Chapter 19
Roland Greenway was paralyzed from the waist down the night Aubrey Lam hit him with her car, which she was using to drive to Sutter Breedlove's window brothel despite being extremely taken by Roland.
There's nobody in the cafeteria Monday morning who isn't talking about it. The story of what went down varies. Everybody seems to agree on one thing: Something super gay was going on when Roland Greenway went into Sutter Breedlove's window and came out of the house in his underwear.
Aubrey's not at school. Darren looks shaken when I walk past him, and I don't know if that's because Roland tried to get with Sutter or because his sister is going to need therapy for the rest of her life.
Still, everywhere I walk, I feel everybody's eyes on me, like they know I'm responsible. Yes, the IntegriTruth Students group looks incredibly stupid right now, and maybe I've saved the musical from getting shut down. But I feel worse right now than I would have if it did get canceled.
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When I'm working on homework before the sun sets, I see a tall, built lady in a spaghetti-strap top and acid-washed jeans dumping stuff on our lawn. She looks familiar to me. I run to the garage to tell Dinah.
“What is it? We're trying to record here,” she says.
“There's a woman out front throwing stuff on our lawn.”
She and Clint look at each other with knowing faces and sprint out of the garage.
I follow them to the front yard. Upon closer inspection, the lady looks like Clint's wife, Brenda.
An older man is helping her pull out a glazed coffin with all four makeup-clad members of KISS painted on it. They roll it onto the lawn.
“Babe, why are you doing this?” Clint says.
“Don't call me that word ever again,” she says with burning eyes. She drags a big box out the back and kicks it over, spilling out a mountain of guns. “And your guns, since you're so good at shooting your shot!”
I pick up one that almost looks like a toy and inspect it. Clint shouts that it's a flamethrower and orders me to put it back down.
“Whoa-ly shit,” I say, and drop it into the grass.
“Oh, and these!” She dumps a bag full of small and thin foiled packages on top of the guns. “Your gas station pills that you spent your whole two-thousand-dollar scratch-off ticket on!”
I pick up one of the packages. It's called POWWOW! and it's got a drawing of a ripped Native American chief with a campfire in front of his crotch underneath a slogan that reads “Be the pride of your tribe!” The back of it mentions a word I've never seen before: “aphrodisiac.”
“Aph-rodis-iac? Is this like tobacco or something?” I ask. It's always weird when we use Native people to sell stuff, considering everything we did to them. Dinah swats it out of my hand.
Brenda cackles and points at Clint. “Aph-RO-disiac! They're boner pills! Your mom's got him taking every five-dollar love potion from here to Mexico because he can't get it up himself!”
As always, my curiosity has been met with instant regret.
Dinah laughs. “He must have bought those for you, honey, because I don't need pills to get a man interested in me!”
I shudder. “Hey, great. I'm gonna go set myself on fire now,” I say, and start to walk back into the house.
“Of course you don't!” Brenda says. “You're the real deal as far as swamp hookers go. You smell like the four a.m. shift at Silk Lotus Cabaret!”
Dinah lunges at her, so I run back and grab her by her shirt before she inflicts maximum damage on this woman who's entirely blameless, as far as I'm concerned.
Brenda gets a better look at my face and does a double take. “Hey! You're that kid who stole my lawn gnome, aren't you? It all makes sense now. You're a whole family of thieves! All of you deserve each other!”
I resent that last statement.
She runs back into her van crying. As it rolls off, Dinah gives it a few kicks on the bumper before it speeds away.
Clint nods at his KISS coffin. “Mind if I stay here for a few nights?”
Behold my fate.