Chapter 3: The Mincer Meeting, Part Two
I still can’t decide if my reason for dropping out was a dumb one or not. Brenda said it was, because of course she did. Living next door, she was usually the first one I told anything, even before the Mincers got it. The boys didn’t know that, and I think they would have been salty if they did, because Brenda wasn’t a member of the Mincer Meeting. Just a “satellite member” (Mario’s phrase).
After Barry dropped out, the idea started floating around my own head, with visions of Miranda mixed in. Brenda saw me moping around my backyard one Saturday morning and came over to ask what was wrong (probably hoping there was a chance to roast me). In one big mumble-sigh I told her how I felt, and she replied, “that’s just moronic, Quigley! You can’t put the brakes on your entire life. Miranda wouldn’t want that. If she was here, she’d say you’re being moronic too.”
The way Miranda died didn’t help Brenda’s case. She was a closet drinker. One night, the week before school started, she drank too much and died in her sleep. By herself, in her room, alone. I existed, so she had no reason to be alone.
I went through all the things you go through when you lose somebody to demons you didn’t know they had. I said she doesn’t drink, I never saw her drunk, I never saw any alcohol in her room, and that somehow proved she couldn’t have been an alcoholic. Before I got crazy enough to start blaming a government conspiracy, her parents told me Miranda had been seeing a drug and alcohol abuse counselor in Springfield for six months. She never told me anything about it.
When Brenda told me what Miranda would tell me from the grave or the great beyond, I shot back, “if she was going through something so terrible she needed to numb herself to death, you can’t tell me she’d be encouraging me to put some pep in my step!”
Brenda glared at me, but there was something off about it, like she was taken aback. Just a little. Normally I’d have been happy to get one over on her, but I was too surprised to see that steely look of hers go just a little soft. Plus, I don’t think I really believed what I said about Miranda, and what she would and wouldn’t say if she could. I knew she’d tell me to live my life. But she was gone forever, and she couldn’t.
Even with all her hard looks and logic, Brenda couldn’t get it in my head that Miranda wouldn’t want me to give up. She eventually just gave up trying to convince me, and said, “if you argue with a brick wall, the brick wall isn’t the one wasting its time.”
If Brenda wasn’t so tough it would be hard to take her seriously when she chews you out or goes on a rant. She wears this steel dental device on her upper teeth that makes her S’s sound slobbery and kind of gross. But when she’s standing her ground and not giving an inch, you (almost) can’t hear that weird slurping noise her words make.
Right around the time Mario’s family came to America, Brenda’s family moved in next door to me, all the way from Duluth, Minnesota. Me and Dad imitated Mr. and Mrs. Boggis’ Yankee way of saying “Minna-soooda” for a week straight (but only at home). It was weird to have neighbors, because their house had been empty for three years, and on the other side of us there was a weed-ridden lot that had been vacant since before I was born. When I was a kid, I’d go over and examine the remains of the concrete foundation of a house that was there thirty years ago, like I was an archaeologist looking for clues about whoever once lived there.
The Boggises showed up just before the start of freshman year, so for the first couple weeks of high school I didn’t realize the new girl lived right next door. The first time I saw Brenda outside of school was a blustery day, one of those days where the sky is brown and everything looks like you’re trying to wake up from a weird dream. I was in the front yard, trying to dig the broken mailbox post out of the ground and take it inside so it didn’t blow away and go through somebody’s window. I’d noticed the new neighbors had one of those big old style Buicks, but I hadn’t seen who drove it yet. That day, when the huge puke-yellow thing pulled into the Boggises’ driveway, I saw a pair of knitted eyebrows and glaring eyes just above the steering wheel.
This big moose of a guy in a sleeveless shirt, with huge biceps, was working on a more modern car in the driveway. He’d just scooted underneath it when the Buick lurched up behind it. The door flew open and I instantly recognized the short new girl I’d seen at school. Her strawberry blonde hair was blowing all over the place, but I knew it was her from her hunchback posture. She marched right up to the guy’s legs sticking out under the other car. Even with the wind, I could hear the girl go off.
“Leslie! You left your stupid weed in the glove box!” the girl shouted. Not screamed, like a girl, but shouted, like a drill sergeant. “What if I’d been pulled over? I’m not going to jail like white trash!”
Geez. Harsh, I thought.
The big guy scooted out from under the car and sat up. He looked up at the girl, then up at the sky, and let out a big breath. “I’m incredibly sorry, Brenda,” he said. “This is completely on me.”
