“I don’t know. I don’t think so.” I let my arms drop. “Thanks, I think.”
“You’re welcome, I think. Can we go now?”
“Hang on. Gimme a pen?”
“Why?”
I put my hand out, and she dug out a pen from the bottom of her purse. I started writing in big letters on the track team poster taped to the wall.
“Don’t!” she said. “We’ll get in trouble.”
THE NEW MATH SUB SUCKS!!!!! was what I wrote. I underlined “sucks” and handed back the pen.
“What was all that about?” she asked.
“Insurance.”
70.
Nat was a little kid buzzing on birthday cake for the rest of the afternoon. I was the balloon tied to her wrist. She talked to the custodians about using their ladders to put up decorations in the gym, then she talked to Banks about the best time to decorate. We didn’t have any decorations yet, but I guess that didn’t matter.
Banks said we could use the school’s folding chairs and tables. Nat checked it off her list. I told her we would need another committee to scrape the gum off the bottom of the tables. She ignored me.
Monica (weight 141 pounds) met us in the parking lot. She was hard to miss, because of the way she was screaming and jumping up and down like her thong was on fire. She hugged Nat, hugged me, screamed some more, hugged Nat, hugged me. Jumped up and down some more.
Drugs, perhaps?
Hardly. Her uncle who owned a restaurant downtown promised us all the tablecloths we wanted. Monica and Nat jumped up and down and screamed. They hugged.
Everybody agreed to meet at Nat’s house to work on flyers.
“You coming, too?” Monica asked.
“Me?” I asked.
“I heard you was moving in with TJ. Somebody heard he bought you a car or a ring or something. Thought you’d be too busy.”
“No, um, he’s working. Besides I promised Nat. It’ll be fun, to um, make flyers.”
“That rocks!” screamed Lauren.
She hugged me, and I hugged back, and then we all hugged. I even bounced a little. I was getting better at this committee stuff.
71.
We made flyers at Nat’s for hours. Her grandmother came out of the kitchen at dinner time carrying a tray filled with cabbage rolls and tripe for us.
After Nat explained what tripe was, I went to my house to get us some real food.
72.
The Hannigan kitchen was a war zone, and Dad was losing the battle. The window was cracked. There were tools all over the floor and thick dust in the air. Half of the wall behind the table had been ripped out, and Dad was hammering at the half that was still standing.
He didn’t hear me come in, because he was singing an old Aerosmith song at the top of his lungs.
I turned off the boom box. “What are you doing?”
Dad stopped in mid-screech and turned around. “Princess! I wondered when you would be home.”
“You said you were going to paint. Paint, Dad, not destroy.”
He set the hammer on the table. “By the time I got the wallpaper stripped, the wall was a little dinged up. I figured I’d rip it out, put in some new insulation, which we need, throw up new drywall, and paint. It will look good as new. Better.”
“It will take you ten years to do this.”
He took off his work gloves and brushed the dust out of his beard. “It’s a weekend job. Don’t be so negative. I’ve got a buddy helping me.”
“I don’t see any buddy.”
“He’s in the john. What are you up to?”
I was rummaging through our cupboards for normal food. “We’re having a meeting at Nat’s and we’re hungry. Does Ma know you’re ripping out the kitchen?”
“It was her idea.”
I loaded peanut butter, jelly, two cans of olives, a box of Triscuits, and a can of ravioli into an old grocery bag. “So she saw what a crappy job you did with the wallpaper and she flipped.”
“She is thrilled she’s getting a new kitchen out of this. In fact, she took the boys to stay with her at Linny’s to help me out.”
“I bet.”
The toilet flushed and boots thudded on the stairs. Dad put his gloves back on. “If you’re making sandwiches, why don’t you slap together a couple for us? That way we can keep working.”
I got up on my tiptoes to reach to the very back of the cupboard, where I knew my mother hid her stash of premium chocolate chip macadamia nut cookies.
The boots came down the hall.
“There’s still meat loaf in the fridge,” I said. “You can split it. So who’s helping you? Uncle Danny?”
Found it. A full box. I put the cookies in the bag and looked up at Dad to say good-bye. His helper was standing next to him wearing oversized work boots, a torn Eagles sweatshirt, and jeans slipping off his butt.
“Hey, babe,” said TJ.
73.
Ever have one of those moments when you couldn’t think of a single thing to say, not even if a guy put a gun to your head and TV cameras were showing the scene live to the whole world, but then when you went to bed that night, you thought of a hundred perfect things you could have said, and you wanted to scream so loud your pillow explodes?
Me standing in our ruined kitchen, looking at TJ holding my Dad’s hammer with a moron grin, was one of those moments.
“You bring us dinner?” TJ asked. “Awesome. I’m starved.”
I still couldn’t think of anything to say. I took the olives out of my bag, put them on the counter, and left.
I slept over at Nat’s that night. She talked in her sleep about the price of table favors. I thought about all the smart things I should have said back in my kitchen.
