Bottled Up (7 page)

I had my excuse all ready.

I was going to tell Fleming that I helped Josie the cafeteria lady pick up a bunch of chocolate milk cartons she'd dropped outside the kitchen. Josie hurt her right elbow and needed me to carry the milk for her. I put my notebook down to help her, but when I went back to get it, it was gone. I went into all the classes near the kitchen to see if anybody had found it, and some kid Jerry said he had brought it to the main office. By the time I got it back, the bell had already rung and I was late for her class.

It was the perfect lie—full of solid details.

But merry freakin' Christmas! Fleming wasn't there. We had a sub.

“Sorry I'm late,” I said, ready to go into my milk carton story.

“That's okay. Glad you could make it. I'm Mr. Kirkland.” The sub smiled at me as if we were old friends. I'd never seen the guy before in my life. “Take a seat wherever you like,” he said.

There was a free spot right next to Jenna. She sits in the first row and normally I'd never be caught dead up front, but I headed right for it anyway. I didn't know how she was going to feel about it. She's not the kind of girl who hangs out with guys on their way to having a rap sheet, and the last time she'd seen me I had a cop for a chauffeur.

“So when is Ms. Fleming coming back?” Maria Lopez asked from the second row.

“Never, I hope,” another girl said.

“What happened to the old bat?” I asked.

“She had a car accident,” Jenna said, looking right at me. She looked
right
at me. I couldn't talk, I'm not even sure I was breathing.

“Is she dead?” some idiot football jock wanted to know.

“No, she's very much alive.” Kirkland leaned against the desk and rolled his sleeves up to his elbows. He looked as if he wasn't used to the shirt-and-tie gig.

“Things could be better for her,” he said. “She's in the hospital, and chances are I'll be your teacher for the rest of the school year.”

“You give a lot of homework?” asked a kid who actually does homework.

I was still looking at Jenna—watching her listening to Kirkland. I wondered if she was checking him out, maybe getting a crush on him. He had that blond-haired, blue-eyed little boy look that girls like. I felt sick just thinking she was hot for him.

“Jenna,” I whispered.

She looked at me but I didn't know what to say when she did. I shrugged my shoulders and looked behind me as if it had been somebody else calling her name. Mr. Smooth strikes again.

“Everybody introduced themselves at the start of class, but I didn't get to hear from you,” Kirkland said to me. “You are?”

“Pip. Pip Downs.”

“What a great name,” he said. “Sounds like something out of an eighteenth-century British novel.”

Jenna smiled when he said that. I wasn't sure if it was because she thought my name was cool or because she thought
he
was.

“I want to know what everyone's favorite book is,” Kirkland said. “So let's start with you, Pip. What's the best book you've ever read?”

I was going to say something smart-ass to him about how I couldn't remember the last time I'd read a book. But he was smiling that old-pal smile at me and Jenna was waiting for my answer as if she really wanted to know what I was going to say.

“I forget what it was called.
The Outsiders
or something like that.”

“S. E. Hinton. A great book. So you're a fan of stories with a lot of internal and external struggle—man against man, man against himself. The novel I'm assigning today is one of those.”

He went on to bug somebody else. He didn't laugh at my answer and he didn't throw me out of class.

This was the first time since Ann Hutch Elementary that I had a teacher who didn't believe my rep—who didn't even know it.

This was wild. I was in class. I was awake. And Jenna was sitting next to me.

Not bad.

Kirkland passed out the books he wanted us to start. He said something about a quiz coming up, but I wasn't really listening. I was staring at the cover picture of two men—one all professor-looking and the other a monster. I'd seen a lot of cartoon spoofs of this story.

“‘All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil,'” Kirkland quoted. “As you read the words in the book, read
between
them as well. See if you see yourself. See if you can determine the truth in those words as they apply to you or to those you know.”

Jenna smiled at me. I didn't know why and I didn't care. I just soaked it up.

Maybe I'd read the book. It didn't sound too bad.

I shoved
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
into my back pocket.

It was a perfect fit.

When I showed up at Mikey's school, he was throwing rocks into that construction hole in front. His backpack was on the ground next to him.

“You got your mitt?” I asked him, hoping like hell I wasn't going to have to walk home to get it, then backtrack to the field for his stupid T-ball practice.

“Yeah, I got it in my pack.” He tossed a rock down into the hole. “Listen,” he said right before it clanked on something. His eyebrows went up as if it was the coolest thing in the world.

“Come on,” I said, taking a gulp from the Coke can I had with me.

He picked up another rock and threw it up as high as he could in the air, letting it clunk to the bottom of the hole.

I picked up his backpack and started walking away, figuring he'd follow. When he caught up with me I shoved the backpack onto his shoulders.

“Pip?”

“What?”

“If you put M&M's in a bowl and put milk on it like cereal, what will happen?”

“The color will come off the shells and they'll get slimy.”

“I want to try it.”

We kept walking. Halfway to the field he said, “Pip? Guess what.”

“What?” I took a drink from my Coke can.

“Daddy's coming on my class trip.”

“Don't count on it.”

“We're going to the zoo.”

“You told me already.”

“Daddy said he'd go.”

“He was hungover when you were bugging him about it. He's not even going to remember he signed the permission slip.”

