CHAPTER 6

LATER, AT CHARLIE’S apartment, Charlie and Roheed were in that state of undress in which they were basically ready but still had some buckles to buckle, buttons to button, and scraggly hairs on the backs of their heads to smooth.

Roheed sat on Charlie’s couch, his back hitting the armrest and his legs not quite fitting on the short sofa. Charlie sat on the floor against the couch, a Mason jar three-quarters full with cheap red wine. He didn’t know much about wine and he couldn’t remember a lot from the movie Sideways, but he did recall Paul Giamatti freaking out about merlot, so he always bought the pinot noir on the bottom shelf. They were watching TV mindlessly, each in their own world, when a movie trailer began that caught their attention.

A voice-over artist with a deep, important voice began: “This summer . . .” Fade in to a drunk girl stumbling through a dark wood. A wolf appears from nowhere, running, snarling. A scream. Smash cut to black as the scream echoes.

The VO artist continued, “A tail about a girl who doesn’t know where her life is headed.” Fade in on a small, collegiate apartment. The girl from the woods has a huge bite wound on her leg. “Does this look infected to you?” she asks her roommate.

The roommate looks at the nasty gash and shrugs. “Nothing a little alcohol won’t fix.” She smiles. Jump cut to the roommate and the girl taking several shots of clear liquor in succession.

Roheed’s eyes darted from the TV to Charlie and back. He was confused at Charlie’s increasing agitation. Charlie pawed around for the remote, spilling his red wine on the carpet in the process. “Oh jeez Louise,” he said, annoyed.

The trailer continued with a shot of a full moon, the audio of a wolf howling in the distance, and landed on the girl in a bathroom shaving her legs. She holds up her razor and sees thick, wiry black hair all over the blade. Extreme close up on her eyes widening in shock, then a whip zoom out to show her appalled face as she looks down and sees that she is transforming into a werewolf! She screams, and the screen cuts to black, her scream echoing.

“She just knows that life as a werewolf . . .” the VO artist continued, with a sly smile in his voice, “bites.”

Picture up on the girl and her roommate as they stand in a studio with fashion pieces all around. “The fashion show is on the eighth,” the roommate tells the girl.

“The eighth!” the girl gasps. “The eighth is the next full moon. I can’t put on a career-launching fashion show . . .” whip zoom in to her face, “if I’m a werewolf!”

The VO continued over quick shots from the upcoming film in rapid succession: a werewolf tears through the collegiate apartment kitchen, a large fashion show is full of onlookers, models put on werewolf masks. “From Executive Producer Jerd McKinley . . .” said the VO artist.

The girl and a guy flirt in a college hallway, and the girl looks at the guy nervously. “I’m Leonora, Leonora Sheep.”

She smiled as the VO artist revealed, finally, the title of the movie, “In Sheep’s Clothing,” and the trailer ended.

Charlie dabbed up the red wine he had spilled with a paper towel and found the remote too late. Roheed stared at the television, mouth agape. Charlie switched off the TV and stormed out of the room.

Roheed called after him, “Charlie, Jerd stole your idea?”

Charlie called back, “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Roheed, still confused, repeated himself, only this time as a statement and not a question. “Jerd stole your idea.” Charlie’s only response was to slam his bedroom door shut.

Roheed guessed that he could Bing more information about the movie that Jerd had apparently stolen from Charlie. But he preferred to get the truth from the horse’s mouth, Charlie being the horse in this scenario, and his mouth being the mouth. Now just wasn’t the time, so instead he shrugged and scrolled through his phone to find his girlfriend, Florence Comfortinn, in his recent contacts list. He video-called her. After a few rings, the call connected, and her overly made-up face popped up on-screen.

“Hey babe!” Florence yelled over the music and crowd noise in what looked to Roheed like a packed dance club in his limited vista through the phone’s screen.

“Hey, Florence,” he said with a sad smile, missing her.

Florence nodded towards the crowd. “I’m just about to do a set.”

“Oh, okay.” Roheed felt deflated; he had hoped that he would catch her at a time where they could enjoy each other’s e-company. There was a short window every so often when, despite the time zone difference and Florence’s night-owlism and day sleep-titude, sometimes they were both awake and free and able to chat for a few minutes.

