Bestest Buddy Chapter 12: Wild Night
Bestest Buddy Chapter 12: Wild Night
unbetaed, but I'll edit later.
Sammy woke up, bleary-eyed, and with a headache. He hated headaches more than anything in the world. He fumbled around in the covers until he found his alarm clock perched on the right edge of the mattress, leaning against the wall. It said two forty-five, but it was probably wrong, because it was a wind-up kind of clock, and it wasn’t ticking. Sammy sighed, angry with himself for forgetting one more thing. “Dog bite it!” He muttered to himself.
He slid to the side of his top bunk and stepped gingerly down the ladder to the floor. He padded out into the hallway, and downstairs to the living room, where his dad’s ‘butt-ugly-cuckoo-clock’ ticked away, accurate as always. Almost four A.M.
Sam went to his parent’s bedroom, which was on the first floor, but couldn’t bring himself to knock. He knew that his dad would get angry if his sleep was disturbed, because he didn’t believe children could get headaches. “What you have to be stressed about?” Dad would ask him in his shorthand way of speaking. “You don’t have mortgage to pay, or kid driving you crazy!” It wouldn’t do any good to insist that his headache was real. “I never had headache when I was young. You are fooling with me.” And then he would be sent back to bed. Unless he managed to wake his mom first. But Sam wasn’t allowed to enter their room without knocking. He knew where the kid’s Tylenol was - in the medicine cabinet in his parent’s bathroom. So much for that idea, too.
Sam turned around and headed back to the kitchen. He silently carried the kitchen stepstool that his mother used sometimes to the pantry, and climbed up so that he could reach the light string, which he pulled, then began to search the top shelves. Ah - he grabbed the little jar he’d hidden in plain sight, and climbed back down again. He swiped a spoon from the dish drainer by the sink, and headed back upstairs as quietly as he could.
Back in his room, Sammy locked his door and shoved the uniform he’d worn on Thursday off his desk chair, so he could sit. Then he pushed the random papers and junk on his desk back a bit so that he would have a good solid base on which to set the jar before he opened it.
The jar opened easily this time, though. It wasn’t new any more, so he didn’t have to deal with the vacuum seal. Sammy stuck his nose down into the jar - he felt better already. “Ahhh…taste the aroma,” he said, quoting an old TV-Land commercial. Then he dug his spoon into the jar of instant coffee, and started eating the granules, right out of the jar. He winced at the sharp, dark flavor. He actually liked the way the stuff tasted, but that first spoonful was always tough. Within two minutes, his headache started to fade, and then the taste didn’t matter at all. Sammy managed to eat about five teaspoons of "Taster's Choice" before he managed to stop himself.
He felt lots better now. He looked around. Geez, his room looked really a mess. David’s room had been neat as a pin before they’d started playing. Later it got a little messy, but not like this. There were clothes all over the floor, and his games were all pulled out, with the pieces of ‘The Game of Life’ all mixed up with Monopoly and Jenga. He remembered now that he’d been trying to make up a new game, one that he didn’t need to beg one of his parents to play with him. He’d even had a little notepad with all the rules listed.
Sammy picked up the notepad and tried to read the rules of his new game, but they were fuzzy now, like the words were dancing on the page. “Never mind,” he told himself. He put the notepad on his desk. Notes belong with the desk. Now the games. He picked up a game board, and started to fold it so that he could fit it back into its box, wherever that was. It would have been cool to have a big folding piece of cardboard when he and David had been playing Secret Musical Agent earlier. They could have made a tent from it, rather than from a blanket from David’s bed and a couple chairs.
He lay down on the floor and set up the cardboard like a pup tent. Too small for him, but maybe Spidey could fit in there. He got up to look for his Spiderman action figure, but that was probably down in the basement, where he’d left his backpack. Sammy shrugged. Anyway, he thought perhaps he should put the instant coffee away before he forgot he had it, and his mom found it someday while she was cleaning his room - she was due to get fed up with how bad his room looked any day now. Sammy knew that if his room looked a mess, he had better either clean it up, or get rid of any contraband.
