Out of Order (10 page)

This one, though, it's got a story. I just don't know what it is because it's in a foreign language. I'm pretty sure it's along the same lines as the cartoon, though, because it's got a beautiful lady in a big-skirted dress and a guy with beast-type makeup on. And I know it's a romance, because Grace's got that same soft-eyed, almost-crying look she gets during epic smooch fests, where for the next few days it's like you're being measured against some pretty-boy actor who got his lines written for him, while you're on your own.

I put my arm along the back of the couch, not actually around Grace, but as close as I can get without Mom coming in and clearing her throat at me. And after a while Grace is up against me, leaning against my chest. Looks like saying I love this movie gained me some points. All lights are on, of course. Still, to be with Grace I'd sit bolt upright watching a movie in Swahili, if it came down to it.

The only problem comes when Cass and Anne-Marie pass through on their way to get food, and stop to watch.

“What are they saying?” Anne-Marie asks us.

I don't answer because I don't know.

“Read the subtitles,” Grace says without looking around. Grace loves animals, and she waves to losers in the hall, but she doesn't have much patience with people who ask stupid questions.

Right then the Beast speaks. The whole screen's just this dude in cheap makeup and plastic fangs, saying over and over in this growly voice, “La Behhhll. La Behhhhll. La Behhhhll.”

Anne-Marie and Cass start giggling.

“La Behhhll,” growls the Beast.

The awful thing is, it
is
funny. When it's just me and Grace, it's easy to forget that I'm watching this goofy guy in pantaloons and fake fur who sounds like Pepe LePew. But with Cass and Anne Marie here, I can't help but remember how stupid it is.

I bite the inside of my cheek so I don't start smiling.

“La Behhll,” Beast says.

“La Behhll,” Cass growls behind us. Giggle giggle.

I could kill them both. But if I say anything, it'll come out as a laugh. I stare hard at the TV.

“La Behhll,” the girls growl in unison. My chest begins to shake with laughter.

Grace can feel it. She sits up and turns to look at me.

“I'm sorry,” I tell her as my face cracks into a smile. “God, I'm sorry. It's just…”

“La Behhlll,” Beast growls again.

Grace reaches over me and picks up the remote from the arm of the couch. She hits the pause button. “You all just let me know when you're finished.”

Her eyes hit me like a laser beam.

I think it's the way I
don't
look at Cass that tells her she better get the hell out of here. “Come on,” she tells Anne-Marie, “bring the Oreos.”

Then they're gone, and the Beast's face is taking up the whole screen, his mouth open right in the middle of “La Behhll.” I look over at Grace, but she's not looking at me now.

She's mad again.

“Sorry 'bout laughing.” I don't want her to be mad. If she's going to be mad, it should be for stuff she doesn't even know about, like feeling up Silver and getting hot for Whorey Dori. Not for the stuff she
does
know about, like Coke-can rings and laughing at a movie.

But Grace won't even look at me. She's just staring at the TV, even though it's paused. And all she says is, “Are you ready to
watch
now?”

This movie would be a lot more realistic if, instead of standing around growling into the camera, the Beast got his leg caught in a trap and had to gnaw his own paw off. Because that's how I feel sometimes with Grace.

“Yeah,” I tell Grace, who isn't leaning against me anymore. “Start 'er up.”

Tuesday morning in biology, Alicia Doghead's backpack is in the aisle, so I step squarely on it and over, like it's a stepping stone. I hear Alicia mutter something, and when I look around, she's glaring at me—but I give her a cold stare, and she looks away.

Chlo's sitting there at the table, as usual. She's not wearing jeans or pants for once. Instead she's got on this denim skirt. But it's not straight along the bottom hem, like every other skirt in the world. It's like she's wearing a big square of cloth, it's got
corners
, somehow—it's got
points
along the bottom, and each
point
ends in a clip-hook, like you'd use to clip a flashlight to your belt loop.

I'm looking her over, and I see she's got on her usual baggy top, a sweater of some kind. But that skirt! Halfway down her skirt there's these metal
rings
sewn on—one about a foot above every corner, each hook. So
she can clip her skirt up, I guess.

It occurs to me that if she'd dress decent, I might even like her okay. But I can't afford to like her, because she's just too fucking weird.

It pisses me off.

I want to start something with her, but I don't dare, because of the English thing, and because she knows too much about me. So I kind of halfway start messing with her, but not really.

“So Chlo,” I say, “you think you and me ought to go out sometime?”

“No.”

“We could. You could wear that. I like that—what is it? A tent?”

“It's a skirt.”

“Where'd you get it? Army Navy?”

“Thrift store.”

I forgot, she's poor. But that doesn't mean you have to dress like a pool cover.