I couldn’t sleep, so I went downstairs. Grandma was watching a Spanish-language news show and sewing a hem into Nat’s prom gown. I sat down next to her. She put her sewing away in a basket and got a can of ravioli and two forks. We sat and watched the news in Spanish and ate.
74.
Breakfast was homemade blueberry muffins served by Grandma wearing a nightgown and her red bathing cap. The muffins were amazing. I said “spasibo” (Russian for “thanks”) and took two, then Nat pulled me out the front door.
“How come she bakes all this great stuff for breakfast but cooks animal guts and cabbage for dinner?” I asked.
“Some questions have no answers,” Nat said. “Come on. We have to get the posters up before school.”
75.
I popped the last bite of muffin in my mouth as we pulled into the parking lot. Monica, Lauren, Junie, and Aisha were waiting for us by the door.
Nat handed out flyers, tape, and muffins, and we split up in three groups. Each group took a floor of the school.
We had an hour.
“What if nobody reads these things?” I asked Nat as I taped a flyer to the door of the boys’ locker room.
“Flyers are like old-fashioned Internet news flashes. I’m not worried.”
“We really should have made a video. They could play it on cable. Everybody would see it.”
Nat ripped off a piece of tape. “You’re right. We should have postponed the prom for a year so we could make a video. Why didn’t I think of that?” She stuck the tape on the flyer and moved down the hall.
“You don’t have to get all sarcastic,” I said. “It was just an idea. Where are you going?”
“We’re done here. We have to do the band room.”
“Don’t you want to go inside?”
“Inside where?”
“The locker room, moron. We could stick flyers over the urinals.”
“Shut up, that’s sick.”
“No, not shuttin’ up. They need something to look at when they’re taking a leak.”
76.
By the time the busses started arriving, the flyers were all over the school. Monica high fived me for the urinal idea. Aisha got points for putting the prettiest flyers on the lockers of the coolest girls in school.
She made sure that Persia Faulkner had the hippest flyer of all.
Nat was still freaking. “There’s so much to do,” she said as we walked to Health. “A bazillion things.”
“We’ll get it done,” I said.
“How? I’m serious, Ash. We have so many vendors to cover, phone calls for donations, table favors to make . . . I would kill for a cigarette.”
I stopped. “Oh my God. I’m going to die.”
“You don’t smoke.”
“Jonesie will kill me. My tobacco essay? For Health?”
“You didn’t finish it?”
“I didn’t start it.”
She grabbed my shoulders. “Ashley Hannigan, this is a national emergency. If you screw up and get kicked off my committee I’ll take hostages, I swear.”
“It’s okay, it’s okay, calm down. Tell Jonesie I’m puking in the bathroom. I’ll get it done before the end of class.”
I wrote the essay in the third-floor bathroom. I wrote it like I was talking to somebody who needed to screw their head on straight about cigarettes, somebody like Nat.
I never wrote anything that fast.
Must have been the muffins.
77.
Nat was right about the flyers. People noticed. By lunch, all you heard about was the prom.
“ . . . in our gym? Here?”
“ . . . still don’t have a dress.”
“ . . . how much?”
“ . . . some phat singer . . . ”
“ . . . he promised . . . ”
“ . . . you goin’?”
“ . . . who’s goin’?”
“ . . . it’ll be lame . . . ”
“ . . . he’ll be so hot . . . ”
“ . . . they’ll cancel . . . ”
“ . . . why not?”
Gilroy wasn’t stalking me, so I was able to connect with my prom girls sitting at the table by the soda machine. I took the last open seat, next to Lauren. She stole one of my fries.
“Good thing you turned that paper in,” Lauren said. “Jonesie was pissed.”
“Are you sure she didn’t call Gilroy?”
“We distracted her. Got her talking about condoms. Worked like a charm.”
Monica pulled the ticket box out of her backpack and clunked it on the table.
“How are sales?” Lauren asked.
“What sales?”
“Everybody’s talking about the prom,” Lauren said.
“They might be talking, but they ain’t buying.” Monica snagged a handful of my fries. “I sold thirteen tickets so far. People are pissed they have to buy another ticket, even if it’s only ten bucks.”
“They’ll be even more pissed if we can’t afford the DJ,” I said.
“Thirteen?” Lauren asked. “Somebody bought only one ticket?”
“No. Hector bought three. Said he’s bringing two dates, because he’s ‘too much man for one girl.’”
We all pretended to vomit.
Monica broke my cookie into three pieces and took two of them. “Maybe this isn’t worth it. Why kill ourselves if nobody’s going to show up?”
“Excuse me,” I said. “Are you off your diet?”
“I didn’t have any breakfast.” Monica put back one of the cookie pieces. “But you’re right. Thanks, Ash.”
Nat took the piece of cookie that Monica gave up. “This prom is totally going to work, and everybody is going to show up and have fun.” She sipped my chocolate milk and took out her pink notebook. I was starting to hate that thing. “Let’s review assignments for this afternoon.”
Everybody groaned. The excuses flew. Lauren had to tutor a second grader. Junie had to babysit her cousin. Aisha had to work at BK right after school and the shoe store at six. Monica was leaving at the end of eighth period to visit her sister in Delaware for the weekend.