“Okay,” Sammy told himself. “Focus.” The boy put the lid on his secret coffee jar, grabbed the spoon, and went back down to the kitchen. It was a good thing he did, too, because he’d left the kitchen and pantry lights on, and he’d left the stepstool in the pantry. Mom would have asked questions about that, and Dad would have complained about the electric bill. He climbed back up to stash the jar behind a couple of canisters and leapt down.
“Mistake. Hurts. Ow.” Sammy muttered, holding the knee he’d banged on one of the lower shelves. And the next thought he has was, “Uh oh.” His knee had landed on one of the extra shelves that his dad had installed. They weren’t fixed down, just resting on the brackets. Sammy’s knee had levered the shelf up, just like a see-saw, and had upset everything else on shelf - which wasn’t much, except that sugar is in lots and lots of tiny little microscopic pieces. The unopened bag of sugar fell off the shelf, hit the floor, and burst open. Along with it went two boxes of pasta, but they didn’t open. But crap. He’d never clean up all those grains of sugar. Still, he had to try. So Sammy took himself off to the broom closet. He needed a broom and a dustpan.
Halfway to the broom closet, Dad’s cuckoo clock jumped out and scared him right out of his skin. Sammy jumped a foot into the air and screamed. ‘Oh crap,’ he thought, fearing that his parents would wake up. He slipped into the dining room and pressed himself up close to the wall like Secret Agent Musician, hoping that no one would notice him, and waited. After what felt like fifteen minutes to Sammy (it was two in reality), he decided that no one had heard him, and came out of hiding.
He was hungry, so he decided to make himself a sandwich. Sammy found some cheese in the cold cuts drawer in the fridge, and got out the bread in the breadbox. Then he grabbed himself a diet cola from the fridge door, and carried the lot back to his room.
Instead of making a sandwich, though, Sammy decided just to eat the bread and the cheese separately, because he didn’t have a plate to set it on. Plus, he didn’t feel coordinated enough to match the bread slices up properly. Once he’d had his fill, he set the leavings aside. He felt like running and playing, and he knew that the time was all wrong. He would wake somebody, and then he’d be in lots of trouble. But he just couldn’t sit still! Sammy got up and paced around his room. If he kept it to his bedroom, maybe his mom and dad wouldn’t notice that he was out of control. But the bedroom seemed so SMALL to him, suddenly. ‘When did it get this little?’ he wondered to himself. He crept to the hallway again, and decided that maybe he could tire himself out if he could run, as fast as he could, down to the basement, and right back up again.
“On your mark,” Sammy whispered to himself, “Get set…GO.” He fired an imaginary pistol with his fingers and bolted down the stairs.
Liz Chu woke to the sound of rumbling up and down the staircases of her house. “What the devil?” She sat up and listened intently to the familiar footsteps. “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” She flung the covers off, got up, and strode indignantly to her bedroom door. Before she could leave, though, Tom rose.
“Oh, I’m on this one,” her husband told her. She could see that Tom wasn’t going to even attempt to be understanding. Sammy was in for serious punishment.
“No Honey, you go back to sleep, I’ll get him.” But Tom didn’t listen, just flung open the door and stomped to intercept their wild child.
Sammy flew up the steps for the third time and met up with his father on the first floor. “Hi, Daddy!” he exclaimed, as if the man were across the street.
Liz winced. She knew this mood right away. She thought that Sammy must be having a delayed reaction to all the cookies he’d eaten earlier that day.
“Honey-” She grabbed Tom’s arm. “Honey, I think he’s reacting to something he ate at his friend’s house. It’s my fault, really; I forgot to tell them about Sammy and sugar. If you’re going to be angry, blame me. I’m sorry.”
Sammy seemed oblivious to the trouble he was in. “Can I run some more?”
