Okay. Moving on.
“You need to get out of those clothes,” Hope said. “Immediately.”
Even the mere suggestion of getting undressed in front of two boys got me all flustered because I’m IMMATURE LIKE THAT.
“Um… WHAT?” I stammered.
“She’s right. Your clothes are contaminated,” Aleck said, “and so are you.”
Despite the obvious truth to what he was saying—I was at nuclear wasteland levels of toxicity—I was kind of offended.
“Excuuuuuuuse me?”
“You’re wasting time. The longer that stuff has to set in, the harder it will be to get out.” He turned to Hope. “Any chance your mom got a good deal on tomato juice lately?”
“To the stockpile!” Hope said as she dashed into the house.
“The helmet protected most of your hair,” Aleck said, appraising me at a safe distance. “That’s good. It’s hardest to get that stink out of your hair. Especially when you’ve got a mop like mine.”
“So this has happened to you before?” I asked.
“Oh yeah,” Heath said. “He’s an expert on the subject.”
Aleck puffed out his chest.
“I’ve been sprayed four times,” he said.
“FOUR TIMES?” I asked. “What are you, an amateur skunk hunter in your spare time?”
“Yes. When I’m not skateboarding or constructing hot-air balloons out of balsa wood or practicing the ancient Japanese art of origami”—huh, I didn’t know he knew origami—“I’m out skunk hunting. But please, give me some credit; I’m a professional.”
Hope came running back out with a large can of V8 in one hand and an industrial-strength trash bag in the other. She’d thrown a faded beach towel over her shoulder and clamped a wooden clothespin to her nose.
“We’re in luck! There are at least fifty more cans in the stockpile!”
The clothespin made her voice sound all pinched and nasal. Without making a big deal of it, she quietly handed clothespins to Heath and Aleck. They immediately clipped them to their own noses.
“Stockpile?” I asked. “Tomato juice? And why don’t I get a clothespin?”
“Our mom is into extreme couponing,” Hope explained. “I’ll show you the stockpile another time. Right now, we’ve got to get you out of your clothes and into a tomato-juice tub.”
As if the situation hadn’t already achieved MAXIMUM LEVELS OF MORTIFICATION, the second mention of getting undressed in front of the boys made me burn even hotter with embarrassment.
“The acidity in the tomato juice neutralizes the skunkiness,” Aleck explained. “And you don’t get a clothespin because then you’re just trapping the odor in your nose.”
“Why tomato juice specifically?” I asked. “Why not a more scientific mix of, like, hydrogen peroxide, baking soda, and soap?”
“We always use tomato juice,” the three answered. Heath punctuated his sentence with dude.
Apparently skunkification was a common occurrence in this neighborhood. That made them the experts, so I deferred to their wisdom. At that point, the stink had totally overtaken my brain, and I couldn’t think for myself anyway.
“I’ll take you inside the house,” Hope said, walking in that direction. “And the boys can hose down Dalí out back.”
She stopped me in the garage to hand over the trash bag and the beach towel.
“I’ll bring up the cans of tomato juice from the basement. Meanwhile, get undressed, put your clothes in the bag, and seal it tight. Do not bring it inside! Understand?”
Hope spoke with the same authoritative tone she’d used earlier with Heath when arguing about the helmet.
“Okay, Mooooooooom.”
I could joke about Hope’s momming kind of bossiness, unlike Manda’s Spirit Squad business.
“I’ll meet you in the bathroom off the kitchen,” she said with a smile.
Before doing what Hope asked, I doubled-checked to make sure Aleck and Heath weren’t anywhere near the garage. It was easy to keep tabs on them because they were causing a major ruckus. Heath struggled to keep a hold on Dalí.
“Dude, now you’re wide-awake?” Heath complained to the dog.
Dalí wriggled out of his arms and hit the ground running. Like, actually running.
“I’ve never seen him go so fast!” Aleck marveled as the two boys took off after him.
I waited until Heath and Aleck were safely out of the yard before stripping down, wrapping the towel around myself, and shoving the noxious clothes into the bag. Upon entering the house, I took extra care not to touch or contaminate anything. When I found the bathroom, I saw Hope had already emptied a few cans of thick orange-red juice into the tub. It looked like a bloodbath straight out of a horror movie.
Hope came into the room juggling a can of juice under one arm, a large candle under the other, and an old-school boom box in her hand. She set the boom box on the floor, the can on the toilet, and the candle on a small shelf above the tub.
“Voilà!” she said, lighting the candle. “Think of it as a high-end spa treatment. I bet Hollywood actresses would pay big money for service like this.”
I tried—and failed—to smile at her joke.
“Oh! I almost forgot.”
She pressed PLAY, and the bathroom filled with the plink-plunk-plinky string plucks my mom calls “relaxation music.” Hope waved her hands through the air as if she were conducting the New Agey symphony.
