Maybe BOBO’S BIG DAY OUT is pretty entry-level viral video fodder, sure, whatever. But it’s a classic for a reason. Anyone who writes it off as midtier is just being an annoying, elitist prick.

It’s got that old camcorder charm, maybe from the early 90s or—no, it was 1989, Newfag knows there was a timestamp in the original version that got cropped out when it recirculated. (Lots of people have only seen the cropped version, but he has the unedited cut on a hard drive back home; he’ll always insist the pacing is way better in the OG.) Admittedly it can feel a little slow at first with the editing, there’s a close-up on a banner declaring it “Julie’s WILD 4th Birthday”, lots of cuts to happy family members wearing little animal ear headbands, a big chocolate cake with jungle animal toppers, a fuckin’ bouncy castle—Newfag has a personal vendetta against any kid who could afford a bouncy castle—anyway.

At the 2:36 mark things get good, when someone off cam announces the “biiiiiig surprise” is here, and the camera swivels, zooms out, and here comes some asshole in a safari costume, and he’s holding a nervous chimpanzee wearing a diaper. We see Julie, a little redheaded girl, and she’s psychotically thrilled. She shrieks like a monkey herself, high-pitched and manic, then she bolts from the table to greet what will most certainly be her new best friend. The safari guy helps the chimp down but the thing looks scared, it holds tight to its handler’s finger and coos nervously, and when the little girl gets up in his face he tries to avoid eye contact altogether. She’s insistent, though, as expected of an entitled brat who can afford both a bouncy castle and a chimp for her birthday. She grabs onto the animal’s face with her dirty kid hands, kind of like she wants to give him a kiss. The safari guy warns her that Bobo doesn’t like kisses, or touching, or eye contact, or little girls. She doesn’t care because she’s four and it’s her birthday, so she tries again, and this time Bobo retaliates with a slap. It’s pretty tame, considering the damage chimps are known to cause, but of course Julie’s mom goes ballistic, immediately screaming about how this wild animal is attacking her kid, and the moron holding the camera is yelling at the safari guy to “control the ape” and, naturally, as evolution determined, Bobo’s little brain can’t take any more excitement and he becomes a wild animal. 

He goes for Julie’s eyes first; like two little green grapes he plucks them out and gets to gnoshing. Everyone’s screaming and yet it can’t drown out the gelatinous squelching, and the cameraman seems to be in shock because he just keeps filming the whole thing as Julie wails for her mommy, blood and ooze slopping down her face, and she’s so loud that Bobo can’t enjoy his lunch in peace so he slaps her again, and again, and again, his knuckles thunking hard against her tiny head. And then he remembers he has nails, his lips peel back and he shows the camera his horrid yellow smile before he starts clawing, shredding at Julie’s face, his dirty nails slice jagged red fissures down her cheeks, through her empty eye sockets, tearing her lips so her mouth is just strips of bleeding meat, and Bobo is having the best day of his life now, you’d think it was his birthday, maybe it was and his dream was to maul a girl and then usurp her bouncy castle.

The video ends pretty abruptly, Bobo is laughing, living it up, the little girl is nothing but pulp on the lawn and the camera gets a surprisingly clear shot of her remains, everyone is screaming and the picture cuts to a blue screen, and then it’s over. Newfag first saw that video on Facebook, of all places. He shared it to his wall with an admittedly distasteful caption, something like “lulz stupid bitch”; his friend list shrank quite a bit over the next few days.

Anyway.

Laika’s face reminds him of that.

He’s rolled her onto her back to see the damage. Now he’s just standing, looming over her corpse, mouth-breathing because of the broken nose, drooling because of the missing teeth. Unsure of what better to do, he slowly inches his foot onto her collarbone, and he can feel her rib cage buckle. It would be so easy to. It wouldn’t matter now.

He’s pulled out of his hypnosis by a car horn. It honks once, terse but polite, like it doesn’t want to disturb anyone. Newfag glances up from the body, looking caught and stupid in the headlights of a box truck off on the edge of the lot. Its brights blot out any sight of the driver; he squints, shields his eyes to try and see through the glare in his glasses. The truck honks again, a little more rhythmic this time, almost urgent.

Newfag looks around the empty lot. He looks down at the corpse under his shoe. Did you call yourself a taxi, Laika? The truck honks a third time—a fourth, fifth, sixth time in fact—and Newf still doesn’t know what to do about it. He stares the headlights down until his vision gets starry, until he forgets where he is or that he was waiting for a truck.

