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"Ugh!" Joseph groaned upon entering Stand Elementary School. Despite the poncho and umbrella set, he was dripping wet. "Today is the absolute pits!" he declared, throwing open the door to his classroom.
"Hey, you're splashing water over me!" His fellow student and begrudging friend, Lisa Lisa, whined.
"Don't bother with him," Caesar snorted, in the middle of taking off his own raincoat, "You know how dogs are like in the rain."
"Hey!" Joseph shot back, "Are you implying I'm a dog?!"
"Ugh, gross, now you're dripping over me. And I wasn't implying it, I was -- "
"Caesar, I'm pretty sure you're thinking of cats, not dogs," the fourth and final member of their lunch-and-study group pointed out. Suzie smiled, tossing two towels over to the boys, and opened her practice book, "I mean, my grandpa's dog loves the rain."
"Oh," Caesar sighed, "Right." He pulled off his boots and began drying his hair.
"Well it's definitely raining cats and dogs," Joseph whined. He took off his poncho and boots, wiping only his hands and face before slipping into his seat which was behind Lisa Lisa and to the right of Suzie.
"Jojo, your hair is dripping over your binder," Lisa Lisa warned, rescuing said article.
"I don't care," Joseph insisted, burying his face in his arms.
"The dummy probably forgot we had homework due today," Caesar sniped.
"I'm sure he didn't," Suzie reasoned, right as Joseph sat up, exclaiming:
"We had homework over the weekend?! Argh, I take it back, this is genuinely the worst day of my life!" He scrambled out of his seat and got on his knees before Suzie, "Oh Suzie, you're the prettiest, did I tell you that your hair is like liquid gold... please please please let me copy your homework!"
"Jojo!" Lisa Lisa growled, "Don't you take advantage of her! You know what the punishment for cheating is."
"It's okay," Suzie smiled. She pulled out her own binder.
"Oh thank you Suzie!" Joseph proclaimed, bowing in an exaggerated fashion, "Thank you, thank you, thank you."
"You better copy it fast," Caesar recommended. Unlike his friends, he had been keeping an eye on the hallway. "Because it looks like Mr. Wham is coming in."
"Nooooo..." Joseph cried, scrambling for pencil and paper.
Joseph was saved from an imminent zero however, because when their teacher entered the classroom, he was not alone.
"Happy Monday, boys and girls," Mr. Wham said, as he did every Monday.
Happy Monday Mr. Wham, the twenty-odd students normally chorused. Joseph normally rolled his eyes at this point, but even he was stuck staring at the new face.
"Children," Mr. Wham sighed, tapping his left foot, "When someone tells you 'happy Monday', what do you say to them?"
"Happy Monday, Mr. Wham!" the boys and girls said as one.
Looking for an opportunity to delay the homework, Joseph shot his hand up.
Against his better judgement, Mr. Wham called on him.
"What is it, Joseph?"
"Who is that?" Joseph blurted out.
"Joseph! What have I told you about pointing?" Mr. Wham chastised (Caesar snickered, Lisa Lisa groaned, and Suzie laughed nervously).
"Sorry Mr. Wham," Joseph sing-songed.
"Regarding our guest, this is Mr. Brando. He is a lawyer and his services have been recommended to us in these trying times."
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Mr. Brando didn't look like any of the lawyers the children saw in books and magazines, that much was certain. Those lawyers tended to be soft-spoken types dressed in finely-tailored suits. They had uncomfortable-looking ties and shoes and were more often than not found buried under a mountain of court papers. When they were outside, they were always seen to carry a briefcase, and most of them wore glasses.
Mr. Brando, by contrast, was decked in a garishly yellow jumpsuit and blazer combination. He was the same height, if not slightly taller, than Mr. Wham, who was an absolute giant by normal person standards, and his muscles could be seen stretching through his tight black undershirt, the bottom edge of which could be seen through his pants.
"What is that thing on his back?" Suzie whispered to Caesar.
The four of them were eating lunch together, as they did every school day. Sure enough, Mr. Brando's introduction to the classroom and Joseph's subsequent stream of questions meant that Mr. Wham had completely forgotten about the vocabulary weekend assignment. The other kids in the classroom, some of which had probably forgotten to do their homework as well, seized on the opportunity and started volleying their own lawyer-related questions as well.
"I... think it's a cape?" Caesar responded uncertainly.
"Yeah, it's a cape," Lisa Lisa confirmed, sipping her apple juice. "No clue why he's wearing it though."
"Who cares about the cape!" Joseph exclaimed, "Have you see his accessories?! He's wearing a tiara with a heart on it for crying out loud!"
