Garrett Nickelsen Tastes Like Fart

I shut the back cover of the last library book I had rented for (and finished) this week. I regretted breezing by the five books I had picked out on Sunday, despite fitting in a few crammed study sessions by myself with my cat peering at me from under the kitchen table.

It was so quiet in the room that I could hear the ticking of the watch that the guy who sat behind me wore. I restlessly tapped my fingers against the cover of the young adult novel, a picturesque portrait of the popular girls’ author smiling back at me. I peered over my shoulder; almost half of the class was still finishing up their essays on the horribly depressing Sylvia Plath. There was still a little over a half hour left on this last exam day, this last day of school. In just a handful of minutes, I would be free to sleep in half the day and stay up watching home cooking shows. Maybe I’d even reverse my sleeping habits and live like a vampire like I did last summer. Admittedly, it was fun, but I kinda-barely-maybe-a-little missed my parents while they were awake and I was asleep, and vice versa.

I silently huffed my frustration and bent sideways to deposit the book on the floor under my desk. My fingers brushed against my study notebook (notes on electro-magnetism and preterit German verbs mashed into the ruffled pages of an abandoned spiral I had found in my room), a worn pencil tucked into the warped metal binding. I slid it from under the novel and a paperback collection of Plath poetry and brought it back on top of my desk, my back emitting a silent pop as I straightened my spine.

I tried my hardest to wedge open the pages that were practically clamped shut by the metal binding slanted down against the pages without bothering my fellow English nerds and their racing minds against the time limit. No luck, as I peripherally caught Miriam George giving me the stink eye from the other end of the room as the pages weakly voiced their complaints in a creaking annoyance. I quickly gathered half the wrinkled paper in one hand and turned it over, opening a blank page, the sides spotted with blue watermarks from the pages’ lines. I had difficulty slipping the pencil from in between its chicken wire binds, sticking the tip of my tongue out in concentration as I guided it upward with my pinky squeezing in between every space between the tightly gathered wire.

With a bright red fingertip and a freed pencil, I opened the spiral back-to-back, a single page facing me, bidding me to cure my boredom with its water-damaged goods. I just tucked the pencil behind my ear and closed my eyes, digging my palms into my eye sockets.

My mother and father always had Saturday night spent as Hoffman Movie Night. It had always been the entire family: Luke, Samuel, Julian, Cornelius, and I gathered around our modest-sized family TV with a family-friendly movie to rid us of studious boredom every weekend, despite SATs or mid-term projects. In the last five years, it had dwindled down to only my mother and me after Corny, only two years my senior, left for out-of-state college. Father rarely joined us during the school year because of his job, an assistant professor’s position at ASU he was lucky enough to score when I started junior high. Convinced of the lack of ‘family bonding’ his job always caused, as it was just Mother and I on good, stress- and homework-free weekends, I stopped attending, leaving Mother with her black and white romantic comedies.

I don’t know how she did it, but the Saturday before finals, my mother was able to guilt me into joining her and Father for Movie Night as it was his first weekend off since Spring Break. Because our entire DVD collection had been toted off to colleges across America over the years (starting with Luke, who now had nearly half the original collection sitting in his New Hampshire apartment, and again when Julian and Samuel rented out a place together near Berkley three years ago), Father suggested we'd rent a movie. He took the liberty to stop at the local supermarket to pick up popcorn, cheap wine, and a Dollar-a-Night movie from the vending machine at the front of the store. If it wasn’t for the Diet Coke he had brought home, I would probably have fallen asleep watching The Bucket List.

The lackluster movie still fresh in my scholastically baked mind, I started thinking of how, so far, my life had been a dud. I had not had fun. I hadn’t lived like the modern American teenager, with parties, boys, or a smelly joint elegantly tucked between my fingers. I hadn’t loved; I hadn’t even dated. I didn’t cut class. I barely went out as it was. I didn’t break rules. I didn’t even curse. In short, I hadn’t lived—at least, according to Today’s standards.

Why not? It’s not like you have anything better to do.

