“I’m still mad at you, even if you made cake.”
Wanderer and Homebody
Part 3 of 6
This story is set, with Morpheus' kind permission, in his Twisted universe. It's a sequel of sorts to my earlier novel Twisted Throwback, but it should stand alone tolerably well (though it features three characters from Twisted Throwback). Thanks to Morpheus for his feedback on the rough draft.
You can read the opening chapter of my novel The Bailiff and the Mermaid for free, or buy it at Smashwords or Amazon.
Emily went back to work on the kitchen cabinets, and Tim and I went back to work on the windows. We had all the windows — except the inside of the one in Lisa’s room — done in another couple of hours. Then we helped Emily finish up the kitchen, and I moved furniture aside to give Tim room to vacuum under things. And so it went until lunchtime.
“I’m getting a little hungry,” I said to Tim as she turned off the vacuum cleaner and unplugged it. “What about you?”
We’d just finished up the den — at least as far as I could tell, though I suspected Tim’s obsession would find more things in there to clean or straighten if she wasn’t distracted by other, messier parts of the house.
“I could make sandwiches,” she said, “unless you’d rather have leftovers from last night? There’s still enough for two or three servings.”
“Either would be fine,” I said, “but what do you think about going out?” At her panicked look I hurried on: “Not far, and not for long. If we go to the nearest fast-food place — that taqueria on Metric Boulevard, for instance, unless you know someplace closer? — it won’t take any longer than eating here.”
“A few minutes longer,” she said.
“We don’t have to do it if you feel like you can’t. But I’d like you to try going out for a few minutes, before we have to spend all day in Dallas.”
“...All right. Maybe so.”
Craig had left to go hang with his friends a couple of hours earlier, and Lisa still hadn’t come out of her room since her fight with Tim. We collected Emily from where she’d been sorting a load of clothes out of the drier, and knocked on Lisa’s bedroom door.
“We’re going out for tacos; you want to come?”
“No,” came her muffled voice.
“There’s cake in the refrigerator with your name on it,” Tim called out.
Lisa opened the door. “I’m still mad at you, even if you made cake.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You should be. You can go without me,” she added, turning to me.
“All right. Your brother’s gone out, too, so you’ll be alone; we’ll lock all the doors.”
Emily, Tim and I all piled into my rental car. Tim seemed okay at first; we chatted about what still needed to be done before Friday during the three-minute drive to the taqueria. We went in and ordered, and stood near the counter waiting for our tacos and enchiladas. But I saw that Tim was getting a little fidgety and glancing out the window at the car.
“So, I haven’t heard yet — what was going on when you Twisted?” (I’d been saving that topic for a moment when she needed a distraction.)
“Oh,” she said, and glanced at Emily. “It’s kind of stupid. I was about to go over to Neal’s house and hang out, but Mom said I had to clean my room first — oh, it was such a horrible mess!” She looked distressed at the memory, and I regretted bringing the subject up when she was already stressed from being away from home. “And I complained about it so much — what was I thinking? — that she said I had to clean the bathroom too, the one I share with Lisa and Craig you know? And so I started to clean up my room, and then I felt all tingly and passed out...”
Just then my name was called, and we picked up our orders.
“Do you feel okay to sit and eat here?” I asked.
“Can we go home now?”
“We could, but we wouldn’t get any more cleaning done while eating tacos in the dining room than if we ate them here.”
“I guess so.”
So we found a table and sat down, and Tim ate intently, not pausing to talk between bites and refusing to talk with her mouth full. Emily and I chatted a little about my recent travels, her experiences in grad school, her husband Vic’s new job, and so forth. Tim finished her taco sooner than we did, naturally, and was impatient to be gone, so we wrapped up our unfinished tacos and went to the car.
“So,” I said as I started the car, “back to your Twist... what happened when you woke up? How long did it take before you noticed your new compulsions?”
“Well, I guess the first thing I noticed was that I was a girl. Mom had found me and put a blanket over me after the Twist burned off my clothes, and she sent everybody else away and sat beside me until I woke up...”
