Say Cheese, It's the End of the World!

         Every Sunday at church when the clergyman started reverting to his boring self and lapsed into endlessly droning sermons, a routine which always happened approximately three minutes after he'd started talking, my eyes would wander off cheerfully in the direction of a family, consisting of an old decrepit-looking lady who looked like she was brought back to life straight out of the fossil collection and her three awkward-looking grandsons.
         "Hey Charles, Charles, are you one-hundred percent absolutely undoubtedly sure that they three really really have been fostered by the Devil?"
         I was but repeating what my dad Charles had told me, and he was by far the most brilliant and most knowledgeable and by far the only witch hunter I'd ever known. Though he was on the dangerous verge of getting fired by the committee because he always acted like a baby in front of everyone in a way that was sort of embarrassing, I was always enthusiastically adopting every one of his whimsical presumptions. When he'd draw me aside and whisper to me real hysterically that "Phil! I am one-hundred percent absolutely undoubtedly sure with all the adequate premises big and small that that lady selling ice-creams and all down there in the alley is a demon from hell!", I'd exclaim, "No way!", at first. Then he'd say, "Yes way!" And I'd say, "No way!" We'd go back and forth like this for a while, but eventually I always believed him.
         So there I was, turning to Charles and starting to repeat my question, but seeing the state he was in, decided against it. Boy there was no use asking him in church about anything. "Oh, oh, oh!" he'd groan dramatically every time the clergyman declaimed some poetic verses. "So beautiful, so soulful and penetrating...!" And everyone would turn to stare at him admonishingly and in unison, even the clergyman. But Charles would pay no heed, an attentive audience of his own comical performance.
         Peeved and exasperated I bided my time for church to be over and for Charles to get normal again, which in his case, meant that he'd return to a more normal degree of craziness. He was still shuddering violently on our way out of church, having heard the clergyman's vehement condemnation of sinners that were bound to be roasted like Chicken McNuggets in hell.
         "Charles?"
         "Oh the flames the red hot flames and the...!"
         "Charles!" I leaned in close as if to whisper, and screamed into his earholes, "Which ones of those three are the foster sons of the devil?"
         He was still shivering as if he really were McNuggets taken out of the refrigerator. He looked at me, then at the three boys, who were being led out by their prehistoric grandmother, and then back at me, the fear undiluted in his eyes. "All of them," Charles whispered feverishly, his voice a mad tremor, as if he'd foreseen his dreadful ends within an oven.
         "Oh really?" I pursued, getting excited all over, "which one of those are already in association with their dad?" Associating with the devil meant that one was a witch.
         Charles looked mournfully at those three boys, as if they were the ones who'd skewer and roast and barbecue him in his afterlife. "The littlest 'um, I think, hasn't gotten involved yet," he was mumbling and swallowing, an ominous telltale that he'd start crying if nobody would buy him a pizza.
         I leapt up. "Somebody's gotta warn that poor kid against his evil brothers!" I cast my eyes around desperately for the family and found them ahead of us, the primeval granny, the two sallow-faced and surly-looking elder brothers who were surely several years my senior, and their kid brother.
         Their kid brother. The sole, singularly predominant reason why I kept nagging Charles about that family, he was all brown and gold and dust and grime, his eyes handsome, his nose handsome, his ears handsome, his hair handsome, his breath smelt handsome, his booger handsome, even his constantly sweat-excreting pores blinked with flamboyant handsomeness.
         And best of all, he was around my age.

         That night I was about to slip out of the house to strike up an ineffably prearranged and coincidental acquaintance with my future boyfriend when...
         "Where are... (hiccupping)... you going Phil?" Tob yelled from our couch where he slouched next to Charles, both their eyes glazing over in front of the TV set. Tob was this neighbor of ours, an obese meatball of a kid who had absolutely no bones at all (this I knew because I beat him up half a dozen times before) and who, whenever he had the chance, would drop by our place to watch television with my dad. I strongly suspected that he did so only because Charles was the only adult who could condone and come to appreciate his strong addiction for TV and also, that Charles was the only guy in the world he could pathetically bully into switching channels when he didn't like what was currently on TV.
         "Hmn...(hiccupping)... yeah, where are you going Phil? (Further hiccupping)" Charles chimed in, squeaking. Man those popcorn were really starting to choke these two.
         "I'm gonna hit the sack," I announced but instead opened the front door.
         "This too early for bed," Tob glanced at me with a dazed expression on his face, didn't notice anything peculiar, and went back to watching his show.
         Charles didn't even bother to say good night. He just scooped up the remnants of the last popcorn and shot a surreptitiously triumphant grin at Tob, the way a rat would when having swiped his bit of cheese without arousing the mousetrap.
