Josh was twelve, and twelve was too old to be getting lost at the mall. And he wasn’t lost, not really; he knew where he was. It’s just he didn’t know where Mom and Dad were. One moment he had been following them to the discount furniture store, and one bathroom break later, it was like they had been spirited away by flying saucers, minus the lightshow. He couldn’t find them at the furniture place, but he remembered Dad saying that was where they were headed.
What do you do when you’re lost? Stay in one place, but that was if you were in the woods. He really would have liked to go to Waldenbooks, but no, he decided that he should probably go to the front entrance, because that was where they had come in. Going outside to wait by the car might have worked if it weren’t utterly lousy with rain.
He settled at one end of a bench facing what used to be his favorite place to go on mall visits. Just a couple months ago, it had been alive with electronic lights and sounds, and people fed quarters into machines to engage in battle with aliens, or race cross-country, or face off against each other at air hockey. There was even a mini-golf course further back, made to look like the surface of the moon, complete with a little lunar lander. Now it was dark and empty, the security shutter pulled all the way down. Even the sign over the entrance was gone. But the pizza place next door was still in business, and if he had the money for a slice he would have gone there.
He looked at his watch. Quarter after four. It was Sunday, which meant the mall closed at five o’clock. People bustled past, going about their lives like normal. His eyes prickled and watered. At least he didn’t need to take a bathroom break.
That was it. He’d had to use the bathroom—one along the way because most of the stores didn’t have public restrooms--and that’s when Mom and Dad had disappeared. Had they marched on to their destination, bought a table lamp or whatever, and just gone back out, presuming he’d been good and was still following them? Was this what happened when you made an unscheduled pit stop? Your parents just abruptly forget you exist?
His stomach was doing that thing where it felt like it was sinking into his feet when the vampire girl sat down at the other end of the bench. At least, that was his first impression. She was like nothing he’d ever seen before, despite looking a lot like a young woman. He tried not to stare too much, looking at his sneakers instead. At twelve, he was somewhat aware of punks and metalheads, but he had never heard of Goths; were he to see one in the wild, he probably would have mistaken them for a punk. Or a vampire.
Josh dared to glance in her direction when their eyes met. She smiled at him. She had bright blue eyes and purple hair, purple lipstick, and wore a purple coat that looked like it had been fashioned from the shaggy pelt of one of Cookie Monster’s less fortunate cousins. Josh went back to staring at his shoes, wishing that the arcade was still a thing, the lights and sounds distracting him from the general discomfort of being lost, but no, he wasn’t lost, he knew where he was. On a bench with a stranger. A pretty stranger, but he was twelve, and… he had no idea how old she was. Older than he was, in any case. His eyes prickled and watered, and it hurt to breathe a little.
“Are you okay, little man?” The voice was soft, husky, gentle. Josh dared to look at the vampire lady. She was looking at him, smiling. She had braces. Mom would have said something unpleasant about the lady having too much makeup on, or her skirt being too short. Josh was oddly reminded of Tinkerbell from Peter Pan, or a ballet dancer; the lady’s dress—what he could see of it under the shaggy purple coat—was black and frilly and lacy. Her legs were covered by black and white striped stockings, and on her feet were shiny black boots with very pointy toes. Her smile widened. “Yes, I’m talking to you. You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to. You know, just nod for yes, or a headshake for no.” For a vampire, her teeth weren’t all that pointy, and vampires probably didn’t have braces.
His eyes prickled some more. She was blurry when he looked at her. He managed to shake his head. He sniffled as quietly as he could. He was twelve. Big boys don’t cry.
“Are you lost?”
He shook his head again. “I know where I am.” He waved a hand at the metal shutter. “That used to be my favorite place to go, and now it’s gone. Like Mom and Dad.” And he rubbed his eyes and tried to be quiet.
When Josh could see again, he was vaguely aware that the lady was talking quietly to someone he hadn’t noticed before, a man with flyaway graying hair and a scruffy beard, dressed in a silver spacesuit, wearing goggles and holding a video camera.
And looming behind this apparent astronaut was an enormous figure that made Josh briefly scared for his skin. It stood on two surprisingly bony legs, but its chest, shoulders, and arms were huge with muscle. It had a head like a Tyrannosaurus rex, with yellow eyes, and sickly yellowish-green scaly skin. It was dressed for wrestling or the circus, with black trunks over dirty gray tights, and a dirty gray long-sleeved shirt. Black boots, tightly laced. The left hand wore a black glove. There was no right hand, but something like a huge metallic crab claw. A metal antenna sprouted from the top of the dinosaur head, which was partially covered by a tight black cowl. The creature hardly moved, but it wasn’t a statue like Josh had hoped. He was thinking, remembering when Dad explained to him that the Creature from the Black Lagoon was a man in a suit, and not a real monster. This was someone in a suit. A big someone, or a big suit.
