Chapter Eight.
"Ducky" I heard myself breath and I secretly cringed, I sounded like all those romantic heroines I despised in all the movies Mary Anne loved.
Yes I was shaken, stressed out and a little bit frightened but I was never one of those girls.
"Dawn" he replied and for a second he sounded like Tom Hanks in all those Meg Ryan movies.
"What are you doing here? Why aren't you at university?" I asked still clutching onto the front of my shirt.
Ducky just looked over his shoulder towards the wide glass windows that showed the inside of the Fiesta Grill.
"That guy I set you up with? Turns out his border line Schizoid, perfectly fine when he takes his medication of course," Ducky said.
"And let me guess he hasn't been taking his little blue pills?" I asked and Ducky flinched.
"Little light pink pills, his room mate found a whole bottle of them under his mattress" Ducky explained.
"Did you know he was crazy before you set me up?" I shouted accusingly and he looked stricken.
"Of course I didn't Dawn! Why else do you think I rushed all the way here when I found out? I had to borrow Samuel Grant's moped and I ended up nearly hitting a squirrel" Ducky cried and my heart softened for a second, like me Ducky had always appreciated small fluffy animals.
"Did you make sure it was alright?" I asked and he sighed.
"Mr Fluffy the squirrel will live to see another day, are you alright?" he asked me.
Sometimes when I was annoyed with Ducky I always thought that he only cared about other peoples problems because he thought that he had to care about everything, that even though he was sympathetic their was nothing sincere in his condolences.
But right then he was looking at me differently from the way he would look at Sunny or Maggie or even Gracie when they were upset.
He wasn't being the quiet listener; he was being the active rescuer.
"I'm fine," I said patting his arm reassuringly.
"But your shirt." he began trailing off.
"Malcolm didn't do that, Sunny's wonder bra did that," I said.
"The black one that she cried over when it didn't fit?" he asked his lips curling into a small smile.
"The very same, I cant believe she talked me into it" I replied rolling my eyes.
"He didn't hurt you did he?" Ducky then asked still looking serious.
"No, he was too busy thinking he was Shrek to do that" I laughed.
"Shrek? Are you serious?"
"He even had a little dog with him, he claimed it was a donkey" I added.
"You know it's very wrong to laugh at crazy people but sometimes you just can't help yourself," Ducky said with a mock stern expression on his face, which caused me to burst into a giggle fit.
This of course caused the lady bug barrette to snap open, fortunately my reflexes were much faster this time but my blouse still hung open for two seconds.
"Sorry about that, the shirts Maggie's" I said blushing bright red but Ducky was staring at my exposed cleavage an almost surprised expression on his face.
"Don't apologize," he finally said tearing his eyes away.
"But despite the balmy LA weather I really do think you should wear this" he said taking his jacket off and placing it around my shoulders.
Suddenly I knew exactly how Maggie felt when Justin saw her boobs after she climbed out of a swimming pool dripping wet.
"What about you Ducky? You tend to cry when it gets under seventy degrees," I pointed out.
"That was one time and frankly my dear I was hammered, of course I would prefer to go inside a nice warm restaurant that happens to serve Mexican food," he said his eyes trailing towards the restaurants doors.
"Is the psycho Shrek guy still in there?" I asked.
"No, if he was I would have suggested the Japanese place down the road" Ducky said logically.
"Raw fish?" I asked raising my eyebrows.
"I have seen you eat fish at least three times Dawn, don't you deny it and go all vegan on me" he grinned and I rolled my eyes.
"Well I might eat fish, on very special occasions" I admitted.
"Would this count as one?" he asked.
"Better stick with the Mexican food" I smiled punching him lightly on the shoulder.
Ducky was the first close male friend I'd ever had, before I met him I'd always hung out in groups of girls.
Boys were at first gross and then they transformed into cute guys you kissed and went to dances with.
But they were never real friends.
When I was fourteen, I'd convinced myself that Ducky was gay.
