Please Ignore Vera Dietz(10)
Author: A.S. King

I’d managed to stay off her radar, for the most part, and maintained my invisibility. But once she started liking Charlie and wanted me out of his life, things changed. I became her target, and he became her prize.

Now that Charlie is gone, she ignores me again. I think she thinks she’s safe now, because it’s been three and a half months and I haven’t said anything about what really happened on the night he died. But she’s not.

My last delivery of the night is a four-pie stop in the old burbs. These are the small single-story brick places that are stuck so close together you can hear your neighbor peeing through the concrete alley between, though they do have front and back yards to litter with more Tacky Glowing Christmas Shit.

556 North Gerhardt Lane. A red brick bread box with a red and green doorbell that plays “Jingle Bells” when I ring it, and a sign to the right of the door that reads WELCOME TO OUR HOME with two spotted fawns on it. Eight cars stuck multi-directionally in the driveway. Two on blocks. The sound of a party spills out into the sleeping neighborhood. One of the cars has a blue and white football jersey taped to the back window and the words GO PANTHERS painted above it. From the sounds within, I’m guessing we won the game tonight.

The door jerks open and the music and smell of pot smoke hit me. I open the flap on the hot bag and say, “That’s thirty-four ninety-nine, please.” Then I look up and I see Jenny Flick, arms folded, glaring at me, and Bill Corso, the school’s semi-illiterate star quarterback, standing behind her. “Look who it is,” she says.

I take the four pizzas out of the bags and hand them to Bill, and then I stash the hot bags under my arm, which is weak from the mix of fear and anger I’m experiencing right now, and get my change bag from the pocket of my black combat pants. Jenny is still staring at me with a scowl on her face, eyeliner drawn around her eyes like she’s a character in a Tim Burton movie.

“Thirty-four ninety-nine, please.”

She digs into her pocket and pulls out a wad of bills. Then she peels them off one by one and lets them float to the doormat. Two of them land on my feet.

“How much was that, baby?” she asks Bill, who is too f**ked-up to notice that she’s been tossing out handfuls of cash.

“I don’t know, Jen. You know I can’t do math when I’m high.”

She starts giggling and tosses the rest of the wad of bills into the air above my head, and then slams the door in my face. I look around at where the money landed, kick it all together into one place, and bend over to pick it up.

The door opens. Jenny Flick appears again, and behind her, Bill Corso has a professional-looking slingshot, aimed at me. “And here’s your f**king tip,” she says.

He shoots a penny that hits my shoulder and stings like a mother. They giggle like a pair of ten-year-old girls and slam the door shut again.

In the car, I count the scrunched-up money and find that Jenny Flick has just unintentionally given me a thirty-three-dollar tip. Probably the best thing drugs will ever do for me. Before I take off, I look back at the house. A bunch of football guys have lined up in the bay window and are mooning me. Raised middle fingers fill the spaces between them. I can’t lie. There are parts of me that want to blow the house up right now. There are parts of me that would laugh while the whole lot of them burned. My shoulder, where the penny hit me, is throbbing and hot. I reach under my seat and grope around for the cold glass. Drink, anyone?

HISTORY—AGE TWELVE

The summer after my mother ran off with the bald podiatrist in the convertible, Charlie Kahn’s dad let him build a tree house. Even though I knew Charlie wanted to do it himself, he called it our project and our tree house. I think it was his way of trying to help me through a hard time.

His dad bought him a bunch of supplies the week school ended—lengths of two-by-four, pulleys and screws, and sheets of weather-treated plywood—but Charlie didn’t choose a tree for three whole weeks. We walked around the woods between our houses and emerged covered in ticks and scratches to eat lunch, and then we dove back in. I asked Charlie what was taking him so long.

“The Great Hunter needs to approve,” he said, then scribbled something on a small napkin and shoved it into his pocket.

Half an hour later, Charlie told me that my asking him about the tree every five minutes was pressuring him, so he asked me to leave him alone for a week. Sounds harsh, but he meant well. I think he needed space to be eccentric, and he was driving me up a wall with all that “spirit of the Great Hunter” bullshit.

We were twelve. Old enough to just pick a tree already.

This was the summer my father stopped renting the office in town and moved his desk and filing cabinets into the spare downstairs bedroom that my mother used to use for peace yoga and forgiveness meditation, which apparently didn’t work out so well.

This was also the first summer I convinced Dad to let me volunteer at the adoption center inside Zimmerman’s Pet Store at the Pagoda Mall. This was hard for him, because it was completely against his nature to care about pets. It wasn’t that he was heartless or cruel or anything like that. Dad just isn’t an animal person. He’d hated every single time I’d dragged him into Zimmerman’s as a kid to look at the hamsters or the puppies. When I’d nag him about getting something fluffy to cuddle, he’d show me on paper how much money it cost to keep a pet, and point out that kids my age were going hungry all over the world. “I think they could use four grand a year more than a dog could,” he’d say.

But he must have realized that summer that I was different than him—and that his coldheartedness was only making me worse. I loved animals. Partly because he didn’t and had denied me one, and partly because it’s in the manual. What twelve-year-old girl doesn’t daydream about nurturing a puppy or a kitten? What twelve-year-old girl whose mother just walked out doesn’t want a companion who loves her no matter what happens? So he helped me fill out the volunteer application, shelled out ten bucks for a purple volunteer T-shirt, and drove me down to the store one day a week, which was the maximum I was allowed to be there, because I was only twelve. I loved it. All of it. I loved the adoption people, who rescued animals and found them good homes. I loved the pet store and Mr. Zimmerman and his wall of exotic aquarium fish. He had a gray parrot who talked and sat on a perch by the register and would make phone-ringing sounds so accurately that none of us could tell if the phone was really ringing or not.