The problem is this: on the wall menu, the hot dog looks plump and juicy, too big for a mere bun to contain. But when the wiener is cooked on the conveyor belt with the pizzas, it shrivels until it doesn’t even reach the ends of the bun. All the employees know that whenever a hot dog is ready, the best move is to put it in the pickup window, call the order number, then get the hell out of there before the unlucky customer comes to claim it and looks at you like you’re an asshole.
The response the cooks all want to give:
Who comes to a pizza restaurant and orders a hot dog anyway?
Cameron Casey learned the hot dog risk on his first day as an official Chuck E. Cheese pizza maker. After nine months of a busboy’s life, he would’ve just about killed someone for a kitchen job. He got to trade his red bowler hat and dish tub for an apron and dirty looks from hot dog lovers. He got to trade the sloppy chaos and out-of-control children for a pizza assembly line and an oven that burns like the sun.
But the best part is, he never, ever has to set foot in the main dining room again.
It’s also known as the Zoo, the Barn, and Hell. Families. Birthday parties. Kids + pizza + soda + ice cream. What really puts this place over the top, though, what makes it a vision to haunt busboy nightmares forever, are the Pizza Time Players. These refrigerator-sized, animatronic animals – Pig, Dog, piano-playing Cow, the giant rat himself, and others – occupy a lit stage at the front of the room, where they sing country-western music and perform “comedy.”
This room turns busboys from bright-eyed newbies into hardened veterans. The first words Louis, the dishwasher, said on Cameron’s first day: “Remember, your hands are washable.”
Yes, Cameron has earned his way into the kitchen and is never going back, thank you very much.
Chef Cameron deals out slices of pepperoni like playing cards and slides the extra large onto the conveyor belt. Seventeen years old, he wears glasses and his zits are under control. He lifted weights at the YMCA for six whole months before accepting that he’ll always be skinny. The one physical feature he’s proud of is his hair, which can be counted on to feather just right every day.
The next order slip comes printing
tickatickatickaticka
out of the metal box in the kitchen. Someone wants a hot dog. Damn. Cameron times it so that he calls the number for pickup, then immediately goes on his break. His co-chef tonight, Loo from Norway (who looks like one of those guys in the underwear ads), can smooth talk the wiener owner. Meanwhile, Cameron hides out in the arcade, with its rows of video games, skee ball, air hockey, and even a pit full of plastic balls for kids. The
boops
and
beeps
and
dingdingdings
are almost enough to drown out the songs from the dining room. Almost.
Once the restaurant is closed and cleaned, Cameron needs a destination. Bryce is off being a good little church camper. Going home means facing his mom and having her make helpful observations like:
What about getting a girlfriend? Handsome guy like you shouldn’t have any trouble.
And
You spend too much time holed up in your room. You’d better not turn out to be a serial killer. Ha ha.
If only there were something fun to do in this town.
He drives the massive block of metal that is his dad’s old Pontiac to Circle K. After successfully purging every other trace of the man from his life, Cameron held on to two reminders: the car and the model airplanes.
He pulls into a parking spot, ready for a deep fried burrito and a Sunkist orange soda. But before he can even cut the engine, a red Chevy Malibu, its metal pulsing along with AC/DC, appears next to him. The white light from the store illuminates the driver: whiskers, muscle shirt, mirrored aviator sunglasses. Ricky Zaplin, aka The Spawn of Satan. Zaplin and his crew of burnouts, crowded into the car, reporting to their territory like lions around a watering hole. Better yet, hyenas.
“Seriously?” Cameron says in the aquamarine glow of his dashboard. His own radio’s Rush song now seems tiny in comparison.
Zaplin looks over, unfolds a predator’s smile.
Shaking off a momentary paralysis, Cameron shifts his car from
P
to
R
, backs out of the space, trying not to screech his tires as he makes his getaway.
He knows from the moment he pulls into the cul-de-sac that his mom’s there: there’s a light burning in every room, their house lit up like a giant Jack O’ Lantern.
