LITTLE BEN'S POV PART 1/2
Dear Readers, Surprise! I had a sudden flame of inspiration and wrote the following.
We will go back in time for a bit to when Sam was about 8. It would be told through the lens of 7-year-old Ben. What a precarious age! I promise it will be very worth it and we'll go straight back to the future and rejoin Sam and her friends at Abigail's Birthday Party next week.
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Ben looked out of his window, the Alpha's daughters were coming over again. He watched as the two girls, one taller than the other, but otherwise almost perfect copies of each other, stop by the curb. They looked both ways. The street was completely still. Not a single car in sight. But the two girls held hands, looking left, and right, and left again before running across the street screaming.
When they got to the other side, they stopped running to laugh, like they had just survived something amazing. The taller girl looked up and grinned. She waved at him. Ben sighed and turned away from the window. He was currently grounded (again), but his Beta father wasn't at home, and his mother would probably be at the computer all afternoon.
He stood behind his bedroom door to listen and waited for the doorbell.
"Ding ding." Right on cue.
Immediately, his twin screamed from downstairs, "Mum! Sam and Savy are here! I'm opening the door!"
His mum rushed out of the study, "Wait, Lizzy!"
Ben waited. He bided his time. He waited for his Mum's footsteps to hurry down the stairs, "Lizzy, how many times have I told you not to open the front door on your own?"
"But it's only us, Mrs Beta." The elder of the Alpha's daughters said.
"Yes, and you're always welcome here girls, but..." Mum tried to explain.
"Can't I just open the door for Sam and Savy?" Lizzy asked. Ben didn't have to see it to know Lizzy was making that act-cute face she used whenever she wanted to bend their parent's will.
"Well, I suppose... If it's Sam and Savy. But ONLY Sam and Savy. No one else." Mum compromised.
Mum had been reading too many kidnapping reports. Every time Mum read, there would be a new set of house rules. It was tough growing up in the Beta household. Sometimes it was like he couldn't even step out of his room without breaking a rule.
Actually, his room was infringing quite a number of house rules too - but there was a silver lining in a house with too many rules - even his parents couldn't remember all of them.
Ben did though. Ben's memory had always been unfailing. He couldn't forget things even if he wanted to. But don't envy him, life gets boring real quick when you never forget.
Trapped in a world where your teachers repeated themselves on an average of 4.25 times, and your dad tells the same dad jokes and life stories on repeat... And you're stuck doing the same things over and over simply because everything from chores to console games was just a mind-numbing sequence of actions.
Ben wanted more. He wanted multiplayer games where there were more choices and the unpredictability of human players - although when he did secretly download and played them, many of the human players played worse than the bots.
Why was everyone so stupid?
He wanted... Actually, he didn't really know what he wanted. He just wanted out of this rut.
"There are Oreos in the cabinet and milk... Oh goddess, that might be expired though... I'll let Luc know to buy more. Don't drink the milk, but please help yourselves to the Oreos and water, girls." Mum was never that great at keeping up with the kitchen. This was the third day this week she realized that the same bottle of milk had probably expired. And Dad would probably forget to buy milk again too, so there won't be any milk tomorrow morning either.
That's okay. Ben preferred coffee anyway. He even got used to drinking it black since there's almost never safe milk in the fridge.
He waited as his Mum's footsteps padded back up the stairs, and took a few steps away from the door.
"Ben?" Mum knocked on his door.
"Leave me alone." Ben answered, careful to keep his voice emotionless. If he sounded too upset, angry, or rebellious, his Mum would come in and counsel him - which would be the opposite of what he wanted.
"Sam and Savy are here." Mum told him, "You may play with them, but you're grounded so please do not leave the house."
"Whatever." Ben took care to sound like he didn't care.
Then he waited again.
His mum's footsteps retreated into her study. He waited for her door to shut and then he waited just a few more seconds to make sure his Mum had really gone into the room.
Once, he had come out too quickly. His mum had left some documents downstairs and had shut the door without going inside.
He literally bumped into her the moment he came out.
"Urm... Toilet." He had managed to make up on the spot.
Since then, Ben had been very careful to make sure his Mum had really shut herself in her study again.
When Mum was considering whether to do her online Masters course with Blackforest University, Ben had known it was going to be a terrible idea from the moment she said, "If I do this, I would need you to help me around the house and with the kids, Luc."
