by Don Calame
“I’m feeling kind of nauseous.” Which is completely true. I don’t know if it’s the anxiety or all the sick people or what, but my head is light and I feel like I might pass out.
Grandpa huffs. “We should have said you were having heart pains. They always take the heart-pain cases first.”
“Right,” Mom says. “And what happens when the doctor comes in and Matt says it’s his stomach?”
“We blame it on Nurse Sourpuss.”
Mom shakes her head. “Sometimes I don’t understand how we could be related.”
“Of course we are, Colleen. You just got the Goody Two-Shoes gene. Don’t worry, Matt. It usually skips a generation.”
This makes me laugh, and I use the opportunity to grimace in pain.
Mom glares at Grandpa Arlo. “Now see what you did?”
A small but stately woman with a great shock of gray-blond hair enters our cubicle. She’s wearing a long white coat and a stethoscope. “Hello. I’m Dr. Kesler.”
Mom introduces herself, Grandpa, and me.
Dr. Kesler grabs the folder at the foot of the bed and lifts a pair of black-rimmed glasses that hang from a thin chain around her neck. She positions them on the end of her nose and proceeds to read.
She closes the folder and looks at me. “So. What seems to be the problem?”
“Sounds like appendicitis, Doc,” Grandpa Arlo says.
“Dad. Let the doctor do her job.”
“You’re having pain in your abdomen?” Dr. Kesler asks.
“Yes,” I say. “Right around here.” I show her.
“Why don’t you take off your shirt?”
If I could snap my fingers and be back home right now, I would. But that’s not going to happen, and I’m too scared to tell the truth. So I slowly pull my T-shirt up and over my head, making sure not to play the pain too big.
The doctor moves in closer, and I get a whiff of her Popsicle-stick smell. She listens to my heart with her stethoscope. Has me breathe in and out. She looks down my throat, in my ears, in my eyes.
“Sit up tall.” Her hands are cold as she presses on the left side of my belly. “How’s that feel?”
“Fine,” I say.
She moves her hand right below my belly button and puts pressure. “That?”
“Sore,” I say, because I figure she’s getting closer, so it must hurt a bit.
When she presses down on the right side of my abdomen, I give her my best it-hurts-like-hell-but-I’m-not-going-to-show-it face, accompanied by a minor gasp.
“That?” she says.
“Pretty bad.”
“Okay. Lie down on the bed for me.”
I do as I’m told. She has me sit up and lie back down again. She makes me bend my legs and lift them to my chest. Coop didn’t go over any of this, so I have to improvise when to wince and when to play it cool.
The doctor scribbles something down on my chart. “How long have you been feeling like this?”
“Since this morning,” Mom leaps in. “Sorry. I’ll let you answer, honey.”
“Actually,” I say, “I woke up in the night and felt it, too.” I just remembered Coop telling me to say this, because if you suddenly feel sick in the morning, it’s more obvious you’re trying to get out of something. But if you felt it in the night, it’s easier to believe.
“Okay, well,” Dr. Kesler says. “We’ll take some blood. Get a urine sample. See what shows up.”
“What do you think it could be?” Mom asks, rubbing her arm nervously.
Dr. Kesler places my file back on the counter. “I thought maybe gastroenteritis, but the pain’s localized so I’d say it’s most likely his appendix.”
Mom swallows loudly. “What do we do about that?”
“To be honest, I don’t like to fool around with something like this,” Dr. Kesler says gravely. “I’m inclined to just go in and remove it.”
“What?” I say. “An operation? I thought you only operated when it bursts.”
Dr. Kesler gives a little patronizing laugh. “No, no. We’d much rather get it before it progresses to that point. If it had burst already, you wouldn’t be able to talk right now. We have a saying when it comes to the appendix: when in doubt, take it out.”
“SHOULDN’T WE WAIT?” I say. “To see if it gets better?”
Dr. Kesler studies me. “We could wait. But I wouldn’t recommend it. If we go in now, it’s a very simple operation. If we hold off and it ruptures, we’re talking about a much more serious situation.”
“You don’t want that, Matt,” Grandpa says. “Trust me. My buddy Arthur Gertzen had that happen, and he said it was like someone was stabbing at his intestines with a red-hot knitting needle.”
