Please Ignore Vera Dietz(24)
Author: A.S. King

“You may hate me for saying this, Vera, but don’t make yourself a slut this early in life.”

I do. I do hate her for saying that.

“Vegas is full of girls who thought putting out a lot was a high idea once, but now they’re just washed-up jokes sliding themselves around oiled poles.”

She is comparing me to Las Vegas strippers. Who told her I was making a slut out of myself? Who told her I was doing anything more than drinking occasional vodka?

“Some of them think this is a really hip way to live, you know. Freedom from the oppression of men! Sexuality personified! Morons, Vera. Morons. I met one the other day reading Whitman. She said it made her smart even though at night she’s taking her clothes off for money. Making a joke out of herself. Making a joke out of all of us. Don’t make a joke out of yourself.”

“Okay, Mom. I get the point. No stripping or turning into a hooker—intellectual or otherwise. Gotcha.”

“I’m serious. These girls used to think it was no big deal to down a few drinks at the pagoda with a college dropout, too.”

I’m irate now. There is no other way to describe it. If she were in the room with me, I’d pick up sharp things and throw them at her.

“Okay, I’m done,” I say. “I really don’t give a shit what you think. And thanks for the fifty bucks on my birthday every year. I’m sure it will make a huge dent in my college tuition. You’re the best mom ever.” I hang up, roughly.

Before she can call back and yell at me (though I doubt she will, because she was as forced into that call as I was) I pick up the phone and get a dial tone, and then leave it off the hook.

HISTORY—AGE FOURTEEN

I sat in homeroom that morning thinking about what Charlie told me on the bus. I thought back to all the times I climbed the Master Oak with him, and all the times we hiked the blue trail. Suddenly, every time I ever saw his buttcrack rushed back at me in a vivid slide show I never wanted to watch. I used to think Charlie just wore low-riding boxers or something. He was skinny, and his jeans and shorts often landed right around his hipbones. I just figured, like everything else about him, this was another way Charlie could be sloppy. But now it was different. This was not the same as greasy hair or ripped-up flannel shirts. My mental list looked like this:

Every day in the cafeteria while we ate lunch, when he leaned forward.
Every day on the bus, when he leaned forward.
When we built the tree house and the deck (at least two hundred times as he ascended and descended that ladder). Especially the time I asked him as a joke if he was going to be a plumber. He was so mad!
When he leaned forward for handfuls of chips on the glide-o-lounger at Sherry Heller’s New Year’s Eve party.
The time we went canoeing on the lake.
The time at Santo’s Pizza after Dad dropped us off. Charlie leaned over the table to snatch my purse to get the dumb picture of him from fourth grade that was in my wallet.
Every time we sat on the big rocks at the end of the blue trail to scrape the dog crap off our shoes.
The time he got that buck behind our houses and dragged me out of bed to see it lying there, dead. I remember thinking, Who forgets to put on underwear when it’s twenty degrees outside?
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that Charlie had been without underwear a lot over the last few years. I tried to remember when he was missing his socks, too, but then the thought of the pervert in the white Chrysler popped into my head. Surely he hadn’t been doing this since we were eleven. Had he? Everything rushed back. The night in the tree house when he disappeared. The times I heard a car turning around in the gravel at night. The times Charlie had new things—not just cigarettes. The Zippo. The pair of fake Ray-Ban sunglasses. The turquoise and silver ring he wore. Only the week before, the new MP3 player. Not an iPod, but close enough. Could dirty underwear really buy a new MP3 player?

When I saw him at lunch that day, I had a bunch of questions.

“So—you just give him your underwear?” I asked.

Charlie laughed and laughed. “Yeah.”

“And what does he do with it?”

“I dunno. I just give it to him. I don’t really care what he does with it.”

He was embarrassed and wouldn’t look me in the eye, but he was laughing, too. He really thought this was funny.

“What about the night you left me in the tree house?”

“What about it?”

“You were gone for hours,” I said.

He laughed. “John and I just sat around and smoked and talked about the world,” he said.

John. John and I.

“Is he the guy from the day when we were eleven? In the white car, who said my pigtails were pretty?”

He nodded, still smiling. “Yep.”

“Are you sure he’s not—um—dangerous?”

He leaned toward me and said, “He’s harmless, Vera. He’s loaded—he inherited millions from his parents—and he has a thing for underwear. I’ve been to his house. He has it in Ziploc bags, labeled by date and piled up in his computer room. I think he might sell it on eBay.”

“On eBay?”

He laughed again. “Well, pervert eBay or something.”

“How do you know he’s harmless?”

“I don’t know how to explain it, but I—uh—I trust him.” He was so confident about this—about this trust—that I saw clearly the hole in Charlie’s process. What does a boy who’s witnessed what Charlie’s witnessed know about trust? How does a boy like that discern right from wrong?

Charlie moved into the tree house as soon as school was over in June. Now that he had his deck and his screened windows, he looked for other ways to improve it, so since he’d just finished his eighth-grade shop class introduction to electricity and had a wad of underwear cash, he decided he’d get some sort of electric out there so he could run a fan on hot nights and listen to his radio without having to use up so many batteries.

The summer was unbearably sticky. When I walked anywhere near the forest, the gnats stuck to me and flew into my eyes, mouth, and ears, and it drove me crazy. Dad finally shelled out for central air-conditioning, now that he worked at home, and it was too easy to stay inside and comfortable rather than go and help Charlie wire the tree house. Plus, electricity scared me. Always had, ever since I’d stuck the tip of a dinner fork into the toaster to pry out an Eggo whole wheat waffle and got a little zap from it.

Mika’s Diner closed three months after I started working there, and because of the up-and-down economy, regular people were taking summer jobs that used to be saved for students. Even college students were having trouble finding decent jobs that summer, so Dad agreed that I could take the volunteer position at the adoption center on Wednesdays and Fridays. I hoped to see more of Mr. Zimmerman so he could get to know me better and like me enough to hire me to work in the store one day, but he was so busy between the store and taking care of his wife, who was at home with cancer, we rarely saw him. When he did take the time to visit, the adoption center ladies fawned over him.