by Gary Paulsen
“What are you talking about? I’m just sitting here adding up my carbs and my protein grams.” JonPaul looked totally freaked out. He should have—I’m very dramatic; I was totally committed to the moment, and I was selling this bit.
“You ate that peanut butter sandwich and twitched and your eyes rolled back in your head and, although it was only for a few seconds and I’m not one hundred percent sure, I coulda sworn you stopped breathing.”
“Probably sudden-onset peanut allergies; I read about that on the AskADoc.com site the other day.” I could see that his hands were shaking. “Do I look okay?”
“Kinda.” I studied his face, frowning.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You look … splotchy. And you seem a little … unsteady.”
“I am dizzy.”
“Low blood sugar,” I said, nodding. “That’s probably all it is. You should lie down for a while.”
“Or maybe eat something?”
“And run the risk of choking to death on your own vomit? What if it’s something more serious?”
“Yeah, buddy, you’re right. I’m gonna bail, head home and go lie down for a while.”
“Smart.” I nodded some more.
JonPaul went off, limping slightly. He’d probably be checking his pulse and taking his temperature all night. That kind of behavior made me more certain than ever that, once he was pushed to batcrap-crazy extremes, he’d be forced to see the depth of his obsessions, and then he’d start to develop a more realistic perspective on the whole health nut thing.
I’d started out on the right foot.
I slid the movie into the machine and watched the car turn into monsters by myself. I kind of missed JonPaul, but at least I could eat bananas dipped in melted chocolate chips and not have to listen to what the processed sugar and hydrogenated fat were going to do to my bathroom habits.
Connie called and talked at me about her committee idea for a while. She asked if we could get together on Wednesday or Thursday to do something and talk about the other thing. I wasn’t really listening. I wondered if England had paid attention to everything France had to say during World War II. I didn’t think so—they were allies, not buddies. That was how I’d think about Connie, too. She just didn’t know we were on the same side, fighting for the good guys to win.
Then Katie emailed me an update of her project outline, with the topic sentences from every paragraph. She asked me to proofread her introduction; it was fine, really top-quality work. That was what I emailed back, even though I didn’t read it. That’s what Delete buttons are for.
The next day at lunch I could see the dark circles under JonPaul’s eyes. He hadn’t been in school all morning.
“I went to see the allergist. Got the scratch test,” he reported. “I’m not allergic to anything.”
“Great! But you can’t be too careful, bud.”
“That’s what I said! But Dr. Culligan said I had to ‘react adversely to the stimuli’ before she could prescribe me anything.”
“What’s in your hand, then?”
“Markie’s EpiPen.”
“You stole an EpiPen from Markie? What if Markie has an allergy attack and needs it? I’m calling his mom to make sure he’s got a backup.”
“He’s got a valid prescription and can get more anytime he wants. Lucky booger. Plus, there are about a million of them lying around over there—they’ll never miss one. And I didn’t steal it—he gave it to me.”
“You just gonna carry it around waiting to stab yourself in the leg?”
“Yeah. Like you said—can’t be too careful. I can tell that my glands are swollen. I think my throat is closing up. Am I wheezing? I think I’m wheezing. I definitely feel like I’m wheezing. Maybe I need an inhaler, too?” He held a carton of cold milk up to his nonfevered head.
Friends don’t let friends wuss out like this.
JonPaul’s weakness could easily be exploited by unscrupulous opposing teams if it wasn’t rooted out of him while he was still young. I was doing this for his own good. As well as the teams he played on.
Looking at it from that perspective, I was helping to make JonPaul a happier, better-adjusted person.
And then he could focus on suggestions about the Tina situation, and if she happened to find out that I was a very thoughtful guy and the best friend anyone could ever have, so much the better.
But I forgot to mention it to him. I was calling Markie’s mom.
7. GOOD LIES MAKE THE WORLD GO ROUND
“Buzz is one crazy broad.” That’s what Dad has always said about my aunt.
