by Adam Selzer
“Why?”
“You’re going to help me get my message out the same way that Aaron Riley guy did for the Christians,” said Stan.
Dustin handed me some pieces of paper—a collection of poems scribbled on the backs of discarded Ice Cave receipts and napkins. The first one was more of a fragment than a fully realized literary epic:
HERE’S TO MY SWEET SATAN
WHO’S THE LEADER OF THE CULT
THAT’S MADE FOR YOU AND ME?
WHO CAN HELP YOU GET A PERFECT SCORE ON SAT?
T-H-E
D-E-V
I-L THAT’S FOR ME!
“You,” said Stan, “are going to get one of these into the yearbook.”
“They’re never going to take something like this,” I said.
“They will if you sneak it in,” Stan said with a smile.
I read through a few of them. They were awful. All of them.
Back in the gifted pool days Dustin and James Cole had tried to depress the hell out of the gym teacher by slipping beatnik poetry about how miserable the life of a gym teacher was into his office. The poems had titles like “Locker Room Mausoleum Sutra.”
“Why don’t you just submit one of the ones you wrote to Coach What’s-his-name?” I asked. “Maybe that one about dodgeball. That was good.”
Dustin smiled, and recited the first of what I remember as being about a hundred stanzas of “Fortune Has Its Dodgeballs to Throw Out:”
It was October in the calisthenic Earth,
gray winds waltzing on raven wings,
crow’s-feet growing ever more crooked
around your eyes
as you thought of catching
a Sunday subway
to some
far dodgeball game
of the heart.
Stan snapped his fingers, as one does.
“Let me put that in,” I said. “That’s way better.”
“I’m more interested in promoting my newer material,” said Dustin. “I ain’t no oldies act.”
“But these suck.”
“Lots of artists go through a phase of churning out crappy religious stuff.”
I read a few more of the new Satan poems. The worst—or the dumbest, at least—was on the bottom of the pile, written on the back of a worksheet.
Sing a song of Cornersville Trace,
Amazing town, amazing place,
Town where we grow and learn
And work hard for the things we earn
Never fade from ’ere our hearts,
Relive all of the wondrous parts
Under our teacher’s watchful eyes
Live we long, our hearts we prize,
Ever sing of this happy place,
Sing a song of Cornersville Trace.
Clearly, the only reason for the poem to exist was that it was an acrostic—the first letter of each line spelled out SATAN RULES. In terms of literary merit, it really sucked ass.
I looked at Stan. “You and your fucking hidden messages.”
“It’s dumb enough to pass for an actual student-written poem,” said Stan. “I’ve never entered the hearts of the young through a yearbook before.”
“I suppose metal songs and Harry Potter books get old after a while, huh?” I asked.
“Some things will never get old, but it’s nice to try something new now and then.”
I didn’t think I could possibly get any of them into the yearbook, but I put the poems in my backpack, then sent Paige a text asking if it was too late for me to join the yearbook committee. I was spending most of the meetings sitting outside in the hall waiting for her, anyway. Signing up seemed like a logical move.
She eventually texted back that she’d try her best, and she escorted me into the yearbook room the next day after school.
Leslie, the president of the club, was one of those girls who acted like she was about thirty when she was twelve. She just had the air of someone who was at that phase of her life, not the one she was actually living through. Now, at seventeen, she seemed like a thirty-something CEO, and ran the yearbook accordingly. She looked sort of suspicious when Paige asked if I could join.
“You want to be in yearbook?” she asked me.
“Well, I can’t join the Spanish club,” I said. “And it’s too late to take up sports, but I feel like I need to join something to help leave my mark on the school before I graduate.”
She gave both of us a skeptical look. “You won’t be allowed to approve pictures of yourself if I let you on staff,” she said. “And we’re almost done with them, anyway. So don’t think you can turn the whole book into, like, a Leon fest.”
“I won’t,” I said. “But Paige said there was a lot that still needed to be done.”
She exhaled and flipped through a binder. “Look. We need someone to do layout on the computers. Everyone just wants to take pictures and interview people to get their favorite quotes and career goals and stuff. Can you do layout?”
“Probably,” I said.
“Fine,” she said. “Ask Mr. Perkins to show you the program.”
Paige clapped her hands and kissed me on the cheek.
We found Mr. Perkins, the media specialist, in his office doing paperwork. His face lit up when I asked him to show me the layout program for the yearbook.
“You’re going to do the layout?”
“Maybe,” I said.
“Oh, thank God,” he said. “I was afraid I would have to do it myself. You know it’s a lot of work, right?”
“That’s kind of what I’m afraid of,” I said. “I’ve got a job and all. And lot of detention time that I need to serve. But I said I could probably do it.”
“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “Any time you spend on the yearbook layout can count towards your detention time.”
I saw that I had an opportunity here, and I took it.
“Could it count double?” I asked.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Deal.”
So I started going into the library during lunch to work on the layout. I’d work for maybe twenty minutes, fill out a card saying I’d been there for two hours, and Mr. Perkins would sign it without looking, giving me four hours of detention credit. At this rate, between lunch and the times I came in after school, I could easily work off all of my unserved detention hours by the time the layout was done.