When Mindy had called me, early in the morning PNG time, she’d been sitting by Tim’s bedside, watching her sleep off the effects of the Twist. She’d told me about the physical changes, but she didn’t yet know what mental changes Tim might have experienced.
“...She asked me how I felt, and I said being a girl wasn’t as weird as I thought it might be, but I was really anxious about the big hole I’d burned in the carpet.”
“Guilty about damaging it?” Emily asked. “You know it wasn’t your fault.”
“No, I mean, it bothered me that my carpet had this big hole in it and the part around the hole was burned. I wanted to fix it but I didn’t see how. Mom helped me get dressed and she wanted me to eat something, but I looked at my room and saw how I’d hardly gotten any cleaning done before I passed out, and I wanted to finish it. So I cleaned up until I was too hungry to wait any more, and ate, and kept cleaning until it was done, later in the evening. But it still didn’t look right because of the hole in the carpet. Mom and I moved the rug from the den to my room to cover up the hole, and that was better, but I’d like to get new carpet in there, only Steve says the carpet installing guys can’t do it until next week. — Can you install carpet, Daddy?”
“Um, no, sweetie. At least I’ve never done it before, and me learning how would probably take longer than waiting for the professionals.” I’d learned a lot of obscure skills in my almost thirty years on the road, but installing carpet was not among them.
“What I really wanted was to replace the carpet with tile or laminate or something easier to keep clean, but Steve wouldn’t let me. He said it would look weird to have one room like that and the rest of the house carpeted.”
“Hmm. Would he mind replacing all the carpet with laminate? If the cost is an issue, I can help out, and maybe we can get a grant from the Nia Clarence Foundation, if it’s necessary to accommodate your Twist.” Unfortunately Texas didn’t have a program to help out Twisted with expenses caused by their Twists, like some states, or at least they didn’t when I checked a couple of years ago.
“That would be nice... I’m not sure I can honestly tell them it’s really necessary though.”
“We’ll see. — Here we are.”
Tim hopped out of the car and was unlocking the front door almost before Emily and I had our seatbelts off. By the time we got inside, we found her sweeping the kitchen.
“Didn’t you just sweep in here yesterday?” Emily asked, looking puzzled and worried.
“Yeah, but it looks like Lisa got some crumbs and stuff on the floor when she was fixing her lunch.”
“She finished lunch in the time we spent at the taqueria?”
Tim blushed. “She kind of grabbed her plate and went to her room with it when she saw me come in. I guess she didn’t want to talk to me.”
Then I realized something. “Wait a minute. Did you already know about the crumbs on the floor before you came in? Is that why you were suddenly so anxious to get home, and to get out of the car as fast as you could?” I thought we might have discovered her trick.
“Huh. Not exactly, but I did get kind of anxious there about the kitchen. I didn’t know it was this, though.”
“We need to test this,” I said. “It might not be comfortable for you, but... hmm. What about if you finish this up, and then go out in the back yard, with Emily? Then I’ll make a small mess — small! — somewhere in the house, and clean it up a couple of minutes later, and you tell Emily if you feel a sudden anxiety about a particular room needing work. Deal?”
“Can we not do that right now?”
“Okay, later. But let’s try to do it before we see the Twist specialists.”
“Okay.” She finished sweeping the floor and began wiping down the table, on which Lisa had left a few crumbs and a dollop of mustard.
After we finished the kitchen, we moved on to the bathrooms. Emily cleaned the half-bath in the hall near the kitchen following general directions from Tim, and Tim and I worked on the full bathroom that she shared with Lisa and Craig.
“This looks nearly spic and span to begin with,” I said as we got started. “Did you just clean it recently?”
She nodded and started scrubbing the toilet. “But you aren’t looking close enough. Craig’s aim isn’t that great... until he learns better this toilet’s going to need a wipe-down every day or two. And the floor around it. And as long as we’re in here you might as well wipe down the sink and counter and faucets with disinfectant, and get any hairs out of the shower drain...”
So we worked in silence for a few minutes. Then I asked: “You said you were about to go over to Neal’s house when your Twist happened... did you ever get to go, or have you been too busy cleaning house?”
