Psychic Reader Neon

One day the yellow brick house had a red and blue neon sign glowing in the sun porch window: Psychic Reader.  A triangle with an eye glowed gold in the middle.  The air was blue with dusk making the sign a beacon to all.

Inspiraton #5

My brother was constantly being taken advantage of by other kids.  Not for money or his lunch or test answers, but rather for attention and, I guess, friendship?  Affection?  I can't fathom exactly why any of them did it, but no kid did it in conjunction with another, so it must have been some innate need to have a friend who you never considered a friend.  My brother was that kid little jerks like to make their temporary friend and do questionable things together, like build a pipe bomb.

Inspired by "Light and the Sufferer" by Jonathan Lethern: "My brother showed me the gun."
This was another of my favorites from The Slipstream Anthology.  Really interesting idea that, I think, epitomizes what "slipstream" is as a (possible) genre.  (I said "possible" because it seems as though the genre status is still being debated.  At least, it was still debated in 2006 when this anthology was published!)

How did you develop your sense of morals?

I have eaten from the Tree of Knowledge, and I feel shame.  I'm not religious, it's just that the idea fits my situation perfectly.  I know about religious stuff from the old guy who lives on the fifth floor.  He recites, or shouts, stuff from the Bible at me as I walk by on the stairs to my eighth floor walk-up.  I'm fourteen, but I can call it my apartment because I pay the rent.  The landlord doesn't know that, of course.  He'd be obliged to call social services, and they would ruin my ruined life.  It's ruined.  I see it now.  But it's my life.  Sticking me in foster care again, or forcing me into a children's home, would mean I'm not in control.

The Tree of Knowledge has shown me the lousiness of my life.  The first thing eating from that damned Tree showed me was my smell.  I remember getting into a fight with Candy Booger (real name Bourgan) in fifth grade when I actually hit a girl.  I knew it was bad to hit, but I didn't know it was extra bad to hit a girl.  She said that I smelled, and I punched her.  While I waited outside Principal Morgan's office, I tried to notice smells.  The copy machine next to me smelled like warm paper.  The secretary who walked past smelled like acid flowers.  I kept sniffing and, finally, I smelled it.  Piss.  Body odor.  Maybe mold?  God, save me, Candy Booger was right, and I had punched her for it.  Nobody appreciates the messenger.

If you could change one thing in the world, what would you change and why?

It was nearly Pandemic Day and we were very excited because this was the Bicentennial and it was going to be extra special.

What are good qualities in a friend? Boy/girlfriend?

Amy helped me bury the body.  She was such a good friend.  I miss her terribly.

I guess I should back up a little.

Even though high school students desperately want to fit in and have loads of friends and dress "right" and know all the right pop culture, they each live in a tiny, selfish bubble.  I suppose some don't, but I sure did.  My bubble swirled around me reflecting me back to me and showing me that I was put-upon and I was unique and I was suffering like no one else had in the history of the world.  I didn't notice, or care, that friends of mine, like Amy, were suffering, too.  I was suffering worse.  No one could understand... except, maybe, that strange, elusive creature: a boyfriend.

I wanted, more than anything, a boyfriend.  The desperation began in earnest during 8th grade.  At The 8th Grade Dinner Dance (the first time we all got dressed up and behaved like gentlemen and ladies), I wore a skirt with my shorts hidden underneath, a pair of sneakers, two pairs of socks, and some horrid shirt with a cute collar.  I boogied without moving my feet with my group of girl friends.  Amy looked fabulous, and she wore pink heels.  At one point during the evening, Amy let me borrow them and I strutted around, trying to get a boy--any boy--to notice.  I would have danced with anyone if he had asked me, including the band director, who, in hindsight, was surely gay.  Mr. Phillips said to me as I clicked by, "Tonight's your night!"  I believed him.  He was wrong.  Amy asked for her shoes back.  I went home still having never been kissed.

How do you define success?

Nobody remembers where they were when the world was saved by me because nobody knew the world was so close to destruction.  No parades.  No holiday in my honor.  Not even so much as a "Thank you" from my own family.  I tell myself that it's enough to know that I did it, but, turns out, it's not, which is why I'm writing it down as I remember it before even I start to forget my heroic tale.

It's not all heroic.  I want to be honest about it, so I promise I'll tell the entire story, even the bits that make me look like a coward or a dummy (there are more of those bits than I'd like to admit, but there it is.)

If you could be a door or a window, what would you be and why?

The Wizard lived in an old RV illegally parked on an empty lot at the end of a forgotten dead end street.  He'd been there for as long as any of the kids could remember, and they'd never see the faded Winnebago move.  The weedy dirt patch had been spruced up with a homemade tire planter, a string of fat Christmas lights, and a wooden wind chime the kids said was really made of bone.

