Sorry You're Lost (6 page)

Manny elbows me. “You are drooling,” he says. “And it smells terrible. I think your saliva is infected. I recommend a doctor visit to check for rabies.”

Allison stops next to a crowded café table filled with eighth graders, kisses everyone there, smiles like a Cheshire cat, and takes a seat at the end of the table next to Chad Watkins, his hair bouncy and full-bodied, his calf muscles bulging underneath the table, his right arm resting on the shoulders of Allison's blue and white cheerleading uniform.

“They are dating, you know,” Manny says. “Heard it through the social pipeline.”

“I should talk to her,” I say, pretending Manny's gossip and Chad don't exist.

“Well,
that
sounds convincing.”

“I mean, I—I will. I'll ask her to the dance. Without bribery.”

“I think that might be the most flabbergasting thing you ever said. I swear, the older you get, the more your brain shrinks. By the time you are forty and wrinkled, you will not remember my name. You will call me up on the phone and say, ‘Hello, there. I don't know who you are or why I'm calling you, but hello. Hello, there. Hello.'”

“Manny, I'm telling you, I can get her to go with me without bribery. We're neighbors, after all. I'll start small … baby steps. I should buy her lunch.”

He grins. “First, buying someone lunch is bribery. It is nutritional compensation for a kiss, not that our cafeteria food is nutritious or proteinaceous in any way. No one in their right mind would eat the swill they serve. I need not remind you of that time I found a crusty red fingernail in my hamburger.” He gags. “It was in my mouth, Donuts, in my mouth! It was wretched, truly an abomination that should have been the end of my cafeteria food career. I should have thrown in the napkin and retired that very afternoon. But no, I went against every fiber of my being and gave it a second chance. That is when things got hairy.” He gags once more.

I can't help but laugh. “It wasn't
that
bad, Manny. It was only a single hair.”

“There was enough hair on my hot dog to clog a shower!” he cries. “The hairnets those lunch ladies wear are obviously defective, but I did not sue because my conscience is the size of a whale and my compassion spreads over continents. Besides, I had nothing to gain. Lunch ladies have even less money than I do.”

Chad picks his shirt up to show everyone his abs. They're all very impressed, especially Allison, who goes in for a touch. She lingers too long for my liking.

“Listen to me, Donuts. Buying Allison lunch is a terrible idea. Or anyone at her table. Especially that brunette Anna Harden, with the purple headband. Ooh, baby, shiver me timbers.” (He shivers. Anna is a close second to Allison, with athletic firepower to boot. After college, she'll either be a professional lacrosse player or a model. If she asks me, which she
probably
definitely won't, I'd suggest model. Better to preserve those pearly white teeth.) “Look at them, Donuts.” He means Anna's table, not her teeth. “There must be something in the water. Wait, is that … no, I thought they were drinking Fiji Water. Just Evian. Oh well, still something magical about that table. I bet if you pick anyone and put them there, they will turn into a goddess”—he scans the room—“yes, even no-neck Ingrid or Pippa with the long stockings or Sabrina.”

Manny nods his head at a table to the left, a few over from ours, to Sabrina, from the front row of Mrs. Q's class, now sitting with five girls chatting away about something, their books and notebooks open. Dark hair falls over Sabrina's eyes as she puts her elbows on the table, sips Cherry Coke, and nibbles on rat poison or the lunchtime equivalent: bologna on white bread. But Sabrina doesn't seem bothered by her lunch, her work, the humidity, or the gossip, or the fact that Cherry Coke has long gone out of style. Immune, she seems, to it all. No dual Donuts-like personality, no self-consciousness. Just her, what she wants to eat, what work she wants to complete, what shoes she wants to wear—a pair of faded blue Converses with no laces—and when she catches me staring, she doesn't look away. Slow jazz music isn't playing in the cafeteria or anything, but when our eyes meet, she rolls hers and, well, that's the end of that.

“What's so awful about her, anyway?” I ask.

He looks around before answering. “She beat me in a debate. Nobody beats me in a debate. I cannot believe that emo girl beat me! You should have seen it. I mean, I am glad you did not see it, but it was quite a sight. It was torture, plain and simple.” Manny buries his face in his hands and groans.

