Please Ignore Vera Dietz(12)
Author: A.S. King

He leveled his eyes with mine. “I think you know why I don’t want you near his house, right?”

I nodded. “We won’t be in the house. We’ll be in the tree house.”

“I know, but what if you have to pee during the night? Or what if you need a drink of water?”

I thought about it. “Okay. I got it,” I said. “The tree house is halfway between our house and theirs. So if I have to pee, I’ll just come here.”

He smiled.

“So can I? Tonight?”

“Let’s see if we can dig out your sleeping bag,” he said, and I was jubilant.

Charlie and I ate popcorn and drank soda and talked about stupid stuff, like kids from school and what we daydreamed we’d be when we grew up. (Me = vet, him = forest ranger.) We listened to the radio a little. Then we snuggled into our sleeping bags and said good night—and after that, all we could hear was the loud screech of cicadas and crickets. It was awesome. Until midnight, when a car barreled up the hill and stopped in the gravel of the blue trail’s parking area. Then Charlie snuck out of the tree house and didn’t come back until dawn.

HISTORY—AGE THIRTEEN—SUMMER

The summer between seventh and eighth grade, Dad put me to work stuffing envelopes for an advertising campaign he was doing to get more customers. He had me doing most of the garden work, too. He still allowed me time with Charlie (we’d become Uno masters and had an ongoing ten-thousand-point tournament), but no more tree house sleepovers.

He said, “I hope you know you can never date Charlie,” and claimed he was saying this to save me from a destiny like his and Mom’s. He said, “Charlie isn’t like us, you know?” and I knew what he meant, but somehow it was that not-like-us that made me love Charlie more.

I had too much on my mind to digest this. I was still digesting the whole mother-was-a-stripper thing on top of the mother-never-coming-back thing. I felt a deep resentment toward Dad that summer. I think part of me blamed him for her leaving and part of me wanted to leave him, too. I got two half days a week at the adoption center at Zimmerman’s, which was my way of getting away from him.

The pet store had been renovated with easy-to-clean tiled floors, and each type of animal had its own windowed area now so dogs and cats for sale and rescued animals for adoption could have their own space. We even had a rescued reptile room. In contrast to the previous summer’s mishmash of metal cages and confusing signs to differentiate between the store and the adoption center, there was now just one long wall of windows, and shoppers could just as easily adopt from us for free or go farther along and pick up a purebred puppy.

The memories I have of that summer at Zimmerman’s are all scratched, like old films. I see myself leaning over the stainless-steel sink in the back room, scrubbing a large Labrador retriever with flea shampoo and plucking fat ticks from her skin, while she shook and whimpered a little. I remember feeling bad that I’d accidentally hurt her—because my mother used to hurt me that way, too. She hated removing ticks, and claimed my father was no good at it and would leave the heads under the skin to become infected. So if I didn’t sit still, she’d kneel on me and pin my arms down while I freaked out, screaming, and she’d forcefully remove them. No patience. No kisses. No hugs. Just a tweezers and some rubbing alcohol, and a stinging sensation that never goes away.

VARIOUS TIMES SATURDAY MORNING—DAY OFF

When I get home from work, it’s one-thirty in the morning and I can smell something weird the minute I walk down the hall to my bedroom. I only figure it out once I open the bedroom door. A mouse died in the wall and the stench is overwhelming. This happens a lot in our house because it’s an old hunting lodge and there’s no way to control where the mice die, and no way to get them out once they do. The only thing we can do is cover up the smell somehow, and avoid the area until the thing rots completely. This happens faster in summer than it does in winter.

Dad’s snoring so loudly that the house is rattling and he doesn’t hear me rooting around the kitchen pantry for scented candles. Mom bought them—that’s how old they are. She went up to the Poconos one afternoon before Christmas and came home with two cases of scented candles.

“It’s the candle capital of the world!” she said.

That’s what they’ll call anything if they want you to buy stuff there. People believe it because people are stupid. Apparently, that’s adequate now. There are kids in my class who can’t locate Florida on a map and they’re going to get the same diploma I’m going to get. They’re going to get accepted to college and become physical therapists or kindergarten teachers or financial analysts and they still won’t be able to locate Florida on a map. They spend gallons of cash on tacky Christmas crap, and they drive sixty miles to buy candles because someone made a sign that says CANDLE CAPITAL OF THE WORLD when really, their local store sells candles just as nice.

I finally get to the case of scented candles in the back of the pantry, dig out three vanilla ones, and snatch the lighter from the shelf. I go back to my room, run in, light them, and run out and close the door again. Then I go to the kitchen for a snack. My shoulder is killing me. I stop in the downstairs bathroom to look at it in the mirror and there’s a big red welt. Seeing it makes me feel delayed embarrassment. I wonder did I handle it okay? Did I look like an ass**le? Should I have told Jenny Flick to f**k off, or thrown her pizzas on the ground? Dad is snoring so loudly, I can hear him over the crunch of my cornflakes. I remember that tomorrow is the second-to-last Saturday before Christmas and we’re going to put up the tree.

When I arrive back to my room, it smells like a dead vanilla mouse, which is a bit better than just plain dead mouse, and when I close my eyes to sleep, I see it behind my eyelids, in a state of decomposition—legs stiff, eyeballs drying out—and suddenly I’m strangled by visions of what Charlie must look like now, nearly four months dead and underground, rotting. Maybe this makes me crazy or weird, but I can’t stop myself from thinking it.

I tell Dad about the stench in the morning, but he says he can’t smell anything. “Not like we can do anything about it anyway, Vera. If it’s that bad, sleep on the couch,” he says. It’s almost noon. He’s already gone out and bought a Christmas tree, which I’m staring at.

“Wow, Dad. That’s one ugly-looking tree.”

“It cost me twenty dollars, too,” he says, still pissed off about it being too expensive.