Since I decided I was getting over-obsessed with JoyTech, and since Aurora and I are friends again, I’ve been walking around like a bit of a slap-happy idiot, toonifying kittens and flowers and shit.

Yesterday, we finally made it to see The Dark Knight. Wow. Definitely the second-best Batman movie ever. Maybe the best.

Even if I couldn’t figure out why (spoiler!) Gordon faked his own death.

And when they revealed Harvey Dent’s face, Aurora screamed and hid her face against my shoulder. Thank you, film industry.

Not surprisingly, my favorite part was at the end when Batman realizes that to protect Gotham, sometimes he’s going to have to play the villain.

Speaking of which, we’re leaving the theater, and Aurora’s going on and on about Heath Ledger being dead, and she’s just sad enough that I’m practically obligated to put my arm around her, and she says, “Oh Nemo,” and kind of leans into me, and then who’s standing right in front of us?

New Guy.

Oh yeah.

“What’s up, buddy?” I grin at him, my arm still around his girlfriend.

“Screw you, Green,” he snarls at me, and I remember that the last time we were face to face, I dumped popcorn all over him and started a giant food fight. I looked at the bag of leftover movie popcorn in my hand thoughtfully, but before I could react, Aurora was stepping between me and him. And she’s mad.

Bwahahahaha.

New Guy just stands there while she lays into him: “What are you doing here? Did you follow me? I’m not going to be monitored, Kevin. We talked about this.”

“Yeah, well, I didn’t know we were talking about giving you ‘space’ to mess around with this bozo.”

“Mess around? You jerk! Nemo’s like my brother, okay? How many times…”

The conversation went something like that, anyway. At that point, I decided to slip off into the night, as it were. Mostly to avoid hearing about how I was Aurora’s brother.

If only she could see that New Guy is stupid Harvey Dent, and I’m Batman.

Or maybe she does see that, and she chooses Harvey.

Okay, so here’s all the crazy stuff that’s been happening:

Getting to know Mrs. Brisby last week made me realize that I couldn’t let animal testing at JoyTech continue to be so out of control. But I couldn’t just bust in to the facility and ‘liberate’ all the messed-up animals, either. So I decided to go talk to Aurora about it.

This was a major pride-swallowing moment, because last time we talked, ‘we’ decided it wasn’t such a great idea to be friends anymore. But when I texted her and asked her to meet me at the Banana Bar, she got back to me right away. And when I went there to meet her, she was already waiting for me.

She was sitting at a table by herself. When I saw her, for some reason, it seemed like it had been a million years since I saw her last. I had to stop and just see for a minute. Does that sound weird?

Anyway, like she knew I was there, she turned around and saw me, and got this huge grin on her face, which was so cool.

Actually, it was kind of too cool, because suddenly I got all nervous, so instead of sitting down and saying hi, I just stared at her shoes and started babbling about what was going on.

I didn’t tell her the whole truth – that I was sneaking around JoyTech in a gasmask costume – instead I said some friend of Jerry’s was working as a janitor there, and that he had taken all these pictures of the animal testing facility that really freaked me out.

Aurora looked at the pictures for a long time, especially the ones of the little monkeys with no eyes or mouths. She looked at them so long that eventually I said her name.

“Aurora?”

She looked up at me like she had forgotten I was there, but when I saw the expression on her face, I knew that everything was going to be alright. Aurora Lively – the only real superhero I know – was about to kick some serious ass.

More tomorrow…

I can’t dump the recycling back at the JoyTech center anymore, but I have to prove that the report Aurora wrote for the Righter was true.

She showed up at my place crying last night, because she got in major trouble with Mr. Rodriguez, our principle, for launching the Righter with such a controversial story.

That, and she got in a fight with New Guy about it. He said the story about JoyTech dumping recycling into Blood River was a big lie. And one thing you should never, ever do is call Aurora a liar.

I told her I was sorry that she got in trouble for trying to help me, because she NEVER gets in trouble for anything, but that just made her madder, and she got all ‘it’s not about you, not everything is about you,’ and she was shouting and she kicked a hole in my bedroom wall, and then she looked surprised and next thing she’s hugging me and crying and saying she’s the one who’s sorry.

Girls are the most confusing thing on the planet.

So she’s squeezing me and crying all over me, and I wanted to tell her that I was the vigilante recycler at that moment so bad the words almost came bursting out of my mouth, but I thought about every time a girl discovered Batman or Spiderman’s secret identity, and I forced myself to shut up.

I couldn’t help Aurora by spilling my guts, so I gave her some of Jerry’s anti-stress cookies and put her in front of the TV. We watched an Indiana Jones marathon until she crashed out, using my shoulder for a pillow. It reminded me of times when things were better between us. In your face, stupid New Guy.

After Walter Donovan drinks out of the wrong chalice and crumbles into dust in The Last Crusade, I eased myself off the coach, covered Aurora with a blanket, because I’m a real gentleman like that, and went to see if I could sneak off with Jerry’s truck one last time.

No such luck. That sneaky old bastard was waiting for me, and he says the truck’s not going anywhere without a full tank. Which, if you’ve ever worked with biodiesel, you know is a pain in the ass load of work.

I’ve got a plan for breaking this recycling thing wide, but I didn’t get to do it last night.