Please Ignore Vera Dietz(18)
Author: A.S. King

Jill says, “I bet Mick will do it.” Mick’s her boyfriend. He’s a skinhead Nazi. But Marie decides not to call Mick. Which is great, because nothing gives me the creeps more than skinhead Nazis.

I take another run, and when I get back to the store and stack my empty hot bags under the stainless-steel counter, there is relative calm. People have settled into their New Year’s Day rituals. They’ve watched their football and eaten their pork for midday and their pizza for dinner. My next runs are normal, and by eight, the phones stop ringing. At ten, Marie actually checks the phone line, she is so surprised. She sends Tommy—who is staring at his own hand and giggling on the back steps—home, and asks Jill if she wants to go, too.

“I’m not letting him drive me home,” Jill says.

“No shit, bitch,” Tommy says. “Who said I would?”

“I’ll take you home,” I offer, stupidly. I think I said it so I wouldn’t have to be alone with James, who has now slipped outside with Tommy to smoke a cigarette. The most we’ve said to each other tonight is “Hi,” and I’m still not sure what to say after last night’s impulsive … thing.

Five minutes later, I am driving into Jill’s apartment complex and I have the music turned up so we don’t have to talk. I have Sly & the Family Stone in. “If You Want Me to Stay.” Mick is standing on the concrete porch with his arms crossed and no shirt on, to show off his trillion nasty tattoos. His head is completely shaved, and his jeans are riding so low, I bet they’d fall down if he didn’t stand that way—with his junk pushed out. When I pull up to Building A, before she opens the door to get out, she turns the volume knob down all the way.

I find this annoying, and my face must show it, because she makes the “What can I do?” face and says, “Thanks for the ride.”

James is waiting for me in the parking lot when I get back. Seeing him there, under the streetlight, breathing smoke and hot breath into the cold night, makes me forget about Jill and her ass**le boyfriend. Makes me forget that I shouldn’t be kissing a guy who’s twenty-three. Makes me forget I’m supposed to avoid all boys and men or else I’ll end up the pregnant loser my mother was.

He’s so awesomely gorgeous and manly and hunky. His hair is grown out a little, so he doesn’t look messy, but rugged. He keeps himself shaven, but sometimes leaves a stubbly goatee, which he’s done today. He wears a Pagoda shirt that’s a tiny bit small for him, so his biceps and deltoids are really defined and I can’t help but want to squeeze them. But this isn’t all physical. He says smart stuff. He’s funny, sarcastic, and cynical. He can see outside this stupid little town because he’s been out of this stupid little town. None of the guys in school have all this going for them. They might have muscles, but they don’t have brains. Or they might have muscles and a few brains, but they still think the world revolves around them. The fact is, being twenty-three makes James even more attractive to me. If you think about it, it’s only five years. When I’m thirty-five, he’ll be forty. When I’m eighty, he’ll be eighty-five. Doesn’t seem like such a bad thing when I put it that way, does it?

I guess the next argument would be that James doesn’t know what he wants to do with his life. That’s true. At least he can admit it. I’d rather go out with a guy who’s facing his shit than a guy who’s running from his shit. Beats finishing college and hating what you do. Beats going to college just to please your parents, which is probably what half the kids in school are about to do anyway.

“Hey,” I say.

He exhales a chestful of smoke. “I thought you were avoiding me.”

“Had to take Jill home.”

“Sure you did. Because she’s your BFF, right?”

I hit him on his arm. “Her ass**le boyfriend was waiting on the porch for her like some kind of prison officer.”

“Yeah. I know him.”

He puts his hand on my waist and the flip-flopping in my rib cage happens. “You mean you know him? Or you know him?”

“He goes up to Fred’s Bar sometimes and I see him there. I went to school with a few of his buddies, too, I guess.”

“Nice guys,” I say, trying to remember if I ever saw Mick the skinhead Nazi at Fred’s before.

“Yeah. They weren’t quite as f**ked-up when we were kids, you know?”

Marie knocks on the window and waves us in. James puts out his cigarette and grabs me by the hand before I pull the door open.

“Are we cool?” he asks, and stutters, “I mean … last night?”

“Sure.”

He looks at me and smiles. “You want to go out after work?”

I think about what awaits me at home. My stinky-dead-mouse room. My snoring and oblivious dad. My f**ked-up neighbor who beats the crap out of his wife. And somewhere—a thousand dead Charlies trying to make me find the proof that Charlie didn’t kill those animals.

“Where to?”

“How about we go up to the pagoda and make out?”

This makes me so happy, I whistle while I do the dishes—which makes Marie wink at me—which makes me even happier, because she approves, and I stop worrying about what Dad would think.

HISTORY—AGE FOURTEEN

The day after Charlie finished building the deck (and I heard all that yelling), he arrived at the bus stop, seething. He lit a smoke while I asked him what was wrong.

“My mom is making me go to the doctor,” he said.

“Are you sick?”

“No.”

“Then why?”

“My colon or something.”

“Your colon?”

“She thinks I shit too much.”

“Oh.”

I wondered how much shitting is too much.

“Why does she think that?”

“Because I keep throwing my underwear away.”

The bus roared up the hill as I pondered this and Charlie fast-smoked his cigarette.

He wasn’t on the bus home, so I assumed he’d caught a ride to the doctor’s office. I sat in our seat—number fourteen—with my earphones in, listening to a mixed Motown playlist I made from Dad’s old vinyl. It was in that stack of old records (that he got from his mom) I discovered Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell. I was on my third way through “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” when Tim Miller, a senior who lived down by the lake, jumped into the seat next to me and pulled my earphone out.