SPN FIC - Misadventure
I never know what will inspire the Muse. A scene, a song, a memory. In this case, it was the July page on the calendar that hangs on my kitchen wall, and the front steps of a house around the corner.
Dean could ignore him, but Sammy doesn't like to be ignored. If you ignore him for more than about two seconds he pitches a fit, and the last thing Dean needs right now is his dumb brother pitching a screaming baby fit out here where everybody can see them.
CHARACTERS: Dean (age 6), Sam (age 2), OCs
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 4589 words
MISADVENTURE
By Carol Davis
This is a stupid side of the street.
It's stupid and ugly and hot and there's nothing fun to do here. If he was bigger, like Joey and Mike, he could go somewhere.
Without SAM.
But he's not. He's six and a half, and all he can do is sit on this dumb stupid step in the dumb stupid sun and look at those ugly stupid girls across the street.
"Dee," Sam says.
Dean could ignore him, but Sammy doesn't like to be ignored. If you ignore him for more than about two seconds he pitches a fit, and the last thing Dean needs right now is his dumb brother pitching a screaming baby fit out here where everybody can see them.
"What," he mutters.
"Want more juice."
It's not juice. It's Kool-Aid, the grape kind. Those dumb ugly girls have a sign up that says GRAPE JUICE but they're not fooling anybody. It's grape Kool-Aid, and it's not even cold, it's warm, because their ice cubes melted a long time ago. They've been sitting there about a year with their stupid table and chairs and their stupid sign and the only person who's bought anything from them is the mailman.
And Dean.
That's the worst part of it. They want money for their stupid not-juice.
"Dee," Sam says. "More juice NOW."
"No."
"DEE."
"I don't have any more money. They want money. I don't have any."
Stupid SAM. It's hotter than the whole blazing sun out here, but Sam won't sit over at the other end of the step. All he'll do is sit right here so he can pick at the hole in the leg of Dean's shorts. It started out being a little hole. Now it's big. If Sam doesn't quit, it's going to be as big as a moon crater and Dad'll get mad because the shorts were new two weeks ago, or maybe three, and they don't have any of that stuff you iron on to cover up holes.
They don't have an iron, either.
Mrs. Helen might.
"Juuuuuuuice," Sam whines, and makes his ugly baby face.
"Shut up, Sam."
"Hate you."
That's new. Where Sam got it from, Dean doesn't know. From those stupid girls across the street, probably, because they're the only people Sam ever really sees, other than Dad and Dean and Mrs. Helen. Those girls are always yelling at each other, and "I hate you" isn't the worst thing they say. It's a good thing they're sitting in the shade, because if they were sitting in the hot broiling sun, like Dean is, and frying their stupid butts off, they probably would have started yelling at each other a long time ago.
The other day, Dina called Katey a bitch and slapped her right in the face.
They're looking at him.
He hates them more than he hates just about anybody. Especially Dina. She's missing all her teeth in the front and her bangs are cut crooked, and she likes to wear flip-flops so her feet are always dirty.
Most of all, he hates her stupid NAME.
Her brother Joey thinks it's funny. Dean and Dina. Every time Joey comes back on his bike from wherever he goes (the playground, maybe, or that store where you can buy beer and cigarettes if you got a fake ID), he sings that stupid song. Dean and Dina, sittin' in a tree.
Dean would not kiss Dina Marie Brady if somebody paid him eighty million dollars.
When he ran over and bought that cup of stupid Kool-Aid for Sammy with the only dime he had in the entire world, she had a booger in her nose.
A BOOGER.
It's enough to make him puke his guts.
Sam's finger goes poking into the hole in Dean's pants. "QUIT it!" Dean barks, and Sam makes that face again.
"Want JUICE," he insists.
"It's NOT JUICE."
"Yes."
"No."
That's a lie, calling that stuff juice. If Pastor Jim was here, he would probably go right over there and tell those girls it's a bad thing to lie, especially when you want money. You're supposed to be honest and truthful about stuff like that.
There's orange juice in the house, but Sam doesn't want that.
There should be bikes in the world, Dean thinks. There should be a bike for every kid. His would be red with white stripes.
The front door of the Bradys' house is wide open. Mrs. Helen says you can't leave the door open because every bug in the world will come in, mosquitoes and flies and moths, and maybe even other things, like birds, or squirrels. But the Bradys always leave their front door open, and you can see right into their house, all the way back to the kitchen. When it starts to get dark at night, and they have the lights on in the house, you can see all their stuff.
She's in there. Tracy.
Tracy is thirteen and likes to wear white shorts and flip-flops, but her feet aren't dirty. She puts nail polish on her toes.
She calls Dean "little man."
That should make him mad, but mostly it doesn't.
She came out a while ago, talking on the phone to her boyfriend. It's easy to tell who she's talking to because of what she says and how she says it. When she's talking to her friends it's loud and he can hear every word, but when she's talking to her boyfriend her voice is soft, like she's trying to get him to go to sleep.
When her boyfriend comes over, they play feely-hands with each other. Sometimes right there in front of the house. She could get a baby from that. (He knows, because he heard some kids talking.) He would like to tell her to quit playing feely-hands, because there is just nothing good about getting a baby. A baby could be like her stupid sisters.
Or Sam.
"QUIT!" he yells, and pushes Sammy away from his pants.
For a second he thinks Sam is going to cry, because Sam's face starts to turn as purple as the stupid not-juice and his lip bounces up and down.
Then Sam hauls off and belts him one.
He hits hard, for a little kid.
"Want JUICE!" he shrieks, hammering on Dean's arm with his fat stupid little-kid fists. "Want juice NOW!"
