Chapter 2
Hell is hot, and Oyster Pit is hotter. There's no way to be comfortable in the summer.
We're a series of small communities built next to a big lake and wooded area outside Houston.
The heat here is sweltering. Head-splitting.
A throbbing ache in your boiling head as the humidity suffocates you like an anaconda in a steam room.
At the same time, people keep their houses so cold that your sweat freezes all over you the second you go back in and you feel like hypothermia is about to set in.
It gets worse. We're down the highway from a family of stinky chemical plants. All day long we get the great pleasure of smelling hydrogen sulfide, which is a nicer way of saying we smell farts twenty-four seven.
Which might be why most of my neighbors are a little unhinged.
There's the woman who pulled her shotgun on a tropical storm because it canceled her daughter's wedding and she couldn't get her deposit back.
There's the drug dealer next door who, afraid of a police raid, raised an army of alligators in his backyard pool to protect him like his very own Game of Thrones dragons.
And now there's this goober, Clint, with his hometown rock star fairy tale.
“I got his wallet,” I tell Felix, rummaging through several cards before pulling out his license. “Clint Holtz. Forty-one years old.” A condom in a shiny red wrapper falls out, and both of us gag.
As we walk to my house, our gnome du jour successfully bagged, we plan our entertainment routine for the week.
There's not much of anything to do in Oyster Pit, so we spend our time watching horror movies or related content.
It's a great way of avoiding the people in this town, who are in their own category of horror.
“The new Gorehound Gary video drops tonight,” I mention.
Gorehound Gary is this guy from LA who re-creates famous horror movie scenes as pranks. He's always wearing a horror movie T-shirt, and his huge pecs and biceps bulge out of it.
For his next video, he claims he's going to dress as a zombie and fight a shark.
“A real shark?” Felix asks. “What movie has a freaking zombie-shark fight?”
“I told you about this! It's an Italian splatter flick from the seventies called Zombie.”
I love a good splatter flick, especially when there's a villain wearing a mask or a buttload of awesome makeup all over their face.
My aunt Dinah thinks I'm a budding psycho killer for watching these movies, but it's not like they're real.
Blood and guts made out of corn syrup and red dye aren't the same as the real carnage inflicted daily on people and animals in our world.
Felix is more into the supernatural than gore.
He's the brainy, logical type, so he's drawn to the unexplainable.
I got him a poster of The Exorcist on his birthday last year, which his parents threw away because they thought it brought bad energy into their house.
They already think I'm a negative influence on him.
The whole demonic possession thing didn't help matters.
Anyway, they banned me from the house until Felix convinced them to give me a break.
My house—or at least it was my grandma's house, until she died in her sleep and I got stuck living here alone with Dinah—is a modest three-bedroom dwelling with dark brown wooden siding, built in the 1950s.
The front and back lawns are bigger than the house itself, which is surrounded by old, wobbly pine trees.
Dinah's banged-up Chevrolet is parked next to the hideous van I inherited from my grandma, which is not a good sign.
She's supposed to be out with her boyfriend tonight.
The second we step inside the side door to the kitchen, our sweat freezes all over us. Our teeth chatter and we shudder. The TV blares from the living room. Hoping to avoid whatever mood Dinah is in tonight, Felix and I tiptoe through the kitchen to my room, but in vain.
“Wade!” Agh. Behold my fate. “Come in here. Now.”
“Fee-fi-fo-fum,” I say quietly. Felix laughs.
Felix waits in the kitchen while I cross into the living room, where I'd spend time when Grandma was alive.
Now that Dinah's taken over, I actively avoid it.
The carpet has taken on a musty, fruity smell from her constant vaping.
She's obsessed with Christmas, so the room looks like a demented holiday store.
Rows of miniature Christmas trees, snow globes, and nutcrackers crowd the fireplace and cabinets.
Don't get me started on all the porcelain and plush Santas.
It all goes so well with the wooden decorative sign she put up that says Good Vibes Only!
alongside her Ted Bundy book collection.
(“He was cute!” was her only response when I asked her why she had all these books about the same serial killer.)
Dinah goes through a predictable cycle in her lair: When she's high on life, she'll watch an endless stream of Hallmark Christmas movies or other sappy romantic comedies on loop.
When she's at her lowest mentally, and I mean lowest, she'll play the most outlandish conspiracy theory bullshit on TV.
