Dear Life, You Suck (5 page)

They both stop wriggling immediately. I shove them onto stools on opposite sides of the table. “Now get back to your potato peeling while I get the meat going.”

The melee’s over by the time Sister Sarah runs into the room. “What the devil is going on in here?” she yelps like a Chihuahua.

“No problem, Sister Sarah,” I say, dumping a bucket of ground meat into a sauté pan the size of a saucer sled. “A runaway spud caught Archie in the forehead.”

The Little Ones bury their giggling faces in their shirts.

“Well, try to be more careful, Archie,” she says.

“Yeah, Archie, potatoes don’t grow on trees, you know.” I turn to Sister Sarah. “Musta been an Irish potato, Sister. Mean-spirited little spuds. And even meaner after they’ve tossed back a pint.”

Sister Sarah stares at me like I just spoke Swahili, shakes her head, and leaves the kitchen.

Once the meat’s sizzling hot and greasy, I grab a stool between Sam and Archie. “Listen up, ladies. I’m gonna edumacate you on the intricacies of the finer sex.”

“Huh?” Sam says, rubbing the back of his head.

“Tits and ass, Einstein,” I say.

The Little Ones laugh.

“Girls are tough to meet, right? Like, it’s tough to just walk up to a girl and start talking to her.”

“It’s ’cause they’re never alone,” Justin says. “There’s always like fifty million of them clumped together in a circle.”

“That’s true. And you know what all fifty million of them are talking about?” The boys all shake their heads. “You! They’re talking about boys. That’s all girls ever talk about. Now think about it. If you trash-talk one of your pals, how many other girls are gonna hear what you said?”

“Fifty million,” Archie grumbles, glaring at Sam.

“Exactly. Fifty million girls are gonna hear that shit in five minutes flat, ’cause girl gossip travels at the speed of light.”

“So what are we supposed to do?” Justin asks from behind his flour-dusted spectacles.

“You gotta tag-team girls like in professional wrestling. You talk to a girl for your buddy, and then he’ll do the same for you. Get them alone in class or study hall and tell them something cool or smart or brave your buddy did. You know, talk your pal up, make him look good. ’Cause even if that particular chick don’t go for you, news of that cool thing you did will travel at the speed of gossip, and fifty million girls will know about it by the end of the day.”

“Is that what you do, Cricket?” Bernie asks. “To get girls. Have your friends talk to them for you?”

Andrew speaks without looking up from the garlic clove he’s peeling. “Cricket don’t got no friends.”

The table goes dead silent. Andrew looks up and his face goes white. “I mean . . .”

“Don’t worry about it, Andrew. For me, not having friends is a choice. Besides, I got friends. But we ain’t talking about me—we’re talking about you, you little shitstains.”

The Little Ones choke out half-laughs.

“Now, as I was saying . . .”

“Cricket!” Andrew yells, pointing at the cooktop.

Smoke’s billowing out of my beef pan. I run over, turn the heat down, and stir like crazy. When it’s done, I dump it into a large mixing bowl. “No worries, just a little well done.” I slide the bowl onto the worktable. “Now, where was I?”

“You were teaching us how to tag-team girls,” Sam blurts just as Sister Gwendolyn returns from the basement.

Sister G blushes and scurries into a walk-in freezer. I pick up a spud and start peeling. “The other thing you can do is talk to a girl about something she and your buddy have in common. Like if a girl’s really into kickball, tell her how your buddy kicked a grand slam in the last game you played.”

“What if you stink at kickball?” Aaron asks.

“I’m just using kickball as an example, Wienerschnitzel. It don’t matter what you talk about, so long as it’s something she’s into. It could be friggin’ astrophysics.”

“What if you like a girl that you don’t have anything in common with?” Gregory asks.

I toss the peeled spud onto the pile. “In that case, you resort to the more traditional method of scoring chicks. You lie your ass off.”

The Little Ones crack up.

“But the main reason you never trash-talk your pals is ’cause any chick with half a brain knows real friends don’t trash-talk their friends behind their backs. So never do it. All it does is make you look like a first-class dickhead.”

Just as I say “dickhead,” the boys’ eyes rise to something behind me, and their faces go white as flour.
Shit
. I turn and Mother Mary’s standing right behind me with her enormous arms crossed over her enormous chest.

