Please Ignore Vera Dietz (Page 9)
Please Ignore Vera Dietz(9)
Author: A.S. King
The thing you don’t see while you’re still there on Earth is how easy it is to change your mind. When you’re in it and you’re mixed up with feelings, assumptions, influences, and misconceptions, things seem completely impossible to change. From here, you see that change is as easy as flicking a light switch in your brain.
I spent a lot of time on Earth wishing I could be as classy as Vera. I thought if I was, maybe we could have a future together. But I assumed I’d never be classy. And it was that feeling, and the helplessness and anger that come from a destiny like mine, that drew me to Jenny Flick—the girl who landed me here.
FRIDAY—FOUR TO CLOSE
Friday nights perk up around eleven. We close at one. There’s usually a run or two to Fred’s Bar at midnight, and parties—sleepovers with giddy preteens or drunken college dropouts who have access to beer.
Two orders come in before we shut the ovens off. Marie is already tossing toppings from the translucent containers into the trash, counting receipts, and double-checking them on the computer. By the time I’m back from the final run, she’ll have my totals ready, and James will be doing the dishes. Jill has already done the prep work for tomorrow, which is my day off, so all I will have to do is mop the floor, start the washing machine before we lock up, and go home.
When I leave, I stack up my orders in the car and have to run back in for a six-pack of Coke for the first stop. In the glass, I see James staring at the back of me, and I wonder has he daydreamed about me the way I’ve daydreamed about him. Maybe my father was right and a full-time job does mature a person. Maybe I’m twenty-three in my brain. Just old enough for James. Or maybe, since he dropped out of state college and started working at Pagoda Pizza, he’s more like eighteen. He waves as I stick the car in reverse, and I act cool and pretend I don’t see it.
First stop—a bachelor, half drunk. Doesn’t even look at me. Needs the Coke for more rum and Coke. I doubt he needs the small pepperoni at all. He tips me a dollar, and I get back in the car and feel Charlie there again.
He makes me put on heavy metal music. He tells me to drive places I don’t want to go, like Zimmerman’s. He warns me, too, not to take Linden Road or else I’ll die in a bad accident. I mean, I don’t know this for sure, but that’s what it feels like, so I do what he says just in case. Even in death, Charlie is frustrating as hell.
In life, the minute he seemed like one thing, he’d change and become another. No matter what the fad—music, clothing, hairstyles, hobbies—Charlie remained this indefinable rebel. His number one priority was smoking his next cigarette. Always. Which is why he had so much detention last spring. And though he’d joined with me in dogging the school’s Detentionheads and Potheads since I could remember, his time in detention brought him closer to them, and further from me. Which was how I ended up hating Charlie.
I think back to last April Fool’s Day, when Jenny Flick told Charlie that I talked about him behind his back. Which was where everything started to go wrong.
“I heard you were talking about me,” he said. He was livid. Every muscle was tensed.
We were at the pagoda, and I was flying paper airplanes. He reached for his cigarettes in his breast pocket. I said, aware he seemed angry but thinking he was just putting on an act for April Fool’s Day, “Oh yeah? What did I say?”
“Are you saying you weren’t?”
I looked at him and smirked. “You’re my best friend. I can’t even figure out what I’d say if I wanted to.”
“Oh really?” When I realized he was genuinely pissed off, I got a little frightened. “So you weren’t the one passing around the whole school that my dad hits my mom?”
“What?”
“You’re acting surprised, but I know you know.”
What could I say to this? I’d kept the Kahns’ secret for my whole life, against my own better judgment, and I’d never said a word.
“Of course I know, Charlie. I’ve only been your best friend and neighbor for seventeen years. But I’ve never said a word about it to anyone. Ever. Like EVER.”
“So how does the whole school know, then?”
“Who says they do?”
“Jenny.”
With that, the shitstorm began.
I had a hundred arguments that made sense. I had a hundred proofs. I had a hundred truths. Nothing worked. Charlie believed Jenny Flick.
“But you even know she’s a mythomaniac!” I said.
“Stop using those big words. You sound like a f**king geek.”
“Maybe I am a f**king geek.”
“Maybe you’re more than a geek.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know. What goes around comes around, I guess.”
I could hear our friendship dying right there. Hit by a truck so big, going so fast, there was nothing left. Not a shred of our childhood, not a splinter of our tree house, not a bit of our New Year’s Eve kiss. Nothing. Jenny Flick had managed to take from me the only person I ever let in and replace me with beer, sex, and pot.
So now I had no mother and I had no best friend.
But, I assured myself, one day Charlie would come to his senses. One day he would see how he’d been led to the dark side by a lying little creep. I actually thought that this conversation at the pagoda was the worst that would happen.
I had no idea what was coming.
I think of a quote in Dad’s bathroom Zen book. “The willow is green; flowers are red. The flower is not red; nor is the willow green.”
Same went for Charlie.
Charlie was my friend; he was very nice to me. Charlie was not my friend; nor was he very nice to me.
FRIDAY—FOUR TO CLOSE—LAST STOP
Here’s me using mythomania in a sentence.
Jenny Flick suffers so badly from mythomania, she believes her own lies. I could never understand what Charlie saw in her. I’ve known her since middle school, when I bumped into her at the bathroom mirror while she layered on eyeliner.
“What’s your problem?” she said.
“Sorry.”
“Yeah, you are sorry,” she answered.
She wore too much eyeliner then, at age thirteen, and now, at eighteen, she wears so much black under her eyes, she looks like a slutty linebacker raccoon.
Jenny Flick could lie about anything. She’d tell you that she met the lead singer from your favorite band and dropped acid with them. She’d say she was screwing the biology teacher, or that her stepdad snorted coke with the principal. She drew pictures on herself with thin Sharpie marker and told everyone they were tattoos. I heard that she lied to her dad, who lived in California with his new family, about wanting to kill herself, and about an eating disorder or cutting or whatever else she could dream up to move in with him, but all that did was get her hooked on an array of antidepressants and land her in a shrink’s office once a week. She lied the same way to her friends. She had the entire third-period study hall convinced she was going to die of leukemia in freshman year. Some of them even bought her cards—even people who she’d lied and gossiped about.