*Hello?* chimed Eve a third time.
After a few minutes of soul searching, Bill finally decided on his course of action. He was going to do it. He was too wound up to go to bed now and wait another twelve hours for this weirdness to end, his natural teenage impatience winning out over his fears of sneaking out of the house. He'd just have to risk being a muscleless little girl wandering out into the cold, unforgiving harshness of nighttime, because he couldn't take this shit any more. Plus, a part of Bill was *really* curious about who Eve actually was, and he wanted to see if he could get the truth out of her.
*I'm here! Sorry, just thinking. Let's do it. Let's meet up right now. There's a small park near the high school, on the corner of Cicero and Cermak. Are you familiar with it? I live right near by.*
*Yes. I know where it is.*
*Great. Meet me by the statue of Josiah Shermer. I'll be waiting for you there.*
*Sounds like a plan. BTW, I live across town, so it will take me like 10-15 minutes to get there even if I drive really fast. Will you be OK waiting there in the dark for that long?*
*Oh sure, no sweat. See you soon. Xoxo*
*K*
With that, Bill clicked off the phone and practically leaped out of bed and across Willow's room to her closet in order to grab some appropriate late October dressage. Opening the pink door and yanking the light chain, Bill groaned as he discovered that Willow owned an entire department store's worth of clothes and shoes.
Ugh. Why am I such a girly girl stereotype? thought the transformed teenage boy as he grabbed a lilac purple sweater which wasn't particularly gender neutral but looked warm, as well as the pair of angel jeans he had walked home in, and slipped them on over Willow's pajama top. He then grabbed the pair of sneakers he had walked home in and quickly laced them up.
Now that he wouldn't freeze Willow's surprisingly large ass off, Bill quickly and quietly ninjaed himself outside of Willow's bedroom, past all the cat pictures and Pokemon fanart cluttered on her door, past the master bedroom which her parents were sleeping in, tiptoeing down the flight of stairs leading to the front door as nimbly as Bill felt was humanly possible. A cat burglar couldn't have been more discreet.
Once downstairs, Bill took a quick detour to the kitchen and grabbed a flashlight and a pocketknife from the utility cabinet that his father had set up for emergencies and just as a general all purpose storage unit for things the family might need.
Bill slipped the knife into his pocket just in case and fished out his house keys. He ambled on back to the foyer, opened the front door, and then locked it behind him.
Within less than a second, Bill wondered if he should go back inside. It was really nippy out here!
But it wasn't just that, as Bill found himself noticing just how much more eerie Robinson Avenue was at night. Shadows enveloped everything in a disturbing and sinister way, suggesting that all manner of monsters could pop out and grab Willow at any time. The orange light cast by the rows of street lamps created an unfriendly glow against the asphalt lined street, reminding Bill of being held somewhere against his will during a police interrogation.
Why am such a scaredy cat now? Bill asked himself. He had sneaked out of the house late at night a million times, what was so different about it now? It couldn't only be because he was more vulnerable as a female, because he wasn't exactly built like The Rock as a guy either. Hell, just this morning he had been afraid to leave his porch because of Big Jon's unwise decision to make a house call.
No, it had to be more than that.
Was Willow's personality bleeding into his own, drip by drip? Willow was childish after all, so it wouldn't be all that surprising that she'd be afraid of the dark. From what he gathered about Willow, Bill doubted that she had ever been out this late before, her parents probably not allowing her to. This might be Willow's first ever act of "rebellion", no matter how minor it was, and she was scared of crossing that threshold.
Or maybe it was a far less metaphysical reason. Bill figured that his fear could just be as simple as him being shaken by the seemingly unlimited power of the Ahn'Ger Stone, and paranoid about what it was going to do next. Bill was an OCD case to begin with. Once he became focused on a particular obsession, his mind wouldn't let him leave until he had figured out everything there was to know about it.
That was likely the reason why he had been creeped out earlier while walking home. Reading about all of those disturbing true crime stories and statistics had made him overly sensitive to the otherwise low probability that a serial killer was going to jump out from the bushes and abduct you. He had to remind himself that for all its flaws, Shermer was a pretty safe town.
Phew. Nice pep talk, Bill. You really are the king of rationalizations.
Bill chuckled at how neurotic he could be, having an argument with himself as he stood on his front porch at 1:00 A.M.
Step by cautious step, Bill made his way off the Strasserman family porch and towards the direction of Shermer High.
**