L'EDgendary

by dobanochi

A few years since we last saw any of them, the Peach Creek Boys and the Merry Men run into one another at just the right time, working together to undermine an oppressive city government as well as their burgeoning insecurities. An action-comedy-drama character study about friendship, leadership, self-esteem, and the divide between who we're born as and who we choose to be.

26. The Huckster's Last Stand, Pt 1

26. "The Huckster's Last Stand, Pt. 1"

Ed was the first of the three to wake up that day.

Knock, knock, knock. "Ed," his father grunted from the doorway. "Wake up, kid."

But the father could barely hear himself, let alone the son hear him, over the sound of the young bear's snoring, which on some particularly bad nights really could shake the whole house. It was one of the many reasons that his parents obliged to let him have his own room in the basement: the only way the rest of the family would be able to sleep was if there were two entire floors between them and Ed.

Hilary had to get to work soon, so he wasted no time trying again to wake him up politely. Instead, he went over to Ed and put his paws around the boy's snout, stopping his snoring and giving him the old nose-pinch trick to wake him up.

Ed's eyes burst open as he saw his father in his work uniform, standing over him. Hilary let go of the kid's snout and Ed sat upright in bed.

"Mornin', Dad!" Ed beamed, not at all offended by the forceful tactics used to arouse his consciousness.

"Ed, really quick," said Hilary, "I just wanted to let you know that I took off work tomorrow. I'm coming with you and your mom to see the doctor."

"DOCTOR!?"

"Shhh! It's four-thirty in the fuckin' morning, kid, your mom and sister're still tryna sleep!" Indeed, there was still no light to be seen outside the narrow window near the ceiling.

"But I don't like going to the doctor!"

Hilary was expecting Ed to take the news poorly. "I know you don't, Ed, but… remember how you told me the other day you were gonna give me two presents for Father's Day this year to make up for forgetting last year's? Well, you can make one of those presents going to the doctor without putting up a fight. Like I said, all I want from you this Father's Day is for you to grow up."

Ed had been half-asleep before this, but now that Hilary mentioned it, he did remember that exchange, and this led him to remember other parts of that conversation. "Is this the mind doctor who's going to make me his zombie slave?"

"It's the mind doctor all right, but he's not gonna do that. He's just gonna-"

"But I thought you said it was just gonna be me and Mom!"

"And at the time, that was true. But the more I thought about it, the more I thought, shit, I need to be there to see what this doc has to say about you. Just be grateful my boss gave me the day off on such short-"

And suddenly, Hilary found himself swallowed up in a bear hug.

"...notice."

"Aw, thanks for helping come with me to keep me safe from the zombie doctor, Daddy!"

Hilary had long ago stopped being amused by the whole 'Mommy and Daddy' thing. "Ed, I need to go to work."

"Oh, okay," Ed murmured as he let go.

"But don't worry about it," Hilary said as he started to leave. "It's my duty to go and protect my son, isn't it? You have a nice day, son." He started ducking under the doorway and he was fairly certain that would be the end of it.

"WAIT!"

Hilary turned around. "Yeah?"

"Now we definitely shouldn't go to the doctor!"

"...Why, pray tell?"

"The mind doctor wants all of us to go so that he can have more people for his zombie slave army!" Ed hollered, his voice reverberating throughout the domicile. "It's all a big trap and we're falling for it!" Gasp. "And then Sarah would be all alone!"

Hilary really wanted to yell, but he knew that would have been hypocritical. So instead, he walked back over to Ed and got his face really close to his son's.

"You wanna die?"

Ed backed his head away from his father's, but Hilary kept leaning further and further in.

"Do you want to fucking die?"

"...No," Ed squeaked.

"Well then, go to the doctor. Doctors make sure people don't die. And that's that." He got out of Ed's face and made his way back to the door. "Now go back to sleep," he said as he left the room.

Ed stared at the doorway for a moment before laying back down on his mattress and staring at the ceiling. A few moments later, however, he heard footsteps coming back down the stairs again and turned to see his father poke his head in.

"Oh, uh, by the way," Hilary said, looking embarrassed to have forgotten, "the foxes are coming over to watch the game tonight. I asked the wolves if they wanted to come over, too, and they said they'd like to, but it depends on how late they get home from work. So whatever you and your friends wind up doing today, just don't do anything that'll make this house stink to high heaven, alright? And if you come home after 7, make sure you knock on the front door so you don't walk in on a… private conversation." And then he left to go and collect trash in the sweltering sun for nine hours.

Ed went right back to staring at the ceiling, fretting about being turned into a zombie slave. Now, Ed wasn't stupid, and he knew that that probably wasn't going to happen, but once his imagination got a hold of the idea, he couldn't stop the visions from coming. He didn't get back to sleep that morning.

-IllI-

Double-D woke next. Never a fan of sleeping in, he stirred himself awake at precisely six o'clock; habit had rendered an alarm clock unnecessary.

His routine that morning was typical enough; he took a shower before eating breakfast, and by the time he was done in the bathroom, his parents had left for work. But as he got dressed, pulling his tail through the hole in the back of his pants and adjusting his knit cap into a comfortable position between his ears, he stared at the contraptions Eddy had had him make to sell that day.

The wolf still couldn't fathom what kind of profit margins Eddy was expecting to make off these things. Even if they were more marketable than Double-D had originally given them credit for, how much were they going to sell them for to get back what Eddy had (apparently) spent on the materials? It was only in the last year or two that the kids in this neighborhood started to receive their allowances in bills rather than coins, and even as the parents finally came around to the idea that their kids were getting older and inflation was a thing and it wasn't the Sixties and Seventies anymore, the newly-financially-empowered kids of the cul-de-sac were still wary to give the Eds more than twenty-five cents at a time for any given thing Eddy and his cohorts might be selling. Even the go-kart scam was only a quarter per ride, but luckily that was successful enough to actually keep selling.

As Double-D triple-checked that the devices still worked in different rooms of his house, he wondered: was Eddy still banking on the goodwill they'd earned from the go-kart operation to get these kids to spend more than a couple of bucks on these things? On the weekends of the last two and a half months since then, they'd made a few more attempts to sell things, but they were little things, things they'd spent exactly zero dollars and zero cents to create, things like denatured gravy sold as Ed's secret formula to help people grow big and strong like him (complete with a surgeon general's warning not to consume too much at risk of dying horribly), or Edd's tutoring services in the three R's (Reading, Writing, and 'Rithmetic) and the four S's (Science, Social Studies, and Shit-Like-That), or hand-copied copies of a journal full of wisdom and witticisms purportedly penned by Eddy's famed older brother (as Double-D tried advertising it, "Oscar wasn't the only one who could come up with Wildean epigrams!" but none of the other kids knew what the hell an epigram was nor who this mysterious Oscar fellow was supposed to be), and these ideas did not maintain the trio's good standing with the kids of Rethink Avenue nor did they sell particularly well (although the idea to sell Double-D's intellect as a commodity seemed at first like it was going to sell like hotcakes but then Mister and Missus Lupo caught wind of it the same day they set up shop, Edd's parents he stop charging the other kids for it and start doing it for free so he could list it as volunteer work and leadership experience on his college applications). Therefore the best they could hope for was that their customer approval rating was in almost the same spot as it was in March, but surely Eddy knew that in all likelihood it had fallen further.

After confirming the integrity of the product and finally allowing himself to eat breakfast, he still had a few hours to kill before Eddy would come a-knockin' and tell him he was ready to go. He tried very hard not to let it become one of those situations where he had so many options for how to spend his time that he wound up spending it all pondering what to do and not actually doing any of it. Toward this end, he would do whatever crossed his mind as soon as it crossed his mind, and if he came up with a new idea as he was doing something else, he could always just switch gears.

He started by cracking open a book about geology. Then he switched to checking the state of the toadstool mushrooms in their habitat on the shelf. Then he consulted all the labels on everything around his room to see whether any of them were beginning to peel off and needed replacing. Then he tried to jot down as many of Ed's new names for the ants as he could remember, starting with Bubba-Butch, Not Kevin, Lourdes Almighty, and Brettland, Bringer of Light. Then he finally settled on allowing himself to goof off for a bit and free-associate with some Legos, his favorite toy in his youth.

He wasn't being as economical with his time as he would usually have liked, but it was okay. It was his summer vacation and he was allowing himself to take it easy. His therapist would be proud of his progress. Furthermore, these small activities were keeping his mind off the two things he didn't want to think about: he didn't want to let his mind drift into strange thoughts regarding fictional animated characters tangentially related to the disturbingly morally-ambiguous men he'd met the other day; and he didn't want to ponder any more about his odd but persistent notion that Eddy actually wanted this scam to fail - for what reason, Edd couldn't tell you.

-IllI-

Ri-i-i-i-ing…

Ri-i-i-i-ing…

Ri-i-i-i-ing…

"SHUT UP!"

Ri-i-i-i-ing…

"Ugh..."

"If you called the right number, you got the right house, at the tone please leave your name, number, and any other pertinent information, thank you." BEEEEEEP! "Eddy, call me back when you get this, will ya? I wanna have a chit-chat. Call me on my work phone." BEEEEEEP! The voice in the voicemail was the same as the voice in the recorded greeting; 'Terry Classy' knew better than to leave his real name on his home's answering machine prompt, just in case someone unsavory was looking for him or his family.

Well, Eddy was awake now. He groggily rolled his way to the edge of his circular bed and fell face-first to the floor when he ran out of mattress. He made his way to the living room where the nearest landline phone was. He was just looking to get this conversation over with.

"Eddy?" Terry asked, already recognizing the number on his work-issued cell phone.

"Mmhmm."

"Well I knew you were either asleep or outside, and I was going to give you the benefit of the doubt, but nah, you sound like you just woke up."

"Yup."

"C'mon, kid, it's nine-thirty!"

"Hey, aren't our people supposed to be nocturnal?"

"We were, then we cut that shit out when we realized we had business to attend to during the daytime."

"Well my brother still got business done and he liked to sleep 'till four in the afternoon sometimes, you never gave him any grief for that!"

