“You know what park rangers tell people when they get lost in the woods, right?”
“No,” Peter told his older sister. He flashed her a sideways smirk, shrugging his shoulders. “Never been lost in the woods. So I never had the opportunity.”
“Look, smart aleck, you know what they say. STAY WHERE YOU ARE. And you need to think of that as applying to you, too, if something ever happens and you’re with someone you don’t really want to be with,” Erica explained. She shifted her leg in the grass of the reservoir hill, planting her hand between her tiny brother and her shoe to keep him shepherded back. “Got it?”
“How am I not going to stay where I am if someone has me?”
“Because I know you. You’ll be plotting something.”
“Who, little ol’ me?”
“The jokes aren’t making this go any faster, you know,” she groused, drumming her fingers on her knee. “Just don’t be making plans. There’s no need to make a situation worse if you’re in a bad spot. Just go with the flow. And if you can, do something to keep them there. The person who has you, I mean. Whatever it is.”
“That sounds like a plot to me,” Peter said, elbowing his sister in the ankle.
“Call it whatever you want,” she said, prodding him right back in the shoulder. “Just stay put.”
Just as predictably as the sun rising, Mandy had changed her mind about Peter’s movie suggestion within a minute of setting foot in the half-finished basement. Albeit, her selection process for new activities was usually anything than but predictable.
“You know what, Peter Rabbit? I don’t think I’m into seeing the movie yet. It’s too early at night. You gotta watch scary movies late. Late-late. You know?”
“I think I do,” Peter said. Just so long as they stuck around in this area, his odds of rescue went up.
The tiny freshman, still recovering at an atomic level from the Hot Heads candy she’d forced him to take, propped his head back against Mandy’s tightly coiled thumb and tried to drink in as much information as he could while he had a broad view of the space.
Rafters in various stages of decay and repair stretched the length of the irregularly rectangular basement. The walls were painted asylum-white, but the level of chipping suggested it was done long before either of them was born. As he guessed, a rabbit-ears TV on an old dresser occupied one side, with a mealy-looking couch facing it. To Peter’s surprise, a computer, ancient and bulky as it was, rested on a desk in the corner. Various boxes of machinery marking the last couple of decades of technological progress rested atop one another in dusty black towers along the wall, though much of it littered the floor. Cardboard boxes dotted the ground behind the couch in random patterns, most of them stuffed with various household paraphernalia, and some completely empty.
Peter couldn’t help but note the sheer amount of cover present in the room. Boxes, cables, computer devices, shriveled plastic Christmas trees, and stacked lawn chairs missing legs. While still dangerous, it wasn’t inconceivable that he could find a hiding place in here, if fate decreed he was to receive another chance at freedom. If only Mandy let her guard down. Where he’d go next was anyone’s guess, but it was a start.
“Here it is. The movie theater,” Mandy announced with a soft snicker beneath her breath. She recollected Peter into her hands, awkwardly kneading him between both palms like a piece of clay. It was a unique sensation, and the boy decided pretty quickly he wasn’t a fan. “What do you think?”
“It’s definitely bigger than my theater,” he said, his breath catching in his chest as the heel of Mandy’s hand caved down against his stomach.
“I’ll bet it is. Most stuff is bigger than your anything, though,” she suggested.
“That’s probably true.”
“Of course it’s true, little boy,” she said. The towering teen seemed to lead each step with her toes, dragging the heels of her sneakers along behind as she trekked deeper into the field of junky disarray she called a movie theater. “I wonder what we should play until it’s late enough to watch the first ScreamSight?”
That’s when Peter’s eye snagged on the telephone. Conveniently located down on the floor, like much of the storage materials Mandy’s mother had apparently seen fit to mercifully leave forgotten around the room. It was an old landline, though thankfully not a rotary. A small enough handset that he could kick it off the stand. The phone’s cord wound around behind the dresser along with the TV plug and the video player beside it in the tangle of cords plugged to the wall, suggesting the phone, unlike the rest of the dinosaur technology on the opposite wall, was still functional and drawing power from the socket. The landline cord draped beneath the dresser, coiled into the knot.
Peter was careful not to stare too long in the direction of this potential saving grace. All he needed was some time alone.
Mandy slung the twist-tied bag of chewy death-candy over the arm of the couch, where it slumped depressively upon the cushion over the partially broken springs. Resting her knees into the plush surface, she leaned backwards over the couch, extending her hands containing Peter over the back so he could stare across the field of boxes.
It was tough not to think of the last time a different girl in his school had carried Peter down to her basement. The evening when he and Lisa had their dinner-movie date, then accidentally overheard her parents and, ultimately, declared their dedication to whatever kind of relationship they’d formed against the odds. Then, of course, the magical matter of Peter’s first kiss. The comparison of this event to that day was almost enough to make the boy choke up.
“Oh! Oh! I’ve got it!”
Mandy’s fingers loosened around Peter with the sheer focus of her excitement. He felt his stomach turning as, just for an instant, gravity nearly took greater control of his frame away from the girl’s wresting digits. However, she quickly recovered, and snatched him back into a firm fist. Peter heard his spine pop quietly, though thankfully not due to a shattered vertebrae. More like accidental chiropractic work.
