Sticks and Stones May Break My Googles

“Trust me. I’ve handled a dozen situations like this in the past two years. I know what these people are like. They’re only interested in the money.”

Lt. Jeffrey McKay leaned forward as he spoke and pressed both palms flat against the glass top wrought-iron coffee table separating him from the Shapiros. He sat opposite the young couple in the exquisitely decorated sun room of their home. Only in their late twenties, Bill and Leda Shapiro had already made a fortune through their exceedingly lucrative chain of skate park-cybercafé-pet salon-tea rooms. In fewer than five years, Fancy Flip’s Hotspot o’Tea Rooms had spread rapidly across the midwestern states and also overseas into Scotland and Italy. The Shapiros’ success easily paid for their $5.5 million home in Jolie Vachon, the most prestigious gated community in Charleston.

Their money had also made them a target. Earlier today, the Shapiro family had attended a birthday party at the neighboring estate belonging to Senator Jackson Colby. The party had been for his granddaughter, and the senator had hired extra security beyond that provided at the community gates. In spite of these measures, the Shapiro’s five-year-old daughter Margie had vanished during the party. An extensive search by police and federal agents had revealed two missing entertainers but nothing else. The investigation had expanded outside Jolie Vachon and was still in progress. McKay had been waiting with the parents for the assumed kidnappers’ initial demands. Two long hours had passed so far without any word of Margie.

McKay purposefully made eye contact now with both Shapiros. He continued his reassurance in as sincere and as confident a tone as he could, “Mr. and Mrs. Shapiro, these people are not stupid. Trust me. The absolute last thing they want to do is to hurt your daughter.”

“We do trust you, Lieutenant. And we are extremely grateful,” the missing girl’s mother said quietly.

Like her house’s décor, Leda Shapiro’s voice sounded elegant and feminine to McKay’s ears. Even in the face of her daughter’s abduction, she was fashionably dressed and coiffed. That same sense of style and taste had ensured the success of the pet grooming salon and tea room aspects of her and her husband’s business. However, to an untrained eye, she might have appeared cold and unshaken by Margie’s disappearance. A veteran detective, McKay wasn’t fooled. He saw clear signs of her anguish. The carefully-applied makeup didn’t completely hide the woman’s pallor. Her hands moved constantly also, belying her apparent composure. During their two-hour vigil, she had alternated between applying balm to her lips, smoothing the folds of her designer dress suit, and straightening the silk tassels on the sofa’s embroidered cushions.

Bill Shapiro had kept himself very still and thus far had let his wife do almost all of the talking. Nonetheless, the detective had found the father’s mood easier to read. The former pro-circuit skateboarder and nationally ranked cyberathlete was enraged over his daughter’s plight but was keeping that anger carefully in check. McKay had noted that Mr. Shapiro had kept his scarred hands balled into fists at his sides for the past two hours. The man’s jaw, too, had been tensing continually as he kept grinding his teeth together. A muscle repeatedly ticked on Mr. Shapiro’s neck as well, just above the portion of a red and black tribal tattoo visible over the collar of an expensive black silk buttondown shirt. He had only nodded grimly at McKay’s recent words of reassurance. All of this pointed in the detective’s mind to a father’s helpless rage at the unknown abductors.

McKay looked down at the notepad he held. Neat rows and columns of information filled eight pages but could do little to ease the couple’s current distress. He flipped back to the first page and looked at a photo taped there of a smiling, darkhaired little girl in a party dress. The picture was of Margie Shapiro, taken that very morning at the birthday party. She was obviously happy, having the time of her young life, totally unaware that she would be snatched away from the world that she knew. Even though the seasoned investigator’s experience made him believe the words he had just spoken to the Shapiros, his heart still ached for their daughter. Even if the abductors didn’t want to jeopardize any ransom by hurting Margie, they could still cause her a lot of mental trauma. McKay hoped that little Margie wasn’t too distressed by being forceably taken by the kidnappers.

