Brett McCarthy

by Maria Padian

  That’s when I heard it: a toilet flushing. Like marionette puppets suspended from a single string, we all turned our heads toward the sound. Which would turn out to be a metaphor for my soon-to-be-redefined life.

  Metaphor: an object or thing used in place of another to suggest a likeness between them.

  Merrill stood in the doorway of the sea-glass guest bathroom, orange powdered cheese ringing his mouth. Kit stood alongside him, shaking her head.

  “I tried to warn you,” she said. “He’s been in the bathroom most of the time. He snuck in.” Merrill, quiet for once in his life. Sensing, with his sixth sense for trouble, that we were up to no good. Now he stood there, eyes wide, gazing from the broken lamp to our guilty faces. He grinned.

  “I’m telling,” Merrill said.

  de•ba•cle

  The scene at the Pelletiers’ ended badly.

  “Merrill!” Diane yelled. He bolted from the room, Diane in pursuit. “If you say one word to Mommy, I will make you so sorry!”

  Jeanne Anne, meanwhile, hadn’t moved from the bed. She’d carefully placed the cell phone on the night table, and now she bent over to retrieve a shard of pottery lamp from the floor. She seemed remarkably calm for a person left alone with two angry Biffolators.

  “You jerk,” I breathed, taking a step toward her. Kit moved between us.

  “Give it a rest, Brett,” Jeanne Anne snapped. “You don’t scare me.”

  “That’s because you’re stupid!” I shouted. “If you had half the sense of a prune pit, you’d be pretty scared right now!” Kit put one hand on my shoulder and squeezed.

  “Chill,” she muttered in my ear. Jeanne Anne laughed.

  “Ooh! Ouch! That hurts…a prune pit! Now I’m really gonna cry.” She stood up, tossed the pottery shard on the bed, and glared at us. “For someone who’s supposed to be good with words, that’s pretty weak, McCarthy.”

  “Yeah? Well, I’ve got some more for you,” I began. Kit put her hands up.

  “Chill! Both of you!” she yelled.

  “Why is she even here?” I demanded, looking at Kit. “Why is this…person…breathing in the same room as us?”

  “Hello? Why the hell are you here?” Jeanne Anne retorted. “I’ll tell you why. It’s because you’re too stupid to realize you aren’t wanted anymore. I was invited; you refuse to leave.”

  This caught me up short. Who didn’t want me anymore? Was she talking about Diane?

  “Invited?” I exclaimed. “I’d just as soon invite a zit. Come to think of it, that’s what you are. A zit. Unwanted, ugly, and hard to get rid of.”

  That got her. Jeanne Anne took a step toward me.

  “Okay, enough. Enough!” Kit shouted. “Prune pit…zit…whatever…you need to leave. Now.” She stared pointedly at Jeanne Anne, who, showing some sense for once in her life, quickly left the house. But not before shrieking that Kit and I were both losers.

  It was a debacle.

  Debacle: a violent disruption; a complete failure; a great disaster.

  Following disasters I usually retreat to the same place: Nonna’s house.

  My maverick, almost-live-in Nonna is my dad’s mom. My grandfather died when dad was little. Nonna never remarried, although she does have a “special friend,” Mr. Beady, the most annoying old man on the planet.

  “Maverick” is Nonna’s word. When I was little, I imagined it meant she was a professional recycler. That’s because Nonna collects used junk, cleans it up, fixes what’s broken, and sells it all at her annual Super-Sized Garage Sale. Only recently did “maverick” appear on one of my vocabulary lists.

  Maverick: an unbranded range animal; esp. a motherless calf.

  Luckily, there was a second definition.

  Maverick: an independent individual who refuses to conform with his group.

  I like that, actually. I like to think of my Nonna as a rebel, especially since we McCarthys are pretty ordinary: a mom who quilts (a.k.a. a “fiber artist”), a college-professor dad, and a word-obsessed jock living in a midcoast Maine town. Nonna keeps us from being too boring.

  From Halloween to Memorial Day she lives in a little rented house on the lot behind ours. Actually, it’s minuscule. It looks like a playhouse, with small shutters and doors, and its roof slopes into funny angles, which is why we call it the Gnome Home. But it’s perfect for Nonna, especially because it includes a detached two-car garage that she uses as a workshop and storage area for her yard sale.

