The S.P.E.

Chapter 6

I was doing my best to be the adorable scamp that I was by ditching my health class. The teacher was a coach who looked like she had as much sex as the average Franciscan friar. It was a sunny Friday at the end of the school year. Staying inside and watching Coach Krepsky push play on the VCR to show an antiquated film on STDs and the modern teenager would have been a crime against life. Those videos really needed an update. They still assumed the modern teenager had a pager and a Walkman.

I went down to the pier and watched the seagulls dive bomb the shore below where people threw their food and disgusting bits of... who knows what... washed ashore. People liked to throw French fries into the air and watch the gulls catch them. When I was younger I did that too, until a seagull snatched Tina's glasses off her face. It took two days of checking seagull nests and crawling though literal feet of seagull shit to get them back and by that point, none of us thought it was worth it anymore. I was trying to decide if I was going to waste the ten bucks in my pocket on riding the Zany Plane until I was sick or buying cheap saltwater taffy until I was sick when a voice caught my ear.

"And this is the wharf! We still pull in a good profit from here, year after year. Mr. Fischoeder said that he would never sell WonderWharf and he's been true to his word. Most attendants are parents with young children, the elderly, and... well see here..." Logan, leading a group of men in suits who seemed all numbers and no fun, gestured towards me when he saw me standing there. "Teenage delinquents! Well, their money is just as green and since they don't know better they may as well spend it here." The group laughed at my expense and started taking photos of the wharf with their fancy phones. My ears turned red with shame.

Those words couldn't have hit any harder than if he physically smacked me in the face. I knew he looked down on me but to say something like that in front of all those people- it stung. I thought we were at least going to be a little friendly. After all, he gave me all that money...

But he had been drunk. Maybe he didn't realize what he had done. And a guy like Logan can probably spend that much without missing it. Perhaps we weren't friendly. Well in that case I had a weapon in my arsenal he wouldn't see coming.

"Hey Logan!" I walked up to him and glared up into his stupid face. All his business-suit friends were looking at me. "Aren't you going to tell these guys about your class trip in high school?"

"What?" Logan gave me a look like I had lost my mind.

"In high school. You had a trip to Bog Harbor with your history class to see the light house." Logan's face flinched. I could tell the suits were trying to figure out what this had to do with anything and who the hell I was. "The trip where you had to stay overnight? And you had a nightmare?" With each sentence his face reached a new level of white. "Remember?"

"Shut it, Louise." He tried to usher the suits away from me. That only made me talk louder so they could hear me.

"Of course, you remember! It's the trip where you had to share a bed with Kyle Pressman, and you had a nightmare, and you woke up in the morning with the sheets soaking wet because you pissed yourself? And you- you tried to convince Kyle that it was night-sweats, but he didn't believe you and pulled back the sheets and they were yellow!" By this point I was practically yelling. Not only could the suits hear me, but so could half the wharf. "You had to bribe him with a hundred dollars not to tell anybody- don't tell me you forgot?"

Logan forced the chuckling businessmen to go over to the offices. Then he came storming back over to me. People were laughing and whispered and pointing at him. I felt pretty damn happy with myself. I smugly smiled into Logan's dark red face.

"You stupid little bitch." He literally spat when he spoke to me. I didn't give him the satisfaction of wiping my face. I was going to enjoy every moment of his rage. "How did you know that? Did Kyle squeal?"