Bed Hopping
Copyright© 2023 by Myll Apila
Chapter 2
The rain continued into the new year. When I wasn’t dismembering enemy soldiers with my friends, I spent much of the time reading in my bedroom, intermittently soaking wads of tissues as I satisfied my newly-rampant hormonal urges while thinking of girls at school, whom I had to lust after from a distance since I didn’t have the courage to actually talk to them.
Eventually the rain stopped and there was even some pallid winter sun. The day of reckoning seemed to have arrived. I took the metal detector out of its box and read the instructions. First I had to charge the battery overnight. That delayed things for another day.
The next day was bright and sunny, almost like Spring. Mum, Dad and Janey watched avidly as I took the metal detector out into our back garden. I donned the headphones, switched on the detector and started sweeping it across the garden in the fashion I’d seen on TV crime dramas. Almost immediately I heard it beeping to indicate it had detected something. I scrabbled away at the damp soil until I discovered the buried treasure – a rusty nail. I resumed the search and found a succession of nails, screws, a washer and other bits of metal which had no identifiable origins or purpose.
Eventually a tap on my shoulder interrupted my concentration. It was Dex. I hadn’t even realised he had come to visit, nor how long he had been waiting for me to acknowledge his existence. I took off the headphones so I could hear what he was saying.
“What are you doing, dude?” Dex asked.
“I’m trying out my Christmas present. This thing was Janey’s idea.”
My parents had gone indoors, probably unable to stand the excitement. Janey was still there however. She stuck out her tongue at me. “The perfect present for a dork,” she said. Yet Janey had hit the nail on the head: I’d been so completely engrossed that I hadn’t noticed how much time had passed or that my parents had gone back indoors.
“Have you found anything?” asked Dex.
“I think Noah’s Ark landed here. The wood rotted away leaving only these rusty nails,” I replied, showing him my less than impressive bounty.
A look of constipation crossed Dex’s face, a tell-tale symptom that he had had an idea, the same ‘tell’ that made him such a lousy poker player. “Hey, could you bring your metal detector round to my house? My mum lost her wedding ring in the garden and we haven’t been able to find it.”
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