Vodka and Lemonade

“Keep going,” Meeri urged. It had been a week since my run in with Marcus, and Meeri was forcing me to stay with her in the apartment above the bar.

I groaned and set the book down.

“Hey, it’s either this or I’ll stick you in an actual school. You don’t want everyone making fun of you because you’ll be in the stupid classes, do you?”

I sneered. It wasn’t my fault that the school system thought I was stupid. It was my mom’s- she never enrolled me in school in the first place. I didn’t even know my dad. When I was in foster care, I barely even went to school. I couldn’t stand all the names people called me. It wasn’t my fault. I didn’t know how to learn like that…and I was so fucking sick and tired of being in the retarded classes. Anyways, so that leaves me: thirteen years old and barely knowing how to read.

“I’m sick of these little kid books. Don’t you think I should be reading big books?”

Meeri laughed and threw a huge book down on the table in front of me. “Turn to page 342. That’s what my sister’s class is reading.”

“you have a sister?” I asked, flipping through the thin pages.

“Yea, lucky you, she’s an English teacher. I told her about you and she snagged an extra copy of the text book she uses.”

“The Tell-Tale Heart? What the fuck is this?”

“Read it and find out. Go on.”

Hesitantly, I looked down at the words. The letters scrambled and swirled around. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “What are these dashes?”

“Hyphens. They act a little like commas. You remember commas?”

“Yea, I do,” I replied before looking back at the book. “True!- N-n-nervo-us- very, very dre-eadf-fully ner-nervous-” the letter began to blur, but I pushed through. “I had b-bean and am; but why- What does it mean when the letters are slanted?” I asked, interrupting myself.

“Those are italics. You are meant to put emphasis on that word. Are you done yet?” She asked. It wasn’t like she was impatient or anything. It was just a question.

I shook my head and continued. “Why will you say that I am mad? Ha! This guy’s off his rocker!”

“Danni, focus please.”

“The die-sease-”

“Disease.” Meeri corrected.

“Disease had shar- sharp-e-ned-”

“Sharpened.”

“sharpened my senses- not des- des-troy-ed-”

“Destroyed.”

“Destroyed- not dul-led them. Above all was the sense of he-ar-ing a-a-a”

“Break it apart. What two words can you make out of it?”

“ ‘A’ and ‘cute.’ ”

“Precisely, now repeat the sentence.”

“Above all was the sense of he-aring acute. Argh! What does that fucking mean?” I yelled, tossing the book aside.

Meeri chuckled, grabbed the text book, and pulled up a chair next to me. “It means that even when he was going bonkers, his sense of hearing was amazingly good.”

I slumped back in my chair. “Well, why the fuck couldn’t he just say that?”

Meeri smiled. “Because he wrote it a long time ago.”

I narrowed my eyes at her. “How long ago?”

She flipped through the book. “1843, see? It says it right here,” she said, pointing to the introduction.

I crossed my arms and looked away.

Meeri nudged the book of fairy tales toward me.

Sighing, I grabbed the book and flipped to where I left off. “The mirror answered fa-ithully, ‘You may be cru-el, you may be mean- but you are also the fai-rest, my Queen…” When I finished with the story, I looked up at Meeri. “Is this really necessary?”

“Is what necessary?” she asked, looking at me from the counter.

“This,” I said, gesturing to the book in front of me.

“Danni, it’s not like we’re in Africa or some third-world place. We live in a place where literacy is important. Do anywhere, and there’s words. What will happen when you go to a different town and you don’t know how to read? You’ll get lost and you’ll wind up dead.”

“I can wind up dead here,” I muttered.

Meeri gave me a hard look.

“I guess that just means I won’t travel.”

Meeri sighed and put her head in her hands. “Danni, I’m not going to be around forever. Lou will not be around forever- oh, don’t you give me that look! Don’t you want to do something with your life? Something besides drugs and basically being a slave?”

“It’s my life, if you have a prob-”

“Yes, it’s your life,” she interrupted. Her tone was still so soft- so warm. “And I’m not trying to bash it, but, hon, what the hell are you going to do when your looks are gone?”

I bit my lip and looked away. The future was never on my mind. There was too much going on in the present. Most of the time when I laid down to sleep, I didn’t know if I was going to wake up. That’s what it was like living out on the streets. Sure, in the winter you could gather round a fire in an old oil drum, but you had to trust that the person you were huddling with wasn’t going to pull a knife out and stab you in the middle of the night…granted, live people provided more heat than their jackets.

“Well?”

I looked away from her. She could be a little intimidating at times. “I-I guess I never thought that there would be a day when I didn’t have my looks. I’ve always felt that I would die young. What else can I do but live in the moment? That’s all life is, I guess- moments.”

Meeri shook her head. “Danni, I’m not trying to sound condescending, but you need to think about your future and what that means to you-“

She was interrupted by the land line ringing.

“Hello? This is Meeri…Yea, sure, here she is-” she said, offering me the phone.

I took it without question. “Hello?” I listened to Lou’s voice on the other end. “Yea, I’ll be there. See you then. Bye.” I said, hanging up. I looked at Meeri. “I’ll be back late tonight. Lou needs me.” I said, grabbing my coat.

“Just, be careful, ok? And take it easy on those ribs.”

I nodded my head. “I will. Bye.”