Please Ignore Vera Dietz (Page 17)

Please Ignore Vera Dietz(17)
Author: A.S. King

“Where’d you get those?”

“What?”

“You always have a new pack.”

“I have my connections, I guess.”

I thought he meant his father. After all, there was no one at school who could get that many packs in a week.

“Do you buy them by the carton, or what?”

“Let’s go and check out the pagoda,” he said. “I’m bored as hell.” Then he pulled out a brand-new shiny Zippo lighter. It had his initials engraved on it: CDK. Somehow, I didn’t think his dad would buy him that.

“Nice lighter,” I said as he used it to light his cigarette.

“Come on,” he said, starting his descent.

“I can’t. I have a stupid essay to write.”

He continued down the tree, and I followed him. When we got to the blue trail, he went toward the pagoda by himself and I went home. The essay was about Romeo and Juliet, our first journey into the mind of William Shakespeare. The assignment was: Many writers and filmmakers have used the classic story of Romeo and Juliet as the theme for their works. If you were to write a modern-day Romeo and Juliet, what would make yours stand apart from these others?

Pretty hot question for eighth graders, if you ask me, but I was excited by it, too, because I liked when teachers asked hard questions. It’s safe to say that when all other students in the class said “Ugghhh!” it was an assignment I was going to enjoy. But this time, there was a problem. I couldn’t picture Romeo and Juliet without picturing Charlie and me.

Part of me was repulsed by the thought. Dad had just told me, the year before, about Mom’s old job at Joe’s and had made it clear that Charlie Kahn was off-limits to me as a boyfriend. (Though to give him credit, he did it in a nice way and was nothing like Lord Capulet. I think his closing words were: “I hope you understand I’m saying this because I love you.”) The other part of me was excited. Charlie was such a strange sort of attractive, it was hard to explain—I felt a mix of wanting to kill him and wanting to kiss him at the same time. When I thought of what true love must be like, I figured it must be a mix like this, and not the stupid eighth-grade infatuation most girls my age felt. True love includes equal parts good and bad, but true love sticks around and doesn’t run off to Vegas with a podiatrist. Anyway, somehow, in my weird, mixed-up brain, Charlie was Romeo and I was Juliet. I wrote my essay about how in my version, Romeo was a total slob and Juliet was a tomboy, and they decided that the fake suicide was excessively dramatic, and instead, ran off to live in the forests beyond Verona. When Charlie asked me what my essay was about at the bus stop the next morning while he picked some old blue-trail dog crap out of the tread of his shoe, I told him it was about Shakespeare, and he made a yuck face before I had to go any further.

That winter, we fidgeted a lot because we were too old to do the stuff we used to do, like play card games in the tree house, and too young to do anything interesting. Charlie went hunting with his dad on the weekends, which was the only thing they ever did together, and I felt happy for him. The only tradition Dad and I had at that point was Friday-night pizza from Santo’s.

When the forest sprouted in between our houses, and the brambles grew new bright green leaves, we took to spring-cleaning the tree house and Charlie started to talk about building The Amazing Deck. Charlie had found a book in the library about tree houses—real ones, like real houses all over the world built around trees. He said that he wanted to rip down the house he’d already built but his dad wouldn’t let him, so he planned to add The Amazing Deck. He worked with the shop teacher to figure out how to support the thing, and they drew a plan together.

The first Saturday it was warm enough, he walked in circles around the base of the tree with a calculator and a cheat sheet of geometry equations. He’d stop and scribble some numbers down on a small spiral notepad and then measure again, and say something like “Better safe than sorry.”

After that, he furiously wrote cut lists. All mitered cuts because, he announced, The Amazing Deck would be octagonal. Because with Charlie, nothing was ever easy. Everything was windswept and octagonal and finger-combed. Everything was difficult and odd, and the theme songs all had minor chords.

I helped him build the deck every day after school, but my spring weekends changed because, since I was fourteen, my father filled out my working papers and made me get my first job, at Mika’s Diner as a busgirl.

Which sucked.

The pay was shitty and the waitresses hated splitting tips, so my ten percent would equal two bucks if I was lucky. And I had to wear the stupidest uniform on the planet—a brown 100% polyester apron-style wraparound skirt thing with a white blouse underneath. Thing was, the wraparound part was too short, so it only overlapped about eight inches in the back. This made bending over a problem, because busgirls have to bend over a lot. Which, I suspect, was Mika’s point in making us wear them. I daydreamed constantly about working at Zimmerman’s that summer to save me the embarrassment of the stupid uniform, but I knew Mr. Zimmerman didn’t hire people under seventeen. I put my name in to volunteer at the adoption center again, but Dad stressed that a summer job at my age was about making money, and volunteering wasn’t in the cards.

When I came home from work on a Sunday afternoon in late May, I looked into the woods and saw Charlie sitting on his newly finished Amazing Octagonal Deck, binoculars in hand. I waved. He waved back. Once I changed and walked out to meet him, though, he was gone. I could hear yelling from inside the Kahns’ house. More than the usual amount. More than Mr. Kahn drunkenly lambasting Mrs. Kahn for missing a spiderweb in a dark corner or not beating the rugs properly. I could hear Mrs. Kahn yelling, too—a first—which meant it was Charlie they were yelling at.

NEW YEAR’S DAY—FOUR TO CLOSE

I’m the only driver in on time. Marie loves me. I still feel like something died in my mouth, even after a chocolate shake and a Big Mac. I still have a headache, too, even though I took two more Tylenol before I left the house.

There’s a big order waiting to go out, so I don’t get a chance to walk into the back room. Marie just hands me my change envelope and my Pagoda Phone and eight pies in hot bags, and rattles off four addresses.

The run takes me an hour, so by the time I’m back, the place is a madhouse. Dylan Pothead has called in sick, when everyone knows he’s just hungover/still partying/hallucinating too much to drive. Tommy Pothead is working but must have done one too many bong hits, because he’s unable to comprehend the map. James finally comes in and winks when he sees me, which makes me feel oddly all-over-the-place, even though last night was amazing. We’re so busy, Marie is thinking about leaving ex-cheerleader-turned-food-service-worker Jill in charge of the store and taking her old Ford out on a few runs to help us out.