Most of the adults thought The Wizard was a meth-head, cooking in his RV, but they didn't know any of the signs and were just judging based on appearance.  If any of them had gone into the RV, like Jake had, they'd know it was clean and followed what The Wizard taught him was "feng shui".

If you were taking a test and you noticed an acquaintance cheating on the exam, how would you handle the situation? If they were trying to cheat off of you, how would you handle it then?

My ninth grade English class was all about smells and vocabulary tests.  Ours was the class with the exchange-teacher from England, Miss Harrington, and all the boys thought she was hot because she had a short, hip haircut and she wore sexy patterned stockings.  And her accent, of course.  This was the year I don't remember doing anything except vocab tests and shunning the attention of Erik, the younger brother of a world-famous tennis star.  Erik played tennis, too, and I guess he was good, but it had to have been difficult to play in the shadow of a Wimbledon-winning older brother.  Besides vocab tests, Erik was the bane of that year's English class.

One of the smells we all fought that year was from Miss Harrington.  While the boys said she was "hot", when the woman was actually hot, she ripened, and in the closed quarters of our small room, it was bad.  I think the jealous girls played it up.  I was not one of them, but maybe it was because I sat in the last row and was most distant from the armpit reek.  Girls would make a show of going to the back and cracking open a window.  If Miss Harrington didn't understand the opening of windows and sides of hands pressed under noses when she walked by, she definitely understood when a bar of soap and deodorant appeared on her desk one afternoon.  I don't know if she used them, but she definitely started dousing herself in perfume, adding to the olfactory excitement of the little room.

Miss Harrington, however, was not my main source of pain: that was Erik.  He hadn't been with our class in middle school, nor had he even been with us from the very beginning of the year.  It was speculated that he'd gotten kicked out of his fancy private school and was only slumming in public school temporarily.  His family was rich, and Erik wallowed in it.  Even my untrained eye could recognize the alligator on his shirts and the freshness of his sneakers.  His clothes were pressed, and certainly not by him.  Erik himself was a sloppy mess.  He thought he was hilarious and God's gift to the girls in this lowly school.  He thought he was cool, and, therefore, he sat in the back row.  Next to me.

I sat in the back because I liked the back where nobody could look at me and I could doodle in my Trapper Keeper and maybe read some Clive Barker before class started.

What would I find if I "googled" you?

My brother Tim tried to make it weird to my parents that my best friend is a boy, but it's not.  Jamie has been my best friend since sixth grade when we were both lost on our first day in Middle School.  I walked into the unlit room 103 to find a boy sitting in the dim.  I slipped into the back row, too, and we waited, silently.  The seconds ticked by without any other students coming in.  No teacher.  Finally, we both pulled out our schedules at the same time.  "Lunch!" he said, slapping his forehead, just as I said it, too.  Without the slap.  We laughed, which I'm glad because I was so scared to be a dork.  Luckily, we were able to be dorks together.  Jamie wasn't afraid of being dorky, which made me feel okay, too.

We're starting high school after this summer, and it hasn't gotten weird in the way Tim thinks it will, even though, you know, hormones and everything.  That's not to say it's not weird.  It is totally weird.

Is it possible to separate church and state? Why or why not?

When it became good business, my Da opened up a church.  We were a traveling preacher show at first, when he saw how prayer loosened pocketbooks, but when we came upon the city of St. Marie and he found out that an empty prayer house could be had for a song, we settled in and became religious.

Do you lie?

When I was fifteen, I finally landed my first boyfriend.  I had been desperate for some years, but I finally had enough and pushed this kid into a locker and leaned on him, one-handed on his chest, and told him I liked him.  Naturally, he gave in to my subtle charms.

His name was Mike, and he was cute.  That was about it.  Nice enough, but though I didn't know my type yet, he was not it.  We were okay together.  Mild.  We made out.  He never invited me over to his house, and I never met his family.  What stands out in my memories of him was that he was cute, he named his younger sister Marsha after Marsha Brady, and he introduced me to the guy who would become my second boyfriend in one of the most dramatic ways possible.

Mike and Peter walked to my house in the middle of winter, which was quite an accomplishment.  It wasn't as cold as it had been, but it was snowy.  When I came to the door, I was surprised to see him, and even more surprised to see his friend.

Where Mike was tall, thin and dark, Peter was sturdy and pale.  He had grey eyes that rarely blinked and a full head of fair, well-combed hair--the kind that he'd be sure to lose at middle age, but that feathered nicely as a teenager.  Mike looked frightened.  Peter looked determined.  I let them both in, though my parents were gone for the day.

