Hellhole

  He didn’t know whether he was mad at her or in love with her, or some hopeless conglomeration of the two—but he’d felt it best to give it some time, think things through. But a closed-off staircase forced him to board one of the school elevators, a mode of transportation he’d always avoided, if only to escape awkward social situations exactly like the one he was about to encounter.

  The crowd parted. Everyone got off at the first floor, revealing Lore’s figure reclined against the elevator’s back wall, her shirt a peppy display of cavorting rhinestone dolphins. “Oh my dammit,” Max rasped, reflexively hitting the Door Open button, but the elevator gods cruelly dismissed his request and sealed him to his fate, a one-way trip to the bowels of the school basement with Lore and only Lore.

  Max glared furiously at the glowing buttons. He did not have room in his brain for this.

  “I’ve never taken the elevator before,” Lore mused, her normal flatlined self.

  Max resisted the urge to bang his head against the doors. Of course it was her first time, too. What a magical set of coincidences! he felt like shouting in hysterics. Shakespeare himself could not have crafted a more star-crossed rendezvous!

  “Mhmph,” he grumbled.

  The elevator came to a lurching halt, and the doors opened. She must have been going to the art room, Max reasoned, because the only other room in the cellar was AV storage, and he highly doubted that she, too, had been sent on an errand to claim the school’s sole working overhead projector.

  “What are you doing?” Max asked when she kept following him.

  She showed him a crumpled hall pass. “Mr. Campbell. Overhead projector.”

  It was too much. Max let out a booming, feverish laugh that echoed off the concrete walls of the stark basement and reverberated at triple the volume.

  “I see,” Lore said calmly, “you’ve cracked.”

  As swiftly as it had burst out of him, Max sucked the laugh back in. “Can you blame me?”

  A hint of a whisper of something that might have been compassion snuck into Lore’s expression. “No,” she said, glancing at the near-identical hall pass in his hand. “I can’t blame you.”

  Somewhere, a fan switched on in the innards of the basement ducts. A whooshing noise filled the air.

  “I’m sorry about yesterday,” Lore said.

  “No, I’m sorry,” Max said, wanting to shake her by the shoulders to convey how sorry he was. “You were absolutely right. Burg is—” He gave her a hopeless look. “Burg is evil.”

  He explained what had happened to his mother the night before. Lore’s facial expression did not change even a little.

  “So.” She brought her eyes up to his. “What’s the next phase of the plan?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What did he ask us to do next?”

  “Us? Wait, you still want to help me? I thought you hated my guts!”

  “I hate all of you, not just your guts,” Lore said. “But I also acknowledge that you are in a pretty big pickle, and since I have prior satanic experience, it would be morally wrong of me not to at least try and help you out of your pickle. Moral turpitude is what forced both of us into devil adoptions in the first place, so it’s probably a good idea to cut back on that wherever possible, right?”

  “Right. Lore, thank you so—”

  “Thank-yous are nice and all, Max, but they don’t do much in the realm of defense against the dark arts. So it’s date night, right? What’s your plan there?”

  Max shrugged. “Sit in the hallway, armed with my heaviest femur—uh, baseball bat, and whack the snot out of him if he tries anything?”

  “Or,” Lore said, “we keep him in line the fun way.”

  “We?”

  “You’re a smart kid, Max, but you seem to have a great deal of difficulty comprehending plural pronouns. Yes, we. I’ll come over too. It’ll be a”—and at the thought of this, even Lore looked uncomfortable—“a double date.”

  “Wow. I—thank you,” he said yet again. “But . . . just to be clear, you need to know that I’m still doing all this in the hopes that he’ll fix her. I mean, I’m also doing it to ensure that he doesn’t hurt her again. And I’m trying to figure out whether that old devil horn fossil might show us some way to fend him off if he tries anything worse. But I’m still pushing for the cure. Otherwise all this will have been for nothing.”

  Lore frowned. She opened her mouth, then closed it again.

  “I know it’s a lot to ask,” Max said. “But I’m just trying to be up-front about it. You’ve helped me so much, it’s the least I can do. I don’t want to lie to you.”

