My Big Mouth

by Peter Hannan

  Luckily, that uncomfortable moment was interrupted by a loud knock on the barbershop door. The force of the pounding swung the door open.

  Unluckily, there stood the Butcher.

  He was wearing one of those super-gross sleeveless netted muscle shirts. He had more armpit hair than some people had head hair. Come on, who needs to see that? He was the only kid in our class who had actual muscles. Couldn’t he just keep them to himself?

  He shook his head at Molly. “I heard that you came over here. What kind of stupid band practices in a barbershop?”

  I was trying to think of a snappy comeback, but Molly came back first: “Shut your piehole, Gerald.”

  What a girl.

  “We gotta talk, Moll,” growled the Butcher.

  “Start talking, Gerald.”

  “Not here.”

  “Well, this is where I am. GERALD.”

  “Stop calling me that —”

  “What, you mean your name?” she said.

  I decided this was a good time to start the song. I strummed lightly on my guitar.

  I sang softly at first, but Gerald kept talking, so I got louder and louder.

  We’re not that popular

  Around the school …

  Edwin started slamming away at the bass. Molly smiled and looked back down at the song’s lyrics. Gerald steamed.

  The Amazing Dweebs!

  The Amazing Dweebs!

  Molly held the paper up between us. Soon, all three Dweebs were hamming it up, loudly.

  Uh-huh, that’s right …

  The Amazing Dweebs!

  The Butcher covered his ears. “I don’t understand why all of a sudden you want to be a dweeb and hang around with dweebs and be in a dweeb band!” he yelled, storming out the door. “This is the worst dweeb crap ever!”

  I had to agree, it did sound horrible. But quality had nothing to do with it. It was dumb — the right kind of dumb.

  You say we’re nerds,

  You say we’re nuts,

  Just watch us while

  We kick your butts!

  The Amazing Dweebs!

  The Amazing Dweebs!

  Uh-huh, that’s right …

  The Amazing Dweebs!

  Edwin and I played so hard we both broke strings. My finger got bloody and my fingernail snapped. (I never use a guitar pick. I always lose them, so I just keep the nail on my index finger kind of long.) Molly danced around the barbershop, using a hairbrush for a microphone. Watching a girl like Molly dance really makes you realize why dancing was invented. She sort of went back and forth between dancing well and dancing dorky, but it all worked for her.

  We sang the simple chorus over and over, screaming, then whispering, then screaming again. We didn’t stop until our voices were shot.

  Talk about amazing. I couldn’t believe I was letting other people see this part of me. They actually joined in on something I wrote. Plus, it was cool that we were able to get so crazy together. There’s nothing better than acting like a lunatic with other people who are also acting like lunatics.

  We twirled each other around in the barber chair some more. When we twirled Molly, she was smiling with her eyes closed. Her cheeks got red, and every time she came around she was more beautiful. But I was trying not to think about that.

  That weekend, I couldn’t stop. I wrote songs about what jerks Gerald and his goons were, about how boring school was, about bad teachers and clueless adults. I had a guitar on my lap and a pencil in my hand for two whole days. I had the amp turned up loud. I went through three notebooks.

  Dad knocked on the door at about seven thirty Sunday night. He had to pound pretty hard because of the racket I was making.

  “Davis, I’m home! You hungry?”

  We had the classic Dad dinner: spaghetti, peas, bread. I never realized how good my mom’s food was until Dad started cooking. Spaghetti’s okay, but the sauce he makes is super-watery and it seeps into the other stuff on the plate. The bread turns pink and mushy and the pea juice gets in there, too, and it’s ultra-disgusting. I love bread. It’s very hard to make bread taste bad.

  My dad makes bread taste bad.

  The cure for his cooking is shaky cheese, lots and lots of shaky cheese. There wasn’t much left in the container that night, so I shook it hard. The only sound in the room was the rattling of Parmesan pebbles.

  Rattle, rattle.

  “So, all in all, how was your first week?”

