Stranger and Stranger (15 page)

P: Could YOU explain how that question is going to help you find her?

J/B/T/W: No need to get huffy, ma’am. We’re the experts here, not you. Now, we noticed you have a taillight out on your car…Were you aware that’s a ticketable offense?

I didn’t wait around to hear any more, just slipped away from the car and back to the trail. No one noticed me, and soon I was out of earshot. I concentrated on making my footsteps as silent as possible and focused my attention on my ears, listening as hard as I could for anything at all. Ghostly birdcalls…pebbles rolling down the cliff…dry leaves rattling…I closed
my eyes for maximum concentration. Haunting birdcalls…grains of dirt compressing under my shoe…spider legs rubbing against one another…

Pretty soon I had reached our lookout spot.

“OtherMe!” I called, and listened.

Eerie birdcalls…drop of cricket spit hitting cricket wing…my own blood pulsing in my eardrums…

This was so stupid. That brat, that rotten annoying LAME piece of STINKY BRAT, she could ROT out here for all I cared. “EMILY!” I screamed. “Get out here, you stupid piece of…BRAT!”

Creepy birdcalls…moth wings beating against air molecules…speck of pollen falling from dried-up wildflower…tiny straining intake of breath through constricted throat of OtherMe, sprawled in tangle of brush on the steep hillside twenty feet above the trail.

That’s where she had been lying in wait for me and Patti, planning to leap down on us, shrieking like a demon, and scare the cheeks off us; at least that’s my best guess. When I found her she couldn’t move or speak. She was barely breathing. Based on my knowledge of the local fauna, I was pretty sure she’d been paralyzed by a bite from a black jackal spider, which would certainly be fatal within a few minutes if I didn’t do something to save her life.

Yep.

So what was I to do? Pretend I never found her? Sneak back to the car, knowing she would die before the Search and Rescue jerks got there? Or find the bite and suck the poison out the way Patti had taught me?

Let her die?

Suck the poison out?

Let her die?

Suck the poison out?

I was crouching there in the bushes, hunkered over her, tapping my chin, trying to decide what to do, when she blinked. Took a breath. Twitched her fingers. And punched me in the mouth—not very hard, what with the semiparalysis and all, but enough to get my lip bloody.

I yelled, and tackled her, and we skidded and slid twenty feet down to the trail, and started pummeling each other—by which I mean I mostly pummeled her, since she was still mostly paralyzed. But it’s not like I pummeled her very hard; I just wanted to punish her a little. And I definitely did NOT mean for her to roll away from me and slide off the trail, and tumble down that slope onto those boulders, and break her leg in several places.

Of course I ran for help, and in a minute I could hear voices—Jock, Biff, Tip, and Winky were finally making their way up the trail toward us. I brought them to her as fast as I could, and if she says any different she is LYING.

So here we are, sitting in the car in the hospital parking lot,
waiting for SuperAnnoyingMe to be released. Patti has been crying quite a bit. I wish she would just go wait inside, but she doesn’t want to be alone, and she doesn’t want the hospital staff asking questions about her identical daughters, like why they have the same name. I tried to be nice and comfort her by pointing out that if anything serious ever DID happen to one of us, at least she’d have a spare; but it just didn’t seem to calm her the way I thought it would.

Later

Of course, the most annoying part about SuperAnnoyingMe getting herself semipoisoned and breaking her leg was that she couldn’t help me with our prank!

Anyway, by the time we got home, Patti looked like a chunk of frozen hell on a stick and was in no shape to notice me slipping out of the house. I spent a few quality hours at Town Hall working on the Manifesto, giving it every bit of purest, darkest Strange I had, channeling all my irritations with Patti and all my anger at PatheticMe to make it as potent and raw as possible. And, you know, it might actually be a good thing PatheticMe wasn’t around to see the final product, cuz this little Manifesto of mine is so Strange, it’s even scaring ME.

Once everything was set, locked, and loaded, I ran the projection a few times through just to make sure it would be as mind-warping a spectacle as I had planned. And, no thanks to
PatheticMe, it IS going to be the most mind-warping thing ever to hit this town. Seriously, they better order extra straitjackets now while they still have the faculty of speech!

Later

Patti made up a bed on the living room couch for SuperAnnoyingMe. I hadn’t talked to her since the whole leg-breaking, so, once Patti went to bed, I sat down on the coffee table for a little bedtime interrogation. She was heavily medicated. I had to shake her quite a bit to get any answers.

M
E
: So, what was that scene in the canyon all about? Were you trying to get me separated from Patti, so you could push me off the trail? Or what?

S
UPER
A
NNOYING
M
E
: Not at all. I just had to…you know, water the bushes…and I got bitten. That’s all.

M
E
: Hm. So why punch me in the mouth when I came and found you?

SAM: Well…you were just SITTING there, tapping your fingers on your chin, and obviously STRATEGIZING instead of at least TRYING to suck the poison out!

M
E
: [Thinking fast.] Come on! I was just
ABOUT to suck the poison out when you punched me in the mouth! What, I’m gonna sit there and watch you DIE, as if you weren’t my very own self?

