Chapter Text
A plan this important requires the best and brightest crew Louise Belcher can assemble. And that’s why, glancing around her crowded bedroom, she knows it’s going to take a miracle to pull this one off.
Tina, home for her final visit before she flies off to England, immediately nominated herself the official brainstorming secretary, and is jotting down their ideas in her favorite Clydesdale notebook. Gene holds up the new-to-him iPad he got for his last birthday so Nat can Zoom in. Jocelyn, her ankles swollen from six straight hours of salad prep and assembly at the Pesto’s place, is glad to relax in Louise’s desk chair, stroking her ever-expanding belly and sipping a can of ginger ale, hiccuping softly into her hand. Jessica and Rudy are in attendance too, but Louise is so mad at her best friends she can barely look at them.
“Okay. So,” Louise begins, giving her hands a light clap. “I’m calling the first meeting of Operation Vengeance to order.”
“Are we wedded to that name?” Tina glances at her sister over the rim of her thick glasses. It took her two days to drive from Chicago to Seymore’s Bay, her things stuffed in a rented minivan, and she’s giving her eyes a break from contacts.
“I like—The Revenge Society,” Gene says with a flourish.
Rudy nods approvingly. “Oh, that’s good!”
“How about the Sorority of Spite?” Tina suggests.
“People, please!” Louise glowers at them all. “Focus! According to our woman on the inside—“ she gestures to Jocelyn, “—Tammy’s graduation party is tomorrow night. That gives us just over 24 hours to plan this thing!”
“I’m due to pick them up at 17:30 hours, and return them at some time between 23:00-24:00 hours,” Nat says briskly. Though she seems to be at home on her couch, Nat’s still wearing her visor as usual, and a lavender shirt printed with little pink komodo dragons.
“And sunset is 7:30, but I don’t think we should start until 9:30-10:00 or so—“
Whatever Tina was going to say is cut off by a long, terrible, stomach-churning burp, the kind of burp everyone in the room can almost taste as well as smell. All eyes swivel to Jocelyn.
“Oh my God!” Jessica groans, pulling the collar of her t-shirt over her nose.
Rudy pulls out his inhaler but doesn’t take a puff yet.
“Excuse me, Tina. Sorry, everyone.” Jocelyn sighs, rubbing her round belly. She takes a sip of ginger ale, and stifles a tiny little aftershock hiccup. “Baby wanted garlic bread for lunch.”
“I’m not mad, I’m impressed,” Tina smiles. After living with Gene, she’s almost impossible to offend with bodily functions.
“Teach me your ways, woman!” Gene demands.
Louise groans and pinches the bridge of her nose. “You’re my friends and family and I love you but you’re terrible, you’re all terrible.”
“Alright, Bunny Girl has a point,” Nat says. “We have a lot to do and not much time in which to do it. My idea; we stick four hundred plastic forks in their lawn and break off the handles. It’ll take forever to pull them out.”
“And forever to stick them in,” Jessica counters. “You won’t have that much time—“
“And you’ll be out in the open for too long,” Rudy agrees.
Louise throws a dirty look at them both. Rudy, at least, has the decency to look abashed, but Jessica meets her gaze without a hint of shame. While they're willing to help plan this caper—even buy supplies if needed—they agreed that they can’t help with the execution.
“Louise, I have scholarships that could be revoked if I get a police record,” Jessica told her earlier in the week at lunch.
“Yeah, me too,” Rudy sighed. “I’m sorry. But we can help you plan!”
“Oh gee, thanks, that’s so generous of you!”
But ultimately, Louise had to take them up on their offer, as they all knew she would. Jessica and Rudy are her smartest friends, after all. Revenge is just too important to Louise—she can’t risk failing because she wouldn’t take every bit of the (totally lame and inadequate) help offered to her.
“Okay, a forked-up front lawn is a no-go,” Nat says cheerfully. “What’s next?”
“Where do you want to focus, Louise?” Tina asks her sister.
“And remember, non-destructive pranks only,” Gene adds with unusual firmness in his voice.
“I remember, jeez!”
In her calmer moments, Louise can understand Jessica and Rudy’s line of thought, though she doesn’t appreciate it. It’s her sibling’s condition for participation that really grinds her gears. They’re planning revenge for their mother, for crying out loud! Tammy gave Linda a heart attack…and made life harder for Louise and Zeke, but that’s not really the point. Their mother deserves the best, and her brother and sister are setting up barriers to success! So what if a little property is damaged in the process? Mom could have died! Still, Louise recognizes that she needs minions to execute her plan, even if Gene, of all people, is leading a coup against her stellar leadership.
“I’ll help on one condition,” he told her while he and Louise were Skyping with Tina, who was taking a break from packing the last of her things in Chicago.
