Have Mercy (Have a Life #1)

by Maddy Wells

She hit the cymbal. “Never better.”

  Jane walked in and stared at Captain Kirby for a second before telling me “I’m going to get some liquor for the gang. I won’t have time tomorrow.”

  “This is Captain Kirby,” I said.

  “I know you, don’t I? Janet, right? Fifth period study hall?”

  “Yes ma’am, Mrs. O’Reilly.” Kirby gave her a big smile. “Except I won’t be in school tomorrow.”

  “That’s okay,” Jane said.

  “I have to go with my mom somewhere. I have a note and all if you want to see it.””

  “That’s okay.”

  If there was one thing Jane couldn’t stand, it was keeping track of student excuses. I knew for a fact that she never did roll call, so she wouldn’t even notice if Captain Kirby didn’t show.

  “I’ll be there next time, though,” Captain Kirby said.

  “Great,” Jane said, looking at me funny. “Where’s Tim?”

  “He’ll be here soon. He’s at work.”

  Jane left and Captain Kirby and I started to see if we were simpatico musically and we definitely were and we were taking a break when she said, “Your mom is really hot.” I felt like throwing up but instead I got out my cell phone to order a pepperoni pizza so we could eat when Tim showed up.

  Chapter 5

  Captain Kirby grabbed the cell phone out of my hand before I could give Papa Johns the delivery address.

  “You can’t eat that shit,” she said. “Pepperoni is full of nitrates and the cheese doesn’t even come from cows and the dough is loaded with gluten and the tomato sauce is corn syrup and red dye. Technically it’s not food. I can’t believe your mom lets you eat that stuff.”

  “She doesn’t know. She would beat me if she did,” I lied.

  She put the cell to her ear. “Sorry. That was my kid. No internet tonight for you, Dorothy,” she scolded and pushed end call.

  “Hey,” I said. “If they have caller ID, I’ll never be able to order from them again.”

  “I’ll cook us something. What do you have in the fridge?”

  Before I could stop her, she was taking the stairs two at a time and opening the refrigerator. It was pretty gross in there: a lot of Chinese take-out, a six-pack of Yuengling, and an uncovered dish of something that had morphed into a science project. “This looks like a frat house refrigerator,” she said and before I could come up with an appropriate response to her foodie pronouncements or ask her how she knew what the inside of a frat house looked like, we were in a bashed up VW van—a definite advantage of hanging with a junior is wheels—and she was explaining how her mom—out of nostalgia for the good old days she had been born too late to participate in—had bought the junker on eBay and we were pulling into the Wegman’s parking lot.

  “Just a second,” she said, reaching behind the drivers’ seat and pulling out a maroon sweatshirt with Captain Janet Kirby, number 77, Regional Champions 2011 in big gold letters on the back.

  “It’s kind of hot for that, isn’t it?” I said.

  “We’re gonna need it.”

  First stop was the fish counter where Kirby picked out some wild red Alaskan salmon.

  “You like fish, right? Well, this wild stuff is a little gamey, isn’t it…Ralph,” she said reading the fish clerk’s nameplate, “but it’s better for you than that pink stuff, which is just coloring. The fish are actually grey. Not the fish’s fault. Not your fault either, Ralph. Just saying.”

  The wild salmon was $23.00 a pound and she bought two pounds of it.

  “Forty-six bucks for some lousy fish!” I said.

  “We’ll put some meat on your bones, Mercy.” she said and winked at Ralph.

  I started to feel uneasy. She made me push the cart while she wandered through the produce

  aisles picking out tomatoes, showing me how to tell which were ripe and what would have to sit in a brown paper bag for a couple of days, a couple heads of lettuce, and some mushrooms. “None of this is organic,” she said. “I’ll take to you the farmers’ market out in Berks County when we have some time.” Then we were in the water aisle and grabbed two gallons of distilled water—Milltown water is polluted, she said, mercury from the old mills, not to mention the dentist offices which dump the stuff unhindered down the drain—then the soup aisle, two cans of broth, a box of brown rice, and a small bottle of olive oil. Kirby seemed to be looking for something as we continued on our pilgrimage. Wegmans was a beehive mess. They were re-designing the layout of the whole store: carts of inventory blockading the aisles, blue shirted employees huddling with supervisors in gold shirts, drop ceiling panels missing, the kind of chaos that comes when something that’s been fixed in place for a long time is being uprooted. We stopped beside a scaffold in the detergent aisle.

