Hold Me Closer, Necromancer - Lish McBride [38]
“Is that a bowling bag?” Ramon asked.
Frank nodded enthusiastically. From his excitement and our lack thereof, I figured we were missing something. “You want us to forget our troubles with a rousing bowling tournament?”
“What? No,” Frank said, shaking his head. “It’s for Brooke.”
“Frank,” Brooke said, “I lack a few of the basic components. Like bowling shoes. And arms.”
“And the desire to waste a perfectly good evening rolling a borrowed ball and drinking overpriced soda,” Ramon added.
“You’re just mad because you have to use the bumpers,” I told him.
“Lies.”
Frank shook his head again and opened the bag. “No, look, see this?” He pointed at a metal doohickey in the bottom of the carrier. “This is meant to hold the ball in place, and your shoes of course, on your way to the bowling alley. But I figured it would be good for holding Brooke’s head, too. See how the part for the ball is circular? We could put her neck there—with padding of course—and then we could take her out with us and no one would know.”
“Because walking around with a bowling bag is perfectly normal,” Ramon said.
Like Ramon and I had ever been normal. I’d always been relegated to the misfit fringe, as if the other kids could sense something innately off about me. Turns out they were right. I was different. I didn’t really mind being on the outskirts of popularity, but I’d never quite figured out why Ramon had ended up there. The only thing strange about him was his association with me. I shrugged. “A lot more normal than walking around with a severed head.”
“Yeah, but we’ll be doing both.”
I waved him off. “It’s Seattle. We got a whole lot of weird going on. No one will notice.”
Frank crumpled a little. “It’s a bad idea, isn’t it?”
“No, Frank, it’s actually a very good idea,” Brooke said.
He perked back up. “Really?”
“She’s just saying that because she won’t have to carry it,” Ramon mumbled to me.
“It won’t be so bad,” Frank said. “See?” He closed the bag again and showed us the outside. The bag was designed like the old-school ones, but it was black and it had a large white skull with crossed bowling pins underneath it.
“What does it say on the back?” Brooke asked. Frank flipped it around. It said knock ’em dead. Frank clutched the bag and waited for us to decide if we wanted to use it or not. Honestly, even if it didn’t work, I couldn’t have told Frank no right then. It seemed to mean so much to him that he’d helped in some way.
“Good thinking, Frank,” I said.
“Really? You’ll use it?” He looked hastily to Brooke. “I mean, if you want, Brooke.”
Brooke beamed at him, tears back in her eyes. “That would be fantastic.”
Frank blushed.
“So, how did your meeting go?” Ramon asked, changing the subject.
While Frank went about setting Brooke up in her new handy-dandy carrying case, I filled them all in about Douglas, tie-dyed kids, and a panda named Ling Tsu. They didn’t scream, and no one ran from me shouting “pariah.” All in all, they took my newfound freakishness quite well. Better than I was taking it. I felt like screaming and running, but as the school counselor had always told us, you can’t run from yourself. That didn’t stop me from getting the heebie-jeebies every time I thought about it.
Still, I had some pretty good friends. I couldn’t be too terrible if they were sticking around.
A few hours later, Ramon, Brooke, and I were back at my apartment. After Frank had gone to work, we’d spent some time going through the people on Ramon’s list, but the whole thing had been a bust. I think most of the people we’d visited were fakes. A few denied that they knew what we were talking about but had shooed us out of their shops pretty quick. One palm reader even pretended she didn’t know English anymore. I’d left my number with a few of them but didn’t expect calls anytime soon. So now we all sat, quiet and dejected, in my apartment. Though I’m not really sure what Brooke did could