Chapter #58Cain and Abel by: Seuzz   Sunday afternoon. You get another text from Jared, asking if you want to get together.
You can't keep putting Caleb off, so you agree to meet. But you ask to meet alone with him and "brother." Particularly after yesterday, at the Perezes' house, you don't feel up to meeting new people.
He texts back their address, and by two o'clock you're on your way over.
* * * * *
They live out on the northeast side of town, in one of the older developments with big houses on big lots. In fact, it looks nicer than the development where your family lives, for the trees are older and bigger and shadier.
The Larsons' house is a bit of an oddball. It's a tall but narrow two-story house built of dark red brick with steeply pitched gray roofs and large windows, hidden almost in the midst of a grove of dark firs and connected to the main road by a wide road of hard-packed dirt and gravel. Dark evergreen bushes are clustered all about it. The main door and garage are on the back side of the house, while the front is dominated by a hexagonal three-story tower that, with its steep, conical roof, almost looks like it was stolen off a small castle.
There is a wide lawn behind the house, surrounded on three sides by thick forest and separated from the garage and front porch by a wide cul-de-sac, and on this lawn, dressed as you last saw them in khaki shorts and ball caps almost as dirty and sloppy as your own, are Jared and Cody Larson. They are throwing a football back and forth.
"Yo! Prescott!" Jared calls as you dismount your truck, and he tosses the football—in a graceful spin—at you. You catch it. "Have any trouble finding the house?"
"Not really!" You toss the football to Cody, who is holding his hands up to receive. Your throw has a much sloppier, wobbling spin, and he has to lurch forward to catch it as the ball falls short. "Nice place!"
"Works for us!" He catches the ball his brother has tossed. "Should'a come out last night, we had a good time!" They had texted you at about eight, inviting you out for poker, but you had demurred. "I won two hundred. Cody scooped up forty."
"I'm no good at poker," you retort as you catch the ball, and pass it back to Cody. "And I didn't have any money to play with anyway. Who did you play with? I mean— Two hundred?"
"Friends. Friends who can afford to lose that much. Friends we could'a introduced you to," he adds meaningfully.
You ignore the comment to address Cody. "And how're you doing, man?"
"My brother's still yanked," Jared answers for him, "'cos he missed his chance with a girl on Friday, and she blew him off yesterday."
"Oh, that sucks." Cody only answers you with a glower. "So have you started recognizing the names of people when they call?"
"Yes!" Cody retorts through gritted teeth, and instead of throwing the ball to Jared he sends it hurtling like a bullet at you, so hard that you jump out of the way instead of trying to catch it. "And I would'a won a hundred-and-twenty last night except my asshole of a brother beat my two-pair with a flush. Eighty of that you got is mine!" he snarls at Jared.
"Shouldn't'a called my bluff," Jared retorts with a nasty laugh.
"I should'a punched you out when you started laughing at me, bruh!"
"My brother's usually a much better loser," Jared tells you, and his expression hardens a little, "and he usually doesn't lose at cards. But he let this loser he just met get inside his head on Friday, and it's fucked him up."
"Fuck! You!"
"I thought the idea was to have fun." You glance behind you at the house. "This looks like someplace you could have fun."
"Sure is," Jared says. He cradles the football under his arm and begins walking toward you. "Come on, we'll show you around."
* * * * *
The house inside is even nicer than on the outside, with lots of tasteful furniture like out of an expensive showroom, in spaces not so large that they feel empty of furniture but not so small that they feel cramped with it. After briefly introducing you to their parents, who are watching TV in a large den, the brothers lead you up a staircase and down a wide hallway into a large room with large bay windows. There are three large desks arranged around the room with laptops and giant monitors, and the divan in front of a large-screen TV reminds you to a startling degree of the divan-and-TV at the Perezes's, for this TV too has a game console connected to it. But the real features are the pinball machine and the two vintage arcade games.
"So this is our playroom," Jared says, spreading his arms. "Computers and TV and shit." He points to the pinball and the arcade stands. "Cody's got high score on all three of those. Yesterday, he even clawed his way back into the top five on the Centipede game."