  “This is good,” Kirby said. She plucked the salmon from the cart, looked left and right, tore the price tag off, balled it up and dropped it on the floor then shoved the salmon into the hand muff on the front of her sweatshirt. “Sometimes it’s pretty cold when the season starts,” she explained. “Let’s walk to the end checkout counter. I know the cashier there. Stop staring, breath and smile and nod your head like I just told you a joke. Hi, Tawana.”

  “Hello Cap,” the six foot tall black checkout girl answered.

  “Meet my friend, Mercy O’Reilly. She’s a composer just like you. Tawana composed our fight song,” Kirby explained. “Not the official one. The one we sing on the field where the coaches can’t hear us.”

  Kirby reached over the counter and put her arms around Tawana’s neck.

  Urethane will shatter glass

  We always win, you bet your ass

  Watch us do our victory dance

  Run while you’ve still got a chance

  They sing-songed, did an elaborate handshake and bumped heads.

  A couple of bald guys in line behind us laughed. One was wearing a Milltown letter jacket—Springsteen’s Glory Days come to life—“How’s it looking for next year Kirby?” he asked.

  “The best again, sir.”

  “Can I bet money on it?”

  “All the juniors are coming back.”

  “You play sports, Mercy?” Tawana asked as she bagged our goods.

  Do mind games count? I tried to say, but nothing came out.

  “She’s recovering from a spring flu,” Kirby said. She paid for the food—the food she decided to pay for that is—with two rolls of quarters and we walked along the line of checkout counters where someone in every checkout line seemed to know her. Apparently Kirby, unlike me, was already famous. I was so scared the security guard was going to stop us, I was beet red and waterfalls of sweat were running off my pits and all that was keeping me from fainting was that I had to pee really badly. Kirby stopped in front of the manager’s counter—where another security guard was looking suspiciously at Kirby’s stomach—and put her palm on my forehead. “May I have a couple pieces of Kleenex, miss,” she asked the manager who handed her a wad of tissues. She walked slowly to the exit and she pulled the back of my shirt when it was obvious I wanted to break into a run.

  I looked at her from the corner of my eyes on the way home, totally intimidated. You know

  when you think you’re really cool and you’re all puffed up about yourself because you just know you won’t sweat it when they blind-side you? Well that attitude comes from watching too many cop shows. In reality, you cave.

  “You were good in there,” Kirby said. “Pretending like you had the flu. Fooled me. Hungry? I am.”

  Captain Kirby, it turns out, was going to be a chef. “Actually, I already am,” she said. “But you know, it doesn’t hurt to learn some basics from the masters.” The masters being chefs at a culinary arts camp she was going to this summer. “Always learning, that’s like my theme song.”

  “I’m going to drop out, too,” I told her.

  “I’m not dropping out. I never said I was dropping out. You’re thinking about dropping out? That’s the stupidest thing I ev
er heard of.”

  “There’s nothing I can’t learn on-line,” I said, feeling, well, stupid for the first time since I started saying it out loud.

  “That’s bullshit.”

  “What do you think you’re going to learn in school? How to make cheesecake? It sounds like you can already do that.”

  “I don’t know what I’m going to learn. But that’s just it. I don’t know yet. What if I miss something big? What if I find out that cooking is just a way into something else that’s way cooler?”

  “That’s a lot of ifs,” I said.

  I helped her get out some pots and pans—all of which she scrubbed—a good chef always makes sure her tools are clean, she said. She put the salmon in the broiler, the brown rice in a pot, adjusted the temperature for both and began washing the lettuce—telling me about the poisoned food chain—“Michael Pollan is like a god. I would marry him right now if he were in the room. Well, if he were a girl”—and how she was going to have her own organic restaurant using vegetables she grew in the back yard.

