47. "Eddy Money (The Apprenticeship of Eddy Wilde, Pt. 1)"
Mercedes knew she probably wasn't a perfect mother - because what mother is? - but she did privately regard herself as a good one. That said, she had absolutely no idea how to help her daughter in a situation as strange as this one.
She had been trying to get as much information out of her daughter as possible while still respecting her boundaries; so far, all Nazz had given her was that she was struggling to reconcile how bad she felt about Kevin with the fact that he may have done something bad immediately before the incident, something that made her justifiably angry at him. Nothing too bad, Nazz made sure her mom understood Kevin hadn't raised a hand to her or anything, but… something that, if not for the circumstances, would have her wondering whether she still wanted to be with him. One of those "out of all the ways you could have acted, why did you choose to act like that?" sort of deals.
Mercedes didn't have any better ideas for how to emotionally bridge the gap between being furious at somebody and still wanting to protest the fact that he had been deeply wronged by someone who should be held accountable. But she had to try to be a good mother; she knew the fastest way to be a bad mother was to not try to be a good one.
Her best guess was this: to stress to her daughter that two things could be true. Kevin could have displayed a deal-breaker of a personality trait immediately before suffering abuse from a third party that he absolutely did not deserve. Mercedes reminded her that even if Kevin woke up tomorrow, Nazz would best not bring up the matter five minutes after he regained consciousness, so whether she wanted to explain to him what he'd done wrong and give him the chance to change or drop him without a chance for him to redeem himself, she'd have plenty of time to think about it… for better or for worse.
Nazz agreed. She wasn't happy about it, but she couldn't argue with that. Still, that information didn't leave her in much of a different position. It didn't solve anything, and she still felt as bad as she had before.
And maybe just feeling bad in this situation was the correct thing to do, but Mercedes didn't want to resign to her daughter being miserable without recompense. She wanted to at least offer her daughter the opportunity for… temporary relief from her troubles, if nothing else.
She was totally aware that many people would call this an extremely inappropriate action of her as a parent, but she didn't care. Her daughter was going through troubles specifically relating to a boy, and Nazz was at that age where boys were starting to look a lot more than just cute. Mercedes wanted to ensure that her daughter didn't come out of this without a healthy relationship with her own… feelings, of that nature, so now was as good a time as any to instill in her daughter the knowledge that no matter what happened between her and Kevin, there were plenty of fish in the sea - and that she should start thinking about what kind of fish she wanted to catch. Therefore Mercedes very gently told her dear Nazarene that if she wanted to, no pressure, Mercedes knew it was a weird offer but if Nazz so desired, she was welcome to go ahead and poke around in those boxes in the back of the attic that her mother had always warned her never to poke around in; she was old enough now to have earned the privilege.
Unbeknownst to her mother, Nazz and Kevin had already messed around a little bit like that; nothing too serious, a hand here or a mouth there, but nothing involving one urinary spout touching another (though not for lack of desire, but stupid Kevin was either too shy or too unresourceful to get himself some rubbers). Nazz hadn't yet reached the top of the carnal mountain, but she was close enough that she was pretty sure she could see what was there. Honestly, when her mom softly encouraged her to explore her sexuality, it was all she could do not to laugh.
But she still took her mom up on her offer out of sheer curiosity. She knew how much those perverted boys liked their nudie magazines full of impossibly hot women; now she wanted to see the opposite.
It's amazing how much paper weighs. And it was similarly amazing how many magazines Mercedes had packed into two boxes. What Nazz found were copies of Playgirl dating back from the late 1970s straight on through to the previous month's issue, the only apparent sizeable gap being a lack of issues from the late 80s and early 90s during the four or five years when Mercedes was still married to Justin and the baby bobcat girl's last name was still legally "Roberts". (There were also a few scattered Playboys in there, and the publication dates suggested they couldn't all have been Justin's - hey, Nazz was the same girl who was pissed at her boyfriend for throwing rocks at strangers while hollering homophobic slurs, so she wasn't morally offended by this discovery, but she sure wasn't emotionally ready for it either.) The innumerable copies weren't mint, but they were kept in pretty good condition as each was individually wrapped in a plastic grocery bag - jeez, talk about thoughtful recycling.
It was sheer and unadulterated fascination that led Nazz to comb through all those magazines and lock eyes with the seductive males pictured within. Seeing the script flipped with all these men objectifying themselves for women's gratification just seemed so… odd. And the framing of it all just made it even weirder. She'd opened up those magazines expecting nothing but page after page of full frontals, but there were a good mix of more tasteful images of guys still half- or mostly-dressed amid ads for ladies' products and completely genuine written women's interest articles, which just made the nudie shots seem so much more… casual, like it was no big deal that they were hanging out in their birthday suits where a photographer could see them.
Nazz had no idea how to feel about all this. Now she was wondering, were the gentlemen's magazines like this too? On the one hand, she could appreciate that they seemed to at least be trying to show that these were still real people by adding those little bios about them, but it didn't seem like much more than lip service. And she could appreciate that this industry was trying to destigmatize things as natural as sex and nudity in this hyper-conservative country, but she lived in reality and she still knew commodifying such things could be dangerous in a world where a lot of people (especially, ahem, guys) often go completely insane in an attempt to get their rocks off.
Nazz couldn't lie, she'd entertained the thought of trying her hand at modeling when she got older - nothing like this, but she had certainly thought that posing in a safe and comfortable way to make some profit off her looks might be a cool thing to do. But seeing these people doing it at the next level where nothing was left up to the imagination just seemed like… well, it seemed like they weren't even pretending that these people were anything more than superficial. And yeah, she knew that was the point, but… she wasn't really sure she was on board for all that.
