Cracked (6 page)

Jazzer wakes up and slowly positions her little body right
under my left ear. She curls up into a ball and makes this tiny little yawn/squeak sound. It’s the sound she makes when she is perfectly happy. I think it’s the best sound in the world. And then it hits me.

Jazzer would fall apart without me. She really does love me. Then I fall apart.

I don’t know where the category-five waterworks are coming from, but they are here, and I’m officially sobbing like a baby. What makes my stomach clench is the thought that my teacup poodle, who technically isn’t even my dog, is the only thing, human or otherwise, that would stop me from committing suicide.

LAST NIGHT I FELL ASLEEP CREATING VARIOUS SCENES
in my mind, all ending with Pop dead. It sounds sick, I know. But I slept like a rock.

Knowing there’s no food in the kitchen cabinet, I brush my teeth and am out the door pretty fast. Once I get my third bike lock undone, I’m on my way to school. Then it hits me: It’s Saturday. Idiot.

Instead of listening to Pop bitch about his headache, I decide to chill at the cemetery for a while before I have to go to work at ten. After I crawl through the rusty and bent part of the black wrought-iron fence, something catches my eye. I know
every single inch of this graveyard, every headstone and bush, so a brown lunch bag sitting in the exact spot I normally sit in—well, that jumps out at me real quick. It wasn’t here last night.

I squat down next to the fence and let my eyes roam the whole place. The old guy’s truck isn’t there. Of course it isn’t. It’s Saturday, not Friday. Idiot. I don’t see anyone or anything.

I’m alone, so I squat-crawl the ten feet over to my spot at the base of the tree and open the bag. I rummage through. It looks like someone’s lunch, all packed up nice by their mommy. No sandwich, but there’s a plastic bottle of fruit drink, a bag of chips, a granola bar, and an apple.

I look around again. Whoever put the bag here did it not too long ago, because the drink’s still cold and covered with beads of sweat.

I’m still alone.

I dump the contents of the bag onto my lap and lift the bag to my face, just to be sure I haven’t missed any food. Stuck to the bottom of the bag is a Post-it note. I reach in and peel it off so I can read it.

Enjoy!

That’s all it says. One word. And enjoy I do. At one point I have to remind myself to breathe, which helps me slow down
and actually taste the food. God, the apple is good. I think about it. I haven’t had a piece of fresh fruit since third grade, when Alison Smith’s mother brought in a humongous bowl of fruit salad for her birthday. That was the last time. Unbelievable.

I look around again, half expecting someone to pop up and get pissed because I ate their bag of food. But no one comes. I check my box of money and count it. $376.54.

I laugh, keeping the fifty-four cents in there. That fifty-four cents has been in there for, like, four years. I decided a long time ago that I like the sound it makes when I move the box around. So it stays.

I lie back on the freshly mown grass with a full stomach and make the biggest plan of my life. I’m going to shoot my pop, and then I’ll go away. Far away.

Suddenly, the $376.54 has a new purpose.

TODAY IS SUNDAY. CHURCH DAY. PHONY FAMILY
Breakfast Day. I hate this day.

“I will not walk into church late, Victor. You know the whole church watches us walk in,” my mother says through my closed bedroom door.

I so want to say,
Wouldn’t your life be easier without me, Mother?
But I zip up my pleated khakis and breeze by her in the hall.

“No ‘good morning’ for your mother?” she says after me. I am on the second from the top step when she says, “Victor! Stop right there!”

I stop and stay facing forward. An intentional act on my part to tick her off.

“You turn around right now and face me when I’m speaking to you.”

I roll my eyes before I turn around.

Her voice is steely. “Now say ‘good morning’ to your mother before you move one more muscle.”

“Good morning, Mother,” I say. I bound down the rest of the staircase quickly, so I can get far away from her.

I hear her tell my dad that she is happy I’m not going to Europe with them because I disgust her. Not my crankiness or ignoring her. Me.
I
disgust her.

One thing is definite:
She
disgusts
me
.

The car ride to church is silent. For me, anyway. My parents chirp back and forth at each other like happy little robots.

