48. "All-Time Low (The Apprenticeship of Eddy Wilde, Pt. 2)"
Hilary Browne was having a very weird Father's Day. First his wife and daughter get home from church going off about how weird the priest had been acting. It was the badger again and today the homily had been less of a sermon and more of a rant, carrying on about how sometimes we do sinful things by complete accident but refusing to acknowledge we've done them makes it a million times worse, and that we ought to confess them anyway not only to God (who, y'know, He knows you did it anyway so just get it over with) but also to the people you inadvertently wronged both directly and indirectly by your accidental sin… and then he sloppily tied it back to Father's Day by saying that fathers in particular should learn this lesson because in a society that tells men that they need to be especially manly as father figures and can't appear weak in front of their kids, the world often forgets to instill in fathers that the manliest thing you can do is admit your flaws and mistakes, especially to your own children, and if you're good at being a father and communicating with your offspring, they won't think less of you for it. Same goes for all interpersonal relationships, actually: if you've already proven yourself to already be a good family member or partner or coworker or friend, they shouldn't think less of you for your confession, and at that point refusing to come clean and apologize is frankly cowardly - it's not like you killed someone. There was a lot of doubling back on himself and tripping over his words and it all just came across like a first draft he'd written the night before, assuming he hadn't completely improvised it. It was like stand-up material that a comic had just started working out that didn't have any punchlines yet.
Then the kid who the government thought was his son finally woke up, and his Father's Day gift to Hill was, drumroll please… absolutely nothing. Ed had completely forgotten, just as anticipated. Hey, all fair game on Ed's part, maybe he too realized Hilary probably wasn't his father and therefore he didn't owe the guy shit in the way of a present. Now Hill was thinking that by that priest's logic, he owed the cub an apology for stringing him along into believing they were biologically related for fourteen years. But the elder bear hadn't seen much in the way of rewards for good actions in all his years, neither his good actions nor anybody else's, so he couldn't imagine that rewards would start coming now.
Of course, one must still maintain appearances, so Hilary kept playing along with the idea that Ed was his son and consequently owed him a Father's Day gift in some capacity. Well, he and his wife had already negotiated with the foxes the evening before to have Ed do some work for them in exchange for pay going directly toward the money they owed the therapist's office - it was stupid that they had to pay anything, because the practice absolutely had business insurance, but they were reserving the right to make the Browne bears pay them anyway for what would surely be a spike in the office's premiums. But now they could just say that Ed working off the debt for them was his present and the real gift was the idea that maybe the kid was finally learning some semblance of responsibility.
Then Hill got really thrown for a loop when Ed came back with a pillowcase full of cold, hard cash, adding up to a good few grand. Apparently it had been found by Ed and Eddy in Toni and Terry's oldest's room - and since those workaholics weren't even home, the context heavily implied that they didn't even know about it themselves. Mr. Browne had absolutely no idea what possessed the selfish little fox to part ways with all this money - he had to imagine there was still more money Eddy was keeping for himself - but shit, he would take it. Especially if Terry and Toni would still be paying Ed for renovating their sons' bedrooms on top of this lump sum.
But now he had to figure out how to share this information with his wife; Mat was presently out at the Giant supermarket buying fresh salmon for dinner - plus some frozen chicken nuggets for Ed, who was allergic to fish. How was he going to tell her when she got home that they magically now had thousands of dollars in cash just laying around? It was more good news than bad news, sure, but it was in cash; how do you put all that in a bank without it looking suspicious? It was good fortune, but a good fortune they'd have to be careful with.
So he decided to go outside and have himself a good think. It seemed like the universe was pressuring him to go outside anyway. He'd been flipping through the channels looking for something to watch when he'd stumbled upon an open-wheel race in… Indianapolis, maybe? Anyway, there were only half a dozen cars on the track, and since Hill had no real working knowledge of Formula One, for all he knew, that might have been normal. The British announcers seemed to be pretending everything was normal while subtly hinting here and there that it wasn't, and it all gave off a vibe of it is not worth your time to watch this, go do something else. Plus the Orioles were losing, the Phillies weren't even playing until later, and although the Nats were winning, it still felt weird in his head that that team even existed so he had no emotional connection to them yet; he also didn't care about the rednecks in the NASCAR race up in Michigan that day any more than he cared about the handful of Europeans racing around Indy, and although there was apparently some big PGA tournament that day, he wasn't the kind of dad to give a shit about golf. So fuck it, no watching sports today, he'd go outside and enjoy the June weather instead.
And it was a perfectly nice day outside, but the entire cul-de-sac had a strange vibe to it. It felt… abandoned. It wasn't just like the neighborhood was empty, it was more like there had been liveliness here an hour ago before it packed up and went somewhere else. A spooky mood probably in part caused by the fact that he could swear to God that he'd heard kids messing around outside right before he stepped out.
Things got even weirder when the Lupos' boy magically popped out of his house at the exact moment Hilary approached it. Y'know, come to think of it, he hadn't heard much about the wolf kid recently. Usually Ed wouldn't shut the hell up about his friends - and he still hadn't, but these last few days, it had mostly been about just the fox kid. Was something up where the loup was out of the loop? Hilary wouldn't typically care, but seeing as if there were some conflict he'd probably hear about it eventually, he figured he might as well hear the other kid's side of the story too for once.
"Oh! Um… h-hello, Mr. Browne," said Double-D as he turned away from his front door and realized his bear friend's father was passing by a few dozen feet away.
"Morning, Eddward," replied Hill, knowing but not caring that it was already well past noon.
"I, uh… hope you're enjoying your Father's Day, sir," Edd mumbled as he joined his neighbor on the sidewalk.
"Ah, can't complain. Can, not, complain…" Mr Browne mused lazily as they crossed the street. "Just taking a walk around the neighborhood, care to join me?"
"I was… actually about to go see where the ruckus went."
"So you heard the ruckus too?"
"Yes, and… now I find myself wondering whether there's some gathering occuring to which I was not invited."
After taking a moment to decipher the kid's nerdy speech patterns, Hilary realized that was a pretty relevant answer. "Any reason they might not have invited you?" he asked. "I mean… not that it's any of my business…"
"Oh, no, no, a valid question, just, um, you know… I've been indoors a lot these last few days. May not have had an opportunity to invite me in person, completely understandable!"
"Alright, hey, just sayin', Ed ain't said much about you recently, just making sure there isn't some sort of tiff going on between you guys."
*Oh, nonono, all is well, all is well, um… I've just been indoors preparing a gift for my own father these last few days! Not had much time to go out and play!"
Hilary nodded stoically and was silent for a moment, Edd completely expecting him to ask what he made or did for Vincent, but little did Double-D know that Mr. Browne was in no mood to talk Father's Day gifts.
"How's your parents doing?" the bear asked instead. The kind of question you ask a neighbor kid who you know but don't know well.
"Oh, um, quite alright, nothing to complain about!" The wolf was a little worried that his parents may have at some point told Ed's and/or Eddy's parents that Edd had blamed the recent destruction of the Lupo house on their sons, but Double-D was fairly certain he knew his parents better than that. He didn't see them as the kind who'd find it worth their time to go complain to the bears or the foxes about owed damages when it was a tired old tale and the insurance company would probably handle it anyway. And as far as verifying the story went, Vince's sense of smell was pretty dull compared to that of his ancestors but Sammie's was about as sharp as her brother's, and she could verify that a fox and a bear had been in the house that day - couldn't sniff out any specific specimens, but definitely a vulpine and an ursid. No reason to doubt their son's story, case closed. Hell, even if the wolves did tell the bears and the foxes that their son said their sons destroyed their house, there was a very likely chance that they'd all believe it without question either and simply wouldn't care beyond that.
They were awkwardly quiet as they crossed Bedford Street. Hill, of course, did not know that this boy had falsely accused his son of destroying his house (again), but he was absolutely picking up on Edd's nervousness. All those "ohs" and "uhs" and "ums" were painting a picture. So if the kid wasn't nervous about something happening between him and the other two Eds, what was he nervous about? Was Double-D nervous talking to him? What, did the grumpy old bear come across as antisocial and hard to talk to? It was a possibility. Or maybe it was something to do with how he constantly carried a faint odor of garbage around as a consequence of his job, that was also a possibility.
"...I hope I'm not making you uncomfortable or anything with all these questions, man," Hilary eventually said, "just figuring as long as you're one of- one of Ed's best friends, I might as well learn more about you from you yourself instead of just what Ed tells me."
"Oh, no, it's quite alright, and I appreciate the candor-"
"Just sayin', not trying to pick on you or anything, dude, but you do seem nervous right now, and if it's anything I'm doing to make you feel weird, just let me know."
"No, no, you're doing nothing wrong! Um…" And then he trailed off and made no real attempts to trail back on again for a good few moments.
As they got closer to the main drag, they could hear that they had nearly found the ruckus again.
"...There is a question on my mind that I've been weighing whether or not to ask you, Mr. Browne," said Double-D. "If I… may be so candid."
"Hey, you're a good kid, your parents raised you right, you probably know better than to ask anything too impolite," said Hill. "So… hey, now I'm curious. What's on your mind?"
"Um…" Double-D rubbed the back of his head as he plotted his words. "I-I do hope this doesn't come across as an attack upon your character, as I know many adults would interpret this as me mocking something deeply related to their pride, but… may I ask how much money is owed toward the damage Ed caused in the psychoanalyst's office?"
...Oh, like the debt for which Hilary had recently acquired enough money to pay off in full? What an interesting question.
"Oh, naw, man, I'm not too proud to talk about that," Hilary insisted. "But, uh… why do you ask?"
"Well… I recently came into some money that I… I cannot, in good conscience, keep. It, um, it was a prize for a contest, you see! A writing contest, about math and science, for youths ages twelve to seventeen! Essentially we were to write a thesis paper! A theoretical proof of sorts! A-and I'll spare you the boring details, but suffice it to say… I submitted my entry by the submission date, only to look further into it after the deadline had passed and discovered what I oh so dearly wish I'd had the time to discover before the essay was due! I'd made a grave mistake in my calculations, you see, and consequently my conclusions were entirely off-base! So imagine how much of an imposter I felt like when a few weeks pass and… I'd been awarded the grand prize!"
Hill raised an eyebrow, wondering where this was going. "Is that so? How'd that happen?"
