And The Winner Is...
By TheBucketWoman
Disclaimer: I own no rights to characters or other references mentioned here, alas.
Chapter Fourteen
Part One: Lizzie
Saturday Afternoon
Maybe she was bitter but lately, it seemed like every time there was something unpleasant to be done, Derek and Casey disappeared and it fell to Lizzie and Edwin to do it. This time had to do with chicken fingers. She asked Edwin why that was. It was a rhetorical question, but since Edwin didn't believe in such things, he reminded her about Casey's raw-meat-a-phobia.
"What's Derek's excuse?"
"Dunno," Edwin said. "All I care about right now is that I'm wrist-deep in goo and need to scratch my nose." He wriggled it, bunnylike, then finally used his sleeve. He'd been slicing the chicken breasts into strips and being really obsessive about cutting out the fat and any other gross thing he might bite into. It was a pet peeve he had.
Meanwhile, Lizzie was setting up the breading, under Edwin's increasingly bossy supervision. No plain old breadcrumbs for Edwin. He had to have grated cheese, fresh ground pepper and mashed potato mix.
Plus, it turned out that she didn't have good egg-beating technique.
"Put more wrist into it," Edwin said.
Lizzie wanted to comment on Edwin and why he had stronger wrists than she did but she decided against it.
"And could you put some hot sauce into the eggs?" Edwin said.
"What about Marti?" Lizzie said.
"It was her idea," Edwin said. "Not too much, though."
"Would you rather do this?"Lizzie said.
"Would you rather do this?" Edwin replied wiggling a bit of chicken goo before he tossed it into the trash can between them.
"Pretty please, Lizzie," Edwin began. "Would you be so kind as to put a little bit of hot sauce into the eggs?"
"That's better," she said.
"Also, would you mind terribly turning the water on so I don't get the faucet mucky?"he said.
She did and he washed his hands, scrubbing them like a surgeon.
"And people wonder why Casey almost turned vegetarian?" Edwin said. He took a quick break, handing her a fruit punch, chugging an orange soda and letting out an epic burp before asking if she was ready for phase two.
"Now," Edwin said, "Ready to get dirty?" Lizzie raised an eyebrow at him.
"You really want me to answer that?" she said. He laughed and proceeded to flour the chicken. She stalled, not in a particular hurry to get her hands into the salmonella. Then she became very interested in a piece of paper sticking out of Edwin's back pocket. Not one to let opportunity pass, she grabbed it while his hands were mucky and he was helpless to stop her.
"What the hell?" Edwin yelped.
"Student Short Film Contest?" she read. "Ages 13-18? Verrry interesting..."
"If you think I'm afraid of getting this glop all over you, you're crazy," Edwin said, putting his chicken strip down and moving toward her.
"But you'll blur the ink," Lizzie said, moving backward and ducking under his arm. "and you'll have to go back to wherever you got this to find out the URL to enter. Where did you get this anyway?"
"Wouldn't you like to know?" he said, moving toward her again.
"Yeah," she said, "Hence the question? Now spill!"
"Spill, you say?" Edwin said, picking up the bowl of eggs.
"You'll never live to see the end of puberty," Lizzie warned.
"That the best you got?" Edwin said. "Derek threatens me with that once a week."
"It must be one of the few things we agree on." Lizzie jammed the flyer into her own back pocket and grabbed the bowl of flour before he could even think to strike.
They spent a minute or so at an impasse, but Lizzie knew that Edwin would crack first; he always did. It was one of his most endearing qualities.
So he put the bowl back on the table and she followed. She helped him bread the chicken in silence for a few minutes until he finally looked up and noticed her pouting.
"What," he said.
"Nothing," she said. "Just that you still won't tell me what your movie's about, is all. You keep promising that I'm gonna be the first to know, but I'll drop dead before you even drop a hint—"
Edwin sighed. "Tell you tonight," he said.
"Now!" Lizzie said.
"Tonight," he said, picking up a handful of breadcrumbs as insurance.
Part Two: Casey
Everybody had tried to keep Derek's mind off his troubles this past week, but his enforced silence was really starting to get to him, Casey could tell.
First of all, Derek was getting increasingly angry with the remote control. The remote was usually a good friend to him, but over the past couple days, he'd been holding it in his fist so tightly that Casey pictured a tongue hanging from it and its buttons bulging like eyes begging her to make him stop. It wasn't the poor remote's fault that there was nothing on TV was it?
This morning, Derek informed Casey that there was nothing on the Internet either. So it was clearly time for drastic action—Casey took him to see Hostel: Part II.
"Don't say I never did anything for you,"she said covering her eyes, even though the previews hadn't ended yet.
He'd unfortunately been far too interested in the movie to make out, but after the movie was another story.
