“What’s the urgency?” Dale asks at the threshold of Patty’s front door.
“I’m in here,” she yells from the kitchen.
“Where?”
“In here,” she rings siren-like. “And mind the footwear. I know you have cleats on.”
Dale grudgingly removes his thoroughly mudded shoes, exposing the floor to the only marginally more sanitary socks and moves toward what he believes is the kitchen, where indeed she awaits him, arms crossed and recognizably jittery.
“What’s the matter?”
“This.” Patty directs Dale’s attention to the center of her kitchen table where a box with her name on it sits.
“That looks like a cake.”
“It’s a box typically used to store and transfer cake, yes. But anything could be inside it.”
Dale bends down as if to scrutinize the box with more gravity than he thinks the occasion merits, having no precise idea of what he’s supposed to discover.
“You haven’t looked inside?”
“It could be rigged to go off.”
“Why would it be rigged?”
“Because that makes more sense,” she says with a seasoning of embarrassment, “than someone sending me a cake for no reason.”
“Where did you find it?”
“It was on my doorstep when I got home.”
“Just waiting for you?”
“Yeah. I thought it was a mistake until I saw my name on it.”
“Did it feel like a cake when you picked it up?”
“I guess. But lots of things have the weight of a cake,” Patty insists. “Like a heart or certain animal heads.”
“It doesn’t smell weird or anything like that. I don’t know how someone would boobie-trap a baked good. I’d say we’ve cleared that level of suspicion.”
“I still want you to open it.”
Dale, whether out of empathy or from having contracted some of his girlfriend’s anxiety, approaches the box as if it was, in fact, an explosive someone would receive in the ‘90s. He sighs resplendently on discovering what he knew was always there.
“Voila,” he declares with droll satisfaction. “It’s a cake.”
“What?” Patty looks over Dale’s shoulder and sees a cake immaculately decorated in buttercream. A black rose rises up at the center with the “Join” on one side of the rose and “us” on the other in red gel lettering. “This can’t be all.”
“What do you mean?”
“I bet the real trap is inside the cake. Like glass or maggots.”
“Who would put maggots in a cake?”
“Some psycho. Why haven’t you thought of that?” Patty stops herself. “Did you think of this?”
Dale looks at Patty incredulously and with a faint trace of hurt. “No. But there’s only one way to find out what’s in it.” Dale removes the cake from the box and places it on the table. With a butcher knife he cuts a too-big slice and balances it on the knife. “I think it’s red velvet.”
“I’ll get a plate.”
“Do you have milk, too?”
“Two percent.”
“What is this a monastery?”
“Take it or leave it,” Patty retorts in exasperated indelicacy.
Dale cuts out another slice for Patty and takes the honorary first bite.
“It’s not bad.”
“It’s okay,” Patty concedes. “Kind of rich in that cake-ish kind of way.”
“I’m almost disappointed. I was sort of hoping that the cake would erupt in writhing larvae.”
Patty snickers under her breath.
“But there’s something really cold about it, I think.”
“Cold how?”
“Just in terms of feeling. Clearly it was a baker’s job. If I’d wanted to provoke someone with baked goods I’d at least have made it myself. This suggests whatever’s being done here is being done at arm’s length.”
“I didn’t know you could psychologize flour and sugar.”
“It’s the nature of the prank. I can tell when a prank is personal and when it’s not.”
“Which kind was the ham in the air vent?”
“It was a pork shoulder, for one. And it was an absolute disappointment, so it’s impossible to evaluate.”
“Why? In terms of pure action and reaction it was great. School was cancelled for a whole day. The hazmat unit came in. And you didn’t get in trouble.”
“I know but … but why make a grindhouse flick when you can make a midnight movie?”
“Your analogies are giving me vertigo.”
“We had a way better idea. Tim was absolutely convinced that he could get a whole pig’s head from his uncle’s butcher shop. The guys and I spent a whole week trying to figure out what we were going to do with it. Like, Jerry wanted to leave it in the girl’s shower.”
“Cute,” Patty says, digging her fork around the sponge with slivers of unresolved suspicion.
“Darren wanted to leave it in the back of Mr. Engels’s car. And in a fit of school spirit, I thought we’d hang it from the goalpost at Dayton on the eve of homecoming. But instead, Tim came into homeroom with a huge chunk of pig meat thawing in his backpack. All those ideas were worthless. I had to improvise, so I just tossed it into a vent.”