  Lore’s eyes softened in the way one’s eyes do when one is smiling without smiling.

  “Throw in the overhead projector,” she said, “and you’ve got yourself a deal.”

  If Max had to describe how he drifted through the rest of the day, it would be in one word: numbly. It was sort of similar to the drunken torture of the day before, but this time he was paralyzed more by fear than by the effects of a hangover. As time dragged on, he found that if one simply stopped caring about what happened to oneself, everything became a lot easier. In gym class, he let himself get pelted by dodge balls, blithely defecting from one side to the other, back and forth, back and forth. In English lit, he answered every question on his Hamlet quiz with “Denmark.” When Audie tried to apologize for her parents’ impromptu visit disaster, he just nodded and nodded, like the bobblehead cat, saying it was no big deal and he’d see her at the pep rally that evening. At lunch, he waved hello to Paul, who gave a knowing wave back. At least it seemed knowing; Paul didn’t really have facial expressions like other people, so Max was left to assume.

  He got a more concrete update after school, when Paul cornered him by the bike rack. “That’s a really big hole up there on Ugly Hill!” he told Max.

  Max cringed and looked around, but there was no one in earshot. “Yeah, I know. I told you.”

  “I’ve been filling it and filling it, but the thing doesn’t seem to fill.” Paul scratched his hair. “Like it’s unfillable.”

  “Well, keep at it.”

  “Oh, I will! I’ll fill that thing until it’s filled!”

  “Thanks, Paul. And you haven’t seen anything strange up there, right?”

  “Nope.” Paul made one of his inscrutable faces. “Trust me, I’d recognize strange.”

  When Max got home, his mother was in the kitchen, looking as out of place as a bald eagle in a hair salon.

  “Where do we keep the salad tongs?” she asked, digging through the gadget drawer. “Do we even have salad tongs?”

  “I don’t think we’ve ever had salad,” said Max. He put a wary hand on her shoulder. “Are you okay? Up and about like this?”

  She put a hand on her hip and gave him a wry smile. “You know, it’s the weirdest thing—or maybe it’s all the drugs they pumped into me—but when I woke up in that hospital this morning, I felt better than I have in ages. Maybe that whole thing last night was just my heart jump-starting itself. Maybe I was touched”—she put a dainty, dramatic hand on her chest—“by an angel.”

  Max snickered. And deep down wondered if this was Burg’s doing. Was the cure starting now that he’d secured a date with her? Was she getting better already?

  Maybe, but best not to push his luck. “Why don’t you relax and let me handle everything? You shouldn’t be running around like this.”

  She waved him off and began pulling things out of the pantry. “If the doctor said I was healthy enough to take a cab ride home, I’m healthy enough to throw together an impromptu dinner.”

  “Yeah, about that,” Max said. “I was wondering—would it be okay if Lore came too?”

  She paused with a box of oatmeal in her hands. “The calculus project girl?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought you were just friends.”

  “We are. But, um—” I need her there for moral support. I need her because we’re having dinner with
a devil. I need her there in case Burg unhinges his jaw and tries to consume us all.

  His mom gave him a wise smile. “Ah,” she said. “But you want to be more than friends.”

  “Um—sure.” If that’s what she wanted to think, fine.

  And it wasn’t exactly untrue.

  His mom sighed and studied the pile of food she’d lumped onto the counter: a pan of frozen lasagna, a box of spaghetti, a bottle of sauce, a can of olives, a jar of peanut butter, and two shriveled peaches. “This is . . . sad. Can I send you to the grocery store?”

  Max didn’t think he could risk showing his face at the Food Baron these days. “I’m sure this will be fine.” He doubted that Burg could eat this stuff anyway, since none of it was stolen.

  “But what if he’s a picky eater?”

  Max reached into the pantry and grabbed three cans of Pringles. “Here,” he said, handing them to her. “Barbecue, ranch, and something called Screamin’ Dill Pickle. Three well-balanced courses of hyperbolic paraboloids.”

  She crossed her arms. “Max. We can’t serve the nice man potato chips for dinner.”

