A Clownish Contract

All of a sudden, my stomach was an anvil. “What?! How do you know about that? It was one time! And it was only a few puffs, I swear!”

Replica paused, her smile gone, replaced by sheer confusion. But then, just as quickly, it came back. “Oh my god, were you really smoking with your stupid boss? I just guessed! Well, I guess you just admitted it, genius! Ahahahahaha!”

Oh. Well, crap.

Well, yeah, she was right alright. It happened a couple of weeks back, after work. I was the last one there besides Al, and we were just closing up shop for the night. We got to shooting it a bit, and personally, I was actually having a lot of fun talking to her as I tried not to go red in the face and/or let her know about my secret crush. And it made me even happier when she told me I reminded her a lot of her at my age, at least until she followed it up with, “That wasn’t a compliment, kid.”

“O-oh,” was all I could think to say. My brain was moving slower than a frozen banana slug.

After that we were done, so we both left. Except our conversation, just about life and stuff, kept going into the parking lot, and when she noticed me heading for the bus stop, she put a hand on my shoulder to stop me. I haven’t washed that sweater since. “Need a ride?” I swear to god she was wearing a smile fit for an angel.

There's a fine line between “deep and meaningful” and “spacey and psycho,” and Al tended to tiptoe it pretty precariously when you got her talking enough. Take this question she asked me for instance. There I was, sitting matchstick-straight in the passenger seat of her car, too nervous to even make eye contact for more than a second, let alone make any sort of move, and so I was just jawing endlessly about the most mundane thing in the world — a book report I had to write for school — when she decided to just left-field me with it. “You should see the book, Al. It’s practically a cinder block. I don’t know what the author was thinking when he wrote the damn thing. I think his name was Webster or somethi—”

“Have you ever looked up at the night sky," she interrupted, "and thought about the possibility that maybe, just maybe, there’s someone somewhere out there looking back? Someone just like you, gazing up at a dot a trillion trillion trillion miles away and wondering if they aren’t alone? If there’s even one other speck of warmth and light and love out there in the cold and the darkness?” She looked up at the stars. There were, like, maybe three of them out. Thanks, light pollution. “And then think, ‘Nah, no way. Aliens don’t exist. Only some kind of crazy conspiracy theorist lunatic would think that the great lizard gods who live in the center of the sun would, in their endless benevolence and wisdom, populate the universe with two sentient species.’ Haha.”

I didn’t really know what to say to that. I was feeling a lot of things all at once. Nervous. Strangely aroused. Vaguely wary that I may be about to get recruited into some kind of cult. And, most of all, that Al really needed to lay off smoking those instant noodle flavor packs so much.

As if on cue, Al leaned over towards me, my heart jackhammering as she drew in closer than we’d ever been before, and opened up the glove box, where she had a thing of rolling paper and a rubber-banded bundle of packets ready to go. Next thing I knew, I was secondhanding the unmistakable scent of Nissin Seafood. Don’t get me wrong: I didn’t mind the situation at all. It was actually a dream come true getting to share a moment with my old yet weirdly attractive boss as she hotboxed the hell out of her car with MSG and artificial flavoring. I just hoped she knew not to microwave the styrofoam cups. You’d be surprised how many people don’t.

“Mind if I smoke?”

She already was. “N-nope. Haha…”

Eventually we got to passing it back and forth. Embarrassingly enough, the first puff I took had me practically hacking my lungs out.

“Ha. First time?”

“N-no.” It was the most obvious lie I had ever told. And that’s saying something. The fact that it was too dark for her to see how red I was turning was the only silver lining.

“You twerp,” I said to Replica. “How the heck did you guess?”

She shrugged. “I know your boss. She seems like the exact kind of weirdo who would do something like that.”

I was about to say something back, until I realized that Replica was right. Al was a weirdo. Damn. Replica's ability to read people was scarily good. I reminded myself to watch out for that.

Not that it really mattered, since I had already succumbed to it with basically no way out.

Luckily for me though, the one recourse I had left was the one thing I was better at than just about anything else. You guessed it: begging and groveling like a pathetic insect.

“P-please, Replica, don’t tell Mom. You can’t tell her. You just can’t.”

“Oh? Why not?” She raised her eyebrows. She was wearing a smile like a snake’s. Wait, could snakes smile? If they could, they’d look like Replica, I bet.

“Oh, come on! You know her. She’ll ground me for life if she finds out. Hell, even longer.” Mom always was as hard on me as she was soft on Replica: extremely. “Please don’t tell. I’ll do anything.

“Then I guess we have a deal, then.”

“A-alright, fine,” I said. I was caught in her trap, and I knew it. “You win. I’ll talk to Don for you. Just, d-don’t tell Mom about… you-know-what, ok?”

“Deal.” She smiled again, wider and creepier than that cartoon green guy. What was his name again? Eh, whatever. You know who I mean.

“But you’re gonna need to put in some serious work here if you want this thing to work out in your favor,” I told her, because it was the truth.

“Huh?”

“I’m talking about if you want this date with Don to go well. First order of business: you need to stop smiling like you’re about to steal Christmas.”

#

“Your sister? Replica, right? Isn’t she in middle school?”

That was the first thing Don asked me at school the next day after I told him about my sister and her insatiable desire for a date with a clown. Obviously I worded it differently, without the “insatiable” and “clown” bits.

“Yeah,” I told him, “But she remembers you from when you came to my seventh birthday party.”

“Your seventh birthday party?” He cupped his rosy red made-up chin in one of his cartoonishly huge gloved hands, thinking. “Was that the one where Maria Cramp stepped on a Lego and had to get emergency foot surgery?”

“Nah, that was Raymond’s eighth.”

“Oh, right.”

“My seventh birthday was the one where you won 86 games of hide-and-seek in a row.”

“Oh yeah!” he said, realization spreading across his face even faster than his big red smile. “That one that made your parents file that restraining order against me! Now that brings me back. Good times. Is that thing still in effect, or what?”

“Far as I know, yeah.”

“Shame. Living in your house uninvited and unwelcome for a week after the party and playing hide-and-seek with you and your family at all hours of the day and night whether you wanted to or not—”

“We didn’t.”

“—was really fun.”

“Weird definition of fun, man.”

“Yeah, I get that a lot.”

“Anyway, apparently Replica’s been harboring this crazy crush on you since then.”

“And that’s why she wanted you to ask me if I would ask her out on a date?”

“Something like that.” I was lucky Don was pretty fast on the pickup. I was always bad at explaining things. For a clown, he sure was sharp where it counted.

“Hmmm…” Don tapped a massive shoe in thought and tugged at some tufts tumbling out of his rainbow mane. “Alright, fine. I guess going out with Replica could be pretty fun. I can take her out this weekend. I know just the place, too.”

After that I gave him Replica’s number. I figured the two of them would take it from there. Figured that my work was done, that my skin was safe and Mom would never find out about what I never wanted her to find out about.

Wishful thinking on my part, as you’ll soon see.

To be continued!