36. "Give 'Em Shelter"
"Toni, get in here."
Ms. Vukovics stuck her head into the living room to find her husband and son, her son standing in front of the TV with a giant paper easel and her husband sprawled out on the couch looking like he was preparing to witness something embarrassing.
"What?" she asked.
"Eddy's Father's Day present is he's gonna pitch me a business plan," said Terry. "You wanna see this?"
She turned to her son. "Really? What kinda business plan are ya gonna pitch him?"
As if a self-fulfilling prophecy, Eddy wasn't really self-conscious about this presentation until his dad started talking about it like it was bound to be a hilarious trainwreck.
"Uh… well, that'd spoil the surprise!"
Terry patted a spot next to him on the couch. "Toni, c'mon. This could be Eddy's First Big-Boy Business Venture. You don't wanna miss it, do you?"
She agreed and took a seat. "But why would you pitch your father a business plan for a Father's Day present?" she asked Eddy.
"Well, uh… b-because I just thought… Dad might like to make some money!" said Eddy with an exclamatory finger pointed in the air.
"Well, shit, he's got me there," Terry said with a smirk.
"Oh, so you're just giving him an idea for him to implement?" Toni asked, still skeptical.
"Well… yeah! Plus, y'know… he might feel all proud and fatherly and stuff to see me, uh… acting professionally about this!" said Eddy.
"Oh, and I wouldn't?"
Eddy's mind was scrambling. He'd already had the thought that his mom might be offended this gift was presented exclusively to his father, but he wasn't expecting her to interrogate him on it right off the bat.
But before he had to say something, his dad bailed him out: "Toni, let's save the grilling for the actual pitch itself." Terry leaned in and looked at his son. "Now, Eddy, this is some big-boy shit right here. I'm gonna grill you just like I've been grilled in business pitches before. I might even grill you for things that I don't even actually dislike about your ideas, just to keep you on your toes. I'm gonna treat you like an adult here, alright?"
Given what he'd recently heard about some of the more extreme hardships his father's own ancestors had likely gone through in the Old Country, Eddy wasn't quite comfortable with the way Terry kept saying he was going to "grill" him.
Toni gave her husband a light shove on the shoulder. "Terry, go easy on him!"
"Well if he didn't want me grilling him, he coulda just bought me a Home Depot gift card like a normal kid!" He turned back to his son. "But normal kids don't do cool things. So I'll treat you like an adult making his first business pitch - which you are. Medium-level difficulty. Alright, I'm ready whenever you are, kid!"
Eddy swallowed a lump in his throat; honestly, his biggest concern was that if his dad didn't like the idea, he'd demand Eddy buy him something tangible and expensive as a replacement gift.
"Alright, so… the theme of this pitch is… use!" he said, the noun rather than the verb, as he gestured to his blank paper canvas.
"Use?" asked Terry.
"As in the act of using something?" asked Toni.
"Yeah, or… putting something to good use!"
"Ah, that makes more sense," said Terry, and Toni nodded in agreement.
"Yeah! Okay, so… sometimes… there's things sitting right under our noses that could be making us money but… we're just not thinking about it the right way!"
"Like we're being wasteful," proposed Toni.
"Uh… yeah! So… it-it's kinda like how my friends and me-"
"'My friends and I,'" Terry corrected. "If you slip up with basic grammar, bosses and banks are gonna tune you out."
"Right! My friends and I…" Eddy flipped the page to the first slide of his presentation. "...We sell things we found in the junkyard and repurposed-!"
"Eddy, why did you draw a triangle?" asked Toni.
"Uh… that's the junkyard!"
"No, Eddy, that's literally just a triangle," said Terry. "There is nothing on that sheet of paper but a triangle."
Eddy looked at the sheet of paper, which bore nothing but a roughly-equilateral triangle drawn with a Sharpie. "Uh…"
"Are you pitching that we start a pyramid scheme?" asked Toni.
"Hell, are you pitching that we join the fucking Illuminati?" asked Terry. "Because I've heard there's good money in that, but-"
"No, no, it's… that's supposed to be a pile of trash at the junkyard! Where the boys and I get our materials from!"
His parents stared at the page for a few moments before saying in unison:
"...Ohhhhh…"
"I really hope this pitch doesn't involve you becoming an artist," said Toni.