The driver throws open the door in a huff. They stand on the seat so their shadow rises above the hood of the car, waving their arms dramatically they yell “NEWFAAAAAAAAG” and Newfag waves at them like a toddler, opening and closing his hand like he just got ahold of his fine motor skills. The driver throws up their hands in annoyance. Then gestures for him to get to the truck.

Regrettably he leaves Laika’s clavicle intact. 

The driver’s still standing out the door, lighting a cigarette when Newfag makes his way over. He’s kind of confused when he finally unscrambles his vision, because there’s a girl in the truck, and West didn’t say anything about a girl in a truck.

She’s tall and spindly and visibly impatient, tapping her fingers against the door while Newfag saunters into the headlights. She has on jump boots and a long black trench. An overall look of someone working on a manifesto. Very Columbine-chic.

She looks at him with apathetic disdain.

“What the fuck happened to you.” Her voice is husky, thick with tar. Newfag just kind of stands there.

“Uh. I. Fell.”

“You fell?”

Newfag remembers Laika’s face being whittled down like an eraser. “Icy,” he explains dumbly. 

The girl points to the gaping gunshot wound in his shoulder.

“Did the ice have a gun and shoot you with it?”

“Yeah.”

She takes a drag before she loses her cool. “Okay.” She checks her watch, kind of nods to herself. “Okay.” She takes another drag then, and this one seems to really help. “I have a gun, too. You know that? I keep it in my glove compartment.”

Newfag may be a bumbling idiot right now but he knows a threat when he hears one. He sobers up from his stupidity quick, and he nods in compliance. The girl softens, maybe, it’s hard to tell.

“No one’s following you, right?” She glances over his shoulder. Newfag turns to follow her gaze, trying his best to look past the corpse shellacked to the parking lot. He thinks about Dimi’s slack jaw, the sound of Bald Man’s skull splitting. All the horny perverts fighting to the death. It would be kind of incredible if someone was following him.

He turns back to her and shrugs noncommittally. “No.”

Kind of lost on what else to do, maybe debating whether or not to shoot him herself, she resorts to checking her watch again. Maybe the watch will give her permission to shoot him with a gun. 

“Okay.” She sucks down the last of her cig, the smoke sticks in her throat and rounds out her voice. “Once you get in the truck you’re going to be honest with me, right?” She hisses smoke out her teeth. “We’re on a tight schedule; we don’t have time to fuck around. Do you need to go to the hospital?”

“What?”

“For your arm. Do you need to go to the hospital?”

He looks down at his bullet hole.

“Uh. No?”

She purses her lips in thought, staring into the squishy depths of his bloody shoulder, assessing the damage herself. She gives him a once over. Then, satisfied, she flicks her cigarette butt and nods.

“Okay. Let’s go.” She lowers herself back into the truck. “Plane lands soon.”

Newfag doesn’t move. He’s stuck in the headlights, unsure what to do—is this another test?

“Uh. West told me a guy was gonna come pick me up.”

The girl in the truck pauses to make a face.

“Funny,” she scoffs. Newfag doesn’t laugh; he doesn’t know what’s funny and he really can’t remember how to laugh. The girl sees his vacant stare and kind of backpedals. “Uh. Well. I’m here.” And then she specifies, “I’m the one West sent.”

She gestures around her, indicating the box truck as evidence to back her claim. Newf hears West’s name and there’s instant relief that comes with it, final reassurance that this is what he’s supposed to do. He nods obediently and gets into the cab of the truck.

“Okay,” the girl kicks it in drive, “It’s forty minutes to the airport from here; the jet took off a little late so we’re good on time.”

“Cool.”

“When we get there, they want us to pull right onto the tarmac. You’re gonna hop in the back and help the guys load it on, and then we’ll go straight up to Montclair.”

“Alright.”

“Alright.” The girl cuts the wheel and they skid out of the parking lot. Newf swears he hears a loud crack, like brittle bones snapping, but maybe he’s just being hopeful.

The two of them sit in silence for a bit. Nothing really to discuss—he doesn’t know the plan, doesn’t have a lot of practice with being in the car alone with a girl or with anyone in fact. As far as he knows he’s always just been alone. 

