Disclaimer: My head's not big! And I don't own Invader Zim! Jhonen Vasquez does.
Zim's getting closer... he actually gets a line in this one! (An unspoken one.)
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The Day Before the Nightmare
Chapter One: Who has a WHY to
Dib got out of bed, took off his UFO pajamas, got dressed and headed for the kitchen, hoping today would be better than yesterday.
In the kitchen he found Gaz already seated at the table eating her cereal, which spared him the usual ordeal of "negotiating" who got to pour it first. Dib's next pleasant surprise came when he found enough cereal remaining in the box for his breakfast as well. Wow, two good omens for the day and he hadn't even finished breakfast yet!
The Professor also sat at the table, buttering SuperToast, his latest invention. Almost as soon as Dib sat down, the Professor started listing off his son's orders for the day, sounding tense and frantic as he did so, as if trying to keep ahead of something. "Brush your teeth, son! Study hard and invest wisely! See your dentist... twice a year! Buy an RRSP while you're young and avoid trans fats! Oh... and protect your little sister until your mother comes home."
"Yes, Dad." At that last, Dib uneasily looked at Gaz out of the corner of his eye to see if she would shoot him a look that said, "Yes, I heard it too." But she continued to crunch away at her cereal as if their father had said nothing at all unusual.
As his father extolled the virtues of exercising... three times a week, Dib finished his cereal and licked off the spoon. He tugged at the corner of one of his boots. They were getting too small, again; he would need new ones soon. Dib was confident that his father would give him plenty of money to buy another pair... once caught in a sufficiently unguarded moment. While the Professor indulged both children to no end with luxuries like expensive electronic equipment, material necessities were another matter altogether. For those, he invariably said, "Go ask your mother."
"Now make sure you do that, son," the Professor continued. "I may be late coming home from work this evening..."
"Late coming home from work..." Well, what else was new.
"... so make sure your little sister eats her supper. She didn't finish her homework yesterday; I understand she was playing some sort of a game, so don't let her do that again today, and if I'm really late make sure she goes to bed on time, and tell her to..."
Dib knew only too well that Gaz would most likely maim him if he tried telling her to do anything, not the least of which was setting down her GameSlave... but as usual he found it easier to say, "Yes, Dad."
Gaz is right here; try telling her yourself! Dib fumed silently.
"...be more careful. 'Somebody,'" the Professor slipped a wink into his voice, "dropped a glass of milk in the kitchen last night...! So if you know what's good for you, boy, you won't let her do that again! By the time I found it the bacteria count was - "
Dib felt an ache begin to build in his stomach; he didn't want to imagine Gaz's reaction if he dared try telling her to wipe up a spill. "I wasn't even in the kitchen when it happened, Dad. I heard it and knew this one was Gaz's. She's old enough and perfectly able to - "
The Professor pointed a finger in his face. "Aha! You DID hear it, boy, so you KNEW about it... and you SHOULD have cleaned it up!"
Dib could only shake his head at this leap of scientific logic.
"Do this, do that," his father continued. "You're a big boy and I'm counting on you... "
Dib could only wonder why age had to be forever relative. Somehow I was sure "big" enough to take care of everything last year... when I was the SAME AGE this "little" Gaz is now!
"... to keep things running smoothly until your mother comes home."
"Um, Dad," Dib finally said. "That's... going to be a... long time." Gaz's chewing slowed down.
"What is, son?"
"Mom's not coming home. She's dead. For a few years now." Gaz half opened an eye, an eye which was looking straight at Dib.
"Still in denial." The Professor looked down, shaking his head. "Son, what did I tell you?" he said quietly to Dib, too quietly. "Don't say that about your mother."
The Professor took a much more relaxed tone with his daughter, and when Gaz spoke to him, she actually sounded almost lukewarm. Instead of delivering an endless list of orders, he asked her how she was today, and how skool was, and did she still like her teacher, and did she have any neat field trips coming up, and...
Dib sighed and looked away from the table. The Professor provided support and protection to Gaz, while being more of a disciplinarian and role model for Dib. This had worked perfectly as long as their mother had been around to provide the complement. However, the Professor still saw no need to adjust his treatment of either child.
Between his father and sister, Dib found himself in a horrible double bind on the subject of his late mother. Dib had faced the truth, dealt with it, and was now ready to move on. But his father would have them all acting as if she was still alive, and whenever Dib did this, the realization that she really wasn't stabbed his heart like an icepick all over again. Gaz, on the other hand, was only too happy to encourage and indulge their father in this whim.
