Metro (3 page)

Andy makes a face and says the first thing that pops into his mind: “I thought it was just because dogs slept all day long.”

“It's a quantum reality thing.”

“Really?”

“
Really
, smarty boy. I've been studying in a holistic prayer group for a few years.”

“Dog years?”

She almost giggles because he says it with a big goofy grin, like it's a real question, not a smartass remark. It charms the hell out of her.

“I walked right into that one,” she says. “You're good.”

“Not really. I just make it up as I go.”

“You look cute doing it though.”

“So how old
are
you in dog years?”

“It's not polite to ask a lady how old she is.”

“But you said, just a minute ago . . .”

“I asked if you could tell, good sir. I didn't ask you to
ask me
.”

“My brain hurts now.”

“I bet it does. Your eyes tell chemical secrets.”

“It's that obvious, huh?”

“Don't worry, I'm not a tattletale. What I am is a very nice young lady. And I sure wouldn't mind if you shared the warmth. Got any extra?”

“That may very well be a possibility, nice young lady.”

Then he winks at her and adds his super-silly, totally dated trademark:

“
Booyah
.”

Says it playful and light, without irony.

Spider-Girl smiles at his silliness and runs her finger along his open, oversize work shirt, eyeing the faded tee underneath, which reads in large, friendly letters:
DON'T PANIC.

“Good advice,” she says, noticing his clothes reek of Mexican food, as she sizes up the rest of him. A bit too thin maybe, but he's
hot
. Short black hair with a floppy cowlick, pretty mouth. Baggy jeans and a webbed belt with a Green Lantern insignia on the buckle, hanging halfway off his waist. Bare feet, which match his neo-hippie ethic. You know, the Goodwill Emo Nerd look.

“So what was your name again, smarty boy?”

“Andy Culpepper. Boy Prince of the Kingdom.”

“Boy prince, huh?”

He sees her looking at him a little too unashamedly. “Am I turning into a lamb chop before your eyes already?”

She grins crookedly. “Does that happen a lot?”

“Only when I'm awake.”

“Cocky too. We'll have to do something about that.”

He smiles, really big and sweet. “I wasn't trying to be cocky.”

“I didn't mind. You make it fun.”

Jollie comes into the living room, ducking under the shadow of two shapeless lovers making out against the wall. She sees the teenager in the Spider-Man shirt before she sees the Boy Prince—the girl is super cute and super blonde and looks super dumb too.

Typical Andy.

As Jollie homes over to them, the Boy Prince holds out his arms and brings her in with a big sigh: “Beautiful lady, come and meet a beautiful lady.”

Spider-Girl holds out a hand, smiling at Jollie. “I'm the lady of the
moment
, apparently.”

“She's a hundred and seventy-three in dog years,” the Boy Prince says.

Jollie takes the girl's hand, smirking. “You must be very wise.”

“I'm tired from sleeping all day.”

“Looks like you're a Marvel fan too,” Jollie says, eyeing her shirt.

“Only when I'm awake.”

Spider-Girl winks at Andy.

A hot comic book nerd
, Jollie thinks
. What are the odds? Mark is gonna be pissed off that he missed out on this.

“The lovely lady here has just inquired about the availability of certain mood-enhancement items,” Andy says.

Jollie bows regally. “Does the lovely lady have cash in hand?”

“The lovely lady is rich beyond the dreams of Avarice,” Spider-Girl sighs. “Say the words and all will be yours.”

Jollie smirks again. “Where did you hear that?”

Spider-Girl smiles big. “Hear what?”

“
Rich beyond the dreams of Avarice
.”

“Avarice is one of the seven deadly sins.”

“I know, but where did you hear that particular phrase?”

“Umm. I'm not sure. Maybe I heard someone say it somewhere?”

Wrong answer
.

If Mark were here, he would have called Spider-Girl's ignorance up front and ruined any chances of conquesting the beautiful specimen. He always screws himself like that, getting too far into the minutiae with nerds who have nice boobs. See, there's a big dif between chicks who dig Peter Parker and people who are just plain mentally ill.

Poor Mark.

He's probably the last nerd just out of his thirties who knows that the first use of the phrase
“rich beyond the dreams of Avarice” was in a stage play produced in 1753 called
The Gamester
—the only significant work of a mediocre English poet and second-rate short-story writer named Edward Moore, a guy who drank himself to death before he reached sixty-three. Mark knows that because he knows everything about classical literature. Most people his age think the phrase comes from a
Star Trek
movie—number four, the one about saving the whales. Mark knows that because he also knows everything about
Star Trek
.

