Slimer
By Chelsea Laine Wells
It was a knee to the balls.
Even though later Ricky said it was because he was kind of drunk from pre-gaming with the pineapple vodka his mom kept tucked down into the couch cushions next to her big ass imprint and that was why he barfed corndogs into that Freddy Halloween mask in front of Olyvia de Luca who he’d been in love with since second grade, it wasn’t. It was Brianna’s knee straight up into his balls, I saw it and felt it in my soul the way you feel sympathetic ball pain. That’s what made him puke. But before that was a bunch of other shit that led up to it like Brianna hurling that Slimer mask onto the roof of the traphouse Ricky wanted to break into to impress Olyvia and me getting half a hand job from Brianna in the back of Ricky’s Honda Fiesta even though we had a history like she was my cousin or something plus she had the Slimer mask on so it was weird. But you gotta really and truly appreciate handjobs, even half ones, even from a sorta fat girl who you’re kind of almost related to, even if her face is kind of bulging out of Slimer’s mouth. That’s a golden rule of mine. So I was feeling grateful. That’s another part of why.
I need to back up. Ricky wasn’t what I would call a friend. More like he was someone I knew since forfuckingever so I was used to him and now he had a car. And the raddest job at this storefront his uncle owned that he changed depending on what time of year it was. Christmas shit at Christmas, pinwheels and flags and under the counter illegal fireworks in July, Halloween costumes through October. What was rad about it was that his uncle also sold weed out of the back and that’s mostly how he paid Ricky, so when he started working there regular our closeness had a little revival because I had no weed hookup to speak of.
The way it started was one day close to Halloween, I was sitting behind the counter sharing a joint with Ricky even though his uncle told us he would break our skulls it he caught us at it in the shop, but stuff like that just didn’t seem to matter to me longer than it took the adults to say it. Anyway he said, “Joey.” And he paused all soulful with his eyes squinted in the smoke. I stared at him. “Olyvia de Luca is the hottest fucking shit walking the earth.”
Immediately I’m not interested. This was not new. Also she wasn’t that hot. Skinny and she dressed slutty and she did that bored as fuck thing guys like Ricky lap up. I couldn’t really tell her apart, to be honest.
“She’s real tight with Brianna What’s-Her-Face,” Ricky said, and I knew who he meant, and now I knew why he was talking to me about this. “Brianna Dorsey,” I said, and took the joint from him and it was wet and that was fucking gross but I guess that’s how bad I wanted to be stoned. You do what you need to.
“You know Brianna,” Ricky said. “Yeah,” I said. “Think you could hook that up?” Ricky asked, all intense into my eyes. “Maybe we go out the four of us the Friday before Halloween, get messed up, fuck around the neighborhood?”
“I’m not like that with Brianna,” I said. “And why would Olyvia de Luca want to hang out with us anyway? Isn’t that your whole fucking deal, why you can’t bang her, because she’s too good and shit?”
“You get Brianna interested and she’ll come,” and I asked why and he said, “because we’ve got a car and weed.”
I guess it was simple like that sometimes. I agreed because I was sixteen and bored as fuck and on a constant low grade mission to make something happen in my completely weak- ass uneventful life. So I talked to Brianna and she seemed into it, which surprised me but did I mention she was kind of fat so that could be why. I wasn’t any big deal to look at but I don’t think she got a lot of offers to hang out with guys.
And yeah, like Ricky predicted, she got Olyvia to agree to go, so the Friday night before Halloween me and Ricky spiffed up a little, as best as we were able which really was not at all, and they met us at the costume shop at closing time.
He was walking weird, coming towards me and Olyvia and Brianna where we were hanging around his car under the orange streetlight which honestly wasn’t doing anything good for either of the girls and their kind of bad skin. We all stared at him with our hands in our hoodie pockets bouncing around in the cold. I said, “What’s with you, man?” kind of embarrassed because he could be truthfully hard to deal with sometimes and I was thinking he was going to make a joke about how his dick was chafing his ankle or something. That kind of thing was his jam and honestly probably why he couldn’t get a girl like Olyvia and why I suspected even with the car and the weed and Brianna along for safety in numbers or whatever reason girls had for flocking together, he was going to come up short again.
Then he got to the car and stuck his hands down his jeans and I tried to catch his eyes all panicky like what the fuck but before I could react too much he flopped these rubber masks out onto the hood of his car. And I relaxed a little.
“I lifted these for the night,” he said all proud. “I have to have them back tomorrow but for tonight they’re ours.”
“Why?” Olyvia asked kind of bitchy and that’s why this kind of girl wasn’t my type. I wanted a girl who was down for shit, down for something at least, and all Olyvia was down for was acting pissed to be wherever she was.
