by L. L. Muir
But that would have to wait until next year. This year, I was going to be the coolest pirate since Jack Sparrow. There was forty bucks of birthday money wearing out my wallet. I was sure that would be enough. No way would that not be enough.
***
Not only was forty bucks not enough, there were not enough pirate costumes in our little city for all the kids who had been invited to Logan Stowe’s Monster Mash.
When I was walking into Creative Costumes, Inc., three guys I did not recognize walked out with the last of the pirate hats, curved plastic swords, and eye patches. You could tell they were trying not to notice they were all carrying the same stuff.
How embarrassing.
I went in anyway because I was looking for a real costume, like the ones they wore in the movies. It turns out the lady that runs the place was really really nice...if only because she didn’t laugh at me when I told her what I wanted.
“Those were all reserved days ago, honey. You’re going to have to go into Salt Lake to find anything like that. And it will cost at least a hundred dollars. Maybe you can have your mom make you a costume.”
I just smiled and nodded, then walked out. I didn’t want to go to the party anyway, I reminded myself. After all, it was still a second-hand ticket. And there was no way on earth I was going to call the number at the bottom of the invitation.
Now I just had to find the guts to walk up to Brooklyn Stowe and tell her I couldn’t make it to her party after all, that something in my pitifully boring life was more important than her famous Monster Mash.
Or maybe I wouldn’t tell her anything. Maybe I could just pay some doctor forty bucks to put a big old cast on my leg the night of the party. I’d show up at school the next day and tell people I’d been hit by a car or something.
That might have even worked, if it weren’t for my mom...
***
I love my mom. I really do. But I don’t love her when she’s with her two crazy friends. She changes, like a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde thing. So, when I came home from the costume shop that day, and heard Christa and Jeanette’s voices, I should have run away from home.
That was my second mistake.
I made my first mistake when I didn’t do a good enough job hiding my Monster Mash invitation!
I was mobbed the second I walked through the door. When they get excited and squeal like that, it’s hard to tell what my mom and her friends are even saying. I just kept my head down and my shoulders hunched and tried to move toward the stairs, but they weren’t going to let me.
After a minute, I figured out they were excited I’d gotten invited to the party. But they were more excited about the surprise they had waiting for me in the kitchen.
I sniffed the air. Didn’t smell like burned cookies. It didn’t even smell like correctly baked cookies. Christa kept lifting her eyebrows, like she was trying to convince me I was going to be excited when I saw it. Or maybe she was telling me I’d better be excited, or else do a dang good job pretending that I was.
I think Jeanette was so excited she was holding her breath. My mom was kind of bouncing around the place just like I had while I was waiting for Brooklyn Stowe to come out of my house. Then I realized I could probably stop thinking of her as Brooklyn Stowe now—now that we knew each other. I could just think of her as...Brooklyn.
That thought made me smile as I was pushed into the kitchen.
My mom and Jeanette took one look at my face and started celebrating, giving each other lame high-fives. Christa rolled her eyes at me and pointed to the chandelier above the table, or rather, to the clothes hanging from the chandelier.
I knew exactly what it was—a suit for me to wear to my own funeral. Because the second I put on the pirate costume made by my crazy mother and her crazier friends, I was going to die. I would just drop right down on the ground and close my eyes for good.
And they thought I liked it. At least the first two thought I liked it. Christa was looking at me through slits in her eyes, daring me to say something she didn’t want to hear. She was really scary sometimes.
Jeanette went over to the table and when she turned back to face me, she was holding something behind her back.
“Now, I had this idea, see.” She cleared her throat. My mom giggled. Jeanette frowned at her until she stopped. “They do this in the movies, sometimes. Well, at least they used to. When someone was supposed to have a peg leg, they would tie one of their feet to their, um...”
“To their butt,” Christa said helpfully.
Jeanette frowned. “Well, yes, they tied one foot to their...bottom...and then they put their knee down into the leg of their pants. Then they used something like this—now don’t laugh—they used something like this for the peg leg.”
She pulled her arm out from behind her back. In her hand was a black toilet plunger.
“Don’t worry. This one is new,” she said.
I looked at my mom, who just shrugged and smiled.
“Now wait a minute!” Jeanette came toward me. “We tried it out. Well, your mom tried it out. She said it wasn’t uncomfortable at all.”
I wasn’t going to ask how they’d tied my mom’s foot to her butt. I was going to have a hard enough time trying to get the image out of my brain without hearing the details.
My mom put her arm around my shoulder and gave me a squeeze. “Of course you don’t have to go with a peg leg if you don’t want to, honey,” she said. “We just tried it to see if it would work.”
“And it did!” Christa shoved her phone in my face, showing me a picture of my mom wearing the same lame pirate costume that hung above the table. One of her pant legs was bunched up at the knee and the wood handle of the toilet plunger was sticking out of it. She was leaning to her left and it looked like she’d peed her pants!
I was going to be sick. My mom had peed her pants! And she wanted me to wear the pants she’d peed in!
She peeked over my shoulder to get a good look at the phone. Then she gasped. “Christa! You said it didn’t show!”
