Diamonds: Life According to Maps | Book Two (2 page)

M
aps had
no idea what he was doing.

“Of course I know what I’m doing,” he said. “Piece of bike. Like riding a cake.”

Kyle Kensington looked at Maps like he wanted to punch him in the face. And not Lane’s face-punching face, but an actual I-must-punch-you-in-the-face face. One of his veins was popping out his forehead like a cartoon, and his entire face was the color of tomato soup.

Or a tomato.

Whichever was redder.

Maps made a mental note to later perform an experiment to see if tomato soup lost some of its red color in the souping process.

Look at him! Maps was so clever. First day on the job and already multi-tasking by planning out a cool experiment he could work on when he got home.

Kyle shouldn’t have been looking down his nose at him. Maps would likely one day invent Kylie’s future robot girlfriend.

Maps had done the impossible—he’d got a job. It was just at some fast food joint near his house, but a job none the less. At least it would get his parents off his back.

Now he was standing in front of Kyle, wearing an unbelievably unfashionable purple apron behind the cashier’s till where customers ordered food. There were discarded fries all over the floor, and the entire joint smelt suspiciously like his mom’s hair salon. He only knew that because he’d accompanied her once, out of scientific curiosity, of course.

“Listen Kylie,” Maps said, hands on hips. “I’ve got this. No need to hover around me like a helicopter parent.”

Kyle looked like he was choking to death.

Boy, was he ever lucky. Maps knew exactly what to do in situations like this. He’d looked it up online before just in case this very scenario happened. He’d watched videos and tried his best to practice, but Benji proved to be incredibly difficult and unhelpful. Benji also implied that Lane might enjoy helping Maps out with his CPR practice, but Maps had no idea why. Lane only really liked baseball, and CPR practice was definitely not baseball. It was a very serious matter.

But still. Kyle was incredibly lucky Maps was there to help.

“Fear not, Kylie!” Maps exclaimed, pointing his finger up in the air like he’d seen superheroes do in comic books. “You’re in good hands!”

And with that, Maps dashed around behind Kyle, put his arms around his stomach, and started jabbing his locked fists into the choking man’s gut. Kyle was a tall, thin man with a gut that heartily spoke of many burgers past. He had adult acne all over his face and neck, and sloped shoulders that looked brittle to the touch.

When Maps had first laid eyes on Kyle, Maps was so unattracted to him that he thought Kyle might’ve un-gayed him. But upon further thought a few moments later when Maps’ mind wandered to a certain pair of extra-gappy teeth, Maps realized not even Kyle’s sweaty back was enough to un-gay him.

Which was fine with Maps. He quite liked being gay. His parents had long since stopped talking about which girl Maps would invite to a school dances, or if he had any crushes at school.

As if on cue, a woman in front of the counter started screaming, someone outside of the drive-thru window began wailing on the car horn, and Kylie starting puking chunks.

All.

Over.

Himself.

Maps jumped away quickly, but Kyle swivelled and looked right at Maps before he hunched over and puked on his shoes. He had tears streaming down his face and snot running out of his nose.

It was official. Kyle Kensington had managed to un-gay Maps.

A few of the other workers flocked around them, patting Kyle on the back and asking if he was all right, or if he wanted to go to the hospital. Some customers leaned over the counter to look at the disaster that was now all over the floor. There was a lot of commotion—people talking, horns honking, Kyle gagging.

Maps looked down at Kyle. “You can thank me later, dude. Also, can I get a raise?”

“
H
ow you managed
to get fired your very first day within fifteen minutes of your first shift is completely beyond me,” Maps’ mother said. Maps thought she was actually yelling, but she’d already made sure Maps knew that she wasn’t yelling and he didn’t want to see her yell. Maps suspected she’d turn into the Incredible Hulk.

She was standing in front of him in the living room, hands on her hips, shaking her head furiously and periodically throwing up her hands up in the air.

As if she just didn’t care.

But she did—clearly—because she was demonstrating the full throttle of her wrath directly at poor, victimized Maps.

“Mom, you don’t understand,” Maps pleaded in a very non-whiney tone, despite what his father said. “I’m a victim here.”

“Okay, go ahead.” She crossed her arms over her chest. “I’m listening. Explain to me why your former boss just called here five minutes ago and said we’re lucky he’s not pressing charges.”

He sighed. “Because I am the hero Quick-Burger deserves, not the one it needs right now.”

“Matthew
James
Wilson!”

Oh no.

The dreaded middle name.

It slinked out like a creature at midnight, a growling in the darkness belonging to a beast you just couldn’t see. It was heavily weighted, enough to latch itself to the bottom of the ocean and stop an oil tanker from moving. The droppage of such an explosive word could only mean one thing:

Maps was in
deep
shit
.

