On the Fritz

Chapter 2 - Part 2

He let go of Sigourney's collar and silently begged her to bite.

Of course, Sigourney did not. She bounded up to Fritz in a clumsy mass of yellow fur, and Fritz gasped like he'd never seen a dog before. He started talking to Sigourney as if she were an infant, not an 11-year-old canine, while Rafael just stared, wondering if this was how Fritz normally acted. He dug his hands deep into his hoodie pockets and started to question whether he had to say hello first.

Eventually, Fritz looked up from where he was sitting on the floor, Sigourney occasionally tapping her paw into the carpet. His face stuck in a smile, he said, "Didn't tell me about the dog."

"Sigourney," was all Rafael said. He really didn't have much else to say because he'd never seen Fritz outside of his school uniform and his legs looked different in jeans.

"Good girl," Fritz marvelled, while Rafael tried to slow his breathing. An impressive drip of drool starting coursing down from Sigourney's muzzle, and satisfied, Fritz pushed up from the floor. "Is your dad home?"

Rafael said, "He's at work."

"Oh," Fritz said, before giving Rafael a quick raise of his eyebrows. "So no witnesses." Rafael's blood ran cold, Fritz pushing past him with a gentle nudge of his shoulder. Was it too soon to pre-emptively call in his own murder?

Evidently bored, Fritz kept on moving toward the opposite end of the house, scanning the walls like he was making a mental map of the building, which he undoubtedly was. Planning his escape route, Rafael figured.

He felt so viscerally uncomfortable, like he'd suddenly developed gastric ulcers in the past 30 seconds. As Fritz wandered inside his bedroom, Rafael's fists clenched.

"Jesus Christ," Fritz exclaimed from inside the room, "reckon you could use a few more posters?"

He followed him in to find Fritz glancing around, obviously struggling to take in everything from the clearly slept in bed to the wall of DVDs. If he was smart, he'd take advantage of the situation to spin Fritz around and beat the crap out of him, but no, some sick part of Rafael was still holding out for the $20 that was supposedly coming his way.

"Not to interrupt," Rafael said, "but I don't think you came here to scope out my interior decorating."

"I sure did," Fritz said, looking back over his shoulder, his eyes bright.

Rafael's eyes widened a fraction, and against all his attempts at relaxing, his breathing got faster. "What?"

"I definitely didn't come here to get you to write an essay for me," Fritz said, wandering over to Rafael's desk. "Finished it last week. Obviously. Did you actually believe that I would come to you for help in school?"

This wasn't a rhetorical question, and Fritz looked back again in hopes of getting some response out of Rafael. He searched through Fritz's expression and desperately tried to find anything that would make what he was doing malicious, mocking, cold. Oddly, Fritz was smiling, his brown eyes warm and his movements soft. Fritz sat down in Rafael's desk chair, swivelled to face him, and waited.

Unfortunately, now that he thought about it, the answer to Fritz's question was no. Fritz had never been slow at school, and even if he was suddenly falling behind, why would he go to the boy he hated who only ever scraped a pass?

"This is just you being a dick," Rafael finally concluded.

"It usually is," Fritz agreed. "Hey, can I get my 10 bucks back?"

Rafael glared. Fritz grinned.

"Well, I'm having fun," Fritz said to himself, turning back around in the chair to face Rafael's desktop monitor. He moved the mouse, and the idling computer lit back up to Premiere Pro, right where Rafael had left it the night before.