“He promised.”

“Even if he did, that doesn't mean he's going.”

“You don't know everything.”

“So stop
asking
me everything all the time.”

He dropped his backpack when we got to the field, and started running off to his team.

“Mikey,” I yelled, pulling his mitt out of the pack.

He turned around but kept running. I tossed the mitt up in the air to him. The little bugger caught it on the run and spiked it, shouting “Touchdown!”

Wrong sport.

I sat under a tree, away from all the parents watching their kids playing T-ball. I took a few slurps from my Coke can. The stupid paperback in my back pocket was digging into me. I lit a cigarette, then took a look at the book.

Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
by Robert Louis Stevenson.

First line: “Mr. Utterson the lawyer was a man of a rugged countenance . . .”

Who's Utterson and what the hell does
countenance
mean? I wondered. But I kept reading. What else was I going to do? Watch T-ball?

Some guy in the book, Mr. Enfield, tried describing Hyde. “I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why.”

More crap. I read a few pages of the book, but most of it didn't make any sense to me. “He was austere with himself; drank gin when he was alone . . .”

“Did you see me hit?” Mikey interrupted my reading, smiling all over his face as if it was Christmas morning.

“Not bad,” I said, having no clue what he was talking about.

“Not bad? It was a home run!”

I hadn't been watching and I didn't need to feel like a shit about it either. Let his parents go to T-ball practice and yell rahrah. Hell, at least I was there.

I'd smoked three cigarettes and almost finished the Coke. And I'd been reading the book and thinking the whole time. Wondering what this counseling thing was going to be like. Wondering how I was going to get the money to pay for my stash.

I pulled Mikey's backpack onto his shoulders and we started walking.

“Can I have a sip?” he asked when he saw me take a drink from the can.

I should have gotten him a Yoo-Hoo or something.

“No.”

“I'm thirsty.”

“No.”

He put his hands around his neck, closed his eyes, and stuck his tongue out. “I'm real thirsty,” he whined.

“We'll be home in a minute.”

He grabbed my arm and the can spilled on me.

“Cut it out before I clobber you.” I put the can to my mouth and finished what was left.

“I'm telling,” he said.

“Telling who?” I crumpled the can in my hand and tossed it at a telephone pole.

“Ha ha. You missed,” he said.

I should have brought him something to drink. I wasn't thinking about him.

All I thought about was getting to Slayer after school—getting some rum for my Coke.

Hey, I needed it.

Bugs didn't.

It was scary, though. First he eats my pot, then he tries to drink with me.

I didn't want to think about who this kid was going to be in ten years.

A line popped into my head right out of the Jekyll and Hyde book:
I let my brother go to the devil in his own way.

He was heading there, all right. I just didn't want to think about it.

When Bugs and I got home, my mother was lying on the couch.

“I got to go somewhere,” I told her. She didn't even turn around. All I saw was the back of her head and Mikey pulling on her arm, going on about his home run.

She did the old
that's nice, that's nice
thing to him that parents do when they're blowing you off. I had to get out of there. I'd done my job. I got him to T-ball. I got him home alive. Let him ask
her
a million questions about M&M's.

I stopped behind the deli. I had a couple of minutes to kill on my way to the counselor and needed some time to get myself right in the head. Hell, I was the best counselor I was ever going to have. I knew what I needed and I knew when. I needed a buzz. I needed something between me and the world, because the world was starting to feel like a pillow somebody was smashing into my face.

“Chimney Boy,” Tony said, slamming his way out the back door of the deli. “I could use a toke. Pass it here.” I didn't have much weed left and I wasn't looking to share it with the meat cutter.

“I don't charge you for grubbing my pot,” I said. “Don't charge me for my next sandwich.”

“This is your rent for planting your delinquent ass back here behind my job.” He put his hand out and grabbed my blunt.

I let him get one hit, then took it out of his fingers. I sucked in as deep as I could.

“You sure are uptight, Chimney Boy,” Tony said. He sat down on a milk crate and wiped his hands on his apron.

“I'm in a hurry.”

“Where you headed?”

“Nowhere.” I took another hit, and Tony reached his hand out again.

“I could have told you that. You're going nowhere faster than any kid I ever seen,” he said, inhaling on the roach, then passing it back. “Your only hope is if a job opens up here at the deli and I'm stand-up enough to put in a good word for you.”

I laughed. “Like I'm going to cut meat for a living.”

“What do you think you're going to do? Trade stocks on Wall Street?”

I sucked in the last I could from the roach without burning my lip again.

“Go to hell,” I told him, then dropped the roach on the ground and stepped on it.

“Already been, my friend. And you're on your way.”

Maybe he was right. I was on my way to counseling—maybe I
was
on my way to hell.

The waiting room was the size of my parents' walk-in closet. There were plenty of pamphlets for me to read if I wanted to know more about sexually transmitted diseases. But who wants to know about the hundred different rashes they could get on their privates? There was another pamphlet on the dangers of steroid use. Only dumb jocks need to read that one, but they can't read anyway. My favorite pamphlet was
Talking With Your Kids About Drugs and Alcohol.
It was way too late for that one. Besides, there should be one for talking to your
parents
about drugs and alcohol.