muchtooarrogant | Slime Spree

LJI Week 2: Sankofa
I was staring at my computer screen, trying to compose a response to my boss' latest e-mail, when I sensed motion behind me. Our new COVID-inspired cubicles were larger than their predecessors had been, incorporating thicker fabric at the bottom to muffle sound and frosted glass at the top to protect from the dreaded projectile sneeze, but it was still easy to tell when someone was hanging out behind you. I swiveled to face my visitor, and saw Ellie poised in a throwing stance, a blue stress ball clutched in her right hand.

"The boss man says I should use this to relieve stress," she intoned, "and I can't think of a better way to do that than targeting you."

Her final word was followed by a thwack, as she bounced the stress ball off the glass wall behind my monitor, and stood on tiptoe to snag it on the rebound. At five feet seven inches, Ellie wasn't anywhere near star basketball player height, but she had an irrepressible energy that always seemed on the verge of bubbling over.

"If Josh sees you screwing around," I warned her, turning back to Outlook's forlorn composition area, "he'll take you off product design and make you write customer satisfaction surveys until the end of time."

"Nah," she denied, "Vijay's in his office right now, trying to wheedle more time off, or at least work from home time." She lowered her voice conspiratorially, "something to do with her youngest kid spray painting a teacher's car."

"Seriously? She only got back from the latest thing a week ago."

Ellie started drumming her fingernails on one of the cubicle's glass partitions, and when I glanced back at her in annoyance, the ball sailed passed me again. Thwack!

"Stop that!" I turned to face her, and she grinned down at me. Without even looking up, she effortlessly caught the ball on its second rebound.

"Ellie needs a favor," she drawled, casually tossing the blue missile over her floral bloused shoulder. It arched briefly ceilingward, floated across the isle into her own cubicle as if pulled by a string, bounced once on her desk, and then tumbled into a trash can.

I sighed. "You know, you have a very strange way of trying to endear yourself to other people."

"Oh, I do," she agreed instantly, batting her blonde eyelashes at me, "I really do, but this is serious. I dropped one of my earrings into the bathroom sink this morning, and it slid right down the drain."

My stomach tightened and I shook my head at her. "Nope! Even if I wasn't pissed at your roommate, I'm not the handy man for your apartment complex. Besides," I continued, not letting her get a word in, "aren't you still dating that Alsatian guy? This is the kind of thing boyfriends are made for."

"His name," she growled, "is Alexander, and my roommate is your sister."

I shrugged.

"Come on, Mark. Alexander's traveling for work, and Kerri won't be home until at least 10:00 tonight. It'd probably only take you like thirty minutes."

"Believe it or not," I objected, already partially resigned to my fate, "I have better things to do on a Friday night than crawl around under your sink and dig through the contents of its disgusting drain pipe."

Ellie knew a proforma response when she heard one. "Awesome! I really appreciate this." She made a house key appear as though by magic, reached forward and flipped my arm's wrist so that the palm faced upward, and dropped the key into my hand.

"Why …"

"Looks like the boss man is headed this way," she said, turning towards her own cubicle. "I have to drop some stuff off at the post office after work, but I'll pick up dinner from that Chinese place you like, and maybe we can watch a couple of episodes from that Diplomat thing on Netflix you've been trying to get me into."

Bracketed on both sides with the detritus from underneath Ellie's bathroom sink, I gazed with disfavor at the u-shaped pipe trap in front of me. I had obtained a large Tupperware bowl from Ellie's and Kerri's kitchen, carefully positioned it under the trap, and loosened the fittings on either end by hand. As expected, since these were plastic pipes, I hadn't needed a tool to unscrew the fittings, but I had no doubt that all my smooth sailing was about to come to an end.

Kerri and I had grown up in a household where both parents had jobs, and from a fairly young age, were pretty much left on our own whenever they weren't home. We also learned quite quickly that, unless it was a literal "the house is on fire" emergency, not to disturb them while they were working. Whether because they were both workaholics, or simply because they decided that they would rather spend time away from us than at home, the time that both of them spent away kept increasing. Eventually, we took over the responsibility of cooking our own meals, doing our laundry, and yes, even figured out how to recover dropped items that slithered down an open drain. So, from past experience, I was well aware that what I would discover inside Ellie's sink pipe would be unpleasant.

Taking a deep breath, I applied gentle downward pressure to the u-shaped trap. Nothing happened. I tried again, this time increasing the downward force. Nothing happened. Had I failed to completely unscrew one of the fittings?