  “Would you raise chickens, too?” I asked. “And cattle?”

  “I don’t know much about animals. I guess I’ll have to learn. But, yeah, why not? Start with chickens, mooooove on from there.” She laughed at her joke.

  She was telling me about what the big corporations did to chickens—“They cut off their beaks because they keep them in like overcrowded cages and they lose their little minds and would peck each other to death if they could and that’s what they feed us.”

  “No way!”

  “Way!”

  Jane walked in, carrying a box of booze for tomorrow night’s festivities.

  “Something smells good,” she said.

  Tim came upstairs from the Trap where he had been waiting for me. “You having an actual dinner in here?” he asked.

  “This is Captain Kirby, our drummer,” I said. We were supposed to vote on it, but the reality in any event was that Captain Kirby was the only one who showed up to audition.

  “That’s cool,” he said.

  He came over to me and kissed me on the cheek as if he had been doing that forever and I blushed and Jane and Captain Kirby exchanged a look.

  Somebody set the table and we sat down to what felt like the first real sit-down homemade dinner we ever had at the house.

  “This is different,” Jane said.

  “Because it’s real food,” I said.

  Tim was the first one up. “Thank you very much Mrs. O’Reilly. We gotta go.” He motioned to me and Captain Kirby to follow him down to the Trap, leaving Jane with clean-up.

  “You okay with this?” I asked her, loitering on the landing.

  “This was fun,” she said. “You got to tell me all about your friend later.”

  “She’s not my friend. She’s a colleague. My drummer.”

  I left her with the dishes and went downstairs where Captain Kirby was asking, “So who’s this Griffin? I mean, besides Mercy’s dad,” and Tim was saying, “You don’t know The Griffin? Well, I guess they’re kind of old” and he played a couple of riffs on his bass and Captain Kirby picked up the beat, closing her eyes and feeling it, and I joined in, singing one of The Griffin’s songs—Kirby looked at me surprised that she knew the words to it—that he wrote way back when I was riding the bus inside Jane.

  Then we did a song that Tim said we should use to showcase our talents to The Griffin.

  Captain Kirby said, “I totally get it. I am so into it.” Then we had an argument about whether or not to wear the berets.

  “Those berets look like circus hats,” Tim said.

  “We’re not a drum and bugle corps,” Captain Kirby said.

  They both looked at me with such disdain that I took it back and said, “Okay, no berets.”

  “I loved that song we just did,” Captain Kirby said.

  “I wrote it,” Tim said.

  I was going to contradict him, saying the melody came from me, but the truth was it was Tim’s song and the reality was that we were his band and as Tim packed his guitar to leave I remembered once that I asked The Griffin how he became the head of the band. I mean he wasn’t the best musician, a fact he admitted. Raymond was by far the best musician in the group. “I write the songs, Mercy,” he told me. “You write the songs the group belongs to you. Because it’s your voice then.”

  Tim kissed me again, this time on the lips, then so did Captain Kirby—on the cheek—and they walked down the driveway jabbering about our upcoming date with The Griffin and how things couldn’t be cooler.

  I closed the Trap door and went upstairs. The Griffin’s music was blaring in the living room. Jane was conked on the couch. An open Jack Daniels was on the coffee table. The dirty dishes were still on the table. I kicked a kitchen chair. “You couldn’t even do a couple of dishes!” I screamed into the music.

  Then, of course, I did them.

  Chapter 6

  Early the next morning, I was working on my laptop, sitting at the kitchen table bullet pointing my case for quitting school when Tim and Captain Kirby rang the doorbell. They wanted to practice even though I said I couldn’t join them for a couple of hours. “Just to get a couple of licks in, Mercy,” Tim said. Like, how did they even coordinate to come at the same time? They met twelve hours ago. Were they texting already?

  “We’ll practice later. I set the schedule,” I said, pointing to a schedule on the basement door which I filled in religiously with practice times.

  “Yeah, but before that we have a couple of ideas we want to work out,” Tim said, not really asking permission as he opened the door to the downstairs while I stared at my laptop.

