Friendly Face, page 4
On a black-and-white-checkerboard backdrop, big red words flashed across the screen: GRIEVING THE LOSS OF A BELOVED PET?
Edward froze and stared at the TV.
The image of a large, cartoonish brown bear wearing a top hat filled the screen. The bear was talking. Edward quickly unmuted the TV as the words FAZBEAR ENTERTAINMENT PRESENTS FAZBEAR FRIENDLY FACES! scrolled beneath the bear.
“Just send in a few strands of hair from your lost pet, and let Fazbear Entertainment do the rest! We use your pet’s DNA to craft a face that looks exactly like your beloved furry friend. The face is then integrated onto an animatronic body to create a loyal pet that will follow you around forever.”
The image on the screen shifted to an example of the Friendly Face, and Edward watched in awe as a robotic orange cat romped around after the red dot of a laser pointer.
“What a small price to pay to feel joy again rather than wallow in those sad feelings of loss and longing.” The bear looked like he was talking directly to Edward, and Edward could feel the intensity of the bear’s cool blue eyes.
On the screen, more red writing flashed: FOR A LIMITED TIME ONLY: AN AMAZING DEAL JUST FOR YOU!
The bear started talking again. “And, if you order within the next thirty minutes, you’ll get free shipping!”
A price streaked across the screen. It was a lot, at least for Edward, but he thought he had enough in his savings stash.
The bear leaned forward, making his communication feel even more personal, almost intimate. “If you don’t love your Friendly Face,” the bear said, “then my name isn’t Freddy Fazbear.” The bear leaned back and smiled, flashing a wide mouthful of teeth. It pointed at its chest, “And I am Freddy Fazbear, so you’re guaranteed to be thrilled with your new faithful friend!”
The robotic cat reappeared on the screen, and Freddy’s voice-over said, “What better way to memorialize a precious friend than with a new pal—someone who will remind you of the memories you made with your pet while helping to make new ones, together. Why settle for an urn full of ashes or a photo on a wall when you can have a memorial you can play with, one who will keep you company any time you want?”
More red letters erupted onto the screen: GET YOUR FRIENDLY FACE TODAY! CALL NOW!
CALL NOW! faded out, to be replaced by a large red phone number.
Edward looked around wildly for something to write on. Of course, there was nothing. His mother kept the living room too neat. Frantically, he read the phone number twice, and then he began chanting the numbers in his head.
He got up and ran to the kitchen. He grabbed the notepad his mom kept next to the phone. As he pulled it toward him, he knocked the phone off the counter. He didn’t even try to grab it. It hit the floor with a crack as he scribbled down the number before he forgot it.
Edward pulled out one of the chairs from under the kitchen table. He sat and stared at the phone number. In the living room, a woman screamed on the TV. The sci-fi show was back on. He didn’t care—if this worked out, he wouldn’t need escapism anymore.
He smiled at the phone number. For the first time in weeks, it didn’t feel like a monster was trying to squeeze the heart out of Edward’s chest. He suddenly saw a sliver of hope for his future. Maybe he could have a friend after all.
Edward nodded to himself. He was going to order a Friendly Face, and then it would be kind of like Jack was still here. As long as Edward had a robotic Faraday, he could pretend his friend was around.
He stood and reached for the phone. It wasn’t there. “Oh right,” he muttered. He looked down at the floor and grimaced. The phone had a crack in the receiver. His mother wasn’t going to be happy with him.
He turned the phone on and heard the dial tone. Well, at least it still worked. Edward smiled and punched in the number he’d written down.
* * *
By the time Edward had talked to the nice lady at Fazbear Entertainment and was given the address to which he should send his money and the hair of his lost pet, it was mid-afternoon. He needed to get moving.
Now he was pedaling his bike along the sidewalk, just a few houses down from Jack’s house. He had a lump in his throat, and the closer he got to the two-story brick house where his friend had lived, the bigger the lump got.
