“Like who?”
“How about guys who go to Star Trek conventions?”
“I went to a Star Trek convention once!”
“And you’re online a lot,” I reason. “So are those people in the soap-opera chat rooms and the country-music fan pages. I’m not trying to insult you. I’m just saying that to have a successful Web site, you have to appeal to the kind of person who’s on the Web. Think about what’s going to attract the interest of old ladies who live alone with nineteen cats.”
“You’re delusional,” he says accusingly, but I know I’m on to something.
I start checking domain names. Cat is taken, along with catlover, mycat, catperson, lovemycat, and ilovemycat. Iluvmycat.com isn’t available either, but I start to fiddle around with the ending and pretty soon I’ve registered my new site: www.iluvmycat.usa.
If it’s traffic Mr. Mullinicks wants, this should be rush hour in Manhattan. Not only are there zillions of cat owners out there, but judging by the number of cat sites, most of them like nothing better than talking about their pets.
Alex is unimpressed. “This is stupid, Vince. At least I like Ferraris. You can’t stand cats.”
“For one semester,” I assure him, “I can fake it.” Just to get his goat, I add, “And think how many girls out there must be cat lovers.”
He’s miffed that my idea is better than his. He looks at my head. “Hey, Vince, you know you’ve got dandruff?”
“Oops, sorry. I hope I don’t get flakes all over the black leather upholstery in your Ferraris.”
“No, seriously,” he insists, brushing at my hair. “Get some Head and Shoulders, will you?”
Normally, I wouldn’t give it a second thought. But for the last couple of days my head has been feeling kind of itchy. So when class is over, I find an out-of-the-way bathroom.
The light is terrible and the mirror is smeared with the kind of generic grime that only collects in public restrooms. I find a clear spot and sift through my ’do, separating the thick hair so I can see down to my scalp. He’s right! Flakes!
And then a tiny piece of dandruff moves.
Nurse Jacinin switches off the light on the magnifying scope and swivels it back to the examining chair. “Head lice.”
I’m blown away. “But I shower twice a day!”
She shrugs. “That doesn’t do anything.”
“It’s impossible!” I persist. “My mother is a clean freak! I don’t have any younger brothers or sisters! I never put on strange hats!”
I make her prove it to me. Big mistake. She finds an infested hair, yanks it out, and holds it under the scope. The sight turns my legs to jelly. My head is inhabited by a family of miniature white tarantulas. I am no longer aware of any itch. Now I feel pounding dinosaur tracks complete with clawed feet digging into my head.
“Oh, you can’t feel lice,” she says airily. “They’re far too tiny. The discomfort you’re experiencing is an allergic reaction on your scalp to the insects’ feces.”
Well, that makes me feel so much better. Not only has my cranium been colonized by tiny bugs, but they’re also using me as an outdoor toilet.
Schools handle head lice the way people in the middle ages used to treat the Black Death. I’m banished for a minimum of twenty-four hours. During that time, I have to shampoo with this special lice-killing gunk. Even then I’m still banned until the nurse has inspected my head. And—get this—she has to do it outside the building before I’m allowed back in. Why don’t they just spray-paint the word UNCLEAN across my chest?
“Touch no one as you exit the school,” she orders, escorting me out of the examining room. “That goes for furniture as well. Lice and their larvae can live up to fifty-five hours on clothing and upholstery.” The last part she belts out so that anyone within three football fields knows I’ve got cooties.
I’m still protesting. “But, Nurse Jacinin, I just don’t understand how it’s possible that I got the lice in the first—”
I fall silent. There, dead center in the row of sickos waiting to get in to see the nurse, sits Kendra Bightly. Her shoulder-length hair is tucked up inside a Yankees cap.
Well, that explains a lot. If butterflies can migrate all the way from Brazil, then I guess it’s not too hard to accept that a truly motivated louse could walk down a strand of Kendra’s hair and hop onto a strand of mine during a brief but memorable make-out session at a frat party.
Dad must have said it a million times: “Lousy FBI agents!” I never realized he was talking about their families’ personal hygiene.
