by Tim Tharp
I’ll tell you who is surprised, though—Geech. He absolutely wasn’t expecting such strong backup from Mom. “Uh, well,” he says. “Right. The military academy. That’ll get you straightened out. I’ll check into the cost first thing Monday morning.”
And right then, I know nothing will ever come of it. Anytime Geech starts talking about checking into the cost of something, that’s the end. For all his plumbing-supply money, he’s the original Mr. Cheap.
For now, though, I’m stripped of my car keys and grounded indefinitely. Plus, I have to give Kevin fifty dollars a month till I pay off his suit. That equals out to about two years of indentured servitude. Okay, I can understand the part about the suit, but I try to make the argument that they can’t take away my keys since I’m the one paying for the car.
Do they care about that? No. They’re paying for the insurance, they say. I’ll have to find someone to take me to school—or else ride the dreaded bus—but they admit that they have to let me drive to work and back after school. Which means, since they both work in the afternoons, they’ll actually have to let me keep my keys after all.
“You know, Sutter,” Mom says. “It’s going to take a long time to rebuild our trust in you.”
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I’ll try to make it up to you.” And I am sorry about making her call my friends and the hospitals and all, but I know my mom. Trust in me isn’t real high on her list of priorities. A good trip to the beauty shop next week and she’ll forget all about it.
Chapter 19
Okay, so I had a bad day. I’m not going to let that keep me down for long. I’m not even going to think about it. I mean, having to ride to school with Ricky is not exactly the harshest punishment in the world anyway. And how grounded can I actually be in the afternoons when Mom and Geech aren’t anywhere around? Of course, they say they’ll call and check in with me, but I’ll believe that when it happens.
“Hey, it’s the firebug,” says Ricky when I get into his car on Monday morning. “Burned up any more thousand-dollar suits lately?”
“Very funny, Mr. Goodweed. You know, that never would’ve happened if you hadn’t pawned off that blaze on me.”
He laughs. “Right. That was my master plan, and you fell right into it.”
But like I say, I don’t even want to think about that night, so I change the subject to Ricky’s date with Bethany. Of course, we’ve already hashed it over on the phone once, but I figure he won’t mind doing it again.
“Dude,” he says. “I’m telling you—this is the girl. Everything went perfectly. Except when I had to borrow a couple of dollars off her, but she was even cool about that. I mean, who would’ve thought dinner and a movie would cost so much?”
“Oh, just about anyone who’s gone out on a real date before, that’s all.”
He brushes that off. “The best part was that we could talk about anything. Not just shallow stuff either. We had a pretty deep conversation about religion.”
“Good kisser?”
“Amazing.”
“Tongue action?”
“Oh, dude, she could win state with that tongue.”
It’s tempting to take credit for fixing him up with this Wonder Woman, but I didn’t do it for credit. So instead I move on to the next subject—where we’re going for lunch today.
He pauses.
“What’s the matter?”
“Dude, I can’t make it for lunch today. Bethany and I are going together.”
“You can’t take me along?”
“It’s a little early in the relationship to be dragging a buddy along.”
“I guess.” That’s what I say, but I’m thinking about all the times he third-wheeled it with me and Cassidy.
“Besides,” he says. “Didn’t you say you were having lunch with what’s-her-name, the paper route girl?”
“Oh, yeah. Aimee. I completely forgot about her. Thanks for reminding me, dude. I’d hate to screw her over. She’s too—I don’t know—naive or sweet or whatever.”
Ricky takes his eyes off the road and studies me for a second. “You know what you’re doing, don’t you?”
“What?”
“You’re on the rebound, dude. From what you told me, it sounds like you and this girl don’t have anything in common. You’re just bouncing off Cassidy to the first easy thing that comes along. And I really can’t see you dating this girl. She’s the exact opposite of Cassidy.”
“Dude,” I say. “You couldn’t be more wrong. For one thing, she’s not the exact opposite of Cassidy. The exact opposite of Cassidy would have black hair and brown eyes. And for another thing, I don’t have any interest at all in dating Aimee. None.”
