Random Acts of Love (Random #5) (22 page)

“What day is it?”

“Monday,” they said in unison.

“MONDAY?” My own shout made the white light appear in my head even behind closed eyelids. A slow, dull recognition of my body’s needs began to register.

“Thirty-six hours or so, then, you’ve been passed out?” Alex guessed.

“I need to pee.”

Josie sniffed the air. “I think you already did.”

I sniffed. Ugh. “Naw. That’s cat piss. Not human piss. I think Crackhead got her revenge.”

Josie peeled back part of my covers and grimaced, gently setting them back down. “Um, she’s right,” she said to Alex. “Crackhead got her back for the thong thing.”

“I would never put a thong on a cat,” I declared, suddenly indignant. “And I don’t appreciate being accused of such a thing.” I slowly moved my rubber band legs off the side of my bed, noticing I was still wearing the same pants I’d worn the night I’d had Amy, Charlotte and Maggie over.

Oh, God.

“Are they still here?” I croaked.

“Who?”

“My friends?”

“No one’s here, Darla,” Josie explained. “We just got back from our trip. There is a giant English cucumber on the dining table, covered in a condom. Someone’s left what appears to be a pussy pocket filled with, um...”

“Mayo,” Alex filled in.

I gave him a look.

“No, really. It’s mayo. And before anyone asks, that is
not
my pussy pocket.”

“No one was going to ask,” Josie groused, shooting him the stink eye.

“Well, anyhow, it’s not. Mine, that is,” he said in a tight voice. 

“And—” Josie’s words were cut off with a sharp inhale as I stood.

“I guess we know what happened to the wallpaper,” Alex said.

“WHAT HAPPENED WHILE WE WERE GONE?” Josie screamed at me, grabbing my shoulders as I stood. 

“Ow! Ow! Stop unleashing the flying monkeys, woman!” I grumbled. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. Cucumbers and pussy pockets and cats with thongs? You people are crazy.”

Josie turned the color of a fire engine and craned her neck to look behind me as I shuffled away from her.

“Darla Josephine Jennings!”

My butthole puckered up instantly, because when someone calls you by your full name you know you’re in trouble.

Except... my anus couldn’t pucker.

It couldn’t move.

“What the...” I reached behind me to feel my behind and encountered a wall of frozen sweatpants cloth and a two-foot long swath of some weird kind of paper poking up out of the waistband of my pants and covering the small of my back.

It kind of fanned out, like a peacock’s feathers in full glory.

“LOOK AT YOURSELF IN THE MIRROR!” Josie thundered. She’s this tiny little thing but her voice can carry. That woman is an electric bullhorn disguised as a human female.

I shuffled toward the bathroom. And I do mean shuffled. My thighs normally smooch up against each other like two people on Ecstasy at a cuddle party, but right now they were superglued together. My short curlies were being plucked out every half inch I moved.

“Ow, ow, ow, ow, ow,” I muttered until I finally got to the bathroom and pulled back the door, ready to look in the mirror.

“Hey!” I called out, still half asleep. The wall had a huge four-foot white spot on it, the ancient wallpaper glue dried and nasty in spots, like a bad case of psoriasis. “What did you guys do to the bathroom wall?”

“I’m going to kill her,” I heard Josie say. Then Alex spoke to her in a calm, soothing voice.

“I mean it!” Josie shouted. She sounded disturbingly like my mama that one time when I tried to see if the cat would fit down the hole in the sink when I was five years old. 

I looked at the wall, then felt my behind. The mirror cleared things up. It showed me wearing a big display of foil-covered wallpaper in a giant arch. It also showed a henna tattoo on my cheek. Was that...

“Josie? Did you tattoo a picture of an anus on my face?” I bellowed. Outrage poured through me. How dare she do this to me? 

Alex came rushing in, about as flummoxed as I’ve ever seen him. Even worse than the time he ran into a No Parking sign in front of the apartment when he thought Josie was fucking Joe.

(Was that really almost two years ago? What the hell happened to the time?)

“Darla,” he said in his best calm, doctor voice, “please stop talking to Josie right now.”

“But she tattooed her anus on my face! Look at it!” Sure enough, someone had tattooed a fucking brown starfish on my cheek.

He reached out and stroked the offending tattoo with his thumb. It smeared.

“Oh my Lord, it’s not a tattoo, is it?” I screamed. “Someone sat on my face and let out a wet fart!”