         Theirs was a big brown chocolate cake of a house where I had stalked them to the other day, with the usual nice white icing everywhere and all. When you start on the first floor and count to the third great delicious lump of icing on the left, you'd get to the very room of the most glorious boy on earth.
         I pushed myself up the windowsill. It was pure poetry and providence of the Almighty that he was actually in his room. It was also pure poetry and providence of the Almighty that I could, from my very position, study with an awed fervor the positive set to his cheekbones, the warm brown effulgence to his skin, the air of self-assurance to his every movement when doing... doing whatever he was doing. But it was so not pure poetry or providence of the Almighty that my fingers had started to slip from my sweat and I lost my balance and practically teetered forward and fell head down into that wonderful boy's room without so much as any fanfare or professional announcers or any other elaborately contrived and convoluted intricacies that should have involved in introducing me.
         The boy started. He stared at me with those eyes of his, so wide and unblinking in its intensity that he seemed forebodingly unreal. And when he finally spoke, as much as I wanted to deny it, there was this warily hostile edge to his voice and worst of all, what he actually said was way beyond my comprehension and to such an extent of ambiguity that everything had suddenly gone berserk.
         He said, "Are you a Jedi or a man-eating penguin? Because if you're neither I'm gonna scream."
         I blinked. Then blinked again, "Why would I be a Jedi or a man-eating penguin?"
         Like a good boy who always kept his words, he started screaming.
         Footsteps sounded down the hallway, tolling like some kind of an imminent death knell.
         I started screaming, too, like he was the intruder and I had every legitimate right to be there in the first place. "You're gonna get us both killed!" I yelled, "See? Your wicked witch brothers are coming to roast us up alive like Chicken McNuggets!"
         Before the groan of an open door would ever have the time to reach my ears, I had beaten the hell out of the place, hanging on for dear life.

         That night I lay in bed gazing into the infinity and nothingness that was the sky and felt depressed. I turned away and stared at the bopping, dappled shadows which were displaying themselves on the wall like puppet shows instead, but decided they were disturbingly palpable enough to enter my most grotesque nightmares and felt depressed. I burrowed myself into the stomach of my stuffed teddy but suddenly felt it a stiff and bulky and lifeless thing that was just staring at me and wouldn't even go roller-skating with me and I felt depressed.
         Suddenly a head poked out from out of my window.
         I did the most reasonable thing a brave big girl like me would've done. I screamed. Loud enough to scare Benedict Arnold out of his grave pissing mad, but not loud enough to scare away the intruder, who was now climbing down from the window sill with such nimble stealth and assurance that he could've easily put a professional acrobat to shame.
         It was that wondrous boy.
         This was the first gracious greeting from me, "How the hell did you climb up a six-story building all the way to my bedroom window?"
         The look he gave me was of wonder and hurt disappointment, "Aw, I thought everybody does that to get into his own room."
         This was the second, more gracious greeting from me, "How the hell did you climb up a six-story building all the way to my bedroom window?"
         He was incredulous, "I can't believe you've got that beautiful fire escape out there in the front and you just let it go rot and wasted." He really looked as if he could not believe that humanity had been reduced to such a pitiable state that people no longer enjoyed using the fire escape to get into their own rooms anymore.
         This is the third, most gracious greeting from me, "How the hell did you climb up a six-story building all the way to my bedroom window?" Because everyone knew that all fire escapes ought to be in the emergency rooms themselves, being all rickety and precipitous like a bunch of out-of-joint skeletons, and that the only people who climbed them were more half-dead than alive anyway.
         "People just ain't no fun anymore," he plunked onto my bed and heaved a brilliant sigh, one miffed little person sorry over the final destruction of humanity. I almost felt sorry for humanity's destruction, too, but decided I was too confused to go on worrying about stuffs like that. "How did you find me here...?"
         "Shh," he interrupted rudely.
         "Why did you wanna find me...?"
         "Shh," he cut in again.
         "What did you come here for...?"
         I would've repeated the 5W's and an H indefinitely and made my English teacher proud, but the boy turned on me with such a look that I shut up immediately. For approximately three seconds. "When did you realize that it was me who barged into your room and...?"
         "I'll answer your questions," he said slowly, like a fed-up teacher trying to teach a kid how to count to three without the kid forgetting what one or two was, "when I figure out what's so wrong with me that I could not answer your questions."
         "Oh so have your figured out what's wrong with you...?"
         "And I need silence. Jedi meditation needs silence."
         So we just meditated for five whole minutes which involved nothing but sitting around and getting bored like hell. I thought I was gonna get ADHD if nobody would ever say a thing.
         Finally he looked up, "I think I have a perfectly presentable reason now."
         "What is it?!"
         "My stomach is suffering greatly from hunger," he announced, seriousness written all over his face. "It is thus wildly texting messages to my brain and commanding my brain not to answer any questions until I'm treated with a nice hearty meal before twelve."
