Whatever Happened... to Robot Jones? Continued

Chapter 25: The Snake

The boys had overestimated the intelligence of the high schoolers.

Under the overhang of Clara's backyard, getting poured drink from real alcohol bottles, they barely seemed to question its authenticity, each of the six chugging their drinks. Only after consuming the liquid did they pause, and gag. "It tastes better if you mix some pop in there," Cubey told them.

"I know how drinks work, shorty," the leading football player, Justin, spat at him. However, he did accept a few splashes of cola into his red cup, and chugged his second cup with no problem.

One of the other players sniffed his cup warily. "Why's it taste to lemony?"

"That's the tequila, it tastes different," Mitch told him, turning and shrugging at Cubey and Robot to see if what he was making up off the top of his head was convincing enough. Cubey just nodded back, quickly, before they noticed.

The brunette player seemed satisfied with this, and downed the rest of his cup. The other players all asked for more, and Cubey didn't bother to spare his not-alcohol on them, giving each cup well more than a shot of the awful tasting liquid, mixed with the soda of their choice. One of them gagged again, and the boys were afraid he'd puke it back up, but he didn't.

There were a number of things that made it apparent that the high schoolers had never done this before. The first being how secretive they were being, choosing to chug it out here in the freezing backyard, instead of lazily sipping it inside the house where everybody else could see. It was almost embarrassing to see them so nervous about it. The other being more obvious, that the taste didn't seem wrong to them. It was awful, all right-the boys could see that. But if anything should have made it obvious that what they were consuming was not alcohol, the taste should have given it away.

Justin crumpled his empty cup in his hand and tossed it into the pitch black yonder of the back yard, where it disappeared. "Alright," he said, after shaking his head furiously. His clothes and hair were disheveled, and he looked like he'd been caught a mile from the edge of a tornado. "Remind me again what we're doing."

"You have to trash Clara's house-or at least start," Mitch began explaining his plan. "But don't make it obvious who's doing it. Her parents' house must cost a fortune, if enough damage is done, she'll have to get mad enough to throw everybody out. And everybody will think Clara's a loser for it."

The red headed player snorted. "That plan is so lame..." he said. "It... actually just might work."

Justin turned to Mitch. "And uh, what exactly do we get out of it?"

"Are you not listening?" Mitch said, getting loud. "You get to wreck. A. House. And nobody will know who did it. What more could you want?"

Justin peered down at him skeptically, before turning to his friends. "Girly hair has a point."

Suddenly, the largest of the two new players put his own cup down and smashed it with his foot on the concrete. "YEAH! Let's wreck this joint!"

"Just remember," Cubey said, "You gotta make it look like-"

"Yeah, yeah, we heard," Justin cut him off. "Make it look like it was everybody. Alright, boys, onto the dance floor. I wanna see how much this place can take."

Robot, Mitch and Cubey stood back and watched their band of six football players slip through the back door and disappear into the flashes of moving bodies in the strobe lights. "You nervous?" Cubey asked Mitch.

"Why should I?" asked Mitch. "What could go wrong?"

Robot opened his mouth to vent just some of the many different scenarios for which this plan could fall apart, and they could, in turn, wind up in a lot of trouble. But in all one hundred and thirty variations of failure his mind could compute in two seconds, he did not think of the version that started with him getting cut off by a gruff voice. "This the Doppler house?"