Alex gave me a look not unlike the one I’ve seen him flash at Josie right after they get into a fight. It’s a mixture of
What planet are you from?
and
How can I hide your body after I kill you?
 

“It’s lipstick, Darla.”

“Huh?”

“Someone put on dark lipstick, puckered up, and kissed you. A puckered mouth and a puckered anus look remarkably similar.”

“You learn that in medical school?”

His eyes turned kinda angry. I’ve never seen Alex truly angry. It made a cold flush run through me, like I’d done something terribly wrong.

His eyes combed over my face. My waist. The petticoat of wallpaper I wore. He planted his long-fingered surgeons hands on his hips, took a deep breath, and let the anger fade out.

How in the hell did he do that?

“Darla,” he said calmly, “You need to get rid of the wallpaper that is adhered to your ass, and then take a shower. Hydrate. I’ll take care of the nuclear bomb that is your aunt.”

“She’s mad at me?” I said, tears filling my eyes. What the hell was wrong with me? I got all weepy like my period was coming. It wasn’t due for two more weeks, so...

“She’s ready to rent a wood chipper and make you disappear.”

I took a step away from him. “Oh, yeah. That’s pretty pissed. I hear you, Alex. I’ll get lost. But I have a question.”

“Yes?”

“Can you go in the kitchen and grab me the bottle of Goo Gone?”

“Goo Gone?”

“Yeah, you know. The stuff you use to get tape off of windows and shit like that.”

He leaned against the doorjamb and crossed his arms over his chest. Damn, he was an imposing man. Another one of those saintly sighs came out of him.

“Why do you need Goo Gone?”

“I need to rub it all over my nibbly bits to get rid of the wax.”

Another sigh. Man, he needed lots of those to calm down. Where other people just pop Xanax, Alex used sighs.

“Your nibbly bits?”

“My hoohaw and poop chute.”

“You learn those terms in medical school?” he asked dryly.

I stuck my tongue out at him just as Josie appeared.

Bad timing.

Alex turned away from us with a kind of fluid grace that made him look like he was on ice skates, disappearing down the hall.

“You realize we’re supposed to be in the car tomorrow to drive to Ohio for Aunt Cathy’s wedding?” Josie hissed, her voice like a fresh kill sizzling on a barbecue.

“Yeah. So. I’ll be ready,” I grumbled. What the fuck was her problem? 

She reached behind me and grabbed the top of the wallpaper attached to me, yanking up. If I’d have been wearing a thong I’d have gotten a wedgie.

Instead, I felt some short curlies pull out and more tears filled my eyes.

“Hey! Cut it out!”

“I can’t believe you destroyed my bathroom, Darla! And HOW?”

“Waxing,” I muttered.

Alex appeared with the Goo Gone, eyes lit up like a Christmas tree. “Here,” he said.

“What’s that for?” she asked him. 

He shrugged and backed away, palms up. Josie was on fire. Smart man, not wanting to get burned. “She asked for it because she needs to remove the wax from her hoohaw and poop chute.” He said those words like some fancy British actor making fun of American slang.

Josie’s head turned slowly back to me, her mouth agape. “This was a waxing accident?”

“Yes.” The less I said, the better. I unscrewed the bottle’s cap and whiplashed back. That shit smelled like pain.

“What were you waxing?”

“My anus.”

Masculine laughter burst forth from down the hall.

“Why?”

“Because I wanted to send it to Joe and Trevor.”

“You wanted to send your anus to two guys you just dumped.”

“Yes.”

“That makes no sense.”

“It did last night.”

“You mean two nights ago.”

“Shit!”

“You can’t. Your anus is closed shut by wax.”

Double shit. She had a good point. Thank God I didn’t need to go.

Yet.

Her eyes narrowed. “I have half a mind to force feed you an entire box of laxatives and just leave you here.”

“You wouldn’t!”

“No, she wouldn’t,” Alex called out. “I would never let anyone do that to someone. I took a Hippocratic Oath.”

“That only applies to your patients,” Josie called down the hall. “And stop eavesdropping! Go make yourself useful. Make coffee. Procure a ballgag. Something,” she muttered.

I held up the bottle of solvent. “You gonna stand there and watch me pour chemicals all over my sensitive parts and rip this wax off like something out of a Steve Carrell movie, or you gonna leave?”

She left.

Smart woman.