Out the window isn’t much. Every so often the highway breaks off, makes way for another abandoned corporate lot, another plot of snow wasting space. It’s all oranges and browns in the lamplight, muddled and ugly and existential. A final affirmation of what he’s leaving behind, one way or another. He tries his hand at sentimentality but it stops short. Gets stuck in the P-trap. Works as intended. He feels nothing.

They pull onto the turnpike, the stuffy corporate parks blip out of existence and the air clears with the rush of clean black asphalt. The girl seems a little lighter now, as if suburbia had been wringing her neck and finally released. She unshealths a celebratory cigarette—just the filter on her teeth seems to calm her down.

“Alright.” She rolls down the window and exhales her words into the wind. “We’re making good time.”

“Nice.” They’ve been driving for maybe seven minutes. 

The girl nods, she bares her teeth and tries a steady breath. Finally, her nerves a little calmed, she manages a quick glance at Newfag. “You doing alright?”

Newf shifts around in his seat. He has no way of knowing; he just sort of shrugs. “Yeah.”

“West said you don’t feel pain.” She sounds a little skeptical, like she’s unsure whether or not West was fucking with her, or if he was being hyperbolic, or what. Newf shrugs again.

“Not really.”

“Huh.” She still doesn’t sound convinced. “It’s like a nerve thing, or…?”

“No. It’s just an everything, I don’t know.” He’s never really had to explain it out loud before, and he’s all too aware of how stupid, how made up it all sounds. He shrugs a third time. “It’s been like this for a while.”

The girl nods but doesn’t have more to say. The silence hangs like heavy judgement, makes it feel like Newf has to explain himself.

He holds up his left hand to her.

“A year ago I slammed my finger in a car door and didn’t even notice until it started bruising. And then I went home and stuck my hand in a hinge, and I closed the door maybe like ten times. My nails are, like, permanently rotted now.” He shows her his first three fingers, their nails black and jagged, only barely hanging onto the cuticles at this point. “I think that was the first time I noticed.” The girl barely looks but she makes a face regardless.

“Gross.”

“Yeah.”

“I bet that makes you fun at parties, at least.” She almost smiles.

Newf blinks at her. “Uh-huh.”

“What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever done without feeling pain?”

“I mean.” He looks at his fingers, into the cloudy blue-black of his nail beds. “Not much. I guess I tried killing myself this morning, but. I don’t think it worked.”

What a wild thing to say. The girl laughs, more out of discomfort than anything. When Newf doesn’t laugh she goes quiet again.

“I thought West was joking when he said you’re dying.” She admits.

“I don’t know if I am.” He says.

She doesn’t give that any room for thought. “Does your mom also call you Newfag?”

“Does what?”

“Like,” she gestures vaguely to him, to his pathetic everything, “do you have another name? That you’d wanna be called instead?”

“Instead of what.”

“Instead of Newfag, oh my god. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah, uh…” His brain is an empty Wheel Of Fortune board. Every tile is blank, they’re searing in the bright studio light, almost seem to be mocking him. Newfag asks Pat Sajak to repeat the hint, and in his pleasant daytime television timbre he reads, “It’s Your Fucking Name” which doesn’t narrow things down in the slightest. He’d like to spin the wheel, buy a vowel or something, but when he tries he finds he’s been hogtied and also stripped naked for some reason. His stupid body is dangling helplessly over a pit of open flames. Pat Sajak prods his ass with a pitchfork. Vanna White is laughing at how tiny his cock is.

“Uh,” his eyes snap open. “Newfag is fine.”

The girl can’t help but take her eyes off the road. She looks at him concerned. Maybe even disturbed. Newfag wonders if she had somehow seen his embarrassing fantasy just then. Eventually, hesitantly, she nods.

“Code names,” she justifies. “Okay. Alright.”

Newfag nods back. “Do you, uh.” He looks out the window. “Do you… have a code name?”

She wasn’t expecting to be hit with the same question. The cigarette in her mouth turns to ash in an instant, she’s anxiously sucking it down with all her might. She flicks the butt out the window and then immediately lights another. “Sure. Uh.” She clears her throat. “Sonny.”

“Sonny?”

“Sure, or y’know, whatever.”

Newfag nods.

“So how do you know West?”

“Y’know we don’t have to talk, right? We can just sit in awkward silence.”

The Schrödinger's gun in the glove compartment snickers menacingly. Newfag nods. “Yeah, sorry. Okay.”