Ten Thousand Saints - Eleanor Henderson [7]
“I’ll pay you back, Pru.”
“No, you won’t. You’re just going to spend it on you-know-what.” With the nail-polished fingers of her right hand and the sign-language skills she’d learned the first semester of tenth grade, she spelled out something frantic.
“I don’t know what that means!”
“Drugs!” she pronounced, cupping her hands against the glass.
Prudence’s puritanical streak was a matter of mild embarrassment for their mother, but for Jude it was simply proof of their genetic divide. “It’s my birthday!” he yelled. The itch in his fingers had spread to his hands, which he mashed into fists, pressing his knuckles to the window.
“I hate you, too!” Prudence shrieked, hands flying like fighting birds. Then she and her friends disappeared into Young Adult.
Jude scavenged. He probed a finger into the coin return slots of pay phones, vending machines, the children’s carousel that had been broken for as long as Jude could remember. He found nothing but a lone gumball in a candy machine, which turned his tongue a defeated electric blue. To spend one’s sixteenth birthday—and New Year’s Eve!—in a shopping mall, with no pot, no beer, no prospects to offer a mysterious, loaded, out-of-town girl—it was too shameful to consider. He swallowed his pride and suggested they head for the Record Room. Maybe Delph would take an IOU.
Anthrax’s “Soldiers of Metal” was playing over the store speakers. Behind the counter, Delph was preparing to thwack a pencil at the one Kram held pinched between his fingers.
“Boo!” Jude yelled, and Kram flinched.
“There will be no skateboarding in here,” Delph called, shaking a finger at Teddy and Jude. “Out with those things, gentlemen, or I’ll call mall security.”
“No!” Jude said. “Not that fat guy on the golf cart.”
“Don’t start on fat guys,” said Kram, who at eighteen had a full-blown beer gut. “I’ll pin you right here, little boy.” And he clambered over the counter and fell on Jude, digging his knees into his ribs.
Kram O’Connor and Clarence Delph III regularly put Teddy and Jude in headlocks, charged them outrageous rates for marijuana, and invented for them a seemingly tireless list of abusive nicknames. Teddy got the worst of it—Teddy Bear, Teddy Krueger, Teddy Roosevelt, Teddy Ruxpin, Teddy Graham, Teddy McDickless, McDick. Never mind that Delph refused to be called by his own first name, or that Kram got his nickname from accidentally tattooing his real name backward in a mirror. They had been friends of Johnny’s, metalheads with muscle cars and big-haired girlfriends (Kram’s car they called the Kramaro), and although they would be graduating, barely, in June, and although Johnny had left town two years ago, they still let Jude and Teddy follow them around, gave them rides, came over to Jude’s every once in a while to jam and tell him how shitty his cheap guitar sounded. The purpose of their alliance they made clear: they required Teddy and Jude for news from Johnny, nothing more. Johnny was in a straight edge band. Johnny’s straight edge band had played a show at CBGB. Johnny was tattooing full-time now, had traded an eight track for his own machine and some needles, and since tattooing was illegal in New York, as it was in Vermont, he had to do it from his apartment, a studio in Alphabet City that was literally underground. He’d stopped returning Kram’s and Delph’s calls months ago; his phone was turned off when he didn’t pay the bill, he wrote Teddy, and he left it off. He could live without it.
Which meant Teddy was screwed. His mother