But I smiled. Because I could tell that she wasn’t scared of Garry anymore.
Not like before.
“If I had money, I would go to some bakery where they didn’t know me and order the cake I want,” I was saying to Garry that evening. I had seen him out in his backyard, washing the tools that he uses to make his effects, so I went outside and climbed onto the roof of Boing Boing’s doghouse.
I know, I know. Mom had said that she didn’t want me going over to Garry’s. But she didn’t say I couldn’t talk to him over the fence.
“But this guy . . . Vince?” Garry was saying as he hosed off his gear. “Maybe he’s tired of cowboy cakes, too. Maybe he’ll like your theme.”
“But what if he hates my theme, and he calls Mom, and she says ‘no’?”
“When were you planning to tell her?” Garry asked.
I hadn’t even thought of that. “I don’t know, I don’t know!” I wailed as I shook my head in despair. “Why is life so hard?”
Garry snickered.
“No, really!” I insisted. “I’m afraid to tell Mom. I’m afraid to tell Vince. Maybe I should just forget the whole thing.”
“Don’t!” Garry said quickly. He looked me in the eye. “Do not let fear rule your life, Charley. I made that mistake.”
“When you quit?” I asked.
“When I . . . left,” he said softly, and then he looked away.
Even in the fading evening light, I could see that Garry was thinking about North Carolina again, so I jumped down off Boing Boing’s roof and left Garry alone with his thoughts.
21
Once I finished my homework that evening, I got down on the floor of my room and, from under my bed, I pulled out the plastic storage bins containing my collection of Monsters & Maniacs. With Boing Boing sleeping in my lap, I carefully studied every cover of every issue I own, trying to find the perfect picture to show Vince so that he could have the baker and the frosting guy at The Paradise Pantry put it on my birthday cake.
I narrowed the choice down to two:
The cover of Issue 48 (“The Car of Tomorrow . . . It Seats Four AND EATS MANY MORE!!!”) has always been one of my favorites. It’s a picture of a family being chewed up and swallowed by a car’s hood (because the car runs on human flesh instead of gasoline, see?). I swear you can practically hear the people screaming.
But I couldn’t decide between that one and an old classic: Issue 12, one of the first Monsters & Maniacs I ever owned. Even though the story isn’t one of the creepiest (“My Daddy IS A MUMMY!”), there’s something about the way the bandages are rotting off the smiling corpse on the cover that still gives me chills.
Both pictures are so awesome that I couldn’t make up my mind. So, the next morning at school, I put it to a vote.
“Which one would look better on top of a cake?” I asked Cougar and Scottie, holding up the comic books for their consideration. I had made them follow me to a deserted end of the schoolyard so that no one else would learn about the final choice.
But instead of taking this decision seriously, Scottie and Cougar looked at each other and cracked up.
“What?” I was irritated. “What’s so funny?”
Scottie shook his head. “It’s just so lame, man!”
“What is?”
“This whole House-of-Horrors thing, Doofus!” Cougar cackled. “I mean, you’re telling people that you’re gonna scare ’em, and then you’re actually gonna try to scare ’em? Good luck!” he said as they started to walk away.
“Well, you don’t have to come!” I shouted at their backs.
“Are you kidding?” Cougar didn’t even bother turning around. “We wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
I caught the Mealiffe Avenue bus after school, because The Paradise Pantry is too far to skateboard to. As I sat on the bus, my knee kept bouncing up and down; I had decided to go with the flesh-eating car as my birthday cake choice, but now I was just really, really nervous about how Vince would react.
The bus dropped me off right in front of The Paradise Pantry, which, I have to admit, is a lot fancier than the Happy Giant Supermarket where I shop. They’ve got white and blue striped awnings out front, and the staff all wear white shirts and blue aprons and smile a lot.
When I walked in the front door, I asked a cash-register lady where I could find Mr. Champagne, and she pointed me back toward Frozen Foods. I took a deep breath, and I started to walk.
