October. Garfield's greatest gamble p.3

The night of Halloween didn't start out exactly like Gar had imagined. For starters, the ears on his costume came out a little wonky. He firmly told himself it didn't matter.

But it got a little worse when he got to Victor's house. Dick opened the door, in his trademark getup of red jacket and jeans, and both boys gaped at the sight of each other.

"What the hell? Where's your costume?!" exclaimed Gar.

"What are you?" returned Dick, stifling laughter.

Indignity over his handiwork not being recognized won over indignity at Dick ignoring their agreement. "Excuse you! I'm a grey fox. It's the city's official animal!"

Gar was proud of his first ever textile project. He'd taken a grey onesie and gone from there, sewing a mix of white and reddish for the chest and painstakingly making the two ears and the tail out of felt and stuffing. He considered it the best thing he had ever made.

"You know I'm from Gotham," Dick said, trying to hold back his laughter. "No, I see it now. I love it. You look great, really."

Vic came to the door and freely let out a fit raucous laughter. He wore one of his stylish brown leather jackets and grey jeans, noted Gar, none of which was a costume. "What are you supposed to be?"

"Seriously? This is your city!" cried Gar.

"He's a grey fox, Jump's official animal," supplied Dick.

Vic shook his head. "I just knew you were a furry."

Dick lost all intent to be diplomatic and doubled over laughing, as Gar screamed at Vic.

"How—You're roasting me when you don't even have a costume!?"

"I stayed up studying till two am last night, I'm practically a vampire," Vic said lightly.

Gar wasn't assuaged. "Can you explain why you betrayed me like this?"

"Gar, I did say I was gonna prioritize studying," Dick said.

"I tried to warn you, man," said Victor. "I told you no one bothers with that stuff here."

"But we were gonna! We agreed!"

Dick chose to move past them towards Vic's car as the other two continued to argue. "Can we just go get the girls?"

Gar continued to fume in the car. But he kept his hopes up, and he pinned those hopes on the girls.

Then they got to Kori's building, and to his grave disappointment, she opened the door wearing an intensely purple sweater and tennis skirt. Acutely aware of the betrayal on Gar's face, Kori looked like a deer in the headlights, and rushed to explain, "I… am a… rofien zobgar?" She rushedly broke off a couple of branches from the decorative shrubbery next to them and held them to her head like horns. "Do you see?"

Raven came out of the building next, and Gar turned on her accusatorily: she was wearing black—a crop sweater, high-waisted shorts and tights. There was nothing festive about her. "I know this was you," he told her. "Kori was game until you came to get ready here."

Raven glared at him. "Gar, nobody gives a crap about Halloween in this city and neither do I."

"But we had an agreement! I've been telling you for a month to get your life together!" Gar wanted to say more, but he cut himself short, because while Raven's blasé expression didn't change, Kori looked more remorseful by the second, and he felt bad for yelling at her. He made himself calm down. "Okay, it doesn't matter. Let's just go to the party."

They clambered into the car and drove downtown.

"Alright, this is what I think," Dick was saying. "If you let a single person choose the music for an entire trip, it's intrinsically unfair."

"Good word."

"Thanks, Raven, I've been studying all day," Dick responded. "Because a car trip may be shorter or longer, right? So instead of one person chooses, we should do it on a basis of minutes. I propose ten minutes per person."

"Okay, I can get behind that," Vic agreed.

Gar popped his head onto the front of the car between Dick and Victor. "But what if a person anticipated Halloween night would be his turn and prepared a really long playlist especially for the occasion?"

"…Okay. I guess tonight can be the last time we use the old system," said Dick.

After they were past the boulevard, Vic said, "You see Gar, we've been driving all across town, and there are no parties, no decorations anywhere. I've seen like, what, half a dozen kids trick-or-treating. You're the only person who cares about Halloween."

"And those kids' costumes sucked," said Raven.

Dick said, "One time, one single year, like three kids showed up to my door asking for candy."

"Did they get any?" asked Gar.

"Nope. Bruce turned off the lights and pretended no one was home. And when they didn't leave, he turned on the sprinklers."

This is the worst town in the world, Gar thought briefly, before replacing that thought with another statement, "Well, that just means everyone's gonna be at my party!"

"Maybe it's something to do with the Titans," posed Vic. "Like we see costumed vigilantes year round, so we lose the taste for dressing up ourselves."

"No, it's not that," Dick immediately returned. "Look at Gotham. They love Halloween there. And it's Gotham. Capital of costumed weirdos. This is something to do with Jump itself," Dick went on.

