Dance with Me

like Frankenstein
—“bad, Pete. Does it hurt?”
“What do you think?” he muttered.
Chuck nodded as if he understood. “Pretty bad day, huh? So … what do
you think is going on with you? Did you walk under a ladder? Break a
mirror? Cross a black cat?”
Pete frowned. “What are you talking about?” he asked.
“What did you do to earn a streak of bad luck?”

---

Pete just shook his head. “It’s not bad luck and I’m not accident-prone,”
he insisted. “I don’t know what it is.”
Chuck licked his dry lips and leaned closer to his brother. “It’s
something weird, though, right? First, you were sick, and Mom filled me in
about the weird accident with the construction site, and now this fishing
thing.” Chuck had been thinking about the weird stuff that had piled up in
his brother’s life—it had all the makings of a really good puzzle. “This all
started when you tried to scare me at Freddy Fazbear’s Pizza,” he pointed
out.
Pete tried to scowl, but he winced as the gesture hurt his face. “What?
Now you’re trying to say this is something like karma? Bull. No way. I
don’t believe in that stuff.”
Chuck shrugged. “You can’t deny it’s weird.”
Pete was silent a moment, then said quietly, “It wasn’t just those things.”
Chuck raised his eyebrows, intrigued. “What do you mean?”
Pete shook his head. “Can’t talk about it now. I’ll tell you later.” He
nodded toward his parents as if he didn’t want them to hear.
Chuck went to his room, sat on the floor in front of his TV, and started
playing video games. He didn’t really think Pete would tell him anything
more, but a couple of hours later, Pete walked into his room and sat on his
bed. His cheek was puffed out below his eye and his eyes were bloodshot.
Chuck paused his game and just looked at him, waiting.
“In school yesterday, I slipped and fell in biology class. I kicked a kid
and his scalpel went flying. When I hit the ground, the scalpel was going
for my eye.”
Chuck’s mouth dropped open. “No way.”
“I knocked it away before it could hit me.”
Chuck was impressed. “Quick thinking.”
Pete looked pleased for a second. “Yeah, when you got the skills …”
“What else?”
Pete shrugged. “I went to pick up the chops at the butcher for Mom, and
there wasn’t anybody behind the counter. So I walked in the back trying to
find someone. Out of nowhere, a cleaver falls from a hook and slams into
the butcher’s block by my hand.”
“Holy cow! That’s close!”
“Yeah, crazy close. I mean, if I believed in weird stuff, I’d think
something was up. But I don’t believe in anything like …”

---

“Curses?”
Pete frowned. “Get real, Chuck.”
Chuck sighed. Why did he have such a stubborn brother? “What else can
explain this? Four times? It’s got to be 
something
. Come on, Pete.”
“Whatever it was, I’m done with it.” Pete cleared his throat. “Just in
case, it’s because of, you know, dragging you to see Foxy.” He stuck his
hand toward Chuck.
Chuck’s eyes widened as he looked at it.
Pete lifted his eyebrows. “Well? Shake.”
Might as well, Chuck thought. Hesitantly, he took his brother’s hand and
shook it.
Pete took his hand back and even apologized. “I’m sorry about trying to
scare you. It was dumb. Let’s call a truce between us, okay?”
Chuck smiled. “Okay, truce. Thanks, Pete.”
Pete stood up unsteadily. “I’m going back to bed. Later.”
“Later,” Chuck murmured, as his brother walked out of his room. Then
he started thinking, rummaging through his desk for a notebook to write in.
His brother may want to brush off all of his ideas but there had to be an
explanation. There had to be.
“What game are you playing?” Pete asked Chuck from his bedroom
doorway. He’d spent most of Saturday in bed and now he felt the need to
get up and walk around the house. Lying in his bed gave him too much
thinking time. He kept replaying each freak accident over in his head and it
wasn’t cool.
“Just an indie adventure game. Want to check it out?”
Pete shrugged and sat cross-legged with his brother on the floor. Chuck’s
room was a lot different than Pete’s. First of all, Chuck actually used his
hamper instead of dropping his clothes all over the floor. His bed was made.
His desk was clear of extra paper. He had a bookshelf with books on aliens,
and conspiracy theories. A couple of gamer posters were pinned neatly on
the wall.
Chuck explained the game. “You see, I’m the mage, and I have to look
for all the hidden ingredients to make a potion to stop an evil wizard. He