If he was gay then he was really one of the girls and our friendship would have been ok. I wasn't naïve; I knew perfectly well that if I ever had a serious boyfriend he would object to me hanging around Ducky and sooner or later I would have to make a choice.
Convincing myself he was gay made things so much easier and for awhile things were great, Ducky became my confident the person I could talk to when my family or Sunny happened to be driving me crazy.
But then when I was fifteen I found out he was dating a girl, an actual girl.
Her name was Veronica and she had long black and purple hair, which clashed violently against the kilts she always wore.
I personally thought she was an Avril Lavinge wannabe but Ducky thought she was so cool until they broke up and she set fire to his dorm.
It didn't matter that she was a complete freak, she was still a girl and all the illusions I'd built up about Ducky were firmly shattered.
We were still friends but there was also the tense feeling that we both knew our friendship wouldn't last forever.
I thought about all those things as Ducky and I sat in the restaurant and Ducky started raving on about the indignity of riding a moped.
"Moped's belong to two kinds of people Dawn, beautiful girls on romantic vacations in Rome, or chess club geeks who are to afraid to get their drivers license" he said sipping from his coke.
"Hey I've always wanted a moped," I snorted.
"Well obviously you'd fall into the first category" he shot back seamlessly.
"Guess I'll have to book a ticket to Rome then" I grinned.
"Why not? You've already been to Hawaii, Amsterdam, New York and the Bahamas," he pointed out with a small smirk.
"It's not my fault that one of my childhood friends happened to be the step daughter of a millionaire, and that he always insisted on bringing us all on family vacations" I grinned referring to my friend Kristy Thomas.
"Now that's generosity"
"No it was free child care, he never wanted to take care of all his kids while on vacation so he used us instead. I really don't blame him, his daughter Karen totally had ADD," I explained as the waitress came with our meals.
I'd ordered the vegetarian nachos, Ducky had order a chiliburger but he tactfully put some lettuce over the beef patty.
"What's that piece of paper?" Ducky asked me and I blinked slowly.
"Piece of paper?" I asked.
"The one you just put down" he said and I stared at the weird note the lady in the bad wig had given me.
"Oh that? It's just a weird note some crazy woman threw at me" I said practically inhaling a salsa-covered corn chip.
Ducky grabbed onto the piece of paper but I wasn't upset, Ducky Sunny and I had no secrets, we'd even given each other copies of our journals before Ducky had left for college.
"You said a crazy woman threw this at you?" he asked his expression shocked.
"Yes, what of it?" I asked and he tossed the paper at me.
"Do you even know what this is?" he asked.
"No" I admitted reluctantly, I hated it when I didn't know things.
Ducky stared at the piece of paper and he slowly ripped it into pieces, I'd only ever seen that expression on his face once before.
It when he threw away all his brothers clothes, right before he left Palo City for good.
"Ducky, do you know what that is?" I asked and he just gave a small shaky laugh.
"It's just a bad memory" he replied, and he wouldn't say anything else.
I'd never been driven home on a moped before and I had to say it was quite an experience. When you drove around in a car you were in a sense shielded from the outside world but on the moped I could feel everything, the wind blowing against my face, the smell of salty sea air mixed with pollution and the sound of fireworks going off at Disneyland.
"You know when I was a kid I used to think it was so cool that I lived near Disneyland" I yelled and I heard Ducky give off a wild laugh.
"Me too!" he yelled back.
The moped however was ridiculously slow, in fact it was a piece of junk and it took almost forty minutes to get back to my house.
"This thing is such a worthless piece of junk" Ducky sighed as he drove up my driveway.
"Everyone should just ride bikes like they do in Amsterdam," I pointed out.
"If I road a bike to the Fiesta Grill I wouldn't have arrived in time" Ducky pointed out as I let go of his shoulders.
"But you would have cut down on pollution" I replied playfully as I slid down onto the ground.
"You know Dawn friendship is sometimes more important then the environment" he said with a long-suffering sigh and I thought about my own position and all I'd gone through.
"Sometimes it is," I echoed and he glanced over his shoulder.
