Slob - Ellen Potter [8]
“How could Wooly treat you like that!” Jeremy blurted. “You!”
She has this idea about me. She thinks I am a better person than I actually am. Nicer, funnier, smarter. I mean, I am smart, but she thinks I’m a genius, which I am not. Not quite. I missed genius rank by one point.
What she didn’t know was that people were always treating me like Mr. Wooly had, or thereabouts. I mean, I do think she understood I wasn’t exactly popular, but sixth graders and seventh graders live in totally different universes. She didn’t know that I had become an official bully magnet, the punch line of every joke. That people made fart noises when I walked by and murmured things like “Fatty Fatty Ding Dong.” She didn’t know and I wanted to keep it that way.
“Just forget it,” I said. “It was no big deal.”
But the anger was leaving her face and being replaced by a look of despair. “Oh, Owen. What a world.”
They were gut-squeezing words. It made me think of other stuff besides Mr. Wooly and stolen Oreo cookies. I glanced at Jeremy. She was frowning down at the pavement. I worried that she might be thinking of the very same stuff.
“Hey,” I said, trying to make my voice sound jolly. “How about we go to the demo site on Ninety-third Street?”
“All right, I guess.” She didn’t sound enthusiastic, but once we arrived at the tall sheets of plywood that fenced off the demolition area, she started to perk up a little. The week before, Jeremy and I had found a loose board on one corner. Security around these places is shockingly slack. Every so often I consider writing the mayor of New York and letting him know what a shoddy job the demo crews are doing and that little kids could really get hurt, but that probably wouldn’t be in our best interest.
We slipped inside. The site was a mess of rubble, of course. The tenement had a blazing fire a few weeks before and had burned down partway. The demolition crew knocked the rest of it down a little while after. There were some real gems scattered around. To date, we had scavenged the motors from a washing machine, a heap of bicycle chains, an old laptop that worked some of the time, half of a pair of handcuffs (no keys), and a really beautiful slab of marble.
One time, we ran into a young guy who was also hunting there. He looked totally normal. Nice button-down shirt and jeans. He said he liked to furnish his apartment with recycled items. I thought that was a very polite way of saying he was a garbage picker, just like us. He was a pretty friendly guy, and he did give us some advice about new demo sites and a warning about metal scavengers. He said that they we should watch out for them. They were really protective of their sites, because they made a living out of collecting stuff like copper pipes, brass valves, and aluminum heating coils and selling it to scrap metal dealers. He said that they weren’t beyond using violence if they caught you on their sites. That scared the heck out of me, but it made Jeremy even more eager to go scavenging. She liked anything that might pose bodily danger.
Back home, we dumped our haul in my room. Mom wasn’t home yet—she never gets home before six thirty—and Honey’s back teeth were swimming she had to pee so badly, so first thing I did was take her for a walk. Honey is a pit bull that Mom found in front of our apartment building one evening. We named her Honey so that she wouldn’t seem quite so scary to people, but it never really worked. In the elevator people press themselves up against the opposite wall and give her the evil eye. She doesn’t seem to care. She wags her tail at them anyway. She’s so easygoing that she never fusses when I put the Crap Catcher on her. It’s one of my first inventions. Fairly primitive—a strap around the waist and a loop fitted under her butt, made of wire slipped into a sleeve of plastic. Attached