“You son-of-a-bitch!” I screamed, giving up trying to choke him, since my damn hands were so small, and reverted back to punching him in his stupid zit-free face.

I heard the others calling out, but I didn’t register anything they were saying. I just wanted to pummel this asshole with my fists. There was nothing on this earth I wanted to do more.

Abruptly, as I was just about to punch the bastard in the face again, someone pulled me up off of him.

“Mort,” Teddy said, as he kept a hold of me and walked me off towards one of the ruined buildings across the street. “Mort, stop struggling.”

I struggled even harder, and even tried to punch at Teddy. But he had a good grip on me, and kept me facing away from him. Plus, he had a lot longer arms than me. Again, I hated being a freaking gnome.

“Get your hands off of me!” I bellowed at him, kicking my wee feet.

“But he’s your friend!”

“My friend?” I stopped struggling. Teddy had turned around and was holding me in my Oz’s direction. “What kind of friend would start dating your girlfriend… and right after you died?”

Oz was back on his feet, but looked pointedly to the ground, unable to meet my gaze.

I flicked my eyes towards Ellie, who was standing there, looking perplexed but not exactly upset. “And you! Did you just wait until he turned into some super-powered, perfect skinned blood-sucker before you decide he was good enough to date?”

Her expression changed, her eyes filling with pity.

Pity.

“This has been going on for a while,” she said. “Ever since we broke up.”

Ever since we broke up?

I pointed at Oz. “You broke up with me to start dating him?”

She nodded.

I felt like the last fucking thing on earth that was holding me together just crashed down on top of me. Teddy set me on the ground and backed up a step.

“I didn’t want to be going behind your back,” Ellie said. “I didn’t want to approach him until you and me were actually over.”

I knew that if I had my human eyes still I would be crying right now. And that pissed me off even more.

“So you broke up with me at my graduation party? What was wrong, you couldn’t wait for Valentine’s Day to find a crappier day? Maybe my birthday or Christmas!”

“Mort…” Ellie said, sadness joining the pity in her eyes.

Good God, that made me even angrier. I glared at them both.

“And how long after that did you wait to start dating him?”

She held my gaze, but her face turned pale. “Two days.”

That’s when it felt like the ground just fell in under my feet.

I knew that I’d be snotty and on my knees crying by now. I guessed that was one good thing about being a fucking gnome. I turned away from everybody, and without a word, I started walking. I didn’t know where I was going, but I sure as shit wasn’t going to stay with them.

Fuck them.

***

My old house wasn’t completely gone. It had been built bisected by a hallway that led from the front door past the front room and the living room, and then on back to the kitchen. The stairs that led to the second floor and the bedrooms, shot off from there. There wasn’t anything left of the house on the living room side. I didn’t go near that side. I didn’t need to see my body rotting on the floor again.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Instead, I walked up the stairs to my room. In my room, I sat down on the floor by my bed and looked around. A lot of stuff was knocked off from where it was supposed to be. But the picture of my mom and dad and me was still there. I stared at it.

Fucking Hell! I miss them so much.

My family was gone. My friends had betrayed me. What kind of fucking nightmare was this?

“Could it get any worse?” I said. I even missed being able to cry: the burning eyes, the snotty nose. Motherfucker…

“Yeah,” Teddy said, standing at the doorway of my bedroom. I hadn’t heard him come up the stairs. Either he was getting super stealthy, or he had used the cloak to make sure that neither I nor anyone else would detect him. Sneaky.

I turned my eyes toward him, since my neck wouldn’t move, “Really, it could get worse?”

He walked over and sat down beside me, leaning his back against the side of my bed. “Of course it could get worse. And it’s going to get worse.”

“I just want to punch something.” I made a fist. A tiny, pathetic looking fist. “No, I don’t want to punch something. I want to fucking wake up.”

Teddy sighed. “Me, too.”

“What the hell is going on?”

