Ralph “Foster” Homily had listened to Yes’s Fragile back-to-back three times now, always savoring the tuneful dial-up guitar on “Long Distance Runaround.” It lent a certain order to the squalor of his room.
Rather, the space eked out by him in the basement, between his mother’s dress boxes and backlog of his stepfather’s anti-bestseller, which the semi-pater proudly claimed to have neither sold nor read. Such was Foster’s life, and through progressive rock, he tried to settle some calm over the dreary disorder.
Foster’s calm went up in flames as Klasper St. Pettigrew scrambled down the basement ladder—the Homily family did not believe in stairs.
“Foster, pack your things!”
Klasper had been Foster’s most faithful tumor ever since the latter had allowed a friendship to metastasize between them in the third grade. In appearance and characteristics they were just about identical—right on down to their pitchy turtleneck voices, their square glasses, their hair the color of streaming piss and their frightening, occult back freckles. The real difference was Klasper wore his hair long.
“What d’you mean?” Foster asked. “Did you get that apartment with Skinner?”
“Screw the apartment. We’ve got bigger worries.”
These sort of antics were de rigueur with Klasper, with whom Foster had tried no less than 17 times to move out with, only to find that the former had either horrible real estate instincts that day or just wanted to hang out and couldn’t work up the gumption to call ahead and ask. Not that Foster knew where his phone was in the basement.
So he played along, getting out of bed and clicking his stereocube off. From his vantage point, between his clothes rack and cardboard box dresser, he saw Klasper rooting furiously through some of his mother’s dresses, murmuring about Foster’s odd sense of fashion.
“So where did you want to go today? Madison Park? Perhaps a fizzelixir at the Junction?”
“Normally I admire your preemptive snark, Foster—uuh—but this is honest, plaintive distress on my part here. We, we are in trouble.”
“What do you mean we, Kemosabe?” Foster mimed without inflection.
“This is serious, damn it! Look!”
Prior, Klasper had drifted through the dark and the dust, a snatching shamble, but under the refulgence of Foster’s lamp the truth was revealed. Foster cringed. Klasper’s face had been marred. There was blood. Worse, there was more than blood. Along Klasper’s left cheek, at random, dappled brilliant sequins ranging from specks to dime sized. They coruscated in a parade of vermillion, cobalt and malachite, even rose pink and silver.
“Oh god.”
“Yes. You see what the stakes are now, Foster. You see—”
“What happened to your face?”
“It’s pretty self-evident, Jefferson.”
“I see ‘what’ happened, Klasp, but I don’t understand ‘why’—”
“I can’t explain it now. I just need you to—”
“—Did one of your employers do this to you?”
“No, the laundromat didn’t do this to my face. Listen—”
“Oh god, were you doing more gangster work?”
“Foster, this is a very sensitive issue, and not just in the sense that my face still hurts like all fu—”
“Did gangsters bedazzle your face. Klasp?” Foster asked with a tremor.
“No! No, no, no! You, are, not listening! We have to go.”
Foster was not cognizant of it at the time—he later reflected on the road—but, despite the self-evident danger that lay behind Klasper’s escapist mania, Foster still believed this was another one of Klasp’s patented adventures.
So he packed quickly. All he really needed was his stereocube, music tablet and a few days worth of clothes, which fit easily in a duffel bag. He pocketed his wallet and corkscrew with the lightning bolt etched onto it. He even outdid himself and packed a few books and a few childhood artifacts. Foster was practicing a prescient pantomime.
“Come quickly,” Klasper said. “We have to raid the rest of the house.”
Find out what happens to Foster next by reading Campus Wordsmiths Feb. 12.