"I'm gonna be honest with you, Eddy," said Terry, "you said the theme of this was putting things to good use, but it kind of alarms me that you thought it was an efficient use of space to waste a gigantic sheet of paper on just a fucking triangle."
"Yeah, okay, but-! Y'see… just like how these giant triangles of trash are goldmines just waiting to be tapped… there is something in this house that could be making us…" Eddy turned the page. "...money!"
"Okay, now we're looking at a rectangle," observed Terry.
"What's that supposed to be?" asked Toni. "Is that our house?"
"Uh… I mean, I guess it can be, but it's supposed to be the money we could be making. Like a dollar bill!"
"Aaand you didn't even care to draw like a basic stick-figure silhouette of a face or write some numbers in the corners?" asked Terry.
"Well… I was kind of focused more on the, uh, talking part-"
"And that's a good evasion, but you shouldn't put yourself in a position where you have to evade in the first place," said Toni.
"Yeah, as a prospective business partner, I'd be worried that you're too lazy to implement the plan you wanna pitch me," added Terry.
"Okay, but… hear me out! My grand idea for this family to make some extra money…" Eddy turned the next page. "...is this!"
"Oh, cool, it's a rectangle turned sideways!" Terry quipped. "Seriously, Eddy, you think this is even remotely professional-looking?"
"Well, I'm glad our broken educational system is at least teaching you basic geometric shapes," said Toni.
"But wait…! Dad, uh… y'know how you said these drawings were, um… a waste of space?"
"Basically, yeah, that's what they are, yeah," mumbled Terry.
"Okay, well… how's this for a waste of space!?" Eddy said as he pointed to the vertical rectangle on his easel and smiled confidently for the first time in that meeting. "Why aren't we doing something with my brother's room?"
Toni and Terry's eyes pursed open for a moment, having not at all expected that to be the payoff. They stared at it for a few more seconds before Terry turned to Toni:
"Y'know, I'd think that whole 'do you think these drawings are a waste of space' lead-in was fucking brilliant if I believed even for a second that he set it up like that on purpose."
Toni had nothing to add to that, so she turned to Eddy: "You want us to make use of your brother's room? What- what inspired that thought?"
Time to ad-lib. "Well… so the other day, the boys and I were hanging out… at the playground, just hanging around, as ya do… and Ed's sister and the bunny are in the playground, too, and we can overhear them talking and… Jimmy mentions he wants a room for a little ballet studio but he doesn't have a room to do it in! And it just got me thinking, hey… we got an entire room we're not doing anything with! Other people would kill for an entire other room in their house! We shouldn't let that go to waste!"
Terry and Toni looked like they bought the story well enough. The foxes didn't care very much for the Hutchinsons - they swore it wasn't just a species thing, they didn't much care for their individual personalities either - so there was a very low chance that they'd ever ask Jimmy's parents in person to corroborate that their son wanted a home dance studio. Even if for whatever reason there was a neighborhood emergency and all the families had to mingle in close quarters and make meaningless small talk, the foxes would probably stick to talking hockey with Mr. Hutchinson, who made his unwilling son practice as Toni and Terry used to make their boys do, and if they had to talk to Mrs. Hutchinson… yeah, they wouldn't talk to Mrs. Hutchinson.
"So the rectangle's supposed to be… what, the door? To his room?" asked Terry.
"Uh… I-I was thinking more the room itself, fr-from above, like… like a floorplan, but… yeah, the door works, too!"
"His room isn't that much longer than it is wide," said Toni. "But nevermind that… what exactly do you want us to do with your brother's room? You wanna make it a ballet studio and charge the kid to use it?"
"No, that little twerp ain't comin' in my house," said Terry, shaking his head. "Did you just wanna turn it into a workroom to build stuff that you can sell?"
"Uh… not exactly. Because I was thinking…" He pointed to the rectangle. "...about making money off the space itself." Eddy flipped the page. "It's the space that can make us money."
"So now we have several rectangles and some circles," noted Terry. "What, dollars and cents?"
"Y-yeah, um…" Eddy stopped to think about where this presentation was going. "Actually, I remember now, th-the first rectangle was supposed to be the house."
