He lay on the ground for a while, smothered by the silent darkness, not sure if he should budge or not. He remembered that you weren't supposed to move if you thought you might be injured, because you could damage the injury further. Yet he felt no pain, so he thought maybe he was alright after all.
"Simon, are you okay?" an approaching, friendly voice asked.
Gingerly, Simon lifted his head to see who had asked the question. His eyes lit up as soon as he recognized the incoming figure.
"Robbie!"
"Hey, buddy. You looked like you took a pretty hard tumble there."
"I'll say."
Robbie knelt down by Simon's side and gently squeezed the boy's hand. "Can you feel that?"
"Yeah."
"Can you move your fingers and toes, arms and legs?"
Simon wiggled his extremities with ease. "Yeah."
"Any pain?"
"Nope. No problem."
"Great. Let's try to stand you up now."
"Actually," Simon muttered, gazing at the black sky behind Robbie, "I kind of like it down here. It's peaceful."
"Oh yeah? You won't think it's so peaceful if you get run over by a herd of stampeding Cecilias."
Simon chuckled. "A herd of what?"
"Cecilias. They're all over this place, and they're wild."
Simon launched uncontrollably into a fit of laughter. Once he had recovered enough to speak, he said, "Robbie, what are you trying to pull? You know Cecilia is the name of my girlfriend, right?"
Robbie looked askance at Simon. "What do you mean, 'what am I trying to pull'? Of course I know Cecilia is your girlfriend's name. Gosh, did that fall knock all the sense out of you, Simon? Don't you realize where you are right now?"
Simon shook his head. "Robbie, I haven't known where I've been since about 11 o'clock this morning."
Robbie swallowed hard, his black eyes penetrating Simon with grave intensity. "Simon, listen to me and listen good. You're in her world now. You're in the Land of a Million Cecilias."
Simon stared blankly at him for a moment before launching into a second fit of howling laughter.
But Robbie wasn't laughing. In fact, panic spread across his face as the ground began to rumble and a faint squawking sound arose in the distance.
"They're coming."
"What?"
"The Cecilias. They're headed this way. We've got to get you up and out of here before they trample you." Robbie grabbed Simon's hand and pulled him to his feet.
"This is insane," Simon protested mildly, although the rumbling ground was beginning to worry him. He looked all around, seeing nothing but the black sky above and the dry dirt below. "I don't see a herd of anything."
"Can't you hear it?" Robbie asked exasperatedly. "There's no time to talk, Simon. We need to run, now!" He snatched Simon's wrist and pulled him away. The two of them ran across the flat, dusty earth, randomly selecting from the infinite number of paths that led toward the omnipresent blackness.
Simon had no idea where they were running, and he didn't really have a full understanding of why they were running in the first place. He knew he didn't want to get trampled, but then again, maybe he wouldn't if he just stood there. Maybe the herd, if there even were a herd, would just go around him.
He halted, and Robbie nervously turned around to check on him.
"Simon, is something wrong?"
"Robbie, this is stupid. Why are we running, again?"
"I told you, the Cecilias. They'll trample you. Come on, man! If you're not hurt then we need to keep moving."
"No. I'm not going anywhere."
Robbie shook his head at Simon. "Fine. It's your funeral."
He turned and ran into the distance, eventually disappearing on the black horizon.
"Great. First Morris, then Robbie. Everyone deserts me in the end."
***
In the distance, he began to make out a dust cloud. At first he saw just the tip of the cloud, but then its edges began to expand, so that after a few moments it took the form of a wide, dusty arrow pointing straight at him. And the arrow was approaching rather rapidly.
"Maybe I should have listened to Robbie after all."
The squawking noise grew louder too, and it began to sound very familiar to Simon.
"Where have I heard that before? It sounds like…"
Simon's face became stone as reality set in.
"Oh my God, Robbie was right. I'm about to get trampled by a million squawking Cecilias!"
He turned to run, but the dusty arrow seemed to be closing in on him from all directions now. The Cecilias had trapped him.
***
The cloud drew closer still, until Simon could pick out individual figures behind the dust. They all looked the same, long blond hair with flowing white shirts and low-riding, hip-hugging jeans. As they drew even closer, Simon noticed the excessive makeup that each one wore.
He dropped to the ground, covered his head and cowered. "I never would have imagined that this is how I would go out."
Then, suddenly, the rumbling and squawking began to quiet down around him. The vibration and the noise seemed to move gradually into the distance, until he no longer felt or heard them at all.
"Did they pass me? Did I live?" He cautiously lifted his head and peeked out at his surroundings.
What he saw terrified him.
***
Thousands of them surrounded him, cocking their heads, swiveling their necks, bobbing their shoulders, and staring at him.
The silence was deafening. But it didn't last long.
"Simon, where have you been?" "Why didn't you call me last night?" "You didn't help me on my homework like you said you would." "Your sister was, like, a total bia to me the other day." "I convinced my father to give you a job, so you had better love me."
All of them opened their mouths at once to shout, nag, and browbeat him about one insipid thing or another.
"My God. This is even worse than the physical trampling I had been expecting."
"I'm glad you have a dog because I think they're cute and all, but they also shed hair and they're smelly and I hate it when you come over to my house and you have dog hair on your clothes because that's like so gross and I mean, ugh, do I really want to kiss a boy who smells like dog? Hello! I don't think so."
"SHUT UP!"
The volume and force of emotion he put behind the two simple words startled even Simon himself.
The Cecilias jerked their heads backward in unison. After a silent moment, some of the heads began bouncing on the shoulders, and then some of them began to speak again.
"How dare you speak to me like that? I'm the one who defended you when my father thought you were stealing money on the job." "I dumped my sexy French exchange student boyfriend for you and this is how you talk to me?" "Simon, I changed my answering service message just for you. That's how much you mean to me. And you have the nerve to tell me to shut up?"
"Alright alright alright!" Simon raised a hand to silence the herd. "I'm sorry I shouted. Just tell me, what do you want from me?"
The Cecilias turned and looked around at each other, then nodded in silent agreement. One of them stepped up to him and said, "We want sex with you. Every last one of us. And we don't want to talk to our parents about it first this time either."
Simon tried in vain to swallow the huge lump that rose in his throat.
"Um, look, I know I'm a teenage boy and supposedly at my sexual peak and everything, but I really don't think I could possibly, um, service every one of you."
The Cecilia who had stepped forward put on a pouty face and bobbled her head. "But Simon, don't you love us?"
Simon was surprised to find that an answer did not easily provide itself to his lips. Instead he traced back in his mind to Morris's question. "If you could wish for one thing for yourself, what would it be?" He still didn't know exactly what he would wish for, but standing before this sex-hungry Cecilia, he realized that it was not a relationship with her.
However, he also wasn't stupid enough to be honest when there were at least a thousand Cecilias surrounding him, ready to dismember him if the answer to their question was no.
"Of course I love you, Cecilia. But I thought we had decided we weren't ready for sex yet."
"Oh, Simon. You know we change our minds on that issue every day. And today, we're horny. So pleasure us!"
As a last-ditch effort, Simon whimpered, "But I don't have any condoms."
The Cecilia smiled. "That won't be a problem. They grow on trees around here, you see?"
A cluster of Cecilias parted to reveal a giant tree, which indeed appeared to have individually wrapped condoms dangling from its branches like fruit.
"Oh," Simon smiled an unenthusiastic, defeated smile. "Great."