The Big One-Oh (5 page)

“I'm sure Charley has a good reason,” she smiled.

 

 

I was back in the kitchen, standing on a chair and stirring my rice on a back burner, when I heard Mom and Vince whispering loudly in the living room. If I stopped stirring, I could pick out the highlights.

“That kid is always in the kitchen,”
Vince hissed.

“But that's not normal,”
said Vince.

Mom's voice got louder.
“Are you saying my son isn't normal?”

I could hear Mom's voice strain.
“No. What
do
you mean?”

“Some kind of a what?”
Mom pushed.

“Some kind of a . . .
freak
!”

I could tell from Mom's silence how upset Vince's words had made her. When she did speak, it was to say,
“Well. I'm sure you can find your way out.”

And she was right.

 

 

Later Mom and I sat quietly at the dining room table and pushed food around on our plates, because neither of us really felt like eating.

First of all, what Vince had said made me feel really awful.

Secondly, as much as I didn't like Vince, I guess my mom did. I felt kind of responsible for their fighting and for him stomping out and slamming the door, but I didn't know how to apologize for that.

Eventually Mom looked up with one of her brave smiles.

“So. Did you decide what you want to do for your birthday?” she asked.

I shrugged. “I don't need a party, if that's what you mean.”

“No?” she wondered. “Won't your friends be disappointed?”

“Nah,” I mumbled. “They have things to do.”

“I'm sure they would change their plans. What if I call their mothers and . . . ?”

“Mom,” I stopped her. I put my hand on hers, hoping that I could soften the blow of what I was about to say. “I don't really have any friends.”

She gazed at me for a while, and I got the feeling that I wasn't telling her anything she didn't know.

“Well. Maybe a party is a good way to make some.”

I think she had it backwards: I think you've got to make friends, and
then
you can invite them to a party. Either way, my party wasn't going to happen. But I could tell that it mattered a lot to Mom, so I decided that I would disappoint her slowly.

“Can I let you know?” I lied.

She nodded, and took a forkful of dinner.

“Mmmm,” she hummed as she chewed. “Your sister doesn't know what she's missing. It's beef stew, right?”

“Actually,” I said, “it's veal osso buco with shallots in a red wine reduction.”

“Oh,” Mom nodded carefully. “Of course.”

It's times like that when I bet she's wondering:
Was there some mix-up at the hospital? Instead of my own baby boy, did they hand me an alien life-form?

But I smiled at Mom.

She smiled back.

And then we finished everything on our plates.

That night, when Lorena finally got home, Mom unloaded on her for missing dinner, so I decided that would be a good time to take Boing Boing for a long walk.

As we roamed the street, I made some important decisions.

#1. The hairnet had to go.

#2. I was not a freak.

#3. I had to tell Mom that I didn't want a birthday party; once we got past that, we could figure out some other way to celebrate my “big day.”

And then something happened that changed my life forever.

I'm not kidding.

 

 

I was deep in thought, and Boing Boing was sniffing around one of Mrs. Cleveland's big trees when I heard loud voices. And they weren't coming from my house.

Suddenly the door to Crazy Garry's house
flew
open and his girlfriend Pincushion rushed out, followed by Garry. They couldn't see Boing Boing and me watching from the shadows across the street.

Pincushion stomped down the driveway, carrying a cardboard box and a big suitcase. Garry chased after her, pleading, “Don't go!
Please!
”

As Pincushion flung her stuff into the backseat of her convertible, she shouted, “I can't take this anymore, Garry. I can't! You're too weird.”

And I thought:
Isn't that what I've been saying all along?

Garry pleaded, “So I'll . . . I'll change! I'll need instructions, but
I can change.
”

Pincushion scoffed, “You can't change, Garry. Look at you. You're a grown man with no social skills . . .”

“. . . no fashion sense . . .”

“. . . and no friends!”

I must have gasped, because Boing Boing stopped his sniffing and looked up at me. After all, Pincushion had come awfully close to describing
me
, and COME ON! No matter what could be said about me, I was not like Garry.

Was I?

Pincushion jumped into her car, started it, and then—as if she'd read my mind and understood my deepest fear—she whipped around to Garry and, before she peeled out of the driveway, she spit out, “Face it, Garry. You're a
freak!
”

I felt the earth drop away from under me.
That word!
Twice in one night. One word—the
same
word!—used to describe me and the
weirdest guy on the planet!

As Pincushion careened out of the driveway, she crashed through some of the bushes that separate our property from Garry's. She spun the wheel and as she turned, her headlights raked across Mrs. Cleveland's front lawn.

That's when Garry saw me.

As Pincushion roared away, Garry and I stood there for one horrible moment, looking sadly across the street at each other.

Two friendless freaks.

And then I started to run.