“What’s it gonna cost me? Two or three buckets of Halloween candy?”
Gene shot her a dirty look. “We can’t damage any property.”
Louise stared at her brother in astonishment. Her siblings exchanged a cross-country glance, and Louise knew they’d already talked it over.
“I mean it. If we get arrested, Tina could loose her shot at Cambridge, and I’m not loosing my share of the security deposit for my new apartment.”
With Gene, this new, responsible large brother acting like a big brother for the first time in their lives, Louise found herself overruled.
“I want to focus on her car, with some pranking to the house.”
“Like, why the house?”
“Because, Jocelyn, they raised her to be an asshole!” Also, Louise wants Tammy to watch her parents suffer and know it’s all her—Tammy’s—fault.
“Oh. Okay. But they have a security system, there’s a sign out front.”
“Fake!” Nat calls out cheerfully from the iPad. “I did a little recon last night. Took some pictures. I Googled the company, and RealTech Security is a hoax. They have a couple of motion detector lights out front and in the back yard, but they’re only useful if someone sees us. No cameras or laser rifles; I checked.”
Louise grins. “Well, that’s good news.”
“But won’t the neighbors see us?” Gene asks.
“They live on one of those culled-the-sack thingies, so they don’t have a lot of neighbors. The old lady who lives across from them is, like, dead, so the house is empty,” Jocelyn drawls. “The one next door with the totally cute son is on vacation in Florida—Tammy’s super jelly and stuff.”
“Wow, nice investigation, Val Girl,” Nat nods approvingly.
“Tammy’s been a real b-word to Jocelyn for eons,” Louise says, both pleased and surprised by Jocelyn’s thoroughness.
“Yeah, and she’s been a total bitch too,” Jocelyn adds with a garlic-scented hiccup.
A pained silence, while everyone else mentally facepalms.
Tina taps her pen against the notebook on her lap. “So. You really don’t think we should wait until late at night?”
Nat shakes her head. “We’ll be cutting it close, but the motion detection lights will go off and wake them up if you wait, and their neighbor will be home too. You don’t want to miss a chance to go mattress dumping.”
Tina raises her brows. “Mattress dumping?”
“Mattress dumping!. See, you take a mattress—I recommend a king size, preferably one of the old ones stuffed with cotton, not polyester—and you push it into their pool. It becomes waterlogged, and it’ll take a crane to pull that thing out!”
Louise is all but bouncing on her toes in excitement.
Gene, however, is skeptical. “Where do we get a mattress? I don’t want to go to the Sofa Queen—“
“The dump!” Nat and Louise shout in unison.
“Sh!”
“Oh yeah, right,” Louise hisses from behind her hands. True, their parents are down in the restaurant, but, as Tammy herself once observed, some of the walls of their apartment are almost literally made of paper.
“How are you going to get it to the back yard? You can’t just pull up a van to their front door and unload it,” Jess points out.
Louise glowers at her; if she isn’t willing to help, the least she can do is keep her damn negativity to herself. Still, Jessica has a point, and everyone in the room knows it.
Her gaze travels to the lineup of bunny ears from years past hanging on her wall. Not for the first time in the past couple of months, she’s tempted to pull a pair down and stick it on her head. Linda, in a wave of nostalgia, took advantage of a fabulous deal Reflections was running on framing objects, and had all three of Louise’s bunny ear hats encased in glass. Inspired by Rudy’s bar mitzvah, Louise began weaning herself off her ears when she was thirteen, though it took her a year to do it; the little silver bunny pendant her father bought her for her birthday that year helped. Geez, I haven’t thought of that thing in years.
Surprisingly, it’s Jocelyn of all people who figures out the solution to their current problem.
“Why not talk to Legolas and see if he’ll help? Their backyards are butted up against each other.”
“Leg—you mean, Logan?” Tina frowns.
“Sure. Tammy’s family moved in behind them, like, late last year. She’s been trying to hook up with him since they met at the faire.”
Everyone except Nat turns to Louise, who sighs and pinches her nose in frustration. “Great. Just great.”
“What is it, Bunny Girl?”
“They’re friends,” Gene answers.
“We’re friendly!”
“He liked your last selfie.”
“I was horsing around with baby carrots stuck up my nose!”
Tina eyes her pink-cheeked baby sister. “Well, he’s your…whatever…and you’re leading this thing, so if anyone should ask…”
Louise sighs deeply. “Fine. I’ll talk to him. But—wait, okay, I love the mattress dumping, but what about her car? Someone has to wrap her car in Saran-Wrap.”
Nobody misses the way she growls the last word. It’s no secret that Louise is desperate for her own wheels, deeply envious of anyone who has their own, and is convinced Tammy doesn’t deserve the shiny new Kia her parents bought her for graduation.
