When Mr. Dog Bites (26 page)

“She’s a Hindu from India and I’m a Muslim from Pakistan. What would my fo-fo-folks think? They’d go blinking ballistic!”

“Bloody hell, Amir. I’m just saying you should dance with her. I’m not saying you should invite her round to meet your mom and dad and have babies.”

“Well, that’s not going to happen. I can tell you that for nothing.”

“There’s no harm in a wee dance.”

“This song’s crap to dance to anyway.”

“So wait till a better song comes on and then get in there.”

“I’ll dance with her on one condition.”

“What?”

“You have to get her pal up to dance,” Amir said.

“Who?”

“That girl dressed as a butterfly.”

“What? Her?”

“Yeah, her.”

“No way, Amir,” I said. He was pointing to some wee dumpy girl with chemo hair and a really pronounced limp. I think she was born with a gammy hip. “What’s her name?”

“Is it not Sophie or something?”

Right on cue, Comeford put on “
Bonkers”
by Dizzee Rascal
,
a top topper tune if ever there was one, by a billion miles the best song of the night, and the most
ironic
. I could have cut his DJ wires for doing that to me. If
Make Amir a happy chappy again instead of a miserable c***!
hadn’t been number two on my
Cool Things to Do Before I Cack It
list, the very thought of dancing with this lassie would never have taken place.

“Right; you up for it?” Amir said.

“Do I have to?”

“It was your idea. Come on.”

We put on our shades and headed for our women. The way to do things at school discos was to walk up behind the lucky lady and tap her on the shoulder and just start jigging. She’d return the dance if she was a cool cat. Easy-peasy. Well, that was the big plan. Amir didn’t follow the rules—I should have known. Instead he leaned forward and said something in his language to Priya, who smiled (it could have been more of a laugh, but it was hard to tell through her cat whiskers) and said something in the same language back to him. Before you knew it they were boogying away, all happy-daze-craze like a couple of good things.

I tapped Sophie’s shoulder through one of her wings.

Tap one.

Nothing.

Tap two.

Nothing.

Maybe she had lost the feeling in that part of her body.

Tap three. (More of a wallop.)

Something.

“For fuck’s sake, what is it?” Sophie said.

“Erm .
.
. Sorry .
.
. but .
.
. erm .
.
. do you want to dance?” I said.

“No, I fucking don’t want to dance. This song’s shite anyway. And if I did want to dance to this shite song, it wouldn’t be with you,” she said, storming off the dance floor. Well, hobbling off, really.

Wow!

Completely round the bend.

I stood there like a pure plonker and didn’t know whether to stand still or shuffle my feet to “
Bonkers.”
I didn’t care what Sophie (or whatever her name was) said, it was a mega stonking song. What would Dizzee Rascal
do? Sophie and I weren’t compatible. Mrs. Seed taught me that word. She’d be proud of me for using all her words. I should have been her Vocabulary King for that week.

Amir and Priya were doing weird dancing. I think it was the bhangra dance Amir had said he wouldn’t do. They were really good at it and loads of people were watching, even though it looked as if they were swatting flies above their heads. I thought to myself,
Go on yerself, the bold Amir!

They stayed dancing for the next song, “Radio Ga Ga” by Queen. I sloped off to the toilet. I didn’t need a third pee—maybe only a half pee if I really forced it out—I just went to the toilet to kill time until “Radio Ga Ga” finished and I got my Amir back. When I heard “Last Night” by the Strokes slink under the toilet door I went back out. And would you Adam and Eve it—they were still at it, this time doing a mental freestyle dance. Amir was right—he was shite at dancing.

“Not dancing, Dylan?” Miss Flynn said.

