“Wanna ride someplace?” Seth asked as they arrived at the bike rack.
“You wanna ride someplace?” Derrick asked, smiling cryptically.
“What do you got?” said Seth.
“Follow me, young warrior,” Derrick said, pedaling back toward Monster Adult X.
MINOANS II
“Yo, I never really went into one of these places before,” Seth said as they entered the darkness of the back hallway. “You sure this is OK?”
“Relax,” said Derrick, laughing. “This really isn’t technically ‘one of those places’ anymore. It’s closed.” He flipped the lights on; the store with the lights on and nobody inside it was one of the strangest sights Seth had ever seen, like the Yellow Brick Road gone degenerate.
“Whoa,” he said.
“It’s weird, right?”
“I don’t—” Seth grabbed a VHS shell from the nearest rack. The cover art was blurry, and in black-and-white. “The Whore Next Door. Is this, like, homemade or something?”
“Yeah, he had all kinds of crazy stuff in here.”
“Had?”
“That’s why we’re here, dude. Store’s closed. He’s leaving everything here for the owners to clear out because he’s salty about having to leave. They haven’t even checked in, as far as I know. Until something happens, this is basically, like, my treehouse.”
“Whoa,” Seth said again. He began strolling around the store, scanning the walls and floors like a foreman sizing up a building site.
“Yeah. I’ve been using it as my, umm, my studio,” Derrick said, putting on an upper-crusty accent and pulling out his sketchbook. “If you can get over the, uh, décor, it’s nice.”
“Décor.” Seth laughed, taking down another tape. “Neighborhood Pussy.”
Seth was a quick study; although teachers and other interested adults worried a lot about whether he was learning the right skills to help him survive in the big world of adults and jobs and responsibilities, his wits were sharp. He reached into his backpack and retrieved a pen-style X-Acto knife, the kind the journalism class used in paste-up.
“If they ever search your backpack you’re gonna get expelled for that,” Derrick said.
Seth rolled his eyes. “Dude. Watch,” he said. He gripped the VHS case in his left hand about half a head below eye level; working quickly with his right, he carved out the eyes of the model on the front cover. Then he sliced a couple of snake-like s’s into her forearms, and a perfect equilateral triangle into the center of her midriff. It took him only a minute, maybe two; his casual speed with the blade was like a magician’s sleight of hand.
He flipped it around so Derrick could see. Just three modifications to the naked woman with the girl-next-door face made her look like a demon priestess. Lowering his voice to a demonic gurgle and making a face, Seth growled: “Neighborhood Satan!”
“Dude, stop,” said Derrick, but he couldn’t keep a straight face; Seth had known how to get a laugh out of Derrick since playground days.
He put the case back on the rack. Face-out, the changes on the model’s body registered just enough to cause a double-take. Seth was happy with his work; he scanned the other titles on the same rack, wondering if a second one would spoil the effect of a single defaced picture. And then he turned to Derrick and said: “We can seriously have all this, though?”
His normal voice was so earnest, so young, Derrick had to laugh again. There wasn’t anybody really like Seth in this world; it’d be a nicer world if everybody could have a friend like Seth.
“All this can be yours,” Derrick said in his rich-butler voice again.
KNIGHTS ENTRY
They spent an hour or so together in the store. It felt strange to both of them, two young men in a place usually visited by older men who almost always arrived unaccompanied. But Seth saw all the possibilities; they were visible on his face, and palpable in his energy. He cased the place like an artist pricing out supplies. When, after a while, he joined Derrick behind the counter, he found a roll of Scotch tape on a shelf underneath the cash register and began assembling a collage on notebook paper. From the Neighborhood Pussy housing, he taped the eyes and stray s’s to the page; they looked lonely there, so he headed out into the racks to grab more materials. “You’re sure this is OK?” he said.
“Everything’s gotta go,” Derrick said. “I can’t stay long, though. Now that it’s early-acceptance season Mom wants to talk every day.” Seth didn’t respond; Derrick knew he’d collected several failing grades over the years—in PE, in civics, in history. Things Seth didn’t care about. When he didn’t care, he couldn’t focus.