Please Ignore Vera Dietz(31)
Author: A.S. King

“Another round for my friends!” Mick slurs.

I hold up my hand and smile. “No thanks, man. You can skip me this time around.”

He gets in my face quickly and loudly. “Hey! What are you trying to say? You don’t want my free drink?” I feel his breath. He’s an inch away, with the angriest, most intimidating face I’ve ever seen. Ten times worse than Mr. Kahn.

I’m completely f**king scared. Then he laughs and steps back and says something like “I was messing around” or “I was joking” or “Take it easy,” but I don’t hear it because my adrenaline level has just tripled and all I can really hear is the blood going through my ears.

James puts his arm around me. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll take Vera’s this time if she doesn’t want it.”

“Seriously, man. I was only kidding around.”

“I know,” I say. But they all know I’m lying.

“Two for the freaked-out chick, Keith!” Mick yells, and the bartender winks at him, which creeps me out even more. Suddenly I realize I don’t know what they’re putting in my drinks. I don’t know if they have some skinhead Nazi master plan. I don’t know anything. I’m a naïve eighteen-year-old girl who doesn’t even belong in this bar.

I look around and see Marie and her husband hugging at the table, sucking down cigarettes, and occasionally locking crooked nicotine teeth. Fat Barry has brought his son, who is the only person in the room younger than I am. He looks like a stupid kid, sitting there between his mom and dad with his baseball cap on. I don’t think he’s moved all night, except when the dessert buffet came out. His mother used to be the playground lady for us when we were in elementary school, and I know she’s an incurable gossip. Suddenly I want to play the rest of the night safe.

Actually, I want to leave.

An hour later, James has talked me into one slow dance, and has requested “Stairway to Heaven.” We’re acting like a couple, and everyone who comes around to talk to us is treating this like it’s totally cool. Fat Barry even tells us we look like a cute pair—which is the kind of thing Dad would say if he’d just give James a chance. But of course, he won’t. Because James is a whopping five years older than I am and he dropped out of college.

After the slow dance, my first ever, I’m in the bathroom—it’s cruddy—and I look at myself in the mirror and touch up the small bit of brown eyeliner I’m wearing. I’m feeling more at ease than I was an hour ago, because these people can accept me for who I am. They can accept my feelings for James.

I’m even growing to like Mick, the skinhead Nazi. He tells funny jokes and has a very witty way about him. Better yet, he has a few set pieces about Corduroy Greg because he used to work for him, too, and hates the guy. When he sees a growing audience around the bar, he talks louder.

“What do the gynecologist and the pizza deliveryman have in common?”

“Dunno,” I slur. I accept Mick’s last snakebite shot because he’s apologized for scaring me like ten times since he did it. He seemed sincere, too.

“They both get to smell the goods but neither one of them can eat it.”

Though this isn’t all that funny, I start to laugh uncontrollably, and I stumble enough for James to reach out and steady me.

“Veer? You okay?” he whispers into my ear.

“I want to get out of here soon,” I answer, and he thinks I mean I want to make out. I know this because he winks at me, and it takes him all of thirty seconds to gather up his cigarettes and lighter from the bar and slip his coat on.

Mick sees this and quickly struts over with his mean face on. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“Vera needs to get home, man.”

“But the party’s just starting!”

“Yeah—but we’re going,” James says.

“But I bought you all those drinks!”

“So what?”

“So, you were supposed to get the next round, ass**le.”

James reaches into his wallet, slaps thirty bucks on the bar, and nods to the bartender. “This should cover him and his girl for the rest of the night, okay?”

Mick walks over to me with his arms out, as if he wants to hug me, and I flinch into James’s side. I do not want to hug a skinhead Nazi. Even if he might be okay. Even if he tells funny jokes. Even if he’s really just a misunderstood nice guy who hates certain races of people.

“Aw, come on! You’re not scared of little old Mick, are ya?”

I giggle because he’s giggling. He has a huge smile. It makes his lower lip curl out a bit, so I can see the very top of his SKIN tattoo.

He steps back like a 1950s sitcom dad and cocks his head, holding his arms out in the universal code for “Aw, come on, give me a hug!”

So I sheepishly separate from James and approach him.

He gets an excited look on his face and sweeps me off the ground before I can embrace him. He holds me around my hips, with my arms pinned down to my sides, so that my br**sts are level with his forehead. And then he begins to wobble.

“Uh … uh … uh …,” he says. I wobble from side to side and try to get my hands free, but his grip is too strong. I start to kick my legs. I can feel he’s losing his balance and I try harder to pull my arms free to catch myself.

But that doesn’t happen.

He falls backward, and I see the hardwood floor coming at my face so fast, I can’t even swear. Then, blackness.

HISTORY—AGE SIXTEEN

The first time Charlie got high school detention, it was for smoking. We were sophomores. I was an invisible sophomore and he was a Tech sophomore, just without the leather jacket yet. I told him a hundred times that he should wait to smoke until we got off the bus, but he couldn’t help it. He had to take a few drags after lunch in the bathroom.

“This place doesn’t understand addiction,” he said. “They should pity me, not punish me.”

Detention was a bore, he said, and he came back with stories of the regulars, who he called the Detentionheads, and he’d make fun of them. There was Bill Corso, a sophomore like us and the up-and-coming star quarterback. There was Frank Hellerman, a senior Vo-Tech kid who built souped-up cars on the weekends and was rumored to drag race out on Route 422. Last, there was Justin Miller, a junior—Tim’s little brother—who was worse, Charlie said, than Tim was.

“A bunch of losers,” he called them. “And the girls are worse, because the only reason they’re there is to follow the losers.” He listed them. Jenny Flick, Gretchen So-and-so (“She’s so dumb, Corso told her that humans mated with apes and created a half man-half ape and she believed him, Vera”), and some girl named Michelle who was a senior and always wore Deep Purple T-shirts. He said they all ignored him.