I was going to graduate after all.
All because I’d obeyed my unholy orders.
13. DEAD CELEBRITIES
By the time winter fully melted away into spring, Paige and I seemed to have found just about every Slushee flavor in town. Days would go by without us finding a flavor we hadn’t seen before. Still, there was no sign of white grape, and we began to believe that it was only a legend.
So we started hunting for Slushees less and less and spent more time going to movies and stuff, like normal couples. I had to spend more time around her friends, which was still tough for me when I couldn’t steer the conversation towards poop, but I could sit through a movie with them as well as I could sit through one with anyone else. I just pretended I was one of those people who never, ever talk during a movie.
One day after a yearbook meeting I talked Paige into swinging by the Ice Cave just to hang out. She hadn’t really spent any time in the back room yet, other than that first day, but I’d been to Casa Bravo a bunch of times when she was working, and after spending so many nights there and at various chain restaurants with her friends, I had started feeling like I was missing out on the action at the Cave. Part of why I spent so much time there, outside of working hours, was just that I didn’t want to miss out if something really crazy happened, and by now I’d probably missed a lot.
As we drove out there I put on CD number six of Moby-Dick, and Ishmael said, “In old Norse times, the thrones of the sea-loving Danish kings were fabricated, saith tradition, of the tusks of the narwhale. How could one look at Ahab, then, seated on that tripod of bones, without bethinking
him of the royalty it symbolized?”
I laughed and hit pause. “Easy,” I said. “By not being the kind of guy who knew what the hell Danish kings made their thrones out of.”
“Or not knowing a narwhal tusk when they saw one,” said Paige. “This book is weird.”
“Yeah.”
“I keep waiting for them to say, ‘Thar she blows, a hump like a snow hill,’ ” I said. “But maybe that’s one of those famous lines that no one ever actually says in the book. Like, ‘Elementary, my dear Watson.’ ”
“They never say that in Sherlock Holmes?”
“Nope.”
“Weird.”
That was one thing I guess I didn’t pick up from the comic book version—Moby-Dick has got to be the weirdest fucking book of all time. Ishmael was always quoting conversations that happened when he wasn’t even in the room and couldn’t possibly have overheard. I wondered if maybe he actually died of kidney failure a week into the voyage or something, and just never mentioned that he spent most of the trip haunting the main deck and the captain’s quarters.
He fucking would, too. It would be just like him to go on and on about whether or not whales were fish, which has nothing to do with anything, but not bother to mention the fact that he’d died, which seems like it would be slightly more important.
We rarely listened to more than a few minutes at a time, but all the rambling does get kind of oddly hypnotic after a while. It almost makes you feel like you’re off in the middle of the ocean, slowly going mad with boredom and thinking that you see faces and symbols in the passing waves.
When we got to the back room of the Cave, Jake and Jenny and Stan and Dustin were all sitting around, and Mindy was standing up, leaning against the wall and smoking. I tried to avoid looking in her direction.
Paige looked pretty well out of her element in her academic letter jacket, but she sat down on an M&M’s barrel and said hello to everyone. Once we’d all said our hellos Stan said, “Franklin D. Roosevelt’s wheelchair.”
Jake, who was sitting next to him, said, “An onion-based sauce known as a soubise.”
Jenny, who was sitting on his lap, said, “Happy Meal toys.”
Mindy said, “A tube of cookie dough.”
And I said, “Whale blubber.”
All this happened before I had a chance to explain anything to Paige, so there was a deadly silence in the room after I said that. It was her turn, and she had no idea what to do. She looked around the room for a second.
“Your turn, honey,” said Mindy.
“Sorry,” Paige said, “I . . . don’t know the rules?”
“You ever play Dead Celebrities?” I asked. “That game where someone says the name of a dead celebrity, and the next person says the name of another one with a matching initial?”
“I guess,” said Paige.
“This is free-form Dead Celebrities. You just say any random shit.”
“The more random, the better,” said Jenny.
“It’s the sport of Danish kings,” said Stan.
Danish kings. For shit’s sake.
“Hey, Stan,” I said. “Do you know what Danish kings make their thrones out of?”
“Narwhal tusks,” he said.
Paige stared at him for a second, then Mindy said, “It’s your turn. Say something. Anything random.”
“Oh,” said Paige. “Uh . . . gummy bears.”
“Jaws 3-D,” said Stan.
“Commemorative plates from the Franklin Mint with the Family Circus kids on them,” said Jake.
Well-played.
“Those red phone booths they have in London,” said Jenny, which I thought might be a subtle hint that she thought I should be thinking about Anna, and not going out with Paige.
“Cucumbers,” Mindy said, looking right at me, and obviously thinking of all the times she’d compared her ex-boyfriend’s dick to those.
“A female dog,” I said.
“Sandals,” said Paige.