Jeez, she really hoped she wasn't being a puritan about all this. At least the people in these softcore magazines were participating voluntarily and getting paid for their troubles - they were, right?
She had a lot of conflicting thoughts about all these individuals - male, female, or otherwise - putting themselves out there as products to be sold on the basis of their bodies alone. As a young woman who was trying to bridge the gap between being intelligent and being able to say hell yes she was pretty, this really got her wondering whether her brain would even get noticed if her body always made the first impression.
And you know what the worst part about this experience was for her? Admitting to herself that holy hell, a lot of these dudes were smoking fucking hot.
One issue that caught her attention was a so-called "Back to School Edition" dated September 1994 (when Nazz was already three and a half). The premise of this special edition was to showcase amateur but good-looking and virile young men attending colleges and universities that fall around the New York City metropolitan region. These were probably the closest Nazz was going to get to finding pictures of guys even remotely her own age (which, in context, thank God for that), so she ventured onwards.
Because these were amateurs, none of them got the privilege of being the main attraction, so there were no centerfolds; they were all treated pretty equally. The format was as such: open to any given page, and a guy's introduction would be on the right side, a tasteful if questionable photo showing them either waist-up frontwards or knees-up with their backs and sides (and buttocks) to the camera in such a way that you couldn't see their reproductive organs, along with a short blurb about who they were, where they were from, what they were studying, what their goals were, and their "stats". Then you'd turn the page and on the left side, on the back of the same sheet of paper, would be their full-body money shot, some standing, some kneeling, some hunched over with their forearms on their knee as their foot was up on a chair, and absolutely no further context beyond that.
It had clearly been arranged so that way every guy's feature was a set up to a very X-rated punchline, and every one of them looked like they'd been instructed to look like they were hoping you'd be pleasantly surprised when you turned the page. And it was heavily implied that they didn't expect anyone to actually read their little bios - but Nazz made herself, because she knew if she were in there, she'd want to make damn sure people knew she had depth.
There were a few in there who caught her eye more than most. There was a lion who wore nothing but a pair of glasses (and he wore them well) who was a Creative Writing major at Columbia hoping to one day write the Great American Novel about the lived experience of African-Americans. There was a horse majoring in French who played football, baseball, and basketball for Fordham (quipping in his blurb that the administrators at his Jesuit institution would probably never see him among these pages). There was a tiger who was studying aerospace engineering and astrophysics at Rutgers, and a buck who was climbing the ranks up at West Point. There was even a rat who was going into architecture at The New School who didn't look half bad when the camera was adjusted for his size; the same could be said for the rhinoceros majoring in Biochemistry at Hofstra. There was even a rabbit in Seton Hall's Pre-Law program who you'd swear looked like a young Dennis Hopper.
And then there was a hyena. He was a Dentistry major at some school in New Jersey that Nazz had never heard of called Ramapo. And he just looked too much like Kevin. Not quite the same, and based on some subtle differences Kevin had taught her, this hyena's people probably hadn't wandered out of the homeland like Kevin's had, but they still looked more alike than not. Their smiles looked almost identical, that smile of someone who knew he was cool and thought you were pretty cool, too. It just hurt too much to look at, so she turned the page without even looking at the budding dentist's full-body shot.
She was then greeted by the gentleman on page thirty-three, and he had a body that most certainly commanded attention, though maybe not in the way you'd expect in a publication like this. Even in his "safe" first picture, wherein his body was turned a little bit more than sideways from the camera while his face looked back at the reader, you could tell without even seeing the full length of his legs that he was incredibly tall. And yet he didn't look stretched; he actually looked like he suited his proportions quite nicely. His blurb mentioned that he could probably hit the five-foot mark in the right pair of shoes, and he certainly didn't waste an inch.
But this fox wasn't even necessarily the most conventionally masculine-looking guy, and that's why Nazz found it so confusing that she found him so… spellbound by him. At the angle the guy was standing, you could tell he barely had any musculature on him. For example, his right arm was in the foreground and it looked like he was trying to subtly flex his bicep by twisting and tightening it straight down rather than a quintessential bent-arm flex, and he did visibly have a little something going on beyond skin, fur, and bone, but not much, and you could decently see his other arm in the background which looked as thin as a rail from what the camera could capture. His torso was also twisted a little bit so you could see it didn't look like there was anything firm and strong around his chest nor his abdominal area, and as for his thighs… uh, maybe he was a good runner? Foxes were usually good runners, right? Really, besides his stature, the most physically impressive thing about this fox was his tail; tails were a lot like eyelashes where girls are always jealous that boys have longer and thicker ones, and this fox's tail meandered its way upwards until it almost met the crown of his head while its circumference quite possibly may have been greater than his waistline.
Hey, in fairness, this fox was definitely fit and in-shape, but the shape he was in was that of someone very skinny and not necessarily manly-looking. Okay, granted, virtually all foxes are incredibly skinny, so maybe compared to other vulpines he was considered athletic? Um… maybe? Nazz hadn't exactly been paying attention to other tods she'd seen to use for context, but she'd certainly never seen a fox who would qualify as a straight-up beefcake. Honestly, she got the impression that you could dress this guy up in such a way that he could pass for a woman, even despite his height. At a certain point, it was actually confusing, because his data set swore his weight was safely over a hundred pounds; that number couldn't all have been bone mass with basically no bulk, could it be? With no disrespect to this guy, he seemed an odd choice on paper (no pun intended) to be included in a magazine that literally had the words "COLLEGE HUNKS" emblazoned on the cover.
