It's a Love Thing (3 page)

“
Shower, now!” And with
that rude demand, she turned and left.

I glared at the clock. "Seven a.m. I’m
so going back to bed. This is my summer vacation, for crying out
loud," I mumbled before dropping back onto the bed. I began snoring
almost immediately.

“
Da da dada da, da da dada
da.”

What the . . .? I swore I
could hear a bugle, and it sounded as if it were playing . . .
Reveille? I peered out from under my pillow and there
it
hovered. The six-inch
demon girl, her wand at her lips as if she were blowing on a bugle,
with sparks flying out the other end. Oh no! I was in hell. Who
knew the devil was a girl?

“
It’s just a dream. It’s
just a dream,” I repeated, snagging the pillow over my ears,
frantic to drown out the make-believe sound.

No, not a dream, a nightmare! A
full-blown nightmare. The bugle’s notes crashed on my eardrums,
causing me to jerk with each note.

“
Peter Pancerella, time to
rise and shine. I let you sleep in.”

I peeked out at the clock. "I hardly
call eight-ten sleeping in," I said to her, and she
smiled.

“
Don’t make me regret my
kindness.” Thankfully, she stopped the horrible bugle sounds and
now chirped away as she flew around the room.

“
My, my. Cleaning is not
your strong suit. What’s that horrible smell?” she asked, plugging
her dainty nose.

This cannot be happening. Six-inch
people didn't exist, especially six-inch people with wings. I was
dreaming again. That had to be it. I pulled the pillow back over my
head and began reciting the Lord’s Prayer–just in case I was going
crazy.

The room fell silent. “Thank you,
God.” Only when I removed the pillow, she was still there with her
arms folded.

“
Are you done with your
morning prayers?” she asked politely. I rubbed my eyes. “If not, I
can wait,” she assured.

“
You can’t be real.
Six-inch, flying people do not exist,” I sputtered out.

“
Five-and-a-half inches.
I’m a little small for my age,” she replied. I think she actually
blushed, but it was hard to tell on a face so tiny.

I jumped and began pacing around like
a crazy man. Why not, since I was crazy!

“
Relax, Peter. You’re not
going crazy,” it said, trying to reassure me. But a six-inch, or
rather a five-and-a-half inch, figment of my imagination telling me
I wasn't crazy didn’t reassure me.

I ran into the bathroom and began
splashing cold water on my face and slapping my cheeks, hard. When
I turned around, much to my dismay, there she hovered.

“
I’m trying to tell you,
you’re not crazy.” Her impossibly delicate wings fluttered softly
as she spoke. “This happens every time. I told Jaxton there had to
be a better way to prepare our clients, but he won’t listen to
me.”

I didn’t know what to ask first. Who
Jaxton was, or who her clients were, though I had a pretty good
idea on the second one.

I decided on the first question.
“Wh-who’s Jaxton?”

“
Jaxton Williams is the
head faery in my department. All orders have to go through him. He
coordinates our assignments and decides who goes where. He also
runs the computer simulations to try and predict the best fit for
each human and faery.”

“
Best fit?”

“
Yes. We are assigned to
the person who is the most physically repulsive to us. That’s why I
was assigned to you.”

Okay,
that
is just plain rude.

“
Jaxton is the best
coordinator we’ve had in a long while. He hasn’t missed yet in
pairing the right faery with the right human,” she cooed softly. If
I had to hazard a guess, I would say she had a crush on this Jaxton
Williams. "We usually don't allow female-male pairings. We work
quite closely with our human and it's too easy to fall in love.
We've lost many a good faery that way. So sad." She shook her tiny
head. "Anyway, Jaxton estimates the chance of you and me falling in
love at point zero-zero-zero-one. And after meeting you, I do
believe that number is a little high," she said with a
snort.

“
Alright, faery girl,
let’s—”

“
Tinkanova-Marie
Bellitoinski,” she smiled. She looked rather sweet when she smiled.
If I lost my mind, at least I’d have something cute to look at in
my padded cell.

