Please Ignore Vera Dietz(38)
Author: A.S. King

I am not driving the car. Someone else is shifting the gears for me. Someone has just put on my right-turn signal and turned me onto Pitts Road. I drive to the hill at Jenkins’s field and I pull the car into my old stargazing spot.

Someone turns the light on in the car and I look at my lump in the rearview mirror. It’s huge, and it’s killing me. It could be the bad light, but it looks like there are bruises forming under my eyes now. This thought brings tears—the realization that I am going to have to explain this to Dad, who will surely pull some crazy shit when I tell him what happened.

I turn the light off.

Then, they are here. All thousand of them. Maybe a million. The field is wall-to-wall Charlies. They are glowing blue-white and I can hear them breathing. They exhale a word. Rest.

I can’t sleep here. I don’t even know if I can sleep, period. Maybe I have a concussion. Maybe I’ll slip into a coma if I sleep. Maybe I’ll die.

Rest.

I blink. A billion Charlies, glowing brighter. A trillion. Inhaling. Exhaling. Rest.

My head rests on the seat, and I curl slightly to my right, tucking myself into my coat. I make sure the doors are locked and close my eyes, and they are behind my eyelids, too. The Charlies. Infinite Charlies. Smiling, stroking my head, glowing blue-white light, and exhaling softly. Rest.

When daybreak hits, I wake up cold. I remember being woken up during the night. Hourly. I remember feeling Charlie nursing me, protecting me, making sure I wasn’t dead. I lie there for a minute or two and then reach up to my head, which now feels like I’ve grown a baseball.

My father is going to have a shit fit.

Before the road starts carrying cars to Saturday shopping and work, I turn the key in the ignition and crank the heat up until I figure out what to tell Dad. There are good sides—I wasn’t ha**ng s*x with James all night. I don’t even know where he is! There are bad sides—I have a concussion and probably need to see a doctor. I can’t say how many drinks I had last night, I had so many.

Times like these, I wish my father was a long-haul trucker or worked in the International Space Station. I pull out of the field with a sigh, knowing I deserve whatever I get. Fact is, I feel lucky I’m not dead. I feel lucky I’m not beat up and raped and in a heap next to a Dumpster outside Jackson Fire Company.

Here’s my father using f**k and shit in a sentence.

“Holy shit! What the f**k happened to you?”

I’ve never heard him swear before. He gets closer, sees the tears in my eyes, and his anger quickly merges into concern.

“Are you okay, Vera?”

“I’m fine,” I say.

“Uh—um, I, uh—” He’s panicked. He could never deal with medical stuff.

“Really, Dad. It’s okay.”

He’s all mixed up. I can see it. Before I got home, he wanted to lay into me. He wanted to read the riot act and make me call my mother again, and book me into some home for girls who love twenty-three-year-old men and like to drink. But when I walked in looking like this, his plan collapsed. Now he’s pacing and muttering to himself, tapping his fingertips together.

I get myself a glass of water and drink back three Advil. After two minutes, he takes a closer look at my head and says, “Get your coat on. I’m taking you to the hospital.”

“Don’t you want to know where I was last night?”

“No.”

“Don’t you want to know if I was drinking?”

He looks at me impatiently and rolls his eyes.

“Can I at least change?”

“I’m starting the car,” he says, trying to hide how concerned he is.

I lock myself in the upstairs bathroom and turn both lights on. Oh man. I look like I got the shit kicked out of me. Did I? While I wash my face and brush my teeth, I think back to Mick the skinhead Nazi and how nice he was in between the intimidating Nazi stuff. Surely this was an accident. He hadn’t meant to drop me on my head. No one would do that sort of thing on purpose—especially at a nice Christmas party with fifty people around to witness it. Or so I decide, here and now. No. Mick just accidentally fell over. He was drunk—like I was. I couldn’t blame him.

But my memory has this little piece of information. A sound bite. The sound bite I have from when I was passed out on the hardwood floor. Maybe I was dreaming. Maybe I could hear while my brain took a minute to find consciousness again. But the sound bite won’t let me forget it.

JAMES: What the f**k did you do that for?

MICK: That chick’s a freak!

JILL: Jesus, Mick.

EXTRA #1: Is she okay?

EXTRA #2: Out cold.

JAMES: Vera? Vera?

MICK: (From a distance.) (Laughs.) Who’s racking?

JAMES: Veer? Vera?

I hear Dad rev the car a few times and then open the front door.

“VERA! Let’s go!” He sounds scared as hell.

PART FOUR

GROUNDED, COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY—PART 1

Okay—here’s me using stultify in a sentence.

My father, who won’t let me go to school with a contusion the size of a baseball, has grounded me and banned me from working to stultify my life. I’m not even sure I used that right, but who cares? Being in the house all the time is f**king me up.

Plus, thanks to the stupid hospital consultant who called in a lab-coat-wearing guy from some unit called “Crisis” after my head X-ray and bloodwork came back, we have four insurance-covered “Family Meetings” with a local therapist before we have to start paying out of pocket.

Dad thought this was a great idea until halfway through the second appointment, when he realized we’d be role-playing and he wouldn’t be allowed to hide behind his calm and cool Zen master bullshit anymore.

DR. B: Mr. Dietz, why don’t you really act like you think Vera acts? I’m sure she isn’t as subdued as you’re making her out to be.

DAD: I don’t want to hurt her feelings.

ME: Please, Dad. I think making me quit my job and locking me in the house did the trick. No need to spare my feelings. Really.

DR. B: See? Why don’t you start with that? Can you capture that sarcasm?

DAD: Really, Dad, you totally SUCK for giving a shit about me.

I laugh.

DR. B: Perfect. Try some more.

DAD: Like, now I have to sit around doing nothing all the time, and my twenty-three-year-old boyfriend can’t see me or bring me alcohol.

DR. B: Vera? Do you want to play?

ME: (Sits up straight, clears all emotion from face.) You will thank me, Vera, in a few years when you realize how stupid you’re being.