Gabe Johnson Takes Over (4 page)

Sir, I'm not lazy like that ass-pipe gym teacher Mr. McCartney would have you believe. In fact, I have no trouble getting up for work, okay? My first full summer day of work at Dante's Donuts began at 5:30 a.m.

I was up long before though. I sweated and then slept, dreamt about stuffing donuts in my face, then woke up and watched some crap on Netflix that just made me mad because it was stupid (something Justin recommended—
The
Burps
). Then I slept. Then I was totally wide awake at 4:30. My brain ticked. My accounting brain (probably get it from Dad, who's the dean of accounting at MNLake Community College). It occurred to me that Kaus Company, owned by Kailey's dad, isn't the only food and drink company in town. Maybe another business might help the band out. Maybe my pal Dante of Dante's Donuts might add a nickel to his donut prices and donate the proceeds to the band. Couldn't that work? He's a Minnekota Lake band alum too. Couldn't we find a way around those Kaus jackasses?

Oh, yeah, I was getting mad at Kailey herself, even though I once loved her.

I thought,
Can't we raise our own cash and keep marching camp rolling?

I needed to make some serious war plans.

I texted Justin and Camille what I believed about the band and the cheerleaders.
Hear me right now! Cheer bitches took our money!
Because it was before 5 a.m., neither responded.

Then I got ready for work.

When I left, Grandpa and Dad were sleeping in the living room. They'd been there all night—Grandpa snoring on the gross brown recliner, Dad sawing logs on the red couch Mom bought three months before she left us to be with a douche sack Mr. Mitsunori. (I'd like to punch his face.) A rerun of SportsCenter blared on the TV. This is the environment I'm growing up in, Mr. Rodriguez. It smelled like old man in the place.

No! You're not an old man, sir. You smell great!

Yeah, that's a little awkward.

Time to make the donuts. I walked out into dawn, fresh dew on the grass, new sun glowing in the trees. It's only a few blocks from my house to Main Street and Dante's old-timey, tourist-trap, brick-and-glass storefront. I walked with new purpose.
Gonna
win!

Dante usually has three kids there on the weekends during the summer, two or three during weekdays. Summers are busy as hell because of the resort traffic on the lake. As I mentioned, Dante had hired RC III. I got him to apply. Then Dante asked me what I thought of him. “RC III is one top-notch hombre,” I said.

Dante did not, however, ask me about Chandra Gore. If he had, I would've been very, very negative on the matter.

Her eyes look like they're firing death at you! She wears black lipstick! She makes her cheeks look pale with makeup! Most of the time, she's wearing old, black lacy blouses like a dead old lady! Her fingernails are painted black! She wears skull rings and black boots! I'm a fan of her now, but really, that's not what I'd be looking for when hiring a cashier. Here's an interview question no businessman would ask:
Can
you
stare
down
customers
and
make
them
feel
ice
in
their
souls?

But there she was. Gore was at Dante's before me. What a shock to my system! There's some really rough history surrounding Gore in my grade, and I just assumed Carrie Dragovich, who is one of Dad's students at the college, would be continuing to work at Dante's for the summer. But I walk in through the back door and there she is, the new hire, Gore herself sipping coffee out of a freaking Styrofoam cup.

I was all prepped to ask Dante to raise prices to support band, but I stopped sharp, wondered,
Is
this
some
evil
hallucination
from
not
eating
enough? Is she real?

“Um…hi,” Gore said. Her big ghost eyes popped out of her head. These were the first words I'd heard her say since seventh grade.

Isn't that weird, sir? Gore was in class with me every day. She was silent.

Then Dante came in from out front with his own cup of coffee. He wears a sailor's hat and white painter pants and a tight T-shirt all the time. Looks like he could be swabbing deck in the Navy. “Hey! Summertime!” he called to me.

“What is this?” I asked, pointing at Gore.

“This?” Dante asked.

“I'm a girl,” Gore whispered.

“Summer help, buddy,” Dante said.

“Where's Carrie?” I asked.

“Working on her dad's farm. You knew that,” Dante said.

“No, this is not going to work,” I said, again pointing at Gore. “She's a potential murderer.”

