“How about this one?” Shane holds up a white shirt that says MENTAL HELP WANTED on it.
I shrug. “A truer shirt was never written.”
“Douche.”
“Probably.”
Shopping doesn’t appeal to me. Never has. My mom does most of my clothes shopping. She’s pretty good at picking out things that I’ll like. I’d shop for myself but the problem is that I usually don’t know I like something until she brings it home. When I look at stuff on the racks, it all just looks the same.
“What do you think’s going on with Ronnie?”
Shane stiffens and stares really hard at a yellow shirt. “I already told you.”
“Yeah, I don’t mean about you, though maybe we’ll get back to that. I’m talking about me.” I grab a pair of crazy plaid shorts and tuck them under my arm.
“Oh.” Shane’s shoulders relax and he turns around. The first thing he sees is the shorts. He grabs them and tosses them on a table. “No.”
“But—”
Shane shakes his head and gives me his crazy eyes. “No.” He waits until he’s sure I’ve given up on them before continuing. “So what about you and Ronnie?”
“We almost kissed. After the bridge. What do you think? Have I got a chance?”
“Of what? Getting back together? The outlook is dim.”
“What about maybe hooking up?”
Shane shoves a black shirt at me. “How are you so dense?”
“What?”
“Ollie,” says Shane. “You could probably use your death to get Ronnie into the sack, but is that what you really want?”
I shrug. “What I want is to not die a virgin. Dude, just being around her is harder than conjugating Spanish verbs. My balls are blue. They’re cerulean. They’re—”
Shane holds up his hands in surrender. “Got it. The less I hear about your balls, the better.”
“So what should I do?”
“Go ice the cake in the bathroom. I don’t know. I just don’t think guilt-tripping Ronnie into boinking you is the way you want to go out.”
“Who’s boinking who?”
Ronnie wanders toward us with an armful of clothes. She looks different and she catches me staring at her. “At least one of you could have told me my hair looked like I’d had it styled by a blind paraplegic.”
“It looks fine,” says Shane over his shoulder.
“I think it looks great,” I say. “Really brown.”
“Thanks?” Ronnie picks up the shorts Shane took away from me. “Who would wear these?” She shudders and tosses them down again. Shane turns to me and mouths, I told you so.
We duck into the fitting rooms to change.
“Damn!” yells Shane from the booth next to mine. “I forgot to get underwear. Ollie, where’d you get yours?”
“Who says I’m wearing any?”
“Gross!” That was Ronnie from the room on my other side.
I make sure to yank off all the tags and transfer the contents of my pockets before exiting. “Much better,” I say, and stretch my arms over my head.
Shane comes out holding his damp clothes. “Where are your clothes?”
“I left them. Not like I’m gonna need them.” I grab Shane’s out of his hands and toss them back into the dressing room.
Ronnie walks out of the dressing room in a skirt so short it makes mini look like a Puritan frock. And her shirt is a skintight baby T with a chick on the front. If my jaw were bionic, it’d be on the floor right now.
I elbow Shane and whisper, “My balls just went to DEFCON Blue.”
Shane groans. He probably rolled his eyes too, but I’ve got tunnel vision for Ronnie. Shoot, Shane could have stood on his head and done the funky chicken with the Jumbo-Mart greeter and I wouldn’t know.
Ronnie snaps her fingers in front of my eyes and I jump. “Hey. I’m up here.”
“Sorry,” I mumble, but right now, Ronnie’s eyes are the least interesting part of her.
“Ugh, I’m going to change.”
I grab Ronnie’s arm. “No! I’ll stop. See? Looking into your eyes. Your brown eyes. Your angry, brown eyes. Why are your eyes so angry? Don’t be angry at a dying man. That’s, like, sacrilege.”
Ronnie’s lips move but no words make it out. Finally she stomps her foot and storms off through the racks. I should probably follow her but watching her leave is so much more enjoyable.
“Ollie.”
“Shane?”
“Are we going after her?”
