Lunchmeat

by Ben D'Alessio

  I was a mope when I got into Mrs. Geiger’s Jeep Cherokee. I didn’t even want to run across the grass and get chased by the Safeties (even though they were even fatter and slower than last year) and took the long way around the blacktop.

  “I told you. I tollld you, Vic, not to trade Venusaur,” Karl said. “No matter what anyone offered you.”

  “I know.”

  “And who did you even get for him?”

  “… Onix.”

  “Onix? Onix?! Vic, I would’ve just given you an Onix. I have, like, three!”

  “They said Venusaur wasn’t that rare. They showed me the list.”

  “Who did? What list?”

  “Jack Yamamoto and Matt Dershowitz. Jack said it was a fair trade.”

  “Jack Yamamoto is full of shit!” I waited for Mrs. Geiger to yell at him for the language, but the scolding never came. “Listen, Vic, from now on, don’t make any trades unless I advise you first.”

  “Okay, thanks, Karl.”

  Although the whole Pokémon craze was growing more insipid for me, the more I replayed my transactional blunders in my head, the more I saw a tiny sliver of a silver lining to the oriental fever that was. The malignants, especially Pierce Stone, were not in any position of power. They had the same starter packs and bought the same booster packs and none of ’em had gotten lucky.

  During Jack Yamamoto’s arbitrations, the malignants stood at the fringes of the jungle gym, not saying a single sarcastic or snide remark; they even let Andrius and Arjun speak without disparaging their accents.

  But of course this one shred of a psychological ballast could not last, not as long as the current regime was administrating Glenwood school. And just like football and rugby shortly thereafter, they stripped the wheeling and dealing of Pokémon cards away from us—we were forbidden to bring them on school grounds.

  The reasoning was to protect the “physical and mental well-being of the students.” There had been one minor tussle between Silas and Brad Knight over the rarity of a Raticate after a transaction had already taken place. Upon examining the card, Silas had decided not to go through with the transaction, but Brad Knight had already declared “no trade-backs,” the equivalent of your signature on a contract. This was one of the more common disputes at the jungle gym, but theirs just happened to get physical. And Jeremy Finklestein, the sock, didn’t help the situation either.

  In his first booster pack, Jeremy had nabbed an Alakazam—a Pokémon with psychic powers. He paraded around the school claiming to have the rarest card in the game. I didn’t think it was the rarest; the thing fought with spoons in his hands. Karl explained that Alakazam fought with his mind instead of weapons—a Short Hills Pokémon, perhaps—and was extremely powerful. But Karl didn’t think Alakazam was rarer than any other holo. And what about my Nidoking? Goodbye, dear friend. He was Pokémon royalty, for Christ’s sake! But Jack Yamamoto’s stamp of approval gave the mind warrior credibility.

  Needless to say, Jeremy attracted much unwanted attention from the rest of the class, who were salivating at the sight of the shimmering card like it was a relic and we, the faithful. Folded-up pieces of loose-leaf would appear on his desk, his lap, or underneath his sneaker, with sometimes as many as three offers listed in smudged pencil. Some of the guys from the other classes caught on to Jeremy’s urination habits and would ask to be excused at around the same time with the hopes of catching him alone in the bathroom. Pierce Stone even told Louis Martino that if he ate the card he would give him fifty bucks and any sandwich he wanted from the Millburn Deli. But Jeremy kept that card close to his heart—literally—in a traveler’s strap he got for his family’s trip to Cozumel.

  Paxton even said that Jeremy’s mom came to Glenwood and could be heard shouting in the principal’s office that Jeremy had to see a psychologist because of the damage these cards were doing to his psyche. That was the last straw; the cards were prohibited the next day.

  But come on, you think some bureaucrats who had never thumbed through a freshly opened pack of cards could stop us? I considered slipping a booster pack under the principal’s door to try and get her hooked. We just went underground with the operation—an organic black market.