What Dean would very much like to say to him is, "I hate you too! You're a monster pain in my ASS!" But the windows are open, and Mrs. Helen would hear him, even though she's taking a nap. She might even be awake already, because of Sammy's dumb screaming, and if she heard Dean say a bad word she would come marching right out here and make him go inside and sit on her couch, where there's nothing to look at except ugly furniture with flowers on it and old pictures of her relatives and her dumb nasty cat.
If he had any money, he'd go over there and buy those stupid girls' whole bucket of Kool-Aid.
And he'd pour it right over Sam's head.
His life SUCKS.
Sucks SUCKS SUCKS.
It's loud in his head. Maybe loud enough for God to hear him. Pastor Jim says God can always hear you, and you don't need to yell, but if He's listening, He sure doesn't seem to do anything about it. Pastor Jim says God loves children, but if that's true, where are the bikes? Where's the TV that gets all the good stations?
Where is his MOM?
Those stupid ugly girls across the street have got a mom. She smokes a lot of cigarettes, and she calls them "dumbass little shit" a lot, but she's there.
Not right now, but mostly.
His mom never called him a dumbass little shit. He'd remember if she did, and she didn't.
He sees legs, and white shorts. It's Tracy, with the phone, which has a cord on it that's like eight miles long. Sometimes she sits on the front step with it, and sometimes she brings out a lawn chair. One time, she sat in the lawn chair and put polish on her toes at the same time she was talking on the phone. That time, she was talking to her friends, because Dean heard her say, "You SO did NOT, and I better not hear you TELL him," real loud, and then she laughed.
She's wearing sneakers this time.
Maybe she messed up the nail polish.
"Yo, little man," she says from over there.
Then she mostly ignores him. She sits down on the step of their house and starts talking on the phone.
"Dee," Sam says.
"Shut up, Sam."
Pastor Jim would tell him that's not nice. But it's not like Sam ever says anything important.
"Money," Sam says, and sticks his hand in Dean's face.
For a second Dean thinks Sam's right, that Sam got money from somewhere (and if he stole it from Mrs. Helen, Dean will kick his butt), because it glints in the sun so bright that Dean has to blink. But it's not money, it's a washer, the very same washer that Dean saw over there by the side of the house two days ago and left there in the dirt with a bunch of pieces of broken bricks and a Hershey bar wrapper and the cap off a beer bottle, because it's a darn washer.
Sam found an actual quarter once, but that was like years ago.
"No it's not," Dean tells his brother.
"Yes."
"No."
"YES."
He would very much like to call his brother a dumbass little shit.
Mrs. Helen would have his hide for that.
"NO," he says.
Sammy makes the face at him, then sits his fat butt down on the step and studies his washer like it's a dinosaur bone or a meteor or something. Come ON, Dean thinks, because, okay, his brother is still mostly a baby, but it's not that hard to tell the difference between a washer and actual money. Money has pictures on it, and there's no hole in the middle.
"Don't eat that," he says. "If you eat that, you'll die."
He still hasn't figured out how to get Sam to not do something. Telling him to do it, telling him to not do it, and ignoring him all get the same results: Sam will do what you don't want him to do, which usually is putting things in his mouth that aren't food. Mrs. Helen's cat eats a lot of things that aren't food, and Dean would very much like to believe that his brother is at least a little bit smarter than a one-eyed cat, but so far there's been no proof of that.
So far, the cat is winning that contest.
"Gimme," Dean says, and holds out his hand for the washer.
"My money," Sam argues.
"It's not money, you du-"
Sam's hand clamps around the washer. The hand starts moving toward his mouth, and Dean almost has to wrestle him to the ground to get it away from him; by that time Sam is whining and building up to a scream, but Dean silences him with, "GIMME it, I'm gonna go buy you some more stupid JUICE."
Dina and Katey won't go for that.
But maybe Tracy will.
He and Sammy have to look one way, then the other, and then do the whole thing again before they cross the street. It's stupid, because not one car has come down the street since they came out of Mrs. Helen's apartment about seventeen hours ago, but if she's awake and she's looking out the window at them and sees them cross without looking, she's gonna sit them down on that dumb couch and talk at them all night long about getting mowed down by a car and how it will break their dad's heart when they're dead. Just to be sure, Dean looks up and down one extra time, then grabs Sam's hand in his own and yanks him across the street.
When they reach the Bradys' side, Tracy goes on talking on the phone. She's picking at it with her fingernail and banging the back of her sneaker against the edge of the step. Mostly she's listening to whoever's on there on the phone with her, but when she does talk it's in the loud friend voice, not the quiet one.
It doesn't look nice inside their house. It looks messy.
"What?" Tracy says, when Dean's been standing there for a while, holding Sammy's sweaty hand.
"We don't have any dimes."
She looks past him to her sisters.
It looks like she doesn't like them any better than Dean does.
"Give the baby a drink," she says.
"Not for FREE," Katey tells her.
"Give the baby a drink or I'll smack you upside your frickin' head. It's not like you're making any money anyway."
"NOT for FREE."
"Who bought you the Kool-Aid, you little turd?"
"Mom did."
"She did not. God, you make my brain hurt," Tracy says, and drops the phone down on the step. There's still a voice coming out of it, so whoever that is that she was talking to thinks she's still there, but Tracy goes over to the pitcher of Kool-Aid and pours some into a paper cup. Katey makes a grab for it, but Tracy points a finger at her and says, "I. Will. SMACK. You," and holds the cup out to Sam, telling him, "Two hands, pork chop. Do two hands."
