Authors: M. T. Anderson
Burger Wuss (2 page)
“They should just hide their faces in their paper crowns,” said Jenn.
“But good luck,” said Rick. “Really. That’ll be jump if you end up at OD’s.”
“Jump,” I said. “Yeah.”
It was evening. My father was sitting on the kitchen counter, talking to my mother. I was walking up and down the stairs for exercise. I was improving my calves
and hams. The telephone rang. I had just reached the landing for the twenty-fourth time.
My mother called up to me, “It’s Mike from O’Dermott’s.”
I went down and got the phone. I took it into the living room. It was portable, so I could also hear WMTA and Mrs. Gravitz from next door.
“Hi,” I said. “This is Anthony.”
“That’s the neighbor’s boy,” said Mrs. Gravitz distantly to her daughter. They kept up their conversation in a mumble.
Through the static, Mike said, “Hi, Anthony. I’m calling to say you got the job.”
“That’s great!” I said. “I’m really looking forward to this.”
“We’re glad to have you as part of the O’Dermott’s team.”
I wanted to make a good impression. I said, “I, like I’m so glad to be part of it. I wouldn’t want to be at Burger Queen. Have you heard, they just got some kind of . . . have you heard about their troll?”
There was a silence. Mrs. Gravitz buzzed like locusts.
Mike said, “Troll? I don’t know about a troll.”
I said quickly, “Their troll . . . with ketchup?”
“Oh,” said Mike. “That’s what we call in the business a promotional condiment dump. It’s a fine piece.”
“Oh,” I said. “Okay.”
“Well, Anthony. Why don’t you come by at two on Saturday? Then you can undergo trainage.”
So that was it. I wrote down the time on a pad and
read it back to him. I didn’t want to make any mistakes. Mrs. Gravitz said she’d remind me.
It was a good thing that Mike — or anyone else empowered to make hiring decisions — could not look inside my mind. The day I found out about my rosy O’Dermott’s future, my head was going a mile a minute. A psychic Mike might have detected a certain strangeness. It was good he could not read my thoughts. I paced in my room. I had decided it was important to hide any outward signs that might make people like him suspicious. That was part of my scheme. I was just pacing. Nothing strange about that. I guess my teeth were sort of grinding. And when I got particularly angry, I caught myself making a kind of barking sound. I kicked the furniture a little. I occasionally pounded on the desk and cried, “Why, why,
why
?” But otherwise, outwardly calm. And this is what I thought:
Okay so I am angry, okay so I am not thinking very logically, but the time is past for being logical, and now it’s high time for no more Mr. Nice Guy. Being Mr. Nice Guy got me exactly jack, I can tell you — everyone saying I’m such a sweet kid, it got me nothing but screwed over, and I mean big time. It’s time to drop-kick nice. Forget it. What I need now is revenge, and revenge is what I’m going to get — yes! What I really need is a plan.
She is wonderful for so many reasons, and luck, you bet it was luck to have her fall in love with me in the first place, considering who I am, which is not anyone much, being that I don’t have many friends and am thought a freak by what I guess are all and sundry. But I have a heart and yes I loved her and the reasons just started with these:
• She was so beautiful when I first saw her: dressed all in green like an elf of the forest, as if she should have been playing a mandolin, perching in an apple tree, her uniform as she bagged my fries sparkling in the light, and as I said to her, looking at the smoothness of her face, “I have exact change,” the smell of the burgers wafted across us like strands of her flaxen hair in mountain winds.
• She was haughty for some time, by which I mean she didn’t pay any attention to me when we passed in the halls, which is not surprising because I am not anybody, I mean not one of the rich or the handsome or the pierced or the shaved — and her not recognizing me in the hall, which I guess made sense, seeing that our only conversation had been about
— a Big O sandwich
— six piece nuggets
— small fries
— medium chocolate shake
— (exact change)
her not recognizing me in the hall, as I said, made me want to speak to her even more, so that after the talent show, when everybody finally saw me and knew what I really could do and what I had inside me, when she came over and complimented me on my act as The Laughing Contortionist, I actually had the spit and guts to ask her out on a date, which we went on, and she said I was a riot and we had like this great time and pizza.
• She had like the most beautiful smile. It was perfect in every way. It lit up the whole of her face and made her cheeks to dimples.
• None of her teeth were hers. The real ones were knocked out on some steps several years ago. The guy got away with her wallet and her mother’s purse. All of the new teeth were made of an unusual and sexy plastic polymer. I am telling you, those new teeth were perfect in every way.
• She had an enormous appetite. She was not a very large girl but she could put away a very large pizza. I am telling you, she ate with gusto. At first we were going slice for slice, and then she started lapping me, and soon I had all this admiration for her like when cowboys meet a dame who can not only hold shots of tequila better than they can but can eat the dead worm too.
Being around her can be summed up like this: She convinced me to do things I never would have done. When I think about my life before I met her it’s mostly a landscape of video games, movies, hanging out, eating chips, not buying things, saying, “What’s up?” saying, “Nothing,” saying, “Yeah, man,” and going on the occasional incompetent high-impact sports spree with Rick, for instance the homemade bungee jump we named “Mother’s Tears.”
Before her, my life was dull, and I knew I was safe, safe, safe. I was going crazy, things were so safe. I would look out the window on hot nights and know,
out there, people are living.
By living I guess I meant making out and cow-tipping. I would be like,
I am trapped in here, in my own safe little life, but I am a teenager and this is supposed to be the time when I am really living,
and I would pace in circles trapped inside the house, and drink all of the orange juice, and pace some more thinking about popular kids in fast cars, and I’d go to the basement and turn on the Game-Brat and wallop orcs until the screen was green with blood.