"Sunny did your make up didn't she?" he asked.
"Yes, it looks terrible" I sighed.
"Not terrible, just….I never realized how old you were before" he said with a small nervous smile.
"How old I am?" I asked raising my eyebrows.
"I've always seen you as that scared thirteen year old I met at two in the morning, but your not anymore are you?" he asked and then he shook his head.
"Sorry I'm exhausted and midterms are coming up which means my brain is slowly turning into mush" he apologized.
"You should go if you need to study," I said although I didn't want him to go at all, I wanted to talk until four in the morning, there were many things I wanted to do.
He leaned forward and kissed me on the forehead, something he'd done many times before.
"Tell Sunny I said hi" he grinned and then the engine spluttered into life.
I watched him as he drove away until I could no longer hear the mopeds engine spluttering.
My hand brushed against my forehead and then I heard the sound of a window opening.
Sunny was staring at me from her bedroom window a confused expression on her face, dressed in her bright red silk camisole.
I was about to speak but then she slowly turned away shutting the window again, oddly enough she looked hurt.
"So, how did the big date go?" Sunny asked me during art class. We were supposed to be painting a still life out of different coloured inks but Sunny and I were never really all that good at art.
We mainly took it because Mrs. Sorrinso tended to let every one talk as much as they liked.
"It was terrible, my shirt burst open exposing my breasts to the whole world," I hissed back.
"And that's a bad thing?" Sunny asked and I rolled my eyes.
"It is in a crowded restaurant, besides the guy was crazy he thought he was Shrek," I added.
"He thought he was a super strong Ogre? That sounds hot" Sunny said as I carefully tried to color in the vase I had drawn, it looked like a wonky bong.
"Well it wasn't" I grumbled.
"That explains why Ducky took you home, since when does he have a moped anyway?" Sunny asked.
"Actually he was rescuing me, he knew the guy was a creep," I admitted.
"Well isn't it nice that Ducky is still a knight in vintage clothed armor" Sunny said sounding a little bitter.
"Um Sunny has some one injected you with supreme bitchieness?" I asked.
"You know I really don't care that you're hooking up with Ducky but you should at least tell me," Sunny snapped.
"Hooking up with Ducky? Have you lost it?" I hissed.
"I saw you two outside your house," she muttered.
"Yeah he gave me a ride home and we didn't do anything Sunny, not everything is about sex," I said with disgust.
"Fine, what did you two talk about then if it wasn't confessing your hidden feelings?" she asked.
"Nothing, well he did freak out when I showed him the symbol" I began.
"What symbol?" Sunny asked and I rolled my eyes drawing a sun with a star in the center of it on my piece of paper.
"That one, the one Nick was drawing all over the place at the hospital," I said pointing to it.
"Well of course he'd freak out over that," Sunny said wearily and I slowly raised my eyebrows.
"That symbol happens to be a tattoo, it belonged to one of the cromags who used to pick on Ducky" Sunny said.
"Which one?" I asked.
"I don't know the fat one, I think he's name was Harris" Sunny said with a vague wave of her hand.
Harris Bueller was the sort of young man that no one remembered really well after high school. He wasn't unpopular; rather he was the yes man to the popular which was even worse.
After all people remembered who the nerd were in our school, and it was better being remembered then nobody knowing you at all.
I couldn't even remember who he was and when Sunny and I found his yearbook all that was revealed was he took shop the same year as Seth.
"Oh yeah that guy Harris he was pretty much a nark man until he started dating that red headed chick from Palo City High and then he started showing up at all our bon fires man. He once brought this like awesome pen and when you clicked it all the ladies clothes came off" said Seth when we interrogated him after school.
"Yes but where does he live?" I asked impatiently.
"Oh well he used to live in that block of high-rises on Seventh Avenue" Seth said dreamingly turning his attention back to a tiny green Volkswagen he was working on.
When Seth said that Harris Bueller used to live on Seventh Avenue I assumed that the kid had moved off to college or had at least run away from home.
