Humming and chocolate-smeared

It was muggy and you forget about the bugs, when you're away for as long as I was.  We were on the Little League fields by the library, taking batting practice with a wiffleball bat and our empties.  Zach showed up.  Almost immediately he threw the wiffleball bat into the woods, over the creek -- I was on the other side of the field, so I didn't see whatever had motivated him to do it.  It was probably nothing.  No one made a move to get it.  We decided to go to a game in New Britain.

There were two or three cars.  I rode in Dave's car.  We parked on some woman's lawn.  She came outside and started shouting at us.  She sprayed us with her hose and we picked up handfuls of gravel from her driveway and whipped it at her.  She didn't stop spraying us, though, so we walked over to the stadium.  Dave was wearing a shirt that said "Would You Like Some MILF And Cookies?" and we were a little embarrassed to be seen with him.  The shirt didn't even make sense.  Maybe if a MILF were wearing it.  But even then, it had a picture of a glass of milk and some cookies, so more than anything it just read like a typo.  My shirt was gray.

We bought tickets midway up in the bleachers and then moved to the back.  A family came in and said we were in their seats so we had to move up a couple of rows.  Nancy threw a soda over her shoulder at the family without looking once we'd gotten into our new seats but it sailed over their heads and landed on someone outside the stadium -- we heard some guy go "AWWWW."  The family pretended not to notice.  I was trying to figure out what Joanna was doing these days, but nobody was talking about her.

The P.A. announcer told us to remove our hats, glasses and shoes for the National Anthem.  The Anthem was sung by this little nine-year-old kid with a beautiful voice who was wearing an alligator mask.  He had a beautiful voice but the mic kept getting stuck in the alligator mask's teeth, which made this unpleasant scraping noise.  Some kid our age in the second row threw an ice cream bar at him and it landed right in front of the pitcher's mound and apparently no one saw it or just no one wanted to pick it up because it was there all night.

Laura was there, making a point to not speak to me or look at me.  She held a hell of a grudge, not that I didn't deserve it. She probably would have gotten over it by now if we hadn't not seen each other for nine months.  Abby was there too, not looking at me either because she had taken Laura's side.  Nobody had taken my side.  I wasn't even on my side.  My side was just me and the other people who didn't give a shit.

The other team's pitcher was an extremely tall Indian man.  He gave up hits to the first two batters then threw his glove at the ump.  The ump didn't throw him out for whatever reason.  He pitched the rest of the inning without a glove -- it sat there out a couple feet to the left of home plate for the rest of the night.  The next inning he came out with a different glove -- a bright red one.  He looked embarrassed.

The announcer came over the P.A. again -- "no pissing in the aisles," he said.  "Please feed your litter to the goats."  A goat scrambled up the aisle at the other side of the stadium.  A couple of little kids on the end of the row started crying and ran away, which only got the goat more agitated.  A security guard came out with a tranq gun and shot the kids and they slumped over in their seats and barely moved for the rest of the game.

Tara started cracking jokes about me -- who dresses you? she asked.  Who knows what I was wearing.  I don't remember what the criticism was.  I asked if she actually meant that she thought that someone else dressed me.  Someone said I was being boring.  Not just then, but all night.  "You haven't said a single interesting thing all night" -- I think Lucas said that.  I had to laugh.  I wanted to be dead -- dead! -- and they were telling me I had to be more interesting.  The only interesting thing about Lucas was that he had bought a rubber vagina and he, by all accounts, masturbated into it, and you really couldn't bring him anywhere.  I didn't say this, because no one was on my side at this point -- I pulled the brim of my hat way down over my eyes and slumped down in my seat so no one could talk to me.  Tara, it should be noted, was fat.

After the fifth inning there was some kind of kid's event on the field -- a couple kids raced some RC trucks around the bases.  The third baseman jogged out onto the field and stomped right on one of the trucks -- it was an accident, he hadn't seen it.  The kid whipped the remote control right at the guy, and the guy spit right on the kid's shirt.  The race guy -- he owned some toy store downtown or something -- ran up to the third baseman and looked like he was going to take a swing, so the third baseman just popped him right on the chin.  The toy store guy was out.  He didn't move.  It took the paramedics like 20 minutes to take him away and not once did he move.  The kids were freaking out; the third baseman looked unconcerned.  Zach asked Dave what Joanna was doing these days and Dave said he didn't know, probably working at camp again, and that was the last I heard about her for the rest of the summer.  I stayed inside my hat.

