Satan's Dollar Store & other stories

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(this is the second story of the "Raisinheart" trilogy)

By the time I was fourteen I was pretty good at being alone. God knows I'd had a lot of practice, but I was still somehow a magnet for all things undesirable. I had accumulated a whole host which clung to me like various rusty odds and ends. I had nicknames which I won't repeat here. I had legends spread about me, ranging from the time my own cat bit my ear half off, to the rumor of what I'd done with Cootie Girl and where. Everybody knew these stories and whispered them in the hallways as I passed, or so I imagined. I was also well on my way to being pretty much insane. What else can you call it when you wander around in a fog of mostly imaginary miseries?

Unfortunately, enough of those were not so intangible. I had continued my pattern of attracting exactly one and only one friend, each of whom belonged to families which strangely moved out of the state within a year of their child befriending me.

There had been Hakim Marsala, a miniature virtuoso celloist I met in the seventh grade. I got to know him in music class and I think we were friends because we were the only boys smaller than the smallest girl, and because we were always the last to pack up our instruments and get them out of the room. Hakim's cello was approximately twice his height and weight and it was I have to admit pretty funny to watch him struggle with the thing. His father had come up with a system to hook the case up with wheels but the straps on which the wheels were attached were elastic, like suspenders, and it was impossible to get their configuration right, so he ended up dragging it along on one wheel at a time while the other wheels occasionally whacked the floor or squealed like broken shopping carts. One day the whole apparatus collapsed on top of him while he was trying to maneuver it down the stairs and he and the cello fell in a clump right on top of Mrs. Angeline. They ended up mouth to mouth on the landing, with his bow poking out of her skirt. Most unseemly.

Hakim was also a chatterbox in private and it was my great privilege to get to listen to the history of his illustrious family while riding the bus every day. Most of his ancestors had done something or other and he was under a great deal or pressure to "amount", as he put it. Each generation of Marsalas had outdone the previous one, and seeing as his father had been his country's Ambassador to Somewhere it was hard to see how he was going to do it. The poor guy worried an awful lot.

After Hakim relocated, I met up with Danny Wheat, another small fry. By this point I had managed to reach nearly eighty pounds and had also become a bookworm. This was a fantastic combination guaranteed to make you really popular in a school of mostly big fat idiots. Danny was a smart kid, and a funny one too. Where I tried to hide and be quiet, he was always drawing attention to himself, and by extension, to me. Danny was the first to pipe up about the quality of the lunch in the cafeteria. He was the loudest to snort in class whenever a teacher said something ridiculous. He just couldn't help himself and was at his worst in those classes where he knew more than the teacher did. He would raise his hand and wave it wildly until he was finally called on and he'd say,

"Actually, that isn't quite right".

Then he would proceed to revise the lecture accordingly until the teacher made him shut up. He knew more about history, politics, other cultures, religions, science and literature than anybody else, it seemed. The one thing he didn't know much about was sports, and Mr. Stones, the gym teacher, never let him forget it.

"I've heard about you", he informed Danny menacingly in front of everybody. "You're the kid who always knows better. Am I right? Am I right? Am I right?"

He'd get in front of Danny's face and splutter and spit like a sergeant in the army. Stones was a flat-topped, boulder-shaped lump of a man with bad breath and a worse mentality. He had a system of counting where everything was measured in laps around the gym in winter, or around the track the rest of the year. If you forgot your special socks, two laps. If you forgot your special shorts, four laps. If you spoke when you were not being spoken to, ten laps. He had most of the kids running around in circles most of the time, but especially Danny and me. He called us "The Wheat Twins", and thought it was very funny. It was a joke on the crackers called Wheat Thins, because we were both skinny, and then there were two of us, so the Thins became Twins. I gave him points for trying to be witty, but I hated that man. He singled us out for extra punishment, I'm sure of it. Neither of us was able to perform to his standards. We couldn't climb the rope to the ceiling. We couldn't vault over the horse. We couldn't hit any target with any ball.