Huge Read online

  Stacy was standing at the curb, waiting for me, and as soon as I’d reached her, she took my hand again. It was a short walk to her apartment, maybe twelve yards, but I was nervous all the way. Everything was quiet, until Sticky howled, “Little duuu-uuuu-uuuude!” into the night, and the others hit and punched him and told him to shut up, and I felt myself blushing. My heart started pounding as we got to her door, because I still didn’t know what to say, but Stacy turned to me, gave me a quick kiss, slipped something into my hand, and bolted inside and out of sight before I had a chance to catch my breath or blink.

  I looked down into my palm, steadied it with my other hand for a second, then unfolded the piece of paper and saw her name written out in big, loopy cursive and her phone number underneath it. Yeah, I got the digits, and it felt like I’d won the lottery and Super Bowl MVP, both at the same time, only a million times better. And I noticed something else, a tiny detail that really jumped out: Stacy didn’t spell her name with a y at the end, the way our teachers spelled it and the way I’d always written it in my journal. No, she spelled it with an i—Staci—and for some reason that one letter seemed to change everything. Sure, I knew I still had a lot to feel bad about, but right now I couldn’t help feeling happier and more excited than I’d ever thought possible. Then again, maybe it had nothing to do with the i at the end of Staci’s name. Maybe it was the heart she’d used to dot it.

  I probably should’ve known everything was going way too well and that I was due for a fall, most likely a catastrophic one, around the next corner. Sure enough, as we pulled up to our house, we saw mom’s car parked at the curb and all the houselights on.

  “Holy fuck,” Neecey whispered, and then asked Darren what time it was.

  It was about midnight, but only just, he said, which meant mom shouldn’t have been home for at least another hour on a Wednesday.

  Neecey turned to look at me from the passenger seat. “We are so totally and utterly and forever fucked, Genie, I’m not even kidding.”

  I had to agree, but I thought there was a chance that we didn’t have to be, so I said, “Just let me out and you guys beat it, and I won’t tell her I was with you.”

  “See, the little dude is chilly to the bone,” Sticky said. “My younger bro wouldn’t do that for me.”

  “Dude,” Darren chimed in, “you saw how he ransacked Razor’s jewels; little dude fears no fear.”

  They were wrong, dead wrong, both of them. I just thought Neecey deserved a pass if she could get it, and I’d give her one if I could.

  But she said, “Genie, get a clue, okay? She’s waiting for you and she’s already seen the Jeep, trust me.”

  I said I’d tell mom that I got a ride from someone, and Neecey laughed in my face before I’d even finished.

  “Who?” she asked. “Who would you get a ride from, Genie, or where would you be at this hour, because you don’t have any friends.”

  Sticky, Darren, Cynthia, and Chakha all protested—Hey, whoa, back off, way harsh, we’re his friends—but Neecey was right. If I had a friend, she was either sitting on top of Darren in the passenger seat telling me the truth, or she was home in her apartment right now, and I’d just made that friend tonight and didn’t know if she even owned a bicycle, let alone a car.

  “We’re going in together,” Neecey ordered, “and if you say like even one word before she gets it all out of her system, then I won’t have to kill you tomorrow because she’ll murder you tonight, got that?”

  I nodded.

  “This is serious, Genie, so like don’t fuck it up, I’m totally begging you.”

  I nodded again.

  Neecey said good-bye to everyone and that she’d see them around the end of October or early November when she wasn’t grounded anymore. I said good-bye, too, and thanks for the ride and everything else and that I’d had fun, because I did. They all said good-bye and waved back, and somebody, most likely Darren, said, “Go on, little dude, show your madre what you’re made of,” and I appreciated the encouragement, but that was exactly what I feared.

  From the outside of the house, things looked bad. Inside the house, they looked even worse. As soon as we opened the door we smelled smoke, cigarette smoke, and mom only ever smoked when she was at what she called her “wit’s end,” and the air was so thick and stale that she must’ve been witless for a while now. Neecey and I looked at each other before we went into the kitchen to face the music, and it was somehow reassuring to see that I wasn’t the only one terrified out of my skin.

