Please Ignore Vera Dietz(11)
Author: A.S. King

My first day volunteering, I took care of three Old English sheepdog puppies that had been rescued from one of those houses where crazy people have too many pets until their neighbors complain about the smell or the noise. I bathed them and brushed them and helped the visiting vet nurse apply lotion to their over-scratched flea bites. It was a feeling I can’t really describe. I felt like I had purpose or something—like I was doing something bigger.

For the rest of the week, while Charlie still searched for the perfect tree for his tree house, I hung around and watched TV. I drank lots of yogurt smoothies and ate lots of low-salt no-frills tortilla chips.

“What are you doing?” Dad asked, openly annoyed that I was on the couch with the remote control before noon on a weekday.

“The Price Is Right is on in a minute.”

Before he could start giving me a lecture on how I should be doing something more productive with my time, like weeding the vegetable garden or inventing a board game that would sell for millions, Charlie walked through the kitchen door.

“I found it!” he said.

I turned off the TV, then turned to Dad and shrugged. “Gotta go.”

He nodded and went back into his office.

We walked out into the forest. Charlie said, “The Great Hunter picked this tree. What do you think?”

It was a great tree, no doubt.

“We start with the ladder, and then the floor.” Charlie reached into his back pocket and pulled out a tattered and taped piece of lined spiral notebook paper. “This is what I want it to look like.”

I studied the paper. There were two distinct rooms. One had a bed, the other a small futon couch. Up to that point, I’d envisioned a tree house Dietz-style. A piece of old plywood, a rope, and a great imagination.

“Are you planning on living here?”

“Yeah.”

I looked up through my bangs. “Over winter?”

He looked at me as if I was making fun of him. I wasn’t.

“Why are you always trying to make me feel stupid?” he asked, pulling the napkin out of his pocket that he’d scribbled on earlier.

“I wasn’t.”

He glared at me—testing. I looked as serious as I could and didn’t laugh, even though I wanted to because when Charlie got testy, it was funny. He added something to what he’d already written and ripped off the corner where the writing was. Then he popped the paper into his mouth, chewed, and swallowed.

“Let’s get to work on the ladder first and then stop for lunch.”

We were ten minutes in, me holding a two-by-four’s end while he sawed perfect thirty-inch segments on a pair of carpenter’s horses, when a car stopped in the gravel shoulder of the road. We were so deep in the woods, I couldn’t see much, except that it was white.

Charlie said, “Hold up. There’s something I have to give this guy for my dad.”

I waited for ten minutes and tried to creatively visualize the tree house. This was Dad’s new thing since Mom left—creatively visualizing everything from making dinner to the weekly grocery shopping. He made me do it for tests, too. (And I had to admit, it worked. Though it did not work for getting him to let me adopt a puppy.)

Charlie arrived back out of breath and red-faced.

“You didn’t have to run,” I said.

“I’m just pumped to get this thing up, you know?” He leaned back against the tree, and balanced the wrinkled paper napkin on his knee again, and scribbled something else on it. He’d been doing this since we were kids, and it annoyed the hell out of me. It’s one thing to be purposely mysterious, but it’s rude to be scribbling stuff right in front of someone. It’s like whispering or something. So I reached over and grabbed it off his knee.

“Give it back!” he screamed, instantly losing all control. “It’s mine!”

“Dude, I—”

He grabbed my arm roughly and twisted it behind my back, which made me drop the stupid napkin onto the forest floor. He kept hold of my arm while he leaned down to pick it up.

“Holy shit, Charlie.” I didn’t know what else to say.

“Don’t ever do that again,” he said. “Some stuff is private.”

“Sure,” I said. “Of course. Me too.”

“Everyone is allowed to have secrets,” he said.

“Yeah,” I agreed, though I never knew anyone like him, who scribbled those secrets on napkins and ate them, or stuffed them in their pockets, or burned them ceremoniously on the rocks around the pagoda.

“Just don’t do it again,” he said, then he grabbed the saw and quickly cut three more step segments, kicking the scraps into a pile at the base of the trunk. He was like an angry machine, shaking as if he’d just eaten those caffeine pills my mother used to take to stay skinny.

HISTORY—AGE TWELVE—MID-AUGUST

From the finished tree house, we could see both our houses and the road. Charlie kept a pair of binoculars by the west window, next to his bed. He started to sleep out there, and had screened in the windows and made shutters for when it rained.

Only after Dad had climbed up and checked the tree house out did he consider allowing me to sleep there one night. I know he had to think about it because Charlie was a boy and I was a girl, and I tried to explain to him that it wasn’t ever like that. I didn’t understand yet that I was fighting my own destiny and Charlie was fighting his. I just wanted to sleep in the tree house.

“Charlie doesn’t like girls,” I tried, only hearing myself after I said it, and then correcting. “I mean, Charlie and I are only friends—like, ew, you know?”

“I know.”

“So can I?”

“Veer, I think it’s time we had a talk about this stuff,” he said, visibly uncomfortable. “Boys Charlie’s age can sometimes think and do things that you don’t expect. You have to be careful.”

“Charlie is twelve, Dad. Just like me.”

“I know, but twelve can be—uh, it can be a confusing …,” he stuttered.

I tried to creatively visualize him shutting up. It didn’t work.

“I know you know about sex. And I know you’re smart. But you’re about to enter a whole new part of life where things aren’t as simple as they once were.”

We stared at each other, silent. I was frowning; he gnawed on his lower lip. A minute ran by.

“So can I sleep in the tree house or not?”

He sighed. I could tell he was really broken up about it, so I added, “Really, Dad, you’ve got nothing to worry about when it comes to Charlie Kahn. He’s about as interested in me as he is in combing his hair.”