Liar, Liar (6 page)

“No, I’m good.” I peered into the jar of what looked like baby diarrhea and then jerked away.

“Looks like baby diarrhea, doesn’t it?” He spread
it happily on some whole-wheat, flax-enriched bread and took a hefty bite. “This stuff is so good for your digestive system. Healthy turds float, bro, did you know that? The ones that sink are bad news and mean you’re eating all the wrong stuff and poisoning your own body with toxins like preservatives and additives.”

We. Are. Not. Talking. About. This.

I couldn’t take it anymore, and as he started jotting down the details of his snack in his food log like some obsessive hippie survivalist scientist hybrid, I jumped up from the couch, hollering, “JonPaul, are you okay? Can you hear me? Don’t go toward the light, come back to my voice!”

“What are you talking about? I’m just sitting here adding up my carbs and my protein grams.” JonPaul looked totally freaked out. He should have—I’m very dramatic; I was totally committed to the moment, and I was selling this bit.

“You ate that peanut butter sandwich and twitched and your eyes rolled back in your head and, although it was only for a few seconds and I’m not one hundred percent sure, I coulda sworn you stopped breathing.”

“Probably sudden-onset peanut allergies; I read about that on the AskADoc.com site the other day.”
I could see that his hands were shaking. “Do I look okay?”

“Kinda.” I studied his face, frowning.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You look … splotchy. And you seem a little … unsteady.”

“I
am
dizzy.”

“Low blood sugar,” I said, nodding. “That’s probably all it is. You should lie down for a while.”

“Or maybe eat something?”

“And run the risk of choking to death on your own vomit? What if it’s something more serious?”

“Yeah, buddy, you’re right. I’m gonna bail, head home and go lie down for a while.”

“Smart.” I nodded some more.

JonPaul went off, limping slightly. He’d probably be checking his pulse and taking his temperature all night. That kind of behavior made me more certain than ever that, once he was pushed to batcrap-crazy extremes, he’d be forced to see the depth of his obsessions, and then he’d start to develop a more realistic perspective on the whole health nut thing.

I’d started out on the right foot.

I slid the movie into the machine and watched
the car turn into monsters by myself. I kind of missed JonPaul, but at least I could eat bananas dipped in melted chocolate chips and not have to listen to what the processed sugar and hydrogenated fat were going to do to my bathroom habits.

Connie called and talked at me about her committee idea for a while. She asked if we could get together on Wednesday or Thursday to do something and talk about the other thing. I wasn’t really listening. I wondered if England had paid attention to everything France had to say during World War II. I didn’t think so—they were allies, not buddies. That was how I’d think about Connie, too. She just didn’t know we were on the same side, fighting for the good guys to win.

Then Katie emailed me an update of her project outline, with the topic sentences from every paragraph. She asked me to proofread her introduction; it was fine, really top-quality work. That was what I emailed back, even though I didn’t read it. That’s what Delete buttons are for.

The next day at lunch I could see the dark circles under JonPaul’s eyes. He hadn’t been in school all morning.

“I went to see the allergist. Got the scratch test,” he reported. “I’m not allergic to
anything
.”

“Great! But you can’t be too careful, bud.”

“That’s what I said! But Dr. Culligan said I had to ‘react adversely to the stimuli’ before she could prescribe me anything.”

“What’s in your hand, then?”

“Markie’s EpiPen.”

“You stole an EpiPen from Markie? What if Markie has an allergy attack and needs it? I’m calling his mom to make sure he’s got a backup.”

“He’s got a valid prescription and can get more anytime he wants. Lucky booger. Plus, there are about a million of them lying around over there—they’ll never miss one. And I didn’t steal it—he gave it to me.”

“You just gonna carry it around waiting to stab yourself in the leg?”

“Yeah. Like you said—can’t be too careful. I can tell that my glands are swollen. I think my throat is closing up. Am I wheezing? I think I’m wheezing. I definitely feel like I’m wheezing. Maybe I need an inhaler, too?” He held a carton of cold milk up to his nonfevered head.

Friends don’t let friends wuss out like this.

JonPaul’s weakness could easily be exploited by unscrupulous opposing teams if it wasn’t rooted out of him while he was still young. I was doing this for his own good. As well as the teams he played on.

Looking at it from that perspective, I was helping to make JonPaul a happier, better-adjusted person.

And then he could focus on suggestions about the Tina situation, and if she happened to find out that I was a very thoughtful guy and the best friend anyone could ever have, so much the better.

But I forgot to mention it to him. I was calling Markie’s mom.

uzz is one crazy broad.” That’s what Dad has always said about my aunt.

“Buzz rocks.” That’s what Sarah and Daniel and I think.

No one’s sure what Mom thinks. But she must like having her sister around, or she wouldn’t have offered to let her move in above our garage. My aunt has lived there as long as I can remember.

When I got home after school, I decided to see if Auntie Buzz had any advice on how to get Tina to realize how incredibly perfect I would be as a boyfriend. Because if anyone knows about relationships, it’s Buzz. She’s been married three and a half times.
The half comes from a spring-break marriage in Cancún when she was in college. “It probably wasn’t even legal in the first place, so it only counts as a halfsie,” she told me once.