Jack’s street was only a couple blocks from Edward’s. Like the street Edward lived on, Jack’s street was lined with a mix of older homes that ranged from quaint Craftsman cottages like the one Edward and his mom lived in to big Tudor and tall Victorian places. All the homes were guarded by ancient oak and walnut trees, some fronted by tall hedges. Others had picket or wrought-iron fences. If only Jack’s house had had a fence.
The street was pretty quiet. Edward heard a few little kids squealing from behind one of the houses. In the distance, a radio played an upbeat pop tune. The music felt all wrong. It should have been slow and dark, something in a minor key.
When Edward reached the corner right before Jack’s house, he stopped his bike and leaned it against the massive trunk of an oak tree in the yard next to Jack’s. He stood on shaky legs and swallowed hard before he looked at the street.
The street was empty, but in Edward’s mind, it wasn’t. He began to breathe heavily.
What was in Edward’s mind got bigger and brighter, and suddenly, it seemed to jump out of his head and explode into the street as if he was watching the whole scene, once again, in real time. There was Faraday gleefully batting at the butterfly. There was Jack, his face stretched into a contorted expression of dread. There was the truck—
Edward leaned over and concentrated on breathing. He had to get this over with.
Straightening, Edward darted out into the street. He didn’t even look for cars, he realized after he was in the street; he just ran.
He trotted to the place where Jack and Faraday lay. He could see them there. It was a weird projection from his mind, he knew, but they looked real, disturbingly real.
Because he could see them, he knew exactly where to find some of Faraday’s fur. When he got there, though, he realized he wouldn’t have needed his mind’s upsetting reenactment. A bloodstain marked the spot of Jack’s and Faraday’s last seconds on earth. When Edward saw it, he had to clamp his mouth shut to keep from spewing what was left of his undigested soup all over the street.
Wanting this over with, Edward spastically scanned the area around the bloodstain for black hair. Finally, he spotted some lying at the end of the rust-colored splotch. Pulling a plastic bag from his pocket, Edward quickly leaned over, plucked the hair from the road, and dropped it into the bag. Then he ran back to his bike, jumped on, and pedaled away as fast as he could. He was home just a few minutes later.
Tearing into his house, Edward slammed the door and leaned against it, panting.
Okay. The hard part is done. Just two more things to do, and they’re easy.
Edward hurried into his mother’s home office, perfectly neat and decorated in creams and pale blues. He went to the pine storage armoire in the corner of the room and dug inside it for a small padded envelope and some stamps.
He took both of these back to the kitchen, and put his money and the plastic bag of Faraday’s hair inside the envelope. He added the right postage, and after checking the time, he went back outside to his bike and headed to the post office.
* * *
The lady at Fazbear Entertainment had told Edward it would take eight weeks for his Friendly Face to get to him. Eight weeks! That was a long time. But it was better than being forever without Faraday and Jack.
Of course, he knew that his Friendly Face could not and would not replace Jack and Faraday, but he believed that having an animated reminder of the kitten that he and his best friend had so loved would help him start wanting to live again. Because right now, he really didn’t care too much about life.
Edward marked his calendar with the approximate date on which he expected his Friendly Face to arrive: August 28. Every day, he crossed out a square and told himself he was one step closer to having what he was waiting for.
The summer was long and lonely.
Edward’s mother suggested that he go to a camp, but he flatly refused. She threatened to put him in summer school. “You like to learn,” she coaxed.
He shook his head. “If you enroll me, I’ll run away from home.”
“I’ll find you if you do that.”
“I read a lot, Mom,” Edward said. “I’ve read a lot about going off the grid, too. I won’t be easy to locate.”
His mother just shook her head and went to work.
When Edward’s mother began talking about moving to a different town for a fresh start, Edward realized he’d better do something to prevent such a drastic action.
“Will you take me to the library tomorrow to get some books?” he asked her over a Sunday breakfast of overcooked French toast. His mom wasn’t stellar in the kitchen, but most of what she made was edible.