“Buzz rocks.” That’s what Sarah and Daniel and I think.
No one’s sure what Mom thinks. But she must like having her sister around, or she wouldn’t have offered to let her move in above our garage. My aunt has lived there as long as I can remember.
When I got home after school, I decided to see if Auntie Buzz had any advice on how to get Tina to realize how incredibly perfect I would be as a boyfriend. Because if anyone knows about relationships, it’s Buzz. She’s been married three and a half times. The half comes from a spring-break marriage in Cancún when she was in college. “It probably wasn’t even legal in the first place, so it only counts as a halfsie,” she told me once.
Auntie Buzz is very high-energy. The double shot of espresso at the coffee shop across the street from her office is called the Buzz in her honor. Dad watched her knock back a few espressos once and muttered to me, “That kind of energy must have been hard on all those husbands.”
Sarah and I work for Buzz on weekends and during school vacations, carrying boxes of swatches and tassels and paint chips and tile samples and carpet books from her office to her work van and back again. Decorating is a heavy business.
She hires Daniel and his hockey team to move furniture. They work dirt cheap and don’t, Auntie Buzz says with a happy smile, belong to a union. Plus they work overtime for pizza and doughnuts and that’s the kind of payment Auntie Buzz can afford. “I’m not good with money, and my projects always go over budget,” she explained.
Auntie Buzz was sitting at our table when I walked into the kitchen, tapping away on her laptop. Mom had a late meeting, Dad was on Generic Business Trip Number Infinity and Beyond, Daniel had practice and Sarah was working, so I had privacy to bring up the Tina thing with Buzz.
“Hi, Buzz.”
“Hiya, Kev.”
“Whatcha doin’?”
“Putting together a demo reel so that I can be hired as the host of a network television show. Or cable, I don’t really care. Just so long as it’s national and pays well. I’ll do any kind of show.”
“Uh, why?” Even though I was dying to ask her about Tina, a person doesn’t just ignore this kind of information.
“When you work for and by yourself on commission and the government is sending you registered letters, you need to get creative about your income stream.”
“I didn’t know you were getting registered letters.”
“It’s a recent development.”
“So … how much trouble are you in?”
She shrugged and then scowled in the direction of a canvas bag near her feet. It was filled with a ton of unopened envelopes. Some of them had green Registered Mail stickers on them and were from the Internal Revenue Service. I’m only fourteen, but those people scare me. Tax time each year at our house is not pretty—Mom and Dad drag out shoe boxes full of receipts and take over the kitchen table for days on end, and there’s a lot of sighing and frowning and clickety-click-clicking of the calculator.
Adults, I’ve noticed, are usually terrible with money. I thought about the sock full of cash I have hidden in my pajama drawer. I’m an excellent saver.
“How much do you owe?”
“I’m not going to open the bills until I have the money to pay everything.” She looked more jittery than normal.
“Do you want me to find out for you?”
“You’re only fou
rteen years old—exposure to that kind of stress might kill you or make you sterile, and I don’t want to be responsible for you not being able to have children someday.”
“I don’t think that’s going to happen if I read a few—twenty-seven—letters.” I hunched down and thumbed through the stack of envelopes.
“Can you put them in chronological order for me? I’ll find an accountant to deal with everything first thing on Monday.”
Monday is always Auntie Buzz’s favorite time to handle a problem.
“Do you have any plans for, uh, solving your financial … situation other than getting your own television show?”
“Why should I? I’d be a natural on TV, and the network—or the cable companies—would be crazy not to hire me.”
Buzz and I were more alike than I’d suspected; that was exactly the way I think. Self-confidence is everything for military geniuses, liars like me, and decorators in trouble with the government. All of a sudden, I felt warmly toward my aunt—a little parental, even.
When Sarah and Daniel and I run through our allowances and ask to borrow money from our folks, we get a huge lecture, and then they make it a teachable moment. No one ever gets punished in this house, because Mom says we should “experience the consequences” of our actions so that we can “benefit from the learning opportunity.”