         So I had to bring him something to eat lest he started meditating all over again. And man was he a weirdo eater. He dunked whole soggy slices of macaroni pizza and a frankfurter into his cereal instead of the regular cornflakes. He ate his PB & J upside down, with the bread sticking out in the middle between the peanut butter and the jelly, which got sticky all over his fingers when he tried to hold it. He even had coffee, only he added half a gallon of milk and chocolate and caramel with no coffee in it. And he hated vegetables.
         "What, in the name of the force, is that?" even when his mouth was full, his voice was all contemptuous music.
         "Lettuce, maybe...?"
         "That," he singled out that poor little green piece of lettuce, eyed it suspiciously, and instantly threw it out of the window as if he had caught the plague or something, "is undoubtedly the evilest, most atrocious living being that has ever walked the planet!"
         You get the idea. It was insanely amazing and drove me nuts at the same time
         He finally finished his meal and was ready to answer my questions. "What were your questions again?" he asked absently, licking his fingers one after the other.
         I was real patient and repeated to him the 5W's and an H.
         He cleared his throat real ceremoniously. I could tell that play time was over and he was now all business-like all over again. "I have come such a distance of lonely miles across fair oceans and lands," he announced with solemnness, despite the fact that his house was only a few blocks away from mine, "for honor, justice, and candor upon the name of my family."
         I groaned too loudly.
         He turned on me sharp, "Upon leaving our house, you have slandered my brothers with the most heinous of blasphemies by addressing them... by addressing them... Wait what did you call them again?"
         "I only just called them your evil witch..."
         "That's right! You have slandered my brothers with the most heinous of blasphemies by addressing them my evil witch brothers, and therefore I have the justice to declare you guilty as..."
         "I haven't slandered anybody!" I had finally had enough and started screaming to make my point.
         "You called my brothers witches!" he hollered back.
         "They are witches!" I screamed even louder so as to talk sense into him even though I knew it'd be a long shot.
         "Are not!"
         "Are too!"
         "Are not!"
         "Are too!"
         "Are not are not are not are not are not...!" Man it was the first time I'd dealt with someone more unreasoningly pigheaded than Charles. I felt like that as civilized as I was, I had to cut the screaming crap and talk things out properly or else I'd be mistakenly categorized as a loony right alongside him.
         So I told him the half-truth that my dad was a crack witch hunter with a license and salary. (The part I didn't tell him being that Charles had shredded his license to pieces and ate them whole four months ago when we were playing Truth or Dare. He picked eating his license over admitting the truth that his boss Mr. Field, who would forget to pay him salaries every other month, was a bigger nastier miser than old Mr. Satan.) I also told him the half-truth that my dad was a callous, merciless gunslinger who shot people around for fun, especially when it comes to ignorant little kids who ever dared to take his profound understanding of the identification of the black arts too lightly. (The truth in it being that Charles was indeed callous and very much merciless when it comes to pitting against me for more pizza.)
         This last point got the boy very silent at first.
         And then he said, real carefully and slow, "So... it's like if your dad says that the lady selling ice-creams and all down there in the alley is a demon from hell, she really would be the one go to hell and have a nice cup of Americano there after a long day's work?"
         "Exactly."
         "It's like, if your dad says that your homeroom teacher who hands out all the smiley stickers and homemade cupcakes during parties is actually a blood-thirsty hell hound, she really would plan to gobble you up like Harringtons grain-free wet dog food?"
         "Exactly!" I was getting excited.
         "Like when your dad says that your next-door neighbor is the voice of God, you guys really would strut around the neighborhood wearing nothing but your light sabers and underwear, only because he tells you-all to do so and oh thus goes the will of the Almighty?"
         "Exactly!" I was really beginning to feel gratified by the heights my sense of logic and reason could reach.
         "So... it can be concluded that..." he said, chewing his words now nice and slow, "that when he says that my two brothers are witches, they're actually normal high school seniors and have nothing out of the ordinary to contribute to such a stigmatizing title."
         "Exactly! That's what I... Wait, huh?"
         Before I could properly correct myself, he was already howling with peals of delight at his ill-gotten victory. He rolled around in bed and plunked down on the floor still laughing, all sprawled up full-length like a sea star and trembling, trembling with such sporadic hiccups to a point that he could scarcely see or breathe.
          That made me a whole lot madder. "You jerk!" I screamed, grabbing for my pillows and pelting him with them on the head with all the vehemence I could muster, "You cheating, good-for-nothing, asshole jerk!"
         And it turned into that half-scuffling, half-swearing sort of fight which involved a tumultuous racket, much of uselessly frenzied screaming, and an elaborate use of more dirty words swung in the air than apparently necessary in such a brawl.