And somehow right when I said it, I knew I’d said the wrong thing. Like she’d caught me in a lie. And then I realized I had no idea how she had survived a black jackal bite. Which should have been fatal within minutes. Or why she’d had the strength to punch me in the mouth. When she should have been completely paralyzed.

Something wasn’t adding up, but I felt like I was on very dangerous ground with her, so I left things as they were and went to bed.

June 15

I woke up very excited to check out the newly strange Silifordville. Patti and AnnoyingMe were still asleep when I got up, so I fixed dinner for myself and hurried out of the house. I snuck around town a bit, which was easier than usual, since there was zero traffic on the roads. And no pedestrians anywhere. Definitely ominous, but not quite what I was hoping for. I got bored after a while and went out to the skate park for some practice. That place was empty too, which suited me fine, at least for a couple
of hours, when this kid showed up by himself, looking…I don’t know, sketched out of his mind somehow.

He ran to me and started in:

K
ID
: You seen Froggy?

M
E
: No.

K: Killer?

M
E
: No.

K: What about PooDog?

M
E
: No.

K: Dirtbike?

M
E
: No.

K: Mushroom?

M
E
: No.

K: Junebug?

M
E
: No.

K: Biscuit?

M
E
: No.

K: [Hyperventilating.] Crap, I gotta find them…

And he skated away. I gave him a minute, then skated covertly after him and spied as he searched the town for his friends. He rang a few doorbells, then ran in and out of the library, then snuck under the fence of the high school, and then finally skated over to Town Hall, where a quick peek in the windows of the
main auditorium told me where most of the townspeople have been all evening: frozen in their seats as the Manifesto of Strange plays out in their heads.

***EXCELLENT!***

I’m gonna check this out further, gotta go—

Later

Wonderful, marvelous, hilarious Strangeness is taking place at Town Hall! As soon as the kid saw his friends through the windows, he ran around to the front and into the auditorium. I waited outside for a few minutes, but he never came back out, so I peeked through the windows again and spotted him in a small crowd of people standing near the back of the room.

They all looked the same—just standing straight, looking forward, no expressions, hands at their sides…it was so weird. And the Manifesto was still playing—so every few minutes, some new sucker from outside would go in to see what was wrong and just freeze in their tracks, staring forward, expressionless.

GOOD STUFF!

Later

Someone finally figured out NOT to go into the auditorium, and called the police instead. Several of the dimmer officers have rushed in and been frozen, nevertheless. Ahhahhhahhhahhaah! But now quite a few of them are milling about outside Town Hall, calling for reinforcements and advice. I am hiding in the bushes, enjoying the confusion and waiting to see how it all plays out.

Later

They have (finally) managed to turn off the Manifesto. Of all people, it was our crazy neighbor Venus Fang Fang who accomplished it. I give her credit for figuring it out, since OtherMe and I took precautions to ensure it would play as long as we wanted it to. Now let’s just hope she is not capable of tracing this back to us!

Anyway, now that the hypnotic power of my Manifesto has released their little minds, the townspeople have fled Town Hall decidedly stranger than they were yesterday. I’m seeing a big increase in non sequiturs being screamed at volume eleven,
inappropriate (and unwelcome) nudity, the eating of grass and dirt, what-have-you. On the downside, there are lots of police out on the prowl, herding loonies into paddy wagons. (I stayed safely under cover, just in case. You never know what a police officer may consider loony.) News vans everywhere. Cameramen are doing their best to shoot footage of weirdos. I caught a few seconds of the mayor being interviewed on the steps of Town Hall, but that was cut short when she started screaming out the names of random fruits and vegetables.

SUCCESS!

Um…only one drawback, which is that the reaction around town is so incredibly, closed-mindedly negative, I am not going to be able to take credit.

Hmm. I may need to go home and sabotage our TV reception so that Patti and AnnoyingMe do not see the news.

Hmmm. If AnnoyingMe finds out what is going on in town, I will try to make her think it is all her fault.

Hmmmm. I wonder. If she finds out what I did, is she likely to turn me in?

I may need to preemptively destroy her!

June 16

BIG TROUBLE!!!!

I DID NOT WRITE THE LAST TWO DAYS OF JOURNAL ENTRIES!!!!!!

Just woke up from harrowing medication-muddled dreams, decided to write them down if I could, and grabbed my journal off the coffee table. Am so heavily medicated, I could not remember anything I had written since my accident, so I flipped back a few pages to catch up with myself. That’s when I discovered that OtherMe and I apparently switched journals two days ago, and then switched them back again today. No idea how this could have happened, but in my current foggy state, I can easily imagine Mom moving us to a new town without me realizing it.

Am now desperately trying to A) remember what I wrote about in the past two days and whether it was incriminating, and B) decide whether I think OtherMe knows about the switch. If she does, she will know that I know that she plans to destroy me! Must come up with plan for

June 17

Was not able to write much at all yesterday due to awful brain-fuzzing medication. Will flush all pills down the toilet as soon I can work up the personal courage to take the pain.