He stared at the two figures standing behind Margie in the photograph and wondered if that could even be possible. A costumed man and woman knelt on either side of the little girl, hugging her gently with white-gloved hands. They were smiling broadly beneath their colorful wigs and gaudy makeup. McKay shuddered. These two were the missing party entertainers. Probably just minutes after the party photographer snapped this photo, the kidnappers had made their move and lured the little girl outside. They had left no signs of a struggle. Their gloves prevented them from leaving fingerprints. The makeup hid their real appearance. Their costumes let them pass through security at the estate and at the gates without any trouble whatsoever. It had been the perfect crime.

McKay studied the white faces of the two kidnappers, trying to imagine what each person looked like underneath. A cold feeling traced his spine like someone ran an icecube up his back. He shuddered. Clowns had always scared him a little, but this photo of two of them grinning and crouching on either side of their innocent victim nearly unnerved him.

One of the agents monitoring the Shapiros’ computers and phone lines suddenly hissed, “It’s them! Putting them on speaker!” Other agents bustled about their stations, clicking buttons and turning dials, tracing and recording everything that was happening.

McKay tensed. Across from him, Leda Shapiro tried to rub balm on her lips with hands that now visibly shook. At her side on the sofa, Bill Shapiro sat up straight and actually bared his tightly clenched teeth.

A jolly-sounding voice suddenly filled the sunroom. “Hiya, Shapiros! It’s me, Dr. Funny Bones! Don’t worry about Little Margie! She’s havin’ a blast right here with Mr. Chippy! At least, for now anyway! But if you grown-ups don’t play by the rules, then who knows what might happen!”
A horn honked. Something squeaked. There was a crash and a hiss. Then, the incredible sound of a little girl laughing and shouting.

Leda Shapiro started quietly crying into one of the delicate embroidered pillows. Bill Shapiro slammed both balled fists down onto the coffee table, shattering the glass and badly lacerating his hands. Agents rushed over to minister to his cuts. McKay sat quietly and unmoving, his skin crawling as he listened to the sounds coming through the speaker phone.

On the other end, somewhere, five-year-old Margie Shapiro was yelling between fits of giggles, “Do it again, Mr. Chippy! Please do it again! Please! Tell him to do it again, Dr. Funny Bones! Please tell him! Again! Again!”

Then, a horn honked, two clowns laughed loudly, and then there was a dial tone.

Dr. Funny Bones had hung up.

I've Got Friends in Low Googles

Dear Diary,

I haven’t forgotten you! I know that you’re jealous of my computer, but I’ll always be a pen and paper girl at heart. You can count on that! Plus I have to tell you about last night.

It was awful! You know I finally got together with my local SWIBS forum. You know, the Singles with Irritable Bowel Syndrome group I post with online? I wasn’t sure about going in the first place, but I thought it might be cool. So anyway I went, and I was pretty tense about it. Remember how much I agonized about picking the right outfit? Well, the reality of meeting them in person was even worse than I ever could have possibly imagined.

First of all, the whole party was the brainchild of the moderator of our forum – his user name is AchyBreakyBrad. I’ve mentioned him before to you, but I never talked about how he was the one who put this whole holiday party together. He’s been posting about it since Labor Day (I went back and checked the archives to make sure). Well, anyway, he’s said all along that his work had a nice big meeting area that we’d all be really comfortable in. He got us all worked up and excited, talking about holiday decorations, music, a Stingy Santa exchange, and most of all getting to have a meal with other people who have IBS. That’s what finally made me decide to go. I hate going to all the other Christmas parties – work, church, even family – because there’s so much that I just can’t eat. And I never can take a date because they think I’m being stuck up for not eating or they’re stuck with me being in the bathroom all night. That’s not fun for anybody, but you know that already, don’t you, Diary?

