My brother’s friends are inexplicably dressed as ninjas and jumping around the front yard when Eric shows up at eight thirty on Friday night. Or rather they have been jumping around the front yard dressed up as ninjas and Eric shows up as soon as they’re gone. He said he was going to come over at seven thirty and he shows up at eight thirty all sweaty.
“I circled the block a few times,” Eric says. “There were ninjas.”
“They weren’t really ninjas,” I say. “Just my brother and his idiot friends.”
“I know,” Eric says. “I just didn’t want to—um—”
I guess a bunch of seniors dressed as ninjas swearing and kicking each other in the chest for an hour before peeling away in their cars could be scary to some people, but I’m used to it.
“My dad’s on a date,” I tell Eric. “We pretty much have the run of the place.”
There are pizza boxes stacked four deep on the kitchen counter. “We have pizza on Fridays,” I tell Eric. “You want some?”
“No thanks,” he says. “I ate.”
“There’s sodas and stuff in the fridge.” I open the fridge. Somebody else being around makes me really look at what’s inside, and it really is just sodas and stuff. I try to think if there’s anything in our cabinets that makes it look like we cook or my dad cooks or we eat anything besides takeout, and I don’t think there is. We have a “chip cabinet” and a “cracker cabinet.” We have a lot of cabinets.
“I was thinking about it,” Eric says, “when I was walking around the block, and I think TimeBlaze: An EVILution can still work. Can I have one of those waters?”
I hand Eric a water bottle and get myself a Dr. Pepper.
“I just think it has to be the full title. So you know how Star Wars is Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope? In our case the titles would go TimeBlaze: An EVILution: Crisis Endpoint.”
“What’s Crisis Endpoint?”
“That would be the name of that particular part. Like Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.”
“Oh, right.”
“It’s just an example, but do you like it?”
“Yeah,” I say, “I like it.”
“Why do they dress like ninjas?”
“I dunno. They’re retarded?”
“Maybe it’s to jump people,” he says.
“I don’t think they jump anybody. They’re my brother’s friends from church.”
“Those kids go to church?” Eric says.
“Yeah. It’s like this youth church or whatever. My family’s not religious, my brother just goes because his friends do.”
“So they’re religious kids?”
“They’re not anything kids.”
Eric looks out at my pool. “I think maybe they jump people.”
“I dunno,” I say.
We play video games in my room. A fighting game my brother rented. Eric’s terrible.
“Look at this guy! Who needs a sword that big?” Eric says about my character, a skinny guy with long blond hair in an admiral’s uniform who is obliterating Eric’s character with a big fuck-off sword. Eric’s character is a disembodied eyeball on top of a purple whirlwind.
“It’s like a surfboard! Beyond your bigger broadswords, size just becomes a disadvantage. It’s bigger than he is!”
The admiral’s sword glows blue and slashes the purple whirlwind, dealing the eyeball serious damage.
“And how does that hurt me? You didn’t even hit anything resembling flesh!”
The eyeball goes tumbling off the cliff level’s precipice when the admiral lands a surprisingly effective kick with his red slipper.
“You know who my guy looks like?” I say. “Emma Tomlinson.”
“You’re totally right,” Eric says. “Do you like her?”
“Ew! No.”
“No, I didn’t mean—I didn’t mean romantically, I meant just do you think she’s okay.”
“What’s to like? She never talks.”
“Good! Yeah! Me too! I think she’s an albino.”
“I think you’re right.”
“And her whole family comes to pick her up from school. Her mom AND her dad AND her two little sisters and they all look exactly like her.”
“It’s like they sent a homeschooled kid to regular school.”
“Have you ever known any homeschoolers?”
“There are some next door. One time we went on vacation and they picked up our mail for us and I had to go get it when we got back and their whole house smelled like… I dunno. Oatmeal? It was creepy in there. I can’t put my finger on it.”
“We don’t talk to people. Do you think people think we’re creepy?”