When Tracy sets the pitcher back down, Katey smashes it with her fist and tips it over, so the Kool-Aid goes pouring out all over the sidewalk.
Katey and Dina both start crying.
"Five more years," Tracy says. "I got five more years of this, and then I am getting in the car and driving to the other side of the WORLD."
There's three dimes sitting on the table. One is Dean's, and one is the mailman's. Where the third one came from, Dean doesn't know. It wasn't there when he came over to buy the first cup of Kool-Aid, and nobody else has come over here except the mailman.
Maybe it's a magic dime.
"Go in the house," Tracy tells her sisters. "You're getting all sunburned."
"Tellin MOM!" Dina howls.
"Tell her what? That you dumped your stuff all over the ground? Way to go, you little monster."
"I HATE YOU!"
"Yeah, well, right back at you."
Booger face, Dean thinks.
A couple minutes later, he and Sammy are alone out there with Tracy. He can hear screaming from inside the Bradys' house, and a bunch of banging and crashing that sounds like Katey and Dina are breaking things.
"They are freakin' UNGLUED," Tracy says.
Then she looks down at Dean and Sam. Sammy is still holding his cup of not-juice, in two hands, like she told him. He looks like he's a little scared to drink it. Or spill it. Maybe he's not sure what to do next. Juice is not this big a thing in their house. Even when Sam spills it, there's no screaming going on; the worst Dad has ever done is say, "DAMMIT, Sam."
"They're loud," Dean says.
"They're raised by wolves," Tracy replies.
He isn't sure what that means, exactly, unless it's that Dina and Katey are wild animals.
Booger-faced wild animals.
Tracy starts smiling a little bit and crouches down so she's the same size as Sam. People do that with Sam a lot, because he's still a little kid and a little bit fat and they like to pinch his cheeks and tell him he's cute. Tracy doesn't tell Sam he's cute, but she's smiling like she thinks he is, and she pokes at the cup and says, "Drink up, before you spill it," and then she goes on smiling while Sam drinks his cupful of warm Kool-Aid.
"You want a ride, cutie face?" she asks when he's done.
A ride? Dean wonders. There's no car here, and Tracy's not old enough to drive one, anyway. And she can't mean a bike, because it's tough for two bigger kids to ride together on a bike. There's no way she could balance Sammy on there.
He goes on being confused when she disappears around into her back yard.
She comes back with a red wagon, and Sam's eyes get huge.
"Ride!" he shrieks.
There are a bunch of things that are a bad idea, where Sammy is concerned. Treats are one of them: candy, ice cream, cookies. Those plastic baby swimming pools are another one. And offering Sammy a ride?
Every time he sees Tracy from now on until Doomsday, he will want a ride.
She will hate that. But it's her own fault.
"I gotta go too," Dean says quietly.
"Oh yeah?"
"I gotta make sure. You know."
"You're the babysitter?"
Mrs. Helen is the babysitter. He's not exactly sure what he is. But he knows the rule: Take care of Sammy.
"I gotta go," he repeats. "I'm not supposed to let him go anywhere unless I'm with him."
"Good enough. Hop in."
This is a baby thing, he thinks as he sits down in the wagon, one leg hanging over each side. He should be the one pulling the wagon, but it's hers - or her family's, anyway - and it'd be inna…innapro-something (a big word, Pastor Jim's word) to tell her what she's supposed to do with her own stuff, so he's silent as Sam struggles to climb in and settles himself in the bed of the wagon, in front of Dean, facing backwards.
If Joey or Mike sees them, they're gonna make fun of him.
They won't be singing any songs about him kissing Tracy in a tree.
Because he's a little kid, riding around in a wagon like a baby.
His life SUCKS.
It's a bumpy ride, every time they go from one chunk of sidewalk to another. The sidewalk's all broken and messed up, but they can't go in the street, they are no way allowed to be in the street, even if the whole thing is a bigger kid's idea. They've gone about half a block when Sam leans back against Dean like he's in a recliner chair. He's hot and fat and sweaty and it's like hugging something you just took out of the stove.
"You having fun back there?" Tracy asks over her shoulder.
Fun?
Falling down the stairs would be more fun than this.
"Are we gonna go far?" Dean asks her.
They're not supposed to go far. Really, they're not supposed to leave the front of the house. They're not supposed to go anywhere where Mrs. Helen can't see them if she looks out one of the front windows, or maybe the side. If she wakes up and looks out and can't see them, when they come back they'll have to sit on that couch and hear about how she was scared half crazy out of her mind because she thought they were kidnapped.
Mrs. Helen makes a lot of drama, Dad says. But she's trusty. Trusty-something.
"How far you want to go?" Tracy asks.
He wants to go home. That's what he thinks, inside his head. He used to say it out loud, sometimes, a long time ago, but Dad was never happy about it. Sometimes Dad wouldn't say anything. Sometimes he'd say, "Can't do that, son," or he would say some whole other thing that had nothing to do with their house or Dean's old toys, or Mom.
A couple times, a long time ago, Dad went into another room, and Dean could hear him making funny sounds.
So Dean only thinks it, any more.
Sometimes he thinks it LOUD, so maybe God will hear him.
God never does.
God is a big dumbass.
"How 'bout around the block?" Tracy asks.
That might be okay. That doesn't involve crossing the street, or being out in the street, and it won't take long. They can be back in front of the house before Mrs. Helen wakes up from her nap and sees that he and Sammy aren't there.
"Go fast," he says.