Cameron stands at the bedroom door watching Molly Casey under her sit-down hair dryer, a
People
magazine open on her lap, glass of white wine on the table next to her. Her domain could have been lifted from a museum display titled “The 1960s,” all chromes and pinks, gewgaws from antique stores and garage sales, the room like a metal bowl filled with cotton candy.
He knows to shout. “Mom!”
She looks up. “Hi, baby! How was work?”
“You’re going out?” There are usually two options on a given night: going out with her hyper friends or staying in with a bottle of wine. She motions to her ear. “YOU’RE GOING OUT!” he yells.
“Me and Jillian are going to dance till we drop and ek cetera!” She says this last part way too often; he’s given up on correcting her. She tilts the dryer up off her bleached blonde hair. “I think I’ve gained weight lately. Do I look heavier to you?”
“No.”
She pinches her stomach, studies what’s held in her grip. At her makeup table she applies a shellac of hair spray, the whole scene lit by a dozen little bulbs like a Hollywood movie set.
He says, “You’re wearing your wedding ring.”
“Yeah, I don’t feel like getting hit on tonight.” She wiggles her finger as if they both need to see the ring again. “Did you eat? TV dinner in the freezer if you’re hungry. Got you some chocolate milk at the store, too.” She grabs a pair of sparkly shoes from her tightly disorganized closet, air-kisses his cheek (don’t dare mess up the lipstick) and is gone.
Cameron sits on his bed, Hungry Man fried chicken dinner balanced on his lap, a glass of chocolate milk on his nightstand. He hasn’t liked any kind of milk since he can remember, but his mom keeps buying it and he keeps drinking it.
The
Fall Guy
theme blares from the little TV, balanced on its rickety wooden stand. All around, evidence of the life he’s built: academic certificates; model airplanes and satellites suspended from the ceiling by fishing wire; a rack full of tiny, painted role-playing game figurines. The actress Heather Thomas – the most perfect woman ever to walk the earth – grins out simultaneously from both the TV screen and the poster above his bed.
He starts with the sad square of cherry cobbler.
People used to say that Claire and her friend Meredith looked like sisters, but Claire doesn’t think so, beyond the brown hair. Meredith’s mouth is as wide as her face, like a hammock hung from her ears; when she laughs she does so with a smile of metal and rubber bands.
If they were real sisters, Claire would be the older one, the first to kiss a boy (George Wilson) and the first to get her period.
Meredith’s parents are off at a cocktail party on this still August night. The girls sit in Meredith’s living room, stripped down to their underwear, attacking an extra large Dion’s pepperoni pizza and skipping through all the cable TV channels. There’s too much to do and nothing to do.
“We should crank call Justin,” Claire says, her tan feet resting on a big book called
The Treasures of Tutankhamun
atop the coffee table.
“But the phone’s all the way in the kitchen,” Meredith replies from flat on the orange shag carpet.
Cinemax is showing the movie
The Blue Lagoon
, about two kids living on an island together. During the embarrassing parts, the girls squeal and cover their faces, slowly working up the nerve to peek. After the movie, they find videos on MTV, hoping to see Duran Duran but getting only Stray Cats and Adam Ant.
“We’ll still hang out like this when school starts, right?” Claire asks.
Because of a fluke in the school district dividing lines, Claire’s house falls right across the border for her high school, while Meredith and everyone else she knows will be going to Sandia. Claire asked her mom to work something out, because that seemed like something her mom could do. The negative verdict came in the form of a silent head shake once her mom hung up the phone with the superintendent’s office.
Claire keeps feeling like her time as Meredith’s best friend, going back to third grade, is now like a sandcastle or a snowman – something with an expiration date. She hates the world sometimes.
“Duh,” Meredith replies. “Even more than this and our parents will just have to deal with it.” She picks at the criss-crossed white scars on her knees.
“They say our schools are rivals. Does that mean we’re rivals, too?”
Meredith says, “We can be double agents.”
After Meredith’s parents return, smelling like booze and talking too loudly, Claire walks home. The streetlight on the corner of her cul-de-sac flickers in Morse code.
She steps into the kitchen to see her family all seated in their normal dinner seats. 9:45 is too late at night for a Serious Family Talk.