I had to strain to hear him, not just for the wind, but he was talking so slowly and using words that aren’t suited for noisy, windy weather, like incredibly and completely.
“That was inconsiderate and muddleheaded of me. I just forgot it was there.”
For a moment the girl just glared and didn’t say anything back. I wouldn’t either, if the person I was so furious with had such a calm response. But the girl decided she didn’t need words, pulled a Ziploc bag of green-brown gunk out of her pocket, and opened it up in the path of the wind. The big dude stood up, cool and collected, and wiped his hands on a rag. He just watched his weed scatter in the wind and disappear. I was kind of dumbstruck by the guy’s composure, more than the girl’s rage. People who like weed really, really like it, and seeing his little stash disintegrate like that must have been a bummer.
But he just shook his head and said, “I deserved that. Well...are we even?” He made a fist and held it out in front of him.
The girl groaned, but she bumped his fist and turned to go inside. When she opened the door she happened to turn and see me standing there gawking. I was too amazed by the whole scene to just go right back to digging up the mailbox. When the girl saw me she formed an awkward half smile, gave a quick wave, and disappeared inside.
Over the next little while I’d catch little pieces of things going on next door. Like how Brenda would call her parents Mark and Tisha in this emphasized tone. And how sometimes Mark and Tisha would literally flinch when she said something really blunt on the way to the car, like she’d made a fist and reared back with it.
After I talked to Brenda a few times, I looked up the population of Duluth, Minnesota, and it was something like 80,000. I just figured she resented having to leave the big city for a little town of 5,000.
The night Brenda decided she could tolerate the Mincer Meeting (we didn’t have that name yet) was the night the doomsday comet passed by Earth. It was March 15th. I remember the exact date because everybody in town was half joking that the world was going to end March 15th, so everybody should throw their Saint Patrick’s Day parties early. Maybe that should have told me something. The news said it could be seen from our particular spot on Earth for only an hour late that night.
Brenda had been my neighbor for eight months by then. Usually if you’ve lived next to somebody that long you get to be at least friendly, even if you’re not friends. But Brenda still had an unimpressed look when she waved at me, in the yard or at school. But she waved, and she didn’t have to, so there was that.
The Mincers were on my roof with Mario’s telescope (of course he had a telescope) so we could get a good look at the comet. Mario wasn’t concerned about it crashing into Earth because he said that’s not how the Bible says the world is going to end. In between our chattering we heard a crunching, pounding noise that got closer and closer. We realized it was somebody walking (stomping, really) down the gravel alley behind the house. Barry shined his flashlight on the alley, and we saw it was Brenda.
The second her face was illuminated, Barry yelped and switched off the light.
“What are you doing up there?” she called.
“The end of the world!” I called back. If anything can bring people together, it’s the end of the world. So I took a chance and said, “you should come up!”
Dave elbowed me and whispered, “she’s gonna shank us!”
Barry turned his flashlight back on and we saw Brenda’s scowl had disappeared. She looked like she was thinking it over, if she really wanted to spend her last moments alive with the group of dudes she always eyeballed at school like we owed her money.
“It’s a beautiful view up here!” Mario called.
“Don’t say it like that!” Barry said. “It sounds like we’re looking through her windows or something!”
“We would never look through your windows!” Mario assured her.
Brenda rolled her eyes and walked into my backyard. She started climbing the ladder, extra gingerly. I thought she was afraid it would fall, so I knelt down and held it where it wasn’t shaking. I swear her face was almost friendly when she looked up.
“I have to be careful,” she said. “I fell off a ladder and broke my pelvis two summers ago.”
Barry screwed up his face. “Chicks don’t have pelvises.”
Halfway up the ladder, Brenda looked up in total disgust. “I know Amish people who know more about female anatomy!”
“Yeesh!” Barry exclaimed. “Big knock on Amish people out of nowhere!”
Dave chimed in. “Name one Amish person you know.”
Brenda froze when she got to the top of the ladder, before she had to make that awkward step from the rungs to the roof. Me and Mario went over and we both took her by a hand (we asked first). I think that was it. The moment she realized we weren’t complete slobs.
She had to say something, though, to make us forget we’d just seen her so nervous, and that we’d just held her hands.
“So, do you guys always make out up here?”
Barry wasn’t bothered. “It would be a privilege to make out with these dudes. If I was gay.”
