"What do we do now?" Ben asked, looking at the reporters but speaking to Pepe el. "I'm never going to escape these people. It's so hard being a famous person, Pepe el... harder than being a doctor or an astronaut or something easy like that anyway. Don't ever try it."
Pepe el vowed to never try being famous, especially when he saw how tall the reporters were. Pepe el knew for a fact that all reporters were tall so that they could intimidate the person they were trying to get an interview out of. And when they all got together, they could form a circle and lean over the innocent little creature they were trying to catch which left no escape route for said innocent creature. Pepe el knew this because his own brother - Alexander Phillip Harold Monarch - was tall and he was also a reporter when he wasn't a van driver for Susanna Ramirez. Pepe el also knew that when his brother wasn't as tall as the other reporters around him, Alexander Phillip Harold Monarch wore shoes with high heels on so that he could appear taller. Pepe el felt intimidated by his brother whenever they spoke on the phone (as the two did not want to appear before each other due to their environmental beliefs), and felt that Alexander Phillip Harold Monarch's height was evident in his voice. Thus Pepe el was intimidated enough by reporters and his brother that he did not wish to be famous like Ben.
Pepe el saw his brother's face in that of each and every reporter closing in on Ben. He was suddenly filled with a rush of anger, and wondered why his mother had had time to give Alexander Phillip Harold Monarch a complete and overly long name and was not even slightly bothered enough to complete his own name. Pepe el also saw in each reporter's face his brother's gait and long legs and was filled such powerful and overwhelming fury - built up from all the intimidation he had experienced over the years - that he charged at the group of reporters with all his might. This left a central tunnel through which Ben could crawl, as all the reporters fell to the floor and then got back up again in their attempts to catch him.
Both Pepe el and Ben were panting by the time they reached Pepe el's van which was neatly smashed into a tree. Pepe el smiled when he saw his brilliant parking which reminded him of an easier time in his life - a time where reporters did not exist. Ben saw the same parking and wondered how on earth they were going to get back home if they could not even start the car. Then Ben realised that home was actually a very dangerous place too, and figured that it would be better to find a hiding place with Pepe el than it would be to return to his house.
"What do we do now, Pepe el?" Ben asked. "I can't go home and this van won't start."
Pepe el thought for a long time, and Ben became increasingly impatient and worried. He was met with a sense of hopelessness and panic that was rapidly becoming familiar to him, and also present was the ever growing feeling of being trapped in his own lies.
"I've got to tell the truth," Ben whispered to himself. "I can't keep telling lies. It's ruining my once brilliant life."
Pepe el heard Ben's words as Pepe el pressed his right ear up near Ben's mouth, and thought that his ears experienced a nice breeze as Ben whispered, especially in the extremely hot weather. England had reached thirty degrees!
"You want to tell the truth?" someone asked from behind the van. "Tell the truth. See where it gets you."
Ben and Pepe el cautiously approached the van by stomping loudly and telling each other repeatedly that there was an intruder behind the vehicle. Pepe el told Ben that he would risk Ben's life in order to save his own. Ben was so touched by this show of honesty that he raised his arms to hug Pepe el. Pepe el, who had been touched by Ben's lack of honesty, also raised his arms to hug Ben. Then they both raised their arms to hug each other but did not actually come into contact with each other.
"If you two are done with your strange show of affection," Susanna said from behind the van. "I've got a car back here and you two need to get in."
Ben's worried expression softened completely when he saw Susanna and he offered her a sympathetic smile. Here he was complaining about how hard it was to be famous, and Susanna had been living in a shopping trolley her entire life. Ben wondered if the shopping trolley had been a baby when she was born too, and whether it had grown up with her as she blossomed into a young and sometimes very critical woman. Did it follow her wherever she went and did she sometimes sneak snacks under the kitchen table so she could feed it? Then Ben realised he was being silly. Susanna would never have a kitchen table! She didn't even have a kitchen, only a shopping trolley to her name! This small detail made Ben sad all over again, so he decided he would listen to her and get in the car. Perhaps listening would be the first gift she had ever received.
"Why are you staring at me like that?" Susanna asked, twirling a diamond ring around her finger. "You always have that same expression on your face when you look at me. Just to reiterate from last time... we're not dating and stuff, so you can get that lovesick puppy look off your face."