“Just a sec.” Ronnie doesn’t look back once. Okay. Maybe she does. It’s not like I’m looking at her head. Either way, I wait until she rounds the corner and then I say, “Okay. Now we’re good.”
“Do you need a minute alone?”
“Probably not even that long.”
Shane pats me on the back. “Not what I meant. But thanks for that visual. I’ll probably never sleep again.”
I wink at Shane. “Whatever. You probably dream about me. ‘Oh, Ollie, you’re the best. Oh, Ollie.’” I fake French-kiss my hand until I realize that Shane’s not there anymore and two kids in a shopping cart are staring at me. And so is their mom.
“Rehearsing for a play.” Then I run.
When I find Shane and Ronnie in the video game section they look like they’re arguing again. They stop when they see me.
“Again?”
Ronnie hip-plants her hands, which gives me an opening to check out her legs, and says, “No, this time we’re talking about you.”
“What about me?”
“Just what a dick you are,” says Shane.
“And this is news to you how?”
Ronnie’s face goes from smiling to stern to smiling to stern in the space of a couple seconds before letting a laugh escape. “I guess it’s not. Bet I can kick your ass at Guitar Hero.”
I steal Shane’s grin. “Loser buys second lunch.”
Okay, so you probably don’t expect someone who’s got just a little more than half his life left to be in a Jumbo-Mart playing a game involving a plastic guitar and Guns N’ Roses songs. But it’s not about the game. It’s about losing myself in something for a minute. About being able to shut my eyes and forget that I’m dying. About hearing Ronnie yell, “I own you, Travers. You’re going down!” instead of the pain in my parents’ voices as they sent me off to school. Maybe it’s not what you’d choose, but it’s thirty minutes that I don’t have to talk about dying.
I could probably go on this way for the rest of the day except that Ronnie totally shreds the fake guitar and unlocks a secret song that’s both creepy and annoyingly appropriate.
“‘Stairway to Heaven’? Really?” Ronnie leans the guitar against the glass case and steps back. “I think I’m done.”
I laugh. “It’s cool. Play.”
“I really think we should get going. We haven’t paid for these—”
“And we’re not going to, Shane.”
Shane gives me the antigrin. “That’s not on the list.”
“We’re so far off the list right now. Forget the list.”
Ronnie drops her voice to a whisper. “But shoplifting?”
I lean back against the case and cross my arms over my chest. “It’s not about stealing—I’ve got money—it’s about being able to do whatever I want.” Shane and Ronnie exchange matching I don’t get it looks. “Hey, you guys started this when you made me burn my books. Tomorrow I’ll be a corpsicle, which means today I can do anything I want. There are no rules, at least none that apply to me.”
“Fine,” says Shane. “Then let’s go paper Principal Pickle’s house. Or find out where we can rent a Godzilla costume.”
“We can’t get to Tokyo before tomorrow morning, Shane. Use your head.”
“No,” says Ronnie, “but we can run around in front of Kellie Chin’s house. Her grandmother lives with them and she’s from Tokyo. Or Hong Kong. Or Seoul. I don’t know. You get the point.”
Shane winks at me. “We can always sna
g my binoculars and go see if we can catch Mrs. Williamson sans clothes.”
“First off, Shane, buddy, pal, she was hot when we were in fifth grade. She’s ancient by now. Second, it’s barely noon. Unless J. T. Elementary has instituted a new naked teaching policy, we’ll probably have a long wait.”
“Then what do you want to do?” Shane’s frustrated. It’s not like he’s tough to read. His forehead’s wrinkly and his hands are jammed into his pockets and he’s staring at me like he can burn a hole through my chest and see my bloody, beating heart.
“I want to turn toward the exit, walk slowly and inconspicuously in its general direction, and then leave without paying for these clothes I’m freeballin’ in.”
Ronnie shuts her eyes and chuckles. “I could’ve done without the visual. But what about after that, Ollie? Are we going to go knock over a liquor store?”
