Going Shopping
Later that evening, Sandy found herself alone in her bedroom and bored. She didn't really feel like spending her time watching TV with her roommate. As a result, she decided to pull out all her pictures and accessories, and she started working on her scrapbooks. Sandy could get pretty serious about her projects. She had boxes full of empty albums, adhesive, embellishments such as assorted buttons, bits of foliage, and fancy washers, hole punches, markers, pens and different types of paper stock. She even had an expensive Cameo die-cutter so she could trim things exactly the way she wanted to. Nearly every week, she was out at the Picture Shop resizing photographs so they would fit better on her pages. Once everything was out and organized on the floor, she took a seat on the carpet and got to work.
Had Jeremy walked into the bedroom right then, he would have taken a long and impatient at all the pictures she'd littered up the floor with, and at all her materials and tools. Then Jeremy would have started scratching his head as if his girlfriend had gone loony.
Not Rudy, though. He'd been expressing a genuine interest in what Sandy did, so much that he'd asked her to send pictures of some of her favorite finished pages. She had, and he seemed to take several minutes to study her shots, before he emailed or messaged her back with his initial impressions. The praise he lavished on Sandy gave her a sense of pride, for nobody outside of her little circle of fellow scrapbookers ever really understood why she did what she did, or why she was so serious about it. You have an artistic eye, Rudy had said to her. You have a great sense of color and geometric placement, of balance and coordination.
Rudy's last message to her made her laugh: 'I'm just saying all that mushy stuff, so I can get into your pants.'
Sandy decided to call him outright, instead of emailing and messaging him like she usually did. Rudy was home, like he always was, and he took the time to pause from whatever weird thing he was studying to talk to her. Rudy listened as she talked about how her day went. He asked questions about what was going on with her ex-husband and her estranged son, and even with Jeremy. Rudy asked her lots of questions about her life, her views, and about all kinds of other things as well. Sandy sighed, for if Jeremy had paid even half of the attention that Rudy was giving her, she'd have been a very happy woman.
"You want to hear something funny?" Rudy asked, after Sandy had turned things around and asked him how his day had gone. "I went to the store earlier. I was trying to see if I could influence the people around me, and specifically the women, by only using my mind."
"You are so weird." Sandy commented.
"Yeah, it comes with the package. I mean, I wasn't trying to bend them to my will or anything. I was just trying to implant a subtle idea into their heads. Okay, so this is what happened, and no, I'm not making this up. I was going through the aisles at the Galmart. It was fairly crowded there, like it usually is. In my head, I was projecting for women to leave whatever aisle I happened to be walking through. Most women just kept on doing whatever they were doing. A few started looking around themselves until they made eye contact with me. A very small number of women actually left the aisle right away, even when they'd been standing there shopping at first. I couldn't tell if my experiment was working or not, because the results were so random.
"Anyway, I decided to switch tactics. I thought to myself, the next woman that comes by, I'm not going to push away from me, but instead I'm going to try and attract her toward me. So this supervisor flashes by at the end of the aisle. I guess she's pushing some abandoned cart back toward the front of the store. I have like half a second to project my thoughts at her, and she was looking straight ahead of her as she walked. Well, this woman stopped in her tracks. She started looking around blankly. When she saw me she asked me if the cart she was pushing belonged to me, even though that cart had been nowhere near me to begin with."
"That was just a coincidence." Sandy shook her head.
"Maybe so." Rudy admitted. "But... there were two other shoppers between me and this supervisor, plus one of them had a kid in their cart. I was standing at least twenty feet away from this supervisor when she asked me that question. The look on her face gave me the impression that she thought she'd heard somebody calling out to her. Even better, I had a witness with me while I was at the store. This was one of the girls who stops by my place sometimes to talk about metaphysics. This girl was making fun of what I was doing up until this last incident. She saw how the supervisor stopped, and how she turned to look at me as if she was honing in on a target."
"Rudy, you're crazy, and so is that girl who was with you."
"As crazy as I was when I showed up in your roomie's bedroom? How about I send myself into your room right now, and I prove to you that some of this stuff is really possible?"
"You can't do that, Rudy. Nobody can!"
"Dare me. Dare me like Patty dared me when I was working at the casino, and let's find out."
Sandy glanced over at the alarm clock, finding that is was barely going to hit seven. Jeremy wouldn't be due back for another couple of hours, she figured, so she had some time to play along with Rudy's ridiculous notions. "Okay, I dare you."
"I wish I'd taken a look at your bedroom when I was in your apartment that morning." Rudy whined. "So I could visualize it now."
"See, you can't do it." Sandy told him.
"Hold on. I didn't say I couldn't do it. I got into Dee Dee's room without knowing what that looked like, didn't I? Let's do this, let's get us both back to that state of arousal, so that I can use that energy like I did back at the coffee house. Just try not to freak out if things start to feel like you're having a dream."
"I did not freak out last time!"
"Right. You remember about that mental bookmark I asked you to keep in mind?"
"Yes."
"Try and bring that back into focus, while I say some dirty things to you."
"Now, that sounds fun." Sandy grinned.
And so, for the next few minutes, the odd pair concentrated on naughty thoughts and each other's company. Sandy found herself smirking over just how ridiculous it all sounded, and how pleasantly quirky and away from the norm Rudy was. She was pretty happy about befriending him, though, even if he had somehow snuck into Dee Dee's bedroom, and...
There was a loud thump on her bed, provoking Sandy to bolt up to her feet and spin around to face it. There was Rudy on the mattress, his upper half teetering on the edge and off-balance. His legs were flailing about precariously in the air until he tipped over and landed on the floor. Rudy spilled all over her precious scrapbook supplies.
"No, you're going to ruin my pictures!" Sandy cried out, as she rushed over to drag Rudy to his feet.
Once he was standing and facing her, Sandy reached out and touched his chest, just to make sure Rudy was a real person. She was deathly afraid of ghosts, and always had been, but this was him. Really him!
Rudy was wearing his casual attire of a black tank top and red cotton shorts. He was smiling at her, and at his success in the experiment. Rudy had just reached out for her shoulders, when they both heard a man's voice booming out from the living room.
"Hey, Sandy, I'm home!"
"That's Jeremy!" Sandy gasped. "He's not supposed to be here! I can't believe he came home early! Quick, go hide somewhere! He'll come in here any second!"
Realizing that yet another scandal might erupt in his life, Rudy's first impression was to duck under the bed, but it was too short to squeeze under. His next hiding place of choice was the closet. While its door was open, he saw in dismay that it was full of boxes containing all of Sandy's scrapbooking supplies. He looked back at the nervous woman with an open mouth.
"The drapes, hide behind the drapes!" The blonde started pushing at him.
Quickly, Rudy flew over the photos he'd just scattered and bent up, and concealed his body behind the dark green folds of fabric. The curtains were still swaying around and the bottoms of Rudy's sneakers partly visible, when the bedroom door swung open and Jeremy stepped in.
"Hey, Sandy." Her boyfriend said. "How come you didn't come out when I called?"
Sandy never had a problem with going out to greet Jeremy before. This time she felt like she was being hailed as a puppy when its master got home, and she wasn't liking that one bit. Sandy sighed, and with both arms she pointed down at all stuff she had spread out on the bedroom floor. "I was a little busy, if you hadn't noticed."
"Oh, you're doing that again."
This time, she grew a little irritated. "Yes, I was doing that again. If I'd known you would be coming home so early, I wouldn't have put everything out like this. As you can see, nobody bothered to tell me anything, as usual!"
