“She doesn’t have to say anything—I know my sister. She doesn’t kiss just anybody.”
There it was—confirmation from a sibling! “So, are you saying she Likes me, as in ‛Like’ with a capital L?”
Gunnar considered this. “More like italics,” he said. Which was fine, because the capital L was more than I could handle.
“So ... are you okay with her liking me?”
Gunnar continued to kill the plants. “Why shouldn’t I be? Better you than some other creep, right?”
I wasn’t sure whether he was REALLY okay with it, or just pretending to be okay with it. The only similar situation in recent memory had to do with Ira’s ten-year-old sister, who was kissed in the playground by some twelve-year-old last Valentine’s Day. The second Ira heard about it, he assembled a posse to terrorize the kid, and now she might never be kissed again.
This situation was different, though. First of all, she kissed me, not the other way around. Secondly, she’s Gunnar’s older sister, so it’s not like he’s got to be protective, right?
“She likes you because you’re genuine,” Gunnar said. “You’re the real thing.”
This was news to me. I don’t even know what “thing” he meant, so how could I be the real one? But if it’s a thing Kjersten liked, that was fine with me. And as for being “genuine,” the more I thought about it, the more I realized what a big deal that was. See, there’s basically three types of guys at our schooclass="underline" poseurs, droolers, and losers. The poseurs are always pretending to be somebody they’re not, until they forget who they actually are and end up being nobody. The droolers have brains that have shriveled to the size of a walnut, which could either be genetic or media-induced. And the losers, well, they eventually find one another in all that muck at the bottom of the gene pool, but trust me, it’s not pretty.
Those of us who don’t fit into those three categories have a harder time in life, because we gotta figure things out for ourselves—which leaves more opportunity for personal advancement, and mental illness—but hey, no pain, no gain.
So Kjersten liked “genuine” guys. The problem with genuine is that it’s not something you can try to be, because the second you try, you’re not genuine anymore. Mostly it’s about being clueless, I think. Being decent, but clueless about your own decency.
I don’t know if I’m genuine, but since I’m fairly clueless most of the time, I figured I was halfway there.
“So ... what do you think I should do?” I asked, parading my cluelessness like suddenly it’s a virtue.
“You should ask her for a date,” Gunnar said.
This time I sprayed the herbicide in my eyes.
My advice to you: avoid spraying herbicide in your eyes if at all you can help it. Use a face mask, like the bottle says in bright red, but did I listen? No. The pain temporarily knocked Gunnar’s suggestion to the back of my brain, and the world became a faraway place for a while.
I spent half an hour in the bathroom washing out my eyes while Gunnar threw me a few famous quotes about the therapeutic nature of pain. By the time my optical agony faded to a dull throbbing behind my eyelids, I felt like I had just woken up from surgery. Then I step out of the bathroom, and who’s coming in the front door? Kjersten.
“Antsy! Hi!” She sounded maybe a little more enthusiastic than she had intended to. I think that was a good thing. Then she looked at me funny. “Have you been crying?”
“What? Oh! No, it’s just the herbicide.”
She looked at me even more funny, so I told her, “Gunnar and I were killing plants.”
Kjersten apparently had a whole range of looking-at-you-funny expressions. “Is this ... a hobby of yours?”
I took a deep breath, slowed my brain down—if that’s even possible—and tried to explain our whole dust-bowl project in such a way that I didn’t sound either moronic or certifiably insane. It must have worked, because the funny expressions stopped.
Then Mrs. Ümlaut called from the kitchen. “Are you staying for dinner, Antsy?”
“Sure he is,” Kjersten said with a grin. “He can’t drive home with his eyes like that.”
“I... uh ... don’t drive yet.”
She nudged me playfully. “I know that. I was just kidding.”
“Oh. Right.” The fact that she was old enough to drive and I wasn’t was a humiliating fact I had not considered. Until now. As I thought about this, I could tell I was going red in the face, because my ears felt hot. Kjersten looked at me and laughed, then she leaned in close and whispered:
“You’re cute when you’re embarrassed.”
That embarrassed me even more.
“Well,” I said, “since I’m mostly embarrassed around you, I must be adorable.”
She laughed, and I realized that I had actually been clever. I never knew there could be such a thing as charming humiliation. Gold star for me!
Tonight Mrs. Ümlaut made fried chicken—which was as un-Scandinavian as hamburgers, but at least tonight there was pickled red cabbage, which I suspected had Norse origins but was less offensive than herring fermented in goat’s milk, or something like that.
It was just the four of us at first—once more with a plate left for Mr. Ümlaut, like he was the Holy Spirit.
Sitting at the Ümlaut dinner table that night was much more torturous than the first time. See, the first time I was desperately trying not to make an ass of myself, just in case Kjersten might notice. But now that she was certain to notice, it was worse than my third-grade play, where I had to dress in black, climb out of a papier-mache tooth, and be a singing, dancing cavity. I forgot the words to the song, and since Howie had spent half that morning whistling “It’s a Small World” in my ear, that was the only song left in my brain. So when I jumped out of the papier-mache tooth, rather than standing there in silent stage fright, I started singing all about how it’s a world of laughter and a world of tears. Eventually, the piano player just gave up and played the song along with me. When I was done, I got applause from the audience, which just made me feel physically ill, so I leaned over, puked into the piano, and ran offstage. After that, the piano never sounded quite right, and I was never asked to sing in a school play again.
That’s kind of how I felt at dinner with the Ümlauts that night—and no matter how attractive Kjersten might have found my embarrassment, it would all be over if the combination of fried chicken, pickled cabbage, and stress made me hurl into the serving bowl.
“I had a consultation with Dr. G today,” Gunnar announced just a few minutes into the meal. His mother sighed, and Kjersten looked at me, shaking her head.
“I don’t want to hear about Dr. G,” Mrs. Ümlaut said.
Gunnar took a bite of his chicken. “How do you know it’s not good news?”
“Dr. G never gives good news,” she said. It surprised me that she didn’t want to hear about her son’s condition—and that she hadn’t even accompanied him to the doctor—but then everybody deals with hardship in different ways.
“I may have more time than originally predicted,” Gunnar said. “But only with treatment from experts in the field.”
That wasn’t quite what he had told me, but I could see there were more layers of communication going on here than infomercials on a satellite dish—which, by the way, I am forbidden to watch since the time I ordered the Ninja-matic food processor. But I suspected that whatever treatments Gunnar was talking about were going to cost more than twelve easy payments of $19.99. Maybe that was it—maybe the cost of medical treatment was the elephant in the room here—although I’m sure that wasn’t the only one; the Ümlauts seemed to breed elephants like my sister breeds hamsters.