Lisa Lisa and Suzie paled. Caesar glanced up and blanched too.
"What's with the sour faces?" Joseph continued, "You know I'm right! I haven't seen anything like that since the -- "
"Jojo," Caesar hissed, "Shut it." His eyes darted warily to the back, where Mr. Brando was having lunch with the school principal, Mr. Kars.
"Oh," Joseph said, turning back and snapping his fingers, "So that's why you guys were whispering. Smart."
"It's not a tiara, for your information," Lisa Lisa added. "It's a hairband. They used to be really popular."
"For girls," Joseph clarified.
"Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth," Caesae finished. The two of them high-fived.
"But what about those things on his knees? And the one on his belt?" Suzie asked. Sure enough, Mr. Brando had four hearts on his body: one on his forehead, one on his belt, and one of each knee. The hearts were bright green and had the same amount of saturation as his bright yellow suit.
"Okay," Lisa Lisa admitted, "I don't know about those. I've never seen belts or knee guards with those kind of hearts."
"It's just a fashion choice," Caesar reasoned, "Nice job for distracting Mr. Wham by the way."
"You didn't do your homework either, huh?" Joseph grinned.
"Of course not," Caesar shrugged, "But unlike you, I figured that I'd either get a zero or do it over lunch." And with that, he cleared his plate and pulled out his binder, getting to work.
"Boys, seriously!" Lisa Lisa sighed. She turned to Suzie for solidarity and saw that the other girl was also working on the vocabulary. "Suzie! Really?"
"Sorry Lisa Lisa!" Suzie apologized, sticking out her tongue. "It turns out I did the wrong assignment!"
Lisa Lisa sighed, resigned once more to helping her friend's with their assignments. In the middle of explaining a particularly basic antonym-synonym set, for whatever reason, she glanced over at the teacher's table. Mr. Brando was sipping from a glass filled with dark red liquid. He didn't have anything else before him, and was engaged in conversation with Principal Kars. He must have felt her gaze then, as he turned around and smiled at her. Lisa Lisa smiled weakly back before ducking her head down.
"Is something wrong?" Suzie asked, noting her friend's odd behavior.
"No, nothing," Lisa Lisa answered, pointing to the next word, "Now what's the antonym of this one?"
She didn't want to worry Suzie and she knew that Joseph and Caesar would just laugh at her, but for some reason, Mr. Brando gave her a strange sense of foreboding. It wasn't normal for people to have fangs, after all. It was just the weather, she rationalized to herself, drinking the rest of her juice.
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"It's still raining?" Joseph complained, after the bell signalling the end of the school day had rung and the four of them were heading home.
"What do you have against the rain?" Lisa Lisa retorted.
"I like the rain!" Suzie grinned, mucking about happily in a puddle. "It makes the plants so happy!"
"This much of it is pretty unusual though," Caesar remarked, "Especially in July."
"What?" Joseph snorted, leaping into a puddle and splattering his friends, "Are you gonna be a weatherman when you grow up?"
"Oh gross, now there's mud on my coat..."
"Joseph!"
"Hey, come back here you...!" Lisa Lisa demanded. Joseph only cackled wildly, quickly running off. She chased him to the crossroads and shrieked loudly when he leaped out at her from behind a corner.
"You're the worst!" she spat, as Suzie and Caesar came running.
"Aw, c'mon, Lisa Lisa," Joseph grinned, leaning back and bouncing on his heels, "It's all in good fun, right?"
"Keep in mind that it's because of you that Mr. Brando is here at all," Caesar grumbled.
"Hey! What are you implying?"
"You know what I'm implying!" his friend retorted. "If you had never dive-bombed your model-controlled airplane into Rudolf's scale model volcano..."
"Rudolf is a nerd," Joseph sneered, "Always going on about science this, science that."
"Well the explosion was definitely scientific," Suzie grinned.
"Attagirl Suzie," Joseph preened. The two of them high-fived. "So I was just helping him along, see?"
"By setting the cafeteria and theatre on fire?"
"Hey it was an accident! Look, Grandma already gave me the talking-to of my life, I'm going to be grounded until the sun collapses on itself and eats the earth up in a black hole, do you really need me to feel worse?"
"It doesn't look like you're feeling bad at all," Caesar griped, rolling his eyes.
"It's not that bad," Suzie reasoned, "I mean, the damage is covered by insurance, right?"
"That is why Mr. Brando is here, yes," Lisa Lisa agreed.
"So we'll get a brand-new cafeteria and theater, probably with surround-sound courtesy of myself, truly." Joseph had the nerve to bow. "You're very welcome."
"But until then we'll have to eat underneath the tarp," Caesar interjected.