And Spider-Man.

And all the other stuff.

49 minutes and COUNTING . . .

“S
tep into my parlor, kids,” Jollie says, moving toward the hallway. Andy takes Spider-Girl's hand and jumps over the back of the couch, which is situated oddly in the center of the room, way too close to an old brick fireplace, which hasn't had a fire in it for years. Instead, it's filled with an antique Zenith cabinet TV set, which Mark bought for twenty dollars at a pawn shop in the early 2000s. (No flat screens here—that would mean we're rich and awful.) The Spider-Blonde stumbles after Andy, almost knocking over the couch, and she giggles all the way, looking at the walls, which are busy as hell. Every surface in the place—even the ceilings and the furniture—are covered in an endless free-form mural of magazine clippings, collage art, old buttons, scraps of paper with dirty limericks written on them, pages from comic books filled with glorious gore and two-fisted heroes, poems pasted and stapled together from the works of Hunter S. Thompson and Charles Bukowski, painted faces and scribbled emotions, all train-wrecked together in an explosion of scrapbook photos that trace all the people who ever lived here and the magic they brought with them, labels from booze bottles, Mardi Gras beads and film festival badges, plastic Hawaiian flower leis and rubber snakes and strings of glittering Christmas-tree lights, purple velvet pouches with lacy yellow trim that used to be filled with bottles of Crown Royal, a button that says
DAMN I'M GOOD
and a sign that says
NO FOUL LANGUAGE IN THIS ROOM PLEASE
, crayon art scrawled by lazy, crazy people in the midnight hour, cartoons scissored from the Sunday papers and pasted in layers to make a new joke, an ad for Skyy Vodka that shows Ben Stiller as Zoolander making a martini, James Bond looking cool with his Walther 9 mm, drawing down through a gun barrel oozing with blood, video covers and love letters and cashed check stubs kept as souvenirs . . . and movie posters. Lots and
lots
of movie posters.

It's a superhighway of information and history.

Pam Grier and Luke Skywalker and Tyler Durden are your hosts.

Jollie, Andy, and Spider-Girl wind their way through it.

It's a just a hop, skip, and a jumpy breeze of human vapor to Jollie's room, and Andy shuts the door behind them.

47 minutes and COUNTING . . .

B
ob Marley becomes a quieter ghost through the thin walls, the three of them black-light shapes under the purple glow of mood lights and the lava-lamp squirm of Jollie's screen saver. You can't see the walls in here either, because there are so many maps and charts, bulletin boards tacked to hell, piles of books and papers, shelves bursting with CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, and anything else that information can be stored on. A big poster of James T. Kirk (buff Shatner, back-in-the-
day
Shatner) on the door, with a drawn-on speech bubble pointing at his mouth that reads:
WHO IS THIS ASSHOLE?
(Long story—don't ask.) Spider-Girl lands right in the center of something that looks like a queen-size futon, and she squeals like a surprised child when it turns out to be a waterbed.

“Oh wow,” she says. “Somebody should have warned me about this.”

“
Booyah
,” Andy says as he lands next to her, and they are boogie-bumped by wave after glorious wave. She laughs at his silliness again.

“It's fifty bucks a cap,” Jollie says to Spider-Girl, getting straight to business, moving for the shoebox under her desk. “Mark doesn't give discounts.”

“That's still cheap for Molly,” she says back, struggling against the waves. “I'm used to a hundred a quarter for ecstasy.”

“Welcome to the Kingdom,” Andy says. “Where the candy is cheap and the sins are deadly.” He starts tickling poor sweet Spider-Girl, who takes it like a sorority sister.

Jollie sighs, opening the shoebox. It's empty. Except for a note in the Boy Prince's jagged handwriting that says:
I
LOVE YOU NOW MORE THAN LIFE ITSELF, BUT I WILL LOVE YOU EVEN MORE ON PAYDAY.

“Real cute, Andy.”

“What?” he says, and he truly has no idea what she's talking about. Then he looks up from where Spider-Girl is giggling and sees Jollie holding the note in his face. He decides to say something intelligent: “Umm . . . I'm . . . terribly sorry?”

Jollie slumps in the comfy chair, swiveling slightly when her gorgeous surplus rump hits the cushion, letting out a huff. “This was all we had
left
, Andy. Mark won't be back for hours.”

