Cruddy - Lynda Barry [24]
“Look at me, Clyde. Can I count on you?”
I nodded yes.
“You promise to Jesus?”
“Yes.”
“Because he’ll know if you’re lying and that is just as bad as stabbing him in his heart.”
I said, “I’m not lying,” but my voice wasn’t so convincing.
The father said, “I’m going to have to work on you.”
Chapter 13
HEN VICKY came out of the Washeteria, the Turtle had his arm around me. I was feeling a slight electrocution from it. Normally I do not like for people to touch me, I have a weird problem with it, a doggish problem. When people touch me I want to bite them. I have had this problem since I can remember, and I had been wondering if maybe I’d finally grown out of it, but my jaws rippled when he put his arm around me. It was all I could do to keep my teeth together tight.
Normally I do not like being touched, but I have wanted a boyfriend in my life. I used to think about the ways it would be possible. I read a story where a freaky-looking girl met a blind guy and told him all kinds of lies about what she looked like, like how her eyes were blue instead of brown, which I thought was idiotic of her since the guy wouldn’t know color anyway. I thought of him, the guy in the story, and how I could take him from her with my truthfulness. I thought it could work out between us.
I have liked certain guys at school. Guys that never even look at me. One has a silver front tooth. One is tall and has a face like a deer. One spoke to me once. He said, “Don’t you know it’s rude to clip your nails in public?” And there is Billy the Kid, the DJ on KHR, who I sometimes sneak calls to in the middle of the night. He asks me how old I am. I tell him seventeen. He asks me if I ball. He tells me to call him when I’m eighteen. I request different songs. “House of the Rising Sun” is one of them. I never thought it was a real place but the Turtle said it was and he would take me there and I had to wonder if there would be a red lightbulb.
In my restricted life, the mother has tried to make me afraid of the aimless man, but truthfully I have never been afraid because I never thought I was the aimless man’s type. I did not think he would keep his eyes on me long enough to hunt me. That I would be as noticeable to him as a gray clothespin on a sagging line. In my restricted life it was the mother who I was afraid of. The Turtle had his arm around me, and if she saw that, my life would be over.
Vicky said, “What, are you two together now?”
She was having a hard time unwrapping the cellophane from her cig pack. She was doing it so slowly, concentrating on the red pull-strip and the glinty shine. And then I noticed we all were concentrating on it, leaning our heads over it and watching it intently. It seemed like a miracle item to me. Vicky held the end of the pull-strip and let the top piece of cellophane hang and flutter and we stood there very amazed by it. And I was thinking how we are always surrounded by incredibly beautiful things but we don’t know it, and that from then on I was going to know it, and then I looked up and the Washeteria woman’s freaky head was right next to the window and she was darting little pig eyes at us and moving her lips at us and her beige moles were wiggling and I was screaming very loud and the Turtle and Vicky were pulling me down the street and Vicky told me to shut up because she hates people who scream. This is one thing I can say about Creeper. It makes everything you look at very loud.
We went to a scrudded-out little park that was mostly weed grass and one set of swings and some warped splintered seesaws and the Turtle said he wanted to seesaw with me so I sat down and then watched him walk over to the swings. Vicky laughed. She said, “Suc-kah! Rober-tah!”
The Turtle started swinging. One of his shoes came off. There was aluminum foil inside his shoe and it caught the light and sent a ray into my eye that knocked me over. Then Vicky was laughing very hard and contorting on