I thought Buzz could get a lot out of a teachable moment. And I was just the person to teach her. I was the answer to her prayers—she just didn’t know it yet.
She was in a lot more trouble than Sarah or Daniel or I ever were, so she’d need more help and a bigger moment of teachabilityness, and if that isn’t a word, it should be.
She didn’t even notice when I took the bag to my room. I sat on the floor and separated the invoices from the checks. Then I went downstairs to the family computer in the basement and sorted through the boxes of software until I found the bookkeeping program Mom uses for her store. On the way back to my room, while Buzz was still on her laptop, I quietly rooted though her purse and grabbed her checkbook. I could have shaved her head for all she would have noticed. She was typing away, and her fingers must have been breaking land-speed records. I saw an empty coffeepot on the table next to her.
I took the disk to my room, installed the program on my laptop and whizzed through the tutorial, and in no time flat, I was entering debits and listing credits. I was so glad we’d done an accounting section in math a couple of weeks ago or none of this would have made any sense to me.
About an hour later, I’d balanced Buzz’s checkbook and discovered that she had a ton of money. She just never recorded the deposits. By the time I’d set up a bill-paying system and gotten everything entered and paid, Auntie Buzz had turned a nice profit in the past quarter.
I felt a little drunk with success, so I read the letters from the tax folks. I didn’t know what she was so freaked out about. The letters told her to call the 800 number and set up a payment schedule. I grabbed the phone and called the number and, deepening my voice a little, had a friendly conversation with a lady named Ms. Young who was completely understanding about Buzz’s dilemma in these tough economic times and suggested a monthly repayment plan. I read the number of Auntie Buzz’s checking account to Ms. Young, who said she would send Buzz the paperwork right away.
I could have told Auntie Buzz that her problems had been solved, but what kind of lesson would that have taught her?
I heard Auntie Buzz make a fresh pot of coffee and introduce herself for about the twelfth time to the webcam on her computer so that the network—or the cable companies—could see what a great personality she had on camera.
I had second thoughts about asking her for advice on Tina when I heard her pretend to banter with her imaginary cohost (“Well, Chuck, you would say that, hahaha”). One. Crazy. Broad.
I went downstairs to check my email. I sent a long note to Connie that I cut and pasted from the town council’s monthly minutes, throwing in a lot of heretofores and therewiths. Then I emailed Katie that I’d just gotten back from a lab draw and—good news!—my white blood cell count was down. I said yes to a request from Markie’s parents to babysit the next day, and I IM’d JonPaul to see how he was feeling. My buddies had sent me homework from the classes I’d missed, so I started to tackle that pile of mindlessness.
Truth be told, as much as I liked looking at Tina and devoting all my time and energy during all my free hours to thinking about making her crazy about me, it was already Wednesday and I still hadn’t come up with any brainstorms to get her to like me.
A few more pointless days like this and I was just going to lie to her. This truthfulness thing was a whole lot harder than my spur-of-the-moment inventions.
8. A GOOD LIE TAKES ON A LIFE OF ITS OWN
I took a break from homework to check my phone for new texts later that evening and nearly jumped out of my skin.
“Mom!” I leapt up from the computer desk in the basement and raced upstairs to the kitchen to find her. I’d heard her come in, and had heard Buzz leave, a while ago. “JonPaul and his cousin, you know, the one in college they call Goober? Well, they have tickets for the Blind Rage concert festival at the Kane County Fairgrounds this weekend and they want to sell me one and take me with. The greatest part is that Buket o’ Puke ’n Snot is headlining.”
“Buket o’ Puke ’n Snot? Can’t say I’m familiar with their body of work.”
