I kissed him and cuddled up against him, and the baseball game was boring, and he was feeling like a man, and I was feeling lonely, so we got out of our clothes and under the covers.
96.
He was snoring when I left. I caught the bus at the corner and sat right behind the driver. It took two transfers and an hour to get home.
My parents were sleeping on the couch when I got in, curled up against each other, with Ma’s head on Dad’s chest and his fingers tangled in her hair. Photo albums lay open out on the table next to a bottle of Tums. Dad’s stomach probably acted up after the Yankees scored four runs in the fifth.
A responsible kid would have woken them up and sent them to bed. Ma’s back was going to kill her in the morning, and Dad’s heartburn would bug him all day. But they looked so cute in an old people way, I couldn’t do it.
I brought down the comforter from their bed and covered them with it.
97.
0I overslept. Bad move when you’re scheduled for a double shift.
Ma was just making coffee when I ran into the kitchen. Dad was snoring like a dying rhino on the couch. When I realized that Dad’s snores sounded just like TJ’s snores, I tripped over the laundry piled up by the basement door.
“Watch yourself,” Ma said. “You almost broke your neck. What’s the hurry?”
I poured a glass of orange juice and gulped it. “Late for work. Isn’t he ever going to fix the dryer?”
“Don’t know why you care,” Ma said. “Don’t see you volunteering to go to the laundromat.”
“It’s just a question. I get off at nine tonight.”
“Gimme a kiss, I didn’t mean to bitch at you.”
I let her hug me and plant a morning breath kiss on my cheek.
“You have a good time last night?”
“It was okay. We got hoagies. Hung out.”
“Why can’t you hang out here? You two could play cards with us or something.”
“Whatever. I’ll ask him. If Nat calls, tell her I’m at work.”
“Wait, you need some toast and butter.”
“I don’t have time for toast.”
“Here.” She handed me an apple from the bowl by the sink. “You need to eat better.”
I took the apple. “Gotta go.”
“Don’t put up with any crap,” she called after me.
98.
Work was insanely busy from the second we opened. The lunch shift flew by so fast I didn’t have time to enjoy a ten-dollar tip given to me by a mom whose kids chewed with their mouths closed and said thank you. I wasn’t sure they were human.
Lunch melted into the early dinner crowd without a break. It was so crazy I didn’t have a second to think about TJ and the way “our” place smelled or the fact that the toilet was in the corner behind a shower curtain. If my life could have been that busy 24/7, everything would have been way easier.
The early dinner crowd turned into the regular dinner crowd. My back hurt and my tail dragged. One of the cooks had a fight with a dishwasher. They beat each other up by the Dumpster, and the dishwasher lost two teeth. The manager should have fired both of them, but good cooks are hard to find, so he fired the dishwasher and told the cook to wash his hands and get back to work.
The regular dinner turned into late dinner. Overtired kids had temper tantrums in the aisles, the boys on the arcade games were getting vicious, and parents kept looking at their watches. My tips shrank and my tail felt like it was filled with lead. I wanted to go home, but not to my house/home because then I’d have to deal with my family, and I didn’t want to go to the slimy apartment/home because it was filled with TJ. I didn’t have a home, my little ratty head told me. All grown up and no place to go.
I took my dinner break with a slice of double cheese and a root beer. I thought about taking up smoking. If I smoked, that would have been the perfect time for a cigarette. But cheese tastes nasty with smoke. The boss yelled at me, and I went back to work.
A family sat down in my section just before eight o’clock. I almost told them the kitchen was closed. I should have, but I didn’t, because I felt bad for the kid. One look and you knew that he got the crap beat out of him a couple times a year, plus he got teased on the bus and in gym. It wasn’t just the retainer, or the thick glasses, or the clueless clothes. It was the “please don’t hurt me” look in his eyes. His dad was a taller, skinnier version of the son. I bet he went through the same torture when he was young, but he never figured out why the other kids picked on him.
When I see parents like that, I just want to smack them upside the head. How hard is it to buy your kid a shirt that doesn’t scream, “I am a huge dorko! Please spit in my hair!”?
So I brought them menus and explained that no, we didn’t have low-fat pizza. They ordered. I served. They ate. I cleared. They paid and left. I cleaned and cheered (to myself) because they were my last table of the night.
They came back fifteen minutes after we locked the front door. My first thought was food poisoning, but my second thought was no, food poisoning cases always took a couple hours to kick in.
My manager went to the door and talked to the dad. Then he filled me in on the problem.
Dorko Boy had lost his retainer.
Do you have any idea what that means?
I had to find his retainer.
In the Dumpster.
99.
The bus driver wouldn’t let me on the bus because I reeked so bad. It was a long walk home. What if I had to walk back to our apartment from the restaurant at night? That would take hours, and I’d have to make it past the guys doing business at the corner of Hamilton and Pearce. Maybe I should ask if Ma could get me a job with the Transit Authority. Or if Dad could get me in as a dispatcher. Either way, I’d get free rides. It would be really cool if I could work downtown in City Hall or in one of the skyscrapers. I’d wear suits to work, and with my legs I could get away with miniskirts and heels, so every time I walked into a meeting all the executives would be like, “Whoa, who’s the new girl?” and I’d be so prepared for the meeting it would blow them all away, and I’d get full benefits and a paid vacation and a company car, and I’d never have to walk home alone in the dark.
