Serpent Mound - 7. Free Day

The bugle sounding reveille went off at 6 am as usual, but today was Saturday. Not only was it Saturday, but Bernie and his friends had no sporting meets, kitchen duty or other assignments. It was a completely free day with which they could do as they pleased.

Free days were not plentiful, but they occurred often enough that Bernie’s group had developed a system. They took turns deciding what to do as a group with their free day, and today was Manny’s turn. For the last few weeks, Manny would tell anybody who would listen about his girlfriend who works in the mall in Cumberland, so of course Manny was going to choose to spend their free day hanging out at the mall.

Bernie, Joe, and the others didn’t mind, even though it mostly meant that Manny would be hanging out with his girlfriend all day instead of doing things with the rest of them. The mall was fun and air-conditioned. There were places to eat, and if they got tired of walking around after a while, there was a movie theater.

The only challenge in Manny’s plan was in how to get there, but Bernie was pretty good at convincing the lunch ladies, Rodney and Marcus, to do whatever he needed.

The five boys sat at their table for breakfast with their heads together, whispering their plan.

“Rodney’s already driven us places three times,” Joe said, “Marcus has only driven us once. We need to spread it out so neither of them get sick of doing us these favors.”

“Agreed,” Bernie replied, eyeing the two men cheerfully dishing out French toast with bacon and fruit to the sleepy Cadets. “Marcus is at his most vulnerable during his coffee and cigar break in the mid-morning, and his beer and cigar break in the mid-afternoon. The breakfast line is dying down now, and except for a few stragglers, most everyone will be served in the next ten minutes, and then Marcus is going to sneak out back for his break. That’s our cue to move in for the attack.”

“Jeez, Bernie,” George said, “Remind me to stay on your good side.”

“Hey, I like Rodney and Marcus!” Bernie exclaimed with a grin, “I just happen to know everybody’s routines around here and know who’s most likely to cave to a bunch of puppy dog eyes.”

The boys laughed and practiced their puppy dog eyes on each other for the next ten minutes until they felt they had them right, and Bernie saw Marcus leave the front line and grab his big coffee mug with the bear painted on the side, and the words, “Bearly Awake.”

“It’s time,” Bernie whispered to the others, “Let’s go.”

The boys cleared their trays and then scurried out the door and around to the back of the cafeteria. Sure enough, Marcus was leaning against the wall with his coffee in one hand, and a big cigar in the other. He held the cigar up to his lips and inhaled deeply, causing the end to glow bright red and the white ash to grow. As Marcus exhaled the smoke, he turned a suspicious eye toward the five boys who approached him from the side.

“Ah, gods,” Marcus groaned. “Is it a free Saturday again so soon? I’m going to have to talk to the Staff Sergeant about giving you five more work to do on the weekends.”

“Aw, Marcus,” Bernie said, looking up and the big man with wide glistening eyes, “We just want to have a little fun on our day off. You remember what it was like being a teenager, right?”

“Vaguely,” Marcus replied, “But I was more concerned about not catching the Black Plague than having fun.”

Joe laughed, seeming to get a joke that went over the heads of the other four boys.

“All we need is a ride to the mall,” Bernie said. “It’s just fifteen minutes away. Please Marcus?”

“And then I suppose you’ll want a ride back again when you’re done,” Marcus said skeptically, “And I’m supposed to overlook that I’m letting a bunch of minors run around unsupervised.”

“Come on,” Joe said, “We’re all seventeen-years-old. We’re not going to get into any trouble, we just want to hang out at the mall and maybe see a movie, and Manny wants to see his girlfriend.”

“Girlfriend?” Marcus asked in surprise, “Now I know you lot need more chores if you have enough time on your hands to find girlfriends!”

“We haven’t officially been on a date or anything,” Manny replied, blushing and looking at his feet, “She works at the Piercing Pagoda at the mall, and she likes it when I come and hang out with her because it’s boring. There’s not that many people in Cumberland, Maryland who need to get their ears or whatever else pierced on a Saturday morning.”

“Before I agree to anything,” Marcus said seriously, staring at Manny and taking a big draw from his cigar, “Have you fucked this girl yet?”

“What?” Manny exclaimed, turning bright red, “No! I mean, we kissed one time when we split an Auntie Anne’s pretzel, but that’s it! I’m trying to get to know her, not fuck her, Marcus! Jeez!”

“Okay, okay,” Marcus said with a chuckle. “You passed the ‘honorable intentions’ test. But, I still think I should have a word with Gary or Bill before I take you off-campus.”

As if on-cue, Staff Sergeant Bill appeared farther down the sidewalk, heading their way on his morning run. He was still wearing his short shorts, but today he had shed his shirt, and as he grew close, Bernie could see the sweat glistening in his thick blonde chest hair as his powerful muscles heaved with his breathing. As he jogged by, he nodded his head at the group standing behind the cafeteria.

“Cadets,” he said nodding in their direction before turning to the older man and giving him a wink.

“Marcus,” the Staff Sergeant said with a sly grin, and in a flash, he was past the group, Marcus and Bernie watching his muscular butt as it bounced with each step under his thin, skimpy shorts.

