Please Ignore Vera Dietz(8)
Author: A.S. King

Dylan isn’t even listening.

“I’ll do it,” I say. Because what else do I have to do on New Year’s Eve now that Charlie is gone?

HISTORY—AGE THIRTEEN

The first New Year’s Eve I can remember making it to midnight was when I was eleven. It was snowing and my mom was still there, and when the ball came down in Times Square, I ran outside, barefoot in the snow, and I yelled “HAPPY NEW YEAR!” Charlie answered, “HAPPY NEW YEAR!” and it was so quiet from the insulating snowfall that it sounded like he was standing right next to me, even though he lived a hundred yards down the road and a skeletal woodland separated us.

The next year, Mom said that we had to celebrate New Year’s Eve as a family. She made homemade eggnog and put out a bunch of leftover holiday (we couldn’t say “Christmas” anymore, because Mom and Dad “leaned toward the Buddha”) cookies on a tray. We didn’t know it yet, but this would be her last New Year’s Eve with us. It wasn’t any different than the previous ones. She looked into space a lot, didn’t say much, and kissed my father when midnight came, as if she were punching a time card.

Things changed when I was thirteen. That year, Sherry Heller invited Charlie and me to her basement New Year’s Eve party so we could all watch her make out with her big-nosed boyfriend from Midland Catholic. He was a football player. He even put his hand up her shirt while the rest of us—the ten or so who showed up—watched from the mold-stained outdoor furniture that had been brought out of storage for the party.

“Want to try that?” Charlie asked.

“No,” I answered, knowing he was kidding.

“How about you?” he asked, winking at Marina Yoder.

She considered him. “Nah. I’ve got a cold.”

I studied him. Other girls didn’t like him because he wasn’t groomed. But I liked that. He bought his clothes old—frayed, holey, faded. He liked oversized hooded sweatshirts with tattered cuffs—the more tattered, the better. If he had a string hanging from the seam of a ripped-up flannel shirt, he’d leave it there. Where normal people would want to cut it off, Charlie would want it to dip in his soup and let the liquid drip down his elbow.

He wasn’t a slob, but his hair was greasy sometimes, and if it was, it was because he wanted it to be. I don’t think there was one time I ever saw him with combed hair. It suited him messy, sweeping over his thick eyebrows, and made him look mischievous and interesting.

Mrs. Kahn gave up trying to make Charlie “look decent” in the fourth grade. I remember the day clearly. It was picture day. November sometime. I wore a pair of green corduroys and a nice blouse with embroidery around the collar. Charlie wore a gray sweatshirt with an oily stain on the sleeve, and his mother argued with him the whole way to the bus stop. She was holding a crisp-ironed white button-down church shirt and a comb. He finally turned to her, grabbed the shirt, threw it to the side of the road, thick with decomposing leaf mold, and ground it in with his foot.

Before she could react, he snatched the comb and flung it far into the trees, and said, “Just go home. Who cares about stupid school pictures?” And she went home, like a trained monkey, after a lifetime of Mr. Kahn treating her like a trained monkey.

The night of Sherry Heller’s New Year’s Eve party, I still had that fourth-grade picture in my wallet. His hair finger-combed over his left eye, and the edge of the oily stain on the sweatshirt barely visible in the bottom right corner.

After another twenty minutes of Sherry and her boyfriend making out, Charlie nudged me and looked at the door. We walked the mile home together and celebrated the new year in the middle of the tree-lined road, full moon lighting the way, Charlie sucking on a Marlboro and me spinning around like a ballroom dancer on crack because I drank too much Coke.

“Veer?”

“Yeah?”

“I say we never go to a f**king New Year’s Eve party again.”

“You’re on,” I said, still spinning.

“It’s always a letdown.”

“Not for Sherry’s boyfriend, I bet.”

“Yeah, I bet they’re doing it on the glide-o-lounger right now, squeaking up a storm.”

“Ew.” I thought about my mother, pregnant at seventeen—gone for nearly a year at that point.

I was still thinking about her when Charlie asked, “Aren’t you curious, though?”

I stopped spinning and stumbled to the ground, right on the double yellow lines. Charlie lit another cigarette and held the smoke in his lungs.

“My dad says boys are only ever after one thing.”

“Right.”

“He says that I shouldn’t even think about boys until after college.”

“Huh.”

I didn’t know what else to say, so I got up slowly and tried to get my balance.

“But what do you think?” he asked, reaching out to help me steady myself.

“I think—” Before I could finish, Charlie was kissing me on the mouth and holding me tight, and when I opened my eyes, the moon was shining on his tender eyelashes, damp with cold moisture. He dropped his Marlboro in the road and smushed it out with his boot. He moved his hands to my waist and I caught them and slipped my fingers in between his. It felt good, his tongue moving in my mouth. Then I remembered. This was Charlie. My best friend. Not a boy. I remembered that I was my mother’s daughter—fighting this very destiny. (Fighting it and losing, because nothing ever felt more right in my life.)

When I could finally untangle myself, I said, “Dude! What’s up with that?”

He shrugged. “I dunno.” He kicked his feet around and said, “Figured we could both use the practice.”

A BRIEF WORD FROM THE DEAD KID

I regret everything that happened with Vera. Even back in grade school when I cut up that leprechaun picture. It’s hard to explain. As far as I was concerned, I didn’t have a choice. I was born to a man like my father and a woman like my mother, and I had to save Vera from myself.

This didn’t stop me from sneaking behind my own back a few times. The time I kissed her on the road on New Year’s Eve or the time I sent her flowers on Valentine’s Day were tests, I guess. Loving Vera Dietz was the scariest thing that ever happened to me. She was a good person from a good family. She could spell big words and remember to do math homework, and her father didn’t swear or drink like my father did. I know her mother was a stripper once, but that didn’t matter. Vera was classy.