Every time a girl lied her way out of the afternoon’s work, Nat drew a frowny face next to her name in the pink notebook.
I chewed my tiny piece of cookie. If everybody bailed, I’d be off the hook, too. I could spend the weekend at Aunt Linny’s. No, wait. My brothers were there. I had lots of relatives, somebody would let me crash for the weekend. I could sleep, work, sleep some more. Maybe TJ could finally take me to see the apartment. I was starting to get excited about it in a stomach ache kind of way. Ma was going to flip out when she heard, but then she’d get excited, too, and we could go to Penney’s and buy curtains.
The bell rang, and the other girls shot out of there, like the lazy cowards they were. Nat drew a smiley face next to her own name and another one next to mine.
“Looks like it’ll just be the two of us,” she said. “You have to get out of detention early again. We have a lot of begging to do this afternoon.”
78.
When she said “begging,” she meant that we had to shake down the stores around the school.
Nat said it nicer as we walked out of school. “We’re going to solicit the merchants on Bonventura Street for donations and supplies.”
“Soliciting means turning tricks, you know,” I said.
“You’re making that up.”
“No, really. If we were whores, we could get all kinds of donations.”
“Not funny.”
“It’s kind of funny. Where do we start?”
In Nat’s fantasy world we’d step into a store, introduce ourselves to the manager, explain why we were “seeking a donation” and walk out with an armful of loot.
Here’s how it worked in reality.
We’d press a buzzer to get the door unlocked. When we were in the store, the owner looked us over to see if we were the kind of innocent-looking girls who hide handguns in their bras. In a back room, a dog growled. The owner would ask what we wanted. Nat read from her index card, and the owner would say, “Cut to the chase, hon, whattyouwan?” Nat would get all red in the face, and I would ask for something from our list: napkins, plastic cups, decorations, soda, cookies, lights, streamers, confetti, or the loan of a video camera. They could give us cash, too.
When the owners stopped laughing, the answer was always the same: “Ugottabeouttayourfreakinmind.”
79.
We hit seventeen stores and scored a big fat nothing.
Getting turned down makes you hungry. I bought us a soft pretzel and a Diet Coke to split, and we sat on a curb. A group of girls were playing double Dutch in the parking lot across the street.
Nat licked the salt off her half of the pretzel. “This is harder than I thought.”
I spread mustard on my half. “Maybe we could decorate the gym with toilet paper.”
“You can make lots of things out of toilet paper,” she said. “I’ve read articles.”
“You’re scaring me, Shulmensky.”
The double-Dutch girls twirled their ropes and sang, “Down, down, baby, down by the roller coaster, sweet, sweet baby, I’m never let you go. . . .”
Nat put a grain of salt on her tongue. “What if Monica was right? What if we can’t pull it off?”
One of the jumpers got tangled in the ropes, and they all burst out in giggles.
“Hmm.” If we couldn’t pull it off, I’d dance in the street. Couldn’t say that, though.
Nat sipped the Coke. “I mean, look at us. We’re begging for paper napkins and getting squat.”
The girls across the street untangled their ropes and started again. “Down, down, baby, down by the roller coaster . . .”
I swallowed. “Maybe we’re doing this bass-ackwards, starting with these little stores.”
“Like we have a choice.”
“You want money, you gonna ask a poor person? Hell, no. You ask a rich person.”
“Do you know any rich people?”
“Of course not. But I know where they shop.”
“What, you want us to go to King of Prussia or something?”
King of Prussia was this mega-mother-blinging mall, the Disneyland of shopping for the rich people who live around Philly. You could fit o
ur whole house in one of the elevators. The floors are made out of marble, the ceilings have stained glass, and the escalators are polished three times a day. Even the bathrooms smell good, like the people who shop there never do anything smelly, if you know what I mean.
I licked the mustard off my fingers. “Exactly. We could go tomorrow.”
Before she could say anything else, Nat’s cell rang. “Hello? This is Natalia. Yes. Yes, sir.”
I took the last bite of my pretzel. Across the street, the shortest girl did a cartwheel and bounced up perfectly between the swinging ropes.
“I’m on my way. Thank you for calling.” Nat closed her phone, stood up, and brushed the salt off her legs.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“My grandmother is in a church down at Broad and Logan.”
“So? Grandma Hannigan spends half her life in a church.”
“My grandmother is Jewish.”
“Oh. And she’s not at a Jewish church, is she?”
“It’s called a synagogue, dumbass. And no, she’s not there. She’s at Holy Hands A.M.E.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“It sounds like she’s in their dunk tank.”
“They have a dunk tank?”
“It’s a special pool, the minister said.”
“For baptizing?”
“Whatever. It’s a Christian thing. All you guys do it.”
“Catholics don’t dunk. We dab. But wait, your grandma went swimming in the baptismal pool?”
“Wrong. She is still swimming in the baptismal pool. She won’t get out.”
80.
It took us twenty minutes to find the church, and another five to find a parking place and walk back to the church. Reverend Pinkney was waiting for us at the door.