"Figures," murmured Toni.
"You couldn't even draw the house as a pentagon with a pointy roof?" asked Terry.
Eddy just kept rolling with the punches. "So… it's not what we do in the room that can make us money, it's the room itself that can-!"
"No, Eddy," Terry snarked, "I know your brother's room already looks like a meth lab, but we're not gonna turn it into a meth lab!"
"I was afraid you were gonna say you wanted to rent his room out," said Toni.
Eddy was disheartened to hear his mom call his shot and shut him down, but he told himself that if he wanted to prove himself to those guys in the woods, he couldn't be afraid of minor conflict like this.
"That's… that's actually where I was going with this."
His parents again looked surprised.
"Wait… really?" asked Toni.
"And how do you plan to persuade us?" asked Terry.
"Uh… what?"
"How do you plan to persuade us?" Terry repeated. "This is a pretty outlandish proposition. You gotta argue your case, bud."
Eddy hadn't been prepared for that particular challenge. "Well… it's obvious, ain't it? Right now you're not doing anything with his room, just… boarding it up and pretending it doesn't exist. Not a guest room, not a rec room, not a den, not a… not even a fucking sewing room-!"
"Jesus, Eddy, where the hell did you get so brazen as to swear in front of your parents!?" asked Toni. Terry turned to his wife with a nonchalant look on his face and raised his hand.
"But seriously," Eddy continued. "Right now you guys are getting nothing of value out of that room. And this is an easy way to go from making zero dollars off that room to making… uh… more than zero dollars off that room!"
"Eddy, why is this proposal to radically restructure our home life and modify a house I own too just a present for your father?" asked Toni.
Eddy kept it honest: "Because I didn't think of it in time for Mother's Day."
Toni accepted that she probably couldn't argue with that, but she kept giving him a what the fuck even is this idea? look. Terry, meanwhile, looked deep in thought.
"I mean…" said Terry, "...kid's got a point. We could be making a couple extra hundred renting out a room."
"Terry, you can't be serious!" protested his wife.
"Oh, I'm serious, but…" Terry turned to his son. "...I don't think Eddy would like what I'm thinking."
Eddy had no idea where he was going with this. "Uh… what're ya thinking?"
"I'm thinking… it would actually make perfect sense to put every square inch of this house to good use and make some money off it if we can. And I agree that there is a room in this house that would make perfect sense to rent out to complete strangers."
Eddy felt a smile crack across his face, but he was hesitant, because he didn't know what his father meant by having a thought Eddy wouldn't like.
"...Your room."
There it was. No more smile.
"Wait… what?" Eddy asked.
"So, let's just ignore for a second that your brother's room has the fucking window bricked over and the door's gonna have wallpaper residue on it for the rest of time and there hasn't been any fresh air in that room in months, and how that all makes it wildly unsuitable and unappealing to any prospective renters."
"And there's still laws for renting out rooms, so if we don't provide them with decent living conditions, they could probably sue us," added Toni. "I know that because I had to rent out a room in a crazy old lady's house in college and if I had the money, I probably coulda taken her to court over the fact that the heater barely worked and her pet birds flying all around and shitting everywhere. I wouldn't be surprised if your brother's room wasn't up to some legal code we aren't familiar with."
"But you know what room would be perfect for renting out because it's basically its own little apartment with an external exit and its own bathroom with a showerplace?" asked Terry. "Yours."
Eddy felt his heart begin to race. This wasn't happening. Talk about the best-laid plans falling apart.
"So I'm gonna tell you right now, I'm gonna vote no on the idea of renting out your brother's room no matter what," Terry continued. "If I have strangers living in my house, I don't wanna hafta share a bedroom wall with them, and I'm sure they wouldn't wanna share one with us, either."
"Hell, I'm just vetoing the entire idea of having strangers in our house," said Toni. "Really, Eddy? You want strangers living with you?"
This, however, Eddy thought he could handle: "Well… just like you said, Mom! You were in a desperate spot once and you needed a cheap, safe place to stay! You guys lived in the city, you know how much it sucks! Why not be that opportunity for someone else?"
His parents gave him a pair of funny looks.
"That is… creepily altruistic of you, Eddy," said his mother.