Tracy laughs at that and says, "Okay, little man," and starts walking faster and faster. The wagon bounces up and down on the bumps in the sidewalk, making Dean think maybe this isn't a good idea at all, but Sammy laughs too and starts waving his arms and yelling, "Go more! Go more!" They turn around the corner going pretty fast, which is kind of fun, like being on a ride at the 'musement park, so Dean wraps his arms around fat sweaty Sam and tips his head back so Sam's head won't crack him in the chin every time they hit a bump.
The sidewalk is smoother after they go around another corner and Tracy starts running pretty fast.
"Here we go!" she says. "Hang on, boys and girls!"
That's dumb. They're BOYS. Unless she means herself.
They're in the sun and then in the shade and they're passing houses and bushes and cars and garbage cans and two dogs bark at them but they keep going and this is cool, even though his butt is bumping against the bottom of the wagon and it's gonna be sore when he gets out. It's the most fun he's had in forever, he thinks, and it would be good if they kept going and kept going until nighttime and when Dad comes back they can tell him it was AWESOME.
"YAY!" Tracy yells from up front. "Here we go!"
They hit a bump.
Dean thinks UHHHHHH and then he's tipping and tilting and falling and that's wrong, he's not supposed to be tipping and falling and Sam's on top of him and everything's all crooked and wrong and he hits the sidewalk HARD with his arm and his shoulder and his head.
Somewhere far away, somebody's screaming.
Sam?
"Oh, shit," somebody says. "Hey. Little man. You okay? Oh my God. Oh shit."
He's dead, he thinks. A car hit him and he's dead.
That screaming goes on and on and on and after a while he realizes it's Sammy. He doesn't want to open his eyes but he does. Sammy is there beside him, all red in the face and screaming, and Tracy is trying to quiet him down.
Like that ever works.
His head hurts BAD, like somebody hit him with a big rock. A kid hit him with a basketball once, real hard, and his head hurt like this then.
His life SUCKS.
"Wanna go home," he mutters.
He does not want to cry, not out here where people and dogs and everybody can see him. He just wants to be someplace else, all of a sudden, like magic, like on I Dream of Jeannie or Bewitched, he wants to be in his bed with the covers pulled up around him and Dad and Sammy sleeping close by, but his life SUCKS and he can't do magic. All he can do is sit up and try not to puke and be quiet for a minute until the world stops spinning around him.
"I'm sorry," Tracy says. "Shit. I didn't mean for that to happen."
Stupid GIRL.
"Get away from me," he tells her, and if anything good has happened today, it's that she doesn't try to touch him or stop him; she just crouches there by the wagon and looks sad and sorry as he gets himself up off the ground and says to his brother, "Come on."
He fell, one time. He was climbing a tree at Pastor Jim's and he fell and hit the ground hard.
"Stop, now," Dad told him.
Dad made him breathe slow and take some little drinks of water. Then say where it hurt.
By the time he and Sammy get to the front of the house, he can say: his head hurts a little. His arm hurts a little. But he's not bleeding, and neither is Sammy. He's got some dirt on his shorts, and his elbow is scraped a little.
He won't die, he figures.
Not right now.
When he sits down on the step, Sammy sits beside him and looks at him with a puzzled face. There's snot on Sam's lip and his clothes are kind of messed up.
There's nobody around. Just Dean and Sam.
"Dee?" Sam says.
Dean squints at him. He needs to go take some little drinks of water, he thinks. Not Kool-Aid, he thinks, and not juice. Just some water. Then he'd kind of like to lay down on his bed for a while, inside the house where it's cool. Maybe rest for a while, and then look at one of his comics.
He hates this street. It's a stupid dumb street.
They've been sitting there a minute when Sam moves in closer and wraps his arms around Dean. He's sweaty and sticky and it's way too hot to be hanging on to anybody like that. Not to mention that it looks pretty dumb.
But there's nobody out here looking at them.
"No more ride," Sam says into Dean's chest.
They should tell, Dean thinks. They should tell Mrs. Helen, or maybe Dad, that Tracy made them fall out of the wagon.
Because she's a JERK.
Sam could be DEAD.
Then a voice says, "You boys need to come in where it's cool. Come on, now."
Mrs. Helen.
For a minute, Dean doesn't move. He sits there on the step holding on to hot sweaty Sam and listening to birds and somebody's dog barking (maybe the dog will bite Tracy, he thinks; maybe it will bite her right in the BUTT) and wishing somebody would hear him, just one time, when he says he wants to go home.
Mrs. Helen says, "I think I have some chocolate chip cookies."
She's a nice lady. She's kind of like Pastor Jim - she doesn't have a church, but she Wants The Best For Dean And Sam. That's why Dad lets her take care of them when he has to go somewhere and work. She talks in a soft voice most of the time, and she has cookies, and her apartment is quiet and cool and she has a good TV.
She also has that stupid cat, but you can't wish for everything.
"Dean?" she says, and reaches down to touch his hair. "Are you all right?"
Dad will be home soon, he thinks. He said two days, and this is the second day. So he should be home tonight, or maybe in the morning.
Maybe Mrs. Helen will let him save a cookie for Dad.
"I guess," he mutters.
"Come on, then. Let's get out of the heat."
There's nothing out here, on this dumb street. No people. Just Dina and Katey's stupid table with its stupid sign. He's got no reason to want to stay out here, so he stands up (blinking a little until he understands that he doesn't feel like puking any more) and takes Sammy by the hand, then turns to follow Mrs. Helen into the house.
Halfway to the door, Sammy stops and holds out his hand, offering something to Dean.
It's the washer.
Stupid thing.
But Sammy has a look on his face like he thinks it's worth a million dollars. "You better now?" he asks.
"Yeah," Dean tells him.