But she changed all that. I had this suspicion that she lived whatever life she wanted to. I knew she hung out with the kids who all the gossip was about. The good-looking kids. The kids who laughed in the halls. I imagined the parties, the ski trips, the beach runs. I wanted unusual things to happen to me. I was a little afraid of her, because I thought they were already happening to her. I thought I was too nice. Too quiet. Too shy.
The second time we went on a date, we were driving home from the mall, and I was frightened by her, and I was wondering how I was going to bring up the subject of Am I allowed to kiss you?, when she told me to pull over, and I saw some kids vandalizing a sign, and I thought,
No way am I pulling over,
but she said, “Pull over,” and I didn’t want to seem like I was afraid when she wasn’t, so I pulled over.
I shouldn’t have worried, because they were just these kids who had been going around town correcting all the grammatical errors on signs, which Diana thought was hilarious. When we stopped them, they were working on:
Diana talked to them. She was so enthusiastic about their work on the posters for Berringer’s Contact Lense Bananza that they let us travel around with them that night, let us take them from place to place in my parents’ car, the four of them in the back seat (they were skinny) and the two of us up front, which was an adventure, and was amazing, except that one of them licked the velour armrest just to be freaky. We drove around and told jokes and laughed. The moon was out. When we stopped, we could hear rodents in the grass and bushes. We were doing what they called a major strike, which meant going around the town border to every sign that said “Billingston:
A Great Place to Live In,” and fixing what they called its dangling preposition. We’d pull over, get out. There’d be the rattle of the ball in the spray can, then the cool hiss, the look of cross-eyed attention on their scrawny faces, and then the can lids being popped back on. Presto:
I thought at first that Diana knew them, but it turned out she didn’t, she had just heard about them, and we had both seen them around at school but hadn’t noticed them, because they were just four more skinny kids in plaid shirts, but Diana was so amazing that it was like she had always known them. She laughed at all their jokes and when I was driving them around I would turn my head quickly to catch a glimpse of her, and she would be looking at me in this way, like she was admiring me for driving them. I was shy with all of them around. I was quiet. But her eyes were friendly when she looked at me.
They asked me to drive over to the town forest. I did whatever they said. It was on the other side of town. Our windows were open, and we could smell the wet hay. It was so sweet it was stuffy.
At the entrance to the town forest, there was a parking area for the ski and hiking trails. They told me to park there. I did.
We walked into the woods. We could see everything that night, because of the moon. One of them had seen some bad grammar in the woods a few days before. We had to walk about a mile to get to the grammar. Diana and I were walking in the middle of them. They were all around us, reciting the dialogue from a Japanese cartoon. They knew it all by heart. I guess it had been dubbed, because when they recited it, they moved their mouths even when they weren’t talking. I asked how far we were going. One of them said, “We’re almost there.” We kept on walking.
In the woods was a giant concrete wall. I don’t know what it protected. Something governmental, I guess. One of the four said, “There it is.” It was in blue spray paint. It said:
They all started laughing. They slapped each other on the shoulder blades. They slapped us. I thought they were going to choke. “An apostrophe! An apostrophe! Oh, that’s rich! . . . Like it . . . ha ha ha ha ha! . . . like it . . . ha ha ha ha! . . . takes the genitive!” Two of them fell on the ground.
Diana and I had to stand against the wall, side by side, while two of them climbed up on us to reach the apostrophe. They sprayed it out. I could feel Diana’s shoulder against mine. She wiggled it. Her arms were bare. I couldn’t tell if she was trying to get closer to me or trying to get farther away so we
wouldn’t touch. I thought about saying something to her, about how close we were. I guess it wasn’t a very good moment, though. There was a rotting sneaker (size ten) on either side of my head. That’s not a romantic thing for people.
Walking back through the forest, Diana and I fell behind. They were ahead, reciting comedy sketches in some kind of Viking accent. We could see their long, thin bodies hopping all over the path.
I said, “I’m glad we did this. For me, this is adventure.”
She said, “It is for me, too. I never do this kind of thing.”
“That’s — I mean, I’m surprised. I thought you did this kind of thing all the time.”
She said, “I don’t go out much.”
“What about with all those kids you hang out with? Jeff and Sue and Mark and stuff?”
“No. They get boring fast. Really fast. All they care about are their cars and their beach parties. I’m like, is this all there is to life? Some day I want to be out there, really
living.
”
Diana and I were walking side by side. The pine woods were darker than the rest of the forest. It didn’t make any sense not to touch her. I thought she probably wanted me to make a move. I thought she was waiting.
I am not sure what it is that finally allows people to just turn to each other and touch. There is some hidden trigger. There is a secret language people
learn, so they can signal to stop talking and just move. I don’t know it.
So instead I kept talking. I said, “I always thought you were someone things happened to.”
“What sorts of things?”
“You know. I thought you led a life of risk and adventure.”
She shrugged. “Here’s what I know: People will think that, if you have a certain kind of hair.”
My brain was racing. I was thinking of her in a new way. I was trying to picture her as being this person who longed for some adventure, just like me, and now I really wanted to kiss her, especially because it seemed like she might be lagging behind with me on purpose. The idea that she might be thinking about me and how she wanted to kiss my face, my face behind which was a brain wanting to kiss hers — I am telling you, that idea was like this new force of gravity pulling me silently toward her like in an asteroid disaster film where there’s an asteroid flying around at a billion miles an hour and of all the places it could go in outer space like