The Big One-Oh (4 page)

“ ‘Cougar'!” Scottie announced. “It's ‘Cougar' now.”

Leland backed me up against the wall. “Can you say that? ‘Cougar.' Say it. ‘Cooooo-ger.' ”

In that moment, I actually stopped to think:
What if I did? What if I called Leland “Cougar”? Would he stop smacking me around? Would he like me, even a little bit?

And, of course, Scottie would be included as part of the deal.

Wow. TWO friends. Just by saying one word. It was worth a shot.

But before I could speak, someone behind Leland . . . I mean,
Cougar
. . . asked: “Do you even know how to
spell
‘cougar'?”

I recognized that voice. Unfortunately.

Leland turned very slowly.

Jennifer Mobley's braces glinted under the fluorescent bulbs overhead.

Now, if anybody ever gave Jennifer a nickname, it would have to be “Red,” because she's so . . .
red.
She's got red freckles all over her pinkish face, she's got red eyelashes, and she's got curly red hair that looks like it exploded out of her skull one day and she never managed to pull it back in.

But people don't give nicknames to people like Jennifer and me, unless they're the kinds of nicknames that you'd really rather not have.

“Your name is ‘Leland,' ” Jennifer explained to him, as if she were talking to a puppy. “ ‘Cougar' is just plain dumb.”

Cougar looked her up and down for a moment.

“Did you save the receipt?” he asked.

Jennifer played right into his sneaky little hands. “What receipt?”

“The one for your face,” he crowed. “Cuz once you look in a mirror, you're gonna want to return this one for a refund!”

He and Scottie split a gut laughing at that as they ran off down the hall, leaving me to face Jennifer. Alone.

Jennifer got the idea in second grade that, because she likes
Monsters & Maniacs
too, we were soul mates or something creepy like that.

She held up the latest issue. “Did you find the Chalice of Satan hidden on this month's cover?” she gushed, and little dots of her saliva flew every which way.

Since I always keep my copies of
Monsters & Maniacs
—and the extras Dad sends me—in perfect condition and store them in airtight plastic bins under my bed, arranged by date of issue, it's always horrifying to see how Jennifer scribbles and draws all over hers. And she does it
every month.

It's madness.

So I didn't even answer her. I just grunted and rolled my eyes, as if to say,
“I'm too cool for that.”

And I walked away.

As I kept falling off my skateboard on the way home, I reviewed the week in my head.

I couldn't really say that there was anybody in school who I could call a friend. And certainly nobody who would call me a friend.

Except Jennifer, and I didn't even want to be
seen
with her.

But is that so bad—not having friends?
I wondered.
After all, I've got school. I've got Boing Boing and
Monsters & Maniacs
and making dinner every night. My life is full,
I told myself.
Even if it does get a little lonely sometimes.

Whoa.

“Lonely”?

How did that sneak in there?

I hadn't thought of it before, but, yeah, it gets lonely. Then, before I could get too upset about that realization, I saw something that made me fall off my skateboard again.

It was our neighbor Garry Quarky. Down on his knees on the sidewalk. With his head stuck in the bushes that separate his yard from ours.

It was only the second time I had ever seen the guy who lives right next door.

 

 

Garry Quarky moved into the house on the other side of us from Mrs. Cleveland about five months ago. Mom baked chocolate chip cookies and left them on his porch to welcome him to the neighborhood, but he never came over to say, “thank you.”

“What an odd man,” I remember Mom said at the time.

We knew Garry had a girlfriend who Lorena called “Pincushion” because she had earrings and spikes and hoops in her ears and her nose and her lips and her eyelids.

I'm serious.

I used to see Pincushion drive up and park her big old boat of a convertible in Garry's driveway every afternoon and carry groceries into his house, but I had only seen Garry come out once before.

That happened one afternoon when I was home alone, and I suddenly heard a horrifying
shriek
from next door. After I jumped about five feet off the ground, I ran into Lorena's room, because her windows look out over Garry's backyard, and this is what I saw:

Garry came dashing out of his house screaming, “Aiyeeeee!” and wearing a rubber apron and goggles, like maybe a mad scientist would wear. He looked like he was about as old as my mom, but it was hard to tell since his long hair was hanging down in his face and over his glasses. He had on thick gloves and, from hand to hand, he was tossing a test tube that was spitting fire and sparks. He kept yelling, “Hot! Hot! Hot!” as he ran across the lawn to an old concrete birdbath that was filled up with green scummy rainwater. He tossed the tube into the water and watched as the flames sputtered and the burning tube sank. Only then did he stop yelling, “Hot! Hot! Hot!”

He took off his gloves and wiped his forehead, like,
“Whew! That was a close one!”
When he looked around to make sure that nobody had seen his weirdness, I ducked behind Lorena's curtain, so he didn't see me on his way back into his house.

Mom was right,
I thought.
What an odd man.

 

 

I couldn't see what was in the bushes that Garry had stuck his head into, but, whatever it was, he was talking to it.

“Let it go! Good boy! Let it go!”

And as he kept saying that, Garry was rocking back and forth on his knees like he was playing tug-of-war. Only he wasn't winning.

“Atta boy! Let it go! Who's a good boy?” he kept on.

Suddenly there was a thrashing in the underbrush, and Garry fell forward, crashing through branches onto his belly. Then Boing Boing burst from the hedge and ran straight at me with something in his mouth. I couldn't tell what it was until he dropped it at my feet, and then I
jumped
.

Because Boing Boing had brought me a foot. A human foot.

Only it wasn't attached to a human!!
Where it should have been attached, there was only bone and blood and . . . oh, man! I don't think you want to hear this.

I gagged, “GAAAgggghhhh!”

