Please Ignore Vera Dietz(15)
Author: A.S. King

“It’s pretty easy to blame the whole thing on the dead kid, isn’t it?”

“I—uh—I guess.”

We get to her house. “Don’t believe everything you hear, you know?”

She cocks her head and thinks about it for a second. “Happy New Year, Vera.”

As I watch her walk to the door, I realize that she’s just another person who probably can’t locate Florida on a map.

I deliver my last run, get a five-dollar tip, and stuff it into the bag behind my seat. Then I get back to the shop and start mopping. It’s already three-fifteen and I want to be drinking the bottles in my trunk by four. James has stocked the cooler, Jill has done the dishes, and Marie has cashed me out. I hand her my money bag and she hands me my double commission in cash, with an extra twenty-dollar bill.

“A bonus for my full-timers,” she says, and winks.

The mix James made in the mop bucket is bleach-heavy. It sticks in my nose and as I mop myself into the back kitchen, Marie’s cigarette smoke thickens and mixes with it and I feel light-headed.

I finish, dump and rinse the bucket, and clean the mop-head. I go into the bathroom to change, and toss my shirt into the washing machine, and start it.

James is still here, in his car, in the parking lot. He motions me into his passenger’s seat and lights a cigarette.

“You going anywhere special?” he asks.

“Just home,” I lie.

“No party? No boyfriend to kiss?”

There is no doubt that James is flirting with me.

“Nope. No party. No boyfriend. But some geeks over on Lancaster Road invited me to their all-night Monopoly party. Wanna go and crash it with me?”

He feigns consideration. “Nah. Something tells me I won’t get any kisses there.”

“Kisses, eh?”

“Uh-huh.”

He leans in toward me and my stomach does a bunch of flip-flops.

“Is that all you’re after?”

“Uh-huh.”

So, I kiss him and it feels really nice, and I really don’t care that James is twenty-three, or a college dropout, or that he smokes. I wonder if this is step two on the baby-steps-to-loserdom trip I seem to be taking tonight, but I simultaneously don’t care. I’m eighteen years old and I’ve never had a real boyfriend. I’ve never got past first base or gone to the prom or got detention for PDA. All this time I thought that if I avoided all the slutty shit my mother must have done, I would be a good person. I’d be safe. I’d be better than her. But while James is kissing me and holding the back of my head with his strong fingers entwined in my hair, I realize I don’t really care about my mother and how she became a shallow loser capable of leaving her husband and kid. I realize that this feels nice and I really want to keep doing it. We stay there for about ten minutes, kissing, until I say, “I have to go.” James’s hand is under my shirt, around my waist, and part of me hates myself for making him stop.

His cigarette has burned down to the filter in the ashtray, so he lights another one.

“Happy New Year, Vera.”

“Happy New Year, James,” I say.

“You working tomorrow?”

“Yep. You?”

“Yep.”

We smile at each other for a few seconds and then I push myself out of his car. It’s cold out, but I don’t feel it.

Six a.m., two hours later, and I’m parked on a dirt track that leads to a dead brown cornfield on top of Jenkins’s Hill. It’s still dark. I need to get rid of the evidence. I open the driver’s door and toss the bottles into the field, one by one, until all four empties are gone. I crush the cardboard holder flat and fling it like a Frisbee.

I know I shouldn’t be driving, but how else am I going to get home?

Anyway, I’m only three miles from my house, and if I get home now, Dad will be sleeping and won’t know I’m drunk. I think this, but my body is falling asleep right here in my bucket seat. I think, Hey, Vera! Come on! Snap out of it and get your drunk ass home! but my body has shut down. I’m already drooling. Who cares what Dad thinks? I’m getting good grades, working his stupid full-time job, and saving for college.

I think of James—how he kissed me and how I have to see him tomorrow. Then I think of Charlie and our first New Year’s Eve apart, and how I miss him. I miss him so much, but it’s confusing, because I missed him long before he was dead, and that’s the bitch of it all. I missed him long before he was dead.

It appears that my body knew I was going to vomit, so it woke me up and got me outside of my car without telling me. I hold on to the back bumper and puke into the row of compressed cornstalks. Again. Again. Again. I dry-heave a few times, then wipe my nose and my mouth and look at the horizon. The light is just appearing—that bluey-violet color that my mother used to get up early to see.

Then, like an army lined in marching formation, they are there. The Charlies—walking toward me between rows of shin-high skeletal cornstalks.

They have needles? Are they needles? They aren’t threatening. They seem friendly this time, but machinelike. They seem like a thousand android Charlies. Coming to get me. With what look like dental needles. They are going to shoot me up with the past and show me everything that led me here. They are going to inject me with outer space truth serum.

When I realize I can’t run away, I try to glue my mouth shut. I refuse to tell them anything. I convince my brain that I am a mute, change-making, tip-counting machine, nothing more. A pizza-delivering android. I do not have emotions. I do not have truth. A thousand Charlies know better. They outstretch their arms and hug me tightly until I bawl and tell them what they want to hear.

If Mr. Jenkins, the owner of this field, was to walk onto his back deck right now to see the beauty of this bluey-violet morning, he’d see me standing by the side of my car, hugging myself, sobbing, “I couldn’t stand you anymore!”

I couldn’t. I hated him.

“I wished you were dead!”

A thousand Charlies know this.

But they don’t have to come to terms with it. I do.

NEW YEAR’S DAY

We’re at Uncle Caleb’s house for our traditional New Year’s Day meal. I’m sitting next to Jessie, my fluffy cousin, and her little brother, Frankie, who isn’t paying attention to what’s going on at the table because he’s watching the muted football game on TV.

“I don’t get it,” my cousin Jessie says. “You could probably get into a good school, Veer.”