Because You Love to Hate Me(78)

I’ll bet that just now, when I said “Steven Kemple,” it was like someone poked a rusty knitting needle slowly through your eyeball and into the center of your brain. And you’re probably, like, Man! I sure hope Julian kills Steven Kemple soon.

Because I’m like that. Denic didn’t know how right he was when he said I could get away with murder.

Oh, one more thing about saying names: “Denic” is pronounced “Dennis.” Don’t ask me why, even though now you’ll probably need to go back and reread the last page so you can erase the “De-Nick” or whatever your stabbed brain has been narrating to you. You’d have to ask Denic’s parents why his name is spelled that way. After all, they named him.

So, that day in Mr. Kang’s biology class when Denic griped about my talent for getting away with anything—and let’s face it, it really is a kind of superpower—we were doing a lab involving looking at epithelial cells, which was extremely gross and awkward because our lab group included Kathryn Huxley and Amanda Flores, who were easily the most all-around-together tenth-grade girls at Hoover. I’d never had the guts to talk to either of them, being the skinny loser that I was, and now here we were, thrust together in a compulsory assignment where we would have to discuss tissue samples harvested from our own bodies.

Like I said, it was gross and awkward.

Talking about my own personal epithelial tissue in front of Kathryn Huxley and Amanda Flores was every bit as humiliating as being handcuffed to a public drinking fountain in my underwear in the middle of Bloomer Park, which is something I know about but, naturally, did not get in trouble for.

Nothing, on the other hand, could deflate Steven Kemple’s self-image.

Steven Kemple, whom I hated immensely and who also would not die, was our fifth lab partner.

Kathryn Huxley was horrified. “He can’t actually expect me to do that!”

The “he” was Mr. Kang, and the “that” was scraping the insides of our cheeks (the ones on our faces) with a toothpick to goop out some of our epithelial tissue, which we would then smear like butter onto a glass slide and examine under the microscope.

“I’ll do it,” Steven Kemple said. Then he hooked an index finger inside his cheek and began mowing his flesh with the toothpick as he drooled and spluttered something barely intelligible that included the words “volunteer” and “sperm day.”

I was disgusted by two things: first, that Steven Kemple would openly talk about his own sperm in front of Kathryn Huxley and Amanda Flores—while he had his hands in his mouth, no less—and second, the size of the tissue sample Steven Kemple extracted from his face. It looked like a pale, miniature leg of lamb.

Amanda Flores’s mouth curled down so tightly it was almost like she could turn her face inside out.

Denic leaned in to inspect the object at the end of Steven Kemple’s toothpick and said, “Dude. Did you just give birth?” Then Denic added, “Hey! That’s a piece of oatmeal.”

Steven Kemple rotated his wrist like he was a jeweler holding a rare diamond. “Yeah. It is oatmeal. From yesterday. I had waffles today.”

I could have vomited, but it would have been too embarrassing in front of Kathryn Huxley and Amanda Flores.

Then Steven Kemple pointed his mouthbaby at me and said, “We should use some of Powell’s.”

Here’s another reason why I hated Steven Kemple: to Steven Kemple, all boys were last names. To Steven Kemple, life itself was a continuous gym class. But the thing Steven Kemple did next was why he should have died that day, because anyone else who did it would have.

Steven Kemple wiped his day-old mouthbaby oatmeal on my left shoulder.

But Steven Kemple didn’t die.

He could have swigged a pint of antifreeze and the fucker would not die.

You hate him, don’t you?





CRAZY HAT LADY


Let me explain.

Crazy Hat Lady was the first.

Crazy Hat Lady used to yell at me for running past her yard and making her dogs bark at me. Did you notice I referred to Crazy Hat Lady in past tense? Yeah, that’s major foreshadowing, too.

Of course I did not know Crazy Hat Lady’s real name. But she always wore hats, and I assumed she was crazy because there was never any reason for her to get mad and thrash her arms wildly and yell at me just because her stupid dogs barked at me whenever I ran by.

I like to run.

Present tense, so you know everything ends with running shoes and a pulse for me.

The incident with Crazy Hat Lady happened two years before Steven Kemple talked about “sperm day” in Mr. Kang’s biology class at Hoover High. Denic and I, who’ve been friends since we were in kindergarten, were tough-guy eighth graders, about to be liberated from Henry A. Wallace Middle School.

Iowans like to name their schools after prominent politicians who came from Iowa, as if to assert to the rest of the world that Iowa exists, and people who are not actually invisible come from there. Don’t Google Henry A. Wallace. He was a vice president.

A dirt path through vacant fields connects the street I live on with Onondaga Street, which runs straight down to the creek I like to run along. The path also goes right next to Crazy Hat Lady’s (former) house. That day, as usual, Crazy Hat Lady’s two dogs—a long-haired wiener dog and an overweight shepherd–chow mutt—were behind a low cedar fence, running around like crazed convicts in Crazy Hat Lady’s front yard. And that day, as usual, Crazy Hat Lady’s dogs launched themselves into a hysteria of agonized barking when I came running up through the field.