Free Lunch

by Free Lunch (retail) (epub)

  Luke hands me a church flyer with a drawing of Jesus giving me a thumbs-up. On the back, it has the address, and says, free lunch! A chill runs up my spine. I don’t know why, but I don’t trust the word free anymore. Lunch here is supposed to be free, but it feels like it costs me a lot.

  Then again, I think of the after-church lunches I used to go to with their big buffets, all-you-can-eat style. My mouth starts watering.

  I consider it, but I think going to church just for a free meal isn’t OK if you don’t really believe in God. And like I said, I’m not sure what I believe.

  “Thanks,” I say. “I’ll think about it.” I mean it too. Though I already know Mom will say no.

  “Cool beans,” Luke says. Though I don’t know what that means. Luke shakes my hand again. Then he and Polly get up and take their trays back to their group.

  Halfway there, Polly turns around, and practically yells, “God does love you!”

  She seems really upset. I feel bad. Then I realize that while they were talking, I was eating. They weren’t. In fact, none of their friends were either. They were waiting for Luke and Polly to return. I watch as the two tables bow their heads and put their hands together. They pray.

  When they’re done, they finally start eating. I think praying is pretty cool. I haven’t done it in a long time. I got tired of having all my prayers ignored. Maybe I’ll try it again. Not before I eat though. Usually when I’m hungry, praying doesn’t seem all that important.

  BRUISES

  I walk home from the bus stop with Brad. He’s whistling this Metallica song he loves. I can’t whistle. When I try, I end up just blowing air and it doesn’t make any sound.

  He suddenly grabs me and points down at the sidewalk. “Dude, watch out! Step on a crack, and break your mother’s back.”

  “Huh?”

  “It’s bad luck to step on a crack, dumbass. You could kill your mother.”

  “I’ve never heard that before. That can’t be true.”

  “Your risk, man,” Brad says. His mom died when Benny was born. I start to wonder how many sidewalk cracks I’ve stepped on. I’m so lost in thought, I almost do it again. My foot is half an inch above a crack, and I freak. What if this is like a real curse? I half jump, half twist to the side to dodge the crack, and I trip over my other foot. I fall real hard and skin my knee. It starts bleeding everywhere.

  Brad laughs. “You’re almost as stupid as Benny.”

  Brad’s right. I am stupid. But even though I may not like my mom, I don’t want her back broken. Maybe Sam’s though. Would serve him right for hitting me and Mom.

  I limp up the stairs to our second-floor apartment. I use my key to unlock the deadbolt. Inside, Ford’s sitting on the floor watching cartoons and chewing the head off my Princess Leia figure. “Stop! That’s mine!” I snap, grabbing it from him.

  “Mine!” he yells back.

  “No. This is mine. All the Star Wars stuff in my room, that’s mine.”

  “No, mine!” he shouts. “Mom gave me.” She’s always giving him my stuff, even when I hide it in the top of the closet.

  My blood boils. I’m ready to scream at her. I could’ve broken her back, but scraped my knee to save her, and this is my thanks?

  I stomp toward the bedroom. The door is closed. Is she taking a nap? With Ford alone in the living room? Ford’s only two and a half. You have to really watch him. Especially since we have a second-floor apartment and a balcony with big railings that he could fall through. Now I’m really pissed. Ford could have gotten hurt.

  I’m steaming with anger. I raise my fist to beat on the door when I hear it—the crying.

  Only it’s not a soft cry. It’s thick, heavy with pain.

  Sobbing. Moaning.

  I get all torn up inside. Sometimes, I hate my mom so much. Like when she’s hitting me. Or just being really cruel. But when she cries? I can’t. I just can’t hate her ’cause it’s like she’s hurting so bad I don’t understand.

  I knock real gentle and open the door. “Mom?”

  She doesn’t seem to notice.

  “You OK?” I ask.

  Her face is buried in the pillow. She hits it twice, then lets out this wail. This horrible gut-wrenching wail. I’ve only heard her cry like this a few times before, like after my sister died. Like she’s in the most pain in the whole world.

  I don’t know how to fix it, how to make her feel better. So I sit at the edge of the bed. I put my hand on her foot, so she knows I’m there. I don’t say anything. I let her cry.

