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CHAPTER EIGHT MIKEY

Mikey listened to the television long enough for the announcer to switch to a different topic before he turned to Joey. "Well, that was depressing."

The black and white Border Collie nodded soberly. "The man's crazier than a drunk hyena." Which he was, Mikey thought. But that was ok. The Plan worked better that way. His family had explained it perfectly.

"Hate breeds more hate and more hate breeds killing," Dad had said. "You can capitalise on that." So Mikey did. He'd kept waiting for the newspapers to say something about Hugo Sota, but they'd be mostly silent, mentioning only that a body had been found on the beach. Maybe they hadn't found the note yet. But he doubted it. Dumb as cops were, they wouldn't miss something that obvious.

The surfboard, now. That they might miss. He'd lugged it halfway to Mexico, it felt like, although in reality it hadn't been that far from the parking lot. It was dragging Sota's heavy form down to the beach that had near done him in. Mikey wasn't necessarily a small guy, and he was very fit, but Sota was 200+ pounds of muscle, if he had to guess, and dragging him from parking lot to surf had been a challenge. Much harder than bashing the cat in the head with a piece of 2 by 4; no, that'd been easy. Well, after he'd waited for Sota's idiot friends to leave, anyway.

Joey's blue eyes were looking at him. "You look thoughtful, babe. Penny's worth?" He tossed a penny onto Mikey's lap.

"Just thinking we should find something more cheerful to watch" Mikey said. "Something to take our minds off dumb politics. Or, in your case, off of blood-and-guts." And in my case too, he thought, but Joey didn't need to know that. He was a surgical intern at St Anne's Memorial Hospital, studying to become a paediatric surgeon - a noble pursuit, although personally Mikey couldn't imagine wanting a career dealing with sick brats and their parents. But Joey was a better person than he was, and he didn't have any intention of changing that.

Joey's half-droopy ears perked at the mention of a movie. "That's a great idea. Of course, I only have-" he looked at his watch. "Ok, I still have a little over three hours before I'm due back. What sounds good?"

What movie to watch? Of course, a question like that would take Mikey back to the house in Chicago where he'd used to live, back before he had moved to California. They'd had the best family debates over which movie to watch on family movie nights. Amy usually won. No surprise there, her being the youngest - what had she been, eight then? Yes, because her eighth birthday had been the month before - they'd had a pink cake and had gone to the zoo because Amy wanted to see the rhinoceros - this in itself because Mikey had told her that the rhino was a unicorn. She'd thrown popcorn at him and giggled and they'd taken a family photo at one of those photo-board things, the kind you stick your face through so only that is visible. A lion had been there last, he remembered, because some of its mane fur was stuck in the hole in the board.

Before. That word meant something, but Mikey could never quite remember what it _was_before. It was important. He was 100% certain of that. He'd asked Mom about that the last time he'd seen her, but she'd just smiled and told him it didn't matter, forget about it.

Forgetting. Yes, the movie. Picking a movie. Sometimes his thoughts got so tangled. If this was fifteen years ago, they'd probably have watched something Disney for Amy's benefit. Probably a princess movie, knowing her. So stereotypical, his little sister. Dad and Mom would have pretended to enjoy the movie; Bradly and Francesca would have been too busy making out to notice it - although Francesca would be bound to notice flaws in the storyline. "Look at that princessa," she'd have said, in the Italian accent she never lost. "Such a damsel-in-distress, always depending on a man. What kind of example is this for little girls?" Then she'd go on a rant about how the princess was something stereotypically royal, like a wolf or a lion, and by the time the movie was over, everyone would be drawn into the conversation, arguing over whether the princess had made the right decision by marrying the prince or if she should have stolen a horse and fled to a distant kingdom to become a bandit. Or something like that.

"You're thinking again" Joey observed, chuckling. "Going into your mind."

"Sorry" Mikey mumbled. "Did you pick a movie?"

"Yep!" the dog's tail thwacked the couch. "A medical drama about a girl who wakes up after ten years in a coma."

The movie turned out to be somewhat entertaining, but as Mikey sat there on Joey's fading couch, a flowery 1970s monstrosity that still smelled vaguely of the bobcats who'd previously owned it, his arm around Joey's shoulders, his mind kept drifting. The movie's heroine was a lynx who discovered upon waking from her coma that her husband had divorced her and was dating someone else. Over the course of the movie she eventually won him back but decided in the end to get with the male nurse who'd liked her from the beginning; who hadn't needed winning over. He considered whether that was the kind of heroine Francesca would have liked. Mikey did not like girls, not for dating anyway, but if he had, Francesca was the sort of girl he would have dated. Silly to waste her on a fool like Bradly - but that was assuming he didn't like his older brother, and he had. Bradly was an ok guy, if he wasn't so entirely stereotypical - good-looking; loved sports and girls, not necessarily in that order; got a clear athletics scholarship into college. Everything Mikey was not. Then again, Mikey had perpetually gotten better grades in high school, and he was better at sports in general. Bradly might be able to dunk a basketball, but Mikey had played football, which was what real men played. Strange that he was the gay one yet it was he who played the more masculine sport. Take that, Bradly.

And that reminded him of Brett, his childhood best friend, the gorgeous husky who was their high school's star quarterback, or at least he had been Before, when he was 16. He'd also been Mikey's main crush, although so far as he remembered he had never told Brett.

What had happened to Brett? Mikey couldn't remember, because once again, that had been Before, and Brett had never appeared in After. Probably he'd gone off to play football somewhere, although Mikey had never heard his name on team roasters. What would they say if they met now? Their childhood in Chicago seemed a lifetime ago, now; here Mikey was living in California, dating Joey and working on The Plan. So much change.

But life had a habit of working out that way.