"Yeah, kid, way to spin making money into an act of charity," said his father.
"Yeah, but I've been thinking," said Eddy, "...maybe everybody would do more good things… if they got something legit out of it themselves. So this is a win-win situation! You guys make some dough while being able to show everyone that you're doing good!"
"Doing good by making money," said Toni, not buying it at all.
"Hey… who cares why you're doing something good… as long as you're doing something good!" said Eddy. "Better than not doing something good, ain't it?"
"I can't decide if that's an extremely mature or an extremely immature statement," said Toni.
Terry, meanwhile, was staring off to the side toward the door to Eddy's bedroom. "I gotta say, kid… you make a really decent point."
"Oh, Terry, we are not doing this!"
"Toni, chill, it's not gonna happen!" Terry turned to his son again with a devilish grin. "Because Eddy's not gonna wanna give up his own room, now is he?"
"Terry, you idiot! This is the same kid who asks us on his birthday every year if we can give him the keys and tear the wallpaper off the wall so he can go explore it!"
"Okay, fair, but does he want to move in there or just… visit it like a museum?" He looked at his son again. "I mean, you tell us, kid. Do you wanna move into your brother's room and give up having your own bathroom and your own door to the outside world and all that Seventies shit that Old Saint Nick got you for Christmas? Because if you move into his room, you know you won't have space for his shit and your shit."
Shit… to tell the truth, Eddy was hoping he could swing it so he could end up with regular access to both rooms. But as much as he loved his own room and the privacy it provided… he did always think his brother's room was cooler. And while that had waned in recent years as his deification of his brother started to wear off… well, now he was privy to the fact that there was a couple grand in there, and come to think of it, if his parents had to renovate his room to make it legally appropriate for renting, that might provide them ample opportunities to snatch the money before he even had a chance to find it himself. Whereas if he moved in there and told his parents to leave the sprucing-up to him, he'd be in no rush…
"I can make space," Eddy finally said.
Once again, his parents were shocked.
"You're fucking with us, right?" asked his mom.
"I'll tell you what, kid," said his dad. "If you're dead serious on moving out of your room, moving into his room, and helping us modify your room to make it appropriate to let a stranger live there - I'll say yes. Hell, I'll give you a cut of the rent money!"
"Terry, are you fucking crazy!?"
"Oh, of course I am, that's why I married you," Terry teased, and his wife shoved him as he giggled.
"Eddy, do you know how much work goes into arranging to have a stranger rent out a room in your house?" Toni asked.
"Uh… no, but-"
"Because we don't know either because we've never done this before and we've never looked into it because the thought never crossed our minds that we'd want strangers crawling around our house!"
Eddy kept a straight face and blinked a few times. "But aren't you always telling me that I should be more proactive? Go out, learn new skills and… implement them?"
"This fucking kid's got an answer for everything we throw at him," remarked Terry with a dumb smile on his face. "But for real, are you serious about being okay with moving into his room so we can rent yours out?"
"...Uhhh-"
"Are you serious about letting strangers into our house!?" Toni asked her husband. "I own this house too, and I say no! Hell, A and V come before T and W so even my name is probably listed before yours on the deed alphabetically!"
Mr. W. tsk-tsked as he shook his head and looked at Ms. V. with a smooth smile that both his sons had done well to learn to emulate. "Now it's time for me to give you my business pitch!"
Eddy winced; the way his father had said that made it sound like a euphemism for an intimate act he'd rather not envision his parents in. "Uh… can I be, uh, granted a brief recess or something?"
"Oh, so now this is a courtroom and not a business meeting?" Terry joked. "Sure. Take five and think about whether you're actually down with what you're proposing."
"Uh… thanks," Eddy said as he excused himself into the kitchen.
The little fox dragged the stepstool over to the fridge and grabbed himself a Dr. Pepper. Hopefully the caffeine would give him the nerve to push through this tough decision. So far it seemed like his parents had just up and forgot that two years back he had not only actively asked to move into his brother's room but actually struck a deal with his mom that he would be allowed to do it contingent on his being able to take a nice picture for school picture day - at which point stupid Kevin ruined his efforts just for his own amusement. Of course, Eddy couldn't blame them for forgetting that episode - it had been a few years, they were busy adults with other things to keep on their minds, Eddy's fascination with his brother's ways had lessened in the intervening years regardless (thanks in no small part to a certain recurring nightmare) and that entire season was forgettable anyway.