“I’m sorry we keep missing each other.” Florence cute-frowned, then smiled.

“Yeah,” Roheed ugly-smiled, then grimaced; his version of the facial expressions Florence had just exhibited were way less cute when he did them.

Florence looked past her phone and listened for a moment to something that Roheed couldn’t decipher. She smiled and laughed at whatever Roheed couldn’t see.

Roheed fake-smiled. “Who are you talking to?”

“Huh?” Florence pulled her attention back to the screen. “Oh, no one. No one.”

A dude’s face popped onto Florence’s screen. He stuck out his tongue and waggled it back and forth. Florence laughed and pushed him off-screen. “You’re such a Yakko,” she said, presumably to the tongue-waggling dude just off-screen.

Roheed fumed. “Was that Alabaster Sixx?”

But Florence’s connection started to suck. She froze, glitched out, and then the screen went blank.

“Hello? Hello? What?” Roheed tried to reconnect, but his phone informed him that Florence could not be reached. He was pissed.

“Charlie!” he yelled.

“What?” Charlie answered from the next room, annoyed.

“I would like an alcoholic beverage!”

Charlie popped his head into the room. “Really?”

“I feel that it is a necessity at this juncture,” Roheed said calmly, even though his heart was racing. He had never had an alcoholic drink before, but he figured tonight was as good a time as any, you know, while he was frustrated and confused.

Charlie looked at the clock on the wall—it was five o’clock on the dot—and shrugged. “It’s five o’clock somewhere,” he said, and handed Roheed a light beer.

Roheed cracked it and took a sip. His eyes went wide. He took another sip, thinking the beer tasted like rubbing alcohol diluted with fermented apple juice and then farted on by a stale bagel. Then he thought the taste was actually growing on him and the lightheaded sensation he was already feeling was pleasant. At that moment, he decided that he was not going to let his potential issues with Florence harsh his mell’ and that the upcoming night was going to be, as the kids were saying those days, epic.

Roheed and Charlie finished their version of getting ready for a night out. Charlie sort of pushed his hair the way that it wanted to go. Roheed tied his necktie in the mirror. Charlie shrugged on a coat. Roheed put his cuff links through his shirt cuffs. Charlie drank more bottom-shelf pinot noir and Roheed had another light beer, so Charlie was feeling nicely lubricated and Roheed was pretty lit. Jonathan pulled up outside of Charlie’s apartment complex, sitting shotgun in a Hitch, which was like an Uber or a Lyft except the drivers also gave you bad dating advice while they drove you around. He reached over the Hitch driver’s lap to honk the horn. Charlie and Roheed hopped in the car and they were off.

After suffering through Armando’s poor driving and horrendous dating tips—“If she has a twin you get to choose” and “Of course you can respond to a text with an email”—Jonathan, Roheed, and Charlie rolled up to a club on the edge of Yellow County, near the Maryland–DC line, called Da Club, the very club 50 Cent was referring to in that song where he proclaimed that we could all “find (him) in Da Club.” They looked quite a sight, walking three abreast, seemingly in slow motion like Reservoir Dogs. Jonathan wore a flashy suit over his lifeguard polo, a size M, no longer very snug due the Medium amount of self-restraint he had shown in the months leading up to the wedding. Charlie didn’t own a lot of dress clothes, so he was back in his trench coat costume that he had once worn to trick his parents into thinking that he had an internship in DC in order to clandestinely manage the YCCSRC snack bar for another summer. Roheed actually looked legitimately cool in a nice tailored suit, expensive sneakers, and a fitted hat, but he walked a little loosey-goosey due to the two beers he had ingested.

They reached the velvet rope of Da Club where a bouncer stood, nipples hard underneath a tight-fitting, black muscle shirt, size L for the Large amount of power he wielded over the small domain that was the door to that particular club. He didn’t even refer to his clipboard, instead looking the trio up and down once before he said, “No.”

The bravado with which they had approached the club fell away like the seeds of a dandelion. They turned to slink away.

A voice called to them, “Hey losers!”

They looked up to see none other than Judas Traditore, the bastard who had once betrayed their relay race team, standing in the doorway of Da Club, grinning like the pug that found the peanut butter.