“I talk to people!”
“I’ve never seen you talk to anybody in English.”
“Yeah, well, not in English. Why don’t you focus on the game? I’m killing you here.”
We’re halfway through another match. I’m thrashing Eric again. I’m a tiny Asian schoolgirl with two razor fans. Eric’s a half-man, half-Zeppelin.
A couple seconds go by where it’s just the sound of my girl squealing every time she lands a knee or a fan on Eric’s character, and his character harrumphing.
Then Eric says, “You know who my guy looks like?” His guy puffs up like a blimp and rockets into the Asian girl, actually a pretty good move I’m sure he got completely by accident. “Patti Helzburg.”
“Patti is fatter and has a bigger mustache.”
Eric cracks up. We rip on people from school for a while as I beat him but not as badly, then we go downstairs to get sodas.
“How long have your parents been divorced?” Eric says.
“Since I was like nine.”
“Is it strange having your dad go on dates?”
“No, I’m used to it or whatever.”
“I would think that would be strange. Here it is Friday night, your dad is on a date. A lot of kids our age are on dates too. If your dad took his date to the movie theater, there’s a very strong chance he took his date to see the same movie kids our age took their dates to.”
“I don’t think they’re going to the movies,” I say, shutting the cabinet too hard.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to—” Eric says. “Sorry. I’m sorry.”
I shrug.
“Do you want me to leave?”
“What? No!”
“Okay,” Eric says. “I’ll have a Dr. Pepper, I think.” He opens the fridge and grabs a can. “I was thinking… I was thinking about the soundtrack, too.”
“Soundtrack?”
“For the movie. The first one.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. I was thinking it’d be cool if it had exclusively industrial music. Like Throbbing Gristle, Bauhaus…”
I have to admit I don’t know who those bands are.
“Oh. They’re from the seventies and eighties. I think they would fit really well with the tone of the first movie. I was really interested in industrial music for a while.”
“Cool. I’ve been thinking about it too. I was thinking, I dunno, more modern stuff, like, uhm, The Earnest February, or Forty Guns, or The Boy Who Cried Sparrow.”
“UGH. I hate The Boy Who Cried Sparrow. I can’t stand them. I absolutely, I mean, I can’t stand them.”
“Okay! Jeez. They don’t have to… we don’t have to put them on the soundtrack.”
“I’m sorry if you like them, maybe that’s where we part company, because I think they’re completely overrated. Like, I get it, their singer went to college. Those lyrics could only be considered deep by a sixth-grader. And their arrangements? Pabulum.”
“Fine. Wow.”
We start back upstairs. I have no idea what pabulum means, or really what “arrangements” are, at least in relation to music. I barely expected Eric to know what I was talking about much less have such a violent reaction. It’s one part scary and one part hilarious to see him so enthusiastic and negative.
“Maybe we’re putting the cart before the horse,” Eric says when we’re back upstairs, “thinking about the soundtrack before we even have the script necessarily, or the whole thing planned out.”
I really think about it, then I say, “No. I don’t think so. I think it’s important to know what kind of mood we’re trying to have, y’know?”
“Good,” Eric says, “I don’t think so either. You know who your guy looks like?” he says. “Tony DiAvalo.” He smiles.
We go to bed at three. Eric unrolls his sleeping bag and goes through a whole nighttime ritual. I feel like he’s never spent the night at somebody’s house before. He has pajamas. Not, like, feety pajamas or anything, but clothes that are specifically for sleeping. An oversize T-shirt with some microchip-company logos, and a pair of gym shorts.
“Do you want a pillow?” I ask.
“Oh, right,” he says. “I forgot my pillow. Knew I forgot something.”
“No problem,” I say, and throw him one from my bed.
We talk about the opening chase sequence through feudal Japan for a little while longer. When discussing the extra-fat Japanese warlord Praetoreous escapes from via riddles, we draw numerous comparisons to Patti Helzburg then we both go silent and I fall asleep pretty quickly.