Tonight, she's watching a documentary about genetically modified moles creating tunnels under the border and smuggling fentanyl for the cartels.
So, yeah.
She's slumped on her rocking chair in her ripped jeans and spaghetti-strap tank top, still as glass, her raven hair parted under a red cap.
She's got a long, oval face and a chin as sharp as a shovel.
She takes a whiff from her vape. Everything she breathes out clouds around her.
I count four crumpled cans of her favorite wine, Tuscan Sun, littered across the coffee table.
She looks me up and down, noting my choice of burglar-like clothes. Her eyes have been in a permanent state of displeased narrowness and her nose scrunched up for as long as I've known her. I'm convinced it's changed the shape of her skull.
“What have you been doing, Wade?”
“Getting ready for school tomorrow. Why? What's up?” I ask.
“Why didn't you tell me you got fired?”
I knew it.
“It's not my fault. Some creepy guy with a bloody coonskin cap came behind the register and started pinching my arm erotically,” I say. I know, I know. It's a doozy, but I'm not feeling up to rehashing the gory details at this moment.
Vapor billows slowly out of her nose. She doesn't blink or take her icy-green eyes off me once.
“So you threw coffee in his face.”
“What would you have done?”
“Margaret did me a favor by hiring you,” she says, taking another puff. “Now I look like a dumbass because you didn't even last one hour on the job. And she's not talking to me anymore because you alienated her most important customer.”
“So she'll just let him grab me like that? I didn't tell you because I knew you wouldn't believe me anyway.” I realize I need to change the subject. “I thought you were spending the night with Cal.”
“Obviously, I'm here instead.”
I guess that's that. I head back to the hallway.
“Make yourself employed again and throw these cans away,” she says. As I'm about to head outside to the recycling bin with them, she yells, “Not in the recycling bin,” from the room. “They take too damn long to come get it and it piles up.”
In the kitchen, I toss the cans into the trash and get some water from the fridge for Felix and me since we're parched. Two cans of Tuscan Sun are sitting on the side. I hold one up to Felix, and he nods and takes it.
In my bedroom, Felix pulls the gnome out of the bag.
My stapled Texas Chainsaw Massacre poster puffs up from the air blowing out of the vent above it.
Below is a series of printed photos of Bill Skarsg?rd in different roles as Pennywise the Clown, Count Orlok from Nosferatu, and the very tattooed and very shirtless Eric from The Crow.
A framed picture of my parents, my aunt, and me in front of a Christmas tree sits below those on my desk. The last photo we had together.
Felix pulls up Gorehound Gary's channel on his laptop while I set up our drag-gnome dressing station on the floor, replete with a blouse I took from Dinah, as well as her makeup.
“You didn't steal your aunt's blouse, did you?”
“It's for a noble cause,” I say.
Gorehound Gary's episode starts. He's on the beach in Santa Monica.
The water sparkles and the setting sun peeks behind a cloud, tinting the sky with a gorgeous shade of pink, purple, and orange I'm not used to seeing here.
Throngs of surfers and swimmers crowd the beach, the breeze blowing elegantly through their hair.
“LA is beautiful,” I say.
“I went there on a trip with my family when I was ten.
We rode scooters in Santa Monica. The air was so crisp and fresh.
One of my happiest memories. If I could live anywhere in the world, I'd go there and surf and vibe all day,” Felix says.
“Seeing the sun set behind palm trees in a pink sky. Most beautiful sunset I've ever seen.”
Gorehound Gary is shirtless, showing off his buff physique as his makeup artist turns him into a zombie.
“But we're not gay,” I say.
“Of course not,” Felix replies.
“Definitely not.”
“He's just talented.”
“Exactly,” I say.
The episode turns out to be him fighting a man in a shark costume on the sand. I feel oddly let down.
“I thought he was going to fight a real shark like in the movie,” I say.
“His content is going downhill fast.”
“You know, we can make stuff as good as his. Better, even.”
“Nobody watches our videos,” Felix says.
“If we can get this drag-queen-gnome prank to go viral, they will.”
“Wade, I can't find my—” Dinah says as she busts through the door. She immediately spots the gnome, the blouse, the makeup, and wine cans scattered on the floor.
“Why do you have my Urban Decay palette… my MAC Russian Red… my blouse? Oh, Jesus. YOU'RE the gnome-nappers? And you've been using my makeup?”