Loathe Thy Neighbor

Chapter 1

I rubbed my nose again. This time I heard soft laughter. I opened my eyes to see a bushy black tail being trailed across my face. My younger sister was standing over me with Sam on her shoulder and his tail in her hand.



“Gah! Billi! That is so nasty!”



Billi laughed as I tried to wipe away the little hairs on my face that I couldn’t find but knew were there. She laughed even harder when I tried to spit hair off my lips.



“You better get up or we’re gonna be late,” she said.



“God forbid I get a day off,” I muttered and threw my blankets off. I still felt like I had cat hair on my nose but wiping with my hands only seemed to spread it. I was going to have to wash my face now. Super.



Billi pouted when I sidestepped around her to the bathroom across hall. She dropped the cat back on my bed and followed me. I sighed.



“Really,” I said. “You need to stop with that Britney Spears perfume. It stinks.”



I stood over the sink and lathered my face with foaming hand soap. I wrinkled my nose at the peachy smell. It

clashed so badly with Billi’s perfume that it could have worked like those old fashioned smelling salts to wake me up.



“Aww! You didn’t even notice my hair,” she whined.





“Yeah, I noticed,” I said, “but you color your hair almost every week. I’ve run out of nice things to say.”



“Hey, I’m not fishing for compliments! Just tell me what you think of this color. It’s new.”



I rinsed my face with cold water then snatched the hand towel off the wall rack. I studied her short brown hair as I dried. She’d buzzed her hair in the back but left it long in the front so she could part her bangs down one side of her face á la Rihanna. She’d obviously been up a lot longer than me since she already had on her pinkish lip gloss, mascara and eye liner. She’d even put in her contacts because her naturally green eyes were now purple. Aside from the color differences, I’ve had a lot of people tell me we looked almost like twins with a four year separation. We had similar, thin body frames and oval faces because of our unusually high metabolisms. We were even the same height – though I think she was an inch taller.



Billi’s dream goal was to become a cosmetologist after she graduated from high school (in another two years). She was forever experimenting with new hair colors and face gunk, and I was sometimes her test subject. I had to admit she’d gotten pretty good at the whole hair thing. Last week she’d colored my hair a “burnt sienna”, (whatever that was) and it was the best brown of all the colors I let her try. My friends all teased me that I’d be bald by thirty at the rate she re-colored my hair, but I’d have great looking skin my entire life.



“Well, it is a darker brown,” I said.



“Tsk! It’s sepia.” She followed me back to my room.



“Looks brown to me.”



“Sepia! It’s richer than the brown I had before! It’s better!”



“You know,” I said, stopping to give her a dry look, “your fat jiggles when you stomp your foot like that.”



“Fat?” She stuck her ass out at me. I could almost see her underwear under her short denim skirt. “Where the hell do you see fat? I am not fat!”



I quickly turned away with my lips tightly pressed together. “You’re gonna get in trouble if you wear that skirt again.”



She gave a frustrated cry and finally stormed out of the room.



“Just like every other stupid guy on Earth,” I heard her mutter. “How could we possibly be related?”



“Hope you’re not wearing your monkey underwear again today!” I hollered at her.



“You’re asking for it, JC!”



I finally let my face fall and laughed. She never won against me except now I had to worry about how she planned to get me back later. It wasn’t my fault she came to me for opinions. I was just another “stupid guy” after all.



I threw on a pair of khaki shorts and the first shirt I found in my dresser, which turned out to be a white tee-shirt with the Jamaican flag on the front – a souvenir from my Mom’s last vacation with her life-partner, Jen. This was the first time I’d worn it outside the house now that it had shrunk to a size that actually fit.



With the way my day was starting out, I had a feeling I would wish I was in Jamaica before it ended. Not only did my cowlick refuse to cooperate with my comb, but I also nicked myself while shaving the thin patches of hair from my face. I wasn’t used to shaving every day since my hair grew slowly and in really fine patches so I did it maybe every couple of days. I once tried growing a beard last year in an attempt to feel less effeminate, but Billi told me I looked like I had fuzzy blond mold growing from my pores. I never tried again after that.