I joined her at the door to see what the crack was like. Capital
B
Boring. I probably should have stayed at home with Mom, watching people on telly trying to lose weight. If she ever found out about the phony funeral, I was going to get chucked in some huge dung heap. That’s a “
metaphor”
 .
.
. I think. I’d lied all because of this, this crap Halloween disco. Nobody knew who I was dressed up as, the girls were rubbish at being normal, the Coke was roasting hot, and the music was painful. It was by far the worst disco I’d been to in my life. I couldn’t believe that this could be the last disco I’d ever attend. I should have put
Go to a banging disco where nobody wants to fight you and get a groove on with some hot chick
on my list. Far too late.

“Nobody to dance with, miss.”

“Oh, I don’t believe that. Have you asked anyone?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“K-B.”

“Excuse me?”

“Knock-back.”

“I’m sure you haven’t asked everyone.” That’s when I gave her one of those looks Mom gives me, or Dad gives Mom. A look that says you think they’re either Looney Tunes Thicko of the Week or that you want to belt them on the jaw.

“I’m not going to ask every girl in the hall to dance with me, miss. What do you think I am, stupid or something?” And I tutted and shook my head four times, because Miss Flynn annoyed me. She wasn’t being what they call “
tactful
.”

“I’m not saying you are, Dylan. I’m—”

“What? Do you think I’m just going to go round and get a K-B off every girl in there? They’re all socks anyway. FUCKIN’ SHITE DISCO. PISH-FLAPS.”

“I’m sorry if I upset you, Dylan.” She put her hand on my shoulder, and I felt bad. Secretly I wanted her to hug me tight so I could feel her boobs sticking into me again. I considered crying but decided against it. “Why don’t you go for a wee stroll around the playground, get some fresh air in your lungs? Then go back in. Where’s Amir?”

“He’s been dancing with some girl for about twenty songs in a row.”

“Oh, well, that’s exciting, isn’t it?”

“Not for me, it’s not.”

“Aren’t you happy for Amir?”

“I .
.
. erm .
.
.”

“He’s your best friend, is he not? You should be happy that he’s having a good time.”

“I
am
happy for him, miss.”

“Who’s the girl?”

“The one with the strange Indian name.”

“Oh, Priya?”

“Yes, that’s her.”

“Well, isn’t that just lovely,” Miss Flynn said, but this wasn’t said to me; this was said into the sky, as though Amir and Priya were always meant to be and this was, like, the most romantic thing ever to happen at any Drumhill School event in the entire history of Drumhill School events.

“Lovely,” I said. “I’m going for a walk, miss.”

“Okay. See you later, alligator.”

“See you.” I knew I was supposed to say “In a while, crocodile,” but I was fed up with baby games. I wasn’t a baby anymore. I was Dylan Mint. A teenager. A young man dressed head to toe as a character from
Reservoir Dogs
, which is a sophisticated and mature film for adults and students. I also had a terminal illness, which is definitely not a baby thing to deal with, and I thought I was dealing with it pretty fucking super amazingly, and I wished people didn’t tread on eggshells when talking to me. I
was
ultrahappy for the bold Amir. Get in there, my son. Give her one for the lads. Make sure you wear a rubber. Pump her hard, you mad thing, you. This was what I should have been saying to him, but us Drumhill students weren’t meant to have thoughts like these, were we?

It wasn’t a brain-gym moment, and I didn’t feel stressed or anxious. I just breathed the cold air into my lungs and blew some breath circles into the air. Pink Floyd
sang about breathing in air, and that song was playing in my noggin while I was out in the school yard. It smelled like Halloween. Dark, cold, smoky, and fruity. It was jet black cutting around the playground, like
Scary Movie
1
,
2
,
3
,
4
, and
5
. Empty. Shadowy. Halloweeny. Cold. A perfect time for some perv willy-watchers to pull you into the bushes and touch your tackle. No need for a blindfold. In my head I was saying to myself,
Dylan, you’ve had enough fresh air to do you a lifetime—and the rest of your lifetime is just another five months. Time to head back in and take this Halloween disco by the scruff of the pants.

