9

She thought it was a seizure.

The way she tells it, Christine had offered to burn Eric a CD and did and brought it over to give it to him, and when she did he was locked up in his room and she talked her way in and he was freaking out, one of his “bad days,” and he told her what he always tells me, which is “go and don’t tell anyone,” and she went down to her car and sat there for a while and thought about calling the police and thought about telling his parents, but didn’t do either of those things. She didn’t leave. She went back upstairs and went back into his room and waited him out. He was tripping. He thought she was a werewolf. He punched her in the gut. But she stuck it out and finally when he was coming out of it, sweaty and glassy-eyed and shaking, the both of them, her from being scared and him from whatever built-up tension the rest of us work out in our dreams, she held him, like La Pietà, that statue we learned about in humanities class, until he was completely recovered and realized what he’d done and apologized and thanked her for staying even though he had told her not to and thanked her for not telling anyone. Then they kissed.

Christine tells me first. I get one of those “can-I-come-over-we-need-to-talk” calls and this time I tell myself I’m going to be supportive and not say anything retarded or insensitive, whatever it is she has to tell me. She gets there and says we should go up to my room but not in a because-I’m-about-to-get-a-condom-out-of-my-purse way.

“He was having some sort of seizure,” she says. And she waited him out, she says.

“Yeah, he gets those,” I say. “He doesn’t like to talk about it.”

Then I expect her to get mad at me for never telling her this big thing about my friend that I knew, and I gear up to say he wouldn’t want me to tell anyone, I was being a good friend, I’m always a good friend, but she doesn’t get mad at me, which is when I know something is really wrong, and she tells me they kissed.

“Who kissed who?”

“I don’t know, it doesn’t matter.”

“‘It doesn’t matter’? That isn’t something you say when it was just a mistake and it’s never going to happen again.”

“Well…”

“Well what?”

“Well I can’t promise it won’t.”

“You can’t promise you won’t, because …”

“I kind of like him. Eric.”

“I kind of like him too, he’s my fucking best friend!”

Fuck not being able to sleep, now I have powers. I have eye-beams that fire pure rage. I have a black internal-combustion heart that never stops exploding. I have a red jealous streak that runs diagonally left-to-right across my chest and like Superman’s crest it strikes fear into the hearts of certain people but in this case it’s those who do not hold up their end of relationships. I am a meteor headed to Earth that was once a part of a planet made entirely of fuck-off.

I need to see Eric and have him tell me this whole thing was a hallucinatory mix-up, that he thought my girlfriend was an extraterrestrial queen he had to make out with in his fantasyland and he didn’t know what he was really doing, just like when he slugged her. I’m out the door and halfway down the driveway, Christine running behind me.

“Aren’t you going to lock your front door?” she asks.

“I don’t,” I say.

“Where are you going?”

“Eric’s,” I say.

“Do you want a ride?”

I wheel on her and if I really had those eye-beams I think I would use them. I end up letting out a half-sob, which is embarrassing, because fuck her, she doesn’t get to see me cry. Besides, I’m not crying. For all she knows I’m going over to Eric’s to bash his head in, even though I’m not, I’m going over to have him tell me what I need to hear so I don’t have to bash his head in.

“I’m sorry,” Christine says, but I’m halfway to the bus stop by then.

“I’m sorry,” Eric says.

“Well, she thinks … she thinks you guys are going to be boyfriend and girlfriend or something.” I laugh. Dudes. We can talk about this stuff. Eric doesn’t speak, though.

“Uhm,” he says.

“Fuck,” I say.

“I…”

“FUCK!” I say.

“I really regret that it had to happen like this,” he says.

“It HAD to happen? Nothing fucking had to happen!”

“I like her too! And she likes me! No one’s ever liked me before!”

“No one had ever liked me before her either, hardly!”

“Right! So … so you know how it feels.”

“I can’t fucking believe this.”

“You said it yourself, in a weird way, I’ve been alive twice as long as you, and in all that time no one’s ever liked me, or wanted to have any sort of contact with me at all. When is it my turn?”

“So you would throw away our friendship and fuck me over for ‘your turn.’”

“I’m not throwing away our friendship!”

“If you think we’re still friends after this you’re stupid. For all your books and interests and ‘films’ you’re an idiot if you think we’re anything except enemies after this.”

Eric looks out his bedroom window. We’re there, where it happened, the crash site.

“I’m really tired,” Eric says.

“Boo hoo,” I say.