"How bad can it be?" Suzie reasoned, "After all, it's not like it'll rain all week, right?"
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Despite it being July, the rain continued. A week later, and it was still there.
"You should have knocked on wood..." Joseph griped. He had perfected the art of shirking his wet garments in record time.
"It's been raining for a week now, you think the sky would've run out of water..." he muttered, wringing out his hair.
"I'm not even going to justify that with a comment."
"Hey! No one was talking to you, Caesar!"
"It's definitely a shame," Suzie sighed, "At this rate, Mr. Brando will never see our school in the sun!"
"You think he'd be done by now," Joseph sighed, "I mean, it's like he's practically living in the old cafeteria!"
"You think he wants to be here?" Caesar scoffed, "Get real. The guy is a lawyer. He's probably got a penthouse on the West End, like all the other lawyers."
"Wait, wait, wait," Lisa Lisa started, holding up her hands. "Run that by me again?"
"The penthouse?"
"No, before that."
"Mr. Brando living in the cafeteria?"
"No, no, before that!"
There was a pause as the other three tried to backtrack accordingly. Finally, Suzie clapped her hands together.
"Oh! You mean, when I was talking about how Mr. Brando would probably leave before seeing the sun?"
"Yes!" Lisa Lisa exclaimed, clapping her hands as well. Unfortunately, the bell for class to begin rang and Mr. Wham stepped into the classroom. In between the 'Happy Wednesday children / Happy Wednesday Mr. Wham' exchange, she passed a note to Joseph.
Meet me in the library at recess. Pass it on to C. and S.
Joseph probably snorted and certainly rolled his eyes, but he did pass the note onto Caesar and Suzie.
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And so it was that during recess, the four of them reconvened in the library.
"You better have a good reason for calling us here," Joseph whined, "I'm missing a game of kickball to be here!"
"It's still pouring," Suzie noted, raising her eyebrows, "How can you play kickball in this weather?"
"He manages somehow," Caesar sighed.
"Hey! That was an amazing goal and you know it!"
"Except you ended up sliding the last three yards!"
"A win is a win!"
"Shh!" Lisa Lisa hushed, coming back from the bookshelves. Joseph saw the book she held and groaned.
"Not that book again..." he groused.
"Hey, it's been really helpful!"
"Helpful with getting us into trouble you mean," Joseph corrected.
"Well we've already got you so we don't need help on that front," Caesar countered.
"The Speedwagon Reference of Mythical Beasts?" Suzie read, "Why are you bringing this out?"
"Because of the past week," Lisa Lisa replied. "I checked with my dad and he says it's been raining more in these ten days than it normally rains in a year."
"So it's a freak weather sequence, what's the big deal?" Joseph groaned. He could smell work from a mile away.
"Yeah that's what I thought too. But then I remembered what Suzie said, and... well, don't you think it's too much of a coincidence?"
"What do you mean?" Caesar asked.
"Yeah," Joseph added, "What coincidence?"
"Oh," Suzie concluded, connecting the dots, "You mean how it's been raining since Mr. Brando came here?"
"Precisely," Lisa Lisa said. Then she opened the massive volume up to the table of contents and scanned the listing of entries before quickly flipping to the end of the book. "The cafeteria had been smoldering for two weeks. Why would the school district send a lawyer now? But it makes sense if the only lawyer they had on-call couldn't come down to Stand Elementary because it had been sunny."
"A vampire?" Joseph echoed, reading the entry, "You think Mr. Brando is a vampire?"
"It makes sense if you think about it," Lisa Lisa reasoned, "I mean, he's been here for a week and no one has seen him eat anything. He has these crazy long fangs and razor sharp nails. He's always asking for the room lights to be dimmed and only leaves the ruins of the cafeteria to talk to the administrators. Plus," she lowered voice and looked extremely serious, "I just get the heebie-jeebies looking at him."
"Oh no!" Joseph warbled in a falsetto, "Quick, call the police! Lisa Lisa got the heebie-jeebies looking at a lawyer!"
"Lawyers are all like that," Caesar reasoned, "My dad calls them the slime of humanity."
"Mr. Brando can be pretty creepy," Suzie agreed, "I think I saw him licking his lips when he was looking at the school heirlooms."
"You mean the Stone Mask and Arrow?" Lisa Lisa demanded.
"Mm-hm! I think he was really surprised. That I was there."
"Suzie!" her friend hissed, "You shouldn't have -- "
"Hold up right there," Joseph interrupted, "Not once have we been glad for opening any book, much less that book. There's five minutes left of recess and I'm not going to spend them in this sticking library."
