It’s a funny thing how people pour that dreamboxoline onto their broken hearts, squirt it in the black veins of their crooked elbows, douche their gratings with it, breathe it, lap it up, suck it up, meanwhile staring slit-eyed at the heartbreaker as though that dirty rotten so-and-so was working the plunger. And this was when I found that out. That’s how O was looking at me now. She wasn’t forgiving me for letting her, as easily as I thought.
Ten minutes ago Bertie and me had rocked and dragged the H bomb into Bertie’s private closet and shut ourselves in after it. A second later Dion slid in, fanning a hand like his fingernail polish was wet, and just as the three of us were getting good and uncomfy on top of Bertie’s smelly socks, Keds and doo-wop 45’s, O appeared.
Right away I could see sumpm was wrong. She looked normal, except that her knee-knocking shiny black sheath skirt had a wet spot on the back and the zipper was a couple degrees off course. She hadn’t stayed five whole minutes with the Regicide, but she had stopped somewhere to paint fresh rings around her eyes and white lipstick on her mouth. She looked calm, she specialized in that. But there was sumpm funny about her eyes besides their being a little crossed, so that you wondered if they weren’t a hair closer together than they ought to be. They looked sore, scheming and goofy all at the same time, like Ol’ Witch Hazel’s niece Little Itch in Little Lulu.
“Could I talk personal to you?” O said, squinting into my face. “You mean me?” I said. I had dreamed she would come to me and say that, but this had the feel of a grenade under her clothes and I scrunched back in the corner against a tennis racket. Suddenly I remembered O was in the bughouse like all the rest of us. And there was some story, sumpm scary, sumpm with love and a knife.
“Aaaay, you made it, ace bad job, Sidekickette,” said Bertie. She just stood there, looking up at him from the bottoms of her black-ringed eyes. “Don’t call me Sidekickette,” she said, and Bertie scratched his chin, thinking. “Hey Dion, who was that bleach-blond sidekickette on the tube who walked on knives? Busting through that paper ring with her flaming batons? Bowls of nickels pennies and quarters, right? She was a ringer for O, maybe she was O, did you maybe used to walk on knives, O, besides throwing em?” “Mary Hartline, Super Circus,” I muttered. “Hey yeah-Mary Hartline. So have a huff, Mary Hartline. We haven’t done any yet. We were, er, like, waiting for you.” “You were?” “Sure.” Just then Emily leaned around the door jamb, looking like a cross between a virgin picked for sacrifice and a unicorn, her long white hospital gown dragging on the floor and a big dab of purple merthiolate on her forehead, with the lump of unicorn horn beginning to stick out of it. “Aaaay-boss good deed, Sidekickette. Mission accomplished. We were waiting for you. How’s the dreambox?” “Don’t call her Sidekickette,” O spooky-fluted, but then they both sat down. “You start, Mary Hartline.”
But O passed and anyhow Bertie never quite opened his hand to leggo the apparatus-instead he gave a lecture demonstration. He impaled the red nose mask on a pinky and pointed to the tube the laughing gas went through. He fingered in a nasty way a little red nub of valve hanging next to it: “Know what this is for? Huh? Everybody listening? No, you don’t know what this is for. Oxygen which we don’t have, sidekicks, so don’t go too long without breathing.” And then he showed us, and Dion tried it, and Emily touched her little nose to it, and Bertie showed us again. And while he was busy showing us, O leaned over to me:
“I ain’t no bull dagger,” she whispered.
It’s a good thing I didn’t know what a bull dagger was, I mean I was the Bogeywoman, the toughest girl possible, but I’d never talked knowingly to another in my life, and Bull Dagger sounded to me sort of like a character from Oliver Twist, so I figured it was sumpm to do with parting fuddies from their bankrolls and I said, “That’s okay. I know you’re not,” although I knew she was. “I’d do it for you, though,” she let go a hot gust of some kind of spirits in my ear. I stared at her. Now I thought she was saying she had oinked Reggie for me and I was scared it might be true. “Don’t you do sumpm like that for me.” She squinted back suspiciously out of her huge, raccoony eyes and said, “Ain’t you one?” “Hump no.” “So how come you did me like that?” “Huh?” “Under the sheets.”
I was beginning to see my mistake and I felt the sweat glittering on my temples, which was sheer fear of being found out. “I didn’t do you like that,” I hissed, “you did me like that.” She thought this over. She didn’t go for it. “I oughta kill you for lying,” she spooky-fluted, “but I’d still do it for you,” she offered again, sorta fiercely, “because I like you better, you ain’t like a fuddy, you ain’t like nobody, but then you have to be mine, you colly?” “Yours?” “Mine. All mine. M-I-N-E mine.”
I was looking, just looking, at that gleaming, half-cracked, poison bait in her slightly crossed eyes, and Bertie put the red pig mask in my hand and I buried my nose in it just to get away from that look. I needed her so bad, or let’s say I needed someone so bad, I was going to say yes now and pay later whatever the bill was, I mean who cared, I was in the bughouse, what worse could happen. She could kill me lit up my dreambox, and I almost remembered that story about just how O got into Rohring Rohring, but even so I was going to say yes if what happened next hadn’t happened-I mean if Zuk hadn’t come out of nowhere to save me.
Anyhow those giant popcorn balls were sailing by, ball by huge slow ball, and I said I wonder why this is fun and Emily, refusal was her middle name, said Maybe it’s not fun, and O, who’d been skipping the gas and pulling now and then on a little two-ounce snort bottle of white rum I think it was or maybe peppermint schnapps, snatched the red gas mask and stared at me balefully and buried her nose in the thing like it was the last rose of summer. And never came up for air again. We all looked at each other, helpless doomed looks were going around like yawns, and the next thing we knew she was thrashing about in Bertie’s tennis rackets and shoes and Marvel comics and 45’s, having a convulsion.
“Cheese, what are we gonna do?” cried Emily. (Because she was eleven years old and Miss Dying Popularity, Emily was exempt from the laissez faire of Bug Motels in trouble.) The rest of us looked blank. “Aaaannh, she’ll come out of it,” Bertie crooned at last, delicately unhooking O’s fine blue fingers from the red rubber mask and hose and ferrying the appliance from her small nose to his big one, a princely triangle, shiny and freckled like a blintz.
O’s teeth were still chattering but some little bubbles that stuck to her lips showed me she was breathing, or trying to, and I remembered from Lake Sci at Camp Chunkagunk that you’re supposed to make sure the girl’s tongue isn’t stuck in her throat and there’s no plug of Double Bubble in there and she didn’t go down chewing her noseclips. (As if any tough girl in paradise, any girl whose life was worth saving, would wear noseclips!) And so I leaned over and slid two fingers through her lips, and felt around the wet satin of her mouth and over the faint callous of her tongue-which was a lot like kissing, kissing without being kissed first, and right in front of the Bug Motels too. And then I bumped along the backs of her teeth and the ridges of her palate-it seemed like everything was where it ought to be, but somehow I couldn’t stop.