"Sure we did, you just didn't notice because you idolized the son of a bitch! And he might have been making good money for a teenager, but when that arrogant little shit moved out, he realized, oh, crap, I actually have to work even harder now to support myself! I'll bet he doesn't sleep in anymore."

"I'll bet he does when he can."

"...You haven't been talking to him recently, have you?"

"Wh-what? N-no. I wouldn't even know how to get a hold of him!"

"Listen Eddy, I'm not forbidding you to talk to the guy, he's your flesh and blood too, but yeah, I'll be straight with you, that kid told me and my wife that he didn't need us as parents anymore and we still don't appreciate that, so I would honestly prefer that you didn't revere him as a god like you did when you were younger."

"Dad, don't worry, I don't. He was a dick to me too sometimes. Plenty of times. As I'm gettin' older, I'm starting to see him in a new light."

"And while I'm not happy that he was a dick to you, I am happy that I don't have to compete for your admiration with him."

"Uh… right, yeah, admiration."

"...You don't admire me, do you?"

"I'd admire you more if you'd just chill out and let me enjoy my summer vacation while I still have one."

"So are you trying to be like your brother or not?"

"Uh… I think… he's not completely a dick, and, y'know… everybody's got something we can learn from them, right, Pop?"

"So what can we learn from your brother?"

"...Is this why you called me?"

Terry sighed in resignation. "Luckily for you, I don't have the time to have this conversation with you, either. I've got two busy days ahead of me tryna seal some deals before the holiday. I was just calling to tell you directly that your mother and I are gonna be out of the house after dinner, but then you didn't answer and I thought, yeah, no, I need to find out why this kid isn't answering, leaving a message just won't do."

"Well, now you know."

"I do. Now get up 'n' at 'em and get something done today. I don't care what, just do something, anything."

"Oh, don't worry, I've got something planned." Did he ever.

"Good boy."

"Where're you and Mom going?"

"The bears invited us over to watch the basketball game tonight, and we figured we'd might as well say yes."

"Since when does our family give a shit about basketball?"

"We don't, really, but I've got a sneaking suspicion that they don't either. Because after the initial invitation, Hilary asked me man-to-man to come over anyway because he wanted to talk about something, and hey, I wasn't gonna tell him no. Like I always tell you, it's important to do what you can to maintain good relationships with people. And while he's definitely not my closest friend, with how much I work, he's probably the friend I see the most often. You know what they always say, 'a fox and a bear make a helluva couple of codependents.'"

"Yeah, I've heard something like that. What did he need so badly to talk to you about?"

"I don't know, but I'm going there to find out. The basketball game is clearly a cover. And you know what? Your mom and I agree - Jesus, she's such a Canadian girl - we both feel on some visceral level that we're supposed to be watching hockey this time of year. Like it's one of our mammalian instincts at this point that when June rolls around we're supposed to have the Stanley Cup Finals on TV. But since the season got cancelled, screw it, we'll watch the NBA Finals instead. Just give us some championship drama already."

"Yeah, that sounds like you." Despite being the son of a tomboy hockey nut from Canada and a guy from debatably the most sports-obsessed region in America, Eddy himself didn't care too much for stick-and-ball stuff; the next time his workaholic money-driven parents asked him why, he would tell them simply, it distracts people from getting business done. Maybe then they'd finally be proud of him, and not just in the way that they were proud he wasn't their hubristic older son.

"Speaking of which, that reminds me, I put twenty bucks on San Jose winning it all back in September, I gotta see what happened to that." Terry could be heard breathing into the receiver for a few moments before he added, "And speaking of bears, I see a black-bear lady eyeing a gold Prowler out on the lot… not the best car performance-wise, but if it's what she's here for, it's what she's gonna get. I gotta run, kid. Duty calls."

"Just don't swindle her too hard," Eddy half-joked.

"Swindle? Wh-!? N-no, I'm not gonna scam her. Our people don't have many allies, Eddy, and I'm not gonna piss off our closest ones."

"Uh- y-yeah, I getcha, Dad, I was just joshin'!"

"Alright, if you say so…" Terry clearly didn't really believe him. "Aw, goddammit, Doug's walking over to her!"

"Who's Doug?"

"He's a weasel in every sense of the word. He will scam her if I don't get to her first. 'Ight, gotta go!" And Terry's voice gave way to the soothing sounds of a dial tone.

Eddy put the phone back in its dock on the living room table and hopped off the couch. His dad had inadvertently posed an interesting point: Eddy needed to sort out what qualities he wanted to emulate from his brother and which he ought to leave behind. Because yeah, for better or worse, Eddy saw his brother as the closest thing he had to a role model, but one whose flaws he was acutely aware of and sometimes the victim of.

He returned to his bedroom; come to think of it, his bedroom was the perfect example of why he had come to admire his brother more than his parents. Located on the ground floor right off the living room with a personal bathroom and its own door to the backyard, it might seem a strange choice for the fox family to designate this as the younger brother's quarters while the elder sibling had a stuffy upstairs room that shared a wall with his parents' room.

That's because the nicer room was his brother's first. When his family first moved into the house, the plan was for the one-year-old to get the small, safe room next to his parents while the nine-year-old had his own space to form his independence, with the idea being that the younger son could inherit the nicer room when the older one went off to college and the smaller bedroom could become a rumpus room or some other kind of frivolous space that nice houses had. That was a perfectly fine arrangement for a few years, but it wasn't long before Terry and Toni came to regret giving their elder son as much privacy as they had.

If memory served, it was summertime. It would have been the summer when Eddy turned six before he started first grade, and the summer after his brother turned fourteen and before he started high school - incidentally, only a little older than Eddy himself was now. As everybody knows, kids of that age are quite mischievous and the trouble they had gotten into as kids gives way to much more 'mature' dilemmas, and as you may imagine, Dear Reader, the boy at school who everybody knows to be independently making money hand-over-fist was probably going to be a popular catch with the girls, even if he was a member of a smaller species.

With an external door in his own bedroom, his parents - and for that matter, his brother - may have never even known he brought a girl home that night if she hadn't sprayed. She was a skunk, specifically one who came from a very religious family who didn't believe in getting their scent glands removed lest they mar the beauty of God's creation. Without delving too deeply into the details of two adolescents experimenting with that most adult of adult situations, it was apparently her first time too, and in all the excitement, something in her reflexes just decided to let it loose. It didn't take long for the scent to seep its way upstairs to where his parents and baby brother were sleeping. The room was rendered uninhabitable for a month and most of his furniture needed to be destroyed by fire; it's entirely possible that the elder brother had this incident in mind when he decided to piss off his under-the-table employer many years later.

When the parents decided the room could be used again, Eddy's brother was all ready to move his stuff back in from the living room, but Terry and Toni told him not so fast. Just to keep their first son a little more under their thumb, they were going to give Eddy the nice room and make his brother take over the smaller room next to the parents' room. Eddy's brother was already pissed that he'd been forced to foot the bill for all the replacement furniture (he'd had plenty of money for it, but he didn't want to spend it), so this just further agitated him. But then he realized that with the room swap, his parents were planning on doffing a lot of the babyish decorations in Eddy's room and making the six-year-old's new space more of a 'big-boy room', and that gave the elder brother an idea.

In the days leading up to the room change, Eddy's brother beckoned him. He asked him what kind of room he wanted. Any decorations, any thematic styles, you name it, he'd pay for it. He had the money. Well, the little kit had recently seen a lava lamp on TV and thought it was the coolest thing ever, but didn't have much of a preference beyond that. So his brother took him up to the attic to where he was keeping his stash of vintage gentlemen's magazines and flipped through until he found a non-pornographic image that prominently showed a bedroom from the mid-1970s. It featured a circular bed, a round fireplace stand, wood panelling and wooden furniture, a record player on the dresser, and a shag throw rug. And on the table next to the bed was a lava lamp. Eddy was in love.

And their parents were pissed. Their son had just taken the bat out of their hands, exactly as he had planned. And while they tried to tell him no, he asked them why not?, and they simply didn't have a good answer. Their son had enough money from his entrepreneurial endeavors to pay for all of it in cash - hell, he had the money for it and he had the connections to get them all even cheaper than the MSRP. A full-sized circular mattress for his baby brother costs a thousand dollars? Pshaw, he knew a guy who could hook him up with a brand new one for eight hundred just as a thank-you-for-being-a-friend. And he could get all of this and still have money left over to decorate his own new room with random shit like a harp and a replica of a pre-evolutionary camel and a reconstructed El Camino and a piece of modern art featuring two prosthetic arms and a toilet seat all to match what would be his aimlessly edgy teenage phase.

But not only had Eddy's brother stolen the power from their parents, he had also stolen Eddy's admiration from them. Think of it this way: you're a six-year-old boy. You love your parents well enough, but still, you're a kid, and they're a bit stuffy for your tastes; they'll buy you just enough toys so Child Protective Services won't think you live in an impoverished or abusive household but when it comes to Christmastime, all they ever buy you is clothes, and when you moan about how all the other kids are getting action figures and Hot Wheels sets and whatever the heck the girls get for Christmas which you don't know what they get but you know for sure it isn't clothes, they remind you that they both grew up in huge working-class families where getting necessities like clothes as a gift was the greatest sign of love, and they demand in no uncertain terms that you be similarly grateful as they were to their own parents. Then along comes your brother, eight-and-a-half years your senior, who suddenly discovers his own talent at effortlessly making money by acquiring this and that and repurposing them into things worth more than the sum of their parts, and now he's buying you whatever you want whenever you want; he'll buy you more and nicer toys than what Mom and Dad are buying you, he'll buy you trendier clothes than what Mom and Dad are buying you, he'll always get you that pretzel from Auntie Anne's or that ice cream from Baskin-Robbins and he'll tell you plainly that Mom and Dad aren't actually worried that you'll get fat from snacking because they know damn well that your species' metabolic rate runs higher than the temperature of the sun, and even when you're the direct benefactor of a mistake he made that results in him having to downgrade his quality of living, he'll still be gracious enough to personally finance a complete bedroom makeover for you. In that position, surely most people would start to prefer their brother over their parents, even if it was clear as day that he was only doing it to make your parents feel inadequate and wait…

...Holy shit, that's exactly what he'd been doing, wasn't it? Eddy was just now realizing it as he walked back into his room and gazed upon all its glories that were almost universally funded by his brother and his various schemes. Now that he thought about it all, thinking through the entire story linearly for the first time in years… it seemed so obvious. Actually, it was kind of like one of those things where he sort of always knew it in the back of his mind but never put the thoughts into words, and now that he had, those words formed a jarring sentence, one made all the more jarring because it had always been there but had only now become legible.