I don’t know every detail of what happened with Christine and Eric in Eric’s room. But you can sure imagine a hell of a lot if you have an imagination that’s used to getting inside of mechs and robots and thinking up political systems for other galaxies not yet discovered and how spiders would organize an army if they had to, and you turn it on something that’s really small and you already know both of the people involved, know them really well, and know the things they could say and do that would hurt you the most and imagine them doing it in the most elaborate detail. You can flesh out the connection they have that you thought you had with both of them but I guess it turns out you didn’t have with either of them. You know what their beds look like and you’ve seen them both with their shirts off. And as much as you don’t want to be imagining it, that only makes you imagine it more, in sharper detail. You think, maybe when Eric and I were trying to imagine all this shit for our stupid fucking comic or whatever, maybe what we should’ve been doing is trying NOT to imagine anything. Because what this is teaching me is, when you try NOT to imagine something, that’s when it really comes pouring out. If all along we would’ve just tried to stop ourselves from thinking of anything, we’d have been done in a night. A single sleepless furious night.

It instantly becomes epic-length. It doesn’t stay just the one event. You’ve had it out of both of their mouths that they have every intention of doing it again sometime. So you get to imagine it live as it probably happens across town, again. It goes from a short film to a movie to a series of movies and comic books and an interactive online game.

And you can also imagine horrible shit that makes you feel a little better. You can imagine borrowing your dad’s SUV and figuring out how to drive just enough to run them both down. You can imagine hiring your brother and his wacko friends to hunt them down and wild out Clockwork Orange-style and leave them in the desert. You can imagine all these things, but mostly you just die.

In the next couple of weeks I step back into a world with just me in it. Christmas break comes up. My dad likes to take us somewhere because my mom sometimes just shows up unannounced on Christmas if we’re home. We drive to San Diego and stay in a hotel on the beach. My brother pushes me in the freezing ocean and calls me “fucking creepy” when I stay in a minute too long. For presents we all get each other Best Buy gift certificates.

On the drive back from San Diego with billboards for strip clubs and Sonic drive-thrus speeding by, we are listening to smooth Christmas jazz on a Southern California radio station, except my brother is listening to something hard and scream-y on headphones, and I’m not really listening, I am convincing myself that when I get home I will have an e-mailed apology/take-me-back notice from Christine waiting for me. I will splash my fingers across the keys, my user name, and splash my fingers again, password, and hit enter, and the little world will spin and there in my in-box surrounded by messages from casino porn robots will be an e-mail from “christines_cliche_email_address” that says she was really 100 percent wrong and wants to take it all back and my company, my boyfriend-ness, is better than all the experimental theater pieces in the world laid end to end. San Diego turns into desert, and we stop at a Sunoco to pee and gas up and so my brother can buy a thirty-two-ounce energy drink to give him the energy he needs to like, sit there and listen to really awful punk, then the California station fades out and my dad switches to classic rock as desert turns into our subdivision.

Right as we’re about to get off the highway, in sight of familiar configurations of fast-food and hotel signs, something big and brown darts onto the road and into our headlights. My dad slams on the brakes but it’s too late, we hit whatever it is, a dog or a deer. We come to a full stop and my dad pulls over to the shoulder.

“Fucking shit,” my brother says.

Whatever it was is already gone from the roadway.

“Jesus,” my dad says, and puts the car in gear.

When the SUV hits the end of our driveway the classic rock on the radio changes briefly, mysteriously, to mariachi then back into classic rock and the car is barely parked before I’m out of it and in the house running upstairs to check my e-mail.

There is no way I won’t be getting an apology and take-me-back notice from Christine, by the way. All the mental work I have done composing exactly what it’s going to say, all the heart I have put into wanting it, there is just no way it’s not going to be there. It’s like when I was nine or ten years old and this video-game magazine I had a subscription to was giving away a Street Fighter II arcade machine. I filled out the application blank and sent it out and as the contest came closer to being over I became more and more absolutely convinced I was going to win. I don’t know when me really, really wanting to win became “I already won,” and my mom did her best to manage my out-of-control hope. The fact that I did not end up winning the Street Fighter II arcade machine doesn’t matter here. Willing one piece of electronic information to be in a place that doesn’t even really exist is without a doubt way easier than willing an arcade game to show up in a crate on your front lawn through sheer force of want, and I’m older now. My powers of imagination and wanting are way more powerful, and add to that they’re less focused on things like video games and more focused on grown-up mature things like winning back the girl who took my virginity.

