The End or Something Like That

by Ann Dee Ellis

  He was in jail for a DUI, which was a horrible tragedy, my mom said once and Dad said, “A tragedy? He was drinking. He got in a car. That’s called stupidity, not tragedy.”

  Mom said, “I know, Doug, but he didn’t know better.”

  And Dad said, “What are you talking about?”

  And then they argued and Mom said, “I feel bad for Sue.”

  •

  Sue was Skeeter’s mom and Sue made me a kangaroo cookie when Kim died.

  I said, “Thanks.”

  Skeeter said, “I had one of them. They don’t taste good.”

  I said, “Okay.”

  Then he said, “Okay.”

  And then he left.

  •

  Now at Ms. Dead Homeyer’s funeral he said, “Are you okay? Really?”

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  We sat on the back pew next to the two old men.

  A huge picture of Ms. Homeyer wearing her Smurf smock, holding a cat, was on an easel at the front.

  Then the man from the foyer wheeled her casket to the front, and they changed the music to a song called “We Are the World.”

  We sat there.

  And sat there.

  And sat there.

  Mr. Au went up and whispered to one of the mortuary guys.

  Then we sat and sat and sat.

  At six thirty, Mr. Au walked up to the microphone.

  “Hello,” he said, and the microphone feedback bounced off the walls.

  The music went off.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry about that.”

  Then a bell chimed signaling that someone had come in the mortuary. One of the mortuary guys left and Au said, “Today, I’m going to talk about a dear friend named Carla Homeyer.“ He pointed to the picture.

  Mr. Au was wearing the same thing he wore to school every day: a golf shirt and Bermuda shorts. He cleared his throat, “Carla,” he said. “Carla Carla Carla. What to say about Carla.”

  He cleared his throat again.

  “Carla was a friend to many,” he said. “She loved her students and she truly believed that there was life beyond this universe.”

  I sank in my seat.

  “This is bad,” Skeeter whispered.

  “Really bad,” I said.

  Then they walked in.

  The worst people who could possibly walk in, walked in.

  • 19 •

  One day, the summer before all of this, the summer before Kim died, Mom was off at an insurance workshop, and Dad was in his study, and Joe was eating Styrofoam or playing the Wii, and Kim and I were in my room dying from sweat. Kim was on the floor staring at her feet and I was on the bed trying to see if I could put my entire fist in my mouth.

  “You can’t do it,” she said.

  “I think I can.”

  “No,” she said. “It’s physically impossible. Besides you’re a weirdo.”

  “It’s not physically impossible,” I said. I tried again, and she was probably right.

  Then she said, “Why do you have so many stuffed animals?”

  I looked over at the corner of the room. My mom had helped me rig up a net to hold all the toys I’d gotten over the years. My grandma was crazy town, and me and Joe each got three stuffed animals for every holiday.

  “I love them,” I said.

  She looked at me. “You do?”

  “No.”

  She sat up. “I think we need to set them free.”

  I got nervous. Kim had a lot of ideas. In third grade I got grounded because Kim had decided to put gelatin in all the toilets.

  “What do you want to do?”

  She smiled. “It’s going to be epic,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Trust me,” she said.

  I sighed.

  So we got a bunch of trash bags and gathered all the animals in the house. My room, the rec room, we even went into Joe’s secret area of his closet and filled two bags.

  “He’s going to kill us,” I said.

  “He can’t kill us,” she said. “He’s a baby.”

  And she was right. Joe was a baby.

  We lugged them all out to the curb, making four trips.

  “Your grandma is insane,” Kim said.

  “I know.”

  Then we started sticking the animals to the light pole with duct tape.

  “Why are we doing this?”

  “Because it’s important,” Kim said, taping my Elmo on first.

  I watched her. Then I said, “We should do it by color.”

  “What?”

  “By color.”

  I figured if we were going to do something like this, might as well be organized about it.

  Kim shrugged. “Okay.”

  So she taped and I handed her toys.

  We started with Mr. Polar Bear and Joe’s pair of bunnies and then we moved from white to gray with Hippy Hippo and a couple of elephants we got from the San Diego Zoo one time.

  An hour later we had stacked two chairs on my dad’s folding table.

  “I’m almost out of tape,” Kim said. “Maybe you should go ask Gabby for some?”

  We both looked across the street. Gabby Forster lived in the biggest house on the block. Gabby always wore bikinis, she never rode bikes or played night games, and one time she told us that her family’s beach house sometimes got rented by Jean-Claude Van Damme.

  So she was way cooler than us.

  Right then, while we were staring at her house, Gabby walked out.

  She was wearing a hot pink bikini, and she looked like a model.

  “What are you guys doing?” She yelled across the street, which was shocking. Like she cared.

  Kim taped a tiger next to Winnie-the-Pooh. “We’re protesting stuffed animal cruelty,” she yelled back.

  I tried not to laugh. Gabby scared me. Nobody scared Kim.

  Gabby walked over. “What are you doing?”

  I held a leopard up to Kim.

  “We’re making a statement,” Kim said.