“Well, I guarantee you this,” Hope began as she opened another can and poured it into the tub, “you’ll never forget the first—and last—time you came to my house.”
I couldn’t help but laugh as the juice glug-glug-glugged into the tub.
Taking a tomato-juice bath is as gross as you’d imagine. Hope said I needed to sit in the stuff for at least a half hour, after which I’d rinse it all off and take a regular soapy shower. She sat outside the closed bathroom door to give me privacy. While I marinated, she entertained me with stories of her mom’s extreme couponing.
“Fifty cans of tomato juice is nothing,” she said. “When I was in second grade, I made the mistake of telling her that I liked the Veggie Bears at Sara’s house. Remember those? They were gummy bears made out of healthy stuff like spinach and carrots and beets? I was kind of a picky eater, so that was all the incentive my mom needed to use her coupon skills to buy a million billion cases of Veggie Bears for, like, a nickel. We still have a few hundred packages in the stockpile. They’re so pumped with preservatives that they never go bad. Ugh. I can’t even look at a Veggie Bear without wanting to puke. And when I got my period? Forget it. My mom hoarded enough pads with wings and without wings, for daytime and nighttime, scented and unscented, organic and biodegradable and whatever else to provide feminine hygiene supplies for every girl at Pineville Junior High for the rest of their lives.…”
“Present company excluded, of course,” I replied from the tub.
“You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
“Well, when you’re the only girl who shows no signs of growing up…”
And just like that, I remembered.
“My pants!” I yelped. “I need my pants!”
I was so set on deskunkification that I’d forgotten all about the Top Secret Pineville Junior High Crushability Quiz with Aleck’s name written down as the answer to dumb trick question #5! It was still in the back pocket of the pants I’d hastily stashed in the trash bag! If he found it, I’d never, ever hear the end of it! Teasing me in Woodshop is the highlight of Aleck’s goofy, doofy day. And the rest of the Woodshop boys, Cheddar and Squiggy and—oh no!—Mouth, would follow Aleck’s lead and get in on the joke, too! Then there’d be no stopping Mouth from busting me in front of his girlfriend, Manda, and she’d—of course!—taunt me in front of Sara and then—KABOOM! THE ENTIRE SCHOOL WOULD THINK I HAD A CRUSH ON MY DEMENTED WOODSHOP PARTNER.
This could not happen.
I hopped up from the tub and searched the room for something to change into or cover up with. There was nothing. Hope had even taken away the beach towel for decontamination.
“You can’t put those pants back on,” Hope said. “I’ve got fresh clothes for you out here, but you need to rinse off first.…”
“I need my pants,” I insisted. “Where are my pants?”
“Hmmmm. These pants sound awfully important to you,” Hope said. “Like these pants have a deeper significance. It’s almost as if these pants are hiding a secret.…”
I’d lied to her about not having anything in my back pocket, and Hope knew it. Did she figure it out just then? Or did she know it the entire time and simply choose not to make a big dramatic deal out of it? Either way, confessing the truth at that moment would’ve been the smart thing to do.
“They’re my favorite pants,” I lied.
That’s right. I picked the not-so-smart option. BLAME MY SKUNKY BRAIN.
“Marcus took the bag,” Hope said with a sigh. “He knows how to handle these situations. You can trust him.”
And that’s how it came to pass that the Top Secret Pineville Junior High Crushability Quiz became the property of the very last person on the planet I wanted to have it.
“So, Aleck, I mean, Marcus,” I corrected myself, “will just, like, destroy the pants, right? For the good of humankind?”
“Probably,” Hope said.
I clung to that probably as if it were a rope dangled over a pit of snapping crocodiles wearing pink Spirit Squad T-shirts. Destruction of TTSPJHCQ was the only life-saving option here.
“After all,” Hope continued, “he has a history of setting things on fire.”
I could only hope he’d give my pants the Hot Pocket–in-the-microwave treatment.
When my thirty minutes were finally up, I rinsed off, then lathered up with something called Tropical Getaway shower gel that reminded me of another red juice: Hawaiian Punch. After my shower, I changed into a pair of Hope’s sweatpants and a T-shirt—both comically too long for me. I took a good whiff of myself, and I honestly couldn’t detect the skunk smell anymore. Had the tomato juice successfully removed it? Or had I merely replaced one strong smell with equally strong, if different, smells? Did I now reek like a skunky tomato punch bowl?
I emerged from the bathroom to find Hope at the ready. “The moment of truth,” she said. She unclamped the clothespin, leaned in, and sniffed.
She gave me a double thumbs-up.
“You want me to get Heath in here to verify my results?”
I politely declined. As much as I would’ve loved the opportunity to make Manda jealous (“Heath got close enough to sniff you? WHY DIDN’T HE OFFER TO SNIFF ME?”), just one opinion mattered.