She sprayed some more disinfectant on the floor and said: “I was so freaked out by how messy my room was, and so focused on cleaning it, that I forgot I’d told Neal I was coming over. Later on Mom told me that he’d called while I was unconscious, and she’d told him I wasn’t feeling well and would talk to him later... I meant to call him back right away but I got distracted, and didn’t call him until Sunday, after Emily got here and we went out shopping. It was while we were driving to the store, and I felt useless like I couldn’t clean the house anymore and I couldn’t buy clothes yet, and I wasn’t old enough to drive... and Mom asked if I’d called Neal yet, so I did. And he didn’t exactly freak out when I told him I was a girl now, and he came over later to hang out, after we got home from the department store. But... he didn’t stay all that long, and he hasn’t come back. I think I bored him talking about all the cleaning I’d done, or maybe he was just too weirded out by me being a girl.”
Neal lived a few blocks to the southwest, and had been Tim’s best friend in the past two and a half years since his mother had married Steve and they’d moved into this house and school district. Tim still had some online connection with friends from the school he’d attended when he and Mindy lived in an apartment, or at least he’d had before his Twist, but he was closer to Neal, who shared a lot of his interests. On my recent visits I’d gotten to know Neal’s family almost as well as Steve and his children, and I’d taken both boys on trips to nearby parks and the natural history museum. Neal had already been an acute observer of nature for someone his age, but it was meeting Tim that got him into collecting insects.
Now, though? Tim had said she was still interested in collecting arthropods (he’d expanded the scope of his collection in the last few years), but it sounded like she hadn’t found any time for that hobby since her Twist. If she no longer shared real interests with Neal, it might be futile to try to maintain the friendship. Still, I thought we should try.
“Neal knew you might be Twisted; I remember we talked about it in the car on the way to Bee Cave, and I mentioned it to his parents and grandmother not long after I met them.”
“Yeah, we talked about it when you weren’t around too. And he promised he’d still be there for me whatever happened, if I turned into a six-armed troll or an invisible bank robber or anything, and I hoped he was right but I wasn’t sure. I mean, if I turned out like Aunt Wendy I wouldn’t expect him to keep visiting me in the hospital every week for the rest of his life.” (I’d taken him to visit his Aunt Wendy for the first time on our last road trip. Not that I was trying to warn him to brace himself about the possibilities of his Twist; no, I just thought he was mature enough to meet her without freaking out, and I was right.)
“Have you gone over to his house since your Twist?”
She scowled. “I haven’t had time! I’ve got so much to do, and you and Mom keep interrupting me to go shop for clothes or see the doctor or eat lunch... Wait. I need to do something.” She threw away the wipe she’d been using, got up and squeezed past me where I was leaning over the sink.
She went to the door of Lisa’s room, down the hall; I couldn’t see her from where I was standing, but I could hear her. She knocked, and Lisa called out: “What is it?”
“Are you done with lunch?”
“What if I am?”
“Can I take your plate to the kitchen?”
“...Okay, if you promise to leave me alone after that.”
The door opened. Then Tim said: “I think you got some crumbs on the carpet... is it okay if I vacuum in here?”
“No! Leave me ALONE!” The door slammed.
I stopped working on the sink for a moment and stepped into the hall. Tim stood there looking at Lisa’s door, then said: “That could have gone better.”
“It could have, yeah.”
She went to put the plate in the dishwasher, then returned to finish up the bathroom.
“Did you actually see the crumbs on the carpet?” I asked.
“I — no, I don’t think so. But I know they’re there.”
I nodded. “I think we know a little more about your trick, now. Do you want to test it out some more?”
“Let me finish this first,” she said, but when we finished cleaning the bathroom she wanted to organize the closets, and we were still working on the hall closet when Mindy came home from work. I didn’t push; I could see Tim was still upset about the quarrel with Lisa.
“Mom!” Tim said when she walked in, without greeting her, “can you get Lisa to vacuum her room, or let me do it? She ate lunch in her room and she got crumbs on the carpet and she wouldn’t let me —”
“Slow down,” Mindy said, putting down her handbag. “I want to hear from Lisa too. Jack, do you know what this is about?”