Gore swallowed hard, then whispered, “You don't know anything.” She turned and bolted for the bathroom. Even through her makeup, I could tell her skin was flushed.

“Unacceptable, dude. No good,” Dante said. “You don't own this place. You don't treat my employees with disrespect. When Chandra is done with her business in there, you apologize to her or you go home. Understand?”

I bent toward Dante. I whispered, “She'll probably stab us before summer is through.”

“I've known Chandra her whole life, Chunk. She's a sweet kid. Don't you go judging a book by its cover.”

Well, Dante knew Chandra because her dad owns MNLake Bank. You know Darrell Wettlinger, right?

You gotta learn all these people's names if you're going to do business in this town, Mr. R.

The story?

Chandra threatened to kill people in middle school. Seriously. Three kids in my class—Kailey, Janessa, and Tyler Paul (who left town soon after, probably because his parents were freaked). She also threatened Seth Sellers, a grade ahead of us. (I approved of that.) She wrote them notes saying she'd cut their throats in the middle of the night and that they'd better watch out. It was a big deal. She was suspended. Her dad had to petition the school board to get her back in. I was friends with all those guys in seventh grade (except Seth). They were so scared.

Of course, they'd all been psychotically mean to her before she made death threats.

Yeah. Things were bad for her.

In any case, RC III showed up before Gore even got out of the bathroom. I trained him. Dante trained her. Gore didn't look at me for the rest of the morning. Not even when I apologized.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Okay,” she whispered, staring above my head. She's almost six feet tall, so it's easy for her to stare over my head.

Yeah. I did feel bad about going off half-cocked like that. A little. Mostly, I felt like jamming every damn donut in the store in my damn mouth because I was so damn hungry!

I didn't stuff anything though. Grandpa was planning a workout for me after donuts. I didn't want to barf all over his old fart shoes.

RC III did well. Gore did too. They learned the donut-selling business fast.

With the new employee training, I didn't get a chance to ask Dante about helping the band until nearly closing time at 2 p.m., when everybody was cleaning up (Gore out front sweeping). “Hey, Dante, would you add a nickel to your donuts and donate to the band?” I asked.

RC III looked up from washing a rack.

Dante said, “What now?” He stood holding this big metal spoon (sort of looked like he was going to whack me with it).

I swallowed, strained my brain, and said something like, “Donuts. Lost our funding. Help the band?” I wasn't articulate. My leadership bone was so weak, Mr. R.

“What the hell?” he asked again.

“Pop machine funding. Dance squad took our money. No summer band. School-sanctioned theft.”

Dante turned a little red. “No way,” he said.

“Totally,” I said.

“Really?” RC III asked.

“Really,” I said. “We need money or else—”

Dante shook his head and winced. “Jesus. I can't change my prices. I'd have to redo all my signs and printed materials. That's costly.”

“Oh,” I said. “Hm.”

“I've got no budget for that.”

“Right,” I said.

Then he took a deep breath and said, “How about you come up with a bake sale or a special event that maybe I can sponsor?”

“Hm,” I said. “Yeah?”

“Something not stupid, Chunk,” he said. “Propose an event and we'll see. Maybe.”

Sure. That was a start, I guess.

No, Justin never responded to my early morning text calling out the cheer bitches. Camille did though. We agreed to get together after my workout at 5 p.m.

“Workout?” she asked.

That's right. Workout.

Project Kill Chunk. Why do you want to hear about this?

Yeah, I'm a real motivational figure, sir. Big time.

Okay. First, to picture this adequately, you must know that my grandpa has no shame with regard to his body. Even though he's an old man, he walks around the yard in compaction shorts and nothing else. He should be in Under Armour advertising for old farts. Got that visualized in your mind?

It shouldn't be surprising that he has no fear of nakedness. He spent his youth wearing a banana hammock, making his oiled-up pecs bulge for crowds of people. That would help a guy feel comfortable being half-naked in the hood.

These days, he's into fitness, not bodybuilding. He built a fitness room next to my room in the basement (the laundry room). He hung a bunch of motivational posters on the wall and brought down a bunch of medicine balls and a couple yoga balls and those kettlebell weights that Russian wrestlers use.