But when the little world stops spinning there is not an apology notice from Christine. There are the anticipated messages from the casino porn robots and there are also fifteen messages from Eric. None of them have subject lines and they all have images attached. I open them one by one.

Attached to the blank e-mails are pictures of Eric and Christine, Christine and Eric among her friends she knows from blogs, the college kids she knew when they were seniors in Theater Division. Cutesy artsy pictures Christine’s friends who make photo-zines have taken. Eric and Christine flash concert tickets. Christine dances with hipsters to live music in a tiny art gallery/music venue. Christine and Eric kiss in a booth at IHOP. Eric and a guy I don’t know with a scruffy beard smoke cigarettes. All the guys who aren’t Eric are like seven feet tall and have beards. He looks ridiculous, like a nerd pet they keep around to amuse them. Christine and the nerd pet kiss in a parking lot. At first I think maybe he’s accidentally sent them to me but the time stamps show they were all sent hours apart from one another, nice and intentional.

It is so out of character that for a minute I imagine one of Christine’s friends has a garage where they disassembled Eric and modified him into somebody who would do something like this. But in a world where my best friend and girlfriend start fucking, I believe there is nothing so bad that it won’t happen to me, and I believe this instantly.

I guess it is only a little bit of a surprise that people have these hidden personality explosions where they turn out to be someone entirely different than who you thought they were. When I was like ten, my mom kind of went haywire. She realized that what she’d always really wanted to do was, not be an artist exactly, but live around artists and have the sort of lack of attachment or responsibility that an artist has. She wanted to start a whole new life with those kinds of rules, or lack thereof, and so instead of moving anywhere she just started living like that in the middle of having a husband and two kids. My parents got divorced, my dad got us, and my mom drove east. She met a guy in Atlanta and they got married in Palm Springs. As a general rule my dad is not huge on knowing where we are all the time, but when my brother and I went to my mom’s wedding we had to call every half an hour and check in.

So it’s not surprising to me that people can just blow up and change or I guess reveal who they always were, it’s just disappointing that the people who stay the same are people like my brother or Cecelia Martin and the people who change or I guess peel back their façade are the people who you thought were the good ones.

I go downstairs and out into the garage to get a case of soda to put in the fridge. There’s a mark on the front of my dad’s SUV where he hit the animal on the road. There’s no blood or gore, just a big yellow stain like we hit America’s biggest bug. I don’t like to think about what angle we would’ve had to hit something at for it to leave a mark like that. And also, we hit a mammal, a pretty big one, not an insect. I think. I wasn’t paying much attention. I was in my head building a world where everything is back to normal that felt so real for a second I thought I could step into it.

In fourth period our first day back I have to run a class survey up to the office. I want it to take as long as possible. I’m in no hurry to get back to Mr. Webber’s history class because I guess he got in trouble for showing us too many movies last semester so now he’s pledged to lecture all day every day and he would clearly rather be running Glory or a Ken Burns documentary and you can feel him boring himself. So I walk around the side of the school and Christine and Eric are sitting in the loading bay. Christine is sharing Eric’s enormous lunch, which he’s not supposed to be here eating until next period, fifth period, when we both have lunch. I’m not going to stop or say hi, I’m just going to clutch my manila envelope and ignore them, but Christine says, “Hey, Darren,” and stupidly, I turn my head. Just enough to acknowledge that they actually exist.

“You don’t ditch class,” I say to Eric.

“I am right now,” Eric says.

“He’s being very rebellious,” Christine says. She smiles. She thinks this is all a joke.

I walk away, and Eric actually says, “That’s right, walk away.”

“Eric!” Christine says.

I actually, actively want to punch him in the face. I think about turning and running back and putting a sneaker in his stomach, and it’s confusion that keeps me from doing it.

Sex with Christine has turned him into an asshole, I think, and that actually kind of makes me smile. Or maybe it’s just hanging out with all the assholes in all the pictures I keep getting. All the muffin-hats.

That day after school Eric is waiting for me by my locker. Maybe Christine made him come apologize for being a real cock at lunch. Maybe he’s come to do that on his own.

“Hey,” Eric says.

“Hey,” I say.

He looks skinny. Skinny even for how skinny he is. Behind his glasses his eyes are retreating into his brain. There’s a scraggly sort-of mustache on his upper lip. I think maybe this is Christine’s older friends making him into one of their own. But he has the same clothes and the same backpack and the same glasses, there’s just less of him for everything to hang off of.

“So …” he says. “How do you wanna do this?”

“Do what?”

“This,” he says. “We have to have it out.”

“You mean like fight?”