But he could see it going either way whether it was to his benefit that his parents forgot that he had once wanted to move in there: if they remembered, they might realize he was serious about his offer to make such a sacrifice, but they also might suddenly see it as a very selfish move just designed to get him in there. Honestly, though, whether they remembered or not was kind of a moot point because… his dad was right, Eddy did only harbor a fascination with his brother's room inasmuch as it was a museum dedicated to the man he once saw as first among the foxes. Eddy was finally starting to become comfortable with the idea of being his own person and not chasing his brother's shadow… and now he gets the opportunity to put himself more deeply into his brother's shoes, an opportunity that he would have jumped at until literally just these last few weeks. Of course that's how his life would shake out, of course it was. Hell, this was just like how his dad asked him the summer before this if he wanted to go to a waterpark resort for vacation and Eddy asked him point-blank why he waited until Eddy was in middle school and too old for such a thing when that was all he wanted to do for the summers of his single-digit years (and if you're curious, Dear Reader, Terry shrugged it off with a "Fine, then we won't go," and didn't even attempt to answer his son's very valid question).
Not to say that Eddy would have absolutely detested moving in there, but… yeah, at this point, it didn't seem like a preferable prospect. The thought of moving all of his stuff upstairs into a smaller room with no bathroom and no source of fresh air and enough dust to make a completely respiratorily healthy person suddenly asthmatic wasn't a particularly exciting one. But he made this pitch to have his parents rent out a room, and it wasn't completely unreasonable that his parents would want to negotiate the details.
Now, of course, he was wondering if the entire idea was worth it. For one thing, he had gotten it in his head that having the two of them in close and frequent proximity would be an even more efficient way of having the traits of theirs that he wanted for himself rub off on him; say that with the wrong inflection, however, and it sounds not the least bit flattering, only obsessive and offputting: "Hey, Redcoat and Redneck, I wanna be just like you so I can get the admiration I desperately crave, will you please live in my fucking bedroom so that I can gain your powers through osmosis?" Oo-de-lally, Eddy could hardly fathom a more awkward moment than one where the two of them realized that that was his M.O. He was gonna have to be careful about that if they ever did get in here - but wait, what if they didn't want to get in here? Why would a couple of adults accept a random kid's offer to live at his house? These guys were heroes across the city, and Eddy was just now realizing that they surely couldn't have gone this long without receiving plenty of offers to live full-time with other people for free, and out of all of those offers, how could the choice of staying with a strange kid's family of strangers (and actually paying rent for the privilege) in a location that's even less geographically convenient than their current digs be the most attractive offer? Surely their exile in Sherwood Forest was self-imposed so as to not burden their civilian friends with harboring wanted men. Oh, and then there was the possibility that Robin and Johnny say no - and his parents go through with renting his old room out anyway. Then Eddy would be out of a good bedroom while having an actual stranger in his house. Oh, fuck that.
Was this ever a good idea? Or did he just tell himself it was because he needed a Father's Day present and he was too stupid and lazy to come up with something better? He may have been getting lucky with his dad becoming suddenly interested in his pitch, but he still was going to have to get lucky at several other points for this to come together as he'd planned.
Eddy's kitchen window looked straight into Kevin's house, and that wasn't an attractive sight, so he looked out it at an angle toward the street, an angle where he could just barely see Double-D's front door. And as he stared out into the world, he couldn't help but think… this idea was stupid. This idea was stupid, it was poorly thought-out, it was foolish, it was unnecessarily risky, it was weird, it was unlikely to succeed, and holy shit, it was them.
It was them. He was just staring at Double-D's house and Robin and Johnny just materialized out of the fucking ether and waltzed up to the wolves' front door. They didn't seem to ring the doorbell or knock, they were merely just looking around the front of the house, as if debating whether to make their presence known. And they weren't even wearing disguises, they were just out in the open wearing their usual different-shades-of-lucky-green shirts.