  First we brought our binders stuffed in our backpacks instead of carrying them around as trophies like Romans during a triumph, and we only conducted transactions under the cover of a swirly slide or oak tree. But that didn’t last; one monster of a trade between Maine Ogden and Matt Dershowitz garnered so much attention at the top of the jungle gym that the kids were climbing up the slide and the siding just to bear witness. Mrs. Lydell stormed up the steps like Godzilla, snatching strewn cards out of the air like they were fighter jets—Jack Yamamoto barely escaped with his life.

  So we adapted. Binders were out. Most of the cards in each respective binder weren’t placed on the trading block anyway. Everyone just had a few queried cards that could be hidden deep in pockets, in socks, in underwear. We met in bathrooms, designating a time before the Pledge of Allegiance to meet in the stalls—Pokémon fever forced me to learn how to tell time.

  “Vic? Vic, that you?” asked Kevin Liu from the adjacent stall.

  “Yeah, it’s me.”

  “Alright, do you have who we talked about?”

  Despite my rookie mistakes during the first couple weeks of the fever, I had since amassed a roster of desirable cards by following Karl’s advice and with some luck from the boosters. “Listen, Kevin, I don’t know if…”

  “Vic, come on, we discussed this yesterday.” Kevin wasn’t lying, but after our negotiation I had discussed it with Karl to get a second opinion, and he vehemently opposed the trade. He used words like “moronic,” “idiotic,” and “asinine.” But I had already set up the meeting with Kevin Liu, so I met him in the bathroom for the rush of it all, and to escape Mrs. Sherman’s arithmetic assault. “Are we doing this or what? I can’t wait any longer because you were late.”

  I left the stall. “Sorry, Kevin, I can’t. My advisor said I shouldn’t.”

  “Advisor? Who? Jack? He doesn’t know anything. You just listen to him ’cause he’s Japanese!” I was already opening the door to leave. “Vic? Vic?! Vic!”

  “Excuse me,” asked Mrs. Kay, a formidable fourth-grade teacher with the crackling, stretched-out skin of a witch. “What were you doing in there? Who is that yelling? Is this about those cards?”

  “I don’t know,” I said and walked back to my classroom—Pokémon fever forced me to lie to teachers.

  In the movies, the priest and the penitent had always stepped into separate boxes and been separated by a screen, as if they were in cages or looking through chainmail. But when Sister Irene opened and guided me through the confessional door, there was only an empty seat directly in front of the priest.

  Father Dorner was a red-faced man with a few tawny hairs sprouting from his oval melon; when I squinted he reminded me of Mr. Conehead. By the time I sat down he had already pushed his glasses up his nose three times. The spectacles seemed to be in a state of perpetual drooping, like snow sliding down the side of a mountain.

  He stared back at me.

  “…”

  “…”

  He stared still, as if I was supposed to begin.

  “…”

  “…”

  I sat back in the chair and let my feet dangle and scoped out the bare walls with an overlooking Christ.

  Ehh humph… Father cleared his throat.

  I was supposed to begin!

  “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”

  He pushed the glasses up his nose, his frames beginning to fog. “Tell me your sins, my son.”

  We were supposed to be thinking about our sins while waiting in the pews for our turns to confess, but I had been distracted by the chronological paintings depicting the events of Christ’s passion and asking myself why my fath
er so revered the Romans if they killed Jesus?

  Ehh humph.

  “I, uh… I’m sorry for, uh… throwing rocks at squirrels.”

  “Mhmm.”

  “And snowballs at cars.”

  “Mhmmmmm.”

  “And, uh…”

  The Roman legions were formidable military units, but I doubt I’d pick one as my champion to battle the Green Knight in the pit.

  Ehh humph.

  I doubt the javelin—or pilum—would hold up against a well-wielded halberd or battle-ax.

  Ehh humph!

  “I’m sorry for being mean to Britney.”

  “And who’s Britney?”

  “My sister.”

  “Mhmm.”