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As I sat nearest to the door in English, I was the first to escape the higher-level class of mental torture. I was quick to swing my skateboard backpack (passed down the line of children since Julian’s daredevil days) over my shoulder before dashing out of the room, not even giving Mrs. Holloway a second glance. I sped down the hallways, but was caught in the dense traffic of freedom-seeking students near the staircases next to the parking lot. In eight minutes, I was at Heather’s silver Ford, the un-air conditioned bullet of a car radiating heat from its spot far back in the student lot affectionately dubbed Africa. Even during the spring and fall, the cement sea was hot enough to fry an egg. It took almost five more minutes before I spotted Heather modestly bidding her sophomore boy-toy goodbye at his mother’s car.

“Took you long enough.” I hitched the thick backpack straps over my shoulders as she dug for her keys in her large purple purse. I never knew what she carried in that monstrous thing.

“People to meet, yearbooks to sign. Speaking of which…” Heather rushed to the other side of the car and jammed her keys in, jiggling them in place before a dull clunk sounded from behind the windows painted over with our school colors. I quickly nudged it open and sat on the hot cloth, slipping my backpack to the trashed floor: soda bottles, change, and even a condom wrapper littered the floor. With my nose wrinkled in silent disgust, I pushed down on the window switch even before she started the ignition, and I didn’t close the door until the window was all the way down. The car had already managed to help me break out a sweat or two on my neck by the time all the windows were down and the radio began blasting a hip-hop loop.

“It’s hot,” she mumbled.

"I know that. But you were saying...?"

"Oh, right. I was going to ask..." She paused as she drove through the empty space in front of her. "Did anyone else sign your year book?" She looked over to me like the concerned friend she was, one eye on the road, yet another silently probing my sucked-in cheeks and tapping fingers.

“Maybe.” I noncommittally shook my head and stuck out my hand through the window, letting the warm, dry breeze blow over my fingers. The bracelet Corny had made me for my birthday last year loosely hung at my wrist, moving up and down my skin in the strong winds running over her hot bullet-nosed car.

“Maybe, meaning… teachers?”

I silently shot her a cocked eyebrow and looked back out the window.

“Elise,” she groaned.

“I’m leaving for college in a year. I don’t need more friends if I’m just going to end up forgetting their names by the start of my first semester.”

“Elise.” She just ignored my never-ending excuse. “You need to live. Like…” She slowed at the red light and flipped her rearview mirror down, passively examining and licking her chapped lips, and flipped it back up. “I mean really live. And, I’ve told you before, I’d be—”

“Glad to help. Yeah, I know.” The car jerked forward, sending my elbow sliding down the rubber edge of the car’s window slit.

“Just as long as you’re not breaking the law.” I gave her a pointed look as she sped down past the numerous small industrial company offices lining the street. “What?” She glanced in my direction before turning back to the road. “I’ve had enough experience under my belt to know what would kill or cripple you,” she huffed.

I silently chuckled before pointing further down the street past the crowded intersection. “Burritos?”

“Right ahead of you,” she mumbled, switching lanes.

I opened my backpack, guiding the only working zipper over the top. Heather, a reckless driver at her best, quickly made a left turn over the middle of three lanes of forty-miles-per-hour traffic, nearly dodging a small, shiny yellow Chevy. I could hear their horn sound as she hastily sped into the parking lot of the local dingy Burrito Ranchero. When I could finally sit up without gravity forcing me to lean sideways into my door, I could feel a few nondescript trinkets rubbing against my bare feet; looking down, I saw half of Heather’s purse and most of the items from my backpack sprawled together on the floor in front of and under my seat, barely leaving room to spot the floor’s grimy gray carpet.

“You’re going to kill me some day,” I muttered, quickly gathering my books back into my backpack as she suddenly stopped in a parking space. A tall caricature of a burrito wearing a cowboy hat and sheriff’s badge stared down at me. Her driving aim was impeccable, but she always slammed on the brakes; this time was no different, and I suddenly jerked against the seat belt, my book of Plath poetry falling out of my backpack again.

“Sorr— Hey, what do we have here?” Heather halted her apology and reached her hand over to my spread-eagled book, a folded, wrinkly piece of notebook paper with shredded perforated edges sticking out next to the gearshift.