“
Listen, Tinker
Bell—"

"Don't call me Tinker Bell," she
snapped.

Whatever. "Let’s say I believe you.
Let’s say I'm not losing my mind, and a six, I mean,
five-and-a-half inch faery really does exist. Why exactly am I
being paired, as you put it, with a faery?”

She dropped a few inches, a frown now
hung on her face. “Ah, well, I’ve been instructed to help improve
your social skills and to clean you up, which, by the way is the
first thing you’ll be doing. You stink.” She pinched her little
nose again and pointed to the shower with her other tiny
hand.

I got the feeling she knew
more than she let on, and wanted to ask her what exactly that was,
but then I remembered: SHE DOESN’T REALLY EXIST! I decided not to
push the delusion. I mean, seriously, why did it matter? I should
be wondering where the padded cell was that I’d be spending the
next several years in.
Man, I hope my
family will visit me.

“
Sorry, delusion, I’m not
getting into the shower. I’m tired and need sleep. Hopefully, after
a good long nap, these hallucinations will disappear, and I’ll be
cured." I waved a hand at the hot faery. “Good night, Tinker Bell.
I’m going back to bed.”

I was halfway down the hall toward my
room before the electrifying zaps began.

“
I. Told. You! Don’t. Call.
Me. Tinker Bell!” With each word she jabbed her wand at me. Little
sparks flew out the end and hit my body, repeatedly.

“
Stop doing that, you
obnoxious five-and-a-half inch demon!”

Oops, I shouldn’t have said that. She
froze in midair, sucking in a huge breath. I’m a dead man. A
delusional dead man, but a dead man all the same. Is it possible to
die at the hands of a delusion?

“
I am not a demon! For your
information, demons are two feet high and covered in hair, you
narrow-minded troll.” She folded her arms. I slumped against the
wall, grateful to have escaped my faux pas with my life.

“
Get into the shower.
Now!”

Okay, enough was enough. If I was
going to spend the rest of my life in lala land, I wasn’t going to
let a faery boss me around.

“
No,” I said
simply.

“
What did you say?” she
asked, clearly shocked by my defiance.

“
I said no, Tink … whatever
your name is.”

“
Tinkanova-Marie
Bellitoinski. You can call me Tinkle,” she replied
calmly.

Yeah, right. Like I was going to call
my delusion Tinkle. Tinkle was something two year olds did in the
toilet. Definitely not a name you called a hot delusion.

“
I said you need to take a
shower. You stink, big time. Now, get into the shower.”

“
And I said n— hey, knock
it off, Tinkle,” I protested as my shirt flew off my body and down
the hall. I stood there glaring at her as if she had a third eye,
my hands clasped tightly over my bare chest. “I’m not getting
in.”

“
Unless you want me to see
what you're keeping in those disgusting way-too-small jeans, I
suggest you get in, now,” she said sweetly.

“
You wouldn’t dare,” I
challenged.

Out came the wand she'd tucked up her
sleeve just seconds ago and my jeans began to unsnap.

“
Okay!” I stepped into the
bathroom.

“
Thank you,” she said with
an angelic smile.

Obnoxious imp! I slammed the door and
locked it before dropping onto the closed toilet.

No stinking faery, real or otherwise,
was going to tell me what to do. I tried to refocus my mind as to
when the whole delusion started. I was just fine after dinner. I
even had my mental faculties when I started to read the cricket
book.

It was the book! I should
have kept playing
Laser
Wars
, maybe then I'd have dreamt up hot
girls that were my size. I sat there for fifteen minutes, picking
at a few zits, thumbing through my dad’s Readers Digest, and
observing my rather sparse facial hair in the mirror-quite a
pathetic showing for two weeks.

Suddenly the water in the shower
sputtered to life, and my body, my half-clothed body, was hoisted
into the shower.

“
Hey, wait a minute!” I
yelled, pulling off my jeans before they became too wet.