He claps Cody on the shoulder; the latter looks slightly mollified, until Jared adds, "It was a shitty consolation prize for blowing it with Leah Eriksen, but you take what you can get."
"Get Teresa out here," Cody mutters darkly, "so I can set up another chance with her."
Jared only smiles and points to a ladder built into the wall.
"Our bedroom is up there," he says, and you realize you are inside that tower. "Can you fucking believe it? A house this size and I gotta share a bedroom with this whiny little cunt. And it means I gotta come down here in the middle of the night and do it on the divan there if I wanna jerk off."
"I gotta do the same, bruh!"
"Yeah, we've had some real interesting conversations," Jared tells you with a sneering smile, "about what each of us gets up to that the other one doesn't know about. Or doesn't know that the other one does know about. Like," he says as he falls onto the divan and spreads his legs, "how my brother got a blow job from Amy Rhodes at the same time I was trying to go out with her, and how he never told me."
"It was a banger, too," Cody chortles.
"Are you guys actually having fun?" you ask.
"Don't be fooled by Tilley's bad attitude," Jared says. "He has a blast when he remembers who he's supposed to be."
He resettles his cap, then fumbles with his zipper and digs inside the folds of his shorts. Then, to your astonishment and horror, he pulls out a long, rigid, pink cock.
"Jesus!" You whirl to avert your eyes.
Jared sniggers.
"Don't mind me," he says. "This is just my way of telling you two to get outta here, raid the kitchen, bring us up something to eat. And Tilley," he adds, "act like Cody when you're out there. That's why I'm sending you out. So you'll have to act like you're supposed to be acting."
Cody spreads his arms and flips double birds at Jared before whirling and marching out. But on the other side, after closing the double-doors to the "playroom," he shuts his eyes, and takes a deep breath.
The anger and tension drain from his face, replaced by a look of vague contempt when he opens his eyes again.
"Yeah, so, come on," he says as he leads you back down the stairs. "Whaddaya like?"
"What have you got?"
"Pretty much whatever." He leads you into a kitchen that is the size of the living room at your place, with a giant island-with-range-top in the middle and two stainless steel refrigerators. "Drinks, meats, cheeses in here," Cody says, indicating one. "Fruits and vegetables and condiments and crap in the other one." Then he does a double-take over his shoulder as his dad comes in, and pales a little.
"I just got a call from your uncle," he tells Cody. "He needs to get the yard cleaned up tomorrow, and I said you and your brother would help for fifteen an hour."
"Can't Micah and Trask do it?" Cody asks.
"Micah'll help, but Trask and Felipe and the rest of the crew all have jobs scheduled. It has to be done tomorrow, because the city rescheduled its inspection for Tuesday."
"Oh, okay."
Then he points to you. "Can Will come along and help? It's just loading and unloading stuff, isn't it?"
Mr. Larson looks at you. "If he wants the money." His expression asks, Do you?
"We'll talk to guys at school," Cody tells him. "It'll go faster if there's more of us."
"That's fine. Just make sure you don't bring more than you can actually use. I'd say it's a six-person job, tops." Mr. Larson nods at him and you, then leaves.
"That's cool," Cody says to you. "You can come out and help, get paid. We'll get you more than fifteen an hour, too," he adds in a low voice. "We'll tell my uncle no one would come out for less than twenty, and then he'll have to pay you and us twenty."
"What's the job?"
"Just clearing out old junk. We'll have to haul it out to the dump. We could use your truck, and you could charge my uncle for that too. He'd have to pay for your gas anyway.
"Also," he adds in near whisper, "you could get a look at some guys for you."
* * * * *
Talk continues as you pile up plates with deli meats and cheeses, with you expressing a certain amount of envy at it all. To your surprise, Cody asks, "You want it?"
"What do you mean?"
He sucks in a cheek, then leans in close.
"Jared and Cody get along fine," he murmurs. "Me and Johansson, not so much. He says it's my fault, but listen to him in there. He's being a prick. You and him would get along better as these guys."
"What would you do?"
"Oh, I got someone else picked out."   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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