Oh, crap. What have I done? My whole body starts to sweat.
“Are you sure it’s his appendix?” Mom says.
“Am I one hundred percent sure? No, because there’s no way to tell until we get in there. We can only diagnose appendicitis by symptoms. Does he have most of the symptoms? Yes, he does.”
“All right. I’m going to call work,” Mom says. “Tell them I won’t be able to make it in today.” She starts digging in her purse for her cell phone. She pulls out her cigarettes, her compact, her wallet.
“When was the last time he ate?”
“Just a mouthful of eggs at breakfast.” Mom has found her phone. “He wasn’t very hungry. Maybe three hours ago?”
“Good. By the time we get prepped, he should be fine for the anaesthesia.”
My face is buried in my hands.
“Don’t worry.” Dr. Kesler pats my leg. “It’ll all be over before you know it.”
Mom and the doctor both leave. One of them pulls the curtain closed, but I don’t look up to see who.
Grandpa Arlo sits in the chair. “Well, at least you’ll have a cool scar to impress the ladies with.”
“Yeah,” I say into my sweaty palms. “Lucky me.”
“Speaking of ladies. Guess who knew the whole time that I was the one who sent the kitten?”
I lift my head and look over at him.
“I knew that’d get your mind off things.” Grandpa’s smiling big. “I came clean yesterday when Edith wanted to expand the search. Put up a few hundred more posters. She laughed at me when I finally told her. Said she’d known all along. She was just waiting for me to say something. I thought it was just your grandmother, but it turns out all women are psychic. You think they have no idea what you’re thinking, but they know. They know everything.”
“Everything?” I say, wondering if Dr. Kesler could see right through my charade the way Mrs. Hoogenboom saw through Grandpa’s.
“I know.” Grandpa Arlo nods. “It’s scary. And if they don’t know right away, they’ll find out soon enough. Trust me on this, Matt: there’s nothing you can get away with as far as women are concerned.”
“Nothing?” I say.
“It’s taken me seventy-six years to learn the few things I know about women.” Grandpa counts these off on his fingers, starting with his thumb. “Tell them the truth. Tell them about your feelings. And tell them in excruciating detail. If you can remember even one of these things, you’ll get more jazz than I could have ever imagined at your age.”
My eyes shoot over to the closed curtain. I don’t want to wait around for Dr. Kesler to call my bluff. I look over at Grandpa Arlo in the chair. He’s the only one who’d understand. “Grandpa, I need your help.”
Grandpa sits up. “What is it?”
“I lied,” I whisper. “I don’t have appendicitis. I was just trying to get out of the swim meet today.”
“Holy crap.” Grandpa’s eyes look like they’re going to shoot across the room. He leaps to his feet. “What the hell were you thinking?”
“It had to be something big or my coach wouldn’t believe it.”
“Well, we have to tell them.”
“Maybe they know already,” I say. “Like you said about women.”
“They don’t know, Matt. Believe me. Give the
m some time and they’d probably figure it out, but we don’t have time. We need to say something. Now.”
“No. Please. Can’t we just — I don’t know — pretend I’m feeling a little better or something. Otherwise it’ll get back to Ms. Luntz and if it gets back to her —”
“They want to operate on you, Matt. Do you understand that? It can’t be worth getting sliced open for.”
I look down at the floor. I don’t know what to say. You’d think it’d be more clear-cut, but there are good arguments for both sides.
“What’s all this about?”
“It’s a girl. I was trying to make her think I was a jock, so I volunteered to swim the butterfly for our team. I thought I’d be able to practice enough so that I could actually swim it, but I’m not ready yet.”
Grandpa laughs and smacks my shoulder. “Uh-huh. I told you it skipped a generation.”
“Can you help me?”
Grandpa does his tongue-rolling thing as he mulls this over. “All right. All right. Let me think.” He moves over to the small cabinet in the corner. He finds a box of latex gloves and pulls one out. “Here we go. This could work.”
“What are you going to do?”
“No time to explain. You just play along.” Grandpa starts blowing up the rubber glove like a balloon. It gets bigger and bigger until it’s the size of a beach ball. He pinches off the end with one hand and tugs his dress shirt up with the other. “Let’s hope this does the trick.”
