"
"What are you doing, dude?!" Anthony asked, storming over and taking Justin's shoulder. The dumb football player was swinging an open bottle in his hands, sloshing it onto the carpet as he waved his arms around. "Chill out before the stupid hostess finds out! We got the real stuff now!"
Clara's mouth dropped open, baffled by his idiocy. "I'm the stupid hostess."
Anthony turned to Clara and flashed her a grin, which immediately dissolved. "Oh..." He rubbed his sweaty palms on his pants, and then thrust out a hand. "Nice... to meet... you."
Clara gaped at him until Anthony finally, painfully, dropped his hand.
"What was in the bottles?" Justin cut Clara off, yelling in Robot's face. "Tell me before I turn you into a napkin ring!"
"What bottles? What the hell is going on?" Clara demanded.
Without anything to say to either of them, Robot started to stammer. But before Justin's fist could go for the blow to either boy, his face twisted, and he dropped Cubey onto the ground. The vampire landed with a hard thud on the basement floor and watched on with Robot, Clara, Socks, and more than a dozen other witnesses as the handsome, heavily admired football player turned around, leaned over, and vomited a fountain of liquid onto a two foot long expanse of floor. A chorus of gagging and 'ew's emerged from the dense crowd as they parted out of the way of the puddle, and the hostess for whom the house belonged to looked mortified. Somehow, a few of the guests who considered this part of hardcore partying cheered Justin on as he puked even more.
"Sick!" Anthony pumped his fist into the air. "In a good way! OH... oh crap... not in a good way..." He smelled the air, and suddenly covered his mouth with his hands, gagging. He shoved through the crowds to get to the downstairs basement, vomit spilling out from his fingers and causing everyone in his path to move violently out of the way as the sickening smell of stomach bile cut through the air.
Robot turned to Cubey. "Cubey, what on earth was in those bottles?"
Cubey stammered. "Oh-I-I don't know-It-It was in a big jug my dad kept in the pantry. It looked clear, so I used it."
"What kind of jug?" asked Mitch.
"Well, it just had a white label on it, I-I didn't have time to read it," Cubey said, shaking. "It just smelled like rubbing alcohol."
"Hey, my dad had something like that once," one of the high school boys drunkenly interrupted, rubbing his stubbly chin with a mindless grin. "I think he got it when he was going in for a colonoscopy-you know, the treatment where the doctor puts a camera up your butt."
Robot and Mitch gave each other horrified looks. "Cubey, that sounds like polyethelene glycol!" Robot exclaimed, grabbing his antennas and yanking. "It's a liquid laxative!"
"WHAT!" Cubey shouted. "WHY WOULD HE KEEP THAT IN THE KITCHEN?!"
"Alright! I don't know where you all came from or what's going on, but this party is totally OVER!" Clara shouted. "I want everybody out of here. Right. Now!"
"Whatever," one of the highschool girls mentioned. "I was out of here anyway. Puke is so not cool."
"And I ain't getting near one of those bathrooms," said a high school boy.
With no one else to point the finger to, Clara marched to Cubey and shoved her pointer finger onto his nose, bending it backwards. "If this is all your fault, you'd better fix this. My father is a lawyer!"
"You can't scream at him!" Mitch came to Cubey's defense. "It's not his fault!"
"Then who started all of this!" Clara demanded. Just then, someone tapped Clara on the shoulder, and she spun around, fire in her eyes. "What?" she spat at them.
"Chill out!" the girl shouted at her. "I was just gonna warn you that you're about to step on your pet snake. Whatever."
"Oh, that's so funny the second time!" Clara shouted at her. She turned to Cubey again. "And I'll bet the snake joke is your idea, too!"
"What snake joke?" Cubey asked, this time speaking genuinely. He looked to Mitch and Robot for help, but they were just as clueless.
"Quit acting stupid!" Clara started. But as she was about to unleash a ton of lawsuit threats of which she may or may not have been able to deliver, she felt something tickle her ankle. Her face drained of all its anger, and she took on a funny expression, like she needed to take care of a bad itch before she could continue ranting. She looked down to see what the sensation was. In the spotlight of one of the strobe lights was a relatively small, but very alive, red, black and yellow snake, curled around her cotton sock. It's head tipped up just in time to look Clara in the eyes, and on cue, Smiley flashed Ms. Doppler his very best trademark smirking tongue-wiggle.
"Well, so much for finishing this one before Halloween" - March 10th
There was so much to fix about this and the next two chapters, but I think it's ready. I got some great feedback about Robot being OOC in the last chapter about talking with a random stranger in the closet and disclosing all these personal thoughts. It made sense for me at the time because in the show, he would go off on rants and just talk to appliances, and at the time he would expect them to respond. As he would grow out if it, like his feelings of superiority, he would have the need to do the same, but to random people instead, because he knows at least they are actually listening/ can respond. But I guess this reason didn't cut it. I may edit the previous chapter later to have it where Robot is just talking to a dark closet with nobody there, but that doesn't make anymore sense to me. I do need him to have this moment where he comes out and talks to Shannon without knowing it's her, for this and the very next chapter. Otherwise, this ship is ready to sail. And begone-you've been in my for 3 months!
In this chapter, Shannon goes hunting for the loose snake before someone else finds it, and the boys deal with Justin and the football players going overboard with wrecking Clara's house when a new party crasher arrives to make everything worse.
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Whatever Happened to Robot Jones? © Greg Miller & Cartoon Network