The Liberation of Gabriel King (7 page)

“You think a person can die from choking on some miserable food?” she asked. “Terrance said he read about a man who died eating cabbage. Hated it so much, he couldn’t swallow, so the cabbage got stuck in his throat. Think that’s true?”

Sounded possible to me. I thought about liver and how every time Momma made me eat it, I had to chew forever.

“Maybe you shouldn’t risk it,” I said, getting nervous, but Frita stuck out her chin.

“Nope,” she said, “I’m doing it.”

Frita put a brussels sprout in her mouth and chewed once, then she spat it out on the table and stuck out her tongue.

“I almost choked,” she said. “I could feel it.”

“Maybe that’s what you’re really afraid of,” I said. “Choking…”

Frita nodded and we stared at the slimy sprout. I sure didn’t want Frita to choke to death.

“You wouldn’t choke if they didn’t taste so bad,” I suggested, “and they wouldn’t taste so bad with something on them. How about ketchup?”

Frita wrinkled her nose.

“Relish?”

“No.”

“Cheese?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Mustard?”

“Nope.”

“Chocolate sauce?”

Frita paused. “Maybe,” she said, “if there was a lot of it and some ice cream, too.”

I opened the freezer. There was a whole tub of vanilla ice cream, so I pulled it down and scooped some into Frita’s bowl. Then I got out the chocolate sauce and mixed it all together so the brussels sprouts were completely covered.

“Better add some whipped cream,” Frita said, so I got that out too, and piled some on top. Frita stared at her bowl, then she took a bite from the edge where there was only ice cream.

“Think we ought to cut the brussels sprouts into smaller pieces?” she asked. “That way, there’s less to choke on.” I shrugged. Didn’t seem like it would make much difference, but I took out a knife and fork and cut each brussels sprout into little pieces. Then I licked all the ice cream off the knife.

“Better hurry before it melts.”

Frita loaded up her spoon. “Gabe,” she told me, real solemn, “if I choke to death, you can have my smiley face picture frame with our class picture in it.”

“Okay,” I said.

Then Frita closed her eyes and lifted the spoon to her mouth. I knew she had a big chunk of brussels sprout on there because I could see it through the ice cream.
Poor Frita
, I thought. I sure was glad I hadn’t written down brussels sprouts. Frita stuck the spoon in her mouth and chewed. I waited for her to spit that mess out, but it didn’t happen. Frita opened one eye. She swallowed without choking once.

“It’s not so bad,” she said. “Put some more chocolate sauce on there.”

I poured it on so thick it was like chocolate soup, and Frita ate three more bites.

“Hey,” she said at last, “I think I like this stuff.”

My eyebrows shot up. “Really?”

“Yup,” Frita said. She handed me the spoon and I loaded it up. “You’ve got to get plenty of chocolate sauce,” she warned. “That way, you hardly taste the brussels sprouts.”

Sure enough, Frita was right.

That’s when Mrs. Wilson came into the kitchen. She stared at all the stuff I’d put on the counter and shook her head.

“I don’t want to know,” Mrs. Wilson said. “I just don’t want to know.”

That’s exactly what Momma said about me streaking by in my underwear.

I looked at Frita and her eyes were twinkling something fierce.

“Gabe,” she whispered, “it’s working.
It’s really working
.”

I knew she was talking about her plan, and even though I didn’t want to admit it, for the first time I wondered if maybe she was right. Maybe we
would
overcome all our fears in time for the fifth grade.

O
NCE
F
RITA SUSPECTS SHE’S RIGHT, THERE’S NO STOPPING UNTIL
she’s positively certain.

“Let’s cross something off our lists every week,” Frita said, “only you’ll have to cross off two or three because you’ve got so many.”

That hardly sounded fair to me, but Frita put her hands on her hips.

“This is serious business,” she reminded me. “Our entire future depends on it, so we can’t be wasting any time.”

“It’s only the first of June,” I said. But there was no arguing with Frita.

Straightaway we had to roller-skate on the yellow line in the middle of the highway because we’d seen that on TV once, so it was on both our lists. I might have picked something that
couldn’t
have gotten us killed, but Frita assured me it would make us plenty brave. She was probably right too, only we never got to find out because Mrs. Wilson drove by just as we were getting started.

