Reality Boy

As I walk by Hannah on my way to register #7, I say, “Oh, and nice touch writing ass**le on my dashboard. Your maturity is oozing. Maybe you need to spend less time analyzing me and more time asking why you’d vandalize my car.”

“Because you were being an ass**le,” she says.

I turn around at register #3. “All depends how you look at it. Because from my side, it was the person writing on my car who was being the ass**le. All I did was tell you the truth,” I say. “It’s not my fault if you can’t handle it.”

“Dude, that’s what I was doing. Telling you the truth,” she says. More tears in her eyes.

“You don’t know anything about me, Hannah. Nothing,” I say, and I walk to #7. As luck would have it, the employees come to buy their pregame food and I ring them up and get busy while Hannah gets some time to sulk. If nothing else, I hope she’s learned that playing head games with a kid whose whole life is a hellacious head game is a bad idea.

I always forget how bad Dollar Night sucks. We sell out of our four hundred hot dogs before third period. Before we do, we have this crotchety old man telling us that the hot dog is cold and we tell him no, just the bun is cold and he says that the cold bun is making the hot dog cold and that we should steam our rolls and that he’d like to return a half-eaten hot dog for his dollar back.

Roger has a name for this kind of thing when he’s in therapy mode. He calls it priority confusion. This guy is so worked up over the temperature of his hot dog that he can’t see how unreasonable he’s being about returning a half-eaten hot dog.

We all have priority confusion throughout the day. Some have it more than others, I guess.

This brings me to Roger’s lessons about the high road. Not only did I have to give up the words of anger—should, deserve, etc.—but also I had to start owning my shit. So, for example, I have no trouble admitting that I bit Tasha’s hand last Saturday. I’m not sorry about it. Frankly, in the case of calling Hannah a brainwashed moron today, I’m also not sorry about it. But as Roger so cleverly points out, just appearing to be on the high road puts you on it. And so I know that part of my head game with Hannah will be to apologize first. That way it’s her problem and no longer my problem. Roger calls that cleaning the slate.

There is a lull before we start closing down the stand and I go to Hannah and she looks at me with her mean face and I say, “I know I’m hard to talk to sometimes. I know I go off into my own world. I do that on purpose.” I shift in my shoes a little because her expression hasn’t changed. “Because I don’t trust anyone because—uh—you know. People aren’t really trustworthy and they bring up my past and shit and it’s not very comfortable.”

She doesn’t say anything.

“So I’m sorry I said that at lunch, but there are a lot of people who believe what they saw on TV and I don’t want you to be one of them, okay? And at some point, whenever it hits you that you were wrong, you can feel free to apologize for vandalizing my car,” I say. Then I go out to the condiment stand and start to haul over the big containers of ketchup, mustard, and barbecue sauce.

Dollar Night crowds are slobs. I had to come out here twice tonight and clear off their mess, and now it’s filled again—mostly with hot dog wrappers. There are trash cans in every direction, but they just leave them here like this is acceptable behavior.

And if anyone knows about acceptable behavior, it’s me.

41

SCRUBBING THE HOT dog roller tonight is a long job made for someone with a lot of upper-body strength. That’s me. By the time I’m finished and taking the grease tray to the sink, everything else has been done and Register #4 Guy is about to start mopping. Hannah has taken off her PEC Center Food Service shirt and is standing there in her punk rock black sleeveless T-shirt that says UP YOURS on the front.

As I walk by her with the clean and dry tray for the roller, I say, “You want a ride home tonight or is your dad coming to pick you up?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” she asks.

I keep walking. I’m the clean one now. I made my apology and owned my shit. So I replace the tray, grab my coat from the little cubby next to register #7, and go out the door to the bathroom, where I pee, wash my hands, and check my face for any stray grease or barbecue sauce.

On my way out of the bathroom, I bump right into someone familiar and I can’t place her until she smiles and holds out her arms for a hug and then I flinch because of my ribs. She looks at me and asks me how I am.

“I’m good,” I say. I say this loud enough so that Hannah can hear, because I can feel her watching me.

“Good,” Hockey Lady says. “I worry about you.”

“I’ll be seventeen in a week. Only one more year until I’m out of that house,” I say.

She nods. “What did you ask for, for your birthday?”

“I asked for a gas card. That way I can save for college instead of putting all my money from this job into my gas tank.”

“Practical,” she says. “You take after your father.”

If staying married to a neglectful, magazine-page-turning nutcase is practical, sure, I think.

She hugs me again. “Well, if I don’t see you before next week, happy birthday, Gerald. Seventeen,” she says, and shakes her head. “I’m so glad you made it.”

“Me, too,” I say.

“I had my doubts,” she says. And that’s what’s left echoing in my head as she walks away. I had my doubts.

I take off my PEC Center T-shirt as I walk toward the door of stand five and I can feel my other shirt go up with it, which means Hannah is getting a full view of my very muscular and bruised upper body and I take my time straightening myself out.

I find Beth and ask her if she needs any more help closing the stand.

“Nope,” she says.

“You sure?” We smile at each other. I’m pretty sure she knows what I’m doing.

“Everything okay?” she asks.

“Totally.”

She smiles. “Don’t look now, but Hannah is waiting for you at the door,” she says. “Want me to put you on register number two tomorrow?”

“Seven,” I say. Very seriously. “I’m always on seven.”

I say good night and tiptoe over the mopped parts of the floor and head toward the door and there’s Hannah, just like Beth said.

“Hey,” I say, as if she didn’t write ASSHOLE on my dashboard.