The pair whisked back around the couch. Mandy, with surprising delicacy, deposited Peter up on the arched back of the couch, and began to rummage through the nearest box. Patiently, the boy concentrated on staying balanced so he wouldn’t fall toward either the concrete in front or the broken springs behind. In reality, his greater concern was that his host might accidentally forget where she’d placed him and turn around with such forced, hands outstretched for balance on the couch, that he’d be flung into the TV screen like a bug on a windshield.
“This was Sparky’s ball,” Mandy explained as she turned back around. She held a mostly-translucent hamster exercise ball in her hand. “Sparky was my hamster.”
Peter was just surprised Sparky wasn’t a tarantula, though he kept this to himself.
“He was definitely a really good pet,” she continued, palming the plastic containment sphere from hand to hand. “He listened to me and stuff when nobody else would take me seriously. I was pretty sad when he died because he got out of his cage and I had to put him in the microwave for punishment.”
Mandy’s expression took on its usual stasis of mortal sincerity. For a few intervening instants, Peter considered whether he should just let his bowels go loose so he could get over the almost-inevitable pants-wetting now so she could humiliate him and move on. Still, it wasn’t exactly a shock to hear how Sparky kicked the bucket. Perhaps for the first time tonight, it occurred to him just how real and raw the situation was.
“God, look at your face. Like you saw a ghost-hamster. No, I didn’t really microwave Sparky, you dumb little Peter-Rabbit,” Mandy laughed, finally doubling over from the effort of holding steady in her practical joke. She tossed the hamster ball up in the air without looking and only just caught it, clumsily shoving both arms back out in a cradle, then batted the same fingers through her ruffled auburn locks to defuse the image of her slippery grip. Her shoes squeaked on the concrete.
Really, though, regardless of the circumstances surrounding Sparky’s demise, Peter was just anxious now that she’d think to try that same blind juggling trick with him.
“And now you get to inherit the last pet’s favorite toy,” Mandy explained. She unscrewed the hinged door of the sphere, then reached forward, hands clawed for the new pet.
Peter remained in sure enough control that he didn’t shiver as the girl’s surprise reach closed around him yet again. Those iron fingers plucked him from the couch back and swung him easily over the plastic mouth of the hamster ball. This, at least, wasn’t a surprise to Peter. The instant Mandy stood back up with the ball in hand, he’d known where he was headed.
He tumbled for only a second before rolling against the curved wall of the hamster ball. The door was snapped shut in the same breath. Doing his best to right himself, only to discover Mandy was actively rotating the ball like a classroom globe between her hands, Peter remembered his sister’s advice and went with the flow.
For a couple minutes, Mandy didn’t seem to have any interest in making use of the hamster ball’s actual exercise function on the floor, and only leaned back against the couch, rolling the ball back and forth around her palms for her own geometric amusement, leaving Peter to cascade at the whims of her fingertips. Her full-bellied laughter echoed through the air holes of the ball and rattled around the walls like the inside of a bowled diving helmet. All the while, Mandy’s flesh smooshed pale against the glassy sides as though she was gripping a glass of water. Thankfully, it hadn’t occurred to her to add any liquids or additional obstacles for Peter to contend with as he completed slow revolution after slow revolution around the ball.
Really, the boy had to admit to himself, this was an incredibly doable activity, all things considered. At most, he was getting the same kind of dizzies as he presumed roller coaster riders felt and the ball, while not devoid of the historic reek of hamster urine, was a soft enough plastic that he wasn’t going to come away with injuries after Mandy finished her fun.
“Round and round he goes…” the girl crooned softly. “…where he stops?”
Nobody knows, Peter mouthed to himself as he turned head-over-heels for the umpteenth time beneath the shadow of Mandy’s plastered palm above. So far, so good with the whole staying-put idea. Maybe she’d get bored enough soon to start the movie.
“Tell you what, Peter-Rabbit,” she said at last. The tumbling between her hands came to a stop. “I’ve gotta go take my medicine before I forget, since it’s already past time to take it, and the doctor was all “I’ll know if you haven’t taken them!” so I probably gotta.”
“Yeah… yeah, yeah, that’s fine,” Peter burped, clutching his temple in a weak bid to regain his sense of balance.
Mandy’s fingers playfully plugged the nearest air holes for just a second, spreading a smile over her face, before she lowered the entire glassy prison to the concrete below, beside her shoes.
“I’ll be back in a few minutes, little boy. I hate having to swallow that stuff cuz it tastes like crap and I have to drink a bunch of water, but when I get back, we’ll see if you can do some tricks in this thing, and then maybe if you want, we’ll see what happens when your hamster ball turns into a soccer ball.”
Left to ponder the probably-concussion-causing consequences of such a suggestion, Peter clambered up and felt the ball roll easily forward beneath his feet on the floor. Getting going wasn’t going to be an issue. His captor and apparently self-appointed owner rose from the cushions and made her way lazily toward the stairs.
“Stay, now. Like a good boy,” Mandy instructed from the third step. She waggled her fingers in a wave, then stomped heavily all the way up the steps, completely out of sight. Footsteps rumbled on the floor above.
The landline phone laid on the floor not ten feet away like the golden gates of El Dorado.