  The other five months, a.k.a. from the beginning of Black Fly Season to the end of the Tourist Season, Nonna spends at her ten-acre personal paradise, Spruce Island.

  For non-Mainers the idea of a personal island probably seems outrageous, unless you’re Bill Gates or something. And “paradise” is a relative term. One man’s bliss is another man’s Alcatraz. That’s what Nonna says, usually after escorting un-appreciative visitors from the island. One rainy weekend, as old friends from Boston were unloading their wheeled suitcases and paper shopping bags onto the dock, one commented that he felt like he’d just made it through an episode of Survivor.

  For us McCarthys, on the other hand, a Spruce Island weekend hauling water cranked from a hand pump, sleeping on bunks in rough wooden cabins, and peeing in an outhouse, is the very definition of paradise.

  October 16th usually found the Gnome Home vacant, its windows with their curtains drawn, like sleeping eyes. Nonna would have been on the island wrapping things up for the season. Harvesting the last vegetables from her garden. Picking buckets of rose hips and boiling them into jam. Shuttering the cottages and wedging steel wool under the doors to discourage…although she could never completely prevent…mice. Once she’d packed up tight for the winter, Dad and I and (unfortunately) Mr. Beady, who has a pickup truck, would ferry her back to the mainland and Mescataqua.

  But this year she’d returned early. She said she was tired and had an itchy brown-tail moth rash. As I walked from Diane’s house the afternoon of October 16th, I was more than a little glad to know she had returned to the Gnome Home.

  Because in the world of Brett McCarthy Screwups, this was big. It was worse than chewing gum in study hall, or a bad grade, or a trip to the principal’s office.

  It was death. Social death. From the lunchroom to the hallways to the playing fields of Mescataqua Junior High School—anywhere that Bob Levesque and his legion of cool friends existed—I was dead meat.

  I would have to break the news to my parents that we had to move, or I had to transfer to private school.

  As I approached the edge of the woods near Nonna’s yard, I could hear little kids’ voices and clapping, as if a birthday party were in full swing. I heard Nonna’s voice above the others: “Okay, everyone, here it goes!”

  There was a soft, percussive sound, a pop like old-fashioned musket fire. Then something moved in the trees above my head, whipping through the leaves. I heard it hit, splat, then rain down in bits. Gray, mushy, bad-smelling bits that landed around and on me. Perfect.

  As I stepped out of the woods, I heard cheers. Across the clearing, in Nonna’s backyard, a group of kids were arranged in chairs, like a viewing audience. Nonna was standing about twenty paces away from them, and with her, unmistakably, was Michael. They were holding a long white tube…PVC pipe…in a green plastic garbage can. They saw me step out of the woods.

  “Brett!” Nonna called excitedly. “Come see our Potato Bazooka!”

  ba•zoo•ka

  Although one can find Potato Bazookas, also known as Hair Spray Spud Guns, on the Internet, complete with directions on how to build and operate them, bazookas are particularly prevalent in The County, a.k.a. Aroostook County, in northern Maine, where the world’s best potatoes grow. Some might argue that Idaho potatoes are superior, but Mainers understand that no self-respecting potato would ever come from an “I” state.

  Bazooka: a light, portable weapon consisting of a smoothbore firing tube that launches armor-piercing rockets. And potatoes. And just about anyth
ing else that fits.

  Not only does The County produce awesome potatoes, it produces them in quantity. Tons. In such great numbers that people can’t eat them…or sell them…fast enough. So for fun they make bazookas and blast them.

  Nonna first learned of this from a County friend who would entertain her with stories of family potato-blasting contests. One especially memorable competition began after dinner on Christmas Day and ended only after some enterprising and not-very-sentimental brothers had filled a bazooka with every ornament from the tree and shot them in a tinselly barrage across the snow-covered front yard.

  People from The County, Nonna was convinced, knew how to have some big fun.

  So Nonna had long yearned to build a bazooka of her own. Now, seeing Michael with her in the yard, it all made sense. This was what he had been talking about after study hall.