  “Yeah, we wanted to make a statement,” I said, which was exactly what Kim just said.

  Gabby stared at the pole. “You guys are strange,” she said.

  I wanted to say something like this was Kim’s idea. I would never do this. I was not strange, I was normal. I am normal and cool, too. But instead I didn’t say anything.

  Then Gabby said, “Why are you doing this again?”

  “Tell her, Emmy,” Kim said.

  I looked at her. “What?”

  “Tell her why we’re doing this.”

  “Uh.” I hated when Kim put me on the spot. “Uh.”

  “Don’t hold back,” Kim said. “We want the people to know.”

  “Uh,” I said again. “We are concerned that stuffed animals are being . . .

  “Uh . . .

  •

  “Stuffed animals are being treated unfairly?” I said. This was so dumb. We were so dumb.

  But Kim said, “Exactly. It’s atrocious.”

  “Oh yeah,” Gabby said, a hand on her bony hip.

  Kim stopped taping. “For example, Gabby, where are your stuffed animals?”

  “What?”

  “Like right now.”

  “Uh, I don’t have any stuffed animals.”

  Kim pointed a leopard at her and said, “Now that’s a lie. That is a horrible horrible lie. Statistics show that ninety-eight percent of the population has at least one stuffed animal in their bedroom. If not in their bedroom, within twenty feet of their bedroom.”

  Where did she come up with this stuff?

  Gabby said, “Well I don’t.”

  Kim gave her this look she does, like the time Joe lied to us and told us there we
re no more brownies, and she did the look and he turned red and she said, where are the brownies and he said they’re gone and she did the look harder and then he said, just don’t eat them all and pulled them out from under the sink.

  It was her lie look.

  •

  “What are you doing?” Gabby said to Kim.

  Kim kept giving her the look.

  “What is she doing?” she asked me.

  I shrugged.

  Then, like magic, Gabby said, “I have some stuffed animals.”

  Kim nodded. “See? Ninety-eight percent of the population.”

  We went back to taping and Gabby stood there. I tried not to keep looking at her. Why was she out here?

  After a few minutes she said, “Do you want to use my dad’s Little Giant ladder?”

  Kim smiled. “We need more duct tape, too,” Kim said, and Gabby ran home.

  That afternoon we covered the pole as high as the Little Giant ladder could go. Gabby brought out a bin full of Beanie Babies.

  We even got more stuffed animals from some of the other neighbor kids.

  When we were almost done, a Jeep full of boys pulled up.

  Gabby, who was holding up a hot pink rhino, immediately dropped it and walked over.

  “Hey, guys,” Gabby said, leaning into the Jeep.

  How did she know how to be so sexy?

  The driver, a beautiful boy with dark hair, ignored Gabby and yelled to Kim, “What are you doing up there?”

  Kim looked down. “What?”

  “What are you doing up there?”

  I looked at Kim. He was talking to her. He was looking at her. She was thirteen. Almost fourteen but still, she was thirteen, and he had to be at least sixteen.

  “I’m eating tacos. What are you doing?” Kim said.

  He laughed.

  Gabby said, “I have no idea what they’re doing. It’s so lame.”

  The kid cut her off and said to Kim, “Will you come do that at my house?”

  Kim said to me, “Emmy. Can I have that unicorn?”

  I handed her the unicorn, my hand trembling, I don’t know why.

  “You playing hard to get?” he said.

  Gabby tried to talk to them again but the kid kept not paying attention to her and I kept feeling sick to my stomach and Kim kept taping animals.

  Finally they drove away.

  Gabby stalked back to the pole and sat on the curb.

  Thirty minutes later we had no more animals.

  Kim came down from the ladder, and we all stood in the road to look at it.

  “Wow,” Gabby said.

  Kim nodded. “It’s beautiful.”

  “It’s better than beautiful,” I said.

  Then Joe came out. “What the crap are you guys doing?”

  Dad followed him out.

  “Dad, look what Emmy and Kim did.”

  Dad stared at it.

  Joe stared at it. We were all staring at it.

  Kim said, “Joe, You know you love it.”

  And he said, “It’s stupid,” and then he said, “Hey is that my . . .”

  Then he stopped because Gabby was standing there, and Joe had had a crush on her since she told him he looked like a UFC Fighter and clearly a UFC Fighter wouldn’t own a Shamu doll.

  He stopped and we all stood there.

  It was the weirdest thing we had ever made, but it was also the best thing. Almost the best thing.

  We left the animals up there for a week. People came from all over to see it, and we even got a small article in the newspaper:

  GIRLS MAKE HUMANITARIAN STATEMENT ABOUT STUFFED ANIMALS

  There’s a picture of the pole and me, Kim, and Gabby, our arms around one another’s shoulders like we all belonged together.

  • 20 •

  Two days after the stuffed animal light pole, Gabby showed up on our porch.

  Kim and I were on the swing eating Cheetos, discussing whether it would be worth it to sit on a couch for a year if you got a million dollars when it was over.