“You look lovely today, Aubrey,” my father says.

“Thank you, darling. So you like my dress?”

“I do, I do.”

Blah, blah, blah.

I always laugh to myself on the way to church. It’s not that I think church itself is funny; I think church is stupid. I laugh inside at the fact that my parents go to church every single solitary Sunday, faithfully. Same church, same time, same pew. They probably say the same prayers in their robot heads.

My mother:
Dear God, please let me impress every human being in this church.

My father:
Dear God, please let my wife impress every human being in this church.

Here’s the funny part: The same two people who go to church each week treat their only son like a cold sore. Actually, cold sores probably get more attention, even though that attention is directed at making them go away. They still are looked at and have creams rubbed on them and maybe even get prayers directed at them. They are seen. People notice cold sores. I bet if I end up getting a perfect 2400 when I retake my SATs, my parents would find some way to screw up my victory. Nothing I do is good enough for them. Not one thing.

But they go to church every Sunday and phony-baloney it with the whole congregation. Shaking hands and patting backs; complimenting jewelry or new hairstyles; making golf dates, lunch dates, dinner plans.

Talking to people.

Noticing people.

Seeing people.

Why don’t they ever see me?

I stop laughing to myself. I’m silent both inside and out now.

SCHOOL ENDS IN ONE WEEK. I MAKE THE DECISION
to not skip. I want to make it to junior year, and I’ve missed a shitload of classes this year. So sue me.

School is where I keep my postcard of the beach. It’s taped to the back of my locker. I don’t need any wiseasses thinking I’m either missing some stupid girl I met at the beach or whatever. I just want to keep it private. Like if King Nerd Victoria saw it, his enlarged freak brain would cook up some story, I know it. I don’t want any cooked-up stories going around about me. Even though I don’t think I’ve ever seen Victor Konig talk to a single person in this school, I’m
not taking any chances. Besides, I’d pound him to a pulp if he ever said a single word about it or me.

I know my mom and Pop would call me stupid for keeping that postcard, so I’ve always kept it at school. I found it when I was seven, in one of my mom’s old jackets, way back in the closet. The same closet as the gun.

The day I found the postcard I was digging for a clean pair of shorts, and I found a bag of my mom’s old clothes buried underneath some papers. I rummaged through the bag of clothes; it was all stuff from when she was skinny. In other words, pre-me. And I found an old jean jacket of hers. I tried it on to see if it would fit, and inside one of the inner pockets was a postcard of the beach.
OCEAN CITY, NEW JERSEY . . . WHERE FAMILIES GO TO THE BEACH!
There was handwriting on the other side. It said:

Leslie,

I’m not ready to

be a dad. I want

you to get rid of it.

—Steve

A man of few words, my dad.

I also need the computers at school to do research about jail time and other stuff. I’m definitely moving forward with Operation Freedom. The other decision I make is to not look Pop in the face anymore. I don’t do it too often anyway, but now I really can’t look into his eyes. I’m afraid he might see through me and know what I’m planning.

Yesterday, when I woke up . . . let me rephrase that. Yesterday, when
he
woke me up by grabbing my ankle and dragging me across the room, screaming that there was no goddamn food in the goddamn apartment, I landed in a weak, crumpled ball. I tried to play dead, but he yanked me up and we were eye to eye. I swear, when I stared into his eyes with murder on my mind, he knew it. And for probably the first time in my life, I felt power over him. He didn’t say anything to me. He just shoved me hard into the wall, knocking the wind out
of me. And as I caught my breath I could tell he knew that I wanted to kill him.

Don’t ask me how, because I don’t know. I could just tell.

I walk through the halls of my school and kids move out of my way. No one wants to look me in the eyes, either. I notice this today. I guess it has always been that way, but since I’ve got eyes on the brain, I really notice every kid dropping their gaze.

I’ve always really liked that kids are piss-their-pants afraid of me. One time, in like second grade, I made Victor eat pavement, and then he pissed his pants. I literally scared the piss right out of him. It was awesome. No one talked to me for a while because they were afraid of me. But I got back into the recess games eventually.