“If you don’t have a good, valid explanation as to how you got fired, and almost got us sued, you’re grounded,” she said suspiciously calmly.

“I told you,” he said, “I saved a man’s life. But I’m a misunderstood soul, Mom. For some reason, he didn’t see me saving his
life
as a good enough reason to keep me around.”

“He said you almost killed him!”

“I saved his life!”

“He said you punched him in the stomach.”

Maps held up fist and pointed at it with his other hand. “This fist? This is the fist he claims almost killed him?”

“Mattie has a point,” Maps father chimed in some where he sat in the kitchen. “Not sure he could do much damage, if any at all.”

His mom seemed to calm down a bit, which was incredibly offensive to Maps. He might not have fists of fury, but he could hold his own in a fight.

Probably.

At least against someone small.

Smaller than him.

And maybe blind.

Or half-dead.

Or more like a three-quarters-dead.

But that was beside the point! Maps could totally hold his own, and if a small, blind, three-quarters-dead person ever tried to pick a fight with him, he’d finish off the last quarter.

His mother sighed. She tilted her head back and stared up at the off-white ceiling as if asking it to send her a replacement son because hers was obviously broken.

“Fine,” she said. Maps perked up. “But you have to get another job.” Maps slumped down. “And you have to keep it for at two months.” Maps slumped even more. “And if you quit or get fired before your two months are up, you’ll have to go work with Benji at the daycare.” Maps was a boneless puddle of goo existing only to blink at his mother from his gooey seat on the couch.

He wanted to whine and cry and kick his feet and yell at his mother for not understanding him at all, but he was totally mature, after all, so he’d handle the situation the way any mature person would: he was going to put blue hair-dye in his mother’s shampoo.

M
aps was having a bad day
.

Scratch that.

He was having the worst day to ever happen in the history of the planet.

First, he’d gotten a B+ on a science assignment that he’d handed in before summer vacation. What the shit was that? It had to be some kind of mistake. It had taken her almost two months to grade the things, and now he was walking away with a B+? Alas, when he confronted his science teacher earlier that day by holding out the paper and waving it in front of her face, rapidly pointing at the horrible mark in red pen, she didn’t seem to understand what the problem was!

In the summer, after e-mailing out the final grades, she made appointments at the school for students who wanted to discuss their grades. There was no discussion to be had here. He would yell at her until she gave him the grade he deserved.

“B+ is a perfectly reasonable grade,” she had said.

Like that lady knew anything about reason! Maps Wilson did
not
get B+s. Maps Wilson got straight A’s in science and a stream of letters in gym class that sounded like the beginning of a swear word.

On top of that debacle, Benji was grounded and wasn’t allowed to hang out this weekend, so Maps had no way of conducting his newest experiment entitled: Arm Hair Aflame. Dumb Benji decided to get grounded because he back-talked his mom. He had no idea how Benji could’ve been so immature.

Benji had taunted Maps earlier on the telephone saying that he was just grumpy because Lane hadn’t sent him any postcards in three weeks, and hadn’t responded to the letter he’d sent. Benji was wrong, of course, because Maps didn’t care at all if Lane replied to his incredibly hilarious and articulate letter.

And now, to put the cherry on the sundae, Maps was waiting in line at the food court standing behind a girl in his English class who kept going on about how cute one of the guys in a grade ahead of them was. She has long dark hair and expressive blue eyes that bordered on buggy.

“He’s, like, so cute!” she squealed. “Omigod, and once he wore this green T-shirt that was, like, so yummy!”

A green shirt? Halleluiah!
. The squawky girl made her eyes really big when she said the word green as though this incredibly special green shirt had just given her a 14-karat diamond ring and developed a butt like David Beckham’s.

Wait.

Why did he know what kind of butt David Beckham had?

Anyway.

The girl was seriously losing her shit over this green shirt.

“It just, like, complemented his eyes
so
well!” easily-excitable-girl said.

She emphasized the word
so
as though her friend wouldn’t have been able to understand just how complementary this magical shirt was unless she added the
so.

He looked at the girl’s friend whose eyes were as big as saucers and practically had glowing little stars in them.

Okay, so maybe she did her friend a favor by adding the
so
.

“And he has this blond hair that totally looks like it’s dyed,” she said. “And he plays baseball!”

Wait.

Hold the horses.

“But,” easily-excitable-girl-Maps-suddenly-disliked said, “he totally has gapped teeth. Like, get braces.”

Maps gaped. This… this… this crummy
vagrant
had no idea what those teeth did to normal people! That tiny little slit between his two front teeth were what made Lane… Lane! And this absolute imbecile didn’t even deserve to look at Lane’s super shiny teeth if she couldn’t appreciate them.

