Free Candy

Chapter Seventeen

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

“So you’re pretty confident about this tune? How about if we plug it into the sound system and fire it up for everyone to hear?” Gretchen asked as she grabbed the iPod out of Marie’s hand.

“Sure, go ahead,” Marie said as she looked around the bar. There’s wasn’t anyone else in the place anyway.

Gretchen unplugged her player and then pushed the jack into Marie’s iPod. She pushed play and the familiar music tracks blasted out of the speakers around the room. The three of them started nodding their heads to the beat, then Marie started singing along with herself.

“Found this rat, just left for dead. Gonna put some glass eyes in his head,” Marie sang as the other two just stared at her when they heard the lyrics.

“Entrails removed, replaced with chips. Gonna brush his hair, gonna paint his lips!” Marie shouted with her eyes closed.

Gretchen stopped the music and Marie’s eyelids popped open.

“What the hell is that?” Gretchen demanded.

Marie looked at Gretchen and then Sheila, who was laughing hysterically. “What? I think it’s catchy.”

“Oh, Suzi did it again didn’t she?” Gretchen asked.

“No, she couldn’t have. I thought the email come directly from  you,” Marie said to Gretchen.

“I never thought you girls would be so twisted,” Sheila said, just smiling.

Gretchen grabbed her laptop from under the bar and flipped it open, “Let me find the words that I had to work with.”

Suzi had a habit of writing everything in iambic pentameter or something close to it. She had already pulled this trick a couple of other times in the past six months. The other two women had decided to forward all the emails they got from Suzi to try to catch any duplicity, but somehow Suzi had fooled Marie. 

“That’s why she always writes in that damned sing-song rhythm. Anything that rhymes can get dropped into the melody,” Marie said waiting for Gretchen to find the email.

“OK, here’s what I got for the lyrics of the first verse. I’ve been shooting down stars, felling blue and red. Braid them in my hair, light up my lips. Gonna hang the best ones round my hips,” Gretchen read aloud.

“I can see where you might have mixed those up,” Sheila said laughing.

“We didn’t mix anything up,” Marie said. “She always wants to sing about taxidermy.”

“Stuffed rats, stuffed raccoons, bleached beaver heads, that kind of chicanery,” Gretchen told Sheila.

“Suzi sounds pretty cool. Is that what she does for a living?” Sheila asked.

“She’s a dentist, for the money,” Gretchen said.

“And an artist,” Marie pointed out. She has some stuffed iguanas and sparrows in one of the galleries downtown.” 

“Cool. Does she ever hang out down here?” Sheila asked.

Gretchen had known Suzi the longest and gave Sheila the story as far as she knew it. Suzi had been the only child of a Japanese-American couple. Her father was a dentist and he wanted her to take over his practice. Her mother was an artist and wanted her to study japanese art alongside her. Suzi tried to keep both her parents happy and became both things, in her own way.

Suzi managed to squeeze in an art degree as part of a double major as an undergrad, and qualify first in her class for acceptance into the dental school at the University of Washington. Needless to say, she didn’t have much free time until she was done with school, and now created as much free time as she could to make up for it. Suzi did take over her father’s dental practice, but stopped accepting new patients as soon as she started.