“Is it safe for me to speak?”

Through his hands, he mutters, “I have concluded my recap of this unfortunate incident. I certainly will not be accompanying her in a sports car to the dance.”

“Well, I'm getting on the lunch line. Maybe I'll invite Allison or Sabrina. I could introduce them to—”

“Stop.” He sticks his arm out like a crossing guard. “Stop right there. You want them to meet the lunch lady? Are you kidding?”

“Her name is Marsha and she's a nice lady.” I push past him.

“Not so fast, Boston Cream,” he says. “When you have returned from the garden of grease, we will reexamine my plan.”

 

HIBERNATION

Before I even reach the lunch line, I hear someone shout, loud enough to wake up the aliens on Mars: “HEY, DONUTS MADE IT OUT OF THE TRASH CAN ALIVE!”

My face goes crimson. Then neon red. I look behind me to see Chad pointing at me, one arm around Allison.

My heart is like a battering ram being rammed against a chest made from a door, and my breath is like a dog's that just ran out the gate and took off down the block. I can't find it—my breath, I mean. It ran away. But all skilled performers know that timing is everything and that keeping one's composure is important, even when your breath runs away. “Thank you—everyone!” I shout. I reach for my chest and gasp for air. “From the bottom—of my heart, I appreciate your concern. The lesson is—to never dig for DONUTS—in the trash can! I am glad—to report that I've already made a full recovery!”

Before anyone can say anything else, I dash to the lunch counter where Marsha is salting fries. Her spiderweb of a hairnet is ripped in two places, but she tries (unsuccessfully) to straighten it out when she sees me approach. “Hey, sugar! Everything okay, baby?”

I can't help but smile. “Hi, Marsha, what's on the menu today?”

The menu is the same every day. That's the joke. Though she's heard it dozens of times, she throws her head back and howls. “Baby, you sure know how to make a lady laugh!”

“I'll be here all week.”

“You promise not to run off with another woman and never come back?”

“I promise.”

“In case you do run off with a woman, a word to the wise: Women are relationship beings. Men are not.”

I ask her if the pizza tastes good.

“There you go, changin' the topic,” she says, and chuckles. “But you'll find out someday. A woman will tell you she wants to talk. Again. But hear me, baby: all she needs is attention and love. And to be reassured that you ain't goin' nowhere. Oh, you'll see.”

“Pizza, please. Got any left?”

“Tell you what, 'cause you made me laugh, two slices for the price of one. Don't tell nobody about this or else I won't be here to give advice, if you catch my drift.”

“Caught it.”

“Great catch! Now here you go, pizza and fries, made with you in mind.” She passes me a tray of food. “Hey, whatcha doin' the rest of the day?”

I haven't memorized the rule book on the student/lunch lady relationships or anything, but this feels out-of-bounds. “Uh, bye, Marsha,” I mutter.

“See ya, sugar. Have a blessed day.”

“Same time, same place, tomorrow?”

She cracks up again, even louder than before.

I head back to our café table and Manny immediately starts ripping into me for eating cafeteria food. The fire bell interrupts him, which isn't a bad thing (I can only take Manny in small doses, even when his schemes work to my benefit), but I still haven't eaten lunch and my head is pounding and I barely slept last night. Above the clamor of chairs and café tables being shoved, a white-haired lunch aide shouts, “Single file, people! Move in an orderly fashion!” Good luck to her.

Evacuations are a free-for-all. And a fantastic stage.

“Hurry, people!” I holler. “Get on your horse!”

Murmurs of laughter, music to my ears. “It's a real fire, people! We must evacuate the premises at once! Not a second's delay. It's a matter of national security. The president told me himself!”

Up ahead, Allison and her crew blend into the masses. I jump as high as I can to get a better look, like I'm on a pogo stick. On the fifth leap, I land awkwardly, twisting my ankle. Pain shoots to the side of my foot. “AH! EVACUATE!” I hop over to the side and steady myself against the wall, which is rough like sandpaper and sticky—something under my right hand. I lift it. Purple glitter, of course. From another dance sign.