  Outside the window, this big blue sky is glowing with sun. In the living room, Ford’s cartoons make funny, happy noises. The smell of fresh-baked bread or cookies wafts in from outside. Like the whole world just goes on, no matter who is hurting.

  Mom’s bedroom is empty except for the mattress and the box spring under it, and the metal frame under that. Some clothes are in the closet on wire hangers. There’s a fan in the corner. That’s it. No photos. No albums. No books. No jewelry box with a ballerina in it. No tin of little keepsakes. My mom doesn’t have anything.

  The most colorful thing in the room are Mom’s bruises. Deep sunrise purple, bright stone turquoise, shocking bumblebee yellow. Lumps adorn her legs and arms, the hues so brilliant, they could be shiny new tattoos. But I know from experience they must be two days old. I didn’t even know she and Sam had a fight this time. It must have happened while I was at school. I hate that he hits her.

  “Say you love me,” Mom whispers.

  “I do.” I smooth her hair back. She crawls into my lap and sobs. I think about the first time she did this. When I was five years old, and my dad left. She did it a lot then. More when her next boyfriend left. Again the first time Sam really roughed her up.

  “Say it again,” she whispers. “Tell me you love me. Say you’ll never leave.”

  “I love you. I’m not going anywhere.” I say it, but I don’t mean it. If I could, if I had money, I would probably run away and never come back. I’d take Ford with me.

  Another bruise wraps around her neck like wallpaper, only instead of flowers, it’s decorated with fingerprints of crimson and purple. Hate bubbles up from my stomach, burning my throat like acid. I hate Sam. I really do. Sometimes I want him dead. Or at least in jail.

  He’s been before. Twice. Just for a few days though. It didn’t stick. I don’t know why he has to hit my mom. Or me. It doesn’t make him tough. It doesn’t make him better than anybody. It just makes him a jerk.

  Mom sits up. Only, she doesn’t look like a mom. Or even an adult. She reminds me of a little girl, six or seven maybe. Her face swollen from crying. Her eyes all innocent, scared. She looks at me like she’s never seen me before.

  Snot drips from her nose, down to her lip. She sniffs, wiping with the back of her hand. Then she smiles. It looks weird on her wet face. “How was school today?”

  “Fine, I guess,” I say, confused. “Are you OK?”

  “Of course I’m OK!” she says, hopping off the bed with a spring in her step. She goes into the hall closet and picks up the laundry basket. “Do you have any dirty clothes in your room? I’m doing darks.”

  “You were crying pretty hard. Do you want to talk?”

  “I wasn’t crying!” she yells, rolling her eyes, like what I’ve said is ridiculous. Which confuses me more, ’cause her face is still wet, her eyes beet red.

  “Your leg,” she points. Then she starts laughing. Hysterically. Like my bloody knee is the funniest thing she’s ever seen in her entire life.

  After all this time, her sudden mood shifts still catch me off guard. It’s like I have two different mothers living in the same body. One who is happy and warm with Sam or Ford, and one who is the opposite, usually with me.

  Mom laughs and laughs and laughs. Until she slumps against the wall and starts crying again.

  I sit down next to her, not sure what to do. My scraped knee has bled all down my leg. My sock and shoe are glistening red. I forgot about myself w
hen I started taking care of Mom. This isn’t the first time either.

  I can’t help thinking it, but I wish I had a different mom. One who took care of me, rather than the other way around.

  BUGS

  “Why are the windows closed?” Mom asks when she wakes up.

  “I was cold,” I say.

  “It’s going to be a hot day. Keep them open,” she snaps, opening the windows again. “Better that the house is cold now so it’s only cool later.”

  “Can’t we just run the AC?” I ask.

  “Are you going to pay for it?”

  I shake my head.

  “That’s what I thought.” I hate when Mom wakes up mad. That means her mood’s gonna stay bad the whole day. She goes and checks the thermostat, to make sure I didn’t turn the heater on or anything. There’s a little piece of tape over the thermostat, a reminder for me and Sam not to touch it. When she sees the tape is there, she gives me a warning glare, then goes back to her room.

  I return to my homework. On Saturdays, I try to get ahead on my studying so the week isn’t too crazy. Right now, I’m doing math on the couch.