         But finally, as truth and justice always prevail in the stories, I won, beat him up like hell, and sat on him triumphantly. "So whaddaya say to that? Ain't your brothers witches?" I yelled, savoring the sweetness of success that had gathered up in my chest.
         He didn't answer.
         I looked down, ready to give him another sock in the eyes or the solid uppercut I was so famous for.
         But the boy was already fast asleep. I had to tow him all the way back to his house and put him to bed like I was his mother or something.

          His name was Nathe. I learned it the next day when I met him on the bleachers beside the basketball court after school.
         There were these guys playing, so I sat down next to him to watch. They had two teams, but it wasn't exactly fair play because one of the teams had only four players.
         One of the guys, probably their captain, called out to us, "Hey yo people, we could really use another player!" But I could tell that he was directly looking at me and trying very very hard to ignore Nathe, who was frantically flailing his arms about in the air as if they were on fire or something. I should've felt flattered.
         "Ooh ooh me me me me me!" Nathe was saying and nearly fell off the railing trying to draw the captain's attention.
         The captain rolled his eyes, Here we go again.
         "Please Georgie I'll do anything, I promise. I'll give you my lunch money, I'll do your math homework, I'll follow you everywhere you go, I'll be the very first thing you miss in the morning, I'll shower you with loves and kisses forever..."
         Captain Georgie looked like he'd rather blow his brains out with a revolver than have Nathe shower him with loves and kisses forever. "Fine," he snapped, still reluctant, and beckoned for Nathe to join them.
         "I knew it! Ah Georgie my savior my hero my redeemer my..."
         Georgie swerved him around hard so that the two are face to face with each other, Nathe's face a pure celebration of super paradise and Georgie's a surly tombstone of sordid deeds sworn beforehand. A taut finger poked the paradise in his face, "Now this time, no funny business. No. Funny. Business. At all. You hear?"
         "Yes sir."
         So I watched them play. And man was Nathe the most fervently hell-bent, the most flat-out pursuing, and the most astoundingly lousy player in the whole field. He could blast at full speed to and fro between two hoops approximately several dozen times per minute, hooting at the top of his lungs all the while without even touching the ball once. He could dodge, swivel, feint, literally leap under people, and maneuver himself like a battery charged with energy and movement, befuddling everyone else in the field with his antics but mostly befuddling himself. And he always always cheered for the wrong team. He even whooped and hollered and did a little jig dance when his own team was sabotaged by a brilliant twenty-two points to nil half an hour later.
         All his other teammates looked ready enough to feed him to the wolves. But not Georgie. Georgie looked like he'd rather eat Nathe up alive himself than have all that fiddly nuisance of having to find a wolf to feed him to.
         "You!" I could see in Georgie's eyes the hectoring promise of hell. The game was now over and Nathe's fellow friendly teammates were closing in on him with murderous politeness which almost always precedes a lurid Gothic tragedy.
         And at the very epicenter of this cataclysmic earthquake stood Nathe, still wholly innocent of the impending nuclear explosion around him and grinning like all he'd ever seen were Easter bunnies and lollipops, "Hey guys! That was a good game ain't it? Georgie almost scored! Almost! Can you believe it?! It was... why are you guys all looking at me funny..."
         And I had to save him again, apologizing profusely to everyone which included several broken noses and some flaccid, disjointed limbs, but nothing much other than that. The guys just went on playing without Nathe, and in the mere first half minute of the game, Georgie's four-player team took six shots in a roll purely out of spite and dignity.
         After that, Nathe and I were pretty much good friends.
         The days went on and we spent most of our time together after school. Nathe could always nonsensically come up with fresh and off-beat things for us to do. We clambered up the fire escape which, with frolicking, scrambling kids on it would suffer epileptic seizures, all the way to my room. We sat on the rugged roof of his ice-cream white house, relishing the seedy dash of yellow and melting saffron which were the last of an oversaturated sunset, and played monopoly with the latticed tiles. We tethered sturdy ropes to bedroom windows with an outlook of a corrugated, lackluster dawn and unflaggingly worked our way for it to be our makeshift little swing where we could just sit there and dangle our feet and make up weird stories about ourselves.
         He was willing to believe anything we made up, anything. Anything but the fact that his two brothers were witches. And that the three of them were actually fosterlings of the Devil. And that his two brothers were plotting against him and looking for a chance to turn him to the heinous, abhorrently sacrilegious dark arts of witchcraft and wizardry, too.
         It all made a lot of perfect sense to me.
         His two brothers were evil.
         One of the two locked himself up in his room asleep all day, the one time he did come out he was all in white from head to toes in his pajamas, bleary-eyed and disgruntled and dry like a moth, and seeing us gave him such a thorn in the flesh that he slammed the door shut and went back to sleep again.