"You talk big," Lisa Lisa disdained, "But if Mr. Brando really is a vampire, missing out on kickball will be the last of your worries."
"Joseph has a point," Caesar, surprisingly, came to the other boy's defense, "When have our predictions ever been right? I mean, maybe Mr. Speedwagon saw all these monsters, but what's the chance any of them would come to our elementary school?"
"Remember when we thought Mr. Wham was a Pillar Man?" Suzie giggled.
"And we thought Principal Kars was one too?" Joseph added.
"Oh! And that performance arts teacher who might have been a Stand?"
"Or how we thought that replacement cafeteria worker was a zombie?"
"Can't forget when Joseph thought his grandpa was Jesus!" Caesar cracked up. He and Suzie exchanged high-fives.
"Shut up you guys," Joseph muttered, flushing, "It was just because Grandma Erina was misleading me..."
"I still don't think Mr. Wham and Principal Kars are totally normal," Lisa Lisa pressed. "And if you guys read this entry, you'd see that vampires and Pillar Men are in cahoots."
"Lisa Lisa please," Joseph sighed, "Mr. Brando isn't a vampire and he's not conspiring with Principal Kars and Mr. Wham to drain everyone's blood. We live in the most boring suburb of the most boring state, nothing interesting happens here."
"Besides," Suzie added, patting her friend's shoulder, "Vampires don't wear hairbands."
"A certainly not heart hairbands!" Joseph concluded.
The bell rang, signalling the end of recess, and the four of them headed back to the classroom.
But Lisa Lisa wasn't convinced.
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"Emergency meeting," Joseph hissed the next day, right as the bell rang yet again for recess. And so the four of them found themselves in the library.
"I never thought Joseph would be calling a meeting in the library," Suzie laughed.
"He probably tripped one too many times while kicking the ball," Caesar guessed. Sure enough, it was still raining.
"Okay," Joseph sighed, plopping the book down, "Although it pains me to admit it, I think Lisa Lisa might be right."
"What!" Caesar and Suzie said at the same time.
Lisa Lisa raised an eyebrow.
"Not that I don't appreciate the confession," she started, "But what made you change your mind?"
"So I left the umbrella that Granny Erina gave me at school, so I snuck in to get it," Joseph began, "And I was going to go into the classroom and then back out, but I heard a sound in the old cafeteria. So obviously I followed it."
"By yourself? In the middle of the night?" Suzie prompted, eyes wide.
"It was late afternoon, no big deal," Joseph shrugged. "Anyways, so I saw Mr. Brando and Principal Kars lugging this huge case. Like, it was huge. It could have fit all of us in it!"
"You mean... like a coffin?"
"Yeah," he snapped his fingers, "Like a coffin. And then they placed it at the end of the cafeteria. I couldn't hear what they were saying because the box was scraping, but I definitely heard 'Phase Two' and 'Heaven'."
"So Mr. Brando is religious," Caesar shrugged, "It's not that weird."
"No, no, you're missing the point," Lisa Lisa corrected, "If Mr. Brando is here to oversee the rebuilding of the old cafeteria, why would he be moving things into it? And why would Principal Kars be helping him?"
"Ah." Caesar furrowed his brows. "Okay, fine, you stumped me there."
"Are you sure you saw it correctly?" Suzie asked, "Maybe Mr. Brando was just moving some debris?"
"But why would they move it further inside?" Lisa Lisa countered.
"No, I know what I saw," Joseph replied, shaking his head. "And I'm sure I saw Mr. Brando moving a coffin into the old cafeteria. I'd bet money that he's planning on making that into his new hideout and Principal Kars is helping him."
"Wait, wait, wait," Caesar started, "Why would Principal Kars help him?"
"Because he's a Pillar Man? And Pillar Men made the vampires?" Joseph replied, pointing at the encyclopedia entry.
"I still don't think Pillar Men exist," Caesar huffed, crossing his arms.
"Even after you asked your grandpa about it?"
"Old people lie to kids all the time!"
"Look," Lisa Lisa stated, "Regardless of whether you guys believe us, you have to agree that Mr. Brando is suspicious."
"Suspicious, sure," Caesar conceded, "But how much of that is from our overactive imaginations?"
"Yeah," Suzie agreed, shrugging, "Just because someone's suspicious doesn't mean they're a vampire."
"But if he is a vampire, then we have to do something, right?" Joseph pressed.
"Well..."
"C'mon Suzie, do you think the adults would believe us?"
"Who'd believe you after you burned down the cafeteria?" Caesar shot back.
"Precisely!" Joseph beamed. "Okay then, let's meet up after school and snoop around."