  As I drew closer, I recognized the assembled group. A few hundred yards down the road a woman named Kathy Livingston ran a home day care…Miss Kathy’s…for preschool-aged children. Visits to “see Mrs. McCarthy” were a regular part of the “curriculum.” Basically, Kathy Livingston hired young women (Dad called them all the Kathies) to watch other people’s kids, and when they got sick of TV, they brought the whole crew over to Nonna’s, where there was always something interesting going on.

  As I crossed the lawn, I saw about half a dozen little kids sitting in plastic molded chairs. Each held a potato.

  “Who wants to show Brett how we make potatoes fly?” Nonna asked them. Little hands shot up excitedly. Nonna pointed to a tiny blond girl. She jumped off her chair and skipped confidently to the bazooka.

  “Now,” the girl said, as if I were the student and she were the teacher, “first you drop in the potato.” She reached up on tiptoe and deposited her potato in the pipe.

  “Then you unscrew the bottom.” Michael stepped forward and removed a cap from the bottom of the PVC pipe.

  “Then you spray the hair spray into the bottom while you count to four,” she continued, looking at Michael expectantly. He grabbed a can and began spraying. “One! Two! Three! Four!” Miss Kathy’s kids all shouted. Michael quickly rescrewed the base cap.

  “Fire!” the little girl squealed in delight.

  Michael pressed a small ignition key, creating, I guessed, a tiny spark inside the pipe, which ignited the hair spray. There was a pop, and we all watched the potato shoot from the pipe and make a graceful arc overhead, landing in a dramatic explosion of brown and white. Baked, I thought. Of course, it was just my luck to have gotten sprayed with a rotten one.

  The kids and the Kathies cheered. I managed a halfhearted clap. On any other day this would have been totally awesome, but I was still recovering from the debacle at Diane’s.

  Just then a horn sounded from the driveway.

  “Okay, everybody, time to go!” Nonna announced, waving her arms in a flocking motion, as if the children were geese. After whines for please-just-one-more, and repeated, enthusiastic thank-yous from the Kathies, the group headed toward the driveway and the waiting van. Only Michael and I remained, the bazooka between us.

  “You know,” he said thoughtfully, “I don’t get the impression that you fully appreciate the power and potential of the Potato Bazooka.”

  I sighed and flopped into one of the empty chairs.

  “No, I do. Really, it’s cool. I’m just a little distracted is all.”

  Michael gave me one of his “Yeah, right” looks before turning away and rummaging through a large cardboard box under the picnic table.

  “I know just the thing to convince you,” he said. Reaching deep into the box, he pulled something out.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, circus-ringmaster-style, “for your entertainment this afternoon we are thrilled to present the one, the only…” Michael spun around and with a flourish held up a plastic doll about a foot high, wearing a colorful outfit.

  “Bazooka Barbie!” Michael cried.

  “Oh my god,” I said. “You’re so weird.” Doing voice imitations, especially from movies, is one of Michael’s many Gifted and Talented tricks. He practically memorizes films and can quote whole scenes.

  “We’ve seen her shop ’til she drops! Drive outrageous plastic sports cars! And wear more pink sequins than the surgeon general generally recommends for her continued health and safety! But today, ladies and gentlemen, Barbie will reach…literally…new heights of daring and fame as she explodes from this bazooka and flies out of sight! Madam!”

  Michael held the doll out to me. A tousled wreck of bleachy blond hair framed her head like a halo. She wore little pink-and-orange shorts, gray with dirt, and a matching T-shirt.

  “Madam,” Michael continued dramatically, “would you do the honors?”

  Oh, whatever, I thought. Despite the day’s debacle I was still mildly curious to see a Barbie burst over the backyard. I took her from Michael and positioned her arms up and over her head so that she would soar, Superman-style, into the trees.

  Michael stood on one side of the bazooka; I stood on the other. He pulled the PVC pipe from the garbage can and unscrewed the base.

  “You may load the Barbie as I inject the fuel,” he said, holding the pipe level with the ground. I slid Barbie down the front end. Her smiling face and outstretched arms disappeared. Michael grabbed a can of Aqua Net off the picnic table and began spraying into the base, counting to himself, “One one-thousand, two one-thousand.” At four he rescrewed the base cap and pointed the pipe skyward.

  “To infinity, and beyond!” Michael shouted, Buzz Lightyear–style, and depressed the ignition button.