Because walking away from the phone pondering the thought of which characteristics Eddy wanted to inherit from his brother and which he wanted to leave behind, he would have said that he wanted to be the kind of guy who was crafty enough to become a self-made man well before manhood, but not the kind of guy who insists on calling his brother Pipsqueak to the point that it was recognized by a branch of the federal government; he wanted to be the kind of guy who was clever enough to make literally any idea that crossed his mind a viable business venture, but not the kind of guy who leaves his kid brother all alone unsupervised while he locks himself in his room and pleasures himself to moving drawings of bunny boobies; he wanted to be the kind of guy who everybody agreed was the coolest and most confident person they had ever met, but not the kind of guy who absentmindedly twisted a toddler's foot until his ankle almost broke because he was bored watching a hockey game, ultimately resulting in said toddler growing up to have recurring nightmares with clear and obvious themes of not being able to trust his brother's love, and then completely clamming up when called out on it by said younger brother ten years later, proving that his coolness and confidence were nothing more than a well-executed sham. Now he could add to that list of yeses and noes that he wanted to be the kind of person who could (and would) shower his hypothetical little brother with gifts that would make the kid smile in ways that his parents couldn't (or wouldn't) do, but not the kind of guy who does it out of spite to his parents rather than the kindness of his heart. Yeah, it was clear as day now. Offering to redo Eddy's room and all the other things he bought for him in the following years never had the goal of making Eddy feel happy for the sake of it, they were all power moves to make it completely transparent to their parents that they didn't have the authority to boss him around anymore. Eddy had remembered the Space Jam incident well enough, but although the bedroom crisis was much more subtle in its symbolism, it was now obvious that this had been a much stronger case for his brother telling their parents that he no longer needed their help. His brother was a rebellious teenager; he had no interest in Eddy's affection and admiration in and of itself, he was only interested in it inasmuch as he could use it as a big middle finger to the parents whom he had found to have exhausted their usefulness.

Shit, now Eddy completely understood why his parents decided to be dramatic and completely wallpaper over the door to his brother's room and lay bricks over the window. And maybe that mug sitting in Eddy's closet that read "#1 SON" wasn't as cutesy and tongue-in-cheek as he had originally thought.

Eddy stared at his beloved lava lamp and let himself zone out as he stared at the goo floating in its capsule. He let these thoughts wash over him.

...What difference did it make?

Yeah, what difference did it make if his brother had only done all those nice things for him for selfish reasons? He still did them. It was still a good thing that he did. And compare that to what that gigantic British fox was doing, Robin or Roger or Rodrigo or whatever his name was. What difference did it make if his entire lovable-rogue charity operation had its foundation in a massive ego trip? It was still a good thing he did.

And yes, if the limey bastard himself suddenly waltzed out of Eddy's bathroom and swore on a Bible duct-taped to a Torah superglued to a Quran that he wasn't doing the whole 'steal from the rich to give to the poor' thing out of a desire to be heralded as a great hero, Eddy would tell him to his face to eat a dick. Eddy could never believe such nonsense; nobody was that heroically selfless. Not in real life, at least. Maybe Superman or Adam Bell, but not some random guy from England. Robin was admittedly smart enough, charismatic enough, and infuriatingly tall-and-conventionally-attractive enough to look the part of an archetypal hero in fiction, but as far as Eddy was concerned, looking the part was as close as Robin was ever gonna get.

Eddy recalled the other day when he spoke to his brother for the first time in eleven months, and one of the questions Eddy had posed was whether doing a good thing for selfish reasons invalidated the morality of the action; his brother hadn't known what to say. Eddy knew that he used to only want power and money like his brother, but now he was thinking he only wanted power and admiration like Robin, and he was starting to think an elaborate Caponesque charity scheme was a good way to go about doing that.

Eddy had also asked his brother what drove him, what inspired him to be who he chose to be, and his brother honestly gave a really depressing answer that suggested he hadn't actually chosen to lead his own life but merely followed the road that was laid out before him, which just so happened to entail that he seemed to lead his own life but actually just fell in line and thrived in the slot he felt society expected him to occupy, which really wasn't that admirable at all. But you know what? Things could still change for his brother. Maybe he'd have a wake-up call and realize that his youthful dreams to be a model citizen were still attainable - hell, if he really got his act together, he could theoretically do something like what Robin was doing but cut out the middleman: rather than stealing from the rich to give to the poor for ego-masturbatory purposes, he could be the rich who gave his own wealth to the poor for ego-masturbatory purposes.

And so could Eddy himself if it turned out he really did have a natural talent for business that he just hadn't completely honed yet. And if he didn't, well then, so be it, he had another offer on the table. Really, he was grateful to have had that moment of clarity about what he really wanted in life, because now, no matter whether today's scam/scheme/plan succeeded or failed, he had options.

-IllI-

Nope. No more lying in bed. No more staring at the ceiling and wondering what the hell was wrong with the world. He wouldn't want her sitting around and feeling sorry for him, would he?

...Well, okay, actually he probably would. But y'know what? Getting him over his self-centeredness was one of the things they had been working on together. And now was the perfect opportunity to lead by example. Even if he couldn't see her basking in her resolve and independence, then she could be her own role model.

It was actually a really nice day outside. Kind of pushing the upper boundaries of comfortable warmth, but hey, it was June. The cul-de-sac seemed abandoned. Were all the other kids hanging out indoors in the air-conditioning? Perhaps that would have been wise of them. She figured she could go take a jaunt around the block to see if she could happen upon them somewhere else in the neighborhood; she could really use some mammalian interaction, and even if she couldn't find them, some fresh air might be good for her head.

She was making her way down the sidewalk toward Harris Street when she saw one of the Schȁfers' farmhands open the gate to the backyard farm and walk out toward his pickup truck. "¡Buenos días, muchacha!" he greeted as he stuck his key into his door.

"Oh, hola, Víctor," she said with a coy wave; the goat was friendly enough, so she could try to remember her middle-school Spanish to converse with him. "Uh… ¿está Rolf trabajando en el, uh… 'farm', contigo, ahorita?"

Víctor could speak English decently enough - it was the only way he could communicate with his germanophone-Swiss employers and his Canadian and Irish coworkers, after all - but he was much more comfortable speaking his native tongue until it was absolutely necessary to switch, so he really appreciated all the effort this bobcat girl was putting in. "Sí sí, Rolf está trabajando en la granja ahorita con Wilfrid y Beatrice y yo."

And she appreciated that he was using easy words and speaking slower than he could have so she could understand him better. "Ah, sí, sí, yo veo… um… ¿Sabe usted, uh, dónde están los, uh… los otros niños?"

"Por supuesto, ¡ellos vi en el parque!" he said as he grabbed a bottle of water out of his car.

"Ah, gracias, Víctor, um… por favor, uh… dice a Rolf y Wilfrid que yo, um… yo digo 'hola'."

"¡Claro que sí, les diré!" he said as he closed his truck's door.

"¡Gracias, Víctor, gracias!" she said waving as he walked off toward the park.

"De nada, señorita, ¡hasta luego!"

Well, Rolf being busy meant one less neighborhood kid would be there to make it feel less like a weird day, but at least she knew there were some people out and about in the neighborhood. So who else did that leave? If she understood Víctor correctly - and honestly, she might not have - he seemed to say there were indeed multiple kids in the park. She'd be fine seeing Sarah and Jimmy there; yeah, she'd prefer to confide in someone her own age, but those two were capable of having a pretty mature conversation when it interested them to do so. If Jonny was there, he might be annoying, but she knew he was good-hearted enough, so she could accept his company. And probably the same for the Eds; honestly, as long as "the other kids" didn't refer to just those three idiots alone, she could tolerate any permutation of the crowd. Not because she hated the Eds, her conversation with them the other day was perfectly amicable and she could get along with any of the three of them by themselves, but she was in no mood for what they represented as a group: a merry band of misfits who inadvertently filled the role of the neighborhood's villains, inspiring her boyfriend to take up the mantle of the protector of the cul-de-sac and ultimately making him the kind of person who's so used to being treated as a hero that he comes to forget that his actions - and his morality - were indeed fallible. She didn't think the Eds were directly responsible for setting off a domino effect which culminated in her current situation, but one could certainly connect the dots in such a way to draw that picture.

She turned the corner to see Jimmy and Sarah riding on the seesaw, the bear doing all of the legwork, while Jonny and Plank were on the top of the aluminum slide, sitting in a wheelchair small enough to fit on it like a Matchbox car on a plastic track. From her angle, she couldn't see the cast on Jimmy's foot and didn't make the connection.

"Uh… hey, Jonny," she greeted. "Where'd you get that wheelchair?" She didn't say it particularly loudly, but it was loud enough to be heard by everyone in her immediate line of vision.

The koala noticed the bobcat just as he had pushed off to ride down the slide. He turned and waved at her as he was on his way down. "Oh, hi, Na-!"

"WHEELCHAIR!?" interrupted a voice that was as youthful and feminine as it was growly and furious.

"Sarah! He stole my wheelchair!"

And Jonny would probably have made a run for it had he not faceplanted when the wheelchair got to the bottom of the slide which was a solid four inches off the ground.

A sound not unlike the crack of a baseball bat was heard, followed shortly thereafter by a holler going something like "Whoooa, ho ho ho!" The fox, the wolf, and the bear looked up from where they were standing in The Lane and saw a koala who seemed to be enjoying himself a little bit too much as he flew through the air over their heads, landing in what was probably Mrs. Dzikowski's backyard.