I'd never touched any of it. When Grandpa works out, I go upstairs. His grunting and sweating are pretty distracting. The laundry room will never smell the same—I'll tell you that.

Grandpa wore his compaction shorts with a tucked-in tank top. He wore wristbands and a sweatband on his crew cut head. He was barefoot (no old man shoes for me to barf on).

I wore my XL Dante's Donuts T-shirt, which is the tightest shirt I'll wear, and a pair of elastic waistband khakis because the stretchies don't pinch my loaf, if you know what I mean.

“You have anything more comfortable?” Grandpa asked.

“No,” I said.

“Sweats?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“We have to do something about your clothes. That shirt will restrict you. Take it off.”

“No,” I said. “I can't do that. Are you kidding me?”

“Why would I be kidding?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

He shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

He set up stations—burpees, push-ups, mountain climbers, yoga ball crunches, medicine ball squats, and medicine ball military presses. He showed me how to do each. (I'd done all this crap in gym at some point in my long academic career.) Then he put me on the clock, “Thirty seconds for each exercise. Thirty seconds rest between exercises. We'll go around the circuit three times. Eighteen minutes of hell,” he said.

“Great,” I said (sarcastic).

“You asked for this.”

“Great,” I said.

Then he shouted, “Go, Chunk! Burpees first. Let's do it!”

I started with burpees (squatting and then kicking back into a push-up position, then crunching up and standing). After a few, I cried, “Almost done?”

“Fifteen seconds,” he said. “Go!”

I tried to go. I wanted to go, but my body did not go. Lightning fired in my shoulders. The back of my neck cramped up. At the end of thirty seconds, I thought I might puke. Sweat poured from me. I sucked for air. The basement floor spun beneath me.

“Good work!” Grandpa shouted. And then he cried, “Push-ups!”

By push-up four, I was down on my knees. Grandpa shouted above me, but it didn't matter. “Do girl push-ups!” he cried, but I couldn't. I spent fifteen of the thirty seconds with my face pressed to the gross basement floor.

It went like this with mountain climbers too. Ten seconds of go. Twenty seconds of heaving for air on the floor while Grandpa screamed above me. Yoga ball crunches turned into a crunch or two and then me draped upside down over a yoga ball while Grandpa shouted. Squats became little dips. Then finally there were military presses, which meant lifting a heavy object above my head over and over.

You can't slack off with a ball over your head. You can't lie down or lie back. You do it or you don't. I did it five or six times, my neck charley-horsing, backs of my arms trembling. Then I moved to
don't
because I couldn't.

“Push it up, Chunky! Push it up!” Grandpa shouted.

As I struggled to lift that damn ball, Grandpa slapped my hips hard. I cried out in pain and my fat rippled and waved. Grandpa shouted, “Go on, chub!” He slapped my hips again and I slammed the ball onto the floor in front of me.

“Bullshit!” he shouted.

“Stick it in your ass!” I shouted back.

He glared, his jaw clenched, the whistle on his phone blew, and he dropped down onto the concrete floor and reeled off like thirty push-ups. I stood there sweating and dizzy while he did it, breathing hard, staring at that ball I'd slammed on the floor, thinking about grabbing it and crushing Grandpa in the head. Before I could, he popped back up and put his mug right in my face. He said, “That's what you do with your anger, Chunky. You squeeze out the pain and pump out the reps. You get it?”

“No,” I said.

“Then you'll die a fat ass.”

“So,” I said.

“So don't ask for help, fat ass.”

I yanked the effenheimer out on him, then ran and locked myself in the bathroom.

I sat on the toilet. My gut bulged out between my legs. I held my head in my hands.

Grandpa knocked, came in. He just said, “Shower up, son. You did good, okay? Pain is good. Pain is gain. That was a good start. We'll get her even better tomorrow.”

I probably stayed in the bathroom for two hours.

Around four o'clock, Grandpa made me a salad. He put some boiled chicken in there so I didn't actually die of hunger.

That was very, very hard. Workout and boiled chicken—both.

Things were about to get harder.