“Yeah,” he says, sounding totally unsure of himself, then again, “Yeah,” like he knows he sounded like a pussy the first time.

“You’re serious.”

“It needs to happen.”

“Fucking stop it. Stop e-mailing me pictures of you and Christine. What the fuck is that about? I don’t want to know you guys. Go fool around and take pictures of each other and die.”

What’s left of Eric squares up to me. “Come on, then,” he squeaks.

“Fuck you, you fucking mutant.” And for the second time today I walk away and for the second time Eric says “Walk away” like he’s seen it in an action movie.

My life is strange and I don’t know anyone in it, except my brother, who’s still my brother, so it doesn’t surprise me when he comes in the house that night singing an Irish drinking song with Alan and it doesn’t surprise me when he comes up to my dad’s office where I’m playing a space strategy game online and shoves a wad of paper in my face, he’s just that kind of asshole, but what does surprise me is what’s on the paper. It’s the dossier of a member of the TimeBlaze zombie posse.

“Tha fuck iz this?” he says in his British fuckhead accent. “Someone exploded yer faggit library all over tha droiveway, ya bastahd.”

I push him to one side and run downstairs and out the front door and when I get there, sure enough, six months of made-up universe is all over the driveway, flapping in a half-assed January wind. Steampunk Praetoreous is stuck in the rubber plants. His cyberpunk counterpart is underneath the wheel of the blue recycling bin. Paper is everywhere and I’m completely fucking done.

I’m going to go back upstairs and tell my brother I will pay him and Jake whatever Christmas money I got in various cards from various relatives to have them go to Eric’s house and push his eyes all the way back in his brain. Then I think of a better idea. Inside my junk drawer, next to porn I’ve printed off the Internet, I find the business card of that guy from my brother’s church. I take out the phone I haven’t had reason to use in a few weeks, and I dial the number on the business card.

On the third ring the guy picks up, and I remind him of who I am, and then I start talking about a boy who can’t sleep.

“I didn’t believe it either but I swear to God … err … I swear it’s true.”

“I believe you. I was ready to believe when I heard thirdhand from your brother. I was ready to believe even before then. These are interesting times. For things like your friend to occur doesn’t come as a complete surprise.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I can’t be much more specific than I’ve been. Thank you for your honesty. If you need anything from me, anything, you let me know. And I hope I can feel free to do likewise.”

“Uhm … okay.”

“Thank you, Darren.”

The creepy church guy hangs up.

I’d like to say that that night I dream of Eric being carried off by monks and nuns and ultrareligious freakazoids and burned at the stake at the top of a hill, but I don’t. My dreams have no poetic justice, they’re just mind farts. I dream about checking my e-mail. There’s a thing where my brother and I are in a submersible in the ocean and he keeps trying to send text messages. I dream I’m fucking Christine. So no dreams about it but before and after I go to sleep I think about what I may have just opened Eric up to, and it never feels as good as I want it to. It feels pretty terrible, actually.

A typical day after me and Christine and Eric explode: I walk home right after school. I should start driving, but it’s too late to switch into driver’s ed and I’ve been bothering my dad to sign me up for the same driving school my brother took but he keeps forgetting. So for now I walk home and it’s February so I’m not all sweaty when I get there. I go in the kitchen and eat everything. I feel a lot like human shit. I’ve started doing the occasional sit-up but it doesn’t move anything around on what is still the worst torso in North America. I check my e-mail in my dad’s office, but it’s a lot like checking my phone: asking for disappointment, a good activity for somebody who likes the numeral zero, and blank screens, and no change. I go in my room and turn on NPR. I masturbate to scenarios totally unrelated to my life: weird fantasy specifics like cat women and Venusian slave girls. Afterward I fall asleep and wake up when it’s dark. I have a couple hours of groggy useless energy after that and it feels like I could stay up all night. I’ve become really involved in this massively multiplayer game online. My character is a daemon lord whose right arm is a scythe. The rest of my squadron is ten-year-olds whose voices are modified to sound like bugs or robots. I always fall asleep eventually, and the days keep going like this.