“Grandpa?”
“On three, I need you to groan, but not too loudly, okay?”
“Groan?”
Grandpa doesn’t wait to clarify. “One. Two. Three.”
I have no alternative, so I let out a soft low moan.
Grandpa Arlo licks his right hand and wets the loose skin on his belly. He presses the closed-off end of the inflated glove to his stomach and then starts to let the air out.
It makes a very realistic farting sound. “Groan a little louder,” he whispers.
“Ohhhhhh,” I wail.
And with that, Grandpa releases even more air, creating an even louder, floppier fart noise.
He nods to me. “Now for the grand finale.”
“Oh, my God!” I scream. “Uhhhhhhh!”
Grandpa Arlo lets the last rush of air fly from the glove through the soggy folds of skin on his stomach, and it’s the loudest, wettest fart I’ve ever heard in my life. It echoes through the emergency ward.
“Whoa-lly Jesus!” Grandpa calls out. “Clear the area. That was some explosive flatulence. Whew!” Grandpa Arlo rips open the curtains and flaps them in the air like a crazy man. “Nobody light a match.”
The nurse, the doctor, and Mom all rush back in.
“What the hell’s going on?” Mom demands.
“I think we might have to make a new diagnosis,” Grandpa says to the doctor as he continues to flutter the curtains. “That boy had more gas than the Hindenburg.”
“Matt? Are you okay, honey?” Mom asks.
I glance up at Grandpa, who gives me the slightest smile.
“I can’t believe it,” I say. “I feel so much better.” I stand up and press my hand into my right side. “There’s no pain at all. It’s like a miracle.”
“DUDE, YOU SHOULD HAVE totally let them take your appendix out,” Coop says. “That would have been awesome.”
“Yeah.” Sean laughs. “Then it would have been the greatest story ever.”
The three of us are hanging out on the roof of my house. We had planned to go to the movies tonight, but Mom says I have to take it easy just in case today’s stomach issue hasn’t been totally resolved. The doctor wasn’t completely convinced that my “gaseous release” solved the problem. If anything, she thinks it might be indicative of a more serious intestinal virus. We promised Dr. Kesler we would keep an eye on it, but really, Mom’s just happy I’m feeling better and eating my usual portions again.
“I wasn’t about to get sliced open just to have a good story to tell.”
“I would have,” Coop says. “And I’d have asked the doctor if I could bring it home in a jar so I could take it to school to gross out Mrs. Zuzzolo.”
Mrs. Zuzzolo is one of our cafeteria ladies and probably the most squeamish person you’ll ever meet. A real, gray, gelatinous appendix in a jar would definitely make her yak.
“That’s nasty, dude,” Sean says.
The night air is sticky, and the sweet smell of our neighbors’ jasmine and honeysuckle bushes drifts up to us. We’re passing around a two-liter Mountain Dew bottle that Coop brought over.
“The whole team totally sucked today,” Coop says, taking a swig from the bottle. “So don’t feel too bad about bailing, dawg. Even if you would have won the fly, it wouldn’t have helped. We came in, like, sixth place. I thought Ms. Luntz was going to have a kangaroo.”
“Yeah,” Sean says. “Halfway through the meet, she Frisbeed her clipboard across the lawn and nearly took off Nicky Bowmester’s zucchini.”
Coop laughs. “You should have seen him dodge that thing. It’d be nice if he was that fast in the pool.”
Coop hands the soda bottle over to Sean, who’s staring at the upstairs window on the Goldsteins’ house. “It’s too bad your neighbors are prehistoric, Matt; you can see right into their bedroom from here.” Sean lifts the bottle to his mouth and drinks.
“Just ’cause they’re old doesn’t mean they still don’t get busy,” Coop says. “I bet if we got some binoculars, we could watch them bang their walkers together.”
“Do not go there,” Sean groans.
“You’re the one who brought it up,” I say, egging Coop on.
Coop taps his temple. “Think about it, dude. The Goldsteins are the same people who were having wild orgies back in the sixties.”
“Ewww.” Sean plugs his ears. “I don’t want to think about it. Talk about something else. Immediately.”