I squeezed her hand. She was getting the hang of it, and holding her own, if not necessarily showing herself to be a real natural. There were no rules, but informally, there was an unwritten rule that saying something totally random was better than saying something inspired by what other people said. Like if Mindy said “cucumbers,” it would have been a poor move to say “zucchini” next. But no one would have cared either way. We didn’t keep score or anything.
I got Paige a handful of Reese’s Pieces, and we stuck around until the conversation turned to poop, at which point we went back to my car.
“And that,” I said to Paige when we left, “is life on the Island of Misfit Toys.”
“How the hell did Stan know what Danish kings made their thrones out of?” she asked.
“He’s probably reading Moby-Dick along with us,” I said. “But he always knows shit like that. It’s like he’s memorized every book in the library.”
“He’s kind of creepy,” she said.
“He’s really creepy,” I said. “But he’s also a genius. You want to go look for Slushees? There might be some new flavors out.”
She nodded, and we took off. It was raining now, and the drops plonked down hard in the deep puddles that sat where the snow piles used to be. At every dip in the road the car sprayed up a ton of water, which always looked like it would be fun to do in a car when I was kid, but now that I was actually doing it, it was kind of freaky. It’s tough to control the car in that second when it’s spraying water around.
We ended up at a Kum and Go on Hickman that had a blue Mountain Dew–flavored Slushee, a new one for us. The clerk was a middle-aged guy who looked almost like a pirate—he had a receding hairline, but what was left of his hair hung down to his shoulders, and he had a mustache. All he needed was an eye patch and a parrot. And maybe an outfit other than a Kum and Go uniform. When we talked to him, we found that he used the word “shit” as a sort of vocalized punctuation mark.
“You that couple who’s trying to find every flavor?” he asked.
“Something like that,” I said. “You’ve heard about us?”
“Word gets around,” he said. “Shit.”
“We’re looking for a flavor called white grape,” I said. “Have you seen it?”
He just shook his head.
Paige leaned over me. “You think you could make some calls about it?” she asked. “Maybe ask your manager to order it?
He coughed and cleared his throat a bit. “Nah,” he said. “I don’t even know who decides how we get these things or what we get. It’s a mystery. Shit. They change a couple of them out every now and then, though, so it might just be something they don’t make no more.”
He gave me my change, then turned up his radio and took a swig from a plastic bottle that had a Coca-Cola label on it but didn’t look like any Coca-Cola I’d ever seen, and helped himself to a stick of beef jerky from our side of the counter.
“I mean, white grape?” he went on. “That doesn’t even sound real. What in the hell is a white grape? Shit. One of the other stores I work at has cherry lime or something, though.”
“Yeah, we’ve had that one,” I said.
“That’s some good shit,” he said. “Cherry lime. Shit.”
As I turned to leave, I suddenly wondered if this guy was an older version of me, time traveling back to give me a warning or something. I mean, his was just the life I had been setting myself up for. He was working a job that mainly required him to sit around eating and drinking all day. He could have been me in twenty years. I just hoped I didn’t lose my hair like that.
We moved on to a Grab ’n’ Go on Merle Hay Road that we hadn’t hit yet, but they didn’t have anything we hadn’t seen a hundred times. The clerk was a girl about our age or a few years older.
“Hey,” I said. “We’ve been trying to find a Slushee flavor called white grape. Have you ever heard of that?”
She smiled but shook her head. “We have white grape cigarillos but not Slushees.”
> I sighed and looked wistfully into the distance at the restrooms. “Maybe we’ll never find it,” I said. “We’re destined to spend our lives in search of the Great White Slushee.”
She giggled, and Paige dragged me back to the car. The rain shower was starting to turn into a thunderstorm now; there was a flash of lightning every few seconds.
“You were totally flirting with that girl,” Paige said as she buckled up.
“I was just joking around,” I said. “Like I do all the time.”
“You need to not be doing it with cute girls, though,” she said. “Not in front of me, anyway.”
I guessed that if you looked at it from a certain angle, my joking with the clerk might have seemed like flirting. I thought I was just being friendly and all, but I guess there’s a fine line between being friendly and flirting, and I suck at reading signs. Even the ones I’m sending out myself.
As I pulled back onto the wet road, she said, “It’s not that I don’t trust you, but I know you still think about that girl in England.”
“Less and less,” I said. “I’m trying not to.”
“Thanks.”
Thunder crashed across the sky, and we drove along listening to Ishmael for another block or two, then she put her hand on my knee. By the time I came to the next light, she had moved it to my inner thigh. Then she went for my zipper.
“Whoa,” I said. “I’m driving here.”
“The windows are all rainy. No one’ll see.”
“But I have to concentrate on the road.”
“You wanna pull over, then? I know a place we can go.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
She sighed out loud.
“Jesus, Leon,” she said. “This is what I’m talking about. You always seem like you’ve got one foot out the door. Like you don’t want to do anything that’ll make it seem like we’re a real couple.”
“It’s not that,” I said. “It’s not that at all.”
“Is there something wrong with me, then? We’ve been going out for a month now, and you’ve barely even felt me up yet.”
“I always screw things up by going too fast,” I said.
“You can screw it up by going too slowly, too, you know.”