If there were three things Frita was never to do, they were playing on the highway, going near the Evans trailer, and
lighting matches. Any one of those things threw Mrs. Wilson into a fit and let me tell you,
that
was something to be scared of. She pulled her car over and lifted us both up by the ears. Then we got a solid chewing out all the way home. It was worse than Momma on Moving-Up Day.

After that we were grounded, so I thought we might take a break from fear-busting, but Frita said we’d just have to find things to do at her house or my trailer since we couldn’t go anywhere else. That was okay because I had plenty to choose from. First, we made a plan for what I’d do if I missed the school bus after school. Then I worked Momma’s new blender even though it was huge and loud and I was certain I’d get my hand chopped off. After that, we practiced picking up earwigs, only I got pinched. But that turned out okay because the pinch didn’t hurt hardly as bad as I thought it would, and Frita said that was just how she’d planned it.

When we were done being grounded, we roller-skated down the center of Frita’s road. She said that was okay because it was our best try and best tries counted. And when it came to the lists, Frita was the judge.

“Long as we try our hardest, we can cross it off because once you’ve tried something, it’s not so scary to try it again,” she said.

That sort of made sense, but personally, I found I could be just as scared nineteen, maybe twenty times in a row. Took me eighteen tries to face down a loose cow in the cotton field. I kept taking off every time she snorted. By my eighteenth
try she didn’t pay me any mind at all. Just flicked her ear when I walked near her.

There was only one thing I utterly failed at, and it almost put an end to everything.

It was the middle of June and we were at Frita’s house, reading through our lists. We were still keeping them secret because Frita said it would be more fun that way. I wasn’t sure how exactly that made things fun, but I took Frita’s word for it.

“It’s your turn to pick,” Frita said that afternoon, putting her list away in the special box under her bed.

“Nuh-uh,” I said. “I just did one.”

Frita gave me that look.

“You know you’ve got three times as many as I do,” she reminded me. “I bet you still got half your list left.”

I looked down and sure enough, Frita was right. I had
more
than half left. Drat.

“What’re you gonna pick?” she asked.

I read through the things I hadn’t crossed off.
Fifth grade, Duke Evans, alligators, the Evans trailer, Frita’s basement, centipedes
…

Centipedes sure were gross, but I’d already tackled earwigs and spiders, so according to Frita’s plan, I ought to be getting braver. I thought about Jimmy and how he really wasn’t such a bad pet once I’d gotten used to him.

“Fine,” I said. “How about centipedes?”

Frita grinned. “All right! I know just where to find one.”

She grabbed my hand and pulled me down the hall.

“Our basement is full of them,” Frita said. I stopped following, but Frita tightened her grip on my hand.

“Don’t…be…a…scaredy-cat…,” Frita said, dragging me across the floor. “It’s just a plain old basement and a little bug.”

But Frita was wrong. There was nothing little about centipedes, and there was nothing plain about Frita’s basement.

“What if Terrance is down there?”

Frita opened the basement door. The light was on and I could hear grunting noises and the
smack, smack
sound of someone pounding something.

“See?” I said. “He
is
down there. Guess we’ll have to come back.”

Frita pulled me down the first step. “Terrance won’t care as long as we tell him we’re coming,” she said. She hollered down the steps, “ME AND GABE ARE COMING DOWN TO LOOK FOR CENTIPEDES!”

I waited for the rush of feet as Terrance ran up the steps to chase us away, but it didn’t come. He was toweling off the sweat when we got to the bottom of the steps.

“Fine,” he said. “I was done anyway.” But he didn’t say it nice. He glared at me. Then he yelled at Frita. “
Don’t touch anything!
”

He snapped his towel at her, and she stuck out her tongue. Terrance took the stairs two at a time, and I watched him go, wondering if I’d ever be that big. I wondered what it
felt like to have such long legs. Never getting any taller was number twenty-nine on my list, but there sure wasn’t anything I could do about that.

Frita stood in the middle of the basement and looked around. The light was on this time because Terrance had been down there. The punching bags and panther drawings didn’t look quite so big and scary when it wasn’t dark.

“Look,” said Frita, “it’s not so bad.”

She took a box off the shelf and put it on the floor. It was full of ornaments and a string of garland. “This is all our Christmas stuff. And here’s that plastic pumpkin I used to take trick-or-treating.”

