“I don’t care,” she said, smiling back at me. And then that was it: She took my hand and started holding it and I felt my breath leave. Now, I had fooled around with a bunch of girls by then, I mean, I had pretty much done it, without doing it, if you know what I mean. If you don’t know what I mean, I mean frenching, finger-banging, and dryhumping; I had even kissed Kara Burton on her cooter and that was about all I was going to do down there for now. But when Dorie leaned over and took my hand, well, I dunno, it felt better than fooling around, I guess. In a moment, she leaned her head over and put it on my chest and without moving I could smell her hair, which smelled very different than all the other girls I had had the chance to smell. Dorie’s hair didn’t smell all flowery and fancy and fruity, like fucked-up strawberries and kiwi, all weird and phony. It was very clean-smelling, just like plain soap; just very simple, natural, even a little oily.
“When I was a kid my brother would give me those snakes, you know, the stupid little black things that grow and get all puffy,” she said, and I nodded, remembering those things, the dumbest kind of fireworks ever, which were exactly the ones I pawned off on my little sister, “and I’d sit in my mom’s lap and my dad would make like a big show of it and everything.”
“I burned my finger when I was kid,” I said. “On a sparkler.”
“A sparkler?” she laughed. “That’s not even like a real firework.”
“I know, it was real stupid,” I said. “I tried to hold the sparkler in my teeth because that’s what my older cousin was doing and I got scared and grabbed it and burned my finger. I still got a scar on that finger.” I held my finger up to her face and pointed it out, frowning. “See, it looks like a little ghost.”
Dorie sat up and stared at my finger. She blinked, squinting at it. “It does look like a ghost,” she said. And then, without any warning, she went and kissed my finger on the spot, and I almost felt like crying because I had not expected it and when she did it my whole heart felt as big as my chest. She closed her eyes and laid her head back on my shoulder. In the meantime, Mike had taken the rest of the fireworks—like thirty more bottle rockets, four roman candles, a bag full of M-80s, and some bright silver sparklers—and had stuck them all over him: in between his collar, up the sleeves of his dirty denim jacket, in all his pockets—even the small triangular ones—his pants, back and front. Then, like a retard, the ends of the fireworks sticking out, their fuses dangerously dangling, he put on a bug-eyed look and started waving his cigarette around.
“Look out for Firework Man,” he began to mumble, like a robot, like a theme song—“Firework Man!”—and he started chasing poor Erin McDougal around the backyard, his arms outstretched, stiff like a monster, igniting the sparklers in his front pockets. Erin McDougal squealed out of pure delight, the first sound she had made all night, as he grabbed her around the waist. He pulled the sparklers from his jacket and waved them about Erin’s face. “Firework Man has put you under his control!” he shouted. “You are under his control!” And she squealed again, giggling, covering her face with her hands. Mike leaned forward, backing poor Erin against a fence, and then he let out a loud shout.
“Fuck,” he mumbled, shaking his hand. “I think I just burnt off a finger.” He threw down the sparklers and began sucking on his finger, and he said, “That hurts like a bitch.” Erin became all concerned and sweet and motherly, holding his hand, kissing it, the two of them laughing. He looked at me and winked and said, “I think I should go inside and wash this,” and Erin nodded and, still hanging on him, followed him inside, Mike taking the time to turn to me and wink once more with his stoner-type smile.
At that, Dorie sat up, kind of fixed her hair, and said, “Do you want to sit on the picnic table with me?” and I said, “OK,” and I followed her over to the red, wooden one-piece picnic table/bench. I sat beside her, holding my breath, and finally after she turned and looked bug-eyed at me as if she was asking me a question like,
Well, here we are
or
What are you waiting for
? I leaned over and kissed her as soft as I could, touching her hair with my hands. It was a very good kiss. Maybe the best. Because she wouldn’t stop kissing. Once we started, she refused to stop. If I backed away to swallow, she would attack me, slipping her tongue into my mouth or going to bite my ear.
“Wow, you’re a really good kisser,” I said, all out of breath.
“You,” she whispered. “You,” like she caught me at something. We started going at it again, her kind of growling and pinning me down against the picnic table, and then she stopped and said, “Oh shit, what time is it?” and I turned and looked at my calculator watch and said, “Twelve-thirty,” and she said, “Oh shit. I’ve got to be at work in the morning,” and she got up and wiped her mouth and then leapt at me again, kissing for round three.
