Please Ignore Vera Dietz(44)
Author: A.S. King

Here’s me using timorous in a sentence.

There’s a table of timorous kids in the back of the cafeteria, and I am one of them. They don’t have any pre-assigned seating and they won’t talk to you if you sit there, and that’s fine by me, because I don’t want to talk to anyone while I eat my soggy, too old, greasy grilled cheese sandwich that cost two hard-earned dollars. I make a mental note to pack my lunch tomorrow.

Until last year, when the shitstorm began, I sat with Charlie in the back booth on the east side of the cafeteria. Sometimes we let other outcasts squeeze in with us, but for the most part we ate alone, just the two of us.

And now he’s a series of molecules. He’s the wind. He’s my shoe. He’s your telephone and your eyeglasses. Now he’s the pickle on my plate next to the cafeteria’s limp grilled cheese sandwich. So when Jenny and Bill walk into the cafeteria, I pick it up and bite into it, hoping just a fraction of me can be as cool as Charlie was only a year ago.

Later today, I have a meeting with my guidance counselor, who is monitoring me for Dad. He’s the only one in the school (that I know of) who knows what really happened to me during February. We told the rest of the administration that I was sick with mono. The family doctor even wrote me a note full of lies. It meant I didn’t have to go to school with the lump on my head and black eyes. It also meant that no one found out about my weakness for vodka coolers and older men.

HISTORY I’D RATHER FORGET—AGE SEVENTEEN—JUNE

The next time I saw Charlie Kahn, after the night he hit me, I was stopped at the APlus for a candy bar. Dad had loaned me his car (with an Earth, Wind & Fire CD in it, which I cranked to 10) so I could go to Goodwill for some new clothes for summer. When I emerged from the APlus already munching, I didn’t see anyone else in the parking lot until I heard Charlie’s voice.

“Hey, Vera! How’s the stripper business?”

He was slurring drunk. Stumbling. He was standing next to his bike, now fitted with all sorts of expensive accessories, over by the bathroom doors. I wanted to slap him back to life. Slap some sense into him. I wanted to slap him so he’d know how it felt to be slapped. So he’d know how it felt to be zero.

“Shut up, Charlie.”

“Don’t tell my boyfriend to shut up,” Jenny Flick said, stepping out of the shadows, her cle**age hoisted up to bulge out of her scoop-neck tank top. Charlie took a loud hit from what must have been a joint. I’d heard in school that he was officially a druggie now, but I didn’t know what to believe until I saw him.

I shrugged and walked back to the car. I don’t know who threw the half-empty beer can at me, but it only skimmed my head and hit the car instead, leaving a small dent just under the driver’s side window.

Dad smelled the beer. I didn’t even notice my sleeve was wet. I’d driven home in a trance, with the stereo off, trying not to cry.

“Were you drinking tonight?”

“No.”

“So,” he said, and paused to look at my face. “Why do you smell like that?”

“Someone threw beer at me.”

“Someone?”

“I’m tired, Dad. Can we talk about this tomorrow?”

He went back to his Utne Reader.

Around two in the morning, I could hear Jenny’s souped-up Nova drop Charlie off outside his house. He opened the car door and a mix of laughter, loud, unintelligible words, and thrash metal music flowed into our forest and infected it with them.

I interviewed at Zimmerman’s Pet Store on a Monday afternoon. I thought I had it made. Mr. Zimmerman—a man I’d known since I was five and who knew me from my volunteering at the adoption center for three summers—was a complete sweetheart and winked at me on the way out.

I drove home prematurely ecstatic.

I parked Dad’s car and he met me at the door.

“How’d it go?” he said, looking past me at the car. He tried to hide it, but every time I came home from driving by myself after that night when the beer can dented the driver’s door, he’d scour the paint job for scratches or dings.

“Said he’d let me know by next week,” I said.

“But did it go well?”

“I think so. I mean, I didn’t kill any of the animals I handled.” He’d made me touch nearly all of them, too. Even the crusty old iguana and a gray parrot that bit me six times. “Anyway, Mrs. Parker will put in a good word for me.”

By Friday, I was getting nervous. Dad purposely moved the pizza delivery application to the kitchen counter again and suggested I fill it out. “That way, you won’t have all your eggs in one basket,” he said.

Saturday, when no one called from Zimmerman’s, I filled it out. Dad let me borrow the car to drive it down to the place, which was stuck into the side of a small, lame strip mall on the main strip of Mount Pitts. The place looked clean and the people who worked there seemed nice. But there was no point thinking about it. I was going to work at Zimmerman’s Pet Store.

On my way back up the main strip toward my house, I stopped at a red light and heard the familiar buzzing of Charlie’s bike. I looked around and saw him, with Jenny on the back, pulling out of one of the roads in the next block. So when I got to it, I took the right and tried to get my instinct to take me to where they had just been. I tried to convince myself this was detective work or simple curiosity, but really it was a mix of jealousy and payback, as if having information about them could make me more powerful. I guess I cared, even though I was trying not to.

About three blocks down Twenty-third Street was a dirty-looking house with the front curtains drawn and the old white Chrysler parked outside. 2301.

When I called Zimmerman’s Pet Store and found out that I didn’t get the job, I wanted to scream. I called Dad from school. It was finals week.

“I didn’t get the job,” I said.

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Don’t you want to say ‘I told you so’?”

After a few seconds, he answered, “Don’t sweat it, Vera. Everything happens for a reason.”

The reason was: Mr. Zimmerman wasn’t calling the shots anymore. The leftover medical bills from Mrs. Zimmerman’s cancer had all but wiped him out. His store had been bought by a corporate group who allowed him to make it seem like a family-owned store when it really wasn’t. The other reason was: They weren’t hiring anyone under eighteen now, on account of a new community service program they’d set up with the high school.