Chapter 2
Years went by. Billy who could not have passed high school let alone college without help had gotten dibs on Grim and had taken him along under the guise of a classroom skeleton (again) to get help in cheating. He had made it into one college (barely) on a football scholarship. It took him ten attempts to finally get a hold of Mandy over the phone and after the last trial ending up with Grim (mistaken for Billy) getting beaten up by a tough biker for calling his girl Mandy over the phone, Grim insisted he would dial. It was no surprise when he found that Billy had no idea how to dial or understand the numbers in a phone id and after that there was far less trouble (at least with phone calls that is). Grim missed Mandy as much as one could miss abject malice but that he found he could have stood but now without her dark banter there was nothing to take away from the mindless drivel that was Billy and given the choice between dark malevolence and shear stupidity he found he would have preferred the former. He was after all the Grim Reaper. He enjoyed being on the causing end of such unwanted pain and agony and he found he had a grudging respect for her wit and something else. He couldn't quite put his bony finger on it but there was something else missing that seemed to illude him constantly now that Mandy was out of the picture.
It wasn't that he missed her, he assured himself almost constantly. It was that it would be in his best interest to get in good with her so he wouldn't end up as a hang up dummy in Billy's house for the rest of his life. How was that girl anyhow? On the phone she said very little and she sounded far more reserved when she talked to him then when he heard her sarcastically making fun of Billy when he 'accidentally' forgot to return the earpiece to it's cradle sometimes. It wasn't that he longed to hear her voice, no, of course not. It was that he wanted to protect his assets incase Billy said something stupid...er then usual. He knew very little about what was really going on in her life. He gained very little insight into it from his hijacked conversations overheard on the phone or the irregular postcards Billy forced her to send. She was going through law school, well that fit her well. She was shrude and could go far with such a degree and until then she could torment the poor victims that had the misfortune of being on the opposite side of a case. She would of course be a prosecutor, there was no question of that in Grim's mind whatsoever. He could not, and he believed no one else who had ever been in a room for more then five minutes with her would either, see Mandy defending someone else's rights. Still, it maddened him that he could find no more about her. Was she dating anyway? Where had that question come in? Why would that matter? Now really, all he wanted to know was whether or not she would save him from life as a mannequin. Right?