“You’ve heard them, you just don’t know it. ‘I Could Kill and Eat You,’ ‘You Suck, but Let’s Hook Up Anyway,’ ‘Anarchy Rules,’ ‘Dissension Is the Answer,’ ‘Loving You Is a Pit of Death.’ ”
She shuddered and shook her head. “Poetic though they sound, and I appreciate that you’ve just described both tender ballads of love and socially prescient commentary, I still don’t believe this rings any bells.”
“Dude and the Jailbaits are playing too, and Skullkraker.”
“Delightful bill. How much is this … ode to dark despair going to run you?”
“Tickets are two fifty.”
“Two hundred and fifty? Dollars?”
“I have money from working for Auntie Buzz, and I’ll pay.”
“Yeah, you will.”
“The thing is, we gotta camp out the night before because it’s open seating so we need to get there early to get good spots near the stage. And it’s a two-day festival with a whole bunch of up-and-coming bands in addition to the headliners, so we’ll leave on Friday and then come home Sunday, late, when it’s all wrapped up. Better make that early Monday morning.”
“Kevin. Son. Are you crazy? You think your father and I are going to sign off on allowing you, a fourteen-year-old boy, to go off with some … Goober creature for two days and nights of antisocial music—and I use that term lightly and with apologies to musicians and composers everywhere—without parental or even coherent adult supervision?”
“What’s your point?”
“No. N. O. That’s my point.”
“Can we discuss this?”
“We just did.” She gave me that look. The one that said I was about to go somewhere I didn’t want to go. And that I was bound to make things worse for myself if I pressed the issue. I know my mom; she’s got no wiggle room. Yes/no, right/wrong, black/white, good/bad. End of discussion.
I stormed back to the family room downstairs, pounding hard on each of the ten steps to let her know that Kevin. Was. Not. At. All. Happy. About. What. Just. Happened.
Because I wasn’t speaking to her, I didn’t say anything as I turned right around and stomped back up the stairs to the kitchen to make myself a banana with melted chocolate chips, and then, just for good measure, I accidentally/deliberately burned a bag of microwave popcorn so that the whole house reeked.
She went to the living room with a book.
I pondered our discussion as I ate my snack. It’s times like this when loopholes become a guy’s best friend. What had she said, again? Something about my father? Hm. Doesn’t seem to me that he was con
sulted at all.
I’ll fix that.
I sent Dad a quick text, stressing the wonder of the situation and the once-in-a-lifetime aspect of the offer. My dad’s a big music fan, so I knew he’d be predisposed to thinking it was a good idea. I forgot to mention I’d already spoken to Mom. Forget, neglect, tomato, tomahto.
The great thing about my dad being gone all the time is that he always responds to text messages and emails from us at the speed of light.
“snds gd. ill txt mom. hom soon.”
Fab. I get to go to the concert and Dad breaks the news to Mom. I hoped she’d be so mad that he went ahead and okayed the concert that she wouldn’t even notice I’d gone behind her back to get permission.
I took the phone to my room to call JonPaul and tell him and Goober to count me in. Mom must have heard from Dad, because I heard her cell beep with an incoming text message. She remained in the living room, though. And didn’t say a word. The hairs on the back of my neck rose.
Playing one parent against the other has always been strictly forbidden in this house. But it wasn’t my fault Dad was never home to know what was going on.
I told myself my actions were justified because Mom would have let Sarah go in a heartbeat—she’s “trustworthy,” which, of course, just means my sister’s smart enough to never let our folks find out what she’s done or where she’s been.
And Mom would have felt okay about Daniel going, because he never does anything without his hockey team and they’re all so terrified of messing up and getting benched for the next tourney that they never get in any trouble. Bunch of brownnosers. Bloodied brownnosers with missing teeth.
I was tired of getting the short end of the stick in this family just because I was the youngest. The ends justified the means.
I could see myself strolling into school after the concert and walking past Tina wearing my Buket o’ Puke ’n Snot T-shirt. That would be the icebreaker I needed to talk to Tina and make her aware that I was a cool guy into alternative music who went on weekend concert trips with college students.