I wipe it on my jeans. Wipe it, wipe it again. Then check my ankle. Something about rubbing glitter on my twisted ankle really gets to me and I wonder what would happen if I just tipped over. Fell over. Like a falling tree: timberrrrrrrrr … and lay in the hallways while everyone else was outside at the all-important fire drill. The third one this month. (February is supposed to be so short, but it never seems to end.)

There aren't too many things in this world worse than having to stand in line during a fire drill, watching your breath and shivering without a coat. Too much time to think, to remember how she wouldn't let me leave the house without a coat (“Put on your coat, honey, it's cold outside”) and a hat and a neck warmer (but she wouldn't let me get a face mask like I wanted to because it made me look like a villain in a superhero movie, which she said was a bad thing). How we'd heat up hot chocolate with marshmallows on snow days. How she'd tell me to run my hands in cold water again after I spilled my hot chocolate again. How she'd let me use a whole carrot from the fridge for a snowman's (really long) nose. How she'd tell me how happy she was when
she
used to get snow days. How she'd tell me she was jealous of me.

I just suddenly feel so heavy. Like I ate a dozen donuts filled with bricks instead of jelly or cream and now they're stacked on my shoulders. I know it doesn't make sense, but that's how I feel during this stupid fire drill, and all I want to do is lie down and count sheep and pretend I'm a hibernating animal like a bear or a badger or a bat or a snail or an earthworm so that I can disappear for a few months. You'd think hibernation and high school would go hand in hand like peanut butter and jelly, macaroni and cheese, Batman and graffiti, Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band. But you can't hibernate in middle school. Trust me, I've tried. The nurse shakes you awake, like you're a maraca. And there are just too many people keeping tabs on your progress.

Except during fire drills. They make you wait in lines, but it's not like they take attendance. Nobody would even notice, except for Manny, who grabs my arm. “Stick with the plan, Romeo,” he says, “and your days of being a crash test dummy for female attention will be long gone. As we improve our compatibility quotients, they will flock to us like a flock of geese. Good-looking geese, of course.”

Something about the way he says it makes me want to fall down—no, the whole scene. My gimpy ankle, the flock of geese, the bricks on my shoulders, the lunch line announcement, the purple glitter on my jeans, no more hot chocolate …

I'd pull out my phone but Manny is too close. He's always too close. Like I said, the whole scene, depressing. No other way to put it.

 

THE NATURAL SCHMOOZER

Let me get something clear: I don't
actually
think my mom's on the phone with me. She doesn't say anything. Doesn't give me advice. She just …

It started soon after she died. Twenty-four days later. I was at a party. It was the biggest, baddest party, only for the coolest cats in the class and I was a Bengal tiger. (Hear my ROAR!) Okay, fine, it was a pizza party. In school. And there were blue streamers and pink cupcakes and I stood by the food table, alone, thinking about her. Kids in my class had already stopped asking me about her, stopped giving me cards, stopped telling me they were sorry. They had decided, I guess, that everything was back to normal, and they didn't want to upset me by bringing it up. They had decided that at parties like this they wanted me to be happy, to have a real party instead of a pity party. Maybe they just wanted the lie—that everything was okay—to make themselves feel better. Or maybe they just forgot and thought I had forgotten, too. I hadn't. A part of me wanted them to check on me, and another part of me wanted them to ask about her, but the largest part of me—most of me—didn't because it didn't matter. Nothing they said could bring her back, and I liked thinking of her the way I wanted to think of her without anyone telling me to stop or think of her differently or just keep busy. Gotta keep busy, people said, so that I wouldn't think of her so much and feel so bad. A history teacher came by once to ask me if I was okay. “Yes,” I told her. “Great,” she said.

When my mom was first diagnosed with cancer, I learned the word “malignant” and heard the word “spread” and knew the word “hope” was a mirage, a fantasy that would only make things worse. But then I learned the word “remission,” and the doctors loosened their ties, cracked bad jokes (said her blood type was B-positive, so we should be optimistic, too), and they increased the odds of her survival to fifty-fifty, like she was something to wager on in Vegas. I slept well and ate well and celebrated on the inside. My kidneys shook pom-poms, my liver did an Irish jig, my small intestines did the worm. The future was bright with a likely chance of sunshine—and then it was over.