“Then what are you having lunch with her for?”
“Moral support. This girl needs it. She lets her family run all over her. You can see it in her eyes. It’s like she doesn’t think she’s important enough to even stand up for herself.”
“So what are you gonna do, give her a makeover like in the movies where they turn the nerd girl into a raging hottie?”
“No. It’s not about trying to turn her into a hottie. She could never be a hottie. She doesn’t have the attitude—that inner positive charge. You can tell by just looking at her slouchy little duck-footed walk. A real authentic hottie has a completely different way of standing and walking—shoulders back, tits out, ass swaggering. She has to know she’s hot to be hot.
“There’s, like, this whole training process. First off, the other girls fall all over themselves trying to hang out with her. Then she has dudes straggling after her like puppy dogs everywhere she goes, and on top of that, at probably about the age of twelve, she realizes even grown men can’t keep their eyes in their sockets every time she walks by.
“I’m telling you—you could take Aimee’s glasses off, put some bounce in her hair, and stick her in a short red skirt that shows everything but her bo-bo and she’s still going to walk around with her shoulders slouched and a look in her eyes like the world’s getting ready to punch her in the mouth.”
“So what are you going to do, save her soul?”
“Maybe. You never know.”
Chapter 20
A lot of people might consider Algebra II with Mr. Aster—a.k.a. Mr. Asterhole—the most boring place on earth, but my theory is that boredom is only for boring people with no imagination. Sure, if I actually paid attention to Mr. Asterhole’s monotone drone, then I’d be bored too, but there’s not much chance of that.
One of my favorite diversions is Motojet. The motojet is like this sleek silver dirt bike, only it can fly and has these cool machine guns and rocket launchers. When you need some speed, you just kick in the jets and vrooooom! You’re gone.
It’s like I have a whole video game in my head, and instead of sitting in algebra class, I’m out saving the universe, or at least my high school. I don’t know how many times I’ve rescued Cassidy from terrorists and gangsters and evil warlords. Of course, every once in a while, I wreck in some spectacular way, the motojet swooping down out of the evening sky, clipping the top of a water tower, and then smashing out the football stadium lights right before I go flipping end over end across the field in front of the whole student body.
And when I finally roll to a stop against the goal post, you should see the girls running over, bawling their eyes out, to where I lie in an awesome, crumpled, smoldering heap. Even my mom is there. “Don’t worry,” I tell them as the dust settles around my fractured body. “I’m all right. Everything’s fabuloso!”
Today, my motojet mission keeps getting interrupted by thoughts of Aimee. I can’t believe I almost forgot about meeting her for lunch. Now, instead of Motojet, I play a movie in my head of Aimee standing alone outside the cafeteria door, checking her watch, looking at all the people who aren’t me pass her by.
Sutter, I say to myself, you cannot disappoint this girl.
Finally, class ends. I gather up my backpack and start for the door, planning to get to the cafeteri
a pronto so that Aimee doesn’t even have to wait a second. It’s not that easy, though. Before I can escape, Mr. Asterhole calls me to his desk.
“Have a seat,” he says, pointing at the desk directly in front of his desk. “Mr. Keely, I seem to have noticed that once again you didn’t turn in your Monday homework.”
“It was a bad weekend,” I tell him, and he’s like, “Yes, well, you seem to have a lot of those.” With Mr. Asterhole, everything seems to be some way. It never just is.
Unfortunately, instead of yelling at me or something, he decides it seems like a good time to quiz me about what he talked about in class today. Needless to say, I don’t do very well, so he starts in on how it seems that I didn’t listen adequately in class. I check the clock, thinking maybe I can still get to the cafeteria at the same time Aimee does.
But Mr. Asterhole isn’t finished. Now he’s going on about how he has my best interests at heart and how if I fail that means he fails. It seems to him that, to have any hope at all of succeeding in college, I need to have at least a basic understanding of what he’s trying to teach me in this class.