"Did you go to the trick-or-treating a lot when you were little, Gar?" Kori asked.

"Yeah, loads," Gar said offhandedly, and he reached to the front to turn the music up so as not to elaborate. "This next song is my favorite, guys."

"See, with my new system, in this trip we would have changed turns like ten times over," said Dick.

"Yeah, why is this stupid party at the end of the world?" asked Raven.

Gar said, "We're not even halfway there."

"What!?" reacted Vic. "Gar, where are you taking us?"

"Only to a kickass Halloween party!"

After driving a lot more, Gar finally told Vic to turn left in a residential street. Vic parked the car where Gar said, and Gar jumped out, towards a house with no banners, no decorations, and only the fact that the lights were on to give anyone any room to consider a party could potentially be going on inside.

The other four followed Gar out of loyalty, and because they had come all this way. Even when they stood outside the door they couldn't hear any music.

"Are you sure it's here?" Raven asked, as Gar blithely rang the doorbell, and then immediately tried the door handle, which turned out to be locked.

But the door was opened before Gar could answer, by a pimpled twenty-something who looked as confused by the kids as four out of five of them looked by him.

Gar just said, "Hey dude, I'm friends with Brent," and barreled inside.

The older guy recovered and let the others in with a, "Oh, uh, come in."

And they did, mostly out of social pressure.

Inside, they could hear some music, but barely. They came into a decoration-less living room with a dozen other men sitting around with drinks on their hands, who stared at the five when they entered. No one was in costume.

Dick grabbed Gar by the back of his costume to keep him from going in. "Gar, what is this? Where did you bring us?" he asked through gritted teeth.

"Excuse you, I brought you to a college party, hello? Thank me later."

"Your movies have greatly over-presented the college parties to me," Kori whispered at Raven, who, seeing as Dick and Vic already looked ready to bite Gar's head off, almost wanted to laugh at the whole fiasco.

Gar had crossed the room to greet his contact, a skinny guy who was conceivably Brent. Brent was holding a guitar amongst a group of a drummer and another guitarist at the back of the room.

"I feel like we're gonna get treated to a live performance any moment now," droned Raven.

Vic followed the path Gar had gone in, and approached the guy he'd been talking to tentatively. "Brent?" he asked.

"Yeah?" Brent accepted.

"Soo, how'd you know Gar?" Vic asked.

Brent gave that some thought. "I think he goes to my aunt's diner and she told him about me? Yeah, I don't know, he started showing up to my garage when we were practicing. You know… he's a really cool little guy."

Vic watched Gar float around the room talking to people. "Yeah. True."

Vic decided right there and then that they were staying half an hour and then they were leaving.

As the other three lingered at the doorway, a guy came up to Raven. "Hey. I bet you're the smartest girl in school, huh?"

Raven was understandably thrown off. "What?"

The guy panicked for a moment, and Raven thought she could physically see his brain change gears. "You're one of those really mean girls, aren't you?"

And Raven understood he was desperately trying to peg her. He probably thought he was smart to not go for a pick-up line. She kept a straight face and decided humoring him would be more entertaining than anything else. "Get me a drink."

Dick and Kori sat on one of the couches, and were immediately were approached by three guys.

"Hey, what's your name?" one of them asked Kori.

"Kori. This is my friend Dick."

But nobody was looking at Dick. "Kori, where's that name from?" said another man.

"It is Tamaranean."

The man nodded, affecting recognition. "Oh, yeah. I thought so."

Now they were six guys around them. One who looked overconfident approached Kori and opened with, "Hey. Are you an alien?" as his friends chuckled and pushed him in the back.

Kori got unexpectedly cross. "I said I was Tamaranean. But I am a legal citizen."

To which the guy sputtered and decided not to finish his pick-up line. Dick chuckled to himself.

Meanwhile, Gar worked his social butterfly magic around them all. He took it upon himself to turn up the music, roused a bunch of people to get up from their seats and at least stand if not dance, and actually single-handedly managed to make it look more like a party.

With the change in atmosphere, Vic began to feel better about the whole thing. Then he spotted Raven in the corner, sipping a beer and blithely letting a guy chat her up.

He scurried over there.

When he got closer, the guy was saying, "No, seriously, it's amazing that you're able to take song lyrics and apply them to your life. Not everyone can do that. Just like, listen to music, and like… really relate to it."

"Totally," Raven said.

"Hey, what's going on?" Vic asked.

Raven said, "Neil and I were just bonding over our shared love of Folktronica."

