by Andrew Smith
“Did he answer?” Karim asked.
“Well. Not in writing,” I said.
Karim nodded and looked out the window. There was nothing to see, and the night was devoid of bloodcurdling screams, or if there were any screams going on, they couldn’t be heard over the whirring chorus of cicadas and tree frogs. Karim said, “I broke up with my last significant other over mayonnaise, as a matter of fact. Because every time we’d kiss, well, the thought of mayonnaise would just about make me gag. Mouths that touch mayonnaise will never touch mine, Sam.”
I should mention here that I have never kissed anyone who wasn’t my mom or my dad, whether they ate mayonnaise or not, so the thought of kissing someone was terrifying to me and filled me with all kinds of awed respect for Karim, to whom kissing other people was as unremarkable as looking both ways before crossing a street. I didn’t get it. And I never wanted to grow up if the toll to get past that particular marker meant kissing someone when you weren’t required to, mayonnaise or not.
Also, I should probably explain that for nearly as long as I’d known him, Karim had been a boy who constantly had a steady significant other. He had gone out with no fewer than four girls this past school year, and Karim was only just about to start seventh grade. I’d lost track of the most recent significant others after he’d broken up with Hayley Garcia, who’d been president of our middle school Science Club, but I could always tell when Karim was experimenting with his independence, because those were the days when he’d spend more time with me—like now, when he was practically living at my house. And knowing that Karim had broken up with one of his girlfriends over the mere prospect of having to go to a school dance with her made it seem all the more reasonable that he would break up with someone else over an emulsion of egg yolk and oil—mayonnaise.
“So it was mayonnaise that got between you and Hayley Garcia?” I asked.
Karim made a kind of clucking sound. “No. Hayley was a long time ago.”21
And Karim continued, “I didn’t tell you, but I started going out with Brenden Saltarello at the end of April. Brenden puts mayonnaise on everything, even corn dogs. Corn dogs. Can you imagine? Putting mayonnaise on a corn dog is like using the flag of Texas to wipe your feet. I stayed over at his house on his thirteenth birthday, and his dad even made a chocolate cake with mayonnaise in it. I just couldn’t take it anymore. It was mayonnaise insanity. It was like living on Planet Mayonnaise. I still really like Brenden a lot, but I had to break up with him, all entirely due to mayonnaise.”
There was suddenly so much I wanted to say to Karim, not the least of which was this: Chocolate mayonnaise cake is delicious.
Instead what I said was this: “Wait. What?”
I sat up in bed and my library book plopped to the floor.
I wondered if Princess Snugglewarm would be mad at me for that.
Karim looked out the window and shrugged. He said, “Yeah. Mayonnaise broke us up.”
“No. I mean, Brenden Saltarello?”
Brenden Saltarello was a year older than Karim and I. He was going into eighth grade. Brenden was super-popular and wrote for the school newspaper, the Mustang, and he played pitcher on the baseball team. Also, I had seen Brenden wearing a Princess Snugglewarm T-shirt a few times at school last year, which placed him squarely in the “people who are okay as far as I’m concerned” category, so I totally didn’t mind if my best friend was going out with him.
“Yeah. Well, sorry I never said anything about it. But you’re the first person I told, Sam. I mean besides my mom and dad, and Bahar. It was Brenden who asked me if I wanted to go out with him too, not that it matters. He told me he had a crush on me. I never even really thought about it until Brenden asked, but I guess I’ve also always been kind of interested in going out with boys, too, you know, what that would be like. And Brenden always made me feel like it was no big deal, which it isn’t. And then I realized that I liked going out with Brenden more than I ever liked going out with anyone else.”
Then Karim looked at me. It was dark, but I could tell by the sound of my friend’s voice and the way his eyes changed shape in the charcoal reflection of the night sky that Karim was telling me the truth, and that he was sad about breaking up with Brenden too.
Friends can tell these things about each other.