In English we’re supposed to be turning in our modern-day adaptations of The Grapes of Wrath. Creative assignments usually send most honors students into a seizure, because there aren’t predefined rubrics for being creative, you’re encouraged to do exactly what you’re not supposed to do in any other assignment, which is MAKE IT UP, you’re not even asked to provide a bibliography, and before long you have to put a belt in soon-to-be-valedictorian Alicia Henry’s mouth to keep her from choking on her own tongue. But the Grapes of Wrath adaptation has a legendary, all-purpose solution: just make it about illegal immigrants. Some kid who was a junior when my brother was a freshman did it, and Mrs. Amory thought it was so great she used it as an example of the assignment for the next couple years, until people got the hint and just started copying it. I have one-upped everybody and made my adaptation, which is supposed to be a prose short story, seven to ten pages double-spaced, about Iraqi refugees. Plus, it’s in screenplay format. Eric and I were briefly debating buying really expensive screenwriting software to write the TimeBlaze movie scripts, but we eventually decided against it and Eric wrote thirty or so pages of the first movie in a Microsoft Word document he formatted very specifically. I just take out the names DR. PRAETOREOUS and TEMPORAL RANGER and THE MAN and replace them with SADIQ and HADIR and TOM JOAD, whose name I decided not to alter for obvious reasons. And I change the dialogue and action, of course.

Mrs. Amory is coming around the room and I hand in my paper and then Chris White hands in his and then some girl whose name I can’t remember but I think is in choir hands in hers and when Mrs. Amory gets to Eric, Eric doesn’t have anything to hand in.

He sort of shrugs and tries to find someplace to point his sinking-in eyes besides Mrs. Amory’s face. And Mrs. Amory stays there longer than she would if it were anyone else who didn’t have an assignment to turn in, looking at Eric like he’s right now undoing everything she knows to be true: first bell is at 7:45 and Pearl in The Scarlet Letter symbolizes evil and Eric Lederer will turn his work in on time if not early.

“Eric?” she says.

“Sorry,” Eric says.

Though it was always a sticking point between me and Christine, that afternoon I’m glad I can’t drive because everyone’s cars are fucked. I walk through a parking lot full of rip-shit, mystified kids who can’t figure out why their Jettas won’t start. Ryan, the kid from Theater Division who is pretty much always wearing suspenders, is about to pull out of the parking lot in his old white truck. I look at him. He shrugs at me. I shrug back. A couple of kids in older cars are behind him, some of them packed with friends whose cars are bricked and need rides home.

The principal comes on the loudspeaker the next morning and condemns what he calls the “car prank” and vows to ferret out the “parties responsible.” I wonder if Christine’s car still works. I think of how it smelled inside her car, like carpet shampoo and the weird nonsmell of the air conditioner. Then I punch my leg underneath my desk and try really hard to think of anything else.

Eric isn’t in class that day, or the day after that. Then on Friday I am leading a squadron of bug-and-robot-voiced ten-year-olds into battle against another squadron of ten-year-olds that doesn’t have such a sage older leader when my phone starts vibrating in my pocket. I tell BMXIZ4FAGS to watch my six and take my phone out of my pocket. Eric is calling me.

I should hold a grudge. It really seems like the right thing to do in this case.

“Can I come over?” Eric asks.

I should really be over people “coming over” at this point, knowing that when they call first they are coming to your house to break your heart in the first person. But there is really nothing the dude can say to me at this point that would surprise me in its awfulness. And also I’m hoping that like when I used to go over to his house with an Xbox and all the controllers shoved in a backpack, Eric will come over with a console that just has a reset button and we’ll hit it and everything will be like it was in October.

We’re in front of my house in pretty much the same spot where I told my brother about Eric that night.

“On Wednesday morning I got pulled out of class. I got called down to the principal’s office, and there was this guy in there with the principal, then the principal excused himself and I was alone with this guy. And he said he knew about my thing. And he said he was from a university. He said he wanted to study my thing. And I asked him if I could have some time to think about it. He said I could, but that time was of the essence, that now that he knew about it there’s no telling who else knows. I left and ditched the rest of the day. He came to my house that night and said he heard I ditched the rest of my classes, and I shouldn’t do that, that if I started behaving erratically that would draw attention to me, and I didn’t want that, did I? He said I should come with him right then, that there were people after me. I shut the door and locked it and when my mom got home I told her. I mean obviously not everything, but I told her this guy had been by and she said she thought it was a good idea, this college program. And it turns out that this guy had already talked to my dad and her, and they thought it was a good opportunity. He told them I was eligible for this early-freshman thing for high school students, effective immediately. And then I knew I was fucked because there’s nothing your parents won’t agree to if they think it’s about you getting into college.”

“Shit. Come inside I guess.”