"One would think that with how many times Sarah's used Plank as an instrument to hit Jonny, Plank would have shattered by now," Double-D muttered to himself.

Eddy, however, was in no mental state to add to that with his own clever quip. "Hm… yeah, that's… that's a good one, Double-D. Mmhmm. So, uh..." He was about to debrief the plan one last time, but as he stared down at the shoebox full of their unholy technological abominations, the words just didn't come to him, so Double-D decided to clear the air.

"Eddy, are you alright?" he said as he put his paw on his friend's shoulder.

Eddy wasn't looking at him, instead staring toward the end of The Lane. "Yeah, yeah, I'm just… oh, son of a bitch! If today's the day that stupid Sarah broke Plank into a million tiny pieces and we can't make a sale because we're dealing with Jonny crying like a baby, I swear I'm gonna break something!"

Well, if Eddy wanted Double-D to stop being so concerned for him, that last comment was a good way to get his sympathy revoked. "Eddy," said Double-D, "I must remark that an inconvenient emotional state hasn't seemed to hinder the scam so far, seeing as Nazz is still distraught over what happened to Kevin."

"The plan, Sock-Head, the plan. Scams are for low-lives. We're legitimate businessmen now!"

"Eddy, perhaps you should know that the term 'legitimate businessman' is near-exclusively used as a euphemism for a member of the mafia-"

"And besides, Double-D, I'm well aware of Nazz's little emotional breakdown over Kevin McDouchebag. And I've got an idea for how to accommodate for it-" But a glance at Double-D caught a sight of Ed in his periphery. "Jeez, Ed, what's with you now?"

Ed looked extremely conflicted about something, almost like he was about to start crying without himself knowing if the tears were sad or happy. "I keep thinking, guys, if Sarah kills Plank and she goes to jail then she won't be able to hit me or throw things at me or tell Mom lies about me or break my toys or poke me with butter-knives she heated up on the stove or anything like that, but I don't want my baby sister to go to jail!"

Eddy and Double-D simply stared at him for a moment as they took that all in before Double-D again broke the silence. "Truly I will never understand the strange love-hate relationship that is having a sibling."

"Well don't ask me, I barely understand it either," Eddy grumbled as he started off toward the exit of the alleyway, but he was quickly stopped in his tracks once again.

"Eddy, I'm serious," Double-D reiterated. "Ever since you first pitched this sca-aaa-"

Eddy's eyes narrowed.

"...pitched this plan, I must say that I've been getting the strangest feeling that your heart isn't entirely in this one. This is not to say that the fundamental concept doesn't make a modicum of sense now that you've explained it, but that's just the thing: you've only now explained it after several days of meandering through the planning stages with a marked lack of enthusiasm. It's almost as if you don't believe in the product."

"Aw, don't worry, Double-D, this isn't the first time I've come up with something lukewarm after some writer's block," Eddy scoffed.

"But that's not my concern, Eddy! This is far from the least-viable sca-aaa-aaa-aaa-plan idea that you've ever had. What concerns me is that… oh, how should I put this? ...It seems almost like you're only going through with this because you expect yourself to do so. Not the scam itself - but the entire concept of scamming, Eddy."

"I don't follow."

"Eddy, please be frank with me: do you even truly still want to be a salesperson? Or are you simply going through the motions because it's all you've ever known?"

Eddy couldn't help but smirk. Oh, you think I want to give up on being a salesperson? As if I have some other option that would take me in completely the opposite direction? He was almost tempted to ask that aloud, but Double-D was a smart cookie and even the subtlest of hints could probably have made him go haywire if he realized what Eddy had in mind. Could I perhaps have the chance to go and be a modern-day folk hero and wind up getting the adoration I've always wanted without having to save up and buy it? But that was a little too smarmy for the new image Eddy was trying to portray.

"Don't worry, Double-D," Eddy insisted. "For real. I'm just trying to… y'know, start presenting myself as more calm and composed instead of, eh, skittish, maniacal, money-crazed. 'Cause y'know, Wolf-Boy, for better or worse, people think that being excited is somehow immature. And that simply will not do."

Double-D thought about that one. "Um… yes, I-I can see what you're saying, though I would argue that while excitability is often coded as juvenile, most would agree that there is a difference between being overly excited as would be a hyperactive child versus simply being passionate-"

"And you can be passionate about something without being a spaz about it, and that's the balance I'm trying to strike!" Just as he said that, a stray thought emerged from the back of his mind that he might have to avoid using the word spaz if he started hanging out with a British guy since he was like eighty-percent sure he'd heard somewhere that that was a moderately offensive term over there. Oh, and speaking of words, this might impress this sock-headed vocabulary snob: "So if I seem like I'm losing my fire, don't sweat it, Dubs; I'm just trying to bridge the… the dichotomy between an overly-excited scammer and a respectable businessman you'd want to do… uh… business with!"

Imagine Eddy's surprise when Double-D looked like he was about to start laughing.

"Tee hee… boy, Eddy, 'dichotomy'? Where'd you ever pick up that word?"

"Uh… listening to you talk, prob'ly. About English homework." Shit, this may have backfired.

"Good heavens… 'dichotomy'! And you almost used that word right!"

"Almost?" Splendid, so between his brother and his nerdy friend, this was now two people who actually thought that his attempts to add a new word to his vocabulary were not only not honorable but were actually laughable.

"Oh, Eddy," Double-D sighed with a condescending smile, "I could attempt to teach you the intricacies of using such a word right here right now, but I'm afraid we have business to conduct, do we not? Not to mention, I fear our discourse on diction may be a bore to our friend Ed here." He glanced at Ed and realized that he still looked emotionally uncomfortable. "Uh… Ed, are you still worried about Sarah?"

The bear was still staring into space. "And I also don't want Sarah to kill Plank because then we'll have to go to Plank's funeral and then I'll have to wear a tie!"

"Good Lord, Ed, your non-sequiturs are getting dark," the wolf muttered.

"Ahh!" came a shriek from the corner lot. "Kurwa mać!" Mrs. Dzikowski screamed, and shortly thereafter Jonny could be seen volleying over The Lane again, back to the playground. Perhaps it was the perfect segue, as with the boar ejecting the trespasser from her property, it reminded the boys of their product inspired by the warthog who thought he was invincible because he had the newest technology on the market - and as Eddy knew, this was also the same guy who had inadvertently footed the bill for their supplies and materials.

"Well… maybe they were bad guys!" Sarah suggested. "Maybe Kevin saw they had weapons and he was trying to protect you!"

"Maybe they were dangerous bandits he saw! Outlaws, even!" added Jimmy from down below in his wheelchair, which now had horrifically bent wheels and axles. "How romantic that would have been for him to protect his love from such dangerous criminals, but oh!, how tragic it is to think that he was struck down so shortly after that! No good deed goes unpunished in this cruel world!" Ever the drama queen, he said this complete with his head turned up and to the side, his eyes pursed shut, and his forearm to his forehead, that whole 'oh the humanity' gesture.

But Nazz simply shook her head slowly. "I'm, uh… I'm not so sure I can just assume that's what was going on." Today was the first day she'd had the will to tell the other kids about that night. She'd omitted the part where Kevin dropped an epithet that she really wouldn't have felt comfortable repeating to a couple of elementary-schoolers, and even if they did know what that word meant (aw, hell, it was the Twenty-First Century, they probably knew it well), she didn't want to mention that part lest it make Kevin seem too irredeemable, and possibly her as well by proxy; then again, she had just tried to elucidate to these kids how Kevin had severely violated her trust, not just in him but in everyone, even people she'd known for years… and yet these children still just assumed that the cul-de-sac's closest thing to a resident hero was carrying out actions driven by goodwill. Maybe Sarah and Jimmy weren't as mature for their age as Nazz needed them to be, despite their precocious vocabularies.

"Oh, but I trust that Kevin wouldn't have begun violence without good reason!" Jimmy pleaded, looking hopeful that he was right. "He doesn't even lay a hand upon Eddy and his friends unless they do something to deserve it first!"

Now, Jimmy wouldn't even turn nine for another month, so he least of all knew what he 'was' yet, but while the older kids in the neighborhood had all thought for years that he was obstensibly gay, case closed, time would tell that that wasn't a completely accurate assessment. It would still be a few more years before he could verbalize these feelings, but in those years of his youth, Jimmy admired Kevin in more ways than one, so to speak. His resolve to do something to stop those pesky Eds, his athletic feats and daring stunts, his generosity for giving out free jawbreakers that his dad brought home from the factory, his sheer off-the-charts swagger and self-confidence; an adolescent Jimmy would say plainly that it very much had a double meaning when a younger version of himself called Kevin his personal hero. The qualities in Kevin that made young Jimmy have a crush on him were the same qualities Jimmy wished he himself had so Sarah would reciprocate his crush on her.

Jimmy continued, "He may be rough around the edges, but sometimes to be good means that you aren't always nice, you know that! Like being mean to a bad person who deserves it!" Lacking any other suitable role models in his life, he desperately needed that statement to be true. "Bad people like… well, the Eds!"

That's about the time Sarah noticed her brother's looming presence approaching behind Nazz along with his two cohorts. "Oh, speak of the devils," she moaned.

But there was nothing outwardly devilish about the trio today. Ed looked like his hyperactivity was being suppressed by something, Double-D looked like he had a steadfast if tenuous grasp on his neuroticism, and Eddy looked like he wasn't a complete maniac for once in his life. They seemed perfectly mellow, if not bordering on boring. But one had to wonder what was in that Sketchers box Eddy was holding.

"Uh, hi, guys," the fox squeaked, lacking his usual bravado.

"Um, uh… hello, Baby Sister and Friends," the bear boomed, lacking his usual enthusiasm.

"He-hello, Nazz, Sarah, Jimmy," the wolf mumbled, lacking his usual air of over-education.

"Oh… hi, guys," Nazz greeted with a small wave. "How's it goin'?"

Jimmy and Sarah simply glared.

"Oh, it's, uh… goin' alright, I guess…" Eddy offered.

