The PTA Queen Bee & The Teen Rebel 02

The sundae vanished quickly into Todd's mouth, ice-cream, cream and topping over his fat face. While devouring the sundae, Todd day-dreamed about other food he would forcibly take from younger teenagers and kids during the day and he again drooled in anticipation. As Todd shoveled the last mouthful of ice-cream into his mouth and discarded the paper cup and the donut bag onto the floor so the janitor would have to pick them up, he caught movement out of the corner of his eye at the end of the corridor.

Todd turned, and saw that Luke and David had returned, and he got to his feet, sniggering. This should be good. The look on Todd's fat face however quickly changed from amusement to abject terror when the third figure, that of the previously unseen Esau Rosenberg appeared from around the corner. All color drained from Todd's face, his eyes went wide and his mouth dropped open. Todd felt his skin go hot, yet at the same time he broke out into a cold sweat. Nerves raced through his 300-pound body, and Todd felt like he was about to piss his pants, crap himself and vomit at the same time.

Todd was not the only person in history to find out that a person looked completely different in reality to what they had envisaged them. Todd had imagined Esau to be a skinny, bespectacled nerd like his younger brother. But Esau Rosenberg to Todd's abject horror stood at an imposing six foot six, his body consisting of muscle upon muscle as though the young man spent nine hours a day working out at the college gym. His impressive muscle tone was accentuated by the tight black jeans and sleeveless black muscle shirt he wore, a black bandana on his forehead. "Oh shit!" was all Todd managed to mutter.

Luke and David pointed at Todd, and Esau Rosenberg regarded the trembling Todd with a solemn expression. Esau did not speak, but silently pointed at Todd, then punched his own hand with a sound that echoed in the empty corridor.

The terrified Todd took to his feet, his body fat wobbling in his haste to get away. Esau could see his quarry would be easy to catch, and called out after him, "You're dead, fatso!" before striding down the corridor to make good on his promise. Todd attempted to run faster when he again heard Esau's voice, "I'm gonna kick your lard ass from here to San Diego, you fat pile of shit!"

While it was very obvious that Esau would be an easy victor of the inevitable fight when he caught Todd, Esau had two things working against him. One, as he had never attended Pine Tree Park High School he did not know the layout of the school corridors. Second was overconfidence. Had Esau ran after Todd he could have caught the obese teenager within seconds, but he preferred to install fear in Todd for a longer period of time before capturing him and beating him up, and so walked at a slower pace.

Calling out, "Count down the seconds until you die fat boy!" Esau rounded the corner Todd had turned into and saw no sign of him. "What the fuck?" Esau muttered, but then saw the entrance to the boys' room, and a smile crossed his face. Cracking his knuckles, Esau went into the boys' room calling out, "Now you get your ass kicked, fatso!" The college student fully expected to find the fat bully cowering in one of the stalls, but to Esau's great disappointment, the boys' bathroom was empty and Todd was nowhere to be found.

Esau emerged from the boys' room and surveyed his surroundings. This area was a dead end, so there was no way Todd could have gotten away. He had to be here somewhere. Esau glanced into one of the classrooms - a science lab. Todd must be hiding in here, or one of the other classrooms. It was just a matter of persistence and patience.

"So you want to play hide and seek, fat boy?" Esau called. "Okay then." He began to count. "One, two, three ..." all the way up to sixty, before calling out, "Ready or not here I come!" and entering the science classroom, beginning his search for Todd and anticipating applying a series of hard punches, kicks and head-butts to Todd's blubbery form.

Todd was not hiding in the classroom that Esau was currently searching, but he was indeed hiding nearby and was close enough to hear Esau's voice as he finished his search of the first science lab and moved to the second. "Fatso, Fatso, Fatso, come out, come out wherever you are!"

While absolutely terrified, Todd was at the same time praising himself for his vastly superior intelligence and resourcefulness. When attempting to avoid Esau, Todd had seen the blue door of the boys' room, and the yellow door of the girls' room. Todd reasoned that if he went into the boys' room, this would be the first place that Esau looked. But as Todd wasn't a girl, and Esau obviously wasn't a girl either, he wouldn't think of looking for Todd in the girls' room. So Todd had entered the girls' bathroom and taken refuge in one of the stalls, waiting until Esau gave up, lost interest and went away. It was a brilliant scheme, and understandably Todd was immensely proud of himself. Not only was Todd a genius for having thought up a solution to his problem so easily, it was also a foolproof one. Nothing at all could possibly go wrong with it.