“Joel Cade!” My mom yelled from downstairs. “Let’s go! You’re going to be late!”



“And why’s that a bad thing?” I muttered.



I gave my hair one last frustrated run-through with the comb before deciding to push it down with some gel.

Then I grabbed my leather band wristwatch and backpack and rushed downstairs. I was surprised how late it actually was. Where the hell did the time go?



Billi was in the living room stuffing her textbooks in her shoulder bag when I got there. In the dining room beyond, I was a little surprised to see Jen having coffee with my mom at the dining room table. She rarely stayed over on weeknights. She usually stayed at her apartment two towns over to be closer to the law firm where she did paralegal work. Her blond-streaked brown hair was up in a ponytail, and she hadn’t put on any makeup so her freckles looked darker across her nose. Like my mom, she was still wearing her pajama shorts and plaid tank top.



My mom, however, was too lazy to even put on pants. As usual. She was just sitting in the chair in her underwear – or so I hoped she had on underwear.



I was reluctant to approach the table for a bagel, but I was hungry. I looked directly at the bagels and nowhere else as I quickly slabbed on some butter.



“Aw, jeez!” Billi cried from behind me. “Mom? Are you even wearing underwear?”



I cut her a dark look. Why did she have to ask?



Our Mom snorted and looked at us over the top of her newspaper, black rimmed bifocals balanced on the end of her nose. I noticed that her hair once gray roots were brown again. Billi must have been on another hair coloring binge last night.



“Why wouldn’t I be?” she said and lifted her over-sized tee-shirt.



“Eww!” Billi cried.



I gagged and rushed to the front door. It was way too early for this.



Outside, I could still hear them arguing. That was the reason why I ate most of my meals in my room. My mom had the raunchiest sense of humor of anyone I knew – it was sometimes borderline elementary school humor. Of course, all my friends loved her.



“J.C.!” Billi called to me from the front porch. “You forgot your keys.”



“They’re on the coffee table! You go get ‘em!”



She rolled her eyes and went back in.



I turned in the driveway. The sun was already hot on my face this morning so I knew we were in for a

summer-like day already. I pried open the rusted door of my white Ford-WTF that my grandfather had rebuilt for me before he died. He’d used a variety of parts from a lot of different trucks so now it wasn’t completely a Ford anymore. He’d built the engine himself and got it running so the important parts were good. The exterior still needed a lot of work, though. The white paint was chipped and rusting away. One side view mirror was loose, and the bumper looked one bird shit away from falling off.



I really missed him. My older brother had also moved out a few years ago so now I was the only male in a house that was overrun with estrogen.



“Found ‘em!” Billi waved my keys from the doorway. “Mom wants to know if you –!”



“God damn it, Molly!”



I turned toward our neighbor’s Colonial-style house. Once again, Jake Riston’s curly-haired terrier shot out between his legs and, because Jake seemed to be moving somewhat stiffly this morning, he was hesitant to chase her down.

At a glance, anyone would say he wasn’t the forty he swore he was. If anything, I would say maybe he was in his mid-thirties. He was standing at his door in black sweatpants and a white t-shirt. An unlit cigarette was stuck between his lips like he’d been about to light it before Molly escaped. Thick black stubble shadowed his jaw so I knew he must have just gotten up for the day. He hadn’t combed his jet-black hair either, which wasn’t unusual since he said he only combed it after showers to keep the slightly curly ends at his nape from sticking out. Sometimes the thin lines of his sideburns even curled when his face was wet. I think those waves were the reason he kept his hair cut short.



I started to set my bag and bagel in the truck to catch the little gray and white terror when she ran past me, but she cut sideways to run past Billi and into our house instead. She loved our house.



“Oh, not again!” Billi cried. “Mom, hide the cat!”



Jake maneuvered his way between the small row of bushes that separated our paved driveways. His usual, good-old-boy smile was pleasantly in place. I noticed that he’d pulled his 2010 Camaro Coupe out of the garage where he kept it during the cold months. He liked to keep the paint fresh and shiny during the winter so he usually only drove his truck.