         The other guy was real ugly, all tooth and grins and headphones, and every time he was in the house he'd be disc jockeying and banging around with explosive music to upend the house like he was afraid that normal people wouldn't get minor strokes and that people with strokes wouldn't die early enough and that dead people wouldn't stay dead enough never again to see the day.
         We seldom come across them even at their own house, but you could tell they were evil anyway because their whole evil existence exuded such evilness that would make you wanna sneeze evilly.
         But Nathe just wouldn't buy it.
         "That guy!" I was gesticulating exaggeratedly to get my point across, "That brother of yours upstairs sleeping all day in his room! Jesus he looks like a bloody banshee! I bet you the reason why he's all dog tired and washed out in the day is that he eats children's dreams at night! Gulps them down, even yours, so there'd only be nightmares left for us kids!"
         "That's Syd," Nathe replied, and stoutly sat down on his haunches with definitiveness, "and he's the nicest, coolest, hottest guy ever alive on earth. And that's that." He didn't even sound like he wanted to argue with me. Boy did that drive me up the wall.
         "And that guy!" Jesus I was so ticked off I was screeching with a trill like shattered champagne, "with those fucked-up headphones! Who the hell would be jamming around with a funky racket like that if not the inside man of digital virus and cyber havoc against human amenities!"
         "That... that's Diem," this time Nathe seemed a little unsure, and kept looking around as if he expected miniature sonic receivers to be hidden in the Cocoa Krispies packet on their kitchen shelf, "Really... he's very nice. Very awesome. And cool... and whacky. For a big brother I mean."
         "What are you even talking about?!" I was peeved, really peeved, "Jesus I bet they fed all that mindlessly crawling trash into your brain like they feed coins into vending machine slots! I bet that Syd of yours did that to you at night when you aren't even looking the right way! That's just the sort of thing witches would do to you when you're asleep!"
         "Syd's not!" Nathe shot up, cheeks piping hot, "He's a Jedi master who taught me how to swordfight with ugly veggies and a guardian of the penguins against inhuman showers and poisonous shampoo and shackle breaker of enslaved kids having to do their arithmetic homework on the volcanic planet of Mustafar!" He cut short, stared at me, and ululated, like a real savage, "Die, veggies!"
         That was how we came to an agreement that we had to meet Syd to verify my point that he was a witch and to verify Nathe's point that he was a Jedi master, a patron of penguins, a patriotic hero of the emancipation of kids, Dora the Explorer's long-lost spouse, Nemo's brother without his stripes, and the lollipop man whom everybody misunderstood and failed to appreciate except for his parent old Mister SpongeBob.

         We were to meet him in one of Nathe's favorite restaurants. It was a nice little restaurant with warm and fuzzy food, a door full of afterglow, ambling acoustics, and an old granny at the front counter who would ask a nine-year-old whether the other nine-year-old she'd taken with her was her boyfriend. Nathe spat out his tongue, disgusted, which made me like that granny even more.
         "What do you and your friend here like to have for today, Nathan?" the Granny asked nice and slow and toothlessly, "We have your favorite chocolate chip monsters; I know how you love chocolate chip monsters that you could send roller-coasting across the table! Ooh and we have our special sausage doggies today, feel like playing see-saw with them now?"
         Nathe shook his head. "Uh-uh, we're waiting for my brother," he replied wide-eyed and firm, "We aren't ordering anything if he ain't here."
         "Such a sweet little boy you are, Nathan." Nathe grinned like a painted Christmas cherub whose top priority right now was to rush to the restroom, slam the door shut, and keenly, wisely rethink his life as a Christmas cherub. "Your brother must be very proud of you. Now come on, let's find you two a seat."
         So we sat down and waited for Syd.
         It was our first time out dining and Nathe didn't even so much as look at me. Man was he considerate. He kept looking out the window, standing on tiptoes, rocking in his seat restlessly like a fidgety kid in his malfunctioning bumper car. Once he suddenly sprang to his feet like a popcorn, toppled our table, and then absently sagged down again, completely unaware of the capsized table who'd been lying on the ground crying for the first half minute. Finally I was so teed off I couldn't take it any longer. So I showed him what I was about to do.
         "Hey Nathe! Nathe! Gee! You see this?"
         He looked up, his eyes clouded and opaque like milkshake over-frozen, "Huh?"
         "This!"
         "A Medichlorian mushroom?"
         "No! Jesus it's a paper pin!"
         "Oh. So you can't eat it."
         I slapped my forehead. "Okay okay okay okay okay okay..." Deep breath, Phil, deep breath, no use getting all steamed up in front of your future boyfriend. "You know what they say about paper pins?" I asked, real patient, "they say that when you try to prick a witch with a pin, it ain't gonna hurt them! So you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna put a pin on your brother's chair..." and I bent down and did exactly that, "... and then if he really is..."
