The End of FUN (16 page)

You go to look up a girl's phone number and you end up downloading some porn. It's a tale older than time itself.

I knew her last name from the play:
Ezkiaga
, but when I inputted
Katie Ezkiaga
, and then
Katarin Ezkiaga
, the only numbers I found were these old ladies in Spain.

“I need to find this girl's number.”

“Give me Katie Ezkiaga's number.”

“Those aren't the right ones.”

“Fine. Go away, then.”

“Nah. Go away.”

Homie
™
disappeared in a spray of pixels, and it was just me and my thoughts again, but that wasn't any fun, so after a while I was like, “Hey, Homie
™
!”

“Show me another girl.”

I scrolled through the profiles, and some of them were kind of cute, but none of them were real, and all of them charged points. So I started searching around until I found one that didn't charge, this hot blond girl with long bangs. Her name was Bunny_luvr21.

“That one there. Open profile.”

“Yes.”

“Open Bunny_luvr21!”

A loading bar appeared, long and blue. Words flickered across in quick succession—

The bar bulged and popped.

“Yeah, open it.”

Homie
™
flickered and disappeared, and another loading bar appeared, and then Bunny_luvr21 popped into view. Not a hot blond girl with long bangs. A rabbit. This shiny white hairless rabbit with big black anime eyes. Its voice was high-pitched and robotic.

“Um. This isn't what I thought it was going to be.”

The rabbit bounced up and down.

“Nah. Go away. End program.”

“Close Bunny_luvr21. End program.”

“End!”

No matter what I tried, I couldn't get it to go away, and I couldn't bring back Homie
™
, either, so I did an emergency Admin contact and got scolded for contracting an STD and was told to do a hard reboot. I should've known—that's what the Admin always say:
Do a hard reboot
.

You're supposed to lightly touch your fingertips to your eyelids and say the reboot code:
There's no place like home
. But—for me anyway—the self-tactility recognition is pretty terrible, and I practically had to cram my fists into my eyeballs for FUN
®
to recognize I was touching myself. (Ha.)

“There's no place like home!”

“THERE'S NO PLACE LIKE HOME!”

Bunny_luvr21 flickered and exploded, and everything went black, and after a while in the darkness a familiar face appeared.

The next day I successfully avoided my dad and sister (well, they had work) and spent the daylight hours trying to get my shoe back from Bones and brooding over what to do next and executing hard reboots. The stupid Bunny_luvr21 had infected my whole system. Every few hours, Homie
™
would flicker and the hairless anime-eyed rabbit would leap into vision and start pestering me some more about hopping.

Evening came. After a tense dinner with Dad and another hard reboot, I finally heard back from Oso.

Awesome. It was kind of a confusing message, but I was happy to have an excuse to get out of the house. Just before I left, I tried one more time to retrieve my shoe from Bones. I went to snatch it from her, and she snapped up and bit my hand, and I yelled and dropped the shoe, and she leapt back like I'd hit her. She cowered on the floor.

“Hey,” I said. “
Easy
. You're the one who bit me. See?”

Little pinpricks of blood were rising to the surface of my skin. It wasn't bleeding all that much, but it still stung. I washed it off in the sink and wrapped a towel around it, and when I got back to the bedroom, Bones was there, ears flat against her head, all sad and angry at the same time. And she still had my shoe. I decided to let her keep it a little while longer.

I headed to King Cowboy in my dad's mocassins. The snow had melted some during the day, but now it was all an icy slick. I fell down four times. When I finally got to the casino, I saw what Oso meant about wearing a mask. It was a party. Not a Party
™
, but a
party
, a real party, with real balloons and everything, like some kind of Mardi Gras celebration, everyone dressed in feathers and beads and these glittery masks.

The music was thumping and there was a fog machine going, and I wandered around looking for Oso, and then a big woman in a bird mask grabbed me by the elbow.

“How do you know Tawna!” she shouted.

“I don't know Tawna!”

“You don't know Tawna?!”

“I don't think so!”