And I was so confused about this crush thing that everyone else apparently knew about, like what it felt like, and how to know if you were having one.
I sighed, thinking about tea with Bahar and not saying anything to anyone.
And Karim added, “We both cried when we decided to split up. But you know—Blue Creek. And, I don’t know, the other boys who go out with boys at Dick Dowling, or the girls who go out with girls, they’re all way braver than I am. Besides, Brenden plays baseball, and those kids can be… well, you know.”
I said, “Oh.”
Karim just cleared his throat and turned again to look out in the direction of the Purdy House—the Screaming House.
He said, “You’re not jealous, are you?”
And I have to say that unlike Karim, I am not a good liar, and I would especially never lie to my best friend. But I felt confused about so many things.
I said, “Well, I am kind of jealous of Brenden Saltarello because you’re my best friend.”
“We’ll never not be best friends, Sam.” Then I could hear the smile in Karim’s voice when he said, “Besides, long distance relationships never work out, and Oregon’s, like, two thousand miles away.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know.”
“But it’s dumb to break up with someone you really care about over something as unimportant as mayonnaise. Or baseball.”
Karim said, “It just… No. Gag. And besides, Blue Creek is a town that makes kids be what Blue Creek wants them to be. You know that. That’s why you’re going to Oregon for high school. It’s why James left too. Brenden’s going to be a baseball player, or a news reporter in Dallas or something, and I’m just going to be here in Blue Creek, alone, texting you guys who are all so far away.”
I’ll admit it that I was sad when James left Blue Creek.
The whole town—James’s dad especially—wanted James to be a great football player (which he was), but he only wanted to study dance (and he was such a talented dancer, and he loved dancing and hated football, besides). So his mom took him away from Blue Creek, so she could let James be James.
Maybe Karim and Brenden would get their chance too.
It seemed like a couple of minutes passed without Karim and me saying one word to each other. We just listened to the sounds of the insects and the frogs outside in the muggy night.
I said, “Well, I bet you anything it’s jarred mayonnaise that Brenden always uses. One of these days, I’ll make homemade mayonnaise for you. It will change your world, Karim. Maybe you could bring some to Brenden. He’d never eat the jarred kind again. And you’d live happily, and bravely, ever after. The end.”
“Thank you, Sam.”
“Karim?”
“What?”
“Did Brenden Saltarello ever make fun of you for wearing Teen Titans pajamas?”
“Shut up, Sam.”
21. To correct the record here, Hayley was only a few months ago.
PART TWO BORIS
THE KID IN THE WINDOW
Everyone at Lily Putt’s Indoor-Outdoor Miniature Golf Course could tell I wasn’t focused on my job at all the next day.
My parents owned Lily Putt’s Indoor-Outdoor Miniature Golf Course, Blue Creek’s version of an amusement park, so I worked there a few days every week. And when I did, I had free rein to customize the menu selections at the snack bar.
Today would be Thai chicken burgers with cucumbers, cilantro, and spicy peanut sauce.
Karim had spent the night, but we hadn’t slept at all because we’d stayed up talking about Princess Snugglewarm and Karim’s evolving love life, all while trying to listen for the terrifying Purdy House s
creams, but they hadn’t come. Even though it never mattered to my parents when Karim slept over, this time he’d told them it was because his house had a scorpion and kangaroo rat infestation, and there was no telling how long the poison gas used by the exterminator would take to dissipate. He said his parents had flown down to a nudist resort in Cancún for a week and left him with a hundred dollars so that he wouldn’t starve to death.
Karim was really working on his lying-to-all-adults A-game.
But it was good for me to talk to Karim all night long about pointlessly random things. The days seemed to be rushing past me, and before I knew it, I’d be packing up and leaving my friends and family behind for months and months, and Karim lulled the spiders in my stomach to a kind of confused quietness, even though just admitting that fired them up again.