"I thought that looked like your car outside," a voice said from the bathroom doorway.

I froze.

"What on Earth are you doing under Ellie's sink?"

It was Kerri's voice. Ellie had set me up!

Now both frustrated and angry, I took hold of the pipe trap and jerked downward with all my strength. From above me, the sink made a glurrrrrrulp noise, and then water, and hair, and slime jetted from the suddenly freed pipe in front of me. The bowl I had so thoughtfully placed underneath the pipe trap would've probably captured the majority of the pipe's unsavory contents, but when the trap came loose, my hand and the piece of pipe it was holding struck the bowl's outer edge and flipped the whole mess directly at me. Coughing and spluttering, I recoiled backward, flopping on my back on the bathroom floor.

I had no intention of touching my face given what was on my hands, but confirmed through my slightly glazed vision that yes, it was Kerri looking down at me from the bathroom doorway.

"Mm-ma-mmmmark," she gasped, "you, you look like Chris Pine on Slime Spree!"

Turning my head to one side, I spat, and then croaked, "Towel!"

Still shaking with laughter, Kerri jerked a towel off the wrack by the shower and tossed it to me. "Ellie said she had something she needed to tell me, but I never expected to find you here."

"Set up," I growled, trying to mop away as much of the slime as I could from my face. "Damn Ellie anyway, I liked this shirt!"

"Um, yeah," she snorted, "I think everything you're wearing will be a loss!"

I carefully stripped the shirt off over my head, but at the last possible moment, a clump of goo fell free and struck my bare shoulder. "Gah!"

In a moment, Kerri appeared beside me holding another towel, and began helping to clean my slimy shoulder. "Given how things were between us," she murmured, "I'm surprised you agreed to come over and play plumber."

Once the goo was removed, I took the towel from her, and gingerly wrapped it around my head. My hair had started dripping as well.

"You know how manipulative Ellie can be when she really wants you to do something." Sighing, I glanced up, and was caught in Kerri's expressive brown eyes.

When we were kids, separated by an age gap of less than a year, Kerri and I had been inseparable. We spent hours together playing games, curled up with each other trying to read the same book at the same time, doing homework, and constantly talking about the time we had spent apart and the people we had met. Even though we each had our own bedroom, our possessions were scattered over the two areas, with the result that both rooms were treated like a shared space with no boundaries. Time, of course, had its inexorable way with us, as it did with everyone, and we had certainly pulled apart a bit as teens, but there had always been a certain understanding between us, a sense of "where you go, there I shall go also." Had it perhaps been that bond, the unbreakable link which bound us together, that had pushed mom and dad away from us while we were growing up?

"How is dad?" I asked quietly.

"Oh, he's fine," Kerri said. "I think he's maybe found someone he's interested in dating." Her gaze stayed steady on mine, maintaining our visual contact. "And mom?"

"She's …" I hesitated. "Still pretty bitter about the divorce, but maybe moving on, a little bit?"

Kerri reached out a hand, and our fingers intertwined. "Wishful thinking?"

"I don't …" I stopped, my throat feeling as though it were suddenly filled with shards of glass. "They used us!" I blurted. "One day they both decided they wanted to throw away their relationship, to trash everything they had worked for together, and they used us to score points off each other."

"And we let them," Kerri agreed, squeezing my hand inside of hers.

We sat for several minutes, saying nothing but still holding hands, our eyes transmitting regret back and forth.

"Did you ever think," I whispered, "did you ever wonder what it would've been like if they had just stayed away for good? Never come back at all and left us in peace?"

Before she spoke I saw the answer in her eyes, and that shared "Yes" flowed between us.

When Kerri and I heard Ellie's key in the door, we braced ourselves, preparing for the attack. We were each holding a laundry basket filled with sopping wet towels, and the weight of all that wet cloth was hard to manage.

When the door opened and she appeared, we each snatched up a towel and shouted in unison, "You suck!"

For a frozen moment Ellie stood there with her mouth hanging open, and then the barrage of wet towels enveloped her. Screaming and laughing at the same time, she desperately attempted to bat away the assault, as well as grasp ammunition for return fire.

In the doorway behind her, a tall gentlemen appeared, and then quickly reversed stride as a misaimed sodden missile struck the floor at his feet.

"Ellie?"

Alexander, it seemed, wasn't out of town on a work trip after all.