*

Carol O'Dea of course had no idea that her eldest son was at this moment hiding in the girls' bathroom, but of course would have despaired had she known this. Her other kids were giving her plenty of worries in any case. Andy and Justin were not in sight, but Carol knew that her two younger boys were no doubt planning acts of violence and larceny respectively. Polly was with her posse of friends. Carol had gotten close enough to this group of girls to see that her daughter was holding court, spreading some rumor that one of the girls in their year group was a hermaphrodite due to her boyish appearance and that she was not developing like the rest of the girls. Carol thought she should put a stop to her daughter's malicious gossiping, but could not find the inner strength to confront Polly and reprimand her and simply walked away.

Libby had moved about two inches from the car since their arrival earlier. Carol approached her middle daughter and said in a quavering voice, "Um Libby, there's lots of fun things for you to do today."

A sneer crossed Libby's face and with a look of total derision and defiance she stated to her mother, "I am staying right here."

This battle of wills quickly going Libby's way, Carol departed and passed by Chris. Her son was talking with his friends, complaining about how his younger sister Polly was not only a bitch but an idiot too, Chris recounting the conversation about right equilateral triangles and how Polly was incorrect in stating that they did not exist. When Chris's friends pointed out that Polly was correct, Chris began to furiously debate the issue with them too, insisting that there were right angled scalene triangles and isosceles triangles, so one must be able to have right angled equilateral triangles too.

Carol did not want to get involved in the insane trigonometry debate with Chris and company, and in any case she had more to worry about in the form of Jenna, the oldest but physically smallest girl in the family.

Teenage boys and quite a few adult men watched with staring eyes and open mouths as Jenna walked by, the petite teenager putting on quite a show for them. Licking on a popsicle like it was something quite different, Jenna stopped to adjust her ultra-short skirt, bending over to display her white panties and the tops of her black stockings. Finishing her popsicle, Jenna lit up a cigarette and sucked seductively on this too, blowing a smoke ring. One of Jenna's former teachers, an overweight middle-aged woman who taught English, regarded her sternly. Jenna's response was to glare at the teacher, her intimidating expression clearly reading 'Come over and try and stop me smoking here you fat bitch.' The teacher did nothing, and Jenna smugly went on her way smoking her cigarette.

Allison was approaching and all Carol could do was despair at the thought of how the snobby blonde would react when she saw Jenna's little show. But Allison scarcely looked at Jenna, her attention was drawn to the tree under which the pony rides were operating, disapproval and puzzlement clearly on her pretty face.

Dennis had failed to leave the pony rides area and was busy talking non-stop to queuing parents about horses, telling each child in turn how wonderful horses were and how he or she was going to enjoy her pony ride. In his hand was a camera, Dennis snapping pictures of the horses and the teenage girls controlling them whenever opportunities arose. He would often stroke the manes and heads of resting horses, and when Clara allowed Dennis to feed the white pony Princess a carrot, his reaction was like he had won a luxury cruise and he stood staring at the horse with a vacant, dreamy expression.

The only times Dennis looked away from the pony rides was to stare at the petting zoo, which had been set up under an adjacent tree. Children were delighted by the chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys, guinea pigs, rabbits, lambs, goats, piglets and calves, and especially a Shetland pony. Dennis's attention would go to the Shetland pony in the petting zoo, on one occasion Dennis raising his camera to take a photograph of it, then back to the pony rides.

Judy regarded Dennis with more than a hint of suspicion on her face. Dennis however did not notice, he was too busy watching Clara leading Princess out to pick up a little girl, the pony now wearing her unicorn horn. Dennis's mouth dropped open at the sight but behind him Judy's mouth tightened to the point her lips were not visible. She could see that Clara's jeans accentuated her 18-year-old niece's firm bottom, and at the waist Clara's lemon-colored panties were marginally visible from the back. The conclusion to what Dennis was staring at seemed obvious to Judy.