Well, anyway, I went, and it was horrible. First of all, this grand meeting place that AchyBreakyBrad had lined up wasn’t close to what I imagined. The address he gave me was an ugly brick building with a big sign that screamed ELOM in green capital letters. I actually called him on the cell he gave out because I thought I had the wrong. It wasn’t though. The great meeting place he had lined up was the conference room at his work! OMG!! What a fantastic place!! Wow!! How did he ever get that reserved with all the holiday rush?!

Hey! Don’t get me wrong! I’m not a snob. If he had worked at a hotel or a country club or even a restaurant, I’d have been cool with meeting there. But turns out that ELOM is some kind of Information Systems Development company – in other words a place where a bunch of computer geeks worked. The “Festivities Room” as AchyBreakyBrad called it was a room with some long conference tables pushed together, and there was computer junk crammed all along the walls. There were charts and computer code mumbo jumbo written on white boards and paper taped to the walls. He thought it was cool because we were an internet group. He kept cracking computer jokes and calling our party a “holiday interface” and telling us to “sync” and “upload” snacks. I thought he was kinda funny online, but in real life? No way, I’d rather drink salsa than spend any more time with him?

So the room sucked. But decorations could have made it work. He said that he was going to take care of the decorations and music if we all brought the food. Cool, I thought, but listen to what he did. Well, he put some tacky little trees on the tables that looked like he’d taken them out of some business’s landscaping. He’d bought some red and green plastic plates and napkins. And the most exciting thing was that he made us wear little holiday hats that he bragged about buying in bulk from some party store online. They were cheap and way too small, probably made for American kids by orphaned kids in some foreign sweatshop.

I wore a snowman hat. It looked ridiculous. I felt like my head was eight sizes too big with that tiny little hat on. Not the best thing to be wearing when you’re meeting a bunch of people for the first time, let me tell you! Not that any of them looked much better. Why can’t any hot single people have IBS? Or maybe they do, but they have better things to do on the Friday before Christmas than meet with a bunch of complaining internet junkies.

Anyway, as if things weren’t bad enough, AchyBreakyBrad pulled out these nametags he’d printed off and made like we were the elves and had to wear them. I really wanted to leave when I saw that he written our user names on the tags. And that’s all! He didn’t put our real names on them! How stupid and lame is that! It’s one thing to type messages back and forth to FuzzySquirrelKiss, but when you find out FuzzySquirrelKiss is a fat middle-aged guy with really hairy arms and bad rosacea, you really would like to be able to call him Tom or Dave or something! He should have at least put our real names on the bottom of the tags or handed out a list or something. I made sure that I said something first when I talked to anybody. I kept sticking my hand out and saying, “I’m Tess!” so that people wouldn’t call me JDeppIsAhottie96. Diary, my user name just doesn’t seem as cool when it’s spoken out loud.

Now, here comes my take on the party music. It stunk! He had all the computers signed on to some music site that played Christmas MIDI’s. Enough said. They weren’t even all in sync. You can imagine how awful that was.

My last hope was for the gift exchange, but that bombed, too. I’ll have to say that this part wasn’t AchyBreakyBrad’s fault. I don’t know what he brought, but too many SWIBS had the same idea I did and brought Tums or Rolaids or Pepto for their gift. Needless to say, I went toward the end and there wasn’t much to pick from when I wanted to trade. So I ended up just bringing home the Nacho Libre poster I opened. I’m not sure if I was one of the lucky ones or not. I’ve never even seen that movie, so I don’t know if it’s funny, but I do know that Jack Black isn’t exactly eye candy in my book. He’s no Johnny Depp, but that’s obvious, right, Diary!!

