Good distractions, like driving classic cars in the moonlight, can’t last forever.
It had been two long weeks since Grandpa and Mom told me the bad news. I’d tried hard to not think about him being sick. I stayed in my room and read. I watched every action movie I could find. I did all I could to not have to think about real life.
But real life creeps back in.
It creeps in right on a Friday night when you notice a forgotten piece of paper there on your desk, written in your grandpa’s handwriting, with a list of answers, all bullet-pointed, neat, and full of data about terminal, untreatable pancreatic cancer. Data that told me he had been diagnosed months before Uncle Reed deployed (he didn’t tell him), and how he kept eating cheeseburgers (when his doctor told him not to), and that his prognosis was three to six months (the average life expectancy after diagnosis with metastatic disease is just three to six months), but that the doctor said every patient’s cancer is different, some live longer than others (and I expect to, so don’t worry, I’m not dying tomorrow).
It was all right there. All the questions he knew I’d have. Because he knew me. He knew how my brain worked. It wanted the facts.
Stupid cancer.
Stupid.
Stupid.
Stupid.
I punched my wall. I punched it again. And again. Then I looked out my stupid window.
Did you know that it takes four hundred and fifty years for your average plastic water bottle to fully degrade? Plastic bags take ten to twenty years to degrade if exposed to air and sun, but five hundred or more years if they’re dumped in a landfill. The reason is that microorganisms are put in landfills to eat the trash like food. No microorganism we now have recognizes polyethylene as food, and that’s the main ingredient in a lot of plastics.
If my stupid neighbors thought that awful, old, flattened plastic Christmas snowman was just going to automatically biodegrade and they wouldn’t have to put it away, they were ignorant of the facts. Couldn’t they see the lump-of-white-plastic ghost of Christmas past? Couldn’t they see the obvious right in front of them?
Right in front of them!
So I did what I had to do. And I’m not sorry. No, I’m not sorry for what I did to that irritating hunk of nonbiodegradable stupid snowman that everyone up and down Cedar Drive still had to look at every stupid day. I mean, if he was still going to be there, either put it out of its misery or put it back to its original state.
Make it useful.
I crept over to my neighbors’ yard and did a snatch-and-grab. I got the old snowman into my garage and inspected him. The tiny generator was still attached. My neighbors had just left the thing unplugged all this time. The snowman was chewed in a couple of places, probably by feral squirrels. There were a few surface tears in the plastic, but otherwise, he was still in one piece. I put duct tape over the tears so that he wouldn’t leak. I got an extension cord, plugged him in, and waited for inflation. He popped like a giant kernel of popcorn. And there he was, staring at me with his Christmas grin, all happy and festive and thinking everything was still merry. Man, that made me mad. So I punched the snowman in the face. But that didn’t do it. He still looked happy.
I reasoned that when I returned it, my neighbors would look like lazy spring morons with an outdated lawn ornament waving at the street. But as I stared at the dirty, chewed-up snowman, it occurred to me that he needed something extra to get the message across.
Using dark black markers, I made the snowman’s eyes twice as big and connected his eyebrows. With a red marker, I drew a blood line down his mouth, and Snow Zombie was born!
I unplugged the extension cord, grabbed rolls of duct tape, and headed out of the garage. The zombie snowman rode on my skateboard down the back alley. The snowman lost a little air, but not too much. By the time I got to my neighbors’ front lawn, I spotted the car. I didn’t recognize him until it was too late.
Tim LeMoot, the Texas Boot. Tim LeMoot slowed down his car, looked me right in the eyes, and kept driving.
I quickly rigged Snow Zombie right up to the front door of my neighbors’ house. I found the electrical outlet by the door, plugged him in, and waited for him to inflate face-first into their doorway, so that the first thing they’d see the next morning was a zombie snowman. Take that, neighbors.
Then I hotfooted it out of there. Lightweight. Like at least one thing was right in the world. One stupid snowman wasn’t lying flattened but instead was doing what he was meant to do. Being who he was meant to be. For about two minutes, I felt useful. For about two minutes, I forgot about the list of answers.
Two minutes.
Then, out of nowhere, Mrs. Rosenblatt’s van rolled up to the curb. And out popped Denny. And he walked up my walk, holding a pie with at least five inches of white meringue, and I was thinking I must have been having a weird dream. Because why would Denny show up on a Friday night with a pie?
The snowman. Denny. It was all just a dream.
Bam! Do you want to know what a pie to the face feels like? Because I can now tell you. I’m not just a crash survivor. I’m a pie-in-the-face recipient, too. A pie in the face will snap you into reality pretty quickly.
“You said you were my friend,” he sang in a high-pitched song. And I felt sorry for him because I know he wanted to sound mad, not like he was serenading a lady.
“Wait. What?” I wasn’t dreaming.
Denny backed away from the scene of the crime, past the bald patch bushes of heartbreak, and made his way down the front walk. I ran after him and caught him by the arm.
“Wait.”
“It’s been two weeks. No calls. Nothing.”
“I’m sorry. I’ve been busy.”
His words came out like an angry song. “You’ve never asked about my other friends. Not once. You never said, Denny, why do you always invite Wayne on a plane to the mall? Where are your friends from your own school? Where are your friends from your synagogue? You never asked me that!”
“Why would I?”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Well, I don’t know.”
“I don’t have other real friends, Wayne. I go to school just to get through it. News flash. I don’t talk at school.”
Man, the hurt in his eyes knocked me back. I wished he’d punched me. It would have hurt less.
“Because I don’t have any. Not like you, Wayne. So now that you got your voice back, you ditch me? I mean, you were my friend. My friend friend. My parents were starting to think I was normal. Normal-ish.”
I’d tried so hard to block out any thoughts that I’d even blocked out a good friend. Which, I realized, was a stupid move.
“Did you know that Wayne Kovok is an idiot?”
That made him smile. “So what’s going on?”
“Sandy dumped me. My grandpa is sick—like, disease sick. And my mom’s depressed.”
“Is that all?”
“Try to contain your jealousy about my life.”
“It’ll be hard, but I’ll try.”
“Who made this pie?” I asked, detecting a strong banana-cream flavor.
“My mom.”
“It tastes good. What I had of it, at least.” I thought of her ambitious sandwiches and how now I might be able to eat one of them.
We stood there, not saying anything. No, there wasn’t anything else to say. It would be all about action now. “Can you skateboard, Denny?”
“Like a boss!”
“Ask your mom if you can stay.”
In two minutes, we were back on track, like nothing had gone wrong. The tightness in my chest eased a little.
I ran inside, raced into the garage, and grabbed my old, old skateboard.
I crashed into Grandpa as he was coming into the living room.
“Are you rabid, boy?” he said.
“Pie attack, sir.” I turned to Denny, who was now standing right behind me, grinning. “Friendly fire.”
“Pie, you say? Any left?”
“Negative.”
“Okay then, carry on.”