“Sure!” she said. The eagerness in her voice made him feel bad. She was thinking that he was “snapping out of it.”
He wasn’t.
Day after day crawled by. Finally, August 28 came … and went.
No package.
Edward called Fazbear Entertainment. “Where’s my Friendly Face?” he asked another nice lady on the phone.
“Could you give me your name, dear?”
“Edward Colter.”
He listened to keyboard clicking through the phone line.
“Here you are,” she sang out after a moment. “There was a delay in manufacturing because of a production anomaly. We’re so sorry for your inconvenience, but you should have your Friendly Face in about two weeks. We’ll include a discount coupon for another Fazbear Entertainment order as an apology for the delay.”
Edward sighed. He didn’t want any other Fazbear Entertainment stuff. He wanted his robotic Faraday.
Now he was going to have to go back to school before his animatronic cat arrived. Somehow that made returning to school even more depressing than it already was.
But what could he do except wait?
So, he waited.
Two weeks into his new school year, two weeks of being studiously avoided by every one of his classmates, two weeks of being babied by the high school teachers who’d been informed of May’s “tragedy,” and Edward was trying to get used to being a freshman without his friend by his side. Every day was an exercise in endurance, just getting through the long hours until he could go home and check his mail.
Finally, on a Monday afternoon, he arrived home to find a package waiting for him on the front porch. “Yes!” he shouted before snatching it up and taking it inside.
Edward dropped his backpack on the floor right inside the door. His mom hated when he did that, but he’d pick it up later. He ran into the kitchen with his package. Setting the big cardboard box with the Fazbear Entertainment logo on the counter, Edward hurried to the knife block by the stove and pulled out a paring knife. A gust of wind outside rattled the small paned window over the sink. He glanced out. The black clouds he’d noticed overhead during his bus ride home from school were churning low in the sky. They were in for a storm.
He didn’t care. Turning his back on the window, he returned to the kitchen table.
Outside, a dog barked incessantly, almost frenziedly, so much so that if Edward hadn’t been in a hurry to open his package, he’d have checked on it. Other than the crazy dog, it was quiet. The only sound inside the house was the low hum of the refrigerator.
Edward began carefully slicing along the seal of the Fazbear Entertainment box. The seal was black and white checked, like the background in the commercial he’d seen. It had Freddy Fazbear stickers spaced every few inches as well. He felt kind of bad slicing through Freddy’s toothy smile.
The knife made a chuffing sound as it sawed through the cardboard. Edward’s breath came in excited little gasps that joined the knife’s rhythm.
Edward didn’t bother to cut the tape at the ends of the box. He just grabbed both sides of the lid and yanked, tearing the tape with a snap. Taking a deep breath, he flipped back the lid and started digging through the Styrofoam peanuts that covered his prize.
The peanuts flew as he reached through them. They snowed all over the table and the floor. Edward ignored them and also the small instruction booklet he found in the peanuts. He could see black hair on the body of a medium-sized cat. He was almost shaking in anticipation of meeting his new robotic pal. Digging out more Styrofoam, he got a grip on his new Friendly Face. Then he pulled it from the box in a spray of more peanuts that skittered this way and that.
Edward lifted the Friendly Face from the box and held it up before his eyes.
Edward screamed and dropped the Friendly Face. It landed on its legs in the open box, and the Styrofoam peanuts held it upright before Edward’s appalled gaze.
He staggered a couple steps back from the table. What had he done?
Edward could hear his mother’s voice in his head: “Edward, you have to be more careful!”
How many times had she told him that his single-minded focus would get him in trouble? How many accidents had he had to clean up because he wasn’t thinking about what he was doing? How many times had he messed up in school, making him the butt of endless jokes?
The day Edward had shot into the street to pluck hair from the pavement, the only thing he’d been thinking about was being done with his disgusting task so he could send off his order for his Friendly Face. He hadn’t been really looking at what he was doing. He hadn’t examined the hair he’d gathered to make sure it was cat hair. He’d just scraped up the first black hair he’d seen, and he’d taken off.