Vic looked at Raven, knowing full well she couldn't stand electronic music. She just smirked at him.

"You want another beer, Scarlet?" Neil asked.

"Sure."

When Neil turned his back, Vic turned to Raven. "Scarlet?" he echoed. "What are you doing?"

Raven shrugged, "It's Halloween." To the guy she said, "Hey, get my friend Hilton one too."

"Okay!"

"Just a coke for me, Neil!" Vic countered. He was staying sober so he could get everyone out of here fast. He looked back at Raven. "Have you ever had alcohol before?" Vic asked.

"Yes," she said, and didn't elaborate.

It was one of those times where her face was so impassive he genuinely couldn't tell if she was lying or not. "Pace yourself," he said in case.

"I opened it myself and I'm only having one," Raven said, deciding to appease his big brother instinct. She could also see him keeping an eye on Kori across the room. It wasn't fair he always seemed to feel he had to take care of them. "Relax."

At the couch, one of the men was brave enough to ask Kori to dance. Before she could think of how to turn him down, someone else asked her for a picture, and then everyone wanted a picture with her.

Kori didn't want to. But she only had two modes; she was either open and friendly, or she shut people down completely, and violently. She hadn't yet learned how to work a middle point of polite rejection. Thinking like that made her think of Raven—surely she'd know how to make these guys back off.

Kori hadn't really misunderstood that one guy's pick-up line. She'd willfully taken it the wrong way because it gave her the opportunity to look pissed off, and she thought that might make them all back off. It hadn't worked.

In the moment she hesitated, Dick, who'd been keeping himself at bay, decided to step in, and only because Kori finally looked overwhelmed. "Hey. Shove off, will you?"

"Relax, I'm just trying to get more people to come," one of the guys told him.

"I'm trying to make my girlfriend jealous," said another.

Dick was finally irked. "All of you put your phones away or I'll break them."

They took offense to that.

"You're like twelve, shut up."

"Yeah, who do you think you are?"

The group's sole source of confidence laid in all of them being taller than Dick.

"Why don't you come and find out?" challenged Dick, not so much angry as bored.

"Why don't you let her speak?" the man who'd originally asked for a picture retorted, and turned everyone's attention back to Kori. "Do you mind taking a picture with us?"

For Kori, there was something about the man's shady tactic—claiming to want to let her decide, which shut Dick down because he did want to go by what she said, when the man was really betting on having seen Kori would be too nice to say no. The faux feminism of it, the way the voice he was allowing her was only because he thought he'd get the answer he wanted. It pissed her off enough that she looked at him and didn't feel bad saying, "Um. I do," and then getting up to go find Raven.

With her gone, the situation didn't diffuse. The guys turned their energy on Dick to blame him for Kori leaving, and Dick was all too happy to make good on his threats.

Gar arrived just in time to break up the fight Dick was about to end. "Guys! Why are we fighting? This is a party!"

Dick willingly let Gar break the group apart; after all, Kori had already gotten away to the kitchen.

"What did you think was gonna happen if you left me alone with that guy?" Raven was asking Vic, sitting on the kitchen counter. They had left the living room for some quiet after Gar turned the music up.

"I don't know, Raven, but the fact alone that he was talking to you was bad enough," said Vic.

The guy in question was lingering outside, peeking in as if to see when he could make his entrance, or perhaps when Vic would leave—which didn't help him in Vic's creep-o-meter. Vic looked at Raven, who still wasn't taking him seriously. "He looks thirty."

"Love know no number."

"Stop it. You're creeping me out."

"'Least he has a job."

"I know to you it's hilarious that he was hitting on you, but to me it just creeped me out."

Kori found Vic and Raven in the kitchen, where she told Raven about her plight with the men hounding her.

Vic pointed at her. "See? These guys are insane."

Raven handed Kori her mostly empty beer can. "Hold this. Then say you already got a drink when they offer you one. Also from this moment on, you have a boyfriend."

Kori simultaneously deduced this must be obvious information and also sincerely felt like Raven was a genius.

Dick appeared in the kitchen. "Hey, guys, I think Gar's about to sing."

So the four loyally left the kitchen.

Having managed to stop the budding fight, Gar had taken to the stage, appropriating one of the guitars and the main microphone.

He looked, as always, at home on stage, but he didn't seem to have accounted for the entails of performing alongside tipsy people. About as soon as the song started, the guy on bass wobbled too close to one of the big speakers and bumped into it. It tipped over and landed cleanly on Gar's foot.