"I'm not sure myself, Mr. Browne! My only hypotheses are that either they made the same error in judgment as I had or they awarded me the prize on the merit of argumentation and persuasion and never even checked the veracity of my claims, but one way or another… my morals will not allow me to accept a prize awarded under such false pretenses, and especially not from any organization or entity that would blaspheme the name of science by allowing themselves to make such careless mistakes! Truly, sir, I regard it as blood money!"
The bear nodded slowly. Where was this kid going with this? "Where are you going with this?"
Edd gulped. "If you don't take it as a mark against your ability to provide for your family, I'm offering to surrender the money to you to put toward the debt owed to the psychologists' practice. To balance my karma and to make a good deed out of a bad action!"
Now Hilary looked nervous himself; he hated how much he liked hearing this. "Well, hey, kid, it's a generous offer, but I really shouldn't be taking money from a kid..."
"Oh, but this is not the same as if you were soliciting money from me, I am the one initiating the offer! And, um, furthermore, I am imploring you to accept this gift! In many world cultures, it would be rude not to accept, would it not?"
Hill caught himself staring. "...How much did they even give you?"
Edd raised a paw and held up two fingers. Then he put up a fist. Then another fist, then another fist, then another fist.
Mr. Browne's jaw dropped. "...And your parents don't even want it!?"
"Oh, they know nothing of it, and I intend to keep it that way! I don't want to get into the stickiness that is the debate on keeping a reward that was not duly earned!" And I especially don't want to have to explain to them how I acquired twenty thousand dollars in cash literally overnight because I can't even begin to concoct an alibi that doesn't betray the fact that I now have personal ties to highly wanted criminals, a fact which this money is a physical reminder of and FOR GOD'S SAKES, MAN, JUST TAKE THE DARN MONEY, I DON'T WANT IT IN MY HOUSE ANYMORE. "Let this be a secret between you and I, Mr. Browne! Now please, if for no other reason than to satiate my curiosity, may I ask for a ballpark estimate of the sum of the money owed?"
Okay, Dear Reader, pragmatic question: what was preventing Hilary from simply lying?
"Uh… yeah, I'll admit, it's, uh… it's up there. Like, uh… not enough that we'd have to mortgage the house, but... enough that the idea of mortgaging the house, y'know, crosses your mind-"
"Please, Mr. Browne, let me give you the money for your bills!" the wolf boy begged as he grabbed the older bear's shirt by the upper-arm sleeves. "It destroys me to hear that you've come into such misfortune a-a-and- I'm young! I have plenty of time ahead of me to earn this money back in earnest! Please, let me do something good for you!"
Hilary was trying his hardest to make it look like this was a tough decision. "Well… if it means that much to you-"
"HI, DAD! HI, DOUBLE-D!"
Up by the corner at Peachtree Parkway, a bear a smidge larger than Hilary was waving the two of them over.
"Uh… hi, kiddo."
"Ed, what's all the commotion over here?" asked Double-D as he and Mr. Browne approached the main road.
"We're doing a lemonade stand for Kevin!"
But as they soon saw, the lemonade was almost an afterthought. While it was only a two-lane road, that was no problem because many of the small mom-and-pop shops along the street were closed on Sundays so the parking lane was mostly free for cars to pull over to see the spectacle. Above the street was a makeshift tightrope made of yarn, upon which a tiny fox was bouncing around while wearing a sandwich board; one side read "CHARITY LEMONADE STAND" while the other said "HELP KEVIN LAFFERTY". For those unfamiliar with the situation, there was a pantomime being played out at the side of the road, a big strong horse malicing a poor little koala with a plank of wood. And once that got their attention, there was a lemonade stand being manned by a bear, a bunny, and a bobcat, whose little structure held a placard further elaborating on what the plan to do with the money was - and letting people know they had a tip jar in case people wanted to donate but weren't necessarily in the mood for lemonade. And a great big grizzly bear, wearing a sandwich sign not unlike the fox's, was there to take drive-by donations and make lemonade deliveries for those who didn't care to leave their car - and to block traffic for those who would have been too heartless to stop otherwise.
"What… exactly... is going on here?" asked Double-D, who didn't have the luxury of being able to read the previous paragraph for an explanation.
"Hi, Double-D!" Nazz greeted, stepping away from the stand as Jimmy and Sarah helped customers. "So we were actually just gonna do a regular lemonade stand to raise money for Kevin's hospital bills, but then I invited Ed and Eddy to pitch in in case they had any ideas for making it more marketable, and… well, they did!"
Edd looked up at Eddy dancing around on the tightrope and having way more fun than you'd expect a cynic like him to have at a charity event benefiting his enemy.
"That… doesn't sound like him."
"And you know? I thought the same thing," the bobcat admitted. "But… I told them this could be their way of proving they're the bigger men. Maybe they're getting off on that, I don't know, but as long as they're doing good things… hey, who cares why they're doing it?"
"Hmph! It would be a bloody shame if that's what it will have taken to get those scoundrels to start caring about other people!" scoffed the rabbit; Jimmy's vocabulary had already been pretentious, but ever since he started reading Harry Potter it was just getting even weirder.
"Yeah, and you just know those dickheads don't regret anything they've done to deserve getting their asses kicked!" Sarah grumbled as the weasel she'd been serving walked off.
"Would you regret what you did if you got your ass kicked?" asked a husky voice behind her.
Sarah and Jimmy spun around to see her father staring straight down at them, looking displeased.
"Oh! Um… hi, Dad!" Sarah stammered. "Um-"
"So this is how you talk when the grown-ups aren't around?"
"Oh, please, Mr. Browne!" cried Jimmy, leaning out of his wheelchair to hug the bear's leg. "Please don't tell my mother and father that I used such obscenities as the 'B' word! They'll be ever so cross with me!"
Hill was quiet for a few moments as he tried to decipher what the hell kind of "B" word the bunny was referring to.
Meanwhile, Nazz decided to leave the three of them to their own discussion and turn back to the wolf. "I was wondering where you were if you weren't with Ed and Eddy."
"Ah, yes, I, I've heard that from several people now. No need to fear! Simply had to be away for a bit to prepare something, uh, personal!"
As you can imagine, that response elicited a screwed-up face from Nazz, but she went with it; besides, Edd could have just been nervous because he was talking to a pretty girl.
"Alright, well, uh… would you like to join us? We can use all the help we can get!"
"Oh, well… surely! I'd love- EDDY, you be careful up there!"
Up on the tightrope, the fox was demonstrating one of his few unique talents: balancing himself on his tongue.
Eddy hopped back up and landed effortlessly back on the piece of string. "Oh, hey, Double-D!" he said with a creepy enthusiasm not typically suited to him. He kept noodling around as he spoke. "Don't worry about it, I came up with a good marketing strategy, didn't I?" He jumped from his legs onto his arms and did a handstand. "If I wind up in the ER, they can just have another charity event for me! And besides, Ed's here to catch me, see?" He allowed his grip to slip and started teetering over. "HELP, ED, I'M FALLING!"
The bear perked up and looked toward where the fox was in freefall, and despite being a good few dozen feet away, he made a run for it. His sprint to save his friend was another reminder that despite brown bears being big bulky things… those dudes can run fast.
And he almost caught Eddy in time. Instead of beating him to the spot where he would have landed, it was a dead-heat draw, and Ed tackled Eddy mid-air and dragged him along the pavement for a few yards.
"Ed, you clumsy oaf, don't hurt your friends like that! We don't need you getting a criminal negligence charge!" Hilary hollered before turning to the wolf. "By the way, Eddward, mind if we, uh, finish up with what we were talking about before we forget?"
"Oh, um… sure!" Edd turned to Nazz, hoping he'd come across as less nervous when he got back. "I, uh, I'll return shortly, Nazz! I just need to attend to some business between, uh, myself and Ed's father!"
"O...kay," said the bobcat with an awkward wave as the wolf and the older bear walked off.
In case you were wondering, Hilary realized almost immediately after receiving the money that Edd had been lying about the science-writing contest: what crazy people would pay a kid this much money in cash? He had to imagine Double-D had been messing around in some illicit business when Ed and Eddy weren't around and now felt the need to dispose of this dirty money. Maybe he'd been paid by some filthy rich kids to provide them with some sort of chemical solution to dissolve the body of someone they killed, or taught a wannabe terrorist group how to make a bomb, or some nerdy science crime like that. But whatever it was, Hill didn't care. He was in the money.
And Double-D was happy to let him be. He would not have had any way to present that money to his parents without raising suspicion, he couldn't open up a bank account by himself yet, nor could he consult a brokerage firm to help him invest it, and what if he were to just keep it and spend it for himself? On what? Where would he keep it? How would he hide it? What was preventing Eddy from catching wind and stealing it for himself?
And speaking of stealing, he was deeply relieved to be freed of that reminder that the Merry Men's lawless tactics had again proven so effective while making the civility he was raised to believe in look foolish, wasteful, and cowardly. Hopefully helping out with this charity lemonade stand and trying to do good legally would take his mind off the fact that he had completely resigned to his fate and accepted that the bold and the brave would always outshine the well-behaved.
-IllI-
And why shouldn't Eddy have been ecstatic while busting his ass to make this lemonade stand as profitable as possible? After all, he was taking home one hundred percent of the profits.
In the abstract, the plan was downright facile: look like a team player who couldn't possibly be here just to sabotage the operation; create a diversion and sabotage the shit out of the operation; and cover his tracks so nobody can realize it was him. But how was he going to cover his tracks, and what kind of diversion would he stage? The nuts and bolts were proving a much more difficult challenge. In other words, all he had so far was:
Step 1: Give useful and genuine help to make the lemonade stand as successful as possible.
Step 2: [TBD]
Step 3: Profit.
And for what it was worth, Step 1 was going swimmingly. Seriously, the other neighborhood kids would have been lost without him. Their plan was just to set up a lemonade stand and wait for people to notice you? That's it!? Hopefully none of these kids were planning on going into marketing when they got to college.
No, Eddy understood the importance of advertising. Setting up a stand at the side of the street and expecting people to happen upon you only works when your only market is the same neighborhood kids you always see. No, with adults, you need to grab their attention, and then hold onto it like your tail depended on it. You do something like, say, dance like a maniac on a high-wire to catch the initial attention of passersby, preferably while in some way prominently displaying a sign informing them of your motive. Then you maintain their attention by showing rather than telling why they should give you their money (amid a dearth of resources, acting it out will suffice), and finish up by gently guiding them to the point where they can exchange money for your goods and services. These idiots seriously weren't even going to come up with any of that by themselves? Pfft, casuals.