They looked upon the scene to try to read the room. Sarah was preemptively angry at them; okay, this much was not unusual. Today Jimmy was in a wheelchair; they didn't know why and honestly didn't care, but maybe they should go easy on him today. And as for Nazz? She seemed to be holding up quite well, actually, considering. Perhaps this wouldn't be quite as inappropriate as Double-D had worried it would be.

"What's in the box, Eddy?" Sarah asked, her annoyed skepticism readily apparent.

"What, this? Oh, uh, let's-let's just ignore this for a second…" Eddy sputtered as he put the shoebox on the ground.

"We'd like first and foremost to check in on you especially, Nazz, to make sure you're doing well," said Double-D. "Though we do recall your wishes to be treated as an individual, we're still aware that you may be having a personal struggle with-"

"WHAT'S IN THE BOX, EDDY!?"

Everybody was caught off-guard when Jonny and Plank ran into the picture and dove for the box. It took a few seconds for the guys to realize what was happening and by the time the gears started turning in their heads, the koala had already tossed the lid away and had already grabbed a specimen for himself.

"Ooh, what're these!?" Jonny asked nobody in particular. "Let's go find out, Plank!" And off he ran with the product he hadn't paid for.

"Jonny!" Double-D pleaded, "You need to pay for that-!"

"Godammit, Jonny, get back here!" Eddy hollered, but Jonny paid him no heed. "Jesus fucking- Ed, go get him, will ya!?"

"JONNY!" Ed bellowed as he took off after him. "YOU ARE A THIEF, AND NOT THE GOOD KIND, EITHER!"

Hearing that comment, Double-D looked more nervous than usual while Eddy seemed to be amused. The girls and Jimmy wondered if they had understood some reference Ed had made that they didn't get.

"So what's in the box, then?" Jimmy asked, looking as unamused as Sarah.

"Uh… y'know what? Sure!" Eddy said as he picked up what was left of the box, trying to neither seem too off-puttingly nervous nor too suspiciously confident. "So we came up with a new product idea-"

"You came up with another idea to scam us out of our money?" Sarah asked, arms crossed and eyes half-closed.

"What!? Oh- no no no no no!" Eddy insisted with a playful bashfulness. "We don't do scams anymore. "We decided… we're not kids anymore. Slinging crappy products our consumers can't enjoy wouldn't be a good long-term strategy, y'know? C'mon, Double-D back me up here."

Double-D was planning on keeping his mouth shut before he felt the fox elbow him in the hip."Um- yes! We've decided that in our venture to become adept and sophisticated businessmen, we must adopt a more mature business model, and we now strive to only provide products and services that we would have no qualms about selling to our own mothers and fathers! Isn't that right, Eddy?"

"Yeah, we grew up and we decided that if we don't want you thinking we're a bunch of snakes, well, we should do what we can to earn your respect. Sound fair?"

"Hmph!" Jimmy huffed with his nose in the air, and not just because he had to look up from his low vantage point. "You're mad if you think you'll ever earn our respect after all you've put us through over the years!"

"Well hey, if we were still money-hungry rats, we've been outta school for almost a week now, we woulda done it by now!" Eddy couldn't help but snap, he wasn't expecting this much pushback already.

And Double-D was kind of taken aback by it as well. "I must say, we weren't greeted with such a cold reception the last few times we attempted to engage in commerce, before we publicly committed to-!"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," said Sarah, "you want us to think that you're magically good people when you're here to sell things to a grieving woman!"

Now Double-D was losing his patience. "In our defense, Nazz has specifically asked us not to dwell on what she'd witnessed that night so as to-!"

"Why the heck would she do that!?" the bear screamed. "Why would she want to forget the man who sacrificed himself to protect her-!?"

"Sarah! Sarah… calm down!" the bobcat pleaded. "Double-D's right. He's… he's right. I saw them a few days ago and I told them, hey… you don't just have to see me as Kevin's grieving girlfriend. I'm still my own person and I'm still living my own life while I wait and see what happens to him now. I don't want to be treated like some damsel who's lost without her man to save her, especially since…" - and she said this half-glancing at Edd and Eddy, knowing they'd probably get too much pleasure out of hearing this but deciding she'd allow it - "...I'm still not sure if he went out trying to protect me so much as his own masculine ego."

And indeed, the fox and the wolf were very, shall we say, intrigued to hear that Nazz's opinion of her boyfriend may have deflated.

"And as for Eddy," Nazz continued, "if he wants to prove that he wants to try running an ethical business, well, we should give him a chance to prove it."

"Nazz, how on earth could you believe he has good intentions after all the shenanigans they've put us through!?" Jimmy asked with a shockingly disapproving tone he rarely used with Nazz.

"Everyone deserves a second chance, Jimmy."

"They've already had a second chance!" Sarah growled. "And third and fourth and fifth chances, and gazillionth chances, too!"

"Fine," Nazz said flatly. "Then I'll give them another one. And maybe they'll mess it up and I'll be pissed at them, but then maybe a few months later they'll want another chance, and-" She shut her eyes in frustration as she searched for the words. "...Yeah, sure, at a certain point you stop giving people more chances. But as much as we all like to think we're all mature for our ages, we're still- jeez, we're not even in high school yet! We're kids! We're supposed to use this part of our lives to figure out who we are, and… and maybe it's gonna take these guys fifty tries to get it right, but if this is the one, then I'd rather be there to help them try to be good people if they decide that's who they want to be, even if there's a chance that they're just gonna fool me again, instead of being the people who told them to go jump off a cliff when they needed support!"

She was pissed. Jimmy and Sarah were scared. And Eddy and Double-D were simply enthralled as they watched the scene unfold.

And little did anybody know that Nazz was trying to convince herself of all this more than anybody else, because she was going to have to have the patience of a saint if she was going to help Kevin become the person she'd hoped he already was.

"Big kids know that yeah, a lot of people don't change, but most people can," she concluded, shooting daggers at Sarah and Jimmy. "Maybe you two will understand when you're older."

The young ones looked thoroughly embarrassed.

Nazz turned back to the stunned salesmen. "So, uh… whatcha guys got?"

"Uh…" it took Eddy a second to get the gears turning again after seeing that. He reached into the box. "So what we came up with was-"

And that's when Ed showed back up, holding the contraption in one hand and dangling Jonny (himself holding Plank) by his feet with his other. Jonny had a shit-eating grin on his face, clearly harboring no remorse for his antics.

"One Jonny with a side of Plank, order up!" Ed declared as he dropped Jonny on his head.

"Oof!"

"Ed, be careful, you could break someone's neck that way!" Double-D warned.

Good, Eddy caught himself thinking, before correcting it to Actually, no, wait, that would be bad - one less pigeon. And Eddy was already annoyed that Rolf was out of the equation since he couldn't get out of work. But four people was enough of an audience for a sales pitch. "Ed, if you don't mind?" he asked as he looked up at the towering bear, gesturing toward the device in his hand.

"Okay, Eddy!" Ed agreed gleefully, dropping the object square on the fox's head.

"I still don't know what it's supposed to be," Sarah grumbled, but when Nazz gave her a chiding look, Sarah seemed to regret her remark.

"It's a whatchamacallit!" Ed boasted. "...Um, Eddy, what do you call it?"

"Thanks for asking, Ed," Eddy sneered as he rubbed his sore head, then turned to address the majority of the crowd as he held up his ware. "It's called a camera-phone-"

"That's not a camera-phone, you deceitful huckster!" Jimmy scolded. "That's simply a walkie-talkie stuck to a polaroid camera!"

"Okay, seriously!" Nazz turned around to scold him. "That's enough out of you! I'm seriously disappointed in both of you. You don't have to immediately forgive him for his past, but you both have to learn that part of being an adult is learning how to act civilly with people you don't like, especially when they haven't done anything to you recently." As a babysitter, she never enjoyed chastising younger children, but clearly treating them like big kids was making them a little too confident in their misbehavior. "I'm sorry, Eddy; you were saying?"

"Th-uh-thanks, Nazz. But, uh… Jimmy's not totally wrong." But damn straight he was wrong about calling me… 'deceitful'? What's that word mean, 'a dirty goddamn liar'? Oh, yeah, that's rich coming from the kid who set up an enormous frame-job to make it look like we fucked up your stupid Friendship Day shindig. Fucking hypocrite… "It's not the same as the camera-phones you'd see if ya waltzed into Cingular Wireless and said 'hey, hook me up with a camera-phone.' But you know what… who here can actually afford the real thing?"

That seemed to get the other kids' attention.

"Maybe it's not the same as the real thing, maybe it's not even close to the real thing," the sly little fox continued. "But you know what? We got creative and made our own version that nobody else can take away from us. Hell, in some ways, these things are better! Ya don't have to wait till after 7 for free minutes - all the minutes are free minutes! And you can have as many people on a line as you want! And you can be together in spirit while you're off on your own, and if you see something nifty that you wanna show someone else, tell them as soon as you see it and snap a picture you can show them when you meet up again. Maybe you can't send it instantly, but hey, no data charges!"

"Then what are you charging us for?" Jonny piped in.

Eddy put on another fake-bashful smile. "Yeah, we'll admit, we gotta make our money back somehow. So how 'bout this: we keep our hands on the chargers. Just like taking a car to the gas station. If the box ain't lying to us, a full charge should last about four-to-six hours. So we propose to you: one camera-phone, one dollar. And for a recharge? Heh, heh… a measly twenty-five cents."

The kids looked intrigued, but not necessarily compelled and definitely not excited. Time to pull out the ace up his sleeve.

"And to get the ball rolling…" Eddy led on as he looked at the bobcat specifically, "Nazz, we'd like to offer you our first one for free."

"Uh… m-me?" she stuttered. As shocked as she was, Sarah and Jimmy were clearly offended that they weren't getting free stuff. "Wh-why me?" she asked.

"Well, the boys and I've been talking, and… we just think you've done a lot to deserve it, y'know?"