But after a moment of pondering it… she totally got it. It wasn't what he was selling, it was how he was selling it.
That smile. Good God, that smile. There was a touch of self-righteous slyness to it, yes, but for the most part, it conveyed that he was comfortable with himself… and he wanted you to feel comfortable in his presence, too.
Flipping back through previous pages, it seemed like most of these guys were going for the same fundamental idea but with a completely opposite strategy. They all looked haughty or angry, and about half of them were outright scowling at the camera; but this fox just looked friendly - which is to say actually, genuinely kind, caring, and friendly, not manipulative fake-friendly like a lot of guys would try to pull. While this guy made a point to look like he wanted to make women feel comfortable, the rest of them looked like they were busy trying to make competing men feel uncomfortable.
This fox looked like he wanted you to know that he was a lover, not a fighter - but if he had to fight to defend your honor, he'd do so in a heartbeat, and he was sure he could use his brains to beat their brawn. Because honey, he was here to protect you, and he didn't need to look big and threatening to get that across; he had all he needed to protect the ones he loved. It was only one thing, and it was the same one thing he needed to seem truly far more masculine and intimidating than the other guys despite his warm smile.
And that one thing he had was that he truly believed in himself. This fox had singlehandedly managed to make all the other men in this magazine look insecure by comparison. Apparently it was true what they said: the sexiest thing you can have is confidence.
...And also she thought he had an attractively tall frame and an absolutely dashing smile and an astonishingly majestic tail and an adorably cute ass. That certainly helped. (And this narrator still doesn't get why so many straight women care about how a guy's ass looks if they don't even plan on using the damned thing, but as long as this whole experience was relevant to the plot, Nazz felt the need to confess that projected confidence alone wasn't the entire appeal of this fox, lest some poor guy who was truly uglier than sin try to copy the "confidence" model and get depressed about the lack of results.)
But you know who else this guy made look insecure by comparison? Kevin. Kevin would probably not only join the rest of those guys in trying to look intimidating, but may also have never realized nor believed for a moment that there was a better way. True, they were young and he had time to grow up (well… so everyone hoped), but would the same guy who screamed and threw rocks at what he thought were gay people ever realize that he could be manly without being an asshole?
It seemed unlikely. This strange fox had gotten Nazz wondering… should she be looking for an entirely different kind of guy? One with a positive mindset more like the one that (she was blatantly assuming based entirely on his body language) this fox had?
This fox had also taught her something that went for men and women alike: it's not what kind of body you have; it's how you use it. Who cares whether or not you're hot? If you are, that's nice, but that should merely be icing on the cake - the cake being your actions. Do you use your body and your life to draw attention to yourself and make yourself look good, or do you use it to help the people you care about?
She read his little blurb. Apparently he was an international student from the UK who was a Drama major at NYU, a few months shy of his twenty-first birthday. He mentioned that he did have a girlfriend who didn't know about the photo shoot, but since she was seeking to become a thespian herself, she'd surely understand him taking any opportunity he could get to build his performance résumé. Yeah, Nazz could see a face like that in Hollywood. A shame she hadn't seen him in a movie yet and didn't recognize his name from anywhere; she hoped the last eleven years had been kind to him.
This fox was a real person. He had hopes and dreams and people he cared about who he sought to protect. And to so many of the people who had turned through these pages, he was just another pretty face, but Nazz had taken the time to reflect on how this guy was presenting himself, to read his story and think about how she could apply things from it to her own life. Whether or not he knew it, this fox had depth, and despite just being a guy in a porno mag, Nazz felt she had managed to get to know him and learn from him, and for that, she was proud of herself.
Of course, curiosity eventually got the best of her, and as if by rule, she turned to page 34. There she saw his full-length photo, his body about a thirty-degree turn left from the camera, a smile on his face that was at once warm and playful while seductive and enticing, his left arm above and behind his head while his right paw was on his hip, and his left leg perched up on a small footstool so as to allow more space to display something that was… well, whether or not it could be considered big could be the subject of much debate, but it certainly looked big on a little guy like him.
You know what? Nazz had been wondering earlier whether women in nudie mags received any more or less dignity than their male counterparts, and now it dawned upon her that her mom's Playboys had been sitting right there this whole time. She grabbed one to investigate.
"Nazarene?"
"Aahhh!" the bobcat girl yelped as she realized her mom had climbed up the attic stairs and was now right behind her - and also realized what she was holding as her mom saw her. "Uh- Mom, it's not what it looks like-!"
But Mercedes simply scoffed and chuckled. "Oh, you found those, huh? Well, I'm not gonna-"
"No! Seriously! Mom!" Nazz begged as she tried to hide the vag mag. "I was just-!"
"Nazz, having a chance to explore who or what you're into is a luxury a lot of women don't get, don't be ashamed!" her mom beamed. "Now's the best time to do it, honestly-"
"I was just looking through to see if the women were treated with any more dignity than the men!"
Ms. Von Bartonschmeer laughed again. "Of course they're not, honey, don't be silly. You know how men can't even pretend to regard women as real people." She shook her head a few times as the giggles trailed off. "Anyway… I just wanted to keep you… abreast of something-"
"Oh my God, Mom…" Nazz groaned with an eye roll. For lacking a father figure, her mom sure compensated with the dumb jokes she provided.
Mercedes chucked again before quickly getting straight-faced. "But seriously, I thought you oughta know… there's a protest happening downtown. You're not the only one who's angry about what happened to Kevin."