Of course, it should be said that Eddy owed a great deal of today's success to Kevin. Eddy had never been able to expand his market beyond the cul-de-sac until now, because before he hadn't had a selling point more compelling than "give us your money because we want it." But adults were depressingly image-conscious and wanted to make it look like they cared about others when pshaw, everyone knows that nobody actually gives a shit about strangers; adults were suckers for charity, and thanks to Kevin providing Eddy with a legit charity case, the fox was finally able to tap into the grown-up demographic. Even his wunderkit brother wasn't able to successfully scam adults until he was in high school; would he have been jealous or proud that his little Pipsqueak had beaten him to that mark? Either way, Eddy was proud of himself.
...Okay, but seriously though, what the hell was he gonna do to create a diversion? The downside of having infinite possibilities was that you had to take a long time to process each and every one of them to figure out which of them would actually work.
And having that cocksucking wolf randomly show up just complicated things further. These other kids might not trust him as far as they could throw him - but he was a tiny dude and they could all probably throw him at least a few feet (barring Jimmy, but fuck Jimmy), and every once in a while Eddy could successfully tap into that scant trust they had that maybe, hopefully, finally, mercifully this would be the day that the fox wouldn't scam them for the sake of scamming them - and then he would scam them anyway because they had dared to trust him. But not Double-D. That skinny little shit couldn't throw a stick of butter over a line in the sand, so keeping with the metaphor, Edd couldn't trust Eddy at all if he couldn't even throw him, now could he? Double-D simply knew him too well; he was Eddy's friend because he knew better than to be his enemy. There was once a time when the fox could pull the proverbial wool over the wolf's eyes, but that was long ago, and Double-D was just too smart at this point to fall for a trick of Eddy's that he wasn't in on. Assuming Edd hadn't already figured out what Eddy was doing in the two minutes he'd been here before he fucked off, it probably wouldn't take him much longer to piece it together when he got back.
By the way, if you're curious: how was he getting the other kids to trust him on this particular day? Oh, he was one hundred percent leaning into the idea that he was in this to show his moral superiority to Kevin. He was also trying to convey that he did share in their disgust with what happened to that douchebag hyena, but that didn't sell quite as well, so when everyone assumed Eddy was just doing it as a form of one-upmanship, he owned it. Still, results were mixed.
"I don't trust that vulpine villain…" the wheelchair-bound bunny muttered to his gal pals as he glared up at the fox swinging himself around on the tightrope. "Surely he'd be not pure enough of heart to truly care about Kevin's plight without ulterior motives!"
The bobcat didn't care for that comment and gave Jimmy a look to convey that clearly. "I don't know where you're learning all these big words from at your age, but I don't know why you had to point out that he was a fox." (One has to wonder whether her sudden desire to defend the vulpine species was motivated by her recent sighting of a Mystery Porn Fox who had inspired her to take the day's initiative.)
Jimmy looked offended that Nazz was offended, and Sarah didn't look too pleased either.
"Hmph! I make a thousand valid points in those two sentences and you focus on the fact that I called him a vulpine villain?" the bunny huffed. "It's called alliteration, darling, and much like my vocabulary, I learned it from reading books and poetry - something that damnèd Eddy surely never does!"
"You still aren't explaining why you had to point out that he was a fox," Nazz replied, a disapproving eyebrow raised. "Do you not see the difference between calling somebody 'a jerk' and calling somebody 'a fox jerk'?"
Jimmy's defensive look remained steadfast. "Nazz, you're older than we are - must I educate you about the history between his people and mine?"
Sarah cut in: "What the heck's been up with you lately!?" she asked Nazz. "You've been defending Eddy and his idiot friends a lot these last few days! What, you get hit in the head too when they were beating up Kevin!?"
Ooh, nonononono. Sarah, that was some next-level bitchiness right there. And if she weren't younger than her (and also a grizzly bear), Nazz might just have slapped her for a comment like that. But instead, Nazz just let her face get even more livid and tried to say as calmly as possible:
"...You know what?" she seethed. "...Maybe I am being too hard on you two. You're still younger kids, aren't you?"
"Aw, don't talk to us like we're a bunch of babies!" Sarah growled.
"I didn't bother expanding the breadth of my vocabulary just to be treated like a toddler!" added Jimmy.
"Well clearly you two don't seem to be mature enough to realize that you don't say things like 'did you get brain damage when they beat your boyfriend into a coma' or 'it's okay for me to hate an entire species because of history'! One day soon, you two are gonna be old enough that you won't be able to get away with saying extremely rude and honestly racist things like that! And I'm not going to be there to defend you - and I wouldn't want to if I was! Because you know what? So what!? So what if he is doing this to get off on the idea of lording over Kevin!? What if you're actually right and Eddy is just such an asshole that the only way he'd ever do good things is with a selfish motive? - At least he's doing them! At least we found the motivation to make him be a good person when apparently nothing else would work! Is that not good enough for you? Would you rather he be doing no good at all? Meanwhile, you two are just adding a bunch of negativity to what's supposed to be a positive action we're doing here!"
Sarah's eyes narrowed. "You've changed."
Nazz just smiled. "I grew up. And now, I'll admit… I'm getting a little impatient waiting for you to join me here."
The bear and the bunny still looked completely unapologetic. They glanced at each other to nonverbally reassure themselves that the bobcat was speaking madness.
"This is why we must make haste with the children's rights movement!" lamented Jimmy. "This seems to me still further proof that one only gets more absurd in their beliefs as they grow older, their minds polluted by the corruption and ugliness of the world! The earth would truly be a better place were it run by the youth!"
"Aw, the world would be a better place if the Kids Next Door were real," grumbled Sarah.
Funny that she should bring up a cartoon about an underground vigilante group led by a British guy despite operating in the United States, because as Sarah said that, Nazz dismissed her from her attention and turned to look up at the fox currently doing jumping jacks on the string of yarn above the street, and she had to agree with one thing: it was rather curious that he'd had this sudden about-face. She had to wonder what - or who - had inspired him to suddenly start giving a damn.
"And by the way? You two have to admit, we wouldn't be making as much money as we are if not for his ideas."
Little did she know, they'd both been inspired by the same fox - in completely different ways, of course.
"Oh, put a sock in it," said Sarah.
There was a lull in the traffic, and with nobody to see them, the performers all mellowed out to conserve their energy.
"Hehe! That tickles, Plank!" the koala giggled before realizing that the horse had trailed off with beating him around the head with his wooden pal. "Aw, why'd ya stop, Rolf?"
"Rolf sees no spectators to witness the make-believe battery of the false Kevin!" said the ESL kid, looking around the street. "Shall Rolf continue to simulate injury to the round-headed Jonny the Wood Boy?"
"Nah, take five, Quickdraw," said Eddy from up on high. "I think we've earned a breather." And he was about to climb down before his bear friend decided to have an idea.
"Wait!" said Ed. "I know how we can get more customers, Eddy!" He ran over to one of the light posts holding the string of yarn, much to everyone's confusion.
"Ed!" hollered his sister. "You can't just pull customers out of thin air, ya dingus!"
"That's why we must make them see us, Baby Sister!" An oddly coherent thought from Ed, but it didn't line up with the way he was shimmying up the light post, which started bending under his weight as he ascended.
"Um, Ed!?" Eddy yelped, hanging on to the rope as it went slack for a moment - before it regained all its tension when Ed stepped into it. "What're ya doing!?"
Down below, the other kids murmured similar questions.
"It'll be just like in that cartoon!" the bear bellowed as he lurched forward.
"What freaking cartoon!?" the fox shrieked. (Ed never did clarify, but we're thinking he might have meant those old Looney Tunes Three Bears shorts, the ones with the abusive father with dwarfism, the dissociative mother who seemed to be an alcoholic, and the baby who was either a gigantic child or a mentally handicapped adult. Sounds about right.)
And sure enough, it was following the script as the yarn sagged almost all the way to the surface of the street. "I am as light as a feather, Eddy!"
"You're as heavy as a house!" Eddy screamed as he held on to the yarn for dear life. Why didn't he just let go and hop off since he was basically on the ground already? Well you see, Dear Reader, Eddy simply didn't want to lose; in retrospect, it was a poor decision to live and die by his pride. "Ed, get off the fucking rope, you're gonna break it!"
"Silly Eddy! Ed is not stupid!" the bruin cooed. "That was my plan all along!"
Ed stepped off, and Eddy went up.
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaa…!" The little fox's screams faded into the sky as he flew higher and higher into the atmosphere, the silence only being broken by the jingling ringing of the yarn rope as it tautened again.
"...Oh my God, Ed…" Nazz mumbled. Everyone else was still too stunned to speak.
"Eddy will be our flare for everyone to see so they'll come and buy our yummy lemonade!" Ed proudly declared as he looked down at the other kids. Again, Ed wasn't an imbecile, there was a decent groundwork for an idea in there, he'd just jumped to an insane conclusion. Hey, still better than if Eddy had tried to drum up business that way, he'd probably have orchestrated a loud and fiery car accident or something.
"Ed, if we have to spend all of our money on Eddy's hospital bills, we won't have any left over for Kevin!" his sister growled.
"Aw, Eddy will be okay!" Ed guffawed confidently.
Jimmy spoke up: "How on earth can you be so sure of -!?"
"Shoosh!" Ed shushed, a finger to his lips. "Ed smells a fox rapidly APPROACHING ORBIT!"
He pointed to the sky and they looked. Bears did indeed low-key have better senses of smell than the canine cousinhood.
"...aaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!" So it seems that Eddy had gone up and down so quickly that the Coriolis effect didn't even apply to him. He zeroed in on almost the exact same spot - which is to say, on the tightrope two stories above the street. There was a blur, and before anybody knew it, Eddy was hanging upside down from the string of yarn, his tail tied in a knot around the wire.
"Heh-loh!" was all Ed said, greeting his friend with his paws and arms in the air.
The fox panted for a moment, catching his breath after his brief high-G-force excursion through a place with very little oxygen. "I'm okay," Eddy insisted, for his image if for nothing else. "...Except for the whiplash…"
Aw, Eddy didn't have whiplash and he knew it. He hadn't gotten whiplash either of the last two times he and his friends had fallen from the edge of outer space and he knew he didn't have it now. (Felix Baumgartner, eat your heart out.)