Liz grabbed his arm. “Come with me.” She dragged her recalcitrant offspring down the hall, towards the kitchen. “Go back to bed, sweetheart,” she told her husband. “I’ll take care of this.”
But Tom didn’t go without making matters a little worse. “You disappoint me again, Sammy,” he told their son before shaking his head in disgust, and walking away. “Shameful behavior.”
Liz sat on the kitchen stepstool that she’d brought out of the pantry and held her son by his narrow shoulders. “Sammy. Sammy!” She raised her voice because he kept seeming to be distracted by other things in the kitchen. “Sammy, what on earth possessed you to get into the sugar? Honey, you know better than that!”
Sammy shrugged. “I didn’t get into the sugar, Mom. I just knocked it over.”
She firmed up her grip on her son. “Now Sammy, you know that’s a lie. The sugar is all over the pantry floor, and you’re wound up tighter than a watch!”
“Oh yeah, I forgot to wind my clock again, darn it.”
“What?” Liz puzzled through that one on her own. Sammy had a wind-up clock, and he’d obviously not wound it or something. He often forgot to wind his clock. It was irrelevant. She always made sure he was up on time every morning. “Please try to pay attention, honey. Dad’s already annoyed with you. Please focus so we can iron this out before he gets up again and gets involved.”
Sammy grinned his gratitude at his mother. “Good ol’ Mom,” he chattered at her rapidly.
She attempted again. “How much sugar did you eat, Sam?”
Sammy shook his head at her. “I TOLD you, Mom, I didn’t eat ANY sugar. I had bread and cheese and…” Just in time, Sammy realized that he was about to spill his deep dark secret. “Okay, I guess I had a little sugar, now that I remember.”
“Did you just eat a handful of it or something?” she asked.
Sammy shrugged. “Guess so.”
Liz rose and went to the refrigerator. She got out two pint-sized bottles of water. “Sit down, young man,” she ordered. “And start drinking.”
Obediently, Sammy trotted over to the kitchen table and, after his mother opened the first bottle, began to drink. Meanwhile, Liz went to the broom closet, retrieved the supplies she needed, and started cleaning up the mess her son had made in the pantry.
‘What on earth did I do to deserve THIS?’ She wondered. ‘And what’s Tom going to say to him tomorrow? Good Lord.’ There was a thumping sound coming from the kitchen. She stepped outside the pantry to have a look at her son. Still sipping his water, Sammy was standing now, and jumping straight up and down between sips.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
Sammy stopped for a moment to answer his mother. “Making the water go down faster.” He started jumping again.
“Sammy knock it off - you’re gonna wake your daddy.”
Sammy stopped jumping, but thirty seconds later, he was running from one side of the kitchen to the other.
Liz hurried across the kitchen. “What in the hell do you think you’re doing? It’s after 4AM, Sammy. KEEP STILL!”
“I CAN’T!” the boy bellowed back at his mother. “I CAN’T!!!”
She stood stock still, stunned by her son’s outburst. ‘I can’t.’ And Liz believed Sammy. He really couldn’t stop moving. ‘What in the hell am I supposed to do with this?’ she thought to herself.
Liz ended up taking Sammy down to the basement, closing the door, and letting him do whatever he liked. She waited with her son, forcing him to keep drinking, and observing him running wild for nearly three hours. This was just not going to work out. The Ritalin that he took to keep him focused at school just made him dopey. Liz had only agreed to give it to the child because Tom had insisted upon it. Sammy’s reactions to sugar were unpredictable, and they couldn’t control his access to the stuff. Meanwhile, his wild behavior was driving a wedge deeper and deeper between the boy and his father. Something was going to give, sooner or later. Liz was afraid for her son.
As she thought more about her son’s issues (while he proceeded to wrestle on the floor with pillows and sing at the top of his lungs), she recalled that David House’s parents were both doctors. Maybe they knew someone who was really good, some real expert, who had a treatment for Sammy that would actually work. She hoped that they wouldn’t be offended, or think that she was taking advantage, but honestly, she didn’t care what the men thought. Her little boy was in serious trouble.
unbetaed, but I'll edit later.