And they walk hand in hand into the house.
* * * * *
Dean could ignore him, but Sammy doesn't like to be ignored. If you ignore him for more than about two seconds he pitches a fit, and the last thing Dean needs right now is his dumb brother pitching a screaming baby fit out here where everybody can see them.
CHARACTERS: Dean (age 6), Sam (age 2), OCs
GENRE: Gen
RATING: PG
SPOILERS: None
LENGTH: 4589 words
MISADVENTURE
By Carol Davis
This is a stupid side of the street.
It's stupid and ugly and hot and there's nothing fun to do here. If he was bigger, like Joey and Mike, he could go somewhere.
Without SAM.
But he's not. He's six and a half, and all he can do is sit on this dumb stupid step in the dumb stupid sun and look at those ugly stupid girls across the street.
"Dee," Sam says.
Dean could ignore him, but Sammy doesn't like to be ignored. If you ignore him for more than about two seconds he pitches a fit, and the last thing Dean needs right now is his dumb brother pitching a screaming baby fit out here where everybody can see them.
"What," he mutters.
"Want more juice."
It's not juice. It's Kool-Aid, the grape kind. Those dumb ugly girls have a sign up that says GRAPE JUICE but they're not fooling anybody. It's grape Kool-Aid, and it's not even cold, it's warm, because their ice cubes melted a long time ago. They've been sitting there about a year with their stupid table and chairs and their stupid sign and the only person who's bought anything from them is the mailman.
And Dean.
That's the worst part of it. They want money for their stupid not-juice.
"Dee," Sam says. "More juice NOW."
"No."
"DEE."
"I don't have any more money. They want money. I don't have any."
Stupid SAM. It's hotter than the whole blazing sun out here, but Sam won't sit over at the other end of the step. All he'll do is sit right here so he can pick at the hole in the leg of Dean's shorts. It started out being a little hole. Now it's big. If Sam doesn't quit, it's going to be as big as a moon crater and Dad'll get mad because the shorts were new two weeks ago, or maybe three, and they don't have any of that stuff you iron on to cover up holes.
They don't have an iron, either.
Mrs. Helen might.
"Juuuuuuuice," Sam whines, and makes his ugly baby face.
"Shut up, Sam."
"Hate you."
That's new. Where Sam got it from, Dean doesn't know. From those stupid girls across the street, probably, because they're the only people Sam ever really sees, other than Dad and Dean and Mrs. Helen. Those girls are always yelling at each other, and "I hate you" isn't the worst thing they say. It's a good thing they're sitting in the shade, because if they were sitting in the hot broiling sun, like Dean is, and frying their stupid butts off, they probably would have started yelling at each other a long time ago.
The other day, Dina called Katey a bitch and slapped her right in the face.
They're looking at him.
He hates them more than he hates just about anybody. Especially Dina. She's missing all her teeth in the front and her bangs are cut crooked, and she likes to wear flip-flops so her feet are always dirty.
Most of all, he hates her stupid NAME.
Her brother Joey thinks it's funny. Dean and Dina. Every time Joey comes back on his bike from wherever he goes (the playground, maybe, or that store where you can buy beer and cigarettes if you got a fake ID), he sings that stupid song. Dean and Dina, sittin' in a tree.
Dean would not kiss Dina Marie Brady if somebody paid him eighty million dollars.
When he ran over and bought that cup of stupid Kool-Aid for Sammy with the only dime he had in the entire world, she had a booger in her nose.
A BOOGER.
It's enough to make him puke his guts.
Sam's finger goes poking into the hole in Dean's pants. "QUIT it!" Dean barks, and Sam makes that face again.
"Want JUICE," he insists.
"It's NOT JUICE."
"Yes."
"No."
That's a lie, calling that stuff juice. If Pastor Jim was here, he would probably go right over there and tell those girls it's a bad thing to lie, especially when you want money. You're supposed to be honest and truthful about stuff like that.
There's orange juice in the house, but Sam doesn't want that.
There should be bikes in the world, Dean thinks. There should be a bike for every kid. His would be red with white stripes.
The front door of the Bradys' house is wide open. Mrs. Helen says you can't leave the door open because every bug in the world will come in, mosquitoes and flies and moths, and maybe even other things, like birds, or squirrels. But the Bradys always leave their front door open, and you can see right into their house, all the way back to the kitchen. When it starts to get dark at night, and they have the lights on in the house, you can see all their stuff.
She's in there. Tracy.
Tracy is thirteen and likes to wear white shorts and flip-flops, but her feet aren't dirty. She puts nail polish on her toes.
She calls Dean "little man."
That should make him mad, but mostly it doesn't.
She came out a while ago, talking on the phone to her boyfriend. It's easy to tell who she's talking to because of what she says and how she says it. When she's talking to her friends it's loud and he can hear every word, but when she's talking to her boyfriend her voice is soft, like she's trying to get him to go to sleep.
When her boyfriend comes over, they play feely-hands with each other. Sometimes right there in front of the house. She could get a baby from that. (He knows, because he heard some kids talking.) He would like to tell her to quit playing feely-hands, because there is just nothing good about getting a baby. A baby could be like her stupid sisters.
Or Sam.
"QUIT!" he yells, and pushes Sammy away from his pants.
For a second he thinks Sam is going to cry, because Sam's face starts to turn as purple as the stupid not-juice and his lip bounces up and down.
Then Sam hauls off and belts him one.
He hits hard, for a little kid.
"Want JUICE!" he shrieks, hammering on Dean's arm with his fat stupid little-kid fists. "Want juice NOW!"