She ignores me, so I pretend I don’t see her as I exit the nurse’s office. But later, as I’m pulling out of the school parking lot—keeping my infested hair a few inches off the headrest; it’s all I need to have to fumigate the Mazda on top of everything else—who do I see trudging to the local bus stop but Kendra.
My first thoughts are sympathetic. She’s probably on her way to the pharmacy to pick up the same anti-lice treatment I have to get. With no car, it’s going to take her three different buses to get to CVS.
A flush of anger. She’s the one who gave me lice in the first place! And it’s not like we have a long-term relationship. We made out—just once—in the middle of a drunken frat party. Afterward she wouldn’t even acknowledge that I was alive. For all I know, this Miss Innocent FBI Agent’s Daughter stuff is just an act. Maybe she hops from guy to guy, spreading cooties like some head-lice Typhoid Mary.
I pull over in front of the bus stop and roll down the window. “Hi.”
She looks as miserable as I feel. “Hi.”
I take a deep breath. “I think we’re going to the same place. Hop in.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says stubbornly.
In the vending-machine business, I believe the appropriate line here would be: You can either ride in the car or at the end of a rope behind it. Take your pick.
Fortunately, I’m a civilian. “The drugstore,” I explain patiently. “You know—to buy the special shampoo.”
Avoiding my eyes, she gets in the car. The silence as we drive along is pretty uncomfortable. After all, what is there to say? I’m infested; how about you?
And finally, just as I’m parking outside CVS, she blurts, “I work in a day-care center.”
“Oh—uh—that’s nice—”
“That’s where the lice are from,” she explains. “There’s an outbreak in the toddler room. I got it from the kids. And you got it when we…” Her voice trails off.
“Don’t worry about it,” I say gallantly. “It’s not like it’s incurable or anything like that.”
Well, maybe it’s curable, but the cure sure doesn’t come cheap. We need permethrin lice-eradicating hair treatment, a gel to loosen the eggs from the follicles, a fine-tooth LiceMeister nit comb, special shampoo made from tea tree oil, and even a spray insecticide for our clothes and pillows. The permethrin alone costs thirty bucks.
Kendra rummages around her pocketbook. “Oh, no.”
I check my wallet. Forty-three dollars—not enough for all this stuff, and definitely not enough to help her out. I’ve got a credit card for emergencies, but it’s from my dad, and monetary instruments from him are not always one-hundred-percent legitimate. The name of the issuing bank doesn’t exactly inspire confidence: Banco Commerciale de Tijuana. I don’t know how much they’d appreciate their hard-earned pesos going to pay for my delousing.
“Maybe we can split it,” she suggests shyly. “You know, buy just one set. I think we’ve got enough money for that.”
“But—” A dozen logistical problems come to mind.
“My parents both work,” she explains. “We’ll be finished by the time they get home.”
It comes to $61.40; we spring for an extra LiceMeister so we can each have one. We’re supposed to comb for nits for two weeks.
Kendra lives in a subdivision of small neat split-level homes at the far end of the attendance district for Jefferson. It’s a n
ice neighborhood, but it’s pretty obvious that FBI agents make a lot less money than the people they investigate. Le Château Luca has eight thousand square feet and a four-car garage, even though, according to DMV records, I am the only family member who actually owns a car.
It feels pretty weird to be in Agent Bite-Me’s house. So this is where the guy hangs out when he’s not at work, listening to my family pass gas.
Upstairs, Kendra changes into an old jogging suit and tosses me a faded sweatshirt. “This is my dad’s. See if it fits.”
I pull it over my head and examine myself in the mirror. Across my chest it says FBI. Me, Vince Luca. This is like Captain Ahab in a SAVE THE WHALES T-shirt.
The process begins. We go down to the laundry room and take turns rubbing permethrin into each other’s hair. I figure this has to make me some kind of man of the world. I mean, I still have no love life, but I’ll bet not even Casanova ever spent an afternoon massaging insecticide into a woman’s scalp.
I won’t try to build the suspense. The stuff is disgusting. It smells like embalming fluid, and it burns. I’m sure the poor lice suffer as they go, but not half as much as the owner of the head they’re infesting.