I shake my head and they both look relieved. “It’s too early for drinking. I was thinking a comic book store.” When Shane starts looking crazier than normal, I hold up my hands. “Calm down, Grimsley. I was only mostly kidding about the comics. I can’t read fast enough to make it worthwhile.”
“I don’t like it,” says Shane.
“Shane, Ronnie? Come on. If we get caught, I’ll take all the blame.”
Ronnie looks at Shane and says, “Fine by me.”
I’m giddy and I don’t really know why. Shoplifting? It’s stupid. The last time I shoplifted was in the fourth grade when I stole a blinking magnet from a dollar store. For three days I had crazy-ass nightmares about the manager, a skyscraper of a woman who always wore a brown yarn shawl over a white shirt, brown slacks, and sensible shoes. She chased me until she caught me and hot glued a magnet to my back and stuck me on her fridge. She used me to hold up a list of potential names for her cats.
After the third night, I went back to that dollar store and shopleft the magnet right back where I found it.
But this time there’s no scary manager to give me nightmares, and even if there is, I won’t be alive long enough to care.
“Let’s get going.”
To be honest, I kind of expect that the second we walk out the doors, alarms and buzzers are gonna go off and a steel cage is gonna fall from the ceiling and trap us. Only that doesn’t happen. Shane and Ronnie breathe a sigh of relief when we get out of the store without being chased, but I’m actually a little disappointed. Not disappointed enough to ruin my day but disappointed enough to know that what I need is a real challenge.
“Guys,” I say as we walk to Miss Piggy. “I have an idea and you’ll be happy to know that it doesn’t involve stealing.”
“Anything you want, Ollie,” says Ronnie with a shy smile.
“I’m in,” Shane says stoically. “So long as I don’t have to climb anything else.”
The fact that they both agree without hesitation says something important about Shane and Ronnie. It says what great friends they are. No. Scratch that. I mean, yeah, it does say that. But mostly it just says they’re stupid.
I sling my arms around my best friends’ shoulders and say, “Take me to The Velvet Underground.”
16:31
The first time I heard about The Velvet Underground was during PE class in the fifth grade. Shane and I and most of the other kids who had already been tagged out in dodge ball were sitting against a wall in the shade when Manny Juarez showed us this flyer that he’d found in his father’s bedroom. It was a poorly photocopied thing that showed an impossibly big-breasted woman straddling a floor-to-ceiling pole. Her legs were pointed into the air, her stilettoed feet forming the tops of the most erotic V known to man. She was gripping the pole with one hand while the rest of her body leaned back like she was comfortably reclining and didn’t have a care in the world.
Underneath that was the name: THE VELVET UNDERGROUND.
It was like finding out that Shangri-la was real. There was even a phone number.
I burned that number into my brain, and later that weekend Shane and I called it. A woman answered and we were convinced that she was naked on the other end of the phone because we couldn’t imagine a woman at a strip club having anything better to do than answer a telephone in the nude. Of course, we giggled and didn’t say anything and after cursing at us, the woman on the other end of the phone hung up. But that moment was the first time we’d ever actually come close to a live nude woman.
As we grew up, other kids we knew would sometimes have stories about The Velvet Underground. Someone’s dad would go to a bachelor party there or someone would drive by it. But it was always this mythical place that Shane and I dreamed about visiting one day.
I’d spent countless hours imagining a brightly lit building in the middle of golden fields, where women of every color and type and breast size imaginable stood outside waiting to welcome weary visitors into their sanctuary, where the men would be plied with alcohol and treated to lap dances and shows the likes of which I’d never be able to see over the Internet.
Some things should remain a dream.
“Are you sure this is the place?” I ask as we pull up to the off-pink building nestled between the railroad tracks and a check-cashing store.
Shane points to the sign and says, “Velvet Underground.” There’s hesitation in his voice. “I’m sure we can find a better strip club.”
“Or how about we not find a strip club at all?” chimes in Ronnie from the backseat.
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “We’re doing this.” I turn to Ronnie. “I know looking at naked chicks isn’t your idea of a party, but we won’t stay long.”