What Dean would very much like to say to him is, "I hate you too! You're a monster pain in my ASS!" But the windows are open, and Mrs. Helen would hear him, even though she's taking a nap. She might even be awake already, because of Sammy's dumb screaming, and if she heard Dean say a bad word she would come marching right out here and make him go inside and sit on her couch, where there's nothing to look at except ugly furniture with flowers on it and old pictures of her relatives and her dumb nasty cat.
If he had any money, he'd go over there and buy those stupid girls' whole bucket of Kool-Aid.
And he'd pour it right over Sam's head.
His life SUCKS.
Sucks SUCKS SUCKS.
It's loud in his head. Maybe loud enough for God to hear him. Pastor Jim says God can always hear you, and you don't need to yell, but if He's listening, He sure doesn't seem to do anything about it. Pastor Jim says God loves children, but if that's true, where are the bikes? Where's the TV that gets all the good stations?
Where is his MOM?
Those stupid ugly girls across the street have got a mom. She smokes a lot of cigarettes, and she calls them "dumbass little shit" a lot, but she's there.
Not right now, but mostly.
His mom never called him a dumbass little shit. He'd remember if she did, and she didn't.
He sees legs, and white shorts. It's Tracy, with the phone, which has a cord on it that's like eight miles long. Sometimes she sits on the front step with it, and sometimes she brings out a lawn chair. One time, she sat in the lawn chair and put polish on her toes at the same time she was talking on the phone. That time, she was talking to her friends, because Dean heard her say, "You SO did NOT, and I better not hear you TELL him," real loud, and then she laughed.
She's wearing sneakers this time.
Maybe she messed up the nail polish.
"Yo, little man," she says from over there.
Then she mostly ignores him. She sits down on the step of their house and starts talking on the phone.
"Dee," Sam says.
"Shut up, Sam."
Pastor Jim would tell him that's not nice. But it's not like Sam ever says anything important.
"Money," Sam says, and sticks his hand in Dean's face.
For a second Dean thinks Sam's right, that Sam got money from somewhere (and if he stole it from Mrs. Helen, Dean will kick his butt), because it glints in the sun so bright that Dean has to blink. But it's not money, it's a washer, the very same washer that Dean saw over there by the side of the house two days ago and left there in the dirt with a bunch of pieces of broken bricks and a Hershey bar wrapper and the cap off a beer bottle, because it's a darn washer.
Sam found an actual quarter once, but that was like years ago.
"No it's not," Dean tells his brother.
"Yes."
"No."
"YES."
He would very much like to call his brother a dumbass little shit.
Mrs. Helen would have his hide for that.
"NO," he says.
Sammy makes the face at him, then sits his fat butt down on the step and studies his washer like it's a dinosaur bone or a meteor or something. Come ON, Dean thinks, because, okay, his brother is still mostly a baby, but it's not that hard to tell the difference between a washer and actual money. Money has pictures on it, and there's no hole in the middle.
"Don't eat that," he says. "If you eat that, you'll die."
He still hasn't figured out how to get Sam to not do something. Telling him to do it, telling him to not do it, and ignoring him all get the same results: Sam will do what you don't want him to do, which usually is putting things in his mouth that aren't food. Mrs. Helen's cat eats a lot of things that aren't food, and Dean would very much like to believe that his brother is at least a little bit smarter than a one-eyed cat, but so far there's been no proof of that.
So far, the cat is winning that contest.
"Gimme," Dean says, and holds out his hand for the washer.
"My money," Sam argues.
"It's not money, you du-"
Sam's hand clamps around the washer. The hand starts moving toward his mouth, and Dean almost has to wrestle him to the ground to get it away from him; by that time Sam is whining and building up to a scream, but Dean silences him with, "GIMME it, I'm gonna go buy you some more stupid JUICE."
Dina and Katey won't go for that.
But maybe Tracy will.
He and Sammy have to look one way, then the other, and then do the whole thing again before they cross the street. It's stupid, because not one car has come down the street since they came out of Mrs. Helen's apartment about seventeen hours ago, but if she's awake and she's looking out the window at them and sees them cross without looking, she's gonna sit them down on that dumb couch and talk at them all night long about getting mowed down by a car and how it will break their dad's heart when they're dead. Just to be sure, Dean looks up and down one extra time, then grabs Sam's hand in his own and yanks him across the street.
When they reach the Bradys' side, Tracy goes on talking on the phone. She's picking at it with her fingernail and banging the back of her sneaker against the edge of the step. Mostly she's listening to whoever's on there on the phone with her, but when she does talk it's in the loud friend voice, not the quiet one.
It doesn't look nice inside their house. It looks messy.
"What?" Tracy says, when Dean's been standing there for a while, holding Sammy's sweaty hand.
"We don't have any dimes."
She looks past him to her sisters.
It looks like she doesn't like them any better than Dean does.
"Give the baby a drink," she says.
"Not for FREE," Katey tells her.
"Give the baby a drink or I'll smack you upside your frickin' head. It's not like you're making any money anyway."
"NOT for FREE."
"Who bought you the Kool-Aid, you little turd?"
"Mom did."
"She did not. God, you make my brain hurt," Tracy says, and drops the phone down on the step. There's still a voice coming out of it, so whoever that is that she was talking to thinks she's still there, but Tracy goes over to the pitcher of Kool-Aid and pours some into a paper cup. Katey makes a grab for it, but Tracy points a finger at her and says, "I. Will. SMACK. You," and holds the cup out to Sam, telling him, "Two hands, pork chop. Do two hands."