Sammy woke up, bleary-eyed, and with a headache. He hated headaches more than anything in the world. He fumbled around in the covers until he found his alarm clock perched on the right edge of the mattress, leaning against the wall. It said two forty-five, but it was probably wrong, because it was a wind-up kind of clock, and it wasn’t ticking. Sammy sighed, angry with himself for forgetting one more thing. “Dog bite it!” He muttered to himself.
He slid to the side of his top bunk and stepped gingerly down the ladder to the floor. He padded out into the hallway, and downstairs to the living room, where his dad’s ‘butt-ugly-cuckoo-clock’ ticked away, accurate as always. Almost four A.M.
Sam went to his parent’s bedroom, which was on the first floor, but couldn’t bring himself to knock. He knew that his dad would get angry if his sleep was disturbed, because he didn’t believe children could get headaches. “What you have to be stressed about?” Dad would ask him in his shorthand way of speaking. “You don’t have mortgage to pay, or kid driving you crazy!” It wouldn’t do any good to insist that his headache was real. “I never had headache when I was young. You are fooling with me.” And then he would be sent back to bed. Unless he managed to wake his mom first. But Sam wasn’t allowed to enter their room without knocking. He knew where the kid’s Tylenol was - in the medicine cabinet in his parent’s bathroom. So much for that idea, too.
Sam turned around and headed back to the kitchen. He silently carried the kitchen stepstool that his mother used sometimes to the pantry, and climbed up so that he could reach the light string, which he pulled, then began to search the top shelves. Ah - he grabbed the little jar he’d hidden in plain sight, and climbed back down again. He swiped a spoon from the dish drainer by the sink, and headed back upstairs as quietly as he could.
Back in his room, Sammy locked his door and shoved the uniform he’d worn on Thursday off his desk chair, so he could sit. Then he pushed the random papers and junk on his desk back a bit so that he would have a good solid base on which to set the jar before he opened it.
The jar opened easily this time, though. It wasn’t new any more, so he didn’t have to deal with the vacuum seal. Sammy stuck his nose down into the jar - he felt better already. “Ahhh…taste the aroma,” he said, quoting an old TV-Land commercial. Then he dug his spoon into the jar of instant coffee, and started eating the granules, right out of the jar. He winced at the sharp, dark flavor. He actually liked the way the stuff tasted, but that first spoonful was always tough. Within two minutes, his headache started to fade, and then the taste didn’t matter at all. Sammy managed to eat about five teaspoons of "Taster's Choice" before he managed to stop himself.
He felt lots better now. He looked around. Geez, his room looked really a mess. David’s room had been neat as a pin before they’d started playing. Later it got a little messy, but not like this. There were clothes all over the floor, and his games were all pulled out, with the pieces of ‘The Game of Life’ all mixed up with Monopoly and Jenga. He remembered now that he’d been trying to make up a new game, one that he didn’t need to beg one of his parents to play with him. He’d even had a little notepad with all the rules listed.
Sammy picked up the notepad and tried to read the rules of his new game, but they were fuzzy now, like the words were dancing on the page. “Never mind,” he told himself. He put the notepad on his desk. Notes belong with the desk. Now the games. He picked up a game board, and started to fold it so that he could fit it back into its box, wherever that was. It would have been cool to have a big folding piece of cardboard when he and David had been playing Secret Musical Agent earlier. They could have made a tent from it, rather than from a blanket from David’s bed and a couple chairs.
He lay down on the floor and set up the cardboard like a pup tent. Too small for him, but maybe Spidey could fit in there. He got up to look for his Spiderman action figure, but that was probably down in the basement, where he’d left his backpack. Sammy shrugged. Anyway, he thought perhaps he should put the instant coffee away before he forgot he had it, and his mom found it someday while she was cleaning his room - she was due to get fed up with how bad his room looked any day now. Sammy knew that if his room looked a mess, he had better either clean it up, or get rid of any contraband.