  Rattle, rattle, rattle.

  “Five days of nonstop misery.”

  Rattle, rattle, rattle, rattle.

  I knew my dad wasn’t feeling so great about the move or his job, and he probably missed Mom even more than I did. For a long time, I thought about her pretty much every minute. The sadness was like a bully that got right up in your face.

  Every single square inch of our old house reminded me of her. I could barely look into the living room. The piano was the worst. You could see the dust on the bench from the doorway. When I was little, I would sit next to her while she played. She didn’t even mind when I banged on the keys, really screwing up the piece she was practicing. Sometimes we would “play a rainstorm” together. We’d start by lightly hammering tiny raindrops on the high notes, then make the rain come down louder and lower and faster, then jab lightning strikes on the middle notes, and finally pound out thunder with our fists and elbows. I’d step on the pedal for a loud, echoing rumble. Then we’d slow it down, and work our way back up to the high plinky notes until the rain stopped. With the last few drops we’d collapse onto the keys and each other.

  I avoided my dad’s room, too. When I walked by the door, I imagined her in there, and I didn’t want to see that she wasn’t.

  Dad and I tried really hard to cheer each other up after she died, but soon we knew it wasn’t working. It couldn’t work. Our cheerfulness was ridiculously fake. We were like bad actors who couldn’t convince anybody, especially ourselves.

  We got tired of trying.

  Now, a year and a half later, we had moved into a new house, which was good. But we’d settled into a different kind of sadness. More like dullness. My mom and dad used to goof around and sometimes even sing together while she cooked or they cleaned up after dinner. My dad would sing “The Man on the Flying Trapeze.” I especially liked that one when I was little because it was also in an old Popeye cartoon:

  He floats through the air with the greatest of ease,

  The daring young man on the flying trapeze,

  His movements are graceful, all girls he does please,

  But my love he has stolen away.

  Dad really hammed it up as they waltzed around the room. I couldn’t imagine my dad singing now. He hardly even smiled. Then again, neither did I. Numb was the new normal in the Delaware house. Of course, I sang in my room, but it wasn’t that super-happy-dancing-around-the-kitchen kind. It was more like the everything-has-gone-to-hell-and-that’s-why-I-hate-the-world kind.

  Meanwhile, a whole new something was happening outside of the house. I liked hanging around with Molly and Edwin, and I loved the idea of writing songs for the Dweebs. I felt kind of guilty that things were going better for me all of a sudden. I was afraid it would make my dad feel even worse, so I just didn’t tell him.

  “I’ve got a ton of homework,” I said, excusing myself from the table.

  But I didn’t do homework. I went back to my guitar and notebook. I just turned the volume down this time.

  I woke up with a sharp pain in my eye. Something was stuck to my eyebrow. I peeled it off. Owww! I had fallen asleep on my notebook’s spiral binding. I glanced over at the alarm clock that I had forgotten to set.

  I was incredibly late.

  I leaped up and looked in the mirror. The spiral had made dents in my flesh from forehead to cheek. It looked a lot like stitches. Luckily, I’d fallen asleep in my clothes and I live close to school. No time for breakfast or a shower. I just bolted out the door.

  I could still feel the “sti
tches” on my face when I ran into Miss Danderbrook’s first-period English class six minutes later, just as the bell rang. Made it.

  We were all taking our seats when Danderbrook stood up in front of her desk and addressed us.

  “Okay, class,” she singsonged, like a preschool teacher. “Pass your poems forward!”

  Poems? I was instantly nauseous. I forgot to write a stinking poem. I must have groaned out loud.

  “Davis,” she said, “is there a problem? And ouch, what happened to your face? Were you in an accident over the weekend?”

  “No … no …” I said, rifling through my stuff. I acted confused, whispering loudly. “Now where the heck did I put that poem? I worked so hard on it …” I pretended to be outraged. “Okay, who’s been messing with my stuff?”

  Edwin snickered, shook his head, and passed his poem to the front.

