Please Ignore Vera Dietz by A. S. King Read Free Book Online

Before I take off, I look back at the house. A bunch of football guys have lined up in the bay window and are mooning me. Raised middle fingers fill the spaces between them. I can’t lie. There are parts of me that want to blow the house up right now. There are parts of me that would laugh while the whole lot of them burned. My shoulder, where the penny hit me, is throbbing and hot. I reach under my seat and grope around for the cold glass. Drink, anyone?

HISTORY—AGE TWELVE
    The summer after my mother ran off with the bald podiatrist in the convertible, Charlie Kahn’s dad let him build a tree house. Even though I knew Charlie wanted to do it himself, he called it our project and our tree house. I think it was his way of trying to help me through a hard time.
    His dad bought him a bunch of supplies the week school ended—lengths of two-by-four, pulleys and screws, and sheets of weather-treated plywood—but Charlie didn’t choose a tree for three whole weeks. We walked around the woods between our houses and emerged covered in ticks and scratches to eat lunch, and then we dove back in. I asked Charlie what was taking him so long.
    “The Great Hunter needs to approve,” he said, then scribbled something on a small napkin and shoved it into his pocket.
    Half an hour later, Charlie told me that my asking him about the tree every five minutes was pressuring him, so he asked me to leave him alone for a week. Sounds harsh, but he meant well. I think he needed space to be eccentric, and he was driving me up a wall with all that “spirit of the Great Hunter” bullshit.
    We were twelve. Old enough to just pick a tree already.
    This was the summer my father stopped renting the office in town and moved his desk and filing cabinets into the spare downstairs bedroom that my mother used to use for peace yoga and forgiveness meditation, which apparently didn’t work out so well.
    This was also the first summer I convinced Dad to let me volunteer at the adoption center inside Zimmerman’s Pet Store at the Pagoda Mall. This was hard for him, because it was completely against his nature to care about pets. It wasn’t that he was heartless or cruel or anything like that. Dad just isn’t an animal person. He’d hated every single time I’d dragged him into Zimmerman’s as a kid to look at the hamsters or the puppies. When I’d nag him about getting something fluffy to cuddle, he’d show me on paper how much money it cost to keep a pet, and point out that kids my age were going hungry all over the world. “I think they could use four grand a year more than a dog could,” he’d say.
    But he must have realized that summer that I was different than him—and that his coldheartedness was only making me worse. I loved animals. Partly because he didn’t and had denied me one, and partly because it’s in the manual. What twelve-year-old girl doesn’t daydream about nurturing a puppy or a kitten? What twelve-year-old girl whose mother just walked out doesn’t want a companion who loves her no matter what happens? So he helped me fill out the volunteer application, shelled out ten bucks for a purple volunteer T-shirt, and drove me down to the store one day a week, which was the maximum I was allowed to be there, because I was only twelve. I loved it. All of it. I loved the adoption people, who rescued animals and found them good homes. I loved the pet store and Mr. Zimmerman and his wall of exotic aquarium fish. He had a gray parrot who talked and sat on a perch by the register and would make phone-ringing sounds so accurately that none of us could tell if the phone was really ringing or not.
    My first day volunteering, I took care of three Old English sheepdog puppies that had been rescued from one of those houses where crazy people have too many pets until their neighbors complain about the smell or the noise. I bathed them and brushed them and helped the visiting vet nurse apply lotion to their over-scratched flea bites. It