“Damn,” Marcus muttered out loud, “I want to take that cocky Cub by the scruff of his neck and hold him face-down while I fuck that muscle ass of his so hard he won’t be able to sit for a week!”

Marcus suddenly remembered that he wasn’t alone and looked down at the faces of five boys who stared back up at him with their mouths hanging open in shock.

“Shit!” Marcus mumbled, “You aren’t going to mention that to Gary or Bill, are you?”

The boys just continued to stare slack-jawed at him.

“Fuck it,” Marcus replied with a sigh. “Let’s get in the van and get you guys to the mall.”

****

Joe, Bernie, Manny, George, and Peter walked in a single line, naturally in step with each other, through the center atrium of the Country Club Mall. There weren’t a lot of people there yet at that time of the morning on a Saturday, but it would soon be filling up with shoppers and teens looking for something to do. Their day uniforms made them conspicuous, and the store managers and bevy of senior-citizens who were finishing their morning mall-walking exercise routines eyed them suspiciously.

The uniforms marked them as Cadets at the nearby Academy, so it was almost as if everyone already knew their history. They wouldn’t be at the Academy unless they had problems in their past, either emotional or academic, and for many, that included a fair share of violence and troublemaking.

However, the locals also had quickly come to know Gary and his staff, and they understood the rigorous training that the boys were put through to turn them into respectable men, and they knew that by coming to the mall on a Saturday in uniform, they would be doing nothing to bring dishonor upon their Headmaster or their Academy.

Manny led the others through the center of the mall until he reached the kiosk where his girlfriend Jenna was working. She looked up from her phone, and a smile broke out on her face as she saw Manny leading the four other uniformed Cadets to her stand.

“Manny!” Jenna exclaimed, dropping her phone, and running over to give him a hug, “Are you off today? Can you hang out with me while I work?”

“I sure can,” Manny said, hugging her back with a grin. “We don’t have to be back until dinnertime, but since we need to call one of the cafeteria guys to come and pick us up, we’ll have to head out about a half hour before dinner so he can get back in time.”

Bernie hadn’t thought about Manny’s looks much before today, he just thought of him as his friend. But now, as he stood holding the girl in his arms, looking down at her from his nearly six-foot height, he realized that Manny was a seriously good-looking guy, and Jenna was a very pretty girl. They made quite a couple.

“So, this is the famous girlfriend?” Joe said, teasing a bit, “None of us were quite sure that you were real. It’s nice to see that you aren’t a figment of Manny’s imagination!”

Jenna blushed and pushed herself away from Manny just a bit.

“Well, he needs to take me out on a date sometime, if I’m officially his girlfriend,” she replied. “But I know that the Academy keeps you guys busy.”

“Manny, you just need to talk to Gary,” Bernie piped in. “If you tell him you need to go off-campus for a date, he’ll let you do it.”

“You think he will?” Manny asked, taking Jenna by the hand.

“Sure,” Bernie replied, “I’ll bet that he’d let you off next Friday or Saturday night so you could go and do something.”

Manny looked back at Jenna.

“Would you really want to go out on a date with me?” he asked.

“Of course, you big idiot!” she exclaimed. “I’ve just been waiting for you to ask!”

Manny grinned and leaned down. Jenna picked up on his cue and turned her head towards him and closed her eyes. Manny gave her a big kiss right there in the middle of the mall with his best friends and the whole world watching.

After he broke the kiss, he turned back to the guys.

“Ok, you lot,” he said to the four, “Go find something to do. Jenna has work to do, and I’m keeping her company.”

So, the four single Cadets wandered the mall while Manny and Jenna returned to her station at the Piercing Pagoda.

“Piercing is something you just have to do once, right?” Peter asked. “I mean, how many people in Cumberland need to come to the mall on a Saturday to get their ears pierced.”

“A lot of people get multiple piercings in their ears,” Joe commented, “I saw this chick on TV once, and I swear she must have had fifteen earrings in each ear.”

“I wonder if Jenna has to pierce anything else besides ears?” George asked next. “Like, what if somebody wants to get their belly-button pierced?”

“Belly buttons, I’d bet she’d do there,” Joe said, “I think I saw a selection of belly ring jewelry for sale in her booth. She’ll probably do eyebrows and noses too.”

“I don’t think she’d go any farther ‘south of the border’ than the belly button, though,” Bernie stated. “There’s some stuff you just can’t do right out in the middle of the mall.”

“Wait,” Peter said, “What do people get pierced ‘south of the border?’”

Joe and George busted up laughing, so hard that they had to stop walking.

“What?” Peter asked. “Tell me.”

Bernie rolled his eyes and turned a bit pink.

“Peter,” Bernie said, “Some people get their… you know… wieners pierced.”

“What?” Peter exclaimed, “What part of the wiener, and for the love of God, why?”

“Dude, I’m no expert on genital piercings,” Bernie replied, “But I’ve seen some stuff. One of my foster dads before I came here liked to walk around the house naked, and he had his wiener pierced.”

“You’re shitting me,” Joe said, recovered from his laughing fit.

