Arliss looks on glumly, dinner box in one hand, shoveling squash casserole into his mouth with the other, Ritz cracker crumbs cascading onto his Chris Stapleton T-shirt and resting on the swell of his beer gut.
I pull a white lab coat and a pair of goggles from the tub and extend them to Arliss. He just stares, unblinking, and takes another bite. I roll my eyes, pull an envelope from my pocket, and hand it to him.
“Don’t roll your eyes.” He belches into his closed mouth, buries his fork in the remnants of his squash casserole, and takes the envelope delicately between his index and middle fingers, like it’s a secret message he’s going to tuck away in his décolletage. Still with the one hand, he opens it and counts. “Twenty, thirty, forty, forty-five…fifty.”
“We good?”
He folds it and stuffs it in his back pocket. “Good as we ever are.”
“All right, Professor. Get dressed.” I hand him the lab coat and goggles.
He turns, tosses the remains of his box into a nearby garbage can, and takes his costume. He grunts as he puts on the lab coat and pulls the goggles over his head, resting them on his brow. “This is the worst job I’ve ever had, and I’ve had some bad ones.”
“So you’ve said.” I check my phone. My adrenaline flares like lighting a stove burner after leaving the gas on too long. I have a new email. I click on it, and it’s junk. A sharp wave of disappointment neutralizes some of the adrenaline, but I still have to wait for the thudding of my heart to subside.
Someone pounds at the back door. Arliss goes to answer.
“It’s the twins,” I call after him. “They’re supposed to have their friend with another basset with them.”
Arliss grunts in acknowledgment and opens the door. He steps aside to let them pass.
Colt and Hunter McAllen are frequent guests on Midnite Matinee. They don’t particularly love the kind of horror movies we show. They’re not great friends with Delia and me. They’re emphatically not geniuses. But they share one shining, redeeming trait that makes them perfect guests: they’re willing to do dumb stuff, no questions asked. It occurred to us to invite them onto our show after they got suspended for riding dirt bikes down the halls of our school. From there, it was no great leap to put on black spandex skeleton costumes and plastic skull masks and, for no compensation of any sort, dance with the most utterly joyous, unfettered abandon you can imagine. Putting on the skeleton costumes is, for them, like putting on a mantle of courage. And they have zero skill as dancers. But they’ll just go for it. Anything. They’ll try doing splits. Hunter almost took out half our set once attempting a backflip that he only halfway landed. Which is an apt metaphor for our show, I guess.
“What up, JoHo?” Colt goes for the high five.
I let him flap in the breeze. Guess how much I enjoy being called JoHo. “Let’s see the dog.”
In the darkness of the hallway behind him, I hear a jingling of dog tags and a yip. A smallish beagle trots up to me excitedly, followed by his owner.
Reflexively, I kneel to pet the dog, scratching him behind the ears. “Hey! Aren’t you a sweetie!” Then I stand, turn, and face the twins. “What is this?” I ask in a low voice (I guess so the beagle won’t get his feelings hurt).
“The dog you asked for,” Hunter says.
“I told y’all we needed a basset hound.”
“Yeah,” Hunter says.
“So this is a beagle. I say bring me a basset hound; you two Bill Nyes bring me a beagle.”
“I think it would be ‘Bills Nye,’ ” Delia says, joining us. “Nice beagle, guys. I thought we asked for a basset hound.” She hands Colt and Hunter their costumes.
“I told them Tater was a beagle,” the beagle’s owner says. “They said it was fine.”
“Beagles and basset hounds are the same thing. Just that beagles become basset hounds,” Hunter says with an air of unearned authority.
“What are you talking about?” Delia’s face is incredulous. “That’s not even sorta how it works.”
“Yep. Like how cats become raccoons,” Colt says.
“In the wild,” Hunter adds.
I don’t know where to begin. “I—wait—cats become—no, hang on. One thing at a time. You thought beagles get older and shorter and saggier and their ears get longer and we start calling them basset hounds?”
“We’re not dog scientists, y’all,” Colt says. “Hell.”
“It’s just our opinion,” Hunter says.
“That beagles become basset hounds?” Delia asks. “That is your opinion?”
“Yep,” they say together.
“Well, that’s not how opinions work,” I say.
Hunter shrugs.
“Like, science wins over opinions,” I say.
“That’s your opinion,” Hunter says.
“Just to be clear,” Delia says. “You two live in a world where animals spontaneously change species and animals within the same species become other types of animals?”
“Our cousin seen it happen,” Hunter says.
“By the way, let’s just go with what y’all are saying and assume that beagles magically transform into basset hounds at a certain point in their lives—I can’t believe I’m doing this, good lord. This particular beagle has pretty obviously not yet made the change to basset hound, right?” I say like I’m speaking with a very young child.
Hunter and Colt would probably look sheepish at this point, but their faces already have a sheeplike quality.
“So even in your deeply strange worldview, y’all blew it,” I continue.
Hunter and Colt look at each other, their exchanged glances saying You wanna field this?
“Did y’all literally split a single brain when you were in the womb and each one of you ended up with half?” I ask.
This sends them into gales of laughter. They love it when I insult them. They must have some weird crush or something. I think it’s why they’re so easily persuaded to relinquish their dignity for free on a public access show. They start trying to thwap each other in the nuts.
I turn from them to the beagle’s owner and finally get a good look. There wasn’t enough light in the hallway to see him well. His face is nothing special, but one of his eyes has a faint purple bruise encircling it and he has a Band-Aid slightly below the bridge of his nose.