That stays in for thirty minutes—already a longer stretch than I’ve ever spent with Kendra. It’s kind of awkward. We have nothing in common except head lice. So we pass the time by spraying our clothes with the anti-egg stuff. Then we go upstairs and do her pillow, blanket, and sheets.
We’re just about to head back to the basement to rinse the stuff out in the laundry sink when the front door opens and a voice calls, “Anybody home?”
Kendra’s surprised. “Uh-oh, my dad. I didn’t want him to know about this.”
She doesn’t want him to know about this? That goes quadruple for me! I mean, doesn’t every FBI agent dream of the day that he gets home early and walks in on his daughter washing her hair in the company of a mobster’s son?
“I’ve got to get out of here!”
“Don’t I wish,” Kendra agrees.
“No, really!” I look around. The window is the only way out, but the backyard is sloped, so there’s a ten-foot drop to the ground.
I’m weighing the idea of two broken ankles when I spot it. The bedroom next door—the master—is located above a screened-in porch. I can get out onto the porch roof and climb down from there. I run into her parents’ room.
Kendra follows me. “I was kidding. It’s not the end of the world.”
But I’m already climbing up on the night table to get to the window. My foot knocks over a tube of Preparation H, and I have an insane desire to laugh. It seems only fair that I know something embarrassing about Agent Bite-Me after he’s been spying on my family all this time.
Footsteps on the stairs set my mind back to business. I jump the four-foot drop to the flat roof.
Kendra sticks her head out the window. “But we’re not finished yet!”
“Save my half of the stuff,” I call up to her. I roll to the edge, grab hold of the drainpipe, and heave myself over the side. The gutter comes away from the wall, and I crash painfully to the ground. And here I thought this kind of thing only happens in Adam Sandler movies.
The drainpipe now hangs away from the porch like a grotesquely reaching metal sculpture.
I consider trying to fix it, but then I hear Kendra’s voice: “You’re home early, Daddy.”
I just run. With any luck, the guy isn’t a very good FBI agent and won’t lift my sneaker prints off his tube of Preparation H.
My racing heartbeat is back to normal by the time I turn into the driveway at home. I park and sneak in the side door. I have no desire to explain what’s in my hair. Wouldn’t you know it? Dad notices me just as I make for the stairs. But it isn’t my hair that catches his eye.
“God, Vince, where’d you get that shirt?”
Heart sinking, I look down, already knowing what I’m going to find. I’m still wearing Agent Bite-Me’s sweatshirt. My chest is a billboard for the FBI.
“That’s priceless!” howls my father, helpless with laughter. “Can you get a couple for me and Tommy? Better yet, a bunch. Some of your uncles would drop dead over them!”
I mumble something about ordering an assortment from a novelty shop in the city and try to break away from him. But he gets a clean look at me, and probably a whiff, too.
“Jeez, Vince, when I was your age, I put grease in my hair, and that was bad enough. But you smell like a mortuary.”
I don’t argue the point. That’s another thing there’s a lot of in the vending-machine business: funerals.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ALL TOLD, I THINK the permethrin spends about seventy minutes in my hair, more than double the recommended maximum. The good news is that no louse could survive it. The bad news is not much of my scalp does either. By morning, I’m sore and flaking. My hair is still attached, thank God. But what I can see of the skin underneath is bright red. Even my split ends have split ends.
I’m not welcome at school; the twenty-four-hour ban is still in place. But rather than try to explain to Mom that her son—his head in particular—is “totally out of commission,” I take my brown-bag lunch and drive away.
I cruise around for a while, idly calculating how many movies it’ll take to get me to three-thirty. I’m flush again—allowance from Dad. Just in the nick of time, too, since I blew all my cash on head-lice remedies. That’s when it hits me: Kendra still owes me my half of the stuff we got at the drugstore. I doubt that any lice could have made it through the nuclear winter on my head, but the nurse said school rules require me to go through the full procedure.