Nazz stopped thinking about the fox for a second. "There is!?"
Mercedes nodded. "And my hand to God, Nazz, if I wasn't raising you all by myself, I'd be down there right now. Swear to God I would."
Nazz had to ask. "Can… I-?"
"You may not," her mother answered, gently but firmly. "And it's good that you want to, but you're just too young. Hey, if this one stays safe… and if it seems like they make some progress for the next one… heaven forbid there needs to be a next one… maybe you and me can go then."
Nazz nodded, smiling. But she had another question, this one she thought she knew the answer to but had to ask anyway. "Um… his parents aren't there, are they?"
"Oh. God, no. Hell, if they do arrest those cops, I wouldn't be entirely surprised if those nutbag hyenas personally organize the counter-protest."
"I don't think they're that bad…"
"Well, I barely talk to them, all this I'm getting about how conservative they are is what I'm hearing from you. And based on their actions… or lack of actions… it really does seem like they're taking the cops' side in all this, doesn't it?"
Nazz nodded again, much more morosely this time. "He always complained about his parents having high standards…"
Mercedes looked annoyed, but not by her daughter. "I don't know what the hell is wrong with those two, but if they're really abandoning their own son like it seems like they are, then I'm dragging us to the next protest to take their places! Hmph! And their weird, vague, self-loathing racism? God bless America, at least our people understood that we were somewhere else before we wound up in Germany!" She took a moment to calm down before remembering that she had just interrupted a very private moment. "So, uh… just letting ya know! If you wanna talk, you know where to find me!" And she saw herself out.
Nazz found herself alone with the magazines once again. So there was a protest downtown demanding justice, huh? People were going out and taking a stand for their morals. Her mom had made a good point, it probably wasn't the wisest decision to go at this tender point in her life, but she still wanted to do something to help. Even if she couldn't get the corrupt cops held accountable, she wanted to do something to help Kevin get better - not because he was the perfect boy for her, but because he was just a boy who needed to be shown sympathy if he were to ever gain the strength to not be an asshole.
She flipped the 1994 Back to School Edition back open to page 33 and looked at that fox one more time. He'd want her to understand that even if she wasn't the most capable at everything, even if people like them weren't action heroes, she was still capable of using the abilities she did have to protect those she cared about. And he'd taught her all this with little more than a caring, protective, inspiring smile - and a couple of steaming-hot buns on his ass.
A few minutes later, she found herself downstairs asking her mom to drive her to Food Lion, and maybe a pit stop at the junkyard on the way back.
About an hour after that, Nazz found herself constructing something out of wood with her mom's tools on her front lawn as a younger bear and bunny looked on, having mostly forgiven her for snapping at them the other day.
"Nazz, why are you troubling to toil in the sun like that?" asked Jimmy.
"Yeah, what're ya building?" asked Sarah.
Nazz looked up from her project. "I'm building a charity lemonade stand to raise money for Kevin's hospital bills. Tomorrow's a holiday so everyone oughta be home."
"Oh my!" exclaimed the rabbit. "Are the expenses really that exorbitant!? I thought his mother and father had well-paying jobs! How dire is it that they're hurting for money!?"
"Yeah, don't they have insurance or something?" the bear asked much more nonchalantly.
"Honestly? They probably do," said the bobcat as she got back to work. "But you know what? This is about the principle of it. We're gonna do this to show to the police that they hurt someone who a lot of people care about - even if he is a jerk sometimes - and we're gonna do this to show Kevin's parents that just because he got caught up with some cops doesn't mean he deserved it."
"Oh, well that's a marvelous idea!" Jimmy proclaimed. "Kevin is so lucky to have a girl like you!"
Nazz nodded, but she couldn't help but privately wonder whether he was a bit luckier than he deserved to be in having her.
"You really think that's gonna make his parents wake up and smell the coffee?" the bear grumbled.
"We're gonna kill 'em with kindness until they see what's up!" said Nazz. "Kindness, Sarah! You should try it sometime!"
Sarah looked vexed by that comment, but she figured if she wanted the older girl's respect, she'd have to act mature beyond her years. "...Ya need any help?"
"Sure! If you guys could just grab me the tools when I need them, maybe hold things when I gotta nail them together-"
"Manual labor!?" the bunny shrieked. "Nazz, I wish to help as much as anybody, but I'm not willing to submit myself to-"
"Aw, Jimmy, will you quit being such a little bitch!?" said Sarah. "Whaddya think Kevin would want you to do?"
Jimmy thought about that and silently conceded that his personal hero would certainly want him to pony up and get his paws dirty.
And so Nazz cobbled that lemonade stand together almost entirely by herself, with Sarah and Jimmy on standby to help as needed. And when her mother came outside to share the news that the offending officers had been apprehended by none other than the infamous Sheriff Woodland, that just made Nazz work harder; if all those people rallying to make their voices heard could succeed in their goals, so could she. She was going to take care of the people she cared about.
And she owed all this motivation to the handsome vulpine gentleman in the pages of a decade-old issue of a women's magazine, a stranger who had shown her that the most attractive thing you can do is truly care about people. Her only lament was that in all likelihood she'd never have a chance to personally thank that Mystery Porn Fox.
It's probably a good thing that she was so intensely focused on her work that she hardly even looked up, because if she had turned around and seen the two individuals leaving the wolves' house on the corner, who knows how she would have reacted if she realized that one of them looked all too familiar.