She pulled down another box. “This one has all my baby clothes in it, and look, here’s the doll Great-aunt Alma gave me.” Frita wrinkled her nose. She hated dolls almost as much as she hated Great-aunt Alma.

I picked up the plastic pumpkin. This stuff
was
kind of neat. I had a pumpkin just like this one, only we didn’t have a basement in the trailer, so mine was stashed in Momma and Pop’s closet.

“What’s in that one?” I asked, pointing to another box on the shelf along the wall. Frita got up on a stool and pulled down the boxes, one by one. It was almost like Christmas.

Until we found the centipede.

Frita might have forgotten all about centipedes if one hadn’t crawled out of a box right when she was reaching in to take out a camping lantern. I was sitting on the floor, playing
with Frita’s old Matchbox cars, when out scampered a million legs and a slimy body. I jumped up and knocked over the box.

“All right!” Frita said, getting up to follow the centipede over to the wall. I hoped he’d be too fast to catch, but he stopped right by the furnace almost as if he was waiting for her to scoop him up.

“Frita,” I said, “I changed my mind. I don’t need to cross centipedes off my list because I already crossed off spiders and earwigs and I shoulda just written down bugs because that’s what I meant. So, really, I’m done with—”

“Hush up,” Frita said. She was crouching down, positioning her hands around the centipede. I looked away. Next time I peeked, she had her hands cupped real tight.

“Don’t be scared,” she told me. “Centipedes are soft and friendly. Let’s name him so you’ll feel like he’s a pet. Or wait! Maybe I’ll keep him. That way you’ll have Jimmy and I’ll have…” Frita thought it over. “Gilligan.” Frita watched
Gilligan’s Island
reruns on TV every week. “That’s the perfect name!”

She was getting some excited, but I stared hard at her cupped hands. My eyes were huge as saucers.

“Daddy says fear is mind over matter,” Frita told me. “If you don’t mind it won’t matter. Now, put out your hands.”

I squeezed my eyes tight and tried to picture Jimmy in his tank. If he wasn’t so bad, the centipede couldn’t be much worse. I reached out my hands…

Frita plopped that centipede right into my palm and I
tried to cup him in there nice and tight, like Frita had, but I was too slow and he was too quick. He was up my arm in a flash.

“GET HIM OFF!” I hollered. I flicked my arm and the centipede fell onto the floor. Then before I even thought about it, I stomped him real good. I was dancing around in a circle, stomping that bug into one big centipede mash.

Only then I caught a glimpse of Frita. Her eyes were huge and both her hands were over her mouth.

“You’re killing Gilligan,” she choked at last. I couldn’t tell if she was going to cry or pound me.

That’s when I stopped stomping.

I looked down at the splotch on the basement floor and all sorts of guilt flooded in. Frita knelt down to look and her bottom lip quivered. She gave me the worst look I’d ever seen.

“You killed my pet,” she said. “He wasn’t even hurting you. He was just crawling around, that’s all.” Then she sniffed hard. “Gabriel King,” she said, “you’re not getting any braver at all!”

Frita turned and marched up the stairs. I heard the front door slam and I knew she’d gone out back to sit in the pecan tree. That’s when my stomach started to churn. I thought about the way Frita’s eyes had gotten big and round like mine did when I was the most scared. Maybe dead things were on Frita’s list.

Then
my
eyes got big and round because I’d killed Frita’s pet just because I was chicken. Maybe she’d never forgive me.

Frita being mad at me was number twenty-three.

There was only one thing to do. I took a little plastic cup out of one of the boxes and even though it was gross, I scooped that squished-up bug into the cup. We’d have a real decent burial for Gilligan. Then I’d promise never to kill another bug again. If that’s what it took to get Frita to forgive me, I’d be Gabriel King, a bug’s best friend.

F
RITA WAS REAL SORE AT ME AFTER THAT—DESPITE THE REAL NICE
funeral we held in her backyard. She didn’t call me on the phone or ask me to come over for two whole days, and when we finally did get together, it was another day and a half before things were back to normal. Only they weren’t
exactly
back to normal. Frita didn’t mention our lists again once. Not even when I told her I’d crossed off number twenty-three since she’d forgiven me.