“No kidding,” I tell her. “Hey, I could go down to the thrift store, get something to match. We could go camping.”

“No.”

“We can't go out at all?”

“No.”

“Because of your
boyfriend
?”

“That, and because we wouldn't have anything to talk about.”

“We could talk about
poetry
.”

“You mean I'd talk, and you'd write it down.”

“We could talk about baseball.”

“I don't know anything about baseball.”

“I could talk,” I tell her, “and
you
could write it down.”

She's stacking her papers, all business. Then she sets them down and gives me a look. “Why would I want to write it down?”

“Because it's interesting.”

“No it's not.”

“Yeah it is. It's like poetry. Only you live it.”

She looks at me. “How's it like poetry?”

“It just
is
, that's all.”

“Describe it.”

“I don't describe it,” I tell her. “I just do it.”

“One word, then. If you could describe it in one word, what would it be?”

“Power,” I say without thinking. “No. Control. Hell, I don't know. Bat, ball, glove. You're the fucking writer, not me.”

Somehow, this is turning out not to be fun. Somehow I lost charge of the conversation.

“Quit talking to me, Chlo,” I tell her. She's always mixing me up.

 

In English, Mr. Hammond gives me a three-week failure notice that I'm supposed to take home. My grade is 53. I'm going to have to save my mom from a stroke by forging her signature.

I'm not too worried. Not yet. That 53 is just a warning before the real grade. It's a scare tactic. I don't scare easy, but my mom might not understand that I can bring it up before the final report.

She wouldn't understand that three weeks is plenty of time.

 

In fifth period Chlo comes in all hot to tutor. She plunks her backpack on the table and sits down. “I was thinking back,” she says, pulling my English book toward her. “There's one of these poems that you might like.”

That gets my attention. “
Like?
As in…not mind reading it?”

“Yeah.” She looks at me over her glasses. “That a problem?”

I grin. “Nope. Tell you what—I'll pay you extra if I
like
it. How's that? Double. Triple. Hell, I'll buy you a car if I like this poem you picked out.”

She reads it out loud. I zone out about a third of the way in.

At some point Chlo's voice stops droning on, and then after a couple more seconds she asks, “Well?”

I give my slow, wise nod. “In my opinion,” I say, very intellectually, “this poem sucks so bad that they should burn every copy of it ever made. I hate it. It's the most stupid thing I ever—”

“Okay, I hear you. Point taken. But don't you get what it's about?”

“Duh! No! That's why you're here. Hello, anybody home?”

“It says that you don't need to learn from books, when you can go outside and learn about life that way. ‘Books! 'tis a dull and endless strife'—get it?”

“Yeah, I get it. Dull and endless—I sure get
that
.”

“I can't believe you don't like the idea it's expressing.”

“Look. It took you about, I don't know, what, six words? to say what takes him a whole page, and you don't use words like…” I bend over the page “…thros-tull. What the fuck is a throstle?”

“It's a bird.”

“Why write about some bird that nobody ever heard of and everybody's got to look up?”

“Everybody doesn't have to look it up, some people know it, plus you can get it from the context—”

“Everybody who's normal's got to look it up. What's the name of the guy who wrote this?”

“William Wordsworth.”

“He's a dipshit.”

Chlo shakes her head. “You know what the problem is? You've already decided you're not going to like it.”

“I have not.”

“Yeah, you have. You're sitting there like, ‘Make this
entertaining over my dead body.'”

“I don't care if it's entertaining or not. I just want to
pass
.”

“I know. It's such a wasted opportunity, though. Especially this poem. It's
so
you! Remember when you climbed out the window in biology?”

I lean back, smiling. “Yeah.”

“And the rest of us were stuck inside.”

“Hey, seize the day, right?”

“At first I thought you were crazy, but then I saw you out there playing baseball, and I was sitting there doing mindless rote work, and I thought, Now there's a man who knows what's important.”

“I sure do.”

“Not quite. Otherwise you'd put more effort into studying.”

“I put a
lot
of effort into studying. I spent all last night looking at Byron. I
do
study,” I say again. “It's just that teachers don't like me. Plus…” My voice dies off. I actually almost said that I'm not too good at this stuff.

“Plus what?”

“Plus…it's just hard sometimes, that's all.” Now she's going to tell me it's not hard, that I need to apply myself. That's what they always say.

But she doesn't say it.

She just shrugs. “Different people are good at different
things. Maybe English isn't your cup of tea. Unfortunately, we all have to get through it if we want to keep our options open.”

“You mean like a career.”

“I mean like being thirty-five and spending your days mopping rest rooms at Taco Bell.”

“Nah. I'd be the one working the register.”