  “Sometimes I take Marlene from her—that’s her stuffed horse—and run around the house, and she can never catch me because I’m like Deion in the dining room, and this one time she stubbed her toe near the fireplace and started to cry and I ran away instead of saying ‘I’m sorry’ and getting her ice. I felt bad.”

  “Mhmm.”

  “I’m sorry we don’t come to church more often.”

  “What?!” The priest’s face had puffed like helium in a big red balloon.

  “Yeah, my mom says she went to Catholic school so she’s prayed enough for one lifetime.”

  “This… this… this is unacceptable!”

  “Father, is the holy water near the front door holy miracle water or just holy regular water?”

  “What?” The priest bounced in his seat like he was in a car without a seatbelt. “Okay, just, just let me…” And he raised his hand over my head so close that I could see the crisscrossings of lines on his palms, closed his eyes, and began to absolve me of my sins.

  “Eeeek tal’alla mande, eeeek tal’alla mande,” I started to say under my breath.

  “What? What is that? Are you speaking in tongues?”

  “I’m not supposed to say…”

  “No! Just… don’t say anything. Ehh humph. Heavenly Father, Victor here…” And he spoke to God for me and said all I had to do to be absolved of my sins was to say four Our Fathers and four Hail Marys.

  Easy enough?

  I thought so, until I knelt before the sepulcher, ready to let my sins flow out of me like a river, and drew a blank.

  “Hail Mary who areth in Heaven, hallowed be thy grace… Hail Mary of Heaven full of grace, hallowed be thy name… Hail Father full of Mary…”

  I had choked on the biggest stage of all. Forget fourth and goal with ten seconds left against Livingston. Forget not being able to write the sequel to my best-selling epic; I froze in front of God. I continued to fumble around with the prayers about Jesus or Jesus’s father or my father (but the priest was Father, too?), and Jesus’s mother or God’s wife, or both?—I needed to talk with my CCD teacher after class and get this family tree squared away.

  A kid from Hartshorn had knelt next to me after emerging from Father McManus’s confessional and seemed to have a real handle on the prayers. I peeked out in my periphery to try and read his lips, like I did with Arjun during Mrs. Sherman’s mental math massacres, but I couldn’t make out a thing.

  “Psst. Psssst.”

  “Huh?”

  “Hey, can you just tell me the first part? I think if I get it right from the beginning I’ll be able to figure it out from there.”

  “…”

  “Come on.”

  “…”

  “I need absolution too. You’re not the only sinner. Hey… wait, don’t go.”

  I looked over my shoulder and could see Sister Irene squinting from beyond the first bank of pews, shaking her head as if to say, “No chance saving that one.”

  Looking up at the hanging crucifix, I said, “I’m sorry for everything,” and left to find my mother in the pickup line.

  Mrs. Mason’s babies died. The school called my house and I could hear my mother scream from the kitchen as I sat on the basement couch, thumbing through my holos. The slight superiority I felt over the malignants for those few short months faded by the end of the school year. New World Manga and other card stores started selling holos individually—they had them displayed in glass cases at the counter—and my good luck with the booster packs was rendered null. The malignants’ purchasing power was too strong and I couldn’t compete. Pierce Stone would spread out five fresh holos in his hands like a magician spreads a deck of cards, glittering and protected in clean plastic cases.

  My father almost steered the station wagon onto the sidewalk when I asked if I could buy a single Dragonite card for twenty bucks—“Twenty bucks for one card?! Maanuggia! Straight to the poor house!”

  My father’s frugality was a trait of envy among the Jews and Indians of Millburn-Short Hills, according to my brother and George. As a child, when I would insist on being put in one of those racecars or spaceships planted outside of supermarkets that required a quarter in order to shake and shimmy in place, my father would instead use his brute force to move the vessel, saving the coin for a rainy day.

  We were frequently told we could only buy something during a full moon—my brother and I would crane our necks out the back window of the station wagon, sulking at the sight of a waxing crescent—and if we ever neglected to turn off a light after departing a room, my father would ask, rhetorically, if he, in fact, owned the “electric company.”

