Please Ignore Vera Dietz(36)
Author: A.S. King

It didn’t work. It didn’t work because I knew not to give the best of myself to the worst of people. So I decided to ask Charlie to take me home. But when I rounded the corner of the pagoda and saw him showing Jenny Flick and Bill Corso and the rest of his new friends how paper airplanes (this time, Corso’s three interim reports to warn of his impending failure) soar in the fast, frigid current, I turned around and headed home.

I fast-walked down Overlook Road in the dark, thinking of Charlie, boiling. Fuck Charlie. Stupid ass**le. Stupid roses. Stupid pagoda. Stupid losers. Stupid boots giving me stupid blisters. Stupid Vera Dietz.

When I walked in the door, up the steps, and into my room without a grunt, Dad noticed. He said up the steps, “Why don’t you come down and we’ll order pizza from that new delivery place and pig out?”

So we did—and he didn’t say one word to me about Charlie. While I put on my flannel pajamas, he moved the roses to the windowsill by the sink, which was nice, actually, because our garbage disposal had gone funky, so they helped cover the smell of old water and rotten vegetables.

The pizza place had a little coupon pasted to the box top. Two dollars off a two-pie order with Coke. As my father cut it out for his fridge coupon organizer, he saw the call for drivers.

“ ‘Must be eighteen,’ ” he read. “What do you think? That could be a fun job.”

“I won’t be eighteen until October. Anyway, I want to work at Zimmerman’s this summer, now that I’m old enough.”

Of course, Dad didn’t like this idea, but he knew it was a paying position, because I hadn’t stopped mentioning it since the first summer I’d volunteered at the adoption center.

After a second’s thought, I added, “Hold on—are you saying you’ll give me Mom’s car if I do this? Because I can do part-time and still work at Zimmerman’s if this means I get the car.”

“I do a pizza delivery guy’s taxes,” he said. “The pay isn’t bad, and he says tips are great. You won’t get tips at the pet store.”

“True. But I can’t cuddle and love pizza, either.”

The conversation took my mind off Charlie. It was nice. He cut out the “drivers wanted” part, stuck it on the fridge under a magnet, and said, “Heck, maybe I’ll do it. Could be a fun moonlighting job. Plus, I’ll be lonely around here if you start dating—or, uh, whatever it is you’re doing.”

I told him everything. The pagoda, the friends, the drinking, and the pot. I didn’t tell him about the paper airplanes, though, because I knew it would hurt him that a bunch of ass**les stole a sacred Dietz thing.

He sighed and clicked his tongue. “Well, that’s disappointing.”

“To put it lightly,” I said.

He looked over at the flowers and back at me. “Veer, there’s got to be some explanation. He spent a fortune on those. It doesn’t make sense.”

“This is the kind of thing I’d have to put up with if he was my boyfriend,” I said. “Anyway, we’re best friends. I don’t want to ruin it. It’s better this way.”

He nodded and reached for my hand. “You’re a real smart little cookie—you know that?”

Of course, I was lying to both of us.

A BRIEF WORD FROM THE DEAD KID

Jenny Flick and I officially met in detention in January of our junior year. I got caught smoking outside the wood shop loading doors, and even though Mr. Smith liked me, he had to write me up because the metal shop teacher was with him, and he’s a hardcore ass**le.

When I first got to the room, the Detentionheads were standing around, talking about a fight that was supposedly going to happen after school the next day. I didn’t recognize most of the new kids because I spent half days at Tech, but I did recognize Bill Corso and his two best football buddies, who looked like inbred hillbilly twins, and Jenny Flick from my times in detention the year before. Jenny Flick was leaning back in her chair with her feet on the desk. She wore a pair of soft leather construction boots, tight jeans, and a black Led Zeppelin T-shirt, and was chewing gum and blowing bubbles. I sat in the back right corner and ignored everyone like I did every other time I had detention.

The Special Education teacher, Mr. Oberman, was the detention teacher for the day, and when he came in, he wrote a quote on the board and as he was writing it he said, “We’re here for an hour, ladies and gentlemen. If you choose to use this hour wisely and do your homework or class-assigned reading, that would be a very intelligent decision. However”—he stopped and eyed Bill Corso—“if you choose to just sit here like a bored jungle gorilla, you will have to write out this quote as many times as you can during the next hour. I have paper and pencils on my desk for those of you who have arrived empty-handed.”

There was no doubt Mr. Oberman was g*y. He didn’t hide it. I’d venture a guess that he was overly g*y in the detention room because it irked the Detentionheads so much. Bill Corso was not going to be told what to do by some fag—so Oberman put on his extra fagginess just to make kids like Corso squirm.

The quote said: HOW MANY CARES ONE LOSES WHEN ONE DECIDES NOT TO BE SOMETHING BUT SOMEONE.

“What the hell does that mean?” Corso asked.

“What do you think it means, Mr. Corso?”

“I don’t know.”

Corso sat at the desk, his legs open wide, straddling the entire thing, as if his crotch was the mouth of a giant whale, and had his arms crossed across his chest. He had no books, no pencil, and no paper.

“Well, maybe if you fill this paper with it a few times, you’ll figure it out,” Oberman said, dropping a piece of lined paper and a pencil on Bill’s desk.

Bill shoved the things off his desk and onto the floor. “I’m not writing that shit. Heller and Frisk don’t make us write.”

Mr. Oberman stayed calm and smiled. “But I’m not Mr. Heller or Mr. Frisk. I’m Mr. Oberman, and if you don’t pick those up and watch your language, I’m giving you another month.”

They stared at each other. The rest of us watched in silence. I already had my math homework out and tried to pretend like I wasn’t watching because these kids were losers and no matter where I was from, I was not going to be a Detentionhead loser.

“I’m giving you one minute to pick those up, Mr. Corso. After that, you’re out and facing possible suspension.”

Bill didn’t move.

At the fifty-second mark, he looked over his right shoulder at Jenny Flick and raised his eyebrows. She shrugged.