Gar's singing voice became a blood-curling scream that overpowered the music.

Dick turned to the guy closest to him. "Where's the nearest hospital?"

Vic felt like a bad friend for feeling so intensely relieved that they could now leave.


Minutes later, Vic was driving through the streets towards the nearest ER.

Laying horizontally in the back seat, draped over Dick and Raven, Gar blithely said, "Hey, can we at least go to someone's house and hang out? It's so early."

"What the hell are you talking about?" demanded Vic. "Gar, you caught a speaker with your foot. We're going to the hospital."

Gar had the gall to sound shocked. "The hospital? No I'm not."

"Uh, yeah you are," retorted Dick.

"Guys, you're exaggerating," said Gar, sounding surprisingly serious. "These kind of things heal themselves. I just need to walk it off."

"I'm sure you believe that, however," Vic retorted.

"I am looking up when you should go to hospital," announced Kori, looking at her phone.

Gar said, "Look, all hospitals do-"

Vic cut him off. "We know, we know, you think hospitals only make you sicker-"

"Not just sicker!" cried Gar. "They make you sick where you weren't before! They keep testing you for this and that and they're bound to find something!"

"But if they find something, doesn't that mean you were already sick, you just didn't know?" reasoned Raven.

"But if it's something you could have lived on perfectly not knowing, do you need to know? Are you even really sick?" returned Gar.

Vic glared from the rear view mirror. "Stop humoring him, Rae. Gar, when you get your foot smashed, you go to the hospital. End of."

"I have found," said Kori, commanding their attention, "You have a broken bone… if you hear or feel a snap or grinding noise when the injury happens."

"The music was too loud. What's next, Kor?" prompted Dick.

"Broken skin or an open wound. Pain or difficulty moving the foot. Pain or trouble walking or bearing weight on the foot. Tenderness or pain from touching the injury. Feeling faint, dizzy, or sick following the injury."

Dick looked at Gar expectantly. "You feel any of that?"

"Nope, I feel perfectly fine," said Gar, sounding proud and spiteful enough that everybody felt it was irresponsible to take him at his word.

Dick took off his sunglasses. "Gar, I never thought I'd say this, but show me your feet."

Gar stopped. "Um…" he looked down at his costume. Dick had completely forgotten it was a onesie. "I'm naked under this, does that bother anyone?"

"Naked naked?" asked Vic, looking through the rear view mirror worriedly.

"No, I mean. I have underwear."

Dick was massaging the bridge of his nose. "It doesn't matter, just take it off."

Gar looked at Raven for final confirmation. After all she was also in the backseats with him.

Raven had been looking at the front for the last stretch of the conversation, and groaned when he singled her out. "Just do it," she snapped. So much for trying not to blush.

Gar wriggled out of the costume, and Dick didn't miss that he winced when his foot accidentally touched the front seat.

"Careful," he said as Gar took the legs off. He was wearing shoes under the onesie, and he took them off carefully. When his feet were free,he and Dick stared. Raven turned too, and forgot her embarrassment.

"So?" asked Vic, who couldn't see from the angle.

Dick swallowed, and tried to stay calm. "Kori, does it say something about the foot turning blue?"

Vic's car sped up ever so slightly.

Kori frantically scrolled. "Yes. …Seek immediate help."

Gar silently put the suit back on.

They stopped at the hospital. All got out of the car except Gar, who remained sitting with his arms crossed. "I'm not going in."

"Gar, get out," said Vic, standing at the passenger door.

"I said I wasn't going to the hospital, and I'm not."

Dick replaced Vic in the passenger door. "If we have to make Kori carry you in, we will."

Kori solemnly moved forward, stepping up to the task.

Gar didn't argue anymore.

Minutes later, the four sat in the waiting area. Gar had been admitted at the ER by a nurse who said it was 'nice to still see kids dressing up for Halloween'.

Twenty minutes later, Gar emerged with his foot in a cast, having ran away from an offered wheelchair, and crossed the hall in front of his friends with crutches, far too rapidly to be advisable, saying, "I'm all done, let's go."

After all that, Gar laid in his bed, drowsy from the painkillers and exhausted from the effort of sneaking into the house and up the stairs while in crouches. As he fell asleep, he concluded he still preferred this Halloween to any other he'd ever had.

End of October.


I missed Monday! But in all fairness, I should actually be job hunting/new client hunting right now. Every update is a small miracle.

Next chapter is called 'November. Undercover as the part of yourself you just can't accept'. It introduces one East High School, and a couple of new characters to go with it :)