“You ever think Tim pranked you?”
“No, but now that you’ve said it I feel less bad for making him take the fall. I’m sure he spent those three weeks of suspension mediating on the offense of overpromising and underdelivering. Though I suspect he was mostly playing video games and jerking off.” Dale chuckles to himself. “Psychological pranks are of a higher intelligence that I and certainly Tim have never reached,” he muses self-reflectively. “I prefer an immediate impact over menace. And personal rather than impersonal. Which is why I can’t wrap my head around this. Where is the menace in this? Where is the malice?”
“Maybe it’s malice by suggestion.”
“Do you suspect this is Angela again?”
“Angela is a bitch, but her meanness is almost boring. This is more sophisticated even if it’s in the same spirit.”
“What spirit?”
“Just doing something to someone because they’re there. Not for any special reason besides being a convenient target.”
“What if it’s a bad expression of a good intention?”
“What, an act of kindness?”
“Yeah. That almost makes more sense.”
Patty regards her boyfriend as if he was a well-meaning stranger. “That would be almost worse.”
“Why?”
“No one who’s not a little bit crazy will ever do a good deed for no reason. It’s too unhinged.”
Dale looks back at the surviving wording on the cake. “It kind of looks like there’s a reason. And I gotta say, if it is antagonistic it’s pretty clever.”
“How do you mean?”
“It’s like they know you. I don’t know what they’re asking you to ‘join’ but you’re not exactly overwhelmed with prosocial attitudes. I think you join things and quit them almost to make some kind of point.”
“I quit things for perfectly good reasons.”
“Let’s list them off then. Yearbook.”
“Sandy Pfeiffer kept putting pictures of herself in every free space.”
“Model UN.”
“They made me Switzerland.”
“JV basketball.”
“Jessica Greenberg kept calling us ‘r-worded.’”
“You can just say the word, neither of us are that upstanding.”
“No, that’s literally what she said. It drove me insane.”
“What about your lack of friend-groups?”
“What about my lack of friend-groups? Is that so offensive?”
“It’s … against the grain.”
“Your friend-group hardly sets an encouraging example.”
“Darren, Jerry, and Tim? That’s not really a friend-group. That’s more like a collective with a shared mission that we occasionally set aside our individual lives for.”
Patty let out a vibrant, tension-deflating laugh. “You watch one Chris Burden documentary and you think you’re a life-sculptor.”
“The point stands,” Dale says, waving her valid critique aside. “You’re a bit feral. I think that’s what people mean when they say someone is an ‘easy target.’ People stand out in a way that is compelling but also sort of disgusting. A lot of what counts as bullying comes from misunderstanding. Trying to arrive at the central fact of someone’s life in a rather ungenerous way.”
“Some would say that that disgust is coming from within.”
“Fair. It makes sense that someone like Angela would never hope to understand you. I would not be surprised if she didn’t understand herself, or even people she ‘likes.’ Someone, though …” Dale pauses to register something approaching disbelief. “Someone figured you out.”
“So … what, this torment you’re so casually describing is now over? We can all go home because I’ve been perfectly perceived?”
“I guess if you allow it.”
Patty relieves her face of a significant portion of keenness and, speaking in a much reduced register, asks Dale, “How would I go about doing that?”
“What if this isn’t a provocation? But an actual, well-meaning invitation? And for a well-founded reason?”
“Invitation?”
“From your secret admirer. Or admirers—plural.”
“I think I would need a little bit more to go on, Dale.”
“Well, sure … it’s the not that well thought out. But lots of grand gestures get fucked up in the execution. Everything is ugly outside of the movies. But consider this in earnest. People are reaching out to you.”
“They seem to be demanding about it. I’d think if someone was being well-intentioned they’d add ‘please’ to their message. Or a cute smiley face.”
“Maybe it cost too much.”
“Well what are we dealing with? Rude people or cheap people?”
“I know,” Dale says, “it’s hard to tell in a house that drinks skim milk.”
Patty rolls her eyes as she sinks her hand into the center of the cake, lifting the black rose up into her palm and smashing it onto Dale’s forehead leaving a mark like a frenzied Ash Wednesday cross.
Dale dips his finger on the formation on his head and tastes what comes off it.
“You know,” he says in droll irritation, “I was really looking forward to cutting into that.”