The backdrop sounds of coffee being made and Josie and Alex hissing at each other in the kitchen were a kind of distraction as I poured the solution in my palm and just went for it, slathering it all over the giant crotch-sized swath of cold, frozen wax and pants cloth. Imagine what a little kid’s pants looks like when they wet themselves.

Now add a wallpaper banner and wax.

The solution stung like holy fuck. But I could start to feel the wax softening, and finally, once the bottle was empty, I had to just wait.

Waiting gave me a moment to actually look at myself in the mirror.

I shouldn’t have done that.

I started to cry, and for some fucked up reason in my mind, there was a memory of a clown crying, too. Man, I was one big, giant, alone mess.

With a very hard thing to do next. Who wants to give themselves the most painful yank in the world? I was gonna have to pull my pants off and take every piece of hair within a square mile off with them.

I...I didn’t think I could do it. I’m a brave woman. I’ve stuck my hand inside the sewage pipe of my mama’s trailer back home to pull out a frozen blockage in an ice snap. Chased a possum out of a toilet with a broom. Pulled Trevor off a snake. Brought a non-organic Ambrosia salad to a dinner party in the tony suburbs of Boston. 

But
this
? 

Nope.
Nopenopenope.
 

“Josie?” I called out. My voice sounded as pathetic as it felt.

Footsteps. A knock on the door. Her head, peeking in.

“You done?”

“Naw. I need help.” I leaned against the counter and spoke the words to my reflection. How true they were.

“What do you need?”

“Can you pull my pants off?”

“What?”

“All this wax and Goo Gone and my hair and my skin and I am just afraid of the
paaain
,” I wailed, drawing out the last word.

Her face roiled with sympathy, fury, and I swear to God there was a little wicked pleasure in there, too.

“Alex,” she called down the hall. “Do you have lidocaine cream in your bag?”

“Yes,” he shouted back.

She looked at me and shook her head. “We’ll just rip ’em off like a Band-aid and Alex will slather you up with numbing cream.”

“Numb my vagina? What?”

“It’s better than not numbing it.”

I sighed. It sounded a lot like Alex’s sighs. “Might as well numb it. It’s not like it needs to feel anything. No one else is doing anything to it.”

She ignored that. “You ready?”

I gripped the bathroom counter and shut my eyes, hard. “Yeah.”

Her fingers slid into the waistband of my pants like cold little icicles. Like evil itself stroking me.

“On the count of three,” she said.

But I knew better. “You
always
say you’ll do something on the count of three, Josie,” I argued. “When we were kids you used to fool me.” 

“One!”

“But then you go and do it on the count of—”

RIIIIPPPPPP!

And the world went dark all over again for a completely different reason.

C
HAPTER 8

Darla

“Hey, Darla! Another package for you,” said the UPS delivery dude. I guess even though I’d moved out of Josie’s a while ago, Mama still used her address for sweepstakes. Well, now I was moved back in.  

This was a medium-sized box that weighed about as much as a dog.

“What in the hell is in there?” I asked, rolling it around in my hands.

“No clue, but I have two more just like it on my delivery route. Someone else in Cambridge must like to do these sweepstakes,” he said as he jogged off.

Huh. Go figure. Someone else in this city was as weird as Mama. Two someones.

I was barely functional, wandering back inside the house. Josie was packing the car, getting her trusty Honda ready for the six hundred mile drive home. Because Mama had insisted that we both be in the wedding, and Aunt Marlene had guilted Josie into making sure Alex came, we were all in for a ton of fun (that’s sarcasm spread on thick, like Caro syrup on a stack of pancakes) this coming week.

I wanted to bash my throbbing head in with a rock. The other part of me that throbbed needed a fucking boulder.

Josie had managed to rip off every hair from the nether regions of my body, plus a few more from a future life, along with a fair amount of my epidermis. Wasn’t her fault, and I’d spent the better part of yesterday and this morning soaking in a bathtub filled with oatmeal and numbing gel, shivering and shaking. Alex gave me a puke bucket, which—I must proudly say—I never needed.

They think I was just drunk.

I know Joe spiked that ice cream pie with something that turned us loony.

I was commando, and Josie muttered to herself as she packed. Mama didn’t want no fancy wedding, so we were supposed to just bring our nicest dresses and shoes and make the best of it. I think the last time Josie wore a nice dress was her college graduation. Or maybe her daddy’s funeral. We’re not exactly the “nice dress” types. I had a ball gown from when we went to the Island of Eden but if I wore that in my little town in the midwest, people would think I was a drag queen.