And this is what he got for it.
Sitting in front of Edward, perched on top of a mound of Styrofoam peanuts like a deformed king, the body of a robotic cat was attached to the stiff, powder-white face of … Jack.
Not Faraday.
Jack.
Instead of Faraday’s sweet, furry face—the face Edward had expected to see when he’d opened the box—the human hairs Edward had sent in had resulted in the stark white mold of a dead-looking human face. Jack’s face.
On the hard material, Jack’s brown eyes were motionless, but they appeared to be gazing intelligently at Edward, just waiting for Edward to say something so Jack could reply with his usual affected display of esoteric knowledge. Edward struggled to breathe as he stared at Jack’s slightly flat nose, thick lips turned up in a smile, and his broad chin. These were Jack’s features … attached to an animatronic cat.
It was an abomination.
Edward felt sick.
Using the back of his hand to knock the Friendly Face out of the way, Edward dumped the remainder of the Styrofoam peanuts from the box. He looked at the empty box and the thing that was part his friend and part cat robot; then he wildly surveyed the kitchen. Spotting a wooden spoon in the pottery jar by the stove, which his mother used for her cooking utensils, he rushed over and grabbed it. He then picked up the box and held its opening level with the kitchen table. He used the spoon to shove the awful—what? creature? machine?—into the box.
He knew he was acting crazy, but he didn’t want to touch the thing. It was just too creepy, too … wrong.
Once he got the nasty Friendly Face in the box, he pushed the instructions manual into the box as well. He didn’t even want to look at the manual. He had no intention of activating this thing.
He looked around again. He had to get rid of it.
He didn’t want to just throw it away. First, if he did that, his mom could find it. Second, the garbage was far too easy to get out of.
Edward gasped and took two steps away from the table. Why had he just thought that?
He shook his head. He didn’t want to ponder the morbid place from which that thought had arisen. He’d read way too many horror stories and science-fiction novels, watched too many macabre movies.
He was being ridiculous, of course. But he still wasn’t going to throw this thing in the trash. No. He was going to bury it.
Outside, thunder rumbled. He glanced out the window. The sky was still roiling. He’d have to hurry.
Grabbing the box, taking care not to touch what was inside, Edward hurried out the back door of the kitchen. He scurried to the garden shed at the rear of the yard. With fumbling fingers, he turned the dial of the combination lock. It took three tries before he got the numbers to line up right so he could get the lock open.
Finally, he was able to get into the shed. He grabbed a shovel and trotted to the perimeter of the yard, right up against the fence at the edge of the property. If he could have taken the Friendly Face someplace off his property, he would have. He wanted it far away, but he needed the thing buried now. He had no way to transport it, and even if he did, the storm clouds were about to release their burden. He didn’t really want to be outside in a thunderstorm.
So he started digging.
He’d dug a two-foot diameter hole about a foot down when he saw a streak of lightning out of the corner of his eye. Even though his hands smarted, he dug even faster. In only a few more minutes, he had the hole deep enough.
Running back to the deck, Edward grabbed the box, then returned, even faster, to the hole he’d dug. The skies overhead grumbled loudly. A drop of rain landed on his nose.
Edward dumped the contents of the box into the hole. The manual hit the dirt first. The Friendly Face landed on the manual, faceup. Edward groaned when the rigid version of his friend’s smiling features looked up at him. He tossed aside the box and began shoveling dirt into the hole at a breakneck pace. Every clod of dirt that hit the Jack face made him flinch. He felt like he was burying his friend alive. He could have sworn the Jack face, though wearing Jack’s nonstop smile, looked accusatory.
Ignoring the condemnation in the fake Jack face, Edward shoveled until the white was obscured and finally covered completely. Stamping down the dirt once he had it all over the hole, he wasn’t happy with the slight mound that was left, but he hoped the rain might pound the dirt down enough for it to settle in and around the Friendly Face.
