Heathers

Another excerpt from How To Own and Operate a Haunted House. Thanks for reading!

Melissa, Tim, Angela Dawn, and I went to see Heathers and eat at Tim’s favorite restaurant, Fuddruckers. Angela Dawn drove me and Melissa to the theater in Ft. Worth during a huge storm.

“I don’t want to put on the windshield wipers,” Angela Dawn said. “They give me a headache. All that back and forth.”

Melissa gripped the door tightly, not used to Angela Dawn’s leaps of logic. I sat in the middle, the price for being small was to always inhabit the most uncomfortable places. Sheets of rain fell on the windshield, and I looked at the speedometer -- 75.

“I always drive worse when I go slow,” Angela Dawn said. I thought I was being subtle.

“I don’t think we’ll have to worry about being late,” I said.

“Not with me behind the wheel,” Angela Dawn said.

“I wonder how Tim is faring?” Melissa asked, having resigned herself to the ride.

I figured he’d already been sitting in the parking lot for a long time. Because Angela Dawn was beautiful and strange, Tim loved her. She dressed in clothes that looked one way around her parents, another when she left the house. Tim admired her ingenuity.

The rain stopped as we pulled next to Tim’s car. As I predicted, Tim had the aura of someone who had been waiting but wanted to seem as if he had just arrived.

“You look stunning,” he said as Angela Dawn exited our of the truck. “What did I do to deserve you all?”

I didn’t want to point out that he didn’t have any of us except Melissa whom he did not want.

“Faggot,” yelled some hooligan out of his pick-up truck window. “You dork with all the girls, you’re a fucking faggot.”

We all looked at each other as the name-caller and his friends sped away.

“I’m the one with the hot chicks,” Tim said. “He’s the faggot.”

“Excellent point. They’re probably on their way to a circle jerks in the woods,” I said.

“What’s a circle jerk?” Angela Dawn asked. She’d never gotten much in the way of a sex education.

“What we look like we’re doing now,” Melissa said, sick, I imagined, of the longing looks Captain Tim wasn’t directing at her. “Let’s go pay.”


Michelle's Spell of the Day
"The optimist thinks this is the best of all possible worlds. The pessimist fears it is true." J. Robert Oppenheimer

Cocktail Hour
Drinking snack suggestion: Jodi's candy corn and cocktail peanuts combination -- tried it, love it!

Benedictions and Maledictions
Happy Tuesday!