The End of FUN (22 page)

“Sure. See you soon.”

I resumed my crouch behind the porch, eyeing the bucket and the towel ladder from a good safe distance, but after, I don't know, another ten minutes, the mouse had not emerged, and my fear was beginning to give way to impatience.
Come on, you stupid mouse. It isn't that hard. You grab onto the towel with your disgusting little claws. You climb out. How hard can it be?

Finally I worked up the courage to check the bucket again—and guess what? The mouse was gone. When I was distracted by the call from Katie, it had climbed out—no doubt heading right back to the house to set up camp under my bed.

Katie showed up with my bag, and we sat on the porch.

“You know,” she said, “
Aaron
is a lot better than
Arnold
.”

“I guess so.”

“Look, I want to apologize. I should have said something about your dad sooner. I really should have. Only—I didn't know Jim was your dad. I thought he was your
uncle
. But that doesn't matter. I should've said something. And I tried—I really did. When you were at my place that evening, I
tried
to tell you. But it was just so complicated. You know—the Space Amazon and all that.”

“Space Amazon, my ass. You could've said
some
thing. How hard could it be?”

Katie pinned me with her blue eyes. “Well,
you
weren't exactly up front with me, either. What about all the
Arnold
stuff? What about your
age
? I served alcohol to a
minor
!”

“Yes, and I called the police, so you better watch out.”

“All I'm saying,” she said, “is you could have told me, too.”

“Fine. OK. So tell me what happened between you and my dad. You slept together?”

Katie's eyes widened. “What? No!”

“Well, what about the undies on the record player?”

“The undies?”

“The black undies!”

She blinked. “What are you talking about?”

“The lacy red undies with the see-through crotch!”

“Wait. You mean from the play?”

“So, they are yours!”

“They're from the play!” she said. “They were a prop!”

“So, you didn't sleep together.”

“No! God, no!”

I took a breath. OK. “So, what happened, then?”

She just looked at me. Two blue eyes. “You really want to know?”

“Yes!”

“Fine. We…made out a couple times.”

“
Made out?
Oh my God, I'm gonna throw up!”

Katie just sighed.

“A couple times—that's like twice, right?”

“Um, more than that.”

“More? How
much
more?”

“I don't know—maybe twenty.”

“Twenty?!”

“It was part of the
part
, Aaron.”

“What part? What are you talking about?”

“The play!
Romeo and Juliet
! The guy who was supposed to play Romeo got put on house arrest, and your dad was the next youngest guy in the cast. I'm telling you, this town is
geriatric
. So there he was—and I was Juliet. Let's just say having a forty-five-year-old Romeo really added an unintentional dimension to the play. To top it off, two days before opening night, Tybalt quit and was replaced by a sixty-five-year-old woman. The whole thing was a shit show.”

“So, that's all it was? You made out in the play?”

“Well, and he asked me out for dinner.”

“And you said
yes
.”

“It's a small town! I was lonely! There's no one here my age! We had dinner. I thought it was as
friends
. But at the end of the night he kissed me and it was just so—
awkward
. I had to tell him I just wanted to be
friends
, and it was all just so awkward, OK?”

“I'm gonna throw up. I really am.”

Suddenly she was glaring at me. “You think this is
easy
for me? I thought you were someone else! Look.” She was standing now, pacing around in the gravel. “Can we just agree that we both screwed up? I don't have a lot of friends in this town, and I'm just—I'm trying NOT to be the Space Amazon, OK? So, can we just be honest with each other?” Katie paused. “You shouldn't have lied to me about your age. And, yes, I should've told you about Jim. I'm sorry. If you want, maybe we can figure out how to be friends.”

“Friends?”

“Yes. You've got my number. If you decide that works for you, then feel free to give me a call sometime.”

After she was gone I sat there on the porch thinking about what she'd said. Funny how quick things change. Like at first I'd thought they'd slept together, and would've given anything to make it not so—but now that it was not so, I was still pretty skeeved.
Making out. Twenty times
.

But the worst part was the part about friends. Friends? I didn't want to be
friends
. One second I'm Arnold and I'm 22 and everything is cool—and the next second I'm just me again and it's all a huge mess. What about the way our eyes had met? What about the electricity I'd felt?
Friends?
I sat there, mind swimming around and around in circles at the strangeness of it all, around and around in an endless loop with nowhere to go, around and around like, you know, a mouse in a bucket.