The vampire lady had scooched over on the bench a little. She smelled nice. “What’s your name? Maybe we can help.”
Josh wasn’t sure what to do or what he wanted. He thought about heading for the car, if it was still there. He looked at the lady, then at the astronaut, who smiled politely. The dinosaur wrestler raised its metal claw in what looked like a friendly manner. Josh managed to mumble his name and looked at the floor. “Am I on TV?”
“No, Josh, not unless you want to be.” The astronaut held up the camera to show that it wasn’t recording anything. “Maybe we should introduce ourselves.”
The lady chuckled. “I was just thinking that. Josh, my name is Velvet.” She touched her right hand over her heart, and Josh managed not to look at the neckline of her little black dress. “This is my uncle, Orion.” The astronaut saluted. “And keeping a close watch on things is the former Interdimensional Heavyweight Wrestling champion, Flubb Dinoslammer.” The creature waved with its left hand. Just three fingers and a thumb. Josh waved back in spite of himself, and Flubb Dinoslammer seemed to smile.
A voice on the PA system said the mall would be closing in thirty minutes.
Velvet had scooched a little closer. Josh thought about scooching away, but not much. “So how can we help you, Josh? We’re old hands at traveling through space and time. We’ve eaten food court fish and chips in more solar systems than can be counted on the fingers of both hands. We collect lost things and lonely people.” Her eyes were huge and blue, the dark makeup around them making them look bigger. Silver rings glittered on her fingers.
“I don’t want to be collected. I just want to go home with Mom and Dad. I’m twelve, I shouldn’t be getting lost. I’m not lost. I know where I am.”
Velvet looked sad for a few seconds. “I know, honey, I know,” she said, very quietly. Then a little more audibly, “This captain’s lost his crew.” The astronaut held out a battered satchel, placing it almost reverently on the bench between Josh and Velvet, who fumbled it open and started rummaging. Three mismatched socks—one striped, one spotted, one bright pink—were produced, then crammed back inside. A bag of marbles. An orange. Something that looked like a cross between a TV remote and a plastic dinosaur. Orion shook his head and said that the Nucleoprotonic Dinotransmogrifator was not ready for humans to use. Velvet’s rummaging became more frantic. The satchel wasn’t very big, but the lady’s arms were in it almost to her elbows. Josh thought he might fall in if he got too close.
Orion bent down and whispered something. Velvet nodded, and the astronaut went towards the mall entrance, hoisting the camcorder onto his shoulder. Flubb Dinoslammer tottered after Orion on his spindly legs. Some people looked surprised, but not a few seemed not to notice. Velvet mumbled something and pulled out more bits and bobs: a rubber duck, a bag of licorice, a coffee mug purporting to be from the Maryland Renaissance Festival. She would look at each item, make a little disappointed huffing sound, and put it back in the bag.
Finally: “Eureka!” Velvet held up an action figure. It was a miniature Flubb Dinoslammer, nearly perfect in its details, complete with a stubby head antenna and the metal crab claw where the right hand would be. It had the heavily-muscled arms and chest of a Masters of the Universe figure, but the legs were different, starting out muscular but becoming longer and thinner below the knees. Even the dinosaur head was the same shade of yellowish-green.
Velvet held out the little dino-headed wrestler to Josh. “I think you need him most.”
Josh’s eyes prickled some more. He held up a hand to accept this gift, remembering how teachers, police, and Mom and Dad would say not to talk to strangers, accept no gifts from strangers, don’t answer the door if you don’t know who it is, let the answering machine pick up the phone calls, and he didn’t know why he wasn’t scrambling off the bench and running towards the parking lot. Surely, if she really was a vampire and wanted to drink his blood, she would have done it by now, even if this weren’t a monster movie.
His fingers curled around the cool, molded plastic. The little dinosaur head grinned up at him with ivory-colored carnivore teeth. He wanted to say thanks, but couldn’t get his mouth to work. He blinked a couple tears away. She smiled at him, eyes shining.
“Josh? There you are. Have you been here all this time? The mall is about to close.” Mom and Dad were there, having appeared as abruptly as they’d disappeared seemingly hours ago. And then Mom was apologizing to Velvet about something, but Velvet was smiling sweetly, saying there was no need; Josh wasn’t a bother at all, she knew how to babysit, she thought he was lost and decided to keep him company. That’s nice to know, we thought he was scared of clowns. No, Velvet wasn’t a clown, but she often worked with them. Further polite pleasantries were exchanged, and it was time to go. Josh stood up. Velvet stood up. Josh joined his parents, and Velvet walked alongside them; they were all headed in the same direction, after all.
Outside, the sky was still a cloudy gray, but the rain had stopped.