  Anyways, there’s this bzzz bzzz bzzz bzzz sound. I look up and it’s one of those big red wasps, bouncing against the inside of the window trying to get out. When those suckers sting you, it’s like getting stabbed by fire. I know ’cause I’ve been stung a bunch of times. Hurts like crazy.

  The bzzz bzzz bzzz bzzz keeps on for a while. Finally, I get up.

  All slow like, I pull the cord that lifts up the blinds. All the windows, and the balcony door, are open. But this stupid wasp chooses the one closed window in the whole apartment. It’s the one window that won’t open. We all tried to get it open a bunch of different ways, but it’s painted shut or broken or something.

  The wasp finally gets smart (or so I think) and flies away from the window. It does one circle of the living room, then goes right back to the same closed window. Dumb bug.

  Vista Nueva is full of all kinds of insects. The courtyard is full of ants, the bushes full of wasps and dirt daubers. Mosquitoes are everywhere when it’s hot. Flies stay over by the dumpsters, but in whole swarms. Hundreds of daddy longlegs spiders live in the utility boxes. Sometimes Benny and I go look at them, just ’cause it’s so creepy to see so many in one place. But the worst are the cockroaches. They usually come out after dark.

  It doesn’t matter how clean Mom and I keep our apartment, the bugs still find a way in.

  The bzzz bzzz bzzz bzzz sound keeps going on. The wasp keeps flying at the glass over and over and over, like it doesn’t know the difference between glass and open air. Maybe it doesn’t. I don’t know. Instead of flying to any of the open windows, it just keeps going bzzz bzzz bzzz bzzz against the glass.

  It’s driving me nuts.

  Sure, the sound is annoying. But it makes me crazy ’cause if the dang thing doesn’t figure it out, it’ll die. I’m not being dramatic. It happens to bugs all the time. They come in, zip around, then try to fly out the locked window. They just bounce off the glass, bzzz bzzz bzzz bzzz, over and over. They always end up dead, cause they can’t eat or drink I guess. The whole windowsill is a graveyard. Flies. Mosquitoes. Bees. They eventually give up and never move again.

  “Stop being stupid,” I say out loud. Like the wasp understands. “Just fly to the window.”

  I roll up some of my homework papers and try to shoo the wasp to the next open window. It won’t go. The third time I do this, it flies at my face like its gonna sting me. “Screw you then!”

  I go back to my homework.

  It’s still making the bzzz bzzz bzzz bzzz sound and making me crazy, so I just go to my room to do homework.

  If that bug wants to keep doing the same thing over and over and over and over till it dies, go ahead.

  Idiot.

  THAT NIGHT, I STAY OVER AT BRAD AND BENNY’S. WE WATCH THIS movie Mad Max, with all these people living in a desert ’cause humans bombed the cities or something. It’s pretty good. The next morning, when I come home, the wasp is dead. Lying on the windowsill with the others.

  I stare at it, its body not moving. Its legs curl in, fetal, like a baby sleeping.

  This big dread comes over me. Like I’m all alone, and cold inside my body, and I want to run into Mom’s arms and just cry. It’s so stupid. So, so, so stupid. I know that in my brain. But I can’t stop this horrible feeling, and it grows inside me. I fill up with guilt and regret. ’Cause I could have saved the wasp if I really tried. I shoulda tried harder. I could have used a drinking glass and a notecard to capture it, get it outside. But I didn’t. I gave up too fast and now this living thing isn’t alive anymore.

  It’s dead.

  And it’s my fault.

  Carefully, I pick it up. I take the wasp’s body outside and bury it. I think about praying, but stop myself. If God cared, he would have made the wasp smarter, so it wasn’t stuck, bouncing against the glass, trying to get outside to the sunshine and the rest of the world. God would have helped it, given it a good life. But he didn’t.

  God doesn’t care. Not about the little guys, like the wasp. Like me.

  THAT NIGHT, AS I DRIFT OFF TO SLEEP, I WONDER ABOUT THE WASP, if there’s an insect heaven, if it’s the same as human heaven. I imagine it would be. Heaven should be like Earth, right? Except everyone is happy. I like that idea.

