Sorry You're Lost

by Matt Blackstone

  “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.

  As I stood near the food table amid the circus of pizza-scarfing and flirtatious smiles, I kept reminding myself it was over, that she no longer had fifty-fifty odds, that there was no longer any reason to be optimistic, that remission was no longer in the cards. I’d wonder who’d pick me up from school and then remind myself it wouldn’t be my mom. I’d look at the pizza and wonder who was making dinner tonight and remind myself that it was over, over, over, over, over. She wasn’t coming back.

  And all that reminding, having to actively remind myself again and again that she was gone, made me feel as small as the ants on the classroom floor nibbling on a stray piece of mozzarella cheese. Made me want to step on those ants (I did), and step on myself and throw a whole pie in a student’s face for complaining about his mom’s curfew rules and another pie in my teacher’s face for organizing this stupid party (I wish I did), because I was alone, with no one to talk to, and it looked really bad, it must have, and there was that long table of food but you don’t want to be the only person snacking, and everyone was talking but me, so I tried to blend in. I pulled out a cell phone. And spoke. And blended in like a banana in a blender, and what a brilliant acting job it was. It was truly an impressive banana performance. I even laughed a few times. And it worked. I was less alone. No longer a lonely banana.

  Sometimes I feel that she’s with me and s
ometimes I don’t. I just talk into the phone, and it makes me feel better for a minute, like the chicken dance in Mrs. Q’s class, which is a great way to burn calories. Not everyone agrees with that statement—my dad, for one—which is why I’m taking the long way home. The long way, meaning “the wrong way,” or “the complete opposite direction of my house.”

  Instead of walking along the main drag in town, where the split-level houses look cloned and franchised like food chains, I make a right out of the school, which takes me past McIntyre Funeral Home and its white sign and white awning and white siding and misshapen black cars. Past the Little League baseball field with its grass frozen over. Past the Rock ’n’ Roll Diner, its jukebox on full display through the window, which gets me thinking of Bruce Springsteen and, for some reason, his hair: he has lustrous locks, thick in the front, thicker in the back. A mullet, I think. My haircut doesn’t have a name, but it’s oily, misshapen, and has angel wings on the sides of my head. Some people may call it an angel haircut, but I haven’t yet met those people.

  It’s only five o’clock, but it’s almost dark. Like some pesky freeloading guest, winter has come and never left. (Leave already, February, you’re no longer wanted.) Some of the trees have tiny buds, but most of them look like bald, hunchbacked old men.

  When I’m a block away from my house, I hide behind a bald tree and peek down the block to see if my dad’s rusty green Buick is parked in the driveway. Of course it is, right on schedule. He’s a salesman at some fancy antiques store where they sell old clocks for thousands of dollars, so he’s always well aware of the time. And now, at precisely 5:10 p.m., it’s nearly time for him to make mad, passionate love to the object of his desire. I’ve seen it more than I should, and it’s embarrassing and hideous and wrong. At first he takes it slow, nibbling on the outside of the legs and thighs, but then he loses control and his mouth becomes a ferocious tiger and his fingers get shaky and violent. He doesn’t come up for air until he’s good and satisfied and full. He barely ever wipes his mouth, not until the end.

  He sure loves his fried chicken.

  I take a few more minutes, allowing maximum time for him to complete his meal before finishing my trek home.

  My house, like everyone else’s on our block, is a ranch. There are no horses or farmers at my ranch. My house is called a ranch because it’s a one-story house with a basement. The laundry room is in a long, dark corridor in that basement. There’s only one light in the laundry room, which you can’t turn on until you’re halfway through the darkest part of the darkest room in the house.

  When I was younger, I hid there in the shadows. No windows or candles. Black as night. I sat cross-legged on the cold floor and invented games. When my mom came down to do laundry, I hid behind an old wooden dresser, and when her footsteps reached the bottom of the stairs, I pretended to be a ghost, a hideous ghost, from generations past. My mission was to scare to death the humans who moved in on my property. They had to pay for their sins in the worst possible way. Starting with this lady of the house.

  My mom’s bare feet swished across the floor as her fingers felt their way through the darkness. In the middle of the room, she groped for the light switch, but right before her hand could find the switch, I leaped out of my hiding spot and, ghost that I was, screamed as loud as I possibly could, “BOO!”

  The laundry room isn’t used anymore. My dad won’t go near it. Every few weeks, he drops off our clothes at the laundromat. He doesn’t cook, either. Twice a week he loads up on fried chicken.

  When I was younger, my mom ran the kitchen with two golden rules: you can’t mix sugar cereals (a Trix and Lucky Charms combo was a no-no), and no fried chicken. She forbade it from entering the house, citing my dad’s high cholesterol.

  “Please, honey,” my dad would beg.

  “Oh, stop groveling,” she’d say. “I’m doing you and Denny a favor.”

  In place of my mom, I got fried chicken and a week full of leftovers.

  I open the front door. The microwave is humming, which can mean only one thing. My dad hasn’t eaten yet. Crap.

  He’s at the kitchen table in a red-collared shirt washed so many times (by the cleaners) that it now looks like dusty brick. His skin is pale and stubbly, his cheeks a faint red, as if they’ve been washed a few too many times as well (but they haven’t; he could use a shower). His unblinking eyes are stuck on the television. He doesn’t even hear me come in until I drop my backpack in my room. “Time for dinner!” he shouts.

