Worst were the regulars with no involvement in the trash enterprise. They’d get their beer and beans up front, then slip around back to do their business with Ghost. I was getting the picture. Golly’s Market catered to lowlifes, and I was working there. So I was a lowlife too.
Some are going to say I was never anything better. Not even born in a hospital to a mom fixing to take me back to her mobile home, but born in the mobile home, so that’s like the Eagle Scout of trailer trash. Kids like me with our teen moms putting whiskey on our gums to shut us up, Coke in the baby bottle, we’re the pity of the world. But I started out as decent as any kid, saying please and thank you, doing my homework, figuring out how to get smiled at. I played to win, with all my little prides and dreams. So what if they were junior-varsity dreams, like marrying Carol Danvers and being an Avenger whenever I grew up. I got up every day thinking the sun was out there shining, and it could just as well shine on me as any other human person.
By fifth grade I was taller than everybody, including some teachers. Guys wanted me on their side for whatever we played in gym, and I’m saying always. Girls flirted. Emmy had said I was tenderhearted, good-looking, and everything. Plenty of poor kids got their faces punched in just for existing. Up to that point I’d not thought much about what I was, but I wasn’t that. This was in the before-time, last days of. Still no internet with all the ways of saying, Let’s us be better than those guys so we can hate on them. Our school had two computers in the library, one that worked. Some few kids did a project where they set up their mailbox address on there, to get mail from a robot we thought, ha ha. What existed at that time for calling people out was the cootie game, where little kids would touch some loser and then run around threatening to spread loser germs on you. In some cases, like the Houserman kids, genuine head lice could be involved, so. Heads up.
But in fifth, we weren’t children. Loser boys got fists. Girls had their girl shit of no interest to me, like their slam books that got passed around. Skinny spiral notebooks like you’d have for a subject, but with SLAM BOOK and PROPERTY OF on the front to let you know it’s not for a teacher’s eyes. Some girl would poke me in the back with one, to pass on up the row. These were the enterprise of the popular girls with plucked-to-the-bone eyebrows and hair parted in the shape of a lightning bolt. Look, you’re sitting behind some girl all day looking down on her head, you notice the hair. The notebooks though, I didn’t, even after they were getting pushed at me. Even with girls writing in them and looking at me like something’s dead hilarious.
Then came the day of Demon’s education. Everybody was set for recess, unless on detention which I usually was, for fidgeting or drawing on my desk. We had the one-piece type with the tiny chair attached, pretty much hell for a kid my size, and the wooden desk tops all gray around the edges with the ground-in dirt of our forefathers. Our parents and grandparents used these desks, and had some of the same teachers, including the mummified individual Miss Huddles we had in fifth. Miss Huddles famously had leathered my mom in front of the entire school for faking a striptease in Christian Music Assembly. （Mom and God, it just never worked.） To look at the old bat now, though, a shrunken head in a dress, I had no fear. These desks had so many names, hairy penises, and doodles carved in them, it seemed senseless not to carry on the tradition. You’re sitting there with a pencil. Hours to get through before you die. I prided myself on excellent cartoon characters for the enjoyment of prisoners to come.
So here’s the bell and everybody files out. A yellow notebook is slapped down on my desk. Slap goes another one as they walk by, girls detouring past my desk on their way out, laughing because this is all so funny. A pile of slam books to cheer up Demon’s detention.
The first page is numbered. You sign in next to a number, so that’s your code. Turn the pages. Each page has one kid’s name at the top. You write your opinion of them, signed with your number. This is all new to me and I’m thinking, pretty hilarious, using a number for your not-at-all-secret identity. On the page of every popular girl, everybody writes Cute sweet nice fun to be with. Always those words, in whatever order. The religious girls get Too straight no fun. Or else L-7, which is the known code for “square,” which is the known code for Too straight, no fun. Guys have pages also. Popular ones being Hella hunk the bomb all that home skillet.
Maybe I didn’t think these books would have a Demon page. Maybe I did. Either way I wasn’t ready for that hot spreading feeling like I’ve pissed myself. Shit eater loser trash jerkoff. No exception. Somebody wrote Asshole. I mean. I’d gone quiet since Mom died, and probably hadn’t said more than five or six words in that class since Christmas. It takes some doing to scrape together asshole out of that.