Allison of course could not see exactly what Dennis was doing from this distance, but she could see him taking yet more photographs and she felt extremely frustrated. Even Carol thought it odd Dennis would spend his entire day at the pony rides. But at least he was here. Her husband wasn't. Carol pondered what Mike was up to at this very moment.

*

Back at Swan Street, Mike finished putting up the last shelf in the basement and went back upstairs to get a morning snack. He took several cookies from the jar and put them on a plate, marveling that the obese Todd had not eaten these like he ate every other piece of fucking food in this fucking house. Breaking a chocolate chip cookie in half, Mike ate one piece and left the other on the plate, going into the refrigerator to get a soda. Opening the can, Mike heard Sambo start up his barking again.

"Fucking cat around here causing fucking problems again," Mike growled, before pausing with look of puzzlement on his face. Sambo's barking was not the usual loud continuous barking the dog emitted at cats, birds and other dogs, but nervous and tentative. The dog was growling, would let out a short, sharp bark, then go back to growling again, nerves very clear in the sounds the dog was making.

Putting down the soda next to the cookie plate Mike made his way outside. Sambo was at the front gate, his ears back, the hair on his back standing up like a hedgehog. The dog was staring unwaveringly at the house at Number 24, barking and growling nervously. Mike turned and looked at the attractive white Cape Cod house and immediately noticed something was amiss with the vacant property. The front door was wide open as was one of the windows upstairs, the drapes blowing in the early morning breeze. The porch light was also on, which was strange given it was now mid-morning.

Mike shook his head, his expression growing sour. That fucking house again, it was nothing but trouble. Some idiots had gone inside for fuck only knows what reason, to hold some séance or some fucking party. Mike thought back to the out of control 'haunted house' party held at the problematic property at Halloween just weeks after the pervert who dressed up in his teenage daughter's clothes departed when his wife left him after discovering his greatest secret. That Mike's three oldest kids were among those at the said party made his mood even blacker than the darkest winter night. Jenna and some of her new friends at her all-girls Catholic boarding school had snuck out their dormitory to attend, catching the train all the way from New Jersey at night.

Now Mike had well and truly had enough. He went upstairs to the bedroom his two eldest sons shared, and retrieved Chris's baseball bat. Mike wasn't going to put up with this fucking shit any more, he was going to go across the road and scare the crap out of whoever was in that house illegally.

So engrossed was Mike in his mission that he completely forgot to close and lock the front door of his own house. The sound of Sambo growling and barking was audible as Mike strode past the 'For Sale' sign now bearing an 'Under Offer' sticker. That fucking stuck up Allison Johnson bitch had sold it during the week, and Mike would have bet a fair amount of money that she would not have made mention that two people had committed suicide here and several other people had died in the house. Still, it was nothing to do with ghosts or the supernatural. There were no ghosts, not now and not ever, just fucking idiots who believed in ghosts like whoever was in the house now pissing Mike off.

The wind chimes that hung on the porch of Number 24 were sounding in the breeze, however as Mike walked through the open front door brandishing the baseball bat they stopped abruptly, despite their being no change to the breeze. Mike failed to notice this, his attention upon entering the house drawn immediately towards the smells coming from the kitchen. It was certainly not an unpleasant smell, in fact it was very nice, the smell of freshly baked cookies. Mike's conclusion was that the stupid kids here were baking a batch of marijuana cookies, and he made for the kitchen to investigate. Baby animal prints of kittens, puppies, piglets and a variety of other young animals adorned the house, hung by Allison to make the house seem more appealing and Mike could not help but notice that a number of them were crooked.

In the kitchen, Mike was greeted by an eerie silence aside from a ticking clock, an empty oven and no signs of life. He reached out towards the oven and it was stone cold. "Strange," Mike grunted, hearing his dog barking across the street but not a sound in this house apart from the clock ticking. Mike glanced up at the clock, and immediately thought that he was looking at the clock reflected in a mirror. His eyes searched the opposite wall for the actual clock but he saw nothing, before turning back to the other wall and seeing that that this really was the clock and not a reflection. Mike stood looking at the clock in puzzlement. Never once had he seen a clock running anti-clockwise, but now he had. Mike watched the second tick from the 5 second position, back to 12 and then to 55 seconds, the minute hand making the small movement backwards as it did so.