The P.A. announcer came on again to tell us that the fireworks show had been cancelled.  "Some nature goon poured water on all of them because she didn't like the noise" he told us, and we grumbled.  Security brought out the lady who had sprayed us with her hose -- apparently she was the nature goon.  The whole crowd stood up and shouted and booed and hissed and showered her with trash.  The trash piled on the field like fake snow.  I guess fake snow is a kind of trash.  The lady started strutting around and waving her arms like, yeah, keeping booing me, keep throwing that trash, I love it.

Dave wanted to leave in the sixth inning, so I said I'd go with him.  Abby had been complaining all night about how she wanted to leave and Dave wanted her to drive her home to make a move on her or something -- it was the whole reason he'd decided to leave, but Abby refused to go now, quite obviously because she didn't want to go anywhere with me around.  Dave was pissed but he couldn't say anything and I wasn't feeling generous.  He explained all this to me on the walk back to his car, as if I hadn't already known it.  I sat in the back seat.

We were better off without Abby, anyway.  She thought she was going to be a writer and was always writing stories about us and changing our names and reading them to us.  She mostly used words whose definitions she didn't understand.  We always knew who the stories were about and she'd get annoyed when we'd guess.  "It's a composite," she'd say.  Bullshit.  She had no talent, was the thing, and nothing to say.  All she had was a reluctance to get any other job.  Dave thought she was promising, but he didn't know shit.

Somewhere around Route 4, I think, we got pulled over.  Dave was terrified.  I thought it was funny.  I was laughing at him, like, "ha ha, way to go, idiot."  He was shaking.  The cop came over and I don't think he liked how much Dave was shaking.  He looked like he had a freaking warrant out on him or something, that's how bad he was shaking.  The cop told us both to get out of the car.  He asked us if we had anything in our pockets; I remembered I had some weed on me.  We said no and he called our bluff.  I tried to guess whether I was going to get arrested or a fine or what.  Who knows what the laws are on these things.  I guess I felt compelled to guess because the worst part was not knowing the first instant.  I dug around but couldn't find my weed.  I was pissed -- who knows where I'd dropped it.  I don't think it ever turned up.  All I had was my keys and wallet and this whistle I found on the ground.  The cop loved that.  He blew it as hard as he could a couple times and nearly fell over laughing.  He liked the sound; he found it funny.  He flagged down another cop car that happened to be passing and they took turns blowing the whistle.  The first cop told us we were friends now and gave me and Dave his phone number.  He asked if he could keep the whistle but I said no.  He got real embarrassed after that, like he'd overstepped his bounds.  As soon as we got a little ways down the road I dropped the whistle into the road.  I was aiming for a sewer, but it bounced over it.

I got home and the door was locked.  I knocked for a while and no one answered so I sat on the front steps.  I would have rather been sitting in front of the TV.  It would have been easier to not think.  A few deer wandered onto the front lawn.  I sneezed and they freaked out.  They made the worst noise I'd ever heard in my life.  This awful shrieking.  It sounded like something being tortured.  You wouldn't think a couple lousy deer could sound like this.  Everyone thinks deer are these pretty things but if you scare them they're just as stupid as anybody else.

My little brother opened the door to see what all the noise was about.  He'd been home the whole time, the little moron.  I told him to let me inside.  I shoved past him, then stood in the foyer for a second because I honestly had nowhere to go.  He ran past me back into the kitchen.  He was sitting at the table, eating this ice cream bar.  He had chocolate all over his face and he was humming some song and smiling about nothing -- about the chocolate bar I guess.  I went over and knocked the thing out of his hands, onto the ground.  I turned around and left the room before I saw what his reaction was, and I went upstairs and I went to bed early.