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Eleven Years Later
Dinner preparation hadn’t gone too badly, Marshall reflected. Save for a few noodles burned on to the bottom of the pot, the rest of the spaghetti had come out at pretty much the flavor and consistency he’d expected.
Also, he’d discovered they actually owned a colander, which was a plus.
He tossed the noodles into the saucepan with the marinara sauce, which had come from a jar—Simon’s favorite brand and flavor, with the extra mushrooms—and was thus pretty much impossible to screw up.
The garlic bread, once he’d removed and thrown away the especially burnt pieces, also looked and tasted fine.
He removed the bag of pre-packaged salad mix from the fridge, and started looking through drawers and cupboards for a large bowl and some salad tongs.
It bothered him that after a year he still didn’t quite know his way around his own kitchen.
His mom and dad had bought them all sorts of pots and pans and utensils, but to the extent that anybody actually tried to cook anything more complicated than toast, it was usually Simon, who had been forced to fend for himself starting at a very young age and actually knew things like how to assemble fresh ingredients into entire meals.
Dash, for whom only the former of those things was true...Dash was very good at remembering to program the numbers of new delivery places into speed dial, Marshall mentally conceded. And he could make breakfast. Well, breakfast cereal. Most of the time. The morning Dash had managed to set fire to a bowl of Frosted Flakes had been, after all, just a one-time occurrence.
The time Dash had taken the ritual knife out of the Evidence Storage Closet to cut oranges for juice Marshall was still less forgiving about, but, honestly, anybody should have known better, and the resulting demonic infestation had taken forever to clean up.
Marshall did cook, but the thing was, being Marilyn and Edgar Teller’s son meant life had prepared him such that following the directions on the side of a box was pretty much testing the upper limits of his culinary abilities.
Still, he was really proud of the way tonight’s dinner had turned out. Everything looked, smelled and tasted not only edible, but actually delicious. There was even chocolate cake, assembled from a Duncan Hines mix a couple hours earlier. A somewhat uneven and inexpertly frosted cake, but a real one. Nothing had gone wrong.
So he was unprepared when his roommates got home less than two minutes later, walked into the kitchen, and instantly assumed twin expressions of…well, if Marshall had to pick an adjective, it would have to be somewhere close to “horror.”
“Mars, is everything okay?” Simon asked.
“Um, yes? Why wouldn’t it be?” Marshall asked.
“That’s good,” said Simon. “I’m just going to need you to give me today’s secret word to verify you’re not your own lookalike replacement, and tell me something only Marshall would know.”
“’Inevitability,’” said Marshall. “And Marshall knows all about Simon’s celebrity crush on Summer Glau.”
Simon blushed, but nodded. “It’s him.”
“Oh, shit,” said Dash. “Then somebody’s dead. Or sick. Or dying. Slick, are you sick or dying? Wait, am I sick or dying?”
Marshall refrained from pointing out that he had no way to even answer that last one, given the last time Dash X had been to a doctor had been never, and furthermore, he wouldn’t even go along with Marshall’s perfectly reasonable plan to break into any medical facilities after hours to run some basic tests, despite how much useful information it might give them about Dash’s physiology and possible origin.
“No,” he said instead. “Nobody is sick. Or dying. That I know of. Yet.” He said the last word as if he couldn’t promise that would continue to be the case if the conversation continued along its current lines.
“But you,” Simon gestured to indicate their kitchen. “You…made food. Multiple types of food. There’s even something that looks like it’s vegetables.”
“I know I made food,” said Marshall. “I realized today is the one-year anniversary of the day we moved in together, and I wanted to do something nice to mark the occasion.”
“Oh,” said Simon. Then, “Thanks! That was really cool of you.”
“I mean, I know I don’t cook very often, but is it really that unusual?”
Dash and Simon exchanged a long look, and finally looked back at Marshall and nodded.
“Oh god,” said Marshall. “It’s happened. I’ve grown up to become my mother.”
Dash reached out and patted Marshall’s shoulder. “If it helps, your mom’s prettier and has better hair,” he offered.
Marshall glared at him. “Be thankful I’ve worked too hard to give into the impulse to see how you’d look wearing spaghetti.”
“Policy. Food fights,” Simon reminded them.