“I’m sorry, Cricket,” she says calmly. “I didn’t mean to interrupt. Please continue. You were saying?”

The Little Ones drop their heads and return to their work.

Sister G walks over, clapping her hands. “Come on, boys, let’s get the lasagna finished so we can get everything in the freezer. While you’re layering the ingredients, I’ll tell you a nice Bible story.”

The Little Ones groan, and Sister G pounds the table with a wooden mallet to shut them up.

I wrap a dishtowel around my neck and mime a lynching behind Sister G’s back.

While we layer and ladle, she tells the Parable of the Lost Son. It’s this long-ass tale about a father who gives his two sons their inheritance, and one of them stays home and works for his dad while the other one heads for the hills and blows all his cash on booze and hookers. The party kid finally returns home, and his father throws a big bash for him because he thinks his son has had some grand spiritual awakening, when really the kid just came home ’cause he ran out of dough. Jesus should have named the story the Parable of the Gullible Father.

I nudge Gregory Bullivant, flash him a wink, and raise my hand. “Sister Gwendolyn, may I ask a question about the story?”

“Certainly, Cricket—what is it?”

I speak in my best phony-baloney little kid voice. “What’s a harlot?”

The Little Ones look from me to Sister Gwendolyn. A few of the older ones bite their lips and look at the floor.

She glares at me through crinkled eyes. “A harlot is a woman who has strayed from God, Cricket. Now let’s get the lasagna finished and the potatoes in the pots.”

“Strayed how?” I ask innocently. “What do harlots do?”

Sister G’s face tightens. “There are many ways people stray from God, Cricket.”

I keep going. I want to see how much hot air I can pump into Sister G’s already overinflated patience balloon. “Would a man kill his best calf and throw a big party if his long-lost harlot came home?”

Sister G clears her throat and wipes her forehead with the back of her hand. “I’ll be happy to talk to you privately after dinner, Cricket. Now let’s get the lids on the sauce tins so we can get things cleaned up.”

I raise my hand again. “Sister Gwendolyn?”

Sister Gwendolyn’s face is as red as the lasagna sauce, and her lips are tight and white. “No more questions, Cricket. It’s time to clean up.”

“But I’m confused. When I was living in Boston, daddies didn’t welcome their harlots home with open arms and throw big parties for them after they ran away with their money. They mostly just beat them silly and put them back to work on the streets. Are city harlots different from Bible harlots, Sister Gwendolyn?”

Sister Gwendolyn grabs me by the bicep and leads me out of the kitchen.

After the Ragamuffin Resort goes silent for the night, I pull on the most ridiculous recycled rags I own, fill my thermos with lodka and venomade, roll a pregnant Tijuana bush baby, and sneak down the fire escape to spend some quality time in the great outdoors with my good pal Ignatius Podiddle. Mr. P is my iPod, a birthday gift from Grubs, courtesy of his five-finger discount. He showed me how to download free tunage on the Prison computer. I hope the FBI doesn’t show up and arrest Mother Mary Misappropriation.

I race across the moonlit lawn toward the giant wooden staircase that scales the treacherous cliff to my Silky Jets. No, my Silky Jets isn’t some Civil War–era Studio 1854 discotheque. My Silky Jets is just a jetty. A giant heap of granite boulders that at night feels like a mile-long balance beam suspended between here and hereafter.

No one ever comes to my jetty. It’s on private property owned by the servants of God, and you have to walk down a ten-thousand-step staircase to get to it. Even the Little Ones avoid my peacetime peninsula. They’re afraid to walk it during the day, let alone in the almighty black.

The jetty’s awesome at night. It makes you feel like you’re on the tip of a forever-long catwalk with the moon moonbeaming your thoughts to every living soul in the universe. Of course, the crackling cannabis and gloss sauce might have something to do with my star-studded perspective. Okay, that’s a lie. Not a lie. More like an
imagination fabrication
. The only reason I can perform my crazy, freestyle, bootilicious rumpus ruckus is ’cause I know there ain’t a soul on the planet peering at my primordial tangotations. Maybe that’s why I like it here so much. The blackness. I ain’t never been anywhere with so much black. Except maybe Boston. The only other way to bury yourself in this much darkness stretching into this much forever is to close your eyes, but that emptiness doesn’t come with hurricane gusts, salt spray, and surf sighs. I love my jetty. I’d live out here if I could.