100.
I didn’t pay attention to the announcements in Homeroom on Monday because I had to analyze another poem for English. This one was about the moon—dumb, but very short. Poems are short because nobody can keep up that level of stupidness for more than one page.
Nat wobbled into homeroom during announcements. She was determined to learn how to walk in those red high-heeled sandals. When the announcements were over, she burst into tears.
“Natalia,” said Ms. Jones-Atkinson. “What’s the matter?”
“Blisters?” I asked. “Those shoes look small.”
Nat shook her head, pointed at the speaker and sniffed.
I reached across and felt her forehead. No fever.
“It was something Mr. Banks said,” Lauren explained.
“T-t-tickets,” Nat said.
Lauren gave her a tissue and she blew her nose.
“Prom tickets?” asked Ms. J-A.
Nat nodded.
“Prom tickets are still available,” I said, trying to be helpful and all.
Nat put her head on her desk.
“What did I say?” I asked.
Nat handed me that scary pink prom notebook, open to the ticket sales page. Lauren and I looked at it together. We had sold a total of 31 tickets. If we didn’t make the minimum number, Banks was going to cancel, no discussion.
The minimum number was 100.
“Oh,” I said.
“You have to do something,” Lauren told me.
“That’s enough about the prom,” said Ms. J-A. “It’s time to get to heroin.”
101.
I didn’t do so good in my English presentation. Turned out the poet was not talking about the moon. She was talking about people or death. Or something.
102.
; Nat was so bummed about the whole ticket thing that I offered to meet with the custodians during Study Hall. I wound up buying them all Snickers bars, and they fished out the extension cords we needed, and the boss guy showed me the special covering they had for the gym floor so the high heels of us ladies wouldn’t ruin it.
Ashley Hannigan, prom organizing queen. That was me. Turned out I was a natural at bossing people around.
I took the shortcut behind the gym to avoid Gilroy’s office. It was always fun to watch somebody else being tortured by Mr. Boyd, so I peeked in the doors. The students were supposed to be running laps, but instead they were shuffling around in groups, like a chain gang getting exercise in a jail.
Boyd jogged out of his office and blew his whistle. “All right, people, let’s go! Two laps to warm up!”
This was the gym class with the so-called popular kids in it. I never understood that—how some kids got to be popular, and others didn’t. I think it was something they decided that week in seventh grade when I was sick with pneumonia. Persia Faulkner, who was as close to Carceras royalty as you could get, was at the front of the pack. Persia and her girls looked at Boyd like he was a homeless guy bumming for quarters.
Boyd blew his whistle so hard I thought his brains were going to shoot out his ears. “Running!” he yelled. “I said running! Miss Faulkner, can we have some leadership here? Set an example, please. Pick up the pace.”
Everyone looked to see what Persia did. She sighed like a diva forced to drink tap water, rolled her eyes, and moved her arms back and forth a little faster so it would look like she was making an effort to run.
“Thank you!” Boyd yelled.
I was stunned. No, thank you, Mr. Boyd! I swear I heard angels sing and trumpets play, though that could have been the concert band practicing down the hall. Of all the people in this sorry-ass school, it was a gym teacher who showed me what I had to do. And all those years I had been thinking that gym teachers were a total waste. Wow. Just goes to show you, doesn’t it?
103.
I followed Persia into the bathroom after gym and waited for her outside her stall. She made a nasty stink doing her business in there, but I was smart enough not to say anything about it. I stood behind her while she washed her hands.
“You want something?” she finally asked.
“I need your help,” I said.
“You got that right. Hand me a towel.”
I explained what I wanted while Persia dried her hands.
“So?” she said.
“So don’t you want to help out your classmates?”
“I excel at not giving a shit about y’all.” She gave me the wet paper towel. “What’s in it for me?”
“A good time. A senior prom. Night to remember, time of your life?”
She fished her lip liner out of her purse and leaned towards the mirror. “You’ll have to do better than that.”
“What do you want?”
She talked to the mirror while she outlined her lips. “Malcolm cancelled our limo when we heard the prom was off. He tried to get it back when we heard the prom was back on, but it was already taken by someone else. Nobody in the tri-state area has a limo available for Friday night. I refuse to show up to my senior prom in the back of Malcolm’s mother’s SUV.”
“You’re blowing off your prom because you don’t have a classy ride? What about your dress? It’ll go to waste.”
She capped the lip liner. “Nothing I own goes to waste. We’ll go clubbing instead.”
“Does it have to be a limousine?”
“Are you deaf? What did I just tell you?”
“I mean, everybody gets a limo. Hell, even me and TJ are gonna have a limo.”
“You still going with him?” She shook her head. “Girl, you a freak.”