“I wouldn't trust you with a drawer full of money.”

“I wouldn't either, but the guys at Taco Bell don't know that.”

“Anyway, Trammel, you should try to keep in mind that whenever you get tired of studying and want to give up, this could be a lot worse. You could be wiping dried piss off the base of a public toilet. Makes Wordsworth sound a little better, huh?”

“Yeah, when you put it that way. But,” I added, “I don't like the poem, and I'm not paying you a dime. For the bet, I mean,” I add quickly. “I'll just pay the regular tutor amount. No offense,” I add.

“None taken,” she says.

 

I hate taking Cass to her dance class. First of all, it's boring, and second of all, it's a waste of my time.

But when Mom tells me she's got to work late all week, and I have to take Cass to dance lessons, I don't dare argue, because I don't want to piss Mom off until
after baseball starts. So like a good brother I take my little sister in the pouring rain to her stupid dance lesson.

When I pull up in front of the studio, Cass gets out of the car and gets my seats all wet leaving the door open while she wrestles with her umbrella, even though the front door of the dance studio is less than five feet away. Then she walks off without even saying thank you. Little Miss Snot, if you ask me.

Now I've got fifty minutes to kill.

In the shopping center there's also a grocery store, a drugstore, a post office, a sandwich shop, a tailor, an insurance agent. The rest of the spaces are empty. I could go grab a sandwich, or I could go to the drugstore, look at magazines, or I could hang out and watch Cass and her friends dance.

Now some of Cass's friends are going to be real lookers in a couple of years when they get some boobs. In fact, a few of them are well on the way. And I got to tell you those girls about fall all over themselves when I come into the room. Like I just walked off the cover of some teen magazine. Sometimes it makes me think how much easier life would be if I could fall for a younger girl. If I could ignore all the giggling and the junior-high stuff, like when insults mean you like somebody.

But no way would I ever be caught fishing around that
underdeveloped little pond called McMoore Middle School. How much more of a loser could I be?

So I decide I'm going to drive over to the drugstore, get a candy bar and a magazine. I drive slow, because it's one of those dark, windy storms, where it's really pouring down and the rain is sheeting up on the sidewalk.

I have to turn the defroster on because I can hardly see through the fogged-up window. The wipers are on full blast even as I'm edging along. I think I see somebody walking across the parking lot up ahead, but it's hard to tell.

When I finally take a swipe at the windshield with my sleeve, I see there is a person, and it's a girl. She's walking along with her back to me. No umbrella, just trudging away through the puddles, wet like a kitten somebody threw into a pond. She looks miserable. She looks cold. She looks…

Familiar.

Whorey Dori.

I've already slowed down without meaning to, I guess just because she looks so damn pitiful. I mean, out here all alone, and nobody ever talks to her even when she's dry.

Dori.

Now, letting her talk to me on the phone is one thing. Offering her a ride would be something else. Something
stupid! Jesus, she already thinks she's got the right to call me anytime she wants! She might figure I'm going to sponsor her back into the group.

The wipers go
tha-thump, tha-thump.

So what if she's soaking wet? She's
so
soaking wet, it won't make a bit of difference if she gets out of the rain or not.

She ain't gonna drown, I tell myself.

But as I get closer, I see exactly
how
soaking wet she is. She's wearing a T-shirt, and her clothes are clinging to her body, her shirt's sticking to her.

Really sticking to her.

Every inch of her.

Now, here I am with fifty minutes to kill. And here's this soaking-wet girl who needs a ride and who—what a coincidence—is a known nympho.

I ease off the gas until I'm rolling along beside her. I crank down the window. The rain's beating on my head while I yell, “You need a ride somewhere?”

She doesn't recognize me right away. She squints at me for a second—then it comes over her face, I'm Colt, her phone pal—and she splashes around to the passenger side.

When she gets in, the smell of rain and wet cloth comes in with her, and her hair is clinging to her cheeks and neck, her clothes are clinging everywhere.

Now, of course I'm in love with Grace. Who by the way has never done one single thing to relieve any of my tension, if you know what I mean. She always acts like I've got a snake down my pants.

And it's not like I'm going to actually do anything wrong. Not officially. There's other things you can do besides the Deed Itself.

In other words, it's pretty junior high to sit at home alone and polish the old bayonet if you can find a living breathing girl willing to do it for you.

Look at it this way: Everybody puts gas in their car, right? And when they go to a gas station, they can either use self-service or let somebody else do it for them. It doesn't matter, the end result is the same: A full tank—and it's strictly personal preference how it got that way. End of story.

If I had to take a guess, I'd say hormones had something to do with this. It's been a while since I've had a fill-up.