Something New

My best friend Jake is the grunt-quarterback of our high school. Not I. I write horror poems and invent useless gadgets like the dad from Gremlins which makes me unpopular. I have been with an out of my league girlfriend Debbie for 2 months. And most ladies fall for brown haired handsome Jake whom Debbie has not salivated behind my back just yet. But he is my best friend and I could not skip our annual summer camping trip to Lake Achaboopee.

The biggest problem is I know Jake just broke up with his girlfriend of two years. She moved out of Georgia to Nebraska. If I can fake being an alpha male for this camping trip with our beloved football God, maybe Debbie will marry me. However, if Jake wins, I have a man-eating reptile-fish thing in my swimming pool. I plan to take it to Lake Achaboopee as an emotional insurance policy.

Debbie is built like a brainless blonde cheerleader, but she has a genius IQ. And takes LSD and before solving random calculus problems nude on my roof. I love her for being odd and looking popular. Would a Neanderthal jock fancy that? Only time will tell.

I invented "Kevin" who is a large great white's head sewn onto an average American alligator' body. I wanted Kevin to be an amphibious killer. I designed it to process the DNA of a target by eating something like their hair first which triggered a hunting protocol on that individual using the shark head's Ampullae of Lorenzini. I have a zip lock bag of Jake's hair in my backpack. When Kevin digests somebody's DNA, nothing else will cross its mind but to digest where it came from. I read how to do this in a popular science magazine and if you believe that, well, let's hope it never comes to any of this.

Lake Achabopee Weekend -- Day 1 -- June - Friday Afternoon

Jake drove up in his orange VW buggy. There was a blonde in the passenger seat.

"You all ready?" Jake said.

Jake looked at Debbie's cleavage for ten minutes. He was stoned. I could tell because his sclera turns to the color of beets. And the buggy wreaked of carbon monoxide and skunk.

"Hop in the back," Jake said. "Pete told me so little about you Debbie."

Jake went up to shake her hand.

"The function of X is Lake Achabopee," she said.

"Far out," Jake said. He shook her hand and studied her cleavage further.

"Pete, I have to tow your kayak?" Jake said.

"Yes," I said.

"Think fast, bitch," Kevin said.

Kevin was inside the kayak under the tarp. A spiraled football hit me square in the face. I felt blood run down the front of my neck.

It killed me. I heard Debbie laugh. I heard Debbie and Jake laugh in chorus. I looked up and saw the silhouette of Debbie and Jake, shoulder's touching. Both laughing.

"You okay hon?" Debbie said.

"I said think fast," Jake said.

I took a large hard look in the passenger seat. It was a silicone sex doll. I felt like I was in hell. I figured at that moment. I needed some of Debbie's hair too. We packed in the bug and drove 2 hours into the Georgie forest to Lake Achabopee.

The first night the fire crackled. Jake played the only guitar song he knew; Mary had a Little Lamb. He couldn't strum, he just plucked each string uncoordinatedly. The entire time looking at Debbie. His sex doll's legs splayed out from his blue tent door behind him. Debbie glanced at Jake then me and back to her Sudoku book with her iPhone flashlight. Ever since she laughed shoulder to shoulder with our star quarterback, I struggled with the idea of proposing to her.

"Dude, what the hell is in your kayak? It weighed a ton. My poor buggy."

I had a twirled napkin up each bloody nostril, and Jake whined, "my boor buggy."

"I am sure Pete told you he won the high school poetry contest," Jake said.

"I am not surprised. I love his poetry," Debbie said.

My dad used to take Jake and I to Lake Achabopee for the weekend when we were eleven. They would catch fish and yap about the NFL. I would be bored out of my skull. Jake did save my dad from choking on a grilled bass snippet one summer. He moved pretty amazing and probably could be a good EMT. "Did you get that sex doll to practice your EMT skills Jake?" I said.

"No. It is as embarrassing as it looks Pete. I am going to have sex with it in a bit."

Debbie dropped her Sudoku book to her lap and let out a monstrous laugh. If you could make a girl laugh you could sleep with her. I jumped up and found the zip lock bag with Jake's hair in my pocket. Only Kevin escaped. The tarp over the kayak had claw marks and an opening.

I begin to feel something watching me. At that moment I remembered every time I ordered take out, there was a tiny rogue hair in my French fries. Tiny hairs just fall off of us. Especially when we work. I did not have any way to disarm Kevin's blood thirst once he processed a living thing's DNA.

I could hear back by the camp Debbie and Jake. And out in the darkness, sticks snapping. My favorite horror movie was Jaws 3 and I thought nothing could be more terrifying than a large great white mouth full of teeth swimming at you like a torpedo. But I may have miscalculated that fear as being the worst. As my palms dripped sweat like a runny faucet, I saw the same horror floating on thin air out from the pitch darkness of a dense forest and into the bouncing orange beams casted out by the camp fire.