I woke the next day with Katie on my mind and spent the morning doing not much of anything except thinking about what she'd said.
Friends
. I tried logging into
Tickle, Tickle, Boom!
just for the hell of it, spent an hour half-assing another search for the portrait of Mary again, and then to top it off, Homie
™
popped up with a newsflash on the Avis Mortem.

Upgraded?
That was one way of putting it. Faced with the oncoming dead-bird disaster, the great scientific minds of the world had gathered in a race against the clock—not to offer a solution but to see who could bum out the most people the fastest. It was like, See you at the apocalypse, mofos.

I sank deeper into my mood. I tried taking a nap, but I couldn't get to sleep, and finally, with the loneliness pressing down like a pile of bricks, I called Katie.

“Hi. Listen. I thought about what you said. And, well, OK.”

“OK, what?” she said.

“OK. We can be friends if you want.”

Hell, it was better than nothing.

“OK,” she said. “Great! Friends it is.”

“You wanna come over or something?”

“Now? I'm at school.”

“Maybe after school, then? Maybe you could help me look for treasure. I'm really at a loss here.”

She showed up later all bright-eyed in her school clothes like everything was OK. Friends. Why is it that women always think you can be
friends
?

“So, what's going on?” she asked.

I handed her the will, and she read through it a couple of times.

“Wow. Cool. A real live treasure hunt!”

“Not really. So far it's just a bunch of dead ends.”

“Well, are you sure you've searched
everywhere
? It's got be
some
where, doesn't it?”

No. Not really. It didn't have to be
any
where or mean
any
thing—except that the old man was crazy and the birds were all going to die and Katie was going to be my
friend
. I sank into the recliner and kicked up the footrest. “I've checked everywhere. There's no portrait. Look around for yourself. There's a picture of deer, and a picture of a boat, and a calendar. And that's all there is.”

“Well,” she said, “I don't know much, but I do know this: whenever a hero sets out on a journey, there's only one thing that sustains him to the end.”

“Nachos?”

“
Faith
. You've got to have
faith
, Aaron.”

“Screw faith. I just want the treasure. He didn't have to make this so frickin' complicated.”

Katie paused. “Look,” she said delicately. “Before we go any further, you've got to understand something:
treasure
won't make you happy.”

Yeah, I'd heard that one before. I wasn't buying it.

“It isn't about
treasure
,” she said. “It's about the
journey
.”

“Right. And you would know.”

“I
would
. Remember how I was telling you about my dad? When I was little he was making all kinds of money. We were rich. Well, not
rich
rich—but it felt like it. And I've never been so miserable in my life. Papa was never home, and when he was, my mom and he were always fighting—and it wasn't until he lost it all in a real estate scam that he finally got his priorities straight.”

“No,” I said. “This is different. I
need
the money. To pay back my dad and sister. To pay off FUN
®
and get out of
FAIL
. And maybe, yeah, to buy some cool shit. And once I get the money and do those things, it will make me
happy
.”

Katie just laughed. “Believe what you want. But I'm serious, Aaron. I've seen it—it's like there's a hole in all of us, and whatever you try to fill it with, that hole has no bottom and can't be filled—”

“A hole that can't be filled,” I said.

“Right. Exactly.”

“Sounds like another one of your riddles.”

She ignored me and started looking around the living room. The picture of deer. The boat. The calendar. Then back to the boat. Her gaze lingered there, and then she started looking up something on her phone. She stayed there a long time, looking back and forth between her phone and the picture on the wall.

“Hey! I think I've got it!”

“What, the boat?”

“It isn't just a
boat
—it's a steamship!”

“So?”

“So I think it's the RMS
Queen Mary
! It was, let's see, an ocean liner in the twentieth century that sailed the Atlantic Ocean.”

She showed me her phone, and the picture there, and the boat in the picture was
exactly
like the boat in the painting—dark hull, white top, three big smokestacks. YAY! for the RMS
Mary
, flagship of the Cunard Line, roamer of the oceans, whose home is now a permadock in Long Beach, California, and whose stately Art Deco compartments serve as a full-service floating hotel, one-of-a-kind fine-dining experience, and wedding/events venue, open seven days a week.

“
Faith
,” said Katie triumphantly. “It was here all along.”