Auntie Buzz is very high-energy. The double shot of espresso at the coffee shop across the street from her office is called the Buzz in her honor. Dad watched her knock back a few espressos once and muttered to me, “That kind of energy must have been hard on all those husbands.”

Sarah and I work for Buzz on weekends and during school vacations, carrying boxes of swatches and tassels and paint chips and tile samples and carpet books from her office to her work van and back again. Decorating is a heavy business.

She hires Daniel and his hockey team to move furniture. They work dirt cheap and don’t, Auntie Buzz says with a happy smile, belong to a union. Plus they work overtime for pizza and doughnuts and that’s the kind of payment Auntie Buzz can afford. “I’m not good with money, and my projects always go over budget,” she explained.

Auntie Buzz was sitting at our table when I walked into the kitchen, tapping away on her laptop. Mom had a late meeting, Dad was on Generic Business
Trip Number Infinity and Beyond, Daniel had practice and Sarah was working, so I had privacy to bring up the Tina thing with Buzz.

“Hi, Buzz.”

“Hiya, Kev.”

“Whatcha doin’?”

“Putting together a demo reel so that I can be hired as the host of a network television show. Or cable, I don’t really care. Just so long as it’s national and pays well. I’ll do any kind of show.”

“Uh, why?” Even though I was dying to ask her about Tina, a person doesn’t just ignore this kind of information.

“When you work for and by yourself on commission and the government is sending you registered letters, you need to get creative about your income stream.”

“I didn’t know you were getting registered letters.”

“It’s a recent development.”

“So … how much trouble are you in?”

She shrugged and then scowled in the direction of a canvas bag near her feet. It was filled with a ton of unopened envelopes. Some of them had green Registered Mail stickers on them and were from the Internal Revenue Service. I’m only fourteen, but those
people scare me. Tax time each year at our house is not pretty—Mom and Dad drag out shoe boxes full of receipts and take over the kitchen table for days on end, and there’s a lot of sighing and frowning and
clickety-click-click
ing of the calculator.

Adults, I’ve noticed, are usually terrible with money. I thought about the sock full of cash I have hidden in my pajama drawer. I’m an excellent saver.

“How much do you owe?”

“I’m not going to open the bills until I have the money to pay everything.” She looked more jittery than normal.

“Do you want me to find out for you?”

“You’re only fourteen years old—exposure to that kind of stress might kill you or make you sterile, and I don’t want to be responsible for you not being able to have children someday.”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen if I read a few—twenty-seven—letters.” I hunched down and thumbed through the stack of envelopes.

“Can you put them in chronological order for me? I’ll find an accountant to deal with everything first thing on Monday.”

Monday is always Auntie Buzz’s favorite time to handle a problem.

“Do you have any plans for, uh, solving your financial … situation other than getting your own television show?”

“Why should I? I’d be a natural on TV, and the network—or the cable companies—would be crazy not to hire me.”

Buzz and I were more alike than I’d suspected; that was exactly the way I think. Self-confidence is everything for military geniuses, liars like me, and decorators in trouble with the government. All of a sudden, I felt warmly toward my aunt—a little parental, even.

When Sarah and Daniel and I run through our allowances and ask to borrow money from our folks, we get a huge lecture, and then they make it a teachable moment. No one ever gets punished in this house, because Mom says we should “experience the consequences” of our actions so that we can “benefit from the learning opportunity.”

I thought Buzz could get a lot out of a teachable moment. And I was just the person to teach her. I was the answer to her prayers—she just didn’t know it yet.

She was in a lot more trouble than Sarah or Daniel or I ever were, so she’d need more help and a
bigger moment of teachabilityness, and if that isn’t a word, it should be.

She didn’t even notice when I took the bag to my room. I sat on the floor and separated the invoices from the checks. Then I went downstairs to the family computer in the basement and sorted through the boxes of software until I found the bookkeeping program Mom uses for her store. On the way back to my room, while Buzz was still on her laptop, I quietly rooted though her purse and grabbed her checkbook. I could have shaved her head for all she would have noticed. She was typing away, and her fingers must have been breaking land-speed records. I saw an empty coffeepot on the table next to her.

I took the disk to my room, installed the program on my laptop and whizzed through the tutorial, and in no time flat, I was entering debits and listing credits. I was so glad we’d done an accounting section in math a couple of weeks ago or none of this would have made any sense to me.

About an hour later, I’d balanced Buzz’s checkbook and discovered that she had a ton of money. She just never recorded the deposits. By the time I’d set up a bill-paying system and gotten everything entered
and paid, Auntie Buzz had turned a nice profit in the past quarter.

I felt a little drunk with success, so I read the letters from the tax folks. I didn’t know what she was so freaked out about. The letters told her to call the 800 number and set up a payment schedule. I grabbed the phone and called the number and, deepening my voice a little, had a friendly conversation with a lady named Ms. Young who was completely understanding about Buzz’s dilemma in these tough economic times and suggested a monthly repayment plan. I read the number of Auntie Buzz’s checking account to Ms. Young, who said she would send Buzz the paperwork right away.

I could have told Auntie Buzz that her problems had been solved, but what kind of lesson would that have taught her?

I heard Auntie Buzz make a fresh pot of coffee and introduce herself for about the twelfth time to the webcam on her computer so that the network—or the cable companies—could see what a great personality she had on camera.