  Molly smiled over at me and raised an eyebrow. “Nice scar, Frankenstein.” She handed in her poem, too.

  Everyone had poems but me.

  I kept shuffling papers, not wanting to make eye contact with Danderbrook. But she wasn’t falling for it. She’d been teaching for a long time, and she’d seen everything. I flipped through my notebook, trying not to panic.

  That’s when I realized that the songs I’d been writing looked a heck of a lot like poetry.

  I didn’t even think about which one to grab. As long as it was it was shaped like a poem, it would work.

  “Got it!” I cried, ripping a page out … and almost in half. Ugh. I went to tear out another “poem.” Any one would do.

  But then I heard a “Pssst!” Molly was holding out one of those little plastic Scotch tape rolls. “Catch!” she whispered, tossing it over. I reached for it, but instead tipped it into the air — then again and again, from fingertip to fingertip — like an insane person playing volleyball with himself. It got a laugh, but I did finally catch the thing.

  “Thanks,” I said to Molly, quickly taping the poem back together. I got up and slipped the crudely mended sheet into the middle of the stack of perfectly typed pages at the front of the room.

  Danderbrook looked at me like I was totally nuts. “Is that it, or do you have an encore?” she asked.

  Another laugh.

  “No, sorry, that’s it,” I said, feeling relieved that at least I had something to turn in. But Danderbrook wasn’t finished.

  “Wonderful,” she replied, pulling the sheet back out of the stack with her thumb and forefinger. She made a face and held it up like it might infect her. “I simply cannot wait to grade that. Is this what was expected of students in Delaware?”

  “No,” I said, not even bothering to correct her.

  “Always nice to get off to a fresh start in a new school,” she said.

  At dinner that night (leftover Chinese, dried out, possibly moldy), I was still thinking about Molly. Nice scar, Frankenstein.

  “Anything happen in school today?” Dad asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “Nothing. At. All. Big fat zip-zilch-nada of a day.”

  “Meet anybody new?”

  “Negative.”

  He stopped eating and looked at me. “How could you not meet anyone new? Everyone there is new to you.”

  “Yeah, well, I didn’t meet any of them.” I decided to change the subject. “Did you meet anyone new at work?”

  “We weren’t talking about me.”

  “Well, I wasn’t talking about me.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said. He paused for a minute. “Listen, Davis, remember how we used to go camping and fishing when you were younger?”

  “Yeah …” I knew where this was going and I didn’t want to go.

  “Well, you have a long weekend coming up, and I was wondering if you’d like to take a little trip up to the woods with me. You could bring a friend along if you want.” Dad was obviously trying.

  “I don’t know, maybe,” I said. “It sounds great, but I’ve got tons of homework.”

  “Okay, well, you think about it,” he said, getting up from the table. He put his plate in the sink, then went on. “Oh, and by the way, I signed you up for karate. It’ll be a good way to get to know other kids.”

  “WHAT?”

  I woke up early the next morning. I didn’t exactly leap out of bed, though. Instead, I listened to the rain for a while.

  Dad tapped on the door. “Are you awake in there? Better get up. Gotta go, bye!”

  “Bye.”

  The rain stopped by the time I left the house, but when I was a block from school, a truck blew by, plowing through a deep puddle. About a hundred gallons of water landed on me. Instant wet rat.

  As I entered the building, the squish-squashing of my sneakers echoed in the hallway. I passed Molly. She was quietly arguing with the Butcher. I prayed that neither one of them would notice me. Edwin slammed his locker and walked alongside me.

  “Take a shower with your clothes on?” he asked.

  “Funny. Stop talking,” I grumbled. I wasn’t in the mood.

  But, of course, he didn’t. Edwin was incapable of that. “Dear me!” He imitated me in a voice like a squeaky Muppet. “Where the heck is my poem? Who’s been messing with my stuff? I worked so hard on it!”

  Ha, ha.

  When we got into the classroom, Danderbrook was clutching the stack of poems in her arms. I sloshed to my seat. A large puddle formed on the floor under my chair.

