“Seriously weird? Remember, this is Jokertown, and you’re talking to a man who’s housemates with Jim. The guy’s almost twenty and still sends letters to Santa-which would just be pathetic, except Christmas morning, there’s extra presents under the tree and the milk and cookies are gone.” Sam let that sink in for effect. “Weird is relative. Cameo’s a theatre person. Weird, yes. Seriously, no. Or at least she always acts like that. We think she’s had one too many method acting classes.” Sam chuckled. “Roger got her drunk at a cast party and she did this hilarious crazed hunchback impression. You should have seen it.”
“Crazed hunchback?” Topper inquired, then shook her head and took a deep breath. “You’re right. I’m being paranoid. Let’s just go see if Jim has any binoculars then check the audience again. The show should start soon.”
They went downstairs and over to the stage where the guys were talking over the sound of an impatient audience coming through the curtain. “What do you think, Sam?” Alec asked. “Ditch the formals? ’Cause I’ve got this Green Knight outfit I was planning to wear for second set-I mean, it’s Halloween and all-and I can’t find the stupid cummerbund and we’re going to be on national TV. Plus the whole tux business makes me look like Lurch anyway.”
“Better than Tiny Tim,” Paul said, glaring. “If I hear ‘God bless us, everyone!’ one more time, I swear, I’m gonna whack someone.”
“‘Top Hat’ is our big number, that’s all I’m saying,” Roger pointed out, “and it’ll look pretty stupid to have four guys in formalwear plus the Rockettes dancing around a Ren Faire refugee. We close on ‘Top Hat’ at the break, then we change costumes, and then you can be the Jolly Green Giant all you want.”
“It’s not the Jolly Green Giant! It’s the Green Knight! From the tale of Sir Gawain.”
“Right, Alec. We all know about your Arthurian fixation. Even the wild card virus knows about your Arthurian fixation. Now lay off and tell us where you hid the cummerbund.”
“I didn’t hide the-Wait a sec,” he said, breaking off and looking down his very long nose at Topper. “Couldn’t you just pull my cummerbund out of your hat?”
Topper stared at him with a deer-in-headlights expression, then slowly shook her head. “Sorry. No requests. Firm rule of mine.”
“Can’t you break it?”
“Only if it’s life or death. Is a cummerbund that serious?”
“You ever been on stage?” Alec’s nostrils flared, making him look even more horse-faced. “With people calling you ‘Lurch’?”
Dirk looked up at Alec. “Hey dude, we could shave your head the rest of the way. Then you’d look like Uncle Fester instead.”
Alec glared down at him. “And if we dressed you in stripes, you’d look like Pugsley.”
“If Pugsley bleached his hair and did a whole ton of steroids,” Paul remarked.
“Shut up, Timmy,” Dirk told him. “It’s not my freakin’ fault I’ve got muscles like this.”
“Well,” said Jim, “if you use the Charles Atlas system for more than five days, what do you expect? You keep saying I’m crazy, but at least I followed the directions.” Jim stood there, cutting a perfect figure in his tux, then added, “But if the problem is Alec being too tall for the lineup, and we need a quick fix, what if we just made Paul taller instead? After all, it’s a lot easier to stretch someone who’s already stretchy, and his braces are fully adjustable.”
Paul waved a crutch. “You know how long it takes me to put these things on, let alone change the settings. We don’t have time.”
“Sure we do,” Jim said. “Look what I just got.”
You could have heard a pin drop at that moment. Jim’s Look what I just gots were usually followed by something spectacular and sometimes frightening, occasionally destructive. He held up his latest gimcrack, what looked like a remote control, with a few extra wires and sparkling diodes held on with strips of duct tape. “It’s a universal remote.” He displayed it with all the pride of a child showing off the new toy Santa had brought him. “The box said it would control all my appliances, electronics, entertainment and audiovisual equipment. I had to fiddle with it a bit before it worked right, but now it does, and doctor always calls Paul’s braces appliances. And look, here’s the vertical.” He pointed the remote at Paul and a jolt of electrical energy shot forth, connecting with the rubber boy’s braces and arcing along them like a Tesla coil.
