Chapter 34
december
It's been two weeks, and Adam hasn't contacted Roland yet. I feel led on because I swear Adam looked like he was seriously considering it when we talked. Maybe there's a part of him that's still so mad, he can't let go; maybe he wants to and he chickened out.
Either way, the tray of guilt I'm carrying on my shoulder won't stop getting heavier.
Right now, I'm working on the finishing touches of editing our film, which I've titled Yass-squatch Ascending.
The deadline to upload it to the BloodMunch Studios website is eight p.m. I've been hard at work editing this for the past month to create cinema magic.
The Grabadook got a genuinely terrified performance out of me that makes the film work.
Felix was supposed to come help with the final edit, but his dad's forcing him to stay at home and study for semester exams next week.
Earlier, Dinah threw a folder of emails on my desk and asked me to do another round of marketing to her subscriber list, meaning the list of emails they stole from the Bigfoot booth at Nessie's Hot Tub.
At this point, Dinah has only one faithful listener, some guy named Ruslan who lives out in the middle of nowhere in Russia.
Either way, I'll get to it after I submit the film.
A pounding at my window almost gives me a heart attack.
It's Dinah asking me to come outside, where she's putting up Christmas lights.
She's got her parka on since it's almost freezing cold today.
I tell her I'm busy, but she keeps knocking until I get up.
I figure I should take a break anyway, since all I have left to do is upload the film to the site.
Outside, the windchill blows against me, and my fingers cramp up. Dinah directs me to go through the piles of lights and undo any knots. Doesn't matter that I woke up naked in a tree while wrapped in Christmas lights once upon a time and that the sight of them makes me queasy.
“Before the arctic front comes,” she tells me.
Texas weather has a way of throwing off your seasonal clock. Sometimes you'll get a hot December or an EF5 tornado on Christmas Eve. Other times, it'll be a gorgeous seventy degrees. Tonight, in the middle of December, we're getting an arctic blast.
“I'm going to change into something warmer first,” I tell her.
Every December, I feel like that dog in How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
Pulled along for the ride with the villain, whether I like it or not.
Dinah usually starts decorating when the clock strikes midnight on Halloween, but her podcast business has delayed her until a whopping ten days before Christmas.
After I've put on three layers of clothing, I open the front door to a deliveryman, dressed in a khaki shirt and shorts, shaking from the cold.
“Does Mr. Clint Holtz live here?” he asks.
“When the zoo lets him out,” I respond.
Clint appears behind me. “You got an early Christmas gift for me, fella?” he asks, and the deliveryman hands him a big manila envelope.
“You've been served divorce papers by Brenda Holtz.” He speaks in a rapid jumble of words before hurrying back to his truck.
Clint rips open the envelope and thumbs through the papers anxiously. When he gets to the last page, he looks at me, mouth agape, and his lips curl into a hefty grin.
“I'm getting a divorce,” he says. He bolts out the door, knocking me aside, and shouts, “Dinah, I'm getting a divorce!”
“Good,” she says flatly, like this should have been done long before.
“I'M GETTING A DIVORCE! MERRY CHRISTMAS, EVERYBODY! Brenda's looks hit the wall once she turned forty anyway.” Tiny specks of white land on his face, killing his smile. He quickly wipes them off.
Dinah's face lights up and she squeals. “Look! It's snowing!”
“Funny, I thought weather wasn't real,” I say between my teeth.
“You're so negative, Wade,” she says. Like a five-year-old with the attention span of a fly, she's spinning as thick snowflakes flurry to the earth.
She starts to dance like a ballerina, leaping through the air with her legs spread wide apart, and she hums the tune from “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.”
“Clint! Lift me up like in Dirty Dancing!”
He shakes his head. “No, ma'am. Snow is a rain on my Pecos. God made me a Texan for a reason.”
“I've always dreamed of living somewhere cold,” Dinah says to me. “I used to take ballet classes with your mom and we'd pretend we were dancing the pas de deux in the snow kingdom in The Nutcracker.”
“You were a ballerina?” I ask.
“I even auditioned for Juilliard. Well, I tried,” she reminisces.
“And here I was thinking I was fancy for being on the B honor roll at Oyster Pit Community College,” Clint says.
Soon enough, the snow starts to build on the ground.
Dinah's shouting at us to hurry up. I'm scrambling to get one string of lights stretched out in the space between our house and the neighbor's, all the way to the road.
It's so dark I have to turn on my phone light, and a roll of newspaper appears in front of my feet.
Dinah would never read the newspaper or watch the public news, so it's clearly the neighbor's.
As I'm about to throw it, the eyes of a familiar monster stop me.
I pull the paper out of the plastic bag and unroll it.
Front and center on the Oyster Pit Post is a photo of the Sasquatch costume that Brandon Barton Buckley stole from us. BIGFOOT IN OYSTER PIT? the title says. I floor it to the inside of the house so Dinah and Clint don't see.
According to the story, three different men saw the costume.
One man saw it dancing “provocatively” in the woods one night by itself as he was collecting firewood.
Another man found footage of it outside his bathroom window while he was taking a shower.
Ross McConnell, my high school's quarterback, was sitting in a bathroom stall at Oyster Pit Park when it peeked over at him from the next stall. He went screaming for help.
So Brandon Barton Buckley is using our costume to go out into the world and… act gay? I crumple the paper up in a ball. I don't want to think about it. Hopefully somebody catches him and gives him the beatdown he deserves. Maybe then they'll believe me that he's a pedo sex pest.
The lights slowly go out. I step outside to see if they did something stupid, but the entire neighborhood's lights are out.
I gasp, running toward my room. I've got to finish editing and send the movie. My computer is off. I try my laptop. The internet is out.
It's already too late to go to the library, so I text Felix as a Hail Mary option. His power is out, too.
I'm going to miss the deadline to submit our film because the stupid-ass power grid has failed AGAIN. I open my bedroom window and scream out into the snowstorm. Dinah's still there in the yard, Clint right behind her trying to ward off the snow with his flamethrower.
“Wade, stop whining and help us wrap all the pipes before they explode,” she says.
I don't sleep. I stare at the ceiling like a madman all night long.
I don't know where to go from here. We made that film for nothing, and now Brandon Barton Buckley is running amok in that costume doing stealth gay terrorism while doing everything in his power to make people like me and Felix invisible.
Before we know it, he'll be the richest man in the world, and nobody will even know the real him because they're too stupid to let the truth hit them in the faces.
It's physically painful how stupid everything and everybody is. Really, there's no bottom. There's no…
“Don't ever underestimate how stupid people are and how quickly they'll open their wallet if you tap into the pit of their anxieties.”
Huh.
I loved that goth lady at the convention. She was so smart, grifting those dumbasses, and they deserved it. All of these loser conspiracy theorists like my aunt and the greasy potato man that currently occupies my living space.
Like a magic signal, I hear the power come back on. I get out of bed, pull the stapled pages out of the folder Dinah put on my desk, and glance over it. This is a lot of idiots. Idiots who might be willing to part with their money if they hear the right thing.
Hmm.
The window for funding the musical is closing soon. The others have barely raised anything.
What if I went off the beaten path of fundraising and gave the Pansgender! fund a creative little boost?
What if…