Please Ignore Vera Dietz(30)
Author: A.S. King

“Are you gonna keep it?”

“I want to, but there’s no way,” I said.

“Bummer.”

“Yeah.”

It was dark and Charlie accidentally brushed his hand against my hip, and it caused waves of butterflies. I giggled under my breath.

“I guess I better get back to what I was doing,” he said.

I nodded. “See you tomorrow.”

The next morning, Dad drove me, the puppy, and the Ziploc of food to the adoption center and made me give her back. Mrs. Parker gave me a sympathetic look, and I felt the slap of irony hit—some secret weapon I turned out to be. I hadn’t even judged myself accurately. When we got home, Charlie came over and invited me up to the tree house for lunch.

“I just got a fresh box of Noodle-o-Pak,” he said, smiling. “Spicy.”

I stopped in at Dad’s office to tell him I was going. He was still in no-smiling mode from the whole puppy-hating Hulk thing.

I hadn’t been to the tree house much that summer, and when I got up the ladder, I could tell Charlie had spent a lot of time working on it. He’d installed a pulley system to haul up a two-gallon water container he kept on the deck. There was a lot of new detail work. He’d started carving designs into the pine beams and had installed a homemade skylight in the roof, which was awesome.

“Holy shit!” I said. “That’s so cool!”

He shrugged. “It leaks.”

“I’m sure you can fix it, Charlie. You can fix anything.”

“Meh,” he answered. “What do you think of the rest?”

“Freaking awesome, man. The paint job. The posters. All awesome.”

“And my kitchen?” he asked, gesturing to his electric kettle and a milk crate on its side that held cocoa mix, the box of Noodle-o-Pak Spicy, and two boxes of assorted-flavor instant oatmeal.

“Uh-huh. Great,” I said.

After he filled the kettle and set it to boil, we sat on the octagonal deck. I noted the thinning leaves and felt a ball in my stomach. There is something about a dying forest that’s sad, no matter how many times I reassure myself that it will come alive again in spring. And of course, autumn meant school. Our sophomore year would start in less than a week. Another 180 days of keeping my mother’s secret. Another 180 days of sending out the PLEASE IGNORE VERA DIETZ signal so no one would even see me.

We swung our legs through the railing he’d made out of saplings. I had to admit my Noodle-o-Pak Spicy tasted extra nice that high up in the trees. Charlie told me about his new plan to do half days at the vocational school for either HVAC like his dad, or maybe carpentry, because he liked wood.

“Plus, it’s not as boring as being at school all day. My dad says I’m a blue-collar guy, like he is.” He sounded as if he was trying to convince himself more than me.

“Really? Huh.”

“I like the idea of a Harley and a truck and a nice house one day. Working for a living, you know? Not like some accountant or—Oh. Sorry.”

“I don’t care,” I said. “I’m not the accountant in the family.”

“You know what I meant, right?”

“Yeah.” He meant destiny, and I hated him for it. Because if we were all supposed to carbon-copy our parents, then I’d end up a brain-fried loser who runs away with a foot doctor, or a downtrodden Zen calculator. I was steering well clear of my destiny, thank you very much.

“Anyway, my dad said he’d buy me a bike if I went to Vo-Tech.”

“A bike?”

“I have my eye on a little rice burner at The Corner.” The Corner was a creepy car lot/gun shop with a small blinking sign on wheels that displayed a different Bible verse each month.

I wanted to ask him if this was his choice or his dad’s. It didn’t seem fair that no one had talked to him about college or any other options. It didn’t seem fair that he’d get a free bike for doing what he was told rather than thinking for himself. It didn’t seem right that he would be rewarded for turning into a trained monkey at the age of fifteen.

THE PAGODA PIZZA CHRISTMAS PARTY—PART 1

“Tonight you will experience the snakebite,” Mick says, and buys us all a round of shots. It tastes like sweetened lime juice and goes down smoothly. Except for the fact that a Nazi skinhead bought it for me.

But I’m trying to come to terms with it. It’s where I live. God bless the USA, where you can love or hate anyone you want as long as you don’t kill them doing either. I’m trying to see Mick as a person, you know? With a mother and father. As a baby—long before he got the word SKIN tattooed inside his lower lip.

The music starts after about two shots. Mick and Jill disappear into the poolroom and James and I sit at the bar, watching Marie and her look-alike husband step dance to country and western music. Fat Barry, the day manager from the store across town, joins in, and works up a red-faced sweat before the song is over.

James smokes a few cigarettes and orders me a beer.

“I don’t like beer.”

“You can’t mix snakebites with vodka coolers, Veer. You’ll hurl.”

“But—”

“Just try it. It’s not bad beer. He’ll put a lime in it for you so it will taste fine after the shots.”

The bartender brings me a Corona with lime and I monkey what James does with his. I push the lime past the lip of the bottle, into the gold beer. “What do you think of Mick?” I ask.

“You know.”

“Yeah. Gives me the creeps,” I say.

“Yeah. But he’s here with Jill. And he seems to want to play friends, so why not?”

“Free drinks, right?”

He laughs. “Yeah.”

An hour later, we’re sitting at the plastic tablecloth-covered long tables, eating our plates of roast turkey. Thank God. Mick bought two more rounds in the last half hour, so I’ve had four snakebite shots, two beers, and a vodka cooler, and I was feeling a bit wobbly until I started eating this turkey. James keeps telling me to eat slowly.

The music starts again once the plates are cleared, and I make my way to the dance floor for “Black Dog” and bang my head, which makes James laugh. Marie pulls out her camera and snaps a few pictures of me. I’m certainly buzzed and I get dizzy moshing my head, my hair slapping me in the face, but I’ve still got balance. Though the turkey is sloshing around my stomach now, so I leave the dance floor before the song is over and go back to the bar, where James is working hard to fill the ashtray with butts.