"Indeed!" Double-D added. "In our discussions about how we wish to redirect our course as it were with regards to the ethics of our business practices, we reflected on the state of the cul-de-sac and arrived at the conclusion that you, Nazz, are far and away the moral center of this subdivision's youth! Time and time again you've handled crises in our community with grace, tact, leadership, and maturity that the rest of us ought to try to emulate!"

"And you're nice to us when nobody else wants to be nice to us!" Ed delivered his rehearsed line.

"Basically, you're the closest thing this street has to a role model," Eddy said with a smile. And hell yes that means I'm saying your stupid boyfriend ain't a role model! "And if we're being honest, that might even include the adults. So… whaddaya say?" he asked as he lifted his invention as an offering to her.

"Uh… sure, I'll try it?" she said unconvincingly as she took it from him. "Are… are you sure you don't even want a quarter for it?"

"No, ma'am!" the fox affirmed. "Completely on the house. Take it and keep it with you knowing that even when you're alone… if you see something worth seeing… you can snap a picture and let everyone on the frequency know that you've got a picture to show them when you see them next!" Hook, line, and…

"Oh, if only you had had something like that when you were with Kevin in the woods!" Jimmy lamented, dramatically as ever. "You could have documented the incident yourself instead of relying on those corrupt officers to turn in their own!"

...sinker. Eddy bit his tongue to keep from grinning too obviously. Thanks for saying exactly what I had in mind without making me say it myself, Cottontail. Now I don't look like the bad guy who brought it up!

Nazz, for her part, seemed just a wee bit shaken by that connection.

And Jimmy could tell. "Oh, dearest me, I'm sorry, Nazz!" he wheelchair-bound bunny pleaded. "I didn't mean to-!"

"No, no, it's fine," Nazz insisted. "You're fine, I… I can handle it… and you're right. I… I got lucky, lucky that those city cops didn't like the county cops and were… ready to turn them in, I guess. So…" she trailed off as she looked wistfully at the contraption. "...maybe this would be good to have for the next time I see something that just… boils my blood…"

"Glad we could help," Eddy said with a sturdy nod.

"Thanks, guys," she said, still sounding hesitant. "But uh… h-how do you use this thing?"

"You see something cool and then press the snappy button!" Ed exclaimed. "And then there's a big FLASH and your subject is STUNNED, suspended in animation, for the light capturer-ers to burn into the filmy thingie-!"

"Thanks, Ed, but, eeeuh… I meant the walkie-talkie part."

"Oh, uh… if I may," Double-D offered as he stepped in and started fiddling with it. "So first we just need to twist this knob to turn it on-" BEEP! "-set it to your preferred volume by further turning the knob and select your frequency with the arrow buttons, and simply press the large button in the center and talk-!"

"But you'll need somebody to talk to, now won'tcha!" Eddy cut in. "But if nobody else wants to buy a camera-phone, then that's alright, that's within their rights, the boys and I'll keep ya company-"

"Oh, no you don't!" Sarah growled as she begrudgingly fished in her pocket for a dollar. "I'm not leaving her alone with you creeps! Gimme one of those!" She grabbed one out of the box without waiting to actually be handed one. "Nazz, if these nimrods try to hit on you or something with Kevin not around, you take a picture of them in the act and call me immediately! I'll kick their butts myself!"

"Well I appreciate you having my back, Sarah," said Nazz, "but I don't think they'd do anything too bad to me, and even if they did, I know I can handle-"

"Sarah, grab me one, too!" Jimmy said as he waved a Washington above his head. "Even if these cretins don't mean you harm, someone else might in this tragic plane of existence, and we don't wish to leave you without a lifeline the next time someone attempts to be malicious toward you!"

Eddy tried desperately not to laugh at the thought. Heh, yeah, Big Mighty Jimmy rolling in on his wheelchair to save the day. With his trusty sidekick, Anger Management Problems Girl! I'm shaking in my boots!

Ed and Edd, however, were too offended to find humor in Sarah and Jimmy's vow of protection.

"Why, I must say that I resent being viewed as an omnipresent threat to Nazz's wellbeing!"

"Ed would never hurt Nice Miss Nazz!"

"Guys, guys, guys!" came a harsh whisper, and the bear and the wolf looked down and saw their fox friend standing in the space between them, his hands as far up their backs as he could reach. "Let them think that way about us. Play along!"

"Hey, Plank and I want one, too!" Jonny declared as he held up a pair of singles.

And just like that, they were off to the races. And as the kids ran off to go play with their new toys, Eddy didn't stop himself from smirking.

-IllI-

The pig had forgotten to put on sunscreen that morning and now he was regretting it. Forgetting his Habs hat wasn't helping, either. He had been running late for work that morning and both just sort of slipped his mind. And as he pored over the soil with the goat making sure that the beets and cucumbers and radishes and such were coming along as scheduled, he couldn't help but think that he never expected it would be this hot in the Mid-Atlantic. Yeah, he'd heard somewhere that Delaware was classified as "the South" by the U.S. government for census purposes, but who actually thought of it as… well, Southern? Jeez, if it was this hot here, how bad would it have been if he'd looked for work in the Carolinas? Or Texas? Or heaven forbid, Florida? He'd been working for the Schäfers for a few years now but he still hadn't acclimated to the American summers; it just didn't get this hot for this long back in Prince Edward Island. Honestly, if a sudden rainstorm materialized out of nowhere and dumped on them, he could have welcomed it as refreshing.

For what it was worth, the Irish washerwoman wasn't having too much fun in the sun either as the cow from the cold, rainy Emerald Isle kept going back in and out of the house to make sure everything inside and outside was spotless. She had similar reasons to the pig for being there; they both grew up in rural areas and wanted to live more metropolitan lives, only to find out that the only jobs they were qualified for with their backgrounds were agricultural work. But whereas the pig just wanted to get out of Canada because he didn't like how liberal it was becoming, the cow had specific goals; Beatrice was hoping to use this as a springboard to eventually make her way to Hollywood, and while Nottingham certainly wasn't the place she wanted to spend the rest of her life, she figured she could use the opportunity to build her resume in medium-big-city theatre and practice her American accent.

The goat had no qualms about the weather, and considering the climate of his homeland, that made plenty of sense. He had very straightforward reasons for being there: he had a family to provide for, and that was a lot easier to do in Delaware than in Durango. Therefore he had no issues with the work, no issues with the weather, and although he sometimes had issues with Wilfrid, he could shrug it off most of the time.

And you'd better believe that the Schäfers' son wasn't going to be complaining. He was finishing up working on the tractor, the yellow-beige coat on his arms shimmering in the sun and sweat beating from his brow under his blue-black mane of hair. Much like Víctor, Rolf was just happy that his family was stateside after what went down back in the Old Country. This backyard homestead was a sliver of what his family had back in the valley between the alpine mountains, but considering their fortune and misfortune, it could have turned out much worse for them. Yes, they may have had to leave their homeland, but they were lucky enough to relocate to the Fertile Crescent where they could grow anything they could grow back in Europe and more, albeit on a much smaller footprint; one could argue for days about whether or not their luck had balanced out.

That's why Wilfrid was willing to risk heatstroke to show up to work on time. The horses had an extremely profitable and valuable farm back in Switzerland before some vaguely tragic event forced them to sell and downsize across the ocean, but when they sold, they made bank, which was especially a good thing because that same mysterious event left the father crippled and the grandfather passed on the trip to America, so they could use that money to hire three complete strangers to work the farm under their son's leadership. And while Wilfrid wasn't exactly doing backflips at the prospect of taking directions from a teenager who barely spoke English, he was making a hell of a lot more money than he ever would have back on the Million-Acre Farm. The Schäfers didn't need to be paying anybody as much as they were paying him to help maintain what was basically an enterprising backyard garden, let alone paying three people that much, but they had the money and they were willing to do it, contingent on the pig, the goat, and the cow being good employees, and that meant showing up on time. He didn't want to ruin a good thing he had going on, even if it meant working with people he didn't totally care for.

"Victor," Wilfrid grunted, not even attempting to pronounce his name the Spanish way.

"Mmhmm," Víctor faintly mumbled.

"Victor," the pig grunted again, "you see this?"

Víctor was looking at his own sproutling, but he glanced up just long enough to say, "What is it?"

"These cucumbers not growing anymore or what?" he asked as he gestured to his subject.

"Mmhmm," Víctor murmured again and looked back at his own cucumber plants which seemed to have a similar problem.

But Wilfrid was expecting a more eloquent answer. "¡Oye, pandejo!" he barked, "¿Está the fuckin' cucumbers muerto, or what?"

Víctor stopped examining his plant and stood to face the pig. "Yes," he said flatly. "Yes, they are not growing. Están muertos, you would say."

"Thank you!" Wilfrid replied in exasperation. "Jesus, when I'm talking to you, answer in a complete sentence! I know you barely speak English, but you ain't gonna get better unless you try, now are ya? ¡Puta madre!" he swore as he turned back to his plants.

Víctor had never been amused by the scant Spanish the Canadian knew and he certainly wasn't amused now. But he refused to let the bigotted pig bother him, so he went back to inspecting the rest of the cucumbers which had looked like pickles for quite a while now.

Beatrice, however, wasn't quite so at-peace with the exchange she'd overheard. "Wilfrid, don't talk to poor Victor that way!" she scolded from the side of the house where she was washing the windows. "He's simply trying to do his job well! How would you like it if he spoke that way to you?"

"I would never've done something to deserve being spoken to like that!"

"Oh, and he did, then?"

"Yeah, he ignored me when I talked to him!"

"No, he didn't! He answered you clear enough, but you weren't happy with it because he can't speak English as well as you!"

And for those curious, Víctor was dutifully ignoring this spat in favor of trying to figure out what happened to all the cucumbers.

"And I was encouraging him to get better at it!"

"You weren't encouraging him, you were rebuking him!"

"...'rebuking'?"

"Yes, rebuking! Do you even speak English!?"

"Clearly I do, you- no. No, no, I'm not gonna say it. I've got a job to keep," the pig said as he pretended to return to inspecting the cucumber plants.

Elsewhere, someone was getting bored waiting for them to notice him.

"Say it!"