  My mother came down to the basement and joined me on the couch.

  “Hello, my prince.”

  “Hey Mom, what does ‘hypnosis’ mean?”

  “It’s a type of mind control, I guess. Hey Victor, are you happy?”

  “Well, I made this trade with Silas, and I gave him my Machamp for his Clefairy, which, according to this list…”

  “No, Vic, I mean… are you a happy kid?”

  “Yeah. Pierce Stone traded my Nidoking to Jack Yamamoto…”

  “He stole it from you?”

  “No, I traded it to Maine Ogden, who… At least, I think it was him.”

  “Is that kid still giving you problems, Vic?”

  “Maine is my friend…”

  “No, no, that Pierce kid.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You can tell me, honey.”

  But before I could respond, the list of Pokémon and their rarity rankings began to glow and shift before my eyes, as if I was suddenly able to translate a tablet of hieroglyphs. “It’s alphabetical order! Mom, don’t you see, this list isn’t how rare they are, it’s just in alphabetical order.” I started reading the names aloud as if she didn’t believe me. “Alakazam, Blastoise, Chansey, Charizard…”

  “Vic, what about…”

  “Mom, I gotta go tell Karl. I’ll be back for dinner.”

  I sprinted out the back door, following the snaking patio that surrounded my house, up the hill and across the Geigers’ front lawn, waving the list of Pokémon in the air like it was a telegram stating that the king was dead.

  Karl was dumbfounded, not by my revelation, but that he hadn’t caught it himself. My new information shook things up on the black market thriving in the bathrooms and hallways of Glenwood Elementary.

  Jeremy Finklestein defended the worth of his Alakazam like a used-car salesman defends a lemon, but nobody was buying it, especially not Jack Yamamoto, who lost credibility himself due to his negligent oversight of the list.

  But my reputation of status-quo hellion was short-lived, for summer was upon us, and second grade came to an end.

  Everyone talked about their summer plans: the WASPs went to tropical islands and the Jews went to sleepaway camps, Michaela Silves went to Portugal to see her grandmother, and Andrius headed back to see family in the magical land of Lithuania. I was headed to Gettysburg. Yeah, I would go back to Ocean City that summer, but no matter how many times I told myself it was an is
land, I still felt like I was missing something—if only they planted a few damn palm trees.

  “The most important battle of the Civil War!” my father reasoned. “The peak of the Confederate offensive.”

  I was much more interested in the battles between the medieval kingdoms of Europe, but the chance of finding some bones or abandoned weapons in Pennsylvania did excite me, and at least during the Civil War some soldiers, like generals, still wielded swords in battle.

  So my dad took me, Karl, and my cousin Derek to witness the carnage from the most significant battle in the American Civil War.

  There are no bones left in Gettysburg.

  On the third day of Britney’s fever, my mother started to worry; I could hear the crack in her voice that always meant something terrible was close. “It just won’t break,” she would repeat, as if a fever were something you could snap in half over your knee.

  It was the part of November when the days got shorter, when it really started to get cold, signaling that fall was leaving us.

  My mother threw open the door to Britney’s room and rushed to the telephone in the kitchen, mumbling something under her breath that I couldn’t comprehend. I poked my head inside and was hit with the stench of hot air. I had to squint through the tiny glow of the night-light to make out my sister’s shape hidden beneath the blankets.

  “Brit?”

  It sounded like she tried to say something but was interrupted by a sharp cough that ended with her wincing in pain. I walked to the bedside and placed my hand over her forehead. She was hot like the kitchen radiator I accidentally touched in our old house.

  I could hear my mother yelling and walked out into the hall and peeked around the corner. “I’m not overreacting! It’s a goddamn hockey game. I don’t know why you have to be there… No… no, I don’t give a shit. I’m taking her to the hospital. Okay, just meet me there.”