Back to the party. To top it off and make the whole night even worse, I got deathly sick from the food. How sad is that? You’d think a bunch of people with IBS would be more careful about what they bring to a Christmas potluck meet and greet, but no, not the brainiacs in my SWIBS group. Some idiot even brought sausage balls. She said they were tofu, but I ate a bite of one and bloated almost immediately. I hid the nasty thing under a keyboard on one of the computer tables, but the damage had already been done. I left pretty quick – made up a story about having to meet my sister in Yahoo Group chat to talk about family stuff, pretty smart, huh? And just in time, too, AchyBreakyBrad started doing karaoke to the Christmas MIDI’s with this fat lady who looked a lot like my old bus driver back in elementary school. The lady’s tag said MissyKittenPie – I talked to her a little while while she was loading her plate up with everything people brought. I don’t see how anyone with IBS could eat that much! And I remember MissyKittenPie’s posts online – she always said that she was in her thirties and talked all the time about she could never eat. Yeah right! The only thing about her even remotely close to bein gin the thirties might have been her pants size! LOL! I’m so bad! Sorry, Diary!

Anyway, I left the party ASAP but didn’t even make it home before I had to stop! I felt that bad! I made it to a Krystal’s to use their bathroom – that’s how desperate I was! You know that IBS and Krystal just don’t mix. I’m surprised I even made it out of there, but that’s another story, and it’s getting late.

Bye for now, Diary! Thank your for listening!

P.S. Diary, you’ll be glad to know that I just signed off with SWIBS for the last time. I deleted my posts and everything. Now that some of the people there know what I look like, it’s just too embarrassing to talk about my bowels. Plus, I know what they look like, too. I read one post and got a really gross picture in my head of FuzzySquirrelKiss sitting on the toilet! Ewwww! I had to quit SWIBS right then. I just can’t talk to those people anymore. It’s just too embarrassing. I think I’ll go check out a group called ThePeople_of_SpasticColon_y – it sounds like they might be fun! TTYL!

Google Like a Rock Star

“Meredith’s mom throws the coolest parties, don’t you think?”

I looked at the red-headed girl on my left and smiled weakly. Everyone had just finished singing “Happy Birthday,” and we were waiting on the cake and ice cream now.

“Yeah, this is the greatest,” I said with what I hoped was convincing enthusiasm. The girl giggled at me, so it must have been.

Of course, she might have been laughing because my eye patch slid down onto my nose while I was talking. I reached up and adjusted the tape as best as I could with only one hand. I winced as it ripped out part of my eyebrow. My right arm wiggled and itched in its temporary cast, but I knew better than to get it out of the sling. Meredith would see and pout and then probably post all over myspace how I ruined her whole birthday party.

The redhead giggled again. Her patch didn’t move at all. Not even when she cocked her head at me and shook her ponytail over her left shoulder.

“A trauma party! Isn’t that the neatest idea?” I didn’t say anything, so she asked, “Did Meredith do your patch?”

“No, her little sister,” I grunted. Talking and trying not to move your face muscles at the same time was hard. No one else was having any trouble. They were all just chattering away. I felt the girl staring at me, waiting for me to say something, I guess.

I asked her, “Um, who did yours?” Each party guest had an eye patched when we showed up at Meredith’s church rec center. Mine was on my left. The redhead’s was over her right eye.

She giggled and brushed her patch self-consciously with her fingertips. I noticed that her nails were painted pale green, the same color as her shirt. I also saw that both of her arms were free, and I was jealous. After the eye patch, we had to reach inside a medical kit and draw our next trauma. I drew the “Wiped Out While Skateboarding – Broken Wrist” card. I tried to get Claire to wrap my left arm – I’m right-handed – but she insisted it had to be the right. I argued until Meredith came over and told me to play nice. I’d been a sucker for her ever since we moved next door to her family, so I went along with the whole thing.

I know I was set up though. She knew I was nervous about not knowing anyone here, and she wanted to mess with me. She had an evil sense of humor sometimes. Just like having her mom assign me as the only boy at a table full of girls from Meredith’s private school. I knew that she did that on purpose just to embarrass me. And her sister insisting that the thick bandage “cast” cover my right arm? Probably just her wanting me to make a fool out of myself eating cake left-handed and one-eyed in front of these girls I didn’t know.

“No, one of the real EMT’s did mine,” the redhead was saying, gesturing at one of the uniformed men helping pass out cake to one of the other tables. “He did the IV, too.”

