Amanda, though…Amanda gets my pain.
“Oh! Oh! Marie told me she was working on catalog modeling, but she never…Oh, God, Shannon. Josh is just going to have to take this one.”
“Josh is WHAT?” Josh screams. “Josh is right here and Josh is not driving a Limpmobile around town. Josh will never have sex again if he drives that!”
“Josh is talking about himself in third person,” Greg says slowly, like he’s dealing with a mental patient.
“The thought of parking the Limpmobile in my neighborhood in Jamaica Plain makes me do that, you…” Josh can’t seem to find an insult to hurl at Greg, his eyes skittering between the Turdmobile and the Limpmobile.
In desperation, we all look at car #3.
Wha-wha-wha.
The giant clawed thing on top is the color of rust and red. The actual car is wrapped with the logo for a famous crab shack, and if that was all, it would be fine.
But the industrial designer who created the two-foot-tall, seven-foot-long…thing…on top of the Smart car had created a masterpiece of a “crab.”
It’s like they took a baby crab, put it on the Island of Doctor Moreau, fed it nothing but water from Chernobyl, and for good measure handed it off to the Human Centipede dude.
“That looks like pubic lice,” Amanda says.
We all turn and look at her, mouths agape.
“We studied it in biology class!” she insists.
“Sure,” we three say in unison.
But she’s right. It looks like the angriest louse ever.
And matched with the store’s tagline: Bring our crabs home tonight and make him dance!
It just…shoot us now.
The three of us get the same idea at the exactly same time, and we run around the building to Greg’s car.
“Why do you get the cool car?” Amanda thunders. The cheerleader’s voice dissolves into Maleficent’s vibrant, threatening tones. My balls tighten. Wait—I don’t have balls. But if I did, they would tighten.
“That’s the car the president of the ad company wanted me to drive,” he says weakly.
I think even Chuckles is glaring from my apartment.
“Nuh uh. Nope. I am not driving any of those three cars!” Josh announces.
“My mother is on one of those!” I wail. “For a little pill that makes life harder.” Mom’s been holding out. I wonder why. She’s the type to crow about this kind of thing. Something serious is going on if she’s not screaming on the town common about how she’s now a “professional model.”
“You don’t have to drive that one,” Greg says.
“So I get to choose between the Turdmobile and the Crabmobile?” I whine.
“I am not driving that piece of crap!” Josh says.
“Which one?”
“Any of them except for yours, Greg!” Josh’s voice becomes a baritone, fierce and demanding, with a predator’s tone that makes all of us stop and stand a little taller, keenly aware of his manhood.
Josh is about as dominant as an umbrella, so this catches us all unaware. A light breeze pushes clouds in front of the sun and the sky darkens as if he’s beckoned some kind of evil force to do his bidding.
Something Wicked This Way Comes. And its name is Turdmobile.
“This is really cruel,” Amanda hisses. “Company car!” She snorts. Once you lose the chipper one, all hope is lost. Greg’s face reeks of defeat.
“I know,” he says as he sits on a picnic table under a tree, the one where all the smokers in the building congregate every hour. “I tried, but trust me—these conversations are taking place at the other three marketing eval companies. It’s a joke.”
“A joke?” Josh is so angry he sounds like he’s about to throw something.
“It’s some hyper-ironic campaign designed to drive people to the URLs. There isn’t a real chain of coffee shops, or that erection drug, or that crab restaurant. They’re fake.”
Hope springs eternal.
Chapter Five
“Wait, wait wait,” Josh says, now breathless. “This is a meta-advertising experiment? Like, we are pretending to advertise ridiculously stupid companies and their bullshit products for the sake of a buried advertising campaign to drive internet traffic for a viral campaign?”
Greg looks even more hangdog. “Yes.”
Amanda, Josh, and I widen our eyes and stare at the cars. My own gaze can’t break away from my mom’s face, contorted with pleasure as her man’s hand disappears below her waist and is obscured by a bunch of daisies.
Josh and Amanda put their heads together and whisper furiously. I’m just furious. I feel like I’m being lied to by my mom, and Greg, but most of all—
Which is worse? Driving a car I have to start with a screwdriver, or showing up for a date with Declan in a Turdmobile?
It’s not exactly a choice anyone ever thinks they’ll have to make.
“This is…” Josh says, standing up and touching the “coffee bean” on top of the car. His palm caresses it and I flinch. It looks like he’s loving on a piece of feces.
“This is,” he says again, withdrawing his hand and subconsciously wiping it on his hip, “…brilliant!”
“What?” Greg and I exclaim in unison.
“It’s so post-hipster! It’s like a neo-Warhol post-modern performance art show!” Josh claps his hands like a little kid whose just been told he’s going to Disneyland.
I stare dumbly at him. Greg shakes his head slowly and squints, like he’s not quite sure we’re in the correct dimension.
“A Warhol what?”
Josh waves his hand absent-mindedly and slings his arm around Amanda’s shoulders. “Which one is the worst?” he asks her.
“Crabs,” they all say simultaneously. Even Greg.
“But the Limpmobile is the worst for me,” I say in a tone that would put Veruca Salt to shame.
“Then I shall drive the Limpmobile!” Josh declares.
“I claim the Crabmobile!” Amanda shouts.
“And I get the turd,” I say quietly. “Coffee gets everything moving.”
“It’s a meme!” Amanda says, perky again.
“Huh?”
“You know,” she adds, giving me a look that says I’m being obtuse on purpose. But I’m not. I swear. I don’t get it. “You met Declan with your hand down a toilet. Now you’ll drive a Turdmobile. It’s…a meme.”