The Mutual Admiration Society(62)
After I check Daddy’s Timex, I tell the boy I’ll be blissfully wedded to someday, “I only got nine minutes left. Give me the rest of the money ya took out of the willow and take Birdie over to St. Francis and trim her bangs, and whatever you do, I’m warning you, batten down your hatches, dear. Our little dreamboat has been a very slippery character all morning.”
Soon as Charlie digs the last of our treasury bills out of his black hightop and says, “Good luck with Father Ted and getting the skinny offa Kitten,” I take off toward the confessional on the other side of the church that the rest of the bad kids are standing outside of, including the worst of the worst, the delinquent who I wanted to see least of all today, the kid who’s got me at #1 on his WANTED DEAD OR ALIVE list—Butch Seeback. It is my general policy to avoid him at all costs, but there is no getting around him this time. (Standing next to Kitten the way he is, Butch looks like a bowling ball about to knock down a pin.)
Moving within smacking distance of that maniac is not on my TO-DO list, so believe me, instead of weaving through these pews, I’d much rather turn tail and hide under our back porch, which I’d happily do if I hadn’t already spotted #5 on my SHIT LIST, Jenny Radtke. The little brownnoser has probably spent the whole morning saying rosaries that I wouldn’t show up so she could report me to Louise. She’s sitting right across from the confession box with that sickeningly sweet smile she’s always got glued on her face. As usual, her perfect blond pageboy that I plan to someday hack off with the dullest blade of Daddy’s Swiss Army Knife after I slip a mickey into her punch during a sock hop is Breck-shampoo perfect, and the spelling bee medal that once belonged to me and I vow will again, is hanging from her neck. She’s fingering the prize, flaunting it in my face, when I slide through the pew in front of her on my way to the sinner’s line and what I wouldn’t give to flatten her already flat face even further.
And besides that little rat fink Radtke tattling to my mother, the other important reason I gotta stick around, like it or not, is because I have a presidential duty to uphold. If The Mutual Admiration Society is going to have any chance at all of figuring out just what the heck happened to our principal so we can clear Mr. McGinty’s name, I can’t lose what might be my only chance in the near future to talk to the #1 most up-to-the-minute, in-the-know kid in the neighborhood.
FACT: Looks like Kitten Jablonski and Butch Seeback have become an item.
PROOF: She’s letting him snap her bra strap.
My confidential source and one of my worst enemies becoming a couple is enough to turn my stomach inside out and hang it out to dry, but it’s not that big of a shock that Kitten thinks Butch is hot stuff. When her and me and Birdie go to the movies together some Saturdays, Kitten always roots for the gunslingers in the black hats and the monsters in the creature features.
FACT: Butch and Kitten are living proof of the famous saying “Love is blind.”
PROOF: Love is probably also deaf, because that’s the only explanation I can come up with for someone as on the ball as Kitten wanting to swap spit with a kid who looks like the bank vault at the First Wisconsin Bank but sounds like Lamb Chop on the Captain Kangaroo show.
When my confidential informant spots me hustling toward her, she shoves Freddie Beaudry out of the line of a dozen kids waiting to confess and waves me over. Not out of the goodness of her heart, mind you. Kitten is a very tough cookie who really isn’t known for that. She is a smooth operator—her snitches report to her day and night—who never does nothin’ or says nothin’ for nothin’. There is always a price.
When I land at the spot she cleared out for me, Kitten says outta the side of her mouth very fast, like always, because time is money, “Cuttin’ it pretty close today, Finley. What’s shakin’?”
“I been busy all morning trying to find out what happened to Sister Margaret Mary,” I say. “What’d ya hear?”
When she puts her hand out, I place two bucks in it—one for giving me skips and one for whatever she’s about to tell me. “I know what you’re thinkin’, but Butch didn’t have nothin’ to do with it,” Kitten says with her grin that always makes me miss July, because her teeth are so yellow and crooked that they remind me of the ears of corn that Louise won’t buy at the Red Owl. “He was with me all night.”
That’s sickening, but not breaking news, because I already drew a line through Butch’s name on my QUESTION OR SURVEIL list, but I’m not going to ask her for my money back, because she wouldn’t give it to me.
“Tell ya what I’m gonna do.” Kitten must be in a really good mood, because she has what every girl in this neighborhood wants, a steady boyfriend, even if he is repulsive, ’cause she tells me much more charitably than she usually would, “Gimme three more bucks and I’ll give ya a big fat hint about Sister Margaret Mary’s disappearance.” After I happily hand over the cash, she makes a big show of sticking the bills down the front of her shirt, because she’s one of the few eighth-grade girls who doesn’t have to stuff socks into her bra every morning. “This morning, Sister Prudence found a note in Sister Margaret Mary’s cell that told—”
“A note?!” This is such great news that if I was Birdie, I would do the woo . . . woo . . . woo Indian celebration dance right down the main aisle of church. Charlie was wrong and I was right! Sister was kidnapped just the way I thought she was!