Shane puts the car in park in front of the building but he leaves it running. “I’m with Ronnie on this one.”
“How can you be with Ronnie? This has only been a dream of ours since fifth grade.”
“Yeah,” says Shane, “but look at this place.”
I can’t help admitting that the parking lot is definitely not a breeze-blown field of golden wheat. It’s pockmarked like Danny Jackson’s face, and it’s littered with bottles of Boone’s and cigarette butts.
“Maybe the inside will be better,” I say with genuine hope. My thoughts go back to that blue flyer with the happy, limber woman on the pole.
“But probably not,” says Shane.
Ronnie reaches over Shane’s seat and puts her hand on his shoulder. “You know what? Why don’t we just do this. If I can suffer through it, so can you. For Ollie.”
I give Shane my crazy face and say, “Since when are mostly naked chicks who dance for dollar bills something you have to suffer through?”
Shane shakes his head. “That’s not what she meant. I just don’t think this is a good place. I heard about this place over off Forty-fifth Street that’s probably cleaner.”
“I’m going.” I open the car door and get out without waiting for either of them to follow. With or without them, I’m gonna see some strippers.
Okay, let me just say for the record that it’s not about the strippers. Okay. That’s a lie. It is about the strippers. But it’s also about doing shit that I wouldn’t normally do. I’m not the guy who goes to strip clubs. Except that today I am. Today I’m the guy who jumps off bridges and runs from cops and steals clothes and looks at live naked chicks.
Because tomorrow I’ll be the guy who’s a corpse.
Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, let’s go look at some boobies.
The glass front door is tinted so dark that I don’t know exactly what I’m walking into, which is a little scary. I look back and see Shane and Ronnie right behind me as I grab the handle and pull.
I walk in like I own the place. The inside is just as dark as the tint on the door. Maybe that’s because it was sunny outside and in here there’s barely enough light to see my hand in front of my face. But the second I hear the pulsing thump of the bass and see the swirly, patterned carpet, I know I’m right where I belong.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” says a deep voice that echoes in my ears. I stop so s
hort that Shane runs into my back and Ronnie runs into his. To the left is a booth with a grizzly man sitting inside. He’s got a pencil behind his ear and his lip is swollen. Without wanting to know, I learn the reason for his bulging lip when he spits into a soda can. Brown juice dribbles down his lip and the side of the can.
“We’re just here for the strippers,” I say. Ronnie’s choking behind me and I can practically feel Shane turning red.
“IDs.” He looks back down at his partially completed Sudoku,
like he’s sure that we’re going to turn and run.
“Sir, my name’s Oliver.”
The bouncer doesn’t look up. “Does it say that on your ID, along with a birthday indicating that you’re over twenty-one years of age?”
“That’s just the thing, sir. If you’d just—”
“No ID, no entrance.” He points at a giant sign on the wall that spells out the policy. Someone also wrote “No fat chicks” under it, but I’m pretty sure that’s not part of the official policy.
I dig my letter out of the pocket of my stolen shorts and slam it down on the counter. “You know what this is?”
“Ollie, come on,” says Ronnie.
“Unless it’s your ID, you need to leave before I call the police.”
Shane grabs my arm and pulls. “We don’t need any more cops today.”
But I’m not done. Some hairy, tobacco-chewing Neanderthal isn’t going to keep me from seeing naked women. “That’s a Deathday Letter. It means I’m going to die tomorrow. It also means that I can do whatever I want. And what I want is to sit at a table and drink soda and give some strippers a few damp and crumpled dollar bills. Comprendo? ”
The bouncer looks up from his number puzzle and spits tobacco juice in the can. He doesn’t even bother looking at my letter. “You should’ve tried a fake ID. Now, I don’t care if you’re going to stand in my hallway, douse yourself with gasoline, and light yourself on fire. Unless you’re twenty-one and have an ID to prove it, you’re not getting in here.” He sneers at me. “Comprendo?”
I lunge at the window but Shane grabs the collar of my shirt, pulling me back so hard that it digs into my neck and chokes me.