Chapter 19
Adam arrived soon after our conversation. After we went back to my room, I turned on my favorite playlist of classic songs from the eighties, the stuff my mom used to listen to. It’s sorta over-the-top punk music, but it really helps to put me in a good mood.
And for the most part I was—minus the part that my BFF wouldn’t or couldn’t speak with me. So, Adam would have to assume the role of Bridge, at least for today. Shortie made an emergency exit, since he doesn’t care for eighties music.
“Here you go,” Adam said, tossing my shoes at me from his bag.
“Yea! My Chica Speakas!” I exclaimed, catching them. “Have you listened to the tape?” I figured that he already had and waited for him to unload his usual snatchy comments.
“No, I’ve been busy.”
I sat down on the floor and hit rewind. Adam looked around the room and hesitated a second before sitting by me.
“Too busy to snoop and spread gossip? You gotta be kidding me.”
“Not really,” Adam said without any expression at all. I wasn’t quite sure what was wrong with him but something was definitely going on.
“Okay, well, maybe there’s something good on here that will cheer you up to your ole evil self.”
As I played my shoe, we first heard Venus and Bridge talking to Rod. Adam and I both agreed that Bridge sounded really nervous, and it wasn’t helping that puppet master Venus was pulling strings right in front of the camera. It was excruciating to listen to again.
But our moods did change for the better when we heard Bart acting like his normal butt-head self. And we could totally tell that Venus and Bridge were becoming uncomfortable and felt trapped like rats, or trapped with a rat, or an idiot, for that matter.
“It’s really weird to hear a conversation like this that you weren’t a part of,” Adam said. “And then know that you talked to these people just seconds afterward. It’s like rewinding the DVD of your life.”
“Yeah.” Then I thought I heard something important. “Let me rewind this. I want to hear what Bart was saying just after I left to catch up with you guys,” I said.
As I rewound the tape, Shortie returned and said hello by tooting in my room.
“Shortie, get out of here!” I screamed. Shortie looked like his feelings were hurt and scampered down the hall to offend some other family member.
I wafted my hands at the stink in the air. “Sorry about that.”
“I guess Shortie has been in the Snacktastics,” Adam said.
“Not after I flushed them all,” I said as I sat back down. Adam and I listened to Rod ask Bart a few more questions.
“Do you have anything else that you’d like to add, Bart?” asked Rod.
“Yeah. I can’t believe that dude Mason and Jabba made it as finalists. I think somebody messed up bad, man.”
“Now, why is that?” quizzed Rod.
“Because it was a joke.”
“What was?”
“Yeah, I put their names down at lunch as a joke. I didn’t think people would actually vote for them,” Bart said sincerely, then continued, “ ’cause that Mason dude is weird looking and he’s a mute. And, well, they don’t call Jabba that for nothing.”
“I’m not familiar with Jabba. Is that a nickname for someone?”
“Yeah, it’s for that chick Susan, because she’s all big and goopy like Jabba in Star Wars. I think it came out in your time or something,” suggested Bart, with his lack of any social graces whatsoever.
“Uh, thanks for the refresher there, Bart.”
I paused my shoe for a moment and looked at Adam horrified.
“Omigod! All this time, Mase was mad at you because he thought you signed him up and it was Bart? I didn’t even think he knew him,” I said.
“I told you I didn’t do it,” Adam said.
“That explains the misspelling of Mase’s name on the ballot. And can you believe Bart just called out Jabba’s name in public? Now, she’s definitely doomed to hear it to her face instead of behind her back for the next three years,” I said, with my head in a tailspin.
“Yeah, and now that you’ve made her popular, it’s only going to get worse for her.”
“Thanks for the news flash, Adam. Now, what do I do?” I could feel the oxygen leaving my brain. Must take deep breaths.
“For starters, let’s keep listening to your shoe,” Adam suggested. I hit the play button again and we huddled in very close to hear since the sound quality of my shoe wasn’t getting any better.
Rod continued with his interview. “Uh, Bart, what would you think if Mason and Susan did win as the Homecoming couple for the freshman class?”
“That wouldn’t happen in a million years,” assured Bart.
“But on the off chance, what if they did? What would you think about that?”
“I wouldn’t, because I don’t even think that would happen in a thousand years.”