“FAGGOT PATROL! FAGGOT PATROL!”
I wake up to screaming out in front of the house. It sounds like my brother’s friend Alan’s sister Cathy.
“Shut the fuck up Cathy you bitch!” my brother yells in what he calls his “wifebeater” voice, which is basically the world’s worst bad Southern accent. “Shut the fuck up!”
There’s a loud smacking sound. Cathy screams then laughs like a witch.
I sit up. The TV is on. Eric’s awake, sitting up in his sleeping bag, playing Threat Monster: Blue, the game we were playing before. Or at least I think he is. It’s two characters I haven’t seen before, and a totally different level. A panda in a mechanized bodysuit fights a kabuki guy whose right arm is a crossbow in a vertical neon city at night.
“Are you the panda or the kabuki guy?” I say.
“Oh, hey,” Eric says. “The ninjas are back.” Eric leans forward to turn the TV off.
“Don’t worry about it,” I say, and he leans back and keeps playing. “Did they wake you up?”
“No. I was up. I woke up earlier. They just got back. I’m the panda. Don’t worry, I saved your game and started a new one.” The TV is muted. The controller buttons click.
“RAPE! RAPE! RAPE!” my brother shouts out on the lawn.
“Cathy, stop raping him! Stop RAY-PING him,” Alan screams in a terrible British accent. “He’s moi MATE!”
“Your brother and his friends sure know how to have fun on a Friday night,” Eric says.
“It’s Saturday morning now,” I say. It is. The sun’s starting to come up behind my blinds.
We stay up until like nine playing with all the new characters Eric’s unlocked and then he walks home. I sleep the whole rest of the day and try to ignore Cathy and my brother in my brother’s room laughing and yelling and whatever else all day.
I don’t know anybody who thinks Cecelia Martin is cute. Her and Jen Ackerman and Teresa Saylor make up this little clique of I don’t know exactly what you would call them. Goth girls? They wear baggy black jeans and spiked belts and black T-shirts with Invader Zim on them and black eyeliner and their hair is always dyed in chunks and colors that make it look like they did it with highlighter, which they may have.
Cecelia walks next to me out of English on Monday.
“Do you hang out with Eric Lederer?” she says. Her voice is too high for her body.
“Yeah…” I say.
“Oh, like, just so you know,” she says, “he’s weird. Like, really weird.”
“Okay.”
“He was like obsessed with me for a while. He saw on my Namespot page that we liked the same music or something, so he thought we were like soul mates or something.”
“Huh,” I say. “That is weird.”
“He told me…” she says.
“Told you what?”
“Anyway,” she says, “he’s weird. I think he might be like one of those school shooters or something.”
“Why do you think that?”
“He was like obsessed with The Boy Who Cried Sparrow,” she says. “Like obsessed.”
“You think he’s a school shooter ’cause he really likes a band?”
“You don’t understand,” she says. “He’s weird.”
“He told me he hates them.”
“I told you. Weird,” Cecelia says. “I gotta go to Spanish. I just thought you should know.”
“Uhm, okay.”
I head down the stairs and Cecelia turns around and heads for Spanish, where her Spanish name is probably Noche or Muerta or Mariposa, because those girls are either obsessed with death or cute things. Like, obsessed.
So he got excited when he found out you guys like the same things. That’s exciting, and sometimes when that happens if the person who likes the same things as you doesn’t turn out to be a complete fucking simpleton who thinks she’s enlightened just because her belt has spikes on it, you and that person will become friends and the two of you will chart out whole literal galaxies on the backs of worksheets, with infinite time to flesh out what you’ve charted. If it turns out the person isn’t that cool, it just might sour you on that thing you both like. So I get why Eric now hates The Boy Who Cried Sparrow and I continue to get why no one who doesn’t look and behave and think exactly like Cecelia Martin likes Cecelia Martin.