Antsy Does Time (7 page)

So out of curiosity I asked, “What do you think a month of someone's life is worth?”

He looked me over, curling his lip like I was a bad piece of fish at the market. “A month of
your
life?” he said. “About a buck ninety-eight,” and he left, cackling to himself, profoundly amused at how I had walked right into that one.

“Well,” said Lexie, no longer peeved at me. “I think a month of your life is worth a lot more than ‘a buck ninety-eight.'” She reached out for my hand, and I moved it right into her path so she didn't have to go searching for it. She clasped it, smiling. Then she sighed and reluctantly said, “As for the kiss, my opinion, as your friend, is that it
does
mean something. There's no such thing as a ‘thank-you kiss'. At least not in high school.”

5
People Sign Their Lives Away for the Dumbest Reasons, but Don't Blame Me, I Just Wrote the Contract

I don't think it's possible not to be selfish. Of course that doesn't mean everyone's gotta be like Old Man Crawley either, but there's a little bit of selfishness in everything. Even when you give something from the bottom of your heart, you're always getting something back, aren't you? It could just be the satisfaction of making someone happy—which makes you feel better about yourself, so you can balance out whatever awful thing you did earlier in the day.

Even Howie, who gets screamed at for always buying the wrong gift for his mother, is getting something out of that; each time he gets smacked for getting flowers his mother is allergic to or something, he's left with the warm-fuzzy feeling of knowing some things never change, and his universe is all solid and stable.

My motivations were getting very muddy when it came to my so-called good deeds for Gunnar, and it was starting to feel more and more like disguised selfishness, because of the Kjersten complication.

Lexie believed that Kjersten's kiss meant something. I put a lot of stock in what she said, not just because I trusted Lexie's judgment, but because deep down, I was pretty sure it meant something, too. At the very least it was an invitation to
make
it mean something. Was it wrong to perpetrate good deeds when attention from Kjersten was one of the perks?

 
 
Thanks to Mary Ellen, the word about “time shaving” had spread quickly. She bragged to the known world about how she donated a month of her life to poor, poor Gunnar Ümlaut, and how the idea was all hers, although I may have contributed a piece of paper.

As people were not entirely stupid, they saw right through Mary Ellen and realized she was leeching off of my idea—so the next day about half a dozen people came out of the woodwork wanting to donate some of their time. Gunnar was more than happy to accept whatever months came his way, and Kjersten was sufficiently impressed.

“This is just what Gunnar needs,” she said when I showed her Mary Ellen's contract. “I don't know how to thank you.”

I could have given her some suggestions.

There was this one girl—Ashley Morales—who was clearly in love with Gunnar—even more so than most of the female student body. She wanted her month to be special. “I want my month to be his last,” she told me. “Can you make sure that he knows my month is his last?”

Since no one else had claimed the honor, I was happy to oblige.

Then there was this other guy who had come from confession, and his priest wanted him to say like fourteen thousand Hail Marys for writing obscene graffiti on the Gowanus Expressway. He negotiated it down to one month of community service. I guess the kid figured a month donated to Gunnar was just as good.

The kid was all worried about it, though, and took it even more seriously than Ashley.

“I don't want to give up a month if I'm gonna croak tomorrow or anything,” he told me, “because it means I'll owe days from last month, and I don't need that kind of grief.”

“C'mon, it's not like it's real or anything,” I remind him. “It's just to make Gunnar feel better.”

“Yeah,” he says, “but what if turns out to be real after all—like those chain e-mails you gotta forward to ten people, or you die?”

“Those aren't real!” I tell him.

“Yeah,” he says. “But how can you be sure . . . ?”

I think about that and get all uncomfortable, because I have been guilty of forwarding those stupid e-mails, too. But I usually just send them to people I don't like.

I sigh. “Okay. What if I make your contract void if you're scheduled to croak before next month? That way you won't owe any days, and you can enter the pearly gates totally free of debt.”

He thought about that some more, finally agreed, and happily went back to his priest, mission accomplished.

 
 
I have to admit, it felt good to be doing something positive for Gunnar, in spite of the fact that it hadn't brought forth a second kiss from Kjersten, regardless of how little salami I ate, or how much mouthwash I used. I think maybe her reluctance came from the picture Dewey Lopez published in the school paper of our first kiss. Luckily it wasn't on the front cover, since he also snapped a picture of Principal Sinclair coming out of the bathroom with his fly open and a piece of shirttail hanging out. Definitely front-page material. Still, the page-four article was seen by the whole school, with the unpleasant headline LOVE SKIPS A GRADE.

I don't know how it affected Kjersten's social standing, but it sure did elevate mine. Everybody wanted to know about it, but I kept quiet, because I figured Kjersten might respect a guy who didn't kiss and tell—even if that guy was one year and seven months younger than her. (Yes, I snuck into the office and checked her school record to find out exactly how much older than me she was.)