While I had been on the bus, I had planned how I would handle this moment. I was going to find Vince, walk right up to him and give him a really squeezy handshake. I thought that he might like that, especially because he taught me how to do it. I was running this scene over in my head, when I turned a corner and I saw Vince. And I froze. Right there in Frozen Foods.
Because he was with somebody. Not just with somebody.
He was hugging her.
A lady with a shopping cart. A shopping cart with a little girl in the kid’s seat. He was hugging the lady, and they were giggling, and she was pretty.
Then a man carrying a crate of tomatoes walked past, and he joked, “Hey, Vince! Is that your way of keeping the customers happy?”
Vince stopped hugging the lady, turned to the Tomato Man and laughed, “Eddy, c’mon! You’ve met my wife.”
I heard it with my own two ears. “You’ve. Met. My. Wife.”
If the floor could have opened at that moment and swallowed me, I wouldn’t have minded.
I guess I gasped, because that’s when Vince looked up and saw me standing there. Close enough to have seen and heard everything that had just happened. And the way his jaw dropped, I could tell that I had seen something I wasn’t supposed to.
I think Vince started toward me, but I’m not sure. The next thing I can honestly remember was being outside, running down the sidewalk as fast as my legs could carry me.
I ran for blocks and blocks. Miles, probably. The whole time I was running, I was hoping I could run far enough that I’d never have to go back and tell Mom what I’d seen, or—worse yet—go back and pretend that I hadn’t seen anything at all.
But my stomach started to ache, and my backpack, with my skateboard and comic books inside, was banging real hard on my spine, and, eventually, I slowed down. I wandered around until I stopped shaking inside.
Then I took a deep breath, and I headed home.
22
When I walked into the kitchen, Mom was standing at the sink, staring out into the backyard. She didn’t turn around to greet me.
Then I noticed that Lorena was sitting in silence at the kitchen table in her Chick-A-Dee uniform, and she was a mess. She had smears of mashed potatoes and gravy on her blouse; her mascara was running down her cheeks; and she had gobs and gobs of coleslaw in her hair.
I waited for one of them to speak, but nobody did. Finally I turned to Lorena.
“What happened to you?”
She sneered. “Brad grabbed my butt again. So I stabbed him in the hand with a fork, like you said.”
“Seriously?” I was actually sort of pleased that Monsters & Maniacs had provided Lorena with a real-life solution.
“Then I threw a Cluck Bucket at him. So he threw a supersize soda at me. And a carton of coleslaw. Before you know it . . .” She waved her hand at all the food she was wearing. “And then he fired me.”
“Wow,” was all I could manage.
“Men are such scum,” Lorena groaned as she put her head down on the table.
That’s when Mom spoke for the first time: “Tell me about it.”
At that moment I realized that she knew. About Vince.
She turned to me. “Vince called. After you left.” She shook her head sadly. “I thought he was single.”
And that was that. We didn’t talk any more about Vince. Or Lorena getting fired.
Instead, Mom did what she usually does when she’s upset. She went upstairs and changed into her doing-chores-around-the-house clothes. Then she dragged the folding stepladder
out to the back porch, where a section of roof gutter had been needing repairs for months.
And, as I chopped and stirred in the kitchen, I could hear the whine of Mom’s electric screwdriver long after it got dark.
There’s a soup I make with canned corn that Mom calls “Charley’s Comfort Chowder,” so I made a pot of that, even though nobody felt like sitting down to dinner that evening. When it was ready, I took a cup of it out to Mom.
She was way up on the stepladder. I had to wait for the screwdriver noise to stop before I said, “I made Comfort Chowder. You hungry?”
She shook her head “no.” But she didn’t go back to working; instead, she sighed and said, “I feel so . . . stupid, Charley.”
I nodded. “Mmmm. I feel that way a lot.”
She smiled a teensy smile.
