Читать книгу Flushboy - Stephen Graham Jones - Страница 17

Instead of dropping the warm Gatorade bottles I find on the top shelf of my locker in the trash on the way to class, I set them behind me, just anywhere, and don’t look around, even though I know there’s some group watching me, waiting.

I’ve been written up four times now for littering in the halls.

On the fifth, I’ll have to have a parent come up to get me back into school.

How I hold the Gatorade bottles is with a piece of torn-out notebook paper. It isn’t a rubber glove. One of these days, the bottle’s going to slip through the paper, crash into the ground, splash some jock’s pee all over my legs.

At that point the joke will be complete, I think.

That isn’t what makes me close my eyes each time I spin my lock, though.

What makes me close my eyes is that, since we got lockable lockers in the seventh grade, I’ve only ever had one combination: Prudence’s birthday.

Whether she knows about the bottles or not, I don’t know, and there’s no easy way to ask. Especially not if I happen to be holding her hand at the time, or have designs on where my hand might be going later.

The nightmare in line right behind the one about the school bus of kids is the one where, twenty years later, my own children are looking at one of my old high school yearbooks and come upon a shot the yearbook editor has worked in near the fold and cropped down all skinny, as if she wanted to hide it, will be my locker, open, the Gatorade bottles clustered on the top shelf, the joke lost in black-and-white, so that I have to swallow it, say to my kids that I don’t know what that’s about, no.

The question will be whether the mother of those children—my wife—whether when it’s her birthday, that combination of numbers will roll into place in my head, and I’ll be holding my breath again, waiting, praying.

But I’d forgive her of anything, I think.

It’s five-thirty. So many minutes to go.