I always chill at the last rock on the left ’cause it’s got the biggest dance floor and the best view. I jam my earbuds in and start with Eminem. Then some Linkin Park and Everclear. You may have surmised by my carefree lifestyle and happy-go-lucky attitude that I am a student of the dance and the earthly rhythms that birthed her. No?
Beaucoup de strange
.

If this was all there was, things might be okay. This and my fire escape. Fluid and fog to raise me up, Matisyahu. Ultimate darkness to make me invisible. Kick-ass tunage to drown out ancient sounds.

Before long, I’m down to my boxers and boots, spinning and spinning and spinning, and I swear, one of these nights the spinning’s gonna rocketship my ass into outer space by the centrifugal force of my own insanity.

I’ll tell you one thing, though. If there is a God, He dances. He dances His omniscient ass off! I guaranfuckintee it. That Son-of-a-Biscuit can cut a serious rug.

After a while, I crash on a boulder and dangle my goosebumpy legs over the bellicose brine. My head’s swaying more than the sea on account of I guzzled too much whoop soup.

I pull out my earbuds and close my eyes. The only sound is the waves on the rocks. It’s a great sound. Deep, heavy monster sighs. It’s funny to think that the same waves will be rolling over the same rocks long after I’m gone. The ocean snores my gray matter to sleep and awakens some silver. I imagine the rock breaking off and drifting away with me on it, like the iceberg does for Hermey the Dentist and the gang in
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
.

Of course, my iceberg doesn’t find a distant shore. My iceberg finds the black unknown. That darkness in the middle of nowhere, where things are calm. Calm and final. It could work. Me and Hermey ain’t that different. A couple of goofy cartoon characters. Scribbled ideas on scraps of paper. Except my comic strip doesn’t have a happy ending. My story got torn out of its notebook, crumpled up, and three-pointed into the nearest trash bin.

A wave splashes over my boots, and I open my eyes. The water’s almost to the surface of the dance floor. Almost high enough to swoop in and carry me off like I’m a happy-go-lucky dwarf dentist. Maybe it’d be for the best.

Of course, there’s a flipside to that cliffhanging coin. Death might be like in horror movies. Which is why I’m still here. Ain’t that a heart-ripping, brain-twisting, pickle-poking puzzle? Fear of staying makes you wanna go, but fear of going makes you wanna stay. Well, shiver me timbers, Captain Complexity.

Ah, fuck it
. I don’t need to decide anything tonight. D-Day’s still eight months away. I grab my stuff and head home.

The following day, Foxy Moxie shocks the shiitake mushrooms out of me with her response to my Dear Life letter. I expected to be confronted at the entrance by a flapping gaggle of school officials, police, paramedics, and psychologists waving straitjackets and testicular jumper cables. Instead, mild-mannered Moxie simply slips the marked-up letter onto my desk with a smile, then pirouettes away in footwear that could easily be mistaken for two of Janitor Menken’s mop heads.

She does corrections with an old-fashioned fountain pen that dispenses way more ink than necessary. Her swirly penmanship reminds me of the Declaration of Independence. Her comments blow the wax out of my ears. She’s all patronizing and inquisitive like I wrote a letter to the lunch lady complaining about the size of the toenail clippings in the chicken gumbo.

Dear Life,

You SUCK!

I want out.

See you on the flipside.

Sincerely,

Cricket

Wonderful choice of recipient!!!

Excellent start but needs more detail.

Specificity!

What in particular sucks?

Why do you want out?

What do you imagine awaits you on the flipside?

Regards,

M. Lord

What the hell’s she playing at?
How come she didn’t psychoanalyze my letter like a typical tight-ass adult and have a mental conniption? She’s a teacher, for Christ’s sake. She’s at least supposed to pretend to care. If not about me, then about herself. Isn’t she worried about the backlash from one of her students telling her he’s gonna push the F THIS CRAP button on the Afterworld Elevator? She’d get canned for sure if someone found this bloody letter pinned to my stiff corpse.