We walked around the side of Mike’s house, stopping twice more to kiss again, and then we were at her front steps and she kissed me on the nose, just once, and I said, “Can I call you? Is that cool?” and she said, “OK,” and then she hopped up her steps, stopped, ran back down, kissed me once more, open-mouthed, and said, “I can’t help it if I like to make out,” with a big smile, then ran up her front steps and disappeared indoors.
After that, I rode my bike home in a daze. I didn’t even remember riding home. I had no idea how I got there. Somehow I was in bed already and I couldn’t stop myself from smiling about, well, everything.
Like I said, Mrs. Madden, who was very thin and tall and blond with short poofy hair, who might have been hot if she hadn’t been so nervous and twitchy and, well, crazy all the goddamn time, well, she made it obvious that the divorce went through by wearing the same see-through yellow nightgown all day, which began to get dirty quick. Also, she had started smoking a lot more, borrowing cigarettes from Mike, which she did not do before. And drinking. Canadian Club whiskey. We were down in the basement smoking dope and it was late and I was going to sneak home and I came up and Mrs. Madden was sitting on the floor in the front room, smoking and drinking a bottle of Canadian Club and watching
Mary Tyler Moore
reruns. I thought about it as I was riding my bike home. When I got there, my dad was crashed out on the couch and upstairs I could hear my mom sewing, the sewing machine going at like two in the morning. I thought, somewhere, someone’s parents had to be happy about something.
So here’s a secret: When I was feeling bad about my folks and weird about my dad and how it seemed pretty inevitable now that at some point he would be leaving, because he had been sleeping on the sofa for a while now and it didn’t seem like they were working anything out—in fact, it seemed things were getting worse because my dad was now doing his own laundry—well, when I started feeling down, I would go rent a horror movie. It was usually something old and black-and-white, like
The Wolf Man
, and was always from the video store by my house. I’d end up going like every other week. The overweight guy, with his greasy carryout food fingers, would roll his eyes and mutter, “Lon Chaney Jr.? He doesn’t even earn the name. Did you ever see
Phantom of the Opera
, with his father? Now that’s a classic horror movie.”
I would just shake my head and bring the video home and watch it downstairs alone, and my older brother, Tim, would come down into the basement—he’d be wearing, like, sweatpants and a baseball hat or some other sorta jock gear—and he’d ask what I was doing and why I didn’t go outside ever, and I’d say leave me alone already and he’d say, “You’re turning into a real mutant fag.” Then my little sister, Alice, would come down and she’d be pouty, like always, because she was a freshman and thought if she became a cheerleader or whatever she could be somebody, but she wasn’t a cheerleader and the whole high school melodrama thing was getting to her, and I dunno. She’d say, “I want to watch TV,” and I’d say, “Too bad,” and if she tried to take the remote control away, I’d get her in a half-nelson and then push her on her head. I didn’t really talk to either one of them. They both seemed like strangers I sometimes shared meals with, I guess.
When it would quiet down, I’d go back to watching the tape and Lon Chaney Jr. would be running barefoot along the marsh, sick with guilt about what he was about to become, and there in the distance, in the shadow of the trees, was some poor British lady, and I would sit there and nod, because that was how I was usually feeling about everything: very confused and very lustful and very angry. Soon my mom would come home from work and she would be frustrated and she would start yelling about why no one else ever cooked dinner, and it was during one of those times, watching Lon Chaney Jr. on one of his rampages, that I decided I needed to get a job and stay the hell away from my house for as long as I could, maybe.
The Yogurt Palace in the mini-mall on Pulaski is where I went. Like I said, I needed a job to get out of my house and also, I had decided I would try and start saving up for a car or a van. In fact, I had recently seen a van with a spider on the side of it, the kind of vehicle I thought a girl like Dorie might like a guy to have. So I went into the Yogurt Palace after school one day and I saw Jessica was there working, and decided to see what she could do for me. She had been working there for like three years and was like the assistant manager already. She was behind the counter and had on her pink apron and pink painter’s cap. When she saw me, right away she started shaking her head.
“What do you want, Brian Oswald?” she asked, leaning against the counter and frowning. I just shrugged my shoulders and went up and said:
“I would like an application for employment, please.”
