up. He does not.”
“Look. He comin’ this way.”
Roland and Barren stifled snorts of hysteria and looked down at their work, so as not to interfere with the flow of whatever Brigham intended to do, now that he was advancing toward Liza, blazing with some sort of naked intention.
“He want you,” giggled the Mastodon.
“Shut up!”
“Liza?” squeaked Brigham, with a frightfully assured look on his face. “Would you come outside with me for a second, please?”
“Why?” asked Liza, horrified.
“I’ve got something for you.”
Roland, Misty-Dawn, and Barren were barely containing geysers of hysteria.
“I don’t want to go outside.”
“Just come with me a minute. I think you might like it.”
“Don’t leave the man with his ass hangin’ out in the air, shit,” encouraged Barren.
Liza shot a look of fury at Barren, who widened his eyes and gave a dramatic, deadpan shrug.
“I’ll come outside with you for ten seconds, but that’s all.”
“That’s all I need,” Brigham intoned with an excess of courtly confidence.
Liza shuffled out the door with Brigham, who seemed to be seven feet tall at that moment, such was his enthusiasm. As soon as they were on the other side of the doorjamb, Liza heard the set builders splutter into floor-beating hilarity.
“I noticed you leaving in the car the other day, and I thought to myself, wow, who is that beautiful lady? And then I was like, no way, that’s Liza,” Brigham confessed with the pride of someone convinced that what they’re saying is exactly what the listener is dying to hear.
“Thanks,” said Liza flatly, trying to come up with her escape route.
“I got you this.” Brigham reached into his backpack and pulled out a small porcelain teddy bear in an angel costume, the stand of which read Bless You! in cursive.
“Oh, God, Brigham,” Liza moaned, trying to impart to him in the least hurtful way that he was an Olympic-level dork, light-years beyond anyone’s wildest imaginings of purebred, championship dorkhood, but that she did not hate him for it.
“I know you’re hurting,” Brigham began emotionally, taking hold of Liza’s shoulder. “Your mother… I know this is going to sound weird to you, but her vanity and lust are bringing you down, but you deserve better—”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Brigham,” Liza spat out, beginning to hate him.
“No, listen, I’m totally sincere, I wouldn’t be asking you to go with me if I didn’t think that you were the type of girl I’d want to marry someday….”
Liza was seized by the image of herself in a white bridal gown, age eighteen, advancing down the aisle of an ugly modern church to organ music, toward an unthinkably terrifying future as Mrs. Liza Hamburger. She aggressively pushed from her mind the nightmare of Brigham’s trembling virgin dork-fingers exploring her nudity on their wedding night.
“I’m not taking this,” said Liza, handing the bear back to Brigham as if it was teeming with bacteria.
Brigham looked shocked.
“But I got it for you.”
“I don’t care. I don’t want it. Take it,” Liza said, holding the diabetically cute thing out at arm’s length.
“Are you gonna go with me?” Brigham kept at her, unable to realize he was being shot down, such was his faith in prayer.
“No!”
“Wait, wait, wait, let’s talk about it. I don’t think you know what I mean when I say ‘go'—”
“I don’t care what you mean when you say ‘go,’ “Liza stammered, suddenly aware that Misty-Dawn and Barren were watching them with glowing eyes through the slits in a rotten clapboard.
“Just get to know me—”
“I don’t want to know you! Take this goddamn thing!” The noxious figurine began to embody all of the cooties of a nude Brigham Hamburger. “TAKE IT!”
“… come to my church with me, and I’ll….”
Liza wound up and slammed the china animal with great force onto the sidewalk, where it crashed satisfyingly at their feet into several dozen shards, one of which ricocheted off the concrete and lodged itself in Brigham Hamburger’s right eye.
Peppy, alarmed by the sounds of pain, hustled her fleshy legs past the painting crew as fast as she could motor them; Barren was flat on his back, laughing so hard his limbs were twitching like a bug.
“Yuk it up, Barren. That act will get you a one-way bus fare back to junior jail.”
“Bitch,” Barren whispered, his face downshifting to its usual wrath.
Peppy looked at Liza with eyes of purest freon as they drove the sobbing Brigham to the emergency room.
“Hold his hand,” Peppy hissed with layers of threat.
“I don’t want to,” muttered Liza.
“Jesus let me not be blind in this eye,” gasped Brigham.
Liza felt the stone-deep feeling of time, in a horrible circumstance, becoming composed of heavy individual minutes that one must chain-drag over one’s shoulder alone. She noticed, out of the car window, something darkly ironic that would tattoo itself on her mind forever: an aged and peeling mural from a defunct drive-thru of an anthropomorphic hamburger with a talk-balloon that said, in letters nearly too faint to read, “BITE ME!”
Brigham’s punctured cornea meant that Roland Spring was immediately installed as Rolfe, to the overwhelming approval of everyone but Liza. Chantal’s portrayal of Liesl’s puppy love became thrillingly believable. “They’ve got some chemistry, those kids,” chuckled Peppy, watching Roland make Chantal blush.
Barbette pronounced Roland “a physical genius” and rechoreographed the number into an adorable modern pas de deux. Roland turned out to have the silky, relaxed vocal quality of a young Nat King Cole; “You Are Sixteen Going on Seventeen” became the high point of the entire production.
Liza’s intestines twisted into sausage links. Her worst fears had come to pass; the blood was on her hands. This turn of events in no way resembled her wish-mantra, in which Chantal and Desiree Baumgarten both broke legs in a car wreck (Desiree being Chantal’s natural understudy, by birthright) and Liza took over the role of Liesl. As the final cherry-on-the-insult, Liza was forced to send a get well card to Brigham.
Heartfeft Wishes… for a Healthful Recovery
“You bet your ass you’re going to