“I’m kidding,” Brenda muttered. She carefully walked up the A-frame of the roof and looked into the telescope. “So, when are we gonna die?”
“The comet is supposed to be visible between 10:15 and 11:15,” Mario said. “So you have ten minutes to repent.”
Brenda looked at him and raised her eyebrow.
“I’m kidding.” Mario turned away and pretended to adjust the telescope.
I got up the nerve to ask Brenda what she was doing walking in the alley so late.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Are you sure?” Mario asked. “You have some red puffiness around your eyes.”
Brenda looked like she could have killed him.
Dave didn’t see the icy look, and said, “just keep the story under five minutes. If I wanted to die listening to a woman yap about her problems I’d call my aunt Jo.”
Brenda turned and glared a dozen daggers.
“Easy. I’m kidding. Really. What’s up?”
“It’s not important.”
I said, “if it’s important enough to make you walk in a dark alley at night, it’s important enough to talk about.” I was trying to come up with something encouraging, and that was the best I could do.
Then, Barry kicked the ladder over. The clang it made when it landed probably woke up the neighborhood. I thought it was a little overkill.
“Now. You’re stuck up here, so you might as well tell us what’s wrong.”
Before we could yell at Barry for trapping us on the roof, Brenda did it for us. “That was retarded!”
Mario scrunched up his face like he was mulling something over. “Maybe we shouldn’t use that word,” he said.
“We?” Brenda snapped.
“Well, we...the four of us...we’ve been kind of debating about it for a week,” Mario said meekly.
(We really had, for some reason I don’t remember.)
“I don’t mean to tell you what to do,” he murmured. “We’re almost strangers, after all.”
“Yes we are, and you want me to tell you about my problems.”
“I don’t wanna be a PC snowflake,” Barry grumbled. “‘Retarded’ is fine, as long as you’re not talking about a special needs kid. It should be okay to say it because now it means dumb, not disabled. It’s irrelevant to disabled people.”
Dave took a tin container of Altoid mints out of his pocket and popped one. “How about ‘Altoided’?” he said.
“What?”
“Instead of retarded. We can say Altoided. Like a compromise word. And if anybody overhears us say it in public, they won’t know what it means, and we won’t get waffle-stomped by somebody who’s got a special needs kid.”
Barry: “But then you’d be saying anybody who eats Altoids is a moron. You’d be making ‘Altoid’ a slur against people who like mints.”
Dave: “Now who sounds like a PC snowflake?”
Brenda: “What...the...?”
Me: “So, Brenda, what brings you out this late?”
Barry and Dave stopped their bickering. All four of us were staring at Brenda now, so she pretty much had to tell us what was wrong. She made this low growl and took a deep breath. “Do you know Jake Kenyon and Lindsey Brown?”
We all did. They were known around school for being big fans of inhalants.
“Well, they invited me to Lindsey’s house so I could finish The Last of Us. I never got to see the finale because we were busy moving.”
Mario: “They watch The Last of Us?”
Brenda: “Yeah.”
Mario: “Hm. Seems like kind of a highbrow show for those two...no, I shouldn’t say that. That’s mean.”
Barry: “No it’s not. Those two are duuummmb.”
Brenda: “Yes. Yes they are. So I get there, and they take me into the garage and start huffing glue. I didn’t even know people really do that! Like licking toads. You hear about it, but you think it’s just an urban legend. Do people really do that in these tiny towns?!”
Dave: “I have an uncle who literally stole a toad from a pet shop so he could lick it.”
Brenda: “Well, anyway, they tried to get me to do it, and I said it was...Altoided...and they got offended and told me to get lost. They said I was being ‘holier-than-thou.’”
Me: “Yikes. That sucks. So...I know this isn’t the most important thing, but what made you want to hang out with those two goons anyway?”
Barry: “Yeah, I mean, you seem way too smart to be hanging around with those two.”
Brenda made a sour face. “I do?”
Mario: “I heard you’re in the AP bio class.”
Me: “We have English Lit the same period. You finished To Kill a Mockingbird in two days, and Mr. Simonson got mad at you for it.”
Brenda: “It was easy to finish because it’s an overrated book. It’s a white woman’s fantasy about white people being progressive heroes.”
Barry coughed. “PC snowflake...”
Me: “Right...so yeah, what brought you together with those two?”