“Uh, a million is more than a thousand,” Rod said, poking fun at Bart, who didn’t even get it.
“Yeah. Whatever. I’m just saying that ... Oh, man, you just wouldn’t want to be around if that happened. Hell would break loose. I mean like total hell. Yeah. That’s for sure.”
“Would you be causing some of that hell that would occur?” asked Rod.
“Maybe,” Bart said. “I suppose anything’s possible.”
“Okay, well thanks for your directness and honesty. We appreciate it, Bart,” wrapped up Rod. “And, oh, before I forget, have you decided who you are taking to the dance yet?”
“Yeah, I’m going with Venus Hunter.”
After that, we heard Rod yell, “Cut!” and then we heard the commotion of the next group getting ready to sit in. Since Adam had a strange look on his face, I paused the tape.
“Hey, Adam, why do you look so freaked out?”
“I’m just thinking ... Did Venus say whom she was going to the dance with?”
“No, she just left with Bridge when Bart started acting stupid. Why?”
“Well, because I was in the next group with Susan, B-Dawg, and Jimbo, and after I announced how I was just so stoked about not just becoming a finalist but also having the opportunity to cover their project for the paper, your shoe went off and I panicked.”
“Yeah, so what?” I said, not understanding why Adam was overreacting.
“Luz, in the middle of the frenzy of your shoe going off, I also told them I was taking Venus to the dance. Now I’ll look like an idiot because Bart just said the same thing.”
“Adam, no you won’t. Bart’s just shooting off his mouth. No one’s going to believe him. If anything, he’s the one who’s gonna look like a jackass.”
“I don’t know. My investigative intestines tell me there’s more to the story,” Adam confided.
“Why don’t you just confront Venus and find out?”
“I guess I have to now.”
After we finished listening to the rest of Adam and the gang’s awful interview, we just sat in silence. Mom offered to whip up some turkey burgers as a snack while we worked in my room. I could still tell that Adam had a lot more on his mind than Venus and this dance.
“Adam, so what’s with all the weirdness lately?”
“What do you mean?” Adam asked, as if he hadn’t realized he’d been acting like a freak for days.
“You’ve been acting really weird to me ever since Venus’s party. And your phone’s not working. What’s going on?”
Adam stretched out his very long legs and brushed off the purple fuzz that was accumulating on his pants from my shaggy rug. Then he started to look intently at his shoes.
“Can you keep a secret, Luz?”
“Can you?” I stared at him with my eyes open as wide as humanly possible.
“Okay, that’s fair. But I’m trying to be serious here.”
“Alright. What is it?”
“I’m thinking about running away.”
My body tensed up. “What?!”
“No, I’m just kidding.”
I threw a pillow at Adam’s face and made his glasses almost fall off.
“It’s my mom. She ... uh, cleans offices for a living”—Adam took a long pause—“and she lost her job last week.”
I was about to bust Adam and say something real smarty-pants because I wasn’t going to fall for another one of his jokes. But something stopped me long enough in my tracks to keep my mouth shut.
“Yeah, the deal is ... the building where she works is being torn down and the company’s relocating to Austin.”
All of a sudden, I was getting a really weird sensation from this conversation. There wasn’t any cutting sarcasm or giant pretentious words. This was the first time we were having a real conversation.
“I’m so sorry, Adam,” I said.
“Yeah, so am I. I’ve been taking her to interviews and the employment office. It’s been real fun,” Adam said, trying to find his sarcastic self again.
“Adam, I feel like a jerk crying about my stupid problems when you have to deal with this. What can I do?” I asked, feeling totally helpless.
“For starters, Cinderella, you could stop leaving your wardrobe on the floor”—he picked up my Chica Speakas—“and work on that limited vocabulary of yours, and, well, we won’t even get started on your fashion sense or baking skills,” Adam replied, almost sounding like the ole Adam again. Almost.
I was going to tell him about how Venus got his Licky Sticky but it didn’t seem that important anymore. Now everything seemed crystal clear to me why Adam worked so hard to be somebody with his clothes, his vocabulary, and his journalism skills.
But I didn’t feel sorry for him. I felt sorry for me for being so caught up in my Gamma Glamma experiment and Homecoming that I had lost touch with my friends. And now I felt it was my responsibility to undo the madness that I had caused. I just wondered, was it too late?