“What? Is this a fucking joke? Did Gretchen put you up to this?”
“I would like an application for employment, please.”
“Get fucked,” she said, flipping me off.
“No. Please, Jessica, I need a job.”
“Why?”
“I need to get out of my fucking house,” I said. “My mom is always home, fucking crying.”
“Yeah?” she asked, looking at me funny, kind of considering it, maybe.
“And,” I said, “and I’m saving up for a van. I’m a good worker. And I got a lot of free time, you know?”
“Well, can you work nights?” she asked.
“I can work anytime,” I said. “Nights, weekends, whenever you need me.”
“Really?” she said, nodding. “Well, when can you start?” And it was just that easy.
So the van I had seen, the one I decided to start saving up for, had a black widow on it, right on the side. The van was black and the spider was black and outlined with yellow with white spiderwebs around it. I saw it parked in front of this dude’s house about two blocks away from Mike’s. I almost wrecked my bicycle when I saw the
FOR SALE
sign on the dash. I guess I needed a van because, like Mike always said, guys who had vans always got the most trim, after the guys who could grow mustaches. Jeb Derrick had a mustache, a blond one, and girls were always sitting in his lap in the parking lot of Haunted Trails. Like I said, for some reason I couldn’t grow a mustache to save my life. But I knew two other guys—real nobodies at school—who got hot vans and, within weeks, they were going out with foxes, and if they weren’t foxes they were at least girls with big knockers. I would settle for an ugly girl if she noticed what song was playing on the cassette player if we were out cruising or parked somewhere. But most girls didn’t seem to notice shit like that, at least the girls that went by Mike’s. I dunno. Those kind of girls seemed too worried about their hair, maybe. I dunno. I thought that if some girl I was with had bad acne but said, “Is this Black Sabbath with Ozzy?” I would close my eyes and think of someone pretty and kiss her gratefully. Dorie, well, Dorie knew the difference between old Black Sabbath and the newer Sabbath stuff with Ronnie James Dio, which completely sucked. It was one of the reasons I liked her so much. She was tall and pretty and not afraid to listen to music that rocked.
As I learned in the week I worked there, the Yogurt Palace had thirty-three flavors, not thirty-one like Baskin Robbins, though I could not tell you what the other two flavors were, except that Superman ice cream wasn’t nothing but vanilla with red, yellow, and blue food coloring in it. Because it was all free—to keep you, as an employee, from stealing—I could create all kinds of crazy ice cream experiments, like pineapple, chocolate, cherry, and rum shakes; and seven scoops of Irish cream parfaits, which after getting high by the garbage dumpster made me glad there was a counter to lean against. Also, there were always tons of thin, body-conscious divorced women in leotards and ponytails who would come in after working at the Jazzercize studio to try our nonfat soft-serve yogurt. Even better than that, there was no boss because the boss had been diagnosed with MS and his son Caffey let the goofy teenagers like Jessica D. run the joint. It was such a fine job I didn’t ever think about stealing because I truly wondered what the hell I was gonna do when/if I got caught, which I knew I would because, like all kids, I would be too stupid not to.
The bad-ass part of the job was on Friday night. Friday night was my first night working alone at the Yogurt Palace, because Jess wanted to go out partying, and I had been working there for a week already, so it was OK with me because, well, there was a dual cassette player in the back for the store radio, and so I did this thing where I tried to create the most perfect rock’n’roll mix, one unbelievable song after the next, like “Surrender” by Cheap Trick going into “Too Young to Fall in Love” by Mötley Crüe, one after the other all night, as if I was being judged by somebody like Ed McMahon, or like there was a live audience there or something. In the middle of waiting on a customer, I dove into the back room where the stereo was and started up the next song before the first one was over, kind of bleeding it into the second—“Paradise City” by Guns n’ Roses going into “Revolution” by the Beatles. No one noticed but me probably that Friday night; not the marrieds and their runny-nosed kids who you knew were gonna drop their single scoops before you handed them their ice cream; not the lonely housewives in yellow sweatpants who were obviously filling the gaps in their hearts with triple scoops of mocha fudge sundaes; not even the other teens, on dates, awkward and wondering if they had enough to cover the bill. I did this thing at ten then, when I had to close: I swept and mopped to “Wild Horses” by the Rolling Stones. That was going to be like my Friday night thing, you know.