As their father left for work, Dib and Gaz finished preparing to leave for skool. Dib felt a strange distance standing between himself and what remained of his family, as if they were neighbours in an apartment house instead of blood relatives.
Dib was watching Gaz very closely, trying to gauge her mood. After their mother died, Gaz's violence toward him had increased, all right, but not as dramatically as Dib had feared it would. In fact, she hadn't hit him at all so far today, and considering that they had already finished breakfast, that was REALLY good.
Dib's preparations for the day included checking his pocket for his camera and alien sleep cuffs... just in case. About six months ago he'd heard something distinctly and undeniably otherworldly while monitoring the night skies through his headphones. Watching the sky even harder for UFOs when he went outside ever since had turned up only lots of swamp gas, a couple of weather balloons, a migrating heron blown off its course, several gliders, and some kid's kite, but still Dib kept vigilant.
Dib kept up a running commentary on every single thing in the sky as he and Gaz walked to skool. As they split up and headed to their respective classrooms, he wished her, "Have a nice day."
"Eh," replied Gaz, where usually she would have told him to drop dead. Today she hadn't even told him to shut up more than once or twice the whole way! Her mood was positively sunny for some reason... getting her best score ever on one of her games the night before, most likely.
Dib headed for his own classroom with caution, suppressing with great difficulty his habit of talking to himself. He couldn't let anyone catch him talking about That Water Fountain.
The previous day when he went to drink from the fountain just outside the door, he had found it broken. As the old familiar anxiety stirred in his gut, he had backed away nervously and then ran before anyone caught him and blamed him for breaking it. Of course he hadn't broken it or had anything to do with it. But that never kept him out of trouble when something happened at home that was outside his control.
In fact, lately Dib felt more and more like everything bad was his fault... and it was getting to the point where he tried to avoid looking at the newspapers or the TV news. As irrational as he knew it to be to feel somehow responsible for disasters half a world away, that still didn't stop him from expecting to be blamed and punished.
But to Dib's relief, he saw Melvin drinking out of the water fountain in question. Water dribbled down the front of Melvin's shirt as he wiped his mouth.
Another good sign! The water fountain which he found broken had been fixed with nobody asking him how he broke it, or insisting that he tell them who did. Whew! Maybe it would also be a good day at skool.
Skool... where the work was so easy he was bored, a feeling he hated, and the socializing was so difficult he felt stupid, a feeling he hated even more. On his first day of kindergarten, Dib had tried to make conversation by innocently asking, "What did your father discover last night?" Instead of bringing a new friend home for dinner that day, he had asked his mother what a "showoff" was, and why didn't the other kids want to talk about their fathers's inventions?
His mother had poured him a glass of milk and a cut him a chocolate brownie before sitting down with him to explain that not every kid had an inventor for a father. She furthermore warned him that some kids would be jealous, and that others would only pretend to be his friends just so they could get to meet the world-famous Professor Membrane. She then suggested that he ask the other kids what their hobbies were, in hopes that common interests could spark friendships.
When word got around that Dib was into hunting for Bigfoot and ghosts and aliens, well, then it REALLY got bad for him. A simple showoff they could ignore, but an elementary skool classroom is no place to be labelled a "weirdo."
While Dib's mother had felt bad for him, she still encouraged him to be himself at all times. If they didn't want you the way you were, they weren't your friends anyway, she kept saying, and trying to be someone you're not is not fair to yourself. "You'll make friends someday, Dib; you're such a cool kid I know you will! Now... what fun thing would you like to do now?"
More often than not, they had ended up reading a book, which Dib thought was more fun than just about anything else. Dib couldn't help smiling as he reflected on this; all that reading had give him a vocabulary twice as large as any other kid in his class. This sure came in handy; when nobody else at the skool would talk to him, Dib had begun talking to himself. As soon as he did so, he found that the quality and intelligence level of the conversations in which he partook went up enormously. Why, whenever -
"DIB!!!" Ms. Bitters's yardstick slammed down on his desk in front of him as he jumped.
"Y - Yes ma'am?"
"Just what planet ARE you on?" snarled Ms. Bitters. "For the third time, do you know the answer?"
Dib glanced at the blackboard and saw a list of sentences, all with one word either underlined or missing. Quickly he found the first remaining sentence with an empty space and filled it in appropriately. Ms. Bitters grunted with something that wasn't exactly satisfaction and went on to ask the pupil behind him the next question.
At lunch, Dib and Gaz sat together until Gaz finished her lunch; then she headed outside to be by herself. Dib followed her.