...Were they there to rob Double-D? As punishment for being too cowardly to join them? No, they weren't that vindictive… were they? I mean, what else could they be there for? Another hour-long cyclical conversation about nothing? It wasn't so much that Eddy genuinely believed they were there to plunder the Lupos; it was more that he genuinely couldn't think of any other reason why they'd pay him a visit. Like, they said take until Monday to think it over again, right? Robbing Double-D as punishment wouldn't make much sense, but… no other ideas made any sense. He'd go outside and ask them themselves, but he was kinda-sorta preoccupied at the moment. Jeez, if they really were here to steal from Double-D, Eddy sure was glad that he hadn't gotten on the wrong side of them.
So what better way to keep himself on their good side than to have them be perpetually morally and financially indebted to him?
He needed to be lucky with a lot of things falling into place to make this plan work, but here he was standing at the window for three minutes and it's during these three minutes that the two individuals he was doing all this for just so happen to appear out of thin air and cross his line of vision, far from their home. If he were old enough, Eddy would go out and buy a lottery ticket.
Meanwhile in the living room, Toni and Terry were having lively discussion via low but harsh voices.
"What the fuck do you need the sports package for!?"
"Because I'm still pissed that I missed the Red Sox's season last year! I wait my entire life to see them finally win it and I don't get to be there for it because I don't live in New England anymore! If they win another two or three in the next ten or fifteen years, I refuse to miss out on them."
"You saw the World Series on national television! Everyone saw it on national television!"
"I saw the playoffs on national television. True fans were there for the regular season that made the playoffs possible."
"Oh, who cares if you're a 'true fan' or not!?"
"Toni, the fact of the matter is that the next time I have to see my family in Pawtucket, I can't let anybody know that I didn't catch a single regular-season game the year they finally won the World Series. It's bad enough that I didn't see one in person - hell, my sister doesn't give a rat's ass about sports and lives in fucking Vermont and even she made a point to go to Fenway last year. It's like a pilgrimage for us. So if I didn't even see a game on TV? They will mock me relentlessly and they will think less of me as a person. This is an actual thing that will happen."
"Terry-"
"They'll demand I present them my Rhode Island birth certificate so they can burn it before my eyes while saying I must be an Orioles fan now. I must atone for my sins."
"Terry, if you care so much about what those people think, then why did you leave!?"
"...Because I met a beautiful girl in Boston and followed her to Nottingham."
"...Very classy, Terry Classy."
"Hey, I'm just being honest."
"But seriously, there are so many other things you could have effectively argued we could spend the extra money on, and you choose the fucking sports package-"
"What about the Canucks?"
"...What about the Canucks?"
"If this next season is their year, are you sure you want to miss it?"
"You really think there's gonna be a season this year!?"
"Do you really think they'd let the lockout cancel another season and lose all that money? They'll have it resolved by September. October, tops. You know this to be true."
"...You don't know that."
"If this is their year, would you feel okay missing their entire season? What would Kris say about you snubbing your nose at the sport he devoted his life to - or about you turning your back on your heritage? He'd say you turned your back on your country."
"If my brother says that, he's an idiot with one too many-"
"Oooo, Caaaaanadaaaaa…"
"...concussions."
"Yerrr hooome aaand naaatiiive laaaaand…"
"Terry, stop."
"I would stand on guard for thee, My Antónia, but would you stand on guard for a struggling sports league that's a key tenet of your homeland's culture?"
"Goddammit, Terry-"
"You get your Canucks, I get my Bruins, I'll get my Red Sox too but we'll chalk that up to a Father's Day gift, and we agree to rent out the room as equal partners in this arrangement."
"...Hrmrmh…"
"Aw, that's the pretty little tomboy I fell in love with at the crosstown game! Fuck BC!"
"It would still feel like an incredibly stupid thing to do to make all that extra money just to blow it on TV… and I'm still not really comfortable living with a stranger again!"
"Honestly, Toni, none of this matters because Eddy's gonna get cold feet."
"W-b-th- then why did you try so hard to argue his point!?"
"Practice."
Right about that time, they both noticed their son walking quietly back into the living room.
"Speak of the devil," muttered Terry. "Hey slugger, how's it going? You make up your mind?"
"Yeah, I'll do it."
His parents looked confused.
"Do… you'll do what?" asked his mom.
Eddy looked confused.
