Slob - Ellen Potter [43]
“Oh,” she said. “All right.” It was hard to know if she understood what I was talking about. She left the room then, and I sat back down and watched the Freakout Channel for a little longer, just in case. No luck.
All right, all right, I told myself. No big deal. I had my episode. The angels were posing as cheerleaders to catch a bunch of kidnappers. Now I could look it up in Retro TV Magazine and figure out what date it was aired on.
I went to the box full of magazines and knelt beside it. I even remembered to put on the white gloves. That was when I realized exactly what a task lay before me. I had to leaf through 104 issues and hunt down every Charlie’s Angels episode. I made it through forty-eight issues before I fell asleep sitting up in bed, my back propped against the wall and the white gloves still on my hands.
13
In the morning I woke up late and went out to the kitchen to eat a bowl of Cocoa Puffs cereal with milk. Actually, it was the fake Cocoa Puffs, with the organic this and that, and it tastes almost nothing like the real Cocoa Puffs, but that morning I hardly noticed. I was too anxious to get back to the Retro TV Magazine issues. I even took a couple of the issues into the kitchen with me, and after I finished my cereal, I put the white gloves on and began to search through them again.
Jeremy came into the kitchen wearing her jacket and a black ski cap pulled down around her ears. Her ice skates were slung over one shoulder. She stood in the doorway and watched me for a minute.
“I’m going skating with Arthur,” she said.
I waited for her to ask me if I wanted to come. She didn’t. Again, I felt her watching me.
“What?” I said.
“I was just thinking,” she said. “Even if you see the person who did it, even if the police can find him and catch him and stick him in jail, it won’t change things. Not really.”
“How can you say that? Of course it will change things!” I said.
“It won’t change things for us, I mean,” she said. “Or for Mom and Dad. It won’t make them less dead.”
“It will change things for the person who killed them, won’t it?” I said. My voice sounded all strangled, I was so angry. “Living in a prison cell for the rest of your life is a pretty big change, in my opinion. Jeez, Jeremy, I would have thought you of all people would see why this is so important!”
“It’s just—”
“It’s just that now you have a bunch of friends and you and Zelda are getting along, so everything is fine, right? Well things are not fine for me, in case you haven’t noticed. Things are pretty lousy, if you want to know the truth. I’m the butt of everyone’s jokes, someone is helping themself to my lunch, and Mr. Wooly is going to humiliate me in front of the entire class. Yet again.”
I knew what she was going to say—that even if the murderer was caught, people were not going to stop making fun of me. That I would still be 57 percent fatter than the average American twelve-year-old.
That’s not what she said.
She didn’t say anything. She just hiked up her skates higher on her shoulder and left the apartment.
The whole thing bothered me so much that I ripped off the white gloves, poured another bowlful of fake Cocoa Puffs, and scarfed it down. After that, I fished around the fridge until I found half a turkey sub that Mom had brought home from work and began to devour that too. My stomach was suddenly gripped with the familiar aching emptiness that came on right before a major food binge. The first time I had felt it was a few months after my parents were killed. Back then I ate a half pint of rocky road ice cream, and that made it better. After a while it would take a whole pint to fill the emptiness. Then