“What if I could get you a classic car, a ride that nobody else has?”
“Is it clean?”
“Sick clean. Ask Malcolm. You two will look like you’re pulling up to the VMAs.”
She smiled at herself to check her perfect teeth. “For real you can do this?”
“I swear. If I don’t come through, you’ll have me killed, so I ain’t lying. You can make this happen, Persia. It’s up to you.”
She turned to look at me. “A’ight.”
“Really? You’ll help us?”
“You get me a cool car and the prom will rock. Now get lost before somebody sees me talking to you.”
104.
Nat was still in a funk when we got to Math. On top of all the prom stuff, I knew she was stressing about her grandmother. I wanted to tell her about my deal with Persia, but I didn’t because she’d go off the deep end if my plan tanked.
The Math sub had heard about the prom trouble. He decided to help us with our budget. Nat gave him the numbers we were working with, and he wrote them out on the board. Instead of asking for passes, most of our classmates hung around to see what all of this was costing us. The sub passed out calculators and everybody talked about what they were paying for, like Dalinda’s three-hundred-dollar dress and Hector’s seventy-dollar hat.
When Mr. Gilroy walked in the door, he was shocked. I don’t know what he had heard about this sub, but for sure he was not expecting to see all of us sitting in our chairs with calculators and paper and pencils, and the board covered with numbers.
“What are we working on?” Gilroy asked.
“Percentages and probability,” said the sub.
After Gilroy left, Dalinda asked the sub what “probability” was.
“It’s looking at your odds,” he said. “Figuring out the chances of success.”
“Success at what?” I asked.
“Pulling this thing off,” he said. “The prom.”
“So what are our chances?” Nat asked.
“We don’t have enough data to calculate probability.”
“That means you got nada,” said Hector.
When the bell rang, I asked the sub if he could sign me in for detention without me showing up that day, because of the prom stuff. He said no problem. Then he asked me if the school’s liability insurance would cover the prom.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You can never have too much insurance. Stuff happens.”
“Tell me about it. Stuff is going to happen to me if I don’t get out of here.”
“Have fun.”
105.
Nat made me go with her and Lauren and Aisha to a meeting with Principal Banks after school. The good news was that Banks had found a little extra money in his budget. He wanted it to go for prom favors, which are basically birthday party goodie bags for teenagers.
Just as he was about to tell us what he wanted us to buy, my new cell phone rang. I didn’t know it was my phone because nobody had called me yet. I didn’t even know my number.
Mr. Banks lectured me about cell phone rules and inappropriate distractions while I tried to figure out how to turn the damn thing off, which I could not do, so Aisha took it out of my hand and pushed a button I didn’t even see it was so small.
Nat and Banks agreed that the goodie bags could have bottles of bubbles and rave sticks and a picture frame. But the committee wanted each bag to have a garter with our school colors, and an etched shot glass, because that was “tradition.”
And, Lauren added, we wanted condoms.
Mr. Banks was cool about the shot glasses, not sure about the garters, and what you call closed-minded about condoms.
“No,” he said. “Absolutely, positively not. We will not and cannot and shall not allow this to happen. Never. No.”
“Mr. Banks, that’s a very negative attitude,” I said. “We’re talking about prom favors, right? If we pass out condoms, that would be a monster favor. We could get them in the school colors, that would be cool.”
Nat kicked me.
Lauren quoted statistics about teen pregnancy rates and asked if the school district tracked the number of babies born nine months after prom season.
That’s when my phone went off for the second time and Banks kicked me out.
It was cool to talk to TJ while I walked to my locker and got my stuff and went outside and sat on the steps. He had picked up some hours from Marty changing oil filters and his second Wal-Mart interview was the next morning. He did most of the talking, but I didn’t mind, because his voice was so happy, and he sounded tall and awesome, and he was working so hard for us. When he asked me what was up, I told him about the meeting he got me kicked out of, and how Nat was wearing her prom shoes that were really stilts, and she needed ski poles or a walker to walk with so she didn’t break her neck. He thought that was funny. He said he loved me and missed me.
106.
After school, I made Nat change into sneakers. We chased all over the city looking for deals on prom favors. You should have heard her flipping out on Banks about the garters and condoms.
No, you should not have heard it. You would have been as bored as I was.
I finally got sick of listening to her whine and dragged her into the free health clinic on Rush Street. The receptionist said she could only give us a dozen condoms, which sucked, but then one of the doctors heard us talking and he asked for our address. He graduated from Carceras, which blew me away, because I never figured somebody from our school could become a real doctor. I gave him my address at the apartment and he said he would see what he could do.
When we left, Nat said he was hitting on me. I punched her and said that was sick, because he had to be, like, thirty years old. Ew.
107.
When I finally got home, there was laundry piled everywhere in the kitchen. My so-called prom dress, the one Ma scammed at the mall, was hanging off the kitchen door. She must have been showing it off again. Billy was drawing in his Spider-Man coloring book at the kitchen table. Nat’s grandmother was sitting next to him sewing something.
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