My Friends Want Brownies, I Want ESPIONAGE: Goosebumps – Secret Agent Grandma #6

So I see we died again.

I like how so far this Goosebumps choose your own adventure book is like a fucking morality play. Or, like… a common sense play. No branching paths AT ALL. We have literally fucked up EVERY DECISION AND DIED. I’m torn between frustration that this isn’t a fun choose your own adventure (because I’m instead being tested into choosing the intended adventure) and… oddly impressed that maybe these first few decisions are the book’s subtle way of teaching us The Rules? Is RL Stine telling us “hey, you’re not going to have fun until you behave with some common sense and don’t go snooping in people’s shit with strangers or do some really basic problem solving, like a competent human”? Am I overthinking a children’s book, once again, as I do this time every year?

Alright, fine, new timeline where I don’t open my grandma’s luggage. Grandma opens the door and takes her heavy bags inside, showing us up.

“I need to start working out,” the cab driver mutters.

A fitting end to the creepy, invasive cab driver’s arc. Farewell, cab driver. In another timeline, we could be holding up a liquor store together right about now.

I show my grandma (or whoever she is) to her room, where she expresses pleasure her room overlooks the rose bushes, so she can “watch my babies growing out of the ground”. Which honestly isn’t even that weird.

You’ve never paid much attention to the garden before. […] Okay, so this year [the roses are] wacky colors. And they are much larger than usual.

Grandma stiffens as she notices my friends, Sophie and Andrew, at the back door, demanding that I get rid of them. I assure grandma they’re just my friends. Grandma murmurs that she must meet them later. It’s fine. All of this is fine.

I leave my grandma to freshen up while I meet up with my friends, who immediately demand brownies from me “before the big event.” I (in real life) haven’t hung out with literal children in, like, decades, so maybe this isn’t weird behavior, but I’m currently more on edge around these friends than I am my imposter alien grandma, who has already murdered me a few times in parallel timelines.

Andrew explains that there’s going to be a meteor shower tonight, handing us a newspaper, which I read and learn that a meteor crashed fifteen years ago in literally my garden (somehow – I am unclear how I discerned this from the newspaper article). Sophie wants to look for meteor fragments in my yard, fifteen years later, like an idiot.

you caution her. “They’ll just look like regular rocks.”

“We should search anyway,” Sophie insists.

Grandma is somehow in the rose garden now, changed into a silver jumpsuit. Someone in this book finally points out that it’s strange that I have never so much as seen my grandma before her visit today.

“Is that your grandmother?” Andrew asks.

“I think so…,” you answer uncertainly.

Sophie laughs. “What do you mean? Don’t you know your own grandmother?”

Right now, you’re not so sure…

Hey now, I know one thing about myself, and it’s that I have never been sure who my grandma is.

I finally have an important thought about this.

You think back to the train station. Your mother’s strange phone call.

Could the Grandma in the garden be an imposter?

Maybe you should tell Sophie and Andrew your suspicions.

SEE, NOW I AM TORN. Like I said earlier, it feels like there are still right answers, like Goosebumps is still testing my common sense before I can be trusted to have any fun. Is spying on my obviously suspicious grandma similarly the obviously right thing to do? Or is maintaining the social contract supposed to be the obviously right thing to do, per our previous suitcase snooping-related death?

It does feel like Goosebumps is more concerned with maintaining civility than with the existential threat to our continued existence. Just like the Democratic Party. Heyoooo! Political humor! And so close to the election. Ariel, turn to page 84 to act like everything is fine.