Friday, February 15, 2008

Valentine's Day

Yesterday my locker vomited out not only my spare fleas but an envelope. Juice was in the middle of saying that maybe if she wasn’t in her pretty-in-pink hunchback phase she might be able to get a date. I was saying, “No way. You’re too ugly. Unless you won some beauty pageant for pear-shaped chics you couldn’t get a date with a chicken muscle. Hark! What’s this?” I picked up the vomited envelope and opened it.

“Maybe if my lipstick didn’t always match my clothes--” Juice was babbling on.

Inside the envelope was a valentine from Brat, the school’s most logical dreamboat and captain of the fishing team, saying that my face was as lovely as a basketball with peas for eyes and that he loved me so much he painted half the school yellow. “I hate yellow,” I squealed, hugging my inflated rubber cheeks with my hands, “but I love him! Hearts are floating around my head, Juice!”

“Maybe if I smile provocatively at him he’ll love me too,” she said, straightening her phase-enforced hunchback posture. “I’m desperate.”

Always true to my best friend, I met up with Brat outside after school and told him, “Brat, I love your card, but you’ll have to share your love with Juice too.” I was confident enough in his logical love to manipulate it in that way.

“Are you nuts?” he said, backing into a protruding brick corner of the building. “That pretty-in-pink hunchback? I’d rather carry books in my fly. Observe!” With that he snatched the valentine from my hand, shoved his books in said fly, and ran away from me, saying, “This is uncomfortable. Hey you! Girl with the nice butt! This is for you. I hope you like guys who wear purple pants.”

“He unzipped his fly sorta-kinda in your presence,” Juice commented. “At least you can remember.”

I told her to shut up. What made matters worse, once I got home I found that Mom had gotten her hair redone, so my sobbing refrain became: “Your hair looks like snakes, and why is my stupid cat smiling? I should have left it at the pawn shop. Oh Mommy, Brat loved me for a moment.”

“I’m sick of snake jokes,” Mom said. “I like my hair.”

Just then the doorbell rang, but it was only my nerdy boyfriend.

“You’re not Brat,” I told him. “Leave me alone, Jiff.”

“I don’t know how,” he shrugged. “But guess what? I got my palms read today and I’m going to win a shoelace! Why don’t we hitchhike our way to the Shoelace Lovers Festival downtown? They have shoe-flavored ice cream floats.”

“With shoelace straws?” I exclaimed. “I’m so there!”

So we spent the evening having staring contests over a shared shoe-flavored float until my eyes dried up. I think Jiff was spitting into the float and I was sucking up his spit.