Please Ignore Vera Dietz(6)
Author: A.S. King

“Hey, kids! What’re you doin’?”

“None of your business,” Charlie said, scowling.

“Want ten dollars?”

“For what?” Charlie moved in front of me on instinct.

“I—uh—take pictures for the newspaper.”

“And?”

The guy was too weird to be for real. His car was too skanky—a white boxy Chrysler that hadn’t been washed in months.

Charlie stared at him.

“Pretty blond pigtails,” the guy said, shifting his head around to see me behind Charlie.

“Fuck off,” Charlie said. “You f**king pervert.”

“Hey, come on now, kid, I wa—”

“Vera! Run!”

I ran. Up the blue trail to the first fork in the path. I took the right, which was the circle back to the small parking area on Overlook Road, right across the street from our houses. I didn’t look back until I heard fast footsteps behind me. Then I heard the car take off.

Charlie was jumping, he was so full of adrenaline. “Holy shit. That guy was a real pervert.”

“You think?” I asked, checking each shoe sole for dog shit.

“He offered me twenty after you left.”

“Ew,” I said. “I think we should tell my parents.” I knew his wouldn’t believe us or care. There was a reason Charlie was such a bright blazing sun. He came from endless cold, black space. “Did you get his license plate number?”

“No. Let’s go to the tree,” he said, reaching into his pocket for another cigarette. “We can think about it then.”

“But what if he comes after us?”

“Let him try and climb the Master Oak. The spirit of the Great Hunter will protect us.”

HISTORY—AGE SEVEN

The first time Charlie Kahn told me about the spirit of the Great Hunter, we were seven. We were in Mrs. Grogan’s first-grade class, counting to one hundred.

He leaned in and whispered, “The spirit of the Great Hunter loves the number seventy-two.”

“Why?” I whispered back.

“I don’t know. Maybe that’s when he died.”

“You mean 1972?”

“No, like how old he was.”

“Oh,” I said, naturally embarrassed, even though being wrong with Charlie was something I was used to by then.

As far as Charlie was concerned, the Great Hunter was an Indian spirit who lived in our woods. He drank from the lake. He watched the stars from the ridge. He protected hikers and hunters and tree-climbing little urchins like us, and he created the most sacred tree of all, the Master Oak, for us to grow up in.

“How do you know?” I asked.

“My dad told me.” Charlie adored his dad, like any seven-year-old son adores his father. Mr. Kahn loved to take him deer-spotting in mid-autumn, let him shoot a BB gun at targets behind the house, and told him stories about the Great Hunter.

Later that morning, we had library time. The librarian gave us a picture to color. It was March. The picture was of some sort of leprechaun wedding. There were a bunch of forest animals on the fringes, throwing shamrocks at the happy couple.

“Do you think we’ll get married one day?” I said.

“To each other?” Charlie asked.

“No, silly. I mean to other people.” (But really, I’d meant to each other.)

He was cutting out the leprechaun even though that wasn’t the point of the project.

“I don’t want to get married,” he answered, separating the bride from the groom. “Too much yelling.”

I nodded as if I agreed, but my parents meditated and did yoga together, and didn’t yell.

“Anyway”—he crumpled the paper with the hole from the groom and the image of the bride and tossed it, basketball-style, into the dull gray wastebasket ten feet away—“the Great Hunter rides solo.”

Secretly, I mourned this.

FRIDAY—FOUR TO CLOSE

Today was a Vocab test and I drew a complete blank on the word swivet. So here’s me using swivet in a sentence.

The thousand Charlies have me in such a swivet, I forgot to study for my Vocab test. I will not follow them into Zimmerman’s Pet Store no matter how many times they try to drag me there. I will avoid the Pagoda Mall for the rest of my life if I have to.

When I get to Pagoda Pizza after school, Marie is standing in the front with Greg, the owner, a BMW-driving yuppie who talks down to women, and she is nodding her head as he tells her crap she already knows.

“You need to have the employees stock the cooler whenever it gets half empty so there’s always cold soda,” he says. “And make sure when they cut the six-packs into fours and twos that they don’t puncture the cans with the knife.”

Marie has to pretend she’s interested even though she knows much more than he does about how to run his store. This is Greg’s first time running a business, I bet. Any other business owner would be more concerned with the employees cutting themselves, not the stupid cans.

I walk into the back, where James and two part-time Pothead drivers are folding boxes and Frisbee-tossing them to the top of the stack, trying to land them without teetering the whole thing down on top of us.

“Greg’s here, man. You might want to stop f**king around,” I say.

“Greg’s an ass**le,” Tommy Pothead says.

“Yeah—Greg can suck my dick,” Dylan Pothead says.

“Hey.” James slaps Dylan lightly on the forehead. “Don’t talk to Veer that way, man.”

“Sorry, Vera.” Dylan makes a mocking bow. “I meant Greg can place his delicate BMW-driving mouth around the throbbing head of my member.”

James shrugs.

“Whatever,” I say. I turn to James. “What am I? Your little sister?”

James grabs me, tucks me under his arm, and gives me a gentle noogie. He smells like Marlboros and soap.

I squeeze onto the back steps after getting my change envelope (a ten, a five, four ones, and a dollar in change) and Pagoda Phone from the office, and fold boxes until the store phones begin to ring. Then I work up front because I have the ability to talk to customers and enter their orders into the computer, and the Potheads don’t. I send James on the first run—a five-stop cockroach-part-of-town circle—and then I set myself up for a trip through pastel suburbia. This time of year, it’s twice as fun because everyone has their Christmas lights up and is participating in the Who-Can-Flaunt-the-Tackiest-Collection-of-Obnoxious-Holiday-Bullshit Contest. This may prove me as parsimonious as my father, but who spends that much money on corny inflatable light-up Santa Clauses and spinning, singing reindeer? Who thought it was a good idea to mold plastic Nativity scenes that light up at night? Seriously. There are still children starving in Africa, right? There are still children starving right here in this shitty little town.