"Naw, I'm not gonna."

"Say it!"

"No, good people don't say that. And I'm a good person!"

"Aw, you may think you are, but you don't get to be the judge of that, you filthy pig!"

Jeez, even Víctor stopped and looked at her after that one.

"Whoa whoa whoa, who's being racist now!?" said Wilfrid.

"Ah! So you admit you were being racist earlier!"

"I'm not the one who just called my people filthy!"

"Well, you're a pig and your mouth is filthy, isn't ya!?"

"You don't go around calling pigs filthy! Do you know why my ancestors rolled around in the mud!? Because we didn't have hair to protect us from the sun like boars did and the only way we wouldn't die of heatstroke was covering ourselves in mud! Why do you think I need to always wear a hat?"

"A hat you forgot today?"

"Yeah, don't remind me!"

"A hat for an ice hockey team that plays in a city whose language you can't even speak?"

The two of them glared at one another for a moment before Wilfrid opened his mouth: "Quit acting like you understand how the culture of my country works, you fat heff-!"

Bffffft. SQUEEEEE.

All three of the farmhands shot glances at the chicken coop.

"What… was that?" asked Beatrice.

"Uh… first it sounded like static, then it sounded like, uh… I don't know," said Wilfrid.

And Víctor was so spooked by the noise that he briefly lost the ability to add a comment in English.

Click, cl-click. "What is all this bickering!?" Rolf demanded as he walked out of the house, back from his bathroom break. "It is disturbing Rolf's Nana's early-afternoon turnip milking! What issue disturbs Rolf's days work!?"

"Beatrice called me a filthy pig," said Wilfrid.

"And Wilfrid's being a racist dickhead," said Beatrice.

"And the cucumbers are not growing no more," added Víctor.

"And the coop's haunted," said Wilfrid again.

"Haunted!?" Rolf implored incredulously. "Nonsense! You must be mistaken for the sounds of the chickens engaging in the act of-!"

"No, no, Rolf, this sounded like static," said Beatrice.

"Yeah, like from a radio or a TV or something," said Wilfrid. "And then a really high-pitched squeal."

"Is true," added Víctor. "The chickens are not making the lovey-dovey."

"Hrmmm…" Rolf pondered as he walked carefully over to the coop. He stood before it for a moment, not moving, giving the farmhands a chance to position themselves where they could see, but weren't too close in case something jumped out at them.

And when Rolf swung the door open, the four of them were blinded by a flash of light with the sound of a snap, and as they all shielded their eyes, something tried to jump out at them, but instead it collapsed onto the ground at the horse's feet. Him and the two-by-four he was holding, which had a strange walkie-talkie/Polaroid camera contraption rubber-banded to it..

"Boy, is it hot in that coop!" the koala groaned. "Plank and I were starting to worry you guys would never find us! You guys just kept talking and talking and talking!"

"Jonny the Wood-Boy!" Rolf barked as he picked him up by his foot; the koala kept one hand on his inanimate friend and the other on another one of those strange contraptions.

"Hiya, Rolf!"

"What were you doing molesting Rolf's chickens in Rolf's chicken coop!? Rolf expects this from the dim-witted, chicken-loving Ed-boy!"

"Uh, Rolf, uh, n-nobody uses the word 'molested' like that anymore," Wilfrid muttered.

"Oh, so now you're our authority on the English language?" Beatrice spat.

"Silence!" Rolf ordered. "Explain yourself, marsupial menace!"

"Aw, I just wanted to surprise you and take a picture of the look on your face!" said Jonny. "And I did!" He waved a freshly-printed photograph held between his toes on his free foot; moments like these were why he always wore sandals.

"Give Rolf that square of-!" Rolf began, but Jonny paid him no heed.

"Hey, everybody!" Jonny beamed into the walkie-talkie, "I just got a really funny picture of Rolf-!"

SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

"Aaargh!" all four of the farmworkers screamed as they held their ears, while the freshly-liberated Jonny fell and landed square on his head for the second time that day. Whether Jonny didn't know that talking into his walkie-talkie in such close proximity to Plank's would cause copious amounts of feedback or if he was simply playing dumb remains a mystery to this day. In any case, he had incapacitated his captors.

"Oi, you bloody eejit!"

"¡Ay, mierda!"

"God-fucking-dammit!"

"Rolf's ears are deafened with the sounds of a thousand screaming demons!"

Snap.

"And now Rolf is blinded by the explosions of a thousand suns!"

"Hey, guys!" Jonny addressed the phone part of his camera-phone. "I got another picture of Rolf-!"

SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

"Will somebody do something about this fucking kid!?" Wilfrid hollered.

"Get out of here, Jonny!" Rolf yelled.

"But me and Plank wanna play in your yard first!" And off Jonny went to go run around the farm, completely aimless but for wherever his heart would take him.

"Get out of here, you pest!" Beatrice screamed. And with that, they all took off and tried to catch the slippery little koala.

Snap.

"Gah!"

SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

"¡Jesucristo!"

Snap.

"Bloody fucking hell!"

SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

"JONNY!"

Snap. SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

"Heuehe-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!"

Snap.

That particular snap came right as Víctor's foot was landing in a soft spot of soil, and the shock of the flash caused him to lose his footing and fall backward, right into Wilfrid.

"Gahhh!" the pig screamed as the goat's horns jabbed him in the gut.

And in another time and place, Beatrice might have laughed at Wilfrid's misfortune and called it karma for his attitude, but right now her ears were ringing so loud that she could have screamed at the top of her lungs and she probably still wouldn't have been able to hear herself.

-IllI-

"Ooh, we're so bad, Sarah!"

"Just tell me if you see anything good."

"We're a couple of regular peeping toms!"

"Just keep your voice down, will ya?"

She was mostly doing this for his benefit. Jimmy sat on Sarah's shoulders as he looked over the fence into her open window. They were playing it as smart as possible: Sarah's walkie-talkie was on the lowest possible volume and Jimmy's was completely extinguished to avoid feedback. All to offset the inherent risk of stealing a window show.

"Ooh, here she comes!"

"Get as low as possible, Jimmy!"

"I'm trying, Sarah, but I wanna see this!" He trained his camera to get ready to snap. "Ooh, baby, yeah! ...Oh, don't just go halfway! Show me more, show me more!"

Old Mrs. Dzikowski drew her curtains half-shut for just a moment so she could take a handheld mini-vacuum to them.

"Oh, the quality of the lace! Beautiful!"

"Just remember to take a picture so I can see, Jimmy!" Sarah growled.

"Okay, Sarah!"

The boar kept vacuuming the outside face of her curtains, but after the better part of a minute, she moved to the inside of the curtains, stretching them out to clean where the creases once were, shielding her face from the window.

"Oh, yeah, show them off for me!" Jimmy cheered. Snap.

Mrs. D. stopped suddenly and looked around, seemingly distrubed by something she didn't quite see clearly.

Jimmy ducked down as low as he could without falling off his friend. "Boy, that was a close one, Sarah!"

"Yeah, yeah, just let me see the picture!" She grabbed the square of film out of the printing slot, giving the picture a good shake before looking at it. "Jimmy, do you even know how to hold still? Look at how blurry this is!"

"Gosh, I'm sorry Sarah!"

"Just take another one, will ya? And hold steady this time!"

"Okay, Sarah, I'm sorry…" he murmured as he peeked over the fence again. Then he gasped at something. "Oh, my!"

"What is it?"

"She's vacuuming her doilies! Look at those intricate designs! I must immortalize them!" Snap.

This time Mrs. D. definitely saw something. Almost like a flash? It may have even come from outside. She put the doily back down on her table and pondered what that could have been.

The bunny and the bear looked at the picture, enthralled by the elaborate and elegant patterns on the paper lace. Now that they had something to share with the world, it was time to draw attention to it. He was going to turn his radio on, speak his piece, and then immediately turn it off, any replies to be fielded by Sarah's phone. Therefore he turned it on, twisting the knob liberally to a very high volume and not caring, since Sarah's radio hadn't gotten a transmission in a while, so what were the chances they'd get one now? And just before Jimmy had a chance to hit the button, they heard this blaring over his speaker:

"Hey, everybody! I just got this really funny picture of Rolf- SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-!"

"AH!" Jimmy and Sarah both shrieked as Jimmy panicked to turn the radio off.

"Do you think she heard that?" Sarah asked sheepishly.

"I don't know!" Jimmy said in a faint cry. He peeked over the fence again, just slightly enough to see into the old boar's window. "She's gone!"

"...Hey, Jimmy?"

"Yes, Sarah?"

"...Your ears were sticking up, weren't they?"

"...Oh, darnit."

That's when the two of them saw something materialize in their periphery to their left. One of the benefits of having a corner lot was that there was not much of a path of resistance if Mrs. Dzikowski wanted to just walk around the end of the fence to get to The Lane.

"Dupki!" she hollered as she charged at them.

"Aaahhh!" Sarah and Jimmy ran away, Jimmy still on Sarah's shoulders. Then they remembered what they had forgotten.

"Sarah, my wheelchair!"

"Skurwysyn!" Mrs. Dzikowski could be heard hollering, and shortly thereafter, Jimmy was knocked from Sarah's shoulders by a small wheelchair flying through the air.

-IllI-

If the entire point of the camera-phones was to let the kids keep in touch while going their own ways, then where else was she supposed to go but right back home? Sarah and Jimmy were probably off doing things more appealing to people their own age, Jonny was off doing Jonny-type stuff, and the Eds, bless their foolish hearts, weren't the most desirable company to keep. So she went home and tried to find things to do that would take her mind off of him. Again.

But as it turned out, the camera-phones' intended purpose worked all too well. She had originally decided to at least attempt to be a good student and maybe get a head-start on her summer reading assignments, which Kevin probably would have encouraged her to blow off altogether, but after twenty minutes of trudging through the late-Victorian English of The Picture of Dorian Gray, the camera-phone that she'd left in the corner of her room started going off.

It began with a single beep, almost like someone hit the button by accident. Then hardly a minute later, she heard the unmistakable sound of Jonny being weird again.