"Sure, babe. No problem." Dad was very supportive.
"Really? It'll take me at least 2 years..." Mum worried.
"Just go for it babe." Dad shrugged and waved it off, "We've got this, right kids?"
"I don't know, okay, I guess." Lizzy had agreed. It's not like the average elementary school kid knew what a Masters in Lycanthropy was.
"Yeah." Ben decided to be 'supportive' too. This was the golden ticket to unsupervised freedom, "Go on."
"Oh!" Mum smiled, "Thank you for understanding!"
She hugged the two twins and gave Dad a kiss on the mouth, Dad kissed her back.
Ben sighed and left the room. The kissing thing... It might take a while.
"Ben!" Lizzy had called out to him.
"What?" He turned around halfway up the stairs.
"You better not be up to anything." Lizzy warned.
Ben mounted the rest of the steps to the second-floor landing, "I'm always up to something, Lizzy. See, I'm already up the stairs!"
And then he locked himself in his room - and her room too. He just needed to do this a few more times before his Dad got tired of breaking down the door and fixing it again. It will only be a matter of time before Dad finally cleaned out the guest room for Lizzy to move out to.
Unlike him, his parents, Lizzy, and indeed the rest of the world, everyone was in constant need of repeated lessons before they learned anything.
"Mum! Dad!" Lizzy screamed from the other side of the bedroom door, "Ben locked me out of our room again!"
"Ben! Let your sister in!" Mum stopped kissing Dad to yell.
Ben waited.
"Mum!" Lizzy whined.
Dad growled up the stairs, "Hoo boy, you're in trouble now young man."
Ben waited.
Dad banged on the door, "Open the door right now! Ben! I'm warning you!"
Ben waited.
GOOD THINGS ARE WORTH WAITING FOR.
Back to the present, the moment he was sure his Mum was back at her desk working, he quietly let himself out of the house and down the stairs.
The girls were in the kitchen eating Oreos and...
"Is that ice cream?" Ben realized immediately, "I'm telling Mum."
"No, don't tell Mum!" Lizzy said, "You can have some too."
"Fine." Ben allowed, "If you give me ice cream, I won't tell on you until the next time you try to tell on me."
Blackmail material was always useful. It was one of the few things that made his perfect memory actually useful.
"It's not really ice cream." Sam said, "If we wait a bit. It'll turn into milk for our Oreos."
She looked proud of herself, "GOOD THINGS ARE WORTH WAITING FOR, Ben."
"It's just melted ice cream, Sam." Ben said.
"But ice cream is made from milk." Sam reasoned and she dipped her Oreo into the mushy ice cream, "So technically, it's just really cold milk."
Sam had always been... Ben didn't know enough vocabulary to explain Sam, but he found himself joining the girls.
"I'm just having the ice cream." He informed them. Lizzy used a metal spoon and dropped two gooey chunks of half-melted vanilla ice cream into his cup. Why were they using cups? He looked at the three girls... Cos they were drinking "really cold milk"?
"I think what we need is an underground lair." Sam told everyone at the table, "Like with a supercomputer that talks and a portal that can teleport us to the Colored Mountains."
"I don't think we have underground lairs like that here." Lizzy told her.
Sam was older than the twins and her sister by a full year and a half, but except for her height advantage over them, there wasn't much difference.
"Then we'll just have to build our own!" Sam decided.
That was how the four of them spent the rest of the day in the basement. Mum and Dad had changed out the old washing machine and dryer and removed the "skeletons" or whatever that was making the weird noises under their home.
Now the room was mostly the laundry area in one corner and the dark abyss, with abandoned cardboard boxes.
Further inspection proved that some of the boxes were empty. Including the ones for the washing machine and dryer...and TV. All big boxes.
"This is perfect!" Sam said, "We don't have much time till dinner so we better get building."
When Mum and Dad found them in the basement, Sam proudly showed them around the new secret underground lair the puppies had installed.
They had even used crayon to draw out all the alphabets on the computer keyboard - in the right order, the way it should be - none of the QWERTY nonsense.
"It's such a good idea!" Mum was always super biased towards the Alpha's daughters. It's like they could do no wrong, "What do you think, Luc?"
"I think the computer keyboard is a bit funny." Dad said.
"But this is really just the perfect space, Luc." Mum pointed out.
TO BE CONTINUED...