When she turned around and glared at him, he explained, "I have to watch you."
"Get over yourself Dib! I'm not a baby!" Gaz snapped.
"I don't like it any more than you do, but I can't get out of it either, Gaz."
"He's not here; he can't see us!"
"Okay, okay, I'll sit over here then! Jeez..."
Gaz claimed a seat on the bench next to the basketball court and sat there playing away on her GameSlave. Only Dib realized what violence lurked beneath so placid a picture.
Dib sank onto the next bench, watching Gaz with one eye, and as ever, the sky with the other. He took out his camera, noting how many exposures remained. He had already wasted most of the roll on false alarms, unfortunately.
Dib knew that he could not risk being caught without at least one frame of film ready; indeed, the more the better. This was far bigger than something breaking or even a plane crashing somewhere. Being privy to that ominous transmission had conferred on him the sole responsibility for keeping lookout and spreading the alarm when the aliens did arrive. If they succeeded in attacking the earth, he would be responsible for whatever followed.... not something Dib wanted on his head. Serious business indeed.
And if, perchance, a UFO were to actually fly over the skool, and he pointed it out to someone, well, they'd pretty much have to believe him then, wouldn't they? And stop making those crazy twirling motions, often right in front of him. But that would never happen. UFO sightings happened only in other places, places like Roswell, New Mexico and the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
Suddenly Dib realized he was seeing something that looked like nothing he'd ever seen before! In his excitement he briefly tried to balance atop the backrest, then settled for standing on the seat. He squinted, then as he grew more sure, lined up the not yet identified flying object in his viewfinder and held a shaking finger over the shutter release. If this was the day he would have his own Close Encounter of the First Kind and see a UFO, photograph it, report it and keep the world safe, this would officially qualify as a Tremendously Good Day Indeed!
Dib held his breath, waiting until the object got close enough that anyone would be able to see that the object in the photograph was a UFO. Just as he was about to click the shutter, he sighed with disappointment and dropped the camera back into his pocket. Just another airplane.
Only now did Dib hear the basketball bouncing. He looked around, wondering how long this had been going on. Torque was shooting baskets and being none too careful where the ball bounced. Dib winced as he saw this; even though the class bully was no friend of his, the sight of Gaz in full Self-righteous Vengeance Mode was no easy thing to watch.
"Protect Gaz," said his father's voice in Dib's head. "She's your little sister!"
While she might be a year younger, nothing was little about Gaz. Nothing. Not her appetite for video games and pizza, not her berserk shrieks when she was pissed off, and certainly least of all her evil, vicious temper.
ME... I'M supposed to protect... GAZ. Somebody who can flatten not only me, but anyone else in my class if not the skool. Uhhh Huhhhh...
Sighing, he figured he'd better do something. I just hope I don't end up in intensive care over this.
"Uhm, Torque", he began, his stomach churning as he anticipated what would most likely follow, "you'd better leave my little sister alone."
"Uh... huh." Torque merely bounced the ball harder and more carelessly if anything.
"Listen, Torque, I mean it. Stop bothering my sister or I'll-"
"Or you'll what?" Torque looked amused. He even stopped bouncing his basketball and stared at Dib, as if this time he was actually interested in what Dib had to say.
Dib paused, unsure of what came next. ".. Or... or I'll make you sorry."
After a second's pause of disbelief Torque burst out laughing. "Yeah right!" he hooted.
"Really, she's not bothering you. Why don't you play basketball at the other hoop - "
"So. What." Torque resumed bouncing the ball. "I'll play... anywhere... I want... Got that... you... four... eyed... FREAK?" He emphasized the last word with an especially hard bounce of the ball.
"Stop it, Torque! You almost hit her that time!"
"Why you skinny little - !" Tossing aside the basketball, Torque raised his fists and took a step toward Dib.
Dib also put up his fists, but as he was no jock, not very effectively. None too deterred by the prohibition against hitting someone wearing glasses, Torque slid a punch between Dib's fists straight into his nose. Dib shook his head and awkwardly swung his fist at Torque, who dodged without effort and hit him again.
Usually Torque would punch Dib once or twice in the nose or stomach and that would be that. However, having gone up to Torque and challenged him, Dib knew he could expect no mercy this time.
As Torque bore down on him, Dib cringed in anticipation of the worst. As a hand grabbed his collar and yanked him back, Dib's eyes snapped open in terror; this had to be Torque's buddies ganging up to pull him down so they could all take turns working him over...
End of Chapter One