Helpless- A Lams Modern AU Fanfiction

Chapter Eight

John's Perspective

I stare down at the outfit that Peggy has forced me into. It's a mountain of blue fur, with giant purple blotches and paws with shiny white claws. I'm shaggy and oversized, and I'm not sure what I'm doing.

"Do I have to do this?" I whine, looking at the fake feet that she's dragged out of somewhere.

"Well, there is one more option, I guess." She walks over to the giant closet she's rifling through and pulls out another mountain of fur.

This one is actually much better. It's a pair of jeans that she's spray-painted blue and added daubs of purple paint to, combined with a furry jacket in a matching pattern. Peggy's attached plastic claws to purple Converse, and she's got a polka-dotted snapback hat with horns attached.

"Why did I agree to this again?" Probably one of the worst decisions I have ever made.
"For Marie and James. They wanted us all to dress up." Peggy jams the hat down over my curls. "Perfect!"

"What are you wearing?" Of course she'll have something perfect.
"I have to tie fake eyeballs to my head. Yours isn't that bad."
"Alex gets to be a cute lizard, and James is excited to be a one-eyed monster. Marie is losing her mind that she gets to be Boo. But I don't understand why we have to do this."

Peggy has pins in her mouth and a tape measure wrapped around her waist. She sticks the pins in her pin-cushion bracelet and glares at me from where she's pinning James' monster sweater. "John Laurens, you have to do this because you're making your siblings happy. It's Halloween, and they finally get a chance to be happy. So quit complaining before I stab you with these pins."

"Sheesh," I mutter under my breath. "Some people are so touchy."

Alex walks into the apartment, carrying a box of donuts, a coffee for himself, a hot chocolate for me, and some extremely complicated and fluffy coffee-like substance for Peggy. He sees the chaos and blanches.

There are bolts of fabric all over the floor, spools of thread and loose clippings littering the carpet. Peggy's thrown her scraps across the room and now it looks like a craft shop has just puked all over the rug.

"I hope you're enjoying yourself," Alex says sarcastically, looking on as Peggy uses a hot-glue gun to attach horns to a hat for James.
"Oh, I am," she says, not looking up. "Don't you love John's costume? I just finished it this morning."

Alex looks like he doesn't know what to say. "See, Peggy, I love the costume- but did you really need to make my apartment look like a disaster site?"
Peggy looks furious. "Hey, you can't have it both ways, muchacho. Either you buy costumes with no mess, or I make costumes and it's not sparkling clean. Capisce?"

She looks frazzled, her curls a halo of fluff above her head, eyes a little wild. We probably shouldn't have let her do this- making five Halloween costumes from scratch is a lot of stress. We're taking the kids trick or treating tonight.

See, because she's got her older sisters, Peggy has absorbed knowledge from their various exploits. She can change a tire, bake a layer cake, sew a prom dress, and hotwire anything from a plastic Batmobile to a Cadillac. She speaks Italian (one of Eliza's boyfriends) and can glue the heel back on a shoe in thirteen seconds. She's our most practical, absolutely insane friend.

"And...done!" Peggy drops her scissors on the ground and takes a bow. "I have sewn the last stitch on the last costume! And now, I'm going to drink my frappuccino and then take a nap before we trick or treat tonight."

She grabs her fluffy coffee drink and then collapses on the ugly corduroy couch. I perch on the counter next to Alex.
"Thanks for letting us hang out here," I say. "I would have suggested my house, but it's still kind of lonely without...her."
"Of course," Alex says, kissing the top of my head. "James and Marie are really sweet. They're in my room watching- what else? Monsters, Inc. Peggy, on the other hand, manages to make a disaster out of everything."

Peggy flings her arm up into the air, eyes still closed. "Just because I'm sleeping doesn't make me deaf, you know!"
"Go to sleep, Margarita," Alex says, tossing a balled-up chunk of fabric at her head.
"Don't call me Margarita," she says softly, then promptly begins to snore.

A few hours later, Peggy is awake and cooking dinner in the tiny kitchen. It's something she's composed entirely out of ingredients from Alex's fridge, which is sadly understocked. She's humming Monster Mash to herself, and keeps shaking her hips and adding salt to the frying pan full of stuff.

It's easy to forget she's only fifteen sometimes, but it's also easy to forget she's really fifteen.
Alex has changed into his costume already, and he's grinning. Peggy sprayed his jeans purple, and gave him a matching sweater, but she added scales in different shades of purple, blue, and dark green that she cut from shiny fabric. She made a hat for him, too, with Randall's weird tentacles reaching off of the top.

"What do you think?" He strikes a pose and then grins at me. I respond by giving him a kiss.
"Beautiful," I say, smiling. "At least you don't have to wear fur."

Peggy smacks a spoon against a plate. "Dinner is served," she cries, revealing plates full of pizza that she's decorated with pepperoni and olives to look like Jack o lanterns. I wonder if she's having more fun with this than my little brother and sister.

A thought suddenly occurs to Alex. "Peggy, what about the Halloween party? I thought you were in charge of that."
Peggy shrugs. "My sisters can put up streamers and fix their hair without me." She doesn't seem even remotely melancholy about the loss of party.

After dinner, the kids (Peggy included as a kid) go off to get changed. Marie emerges first, her hair up in little pigtails. Peggy's costume for her is almost like a tiny sleeping bag made of purple corduroy, complete with a zipper around her face. There are plastic eyeballs on pipe cleaners bouncing around the hood. Marie looks ecstatic, and she flings herself at me for a hug. "Johnny, look at me!"
"I see you, Rie. You look very nice. Did you say thank you to Peggy?"
"Tank you, Peggy," my little sister says, grinning and showing off her new gap-toothed smile.

James has a puffy green coat and jeans (Peggy must have bought a lot of spray paint) that are lime green. He has green Converse with claws glued to them, and he has gloves with plastic claws on them. He has a hat like Alex's and mine, with horns and a giant eyeball painted on it.

Then Peggy reenters the room, and I stare at her in disbelief. If our costumes are fabulous, hers is a work of art. She has purple leggings and a matching long-sleeve shirt, and she's sewn a shimmery emerald green dress and matching scarf out of silky fabric. Her hair is amazing.
She's made giant curls out of her hair and twisted purple yarn in four different shades into the curls. There are plastic snake heads (don't want to ask where those came from) attached at the bottoms.

"What do you think?" Peggy asks, bouncing a snakey curl. "I threw this one together at the last minute. I hope it doesn't look too bad."
"Bad?" Alex says. "That's incredible!"
"I don't know," she says dubiously. "It's not up to my usual standard."
"Is your usual standard, like, ballgowns or something?" I'm a little surprised as well.
"Yes, actually," Peggy says. "Now who wants to go trick or treating?"