Please Ignore Vera Dietz(46)
Author: A.S. King

It is erect and I wonder will this f**k me up for life.

He shuffles to the hall table and puts the soda down. As he shuffles back, it bounces, like a diving board. This is becoming one of the funnier moments in pizza delivery.

He reaches down into his back pocket, which is on the floor with the rest of his pants, and asks, “How much was that again?”

“Ten,” I say, realizing that he has the use of his hands back and I just want to get out of here.

He hands me a ten and two singles and stays at the door with his pants around his ankles and his hard-on. When I back out of his little driveway, he waves. I tell the air, “See? This is why we need signs.”

PART FIVE

SECOND DAY BACK IN SCHOOL—TUESDAY

I ask Dad over breakfast, “Do you think Mom stopped loving you before or after she met what’s-his-name?”

He chews his granola slowly. It bugs me. Maybe it bugged Mom, too.

“I don’t know,” he answers. “I’m not even sure she did stop loving me,” he adds.

I know the feeling. I don’t think Charlie stopped loving me, either.

Now Charlie’s dead and I’m here in the kitchen—on my way to school, and then to work. It’s my senior year and I still have no idea what I want to do with my life. I am motherless, and in the last year, I lost my best friend twice, fell in love with a guy I shouldn’t have (twice), got beat up by a skinhead Nazi, and had things thrown at me, including beer cans, money, and dog shit.

Oh. Yeah. And last night.

“There was a guy out on Hammer Lane last night who answered the door with his pants down,” I say to Dad, who seems to still be chewing the same mouthful of granola.

“In his underwear?” he says, between chews.

“Nope,” I say, slightly embarrassed to describe the details. “Um—fully, uh—you know. No underwear.”

He looks at me and bulges his eyes out, chews fast, and swallows. “Did you call the police?”

I shrug. “What could they do about it?”

“Vera! What’s wrong with you?” He’s now pouring the rest of the contents of his cereal bowl into the drain strainer and rinsing the sink.

“I wouldn’t have even thought to call the cops. He was just a weirdo.” Right? Wasn’t he? Harmless?

“You see? This is the kind of thing I was talking about when it comes to responsibility. You need to have a vision of community, Veer. What if that guy—what if—what if he does that when the Girl Scouts come around to sell cookies?”

I shrug again. I didn’t expect him to freak out like this. We stare at each other for a minute.

“Can you remember the address?” he asks.

“Yeah. But what’s the point in saying anything? What can they do about it?”

He looks at me, thoroughly disappointed. “Do you want me to call them?”

“No.”

“Well, one of us will.”

Okay. I admit it. The only reason I mentioned it was to make him feel bad for making me work this job. I had no idea he’d freak. But now I’m looking at him and I’m thinking about what an enormous hypocrite he is. I’m thinking about how my guts told me a million times to help Charlie. I’m thinking about the million times Dad told me to ignore it.

“Let me get this straight,” I say. “You want me to report some loser who answered the door for the pizza delivery with his pants around his ankles, but you’ve been telling me my whole life to ignore the boxing match—” I am so angry, I feel my hand shaking as I point to Charlie’s house. “Right next door? What kind of person do you think I am?”

“I—”

“What about the Girl Scouts who came to the Kahns’ and sold Thin Mints to the lady with the broken arm? What kind of community lessons did they learn from that, Dad?”

This approach is destined to backfire on me, so I decide to dump the rest of my cereal down the drain, too, and talk nonstop on my way to the door.

“All you ever said was, ‘Ignore it, Vera,’ and now you think this creep from last night is worth talking about? Get a grip, Dad. That’s the most hypocritical thing I’ve ever heard. And that ass**le is still beating her up. He’s still getting away with it. You’re still letting him get away with it.”

I slam the door and walk briskly to the car. I see the bus coming up Overlook Road and remember how Charlie and I used to wait together, and how he’d smoke two cigarettes one off the other between 7:00 and 7:14, when the bus stopped. How he always made sure to exhale his last breath into the bus on the way up the steps.

I wonder if I’d called the police back when I was ten or thirteen or fifteen, would Charlie be alive now. I regret it. I regret every minute I lived keeping that secret. I regret every time I didn’t talk to Charlie about it. I regret having parents who couldn’t try to help or seem to care. I regret not being reason enough to make them care more. I regret never saying what I was thinking, never saying, “But what if that was me? What if I marry some loser who hits me? Would you care then? Would you help?” And I regret not calling the police that first day we met the pervert. Because I’m sure he had something to do with how Charlie was acting at the end.

I realize, sitting here in my car, watching my neighborhood wake up, that I can’t let my regret stop me anymore. I say, half to Charlie and half to myself, “I’m so sorry. I promise I’ll change this somehow.”

As I back out of the driveway onto the road, I see Dad looking at me through the front bay window. He waves, which means truce, which means he still can’t handle talking about anything remotely heavy and would prefer to ignore it. I think of the Post-it note he tacked near the sink. “Fundamentally, the marksman aims at himself.”

Fundamentally, Dad is ignoring himself.

Fundamentally, Mr. Kahn is beating himself.

Fundamentally, then, I am delivering myself. I wonder if I want a six-pack of Coke with that? Garlic bread?

HISTORY I’D RATHER FORGET—AGE SEVENTEEN—AUGUST

The summer wound down. I got good at ignoring Charlie and Jenny or whoever else he brought into the woods for pot parties and sex, or whatever he was into now. I got good at ignoring the Pagoda Mall and any leftover urges I had to work at Zimmerman’s, now that I knew the adoption center was moving, and especially now that Jenny Flick had started showing up there to rack up community service credits for graduation.

I liked working at Pagoda Pizza, and even though I was dying to switch to night shift and start delivering once I turned eighteen, I got along great with Nate, the day manager, who said my love of Al Green made me an “honorary sister.” I liked working so much, I was kind of sad to be going back to school to become Vera Dietz, the whatever-lies-Jenny-Flick-and-Charlie-told-people senior. There was a week left, and I hadn’t bought any supplies yet. Or clothes. I hadn’t even opened the envelope with my schedule in it, which had come in the mail two weeks before. I was thinking of these things as I pulled into the driveway after a ten-to-four shift. When I noticed something moving toward my driver’s side window and then looked up and saw Charlie, I was scared.