"I'll… move into my brother's room. Ain't that what we were talking about?"
"Hm…" said his father, "...wasn't expecting that, honestly."
"Cool, so… we have a deal?"
"No!" said Toni. "No, no, I-! Goddammit, Terry, just renege on the deal!"
"Hey!" Eddy protested. "You can't go back on our deal! What makes you think you can just-!?"
"Eddy, grow up!" his mom shot back. "Every functional adult in the world knows that sometimes you have to lie and break promises to protect your own interests - and every halfway-decent parent in the world will tell you that it's especially okay to lie and break promises to literal children who don't know any better for their own protection!"
"Mom, just because I'm a kid doesn't mean I'm stupid!"
"That is literally what it means, Eddy! Being a kid means you don't have a fully-developed mind and you can't make responsible decisions yet! That's why you're still in school! That's why you're not allowed to vote! That's why you can't be trusted with cigarettes and alcohol!" Toni turned to her husband. "Terry, are you gonna back me up here!"
Terry had been staring into space again, thinking. "I don't wanna renege, though."
"Ha!" was all Eddy had to say about that.
"TERRY! Strangers! House! My! Not doing it!"
"Right," said Terry, "because there's exactly zero chance that they'll be afraid of us either. Hell, half the people in this country would probably refuse to live with a bunch of sneaky foxes for free!"
That gave Eddy another idea. "What if the strangers were… one of us, though?" he asked, gesturing toward himself and his parents.
"Eddy, this isn't a race thing!" said Toni. "I wouldn't trust any strangers in our house! And God knows I've met a few of our people who… make me understand why some people hate foxes. Like your brother."
"And I'll concede one point to your mother," added Terry, "it's probably illegal to put a flier up saying 'Room for rent, no bunnies, no weasels, no jungle cats.' Don't get me wrong, Eddy, I still like the idea, but if we were limiting it to other foxes, we'd have to play along with anybody else who applied for the room, go through the motions of pretending to consider them so they wouldn't get suspicious, turn them away, wait for a fox to apply, and hope to God all our rejects never realized they would have a pretty open-and-shut case for housing discrimination."
"Well-" Eddy stammered, "-what if we put up signs saying 'Room for rent with a fox family'? Y'know, like, hint hint."
Toni felt ignored. "I'm not sharing my house with-!"
The boys ignored her.
"Hm, that could work…" Terry thought out loud. "...Shit, now you got me wondering, there's gotta be some legal defense for like, not renting out to someone who can't physically fit in our house."
"And that's another thing!" said Toni. "I'd rather not share a house with someone who's two or three times our size!"
"So what you're saying is…" Terry ventured, "...it is a species thing to a certain extent."
"F- yes! Yes, of course it is! But I couldn't just say that when Eddy asked if we'd be okay renting out to foxes because it woulda sounded like 'Why, yes, I am racist'-!"
"What about bears?" asked Eddy.
It seemed like every time Eddy opened his mouth, he just kept surprising his parents.
"What about bears?" asked Terry with a wince.
"Well, you're always telling me, they're one of our people's few allies because the world seems to hate them just like they hate us… would you make an exception for one of them? Would you trust them enough?" He would have to address this question eventually, so he figured he might as well do it now.
"I mean…" Terry began, still confused, "...if they can fit in our house… and they seem like good people… sure? Maybe? I mean, wait, that's another thing," he said as he turned to his wife. "Toni, you… do know that we have a right to screen these people before we let them in, right?"
"Of course I know that!" she answered. "But the way you two idiots aren talking, it seems like you just wanna let the first person who knocks on the door live with us!"
"Why would you think we wanted that? What kind of crazy people rent out a room in their house without interviewing the tenant first?"
"My landlord in college! I answered the ad and she said 'Fine, move in, just don't bother Perry's nest on the floor'!"
"Well… that lady was fucking crazy. She's an outlier. Hey…" Terry took her hand and clasped his hands around it, and looked her tenderly in the eyes. "...We can go through the steps and not actually ever let anybody in. I wouldn't ever let anybody in here if my wife wasn't comfortable with them. We can just… let people answer the ads… let them interview with us… and if even one of the three of us don't like them, then we send them away… and if nobody's ever good enough for us, then fine, fuck it, we get an extra room for guests or something. Does that sound fair?"