Two years after having a baby, you discover that, through a hospital error, you were given the wrong child. What would you do?

When I turned ten, my parents asked me to the living room for a family meeting.  I thought they had found out it was me who covered the boy's room ceiling at school with hundreds of wet wads of paper towels.  Thrown forcefully underhand, they stick with a satisfying "thwack" and surprising longevity.  "Longevity" is a word I inadvertently learned from my Word a Day calendar.  So was "inadvertently".  I didn't want to learn, but junk like that sticks to my grey matter.

Luckily, I knew not to confess without listening first.  Good news: they didn't know about my escapade (March 5th Word of the Day.)  Bad news: they weren't really my parents.

If you were a Disney princess, which one would you be and why?

Elmore's stepfather pulled him out of high school the second he turned sixteen, forcing the boy to stay at the farm and work on the equipment and help with the cows.  He had loved school; it was one of the only ways he had to escape his stepfather and his two stepbrothers, older and bigger and dumber than he was.  Adam and Drew were bullies and learned how to beat their new brother from their father.  Elmore's mother seemed to be running out of apologies for the man she married.  She whispered her sorrow over and over as she cleaned Elmore's cuts and put ice on his black eye.  Elmore whispered back that they should leave, but his mother's excuses would come pouring out again, and they stayed another week, another month, another year.  The year he would have gone to prom.  The year he would have graduated.  The year he could have left.  But not without his mother, no matter her excuses.

Pageant Question: It is okay for women to wear pants, but why are people so uncomfortable with men in skirts?

"Mr. Ripley," whined Marcus.  "Can you let us out early?"

"You know the answer to that, Marcus.  You're in tenth grade and you know everything, don't you?"  Mr. Ripley ambled over to Marcus' desk.  "You haven't finished your worksheet.  Finish those problems and then you'll be able to talk."

Sharon, always wanting to look good, waved her worksheet in the air.  "I'm done!  Tell us a story, Mr. Ripley!"

The class quieted when Mr. Ripley strode to the front of the room.  "You all wrote down your homework?  All the problems on page 80?"  Cult-like, the students answered that they did.  Ever the showman, Mr. Ripley used the drama of silence.  "Why is it that women can wear skirts and pants, but men can only wear pants?"

The class took a moment before erupting in laughter and their own opinions.  "Scottish people wear skirts!"  "My Uncle Danny wears skirts!"  "Men have different parts!"  "Women shouldn't wear pants!"

Mr. Ripley regained attention by unexpectedly standing on a chair.  "Women's skirts come in so many great patterns and colors, and they're so comfortable and free-flowing, why couldn't I come to class in a skirt?"  Amid the heated debate, the end of class bell rung, and students scooped up their books, still paying attention to getting out their opinions rather than wanting to leave, which had only minutes ago been their priority.  Consensus seemed to be encouraging Mr. Ripley to come to class wearing one of his wife skirts to see what happened.

Pageant Question: What is the greatest challenge facing young women today?

Melissa watched her friends make out.  They looked like fish gasping on a hook.  Their eyes were wide open and their heads turned in tiny circles, tongues occasionally pushing out their cheeks.  They were in Peter's basement and Jenna had brought her here, supposedly as support to help her resist Peter's advancements.  It didn't work.  Melissa started humming to cover the sound of Jenna and Peter's desperate lip-lock.  When he put his hands up Jenna's shirt, Mel went upstairs to find a drink of water.

Pageant Question: Substance abuse is huge problem among teens. How do you stay drug free? What solutions do you propose to solve this problem?

Vic's house was the first split-level that she had ever seen, and she thought it looked like one of those cool, rich-person's multilevel apartments you might find in New York City.  It was also walking distance from the high school, which she also thought of as cool because she would have gone home every day for lunch.  Lora, however, lived in what had been a "show home" neighborhood back in the 1970s.  As a very fresh freshman, she was only just beginning to think outside her own world view, and it gave her a tingling feeling in the back of her mind that, perhaps, her family was rich, and everyone in Vic's neighborhood was not.

Lora was not Vic's girlfriend, but rather a friend who happened to be a girl.  Cheryl was Vic's girlfriend, and also one of Lora's best friends.  Vic, Chris, and Frankie were buddies.  Lora, Cheryl, Jenny and Barb were besties.  Freshman year was when they all discovered each other and found that boys and girls could mingle.  So far, it was working, and on the night of the Fall Dance, they met up at Vic's split-level to hang out before walking over.

Each of the friends had a secret none of the others knew.  Lora only knew hers: she had fallen for Vic.  Her fall was solidified that night when, in her mind, Vic saved them all from a gang of druggies.