         "Yes!" Nathe leapt to his feet like a Jack in the Box, finally, finally conceding the righteousness of my point after all my strenuous exertion and my eloquently worded persuasion, and I crossed my fingers thanking God thanking Charles thanking even Tob and Isaac Newton and my suddenly beautiful math teacher that it was all along the universe's immutable, predestined, inalienable maxim that hard work always pays off when... "Phil, Syd's here! Syd! Syd Syd Syd Syd Syd Syd Syd!" He scrambled up the table, bounced around, flailing his arms about like a lunatic shipwrecked seaman seeing both his death in Sahara and the Millennium Falcon.
         "Nathe just sit down for chrissake!" I shouted, because there was technically no one at the front steps of the restaurant, "Nobody's here! Everyone's gonna be looking at us! Jesus everyone is looking at us!"
         And suddenly I stopped yelling.
         There was the voice of the old granny at the counter. She was greeting someone, a customer, maybe. "...Now dear, that look of yours! Won't you just spruce yourself up a little!" She was saying, "you look like you've been sloughing through a downpour for three days now without decent nourishment..."
         "Yeah yeah and without any decent sleep at that, either," came a slurring voice which yawned and willfully stretched itself with each of its sprawling syllables.
         There was a shrill hamster shriek from Nathe as he threw himself from his seat, bolted across the restaurant, shinnied his way up the new comer's back, and just squatted there on his brother's shoulders and buried his face into his hair like the hair was his favorite brand of watermelon smoothie or something. The shrieking still didn't stop.
         I blinked. And blinked again.
         Syd carried his kid brother over to his seat and plunked him down like some kind of wearying luggage he had to dispose of immediately, without saying anything.
         "Syd," now back in his conked-out bumper car, Nathe seemed increasingly dissatisfied with the restaurant's shoddy recreational facilities and so turned his face up to his brother, eyes wide and ashine and this time really beginning to look like an ornamental Christmas cherub, "I wanna sit with YOU."
         Syd looked like he'd rather throw himself back into his room upstairs and sack out there soundly and peaceably for another hundred years until a princess charming on a white stallion would hop around the corner carrying with her the hearteningly upbeat news of his kid brother's instant death. But when he looked down, saw the radiantly beaming eyes of a plastic Christmas cherub, and knew that the sterile contradiction of reality had once and for all starkly registered itself, he told Nathe, "--shut--up--you'll just piss in my lap."
         I was really afraid that Nathe would do something even more conspicuously abashing that would get the three of us kicked out of the restaurant altogether (hey it was a fancy enough restaurant) when a waitress dropped by and literally saved my life and the world. Phew.
         But it wasn't over.
         Nathe wanted cheeseburgers, chicken nuggets, a large order of curly fries, and a double-thick chocolate shake with a cloudy shower of M&M's and freeze-dried pellets of ice-cream.
         But Syd disagreed. "Just give him vegetable soup," he told the waitress gruffly with an expression and temper one would have after being persistently aroused from his midday slumber.
         "Syd!" Nathe protested, "You know I don't like vegetable soup!"
         "Who said anything about you liking it?" boy did Syd look like he would fall flat on his face and drop dead asleep, "I said I order it and you eat it."
         The waitress looked like she was in a real catch-22. I felt really sorry for her. She finally made up her mind, sided with Syd, and jotted down vegetable soup in her pad. That bitch.
         "And what would you like for your order, sir?" She asked Syd.
         You could tell Syd was more than a bit miffed to have to answer another person's question again. "I would very much like some wholesome sleep and quietude--" he said with such a degree of politeness that it would suffice to murder old Mr. Abe Lincoln in his sleep, "--without a certain waiter nosing into other people's privacy of what they'd like to have for their dinner thank you very much for being so considerate Miss."
         Finally after taking my order as well, the waiter left, looking profoundly confused.
         "Hey that's not vegetable soup!" Nathe cried aloud defiantly minutes later when his soup was being served at our table. "Syd! This not..."
         "This' just plain old vegetable soup to me," I said.
         "No, it's not!" said Nathe, suddenly altogether failing to remember that he was supposed to hate vegetable soup, "Syd! They gave us the wrong dish! This ain't vegetable soup, it's solar planet soup!"
         Syd had just stirred awake from where he'd been slouching and most probably even dozed off, and was reasonably crankier and more aggravated when being time and again woken up. "Do you know," he said slowly, deliberately, "how many considerable calories are gone into simply calling those waiters over to change your bloody soup?"
         Somehow this seemed to have made Nathe inexplicably happier. "Actually, it's fine," he replied reassuringly. "I like my solar system soup better. Look! My cute little planets are all floating and jiggling around in the sun's bubbling red radiation!"
         "That's just ketchup in the soup," I reasoned.
         "And I found Mars," oohed Nathe mysteriously, protective over his newly unearthed domain.