“Sit down, baby,” her mom says. “We have some news.”
And it’s here at the table, while moths flutter drunkenly outside the back yard window, that Claire hears about the death of Dakota Vanzant.
“She was in South America and… well…” Her mom says more, something about a plane crash.
“What did she go to South America for?” Bryce asks. “I thought she was in college.” His eyes are pink and puffy.
“I don’t have all the details. The important thing is that the Vanzants need our love and prayers right now.”
“This can’t be right,” Claire says. “It’s a mistake, like someone else with the same name or something.” She pushes back her chair and runs from the kitchen. She can’t be the only one crying, the way they’ll look at her like a kid.
In her room, she takes Dakota’s photo off the mirror. The looping cursive on the back:
To C – My favorite girl in the whole world. From your pal, D
. Claire turns it over and over in her fingers, wondering if it might fade away like the real girl.
Claire lies on her bed and looks out at the next-door window, like she used to, when she waited for glimpses of that world: Dakota laughing on the phone, painting her nails, dancing to music, playing with Tarot cards. The one song always on the record player, riding wild horses someday. As soon as it ended Dakota would put the needle back and start over again, all the times flowing together to make the soundtrack of that room, that girl.
When boys in loud cars came to pick Dakota up, Claire would watch this too, and imagine where they were going, waiting until that could be her on those journeys. When Dakota came over to babysit, Claire wanted her all to herself but unfortunately annoying Bryce had the habit of lurking around.
Bryce didn’t know that Claire was Dakota’s favorite, that they were something better than best friends. That Claire knew how to keep Dakota’s secrets.
* * *
The next day, adults gather in the street and do lots of head shaking. Every night at dinner, the Vanzants are mentioned during grace. Claire wonders what the point of praying is when something bad has already happened.
Details trickle in over the next days, reaching out for Claire anytime she happens to pass when her mom is on the phone: a student group building houses for the poor, a small plane, no survivors. She wants to hear about the others, who got to be with Dakota at the end, but they remain faceless, nameless. Her mom types a notice for the church newsletter.
When the Vanzants have to fly somewhere to do identification, Claire is informed she’ll be feeding their pets. Bryce eats a bowl of strawberries with powdered sugar and Claire wants to dump them in his lap and ask how he can have dessert, how he can enjoy anything when this has happened. Instead she takes the house key without a word and walks next door.
The Vanzant house with its Southwestern theme: Indian Kachina dolls and pottery on every flat surface, landscape paintings on the walls, everything in shades of brown. It still looks the same, like a normal house and not a place where a dead person used to live.
The only sound inside is the grandfather clock until the dog’s nails clickety-click along the tile. “Hi, Noni,” Claire says, picking up the gray bearded terrier that’s as old as she is.
In the living room, a family portrait and two pictures of Dakota – one in white cap and gown, the other her senior portrait that everyone has seen now – stand along the fireplace mantle.
A black fish the size of her pinky nail swims circles in a bowl on the windowsill, its entire world a colorful plastic shipwreck. It darts in and out of the broken hull, an apostrophe in motion. Claire sprinkles some flakes atop the water; she doesn’t realize she’s crying until the salt hits her lips.
She walks down the hall, not knowing where she’s going, but knowing exactly where. Crocheted and framed on the wall:
Never Put A Question Mark Where The Lord Has Put A Period
.
The walls in Dakota’s dim room are bare save for a photo of two lines of kids in matching jackets, posing in front of the Eiffel Tower. Not hard to find the prettiest one, in the back with the tall people. On the desk, an abalone shell filled with strange coins, a lineup of soccer trophies, the deck of Tarot cards inside a pink silk pouch.
She looks in the closet. Dresses and jackets on hangers. A tutu. White cap and gown. On the floor, wedged into the corner, are Dakota’s old shoes, the awesome shoes: black sneakers with bright orange laces. Claire used to gaze at those with awe; she’d never thought about switching shoelaces before Dakota introduced the idea.
The grandfather clock bongs from the entry hall and Claire jumps.
Back in the living room, she sits on the couch, Noni curled in her lap, and watches the fish until the last of the light slips away.