explaining: “He doesn’t eat meat.”
“Which is what matters,” Mark snorted.
Lawrence earnestly nodded.
Mark, Boyce, and Hank dubbed themselves The Three Musketeers and settled in for the rest of the school year. Lawrence, who had been raised to give, bought a frozen Three Musketeers bar for each. They caucused privately and invited him to be the Fourth Musketeer. He proudly accepted. His status as Fourth Musketeer involved fixing the subpar results of their lackadaisical cooking efforts, wearing Mouseketeer ears for their amusement, and keeping his mouth shut when they chatted. They chatted about things he did not understand–hos and drugs and Grand Theft Auto and bad ass pits and how crappy school was–and they spoke with regret in coded terms of things they hadn’t done in high school, and how they had better do them while they could.
One of the things was making a film–a cooking show, they told Lawrence one day–and it would star him, the best cook in the class. Mark held the camera and Boyce held the mike as Lawrence proudly laid out the cooking table with tools and ingredients for his favorite recipe, his father’s beef stew, subbing soy meat for beef.
“You like wearing that apron, don’t you, Lawrence?”
Lawrence smiled at the camera’s friendly eye. “Oh yeah,” he replied. “It makes me feel like a real chef.”
“So remember the chef’s hat.” Hank presented the puffy white chef’s hat to Lawrence on a tray. Lawrence placed the hat on and flushed with pride.
Mark peered through the camera as if through the sight of a sniper’s rifle.
Smiling angelically down upon his domain, Lawrence diced carrots, celery, and onions; sautéed the veggies and built up a sauce; tossed pearl onions, potatoes, mushrooms, peas, and soy meat into the pot; seasoned the simmering pot with herbs; inhaled the intoxicating aroma; stirred the pot lovingly, gently, sweetly. Occasionally he looked up shyly at the camera, as for years he’d looked up at loving parents and sister when taking on a new challenge. When the stew was ready, Mark led a giddy Lawrence by the arm to a seat of honor at a well-set table to receive the first bowl. Boyce behind them slid a mob of red, fatty beef chunks into the pot and filled Lawrence’s bowl, taking care to load it with extra meat which he submerged with care.
“Time for the chef to take the first bite,” said Boyce with the hushed anticipation of a golf announcer on the eighteenth hole. “Take a big bite, L.”
Mark took dead aim at the Lawrence’s face with the camcorder as he raised a spoonful of stew thick with beef chunks, potato chunks, carrot, and peas, all brown from the sauce. Through the viewfinder Mark observed Lawrence placing the spoon in his mouth and closing his eyes with sensuous joy as he chewed the stew well, as his parents had taught him; then he suddenly stopped, like one realizing he’s unwittingly entered a dangerous room. “Something’s wrong,” Lawrence hushed, pulling a half-chewed chunk of stringy meat from his mouth in tweezering fingers. He recognized the chunk as meat and his face swelled with horror and then the dam burst, the contents of his mouth and gut spewing wildly into and all over the table, slime and chunks and steam everywhere. With a sickly voice he told the camera, as if telling a friend: “There’s meat in there” as slime dripped from his mouth.
“There’s meat in there” was the tag on the clip on YouTube the next day, and it was also the caption beneath a close-up of Lawrence with bulging cheeks and imploding eyes a moment before the surge burst through his lips. The clip garnered two dozen views the first day, three hundred-plus the next, and well over a thousand by the afternoon of the third day when Lawrence learned of it and showed it to Mercy.
“Oh, my baby,” she murmured, draping her arm across his shoulders, leaning her head against his, kissing the hair atop his head as she’d done when he was beaten up in ninth grade. He did not turn to her, but stared ahead and clicked play again. “You don’t have to do this to yourself,” Mercy hushed. He forwarded to the part when Mark led him to the table. “I’m gonna get that monster thrown out of school,” she said with a tear in her voice. “First I’m gonna get YouTube to take that trash down, then I’m gonna see the principal tomorrow and get all those guys thrown right out of school!” The clip was at the moment when Lawrence realized he was a cannibal eating a fellow creature; now the spewing, now the aftermath–the clammy skin, the viscous drool, the horror that Lawrence summed up like so: “There’s meat in there.” “I should have been there with you somehow. I’m so sorry, baby.” Lawrence was hunched forward in a world of his own; her words couldn’t reach him. “I’m sorry, so sorry.” Again he played the regurgitation ... the close-up of the vomit all over the table ... the close up of the sickened boy with shiny, slimy lips. The boy turned to his sister:
“They’ll never eat meat again, Mercy. One-thousand three-hundred and fifty-five people. They won’t.”
She relaxed now, choked out a quivering laugh of relief and kissed her brother on the nose. An impulse led her to place on his head the king’s crown she’d bought for him many years before. She leapt to her feet and curtsied to the king and swept out the door to make plans to move in with her friends.
- end -
Thank you for reading “Lawrence.” If you enjoyed this free ebook, please do share it widely, for that’s why it’s free! And please remember to like it on Facebook. Like “Lawrence,” my novel The Mighty Roman features a young hero taking a stand for gays, animals, and other oppressed groups, so you may well want to check that out. For much more of my fiction, and other literary goodies, please visit Jon Sindell Fiction. And feel free to connect with me on Facebook, on Goodreads, or via email to
[email protected], as I love connecting with readers. Lawrence, I salute you!
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