  Not reassuring enough, though. When we got into the kitchen, mom was still wearing the black T-shirt and jeans she wore to work at the bar, her hair was down and badly mussed, she was drinking back an entire cigarette, and her mascara had run from her eyes, which were glaring rather nastily at us. Instantly, I felt panicked, and had this overwhelming urge to say something to her—to apologize, confess, beg, plead, whatever—anything to calm her down and bring her back to earth. But just as I was about to open my mouth, Neecey reached out and grabbed my hand, steadying me and reminding me to shut the hell up, which I did. Mom stood up from the chair at the kitchen table, mashed out her cigarette, and proceeded to make us feel as if we’d both made a big mistake by being born.

  Having a bad temper kind of ran in the family, and Neecey and I had been expecting things to get hot. But mom was madder than I’d ever seen her before—scalding, cursing, scary mad—so mad that I honestly thought she was going to lose control and start swinging, although she’d never hit either of us before. Not that I could’ve blamed her if she’d made an exception just this once. She had every right to rip my arms off and beat me over the head with them if she wanted to, because I’d not only lied to her and disobeyed her and generally screwed the pooch every which way from Sunday, but I’d worried her to the point where she’d actually feared for my life. Yeah, I did, and even guys on death row knew that worrying a mom on top of making her angry was just about as capital a crime as you could ever commit.

  Thing was, she’d called to check up on me this evening and found the line busy because I’d left it off the hook. No, I could not have made a more dumb-fuck amateur move if I’d tried. Because once mom called and got a busy signal, which of course she would, she’d call back a few minutes later, which of course she did, and she’d get a busy signal again, and then she’d keep at it until she realized that the phone had been busy for nearly an hour. This would confuse and disturb mom for basically the same reason Neecey had just brought up in the Jeep: who the hell could I possibly be talking to, when I didn’t have any friends? Okay, I might’ve overlooked that line of thought earlier, when I’d taken the phone off the hook before leaving the house. It was possible.

  So mom called the operator to make an emergency breakthrough, and found that the line was out of service. Yup, now she was worried. She called the retirement home to see if I was there by some chance, they told her I wasn’t, and then she started to panic. She called Cynthia’s mom and asked for Neecey, but Neecey and Cynthia were already out, so she asked Mrs. Murdock where they’d gone and she said she didn’t know—they were out with friends and they’d be back later. So mom called our house again, got another busy signal, and said, That’s it, and left work, right in the middle of her shift, leaving only one person to cover the whole bar. Bad news, very bad news. And when she got here, she found nobody home, the phone off the hook, the Cruiser locked to the back porch, and, worse still, Thrash facedown on the bed in my room. Mom said seeing him like that actually damaged something in her brain. I’d never left him that way before, but there he was, my tiny plush sidekick and best friend, all alone with his face in the pillow and his backside up in the air, while I was nowhere to be found, and she said the sight of that was just so creepy and chilling that she knew, she just knew, that I’d been abducted, sexually abused, dismembered, and dumped on the roadside hours ago, and she sort of lost it.

  I had to give it to mom, though, because as soon as we’d walked into the kitchen,
she seemed to find whatever it was she’d lost, gathered it up, gave all of it to me, and still had enough left over to rope Neecey into the fire so she wouldn’t feel left out in the cold. And if you’ve ever had your mother mad at you like that—inside out, beside herself, head melting, skin splitting open, serpents and fire shooting out of her mouth—then you already knew it was the absolute worst experience you could ever possibly have, and the only thing you wanted to do was pretend it wasn’t happening, or disappear, but you couldn’t do either, so you just wound up feeling like a worthless piece of shit and bawling like a helpless two-year-old that hadn’t been fed, changed, or held for weeks.

  It was a solid thirty minutes of screaming and angry tears before mom had burned off all her excess fuel and had to sit back down to recharge with three more cigarettes. Thanks to Neecey we’d both managed to stay quiet and not make it any worse for ourselves than it already was. Mom sat smoking at the kitchen table, and we stood exactly where we were—rigid, cowering, chins on our chests—for a few more minutes of tense and painful silence.