I figured out pretty quickly that my life wasn’t made for having friends. I was never allowed to go over to anyone’s house, not that there were tons of invites or anything. Those dried up in, like, kindergarten. And you don’t have to be a brain surgeon to figure out that I’d never invite anyone over to my apartment. Ever. So, yeah, my life isn’t made for friends. I don’t need friends, not when my life is so full.

So full of shit.

Study hall is the perfect place to work out the kinks of Operation Freedom. Back at the cemetery, I played around with a crapload of other names before I decided on Operation Freedom.

Operation Payback.

Operation Pop-less.

Operation Smackdown.

They all sounded stupid and mean. So I went with Operation Freedom. It makes the whole plan sound necessary and important, and not awful. I really need it to not sound awful in my head.

The first search I do is on the amount of time a juvenile could get for murder when it’s in self-defense. I click on an article that says two teenagers got thirty-three years for a double murder they committed. Thirty-three years is a long time. I do the math in my head. I’d be forty-nine when I got out of jail. Only eight years younger than my pop is now. I search again.

Next article I click on is about a sixteen-year-old white supremacist that shot a fifteen-year-old in the back of the head while he was sitting in class. That kid was tried as an adult and got fifty-three years to life. Fifty-three years is twenty years longer than thirty-three years. I’d be an almost-seventy-year-old geezer when I got out.

Fuck. Operation Freedom is squashed like a roach.

I CHOOSE A NEW CORNER IN THE CAFETERIA TODAY,
and I decide to sit with my back to the wall. I don’t want that idiot sneaking up on me again. Facing out into the room full of people gives me a whole new feeling.

Dread.

I watch tables, crowded with teenagers, laughing, shoving, giggling, smiling, eating, flirting, and talking. That’s a lot of
ing
. And I’m not part of any of it. And I never have been. I feel queasy. The only thing I can get down is my chocolate milk, each sip an FU to mom. I push my tray of food away from me and take it all in.

If I never came back here, never walked these halls again, never ate in this caf, there isn’t one person in this entire school who’d be affected. Even my math teacher would get over it. I’m just a feather in his cap; he doesn’t know me. He doesn’t know anything about me. All he knows is that I’m smarter than he is when it comes to anything math-related because all we’ve ever talked about is math.

Now, I realize I am not the most approachable person in the world. I sit here, in this corner or that corner, on purpose—so I don’t have to interact with anyone. I drop my eyes, put my earbuds in my ears, and make myself fade away. I walk straight home. I don’t stop at the store, or ride my bike to the park, or invite people over, or go anywhere, with anyone, at any time. I get all that.

Wow. I think I just blamed myself for being a nobody. Yep, I did. I blamed myself. How perfect. My crap life
is
all my fault.

My pity party lasts almost the entire lunch period. The sound of laugher snaps me out of my daze. I look to my left and see Patty Cullen across the way, and
she’s
laughing. She sees me see her, and we stare at each other. Maybe it’s the sunlight streaming down from the window behind her, but I swear that she looks like an angel. The dust particles float and dance in the light like glitter; everything seems to be in slow
motion. I wish I had the guts to walk up to her table and tell her how pretty her hair looks with that headband and how nice her smile is. “Guts” is the wrong word here. Balls. I wish I had the balls to compliment her.

No one at her table notices us noticing each other. After a few seconds Patty raises her eyebrows and smiles at me. I raise my eyebrows and probably look like I just had an accident in my pants. The bell rings and the room full of
ing
-ers head out. I get up to toss my lunch tray, and when I turn around to head to class, there she is, smiling in all of her headbanded glory.

“Hey, Victor, are you okay? You know, from Friday?”

Balls, guts—neither one is making an appearance at the moment. “Yeah, fine.”

“Good. I thought about you over the weekend. I was wondering if you were really okay.”

She thought about me? Over the weekend? Me? I can’t believe she thought about me over the weekend. She thought about—

Patty interrupts my inner astonishment with: “Okay, well, I’ve gotta run to French.” Her mouth curls into the most adorable grin and then she blows me a kiss.
“Au revoir.”