  Really not in the mood. For the food or the company. Not sure which sounds worse, actually: leftover chicken from four days ago, or watching my dad devour another chicken leg and then wipe his greasy fingers on toilet paper. He says toilet paper’s cheaper than paper towels, and I understand that—I do, I really do—but it’s toilet paper; it belongs near a toilet, not on the kitchen table. Every time I mention it he gets all red and flustered and shouts, “Do you wanna buy paper towels?” What kind of question is that? Do I wanna buy paper towels? Show me a kid who actually wants to buy paper towels. Seriously, bring him to me. He’s ruining everything.

  I move my backpack on top of my unmade bed. I still have the same green and white football sheets and covers I used as a kid. The field is green, the yard markings are white. On the fifty-yard line, a player in a blue uniform holds a football under his armpit. He’s not moving. He’s just standing there. Ramrod straight. His knees aren’t even bent. I mean, I know it’s a sheet, but the player in the blue uniform isn’t moving at all, not even backward or to the side. He’s just standing there, like a bump on a log. I think it’s sad, that’s all. I know it sounds dumb.

  But even though my sheets are juvenile, they’re very comfortable. I throw them over my face when I want to disappear. Some days, when I feel really lousy, I build my old G.I. Joe tent, grab the sheets, and go disappear in there. But it takes energy to do that. “I think I’ll get some rest!” I holler down the hall. “Had a long day.”

  “Right, uh, okay then,” he stammers. “Let’s talk when you’re feeling better.”

  That’s what he always says. “Let’s talk when.” If I see him later, he’ll pretend he never said it. The most he’ll do is hand me my one dollar allowance. One measly dollar. You can’t even buy paper towels with that. Not a single roll. At least not the good kind.

  I appreciate my allowance, don’t get me wrong. I know there are plenty of starving children who aren’t fortunate enough to wipe fried chicken grease on toilet paper. But, come on … one dollar? That’s been my allowance ever since my mom got sick. My allowance—like the laundry room, my football sheets, and everything else in my house—sort of got frozen in time.

  I don’t even think of spending my allowance anymore, but I used to. I’d have to wait two weeks to buy a pack of gum, five weeks to buy a five-dollar foot-long turkey sandwich at Subway—but then there’s tax, so I really had to wait six weeks.

  But try telling that to my dad. He’s not exactly a natural schmoozer. Doesn’t like to sit down and talk things out. I don’t blame him a whole lot, though. I’m kind of glad he’s like that. I’m not glad he’s ballooned to over three hundred pounds the past few years, but I’m grateful he doesn’t talk a whole lot. I mean, even if my dad tried to talk to me about Mom and asked me why I kept talking to her on her old broken phone, I’d probably ask him if the Phillies will make it back to the play-offs this year, if Chase Utley is still his favorite player, if hot dogs are better on the barbecue or at a ball game.

  I don’t mind talking about baseball, because when you talk about it, you don’t have to worry that one poor choice of words will make the other person run away. Like one time I told my dad I was glad Mom died. I didn’t mean it. What I meant was I was glad she wasn’t in pain anymore. I just wasn’t used to talking about important things.

  I know that what happened in Mrs. Q’s class is important—to her, to me, to my dad—so of course I don’t want to talk about it. I don’t even want to think about it. Surfin
g on an armrest desk? Falling in the trash can? Seriously?

  I pull at a metal chair, drag it over the stained carpet to my desk, where I sit down and jot,

  Dear Mrs. Q, I’m sorry my inappropriate behavior got in the way of the Learning Zone. You’re a good teacher, a very good teacher, and very good-looking.

  I cross off that last line because it sounds terrible. The whole thing sounds bad. I crumple the letter into a ball and throw it across the room toward a small wastepaper basket and miss, of course. Air ball. Like the rest of my day.

  I start over:

  Dear Mrs. Q, Sorry for interrupting your very fascinating lesson on mathematics. I can’t wait to use these tools in the very near future. You deserve many awards: teacher-of-the-year, rookie-of-the-year, and best-looking-lady-of-the-year. You are an inspiration. You’re my inspiration. So keep up the good work. I really am sorry.

  I think of walking into the kitchen to show my dad the note. Maybe he’d be proud of me for manning up and apologizing. Maybe he’d tell me I used sound judgment in apologizing and that I should do the manly thing and give it to Mrs. Q. No, he’d probably just nod his head, which I hate because I’m not a mind reader, and hand me back the note. And then later, if I eat with him and he works up the courage to ask me questions, we’ll do the same song and dance we’ve done so often I’ve memorized it:

  Dad: “Uh, hello, Denny.”

  Me: “Greetings, Dad.”

  Dad: “Yes, uh greetings.”

  Me: “And salutations. Greetings and salutations.”

  [Dad fiddles with his thumbs.]

  Dad: “Right, salutations.”

  [Two minutes of silence.]

  Dad: “So, what’d you learn today?”

  Me: “Nothing.”

  [Dad drops silverware on his plate. The clang hurts my ears.]

  Dad: “Why didn’t you learn anything today?”