         "But that's just baby carrot!"
         "Ooh, Syd, Syd! I found Saturn!" He was technically all bated breath as he fished out a chunk of wrinkled, over-boiled potato with reverent care and expectancy, "It's the most beautiful of all planets. Syd, you wanna have it? For me? Pretty please with a delicious Saturn on top...?"
         "Eat it yourself," Syd looked like a wound-up doomsday host to a party of belated guests. "That planet's got a ring that tastes like straggling shoelaces you don't even know how to tie."
         "But you haven't eaten anything since yesterday! Coz you're asleep all day!" Nathe was flabbergasted.
         "Just... find a planet earth and I'll eat it probably," Syd consoled with pointedly unfeeling dullness.
         "Why so prejudiced? Other planets are also very tasty!" Nathe objected to the political incorrectness of it.
         "Because it's such a bloody planet to be on," Syd yawned with the scrumptious residue of an afternoon sleep. For a moment nobody knew how to say anything.
         "When I grow up, I'm gonna be an astronaut," we were all carefully picking away at our dinner when Nathe suddenly said to himself. He sounded really convinced. "You'll see, I'll be an astronaut one day and surround myself with these cute, shiny, smooth little planets in space."
         "Hey yesterday you said you wanted to be a motorbike racer!" I protested.
         "I can be both a motorbike racer and an astronaut!" Nathe said defiantly, "I'm gonna be in my super amazing space suit and helmet and ride a motorbike through asteroid belts and race with shooting stars! Break-neck fast!"
         "You'll just tumble down from space and hit your head and realize you're subconsciously afraid of the heights. What the hell. Eat your vegetable soup." Boy did that fuddy-duddy party pooper know how to hype up an interesting conversation.
         And all of a sudden, just as our conversation was building up to its culmination of epic brilliance and interestingness all thanks to Syd, Nathe went neurasthenic with scare. "Ahh, ahhh, ahhhh, ahhhhh, ahhhhhh!" He was so terrified as hell and such a stuffed animal of hiccupping screams that you would've thought that he'd seen a naked, bulging, sodden-faced Frankenstein in his soup.
         "--what--now--?" Syd didn't even bother to look up. He was already one with his seat having been dozed off so affluently.
         Nathe looked frightfully at his soup, then back at us. "Le... lettuce!" He whispered, and then shut up solemnly like a clam.
         Syd's eyes flew open as if suddenly electrified. First he looked at me, as if he'd just noticed me there. Then he looked at Nathe. Then at the poor, innocent, gratuitously antagonized piece of little lettuce sticking out of the remnants of Nathe's half-cold vegetable soup.
         "I'll eat it."
         He said with finality.
         And that was that.
         Nothing much really happened for the rest of the meal. The conversation continued to be highly interesting, and Syd never looked up from where he was sleeping any more than Oompa Loompas started falling from the clear skies.
         But frazzled as he was he did look up once, just once, when he lifted his head, suddenly locked eyes with me, and stolidly, noiselessly placed my paper pin back on the table, and flopped back to sleep again.


          I really wanted to horse around with Nathe more the next day somewhere by the dock, with its slurping waves and seagulls yapping everywhere, but one of Charles's fellow witch hunters and his daughter dropped by our place and just generously, benevolently decided they'd stick around our apartment a little longer for a few weeks or so.
         "Don't be shy," offered Mr. Sumpson hospitably, as he made himself comfortable in Charles's TV couch and compassionately stuck his beefy fingers into our refrigerator and lapped up all of my carton of chocolate milk, "just make yourselves at home..."
         "But it is our home!" I tried arguing with him for the hundredth time.
         Charles was of no help at all. He'd been hiding and cringing behind me the moment he saw Mr. Sumpson's bloated sausage fingers suffusing our pizza reserves in the freezer and was now squeamishly nibbling away at his own fingernails in bereavement over the ensuing loss of his beloved TV couch.
         "Exactly!" Mr. Sumpson beamed as he slowly drew out yet another slice of our red, crusty, syrupy macaroni pizza so we could watch it disappear into his abyssal mouth already quivering with substance. "No need to feel uncomfortable just because you're accommodating me and Lil as genially-invited, cordially-welcomed, superbly well-mannered guests of honor!"
         Even his daughter hated him vehemently.
         "I love my old man," Lil admonished every time I started complaining about her old man. "Phillida, you're just too young and unworldly to appreciate that." Lil was crazy. And she drove me crazy every time she insisted in calling me my disgusting name and told me that I was just too young and unworldly to appreciate it.