  When I dream, I dream that I’m the one trapped behind the window. I’m hitting it, trying to escape, but the glass won’t break. Outside, all these kids from school are laughing at me. I want to cry, but I don’t. Instead, I get real angry and start screaming.

  Then my legs feel all weird, like they’re being tickled with a feather. Or birds are pulling at the little blond leg hairs starting to sprout down there. Then I have the same weird sensation on my cheek, like a mouse is dancing on my face.

  That’s when I wake up.

  “ARGGGHHHH!” I scream. Sitting up, two cockroaches fall off my face. There’s a few more on my legs and arms. I don’t know what they were doing. Were they laying eggs in my mouth? Were they trying to eat me while I slept?

  I’m freaking out so hard, I don’t even realize I’m still screaming. Not until Mom and Sam run into my room. The second Mom turns on the light, a dozen roaches skitter and scurry toward the crack in the wall.

  Mom’s screams match my own. She and I hug each other, jumping up and down, shrieking. Sam picks up my sleeping bag and slaps it. More insects scurry out of it.

  “That’s it! That is the final straw! We are moving out of this dump!” Mom screams. “I’ve had it! I’ve. Had. It!”

  I’m shivering, from fear I guess, holding on to my mom. Sam looks over at me and pushes me away from her, “Q-q-quit b-b-being a sissy.”

  “He’s not a sissy!” Mom yells. “He was just attacked by cockroaches.”

  “He w-w-wasn’t attacked,” Sam says. “Th-th-they’re h-harmless b-bugs.”

  “How do you know?” I ask. I want to say, You didn’t even finish high school. But I don’t.

  They argue for a minute about moving. Mom hates it here. Sam says we don’t have money to move. Finally, Sam says, “Sh-shut up, w-woman. I’m tired.”

  Mom hugs me. “You OK?”

  I nod. She looks me in the eye and shivers, doing a whole-body shake. “Bugs are so gross.” We both laugh.

  For a minute, I see my mom. The one who loves me. I want this moment to last. But it’s late. Mom follows Sam back to their room, with the actual bed, where Ford slept through the whole thing.

  And I’m all alone again.

  When I turn off the light and go to lie down, my heart starts racing. There’s no furniture in my room, but it feels claustrophobic. Like the bugs are still everywhere. They don’t like the light, so I turn it back on. After a few minutes of watching to see if any are around, I crawl back into my sleeping bag, zipping it all the way closed with me inside.

  THE NEXT DAY AT SCHOOL, MR. CHANG STARTS SCIENCE CLASS with a chapter on insects. I
shiver just thinking about last night.

  “Here’s a fun fact,” Mr. Chang says, “if humans bomb the planet with their nuclear arsenal, the only life left on Earth will be cockroaches. Only they can survive the toxic fallout.”

  Someone screams, “Gross!”

  Someone else shouts, “Disgusting!”

  I want to tell the class my story. That’d really creep them out. But I know rich people don’t have cockroaches. That’s a poor-people problem. I don’t want people knowing how poor I am. So I keep my mouth closed.

  Then I think about it: If the world gets bombed, cockroaches will take over the planet—like they have my apartment complex. So yeah. Guess that means if I figure out a way to survive the radiation, I’ll be right at home.

  HALLOWEEN

  At school, we get to wear costumes. I know all the cool kids are going to dress up. So I want to dress up too.

  I ask Mom if I can buy a costume. She laughs. “Sure, I’ll buy you one. If you give me the money for it.” She knows I don’t have any.

  I’m all upset. It’s not fair. Other kids probably don’t even think about money. They just tell their parents what they want, and they get it. It’s not like that in my house.

  Guess I have to do what I always do for Halloween. I have to make my own costume.

  Last year, I mixed green paint into Elmer’s glue and coated my whole body with it. When the glue dries, it cracks, looks like skin peeling off. I got some clothes from a penny sale, cut them up, and rubbed them with dirt like I crawled out of a grave. Then I went as a zombie.

  Another time, I built a robot costume with cardboard boxes, foil, wire coat hangers, and some flashlights I borrowed. When I was little, I just covered myself in flour, ’cause it makes everything white, like a ghost. You can make all kinds of costumes if you use crap from around your house or from Goodwill.