“Did you want her to move any time soon?” I asked. “Because it probably won’t happen until Christmas.”
“Ha ha, Miss Comedy.” He looked up from the pumpkin he was carving and straightened his glasses. “Nice shoes.”
“You think?” I did a little twirl in my flamingo slippers. They were so big that I had to waddle everywhere. Just like Bendomolena.
“They’re stylin’.”
“Dad, if you never say ‘stylin” again, it’ll be too soon.”
“Can I still say things are cool?”
“Not around me, please.”
“That’s cool.”
I sighed. “Where’s Mom?”
“Out buying candy for when the neighborhood kids come begging tomorrow night.”
“Um, she left you alone with the pumpkin?” My dad, well-meaning as he is, has almost been forced to retire from pumpkin carving, thanks to the dramatic and colorful Massive Blood Loss Incident of Halloween Three Years Ago. Let’s just say one should never carve a pumpkin while watching the Steelers lose.
As an answer, I got the Dad Look.
“I only ask because I love,” I told him. “How are we on Band-Aids?”
“Isn’t Victoria coming over?” Stab-stab-stab, slice.
“Any minute.” I sat down at the table and watched for signs of blood. “Y’know, I can make a tourniquet using a shoelace. I learned how in Girl Scouts.”
“I thought you dropped out of the Girl Scouts.”
“Not before the lesson on first aid. Besides, the uniforms were itchy.”
“Of course they were. How’s the pumpkin?” He turned it so I could see its triangle eyes and nose and crooked mouth. He’s a traditionalist like that. “Does it look even?”
“It’s just gonna get smashed in the street like every year,” I said as I ate some pumpkin seeds off the cookie sheet.
“Humor me, Aud.”
“Best pumpkin ever!”
“Your lack of faith is very distracting,” my dad pointed out.
I eyed the pumpkin, which had a few unintentional gashes where its ears should have been. “Believe me, Dad, I can tell.”
Victoria let herself in and came into the kitchen just as my dad accidentally shaved off one of the pumpkin’s teeth. “Hey, I thought your dad wasn’t allowed to carve pumpkins anymore.”
My dad pushed his glasses back up on his nose. “Hi, Victoria.”
“Hi, Mr. Cuttler.” My parents have asked Victoria a bajillion times to call them Henry and Carol, but she says it would feel too weird. “Still got all ten fingers?”
I waved the phone in her face by way of greeting. “Did you bring it?”
She pulled the bottle of Marvelous Magenta out of her bag. “Ready and waiting for you, my dear.”
“Dad, I’m going upstairs so we can dye Victoria’s hair. If anything happens, just remember to raise the cut above the heart, okay?”
Victoria was peering around my shoulder. “Does that pumpkin have ears?”
“Battle wound,” I told her.
“Oh. Pretty hard-core, Mr. Cuttler. I like that.”
But my dad was too busy trying to fix the pumpkin’s now-toothless grin to respond, so I grabbed her arm and pushed her toward the stairs. “Goodbye,” I told my dad. “We’re going far, far away from here.”
“Take Bendomolena with you,” he said as we trooped up the stairs, stepping over my land mass of a cat.
I love my room. Victoria loves my room, too, but she’ll never admit it. My parents don’t exactly love it, but they’ve decided to accept its fate as eternally messy. Well, not so much messy as busy. I have a very busy room. CDs are in every corner and on every surface, and there’s a bunch of cut-up magazines all over the floor, where I put them after hacking them up and making collages of all my favorite bands. I thought it would be really cool to have one whole wall be a huge collage, and about one-fourth is covered so far. I can do whatever I want in here, and sometimes when it’s the middle of the night and it feels like no one else in the world is awake but me and I’m cutting up another picture and an amazing song comes on the stereo, I could die happy.
Evan always said that my room creeped him out, that the walls were watching him or something. That’s so like him to think that everything’s watching him, waiting to see what he’ll do next. What an egomaniac. I hate him.
Victoria still hated him, too. “So…I believe it’s officially a year to the day since you met Fuckhead?”
I sighed. “You’re the most indelicate person I’ve ever met.”
“You mean except for the guy who ruined those beautiful vintage boots”—she still wasn’t over it—“and wrote a mean song about you?”
“The Song of Which We Must Not Speak,” I reminded her. “The Song That Will Die an Obscure Death and That No One Will Ever Hear Again.”
“Of course. So are you gonna burn anything in effigy to commemorate the day Ev puked on your boots? A Ken doll? Anything?”
I put on the gross latex gloves that came with the hair dye and shook the bottle a couple of times. “Nope. I have to work. You know that.”
Okay. I’ve been trying to avoid this part, but it’s not a secret anymore. It’s true. I work at an ice cream shop—excuse me, shoppe—at the mall. That in itself is not so bad, except for three things: (1) I hate the mall; (2) I hate all the customers; and (3) I’m forced to wear a bright pink hat and T-shirt that say…are you ready for this?