         And then one day she suddenly took up this random fanaticism of taking pictures of herself and sensationally succeeded in the seemingly impossible feat of driving me crazier still. Lil loved taking pictures of herself. When we were in the restroom waiting in line, she'd be taking selfies. When we were having our soda pops and chocolate fudge sundaes, she'd be taking selfies. Even when we were in Mr. Sumpson's car as he drove us to my dead brother's grave because it was his commemoration day, she would still be taking selfies. You should've seen her. It was a phenomenon.
         "You won't understand," she sighed melodramatically and put down her iPhone when asked of how come she was still happily taking pictures of herself on her ex-boyfriend's commemoration day. Lil had been my brother's girlfriend before he landed with a plane crash in Philadelphia along with my mom. "You're just too young and unworldly to appreciate the resonantly cathartic art of photography."
         That bugged me like hell. That and the big words. And so I started plotting a revenge on her.
         On our way back from the cemetery, after the flowers were properly laid on the graves and more selfies were fantastically taken, I finally saw my chance. "I think you were just making up stories about my brother," I told her. "You told me yesterday that he wanted to be a pilot. How come he still wants to be a pilot if he's killed in a plane crash? How's that?" I went on, real pleased with my unequivocally ingenious logic, "I bet I care about him ten times more than you do," even though truth be told I can't even remember a darned thing about him.
         "You won't understand," this time Lil gave a more lugubrious sigh as if the whole of the Pacific had been sapped and wizened and nothing left to do about it, and even by that time I would still be too young and unworldly to appreciate anything because I wouldn't even know where the Pacific was.
         "Of course I know where the Pacific is!" I exclaimed, lurching my seatbelt back and forth so affronted was I by this ignoble accusation, "It's in the North Pole!"
         "Ah yes! The North Pole..." despite all my best efforts to put her out this way or that she was now free-falling into that realm of obsessive oblivion where everyone would enter when given a clean black thwack between the eyes. "I used to want to be a stewardess and your brother a pilot. He wanted to haul an empty aircraft over the earth in slow motion like an old 60s country movie and land in the brilliant Arctic and eat sweet cream with the polar bears."
         "Then who would he be flying the aircraft for, if it's all empty?" I pointed out.
         "Me and the aurora borealis smiling in the far north."
         "And who would you be stewarding for, if there ain't no passengers in it?"
         "Him."
         "What about the aurora borealis smiling in the far north?"
         "No, just him-- Just--Him--"
         She had on that fervent faraway look in her eyes, "So he said."
         Boy was she crazy, was what I settled on finally and definitely.
         "But that's just idle talk," Lil laughed suddenly and took another selfie of herself laughing, "Idle talk of children! And some idle talk they were... that you could almost believe in them once upon a time and still pretend to cling onto believing in them now and somehow wonder at how you started believing in them in the first place."
         There was a sudden humming silence within the car as Mr. Sumpson turned off the radio at the driver's seat.
         "And suddenly your brother's gone, the idle talk gone, the dreams gone, and all that song and dance and moonshine gone, and all sorts of people deranged over all that gone-ness..."
          A funny thought struck me that when she said deranged she put a lot more emphasis on the word than usually necessary and was in truth deliberately settling her gaze on Charles, who up to this point had been noisily embarking on the pressing obligation of doing away with a raucous sack of potatoes chips at the front seat.
         Immediately I knew what she was implying. "Hey you take that back!" I went crook. "Charles is not deranged! And definitely not deranged over somebody I don't even remember!"
         "Yeah that's the spirit!" With his radio turned off Mr. Sumpson was free to butt into our conversation as much as he would like while still driving the car, "Charles ain't never freaked out with grief over anything! He was just jinxed out of his mind by some evil witches lurking in the dark out there somewhere! A curse on the nerve! An iniquitous spell! An abracadabra yes sireeee now ain't that right Charles buddy?" He wrapped his arms around the shoulders of a gulping Charles in a playful, neighborly way and then took a whole handful of Charles's potato chips as his own before any squealing complaints could be heard.
         "Charles was... jinxed by a witch?" I repeated more than dubiously, incredulous both at this piece of newfound insight and at the freshly exhibited fact that Mr. Sumpson could swallow not twelve pieces of chips all at once but twenty-three. It was all too novel.
         "Now that's the spirit!" Mr. Sumpson replied reassuringly, his eyes gleaming like all that barbecue sauce he'd shamelessly plundered back at our house, "Next time, next time oh ho I guarantee you- I'll tweak those sonuvabitches' head off!" He gave Charles a cheerful, comradely punch in the shoulder and this time, more than charitably, took the whole sack of potato chips from him and dumped them all down his bottomless gorge.
         Charles looked like he wanted to grab one of my plush teddy bears, wrench out all of its stuffings, and at the same time weep into it afresh with inhuman abandonment. I felt very sorry for him at that point and took out the wad of gum that I'd been chewing for a while in the car now and had presently attained a sort of savorless, papery texture, and offered it to him. He popped it into his mouth without a second thought.