-IllI-
Incidentally, Eddy spent a significant portion of the next day also looking at pornography. In the process of moving his brother's stuff around to make room for his own stuff, he was taking an extended break holed up in the closet while Ed (who, in an arrangement between his and Eddy's parents, was being "paid" towards helping the Brownes pay their debts to the therapist's office he'd destroyed) carried everything of Eddy's into what was once his brother's bedroom. Eddy had come into the closet looking for treasure of the monetary persuasion, but got sidetracked refamiliarizing himself with his brother's magazine collection.
It was a sight to behold. Copious copies of Playboy spanning the decades, many from before his brother was even born. But the collection also had a bunch of the species-specific quarterly spinoffs: PlayFox, PlayWolf, PlayBear, PlayBoar, PlayBull, PlayBat, PlayBadger, PlayBuck, PlayBeaver, PlayBuffalo, et cetera, et cetera ad infinitum, up to and including perhaps his brother's (and Hugh Hopner's) favorite, PlayBunny. Not to mention other household names like Penthouse and (say it with me now) Hustler. Jeez, no wonder the guy was so into hares and rabbits; they were apparently the only ones who could keep up with his libido. Honestly, at least a few of these magazines had to have been things he collected just for kicks like a bunch of the other random shit in his room, but it was nigh impossible to tell which ones were his brother's spank material and which were just edgy knickknacks (ba dum tiss).
But Eddy wasn't in there expressly to dick around with secondhand smut. He was there to stake out any and all locations of his brother's hidden cash. He'd already gotten all the money from the other known locations: hundreds in the stuffed camel's bunghole and fifties under the refrigerator and some filthy stacks of twenties that had been lining the base of the snake pit in the trunk of the car but were nevertheless still legal tender (and in his underwear drawer beneath his brother's briefcase of Speedos, a few dozen rare two-dollar bills, just to be eccentric). That only left what was beneath the floorboards here in the closet.
While Ed made a racket outside moving furniture, Eddy calmly grasped each and every floorboard one by one to find a loose piece of wood. He was excited, of course, but maybe not as much as one would think. He'd already acquired exponentially more money today than he'd ever had in a lifetime; it was like he was presented with a mountain of cash, and this would just be sprinkling a little more on top. And he wasn't too concerned about Ed finding any; Ed would have loved the cash, too, but that bear was more into the things money could buy than the money itself, so Ed was no threat to happen upon any money Eddy's brother just up and forgot about before Eddy found it. Besides, Ed lacked the sheer patience he'd have needed to uncover it, because Eddy's brother made a point to hide these treasures very, very well.
Example given: absolutely none of these floorboards were budging. Eddy seriously wanted to call his brother up again just to confirm that there was indeed something in this closet, but he was fairly certain that his brother had grown up past the point of lying to him to this extent. Alright, he was kind of expecting this, so the little fox pulled out a crowbar that was nearly half the length of his body and threw all his weight into prying a plank free.
He heard the sounds of ripping, not just glue but also paper. Sure enough, the Benjamins had been stuck to the bottoms of the boards and a bunch of them were torn in half as he pulled the board up. Hey, his brother had been a teenager when he left all this money here, he could be forgiven for not having thought it entirely through.
And Eddy wasn't even that mad. He was annoyed with his brother's lack of foresight, yes, but he wasn't angry over the loss of a few hundred dollars, nor was he sad about it like he might have been in the past. He'd already netted nearly ten grand today, far more windfall than he could have ever asked for, and this extra money clearly wasn't going anywhere, so he should have had some time to think about how to more safely extract it.
Hmm. Maybe this is what it felt like to always be chill about things like his brother always seemed to be.
But then he heard a ruckus outside the closet and he quickly wasn't chill anymore.
"Whoa-oh, ha ha!" CRASH, BANG, SMASH, CLANG.
"ED!" the fox shrieked as he threw open the closet to see that the bear had tripped somewhere along the line while carrying in Eddy's wheel-shaped mattress, causing it to go rolling and bouncing all over the room. Everything that had made Eddy's brother's room Eddy's Brother's Room had been either damaged or destroyed. The fridge had been toppled over, the art exhibit with the toilet seat had been knocked off the wall, the car looked like it had just been involved in a road accident that was surely fatal, and the camel… well...
"Aahhh!" Ed hollered as he sat up near the bricked-over window, trying to get the taxidermied head off his own. "Eddy, I am a camel!"
Okay. Okay. Remain calm, Eddy. He was calm ten seconds prior when he ripped a bunch of hundred-dollar bills in half, he could remain calm through the other thing he coveted being destroyed, right? Okay, Eddy: think. What would his brother do in this situation? And actually, come to think of it, what would that universally-beloved tall lanky motherfucker Robin do in this situation, too?
It's funny, but despite Robin and Eddy's brother having completely different moral codes and M.O.'s, Eddy drew the conclusion that they'd both respond to this similarly: they'd both accept that getting frustrated about this would not help anything or anybody, and they'd both try to see this as an opportunity rather than a crisis.
And wouldn't you know it, he had an idea.
"Hey, calm down there, Ali Baba!" Eddy cooed as he walked over to the struggling bear. "Before I pull that mask off you, how about you help me out while you still have it on?"
"But I cannot see, Eddy!" Ed moaned as he flailed his arms, one of his big paws catching Eddy and knocking the little fox over.
"Well…" Eddy grumbled as he got back to his feet, "...let me help you out then. C'mon, stand up!"
Ed did, but wobbled unsurely in his blindness.
"M'kay, now just turn around this way… now bend over…"
"What am I doing, Eddy?"
Eddy pondered for a moment before deciding to keep it simple. "Uh… you're getting us some jawbreakers!"
"JAWBREAKERS!"
