Our waitress began to grow younger. When she had first served our table, she had looked to be in her late thirties—but now she was barely in her late teens.
“Uh, uh, do you have to go potty, honey?” Cindy asked me, thinking quickly. She boosted me out of my highchair herself, she was in such a rush, grabbed my hand, and
hustled me into the ladies’ room, which fortunately was empty.
I was not particularly happy at being treated like this, but I was far more concerned by the sudden transformation of our waitress. “What the heck happened to her?” I
asked.
“Damn it all! We’re contagious!” she hissed angrily.
Now I was totally confused. “Huh?”
She sighed, ran her hands through her hair. “While we were developing the chemical, we found that we could culture a special kind of bacteria to generate it—like
penicillin. I took a sample of the bacteria with me when I fled with the chemical. I didn’t mention it before because I thought it had burned up in the fire!”
I suddenly remembered the little metal box I had taken from her child’s hand last night, and which I had pressed a button on. “Uh … did that bacteria sample happen to
be in a small little remote-control thingie?”
She glared at me. “YOU infected us?!”
I glared right back at her—up at her, technically. “Hey, I took it out of your hot little hand, dearie. If you had left it behind in the fire, it would have burned up. If you
had told me it was dangerous, I wouldn’t have infected us—for that matter, if you had actually told me who you were last night …”
She held up her hands, in a gesture of surrender. “All right, all right, I’m sorry. I was afraid that you’d think I was a crazy little girl—or that, if you did believe me,
you’d want to force me to give you the secret of eternal youth. I should have told you last night, I admit it—but I fail to see what difference that would have made.
You inhaled the chemical at the fire last night—you still would have turned into a three year-old, no matter what I told you!”
“O.K., fine, whatever! So what do we do now? And if we’re infected, why aren’t we growing any younger?”
“Perhaps we are—only more slowly,” she said, grimly. “Presumably the initial presence of the chemical in our body upon our infection has impeded the bacteria’s
effects on us. We can only hope that it has granted us a total immunity. And we should also hope that the bacteria is simply emitting the chemical in evaporated form
from our pores, and not infecting other people that we meet. That way, people’s rejuvenations will stop once we are no longer near them.”
“We still have to get to Chicago,” she mused. “But this … complicates matters.”
“That’s an understatement,” I growled. “Who’s going to want to ride with Typhoid Mary and John Boy—even if we are Fountain of Youth Typhoid Mary and John
Boy?”
We walked over to the table, trying to avoid coming too close to our waitress—who was, fortunately, too confused by her newly loosened clothes and youthful body to
notice us—paid our tab, leaving a generous tip for the waitress (if renewed youth was not enough of a gratuity,) and we moved to leave the restaurant.
“Just a moment,” a terse voice said.
Cindy and I turned around.
The owner of the restaurant moved in front of us—far too close to us, now that we knew about our … condition.
“Kids,” he asked kindly, “Where are your parents?”
Cindy and I shared a look. Apparently, the adult-free meal had attracted a concerned grown-up. Unfortunate.
“Daddy is outside waiting for us,” Cindy tried.
He wasn’t buying. “Kids, where are your mommy and daddy?”
“Daddy says mommy is in heaven,” Cindy lied. Cold—but we needed to get away from this guy, for his own good and ours.
The guy was taken aback briefly—but recovered quickly. He knelt down to be on an eye level with Cindy, who, as the older member of our pair, he seemed to be
directing all his questions. He rested a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Kids, it’s important that you—”
That was all he got out before it happened. What followed next was almost too impossible to be believed. The man’s age spun backwards faster than our eyes could
follow. His hand left Cindy’s shoulder as his body grew too small to reach that high. His clothes dropped to the ground as he shrank too small to fit them.
A naked two year-old (hey, he was even younger than me!) stared up at Cindy in shock, then toddled away, toward our rejuvenated waitress (who was still a young
woman; out of the two fo them, she certainly seemed to have gotten the better deal.)
The waitress must have been watching his little intervention with us. “Steven?” she asked the little two year-old incredulously.
“Tay-cee! Tay-cee!” he said urgently, holding his arms up toward her, his infant expression desperate.
Perhaps employer and employee were simply good friends, perhaps something more—or perhaps she was simply a good person. Tracy (or Stacey, or whatever he had
been trying to say) reached down, and picked up her infantized employer, hugging him next to her breasts, in a very motherly gesture.
Well, at least he seemed to have someone to take care of him. I considered those curves he was pillowed next to, and felt jealous.
Cindy and I gave each other shocked looks, then beat a simultaneous retreat out of the restaurant before awkward questions, or even more awkward accusations,
started to come up.
“What was that?” I asked her, when we felt we had gotten a safe distance away.
“Somehow, when he came into physical contact with me, his body rapidly absorbed a large amount of the chemical compound.”
“Well, that’s just great. Now we can’t even let anyone touch us.”
“We still have to get to Chicago,” she reminded me.
I gave her an incredulous look. “HOW?! We’re in the bodies of children! We zap people by touch! How can we possibly get to Chicago?”
“Well …”
(Note: I realize that I’m offering more than one option in two of these categories, but I was unable to limit myself. Choose simply one of them—i.e., “Let’s catch a
train” and drop the bus option—or, if you have a better way of dealing with multiple options, feel free to do so.)