When Tracy sets the pitcher back down, Katey smashes it with her fist and tips it over, so the Kool-Aid goes pouring out all over the sidewalk.
Katey and Dina both start crying.
"Five more years," Tracy says. "I got five more years of this, and then I am getting in the car and driving to the other side of the WORLD."
There's three dimes sitting on the table. One is Dean's, and one is the mailman's. Where the third one came from, Dean doesn't know. It wasn't there when he came over to buy the first cup of Kool-Aid, and nobody else has come over here except the mailman.
Maybe it's a magic dime.
"Go in the house," Tracy tells her sisters. "You're getting all sunburned."
"Tellin MOM!" Dina howls.
"Tell her what? That you dumped your stuff all over the ground? Way to go, you little monster."
"I HATE YOU!"
"Yeah, well, right back at you."
Booger face, Dean thinks.
A couple minutes later, he and Sammy are alone out there with Tracy. He can hear screaming from inside the Bradys' house, and a bunch of banging and crashing that sounds like Katey and Dina are breaking things.
"They are freakin' UNGLUED," Tracy says.
Then she looks down at Dean and Sam. Sammy is still holding his cup of not-juice, in two hands, like she told him. He looks like he's a little scared to drink it. Or spill it. Maybe he's not sure what to do next. Juice is not this big a thing in their house. Even when Sam spills it, there's no screaming going on; the worst Dad has ever done is say, "DAMMIT, Sam."
"They're loud," Dean says.
"They're raised by wolves," Tracy replies.
He isn't sure what that means, exactly, unless it's that Dina and Katey are wild animals.
Booger-faced wild animals.
Tracy starts smiling a little bit and crouches down so she's the same size as Sam. People do that with Sam a lot, because he's still a little kid and a little bit fat and they like to pinch his cheeks and tell him he's cute. Tracy doesn't tell Sam he's cute, but she's smiling like she thinks he is, and she pokes at the cup and says, "Drink up, before you spill it," and then she goes on smiling while Sam drinks his cupful of warm Kool-Aid.
"You want a ride, cutie face?" she asks when he's done.
A ride? Dean wonders. There's no car here, and Tracy's not old enough to drive one, anyway. And she can't mean a bike, because it's tough for two bigger kids to ride together on a bike. There's no way she could balance Sammy on there.
He goes on being confused when she disappears around into her back yard.
She comes back with a red wagon, and Sam's eyes get huge.
"Ride!" he shrieks.
There are a bunch of things that are a bad idea, where Sammy is concerned. Treats are one of them: candy, ice cream, cookies. Those plastic baby swimming pools are another one. And offering Sammy a ride?
Every time he sees Tracy from now on until Doomsday, he will want a ride.
She will hate that. But it's her own fault.
"I gotta go too," Dean says quietly.
"Oh yeah?"
"I gotta make sure. You know."
"You're the babysitter?"
Mrs. Helen is the babysitter. He's not exactly sure what he is. But he knows the rule: Take care of Sammy.
"I gotta go," he repeats. "I'm not supposed to let him go anywhere unless I'm with him."
"Good enough. Hop in."
This is a baby thing, he thinks as he sits down in the wagon, one leg hanging over each side. He should be the one pulling the wagon, but it's hers - or her family's, anyway - and it'd be inna…innapro-something (a big word, Pastor Jim's word) to tell her what she's supposed to do with her own stuff, so he's silent as Sam struggles to climb in and settles himself in the bed of the wagon, in front of Dean, facing backwards.
If Joey or Mike sees them, they're gonna make fun of him.
They won't be singing any songs about him kissing Tracy in a tree.
Because he's a little kid, riding around in a wagon like a baby.
His life SUCKS.
It's a bumpy ride, every time they go from one chunk of sidewalk to another. The sidewalk's all broken and messed up, but they can't go in the street, they are no way allowed to be in the street, even if the whole thing is a bigger kid's idea. They've gone about half a block when Sam leans back against Dean like he's in a recliner chair. He's hot and fat and sweaty and it's like hugging something you just took out of the stove.
"You having fun back there?" Tracy asks over her shoulder.
Fun?
Falling down the stairs would be more fun than this.
"Are we gonna go far?" Dean asks her.
They're not supposed to go far. Really, they're not supposed to leave the front of the house. They're not supposed to go anywhere where Mrs. Helen can't see them if she looks out one of the front windows, or maybe the side. If she wakes up and looks out and can't see them, when they come back they'll have to sit on that couch and hear about how she was scared half crazy out of her mind because she thought they were kidnapped.
Mrs. Helen makes a lot of drama, Dad says. But she's trusty. Trusty-something.
"How far you want to go?" Tracy asks.
He wants to go home. That's what he thinks, inside his head. He used to say it out loud, sometimes, a long time ago, but Dad was never happy about it. Sometimes Dad wouldn't say anything. Sometimes he'd say, "Can't do that, son," or he would say some whole other thing that had nothing to do with their house or Dean's old toys, or Mom.
A couple times, a long time ago, Dad went into another room, and Dean could hear him making funny sounds.
So Dean only thinks it, any more.
Sometimes he thinks it LOUD, so maybe God will hear him.
God never does.
God is a big dumbass.
"How 'bout around the block?" Tracy asks.
That might be okay. That doesn't involve crossing the street, or being out in the street, and it won't take long. They can be back in front of the house before Mrs. Helen wakes up from her nap and sees that he and Sammy aren't there.
"Go fast," he says.