---

has my village under a spell and I need to help break the curse with the
potion and release the village before it’s too late.”
“What happens if you’re too late?”
“Then I lose them forever. They remain under the control of the evil
wizard. And that is 
not
happening.”
Pete smirked. “You like to be the hero, don’t you?”
“It’s the only way to win. Want to play with me?”
“Sure.”
Chuck’s eyes lit up as he grabbed the other controller. “You can be my
apprentice.”
“Why am I the apprentice? Why can’t I be the mage and you be the
sidekick?”
Chuck shook his head. “You have a lot to learn.”
Pete turned to their mom, who was leaning in the doorway. She was
smiling.
“Hey, Mom,” Pete said.
“You guys need anything? How about some popcorn?”
“Could use some popcorn, thanks.”
“And a juice box for me,” Chuck said.
Pete played the game for a couple of hours and then went back to bed.
He had to admit it was nice to get along with his little brother again. After
shaking hands and calling a truce, it was almost like it used to be when they
were little. When they didn’t have a care in the world. Before the
resentments, the name calling, the divorce. He had to admit he missed those
days.
Before Pete knew it, Sunday night rolled around and he started getting
ready to go back to school. To his relief, the swelling in his face had gone
down. He’d removed the bandage from his arm, exposing a fresh scab on
the wound right above his wrist. It made him think of his dad accusing him
of hurting himself. Sure, thoughts of escaping his parents crossed his mind
sometimes, but not the way his dad was thinking.
Pete had spent most of the day binge-watching TV. He hadn’t dared to
leave the house, afraid he’d have another freak accident. Not that his mom
would have let him leave, anyway. She’d kept a close eye on him all
weekend, really stepped up for him. Maybe he’d cut her some slack when
she started piling on a bunch of stuff for him to do again.

---

If all these freak accidents had been some weird karma thing, he’d
apologized to Chuck, hadn’t he? So that meant he should be free and clear
of whatever it was. But he still had a feeling that lingered in his gut like a
sickness. He worried that everything might not be over.
That it might never be.
Then there was a knock on his door.
“Come in,” he called out, and Chuck stuck his head in. Normally, he’d
yell at him to get the heck out of his room, but things were different with
the truce. Picking on his little brother didn’t seem as much fun anymore.
Not that he’d tell him that.
“Yeah?” Pete said.
His brother stepped in with a notebook in one hand and closed the door
behind him. He fished his inhaler out of his shorts pocket, took a puff, then
slipped it back in.
“How you doing?” he asked Pete.
“Okay, I guess.”
“You ready to go back to school tomorrow?”
“Yeah, right.”
Chuck flashed his braces and ran a hand through his hair. “Just
checking.”
“What’s up with the notebook?”
“Something I’ve been working on this weekend since you told me about
the accidents.” Chuck walked over to Pete, flipped open his notebook, and
showed him some sort of handwritten chart. There were five boxes arranged
in a circle, with arrows pointing between them. On the top of the chart was
a box labeled: 
FOXY THE PIRATE
. The following boxes read: 
BIO CLASS
,
BUTCHER SHOP
, 
CONSTRUCTION SITE
, and 
LAKE
. The final arrow pointed back
to 
FOXY THE PIRATE
.
“What’s this mean?” Pete wanted to know.
“It means, I think the point of origin—where this all started—was in the
maintenance room with Foxy.”
“Yeah, we already talked about that.”
“From there, each freak accident led to the next and now in order for this
to be all over, you have to go back and fix whatever you did in the first
place.”
“I did. I apologized for the stupid prank, okay? Everything should be
good now. You forgive me, right?”

---

“Yeah, we’re brothers. Of course I forgive you,” Chuck said. “But in all
the games I play you have to face the ultimate bad guy. The villain. Just like
with the game we played last night. The mage had to fight the evil wizard in
the end in order to set the village free with the potion.”
Pete forced a laugh as his stomach curdled in dread. “Bad guy? Who?
Foxy, the animatronic?”
“Maybe … but … what exactly happened after I ran out of there that
day?”
Pete looked back at his TV, glimpsing an action movie. “Nothing, Foxy
sang a song and then I left. No big deal.”