Chirp. "Hey, everybody! I just got this really funny picture of Rolf- SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE-!" Chirp.

And then a few minutes later, she heard his voice again:

Chirp. "Hey, guys! I got another picture of Rolf-! SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!" Chirp.

Then came a series of intermittent beeps and squeals with fragments of voices peeking through, Jonny's as well as Rolf's and those of his farmhands. Yes, it was annoying to listen to and not the most pleasant on the ears, but something about the sheer goofiness of the situation kept her attention.

After a time, the chorus of Jonny's chuckles was interrupted by Sarah: Chirp. "Jonny, you blockhead, stop making those noises happen! I know it's you!"

Chirp. "Why!" Jonny exclaimed. It wasn't inflected as a question; he had no intentions of stopping.

Chirp. "Because you're pissing us off!" Chirp.

Nazz almost grabbed her walkie to step in right there and tell Sarah to watch her language, but she kind of wanted to let this play out.

Chirp. "Plank says you're just being a- SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!" Chirp.

Chirp. "Why don't you say it to my face!?" Chirp.

Chirp. "Because you're a-! SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!" Chirp.

Chirp. "And we really don't need you bugging us right now! Jimmy just got hit in the head by his own wheelchair!" Chirp.

Okay, now the responsible big kid needed to step in. Nazz grabbed her walkie-talkie: "Hold on, what happened to Jimmy? Does he need to go to the doctor or anything?"

Chirp. "Oh, uh- h-hi, Nazz!," said Sarah, spooked to know she'd overheard everything. "He-he's okay, don't need an ambulance or anything, just, uh, we weren't doing anything wrong!" Chirp.

And she left it at that. She didn't need to get involved and ruin their youthful shenanigans. Sarah and Jimmy had probably suffered the wrath of Mrs. D., whose décor they admired. But she was sure it was just good clean American fun.

Jonny and Sarah kept having a spat over the frequency, and Nazz simply sat there, staring at the receiver, finding herself strangely envious of their youthful mischief. And somewhere in all that, a strange thought occurred to her: was she forcing herself to grow up too fast?

She'd already heard plenty of opinions from the adults in her life, and that sample size seemed split fifty-fifty between people who viewed childhood as a blessing or a curse. On the one hand, you don't have the liberty to do a bunch of things adults get to do, but at the same time you have all the liberty in the world to engage in reckless fun with a fraction of the repercussions, a privilege every adult wishes they had at least once in a while. Surely the correct answer was that while youth had its unique downsides, it absolutely still had its unique upsides as well, and hearing those kids act their age made her start to miss it already.

She had always tried to do what she needed to do to be perceived as mature for her age, and while that had its benefits, a little inkling inside of her kind of regretted that. Listening to the bitchy bruin and the hyperkinetic koala annoy each other to no end made the bobcat strangely jealous of how they seemed to harbor no concern for whether anybody else perceived them as annoying; she worried she may have been sacrificing that freedom a bit too early.

Did she really need to be trying so hard in school already? Closer to college, sure, but she hadn't even started high school yet; while she envied Double-D's grades, she didn't envy anything else about him, and someone like him definitely didn't know how to have fun. Did she need to be presenting herself as the most mature one around to the other kids? She believed she was and the other kids certainly seemed to listen to her when she had something to say, but maybe that's because nobody else was really competing for that spot? Heck, she could possibly even relate better to them if she allowed herself to seem on their level. And did she really need to be rushing into an adult relationship with Kevin-?

-Whoa, whoa, whoa, hold on there. Yeah, no, remembering Kevin and the fate that befell him made her reverse course on the spot. Being a kid had its perks, but it was only one stage of life and she was ready for the next one, especially if getting randomly beaten into a coma for the rest of your days was a possibility. She resolved that she wanted to live as much of life as possible while she still could, final answer. What was supposed to make you feel better about hearing that forty is the new thirty if you don't even make it to twenty?

Jeez, this was new. Cool, so on top of being instilled with a new sense of distrust after seeing her boyfriend's ugly side, she had just unpacked a fear of death that she must have acquired from watching said boyfriend get beaten half to death, because this sure as hell wasn't here a week ago. Awesome, so this was another thing to deal with. All the more reason to do all she could before she croaked, she guessed.

Eventually the bickering between Jonny and Sarah trailed off, and the frequency was silent for a moment. Agitating as they were, she kind of missed their presence, because now she was alone again. She found herself consciously thinking that she was waiting for someone to say something again, she didn't care who. A small part of her brain honest to God thought that if she kept staring and waiting long enough, she might even hear Kevin.

The next voice she heard was not Kevin's, but what was said did remind her of him: "Uh, he-hey, Nazz?"

-IllI-

The three of them were just sharing the one camera-phone; no need to cut into their own product. They wouldn't even have been carrying the one, but they wanted to keep in contact with the other kids, just in case something cool happened. And it sounded for a while like something interesting was indeed happening in the form of Jonny torturing Rolf and his international cadre of farmhands, but then Sarah got involved and they literally and figuratively tuned out. But no matter, they had plenty to entertain them as they walked back from The Candy Store, like ruminating on the mysteries of life.

"Double-D, how come the jawbreakers keep getting smaller and smaller?" Ed mused.

Slurp. "They melt in your mouth, Ed!" Double-D answered, enjoying his treat too much to give him a more intellectually-worded answer, lest any saliva dribble out.

"Nuh-uh, I meant every time we get jawbreakers the jawbreakers are smaller jawbreakers than the jawbreakers we got the last time we got jawbreakers!" Ed said with a huff. He annoyedly poked his finger on the wolf's snout a few times. "Ed is not stupid, Double-D!"

"Oh! Apologies, Ed!" Slurp. "I suppose it's simply our perspectives evolving." Slurp. "As young children, we often thought of jawbreakers as these great big things…" Slurp. "...but as we grow older, we begin to realize that they are not quite as mighty as we had once thought!" Slurp. Indeed, in years past, you could have polled the kids on Rethink Avenue and they would have pinkie-promised that the jawbreakers manufactured on Nottingham's West Side and sold at the simply-named Candy Store were bigger than their heads, but these days the kids understood that the standard variety of their favorite candy was only a bit larger than a golf ball - still sufficiently large, large enough to regularly stretch a medium-sized mammal's cheek out for a few days and large enough to have been banned in several countries for posing a choking hazard completely devoid of positive nutritional value, but not nearly as large as the mental image they had of the jawbreakers in their younger days. (Though it should be noted that The Nottingham Confectionary Company, NoCoCo, did manufacture "elephant-sized" jawbreakers which really were the size of a medium-sized preteen mammal's head if not larger, but these were purely a novelty item which in reality were too large even for adult elephants' mouths and were mostly only sold in souvenir shops in tourist traps.)

"Yeah, Ed," Eddy chimed in, his devilish demeanor having returned. Slurp. "The bigger ya get, the smaller everything else gets. Jawbreakers, too." And I swear to God if either one of you says I wouldn't know from experience, I'll bite yer fuckin' jugular out.

"Um… I suppose that's a much more succinct way of putting it, Eddy, yes!" Double-D replied. Slurp.

They approached the corner of Peachtree Parkway, which would turn into Sherwood Forest Road a few blocks down, and Grove Street, which would turn into Rethink Avenue a few blocks down. When it came time to actually turn and start heading northeast, Eddy came to a complete stop and seemed to be staring across Grove Street and at the forest in the middle distance. The other two didn't get it.

"Uh… are you alright, Eddy?" Double-D asked.

"Eddy's being a good little boy and he's not crossing the street before he looks both ways!" Ed interjected.

"But… we don't need to cross the street, Ed. We live this way."

Ed seemed to jump at something when he heard that one. "Hm, oh yeah!" he said with a low, grumbling chuckle as he started off toward their cul-de-sac.

"Ed, wait!" Edd pleaded. And Ed did, but he looked confused as to why he needed to. Double-D continued: "Eddy, if I may ask-"

"I'm thinking I oughta give my brother another call," Eddy said, oddly flatly. "Can't call him from the house phone, but the payphone's across the street."

"Oh, did you wish to discuss business with your mentor?" Double-D asked, a snide smirk growing on his snout. "Perhaps illustrate your greater success with your new strategy of honesty compared to your previous policy of deception - the dichotomy, perhaps?"

The wolf covered his chuckle but couldn't contain it; he felt so giddy to have made such a clever remark, even if it did rely upon using the word dichotomy in a way that wasn't quite proper. Then he opened his eyes and saw the fox glaring up at him.

"Oh- dear, Eddy, I apologize, I didn't mean to offend-"

"I'm just wondering why you're making fun of me for trying to expand my vocabulary after bugging me to do it all these years."

"Oh, well-" (and he couldn't help but chuckle again) "-perhaps if you hadn't mocked me incessantly for my intellect, I wouldn't find it so amusing that you're trying to take after me all of a sudden!"

Eddy was still glaring. "Well anyway, I'm gonna go give my brother a ring. Poor guy's more lonely and depressed in Oregon than I ever imagined."

Double-D was starting to regret his jesting. "Ah, well… that's quite kind of you, Eddy, to check up on him like that."

"Yeah, so I'll take the camera-phone with me so I can keep in touch with the neighborhood idiots, you guys head back and be available for them if they want a recharge already, alright?"

"Oh, certainly, Eddy!" And Double-D was so impressed by Eddy's sudden turnaround on that day alone that he didn't question Eddy's intentions for a second. "Come, Ed! Let's give Eddy an opportunity for fraternal bonding."

"Bye, Dichotomy!" the bear waved as he walked home with the wolf.

"Oh, shut the hell up, Monobrow," Eddy muttered under his breath, "I bet you can't even spell that word." He crossed the street and pushed some random buttons and listened to the dialing instructions repeat themselves until Ed and Double-D were out of sight, just in case they turned around to look; they didn't. As soon as they were gone, he hung up the phone and made his way down Peachtree Parkway until it gave way to Sherwood Forest Road and the squares of sidewalk cement ran out. One day soon he would call his brother back, that poor miserable schmuck, but today was not that day.