“
I gave you fifteen
minutes, I’m done waiting,” Tinkle yelled through the door. Out of
nowhere appeared an ominous scrub brush and some strange looking
blue soap. The soap and brush started at my head, lathering and
scrubbing, hard. My head began tingling.

Each time I tried to grab the brush;
it rapped me on the hand. After several welts, I decided to try for
the soap, only it kept slipping out.

The pair worked its way down my back,
scrubbing off what had to be six layers of skin, all the while my
skin tingled.

“
This has to be real. It
hurts way too much to be my imagination.” Yet there was still a
nagging voice in my head telling me it was impossible. As the soap
approached my lower male regions, I protested.

“
Listen up, Faery.” I was
not going to call her Tinkle again. “I’ll wash my own man parts, if
you please.”

I heard her snicker as the soap and
brush slid to a halt in midair in front of me. I grabbed them and
proceeded to wash my reason for living, unassisted. After only a
few seconds, the soap and brush bolted out of my hands and resumed
scrubbing my legs.

"Hey, I wasn't done!"

“
It takes the average male
10.6 seconds to adequately wash his ‘man parts’”, she snickered
again. “I gave you 12.4 seconds, in case you’re a little
slow.”

I continued to grumble and complain,
in my head, until the mandatory shower was complete. As I stepped
out of the stall, a towel floated over to me and began a vigorous
rubdown of my wet body, stopping long enough to allow me to dry my
man parts. I stepped to the mirror to shave my face as the towel
continued dying me, and was taken by surprise to see a naked, pink,
fat guy staring back.

It was me. The pink and naked part I
got. What I couldn’t figure out was why she made me fat. Before I
could ask, the door opened a crack. I grabbed the towel, which was
still drying my feet, and covered my body. In flew a clean t-shirt,
underwear, and some jeans.

“
Why did you make me fat?”
I demanded, jerking the clothes to cover my body. The towel had
ripped itself from my hands and had resumed drying my feet.
Fighting with the towel, I somehow managed to slip on the underwear
and t-shirt, but the jeans didn’t fit. I looked at the tag, they
were from last year.

“
What do you mean I made
you fat? How did my forcing you to take a bath make you fat?” she
demanded from the other side of the door.

“
I’m looking in the mirror
and my stomach is bloated. And these pants don’t fit, by the way.
They’re from last summer.” I wrapped the finally dormant towel
around my waist, tossed the jeans out into the hall and closed the
door again. She reopened it a few seconds later and tossed in
another pair.

“
These are from last year
too. I need the ones with the pockets on the side,” I explained.
This time she came back with some gray sweats.

“
Here. These will have to
do. Those pocket jeans are filthy,” the faery grimaced.

“
They’re not that bad.”
Just my luck, I got assigned a rude pixie.

She pulled out her wand and raised the
pocketed pants off the floor, suspending them in front of me. “And
what exactly do you call this?” She pointed to a large gray spot on
the right thigh. “And this?” She proceeded to point out several
spots of who knows what on the legs.

“
Okay, so they’re a little
dirty. I have several other pairs in my room.”

“
These were the cleanest
ones,” she said grimly.

I grabbed the still floating sweats
and put them on strategically under the towel. The little demon
smiled smugly as I started toward my room.

“
The dress I am wearing is
from two years ago and it still fits,” she said, pulling on the
collar.

“
Well, those jeans shrunk.
All my jeans shrunk last summer. My parents had to buy me all new
clothes.”

I sank onto my bed and grabbed the
cricket book, while Tinker Bell grabbed her stomach in a giggling
fit. You’d think since it was my delusion, I would dream up
something better than an obnoxious girl.

Regaining her composure, she flew over
to the top of my dresser and waved her wand. A small silver bag
appeared out of nowhere. She opened it and pulled out a pink pen
with a feather attached to it and a tiny purple notebook covered in
sparkles. While I pretended to read, she wrote furiously with her
feathery pen, sitting atop of my dresser.