"Good Lord, what just happened here!?" screeched a voice.
"Our first customer!" Ed hollered with a smile, though it quickly dissolved. "Oh, no, it is just Double-D."
The wolf slowed from a run to a trot and caught his own breath. "Ed!" he panted. "What… on EARTH… made you think… that was… a GOOD DECISION!?"
Ed didn't have much of a chance to reply before the group all jumped at the sound of a police siren.
"Our first customer!" Ed hollered with a smile.
"What the hell is going on here!? What the fuck are you doing hanging on a yarn wire across the street!?" demanded a caribou stepping out of the squad car. He saw the signs on the lemonade stand as well as the one upside-down Eddy was still wearing. "What is this? A youth police protest!? Oh, you fuckin' kids think you're so grown-up and strong and smart that you don't need cops and you can tell them to fuck off!? I hope you kids made enough money with your little lemonade stand - which you probably don't have a fucking permit for - because I'm giving every single one of you a ticket for inciting a riot! And if any of you show even one ounce of insubordination, you'll be spending the night in -!"
Something must have clicked in this head, because he stopped in his tracks when he glanced again at the fox hanging from the wire, then the big hulking bear, and then the wolf just for good measure. This officer wasn't with the county, he was just Peach Creek municipal, so while he wasn't on the hunt for an infamous fox and bear, he knew this suburb, and he knew about this fox, bear, and wolf who had a penchant for defying the laws of physics and making the fabric of reality disintegrate wherever they went.
"...Oh, fuck this," the caribou murmured to himself as he slowly walked, then galloped back to his cruiser upon realizing just what forces of nature he was dealing with. "Fuck this, I'm outta here." He shut the door, started the engine, threw her in reverse, did a three-point turn and peeled out of there, having decided that he didn't want to wind up in the mesosphere today.
The kids all watched him drive off, each waiting for their heart rate to go down after experiencing the fear and anger of having a pissed-off cop yelling at them (barring Rolf, who had barely comprehended half of what the caribou had said), and just in time for them to realize that several other people, local civilian residents coming from all directions, were making their way over on foot to see what all the commotion was about.
"Our first customer!" Ed hollered with a smile.
"Uh, Ed?" Eddy piped in sardonically. "Ya realize we've had a lot of customers before this, right?"
And so the second wave of buyers and donors went off quite nicely. And although the spectacle of the fox on the tightrope had to be cancelled, there was still a sight to be seen in Double-D struggling to untangle Eddy's tail. He couldn't reach with a stepladder, he couldn't reach while sitting on Ed's shoulders, and sitting on Ed's shoulders while the bear was himself standing on the stepladder was just too wobbly for his liking. So with desperate times calling for desperate measures, Edd went and retrieved a long pair of hedge trimmers to snap the rope. The wolf had instructed the bear to catch the fox on his way down, only for Edd to feel very foolish indeed when he began to admonish Ed for not catching Eddy a dozen feet away before realizing it was Ed's shoulders he was sitting upon. Double-D just wasn't in a good frame of mind.
Ed picked Eddy up and carried him to the curb, catching the eye of all the motorists and pedestrians waiting in line for lemonade. Edd got to work untying Eddy's sweeper.
"How's it feel knowing ya just fucked me up more than Ed almost getting me sucked into the engine of a 747?" Eddy grumbled through the scratched-up snout he'd landed on.
"I apologize, Eddy, but you must concede that there wasn't quite an easy solution for that dilemma," Double-D grumbled back, at once frustrated by Eddy's attitude while still shaken by yet another big, angry, armed cop yelling at him. "Nice to see you again, too. Have I missed much?"
Eddy put on a smirk. "Nope absolutely nothing. Just chilling, nothing to write home about!"
Double-D looked skeptical. "Ah, so you've not heard word from your new chums yet? They've made no decision whether you're cool enough to play with them?"
Eddy just kept smirking. "I have no idea what you're talking about."
The wolf was unamused. "Perhaps I should have expected nothing less from two men who do not hold jobs but to procrastinate as long as possible before making an important decision, such as whether to allow a minor to join them in the criminal lifestyle."
"Shhhh!" Eddy hushed as he put a paw on Edd's maw. "Don't say that so loud when you fucking idiot!" Thankfully the other kids didn't seem to notice.
Double-D smacked the fox's hand away. "This is no way to treat somebody who's liberating you from your own bad decisions and their physical consequences!" Edd forced himself to be a good man and keep working to unknot Eddy's tail. "And it is quite at odds with how you otherwise seem to have embraced a much more charitable spirit in my absence!"
"Whaddya talking about?" Eddy asked with the smile that his brother had made famous. "I've always been like this, wanting to help people! Nice to see that you finally got around to noticing."
"Well assisting with a benefit event for Kevin of all people, while probably the morally correct and noble decision, is an action that even I would find myself struggling to bring myself to do."
"I love how you ain't even trying to hide the fact that you think you're a better person than me."
"But am I wrong, Eddy?" Double-D paused with his relief efforts to look the fox straight in the eye. "What on Earth could ever have brought you to the decision that you would consciously, voluntarily choose to help Kevin? Especially when but a few days ago it was all I could do to stop you from loudly celebrating his misfortune!"
Eddy shrugged, trying his hardest to look cool as a cucumber. "What can I say? I wanna show all these other idiots that I'm a better person than him!"
Edd gasped in such a way that you think he was trying to specifically be as dramatic as possible; this time, all the other kids did notice, but they were all too busy with their tasks to pay him any heed.
"You… you selfish, sick, evil little… bastard!"
Eddy was as surprised as he was confused. "Really? The first swear word you're ever gonna say is bastard? That's such a lame word to say, it's not even fun! I'm pretty sure you can say that word on television!"
Double-D was not shaken by this remark. "As wicked and wayward as I believe those men to be, I would never deny that they at least seem to have good intentions! But you have learned nothing from their ways! You're only going along with the veneer of caring about what happened to Kevin in order to make everybody share in your ego trip!"
"...And?" asked Eddy. "Go tell anybody here that I said that. They already know. I'm not gonna be dishonest with them! And they all agree - more or less - that that's okay, because I'm still doing it, ain't I!? ...YEOW!"
Eddy yelped in pain as the wolf violently pulled his thick tail out of the tight loop of yarn. "Once again, I seem to be the only person on this block with a functioning moral compass! No, Eddy, I care not what all these other delinquents say, it is not okay to do such supposedly good things for purely twisted self-serving reasons!"
The fox was done smirking. "You know how everyone on this street thinks you're really stuck up your own ass with how much of a goody-two-shoes brainiac you think you are, right? Do you really think a good person would say everyone is an idiot except for them? Would a good person really say that if everyone disagrees with them on something, they wouldn't even think there's a chance that maybe they're the one who's wrong? You really think that?"
The wolf took a deep breath. "Well… let's put it this way: if there were a village of twenty people in Germany in 1940, and nineteen of them thought -"
"Jesus Fucking Christ, Double-D, you go to draw a comparison and you go straight to the freaking Holocaust!?"
"I feel that I have to!" the wolf shot back. "You don't seem to be grasping how ludicrous it sounds to suggest that the majority is always right on principle!"
"I'm not saying the majority is always right, fuckass, I'm saying you're not even considering that might be because you're just that fucking full of yourself! Hey, I don't think you're getting the wrong idea from me because you're stupid, I think you're choosing the stupidest possible meaning of everything I'm saying because you think I really am that-!"
"Hey guys?" Nazz asked gently from the lemonade stand. "Whatever you guys are arguing about… could you be quieter about it? I just don't wanna scare the customers."
Edd and Eddy turned back to face one another and just glared in silence for a few moments. Then the fox realized he may have had a talking point he'd been forgetting to use.
"Plus you're forgetting the part where I just gave Ed's family a bunch of the money my brother gifted me."
Right on cue, Double-D's jaw dropped. "You… what!?"
The fox was smirking again. "I mean, you heard the stupid mauler basically Godzilla'd the therapist's office, right? Parents are on the hook for thousands. So they make a deal with my parents to have him help remodel my brother's room to earn some dough, we do some digging, and whaddya know? We find a goldmine. And since I'm not a greedy little boy driven by getting rich anymore…" He closed his eyes and chuckled. "...I let him have it."
Edd audibly gulped. "How… how much?"
"Couple thou, no biggie." Eddy almost seemed to scoff at the idea that it was indeed a biggie.
Oh. Okay, then. Perhaps this is why Mr. Browne was so hesitant to accept his money. Gee… thousands!?
"Oh, Ed?" Double-D beckoned.
"Yes, Double-D?" Ed answered from the street where he was handing a seal family in a handicap-accessible Dodge Grand Caravan a couple cups of lemonade.
"Uh, Double-D?" Eddy asked, suddenly timid as he realized how this could backfire if word got out. "Uh, maybe don't -!?"
"Could you come over here for a quick moment?" Edd asked gently. "I'd like to ask you something about what you and Eddy were doing before I arrived here."
Eddy was relieved; okay, Sock-Head was smart enough not to loudly tell everyone that he'd had access to a substantial sum of money and gave none of it to Kevin.
The bear hustled over to where the wolf and the fox were sitting on the ground, along the way loudly telling everyone:
"Oh yeah, it was fun! We were throwing away Eddy's brother's stuff and then we broke the bricks over the window and there was a bunch of money in there and Eddy let me have it so Ed's mom and dad won't be as mad at Ed for breaking the evil doctor's office!"
...FUCK.
All the other kids' eyes were quickly upon the brother of Eddy's Brother. Even a few of the customers were staring.
"You had money to burn and you donated none of it to the cause you're claiming to help!?" accused Jimmy as dramatically as possible. "I warned you, Nazz, that he was a charlatan!"
"Rolf agrees!" Rolf agreed. "This seems to the son of a shepherd to be a conflict of interest!"
"He just wanted Plank to beat me up!" tossed in Jonny 2x4.
"Eddy…" Nazz started, looking more hurt than offended. "Is that… true?"
The little fox froze as he had no idea what to say. Sure, it sounded shitty when put that way, but were these people forgetting that he still gave all that money away to help a friend?
But then, calmness and rationality came from - shock of all shockers - Sarah of all people. (I know, right!?)
"Yeah, he's telling the truth," she grumbled. "Ed trashed a doctor's office and now our parents gotta pay up. We really do got bills to pay - not as big as Kevin's, but we've got bills."