The girl waved her left wrist in front of me and giggled again. She giggled a lot, I had noticed. The IV line, though, I hadn’t seen until now. Its tubing only went to her elbow, so it really didn’t really stand out like my bright blue sling or the more obvious traumas of the other girls at our table. There was an athletic girl in shorts with one leg heavily bandaged and propped up on a chair, a short-haired girl had a head injury of some kind judging by the strips wrapped neatly around her forehead, and the one on my right beat us all by wearing a freaking neck brace. It didn’t bother her, though, because she’d been yapping the whole time to a fake burn victim at the next table. She looked anorexic though like most of these private school girls, so she probably wasn’t worrying about cake anyway, I thought ungraciously.

“He did a really professional job, I think,” the redhead was still talking. I looked at her wrist, pretending to care. I had to admit that Meredith’s mom did go the extra step to make the party memorable. How she got a real ambulance and real paramedics to attend was beyond me. I just hoped people weren’t bleeding to death somewhere because these guys were here entertaining us.

“I drew the Dehydration card. See my big bottle of water?” The girl pointed next to her chair at a liter-bottle with tubing taped to its cap. It had a little clip on its end where it was supposed to hook onto the IV tube. “I guess I’m lucky that I don’t have to carry that around, huh?” She giggled.

What was that now? The third giggle? Yeah, lucky you. You won’t have any problem eating cake, will you? All you have is a bit of plastic taped on your wrist. And it’s taped neatly on, too, with just a few little strips, I grumbled in my head.

I remembered Claire gleefully ripping off a huge strip to tape on my eye patch and imagined her wrapping tape around my forearm. I shuddered. The girl saw and raised the one eyebrow that I could see.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

I lifted my bound arm slightly. “Well, I was thinking good thing I drew a broken wrist. It’s just wrapped with cloth bandages, but Claire would’ve used so much tape sticking on an IV that I’d rip out all my arm hair just getting it off.”

I felt myself blush. I didn’t mean to say so much. I was just irritated with Meredith and the whole party theme thing and not getting to sit close to my friends. I looked down, and the cotton wadding of my patch slid across to the center of my nose.

For the first time, the redhead didn’t giggle. She laughed for real.

“Stupid eye patch!” I groaned disgustedly and reached up with my free hand to adjust it.

“Here, let me do that, so you don’t jerk the tape.” Still laughing, she scooted her chair closer to me. She reached up with both of her hands and slowly began peeling away the tape from my left eyebrow.

Her movements were quick but gentle. It didn’t hurt at all. Or maybe it did, and I didn’t notice. She talked the whole time that she worked, so I focused on her words rather than what she was doing.

“Claire did use too much tape. And she used too much padding, so the patch is too heavy. See? That’s why it keeps slipping. I’ll take a little bit out, and it should be fine.”

Dangling from her left arm, the unattached end of the IV tube arm tickled my neck a little. I stared at her wrist with my good eye. Her skin was very pale and smooth with just a light freckle scattered here and there. The tube tickled my neck again. I heard a giggle and blushed when I realized it was me.

“There. All done. You should be able to eat some cake now without being afraid of going blind.” She leaned away and smiled. I noticed for the first time how pretty she was, and I felt my face get really hot. I was glad I wore my hair shaggy because I knew that my ears were blood red.

“Um, thanks. You’re really good at that … I mean, the way you touched me was good … I mean, it felt good the way you touched it … Crap … I mean the bandage … the way you fixed the bandage! It didn’t hurt a bit when you pulled it … Claire had to pull it five or six times, off and on, off and on, like it was really hard … um … not hard … I mean, difficult … the tape … I mean, the tape was difficult …”

I was rambling. I stopped. The other girls at the table were looking at me now. They were all laughing, too. Even the girl in the neck brace. The redhead – I really needed to find out her name – was laughing the most. I looked around the room frantically.

Where was Meredith’s mom with the cake anyway?