Slob - Ellen Potter [30]
“Okay, who does this belong to?” I asked him. I tried to use my stern voice.
“Don’t worry, don’t worry.” The kid waved a casual hand in the air. I’m telling you, he was a pro. “It used to belong to my older brother, but he got a new one and this is just sitting around in the back of his closet.”
It might have been the truth, who knows. That’s what I told myself as I dug through my backpack and collected up the spare coins that were floating around in there. Altogether I had one dollar and sixty-three cents.
“Sold!” the boy said and pocketed my change hurriedly. I suspect he was worried that his older brother would come home any minute.
At the apartment I hooked up the amplifier. It took some time. Jeremy came in and when I told her about it, she said, “That’s it, then! Nemesis will work!”
“Don’t get all excited yet,” I warned her. “Even if we can get a strong signal, there’s another problem.”
It was a doozy too. I had thought about it long and hard but couldn’t figure out how to solve it.
“We’re looking for a specific day two years ago, right?” I said.
Jeremy nodded. “October 25.”
“Right,” I said. It bothered me that the date flew right off her tongue so easily. It was hard for me to say that date without my voice sounding weird. “So, even if I do manage to pick up a signal from the past, I have to be able to figure out when that signal was first sent out.”
“Oh.” She sounded so disappointed. It reminded me that if this project worked, it was going to affect both of us, not just me.
“I’ll figure it out,” I assured her.
I sounded more confident than I felt. I had no idea how I was going to figure it out. I mulled over the problem as I worked. I mulled it over as I ate dinner. And I mulled it over some more that night as I went back to work on the amplifier. But I was getting no closer to a solution. I was just getting more and more frustrated. To take my mind off it, I turned on the TV and watched some really stupid sitcoms, but they were so stupid that my mind drifted back to the problem. I guess I can’t stop myself from thinking for very long. As it turned out, though, the solution was staring me right in my face.
The TV.
I jumped up and ran to Jeremy’s room. Jeremy was already in bed when I knocked on her door. She sleeps with her head under her blanket. She always has. It used to make me crazy when she was really little. I was convinced she would suffocate, or at the very least suffer irreparable brain damage from lack of oxygen, so I would slip into her room every night and pull her blanket off her head. By the morning it was always back over her head again, and eventually I gave up.
I sat on her bed and said her name a few times but she didn’t respond. I’ve never seen anyone sleep as heavily as Jeremy sleeps. You almost have to get rough with her in order to wake her. I pushed her shoulder a few times. When that didn’t work, I pulled the covers off her head and pinched her cheek.
That worked.
“Hey!” She sat up like a shot, her hair wild.
“Listen,” I said, “do you think Arthur would let me borrow her old Retro TV Magazines?”
“That’s why you woke me up?” She collapsed back down on the mattress and pulled the covers over her head.
“This is important, Jeremy. What do you think?”
She didn’t have to think very long. She answered instantly, “No, I’m absolutely positive that she wouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because she’s very protective of her collection.” Her voice was muffled under the blanket. “She keeps them all in individual plastic sleeves, and she puts on these white gloves when she reads them.”
“That is really weird, you know.”
There was a pause during which I guessed she was trying to think of a way to defend Arthur. But she couldn’t, so she said, “Yeah, I know.”
“Will you ask her anyway?” I said. “This is really important.”
“What’s so important about old Retro TV Magazines?” she asked. She took the blanket off her head to look at me.
I told her all about my new idea. She listened carefully. She doesn’t usually understand