Pageant Question 34: If you could un-invent an invention, which would you choose and why?

My boyfriend is from another dimension.  True story.  He appeared in my bedroom, naked and screaming.  If that's not a fantastic way to start a weird relationship, I don't know what is.  It happened like this:

Me: sleeping, twisted in my ancient Hello Kitty sheets and comforter, drooling onto my pillow.

The sound and feel of a giant vacuum pulling all the air from the room, followed by a loud *pop!*

Han (my boyfriend): writhing on the ground in pain, sucking wind as hard as he can and letting it back out in a hair-raising scream.

My parents: moved to Vegas and left me the house when I graduated high school two years before, so I was alone.

My neighbors: tiredly expect my life to be weird.

Han, which is a ridiculously short abbreviation of his real name, has been living with me for a few months now.  I call him my boyfriend, but that's what I have to do because he lives here.  He is not, technically, my boyfriend.  I don't have anybody who could really care, but, still, it's easier to say "boyfriend" than to explain why this dude lives in my house and is with me all the time.

Pageant Question 15: If I were to visit your hometown for one day, what would we do?

The kids in the neighborhood called them "The Fields", but it wasn't just fields; there were trees and creeks and even small hills.  It was Joelle's favorite place to play, with or without anyone else.  Although it was against her parents' wishes, she would often go out to The Fields to play alone, exploring, spying, listening, imagining, building.  While there were many improvised "forts" in the woods, they were group activities.  Joelle was proud to be building one of her own, and she called it her home base.  It was from this base that she intended to do further exploring.

To a nine year old, The Fields were huge, quite possibly never-ending.  Joelle wouldn't connect the fact that they lived on an island with the idea that the woods could not possibly go on forever when there was a river surrounding their town until she was ten, and by then, she had discovered a secret about The Fields no one else knew.

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Doug woke early, having to pee.  He peered myopically at his alarm clock, telling himself that if it was still before eight, he could go back to sleep.  It was seven.  Doug made sure he threw the covers closed again so the bed would stay warm, and he shuffled into his moccasins, crossed his small room in two steps and  opened the door to the dark hallway.  He was so glad to be back home and away from his crazy mother.

When his parents were divorcing, his mother had uprooted him from the city in which he had been raised and pulled him as far from his father as they could get, to his grandmother's house.  Doug loved his grandmother, but moving to a tiny town in rural Pennsylvania, being dragged out of school in the middle of his extremely awkward freshman year, and having his family torn in two was devastating.  The more he lived alone with his mother without his father's influence, the more he resented her and the more he understood why his father would cheat on her.  For three years he endured his mother's faint heart and weeping and bitterness.

Doug was what was called a late bloomer.  He was short, pudgy, and his voice hadn't changed yet.  He believed it was because of his mother, and lack of contact with his father, that had stunted him.  In his junior year of high school, he took the GED instead of enduring another year of mockery.  In a finally deepening voice, he announced his intention to move back home, to the city, with his father.

His mother wept, of course.  "Your father won't want you back," she announced.  "He loves his freedom."

"He already said he wants me back."  Doug stood, defiant.  He had been secretly calling his father and arranging it all behind his mother's back.  When he told her, she accused him of the same kind of deception as his father.  Doug was secretly proud.  His father picked him up himself, driving a new vintage Volvo.  They took the winding roads back home at top speed.

Doug had been back with his father for just under a year when he woke a seven in the morning in his old room, mattress on the floor and clothes in a pile simply because his mother never would have allowed it.  His eyes were only half open when he got to the bathroom door and found it closed.  He knocked lightly, "Dad?  Gotta pee."  Without an answer, Doug turned the knob and was only able to push the door open a couple of inches before it bumped to a stop.  "Sorry!"  Without a response, Doug blinked the sleep from his eyes and pushed harder at the door, shoving his father's arm and shoulder enough to poke his head inside.  His father lay on the floor, unmoving.  Cold.  Dead of a massive heart attack.

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We watched from inside the house, my sisters and I, as people came and picked through the piles of garbage we had put out earlier that day.  It was expected that some would show up to go through what we had sorted and left on the porch as "good", but what we hadn't expected was that grownups would dig into the bags and boxes at the curb, stuffed with trash.  One man, cigarette dangling from his mouth and coughing into the frigid night air, loaded the garbage onto a tarp and dragged it across the street to his small house.  My younger sisters were horrified and wanted to yell at them to go away.  "Don't they know we put the good stuff on the porch?  Why isn't anyone looking up here?"  Annabelle was probably mad that all her hard work wasn't being appreciated, though she had done the least of the three of us.