Mike shook his head, then heard the wind chimes on the porch start up again followed by two sounds from upstairs. The first was music playing, then came the distinct sounds of footsteps on the floorboards, the sound echoing in the empty house. Mike heard an upstairs door open and close, and brandishing his bat made for the stairs, determined to confront these stupid kids who were in the house and put a stop to this nonsense.

The music continued as Mike, grumbling under his breath, climbed the stairs but as he reached the landing it stopped abruptly and he paused, again puzzled. The music that had been playing was a cheerful instrumental tune from the early 1960s, not the heavy metal or similar music he would have expected from teenagers who were in the house illegally. But whatever the taste of music that these no good kids had, Mike was going to put a stop to their fun.

Dead silence apart from the creaking of the boards under Mike's feet filled the upstairs, where all the doors were closed. On the wall opposite the master bedroom was yet another baby animal print, this one of a young orangutan. Mike opened the master bedroom door expecting to find drunk or stoned teenagers conducting some sort of séance, but he was greeted by a completely empty room, with nobody to be seen. Mike looked into the ensuite bathroom, again everything was quiet and empty.

Stepping out of the room, Mike went to open the door to the next bedroom but an uneasy feeling filled his body. He looked at the picture of the baby orangutan, and it seemed like its eyes were staring directly at him, following every move he made. The dead silence in the house accentuated his sense of unease. Mike opened the door to the second bedroom, and again there was nothing to see. Mike was totally puzzled. Mike had distinctly noticed that the window of this bedroom was open with the curtains blowing in the breeze, but now it was completely closed now.

Shaking his head, becoming more and more un-nerved by the orangutan picture staring at him Mike checked the other two bedrooms and the main bathroom, and even the walk-in closet in the hallway and there was nobody there of course. Mike returned downstairs, the stairs creaking under his feet feeling yet another baby animal picture staring at him, this one of a kangaroo joey that hung adjacent to the staircase.

The stubborn Mike still was not convinced ghosts existed, but was forced to admit to himself that there was something very seriously amiss with this house. He stood in the foyer listening to the wind chimes emitting their eerie sounds and turned to leave, but jumped as he heard another series of unpleasant sounds came abruptly from somewhere near the kitchen. The hissing, spitting, growling and screeching noises were unmistakable, they were the sounds of a cat fight. Perhaps that damn cat that always annoyed Sambo and another one had got inside while Mike was checking out the upstairs?

Mike, still holding his baseball bat strode through the kitchen, the noisy sounds of the cat fight continuing. In the kitchen there were no signs of any cats but the noises did not abate, and they seemed to be coming from the basement, the door to which was open. Mike turned on the basement light and put one foot on the stairs, then his heart jumped as he caught in the corner of his eye what looked like a human figure black in color, shadowy, ill-defined but definitely human in shape. Turning around Mike could see nothing now, but the shock lingered and a sharp pain from Mike's heart spread through his chest. Mike felt dizzy and sick, clutching at his chest and losing his balance. Mike fell backwards and tumbled down the steep basement steps, landing heavily at the bottom, blood pouring from a cut on his forehead incurred during his fall. Unconscious and with his breathing shallow, Mike lay at the foot of the basement stairs with the bat a short distance away as the sounds of the cat fight ended abruptly and the eerie silence filled 24 Swan Street again, with only the sound of the kitchen clock and the wind chimes audible.

The front door of the pretty Cape Cod house remained open, the curtains in the living room twitching ever so slightly. At the O'Dea house, Sambo worked himself into a frenzy, the German Shepherd growling and barking nervously at the house across the street.

*

None of Mike's kids nor his wife of course had any idea of his dire medical state, least of all his youngest or eldest sons both of whom were hiding for different reasons. Justin was concealed behind a puppet show booth, not because he was interested in the said puppet show, but due to his interest in an elderly lady's purse, which she had left to one side. Moving slowly to avoid detection, Justin's nimble fingers discretely opened the bag, went into the wallet and extricated all the cash, before the seven-year-old went on his way to count the proceeds of the theft, trembling in delight at his act of larceny and the way he had avoided detection. This was not actually true, his older sister Libby had seen Justin steal the money but could not be fucked doing anything about it.