“All right,” Coop says. “Let’s talk about how we’re more than halfway through the summer and we’re still screwed as far as our goal is concerned. And then we can discuss how it’s pretty much all your fault, Matt.”
“Excuse me?” I protest.
“Coop’s right,” Sean says. “I mean, between pooping your pants and sabotaging us at the bikini store, not to mention you’re always busy practicing your stupid butterfly —”
“Facts are facts, dude,” Coop adds. “But fear not. You are looking at the savior of the summer.” Coop pulls a folded-up piece of paper from his back pocket and waves it in the air. “What I’ve got right here is our ticket to heaven. And when I say heaven, I mean a place where countless girls run around without any clothes on.”
“What is it?” I try to grab the paper but Coop pulls it away.
“Ah-ha. Wouldn’t you like to know?”
“Not if you’re going to be a big dick about it,” Sean says.
“I’ll ignore that because I know you’re under the influence of Mountain Dew.” Coop unfolds the page and lays it out on the shingles of the roof. By the moonlight I can make out a topographic map of some woods near the ocean. “What would you say if I told you that this is a map to a nude beach?”
“Seriously?” Sean says.
Coop nods. “This map was e-mailed to me by a very reliable member of Naturists for Life dot com.”
Sean and I both give Coop a questioning look.
“Don’t ask. Anyway, the nude beach happens to be located at Jasper Cove. Which is in Greenhead.”
“Well, that does us no good. Greenhead’s, like, fifty miles away,” Sean says.
“Let me finish,” Coop insists. “As it turns out, my sister happens to be going to Greenhead tomorrow with a friend so they can shop at the outlet stores. And I’ve paid her in advance to give us a ride.” Coop holds up both hands. “It’s okay. There’s no need to bow down.”
Sean grabs the map and studies it. “Holy crap, Coop. You’re the man.”
Coop fakes a yawn and pats his mouth. “In other ne
ws, the sun is hot and math is boring.”
I take the map from Sean and have a closer look. “This could be anywhere,” I say. “How do we know this guy wasn’t just screwing with you? Maybe he’s one of those weirdos who likes to lure young boys to his cabin in the woods.”
Coop snatches the page back. “Trust me. It’s legit. But if you don’t want to go, I’m sure Sean and I can handle seeing all that nude-age on our own.”
“I want to go,” I say. And I do. Because who wouldn’t want to go to a nude beach? “I just don’t want to be sent into the forests and wind up meeting Leatherface. That’s all.”
“Mattie, Matt, Mattington.” Coop sighs and slings his arm around me. “What are we going to do with you? Haven’t you ever heard the saying ‘No risk, no reward’? This is an adventure, buddy. Sometimes you just have to strap in and go for the ride.”
I don’t mind going for a ride; it’s just that any ride with Coop generally turns into a runaway train.
“HER LAST NAME IS NOT BAGGINS, okay?” Sean says, punching Coop in the shoulder. “It’s Beggs. Tianna Beggs.”
“Does she?” I ask.
Sean turns and looks out the backseat window of Angela’s hermitically sealed Toyota. “You know what? Talk to me when you actually have a girlfriend.”
“Oh, so she’s your girlfriend now?” Coop says.
“That’s right.” Sean grins. “We’ve been talking and texting almost every day since the party, and last night I finally asked her out and she said yes. So eat it.”
“But . . . What about poor Valerie? Isn’t she going to be destroyed by this?” Coop laughs.
“One day, when you actually grow up, Coop, you’ll realize that when you have something real, someone like Tianna, you understand the difference between what’s really real and what’s just pie-in-the-sky fantasy.”
Coop turns to me and laughs. “We’ve lost him, Mattie. He’s trapped in the tractor beam of the golden doughnut. We may have to do an intervention.”
“You’re a little pig, Cooper,” Angela says, looking in the rearview mirror. “Keep that filthy trap of yours shut or I’m throwing you out.”
We’re all crammed together in the backseat. It’s taking way longer than it should to get to the beach because Angela drives ten miles under the speed limit to save gas and cut down on the wind damage to her car’s paint job. Britney, Angela’s friend, has been doing her makeup in the sun visor mirror for the entire hour we’ve been driving.