So the next day, the day I was working at Lily Putt’s, we were supposed to reconvene our three-person inquiry into the history of the Purdy House. To be honest, neither Karim nor I really wanted to read any more articles after the first story about the drunk guy and the sheriff who shot at the monster in the sky. Karim made such a big deal about how scary the story about the screams and the black invisible giant bird monster was, while Bahar remained our steady voice of reason. (“A hundred years ago, people were seriously impressionable, which explains the whole Communists-from-California thing,” she’d said.) And as usual, I was caught somewhere between the cousins—wanting to be sensible like Bahar, but feeling a panicked sense of irrational terror, like Karim.
So I kept my three as of yet unopened novels behind the counter at Lily Putt’s snack bar, unrealistically thinking that I might have a chance to read something when I wasn’t busy, but every time I even considered opening a book, I’d start to nod off because I was so tired from listening for things that weren’t there with Karim, who was still at my house, undoubtedly taking a nap in his Teen Titans pajamas, in my room, and in the secure safety of the air-conditioned daytime.
It was a miserable and sweltering-hot day, and the Thai chicken burgers ended up being a little more labor intensive than I had anticipated. All I really wanted to do was take a quick nap somewhere that was not in the dark, somewhere not with screaming or swirling black birdlike clouds, and not with the ghost of Little Charlie.
And it was a busy afternoon too.
Whenever school was out in Blue Creek and it was as hot as it gets in Texas in summer, the indoor air-conditioned course regularly filled up with miniature golfers who were almost always hungry, or losing their balls, or needing assistance getting their putters unstuck from the mechanical llama hazard.
Tap tap tap tap tap!
“Hey. Hey. Hey.”
I swear (excuse me)22 that I had only fallen asleep for a few seconds when some little kid started knocking on the glass of the order window. And it was probably a good thing he woke me up, because I was just about to make a deep descent into a paralyzing sweaty-hot midday nightmare, which is the worst, most horrifying type of nightmare a guy can have. This one was like a movie whose opening credits rolled over a shot of the Purdy House gates on a windblown, moonless night.
Tap tap tap tap tap! “Hey. Hey. Hey. Is anyone back there? Hey.”
I’ll admit that I had to stand on top of an overturned plastic milk crate when I took orders, just so that really short people (like the kid who smudged his knuckles all over the order window) wouldn’t think they were talking to some disembodied spirit of a child-chef.
My voice crackled with denied sleep. “Yes. Hello! Welcome to Lily Putt’s Indoor-Outdoor Miniature Golf Complex,” I said.23
The kid on the other side of the smudged window looked to be about seven years old, and he had dirty hands, with artificially colored some-type-of-sweet-drink thing staining the skin around his mouth, and little golden crumbs of dried snot24 ringing his nostrils like they were a pair of tiny bear traps. I could practically smell him through the little sound hole in the order window, and I could only imagine he smelled like an old damp dishrag.
Reading my hand-lettered sign above the glass, he said, “What’s a Thai chicken burger?”
He pronounced it “thigh.”
I cleared my throat. “A Thai chicken burger is seasoned with a bit of green curry and lemongrass, grilled to a hard caramelized sear, and topped with a drizzle of spicy peanut sauce and quick-pickled cucumbers, daikon, and cilantro. We serve it on a soft steamed roll with a side of tempura green bean fries and a mango-chili-lime aioli.”
Karim really needed to try this aioli. It would change him forever.
But the kid at the window was unfazed and emotionless. It was almost like I was talking to a cardboard cutout, or our mechanical llama hazard.
“I don’t like any of that,” he said.
Confident I would send this two-dimensional unpleasant kid away happy one way or another, I said, “We have a money-back guarantee on all our burgers.”
The kid was as emotional as a frozen cod. “Keep your money. I hate all of that stuff. Is this a torture chamber or something?”
“Well, we also have regular hot dogs,” I said, remaining cheerful and enthusiastic like a good snack bar chef should always be.
“Are they on buns?”