Tracy laughs at that and says, "Okay, little man," and starts walking faster and faster. The wagon bounces up and down on the bumps in the sidewalk, making Dean think maybe this isn't a good idea at all, but Sammy laughs too and starts waving his arms and yelling, "Go more! Go more!" They turn around the corner going pretty fast, which is kind of fun, like being on a ride at the 'musement park, so Dean wraps his arms around fat sweaty Sam and tips his head back so Sam's head won't crack him in the chin every time they hit a bump.
The sidewalk is smoother after they go around another corner and Tracy starts running pretty fast.
"Here we go!" she says. "Hang on, boys and girls!"
That's dumb. They're BOYS. Unless she means herself.
They're in the sun and then in the shade and they're passing houses and bushes and cars and garbage cans and two dogs bark at them but they keep going and this is cool, even though his butt is bumping against the bottom of the wagon and it's gonna be sore when he gets out. It's the most fun he's had in forever, he thinks, and it would be good if they kept going and kept going until nighttime and when Dad comes back they can tell him it was AWESOME.
"YAY!" Tracy yells from up front. "Here we go!"
They hit a bump.
Dean thinks UHHHHHH and then he's tipping and tilting and falling and that's wrong, he's not supposed to be tipping and falling and Sam's on top of him and everything's all crooked and wrong and he hits the sidewalk HARD with his arm and his shoulder and his head.
Somewhere far away, somebody's screaming.
Sam?
"Oh, shit," somebody says. "Hey. Little man. You okay? Oh my God. Oh shit."
He's dead, he thinks. A car hit him and he's dead.
That screaming goes on and on and on and after a while he realizes it's Sammy. He doesn't want to open his eyes but he does. Sammy is there beside him, all red in the face and screaming, and Tracy is trying to quiet him down.
Like that ever works.
His head hurts BAD, like somebody hit him with a big rock. A kid hit him with a basketball once, real hard, and his head hurt like this then.
His life SUCKS.
"Wanna go home," he mutters.
He does not want to cry, not out here where people and dogs and everybody can see him. He just wants to be someplace else, all of a sudden, like magic, like on I Dream of Jeannie or Bewitched, he wants to be in his bed with the covers pulled up around him and Dad and Sammy sleeping close by, but his life SUCKS and he can't do magic. All he can do is sit up and try not to puke and be quiet for a minute until the world stops spinning around him.
"I'm sorry," Tracy says. "Shit. I didn't mean for that to happen."
Stupid GIRL.
"Get away from me," he tells her, and if anything good has happened today, it's that she doesn't try to touch him or stop him; she just crouches there by the wagon and looks sad and sorry as he gets himself up off the ground and says to his brother, "Come on."
He fell, one time. He was climbing a tree at Pastor Jim's and he fell and hit the ground hard.
"Stop, now," Dad told him.
Dad made him breathe slow and take some little drinks of water. Then say where it hurt.
By the time he and Sammy get to the front of the house, he can say: his head hurts a little. His arm hurts a little. But he's not bleeding, and neither is Sammy. He's got some dirt on his shorts, and his elbow is scraped a little.
He won't die, he figures.
Not right now.
When he sits down on the step, Sammy sits beside him and looks at him with a puzzled face. There's snot on Sam's lip and his clothes are kind of messed up.
There's nobody around. Just Dean and Sam.
"Dee?" Sam says.
Dean squints at him. He needs to go take some little drinks of water, he thinks. Not Kool-Aid, he thinks, and not juice. Just some water. Then he'd kind of like to lay down on his bed for a while, inside the house where it's cool. Maybe rest for a while, and then look at one of his comics.
He hates this street. It's a stupid dumb street.
They've been sitting there a minute when Sam moves in closer and wraps his arms around Dean. He's sweaty and sticky and it's way too hot to be hanging on to anybody like that. Not to mention that it looks pretty dumb.
But there's nobody out here looking at them.
"No more ride," Sam says into Dean's chest.
They should tell, Dean thinks. They should tell Mrs. Helen, or maybe Dad, that Tracy made them fall out of the wagon.
Because she's a JERK.
Sam could be DEAD.
Then a voice says, "You boys need to come in where it's cool. Come on, now."
Mrs. Helen.
For a minute, Dean doesn't move. He sits there on the step holding on to hot sweaty Sam and listening to birds and somebody's dog barking (maybe the dog will bite Tracy, he thinks; maybe it will bite her right in the BUTT) and wishing somebody would hear him, just one time, when he says he wants to go home.
Mrs. Helen says, "I think I have some chocolate chip cookies."
She's a nice lady. She's kind of like Pastor Jim - she doesn't have a church, but she Wants The Best For Dean And Sam. That's why Dad lets her take care of them when he has to go somewhere and work. She talks in a soft voice most of the time, and she has cookies, and her apartment is quiet and cool and she has a good TV.
She also has that stupid cat, but you can't wish for everything.
"Dean?" she says, and reaches down to touch his hair. "Are you all right?"
Dad will be home soon, he thinks. He said two days, and this is the second day. So he should be home tonight, or maybe in the morning.
Maybe Mrs. Helen will let him save a cookie for Dad.
"I guess," he mutters.
"Come on, then. Let's get out of the heat."
There's nothing out here, on this dumb street. No people. Just Dina and Katey's stupid table with its stupid sign. He's got no reason to want to stay out here, so he stands up (blinking a little until he understands that he doesn't feel like puking any more) and takes Sammy by the hand, then turns to follow Mrs. Helen into the house.
Halfway to the door, Sammy stops and holds out his hand, offering something to Dean.
It's the washer.
Stupid thing.
But Sammy has a look on his face like he thinks it's worth a million dollars. "You better now?" he asks.
"Yeah," Dean tells him.
And they walk hand in hand into the house.
* * * * *