“Halloween,” Ricky said like it was obvious, which it was. “And you brought them out in your underwear?” Brianna asked, flicking at one with the tip of her finger.
“Yeah, baby, I smeared it with my dick cheese for you,” Ricky said all leering, and again. Again with that shit. This was why he couldn’t bag a girl like Olyvia in the first place and he just didn’t get it. But that was Ricky so what were you going to do.
“Killer,” Brianna said, and put her hands back in her pockets. “In my jeans, Christ, not my underwear,” Ricky said. “Anyway, these are top of the line. None of that dime store shit. Real rubber, not plastic, some of the best horror movie characters. Here.” He sorted them out. Freddy, Slimer, Chucky, and generic head wound ghoul type thing. Ricky snatched up Freddy for himself. I got Chucky. Brianna picked up Slimer. That left Olyvia with the generic one but she was looking all the hell over the place instead of picking it up. So Ricky took it for her.
Brianna put hers on. I’m not gonna lie. She looked stupid. Her face stuck out and the little Slimer arms waggled on the sides of her head.
“What is this thing?” she asked. And me and Ricky both went, “Slimer!” like who doesn’t know Slimer? “The, you know, green ectoplasm ghost thing from Ghostbusters,” I said.
Brianna was about to say something back when Olyvia practically shouted, “God, can we please get in the car? It’s freezing out here.”
What a bitch. So we did, and Ricky put on this Def Leppard tape that he thought was cool because it was classic but it definitely wasn’t. Guys liked shitty stupid music. Girls liked the radio, even I knew that, so they could dick around with it. But that wasn’t the kind of thing Ricky knew.
He drove us to this place called the Dairyette and got out and without asking got a bunch of corndogs, which seemed like a weird choice, but okay.
“On me,” he said, getting back into the car. Now, I could tell Brianna liked a corndog, the girl could eat a corndog obviously, which I’ve got no real problem with. And she put away a couple. But there was no way Olyvia was going to eat something like that. If it was me trying to get in her pants and I gave a shit I would have bought that girl a lemonade or something so she could pick at the straw and dick around with the ice. That was her type of shit, for sure. But Ricky wanted corndogs and he was bankrolling so that’s what we had.
“You don’t want one?” he asked Olyvia with his mouth full. “Pass,” she said like he had offered her dog crap, and stared out the window. I looked at Brianna but she didn’t notice. She was digging with her teeth at that little hard dough thing on the corndog stick. Slimer arms jiggling.
Then he got out a joint and that was the most action I saw out of Olyvia, her pinching the joint out of Ricky’s fingers without touching him and taking a drag and then passing it. That was the most her mannequin ass moved. Probably the whole reason she’d come. Ricky kept saying, “Good shit, good shit,” and we all just stayed quiet because it was decent weed, not that great, so there was nothing to go on about really. He filled the silence and I just zoned out.
Finally Ricky turned the car on and said, “Now for some mayhem, guys and ghouls,” and basically when he said guys and ghouls I wanted to die or throw up or gouge my eyes out or something, it was so fucking awful, you just cannot make this shit up. I was regretting this whole thing. Like was it really worth the weed to be hanging out with him? Other people had weed. Other people had cars. Guys and ghouls. Good Goddamn. I sank down in the seat and picked at the hair on that Chucky mask and closed my eyes and decided I would just say and do as little as possible until it was over. Like playing dead like if a bear was trying to eat you. That’s how embarrassing it was. As bad as a bear eating you.
So he was driving towards something, I didn’t even know what, and I was lying there with my eyes closed, when Brianna’s hand landed on my thigh. I opened my eyes up quick and she was staring at me all intense through the Slimer mouth with teeth on her forehead and teeth under her chin and her fat face kind of bulging and, you know, the little arms, but her hand was moving with little to no hesitation up to the crotch of my jeans where my dick lay totally asleep. Hadn’t thought I’d need it. But here we were. And it woke up fast, as they do. I was watching her and there was light passing over us and away in the dark car and she didn’t seem to need anything from me. Like she didn’t seem to want me to kiss her or anything. So, cool. So I dropped my head back against the seat and closed my eyes again and let Brianna maul my hard-on through as best she could with her hand kind of twisted around backwards. Bringin’ on the Heartbreak was playing and that song is the shit and it was just not bad at all.
