The Bloody Souvenir by Jack Gantos Read Free Book Online

 
    T HE B LOODY S OUVENIR
    BY JACK GANTOS
    M y mother was right. I was not my own man. I was a “spineless follower” just as she had always said. I was a boy who was easily led astray. I liked hanging around with dangerous kids who were full of insanely feral ideas that ended in disaster, and I felt lucky that we had recently moved next door to the two most dangerous guys in the world, the Pagoda brothers. Frankie was a skinny, innocent-looking kid who was my age, even though he was covered with about a hundred years’ worth of bruises. We were in the same sixth-grade class, though I didn’t see him much because he mostly only showed up for lunch and to take his afternoon nap in the puke-smelling nurse’s office. Gary Pagoda was in eighth grade, but I was never sure of his age. Maybe he was fifteen or eighteen or even twenty. It was impossible to tell. He had a lot of scar tissue on his face. When I looked at his mouth full of chipped teeth, I thought he might even be twenty-five. But when you considered how he behaved, he might just have been a supersized six-year-old psychopath. One thing I did know is that he had already been to prison. The other thing I knew was that I was vastly jealous that I hadn’t been to prison, too, because that is where he got most of his manly facial wounds and body tattoos, which my mother said were “too rude for the naked eye.”
    Well, you can imagine that my mom did not want me to play with those kind of boys. In fact, she “forbid” me to play with them, especially after Gary had poured a bucket of boat fuel on top of their swimming pool and set it on fire. He made Frankie and me dive in and play like we were the survivors on a Nazi submarine that had been hit with a depth charge. He stood on the end of the diving board and threw cherry bombs into the water as we swam around under the flames. No one was seriously hurt, though Frankie temporarily lost his hearing and I only suffered a little burn from where I popped up for air and set the top of my head on fire. It was no big deal that I had a patch of hair that looked like the remains of a tiny forest fire and smelled like burned rubber. I could tell Mom was annoyed, but she was still at the point where she was hoping I would grow out of this self-destructive stage. It wasn’t until a week later when she entered my bedroom and caught me stitching up a three-inch gash over my knee that she lost her temper. I was using one of her sewing needles and some nylon fishing line I had found in the garage.
    â€œYou are becoming just like those Pagoda boys,” she said harshly.
    â€œNo, I’m not,” I replied. “I’m smart enough to know the difference between dangerous play and fun play.”
    â€œNo, you are not,” she shot right back. “You are lying to yourself. Mark my words, you’ll do something so stupid someday that even you won’t be able to deny just how Pagoda-stupid you’ve become.”
    She was right, of course, I had already become a hazard to myself, but I actually thought I could stop going over there whenever I wanted. I’m not addicted to stupidity like they are , I had said to myself. I figured I could just snap my fingers and become a whole different kind of kid—like a choirboy, or a chess genius, or a Latin scholar, but I was wrong. I could snap my fingers until the skin peeled off and I wore the raw flesh down to the bone and I wouldn’t change one little bit. In fact, I was even more stupid than they were, though I didn’t know that just yet.
    I thought I was just flirting with danger like when we made the Roman catapult out of a springy pine tree and shot each other across the front yard. I only dislocated my shoulder when I landed on a concrete yard gnome, but Mom didn’t find out because Gary popped the joint of my arm back into the socket for me. But this game didn’t mean I had totally lost my sense of good