d

D This is how the story goes: after the drive-in movie and the sodas at the malt shop, two teenagers sneak away to the woods to park and make out inside the pulsating sound waves of Top 40 Hits. But just as his fingers reach tremblingly for the top button on her blouse, there comes a newsflash: Serial killer escaped from the Maximum Security Prison for the Criminally Insane! The boy wants to leave at once, but the girl convinces him that they should stay. Just do the math, she says. The population of our township hovers between 1,432 and 1500; thus, the odds of his encountering the two of us as opposed to any of the others are so minuscule as to be virtually infinitesimal. They go back to their kissing, and his fingers brush the smooth surface of her second button. But then they hear it: footsteps in the dry leaves, crunch, crunch, crunch. Hastily, the boy turns the key in the ignition: click! The battery's dead, drained by the aforementioned Top 40 Hits. For lack of anything better to do, he turns to blaming the girl; after all, she was the one who had insisted on staying. But Uh-UH, she says, We ain't gonna be NObody's urban legend! (Despite the fact that she is not only Caucasian but the palest and blondest of all the xanthochroi ever to grace the shores of Lake Waukesha, when confronted with a challenge, she tends to slip unconsciously into jive talk, which is why she was denied First Place—unfairly, many claim—in the All-County Final Debate, Sophomore Level). She has a plan, but will it work? Crunch, crunch, crunch. Switch to the perspective of the serial killer approaching the car where two forms huddle under their youthful crowns. He reaches in with his hook and slashes at their human softness—but something doesn't feel right—where is that satisfying sensation of resistant bone? This is the point in the story where we freeze-frame him as the teenagers tiptoe bared-headedly away to safety while he finds only their heavy winter coats, and on top, the two now-famous decoy crowns!

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