“Okay,” Sammy told himself. “Focus.” The boy put the lid on his secret coffee jar, grabbed the spoon, and went back down to the kitchen. It was a good thing he did, too, because he’d left the kitchen and pantry lights on, and he’d left the stepstool in the pantry. Mom would have asked questions about that, and Dad would have complained about the electric bill. He climbed back up to stash the jar behind a couple of canisters and leapt down.
“Mistake. Hurts. Ow.” Sammy muttered, holding the knee he’d banged on one of the lower shelves. And the next thought he has was, “Uh oh.” His knee had landed on one of the extra shelves that his dad had installed. They weren’t fixed down, just resting on the brackets. Sammy’s knee had levered the shelf up, just like a see-saw, and had upset everything else on shelf - which wasn’t much, except that sugar is in lots and lots of tiny little microscopic pieces. The unopened bag of sugar fell off the shelf, hit the floor, and burst open. Along with it went two boxes of pasta, but they didn’t open. But crap. He’d never clean up all those grains of sugar. Still, he had to try. So Sammy took himself off to the broom closet. He needed a broom and a dustpan.
Halfway to the broom closet, Dad’s cuckoo clock jumped out and scared him right out of his skin. Sammy jumped a foot into the air and screamed. ‘Oh crap,’ he thought, fearing that his parents would wake up. He slipped into the dining room and pressed himself up close to the wall like Secret Agent Musician, hoping that no one would notice him, and waited. After what felt like fifteen minutes to Sammy (it was two in reality), he decided that no one had heard him, and came out of hiding.
He was hungry, so he decided to make himself a sandwich. Sammy found some cheese in the cold cuts drawer in the fridge, and got out the bread in the breadbox. Then he grabbed himself a diet cola from the fridge door, and carried the lot back to his room.
Instead of making a sandwich, though, Sammy decided just to eat the bread and the cheese separately, because he didn’t have a plate to set it on. Plus, he didn’t feel coordinated enough to match the bread slices up properly. Once he’d had his fill, he set the leavings aside. He felt like running and playing, and he knew that the time was all wrong. He would wake somebody, and then he’d be in lots of trouble. But he just couldn’t sit still! Sammy got up and paced around his room. If he kept it to his bedroom, maybe his mom and dad wouldn’t notice that he was out of control. But the bedroom seemed so SMALL to him, suddenly. ‘When did it get this little?’ he wondered to himself. He crept to the hallway again, and decided that maybe he could tire himself out if he could run, as fast as he could, down to the basement, and right back up again.
“On your mark,” Sammy whispered to himself, “Get set…GO.” He fired an imaginary pistol with his fingers and bolted down the stairs.
Liz Chu woke to the sound of rumbling up and down the staircases of her house. “What the devil?” She sat up and listened intently to the familiar footsteps. “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” She flung the covers off, got up, and strode indignantly to her bedroom door. Before she could leave, though, Tom rose.
“Oh, I’m on this one,” her husband told her. She could see that Tom wasn’t going to even attempt to be understanding. Sammy was in for serious punishment.
“No Honey, you go back to sleep, I’ll get him.” But Tom didn’t listen, just flung open the door and stomped to intercept their wild child.
Sammy flew up the steps for the third time and met up with his father on the first floor. “Hi, Daddy!” he exclaimed, as if the man were across the street.
Liz winced. She knew this mood right away. She thought that Sammy must be having a delayed reaction to all the cookies he’d eaten earlier that day.
“Honey-” She grabbed Tom’s arm. “Honey, I think he’s reacting to something he ate at his friend’s house. It’s my fault, really; I forgot to tell them about Sammy and sugar. If you’re going to be angry, blame me. I’m sorry.”
Sammy seemed oblivious to the trouble he was in. “Can I run some more?”
Liz grabbed his arm. “Come with me.” She dragged her recalcitrant offspring down the hall, towards the kitchen. “Go back to bed, sweetheart,” she told her husband. “I’ll take care of this.”