Brenda growled again. “I overheard Lindsey tell Jake she didn’t have any money for lunch, and he didn’t either. So I gave them ten dollars. Okay?” She ran all the words together like she was confessing to a sin. “Don’t tell anybody. I’m not a charity organization. So anyway, we started talking after that, and they seemed like...I don’t know. Like they could use a positive influence.”
The four of us snuck looks at each other, but didn’t say anything.
“So I was helping them with homework, stuff like that.”
(None of us said anything again.)
“That went on for like two weeks. Then they invited me over tonight and, yeah. Huffing glue.”
Mario: “Well, I’m sorry they treated you that way when you refused to partake. But you should be proud of yourself for turning it down.”
Dave: “You ever seen styrofoam melt in a microwave? That’s what glue does to your brain. Another two years, Jake and Lindsey are both gonna be eating through a straw. They already kind of drool when they smile. Didn’t you notice?”
Brenda looked just slightly embarrassed. “Yes. I noticed.”
She sat down on the pitch of the roof. “I guess I was just eager to have friends again. Like an idiot. I don’t really talk to my friends in Minnesota anymore.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Well, I guess it’s more that they don’t talk to me anymore. Everybody changed. It happens.”
Barry: “Wellllll there’s four of us, and we don’t sniff glue.”
Me: “I take a whiff of the air when I pass by the gas station. Gasoline just smells really good. But I don’t hang around like a troll and inhale the fumes. I keep going my way.”
Brenda’s shoulders kind of raised up like she was cringing. She growled again. “I just didn’t bother introducing myself or whatever, because you saw the whole thing with Leslie, my brother. The weed incident. I just thought, that guy definitely thinks I’m a psycho.”
I’d already told the boys about it, but they were savvy enough to keep quiet.
Me: “I don’t think you’re a psycho. If I thought that, I wouldn’t invite you up on my roof.”
Brenda: “Yeah, but you have protection. It’s four to one.”
Mario: “None of us would hit a lady.”
Brenda: “What, are you serious?”
Mario: “What kind of man puts his hands on a woman?”
Brenda stared at Mario like he’d just said the opposite and he’d gladly punch a woman. Whatever she would have said next was interrupted by the appearance of the doomsday comet. It looked like they do on TV. A tiny yellow-white ball of light with a glowing tail.
We knew it wasn’t really doomsday. But I think we all figured, just in case it was the end of the world, anything we said would be a dumb last thing to say, so we should just keep quiet.
That lasted about forty-five seconds until Brenda spoke up. “So, um...thank you guys for letting me hang out the last night of–”
Before she could finish a genuine, nice, heartwarming thank you (though I guess she could have been setting us up for a roasting) the comet disappeared. Just like that. We were promised an hour of this rare, amazing sight, and sixty seconds was all we got.
Brenda laughed. And her laugh was absolutely horrible. It was like a mix of a donkey and somebody’s drunk aunt. “HAAAWWW! HAW! HAW!”
When she saw how disappointed Mario was that he didn’t get a long look at the comet, and that the rest of us were so startled by that laugh, she tried to dry up and pretended to clear her throat. That’s when she knew she was stuck with us. We knew her secret, that she had the worst laugh in the world.
No sooner had I said it was a shame the world didn’t end because it meant we were stuck on the roof, we heard a shrill voice on the ground, shrieking Barry’s name. Adelia Barrymore, no more than six years old at the time, was running in the street in her pajamas. Her little flip-flops smacked the pavement and echoed down the street. This little girl had literally run a mile and a half from her and Barry’s house. She was crying like the world was really about to be decimated by a comet. When she got to my front yard she called up to Barry (she called him Christopher) and tried to tell him, between short gasping breaths, that she had a bad dream.
Barry hurried over to shimmy off the edge of the roof, but I stopped him. I stomped my feet a few times over the spot above Dad’s bedroom, and he came outside a minute or so later and put the ladder back up. I caught the look on Brenda’s face. She was beyond perplexed and her eyes were wide. She wrung her hands together like she didn’t know what to do (and what could she do?).
I wouldn’t see such a non-Brenda look on her face for two years.
It wasn’t easy getting Adelia calmed down, or anybody really, because all the power and electricity, even the phones (and the cell tower) went completely dead for twelve hours. Nobody could help pointing out that it started right after the comet passed, so it was just accepted all over town that the two must have been related. But when the power and the phones started working again late the next morning, it was like everybody forgot they ever lost it.
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