I agree with him wholeheartedly. I’ve been meaning to get my act together, I explain. I’m really going to put the nose to the old grindstone for the rest of the semester. You’d think that would be good enough for Mr. Asterhole, but no, he’s got to go and lay out a problem for me to try my hand at, just to see how bad I am. Which, as it turns out, is pretty bad.
He looks at me over the tops of his glasses. It’s a tsk-tsk look only without the sound effects. “Let me show you how it’s done, Mr. Keely,” he says. “Watch closely.”
And I’m like, Errrrrrrrrg! I can’t believe this. My earlier vision of Aimee alone by the door is turning out to be real. I can just hear her saying to herself, “I should’ve known he wouldn’t come. That’s how everybody treats me.”
“And that’s how it’s done, Mr. Keely,” says Mr. Asterhole, finally. “Does that seem to make sense to you?”
“Yes, sir,” I say. “It sure does. It seems to make a lot of sense.”
By the time I finally get out of there, I’m fifteen minutes late and counting, so I break into a jog. Ms. Giraffe-neckowsky sticks her head out of her history classroom, but I’m too far gone to yell at. A couple of friends—or quasi friends, actually—call out, “What’s the rush, Sutter?” and “Yeah, is there a fire or a party?” But I don’t have time to trade jokes right now.
When I get to the cafeteria, I can’t believe my eyes. There’s Aimee standing by the door alone. She waited. She actually waited. This girl is steadfast. She has faith in the Sutterman.
I slow down to a saunter. “Hey, you’re here,” I say, catching my breath. “Sorry I’m late.”
“That’s all right,” she says, and I have to wonder how many times she’s said that to the people in her life who screwed her over somehow.
“No,” I say. “It’s not all right. But I couldn’t help it.”
Chapter 21
As we walk in to get our pizza, I explain the situation with Mr. Asterhole. It turns out she also had him for Algebra II, but that was about a millennium ago or something since she’s now in AP Calc.
“You probably thought algebra was a breeze,” I say.
And she’s like, “Kind of.” Her voice is so soft. If it were a food item, it’d be a marshmallow.
“Maybe I could get you to tutor me.”
“Okay,” she says, and she has this little near-smile on her face like she thinks something good might actually happen to her but she can’t quite trust it.
Of course, the cafeteria is not the popular hot spot for lunch—I mean, I never go there—so we don’t have any difficulty finding a table. In fact, it’s kind of weird, like an alternate universe where there’s all these students who I never knew existed.
You might think that Aimee and I wouldn’t have much to talk about, but hey, I can talk to anybody. I start off with a story just to relieve her of the load of trying to come up with something to say. It’s one of my favorites, the time Ricky and I took a float trip down the Tuskogee River last summer.
We weren’t exactly bona fide canoeing experts and paid more attention to cracking jokes than navigating, so the occasional rollover was unavoidable. Once, we both ended up in the river with a semi-raging current around us. The canoe started spiraling away downstream, but what did Ricky and I do? We both swam straight for the ice chest. Save the beer at all costs! That was our attitude. Luckily the canoe got hung up on the bank and everything turned out fine.
Aimee’s like, “You guys are crazy,” but you can tell she kind of wishes she could be a little crazy herself sometimes.
“That’s not the craziest part of it,” I say. “The craziest part was when we decided to jump off the bridge.”
“You jumped off a bridge?”
“Of course. And not some puny little bridge either. It was one of those big iron bridges with the framework that arches way up. I mean, it must be about a mile from the top of that framework down to the water. It’s so high you have to watch out for low-flying aircraft up there. Some other dudes were jumping off of it, so we thought, What the hell? Might as well give it a try. We’d had quite a few beers by this time.”
She’s staring at me wide-eyed and rapt as all twelve apostles rolled into one.