I had planned to wait until morning to bring something up, but the moment seemed right, so I asked: “Can I still have my birthday party?”
Mom looked surprised. “Why wouldn’t you?”
“Because,” I shrugged. “Because we don’t have a free cake anymore.”
“Then you’ll just have to make one. I bet your friends will be impressed.”
I appreciated her confidence in my cooking skills, but I could never create the Monsters & Maniacs cake of my dreams.
I was snapped out of my pity-party when Mom gave a little gasp and smacked her forehead. “Oh, honey! I completely forgot. I’ve got something for you. Something wonderful!”
Mom hurried into the house, and I followed. She was explaining, “I started getting into the spirit today. The birthday spirit . . .” as we went up to her bedroom, “. . . so! I went shopping during my lunch break. And what do you think I found?”
By now, we were standing at the foot of Mom’s bed, and she was holding up a shopping bag that she had pulled from inside her closet door.
“This was going to be a surprise, but this is as good a time as any for cheering ourselves up, isn’t it?”
I nodded eagerly.
Mom emptied the shopping bag onto her bedspread. And when I saw what tumbled out, I just about collapsed.
I was staring down at eight miniature cowboy hats with elastic chinstraps; a plastic bag full of plastic cowboys and plastic horses; napkins with pictures of cows on them; paper plates with lassoes printed around the edges; and a paper tablecloth covered with drawings of bucking broncos and cacti.
“I just went to browse, and I couldn’t help myself! I got such a kick out of buying it all,” Mom was chattering away as I stared in shock. “Come to think of it, it’s the one nice thing that happened all day.”
She turned to me with a big smile and said, “What do you think?”
I didn’t answer right away, because I knew I had a choice: I could either break down and tell Mom about the House of Horrors birthday that I had promised everybody, and, by doing so, I would probably crush her spirits.
Or, I could say what I said.
“Oh, cool. Cowboys.”
23
“Is it true? Is it true?!” Jennifer Mobley was panting with excitement as she raced down the hallway toward me, hair flying, braces sparkling.
“Is what true?”
“You’re throwing a House of Horrors Birthday Party?! I know I’m not invited or anything, but I hear people talking, and I just gotta ask you . . .”—she lowered her voice—“. . . how’re you going to do it, Charley? How’re you going to scare people? Can you give me a hint? Just a little one?”
I winced at her questions, and she quickly stepped back. “Oh, okay! I totally understand. You don’t have to tell me now and ruin the surprise. But maybe you can take pictures and make notes, and tell me afterwards? Huh? Please? Promise?”
“I don’t know,” I mumbled as I busied myself with school-books. “I’m thinking now that maybe it’s not such a good theme. Maybe I should change it.”
Jennifer’s mouth flew open with shock. “What? You can’t change it! Your theme is . . . is genius!”
I almost said “Really? You think so?” but just then, from behind us, Cougar spoke: “He can’t change what?”
We turned to find that Cougar and Scottie had been eavesdropping.
“He’s gonna change his birthday theme!” Jennifer practically exploded to Cougar, momentarily forgetting that she never speaks to him.
Cougar clapped me on the shoulder. “Oh, man. We gotta talk.”
“Excuse me?” Jennifer said to Cougar, pointing between herself and me. “We’re already talking here.”
“Oh, I believe you are through,” Cougar sneered.
“I don’t believe we are,” Jennifer sneered back.
“Hmm. That’s odd,” said Cougar pensively. He stuck a finger in his nose, pulled it out and examined his fingernail. “Cuz this booger says that you are through.”
And when he thrust his finger at Jennifer’s face, she threw up her hands, shrieked, “Ew, Leland!” and ran off down the hall.
Cougar swiped his finger on his jeans and turned to me. “So, what’s goin’ on?”
“I’m . . . I’m having second thoughts,” I said weakly. “About my party theme.”
“What kind of second thoughts?” Cougar’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. “Cuz I’m telling you right now—you’d better not have a clown.”