  Then mom stood up, came over to me, and said, “Come here, let me take a look at that eye.” She held my head with both hands, inspected me, and sucked her teeth. “Where’s your shirt? Or should I be afraid to ask?”

  Come to think of it, I had no idea where it was. As mom turned her back and went to the refrigerator, I took a quick look at Neecey; she shook her head no, so I didn’t answer the question.

  “We’re all out of steak,” mom went on, “so you’ll have to settle for hamburger.”

  This time it was Neecey who stole a peek at me, quickly shooting out her tongue, as if to say, I told you so, and for some reason she and I couldn’t help snickering. Nah, that was not a smart move on our part when we were still in grave and immediate danger, and mom turned around to ask what was so goddamn funny. I didn’t want to break the silence first, so I waited for Neecey to speak.

  “It’s just, Genie doesn’t think hamburger will work on a black eye. He thinks you need like a steak.”

  Maybe that caught mom off guard a little, because she shrugged and said, “It doesn’t really matter what kind of meat you use; it’s more important to have a dense mold for the eye socket, so the cold and pressure are even enough to reduce the swelling.”

  “So a chopped sirloin patty,” I worked up the nerve to say, “if it was like frozen solid, wouldn’t be as good as, say, a really cold rump?”

  Mom shrugged again. “No, probably not, especially since a frozen patty won’t come in contact with most of the wound.”

  I smirked at Neecey, I couldn’t help it, and mom saw that, too. Then, out of nowhere, she said, “Not that you’d ever want a really cold rump pressed against your face.”

  We all burst out laughing.

  Yeah, it was a stupid joke, and not the kind mom would usually make, but we laughed anyway. It showed me that no matter how angry mom was, she was doing her best to go easy on us. That helped a lot. She was still upset and wanted to know what had happened, but she was much calmer, more composed, and it made Neecey and me feel more relaxed and easy about what was coming. We still had to go through the chore of giving her a flimsy cockamamie bullshit story and waiting for her to mete out justice, but we all knew the routine, so we just got to it.

  And the only things mom learned from us that she didn’t know already were that I had taken grandma up on the case, lied to her about it, heard Neecey talking to Cynthia on the phone, followed them tonight, and then got into a fight with a kid who’d tried to pick on me. That was it. There was nothing about Darren or the crew, hardly any names, no mention of the church or Razor or Staci or drugs of any kind or Tommy Sharpe or, when you got right to it, really any of the important details at all. It was just a story about me doing exactly what mom and Neecey had been trying forever to keep me from doing, without most of the stuff I’d gone through to do it; except, of course, the lying and promise-breaking, sneaking out of the house, and getting into a fight, all of which pretty much had to be admitted and paid for. Mom wasn’t ecstatic about any of it, but she didn’t seem surprised either, and maybe that’s why she didn’t ask for specifics. Besides, the only proof she needed was written all over the left side of my face.

  So we cut off the tiniest sliver of what’d happened and chewed it over with mom for a while, and she was pretty cool about it, all things considered. When we were finished, she said, “You realize, Genie, this is probably the worst thing you’ve ever done, even worse than hitting that teacher, because I honestly and sincerely believe in my heart that you didn’t mean to do that. God, I have to believe that. But you meant to do this, you even lied to my face so you could, and that, Genie, deserves the worst punishment you’ve ever had.”

  Thing was, mom wasn’t even mad when she said it, and that’s what really scared me. I realized I was looking at being grounded forever—I was looking at life.

  “Honestly,” she went on, “I don’t even know what I’m going to do with you this time, because nothing seems to work.”

  Yeah, I’d heard that one before, too, but this time was different. This time I felt it, and goddamn it, it hurt. My own mother was on the brink of thinking I was hopeless, and everything was starting to look bleak—when Neecey jumped in. She told mom to blame her instead, or that they should blame themselves, because they both had some idea of what I might do and could’ve talked to me about it, but they didn’t. Mom held steady, though, and asked Neecey if she thought I would’ve listened.