Instead forty minutes later Sunny and I found ourselves in a very awkward situation.
"Did they just carry a coffin down the stairs?" Sunny asked looking astonished, of course that could have been her turquoise eye make up.
"Maybe a little old lady with heaps of cats died" I said hopefully.
"The pallbearers were wearing varsity football jackets," Sunny said.
"Ok maybe she was an old lady who really loved football," I added and Sunny for the first time ever adjusted the hemline of her shirt so it actually covered her chest, she then briskly walked towards the apartments elevator, I followed her feeling completely horrified.
After asking for directions twice we managed to find the Bueller apartment, mourners dressed in black were spilling out into the hall way.
"Excuse me, we were friends of the deceased" Sunny said bossily pushing her way through, surprisingly no one questioned this.
Inside candles had lighted up the apartment and some one had placed a shrine on top of the television.
It showed a boy smiling for his school picture next to several newspaper articles, which had been carefully clipped out.
"Holy tofu! Sunny this is Harris Bueller and he's the guy who was killed in the McDonald's fire" I whispered reading one of the articles.
"Well then we're practically being respectful by showing up to the funeral, hey here's a picture of the tattoo" Sunny said picking up a photograph of Harris standing in his board shorts next to a surf board.
"Man he was fat wasn't he?" I remarked.
I stared at the tattoo on his arm, I'd always been into superstition and I believed firmly in my powers of intuition.
Something seemed vaguely wrong in that picture, sick and almost angry at the same time, which was odd because he was smiling.
"I know that neither of you happen to be my stepbrothers friends" a voice asked crisply, Sunny and I turned around.
A girl was staring at us, she looked vaguely familiar and I knew I'd seen her before.
Her hair had been bleached blond along with her eyebrows, and she was wearing her own version of a funeral outfit, which consisted of a black cheerleaders skirt, white halter neck and a thick plastic beaded black necklace.
"And how exactly do you know that?" Sunny asked folding her arms.
"Because your Sunny Winslow and my brother never slept with you, I don't know who you are but I doubt he slept with you either" she said to me.
"And who are you exactly?" Sunny asked raising her eyebrows.
"Venice Nova tell" Venice introduced herself.
"That is so not your real name," I snorted.
"It's my true name, I am a follower of the Hilton way" Venice said and I shot Sunny a questioning look.
"It's a new movement that follows the teachings of Paris Hilton, it's very popular with teenage girls and they tend to change their names to geographical locations and Hotel brands" Sunny whispered to me.
"Why would anyone want to follow Paris Hilton?" I asked.
"Because she's the golden messiah, she has taught us all how to become hot and fabulous without ever having to do any real work" Venice said.
"Oh well that makes perfect sense" Sunny grinned.
"If you're being sarcastic I'll have to ask you to leave, I refuse to allow negative energy to harm my general hotness" said Venice, quite seriously.
"She's not being sarcastic she's being Sunny, listen do you know anything about the tattoo that was on your step brothers arm?" I asked and Venice's eyes slowly widened.
"We can't talk about that here," she whispered.
"Well yes talking about tattoo's at a funeral isn't appropriate" Sunny said as if she'd experience that social taboo before.
Venice flicked her hair over one shoulder and then her eyes darted across the apartment towards the kitchenette her eyes falling on a girl serving up several platters of cold meat.
Suddenly things stopped being so silly, instead they felt serious.
Despite the fact the girl had long straight red hair and she was dressed in black I recognized her face.
She was the woman who had thrown the note at me in the alleyway.
"Meet me in the girls bathroom, tomorrow before class" Venice hissed.
"Wait a second you go to our school?" Sunny asked.
"Of course I do! I'm a freshmen," said Venice.
"Oh, freshmen" Sunny sighed wearily as if that explained why Venice had been beneath her notice.
The woman suddenly glanced up and her eyes fell on us, for a second I was sure she recognized me and I grabbed onto Sunny pulling her towards the door.
"We have to go, nice seeing you Venice" I said and Venice gave me a small resigned smile that indicated she understood why we were leaving.