Ben sighed at Susanna's words. Clearly she wasn't over him and she was just trying to be mean to him so she could bring up the past and reignite their non-existent memories, hoping to push them back together. Ben promised himself he wouldn't fall for such tricks. He also thought back to his fame, which brought a familiar pang of sadness to his stomach, and wondered if Susanna who had never lived beyond the confines of her shopping trolley suddenly wanted to come back to him because of all the money he had not yet made.
"You shouldn't love people for their money," Ben said wisely, directing his words at Susanna. "You should love people for who they are because love makes you happy and strong and content. Bringing money into relationships makes them bitter and ruins the love that should be there. I hope you know that Susanna because it's something that's very much believed in within my family. My mum and my brother and my sister don't care about money at all. They never have."
Susanna thought love also made people naive and idiotic, and that it could and would get people in trouble. She had seen the breakdown of her own parents' marriage, which was made more dramatic due to the intensity of their feelings. Thus she vowed never to allow love into her own life; she also vowed to get rid of Ben as soon as possible because he spouted nonsense wherever he went.
"Hey Peps," Susanna said to Pepe el, ignoring Ben. "I see your parking has improved drastically since the last time I saw you in this town."
Pepe el smiled. "Yeah, it went really good. Now I hit trees. Before I hit lakes."
Ben felt jealous and intimidated by the history Pepe el and Susanna shared. He also thought that Pepe el was like his own brother, and that it seemed like Susanna had dated Pepe el; therefore she had dated Ben's brother which was not okay in the bro-code. Ben knew that Susanna had dated Pepe el because she had spoken to him and it was a fact that all women (except for family members) were dating you when they initiated a conversation with you, or had dated you in the past. Ben knew this because he had had no relationship experience but felt that he was an expert on relationships.
"So are you two going to get in the car or are you just going to stand here all day waiting for the reporters to find you?" Susanna asked.
"How come they haven't found us already?" Ben asked aloud. "They must not be very good at their job. I can tell because they've made one mistake so they must be terrible, which is great for me."
"Well they must think you have a different car," Susanna said. "They perhaps don't expect you to be driving around in a white van."
"But they saw us leave in a white van!" Ben cried. "They must be somewhere. What if they found out I'm lying about dying? That I was never ill in the first place!"
Ben expected Susanna's eyes to widen or for her to look at least a little bit shocked, but she seemed to take his revelation in her stride as she took one of his hands and one of Pepe el's and led them to one of the rear doors of her car. Ben and Pepe el got in, both still feeling confused, and Ben thought he saw something move in the corner of his vision. He ignored this however as he was suddenly greeted by the wonderful feeling of relief as he let the truth out to someone who would judge him. Pepe el was Ben's brother, so Ben could not feel relieved enough with the other man, as family members tended to judge each other less critically when it came to someone within the family committing a major fault.
"Where are we going?" Ben asked, as Pepe el did his seatbelt for him and Susanna started the car. "Are we there yet?"
Susanna sighed and put in her earphones so she was not distracted whilst driving. Ben found this extremely offensive and raised his pinkie at her so she could see it through the front mirror of the car. He knew raising a pinkie was swearing because he had seen a little kid do it once when he'd walked past a school playground. He snickered when he saw her raise an eyebrow as he knew he had offended her deeply, but then he felt guilty because of all the terrible events she had faced in her life and decided to be friends with her again. Ben raised a middle finger for friendship and Susanna glared at him through the front mirror, slamming on the breaks when she had to pause on the road so that Ben's body was slammed forward a little bit too.
"Are we there yet now?" Pepe el asked beside him. "I'm hungry. Do you have food in here? Do you have burgers?"
Pepe el began searching the car for burgers and Ben wondered where they were going. He was going to ask again when she suddenly pulled in to a small driveway and waited for the garage door to open. It opened slowly and she moved the car into the garage before stopping and getting out. The garage door closed behind the car and the room was suddenly submerged in darkness so Ben could not see anything.
"Are you two getting out?" he heard Susanna ask. "There's someone that wants to meet you."
"I'm blind!" Pepe el cried. "I'm blind! I'm blind! I'm blind! I want a Labrador puppy as my guide dog."
Ben sighed and thought Pepe el was being offensive to blind people, so he got out and left the door open for Pepe el who used the mini torch hanging on his keychain to light up the garage. Pepe el expressed his relief for his ability to see again and then walked with Ben and Susanna through a door and into a living room, where a man that Pepe el had never seen before was sitting with a frown on his face.
Ben raced over to the man immediately and grabbed the man's face.