“Nope,” Bernie said, matter-of-factly, “Not shitting you. He was pierced right on the underside of the head of his dick. He wore this thick ring in it he called a curved barbell, so it wasn’t a solid ring, but had silver beads on each end of it, and it was curved almost into a circle with a little gap in between the beads. When he’d put it in, he’d take one of the beads off and stick the end in his… pee-hole. Then, the end would come out of the pierced hole on the underside, and he’d screw the silver bead back in place to keep it from falling out.”

“Jee-zus!” George said. “He did all that right in front of you? How old were you?”

“I guess I was ten with I lived with him for a while,” Bernie replied.

“How the fuck did he take a piss with a big silver ring blocking up the pee-hole?” Joe asked.

“Not very easy,” Bernie said, “He mostly sprayed the whole area around the toilet. It was my chore to clean the bathroom every day, and I was constantly wiping up his piss splatters. His wife was always screaming at him to sit down to pee, and he’d yell back that he wasn’t going to sit to take a piss like a fucking woman.”

“Dude, that sucks,” Joe said. “Did he tell you why he pierced it in the first place?”

“Yeah,” Bernie said, looking at the ground, “He and his wife had sex… a lot. Every day, really loud. He told me the ring made his dick extra sensitive, so it felt even better when he… came.”

“He told all that to a fucking ten-year-old?” Peter said, “What a perv! No wonder you didn’t end up staying with him.”

“Oh, that wasn’t the reason I had to stop living with them,” Bernie said. “They kicked me out and sent me back to Children’s Services because there was an… accident… and I got blamed for it.”

“What kind of accident?” Joe asked, cautiously.

“Well,” Bernie replied, “Less of an accident and more of a mean prank. Everybody thought I did it, but I swore it wasn’t me. Nobody ever believed me, though.”

“What was the prank?” Joe pressed. “We’re your friends. You can tell us.”

Bernie sighed and looked around to see if anybody could be listening, and he motioned for the other guys to sit in a group of chairs in the middle of the mall.

“One night, there was a fire in the kitchen,” Bernie began after they were all sitting and leaning in close to hear what he had to say. “It wasn’t a really big fire. Somebody shoved a dish towel into the toaster and cranked the darkness setting up to 10. So, the towel caught on fire, and it made a lot of smoke, and the smoke alarms went off all over the house.”

“That’s it?” Joe asked, “Somebody burned a towel in the toaster?”

“No, that was just part of it,” Bernie continued. “The other part of the prank was on my foster dad, specifically. Before whoever it was set the towel on fire, they went into my foster parents’ bedroom, and they tied one end of a string around the ring in the piercing in the head of his dick. Then, they tied the other end to the bedpost, really tight.”

“Are you saying…” George began.

Bernie nodded.

“When the smoke alarms went off, my foster dad jumped out of bed and started running to the kitchen. He only made it a few feet before he got to the end of the string, but he was already moving fast. When the string went tight, it ripped the ring right out of the end of his dick. Instead of having a pee-hole and a pierced hole on the underside, he just had one big, long ripped-open hole that bled. It bled a lot, and he screamed and yelled like he was dying. His wife had to call the fire department for the towel burning in the toaster and an ambulance to take him to the hospital and get his torn wiener sewed back up again.”

The three boys stared at Bernie with their mouths hanging open. Finally, Joe’s mouth snapped shut and he took in a big breath.

“Dude… that is… epic! What a way to get back at an asshole foster dad!”

“I told you,” Bernie exclaimed, “It wasn’t me; I swear!”

“Oookaay,” Joe replied. “We believe you, then. But just in case, remind me to never piss you off.”

Bernie frowned but understood the need to let it go for now. He knew that it was the white mist which caused the accident with his foster dad, but it took someone very special like Gary or the Staff Sergeant to believe in the unexplainable. He hadn’t seen the white mist for months now, not since that first day at the pond, and when Bernie had fought back by grabbing the Staff Sergeant’s hand and pulling him back up, it had disappeared and had not been seen again. That was probably for the best.

George sensed that Bernie was uncomfortable with the way they had left the conversation and stepped in to change the subject.

“Hey guys, the new move in that big horror series is out now! ‘The Petrifying Part 7’! There’s a matinee that starts in just fifteen minutes. Let’s get some movie snacks and go in and see it!”

“Good idea, George,” Joe replied. “I remember I was just eight when ‘The Petrifying Part 3’ came out, and my older brothers helped me sneak into the theater to see it with them. It was fun but really scary! When the ghost popped out from the mirror and melted the woman’s face, I screamed like wuss, and hid under my brother’s coats for the next ten minutes. They had to coax me out with a box of Milk Duds.”

“Well then,” Peter said, “We’d better stock up on Milk Duds before the movie starts just in case Baby Joe gets scared again!”

The four boys laughed, and Joe chased Peter around the theater lobby as if he was going to give him a beating. None of them paid any attention to the white mist that drifted down from the mall’s skylight and followed them into the cinema.

“Seriously, though,” Joe said, as they found seats in the middle of the mostly empty theater, “These movies stopped being really scary after Part 4. I’ll bet you a week’s worth of kitchen duty that nothing scares me at all in the next two hours!”