Suddenly Garry was there, picking up the foot, like,
“Oh, yeah, I guess I dropped that.”
When he straightened up, I could see that he was wearing the same rubber apron he had on the afternoon he drowned the flaming test tube. Only now, the front of the apron—you're not gonna believe this—was covered with
blood!

I mean, it looked like blood.

I didn't know whether to hurl or scream or gag again. And before I made a choice, Garry spoke:

“Your dog . . . he, uh . . . he found . . . ,” Garry stammered as he held up the foot. “And then he . . . uh, he . . .” And that's when
he chomped down on the foot!
It smooshed like a kitchen sponge.

I was about ready to pass out.

Garry released the foot from his teeth. “Then your dog . . . he . . .” Garry made little moves with his hands, like we were playing charades and he was trying to get me to say,
“ran away.”

It was while he was re-creating Boing Boing's kidnapping of the foot that Garry finally realized I was staring at it in his hand.

“Oh!” he yelped. “This . . . it's only . . . ,” and, as he spoke, he squeezed the foot into a little ball and closed his hand around it. When he opened his fist, the foot sprang back into shape.

“See? Poof! Squishy.” And he bit it again. “No pain!”

My head was throbbing with the realization of what a total wacko we had living next door.

Then Garry announced, “Okay!” turned and went back across the lawn and into his house, brushing grass and leaves and dirt off his rubber foot.

Now, maybe I have my little peculiarities.

And maybe I don't have any friends.

But, man, oh, man,
I thought,
at least I'm not a nutjob like my neighbor Garry.

I wasn't sure whether I should tell Mom the story about Garry and his squishy foot, but, by the time she got home that day, I had something else more important to tell her.

Something she wasn't going to like.

Mom had invited Vince to dinner that night. After all the times they had gone out together, it was the first time that Vince was coming to our house, so Mom asked me to cook something “special but not spicy.”

And she asked Lorena to please be sure to be home. Mom didn't even say, “Be nice,” or anything like that. Just, “Be here.”

But while I was in the middle of dinner preparations, Lorena called and told me to tell Mom that Brad had offered her an extra shift at Chick-A-Dee, so she'd be eating at work and getting home after nine.

“I wish you'd told me before I defrosted this veal,” I said as I minced my carrots and celery.

“Well, freeze it again,” she snapped. Lorena doesn't understand how refreezing can damage meat.

“Maybe you should call Mom at work and tell her yourself,” I suggested.

“I have a job to get to!” she yelled just before she hung up.

 

 

When Mom came in and I gave her Lorena's message, she froze. Then she nodded twice, which is always a dangerous sign. It means that she's trying to figure out just how mad she's going to get. It was so quiet in the kitchen that I could hear the gas flame under the water I was boiling for my wild rice.

Mom looked over all the stuff I had spread out on the countertops and on the stove, and she asked very quietly, “Need any help?”

“Nope. Everything's under control.”

Mom nodded one more time, and she walked out, saying, “I'll go get ready, then.”

Ooooh. She was
mad.

 

 

If I hadn't hit Mom with Lorena's message as soon as she walked in, perhaps she would have asked me about the hairnet I was wearing.

I know. You're probably smacking your forehead and crying out,
“A hairnet? Why does a nine-year-old boy need to wear a hairnet?”

I can explain.

On Monday morning that week everybody arrived at school to find that, over the weekend, someone had come in and put up public health posters. We were told it was because about three weeks before, a boy in the third grade had chipped a tooth trying to open a soda bottle with his teeth, so Principal Brandt had decided that safety was the most important issue in our young lives.

The posters warned us about dangers that lurked around every corner of our school building. For instance, one advised us that “SPEED LEADS TO SPILLS”; the poster showed a figure of a cartoon boy falling down stairs to his doom.

Another one showed kids slipping and sliding all over a freshly mopped hallway under the warning: “WHEN IT'S WET, DON'T GET WILD!”

You get the idea.

So, when I walked into the lunchroom at noon, I wasn't surprised to see a poster over the cafeteria line that announced: “KITCHEN STAFF MUST WEAR HAIRNETS AT ALL TIMES.”

And, sure enough, that day, for the first time ever, all the ladies on the cafeteria line—and even Mr. Gorden, who works at the dishwashing machine and has hardly any hair—were wearing their nets.

And I thought,
That's a reasonable request.
Imagine all the germs that lurk on a strand of hair! I mean, nobody wants to find someone else's curls in their ice cream, do they?

So, since I knew that Mom was hoping this dinner for Vince would give him the best possible impression of our family, I decided that evening would provide the best opportunity for me to start my new cleanliness program.

 

 

I can understand that the hairnet might take some getting used to. And, perhaps, when Vince rang the doorbell at six-thirty and Mom called downstairs,
“Would you get that, honey?”
I should have given a little more thought to my appearance. But I was in the middle of chopping onions, and whenever I chop onions, I cry. I've tried all the tricks that I read about to prevent tears, but those darned onions always get to me.

I wiped my hands on a kitchen towel and opened the front door.

“Hey, Charley! How's it going?” Vincent boomed as he grabbed my hand and pumped it up and down. “Now, shake hands like I showed you. Squeeze my hand . . . ,” and he squeezed mine, “. . . like you want to choke the life out of me! Squeeze it like you . . . huh?”

For the first time, he looked at me, and when he did, he stopped squeezing and pumping. Then he dropped my hand.

“Are you
crying?
”

“No,” I sniffed, and wiped a tear off my cheek.

His face crinkled in disbelief. “Is that a hairnet?!” he gasped.

Behind me, Mom made her entrance.

“Well, this is a first! Dinner at home!”

Vince didn't say “hello” or tell Mom how nice she looked; instead, he pointed a finger at me and wagged it. “Why is he wearing a
hairnet?!
”

Mom stopped in her tracks and examined my head. I could see her eyes widen, but she struggled to keep her cool.