In Ealing, a town where nothing ever happens and anyone who doesn’t live here is only passing through—either in one direction toward Waterloo or Cedar Falls, or in the other direction, toward Iowa City—there is a gas station/peanut-brittle-and-venison-jerky shop/petting zoo called Bill and Carol’s. The peanut brittle and deer jerky are not made there, even though the owners pretend that they are, and the petting zoo is the dumbest thing I have ever seen in my life. All the animals except three have died. The three animals in the Bill and Carol’s Peanut Brittle and Jerky Petting Zoo that are still alive are a desert tortoise, a Chihuahua with three legs, and a twenty-four-foot-long Malaysian reticulated python. The python would not eat the tortoise because of its shell, and the Chihuahua is very nimble, more so than the other animals that used to be part of the zoo’s collection.
So that day, at approximately the same time that my naked thirteen-year-old butt was being stared at by my mom and dad and a bunch of strangers in the emergency room of Ealing’s Angel of Mercy Lutheran Hospital, Bill and Carol’s twenty-four-foot-long Malaysian reticulated python, which was named Eddie, escaped from their woeful petting zoo and made its way down Onondaga Street, into Crazy Hat Lady’s front yard.
Naturally, Crazy Hat Lady’s long-haired wiener dog barked, yapped, and flung glistening strands of saliva. The other dog—the one that had bitten me—had been carted off to the dog pound to think about what he’d done for forty-eight hours. But Crazy Hat Lady, on hearing the commotion in her yard, assumed that the annoying runt who liked to torment her poor dogs had come back, running on the path beside her yard, which is what the little fucker liked to do.
She was wearing a lavender cloche with what looked like a bow tie pinned to its band. Her big mistake, besides choosing a green frock, was making an attempt to wrestle her long-haired wiener dog away from Eddie, who coiled his elm tree of a body around and around and around Crazy Hat Lady.
When I read about what had happened on Onondaga Street, I felt a little bit guilty, but only a little. Had I caused it by sheer will? Yeah, pretty sure I had.
Over the next two years, after what happened to the others—Camaro Douchebag, Unfriendly Bicycle Meth Head, Perverted Angry Substitute Teacher, and a few others—I came to recognize the fact that I was Ealing Iowa’s Little Angel of Death. It only took one little trespass on their part, and I would think, You should die, Camaro Douchebag, or Unfriendly Bicycle Meth Head, or whoever—and not just die, but die in the most strangely unpredictable manner imaginable, like death by space junk, for example, which is what hit Perverted Angry Substitute Teacher when he was driving in his convertible Fiat, which is a fleet vehicle for perverts.
Every last one of them died. I didn’t ask why or how I controlled their fates.
I just did.
Which is why I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why Steven Kemple would not die.
DON’T BE AN IDIOT, JULIAN
The Friday after Steven Kemple pulled something big enough to deserve a name and birth certificate from his mouth and smeared it on my Herbert Hoover High School cross-country team polo shirt in Mr. Kang’s biology class, Mom and Dad went to Minneapolis for three days.
“You know the rules, Julian,” my dad told me before they both kissed me on the forehead and climbed into the Prius.
Of course, it didn’t matter what the rules were. I could break every one of them, leave bloody corpses strewn throughout the living room, and Mom and Dad wouldn’t even notice. This is probably foreshadowing.
Mom, who did not wear hats, slid her window down and waved. “And call us every night!”
They gave me permission to have a party. But let me be clear: “party” to a skinny, dorky fifteen-year-old from Ealing, Iowa, named Julian Powell meant my best friend, Denic, was allowed to come over and spend the night, and we’d stay up late eating pizza and playing the dorkiest, most violent video game that was our current obsession, which was called Battle Quest: Take No Prisoners.
Denic came over at five. The delivery guy from Stan’s Pizza, a senior named Scott Neufeld, who was also on the Hoover High cross-country team, knocked on the door when Denic and I were about an hour into Battle Quest: Take No Prisoners.
I thought it was odd that Denic had ordered four pizzas from Stan’s. We usually couldn’t even finish one.
“Are you starving or something?” I said.
Denic carried the stack of pizza boxes into the living room.
“No. You’ll never guess what I did,” Denic said.
“Lost a bet that involved making an entire pair of pants out of four extra-large Stan’s pizzas?” I guessed.
“No,” Denic said. “I invited Kathryn and Amanda over. And they said yes.”
“Did they tell you they eat a lot?”
“No. I just—Don’t be an idiot, Julian.”
I will admit that it was simultaneously thrilling and terrifying to think of being alone in my house on a Friday night with Kathryn Huxley and Amanda Flores.
“Why did you invite them?” I asked.
“Are you out of your mind?”
I was certain Denic’s question was purely rhetorical.
“But I’m in pajama bottoms and a T-shirt,” I pointed out to the fully dressed Denic. In fact, it was just at that moment that two things happened: first, the doorbell rang, which is not really foreshadowing because you already know who rang it, and it was someone named either Kathryn Huxley or possibly Amanda Flores; and second, I not only realized that Denic was fully dressed, but that he was dressed nice, like school-dance nice, which is something a fifteen-year-old guy would never notice about his best friend unless he found himself in a situation where he was embarrassingly underdressed in the impending presence of two very beautiful and smart, popular fifteen-year-old girls.
“You fucker,” I said.
Denic waved his hand dismissively. “They’ll think it’s sexy.”
“Then you should put on pajamas, too.”
“Don’t be an idiot. You know I sleep in my boxers.”
“I’ll lend you some of mine.”
The doorbell rang again while Denic and I argued about fashion and sleepwear.
Denic repeated the mantra of the evening. “Don’t be an idiot, Julian. Answer the door.”
Amanda Flores laughed at me. “Don’t tell me this is a pajama party. What are you? In fourth grade?”
I was pretty sure those were rhetorical questions.
And my pajama bottoms had 1953 Chevy pickups on them.
“No. I. Um. Always dress like this. Um. When I . . .”
Denic pushed past me and opened the door all the way so that Kathryn Huxley and Amanda Flores could see that he was dressed like a tenth grader, as opposed to a shoeless fourth grader with little red trucks on his pajamas.
He said, “Hi, Kathryn! Hi, Amanda! Are you hungry? We got Stan’s. Come in!”
I kind of hated Denic at that exact moment, but not the kind of hate that would cause him to be crushed by a reticulated python, or end up strangled by a Windbreaker that got pinched in the rubber rail of an escalator, which is what happened last April to Camaro Douchebag the day he intentionally splashed me with mud when I was running. And, like I said, it’s perfectly okay for best friends to hate each other from time to time.
It wasn’t the kind of hate I had for Steven Kemple.
Kathryn and Amanda followed the very nicely dressed Denic into my living room.
Kathryn said, “Are your parents gone?”
She sounded so sexy and daring when she asked it. I nearly passed out, which would have been super embarrassing.
I managed to squeak out an answer. “Yes. They went to Minneapolis till Sunday.”
“Nice socks,” Amanda said. “Hey, aren’t you the kid who got handcuffed to the drinking fountain in his underwear at Bloomer Park when we were in sixth grade?”