“Are you okay?” the vagrant’s friend asked. Maps hadn’t even noticed, but the two girls in front of him in line had turned around and were looking at him with expressions of worry on their faces.

Unable to help himself, and not wanting to, really, he turned toward the unappreciative girl with the brown hair and yelled, “You don’t appreciate the gap!”

Suddenly, it seemed as though everything and everyone around him was silent. Not a footstep against the floor tiles were heard, not a single whisper in the distance.

“Excuse me?” girl-Maps-really-disliked asked, even though it didn’t sound like a question.

“You heard me!” Maps hollered in his intimidating, masculine baritone.

She put her hands on her hips and looked at him like she wanted to swat at him. “I actually love the Gap. I go there all the time.”

Was she implying that she’d kissed Lane?

Well, that was decided. He was going to have to commit first degree murder. He was going to go to jail because of a set of gapped front teeth, and his parents would have to visit him during regulated hours.

At least Benji would probably try to smuggle a nail file into a birthday cake for him.

Probably.

Maps didn’t want to go to jail, but it was completely unavoidable.

“Come on, Amanda,” brown haired girl said as she grabbed her friend’s arm and started to walk away. “This guy’s weird.”

“That’s right!” Maps yelled after them. “You’d better flee!”

They passed worried glances at each other and then over their shoulders at Maps as they scurried away. He wasn’t surprised, though. He probably looked pretty rough and intimidating in his cargo shorts, flip-flop sandals, and Bill Nye T-shirt.

He slid his glasses back up his nose as he looked down at his wrist watch. He was late
ish
for his first shift at Chicken Castle, but they probably wouldn’t care. He lived by no man’s rules. Or in this case, no chicken’s rules.

“
Y
ou’re an hour late
,” Mr. Chicken said. Or maybe his name wasn’t really Mr. Chicken, but Maps forgot his name, and he
was
the president (or whatever) of Chicken Castle, so Mr. Chicken only made sense. “And you’re not wearing your uniform.”

“Uniform?” he asked, looking down at his own clothes. “I thought that was optional.”

Mr. Chicken stared at Maps. Stared hard.

He was a middle aged man with greying hair around his temples a big, round nose. Maps had gone to Chicken Castle the week before with his family and his mother insisted that he bring a resume along with him. He’d handed Mr. Chicken his resume and Mr. Chicken had agreed to give him a shot.

But then again, who wouldn’t? He was Maps, after all.

Mr. Chicken sighed. “Fine. But you can’t work in that outfit, so you’ll have to put on the mascot uniform and go outside to greet people.”

“You must be joking,” Maps replied, horrified.

“Does this look like the face of a man who jokes?” Mr. Chicken pointed to his face.

It did not.

Maps thought of Benji playing with little monsters at the daycare and shuddered. He would brave it out and put the mascot outfit on to make his mom happy and keep her from yelling at him. Just one more week and school would start and then he could make up some kind of excuse about focusing on his grades so he could quit his job at Chicken Castle.

Mr. Chicken pointed toward the back of the restaurant and a door that had an
Employees Only
sign on it. Sullenly, Maps dragged himself over toward the door. In the back room there were a few boxes stacked up on top of one another, a small table with two foldable chairs, and a giant, yellow, feathered, chicken suit on a hanger. The eyes were big and round and mesh and staring right at Maps like a creature from a Stephen King novel. And on top of its head was a shiny, golden crown.

He squared his shoulders and walked over to the costume that he was most definitely not afraid of. Not even a little. Even though it was creepy as shit.

He slid the suit off the hanger and unzipped it in the back. Next, he stepped into it and immediately thought he was going to die of heatstroke. The thing was insulated enough for a Canadian winter!

Maps attempted to zip it up on his own, only got it about half way, and then gave up. He was careful not to crunch his glasses when he slid the giant, totally not freaky bird head over his own head. He could see—kind of—out of the big, mesh eyes.

He wabbled his way back out of the employees only room and went to the front of the restaurant. Without even saying anything to Maps, Mr. Chicken pointed toward the front door. The little podium at the front that housed all the menus inside of it.

A few customers walked in and were promptly seated. Maps, however, didn’t move or talk to anyone. He just stood there, staring at the customers as they walked by.

“I think you’re supposed to greet people,” someone said with a hint of humor in their voice.

Maps turned his whole body, because just moving his head in the chicken suit was impossible, and looked at the person. It was a guy, around his own age, who was about the same height as him, but thinner and with dark brown hair. He had super long eyelashes looked like they had makeup on them. But seriously, they were really long—like spindly little spider legs.

He had to admit, the guy was pretty. Could guys even be pretty? He had no idea. He was no good at this gay thing, but when he got home, he’d do an internet search and see if thinking other boys were pretty was normal for a gay man.