Then Ricky stopped the car and Def Leppard fell silent and Brianna pulled her hand away. I had to open my eyes and face this shit again. Maybe we would get somewhere private and I could see what was up. Get her to keep going. I don’t care if a girl is a little fat. I straight up do not fucking care. I looked around, blinking, and figured out that weirdly enough we were in my neighborhood, in the worst part of it. Ricky had parked by an alley. He put on his mask and talked to us through it and it was muffled as hell and the mask was a little crooked so Freddy looked more like Sloth from The Goonies.
“Put on your disguises,” he said. “We’re gonna fuck some shit up.” I looked one last time at Brianna with my regular face and made this expression like, I don’t fucking know, we’re not that close, and put on the Chucky mask. It smelled like a million dead condoms and it itched. I thought about what Ricky had said about dick cheese. And then tried not to think about it.
Olyvia goes, “Okay I am not putting on this mask and fucking up my hair, so.”
“Come on,” Ricky said, coaxing her, “it’ll be fun. It’s a hatchet wound.” Then through my small ass eye holes I saw him turn his Sloth Freddy head towards me. “Hatchet wound,” he said, and I could feel him grinning under there. “Get it? Hatchet wound.”
“Yeah, man, I fucking got it,” I said. My voice sounded like a hand was over my mouth.
“I don’t get it,” Brianna said. “Don’t worry about it,” Ricky said, and opened his door and got out. Olyvia got out too, I watched her hair swing out behind her through my mask and the backs of her thighs under her short as fuck skirt. She was going to bitch about being cold. No question.
So we grouped together on the sidewalk, Freddy and Chucky and Slimer/Brianna and Olyvia with her hands in her hoodie pockets and no mask because of her hair. Ricky had her mask shoved in his back pocket.
“What the fuck, wait,” Brianna said. “Why do we need disguises? Mine’s not even a disguise. There’s a hole where my face is?”
“Whatever, it’ll still work,” Ricky said dismissively. He turned to walk up the sidewalk and we all kind of trailed after him. “People will be like, who was it? And they’ll be like, Oh it was fucking Slimer.” He laughed his high pitched laugh, alone, his breath rising in the air like smoke out of the mask, above his crooked ass rubber burn scar head. It looked weird without the fedora.
“What’s the plan?” I asked really loud so he’d hear me, not because I cared or because I wanted to do whatever he had in mind, but because we were literally a block away from my place and I was trying to figure if I could get Brianna through my window without my mom hearing and bang her on the floor because my mattress was squeaky as fuck. It seemed like a thing that could happen, if we could wrap this up and skate without Olyvia losing her shit about Brianna leaving her alone with Ricky. Which, I mean, I kind of wouldn’t blame her for.
“We’re gonna break into a traphouse and see what kind of freaky shit they have in there.” Okay. So Ricky was wanting to do some hoodrat shit to impress Olyvia, who wasn’t rich or anything, but everyone knew her scary Italian dad was a coke dealer which meant they had a pool and she had a cell phone. So she was definitely a cut above our poor asses.
“Well whatever, can we just do it already?” Olyvia said. “It’s fucking cold out here.” There it was, as predicted.
“Just do it already,” Ricky repeated. “As you wish, m’lady,” and that shit was worse than guys and ghouls, I actually tripped over my fucking feet with the force of how bad I wanted to die. Who said this shit? M’lady, holy Christ. “Here we are,” Ricky said, making this sweeping gesture with his arm like he was, what the fuck if I know, a knight or something. M’lady. I turned my fucking Chucky head all the way towards Brianna to see if she was grossed out by Ricky’s existence the way Olyvia seemed to be, given that Olyvia was now walking on the curb like a tightrope and kind of falling off of it to get away from him, and Brianna’s face stopped me. Fucked me up.
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Chelsea Laine Wells is a graduate of the Columbia College Chicago Fiction Department. She served twice as a co-editor of Hair Trigger, Columbia College’s yearly literary anthology, as well as a judge in Columbia’s Young Author Writing Competition for many years. Her work has appeared in Third Point Press, The Other Stories, Litro, Cease, Cows, The Butter, PANK, wigleaf, Heavy Feather, Change Seven, Split Lip, Molotov Cocktail, Paper Darts, Little Fiction, and others. Honors include first place in the Columbia Scholastic Press Association Awards, first place in the Guild Complex Literary Awards, finalist in Heavy Feather’s chapbook contest, nomination for two Pushcarts and four Best of the Nets, and a 2015 Best of the Net win, among others. She is also founding editor of Hypernova Lit an online journal dedicated to publishing the writing and visual art of high school students, which she runs with her husband Bryan Lindsey. Chelsea works as a public high school creative writing and English teacher and lives in the Oak Cliff area of Dallas, TX. Her work is represented by Maria Massie of Massie McQuilken. Find out more www.chelsealainewells.com.