Now the other kids were starting to see Eddy's actions as more charitable, but that still left the question of why he shared none with Kevin's cause.
"And he just… gave your parents a bunch of money he found?" asked the bobcat.
The bear girl shrugged. "I dunno anything about that. But I dunno if Ed would have a reason to make it up, either."
And Ed came in to save the day: "It's true, Baby Sister! He said he'd give me the money if I threw all of Eddy's brother's garbage out, Eddy would let me have all the cash we found! Then we were throwing away Eddy's brother's broken racecar and that's when Nazz asked us to help so we did and then I gave my dad the money!"
Oh, bless you, Ed. Being too stupid to feel anxiety in a moment like this, he'd bailed Eddy out. And it wasn't even a lie, it was just something Eddy had forgotten in his panic.
"Yeah, that's right!" Eddy exclaimed. "I already willed away the money before I even knew you guys were doing this! I couldn't renege on my agreement, could I!?"
Most of the other kids' expressions lightened, and although none of them said anything, it was clear they were agreeing: no, no he could not have done that, at least not without looking like a jerk.
"Wow, that's… actually really nice of you, Eddy," said Nazz.
"Rolf is also pleasantly surprised that Money-Hungry Ed-boy willfully parted with currency rather than hoarding it like a monkey with bananas!"
"Yeah, I guess my family ain't gonna be as poor as we woulda been without him now…" Sarah muttered, nodding begrudgingly.
But then there was that bitch motherfucker Jimmy…
"So what if you'd already committed that money to another cause!? What was preventing you from asking Ed and Sarah's mother and father for a mere morsel of it back to give to arguably a more pressing concern!? Surely they would have understood -!"
"Jimmy, it really seems like you're going out of your way to hate on Eddy today!" Nazz barked at the bunny. "What's going to be his motivation to get better and stop being a jerk if you're just gonna tell yourself that all he can ever be is a jerk!? Or is that just how rabbits regard foxes?"
Eddy smirked in the background while Jimmy blushed under his fur. (Yeah, that's right, shut the fuck up Jimmy, you pretentious little shit, nobody likes you.)
The bobcat glanced back at Eddy to make sure he wasn't too hurt by the turn in the conversation, then inspected the small wooden box they were keeping their profits in - and the much larger backpack they were keeping the money in when the small wooden box overflowed, which had happened several times already.
"Besides," said Nazz, "thanks to Eddy's help, it looks like we're doing pretty good by the… by the looks of it…"
"How good?" Eddy asked.
Nazz didn't want to say anything too loudly in front of the customers lest it sound like they'd already made enough money, so she waved him - and everybody else - over to where she added the current sum in the box to the backpack. They all took a peak in.
...Whoa, mama. That backpack was gonna get hard to carry soon. Nelly.
Screw his brother's extensive smut collection, it wasn't too long ago that the sight of this much money would have made Eddy pop a legit boner. But no, not today. He had found the self-discipline to work toward what he now realized was a greater and more noble goal. This money was to be a means to an end. This wasn't for who he was; this was for who he'd become.
And seeing it all in one place got the gears turning in his head that he had to hurry up and figure out a plan to acquire it for that end. It wasn't getting too late, but they'd been out there a few hours and they could conceivably wrap up the operation any time now; he hadn't put in all this hard work to make this a successful venture just to not be able to reap the rewards of what he'd sewn.
"So - sorry, I'm just confused," Nazz began, "you just… found some of your brother's money laying around?"
"Uh, y-yeah!" Eddy stammered at the pretty girl. "Just, uh… sheer dumb luck, heh heh…"
The bobcat returned a nervous chuckle of her own. "Well… I don't remember too much about your brother, but… I remember he was a crafty businessman! Hey… maybe you channeled some of his skills when you found his stuff! You really did help us out a lot today, Eddy… I appreciate it. We appreciate it."
She smiled softly as the other kids gave him smiles that were… less genuine, but smiles all the same.
"Gee, um… thanks, Nazz." Now his cheeks were burning.
"Hey!" chuckled the koala. "Get a room!" Everyone ignored Jonny as he kept chuckling; evidently he'd just heard that line for the first time recently and had fallen in love with it.
"Well, hey, uh…" Nazz started again, "I might not know him too well, but… I think your brother would be proud of you! Um…" - another nervous chuckle - "... I'm sorry, what was your brother's actual name again? I only know him as… well, your brother! Was it Tim? I feel like it was something like Tim. Or… Chris or Sid or Rich or something like that?"
And maybe Nick would have been proud of him. What a twist of irony it would have been if an act of charity of all things would have been what finally made Big Bro proud of his little Pipsqueak. But his brother wasn't the one whose approval Eddy was seeking right now; it was two individuals, actually.
Checking in on our other characters, Sarah, Jimmy, Jonny and Rolf had all tuned out of this conversation and gotten back to their schtick, Ed had zoned way out as per usual, and Double-D… man, he was panicking all over again. Eddy gets public recognition for his good deeds and philanthropy… and these people believe him!? Hey, Edd had just given twenty thousand freaking dollars to Ed's family - where was his praise and recognition!? Oh yes, that's right, he couldn't tell anybody about it because the money was contraband and the amount so great that he really wouldn't have had an excuse to ask for some of it back to give towards Kevin's needs - and asking for it back was something the wolf was simply too cowardly to do. So the fox who's specifically trying to emulate highly wanted criminals succeeds and the poor boy trying to play by the rules gets screwed over again. This life just wasn't fair. And he could swear on a science textbook that it almost seemed like the Merry Men had somehow orchestrated this moment of frustration, embarrassment, and existential fear by gifting him that backpack full of blood money in the first place. Does that sound completely absurd? Exactly.
"By the way, how you feeling?" Nazz asked Eddy.
"Oh, I'll be just fine!" squeaked Double-D, to everyone's confusion.
"Um… that's good to hear," said the bobcat, trying her best to be polite. Eddy just rolled his eyes.
"I was a bit rattled by that malicious, miserable officer of the law, I do admit, but, ahem, nothing I can't handle! Heh, heh…"
Nazz tried not to make a funny face. "Hey, that's… that's great!"
"And where on earth did he get the idea that this measly gathering of youths constituted a reckless and rebellious protest against the police!? I mean… heh, what kind of protest could we even stage that would solve Kevin's crisis now!?"
Now Nazz made a funny face. "Well… maybe he was thinking of yesterday's protest?"
"Yesterday's protest?" Recall that Edd had never actually been informed of the news since his parents hadn't heard it either, having been out of town all day yesterday and not in any rush to catch up with the news this morning.
"Yeah, there was a pretty big protest downtown yesterday, people demanding the cops who, uh… who hurt Kevin… people were demanding they be arrested on the spot."
A protest, huh? Y'know, Double-D didn't actually know how his parents expected him to feel about protests. Not to suggest that he still felt beholden to the values they forced upon him, but… for his own introspection and self-reflection, how would he have been expected to feel about protests in their presence? He didn't exactly know. If he had to make an educated guess… it would probably be something along the lines of "peaceful protests like Gandhi and Dr. King = good, rowdy and reckless riots = bad." A fairly mainstream opinion. But which one was yesterday's?
"Well, I certainly hope it was civil on nature," said Double-D, "and that nobody got injured or incarcerated for standing up for a good cause!"
The bobcat still looked like she was currently enduring the single most awkward moment of her life. "I mean… I actually don't know one way or another how messy it got. I heard some people might have gotten arrested, but… I think it went mostly smoothly. And hey, it worked! That's what's important, right?"
Double-D had not only not been expecting that, but on no conscious or subconscious level of his brain did he even realize that "it having worked" was an option.
"It… worked!?"
Nazz, on the other hand, hadn't realized it was an option that intelligent and worldly Double-D could have possibly been that out-of-the-loop. "You didn't hear? Dude… they listened! They arrested them! Those two cops are in jail now!"
Edd blinked. "...They… arrested him?"
Okay, Nazz was starting to find this all rather pathetic. "Uh… yeah, Double-D! Well, I mean… I think it might have just the one guy who actually, you know, physically caught them, but -"
"One guy?"
This was so very pathetic. "Yeah, um… what's he officially? The sheriff or… or the chief of police? Or is he both? If you know who I'm talking about, it was him."
"...And when did this happen?"
"...Yesterday."
"What time of day?"
Nazz chuckled awkwardly, refusing to believe she had to spell this all out for him. "I dunno, like… heh… around dinnertime is when I heard it? From my mom, and she just heard it right when she told me."
Oh, dear. Oh dear oh dear oh dear oh dear oh dear. This was not good; in fact, this was bad. Let us summarize, Dear Reader, all the ways the world was piling on to remind him that he was an ineffective little dweeb and that this world truly belonged to those who did not bother with the rules like he did:
Two criminal masterminds magically conjure twenty grand in cold hard cash and somehow remotely set him up to embarrass himself, reaffirming their superiority. That was bad.
A sociopathic teenager is somehow inspired by these actual, literal criminals to turn a new leaf, managing to tangibly and greatly help a half-dozen of his neighbors in a single day, and for the most part everyone seems to welcome this new version of him and praises him for his progress. That was bad.
An objectively shitty cop swings by and berates and threatens literal children for committing a victimless crime (which come to think of it shouldn't even have counted as a crime), further proving that to blindly trust law and order in modern American society would inevitably put people like this in positions of power and so-called moral authority - ergo, the law was oftentimes bad. And that was bad.
Meanwhile, ANOTHER shitty cop to whom he was blood related and whom had committed vast abuses of power within his own house goes ahead and does something objectively good (perhaps, for all Edd knew, also out of spite for him), and despite being a terrible person he still accomplished far more good for the world than Double-D had in the past couple days while he was busy reading bizarre obscure fanfiction and feeling sorry for himself. THAT was BAD.
The wolf was catatonic for a time as he processed how his life had led to this moment of realizing that he'd accomplished nothing in life but acting as a pawn for authority figures and so-called friends who wanted him to be nothing more than a follower who would only accomplish what they wanted him to accomplish.
And while he was briefly dead to the world, Nazz turned back to the fox and repeated her earlier question. "So Eddy, you feeling okay after that nasty fall? And, uh… delayed landing?"
But Eddy looked like he had also zoned out for a moment there, but he snapped back into the present. "Oh! Yeah, um… hey, wouldn't be polite to complain, right!? But, uh, honestly, head's kinda throbbing just a smidge… you mind if I run home and get an ice pack?"