“You gotta meet her! That's why we're all here, right? IT'S HER FRICKIN' BIRTHDAY!”

I told her I was looking for my friend, but either the birdwoman didn't hear me or she chose to ignore me. Instead, she dragged me through the fog in search of Tawna. But Tawna was not going to be found. Not that night. From what I could gather, Tawna had run out the back door with a guy named Maury, or maybe it was Clarence. Terrence? Opinion seemed split fifty-fifty as to whether this was a good idea, seeing as it was in clear violation of her parole—and then in the other corner you had True Love.

Eventually I peeled away from birdwoman to continue my search for Oso, and just about the time I was getting ready to give up, this dude in a bear mask put his hands on my shoulders.

“Oso!”

“Hey, bro!” He wrapped me in a big bear hug. “Anyone know you're here?”

“Just you and some woman in a bird mask. She wanted to introduce me to Tawna.”

“You saw Tawna? Where is she? I been looking everywhere for her.”

“I don't think she's here. I heard she left with some guy.”

“What?” Oso whipped off the mask. Dark eyebrows all bunched together.

“She went out the back with some dude.”

“Lawrence? Was it LAWRENCE?!”

“Maybe?”

“Come on!”

YAY! for Oso Sandoval, whose real name is Angel—
Angelo,
actually—and who is known among friends as El Oso, the bear, on account of how big he is. But being big isn't what makes Oso cool. It's his creative mind, positive energy, and mad art skills, which I'm sure would easily give him star status at any one of the more than 150 Art Academies
™
of America, whose unique programs and flexible learning options make it the first choice for aspiring creative professionals. (YAY!)

Here's just one example:

When we were in fourth grade, our teacher handed out these worksheets with a picture of a glass of water on it. And next to the top half of the glass it said
50% Air
, and next to the bottom half it said
50% Water
, and on the bottom it said,
Technically, the glass is full
. And what we were supposed to do was color in the water. That was the entire assignment. Maybe we were learning fractions or something. Mrs. Carlyle was nice, but she was a pretty crappy teacher.

Anyway, while the rest of us fought over blue markers like a bunch of monkeys, Oso crossed out the word
full
and wrote
imaginary
. Then, where the water was, he drew a dragon in scuba gear eating its own tail and blew everyone's mind. The guy has talent.

I followed him through the crowd, down a hallway, and out the back door. We ran up and down the alley looking for Tawna. But Tawna was gone.

“Well, she wasn't the one I really needed to talk to anyway,” said Oso. “It was that sonofabitch Lawrence. They're probably halfway to Reno by now.”

“Who's Lawrence?”

“A shape-shifting son of a bitch.”

“What?”

“An evil spirit in human clothing, bro. He stole my pills. Swapped them out for duds. Now I'm wanted by a Mexican biker gang. I'll tell you about it later. You wanna see my new truck?”

I followed him down the alley to where his truck was parked. It wasn't just any truck. It was like this giant almost-monster truck with skulls painted all over it.

“That's yours?”

“Not bad, right? Dude I know gave it a twelve-inch lift. Then this OTHER dude, he works at a body shop out by Walmart, he let me use his airbrush. I was gonna put another creeper on the hood, but I didn't have the time. Whaddya think?” He ran his hand lovingly along the hood of the truck. “Feel how
smooth
that gloss is. I buffed that shit with a
diaper
.”

It was pretty nice all right. Oso had done it up in blue and white with his signature creeper skulls, which had evolved since the last time I'd seen them. They were even creeper-ier now.

Oso grabbed my wrist. “What happened there? You get bit?”

So I told him about Bones and my shoe. Oso nodded. “That's awesome. Know what the Apache say?”

“The Apache?”

“The tradition is, in order to become a medicine man, you have to be attacked by a snake, an eagle, or a mountain lion!”

“…And?”

“And you got attacked!”

“By a dog!”

“Hey, it's the modern world, bro! We do with what we have. Snake, eagle, dog—it don't matter. That right there.” He pointed to the tiny bite marks. “That right there is a
sign
, bro. Big changes are coming your way. Mark my words.”