“Would you look at that,” Dad said.
Josh thought it was a fire truck at first, but fire trucks were red or yellow, not silver. It looked like a bus, but with not as many windows, and the tires looked more serious. Flubb Dinoslammer was standing beside an open door in the vehicle’s side, waving with his claw at people. Orion was there too; he had taken off his goggles, and had changed out of his silver suit into a maroon jumpsuit. He stood in the vehicle’s doorway at the top of a little flight of metal teps, taking pictures with a Polaroid camera.
“We are not getting one of those,” Mom said. “Not one that big, anyway.”
Velvet came to a stop at the shiny silver vehicle. “This is where we leave you, Josh. Our planet needs us.” She put on little sunglasses with round red lenses and gave Josh a thumbs-up using both hands. “You might catch us on TV if your folks let you stay up late.”
Orion chuckled softly. “Somewhere in the universe is a mall where the arcade is still in business and, there’s a Mystic Marathon cabinet with my name on it.” He offered a business card to Mom, who took it and handed it to Dad.
Josh stopped for a moment, then held out his gift to Dad. “Could you hold this?”
“Where’d you get this? Looks weird.” Dad looked at the mini Flubb Dinoslammer, and the mini Flubb Dinoslammer grinned back at him.
“She gave it to me, I know that I’m not supposed to—”
“It’s okay, Josh. You can say goodbye to your punk rock girlfriend.” Dad said it to be funny, Josh knew that, and he knew it would have been worse if Mom had said it.
Josh went over to Velvet. She was taller than him, but shorter than Mom. He tried to look her in the eye and succeeded. She smiled at him, and he would have liked to say something, but he didn’t know what to say. He reached out to her, feeling like he was five years old, and found himself gently, all-too-briefly enveloped in warmth and softness and a sweet aroma. He sniffled. “It’s okay, Josh. It was nice to meet you today.” Velvet and gently patted him on the back before letting him go.
Velvet’s astronaut uncle took two Polaroid pictures of Josh and Velvet standing side by side, she with her arm around his shoulder like they were buddies. Josh got to keep the one that looked better, shook hands with Orion, and then he was off with his parents to the family car.
“What was that all about?” Dad didn’t sound angry or anything, but curious.
Josh took a breath, let it out, took a breath. “You said you were going to the furniture place but I had to use the bathroom and when I got to the furniture—”
“Oh. We weren’t headed to the furniture place, we were going to Gee Bee.”
“Gee Bee?”
Mom sighed. “We almost went to mall security, but Dad remembered that you usually go to where the video games are.”
“So I guess it was good I didn’t go to Waldenbooks.”
“Well, we looked for you there just in case.” Dad and Josh were the big readers. “I didn’t know they closed the arcade. Unless they relocated it.”
“Relocate?”
“Moved the games to another part of the mall. But I’m guessing they’re gone for good.”
“Who was the girl?” Mom sounded a little impatient. “She looked like a mime.”
“She said her name is Velvet. She’s on TV or something.”
“Like Creature Feature,” Dad said in a Dracula voice. “Saturday nights after the news, when you’re supposed to be sleeping.”
“I’m sorry,” Josh said, the Flubb Dinoslammer figure clutched in one hand, the picture of himself and Velvet in the other. “I remembered to stay put.”
“It’s okay, Josh. You’re not in trouble. It was just a miscommunication. We should have said we were going to Gee Bee in the first place. But on the plus side, you had a little adventure and met someone nice.”
“You were lucky she didn’t want to drink your blood,” Mom said abruptly.
Josh wondered if he was going to have to listen to another of Mom’s creepy stories from the old country about some child who got lost in the woods and was eaten alive by wolves, but she said nothing more about it on the ride home. Instead, Mom and Dad talked about things that Josh wasn’t sure he understood, and there was a pre-season football game on the radio. He looked at the gift Velvet had given him, and it looked back at him with googly eyes. He looked at the Polaroid, at Velvet’s smile, the purple hair and the fluffy purple coat.
When they got home, the Flubb Dinoslammer figure went on top of Josh’s bookshelf, leaning slightly back against the wall because it had trouble standing upright on account of the toy’s skinny legs, and the Polaroid of Josh and Velvet was pinned to the bulletin board in the kitchen, beside the old picture of Dad receiving some kind of commemorative plaque in recognition of something or other at his job.
In time, Josh took the Polaroid with him to college, keeping it in a photo album amid pictures he’d taken with his own camera, pictures from visits to Renaissance Festivals, museum trips, and assorted fantasy, horror, and science fiction conventions. It was on one happy occasion at a sci-fi convention, a month shy of his twentieth birthday, that Josh met Velvet again, and the purple-haired dimension-hopping Goth lady happily remembered meeting the little boy who turned out not to be lost in the mall after all.
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