I smiled politely as he approached me, but my eyes lingered on the Camaro gleaming in the morning sunlight. I hated having to get into my rust bucket with that rude little thing teasing me with its pristine paint and fresh wax shine.



“Sorry about that,” Jake said to me. “She always gets away from me the second I turn my back.”



“I can’t believe she still runs that fast.” I picked my bagel back up. “Isn’t she six or seven now?”



He laughed softly through his nose and lit his cigarette. “Somewhere close, but she still keeps me on my toes.”



My Mom – still sans pants – suddenly shot past the door after Molly. Jen was laughing hard enough to be heard from outside, which made Jake laugh. I groaned and covered my eyes. I was glad we lived in the middle of, the middle of nowhere. I was embarrassed enough having Jake witness the early morning lunacy that was my life – even if he said he was used to it.



He took his cigarette out of his mouth and gave me a wry look.



“Does Joan ever wear pants in the house?” he asked.



I ducked my head and scratched my eyebrow with my thumb. Where was a good, deep hole when you needed to crawl in one?



“Come on,” Billi said and even she was red-faced as she hurried to the passenger’s side of my truck. “We’re already going to be late as it is.”



“Gladly.” I climbed in the driver’s seat. “Catch you later, Jake.”



“Bye Jake!” Billi waved to him.



Jake gave a half-hearted wave and waited in the driveway while we took off down the heavily wooded road. I watched his figure grow smaller in my rearview mirror as we gained some distance. I wondered what time he got home this morning. He couldn’t have gone far. Did he rob someone in state? Maybe in town?



Since last year I’d gotten suspicious about his nightly “walks”. He had the perfect cover as the co-owner of a nationwide moving company called “Royale Lines”. From our little town on the Maryland peninsula, he was almost two hours from a lot of big cities: an hour from Baltimore, an hour and a half from D.C., two hours from Philadelphia…. He had plenty of time to drive one of his many big-rigs to any one of those places and still be back in time to let Molly out to potty. I actually had the date and time of some of Jake’s walks saved on a flash drive that fit the timeframe of the robbery articles I’d saved. In the last year, at least four big robberies that I knew of were reported in some of the papers within a two hour radius, and those were the nights I never saw Jake return home. Billi kept telling me I was just paranoid and needed to find a new hobby. Good-old boy Jake was too nice a guy to steal from anybody, she would tell me. Too many people knew him and they could testify that he wasn’t a thief. So I was screwed regardless of whether he was or he wasn’t.



Still, it didn’t deter me from continuing my investigation. I had almost three years invested. I wasn’t about to stop now. There was something weird about the man that I couldn’t ignore. He was too goody-goody to be this perfect. Wasn’t that usually a sign?



“Look out!”



I slammed on my brakes just as a guy on a black and red street bike cut in front of me to avoid missing his turnoff. I couldn’t see if it was a man or a woman since “he” had on a black and red helmet, but I assumed it was a guy just because of the aggressive way he sped down the road like he didn’t give two shits about dying.



Billi rolled her window down to give him the finger. “Crotch-rocket bastard!”



Of course, the guy didn’t pay attention. His engine was too loud to hear her and he didn’t have any side view mirrors as far as I could tell.



“Damn,” I wheezed and picked up the last half of my bagel from under my feet out mine. "I’m glad you figured out how to use that belted-seat-doohickey this morning. You don’t usually put it on.”



“Shut up.” She pushed her hair out of her right eye with a sharp, angry motion. “I’m just glad no one was behind us. That could have been really bad.”



“Yeah.” I shifted back into gear with a shaking hand. “And I already lost half my breakfast. This day’s already at a category three suck.”



I spared a glance down the road the guy had taken as we passed. Now that I thought about it, I’d seen that motorcycle coming from somewhere on our road. I thought it might have come from Jake’s, but Jake didn’t own a motorcycle. Maybe it was one of his employees? I didn’t doubt that one of the job requirements of working for him was “get-away experience”.

Author's note: I have a thread for comments, questions, etc at: http://www2.adult-fanfiction.org/forum/index.php/topic/24415-passhenette1s-new-improved-thread/. Thanks for reading!