Eddy didn't even have to tell Ed to run full steam ahead into the brick window, Ed just… did.
"YES! Again, Ed!"
THUNK! Crumble, crumble…
"AGAIN!"
THUNK! Crumble, crumble…
"AGAIN, goddammit, AGAIN!"
THUNK! Crunch…
With the padding from the decapitated pre-evolutionary camel's head, Ed was able to safely (well, "safely") pound the brinks in the window until they were destroyed… revealing that there was an entire second layer of bricks, and in between lay some green, leafy insulation to keep warm in the winter and cool in the summer.
"It's the mother lode…" Eddy murmured to himself. And indeed it was.
Now inspired by the prospect of seeing jawbreakers, Ed found the wherewithal to yank the head off his head. "I don't see any jawbreakers, Eddy."
The little fox simply chuckled to himself. "I know we don't get to see paper money that often, lumpy, but this green stuff can buy us a lot of jawbreakers! Heh, heh, heh…"
But little did Loudmouth know that Lumpy's brain was churning.
"Whose money is this, Eddy?"
Eddy didn't think anything was weird about this yet. "It was my brother's, but now it's all ours! Ha-ha!"
Ed looked sheepish as he asked his next question. "...Can you ask your big brother if Ed's mommy and daddy can have some?"
Now the brakes were screeching in Eddy's head. "Say what now?"
The bear seemed ashamed to say it, but he said it anyway: "Can you tell your big brother that Ed broke a bunch of things in a really mean doctor's office and now Ed's mom and dad have to pay for it and Ed feels bad for being so stupid and making his parents get in trouble for him so Ed wants to know if he can have some of the money so his parents don't have to pay for him being dumb?"
That… was kind of a really good pitch.
Dear Reader, selfish as he was, Eddy wasn't heartless. He knew his friend Ed was a good man, and if Eddy had one Achilles's heel, it was seeing Ed crying. Granted, Ed was far and away the most liable of the trio to start weeping, and it didn't always break Eddy's heart - in fact, it usually didn't - but every so often, it would be clear that Ed was in a place of genuine misery, and if all the planets and stars aligned, Eddy might find his own heart wrenching as well.
But Ed wasn't even crying this time. He just looked depressed. He looked like he was in a state of sorrow well past the desire to cry, a very adult sorrow that Eddy had never seen in the bear before. And seeing it now chilled him to the bone.
"...Sure, bud."
Ed's face instantly lit up. "You'll ask your brother!?"
The fox shook his head. "Don't need ta'. I know the guy better than you do, Ed, he'd say yes."
Ed immediately leapt for joy - hitting his head on the ceiling half a second later, but no biggie. Then - you know what came next. Bear hug. Big-ass bear hug for the generous little fox.
"Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you, Eddy!" Ed exclaimed to the world. "And thank you, too, Mister Eddy's Brother!"
"Uh…" Eddy wheezed as he gasped for air, "...don't mention it, big guy."
Don't be too proud of Eddy, Dear Reader, because he really didn't want to do that. The money between the two sheets of bricks in the window was easily the greatest quantity Eddy had uncovered that day. Eddy didn't actually know how much damage Ed had done in the doctor's office, but he understood the sum owed was safely in the thousands; if the debt were on the lower end of the range of possibilities, there was a decent chance this window money was actually enough to cover it. Which is to say that this was a lot.
But Eddy asked himself: how would someone who other people admired handle this? When put that way, the answer seemed obvious. If Robin were in his position, he probably wouldn't even think about it. And how could Eddy become known as a great hero if he wasn't even a hero to his friends?
And then there was something that Robin and Eddy's brother would probably both agree on: they'd encourage him to have enough self-confidence to believe that between good wits and good karma, he'd one day soon get this money back, maybe even with interest. They'd tell him to have faith in their people's talents, and that if foxes were good at one thing, it was being clever and resourceful; foxes always find a way.
And he'd have to believe them, and believe in himself. And so he would.
Ed put him down and they got to work collecting the money out of its nook. As Eddy let his friend do all the work (in the fox's defense, he could only reach so high), he took a look around the trashed room. Man, this was gonna be a bitch to clean up.
But then he noticed something peculiar. Despite all the damage it had dealt, the circular mattress was looking pretty unharmed. True, it was scratched to high heaven, but the scratches were all cosmetic, none too deep or damaging. Slap a new bedsheet on it and it could still perform the duties of a mattress. And yet all of his brother's stuff was tarnished.
Well, ain't that symbolic? Eddy brings his stuff in here and it immediately wipes out all the remnants of his brother. It was a bummer because Eddy still did think all that stuff was cool and would have loved to have had a room just like his brother's for at least a little while, but you know what? He'd already decided he didn't want to photocopy his brother's blueprints, and maybe this was some cosmic hand forcing him to fully commit to that decision. That was one more thing that Eddy's brother and Robin would likely agree upon: Eddy shouldn't trouble himself trying to be just like his older brother - hell, he shouldn't even be trying to be too much like Robin, either. Eddy should be striving to be his own man.
Eddy realized that erasing his brother's legacy to forge his own would only help him towards this end, and for that reason, he was at peace with this disaster.
...Still, though, it would have been nice if he could have at least sold his brother's stuff off. The El Camino alone probably could have made him a pretty penny, even if its guts were missing. And the art installation could have gone either way, that could have been worthless or that could have been a small fortune. And there was still the fact that-
"Hey Ed?"
"Yes, Eddy?"
"I still think my brother would give you this money, but, maybe under one condition."
"What's that, Eddy?"
-there was absolutely no way Eddy was cleaning this shit up.