  Barbie blasted from the bazooka in a flash of pink and orange. Her trajectory was high but short. She landed on the lawn with a bounce, somersaulting twice before coming to a stop a few feet from the woods’ edge.

  “Hmmm,” Michael said, thoughtfully. “I wonder why the potatoes went so much farther than the Barbie?” Even fooling around, Michael thinks and asks questions like a scientist.

  We ran over to inspect her. Barbie had bent in the middle to form a perfect L. Her arms still extended over her head, but she had landed with her face planted in the grass. Her minuscule little butt, wrapped in its hot-pink, slightly singed shorts, pointed skyward.

  “Barbie, that’s not very ladylike,” said Michael.

  I couldn’t help it—I howled. It felt good to laugh, even at poor Barbie’s expense.

  “I see now that you do not underestimate the power of the Potato Bazooka,” Michael said in his Darth Vader voice.

  “Let’s do it again,” I suggested, “this time riding a potato.” We rescued Barbie from her undignified position and turned back to the house. Standing next to the bazooka, arms folded across her chest, stood my mother.

  “Brett,” she called across the lawn, “you need to come home. Now.” Michael gave me a puzzled look.

  “That doesn’t sound too good,” he said. I handed him Bazooka Barbie. She had green grass stains on her forehead.

  “It’s not,” I said.

  fore•bod•ing

  Mom goose-stepped across the lawn and straight into the kitchen. I had just seen a movie in social studies about the rise to power of Adolf Hitler, and it included footage of goose-stepping soldiers saluting the Nazi flag, so I knew the march. If that wasn’t foreboding enough, she didn’t offer me a snack or ask her usual cheery how-was-school-today questions.

  Foreboding: predicting a coming ill or misfortune. In other words, the future doesn’t look bright.

  “So,” she began. “I just got a call from Marie Pelletier.”

  Merrill! I thought. That little brat.

  “What do you think she told me, Brett?”

  Mom had decided to dispense with the SS treatment and do her Spanish Inquisition thing. Instead of just blasting me with what-were-you-thinking-of’s, she would pull it out of me with tortuous questions. I decided to just get it over with.

  “Mom, it was an accident. You know I wouldn’t intentio
nally smash her lamp.”

  Mom looked puzzled.

  “Lamp? I don’t know anything about a lamp.”

  Whoops. Wrong answer. Maybe Merrill hadn’t snitched. Diane must have pulled off some minor miracle…maybe duct-taping his mouth? At any rate, whatever Mrs. Pelletier had called about had nothing to do with broken pottery.

  The sick feeling, which had faded during the Barbie blasting, swept over me again. Foreboding.

  “What did Mrs. Pelletier say?” I asked.

  “Tell me about the lamp,” Mom shot back.

  “Well,” I began, trying to think fast. Don’t lie, said a little voice in my head. You know you will get caught, and then you’ll be in worse trouble. So I tried a low-key approach that told the truth, the half truth, and nothing but the truth.

  “We were in the guest room and I tripped over the edge of the bedspread. I bumped into the night table, a lamp tipped, and it broke. It was a total accident, Mom.”

  She shook her head, sighed, and pulled up a stool.

  “And I suppose this happened while you were telephoning the Levesques?” she asked quietly.

  Bingo. The moms knew. This was bad.

  I pulled up a stool and waited. Mom decided to drop the Inquisition and get to it.

  “Marie got a call this afternoon from Meredith Levesque,” she said. “Meredith told her that some girls had made a prank call from the Pelletiers’ number. Your name was specifically mentioned. She said the joke had something to do with a girl stranded at the movie theater? A maid who doesn’t speak English? At any rate, Meredith ended up leaving her house and heading to the theater to find this kid. Luckily, her son telephoned her before she got there. One girl apparently had the good sense to call the Levesques and let them know it was a prank!”

  “Oh my god!” I burst out. “The whole thing was that girl’s idea!”

  “Well, let me tell you,” Mom burst back, “it was a stupid idea. To her credit, Meredith isn’t particularly upset. She Googled the number to get the name on the phone account and called Marie just to let her know that some kids were using her phone inappropriately. But are you aware”—Mom looked meaningfully at me—“that Marie uses their home phone for her decorating business? And are you aware that Meredith and Drew Levesque are brand-new clients of Marie’s? Let me tell you, Marie is ripped. This was very embarrassing for her.”