Now Toni was trying to make her own tough decision. "Terry-"
"Just play along until it becomes unbearable," said her husband, and then he leaned in and put on a goofy grin. "Do it for your country."
"What?" Eddy had no clue what they were referring to.
Toni took a breath and rolled her eyes. "Fine… I'll play along-"
"Cool, so can I start moving my stuff now?" asked Eddy eagerly.
"Well hold your horses, kid," said Terry, "this isn't gonna happen overnight. We've gotta do a lot more than just move your stuff out, we've gotta redo your entire room and make it suitable for strangers-"
"And put new locks on a bunch of the doors," added Toni.
"-and rental periods usually start at the top of the month anyway, so we've got a few weeks."
"A few weeks!?" Eddy asked incredulously. "I-I mean… I just thought you'd wanna go out there and… and get some money ASAP! A-a-and because… hey, some people need a place to stay now, they won't wanna wait until July!"
"Eddy, did one of your friends get kicked out of the house and now they need a place to stay?" asked Toni, now looking genuinely concerned.
"Hell, I wouldn't put it past Hilary to kick his son out of the house if the doctor's appointment yesterday didn't go like he'd hoped," remarked Terry.
"Wait, is that why you asked if we'd let a bear live with us!?" Toni asked her son. "Goddammit, it all makes sense now. Hilary, you fucking asshole-!"
"Oh, nonononono," Eddy insisted, "it's fine, Ed's fine, uh… I-I don't need us to rent out a room to my friends…" Well, they ain't my 'friends' exactly… "Uh-"
"Oh… I get it," said Terry. "He wants to move into his brother's room. That's what this was all about."
"Wait, yeah, now I remember!" said Toni. "We told you you could move into his room if you took a decent photo and you somehow couldn't do it. Then he didn't mention it for a while and I just figured he grew out of it."
Naturally, Eddy wanted to protest that that son of a bitch bastard Kevin fucked his picture up twice and that the school photographer refused to intervene, but his parents hadn't believed that the photographer would be that much of a shiftless asshole then and they probably weren't going to believe it now. And although he now had no idea what to say to make this look like anything other than an elaborate scheme to creepily further worship a person his parents detested, luck smiled on him, and he didn't need to say anything at all.
"Well, looks like he bent over backwards to get what he wanted…" said his father, "...and actually convinced us to give it to him. No reason to rescind the offer now."
"Or we'll play along with it until we have a good reason not to," his mother amended.
And to this day, Eddy has no idea how that worked. Granted, he still had to spend the rest of the day intermittently convincing his parents to press the accelerator on getting the house and his room prepared for renters as the three of them made the first steps of sizing up the two rooms and moving the first of Eddy's things, but eh, we can skip that part. But he had managed to get both his parents to at least tepidly go along with the idea of making room for new occupants who - unbeknownst to Toni and Terry - he was hoping would be available as better role models than either of his parents or his brother could have been. Having to do some manual labor to move into some new digs in fulfillment of an obsolete dream wasn't the best thing in the world, but considering the circumstances, he'd gladly make a small sacrifice. He could already feel the greatness rub off on him; it had the texture of velvet.
All he needed to fall into place now was to get the fox and the bear to agree to move in - yes, for a fee, but surely it was a small price to pay for a place to crash that wasn't a smelly van in a smellier junkyard or a camp in a forest that no longer felt like home. For all he knew, that might have proven to be a tougher sell than getting his parents to make a room available in the first place, but honestly, sad as it was to say, he thought these two near-strangers were probably still more reasonable adults to negotiate with than his parents were. At least he knew he wouldn't piss them off by being an obnoxious nerd and militant coward like Double-D had been.
Speaking of Double-D, in the time between his parents conceding victory and actually starting the process of removing the wallpaper from the door to his brother's room, Eddy did make an attempt to see if the Merry Men were still at the wolves' front door so he could ask them on the spot if they'd like a nice safe room in a nice safe house. But upon stepping outside and turning to look toward the Lupos' house on the corner, he didn't know whether the fox and the bear were inside Double-D's house or if they went to someone else's house or if they had left the area completely, but they weren't at his doorstep anymore.