  “Oh, I assure you,” Max said, “we can.”

  Adventurer in Surrealism

  THE CROSS-GENERATIONAL HUMAN-DEVIL Double-Date Dinner: cute title, terrible idea.

  All four of them sat awkwardly around the dining room table, a piece of furniture that had gone unused for as long as Max could remember. Dusty place mats had been unearthed from dusty kitchen drawers, silverware hastily washed and arranged in uncertain settings, and leering creepily at all of them was a Popsicle-stick turkey centerpiece that Max had made for Thanksgiving when he was six.

  Max’s mom had never exactly been blessed with a gift for entertaining.

  “So,” she said, nervously fingering the napkin in her lap, “where do you live, Lloyd?”

  Burg-Lloyd took a sip of water and gave her a charming, irresistible smile. “On the other side of Main Street, not far from here. Just a hop, skip, and a jump home after a long day at the bank.”

  Max kicked him under the table.

  “Phone company,” Lloyd corrected himself.

  Max grimaced. The Popsicle-stick turkey looked on.

  “And you, Lore?” his mother continued, to Max’s further dismay. He appreciated that his mother was trying to take an interest in Lore—really, he did—but when he saw how uncomfortable Lore was, he wanted to call a helicopter taxi and airlift the poor thing out of there.

  “Um, I live over in Paradise Fields,” Lore said timidly, picking at her soggy lasagna.

  “Oh? I haven’t heard of that. Is it a new housing development?”

  Lore slouched deeper in her seat. “Yeah. Sure.”

  Max’s mom struggled to come up with another way to engage her sullen guest, but finally she had the sense to abandon this pursuit. Her other guest, though, was even more puzzling. “Are you sure you don’t want any lasagna, Lloyd?”

  As expected, Burg-Lloyd had gone straight for the Pringles, arranging them in an artistic spiral on his plate and completely forgoing any of the dinner-type food on the table. “Nah, I’m good. So tell me, what did you do for a living before you started modeling full-time?”

  Max’s mom giggled and blushed. Max strangled his napkin.

  “I was a nurse,” she said.

  “Mmm,” he said, nodding. “That must have come in handy around Halloween.”

  She cocked her head. “How so?”

  “Well, you’re all ready to go with a slutty nurse costume—”

  “Mom!” Max interrupted, frantic. “Why don’t you show Burg—uh, Lloyd—some baby pictures of me?”

  But she was lost in his Cusack-y eyes. “Oh, no one wants to see those, Max.”

  Max grunted. Years ago, she couldn’t pull out those things fast enough. Now some guy waltzes in, bats a few eyelashes, and she forgets she ever had an adorable naked baby boy with a bubble-bath beard.

  “Tell me, Lloyd,” his mother said in a sultry tone Max had never heard before and never, ever wanted to hear again, “is there a Mrs. Cobbler?”

  “Not since—” Burg-Lloyd paused, as if he were choking up. “Not since she passed a few years ago.”

  This earned a compassionate coo and a comforting pat to the hand, both of which Max watched with unbridled hatred. He shot a look at Lore, who was looking quite ill. He mouthed to her, “Help, please.”

  “Phones!” Lore shouted. Everyone jumped and stared at her. “Wasn’t . . . he going to fix the phones?”

  “Oh, yes,” Max’s mom said hesitantly, “but surely that can wait until after dinner—”

  “I’m done!” said Max, tossing his napkin onto his plate.

  “Me too,” said Lore, doing the same.

  Max’s mom looked at Lloyd’s plate, on which nothing remained but a couple of Pringle crumbs. “Well, look at that. I guess we are done . . .”

  “Phone lines are out back,” Max said, grabbing Lloyd by the elbow and dragging him away from the table.

  “This is going really well,” Burg whispered to him as they walked. “I’m gonna be your new daddy!”

  With an infuriated grunt Max deposited him outside the kitchen. “Good luck, phone genius.”

  When he returned to the dining room, his mother smacked him on the head. “What is wrong with you?”

  Max scowled and took her aside, out of earshot of Lore. “Mom, I don’t like this guy. I don’t think he’s right for you.”