With Boing Boing nipping at my heels, I ran faster than I have ever run. Across our lawn! Up on our porch! I blasted through our front door as if the Goblins of GlugGlug (
Monsters & Maniacs,
Issue 25) were at my back.

“Mom! Mom!” I ran from room to room, yelling my head off.

Mom rushed out of the laundry room, carrying a basket of clothes. “What, Charley? What?”

Lorena raced down from upstairs shouting, “He'd better be bleeding!”

I was practically wailing by this time: “MaaaaaaaaaahhM!”

Mom dropped her basket of laundry, fell to her knees and grabbed me by both shoulders.

“I'm right here, Charley!” she shouted. “What is it?”

I gulped a big ball of air, and I said it.

Yup. I actually said it.

“I gotta have a birthday party.”

That night in bed, there were about a hundred thoughts running around in my brain, all trying to get my attention. And one thought kept poking at the top of my skull. One thought kept shouting louder than all the rest.

And that one thought was this:
I'm going to have a birthday party.

Because,
I told myself,
I am going to throw the best party—in the history—OF THE WORLD!

And as I thought that, I thrust my fists above my head in triumph. Unfortunately, there's a wall there, so I cracked my knuckles pretty hard and made a loud BOOM! that caused Mom to poke her head in and say, “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I answered. “Yeah. I'm great.”

As I raced around getting ready for school the next morning, it hit me that I had a lot of work ahead. After all, with my birthday less than three weeks away, I had to get organized. I decided that the best way to keep all my ideas in order was to put them all in one place.

I have a super-special spiral notebook: my
Monsters & Maniacs
Official Record. In it I list every story in every issue, and after each entry I write a short description about the story and the characters in it. Then, using a rating system that I created, I give each story one, two, three or four daggers, four being the best rating a story can get.

I decided on rating with daggers because they're actually pretty easy to draw.

But all of my
Monsters & Maniacs
stuff only takes up about half the notebook, so, while Mom yelled from downstairs, “You're gonna be late!” I opened to the middle of the book, and across the top of the page I wrote: THINGS TO DO FOR MY PARTY. Down the left side of the page, I numbered the lines from 1 to 10.

I didn't have anything to write on any of the lines yet, but it felt good to get started.

 

 

On our way out to the car, Mom saw our mangled bushes. She stopped suddenly and gasped, “Now what in the
world?!
” I guess that, in the excitement of my previous night's announcement, I had completely forgotten to tell her how Pincushion had driven her car through our hedge. So when Mom looked to me and shook her head in confusion and dismay, I just shrugged and shook my head, too.

 

 

Before the first bell that day, I sat way off at one end of the playground and studied my Birthday Notebook.

THINGS TO DO FOR MY PARTY was all I had written so far.

But on my way to school that morning, I kept rerunning the memory of Pincushion's screeching departure from Garry's house the night before. And when I remembered how she had yelled,
“You have no friends!”
I realized what belonged on line 1. So I wrote it in:

1. MAKE FRIENDS

I stared at those words.
How?
I wondered.
How how how how?
And then it hit me!

So I wrote on line 2 . . .

2. WATCH PEOPLE WITH FRIENDS TO LEARN HOW

. . . but as I finished, Jennifer suddenly shoved an issue of
Monsters & Maniacs
between my face and my Birthday Plan.

“Check it out!” she said. “I went through this issue and counted every time they use the word ‘booger' and the word ‘barf,' and which one do you think won?”

I looked up at her. I could tell that Jennifer had eaten an apple for breakfast, because bits of its red skin were still in her braces. I didn't answer, hoping that she would realize she had interrupted something very important and leave me alone. After a long pause she shrugged, still smiling.

“Okay. Think about it. Tell me later. I'll just go stand over . . . there.”

She pointed to a patch of dead grass about twenty feet away.

“It's a free country,” was all I said.

 

 

At lunch, I got my first chance to watch friendship at work.

Across the room, I saw Donna eating with Dina and Dana. Just as they finished their lunches, Donna reached into her shoulder bag and, with a little
ta-da!
move, pulled out two new unsharpened pencils. They were thick and pink and, from the end where the eraser should be, little colorful yarn balls dangled.

Donna presented one to Dina and one to Dana, and you would have thought that the two of them had just won a Jeep or something, the way they squealed and clapped and hugged Donna.

I opened my Birthday Notebook and, under WATCH PEOPLE WITH FRIENDS TO LEARN HOW, I wrote:
You can buy friends with gifts.

I was excited to have discovered such an important fact, until I dug into my pocket and pulled out all the money I had.

A nickel and a dime. Fifteen cents. That wasn't going to buy too many friends.

But there must be other ways to make friends, because not everybody has tons of money. I decided I needed to find one of those inexpensive ways.