“Lisa got mad about Tim cleaning her room while she was away; she got mad again when Tim intuitively figured out that she got crumbs on the carpet. I think we’ve discovered Tim’s trick, by the way, though we need some more tests to be sure.”
“Wait, what? Is it...” she hesitated. “Dangerous?”
“No. She seems to know when part of the house gets messed up and needs cleaning. She knew about the crumbs on the carpet even though Lisa had been in her room with the door closed the whole time.”
“Do we know there really are crumbs on the carpet? Tim, are you sure you aren’t just guessing because she ate in her room?”
“I know. I don’t know how — I guess it might be my trick.”
Mindy sighed. “Let me go talk to her, and have a discreet look around. And I need to get supper started...”
“Oh!” Tim said, “I’m sorry, I should have done that. I can work on it while you talk to Lisa.”
“Let’s work on it together — after we talk to her.”
Tim gulped.
“Lisa?” Mindy called out, knocking at her door. “We need to talk.”
“Just a minute.” Lisa opened the door. “What’s up?”
“I hear you and Tim have been fighting. I’d like to hear your side of it before I decide anything.”
“She went in my room and messed with my stuff! I got home and everything was all moved around and I couldn’t find anything, and I think she was looking at stuff on my console —”
“No, I didn’t!” Tim said. She and I were still working on sorting out the stuff we’d pulled out of the hall closet, prior to putting it back in a more orderly arrangement. (Emily was taking a study break.)
“Not now, Tim,” Mindy said. “Let Lisa finish talking first. — You were saying?”
“So she messed with my stuff, and I guess I yelled at her about it, when I found out. And I told her to stay out, and she said she would, but then she started bugging me about coming in to vacuum the floor.”
“She said you were eating in your room?”
“It’s kind of hard to relax and eat in the kitchen when she’s hovering around cleaning stuff up as soon as you turn your back!” Lisa scowled at Tim.
“Well, if you’re going to eat in your room you need to make sure to clean up afterwards.”
“Do I have to do it right after I finish eating? Every single time?”
Mindy sighed. “It used to be we’d sometimes let things slide... let dishes or clothes pile up until the weekend, wait for a not-very-busy weekend to do the vacuuming and stuff. But now... we all need to make adjustments. Tim gets upset when things aren’t clean.”
“She can clean her own room as obsessively as she wants, but it’s none of her business how often I clean mine.”
“The crumbs will attract bugs if we don’t clean them up soon,” Tim fretted, and Mindy shot her a warning look. Lisa responded:
“I thought you liked bugs!”
“Let’s not change the subject,” Mindy said. “Lisa, this isn’t about whether or when, it’s about how. Promise you’ll vacuum your room sometime before bed tonight, or let Tim do it right now.”
“She can do it,” Lisa said after a moment, and to Tim: “I’ll be watching and making sure you don’t mess with anything else.”
“Okay,” Tim said. “I’ll go get the vacuum cleaner.”
I finished putting away the towels, cleaning supplies and so forth from the hall closet.
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Comments
poor kid, such an awful compulsion
gonna be a challenge dealing with it.
Having the need to constantly
Having the need to constantly clean rooms, places or things is really a bad compulsion, as it can and will interfer with your life so very much. Even the need to clean normally is bad enough, but to be compelled to do so would be so very sad indeed.
Not quite as bad as it looks
Based on the way Twist-compulsions were portrayed in most of Morpheus's earlier stories, I'm assuming that most such compulsions are not exactly like standard OCD. Tim likes cleaning, as Blake in the first "Twisted" story likes wearing revealing clothes and Leila in "Twisted Pink" likes wearing pink clothes (once they get over some initial cognitive dissonance, realizing that they like stuff they used to hate). But Tim's compulsion isn't all fun and games either, as it leads to conflicts with other people in her life and keeps her from doing other things she enjoys. I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that things will get better for her, but not quickly.
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I feel bad forthe kid.....
It sounds like her Compulsions are really out of control and she has what appears to be a pretty weak Trick as well, it isn't useful, just fuel for the fire of her Compulsion.
I wonder if Tim could be persuaded to take on the name Hestia after the Roman Goddess of Domesticity? LOL
The Nature of Monkey is Irrepressible!