Paul began to get taller and taller, rapidly nearing Alec’s height then going somewhat beyond, his body becoming correspondingly thinner, like a life-size Stretch Armstrong doll. “Gimcrack! Cut it out!” Paul’s leg braces were clearly visible beyond his highwater tux pants, getting higher still as electricity crackled and adjustment pins on the braces clicked and ratcheted spasmodically, inching higher and higher.
“Cut what out?” asked Jim.
“He means stop,” Roger said. “There’s a stop button, isn’t there, Jim?”
“Sure,” said the ace, “it’s right here.” Jim pressed the remote and the electrical charge zapped into nothingness, Paul’s braces locking just short of eight feet. His elongated midriff stuck out below his shirtwaist and above his tux pants, held up by his massively strained suspenders.
Topper leaned over to Sam and whispered in his ear, “On second thought, let’s not ask about the binoculars.” Sam nodded.
The rubber boy looked down at himself. “Hey, actually this is pretty cool.” He stilt-walked a couple steps towards Alec. “Hey look, Alec, I’m even taller than you!” He smiled then, the corners of his mouth curling up like a caricature. “I can even touch your horn…”
Paul reached his elongated arm for the forward point of Alec’s Mohawk and the tall joker jerked away. “Don’t you touch it, you fucking rubber chicken!” Alec reared back, his goatee flying. “I know you’re not a virgin!”
Paul grinned even more wickedly. “Hey, when you can beat all the other guys at Freakers annual ‘Whip it out’ contest, the girls can never get enough of you!”
“Really?” Jim looked perplexed again. “That hasn’t been my experience. I keep getting emails about how to ‘Add extra inches,’ and those work, of course, but there’s never any ‘Lose unwanted inches’ programs, at least for your penis.”
There was another of those pin-drop silences. “Jim,” Roger said, shaking his head, “please, whatever you do, don’t mention that once the curtain goes up. And Alec, Paul-that goes double for you two. You should know better. This is our first live broadcast and we don’t want to piss off the network.”
“The Network?” Jim repeated. “The celestial intelligences I hear with my pyramid hat?”
“Well ‘celestial intelligences’ may be going a bit far, but they’re the ones who cut the checks,” said a woman’s voice from behind Sam. “Remember, we’re talking Mtv here.”
Sam turned, seeing a tall brunette in a gold dress with more sequins than the Sultan of Brunei, her hair elaborately coiffed up with pins tipped with gold coins with a matching necklace and drop pendant earrings, and a pair of beautiful brown-and-white-feathered wings behind her. And equally spectacular cleavage in front. Peregrine, the flying ace model and talk show hostess.
She swept forward, regal as the Queen of Angels, which was probably the general idea. “I hope you boys excuse the liberty. I was wanting to talk with you about a possible appearance on my Perch, and Chaos invited us backstage.” She waved behind herself, then partially unfurled her left wing, to both shelter and backdrop two other individuals. “I also wanted to introduce my son, John Fortune. He’s a great fan of yours. And this is his date…” She glanced back.
“Velvet,” supplied the girl, “Velvet Brown.”
If it was possible to eclipse Peregrine, this girl did. Posed against the feathered curtain, which made her even more radiant, was a startlingly beautiful young woman, no more than sixteen, gorgeous as a Hollywood starlet of another era, with long dark curls, flawless ivory skin, and intense violet eyes. She was dressed in a velvet riding habit, circa 1940s, and a pert little top hat, and had one slim hand laid on the arm of a young man about the same age. This lucky boy was as gorgeous as his mother and almost as tall, with the extra perk of being genuinely exotic, at least on the nat end of the scheme, with café-au-lait skin, kinky hair the color of burnished gold, and huge almond-shaped brown eyes. This didn’t exactly fit with the round black glasses or the purple scar makeup in the shape of a lightning bolt at the edge of his hairline, but having a mother who could actually help you fly was probably consolation for a less-than-convincing Harry Potter costume.