Please Ignore Vera Dietz(28)
Author: A.S. King

“Sorry. Coach saw me and needed me to help him out down in the gym,” he says.

“Put the pass back on my desk,” Mr. Shunk says, not looking up from his notebook.

“ ’Kay, Teach.”

“Tomorrow you’ll read us Chapter Three, Mr. Corso.”

Bill nods as if that didn’t scare him, but I know it did.

SECOND FRIDAY IN FEBRUARY—PARTY NIGHT

Bill Corso skipped the rest of the week of school. I don’t know if Gretchen or any of the other Flickites are telling him this, but each day, Mr. Shunk says, “I guess I’ll have to wait another day to hear the dulcet tones of Mr. Corso reading Golding.”

No one gets this but me, and I feel, even though Mr. Shunk doesn’t know it, that he and I are on the same team.

Tonight is the Pagoda Pizza Christmas party over at Jackson Fire Company, which my dad says used to be the kind of place where you’d watch girls with tassels on their boobs dance. He told me Mom used to bust out laughing because there was always one girl who was new to it, and went off beat, like a washing machine with one lumpy towel. There are too many things wrong with this description for me to actually process it. I need to teach Dad the meaning of TMI.

“So what makes you think I’m going to let you go?” he asks.

“Because you trust me and you want me to have some fun in my life?”

“Are you even allowed into that place? You’re underage.”

“It’s a private party. Even Barry’s kid is going to be there. He’s, like, fifteen or something.”

He doesn’t say anything.

“I think they’re having a turkey dinner, too, so you won’t even have to feed me before I go,” I say.

He nods and starts reading the paper.

I have three hours to wait out at home before I leave, so I do some homework and clean my room. I’m on the deck, shaking out my throw rug, when I see movement in the trees. I stop. Stare. A blinding reflection, like a mirror makes in sunlight, is flashing at me. I know the thousand Charlies are there, calling me to the tree house. I can hear their faint whispering.

So I hang my rug over the banister on the deck and walk a few steps toward the woods. It’s a quiet day. The road is through with school buses for the week and the rush home hasn’t started yet. The sun is low. There are no aliens. No accordion dolls coaxing me into the trees.

I cup my hands around my mouth and yell, “Karma’s a bitch, eh, Charlie?” Then I pick up the broom and start beating the dust out of the rug.

Dad stays in the den after his small dinner and doesn’t give me the lecture about responsibility that I’m expecting. He just says, “Be smart, Vera. Have a good time.”

I drive to Jackson, where I find James already at the fire company bar, and he orders me a vodka cooler. Next to him are two people I don’t recognize at first. But then I realize the brown-haired woman is ex-cheerleader-turned-food-service-worker Jill (I’m just not used to seeing her without her uniform on), which means the tall guy in the black leather coat next to her is Mick, her skinhead Nazi boyfriend.

HISTORY—AGE FIFTEEN

Ninth grade was a blur. Charlie and I were separated by the plethora of new people we’d never met before who went to the other middle school. I was put in the advanced track and had some of my classes in the senior wing, which helped me achieve my main objective—getting through high school unnoticed by doing well enough to not draw attention, but not doing so well that I stuck out. I didn’t want to get to know anyone, because eventually they would ask me about my parents, and I had to keep Mom’s past a secret or I’d suffer the consequences. I liked pretending that I didn’t have a mother, and that my father simply caught me when the stork dropped me from his crisp white sling.

Charlie and I still shared a seat on the bus. We’d press our earbuds into our ears and read or daydream or, in Charlie’s case, occasionally scribble things on tissues or napkins and then eat them. On weekends, we’d see each other sometimes, but Charlie was busy between hunting trips with his father and dates. Girls swarmed him that year, impressed by his windswept attitude, his over-the-eyes haircut, and his Goodwill dress sense. By the time summer came, I think he’d had about four different girlfriends, but he kept them totally secret, and if I asked, he would deny it, as if having girlfriends wasn’t cool.

He moved into the tree house when school ended and spent a lot of his time leafing through motorcycle magazines. We took an occasional hike on the blue trail and talked school gossip and career stuff (me = still vet or vet nurse, him = still forest ranger, but starting to lean toward more exotic things like roadie for a metal band or racing motorcycles). I thought about asking him to come with me to the licensing center when I finally got Dad to drive me there to pick up the rules-of-the-road study book, but he was keeping to himself a lot, and though we were still best friends, we were mature enough to give each other space. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t more cautious around him since he’d told me about John, his pervert underwear-buying friend. That year, I’d heard the car go up and down Overlook Road and turn into the gravel so much, I’d begun to recognize the sound of its sputtery engine from the bottom of the hill as it echoed off the Millers’ clapboard house. It was so obvious, I couldn’t believe Mr. and Mrs. Kahn hadn’t figured it out yet. A few times, the thought of what that guy could be doing with Charlie’s underwear crept up on me and made me want to tell Dad, but I didn’t.

I volunteered Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays at the adoption center that summer. It took two arguments with Dad to convince him that these volunteer hours would count for something if I was one day going to be a vet. He was still hell-bent on me working fast food for minimum wage, because he said saving tuition money was more important. In the end, I was saved by the crappy economy again. Most fast-food jobs were taken by college students—or more accurately, by college graduates.

I slept late every day I wasn’t at the center. At first, Dad would make sure I was out of bed by noon, but then he stopped arguing with me and let me do what I wanted. So I started to sleep until one. Until two. Sometimes I slept until four, the whir of the central air under my window blocking out the sounds of the world.

“Is everything okay, Vera?” he asked, around the end of July.

“Yeah.”

“You’re sleeping way too late.”

“I think I’m growing a lot.” This was true. I’d grown two inches in only a few months.