"Turn that frown upside down!" he said cheerily, whilst playing with the muscles on the man's face. "Dial up that smile! Don't cut that laugh in half!"
Susanna sighed again. "Can you stop with the idiocies for a second, please? This is important."
Ben nodded solemnly. "It is important. Very important, in fact, for people to smile. When you smile, it's like a rocket of positivity shoots across your face... well at least the lower half of it anyway and it makes the world a better, brighter place where we can all exist peacefully together. Smiling solves everyone's problems."
Susanna scoffed. "Smile right now, Benjamin."
Ben looked around for a guy called Benjamin and could not find him, so he smiled instead.
"Has that solved all your problems?" Susanna asked. "Are the reporters still after you? Are you still trapped in your lies?"
"I can't see any reporters and I told the truth to you," Ben said happily. "Now I just need to tell the truth to everyone else and we're good to go! Right, dad?"
Larry Hughes was not impressed by Ben's mantras. He had watched his son closely for the last three months and had seen the twenty two year old get a terrible job, become a reality TV star and then finally fake his own imminent death. Larry wondered where he had gone wrong in his parenting as he had been such a good father, especially since he'd hardly ever been in Ben's life. Larry felt that this was good parenting and he also felt that he had a right to believe in and preach this, as he had had no experience of parenting.
"Why are you pretending to be ill?" Larry asked Ben, who looked slightly shocked. "Why are you telling your mother that you're dying? You knew that she'd immediately do something stupid like start a reality TV show about your death."
Ben shrugged and rearranged his expression so that he wore a mask of indifference. "I would tell you but you're never here. You didn't even come to Hen's wedding when she didn't have a wedding."
Larry Hughes sighed for the hundredth time since Ben's birth and wondered what he had done to deserve such a lack of gratitude from his son. He had walked out of Ben's mother's life six years after Ben's birth, having had enough of Ben's mother's complaints and financial issues. He hadn't, however, wanted Ben and his siblings to have a bad image of their mother and had also been kicked out of the house so Larry Hughes left one night and didn't contact Ben again until Ben turned nineteen and was a graduate in Online Activities. Larry Hughes was momentarily confused about why he hadn't thought to contact his son before, but put the problem down to good parenting.
"You can glare at me as much as you want, son," Larry said to Ben. "But that can come later. Right now we need to sort out the issue of you lying about your death."
"But why is it an issue?" Ben asked. "Why do you care anyway? It's only bothering me. I'm the one who has to pretend to be a dying person, not you."
Ben felt that he had put himself across as being passionately angry and was justified in his hatred of his father. Directing anger on to his father also made Ben less worried about the lies he had told, so he thought Susanna had done a wonderful job of distracting him. He vowed never to be mean to her again because she had been so incredibly kind to him.
"I care because your mother's TV show is interfering with my business," Larry said. "I've had reporters sniffing around my offices all week because she's told them all about our relationship. Look son, I just want to get on with my life. I've built a name for myself and I've been okay so far, but I don't want any part of this reality show business. I'd very much like to fix our relationship too but not while some producer or director or whatever he is tells me how to do it. I can only try to fix our relationship properly if you tell the truth and we wrap this thing up quietly. I don't want any of this affecting my business either, because if you're going to get any inheritance, it's going to be through that business."
Ben was extremely suspicious of his father and doubted that the man was really trying to get Ben to tell the truth for Ben's own good. It could only be that Larry was jealous of Mike the producer who was in a relationship with Hillary who used to be Larry's wife, Ben thought. Ben figured that Larry couldn't possibly be a good guy, or otherwise his mother wouldn't speak so badly of the man.
"I'm going to tell the truth," Ben said anyway. "But not for you. It's for me because it's really hard being famous. You wouldn't know obviously, but I do. And I'm only going to get rid of the problem quietly because I don't want mum getting upset about anything. When she loses the reality TV deal, I want her to be able to deal with it without everyone else in this town judging her."
Ben thought he had been incredibly mature and was just about to tell Larry that when Pepe el tapped Ben on the shoulder and pointed a finger at the TV in the corner of the living room. Ben gasped when he saw his own face on the local news channel and Larry put his head in his hands as he realised he'd been too late.
"Why is my face on TV?" Ben asked.
"Why do you think you idiot?" Susanna asked. "Can you not see yourself standing near Pepe's van? They recorded you saying you were faking being ill."
And sure enough, on screen, in a bold red colour, read the words 'Local man fakes illness to secure reality TV deal'.
Ben cursed.