-IllI-
Eddy helped himself to some Oreos and Mountain Dew while Ed toiled away to earn his pay by dragging all of his brother's damaged and defunct possessions out to the curb - where, ironically, Ed's father would very likely be the individual to load it all up onto a garbage truck come Wednesday.
Y'know, even with Double-D out of the equation, Ed and Eddy still made a good team. A classic pair of a fox and a bear, one mammal of herculean strength not too terribly concerned about being perceived as brainy happy to do the grunt work for a mammal who was short and slender but cunning and calculating and not too terribly concerned about being perceived as brawny (okay, yeah, Eddy was still a guy and still would very much have liked to have been a muscle man, but considering someone like, say, Robin was definitely on the more athletic side of their species's scale and even he still looked more like a shrimpy little dork than not, Eddy was starting to get the impression that he'd have to abandon his desire to look like a bodybuilder for his own sanity - hey, at least in return he got a body where he could eat an entire box of Oreos and suffer no adverse health effects). Things would be different with the wimpy little wolf gone, but Ed and Eddy would manage.
Especially if under the wings of another fox and another bear. Eddy was still going to be his own person, but he could use a role model or two, and these two random homeless criminals were probably better role models for the boys than any of their parents. Of course, now they were getting cold feet about letting a couple of kids roll with them, but Eddy's brother had given some pretty decent advice himself.
So, prove to the Merry Men that he belonged among their ranks by demonstrating his worth? Good idea in the abstract, but what would that mean in practice? Did they want to see him do some sort of act of charity or community service or something like that? Would it be some sort of daring feat of acrobatics that he'd need to do to convince them that he would be capable of playing the action hero just like them? Were they holding out for someone who already knew how to handle antique weaponry?
Because surely it would be insane to have to demonstrate skills as a thief just to win them over. Yeah, they weren't the ones tasking him with proving himself, but think of it this way: if you drilled into their heads and looked for how high of a bar they'd subconsciously set for him to be worth their time… there had to be something he could do shy of pulling a Sly Fucking Cooper to win them over.
Or was there not? Like, if they had to pick one, what would they say was the one core element of their operation? The stealing? The charity? The swashbuckling? The medieval aesthetic? The part where they implied they had fun getting sloshed every night of their lives?
It… it had to be the thievery, didn't it? Well, hell, how was he supposed to do that? He could probably steal a little something, but nothing too impressive, and if they wanted it to be from a rich person? Hey, if he really wanted to, he could probably present them with his brother's money and just lie about where he got it from, but then he'd be cutting into his own funds - and he would be doing himself a disservice by not getting himself valuable experience with what he was seeking to make a big part of his life soon.
Well, it was something to think about. All he knew was that he'd better figure out something, he didn't want to have completely moved rooms and convinced his parents to rent out his old room to strangers all for absolutely no payoff.
Crash. It had come from the front door.
"Eddy, the car won't fit through the door!"
The fox made haste towards the living room to find that Ed had somehow someway gotten the El Camino all the way out of his brother's room and down the stairs but was now struggling to actually get it out of the house.
"Oh, c'mon, Ed…" Eddy grumbled as he guided the bear and the car back and out of the house through the garage door. Ed dropped the heap of junk on the lawn at the end of the driveway along with a bunch of broken bricks and the beheaded camel, and although Eddy was preparing to protest that this arrangement looked astoundingly trashy, a passing beauty stole his attention.
"Hi, Nazz! Hi, Rolf!" Ed waved at the bobcat carrying a small wooden booth down the street with the help of the local workhorse.
"Hello, Ed-boys!" Rolf replied before Nazz could get a word in. "Come, size-of-a-small-hill Ed-boy! Lend your strength so the young lady need not labor! You may help us too, knee-high-to-a-coffee-table Ed-boy, if your small and slender body can handle such manly tasks!"
While Eddy was seething at the horse's comment and wanted to tell him off, it was now Nazz's turn to speak before someone else could.
"Oh, Rolf! Don't-! Don't mess with him like that! Besides, I can handle it!" She put her end of the booth down for a moment and turned to face Eddy.
And between her comment defending his dignity and her caring smile, Eddy mellowed out a lot very quickly. Not completely mellow, but a lot.
"You guys can still help us out if you guys want, though!" she continued. "We're setting up a lemonade stand to raise money for Kevin's hospital bills and we could use all the help we can get! The more, the merrier!"
Oh, Nazz. What a choice of words that was.
But Eddy wasn't thinking of that one installment of this story from a few months back which was all set-up and where consequently nothing really happened. At least not yet. He was thinking about how he found Nazz almost pitiable. Here was a girl who was empathetic enough to take action to help her boyfriend as well as stand up to defend the local height-challenged kid… but didn't seem to realize that her boyfriend was a fucking asshole who didn't deserve mercy specifically because of how much of a fucking asshole he was to other neighborhood kids, especially those whose names started with the letter E. Either Nazz was too naive to have ever thought about the moral implications of staying with a guy like Kevin… or she had, and then decided it was okay, which was a bajillion times worse.
Of course, Eddy had no way of knowing that Nazz had recently started to entertain the thought that perhaps Kevin was not the kind of guy she should want to be with (nor, for the record, was he aware that she had already long ago thought that perhaps Kevin was justified in using force to get the Eds to knock it off with their destructive and manipulative antics, and that both of these criticisms could be true). All he knew was that Nazz seemed well-meaning but ignorant, perhaps willfully so.