  She was scowling even harder than he was, but all at once, her face relaxed. “Oh, Max,” she said, putting a hand on his arm. “Are you just uncomfortable with the idea of me dating?”

  “No. No, that’s not it—”

  “Because that’s totally understandable, honey, especially since I screwed the pooch so badly with your father. But it’s been so long since I—”

  “I know,” Max interrupted, not wanting to hear the end of that sentence. “Just—not this guy. Anyone else.”

  “We barely know him, Max. At least let me socialize a little before you so summarily dismiss him.” Her face brightened. “I have an idea. Why don’t we split up for a little while—you and Lore can be alone, and Lloyd and I can be alone. To talk.”

  Max grunted. “Fine. But your overprotective son doesn’t want you out of his sight.”

  She glanced at Lore. “And your responsible parent doesn’t want you out of hers. You stay here in the dining room, and Lloyd and I will go sit on the couch.”

  “And we’ll both agree not to”—he felt squeamish—“do . . . anything.”

  “Ew, Max. What do you take me for, a slutty nurse?”

  The kitchen door opened and closed. “Phones are fixed!” Lloyd said, swooping back into the dining room.

  Max scoffed, but he grabbed the cordless out of its base and hit the Talk button. A dial tone sounded from the earpiece. “It works,” he said in amazement, retrieving the Beige Wonder from the junk drawer where he’d thrown it. It lit up, working and somehow fully charged.

  “All in a day’s work,” Lloyd said, winking at Max’s mom.

  She giggled (again with the giggling!) and started backing up into the living room. “Care to come join me on the couch?”

  Burg-Lloyd scampered over to the sofa and they sat down together, talking in hushed tones while Max plopped back into his seat at the dinner table. “Can you believe this?” he said to Lore.

  “No,” she said. “Especially not that your mother thought this lasagna would be edible. How long has this lived in your freezer?”

  “Since the Cryogenian period.” Max picked up his fork and absent-mindedly dug through the now-cold spaghetti. “Here, have some of this.”

  She started picking through the pasta. “You know what I wish we had for dessert? One of those cookie cakes. You know what I mean, those giant cookies with frosting that you can get at the bakery section of the grocery store?”

  “Yeah. I’ve never had one, though.”

  “Really? Oh man, those things
are so good,” she said, slurping up a noodle. “My mom used to get them for my birthday. They must have been, like, the equivalent of forty cookies, but I didn’t care. I ate the whole friggin’ thing. I still would.”

  “That’s adorable,” Max said.

  “What is?”

  He reddened. “I don’t know.”

  He really didn’t. He just knew there was something cute about Little Lore eating a giant cookie, or maybe it was Now Lore not being embarrassed about eating a giant cookie, or maybe Lore was adorable even when there wasn’t a giant cookie involved. Whatever the case, he’d just made a case for adorability. Out loud.

  He dove back into the pasta. The Popsicle-stick turkey looked on.

  “So what should we do while the kids have their fun?” Lore asked, graciously ignoring his dysfunction. “Watch a movie?”

  “Nah,” Max said. “I watch enough bad movies with my mom. I have a bunch of board games, though. Got any favorites?”

  “Nope.”

  “What?”

  “We don’t own any.”

  Max gawked at her. “Not one? Not one single board game?”

  “I think we have a deck of cards somewhere.”

  “Wow. Okay.”

  “Oh, how shocking, I don’t share your interests. What about you? Got a stash of yarn at your house, any half-finished knitting projects?”

  “No.”

  “Not one? Not one single ball of wool?”

  “Okay, point taken.” He scratched his chin. “So . . . we need to find a common hobby. How about video games?”

  “Negative. Jigsaw puzzles?”

  “Yuck. Model dinosaurs?”

  “If you mention model dinosaurs one more time, I’m going to throw you in a time machine and feed you to an actual T. rex.”

  “T. rex doesn’t want to be fed,” Max said. “He wants to hunt. Can’t just suppress sixty-five million years of gut instinct!”

  Lore stared at him. Max goofily grinned back at her.

  “It’s a line from Jurassic Park,” he explained.