"This is a terrible idea..." Caesar sighed.
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"Okay, that could've gone better," Joseph admitted, scratching the back of his neck.
"A lawyer?" Caesar repeated, "You want to be a lawyer, really?"
"Of course not," Joseph scoffed, "Do you have any idea how hard lawyers have to work? I'm allergic to work, remember. And reading." He shuddered. "Granny Erina said lawyers had to read a lot too." The two of them veered left, right behind the cafeteria, just in time to see Lisa Lisa and Suzie scurrying out from the gap in the wreckage.
"Right on time," Caesar grinned, holding out his umbrella for the girls.
"Oh gosh, I'm not doing that again anytime soon," Suzie shuddered.
"I swear I inhaled a gallon of dust," Lisa Lisa complained, stretching her hands past the edge of the umbrella to wash the grime off.
"Whatever!" Joseph declared, "At least you guys didn't need to distract Mr. Brando! I swear, talking to that guy up close gives me the creeps."
"I told you!" Lisa Lisa gloats.
"Yeah, yeah." The four of them walked to the tarp, sitting themselves down on the deserted benches. "Well?" he prompted a second time, "What'd you guys find?"
"We didn't have time to go through everything..." Suzie admitted.
"What do you mean everything?" Caesar asked. "I thought he just had a coffin?"
"No way! It's practically an apartment there!"
"An apartment in a mausoleum," Lisa Lisa added, shuddering.
"So what'd you guys find?" Joseph insisted.
"Well... we only had time to look inside his coffin. Mr. Brando has a lot of books, but there was a journal? A diary? Something about the method to reach Heaven, definitely."
"So he's religious." Caesar concluded.
"And a lot of blood," Suzie added, looking a little sick.
"What?"
"Blood?"
"Yeah," she repeated, bottom lip quivering. "I always thought he was drinking tomato juice but..." she trailed off, nose wrinkling.
"Are you sure?" Caesar pressed.
"We smelled it," Lisa Lisa confirmed. She looked sick too. "I mean, I guess it could be animal blood, but even then... there was so much of it."
"He -- " Suzie gulped, "He used milk bottles to store them!"
"Okay now that's just gross."
"So do you guys believe us now?" Joseph demanded. Suzie nodded viogorously. "Caesar?" he continued. "What about you?"
"Well..." Caesar grimaced, "If Suzie says that she saw blood..." he nodded as well. "Okay, I think there's a good chance Mr. Brando is a vampire. But what are we supposed to do? The adults are just going to laugh us off, like they did about Principal Kars."
"I've got a plan," Joseph replied, grinning wildly. "Because no vampire is going to live at Stand Elementary while I'm here!"
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Joseph's plan ended up being a modified version of their plot to oust Principal Kars. It involved the four of them stealing two UV floodlights and blasting said lights into the cafeteria in the dead of the night. There was a dreaded shriek, half-bat, half-rat, before Principal Kars came sprinting onto the scene. Needless to say, all four of them received detention for two weeks, and Joseph needed to write 'I will not steal ultraviolet floodlights from the Speedwagon Foundation ever again' three hundred times. Suzie, Lisa Lisa, and Caesar were grounded heavily by their parents. There wasn't much point in grounding Joseph further as he was already grounded beyond belief, which is why he got lines.
"Hey, look on the bright side!" Joseph declared, "the sun is back and we got rid of a vampire!"
"Well when you put it like that," Caesar nastily replied, "Gosh, I'm so happy. Maybe when the sun implodes, I can finally go outside and kick a ball again!"
"You think you have it bad?" Lisa Lisa groaned, "My dad wants to double my training! He thinks that I'm acting up because I've got too much energy!"
"I tried explaining the situation," Suzie added, "But my parents just laughed and added two more weeks."
"Granny Erina pulled my ears so hard!" Joseph whined, rubbing said appendages, "I swear the ends are longer now!"
"Still, it's been a week and there's no sign of Mr. Brando," Lisa Lisa concluded. "So I'd say it's a job well done."
"That's because they're finally starting construction of the new cafeteria," Caesar corrected.
"Maybe he wasn't a vampire...?" Suzie questioned. "Just an eccentric lawyer?"
"Who lived in a burnt-out elementary school cafeteria?"
"And slept in a coffin?"
"And drank blood at all meals?"
"And wore hearts on his forehead and knees?"
All four of them collapsed into giggles then.
"Let me help you with that," Lisa Lisa said, as she was the first to stop laughing. "Maybe if we finish our chores fast, the sun'll still be out!"
"Not if Principal Kars has anything to say about it..." Caesar sighed. He scrubbed a little faster though.