“The aliens didn’t say. Didn’t seem personal. They just came to destroy everything, and then decided to play with what was left.”

“Jesus… those fuckers.”

“I’m sorry we didn’t tell you about Oz… and about Ellie and Oz. We were all kinds of surprised by that.”

I made a low sound, like a growl. “I would’ve never guessed my best friend would stab me in the back like that.”

Teddy looked over at me and scowled. “They didn’t stab you in the back. They just… fell in love.”

I closed my eyes, so I didn’t have to look at anything. But I was so creeped out sitting here in my room. Mostly, my things were still here—my stuff, the walls, my bed. The weirdest thing was, I wasn’t really here. Whatever the hell I was now, I was not the same person as I was.

“You’re still you,” Teddy said, as if he could read my mind.

I struggled to get up to my feet again, and then looked around the room for a few beats. I didn’t want any of this. But I knew, someday I might need it. And someday down the line, I may actually want it.

I started picking things up, and putting them into my inventory. It was a weird sensation, putting something into the inventory that wasn’t my mom’s frying pan. I picked up the picture of my mom, dad and me first, and put it into my inventory. But then I felt a sudden panic. What if I couldn’t get it out again? What if I had fucked up and destroyed it accidentally. So then I pulled it out of my inventory and looked at it again. It was fine—I was so relieved. At least I could do that.

Teddy sat there, leaning against my bed, watching me as I went around my room, picking things up and putting them in my inventory. I don’t know why I picked up my clothes and put them in inventory, but I did. I picked up some comic books, and some books off the shelf. Some of my favorite stones off the shelf over my bed. I’d wanted to become a geologist in middle school, had changed my mind, but I still loved the rocks.

There were some other pictures that were hanging over my bed, and I asked Teddy to reach up and get them for me. He climbed off the floor, and did exactly what I asked him. Even though one of them was of me and Ellie, kissing.

“I meant it,” Teddy said, as he handed me that picture. “They weren’t betraying you. They just fell in love.”

I got it, I really did. But… “I really don’t want to hear about love anymore.”

Teddy nodded. “That’s fair.”

I looked around my room, at what was left. I wouldn’t be able to pick up my bed, so I tried to put it into my inventory by just touching it. It didn’t work.

That sucked.

I started to walk towards my door, stopped and looked in at my bedroom for the last time. I didn’t think I could come back here again. I wouldn’t have the strength.

My parents room had been on the side of the house that was destroyed, so I knew there wasn’t anything there, nothing to remind me of them. Just my pictures.

I went downstairs, Teddy, following me, and went into the kitchen. It was still there. I went over to the stove and looked up. I couldn’t see them, but I was pretty sure they were still there.

“Teddy? Hand me the salt and pepper shakers, please.”

Teddy came over and handed them to me. They were in the shape of a rooster and a hen. They had been a couple of my mom’s favorite things in the whole world. I bought them for her at a Christmas sale at my school when I was six.

I put them into my inventory.

“You should go through the cabinets and see if there’s anything you can put in your inventory,” I said to Teddy. “Any food at all.”

Teddy started doing that, and I walked down the hallway and over to where the living room used to be, to where my body still lay. There were no outside walls, and debris covered the floor. I moved to the wall that was left, to just past where my body lay. I leaned down and picked up the broken piece of my grandmother’s mirror. The piece that had been up on the wall had fallen off and shattered on the ground. Probably when the monster had tried to eat me.

It was okay… it was broken anyways. I put the remaining piece of mirror into my inventory and walked back, meeting Teddy in the hallway. I hadn’t even glanced at my body.

“We should get back,” he said. “They’re probably worried.”

It was funny that he didn’t ask me if I was coming back with him. Where else was I going to go? But I already knew, the second he’d showed up at my bedroom door, that I was going to go back to the pizzeria with him, and to my friends. Because, no matter what had happened between any of us, they were my friends. They always had been.

They were all I had left now.