Now he contemplated his face in the mirror and told himself he'd get used to this, he'd come to like it, it would be a trademark. It would make him gothier than goth, for life, always an outsider, always one of the weird ones, like the old-timers who'd come to Disney with their teenaged, eye-rolling kids. Goths' kids were never goths, it seemed -- more like bang-bangers or jocky-looking peak-performance types, or hippies or gippies or dippies or tippies or whatever. But their parents were still proudly flying their freak-flags, weird to the grave. "We'll let everyone know about it," he said, thinking not of *everyone* but of all the cool subculture kids he'd grown up with and worshipped and been rejected by and dated and loved and hated -- "and we'll make it part of *everyone*'s story. We'll protect it, guys. Of course we'll protect it." That settled the argument. Death hadn't expected that. Since when did he get the last word on any subject? Since now. They were following his lead. And then the girls put him to bed, shyly helping him undress, each of them leaning over him to kiss him good night. Tracey's kiss was sisterly, on the cheek, her spicy perfume and her jet-black hair caressing him. Lacey's kiss was anything but sisterly. She mashed her breasts to his chest and thrust her tongue into his mouth, keeping her silver eyes open and staring deep into his, her fingers working busily in his hair. She broke the kiss off with a gasp and a giggle. She traced the ruin of his mouth with a fingertip, breathing heavily, and let it slide lower, down his chest. He found himself actually *hard*, the first pleasurable sensation he'd had in his dick since that fateful night. From the corridor came an impatient cough -- Tracey, waiting for Lacey to get going. Lacey rolled her eyes and giggled again and then slid her hand the rest of the way down, briefly holding his dick and then encircling his balls with her fingers before kissing him again on the twist of his lips and backing out of the room, whispering, "Sleep well, see you in the morning." Death lay awake and staring at the ceiling for a long time after they had gone. The English teacher dude had left him with a bedpan for the night and many of them had promised to return in rotations indefinitely during the days, helping him out with dressing and shopping and getting him in and out of his marvelous chair. He stared and stared at that ceiling, and then he reached for his laptop, there beside the bed, the same place it had lived when he was in the hospital. He fired it up and went straight to today's fly-throughs of the ride and ran through them from different angles -- facing backward and sideways, looking down and looking up, noting all the elements that felt like *story* and all the ones that didn't, wishing he had his plus-one/minus-one joystick with him to carve out the story he was seeing. #