Kjersten never mentioned the article or the picture or, for that matter, the kiss. But she did continue to tell me what an entirely great guy I was, which meant another piece of Trident might only be a few days away.

“It's so, so special that you're sensitive to Gunnar's little problem,” Kjersten told me when I handed her the month Howie gave me—which was month number seven and counting.

At the time I had laughed, and wondered how she could call it “a little problem.” I'm not wondering anymore. And I'm not laughing either.

 
 
By Friday, I had gotten Gunnar a full year.

6
A Nasty Herd of Elephants That Are Nowhere Near as Embarrassingly Adorable as Me. Don't Ask.

Nobody gets up early on Saturday morning in our house anymore. Friday night's a late night for the restaurant. Mom and Dad are usually up even later than me—and that's saying something. I slunk into the kitchen at around eleven that morning to see Mom, clearly still on her first cup of coffee, trying to comfort an inconsolable Christina.

“But I don't want to put Ichabod to sleep,” Christina said through her tears. “It's inhumane.”

“It's inhumane to let him suffer.” She looked at our cat, who was now lying on the windowsill in the sun. If he was suffering, he wasn't showing it. It was actually the rest of us who were suffering, because poor Ichabod was so old he had forgotten the form and function of a litter box, and had begun to improvise, leaving little icha-bits in unlikely places.

“It's the way of all things, honey,” Mom said sympathetically. “You remember Mr. Moby—and what about your hamsters?”

“It's not the same!” Christina yelled.

Mr. Moby was Christina's goldfish. Actually a whole series of goldfish. She named them all Mr. Moby, the same way Sea World named all their star whales “Shamu.” Then she graduated to hamsters, which were cute, cuddly, vicious little things that would devour one another with such regularity you'd think cannibalism was in their job description. But Christina was right—this was different. A cat was more like family. Besides, in my current state of mind, mortality was kind of a sore spot.

“Mom,” I said, “couldn't we just let nature take its course, and let Ichabod go when he's ready?”

“I'll clean up if he misses the litter box,” Christina said. “Promise.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe she can levitate it out the window.”

Christina scowled at me. “Maybe you could give Ichabod one of your friend's extra months.”

This surprised me—I didn't even know she knew about that, but I guess word gets around. Fortunately it flew miles over Mom's head.

“You know what?” Mom said. “I'm not gonna worry about this anymore. It's on your head.” Then she poured herself a fresh cup of coffee.

 
 
I went over to Gunnar's house that afternoon, using our
Grapes of Wrath
project as a cover story, but what I was really hoping for—and dreading at the same time—was seeing Kjersten. It turns out she had left early for a tennis tournament. I was deeply disappointed, and yet profoundly relieved.

We were halfway through
The Grapes of Wrath
and had decided that, for our project, we were going to re-create the dust bowl in Gunnar's backyard, then arrange for our class to come see it. The dust bowl is what they called the Midwest back in the thirties, when Oklahoma, Kansas, and I think maybe Nebraska dried up and blew away—which has nothing to do with
Gone with the Wind
, although that movie was made during the same basic time period.

Mrs. Ümlaut fretted a lot when we told her about our plan.
Fretted:
that's a word they used during the dust bowl. (“Fretted,” “reckon,” and “y'all” were very popular in those days.) But since the backyard was mostly crabgrass already going dormant for the winter, she reluctantly agreed to let us kill the whole yard as long as we promised to redo everything in the spring. I couldn't help but glance at Gunnar when she said that, because what if he wasn't around in the spring? Then again, maybe this was her way of implying to him that he would be.

I figured the biggest problem with the dust bowl was Gunnar's unfinished gravestone smack in the middle of the yard. By now Gunnar had finished his first name and begun working on his middle name, Kolbjörn, which he was worried wouldn't fit on one line. “I may have to start over on a fresh piece of granite,” he told me. I just nodded. I decided it was best if I didn't involve myself in tombstone-related issues.

Before we began murdering helpless vegetation, Gunnar took me up to his room to show me what he had done with the twelve months I had gotten for him. He had three-hole-punched them, and put them in a binder labeled
Life.
He displayed it proudly, like someone else might display a photo album.

“I consulted with Dr. G yesterday,” Gunnar said. “He says I might make nine months—maybe more, because my symptoms haven't been getting worse.” Then he patted his Binder of Life. “But maybe the real reason's right here.”

I let out a nervous chuckle. “Whatever it takes, right?”

I still didn't know if he was serious, or just playing along. The kids who donated their months were, for the most part, treating it like a game. I mean, sure, they were hung up on the rules, but it was more like how you argue over a Monopoly board, and whether or not you're supposed to get five hundred bucks if you land on “Free Parking.” The rules say no, but people still insist it's the cash-bonus space. In fact, my cousin Al once busted a guy's nose over it—which sent him directly to jail, do not pass “Go.”