Eat'em: Chapter 2

CHAPTER 2

“Rise and shine, Jake!”

My Uncle Patrick.

Uncle Patrick much preferred to go by his middle name, Valentine. He flat refused to respond to uncle anything. He was actually two days younger than myself, a fact my parents both resented. Not much takes the wind out of a mother-to-be’s sails like the grandmother-to-be sharing the same news. My dad swore up and down my grandparents did it just to spite them. He even believed my grandma intentionally postponed labor so Patrick Valentine would be the most celebrated of the two newborns. A picture of Val right out of the hospital has him in a ‘World’s Best Uncle’ onesie. It hung proudly over the thirty-two inch plasma screen in our single bedroom apartment.

Val flipped the light on and I cowered deeper into the cushions of my parents’ old leather couch.

“Seriously, Baby-Jake!” Val’s chipper, Every Morning is a Good Morning, tone tended to conquer any other noise polluting the atmosphere. Silence wasn’t something I’d experienced in some time. Calm was anything that broke through the storm, which Val could do without effort. “Come on, you lazy orphan, get up. Get up! Get up! Get up!”

Orphan for us Brooks more-or-less represented a term of endearment. We were both orphans. Mortality struck my dad first (Val’s brother), and then it grasped its mangled fingers around the lives of my mom and stepfamily, finally, catching up to my grandparents within six months of each other. Val and I lived in our own apartment for only a few months. For his parents, death lingered agonizingly close for years, leaving me in the care of an uncle younger than myself as a cruel punch line to a joke only Val and I would ever be privy to.

“And could you put a shirt on, for the sake of humanity?” Val opened the fridge and rummaged around. “I swear to god, Jake-Nasty, I wake up early every morning; I’m tired of being rewarded with your Wicker Man physique. Plus, you’re getting your damned nastiness all over my couch, Deadpool, so put on your costume if you’re going to grind up on my stuff.”

Eat’em pounced on the back of my head as I buried it into the security of a squished-to-mush pillow made out of some space-age memory foam; the guaranteed firmness of which gave out after a weeklong spell we suffered with no air conditioning. I futilely shoved handfuls of mashed foam into my ears to block out The World’s Best Uncle and my eager demon.

“Waffles, yes,” Eat’em said. “I shall gulp the innards of Aunt Jemima, lapping plasma from her hollowed skull, yes. Imbibe her succulent fluids until she’s empty once more!”    

“Why are you up so early?” I shouted into a pillow.

“Because, Your Jakeness,” Val skipped from the kitchen and stomped as he jumped into a squat in front of the couch. Then he sang in his best VeggieTales impression, “It’s the first day… of the first grade!”

“No!” I grunted wearily.

“Yes!” Eat’em yelled.

“Yeah buddy,” Val cracked the top on a soda. “Senior year is here! Well, first day of college for you, Dr. Jacob Forbes Nash. Wealth is no excuse to be an uneducated dolt.” He sang Sublime lyrics, “Early in the morning, rising to the street.”

“I’m not going.”

“The Hell you aren’t,” Val kicked the couch and slapped the wall over my head. He trumpeted an off key version of Taps with his face a few unintended inches from Eat’em’s backside. “WAKE UP, PRIVATE STUPID! IT’S TIME WE LEARN YOU SOME GOOD!”

All my strength went into rolling over.

If one didn’t know any better, they’d think Val and I were separated by years instead of days. His skin shone bright like my dad’s once had. In fact, he could have passed for a younger, skinnier version of my father, with green eyes and fiery hair. Val’s hair was unkempt and looked youthful. He never had to shave either, taking even more years off his complexion.

By comparison, I grew a tasseled bird’s nest, crested with an ever-receding hairline that I’d been blessed with before stepping foot in high school. Crests formed at the edges of my eyelids, burrows on my cheeks led from the sides of my nose to the corners of my mouth, and I’d been told my deep-set eyes resemble those of Steve Buscemi. Nobody ever said a Young Steve Buscemi… just I look like Steve Buscemi.

The exception, of course, was my red irises. Sometimes I introduced myself thusly, “My name is Jacob Brook, and no, I’m not wearing contacts.” The typical, “Okay…” takes up less time than when I waited for people to ask. Then they’d have to say, “Weird” or “that’s cool!” “Were they always like that?” “Do you see things different?” And the conversation would lead to the scrutinizing of the rest of my features and eventually the inevitable, “Has anyone ever told you, you look just like that guy from the Adam Sandler movies,” or “Con Air,” or “Boardwalk Empire.”

Yes… Yes, they have.

“Soldier!” Val stood in a mock militant stance. He held out a can of Jolt Cola directly over my head. “Hair of the Dog. You’ll feel better after you’ve got some sustenance.”

“I want some!” Eat’em shouted, standing rigid, at attention on the back of my head. “Sir, it’s just the Jolt I need to slay that immortal hag Jemima.”

“No!” I rolled over, tossing Eat’em to the floor as I did. I typically paid no more attention to the demon than I would a mole on my back. At his plea for soda and syrup I forgot, as I sometimes did, I’m the only one who saw and heard the little devilish nuisance.

“You act as if I’m giving you a choice, Private Jake-Nasty.” Val plopped the can onto my chest, using a deep scar on my right pectoral muscle as a makeshift coaster. “Hydrate or die!”

I grabbed the energy drink and sat up. A heartwarming desire to shove Eat’em into the garbage disposal gave my day new purpose. I shouldn’t have stayed up watching movies. “Sure, I’ll drink it,” I said, “but it’s not going to help.”

“Just a sip, yes?” Eat’em tugged at my ankle. “One insurmountably insignificant ingested sip of said savory sensational liquid is all I request!”

“Just shut up,”

“Shut up?” Val asked.

“Yeah.” When I needed to speak to Eat’em, I disguised it as a conversation between two parties. “I’ll drink the Jolt and I’ll go to school, but you got to stop the singing in the morning… and the soldier act.”

“Yes sir, Colonel Jake.”

I dressed, drank my breakfast, and snuck a couple more energy drinks into my backpack for my secret companion. A wired demon was a happy demon. I found the sugar-crash to be far more agonizing than the sugar-high. But if anyone had advice on how to wean a demon off anything a demon wants, I hadn’t heard it.

“Let’s go, Crazy Jake,” Val threw open the door to a sallow sunrise, which immediately overwhelmed the apartment in a blinding veil of white.

Valentine and I crossed the threshold into the bright sunlight, followed by a victorious Eat’em - an empty bottle of pancake syrup skittered behind us, lynched in the demon’s tail.