CHAPTER 14
“TRICK-OR-TREAT,” TODD SAID.
“I wish it was a trick, because seeing you is no treat,” I said.
Todd handed me a plastic grocery bag. “Our leftover candy,” he said. “For Sam. Not you.”
“You know, even when you do something nice you manage to be a jackass,” I said. “It’s remarkable, really. If only there were a way to harness this talent.”
He pushed past me into the house. We set up in the dining room. We sat on either side of the table with Todd’s Trying the Knot packet spread out between us. “I saw your mother’s article in the Daily Ledger,” he said.
“What? When was she in the paper?”
“This morning. Didn’t you see it? Oh, right, sorry. I forgot you’re illiterate.”
“Very funny, Señor Shitslacks. What’d it say?”
“It talked about her campaign against the marriage ed course, and how the school board insists that we keep the course going, even while they’re debating it, yada yada.”
Between going to school, buying Halloween stuff, and being at Sam’s, I hadn’t been home all day. But that didn’t really make me feel like less of an ass for not knowing about Mom’s article. I’d have to check it out as soon as I got home.
“All right, Princess, let’s get this over with,” Todd said, pulling out the budget sheet. “We earned forty dollars of real cash, so we have six thousand bucks. Plus the twenty we banked from September. Damn, this month we’re rich.”
“You do the math; I’ll fill in the sheet,” I said. “Start with living expenses.”
“We already had the big house last month, so we’re not changing that.”
“Fine with me.” I wrote it down. “Home A. Mortgage two thousand. Utilities five hundred.”
“That leaves $3,520,” Todd said. “Let’s get all the extras this time. Cell phone, Internet, and cable. I hated not having cable.”
“Whatev.” I filled in the sheet. I heard Mar and Sam crack up at something in the other room. Probably Long Duk Dong. “How much is left?” I asked.
Todd subtracted in his head. “That’d be 3,365.”
“Really?” I said. “Right on.”
“Cars next. A luxury hybrid for me, and nothing for you.”
“Why don’t I get a car?” I cried.
“You’re a townie. You ride your bike.”
“Screw that,” I said. “We’re rich. I want a luxury hybrid too.” I wrote down two hybrids. “Now how much?”
“Twenty-five sixty-five.”
“We still have that much?”
He double-checked the math. “Apparently.”
I looked at what was left to budget for. “I don’t think we can possibly spend all of it. Even if we go for top-of-the-line food and entertainment—should we?”
“Of course.”
“Then we still have over sixteen hundred left.”
He spoke into an invisible microphone. “What will our contestants choose? Bank it or blow it?” The dork.
“We should bank it,” I said.
“I think blow it.”
“On what?” I asked.
“Forty-two-inch plasma TV, baby.”
“What do we need that for?”
He leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head. “The sweet cable package we have now. All the sports channels. I’m not watching the games on some nineteen-inch piece of crap.”
“You’re a lunatic. This is fake. Okay. You take half and spend it on whatever you want,” I said.
“Hookers?”
“Something we could both use.”
“Hookers?”
“For the house. Ugh! Why are you making this so difficult?”
“Why not?”
I ignored him and did the division myself. “We’ll put $807.50 toward a new TV, and the same into savings. Done. Hardly worth the effort.”
Todd gathered together everything but the budget sheet and walked back around the table. “I’m outta here,” he said. “So you’ll turn in the budget, right?” He patted me on the head. “Thanks, little woman. What a good little wife.”
I smacked his hand away. “Kiss my ass.”
“Wouldn’t you love it.”
“Only if I were a dog, like you.”
“You’re not too far off,” he said, and strolled out.
When I got back to the family room, Sam was asleep on the couch with a half-eaten piece of red licorice clutched in her fist. “She crashed,” Mar said. “I think she was literally high on sugar.”
“Seriously,” I said. “I thought she was going to start freebasing Pixy Stix.”
“Todd gone? You guys get done?”
“Yup. He’s such a dickhead. I don’t understand why he makes the extra effort to be a prick. Otherwise, he might be a decent guy.”
“Speaking of decent guys, remember at the dance last month when you, me, and Johnny pulled that prank?”
“Oh yeah, Johnny. I know, he’s actually an okay guy. He’s kind of a riot, too, sometimes. Did you notice that?”
“I know, but Fiona—”
“Guess what he said to me that night? He said that people with class are like people with herpes.”
“Listen Fio—wait, he said what?”
“Hold on—no, that wasn’t it. That couldn’t have been it. What was it he said? It was hysterical.”
“Tell me later. Listen, Fiona, I need to talk to you about something.”
“Oh! I remember what it was! If you have class, then you don’t talk about it, just like if you have herpes. That was it. Omigod . . .” I clapped my hands together. “I just got the best idea to prank Todd! Oh, this is priceless. But I need a speaker set for my iPod. You don’t have one, do you? It needs to have some kind of alarm function. And I’ll probably have to download some software.”
Marcie slammed the couch with her fists. “Dammit, Fiona! I’m trying to tell you something, but you just won’t shut up for five seconds so I can say it! I’m so sick of listening to you blab on and on about Todd, and pranking him, and how miserable your life is, and everything. I can’t take it! Other people have lives and problems too. But you never notice because you’re always too wound up in your own drama. You’re totally self-absorbed and inconsiderate lately. I’m sorry, Fiona, but I can’t handle it. I need a break from you for a while. I gotta get home.”
She grabbed her stuff and was out the door before her words stopped echoing in my brain. Once they did, I felt the full blow of the realization that my best friend—my only friend—had just screamed at me and walked out. Never in my life had I thought Mar could be so mean. She’d never blown up at me like that before. So I had no idea what to do about it. I just stood there dazed, hoping that she’d cool down sometime soon.
Thursday, October 31
I have a few things to say about marriage, as I see it. First of all, what is the point? Is there any reason to put yourself through torture—or to torture those around you—just to say you’re married? Where’s the payoff? And second, if you get married just to have kids, forget it. They’ll know it and it will screw them up royally. So again, what’s the point?
Sex can’t be the reason, because if you ask me, you have much better odds of getting laid if you have the entire population of the Earth available to you, rather than just ONE person. And by the way, how unbelievably boring would it be to have sex with the same person for fifty years? To me, marriage seems to be an archaic institution left over from the age when survival of the species was important, and people didn’t live past thirty-five years old.
It’s time for marriage to go the way of the dodo: fondly remembered, but utterly extinct.