Still, he lacked the one thing Maps truly liked in his men: gapped teeth. And pear-green eyes. Well, and blond hair. And dumb smiles. And maybe the name Lane Rhodes.

So he just blinked at pretty-boy through his round, mesh eyes.

“Are you new?” Spider-lashes asked. “I’m Perry.”

“Perry? Your name is Perry?”

Perry folded his arms across his chest. He was wearing a yellow Chicken Castle T-shirt and black jeans. “Yeah, so?”

“It’s a weird name.”

For some reason, Perry smiled. “And what’s your name then?”

“Maps.”

“Maps? And you think Perry is a weird name?”

“Yes. But please, while in uniform, refer to me as King Chicken.” Maps pointed to the shiny crown on top of his head.

Perry’s smile grew. Maps had no idea why. He was serious. He didn’t want to break character and get sent to jail a.k.a. Miss Muppet’s Daycare or whatever.

“I think I’m about to suffer from a heatstroke,” Maps said. “This costume is really hot.”

“You’re telling me,” Perry replied. And then winked. Winked! Like they were sharing some kind of inside joke.

Perry was weird.

He liked that.

Maybe one day Perry could be Benji the Second.

“I’m going to go outside and greet people. It’ll probably be cooler,” Maps told Perry as he walked out the front door.

And it was cooler, if only by a fraction. The sun was beaming down on his feathery body, and the wind was practically non-existent. But at least there was more space he could walk around and entertain himself.

After a few minutes, a family of four walked up to the front of the restaurant.

“Welcome to Chicken Palace,” Maps said as he marched in front of the doors. Like the true gentleman he was, he held the door open for them to walk through. “Eat some chicken, eat some wings, we have chicken and some other things!”

Perry was standing behind the podium laughing like a hyena.

The little boy who was holding his mother’s hand looked up at Maps and said, “Don’t you mean Chicken Castle?”

Maps shrugged. “Yeah, whatever.”

He let the door swing shut behind them and then waddled back over near the sidewalk to wait for the next Chicken Castle patrons.

After a few minutes of Maps kicking at rocks with his big chicken talons, he saw a group of people walking toward him. He mentally prepared his next loveable jungle that was win over the customers, but faltered when he saw that most of the people in the group were wearing baseball uniforms. And there was one pair of particularly white, particularly tight baseball pants that he recognized.

“Lane,” Maps said. The group stopped right next to him. Lane’s skin was darker, and he looked impossibly bigger in just the couple months that had passed.

Lane looked him up and down in his chicken uniform with a confused look on his face that Maps had definitely not missed the past few months.

“Uh, Chicken?” Lane said.

“You’re back from baseball camp?” Maps asked.

Lane stared at him, his eyebrows low. “Uh, today, but—”

Today! Lane had gotten home today and hadn’t even come to see him! Not even a phone call or a rock to the window. Lane had just barged into his life and smiled at him and made his heart race when he told Maps that he liked him, and then left to stupid baseball camp and had forgotten all about him.

It wasn’t like they’d decided to be boyfriends or anything, not that Maps knew what that entailed, but you don’t just show up with bad drawings of cats and baseballs, and then break hearts. That was just rude!

Stupid Lane with his stupid teeth and his stupid smile.

“You know what?” Maps asked totally in not a yelling voice. He threw his winged arm out in front of Lane and pointed toward the parking lot. “No chicken for you!”

Lane, if possible, looked more confused. “Uh, what?”

Another jerk in a baseball uniform squeezed through the group and came to stand next to Lane.

“What the hell, man?” he asked. “What’s your problem?”

Maps pointed at Lane. “He is!”

The guy looked at Lane, and then back at Maps. “If you have a problem with him, you have a problem with me.”

Sure. Maps could handle that. He wasn’t smaller than Maps, or blind, or three-quarters-dead, but he, filled with unspeakable rage, would unleash his terror on this guy. He was about as big as Lane, but had awful brown hair and a mean-looking scowl on his face.

And then he made one fatal mistake: he got all up in Maps’ grill.

“What?” Maps said, stretching his winged-arms out on either side of him. “You wanna dance with King Chicken, punk?”

The guy shoved Maps. In turn, he launched himself at the guy, but impacted with a wall. A wall that turned out to be Lane’s chest.

“Hey, hey, both of you!” Lane said. He had one of his palm’s on Maps’ chest, and the other on his friend’s. “Cut it out.”

Just then, before Maps delivered the beat-down on Lane’s friend, Mr. Chicken himself came out the front doors.

“What’s going on here?” he said. Immediately, Maps, Lane, and Lane’s friend jumped away from each other. Mr. Chicken stared. “I think you’d all better leave.”