"Um, Derek," she said in the front seat of the car. "You're in danger of breaking your PDA rule." His mouth was attached pretty firmly to her collarbone. "Not that I mind or anything, but..."
Okay, she thought, so we're in the indoor parking lot, but still.
He put a finger over her lips, almost as a placeholder, it seemed. Then he kissed her.
When he came up for air, she said, "Okay, we can stop at the video store, 'cause I'm sure they have Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Sleepaway Camp or something."
He laughed; she felt his breath on her neck more than heard the laugh itself. What she wouldn't give for his regular laugh.
Just a couple more days to go, she reminded herself. If anyone had told her a year ago that a quiet Derek could ever be a bad thing, she never would've believed it.
His tongue flicked her earlobe and she jumped.
"De-rek!"she squealed. Two could play that game. She slid her hand under his t-shirt and ran it up his back, which never failed to bring out the goosebumps. She gave up and moved closer wiggling close enough for the gear shift to dig into her side as she put her other hand onto the back of his neck. She accidentally hit the parking brake and the car rolled a few inches before Derek clicked it back on.
Before her heart started beating properly again, he put his hand under her shirt and that was when she put a stop to things.
"Hellooo," she said. "Public?" She looked around at the darkened lot which was all but deserted on this level. She reached up and put the light on. He gestured at the desolation that surrounded them.
"All I need is for a guard to point a flashlight at us," Casey said. "Not my idea of class."
He gave an almighty long-suffering sigh, but he couldn't help but smile a little as he turned the key in the ignition.
"Are we renting videos?" she asked. The slowest possible grin spread across his face. It was the type of grin that would have made the Devil apprehensive. Then he nodded.
Part Three: George.
That was the best chicken ever. Edwin and Lizzie needed to cook more often. George had only set the task for them so that he and Nora could have a little alone time while Marti was on a playdate. He'd been prepared to order a pizza if he needed to, but things worked out well. There was widespread talking with mouths full because nobody's mouth seemed to stay empty long enough to finish a sentence.
Derek and Casey had brought cupcakes home with them, so everyone lingered at the table, for once in no particular hurry to get to the television.
This was when George noticed Marti toying with her cupcake.
"Not eating any cupcake, Cupcake?" he said. He figured that that would be gross enough to get a smile out of her, but it was no go.
She took a sullen bite. She really wasn't one to let good sweets go to waste.
"What's a matter, Miss Smarti?" Nora said.
"Nothing," Marti said.
This made Derek's ears perk up and he moved to stroke her hair, but stopped himself long enough to lick the frosting off his fingers. She moved out of the way.
"Ew," she said, in an unconscious Casey impression. He put some frosting on her nose, and that raised a quick smile from her, even as she tried to be disgusted. "You're nasty," she said wiping at it with the back of her hand. At no time did the idea of using a napkin seem to occur to her.
"So," Casey began, "You hung out with Dimi and Gus today, right?" Marti nodded. Gus was the son of one of George's co-workers, and when they'd set up the playdate, George had had one moment of terror in which he imagined having to apologize for Marti beating the kid up. But so far, it hadn't happened.
"Well?" Casey said. "How'd it go?"
"Kay," Marti said. His youngest was really getting to be a hard nut to crack. He hoped this was a phase.
"Just okay?" Lizzie said.
"Uh-huh," Marti said. "His mom made us do educational stuff, but then we watched Harry Potter."
"Hermione's hot," Edwin said. George wasn't sure that Edwin realized that he'd said that out loud. At least until both Lizzie and Casey took a turn at smacking him on the back of the head.
"Not funny, Derek," Casey said. Derek did his best to stifle the laugh.
"No violence at the table," Nora said automatically. Derek put his head down on the table, narrowly missing his frosting laden plate. The sight of the kid's shoulders shaking set George off, too, which at long last set Marti off.
Part Four: Edwin.
After dinner, after Marti went to bed and Casey and Derek sat down to their movie, banishing Edwin and Lizzie (even though Edwin hadn't seen Shaun of the Dead yet, and really really wanted to,) Lizzie reminded Edwin of the promise he'd made earlier that night.
"Okay, okay," he said, leading her up to the games closet. They sat across from each other as he gave her a breakdown of what he was trying to do. She laughed in all the right places, so he felt pretty good about it even though he'd never made a pitch before.
"Okay, so that's actually pretty cool," she said. "Why didn't you just tell me?"
"Because, what if it just sounded stupid when I said it out loud?" Edwin said. "It sounded like a good idea in my head, but so did that apple butter sundae that time."
Lizzie shuddered at the memory. "I kinda see your point." she said.
"So when are you gonna show me the footage?"she said.
"Maybe tomorrow," Edwin said. "But we need to wait till we're alone in the house. We don't want anyone else to see it yet."