But Tom didn’t go without making matters a little worse. “You disappoint me again, Sammy,” he told their son before shaking his head in disgust, and walking away. “Shameful behavior.”
Liz sat on the kitchen stepstool that she’d brought out of the pantry and held her son by his narrow shoulders. “Sammy. Sammy!” She raised her voice because he kept seeming to be distracted by other things in the kitchen. “Sammy, what on earth possessed you to get into the sugar? Honey, you know better than that!”
Sammy shrugged. “I didn’t get into the sugar, Mom. I just knocked it over.”
She firmed up her grip on her son. “Now Sammy, you know that’s a lie. The sugar is all over the pantry floor, and you’re wound up tighter than a watch!”
“Oh yeah, I forgot to wind my clock again, darn it.”
“What?” Liz puzzled through that one on her own. Sammy had a wind-up clock, and he’d obviously not wound it or something. He often forgot to wind his clock. It was irrelevant. She always made sure he was up on time every morning. “Please try to pay attention, honey. Dad’s already annoyed with you. Please focus so we can iron this out before he gets up again and gets involved.”
Sammy grinned his gratitude at his mother. “Good ol’ Mom,” he chattered at her rapidly.
She attempted again. “How much sugar did you eat, Sam?”
Sammy shook his head at her. “I TOLD you, Mom, I didn’t eat ANY sugar. I had bread and cheese and…” Just in time, Sammy realized that he was about to spill his deep dark secret. “Okay, I guess I had a little sugar, now that I remember.”
“Did you just eat a handful of it or something?” she asked.
Sammy shrugged. “Guess so.”
Liz rose and went to the refrigerator. She got out two pint-sized bottles of water. “Sit down, young man,” she ordered. “And start drinking.”
Obediently, Sammy trotted over to the kitchen table and, after his mother opened the first bottle, began to drink. Meanwhile, Liz went to the broom closet, retrieved the supplies she needed, and started cleaning up the mess her son had made in the pantry.
‘What on earth did I do to deserve THIS?’ She wondered. ‘And what’s Tom going to say to him tomorrow? Good Lord.’ There was a thumping sound coming from the kitchen. She stepped outside the pantry to have a look at her son. Still sipping his water, Sammy was standing now, and jumping straight up and down between sips.
“What are you doing?” she demanded.
Sammy stopped for a moment to answer his mother. “Making the water go down faster.” He started jumping again.
“Sammy knock it off - you’re gonna wake your daddy.”
Sammy stopped jumping, but thirty seconds later, he was running from one side of the kitchen to the other.
Liz hurried across the kitchen. “What in the hell do you think you’re doing? It’s after 4AM, Sammy. KEEP STILL!”
“I CAN’T!” the boy bellowed back at his mother. “I CAN’T!!!”
She stood stock still, stunned by her son’s outburst. ‘I can’t.’ And Liz believed Sammy. He really couldn’t stop moving. ‘What in the hell am I supposed to do with this?’ she thought to herself.
Liz ended up taking Sammy down to the basement, closing the door, and letting him do whatever he liked. She waited with her son, forcing him to keep drinking, and observing him running wild for nearly three hours. This was just not going to work out. The Ritalin that he took to keep him focused at school just made him dopey. Liz had only agreed to give it to the child because Tom had insisted upon it. Sammy’s reactions to sugar were unpredictable, and they couldn’t control his access to the stuff. Meanwhile, his wild behavior was driving a wedge deeper and deeper between the boy and his father. Something was going to give, sooner or later. Liz was afraid for her son.
As she thought more about her son’s issues (while he proceeded to wrestle on the floor with pillows and sing at the top of his lungs), she recalled that David House’s parents were both doctors. Maybe they knew someone who was really good, some real expert, who had a treatment for Sammy that would actually work. She hoped that they wouldn’t be offended, or think that she was taking advantage, but honestly, she didn’t care what the men thought. Her little boy was in serious trouble.