The bobcat looked distraught that her entrepreneurial savior had suffered such a painful fate, and she was not going to deny him the opportunity to indulge in some comfort to make up for it. "Oh, of course, Eddy, by all means! And hey, if it hurts too much to come back, don't worry about it, you've already helped -"
"Aw, nah, don't worry, I'll be back!" he declared as he started off down Grove Street toward where it would become the Rethink Avenue cul-de-sac. And so he would be back. Because he now had an idea.
Tell me, Dear Reader: did you notice how even though all the kids gave Ed their furious attention when he outed Eddy for giving him money, they still kept an eye on their business, but when Double-D was having his silly little self-identity panic attack, Nazz - who was not angry with the wolf, but worried for him - completely disregarded the lemonade stand that she cared so much about? Because Eddy certainly did.
-IllI-
It was hard to tell when exactly Double-D snapped out of his catatonia, because whenever he did, he did so by instead slipping into a state of quietly, awkwardly standing around which wasn't much different than before. He wanted to help with the lemonade stand, but while he had plenty of skills, none of them stood out as being immediately helpful to this endeavor.
Eventually he forced himself to be at least a little bit more proactive about participating; rather than just smiling at customers, he'd wave and say hello and thank you like a greeter at a big-box store. Not an invaluable asset to the team, but the others could appreciate his presence and effort and Edd himself felt a little less bad about being so terribly useless. And the poor pup was so inwardly focused on atoning for his uselessness that when the fox came back with an "ice pack" that was curiously completely liquid and had a piece of duct tape on it, it didn't even cross Double-D's mind to question whether this was a telltale sign of another nefarious scheme.
"Hey, Eddy!" Nazz greeted upon his return. "You feeling better?"
"Aw, yeah, feelin' great, Nazz!" Eddy answered, almost distressingly chipper. "Hey, question though: Ed had a break yet?"
The bobcat and the wolf both glanced over at the bear in the street, who was bent over to deliver drinks to a raccoon in a downsized PT Cruiser.
"Oh! You know what? I don't think he has!" Nazz remarked before glancing over at Edd with a sweet expression. "Double-D, would you mind doing drink-running for a few minutes so Ed can have a rest?"
"Oh, um… sure I can!" Edd, of course, was far too gentlemanly - and too non-confrontational - to ever tell a lady no.
"By the way," asked the fox as the wolf scampered off, would it be cutting too much into our profits if I let the guy have a glass of lemonade?"
"Oh, no, don't worry about it!" the bobcat insisted, shaking her paws dismissively. "At this point, he's earned one! And you know what? Take one for yourself, too!" She handed him a pair of cups without waiting for him to verbally accept them.
But accept them he did. "Thanks, Nazz," he said (trying to sound cool as he did) before walking off and gesturing his head for Ed to come with him. "Hey, Monobrow! Let's take five, huh?"
"Sure, Eddy!" the bear beamed. "Can Ed have some of the yummy lemonade?"
Ed reached down to grab a cup, but Eddy yanked it out of his grasp. "Hey, chill out there, Lumpy! Let me help you out a little, make sure you get the most out of recharging your batteries…"
"Okay, Eddy!"
"By the way…" Eddy began as he sat down on the curb, putting the cups and the squishy ice pack down beside him. He glanced down toward the corner; they were around the side of the building now, and as Eddy could hardly make out what anybody at the front was saying, surely he and Ed were out of earshot of any of them. "We've been talking so much about me and my brother and Kevin and our new friends Roger and Mini-John… we ain't had the chance to talk about you! So tell me, how's Ed doing? Seen any good monster movies lately?"
Naturally, Ed got excited about this. "Ooh, ooh! Eddy, you have to see Draculenstein 3: Promethean Vampire in tha Hood, it's so good, Eddy, I promise-!"
"Shhhh! Ya don't wanna distract the business at the stand, do ya?" Crap, the cups were already full, so there wasn't much volume for adding his secret elixir. You know what? He could probably siphon it into his ice pack. Ed could figure out a way to drink from it.
"What're you doing with the lemonade, Eddy?" Ed asked as the fox gently peeled the duct tape off the thick plastic pouch.
"You've been sweating in the sun all day, Big Guy. Here's some Gatorade to help you bounce back!" Nah, fam, it was Red Bull. "You might not think you need it now, but what if there were some actual monsters who should just so happen to show up and crash our party? Wouldn't you wanna be fully energized so you could fight them off?"
"Oh, of course, Eddy!"
"So tell me, Ed…" said Eddy as he held the top of the bag up by the piece of tape, trying to gently pour the lemonade into the small puncture hole but inevitably missing and spilling all over the bag. "... you ever stop to think about how you would fight a bunch of monsters?"
"...Uhhh-"
"Because remember, not all monsters are the same! Even when there's a bunch of them who're the same species, they all have their unique strengths and weaknesses! Ya gotta assess 'em as individuals if you're gonna succeed in beating 'em!" Christ, it's a good thing Nazz gave him two cups, because ninety percent of the lemonade wasn't making its way into the ice bag.
"...I have never thought of that, Eddy!" The bear honestly sounded concerned, realizing that he had been woefully unprepared for his life's goal.
"And that's alright, Grizzly Adams, at least you're thinking about it now, right?" Onto the second cup; heavens, this was getting sticky. "Hey, I'll help you out. Here's a piece of advice I heard from my brother when he had to fight a big huge monster."
"Your brother had to fight a monster!?" Ed was grinning ear to ear.
"Hell yeah, Ed! A big, powerful, thought-to-be-invincible monster called the, uh… the, uh, Irs! And the Irs was gonna beat my brother up really, really bad if he didn't cough up all his hard-earned cash! But he did it! My brother beat the Irs! In fact, he beat the Irs so bad that the Irs was butthurt and wanted a rematch the next year! And my bro agreed… and beat him again! And then the Irs wanted a rematch, again! And let's just say my brother's been on a hot streak of defeating the Irs every single year since he was twelve!"
Ed gasped, paws to his mouth. "Your brother beat the Irs when he was younger than us!? Your brother is so cool, Eddy!"
"My brother is the coolest, Ed. If only you or I should ever be so lucky. But you wanna know how he did it?"
"Tell me, Eddy, tell me!" The bear was flailing his arms and hopping up and down in anticipation.
"Here was his foolproof strategy, Lumpy: fight the monster away from home."
"...Away from home?"
"By that I mean this, Ed: fight him so that you're… drawing the monster away from your home. You gonna punch him? Punch him away from your home. You gonna run and make him chase you? Run away from your house and your neighborhood. Basically, get the monster - or monsters - as far away from your home as possible! That way, even if they get you, they can't get everything and everyone you love while they're at it!"
The bruin looked like his mind had just been quite literally blown. "Whoa…. that's great advice, Mr. Eddy's Brother!"
"Yup! That's why you never saw him fight the Irs even while he was living here, Ed! He had the smarts to take that shit away from here so his baby brother wasn't in any danger!"
Okay, at this point the second cup was depleted and Eddy's solution was still eighty-five percent Red Bull, but… honestly, did Ed even need to have any lemonade? The extra sugar could have helped, but the taurine should have done its job well enough. It was a shame Eddy didn't have any more of their lemon-flavored En-O-Gee Drink from two years back, a concoction so full of sugar that it literally had Double-D bouncing off the walls, because that would have been a nice throwback. But in a pinch, a dose of cattle cum would do.
"Alright, Ed, drink this," the fox instructed as he handed the bear the bag. "Careful now! Don't spill!"
Just as forecast, Ed plugged the whole thing down without protest before making a comment. "It tastes sour, Eddy!"
"Aw, that's just the plastic it was in!" Eddy said with a handwave. And now, to wait.
"...My tummy hurts, Eddy."
Well, that didn't take long.
"Just take your mind off it, Ed," Eddy said, patting the bear's shoulders when he leaned over to clench his gut. "Just think: what if there was some monster causing you all that pain and discomfort, and you could beat his ass to get him to stop? How would ya do it, Ed? How'd ya?"
Eddy looked into his friend's eyes. They were quickly losing focus. Therefore it was time for Eddy to start focusing.
"Let's pretend the monster was the size and shape of me, huh?" the fox proposed with a sly smile. "What would you do? You wanna demonstrate? I can handle it. Not my first rodeo." This was gonna hurt like a son of a bitch, but it was all a sacrifice Eddy was willing to make.
Now you may be wondering: what was going on in Ed's head? Well, ask yourself: what would you be thinking if suddenly instead of your little vulpine friend, there stood a toothy-grinned gremlin standing in his place, locking eyes with you as if to egg you on to do something to him before he ruins your life.
"C'mon, Ed!" urged the gremlin, still smiling. "Fight 'em away from your home!"
Well, your home is to the left; best fight him to the right.
Back at the lemonade stand, staff and patrons alike were stopped in their tracks at the sound of a boy screaming, turning their heads just in time to see a small fox crash into the cement square of sidewalk at the street corner, even sort of sliding along as he came in from a from a low angle, leaving a long divot in the concrete, twice the length of his body and deep enough for him to disappear into.
"Okay… I'm actually hurt now…" Eddy could be heard groaning from his crater.
And then around the corner came the monster-hunting grizzly, looking wild-eyed and willing to start a fight.
"Did you just do that!?" shrieked the bobcat.
"Sarah, what on Earth's gotten into your brother this time!?" demanded the rabbit.
"Rolf does not enjoy the malevolent look on the chicken-loving Ed-boy's face!" remarked the horse.
"Gnarly landing, Eddy!" giggled the koala.
"Ed, what the heck are you doin' now!?" growled the bear's baby sister.
"Ed… are you alright?" squeaked his wolf friend.
But the bear saw no bobcat, no bunny, no horse, no koala, and certainly not any creature he'd recognize as a blood sibling nor any wolf he'd know as a friend. All he saw were a quintet of horrible monsters, with a gaggle of still more monsters gathered in the street to watch.
His large-mammal instincts instructed him to focus first on the physically biggest threat; that was the ogre with the weird fucked-up hand-paws that looked like they could barely function as hands. This guy rivalled Ed in height and strength and certainly looked equally ready to scrap. But could he match a bear's sheer intuition for brawling?
Ed rushed the horse who he couldn't tell was a horse, and the horse who he couldn't tell was a horse charged back, screaming something in German as he did.
They made contact.
And much to everyone's shock and dismay, Ed had his ogre pinned without even really trying.
