There was no one else home when I reached my house. No big surprise. My parents had been divorced since I was six and mom worked as a nurse practitioner at one of those drug store clinics. Her usual shift ran from just after three in the afternoon to almost midnight, so we were lucky to even see each other during the week. My sister Katie, who at seventeen had her own rusty car and was theoretically in charge when mom was out, was also absent. Again no big surprise.
Katie was okay, as far as big sisters go. Most of my life, I’d sat in the back seat while mom hauled Katie to one gymnastics event after another. But in the last year Katie had quit the gymnastics team, started wearing roughly four tons of eye gunk, and started wearing enough black clothes to make her a best customer at Hot Topic. Still, she didn’t spend a lot of time ragging on me, which was about all I could ask for. Her whole big emo/goth rebellion thing that seemed to mostly involve being gone until five minutes before mom showed up. So the house was mine.
With no more than a minute of cussing, I managed to get both me and the soggy box inside. Then I stumbled to my room, dropped the drippy brown mess on the floor, and finally tore open the top to see what was inside.
It was a VCR. Not just any worthless old VCR, but one that was at least twice the size and three times the ugly as the one my mom had thrown away years ago. In other words, fake Trinity had used me to carry away her garbage.
I almost took it straight through the house to the dumpster, but there were a half dozen or so tapes in the box. Remembering the boob-massage show fake-Trin had given me at Treasure Palace, I thought I might plug the old box in for a second just to see if the woman had gifted me with some educational materials. In other words, I wanted to see if there was any porn.
I hefted the big silver VCR out on the floor in front of the 32” flat screen that had been my mom’s guilt trip inspired Christmas present. There was a power cord and a set of video cables in the box, but no sign of a remote. I couldn’t even see if the VCR had a pause button. There was just play, rewind, and eject, all of them lined up on the top next to the weird pop-up tape slot. Along the back, there was no manufacturer’s name, just a sticker with the number 27. There were parts of another sticker, some kind of weird, pointy symbol, like the kind they put on medical waste, but most of the sticker had been scratched away. The edges of the box had rough edges, like someone has welded it together in shop class.
“It’s Franken-VCR,” I said aloud as I hooked up the cables. “Probably plays nothing but horror flicks.”
I got the box set up and picked a tape. The first one just said “TV” on the hand-written label. I slotted it, hit play, and hoped for some movie with “naughty” in the title. As it turned out, it was kind of the opposite. As soon as the tape was pressed into the VCR, the theme song for Gilmore Girls started up. The picture was amazingly clear, and (like every guy in America under 99) I’d had my share of Rory Gilmore fantasies, but I was hoping for a different kind of chick show—the kind with bare naked boobies, so I stabbed the eject button and tried the next tape. This one also said “TV”, and if the Gilmores had been a disappointment, this one was worse. It was some show I’d thankfully never seen called “What I Like About You.” I could tell was going to be irritating before the opening credits were done. Time for tape 3.
This time I got lucky. The tape said “Chick Flicks”, which seemed at least a little hopeful. Turned out it wasn’t porn, but it was at least something that interested me: a copy of the movie “Mean Girls.” I didn’t have a DVD of the film, because it was certified “something I’d be embarrassed to have any of my friends find out I owned,” but seeing Lindsey Lohan at her young and busty best got me to leave the tape in for a few minutes. Then, because the image was so amazingly good, I watched a few minutes more. Then, because of that scene where Cady wears a red sweater, I took off my pants.
Sure, it’s embarrassing, but I did have the house to myself and hours of time to kill. Heck, I was already thinking I might do a repeat performance if there was anything good on the other tapes. Sue me, I was 15. Beating off was my hobby.
I leaned back on the bed with my feet hanging off the end and my jeans pulled down, fantasizing about what I’d do if Cady Heron was there with me. The thing is, this little episode didn’t go as expected. Just as I was starting to wish I had planned ahead far enough to bring some Kleenex, the TV spurted before I did. Only it spurted in the form of a blue-white lightning bolt that snaked out of the screen in slow motion and smacked me square in the chest.
Intermission time. Everything went black.