Chapter Five: Guess Who
Bottle cap? No. Too small. Poster tube? Definitely no. Both were the wrong size, and much too… circular. What he needed was something that was move of an oval, something that he could fit right over the picture and trace. An egg? Yeah, but where was he going to get an egg? Besides, eggs roll around. He'd never be able to keep it in one place. What else? What else, whatelse, whatelsewhatelse? Sometimes getting his poor fried brain to work was like pulling teeth…
"Normal!" Sketchy shot up out of his chair, careful to turn his project upside down before he left the lunch table. "Normal, do you have any pliers?"
"Pliers?" Normal replied, looking, as usual, apathetic.
"Yeah, the kind with the oval-ish handle things?" Oh, man, he needed a pair of pliers.
"What for?" Normal asked suspiciously, his eyes narrowing in a way that Sketchy was sure he would have found hilarious if the situation hadn't been so serious.
"I'm pulling out all my teeth," he replied sarcastically. It always worked for Max and OC, right? Normal didn't budge. Apparently the sarcasm had to be accompanied by breasts to work.
"Come on Normal, I'm on my lunch break. I'll give them back in five minutes, I swear. You can dock my pay if I don't."
Ah, yes, the magic words. Normal shrugged, mumbled something about checking in the back. He returned moments later and handed Sketchy a small pair of rusted, aged needle-nose pliers. Perfect. With a quick thanks to the boss, Sketchy launched himself back onto his makeshift work table. Hopefully, the pliers would work. He'd already tried it twice freehand to ruinous results, and his finished product had to be perfect, or no one would believe him.
Setting the pliers carefully over the paper, Sketchy took up his magic marker. He took a deep breath to steady himself, took the cap off the marker, took hold of the pliers to keep them in place, and began to trace the oval created by the pliers' handles. Carefully, he switched sides to finish the oval, then moved onto the next. The final product could only be described as completely awesome, and completely mind-blowing.
"Normal!" Sketchy shouted as he gathered up his stuff, hurriedly shoving his papers into his back pack.
"What?" Normal shouted back, the edge in his voice proving how very tired he was growing of his gangliest employee.
"I have to take the rest of the afternoon. Please, man, it's an emergency." He was practically hopping up and down, he was so anxious for an answer. He bounced rapidly on the balls of his feet, murmuring "pleasepleasepleaseplease" until Normal finally rolled his eyes and relented.
"Thank you!" Sketchy shouted, feeling that he could have hugged the older man at that moment. He put the pliers into Normal's outstretched hand and bolted out of the building. He had a lot of thinking to do.
A/N: The last time I wrote something that prompted so many red and green squigglies to pop up on Word, it was for French class. Purposefully bad grammar - the bane of Microsoft's existence (okay, a slight exaggeration). Anyway, sorry this was short, but confining oneself to only one viewpoint per chapter does have its disadvantages. Well, at least the chapters are coming out easy and quickly enough. More soon...
A/N2.0: Oh, and the pliers? They were the only thing in my apartment that would make the right kind of oval when traced, I kid you not. I actually researched this. The "Whatelsewhatelsewhatelse" line - that was me. And, no, I don't know how I came to possess a pair of needle-nose pliers. I don't even know how I know the name of that particular tool.