I jumped to the other side of the kitchen, put my back against the wall and pointed my finger at them.
“You want me to wear a costume my own mother peed in? That’s disgusting!”
All three of them started laughing so hard I thought it was probably a good thing they were standing on tile. But I wasn’t going to stick around and step in something.
I started edging around the wall toward the front of the house. They were too hysterical to stop me.
“But honey,” my mom said when she could catch her breath between giggles, “I washed the bottoms. I promise I did!”
Bottoms.
That was the problem. They weren’t pants, they were bottoms—to my mother’s pajamas! Red and white stripes. Shiny satin. There was no way they would pass for anything else. It didn’t matter if I wore the long-tailed black tuxedo jacket, the garden hat stapled up on three sides and painted black, or figured out how to attach the plastic green parrot to my shoulder. It wouldn’t even matter if I tied my foot to my butt and super-glued a toilet plunger to my knee.
The first thing out of Brooklyn Stowe’s mouth would be, “Tell your mom I love her pajamas!”
And yeah, I was back to thinking of her as Brooklyn Stowe, because I was going to bail on her Monster Mash and she was never going to want to talk to me again.
CHAPTER FOUR
Bailing on the Monster Mash was not going to be as easy as I thought it would be.
I couldn’t sleep at night because these movies kept playing in my head—movies about all the different ways I could tell Brooklyn Stowe why I couldn’t make it to the party, or why I didn’t make it to the party. None of those movies had happy endings.
My mom was baking her brains out, trying to apologize for the kitchen incident. About once an hour, she came up with a new idea to fix the costume. Unfortunately, my mom did not sew. If it couldn’t be hot-glued or stapled, it was out of her hands.
I explained to her, thre
e times, that I’d already decided I didn’t want to go as a second string guest. Finally, she stopped trying and took the toilet plunger and her pajamas out of the kitchen. But I could still imagine them hanging there, like ghosts hovering over me while I ate my cereal in the morning.
I never told anyone at school about the invitation. I knew I should give it back, but I wanted to keep it. Maybe someday I will tell my kids that I was once invited to the coolest party in town, and I want to have proof.
I never used my locker. I didn’t even go back for the books I left in it. I was going to have a huge fine at the end of the year, but maybe my forty bucks would cover it. It was worth forty bucks to not have to face you-know-who.
I even went outside to get to the lunch room to avoid the Ninth-Grade Quad. The least humiliating of all those movies in my head was the one where I just didn’t go to the party and never ran into her again, so I never had to explain. I went a whole week without seeing her. Of course, she may have seen me, but I didn’t look up much, so I wouldn’t know.
Then, for the second time since school started, I was called to the office. Maybe Simon Hanson had denied the bomb was his. Maybe he’d pinned it all on me. Maybe they’d need to keep me in some sort of detention center until after the Monster Mash!
I was a little too excited when I rushed into the office. I didn’t notice Brooklyn Stowe standing there until I banged my heavy books onto the counter. If I’d peeked in first, I might have avoided her. Her smile fell away, and I realized I must not have looked too happy to see her. When I smiled back, it didn’t feel very convincing either.
I looked at the secretary. She just pointed at Brooklyn.
Brooklyn smiled at the woman and said, “Thanks, Candy.”
By the way, they should never hire school secretaries with the name Candy. It sets you up for all kinds of disappointment, especially if the woman is not nice, let alone sweet. The Candy at our school made it very clear, from day one, that she did not like kids. And when you heard some kid admit he didn’t like Candy, chances were, he was just coming from the office and not some freak of nature who didn’t like sugar.
I had no idea a student could hold enough power to have another student called out of class, but then again, she was Brooklyn Stowe. What are they going to do, tell her no?
She gestured for me to follow her into the hall.
A long time ago, someone donated a sculpture to the school that was supposed to be of our mascot—a Spartan. We call this sculpture The Ugly. No one can figure out what part of the blob is supposed to look like a Spartan, so a new name was necessary. Of course it’s not official, but sometimes even the faculty will slip and say something like, “We’ll meet at noon, next to The Ugly.”
Brooklyn led me to the bench next to the sculpture and sat down. She looked worried, but asked me if I was okay.
“I’m fine. How are you?”
Okay, so I wasn’t really original. Give me a break.
“Oh, it’s getting a little crazy at home, with the Monster Mash coming up and all.”
“Yeah.” I started searching the bottom of The Ugly, to see if it had feet.
“I have a little good news,” she said, smiling. “Do you know Ryan Newland?”
I glanced up at her for only a second and shook my head.
“Oh. I thought you might know him.” Her face fell again.
“Why?” I said.
Was she going to confess that I’d been given Ol’ Ryan’s leftover invitation? If so, this might end up being a conversation I hadn’t rehearsed in my head.
“Well, he wasn’t going to get to come, but his mom changed her mind about signing the waiver.”
My heart started pounding. This was it. I was going to be uninvited. If Ryan was going to the party, that meant I couldn’t! There was a limit, there were rules. And her dad didn’t change the rules for anyone but Logan’s friends.
