Forgive Me, Leonard Peacock(3)

Then I stick the present in the refrigerator, which seems hilarious.

Linda will be looking for a chilled bottle of Riesling to calm her jangled nerves after getting the news about her son ridding the world of Asher Beal and Leonard Peacock too.

She’ll find the pink wrap job.

Linda will wonder about my allusion to Samson and Delilah when she reads the card, because that was the title of my father’s failed sophomore record, but will get the joke just as soon as she opens her present.

I imagine her clutching her chest, faking the tears, playing the victim, and being all dramatic.

Jean-Luc will really have his professionally manicured French hands full.

No sex for him maybe, or maybe not.

Maybe their affair will blossom without me around to psychologically anchor poor Linda to reality and maternal duties.

Maybe once I’m gone, she’ll float away to France like a shiny new silver little-kid birthday balloon.

She’ll probably even lose a dress size without me around to trigger her “stress eating.”

Maybe Linda won’t return to our house ever again.

Maybe she and Jean-Luc will go to the fashion capital of the world, the City of Light, auw-hauh-hauw!, and screw like bunnies happily ever after.

She’ll sell everything, and the new homeowners will find my hair in the refrigerator and be like What the…?

My hair’ll just end up in the trash and that will be that.

Gone.

Forgotten.

RIP, hair.

Or maybe they’ll donate my locks to one of those wig-making places that help out kids with cancer. Like my hair would get a second shot at life with a little innocent-hearted bald chemo girl maybe.

I’d like that.

I really would.

My hair deserves it.

So I’m really hoping for that cancer-kid-helping outcome if Linda goes to France without coming home first, or maybe even Linda will donate my hair.

Anything’s possible, I guess.

I stare at the mirror over the kitchen sink.10

The no-hair guy staring back at me looks so strange now.

He’s like a different person with all uneven patches on his scalp.

He looks thinner.

I can see his cheekbones sticking out where his blond curtains used to hang.

How long has this guy been hiding under my hair?

I don’t like him.

“I’m going to kill you later today,” I say to that guy in the mirror, and he just smiles back at me like he can’t wait.

“Promise?” I hear someone say, which freaks me out, because my lips didn’t move.

I mean—it wasn’t me who said, “Promise?”

It’s like there’s a voice trapped inside the glass.

So I stop looking in the mirror.

Just for good measure, I smash that mirror with a coffee mug, because I don’t want the mirror me to speak ever again.

Shards rain down into the sink and then a million little mes look up like so many tiny minnows.





FIVE


I’m already late for school, but I need to stop at my next-door-neighbor Walt’s11 so that I can give him his present.

Today, I knock once and let myself into Walt’s house because he has to walk slowly with one of those gray-piped four-footed walkers that has dirty tennis balls attached to protect his hardwood floors. It’s difficult for him to get around, especially with bad lungs, so he just gave me a key and said, “Come in whenever you feel like it. And come often!”

He’s been smoking since he was twelve, and I’ve been helping him buy his Pall Mall Reds on the Internet to save money. The first time, I found this phenomenal deal: two hundred cigarettes for nineteen dollars, and he proclaimed me a hero right then and there. He doesn’t even have a computer in his home, let alone the Internet. So it was like I performed a miracle, getting cigarettes that cheap delivered to his doorstep, because he was paying a hell of a lot more at the local convenience store. I’ve been bringing over my laptop—our Internet signal reaches his living room—and we’ve been searching for the best deals every week. He’s always trying to give me half of what he saves, but I never take his money.12

It’s funny because he’s rich,13 but always keen on finding a bargain. Maybe that’s why he’s rich. I don’t know.

A “helper” comes and takes care of him most days, but not until nine thirty AM, so it’s always just Walt and me before school.

“Walt?” I say as I walk through the smoky hallway, under the crystal chandelier, toward the smoky living room where he usually sleeps surrounded by overflowing ashtrays and empty bottles. “Walt?”

I find him in his La-Z-Boy, smoking a Pall Mall Red, eyes bloodshot from drinking scotch last night.

His robe isn’t shut, so I can see his naked, hairless chest. It’s the pinkish-red sunset color of conch-shell innards.

He looks at me with his best black-and-white movie-star face14 and says, “You despise me, don’t you?”

It’s a line from Casablanca, which we’ve watched together a million times.

Standing next to his chair with my backpack between my feet, I answer with Rick’s follow-up line in the film, saying, “If I gave you any thought I probably would.”

Then I follow it with a line from The Big Sleep, saying, “My, my, my. Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains,” which feels pretty cool and authentic considering I have the Nazi P-38 in my backpack.