"Sorry, Nazz!" Ed piped up; in the past he'd been more nervous and mush-mouthed around the pretty bobcat girl, but ever since she'd gone MySpace-official with mean old Kevin, the sour taste in his mouth had caused Ed's crush on her to wane significantly. "Me and Eddy can't help you help Kevin because Ed is helping Eddy move Eddy's brother's stuff out of mmfmfmmfmmmfmfmmf!"
Ed was suddenly stifled by the fox who had climbed up his back and snapped the bear's snout shut.
"Uh- w-we'd love to help you out, Nazz!" said Eddy from seven feet in the air. "We, uh, we gotta finish what we're doing here first, but, uhhh, after we're done… yeah, we can lend a hand!"
Nazz was pleasantly surprised by that, and her expression conveyed that clearly. "Wow, um… th-thanks, guys, that'd mean a lot to me! Like, um…" She struggled for words as she tried to address what she knew would be the elephant in the room. "I know… you guys and Kevin don't always get along - ever, but, uh… hey, for what it's worth, he and I don't always see eye-to-eye either, and there are some things about him I don't like either, and… I sure hope I'll have a chance to talk to him about those things one day, but for that to happen… you know…"
Eddy nodded, looking a little bummed out, as did Ed, his mouth still held shut by the fox's paws.
"So…" she continued, "...I'm telling myself that I'm being the bigger person by doing something to help him out and show… well, not just show the courts, but also his parents that he didn't deserve what he got, so I'm trying to outdo them with positivity and kindness in… you know… in the hopes that it'll have a positive effect and make people want to listen to us. And I think you two would be… being the bigger men too by looking past your, uh… well, your past with him, so… I-I just wanna thank you guys for even… considering to help out. It really means a lot to me, and I appreciate it. And I think Kevin would appreciate it, too. Might even make him appreciate you two more after all this is over!"
Eddy nodded again. Yeah… yeah, it might. It might make Kevin stop being such an antagonist toward them if and when he woke up. But Eddy didn't know if he was quite the bigger man yet. In his head, he was still a boy trying to figure out how to become that bigger man he wanted to be. And there was nothing wrong with that, but he wasn't that man yet and he didn't know if that man would help Kevin out anyway.
"By the way…" Nazz ventured, "...where's Double-D?"
"Oh! Uh…" Eddy wondered aloud as he searched for an explanation.
"Mmfmfmmfmmfmmmfmmf!" said Ed, still effectively muzzled.
"What, uh, what Ed's trying to say is, uh, um… he's trying to say that… Double-D's at home preparing a surprise for his Dad when he gets home from work! Father's Day and all that!"
Nazz and Rolf both glanced over at the Lupo house.
"Rolf sees both of the shaky-legged Ed-boy's mother and father's vehicles in his driveway!" the Swiss horse observed. "Where may they have ventured without their horseless carriages?"
Eddy played dumb. "Huh. You're right! Gee, I hope he isn't avoiding us! He sure has been acting distant lately! Isn't that right, Ed?"
The fox dug his feet into the bear's neck at just the right pressure points to force him to nod. Not the first time he'd had to do that.
"Wow… sorry to hear that," said Nazz, seeming like this revelation was more of a downer than the entire situation at hand with her comatose boyfriend. "It's a shame, because… just like you said, it's Father's Day! We're expecting everybody to be at home or around the neighborhood to buy some lemonade, and… you three seem to be good at selling stuff, I was kind of wondering if I could recruit you guys to be, like, our marketing experts! You guys are good salesmen, get a bunch of people to buy some lemonade for a good cause!"
There it was. It was something about the way she said that which first got the gears turning in the fox's head.
"Well… hey, I'll let you guys get back to work," she concluded. "When you're ready… y'know, we were just gonna set up by the corner right here, but Sarah and Jimmy had the idea to maybe see if we can find a spot on the main road a few blocks away! So find us over there, we'll be happy to have you! Hopefully we can make a lot more money over there!"
Nazz picked up her end of the stand and kept on carrying it down the street with Rolf as Sarah and Jimmy could be seen carrying stacks of cups, bags of lemons, a sack of sugar and a juicer on the other side of the street. Eddy wasn't going to be happy at the prospect of working with Sarah and Jimmy for Kevin's benefit, but he told himself that it would be a small price to pay in exchange for a solution to his own dilemma. And if he got what he wanted… Kevin wouldn't actually benefit from all this, now would he? If the Merry Men knew the whole story between the Eds and Kevin - which Eddy was more than happy to share with them - they'd surely agree Eddy would be morally justified to do what he was thinking about doing.
Oh, no. Oh, no, Eddy. Oh, no, Eddy, don't. Oh, no, Eddy, don't do it. Oh, no, Eddy, don't, don't do it. No, Eddy, don't. Eddy, no, don't do it. You don't want to do that, Eddy. No, Eddy, that's not a thing you want to do. Oh, no, Eddy, don't, no, don't. Eddy, don't do it. Oh, no, Eddy. No, Eddy, no, don't. No, Eddy, no, no, don't do that, no, Eddy, don't, no, don't. Oh, Eddy, no, Eddy, don't, no, no, don't, no, Eddy, no, it, don't, don't do it, no, no, Eddy, no, stop, don't, Eddy, no, don't, stop, Eddy, no, please, don't. No, Eddy, don't do it.
Eddy let go of the bear's mouth.
"Eddy, why are we going to help Kevin if Kevin hates us?"
The fox patted the bear on the back before climbing down. "Because we're gonna be the bigger men, Ed," Eddy said confidently. "And if all goes according to plan… Kevin's gonna pay us back more than he'll ever know."
Eddy was gonna do it.