Location: Cyberspace
Time: Day 4 - 3:52 PM
“I never thought I would go like this,” Mundo said, staring into the face of porn. “I mean, I always fantasized about it, but I never thought it was possible.”
Isaac’s hand slipped. He recoiled, pulling out his sword, and stabbed it through the cyber girl’s left breast. “Screw this, guys. If I’m going to die, I’m going to be with Kim. Not some freak in cyberspace. Not with her and not with you guys. I want my Kim.”
“You know,” Grandpa said. “Back in my day, we actually had to talk to girls to have this kind of close interaction.”
“…This is still your fault, Mundo. You goddamn idiot.”
“Shut up and help me think of a way out of this.”
“Why don’t you jump off and do us all a favor? We’d be better off without you. …You goddamn idiot.”
“Shut up, Isaac!”
“You both shut up!” Grandpa snapped. “Why can’t you be a good boy like Quilton.”
“Quentin…” the Bard muttered.
“Don’t make me turn this e-mail around!”
“That’s it!” Mundo snapped his fingers. “We can redirect the e-mail. We can send it straight through to Natalie’s computer!”
“Oh, yeah,” Grandpa rolled his eyes. “Like this story really needs another female character.”
“How do you expect to redirect the e-mail?” Isaac asked. “It’s already being sent. We’re screwed, dude.”
Mundo shook his head and began climbing to the top of the cyber message. “We’re not screwed, …dude. We just need to change the e-mail address to Natalie’s.”
“Oh, and you just happen to know her e-mail address off the top of your head.”
“Hey, who do you think was going to ask her out after she dumps Adam? Of course I know it.”
Ripping his sword out of the girl’s breast, Isaac put his foot in the hole he had created and hoisted himself up the subject line. Mundo seized his hand and helped him. Together, they scaled to the top of the e-mail and looked down at the letters before them.
“Okay,” Mundo said slowly. “Her e-mail address is 555-cutiepie@yahoo.com.”
“You can’t have an e-mail address like that.”
“You can in Hollywood.”
“Whatever. Where’s a ‘5’?”
“There’s one!”
“And there’s another one!”
“Start spelling! Go, go, go!”
“How do you spell ‘cutie’?”
“With an ‘i’ and ‘e’. Idiot.”
“Which comes first?”
“What?”
“The ‘i’ or the ‘e’?”
“Idiot. ‘I’ always comes before ‘e’. Where did you go to school?”
“Uh, the same place as you. Idiot.”
“Idiot.”
And so, the dyslexic idiots continued to play Scrabble on the address line as the e-mail flew through the bowls of cyberspace at lightning-fast, dial-up speeds. They were almost done when they realized something. Something awful.
Quentin had followed them.
With curious hands, the Bard grabbed one of the symbols and held it over his face, turning it one way and then the other. “Hey… I found a defected ‘a’! Don’t worry! I’ll get rid of it.” He threw it over his shoulder like a piece of trash.
“You moron!” Mundo screamed. “That was the @!”
“The what?”
“The @!”
“The @?”
“The @!”
“…What’s an @?”
“It’s going to be your life if you don’t get it back!”
Despite his old age, Grandpa’s reflexes were quick. Squeezing the porn girl’s other breast, he reached out with his cane and lassoed the @. “I got it, boys!”
“…Thank God one of us isn’t a complete retard,” Mundo said.
“Oh, yeah. I got it. I got it alright.” Grandpa winked at the porn girl.
“Would you just bring the @ up here, old man?”
“The what?”
“…Just get up here.”
Meanwhile, Natalie had just gotten home from school. She threw open her door and tossed her bookbag on the bed before falling down next to it, facefirst into the cool blankets. They smelled like strawberries. Her whole room did. Red walls, swirly pink bed sheets, white curtains with kitties and berries printed on the fabric. She sighed, deeply, letting her voice sink into the bed like a fallen dream. Then she heard the voice, the voice from afar, the voice that was calling to her…
“You got mail!”
She hurled her bag at the computer. It missed, slumping against the wall, and she sighed again. Running her hand through her tangled brown hair, she somersaulted over her bed and plopped down in her wooden desk chair. She stared at the computer screen, then at the keyboard, which she had to dig through the crap on her desk to find. Clicking, she saw she only had one message. The subject line read, ‘hi! you won’t believe this!!! xxxx
’. Her eyes narrowed. Grabbing the mouse, she scrolled over to the delete key.
“Good-bye,” she said, in the same annoying tone as the ‘you-got-mail’ message. She started to press down on the mouse button and then stopped.
What could it hurt? She had a firewall. How bad could one e-mail be? Maybe she would believe it. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.
Grinning to herself, she ran over to her door, shut it, turned the lock, and then hurried back to her computer. Just one peek. Just one.
It couldn’t be that bad.