“I’m enlisting a little help,” Nat says. “You’ll split into two groups. Team one dumps the mattress; team two wraps the car in cling wrap. Mild vandalism, maybe a little bit of littering, but nothing is actually damaged. You should be able to accomplish everything in twenty minutes.”
“If you can get that Logan guy’s cooperation,” Rudy frowns.
“Don’t worry, I’ve got this,” Louise smiles with more confidence than she feels.
* * * * *
After feeding everyone burgers on the house—even Jess and Rudy, though they don’t deserve them—Louise finally makes it back up to her room. She pulls out her jewelry box, yet another gift from Zeke. It’s covered with chocolate brown leather that’s been twisted to form a grumpy goblin-like face, complete with yellow eyes staring up at her. He gave it to her through Mudflap their first Valentine’s Day, with a little note identifying it as a Grinchel. It’s so ugly and creepy it’s kind of cute, and Louise loves it as much as the jewelry inside—no dragon admires its mountain of gold and gems more than Louise Belcher gloats over her small collection of trinkets. Grinchel guards only her best things, most of which are presents from Zeke.
Besides the gold hoop earrings she wears every day, the box is home to her THC molecule necklace, as well as a trio of gold nose studs and a gold anklet, all from Zeke, all flashy and expensive, and she feels like an empress just looking at them. There’s the silver earrings Al and Gloria presented her with for…something, and of course the bunny pendant, a bit tarnished, still in its velvet box in the corner. She takes it out, cleans it up, and puts it on.
Staring at her phone, Louise contemplates the inevitable. Jocelyn, she decides, is right; a quick Google maps check verifies that the Larson and Bush back yards are almost in perfect alignment with each other, separated only by a strip of public property. If Dingleberry’s willing to go for it, taking the mattress through his yard really is the best idea she can think of, at least, on such short notice.
She opens her phone and checks her Facebook page. Louise spends little personal time on social media, since maintaining the restaurant’s online presence requires so much attention. She was astonished when, a few days after they played basketball together, Logan pinged her with a friend request on her Facebook account. She was even more astonished when, a few days later, she accepted.
Louise isn’t sure if Logan has her filtered or if he also rarely updates, but she’s seen few posts from him. Mostly selfies (of course), check-ins at bars, a meme or two, stuff like that. Then, three weeks ago, a brief announcement that his mother entered inpatient hospice care. Louise sent him a condolence message that he didn’t answer. Last week he announced his mother’s death, and a few days later, posted a link to Cynthia Bush’s obituary. Since his phone number is listed on his info page, Louise left him a voicemail, but she’s not surprised he hasn’t answered, all things considered.
Louise takes a breath, scrolls through her contacts, and finds his number. Good think he posted it, she thinks to herself. There’s no way in hell she could make a request like this through Messenger.
Logan answers on the third ring. “What do you want, Four-Ears?”
“Hello to you too, Dingleberry.”
“Pleasantries aside, thanks for…well, sorry I didn’t get back to you. Lots to do here. You know.”
“Yeah.” God, this is such bad timing! She begins to nervously play with the pendant, running her thumb along the ears. “Uh, how’s everything going?”
“Oh, just great!” Logan takes a breath. “Sorry. Dad left for Montana yesterday.”
“Montana?”
“Yeah, he grew up there. Aunt Nettie inherited the ranch. He’s riding horses and fishing and whatever.”
“Huh.” Louise digests this information, trying not to let excitement creep into her voice; at least they won’t have to work around Tom Bush. “I wouldn’t have taken him for the outdoorsy type.”
“I know, right? Anyway, he’s out there doing that, and I’m house sitting. Looking for my own place. Prepping for an interview with Devereaux Hospital.”
“Oh. Well. Good luck.”
“I make my own good luck,” he says with such palpable smugness she wants to reach through the phone and smack him. “Glad you called, actually.”
“You are?”
“Yeah, I felt shitty for not getting back to you, and this spares me the trouble. So, what do you want?”
“What do I want?” Louise laughs a little, preparing herself for combat. “Logan, Logan, Logan! I’m calling to do you a favor, not the other way around.”
“Oh really? And what do you plan to do for me?”
“I thought—no, you probably wouldn’t be up for it.”
“Come off it, Four-Ears.”
“Well, see, I’ve been cooking up this plan—“
“Yeah?”
“And I’d like to extend to you a personal invitation to help execute it.”
“As one friend to another?”
Louise closes her eyes and sighs: Oh, what the hell! “Sure, buddy.”
Logan bursts out laughing. “I knew I’d make you admit it in the end!”
Resisting the urge to throw her phone at the wall, Louise paints a strained smile on her face, because she knows people can hear a smile. “Yeah, you win. Hurray for you. Do you want to hear my fabulous plan or not?”
“Lay it on me, Four-Ears.”