“So up we climbed.” I gaze toward the ceiling to hint at just how high we had to go. “But the thing is the farther you climb the more you start to wonder if this is such a good idea. Somehow it looks higher when you’re actually on the bridge compared to when you’re just standing around on the ground staring up. But what can you do? Once you’re on your way, there’s no crawling back down without looking like a complete pussy.”
She nods her understanding, although I’m not so sure girls fully get the whole looking-like-a-pussy dilemma.
“So, anyway, I do the Spider-Man all the way to the very top and take a seat up there in the breeze. And let me tell you, the view’s stupendous as long as you don’t look straight down, which of course, I happen to do. But like I say—there’s no turning back. So I take a humongous breath”—I demonstrate—“and down I go.”
“Did you dive headfirst?”
“Are you kidding? I’m not that crazy. No, I went feet first. And you know what? On the way down I discovered that you have an amazing amount of time to think while you’re in the air. So, there I am, and this idea hits me—what if a canoe comes floating under the bridge? I might plummet straight down and break someone’s neck. You know, it’s like I could take it if I just killed me, but I’d never forgive myself if I killed someone else while I was at it.”
“That’d be awful,” she says.
I gaze back toward the ceiling. “There I am in midair, looking down between my toes, and it’s like the water’s rushing up toward me, and then—whooom! I hit the surface.” I clap my hands and she jerks back.
“Now,” I say, “let me stipulate one thing right here. When jumping off anything high into a body of water, a dude should always remember to keep his legs together at impact. It will be very painful otherwise. I know from experience.”
Pain shoots across her face. She is the absolute best audience ever.
“On top of that, I also didn’t take into account that if you jump from a very high place you are going to shoot very far down into the water. I mean, deep. And I didn’t think to take an extra breath before going under either. So there I am, underwater for what feels like ten minutes. My eyes are bulging. I’m kicking and flailing, nothing but a gray ceiling of water above me. A newspaper headline flashes before my eyes—IMBECILIC
YOUTH PLUNGES TO DEATH FROM TUSKOGEE BRIDGE.
“Then I see it—a pale circle of light shining through the water—and I know I can make it. My head breaks through the water, and sweet, sweet oxygen fills my lungs. Saved!”
I settle back in my chair. “By the time I got to the bank, I was almost sober, and here comes Ricky shooting down from the bridge like an
arrow. ‘Hold your legs together,’ I yelled. But he couldn’t hear me, and splat.” I clap my hands again and she jerks back again.
“Anyway, obviously we both lived to tell the story, but I’m not sure we can have children now.”
Aimee smiles the biggest I’ve seen yet. “Wow,” she says. “That’s about the most amazing thing I ever heard.”
Chapter 22
“So,” I say, picking up a slice of pizza. “How about you? Do you have any good stories?”
She thinks for a moment. “Well, I remember that time we had English together sophomore year, and Mrs. Camp got called out of the room, so you stood up in front of the class and delivered this whole lecture about symbolism in that old movie Dumb and Dumber. You had the whole class cracking up, but Mrs. Camp wasn’t too happy when she came back in.”
“Yeah,” I say. “Dumb and Dumber, that’s like one of my all-time favorite movies.”
“And then there was the time I saw you surfing on the hood of a car and it ran over a curb and you went flying off into a hedge. I thought, Oh my God, he’s dead! But you just jumped right up and got back on the car. Do you remember that?”
“Yeah, vaguely.” It’s kind of flattering that she remembers these things, but I wasn’t looking for more stories about me. “What about you?” I ask. “Don’t you have some stories about yourself?”
She scrunches up her nose. “I’m boring.”
“No, you’re not. Think about it. You’re probably the only person in here who’s out roaming the neighborhoods at five o’clock every morning, even during the school week. I think that’s pretty amazing.”
She smiles. “Well, I guess some things have happened on the paper route that are kind of interesting. There was this one time—I don’t know whether I should tell you this or not.”
“You can tell me anything.”
“It’s kind of gross,” she says. “It happened back when I was twelve.”