I kill time until after nine and then head over to Kendra’s through the thinning Long Island traffic. Just to be on the safe side, I park three blocks away from her house. I don’t want Agent Bite-Me running my plates through the FBI computer. A Luca is visiting our daughter! Oh, joy! I don’t think so.
Kendra’s home alone except for the guys from Secure-O-Matic, who are installing a new burglar alarm.
“Daddy thought someone tried to break in off the porch roof yesterday,” she explains with a nervous smile.
“There are a lot of wackos out there,” I agree, poker-faced. “Good thing the FBI is on the job.” I hand her a brown paper bag. “Your dad’s shirt.”
The alarm guys are snickering at us as we head for the basement. But trust me, it’s all business. We rub egg-loosening gel on our heads, rinse it out in the laundry sink, and then comb each other with LiceMeisters. The teeth on those things are so fine that you need a hydraulic crane to pull them through your hair and a gag to muffle your screams. If you ever used a LiceMeister to make a kazoo, I’ll bet only dogs could hear it.
She’s the first one to bring up yesterday. “You know, you didn’t have to play Spider-Man out the window. My folks realize I’m not six years old anymore.”
I try to make a joke out of it. “Hey, federal agents are armed.”
She laughs. “I know he carries a gun, but I’ve never even seen it. He has a strict rule about keeping his work separate from his home life. I guess he rubs elbows with some pretty bad people.”
Yeah, like my nearest and dearest.
I rush to change the subject. The Bightlys have a family room set up in the basement. “Nice stereo,” I say, scanning shelves full of audio equipment. “Two stereos.” Then I realize that the second speaker I’m staring at is hooked up to a microphone. “Is that a—karaoke machine?”
She’s tight-lipped. “Yeah. So?”
The thought of Agent Bite-Me singing karaoke is even more mind-blowing than his hemorrhoids. I just can’t wipe the huge grin off my face. “No, it’s fine. It’s just kind of hard to picture an FBI agent standing in his basement belting out ‘You Are the Wind Beneath My Wings.’”
She won’t even meet my gaze, and I can barely hear her mumble, “It’s not his; it’s mine.”
Well, that’s even weirder. This serious, straitlaced reporter from the school pape
r is a closet performer.
I’m genuinely interested. “Sing something,” I encourage her.
“No.”
“Come on. I’ll bet you’re great.”
“You’re making fun of me.”
“No,” I say honestly. “I’m looking for a way to kill time until I can go home without having to tell my parents why I was kicked out of school today. Come on, I’ll do it with you.”
We compromise. I promise not to laugh, and she plays me a tape she made of her song stylings. I can’t help noticing that she has racks of these cassettes, all marked with the semi-clever, semi-idiotic name K-Bytes.
She’s good. She’s great, actually. Her speaking voice is high and cutesy, but singing, she comes across deep and throaty—almost sexy. It’s a very Alex way of thinking, but I’m kind of impressed that I made out with a girl who can sound like that.
I clap when the song ends, but she hits STOP and refuses to play me another one.
“Come on,” I laugh. “You’re awesome. I want to hear more.”
She bops me on the head with the cassette case, and it actually hurts, what with my incinerated scalp and all. But I don’t complain because I feel like something is different now. There’s a subtle change in the atmosphere between us that’s both scary and irresistible all at once.
I grab her around the shoulders and snatch the plastic box from her hand. “Now you’re going to eat this,” I growl.
“Make me,” she snarls back.
But we both know we’re not fighting, and whatever’s going on has nothing to do with a cassette case.
By the time we start kissing, we’re both really into it, and our session at the frat party seems like a half-speed workout with no tackling. We sink to the couch, breathing as if we’ve just run a mile.
It’s almost like I’m two people. One of them is Marco Polo, determined to advance, explore, experience. The other is a real pain in the butt who can’t stop thinking, This is Agent Bite-Me’s daughter; this is Agent Bite-Me’s house; this is Agent Bite-Me’s couch.
I don’t know who her two people are, but one of them makes a small sound in the back of her throat. And it’s not the perky speaking voice, either. It’s the singing voice.
Son of the Mob Page 5