"Unhand Rolf, predatory savage!" the horse hollered. (At which point all the onlookers glanced around awkwardly, not knowing whether the foreign kid knew he had just said something incredibly racist.)
Ed didn't understand why this ogre was talking about Rolf when that horse was nowhere around, but there was no time to ponder this incongruity. He had the ogre on his gut on the ground, held in a headlock. But Ed's supreme ursine sense of smell could sense the presence of something… metallic. His brain was working.
He reached down the ogre's shirt and pulled out a golden horseshoe on a golden necklace, put his other arm on the back of his opponent's neck, and he pulled. He pulled hard.
The kids and adults watching gasped in shock as Rolf gasped in asphyxiation, reaching back to try to force the behemoth off him, but he simply didn't have the dexterity. Although the Schäfer clan was not hurting for money, the proud equine family had always refused to get the elective surgery most hooved mammals who could afford it chose to get, wherein their hooves were broken up and reshaped into crude but functional "fingers". Rolf could seriously have used some crude-but-functional fingers right about now.
Ed had a good hold on this ogre, but how was he gonna finish him off? Fight him away from your home. Ah, yes, protect your home, Ed! Don't just incapacitate him! Get this sum-bitch outta here! With any luck, much of the horde might follow.
Hey, you know what else his crazy nose could pick up? The gasoline fumes from the cars on the street. And he could smell a very big source of gas fumes coming. Gas fumes and a lot of other funky smells.
Amid murmurs of confusion from the crowd, he stood up, the horse (still catching his breath after the strangling) in his arms. Then, when a waste management truck came barrelling down the thoroughfare, Ed tossed his ogre into the truck's bed like a heavy sack of potatoes. Alley-oop.
"ROLF!" the horrified children all screamed, but the horse was out of town before they could blink. A few of the adults on the street took off after the dumptruck to flag it down and tell the driver he had a person in the back.
As far as Ed was concerned, several of the spectator monsters had been dispatched along with the big bad boss fighter. That's right, get the hell out of Ed's neighborhood!
Not to underestimate the powers of the smaller monsters, of course. First one he saw: something that could only be described as an imp, a creature that only sought to breed chaos for his own amusement. And this imp held a board for some reason. An itinerary of mischief, perhaps? Best investigate.
"Hey! Gimme back my pal!" Jonny demanded, jumping up and down in a vain attempt to get his paws on Plank and Ed held his wooden friend out of his reach. But little did the koala know that he and his buddy would soon be in very, very close contact.
Ed picked up the imp by the scruff of his neck, tossed him up, and as he was on his way back down, THWACK!
"WOOOOOOO-HOO-HOO-HOOOOO!" The impish koala couldn't help but enjoy the ride as Ed sent that moon-headed monster to the Milky Way. Mark MutGwire could have taken all the PEDs in the world and that dog still wouldn't have been able to hit a ball as far as Ed hit Jonny with Plank.
"JONNY!" the remaining opponents cried. Again, several spectators got in their cars and drove off in the vague direction Jonny seemed to be headed. The crowd got smaller; Ed was driving them away from his home.
The warrior bear dropped his smiley-faced makeshift bat and searched for his next foe. Hey, was it St. Patrick's Day? Because Ed saw a trickstery leprechaun and a loud-mouthed banshee right next to one another. Strangely, the leprechaun seemed to be bound in a wheelchair-like contraption; maybe to attract pity to lure people into his tricks? In any case, this could be easy. If the banshee was the Irish predictor of death, it would stand to reason that the leprechaun she seemed so close to should be the deceased.
"Sarah, HELP ME!" the rabbit wailed as Ed grabbed his wheelchair and sent him sailing down the street like a shopping cart in an empty parking lot.
"GODDAMMIT, ED!" Sarah yelled, not unlike a banshee, as she ran down the street along with several more motorists to catch Jimmy. And just like that, Ed killed two birds with one stone.
And the last two? These would be a toughie. On the one hand, you had La Llorona, this sad woman who you could intuitively tell was a highly empathetic entity but who would not hesitate to fuck your shit up if you got in between her and the person she was sad about. Then there was the alien with his space helmet. Ed wouldn't know how to put it into words, but he could just sort of tell that this was a profoundly intelligent being… whose intelligence was stored in his helmet, and if he were to suddenly be robbed of this helmet, all his mental and physical fortitude and wherewithal would evaporate instantly. Ed could sense that the alien wasn't the one who La Llorona was llorando over, but the weepy woman would likely extend her sympathy to her combat ally if Ed took him out.
Ed had an idea. It was risky, but he had a plan. And if he died doing this, then so be it; he had to protect his home.
"MY HAT!" Double-D screamed at the top of his lungs as he covered his scalp with one arm and tried to pull his shirt over his head with the other, collapsing to his knees and watching the bear run off with his garment.
Nazz, meanwhile, thought she had seen enough of Ed's antics. "ED! THAT'S NOT VERY NICE!" La Llorona cried as she ran after the destructive bruin. And with the cause of all this madness leaving the scene, the remaining onlookers chased off after him as well to capture him.
In Ed's head, that was the last of them. He wasn't going to turn his back and analyze the mob as he led them away, chasing him to the other, outlaw-free forest on the northwest edge of Peach Creek. He had absolutely no reason to believe that there was anybody left at the site of the lemonade stand save for a semiconscious gremlin.
And as Eddy got the other half of his consciousness back, he had to agree, the scene was as quiet as a graveyard, surely he must have been alone now. He hadn't just been faking it when he played half-dead, he had been genuinely struggling not to black out. So by the time he was able to gather the strength to climb out of his hole, Ed and company had been gone for a solid few minutes already, and again, you could hear the wind blowing and planes in the sky by how quiet it was.
He crawled over to the site of the lemonade stand. Apparently it had gotten trampled somewhere along the line - anecdotal recollections remain unclear about exactly when - but the structure was destroyed and there were lemons and cups and sugar everywhere, the juicer broken on the ground.
And yet the strangest thing was this: the money was scattered all over the place, too. Dollars and cents all over the sidewalk, some of it stained by the ingredients. A little bit of it had blown away from the rest in the gentle breeze, but for the most part, it all seemed to be confined to a finite area, much of it in one pile in the middle. Alright, no harm, no foul.
The little fox pulled a garbage bag out of his back pocket. Factory-folded, he unfurled the plastic and gave it a few good shakes to destatic the cavity, and then got down to stuffing it full of dough. You know, there had been a point in his life not too long ago when Eddy desperately sucked at math; he still wasn't particularly good at it, but he'd actually made himself sit down and figure out multiplication so that he could one day more efficiently count his money. And while he was no longer quite so interested in hoarding wealth as its own end, he was feeling proud of himself that he'd taken the time and had the discipline to teach himself how to -
"Eddy?"
The fox's heart stopped.
He turned around slowly and found the wolf standing at the corner of the building, tail between his legs, and the backpack once used to hold the lemonade stand's profits worn over his head like a hat.
Eddy didn't know what to say, but after a moment, he understood that he didn't need to say much at all.
Double-D didn't look angry. He didn't look disgusted either, and he hardly even looked confused. He simply looked defeated.
They locked eyes and simply stared for a few moments; Double-D just wanted to make sure Eddy knew he'd been seen before he communicated something else.
Edd held out a dangling paw, then swept it outward.
The fox was stunned, and still completely speechless. Being the timid one between them for once, he pointed to the bag, just to make sure he was understanding this correctly.
The wolf nodded, then made the shooing motion with his hand again.
They stared at one another again for a moment, then Double-D went back around the corner of the building and disappeared.
Eddy, not knowing what else to do, kept shoveling the money into his garbage bag, thoroughly picking the area clean until the only currency left was that which was waterlogged with spilled lemonade. He was still aching from head to toe, but he had one chance at this and he had to give it his best shot, so he tied up his bag and started hoofing it.
And as he turned the corner onto Grove Street, he saw the wolf sitting on the ground, head hung low, his eyes hard to even see with the bag draped over his head. But he must have seen the fox's feet cross his line of vision and stop right before him, because Double-D forced himself to look up and look Eddy right in the eye.
He waved his paw again, this time sideways down the street.
Eddy still looked spooked, and he didn't know why in the world Double-D was doing this. But when he got permission, he took it. And off home he ran.
Eleven minutes later, his winnings hidden safely in his brother's closet, Eddy returned to the scene of the commotion. Double-D still looked gloomy, not seeming to have moved a muscle, barely regarding Eddy as he ran past save for a quick glance. Eddy got back into his position in the broken piece of sidewalk as best as he could remember, and closed his eyes. He started thinking boring thoughts, school and long car rides and the like, and focusing on how tired he was from his sprint home and back. Even though it was still broad daylight in front of his skyward-looking face, it wasn't hard for the fox to force himself to fall asleep; his people were used to being nocturnal.
-IllI-
"OH MY GOD, WHAT HAPPENED!?"
"WHERE'S THE MONEY!?"
"THIS CAN'T BE HAPPENING!"
Eddy was awake now, but he wouldn't let them know it that easily. He kept his eyes closed and his ears open.
"Eddy!" Nazz cried. Suddenly the fox felt himself being shaken, so he allowed his eyes to open a tad and his mouth to gurgle some sounds of life.
"...Wha…?"
"Eddy!" the bobcat repeated. "Please tell me you're alright! Do we need to call an ambulance!?"
"Make him tell us what he knows about where the money went!" Sarah demanded from somewhere to Eddy's right.
"I wouldn't rule out the possibility that Eddy somehow orchestrated all that and pocketed all our earnings for himself!" added Jimmy. "I wouldn't put something despicable as stealing from a charity past that fox!"
Eddy felt Nazz let her paws off him and faintly heard her step away, and closed his eyes again to play his part. He still hasn't lived down his regret for doing this, because he missed the chance to witness something his eyes had always yearned to see.
SMACK!
"OW!"
SMACK!
"GAH! What the hell, Nazz!?"
"Oh, you wanna ask me what the hell!? Well what the hell is WRONG WITH YOU TWO!?" Eddy heard Nazz screaming. "He was clearly unconscious and you're STILL accusing him of stealing!? When it doesn't even make any SENSE!? Newsflash, you mean-spirited little twerps: good people aren't as hateful as you!"