I was free. Free from my burden. Free to sleep again! Free from my mother’s pouting!
And I felt horrible.
I didn’t want to be uninvited! I didn’t care if it was a second-hand invitation or not, I wasn’t going to give it back. I’d lie if I had to—I’d tell her I threw it away—but I wasn’t going to give it back! She had come to my house in her pretty pink sweater and invited me to her party, and I felt like, if I gave the invitation back, I’d be giving up that memory. And I wasn’t the type of kid who had a lot of really spectacular memories to hang on my wall, you know?
“That’s great,” I said. “I bet he’s really happy.”
“Yeah,” she said. “So...”
I felt like I actually might cry. They’d call my mom and ask her to come get me and take me back to elementary school, that I wasn’t emotionally ready for Junior High, even though I’d already been there for over a year.
“So, I was wondering, if you have a costume yet,” she blurted.
I wanted to tell her I did, to make her feel even worse for uninviting me. I wanted to tell her I’d spent my life’s savings on it. But I couldn’t. Not to Brooklyn Stowe, the girl I’d probably remember for the rest of my life, even if I never got to go to a Monster Mash.
“No. I couldn’t find one,” I said. “So it’s okay.”
She looked happy about it, but then she frowned.
“So, what’s okay?”
“It’s okay if I can’t come to the Monster Mash. I knew it was a second-hand invitation anyway.” I gave her a quick smile and started stacking my books, to pick them up and walk away with as much dignity as I could pretend to have.
“What is a second-hand ticket, Cameron? And why can’t you come to the Monster Mash?”
I couldn’t look at her. I was way too embarrassed.
“You gave me Ryan’s ticket, but now that he’s going, I can’t. I understand. I do. Really.”
I stood up, but so did she. And she was standing in front of me. I could have leaned forward a little and actually kissed her!
“Cameron! I did not give you Ryan Newland’s ticket! I gave you one of mine! You’ve been on my list since last year. I promise you have.”
My eyes bugged out and I couldn’t seem to get them to come back into my head. The bell rang and the rumble of feet and voices was building down the hall, in both directions. But I had to find out what in the heck she was talking about. Why in the world would I have been on her list? How did she really even know who I was? I was no one!
I reached out and grabbed her hand, worried the flow of bodies might sweep her away from me before I could question her. But just touching her made my mouth stop working. I swallowed hard and tried again.
“Then who did you give Ryan’s ticket to?”
She laughed. “No one. I went to his house and talked to his mom. Just like I talked to yours. Sometimes that waiver freaks parents out.”
“You told your boyfriend that you had someone in mind for it.”
“Who, Mad? Yeah, I had to tell him that so he’d stop trying to get it from me.”
“Oh,” I said. But that still didn’t tell me why she was planning to invite me in the first place.
She wrinkled her cute little nose at me, like she was embarrassed. “I was there, last year, when you were talking to Coach Tyson, after the last tryout!” She had to talk loud to be heard, but suddenly, I wanted her to stop talking completely.
I shook my head and backed away, looking for a quick escape route.
“Sit down!” She pushed me back one more step and my knees hit the back of the bench. I was boxed in by The Ugly and The Angel. “We’ll wait until the bell rings again. I’ll get you a pass to get into your next class.”
She stood there, waving at people as if she didn’t have a care in the world, as if she wasn’t holding me against my will. She would just wink at me, every minute or two, between waves to her adoring public. But I would have to push her out of my way to get away from her, and I could have never done that.
Finally, traffic died to a trickle and she sat next to me. Then s
he reached over and grabbed all my books, holding them hostage.
I dropped my head into my hands and waited for her to humiliate me.
“Was he a friend of yours?” she asked.
“Who?”
“That kid you asked Coach Tyson to keep on the team instead of you.”
“Sure,” I said. “What am I, stupid?”
“Uh huh. So what was his name?”
I had no idea. But the kid’s parents were there, both of them, for every practice. You can tell the type of people who think sports is the most important thing in life. And that kid was going to have a crappy time at home if he didn’t make the team.
But I didn’t care, really. I was always picked first for basketball teams because I was tall, so I had a little more experience. Maybe my height was the reason I didn’t stand out like a sore thumb in the Ninth-Grade Quad. And my dad told me once that life was going to be easier for me because of my height. It wasn’t fair, but tall people were expected to be leaders for some reason. School ball was proof enough of that.
But this other kid, he wasn’t tall. And he wasn’t so experienced. Coach Tyson told me the last slot on the team was going to be filled by either me or this other kid. And since it would obviously mean more to him and his family, I let my game slide a little during that last tryout. Coach pulled me to the side to ask me why I was suddenly missing my free-throws.
I remembered looking around, seeing Brooklyn Stowe on the bleachers only five feet away from us.
“You had earbuds,” I said, accusingly. “You weren’t supposed to be listening.”
“So sue me,” she said. “What was the other kid’s name?” She laughed when I didn’t answer. “And that’s when I put you on my list, Cameron Casey.”
I shook my head. It didn’t make sense.