  “No, he never listens, but we still didn’t try, so that’s like partly our fault.”

  But I was listening this time; I was standing right there.

  “Do you really think we should be having this discussion in front of him now?”

  “Probably not, mom,” Neecey replied, “but if we don’t have it in front of him like sooner or later, he’ll never know and he’ll keep doing the same things over and over again.”

  I guess that’s when it hit me that mom was responsible for all three of us, but both of them were responsible for me, and it took everything they had working together to handle the job. I wanted to jump in and tell them that I got it now and that I’d try to do better, but they were starting to argue about what they should do and what was best for me, and I didn’t want to get in the middle of it any more than I already was.

  Eventually, mom said, “What am I supposed to do, Neecey? He has to be punished.”

  Neecey paused. “But you can’t punish him this time.”

  “Oh, no? Why not?” Mom’s smile was more like a dare.

  Then Neecey dropped the bombshell. “Because he met a girl tonight and he likes her and she likes him, and if you punish him now, he’ll lose the best shot at having a real friend that he’s had in like three years, so you can’t.”

  Mom was not expecting that—shit, neither was I—and it took a second to sink in. “A girl? What girl? A high-school girl?”

  “No, mom, she’s going into seventh grade, like Genie.”

  “Then what’s she doing at a high-school party?”

  “Chill, mom. She just like crashed it, and nobody even knew she was there or we would’ve made her leave. But all she did was like sit down by the reservoir and talk to Genie, and you know what? Now they completely like each other, so we totally have to think about that.”

  Mom looked at me and I could tell the new information was causing her some doubt, maybe even hesitation, so I ran with it, and showed her the piece of paper with Staci’s name and number on it. Mom made this face like she’d just gotten a big tax return and a notice of audit from the IRS at the same time, so I was having trouble reading it. She handed the paper back to me and slouched a little.

  “Is this true?”

  “Yeah, mom, it’s true.”

  Mom sighed and looked back at Neecey. “Well, if she really likes him, she’ll be waiting for him when school starts in two weeks.”

  Denied.

  But Neecey didn’t give in. “No, mom, she
like totally won’t and we both know it. If he doesn’t go after her tomorrow or like the next day, she won’t even remember his name in two weeks, or that she ever liked him in the first place.” Mom tried to object, but Neecey kept going. “You were thirteen once, mom, and maybe because I’m younger I like remember it better or whatever, but we both totally know that in two weeks she’ll have a crush on someone else who isn’t completely grounded for life and Genie will miss his chance. But this is his chance, mom. It is. And she’s a sweet girl, I swear, she’s really nice, and you’re totally going to love her. Come on, mom, please, don’t do this to him. Please, mom, please.”

  Jesus, Neecey was making my plight seem goddamn desperate and she was laying everything on the line to break mom down. At that moment, no matter how it turned out, I knew I had my big sister back for good.

  Mom raked her hands over her face and sighed heavily, almost groaning. It was obvious that she was having a conflict, a deep one, between my high crimes and loneliness, and which was more important—justice being done or the possibility of me having a friend. It was eating her up as we all stood there in the kitchen, and it showed, every bit of it showed. But then mom shook it off, straightened up, and wiped her eyes. “I almost don’t know what to do with you anymore, Genie, that’s how far you’ve gone. And there isn’t a single reason I can think of for me to trust you.”

  No, that wasn’t the answer I was looking for.

  “But I’m just about at the end of my rope, so maybe it’s time to try something new.” Mom paused. This was it; my whole future hung in the balance. “Maybe you should tell me what your punishment should be.”

  Suddenly there was a ray of light through the darkness. I knew the answer right away, but I had to play it cool, give it some time, and make it look like a struggle or she’d think I was letting myself off easy and I’d blow it. I fidgeted around a little, wrung my hands, dropped my head, and drew circles on the floor with my foot. Both mom and Neecey were quiet, waiting. It was working.