On the way into the house Eric stops. He reaches into a bush next to my front door and pulls out a piece of paper that’s all wrinkled from being stuck in a bush and drenched by sprinklers then dried by the sun. It’s some TimeBlaze art, still blowing around from when Eric covered my yard in it. A Thragnacian Containment Pylon. The Containment Pylons float in space at regular intervals around the wormhole that is the Thragnacian’s charge. They opened the wormhole as a weapon in their war against the peaceful Albions, and the Galactic Conclave decreed as punishment that they should have to use their superior technology to harness the wormhole, and take care of it for the duration of their civilization. Eric folds it up and puts it in his pocket.

We go into the kitchen, maybe from force of habit. Eric starts closing all the blinds.

“I’m really sorry about everything.”

“Yeah, what the fuck, dude? Seriously. I’ve been meaning to ask you what your deal is sometime when I didn’t think you were going to say, like, ‘We should have it out,’ or something.”

“I’m sorry about that. It was really stupid. I was saying and doing things I knew to be stupid. I’m really, really sorry. In light of everything that’s happened you don’t really have any reason to, you know, let me, but I was wondering if I could stay with you until this guy, this guy who I’m pretty sure isn’t from a college, until he goes away.”

“I don’t know if that’s a great idea.”

“Oh.”

“I mean, he probably knows where I live too.”

“Why?”

Then I tell him. I tell him about the church guy and about the call and that I don’t know how and I don’t know when but the church guy probably resulted in this dude we have on our hands now, visiting Eric at home and handing his parents college brochures. And I tell him I called the church guy because Eric was being such a dick and that was my revenge.

“Oh,” Eric says. “It almost worked.”

“What almost worked?”

“Everything has been shitty. Everything. My thing. The bad days are substantially worse. I can still anticipate them, when they’re going to be, my stomach starts to hurt and I get these headaches and that day I’ll have to go out into the desert but now they happen more and more frequently and I feel shitty, I mean really physically shitty, pretty much all the time. So when I was doing all that stuff … the e-mails and whatever and just generally being a dick, I was hoping—Jesus, it sounds stupid—I was hoping you’d get fed up with me and knock me out. Like you said that one time.”

“I’d knock you out? I’m the least athletic person we know, dude.”

“I know, that’s why I really had to be an unbelievable dick. I was thinking maybe you’d get your brother to do it.”

This is such a dead-on echo of what I was contemplating a couple weeks ago, not in any real way, I don’t think, but just in the holodeck of revenge we keep around to make ourselves feel better, that for a second I don’t say anything. Then I think of something.

“You didn’t have to start dating my girlfriend just to get me to get my brother to rough you up.”

Then Eric is quiet. Then he says: “I didn’t do it for that. I did it for all the reasons I said I did it. I wish I hadn’t. But it helped me feel shittier, definitely. It helped me want to get knocked out, black out, take a few hours off, definitely. I felt really profoundly guilty and I still do.”

I ask why he didn’t come to Christine with all of this.

“I wanted to come to you with this, because this seems like it might be an adventure. And you bring adventures to the kids you make up comic books with. Christine, and those kids, those kids are more for blog entries and memoirs.”

“Ah,” I say, not really understanding what he means and also having to stop myself from automatically correcting him: Time-Blaze is, or was, not a comic. TimeBlaze is, or was, a ten-part movie maxi-series with the mythos filled in by comic books and graphic novels, culminating in a series-rebooting singularity at the end of the tenth movie, following which, using some technology not yet invented, all existing copies of all the previous movies will have their stories altered. I want to correct him out of habit, I guess.

“And also, I figured if I was going to come to you, which I knew I had to, I couldn’t come if I was still, y’know, dating Christine, so I’m not anymore.”

“You broke up with her?”

“I told her what the deal was.”

The fact that Eric, poindexter Eric, could not only land Christine, who was dating someone (never mind it was me), but then when the time called for it up and drop her, her and all the nakedness she entailed, makes me hate him and admire him and be happy to be on his side all at once. Then I wonder semiselfishly how it all went down, how she reacted. And I think to ask and I realize I’m really not ready to talk to Eric about her. There’s a clone of our dead friendship starting to grow in a tank full of pinkish fluid and I think talking too much about what happened, no matter the reasons for its happening, will flush the tank and leave the thing sputtering and dead.

So we’ve hit the reset button, but it doesn’t clear the board. There are forces after us, stuff I called down upon our heads. But I have a best friend with superpowers, and days to fill, and rage to direct. And Eric has superpowers, and days and nights to fill, and a best friend with rage to direct. We have both seen enough and read enough to know that the guy who says there are people after Eric is probably the person in charge of the people after Eric.

Now we have our adventure.