“Where did he go?”

“He's making a pickup, but it's with Jackie's dad—that scary loudmouth guy.”

“Razzle.”

“Yeah, whatever. They always take forever.”

Andy almost feels smarter than Jollie for a split second, then reminds himself he only ever remembers Razzle Schaeffer's name because it's kind of hard to forget.

Spider-Girl makes a pouty face. “How long will it be?”

Jollie throws up her hands. “Shit, knowing those guys, at least four in the morning.”

She glances at the tiny clock near the computer—it's just now one.

Shit.

“That's not very long in dog years,” Andy says, giving Spider-Girl a wicked jab with two fingers.

And Spider-Girl doesn't squirm this time.

She's suddenly all business, with an evil wink: “I can wait. If
she
joins us.”

Andy raises an eyebrow, and Jollie makes it a matching set.
Don't even think about it
, her look says to him. And in the same instant, she
starts
thinking about it.

It's been awhile since we were this crazy
.
But m
aybe it's what I need.
We won the revolution tonight, after all.

She takes her smartphone out of her pocket and keys the screen open—there are forty-seven unread messages from just the last half hour and ten new voicemails, all from Peanut Williams and the boys in Philly. The emails have all-caps subject lines like SENATOR BOB WANTS TO KNOW ABOUT WHITE-COLLAR RAPE and SENATOR BOB ORDERS THE FILIBUSTER SUPREME, DUDE!

It's all about Senator Bob tonight.

She smiles at the phone.

And Spider-Girl is still smiling at her, Andy's tongue running along her neck.

Jollie sets the phone down on her desk. And she finds that her body begins to react faster than her mind can be made up, putting down the shoebox, moving quickly to the door and locking it. James T. Kirk gives her the fifty-watt okey-dokey. She tells him to shut the hell up. Then she moves herself into the waves of her bed, and the easy arms of the Boy Prince.

This would break Mark's heart in half
, she thinks.

If he was here to see what they are doing now, while he is off scoring.

But this is what I need
, she also thinks, as Spider-Girl's first innocent kisses come in, sweet on her neck like honey and bitter like wicked steel, dumb like a frat chick and desperate like a gnawing rat. Smooth and wet and soothing and toothy. Exciting.

This is what I need, not to be in love with him. I'm sorry, Mark, but I can't marry you. I have to save the world first.

35 minutes and COUNTING . . .

H
e's the guy everyone wants to know in this town. But not because he's a brilliant mind, bursting with stories and bits of knowledge collected from every obscure nerdariffic nook and cranny, not because he's a real artist living the dream that so many dishwashers and spare changers and burnout musician-types fantasize about. No, not at all. Most people want to know Mark Jones because he's a drug dealer.

It's pretty simple math.

There are a lot of
dudes
in this town who deal pot from under their beds, ecstasy caps or acid squares or even H-bags when a bigger score happens, but Mark has been here longer and knows the market better than most people. He's been here since the summer of 2005. He'll tell you that everything you need to know comes from a zinger line in a Marty Scorsese film or some bit of wisdom uttered by Bill Murray in
Caddyshack
. He'll tell you his first ambition was to be a professional screenwriter—but he found out soon enough that you have to live in Hollywood for that. Problem is, he couldn't leave Austin, not ever. It had him by the soul—this amazing arty-farty boomtown, full of liars and losers and guys who sometimes make it really big, an overripe music scene bursting with blues cats and metal punks, rockabilly martyrs, filmmakers of every shape, size, and religion struggling in every dark corner to record their own
Exile on Main St.
or make the next
El Mariachi
. There are theater art gangs and performance groups who do their thing like you wouldn't believe, sidewalk musicians and homeless transsexuals who've become local celebrities. It's like San Francisco, only smaller. Like Athens, Georgia, only better. Circuits of trendy restaurants and soulful dives, sushi places and strip clubs, sports bars, roadhouses brimming with the blues, jazz haunts that freeze time and roll back the years, the tacky runways of 6th Street and the campus drag, glimmering and grooving, shaking to the very core of the earth with a million billion holes in the wall where you can hear every religion that exists in the spaces between midnight and one in the morning. And on Friday night, don't forget to catch
Aliens on Ice
. That's the James Cameron film, acted out live on a hockey rink by geeky drama-school dropouts with cardboard props and nothing better to do.