The idea was to find my best bud—presuming he and that girl Priya had taken off their Velcro knickers—check out some more chickadees, hand Comeford a list of thumping beats to put on, hammer out some fat moves on the dance floor, go home, act all sad, go to bed, and get warm and cozy under the covers. That was the idea swirling around. And that was when I heard the first groan—well, more of a moan, really—coming from right under Mr. McGrain’s office window. It stopped me in my train tracks. I Iceman froze, rooted to the spot like weeds in our garden. Then a grunt, a splat, and a sound that I couldn’t explain, but if I had to write it down in Mrs. Seed’s class, it would look like
aaarrrccchhhkkktttsssccchhhtttccchhhccchhh
. For a billionth of a nanosecond I thought the pedophiles were making a charge on me, or worse, on the school’s Halloween disco. I took out my cell phone in case I needed to call the cops and ask them to send in a SWAT team
asap
. I dialed 911 and put my thumb over the button with the little green phone picture, ready to make the cops’ number active in case one of the pedophiles tried anything risky frisky. Then a retch—like the dry boak—a splat, and someone said, “Fuck.” Not like a normal “Fuck,” more of a “
Fuuuuuuuuuuck
.” It seemed to last forever. I clicked the big square menu button on my cell phone, making myself a makeshift flashlight, put it in front of me, and walked slowly toward the sound of the “
Fuuuuuuuuuuck
.”

What I saw knocked me for eighteen. When the doc told me all about the “
degeneration”
of my illness, that only knocked me for ten, so you can imagine how much this knocked me. And anything over a ten is anxiety and psychological stress for me. Twitching. Shaking. Whooping. Barking. Grunting. All that jazz.

“WHOOP. WHOOP.” My head and body shook like a Japanese earthquake. “WHOOP.”

I directed my phone-light/flashlight gizmo. Dad would have been dead proud of me with my Special Air Service skills. Maybe I could be an SAS cadet when this mission was over? Drumhill’s playground had turned into a jungle, a war zone; I was deep inside enemy territory. There was no going back. With the help of the phone light I first eye-spied the sneakers, soles up, facing me. Someone was on their knees, which must have been as sore as a mofo on that stony gravel. The eighteen came when I recognized the sneakers. Red Adidas high-tops. One big one. One wee one. Dangling beside each other.

NOOOO WAAAAYYYY, JOOOOSSSSÉÉÉÉ!

The Converse bag.

NOOOO WAAAAYYYY, JOOOOSSSSÉÉÉÉ AND ALL HIS FAMILY!

The bag lay on the ground, half of it covered in puke soup. Talk about yuckity yuck yuck. But Holy Moly, Jeeze Louise, and Gordon Bennett rolled into one. It was none other than Michelle Malloy on her hands and knees, making horrendous sounds and puking her guts up. Dad said that anyone who was Uncle Dick (that’s rhyming slang) was driving the porcelain bus. Well, if this was the case, Michelle Malloy was the captain of the porcelain bus fleet. The poor lassie must have eaten a dodgy candy apple.

“DISGUSTING SLUT. BITCH .
.
. Oh .
.
. Sorry, Michelle.” I couldn’t help it. It just sort of popped out. If Amir had been there, he would’ve been in pure stitches at my greeting. He loved that shit.

“Fuck you want, Mint?” she said. Charm alarm.

“Nothing. I was out for some fresh air and I heard the noise, that’s all. I came to see what it was in case it was .
.
. you know.”

“Right, so you heard it, now fuck .
.
.” But she didn’t have time to say “off,” as all the diced carrots, squishy onions, sausages, and burgundy stuff erupted from her gub and sprayed on the wall. Some of it splashed on her bag. I kicked it out of the way. “Don’t touch my fucking stuff, Mint.” She was on all fours, doggy style. The same style I’d thought about when I closed my eyes at night.

“I wasn’t, I was just—”

“Well, don’t just.”

“Did you eat something dickie dodgy?” I asked.