“Clowns give him nightmares,” Scottie sniggered to me.
“That was only one time!” snapped Cougar. He turned back to me. “And don’t even think about cowboys.”
“Eww! Cowboys . . . blecch!” Scottie stuck out his tongue in disgust.
So I sure wasn’t going to tell them what Mom had already bought.
“Look, man,” Cougar suddenly sounded threatening. “You announced a House of Horrors party. You better at least try to scare people.”
“Yeah,” Scottie nodded. “Even if you can’t.”
“But it’s not easy!” I blurted out. “Scaring people.”
Cougar shook his head. “Oh, I dunno. That bloody-eyeball-thing of yours had me going pretty good.”
“Yeah!” Scottie snorted, punching Cougar’s arm. “You went down like a ton of bricks!”
“Shut up!” Cougar barked and punched him back twice as hard.
But while they sparred, I stood there with my jaw dropping, because what Cougar said had just sent a bolt of inspiration crashing into my brain!
You think a single eyeball is scary? I thought. What about seeing a severed foot floating in a punch bowl? Or finding a bloody ear in your slice of birthday cake? Or . . . My explosion of ideas was interrupted when Cougar turned back to me.
“Look, Charlie, we’re coming to your birthday party like we promised. And if you know what’s good for you, you’ll throw the party . . .” he jabbed his booger finger in my face, “. . . that you promised.”
24
I truly believed that Cougar’s comment held the key to my salvation: body parts can be very scary, especially when not attached to a body.
And I knew where to get some!
My heart was pounding like a jackhammer as I raced home that afternoon, because I was painfully aware that the plan I was formulating—although brilliant—wasn’t perfect.
For one thing, I had no idea how I was going to break the news to Mom that my party theme would no longer be “cowboys.”
And since she had forbidden me to ever go over to Garry’s again, how was I going to explain to her where I got a shopping bag full of latex body parts?
Still, my idea was burning a hole in my skull, and I had to act on it immediately. I was only planning to borrow a few effects from Garry and worry about the rest later.
That’s all I had in mind.
Honest.
I never planned to burn down our garage.
Of all the afternoons to leave the house, Garry had picked the worst possible one. I pounded on his front door for about five minutes before I accepted the fact that he wasn’t at home. I was so deep in thought about what to do next that I didn’t hear the delivery
van pull up at Garry’s curb.
When I turned around and found the Delivery Man standing right behind me, I yelped like a dog when a door closes on his tail.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you,” said the Delivery Man.
“You didn’t scare me,” I lied.
He read the label of a box he was carrying: “Got a delivery here from Stage Effects Latex for Garry Quarky. You know him?”
I didn’t answer right away, because I was staring at the box. And—call me crazy—but, from the size of it, I was willing to bet that there was enough latex in there to make a whole lot of scary body parts.
And, because I had watched Garry, I knew exactly how to do just that!
“Kid?”
“Huh?” I blinked, trying to remember what the question was.
“Do you know this Garry Quarky guy?” he asked, nodding at Garry’s house.
“Garry? Oh, sure. We’re buddies.” I pointed to my house. “I live right there.”
“You wanna sign for the package, then?” the Delivery Man asked. And he held the box out to me.
Can you imagine my state of mind? I was being offered the opportunity of a lifetime. Mom would be home by the end of the afternoon. Garry may not be. I might never have this chance again!
And though a little voice in my head was chattering, “That latex is not yours!” it was being drowned out by an even louder voice that was chanting: “Birthday! Birthday! Birthday!”
“Sure, I’ll sign!” I said suddenly.
And, with a flick of a pen, my fate was sealed.
I waited until the delivery van had turned the corner at the end of our street before I ran around into Garry’s backyard. Sure enough, Garry had left a lot of his tools out to dry, so I borrowed the ones that I guessed I would need—including the molds for making a finger, an ear and a nose.
The Big One-Oh Page 8
