Brilliant.
“Thanks,” Charlie says. He’s so stupid. He thinks she likes him.
Then I think: Maybe she’s patronizing him for me. For my benefit. Maybe she wants me to know that she didn’t like him embarrassing me. I hope it’s that. I kind of love that thought.
Sarah turns her bike around. “Bye,” she says and waves.
I wave back. I walk my bike up the driveway slowly while watching Sarah out of the corner of my eye. She rides up her driveway and into her garage. A second later the garage door closes.
I miss her already.
We’re putting the tackle back on the shelf in the garage when Glen opens the door to the house. “Did you forget it’s payday?”
“I didn’t forget,” I say.
“You were gone awhile.”
“Yeah,” I say. I hate questions that aren’t questions. Glen asks these kinds of questions all the time. Plain old sentences that demand an answer. “The fishing was good, so we stayed awhile.”
“It was really good for me!” Julia says.
“Michael didn’t catch anything,” Charlie says. “Not even a kiver.”
“Nothing?” Glen asks. “Fish didn’t like your hook today?”
“No,” I say. “Sarah from next door went with us. I spent most of the time teaching her.”
Glen laughs. “That explains a lot.”
“What?” I say. I say it defiantly. Mrs. Newfang taught me this one, too. Defiantly is something I’m supposed to avoid no matter what. The world could be on fire and earthquakes could be shaking us to bits, and I still shouldn’t be defiant, at least according to Mrs. Newfang. I tell her that it’s hard for me not to be defiant when people are stupid or rude or saying things to hurt me.
“Easy, buddy,” Glen says. He puts his hands up like I’m going to charge him. “No need to be so defensive.”
I clench my jaw. I ball my hands into fists. These things happen automatically. I want to tell him that I know exactly what he meant by it, and that he’s a fucking coward to deny it. I want to tell him that I can already see the script that I’m trapped inside. The fake words. The pretend feelings. He knows what he meant, and he knows I know what he meant, but I still need to pretend and play act this stupid scene, even though our audience—Charlie and Julia—have seen this show a million times. I want to tell him that there is nothing wrong with being defensive when you need to defend yourself. I want to tell him to go to hell.
I want to punch him.
Instead of all those things, I turn away and pretend to organize the tackle on the shelf. I take a deep breath that doesn’t help me calm down. Then I say the only word that I can live with that won’t get me in trouble. “Whatever.”
Glen just stands in the doorway. He knows I am trapped. He knows I can’t organize the tackle forever, that eventually I will have to turn and face him again. He knows that my “Whatever” will be defeated by his patience. We are in a battle to see who can outlast the other, and I know I can’t win. Glen is patient. Assholes are always patient. They would rather waste a lifetime and win than lose a battle or even tie. But that doesn’t mean I won’t try. People fight when there is no hope of winning all the time. I do it all the time.
“Guess what I caught today?” Julia says.
“What did you catch?” Glen asks. It’s not a real question. He asks it in a flat voice that’s almost like a robot. He’s saying it because he can’t just ignore Julia even though he’s fighting with me.
“A bass,” Julia says. “Michael says it was at least a foot long.”
“Not at least a foot long,” Charlie says. “One foot long exactly.”
“Maybe longer than that,” I say, turning and facing Charlie. Avoiding eye contact with Glen. “It was a monster.”
“Good for you, Julia,” Glen says. “Next time you catch one that size, bring it home. I’ll teach you how to bone it, and we’ll have it for dinner.”
“Okay,” she says. “I will.”
I know she won’t. Julia is good at saying things that aren’t true to keep people happy.
I’m not good at that at all.
“You’re going to collect now?” Glen asks. This question is for me.
“After I wash up,” I say. Not a yes, which is a small win for me. And I’m still not looking at him. I stare down at a pickle bucket like it’s full of gold and jewels. I still can’t win, but I don’t have to lose everything.
“Good,” Glen says. “Hurry up. You’re already late.” He turns and closes the door.
I feel my teeth unclench as soon as the door clicks shut. My hands relax. I take a deep breath, and this time, it helps a little. I take another. “Thanks,” I say to Julia.
She nods.
“Thanks for what?” Charlie asks.
“Nothing,” I say. “Finish putting this stuff away. It’s payday. You heard Glen. I can’t be late.”
five
I hate payday for a lot of reasons.
It’s not my payday.
I’m doing work for Asshole Glen.
No one wants to pay me.
The customers are all old, annoying people who can’t use computers.
Glen keeps adding customers.
My first stop is the yellow house on the corner of Connecticut Avenue and Farm Street.
The person who lives here is one of my favorite customers because he-or-maybe-she-but-probably-he always leaves an envelope in his-or-maybe-her mailbox. It’s probably a man. The handwriting on the envelope looks like it was written by a man. All capital letters.
Girls love lower-case letters. All those dots over the i’s and j’s that they can turn into hearts and smiley faces.
If everyone was like Yellow House, my job would be easy. I still wouldn’t make any money, but I wouldn’t hate it as much. Just ride my bike around, collecting money in mailboxes. Piece of cake.
Glen says that when he was my age, he was a paperboy. He delivered The Woonsocket Call every day after school, tossing the papers onto doorsteps until people started putting up those plastic newspaper mailboxes. He collected the money on Fridays because Fridays were payday back then.
Glen is still a paperboy, which is pretty pathetic, but if I said that to his face, he would be mad. He drives around in the morning before anyone else is awake and throws newspapers rolled in plastic bags onto porches and stoops, just like when he was a kid. That’s his job. Drive around and throw.
He was working for Home Depot on the weekends for a while, but he got laid off, which means he either quit or got fired. I heard Mom arguing with him about it one night after dinner, but I couldn’t tell if she was mad at him for being lazy or stupid, because he’s both things. I think he quit, though, because if he got fired, he would be looking for another job.
Instead of trying to find another job, he does something called investments on the computer all day, which doesn’t make any money and might be costing us money. As far as I can tell, he’s doing the same thing that Steve Zimmer in my algebra class does with comic books. Steve buys tons of comics but never reads a single one. Instead, he puts them in plastic sleeves that cost more than the comic books themselves and seals them like he’s a cop on a TV show handling a DNA sample. He says that someday they’ll be worth thousands. “With inflation,” he says, “maybe millions.”