I felt like we were making progress now. “Yes!”
“I don’t like buns.”
Look, I get it. Even at twelve years old,25 I understand that sometimes customers just want to feel confident that you’re going out of your way to personalize their experience. So I said, “I could just put a plain wiener—assuming you like it cooked—inside a bag of crushed corn chips or something. I really can make anything you’d like.”
The kid just stood there, a blank (but dirty) slate for a face, staring at me.
It was almost like he had entered a state of suspended animation or something.
If I wasn’t so anxious about his strangeness, I would have probably turned around to make sure the second hand on our clock was still moving.
I waited for him to make up his mind, giving him a wide-eyed, time-frozen, and grinning nod of encouraging patience.
Nothing. Just staring and looking like a creepy little mannequin.
The kid, unblinking, mouth slightly open, glanced back over his shoulder and then turned to me and said, “Have you ever had to hide inside a garbage dumpster to avoid being attacked by mountain lions? I have.”
Just the thought of being inside a dumpster made my chest constrict from the anticipation of claustrophobia. But you’d think someone who’d had to hide in a garbage dumpster to avoid being attacked by mountain lions would be more open-minded about food.
“Oh,” I said. “For how long?”
“Until trash day.”
“I see.”
He was staring again, not doing anything else.
After a good half minute, I said, “Chicken nuggets?”
“Do they come with ranch?”
Maybe I had finally cracked the frozen sea of ice between us.
I said, “Yes!”
The kid said, “I already told you once that I don’t like chicken. And I don’t like ranch, either.”
More staring and waiting.
A lot more waiting.
“So then, how about a plain hot dog with no bun?” I asked.
The kid was starting to make me feel so nervous and self-conscious that I was considering breaking into a song and dance for him, but I already guessed that he didn’t like music or dancing.
“Do you have those little plastic packets of mustard, ketchup, and relish?”
“Of course we do.”
“Sweet or dill relish?”
Ha! He would not be victorious this time, I thought.
“We have both—dill and sweet.”
He wiped his nose with the back of an index finger.
And I added, “So, if you relish the thought of a hot dog, you have come to the right place!”
Sometimes I crack myself up. But the kid was not impressed. Spending days inside a dumpster to
avoid being eaten by mountain lions can pretty much ruin the impact of humor for the rest of your life, I thought.
The kid took a deep breath as though he had finally decided on what he wanted, which happened to not be something to eat, as opposed to something that might make me feel bad. He said, “You’re not funny, and you’re not nice. It must be so exhausting for you, letting people down as much as you do. Does anyone even like you at all?”
Then he walked away without ordering anything.
I’ll admit it: for the rest of the day I moped around in a daze, trying to figure out why some random kid had shown up just to let me know about all the things he hated, and how he thought I was a friendless disappointing failure who never had to hide in a dumpster from mountain lions and who nobody could possibly like. And even though he was a complete stranger, someone I’d never seen before and would probably (hopefully) never see again, for some unexplainable reason the kid made me feel completely depressed and inadequate.
If there had been a dumpster nearby, I would have hidden in it.
And since just thinking about hiding in a dumpster makes me anxious, I suppose I’d be lion food.
22. Because, you know, I never swear.
23. This is what my dad required me to say to every customer. The “complex” part was a new touch. Dad wanted the people of Blue Creek to appreciate the vastness of our family’s enterprise.
24. (excuse me)
25. But also, I might add, about to start high school more than a thousand miles away, which made me feel terrifyingly grown-up and wise, except with a stomach full of moshing spiders.
OF CRUSHES, KILTS, CAMPING, AND LINE DRIVES
One time after unsweetened Saturday tea a few weeks ago, Bahar and I found ourselves walking through Lake Marion Park, which was not the most direct route from Colonel Jenkins’s Diner to Bahar’s house, but it was a nice day, and she asked if I wanted to go that way.
Let me be clear, that’s not a crushy thing to do.