  “Don’t worry,” Captain Kirby told me. “We’re not taking off without you.” She looked over my shoulder. “You flunking math? What are you working on?”

  I closed the lid on the laptop. “Nothing. Just something for The Griffin.”

  I used to think that no relationship was more complicated than boyfriend girlfriend—even though my personal experience was nonexistent, I did have a whole high school full of players to observe—but lately it seemed that all my relationships were becoming more nuanced than I could deal with. In the last day, my relationship with my band had turned into a power struggle over how to get The Griffin interested in us and instead of being happy to have allies, I felt like they were usurping my role as daughter. I mean, what if he liked them better?

  “I’m presenting my case that I should drop out of school,” I told her. “Do you know how many high school dropouts—and I mean high profile entertainers—have become millionaires? Christina Aguilera, Drew Barrymore, Simon Cowell, Mischa Barton, Charlie Sheen…”

  “Charlie Sheen? He’s like an ad for institutionalizing slackers.”

  “He’s still a high profile entertainer. Very successful.”

  “You’re a moron if you drop out,” Captain Kirby said. “I told you.”

  “So who are you?”

  “I’m two years older than you,” Captain Kirby said.

  “One.”

  “Two. I repeated third grade.”

  “Well, if you couldn’t pass third grade, why should I listen to you?”

  “Because I’m older, I have more experience.”

  I opened my computer and went back to making bullet points to accompany the graph of high school dropouts and income. Quentin Tarantino, Hilary Swank, Jessica Simpson, Johnny Depp, Jim Carrey. Okay, I never really got Jim Carrey. Is he supposed to be like a clown reflecting our own ridiculousness, or is he just ridiculous? Even Mr. Dow, my social studies teacher, couldn’t answer that. But the point is, Jim Carrey succeeded because he had the whole world telling him it wasn’t going to happen. Wouldn’t you be more likely to become an artist or whatever if you had the whole culture telling you that you needed to get your educational ticket punched to get ahead? It seemed to me, and I keyed this in as a starred bullet point, that if you allowed yourself to be put to sleep for eight years of high school and college, tha
t you were just a hypnotized troll in a game that had been thought up to make you too numb to think for yourself.

  “Look,” Captain Kirby said. “Don’t get yourself so worked up over this. I know it’s hard, your dad coming home only now and then. But this isn’t going to get his attention the way you hope.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said.

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” Captain Kirby picked up the pencil hanging on a string on a tack on the Trap schedule and wrote in “band practice” in the ten o’clock time slot and drew an arrow straight down to the four o’clock slot I had already booked for us. Then she drew a picture of a dog wearing a beret over it, which made my stomach spaz out seeing how it messed up the whole page. She opened the door and followed the sound of Tim crashing through the head of our new song. Wanh, wanh, wanh, waaaaaaaaahn.

  I’d decided on a PowerPoint presentation, as usual. Since I had only a limited time with The Griffin I found it was the best way to present my case for whatever I wanted. For example, he upped my walking around money when I showed a graph on escalating snack costs and my stagnant income. I got the idea from Mr. Dow who gave very convincing presentations on the uses and abuses of power using PowerPoint, also nature versus nurture trying to figure out why so many of us were so screwed up “before anything has actually happened to you,” he said, scratching his head contemplating our fairy tale innocence, while we scratched ours trying to figure out what planet he lived on. Every kid I knew had something bad going on in their life, even though most kids would never admit their family wasn’t a replica of the Family Guy.

  I was finishing up when Jane came into the kitchen. “God, what time is it?” she asked, opening the refrigerator and taking out the milk carton. She sniffed it, said, “Ugh,” and poured it down the sink. “Did you make coffee?”

  “The coffee’s cold,” I said. “It’s late.”

  She looked at the clock on the stove, which was six hours off because no one bothered to set the time since we bought the stove four years ago.

  “Shit,” she said. “I have to be at the pre-prom worry session,” which was a meeting where the prom committee got together to make sure they didn’t forget anything like a streamer of crepe paper or plastic fruit punch cups. “Do you mind? I’m running late.” Jane pulled out a cigarette.