  “Do you have your own personal rain cloud, Frankenstein?” Molly asked, slipping into her chair.

  “Okay, people,” said Danderbrook, now sounding like a severely depressed preschool teacher. “This should not have been a tough assignment. All it required was a teeny bit of effort. You couldn’t harm a fly with the effort expended on most of these poems. A fruit fly. A baby fruit fly. That’s why tonight’s homework assignment is the same as your last homework assignment. That’s right … start over.”

  “Awwwwwwwwww,” everyone groaned. Everyone but me. I was just glad I wasn’t the only one who had screwed up.

  “However,” she said, “there is one student I think we should hear from.”

  Everyone looked at Edwin, who smiled.

  “I’d like that student to come up and read to the class,” Danderbrook continued.

  Edwin stood up.

  “No, Edwin, not you. It can’t always be you.”

  This made Molly smile, and she got up. After all, she was the only other obvious contender.

  “Davis Delaware,” Danderbrook said, waving Molly away and giving me a heart attack, “please do us the honor of reading your work.”

  What?

  I glanced over at Molly and Edwin, who looked at each other in disbelief and slowly sat back down. Danderbrook held out my mangled poem.

  She was doing this to embarrass me. I knew it. It seemed kind of mean, especially since I was a new kid and everything. Why me? What did I do to deserve this?

  I sloshed toward the front of the room, preparing for a megadose of humiliation. She handed me the paper. I held it up in front of my face and looked at the title: “Watch the Melting Clock.” What was I thinking? This song was about Dander-brook, and she had obviously figured it out. It was about me being bored out of my mind in her class a few days earlier.

  I’d been staring at the clock, praying the minute hand would budge during my lifetime. The second hand seemed to be ticking backward. It was incredibly hot, and a trickle of sweat had dripped off my nose and onto the page. It had landed on the face of a drawing I’d done of myself, causing the ink to run like a watercolor.

  That’s when I had thought of Salvador Dalí. I’ve always liked that painting with the melting pocket watches. It’s called The Persistence of Memory, but I just call it the melty-clock painting. I never really even knew what the heck it was supposed to mean, but at that moment I’d felt like I was living in it. I’d imagined the clock dripping down t
he classroom wall. I’d looked back at my notebook, and my head had spread into a big blue blob. Danderbrook was melting my brain and ticking my life away.

  So, here we were. My poem had insulted old lady Danderbrook, and now she wanted payback in front of the whole class. I was brand-new at this school and already screwed. This poem would be my new “Urine Trouble, Pee Boy.”

  “Please, Mr. Delaware,” she said, gesturing for me to start reading.

  I hid behind the wrinkled, taped-up page and mumbled, “Watch the Melting Clock.”

  “Speak up,” said Danderbrook.

  The paper rattled in my sweaty fingers. Someone snickered.

  Danderbrook snapped. “ZIP IT! You would all do well to listen up. This poem’s presentation — its wrinkled, distressed appearance, the tear, the tape — has been carefully designed to express its theme: the ravages of time. Mr. Delaware has written a breathtaking and mature examination of the nature of mortality. He even went to the trouble of faking scars on his face yesterday and hosing himself down today to reinforce that theme. The fact that he chose to write it as a Shakespearean sonnet — getting a bit playful with the structure, using eight instead of ten syllables per line — only makes his poem’s somber reflection that much more resonant within the context of classical literature.”

  Excuse me?

  What the heck was she talking about? She had to be kidding, except I could tell from the look on her face that she wasn’t. I had written a sonnet … well, almost a sonnet … accidentally? Was that even possible? I’d had to write one back at my old school earlier in the year, and I guess I just fell into the basic format.

  I glanced over at Molly. She looked beautiful even with her mouth hanging open. On the other hand, Edwin’s eyes seemed like they might pop out, bounce off his desk, and roll out the door. The class looked like a roomful of spooked raccoons.