Now Eddy allowed himself to open his eyes a little, just enough to turn and see the bobcat going off on the bunny and the bear girl, both of whom were rubbing their cheeks. Rolf was there too along with a passed-out Ed; Eddy would later find out that when they got the horse out of the garbage truck, they asked him to carry the bear home after he inevitably suffered a sugar crash; despite what he'd just been through, Rolf was too proud to say no. Eddy would also later find out that Jonny 2x4 was presently in the custody of police in southern New Jersey who were in the process of figuring out how to arrange for his transport back to Delaware.
"Look at you!" Sarah shot back. "You're so messed up in the head these days that you care more about an asshole like Eddy more than you care about the fact that all the money for Kevin just got freaking stolen -!"
"OF COURSE I CARE MORE ABOUT PEOPLE'S LIVES THAN FUCKING MONEY!" Nazz needed a breath before continuing: "WHY DON'T YOU!? So Eddy's been an asshole! So what!? You really think he's such an asshole that he'd steal from a charity event that he put so much work into having it succeed!?"
Eddy had been completely prepared to field all these questions himself for anybody who was skeptical of his injuries and subsequent unconsciousness, but if Nazz was going to say all this for him, he wasn't gonna stop her.
"Yes, I do!" defied Jimmy.
"Rolf feels the need to intervene!" Rolf intervened. "This is very unlike trendy Nazz girl to behave so aggressively to long-eared Jimmy and short-tempered Sarah!"
"Do you not think they deserve it!?" Nazz screeched. "Or are we using English words you just don't know!?"
That's when Eddy realized that at his feet - "down" or "below" his line of vision - Double-D was still sitting at the side of the building, though he was now taking the bag off his head and putting his hat back on; apparently the gang had come back with the hat, given it to Edd, and then realized what was missing. There was a brief moment when the wolf's deformed head was completely visible to the world, but eh, he'd looked around first and nobody could see him but Eddy, who already knew what was under the hat and what wasn't. Once prepared, Double-D stood up.
"Rolf agrees that Jimmy and Sarah behave rudely, but Rolf must refute Nazz's assertion that Rolf has insufficient handle on the English language!"
"Pardon me," Edd interrupted, eyes cast upon the ground and not making eye contact with anyone. "I… must apologize…"
"Apologize for what!?" Sarah growled. "Lemme guess, you were in on it!?"
Jimmy looked like he was about to toss in a snarky remark of his own, but Nazz raised a paw sharply while giving them a frightening look. And they flinched.
"I was present and awake for the entirety of your absence and I failed to watch over the lemonade stand," the wolf lamented. "I was too cowardly and paralyzed by fear to let my face be seen without my hat - and in my anxiety, I grabbed the money bag and emptied it to use as a head covering without even thinking about why that would have been a foolish decision."
"And what a blasted fool you are!" said Jimmy. "You left such a vast quantity of money out in the open -!"
"JIMMY!" It was Nazz again, if you couldn't already tell. After giving the bunny a glance to make sure he kept his anglophilic mouth shut, she turned and walked over to the wolf, putting a paw on his shoulders. "Double-D, you don't have anything to apologize for, you haven't done anything wrong!"
"Oh, but I have!" (He did, but not what he was alluding to.) "Just as I said, I acted the coward when I should have been more watchful of -!"
"Double-D! Double-D, calm down!" the bobcat implored him. "What just happened was hectic, and… traumatic for all of us! So you panicked and froze up. Okay, so what? Big deal. We all have moments like that. And you know what? Honestly… what could you have done? Even if someone stole all the money right before your eyes… what could you have done to stop them?"
"Chase those scoundrels off!" said Jimmy. "Or fight them like a man! That's what Kevin would have done!" (Jeez, these kids really wouldn't knock it off with the smart-aleck remarks, would they? For what it's worth, contemporary interviews with Sarah Browne and James Hutchinson reveal that in moments like these, they were absolutely terrified of Angry Nazz, but… she just kept setting them up for catty comebacks and they couldn't resist.)
And they were definitely terrified of Angry Nazz when Angry Nazz turned to them and gave them an Angry Nazz look.
"Well just look at where Kevin's bravery got him," she told them, slowly, sternly, and solemnly.
"Wise-cracking Ed-boy seems to be awake!" Rolf exclaimed, pointing (well, "pointing").
"Oh my God!" Nazz yelped, running over to Eddy and bending down to give him a hug. "I'm so sorry, I was so busy arguing for you that I forgot to check you were okay!"
"Um… thanks, Nazz," the fox squeaked, not knowing how to feel about this pretty girl hugging him all of a sudden. "But I, uh… I don't think I'll need an ambulance. I'll be alright."
"Oh, thank God!"
"And I can confirm that Eddy was unconscious in his present spot for the entire duration of your absence," added Double-D. "Though I was earwitness to a few characters who happened by. Some sounded like older teenagers from elsewhere in town laughing at Eddy's unconscious mass, others seemed like ornery adults complaining about the mess we'd made… and one I believe may have even been the police officer from earlier who threatened us."
Nazz and the other kids gasped nearly in unison.
"And I'd bet it was the cop!" said the bobcat. "He came back, saw Eddy knocked out, money all over the ground… and he grabbed it! That sicko! And why shouldn't he!? Not like anyone's gonna have any evidence!"
Edd just nodded solemnly. After all, why shouldn't he lie and cover Eddy's ass? If the last few days had taught him anything, it was that he couldn't win. The bold and fearless would always win, shattering the rules that a weak-willed pussy willow like Double-D lived by. Why delay the inevitable? Why should he stand up in the name of law and order when law and order had abandoned him?
"Do you have any proof that we could take to the authorities to have that man turn over the stolen money!?" Jimmy begged.
Edd was about to say no, but Nazz answered first: "Oh, do you really think they'd care to turn in one of their own!? You saw how hard it was to get a couple of cops held responsible for something enormous, why would they bother holding them responsible for something so minor in comparison!?" With a harrumph she looked around the scene before deciding what she ought to say and do next. She addressed the wolf: "You don't have any hard evidence, do you?"
Edd shook his head.
Then she walked over to the fox and offered a hand. "Let me help you up, Eddy."
Wordlessly, Eddy accepted. As he got to his feet, they both saw Jimmy and Sarah glaring at the two of them.
"So… how much of that did you overhear?" Nazz asked.
Eddy sighed. "Most of it."
Nazz nodded, a sad expression on her face. "How you feeling about that? I know you put in all that hard work, and… I know you and Kevin don't get along, but I was so happy to see that you were willing to help anyway, just because it was the right thing to do… all that for nothing…"
If the situation had played out differently, Eddy might have played this off as being very melodramatically distraught, probably openly weeping in the hammiest acting you've ever seen. So the fact that it turned out this way helped him dodge a major bullet. Now he had the chance to realize that would have been a terrible move, and the opportunity to play a lot more subtly and believably.
"...I'm angry," Eddy finally said, looking like he was indeed on the brink of seething. "I'm angry, but… I just don't have the nerve to be angry right now. Y'know? Like… what's it gonna fix?"
And Nazz concurred. She was devastated about the destruction and pillaging of this lemonade stand which represented her best effort at trying to be an active force for good and help to the people in her life, of course she was devastated. But what would that solve now? What good would getting angry about this and throwing a fit accomplish? And if she was correctly reading the body language that she had gleaned from that Mystery Porn Fox, he seemed like the kind of guy who would encourage her to not get discouraged. Lick your wounds now, he might say, but don't let this instance of defeat define you as a defeated person. Mystery Porn Fox struck her as the type to say that we all fall down sometimes - what matters is that we keep getting back up. It's just a shame that she couldn't realize she was thinking of all these motivational and uplifting words by herself and instead of feeling the need to attribute them to some guy she'd seen naked in a magazine.
So she completely agreed with Eddy, and in a weird way had to wonder whether he'd been inspired to be a good, level-headed person by the Mystery Porn Fox as well. But there was no chance at that, obviously; Nazz had a lot of suspicions about Eddy, but the idea that he was secretly looking at pornography marketed towards heterosexual women was not one of them. She couldn't believe she was thinking this, but she was proud of him; she only hoped that the Mystery Porn Fox would be similarly proud of the both of them, and that he wouldn't think their misfortune was because of their own foolish failure to prevent such a situation. But Mystery Porn Fox wouldn't be that harsh on them, would he be? Nazz desperately hoped he wouldn't. Oh, Mystery Porn Fox Whose Name Nazz Genuinely Didn't Remember, Nazz desperately hoped she hadn't disappointed you.
The younger kids were still glaring. Aw, they were kids, they'd grow up eventually, but it was still so frustrating to see that they refused to give Eddy a chance to prove he'd changed - for real this time. But just to drive the point home:
"So Eddy… just to be clear…" the bobcat started unsurely, "...you were out that whole time and you don't have any idea what happened to the money?"
Eddy realized he was about to get away with this. And he was excited. He was the kind of excited where not only was his heart starting to race, but he found himself feeling the need to suppress some nervous reflexes like his ears or tail twitching. To this end, he tried to keep his mind as empty as possible and put on a poker face that looked a slight bit disappointed but not much more than that.
"Yeah… yeah, that's right."
Nazz glanced back to Jimmy and Sarah and gave them a told-you-so look. She believed him.
-IllI-
The cul-de-sac gang made no attempt to rebuild the lemonade stand or salvage their business, instead spending the rest of the evening cleaning up the debris, a task made somewhat easier after Big Ed woke up and was able to start pitching in (after apologizing to the kids that he thought that they were a motley crew of monsters hellbent on taking over Peach Creek and then ultimately the world). When Karin Lafferty drove by the scene on her way to work that night, the kids all ignored her, and she them.
Eddy slept well that night. He still didn't know what the hell went through Double-D's head and he hadn't asked; after the cleanup, they each just went home without talking to one another. But Eddy got what he needed: a ticket to dignity and respect. And after counting his money, he had indeed fetched a pretty penny that day. You know what? He was starting to consider that he might put the remainder of the money he'd inherited from his brother towards new furniture for his soon-to-be-former bedroom, just like his brother had done to furnish his little Pipsqueak's room. Hey, as long as he knew he had the skills to acquire large sums of money whenever he wanted or needed, he could afford to gamble on himself like that. And one has to wonder whether his brother would be happy that his money was once again being used to pay for big expensive things that would make their parents feel like useless assholes who couldn't pay for it themselves.
...But Eddy would only drop the money on furniture contingent on the Merry Men agreeing to take up residence there. Eddy wasn't gonna throw away all his new money on furniture just for some stranger to live inside his house, fuck that.