  Gabby had no shoes on and she wore a gold bikini. She said, “What are you guys doing?”

  I looked at Kim. This was so weird. All these years across the street and she hardly ever even looked at me, let alone came over to talk.

  “Gabby,” Kim said, “if someone told you that they’d give you a million dollars if you sat on a couch for a year, would you do it?”

  My stomach knotted. Another dumb conversation. She was going to think we were so stupid.

  She leaned against the railing and said, “What?”

  Kim held the Cheetos out for her, which I was sure she wouldn’t eat.

  “Think carefully,” Kim said. “Would you sit on a couch for a year for a million dollars?”

  Gabby took the bag and said, “Where is the couch? Like in my front room?”

  Kim nodded. “It’s wherever you want it to be. Your room. Your kitchen. Backyard.”

  Gabby pulled out a handful of Cheetos, and we were in the twilight zone.

  “Can it be a sectional?”

  “No,” Kim said. “Just a regular couch.”

  “Can you exercise on it?”

  “You just have to always be touching it,” I said, getting up my courage. “But you can do jumping jacks or lift weights.”

  Kim and I had worked all this out.

  “Huh,” she said. “What about the bathroom?”

  We went through all the scenarios and soon she was on the swing with us. She’d only do it if she could get the couch from some furniture store I’d never heard of. And she wanted it reupholstered every three months, but how would she do that? Then she said the kicker. She’d have to have at least four people on staff the entire year.

  “For what?” I asked.

  “Uhhh, basic human needs. Duh.”

  I swallowed. “How would you pay them? It’d have to come out of the million dollars,” I said because it would.

  She gave me a dirty look. “No way. I get the million after. This is part of the deal.”

  “What? It’s not a couch and a couple of servants. It’s just a couch.”

  I couldn’t believe I was arguing with her but hello. “You can’t have a staff for free.”

  “You never said that in the beginning. The only stipulation was that you had to be touching a couch for a year,” Gabby said.

  “Yeah but . . .” and on and on and on. Gabby was so stubborn and it made me mad. You can’t make up your own rules. It was our game.

  Finally, when we were both almost shouting, Kim yelled “HEY!”

  We stopped.

  “Gabby can have a staff.”

  “WHAT?”

  Gabby smiled.

  “But does it come out of the million?”

  “No,” Kim said. “You were the one who said it was okay to have movers take you and the couch to the movies and restaurants, and we never said that had to come out of the money.”

  I folded my arms. “That’s different.”

  “It’s not different,” Gabby said.

  “It’s not different,” Kim said, and I was mad. I scooted over to the end of the swing.

  Gabby stood up. “Do you guys want to come swimming? We just got a new slide, and my mom went to Costco and we have a ton of good food.”

  Kim looked at me. “That’d be fun,” she said.

  •

  “Ugh.” I didn’t want to go swimming. Ugh.

  •

  They both stared at me. “Sure,” I finally said.

  And so we went swimming at Gabby’s, who gets to a have a staff of four if she ever lives on a couch for a year.

  • 21 •

  The worst people possible walked into Ms. Dead Homeyer’s funeral.

&n
bsp; First Gabby.

  She was wearing tight tiny shorts and a tank top. Her boobs were showing, which meant she was wearing the double padded bra she ordered online from Bonanza dot com last summer. She made me get one, too, but it didn’t do that to my chest.

  “You should get one, Kim,” she’d said.

  Kim just laughed. Kim didn’t need a bra to do stuff to her chest.

  Now Kim was dead.

  So Gabby was wearing that bra for sure, her hair in a ponytail, and green eye shadow.

  I pulled my jacket closed over my sequin dress and acted like I didn’t care.

  Then two of Gabby’s halter-top friends, Sadie Andreason and Heidi Baker, came in.

  Next was Jud Jackson and Paul Lohner and Carl Armstrong. Then Laura Thomas and Jillie Brown.

  And then, as if things couldn’t get any worse, the hugest jerk of all of them, Tony Shurtz.

  When Tony Shurtz walked in, I wanted to die. I couldn’t deal with him today. Not today.

  I sank in my seat even lower.

  Skeeter looked at me. “What are you doing?”

  I was so far down on the pew, I couldn’t see Mr. Au. In fact, my head was cranked into my chest.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  Mr. Au got out a ukulele and started singing.

  By the time he was done with his song about birds, ten more people in our grade had walked in.

  I sat up. What is going on?

  Finally, after one more song, this one about dogs, Au put his mouth on the mic. “That was a song I know Carla liked.” He wiped his forehead, because singing songs with a ukulele can get sweaty and said, “We don’t have anything else planned for the funeral, right?”

  He looked at the mortuary guys. They looked at each other.

  Who was in charge? Where was Ms. Homeyer’s family? Where were her friends?

  Au said, “I thought we could have an open microphone. Anyone who feels compelled to should come up here and express their feelings.”

  An open mic? At a funeral?

  For no reason, my heart started to thump.

  He kept talking, “I see that some of my homeroom students are here. They were a half hour late and that was my fault. I told them the wrong time.”