“No, Heather—”

She completely ignored me and finally turned off the radio as she quickly turned the key in the ignition and whipped out of the car, the paper from my book clutched between her fingers. I let an inward groan of frustration shake my throat before trudging out into the dry heat behind her as she opened the door to the mini-Mexican shack perched on the edge of the Texaco. I meekly followed her in, my head bent down as usual, still mumbling my feeble request of her to give back my list.

“Heather, could you just—?”

“Blah, blah, blah, blah, blaaaah,” she muttered, waving a hand in the air. The short burrito shop owner stood behind the aged cash register with a raised eyebrow and his lips in a thin line.

“Heather, I need that.” I tried to grab the page from her hands, but she held it up far above my reach.

“No such luck, short stuff.” She quickly folded it back up and shoved it into her purse, taking out her wallet before zipping it closed. “We’ll talk later. But for now, I’ll have a chicken burrito.”

“Would you like everything on it?” the cashier asked with a thick accent, ducking his head and punching in a few numbers.

“Yeah.”

“Same thing for me,” I piped up, reaching up to rub my neck. As expected, when I drew back my hand, a thin layer of sweat defiled my palm. I groaned and wiped off my hand against my jeans, making sure to give Heather a hard, irritated look. “You totally owe me this burrito,” I muttered as she silently rummaged through her purse for her wallet.

As I settled at the only table not placed by a window, only one of three tall coffee shop tables, Heather headed for the fridges in the back of the Texaco for drinks, and soon joined me with a liter of Diet Coke and a tall, fruity energy drink picked out for herself.

“And the search continues,” I dryly mumbled, shrugging the cap off my soda.

“When does it ever stop?” she said, peering at the ingredients highlighted in red on the side of the can. She blew her overgrown bangs from her eyes and chugged a few large gulps of the acrid drink, wiping her lips off with the back of her hand. “Quite fruity, but not as good as that other one…”

“The Mellow Yellow?”

“Yeah.” She nodded and examined the can again. “That one.” She tore her gaze from the orange dragon and white logo on the front to something behind me. I turned my chair to see the tanned cashier bending over the counter, waving a grocery bag with our foil-wrapped burritos.

|||

Thanks in part to Heather’s reckless speed, by the time we got to her house and in the pulsing air conditioning of her kitchen, the burritos were still hot. But then again, she said they were only still fresh because it was like our own little heat plate outside in the Arizona weather and, more specifically, in her car.

With both my hands clutching the huge burrito, I nibbled off bits of lettuce hanging out from the tortilla. I was about to sink my teeth into an appropriate, golf ball-sized bite when Heather smugly brought up the piece of paper hidden away in her purse.

“So you finally want to come out of your shell,” she humorously probed, picking at the bits of meat that had dropped from the end of her burrito. “A list. A fucking list.” She lightly chuckled as I flinched at her language. “Where in your brain did you come up for an idea of some—ha!—some high school bucket list? Seriously, it’s, like, straight out of a Hallmark-Skin-e-max slasher movie. Of sorts.”

“Thanks, I guess,” I muttered, setting down the rest of my untouched lunch as my attention was required elsewhere.

“It’s just… oh.” She giggled and reached down into her purse set at the end of the counter, whipping out the notebook page. Smoothing it out against the marble tabletop, she read each number from the top:

“One, go to a party.” She looked up at me with a cunning smirk. “I’m sure we could somehow arrange that. And two, go to a concert. Do-able. Three, make a new friend. Eh…” She shrugged her shoulders, popping in an escaped strip of shredded lettuce from her plate. “I think we can do without that one.”

I nodded in agreement, picking at a piece of chicken. “Sounds good, 'cause I really—”

“Kidding, Elise.” She rolled her eyes, dragging her finger down the page. “No way I'm passing that one up. Ears pierced, yup. Break curfew? A challenge, but yes. Go out to eat at 3 a.m. That’s gonna be a bit of wor—Oh, never mind.” She cleared her throat and wiped her hands off on her jeans, then fluffed out the page as if reading an important speech. “And number seven, ladies and gentlemen,” she announced to an empty house, “is… ‘kiss a boy.’” She looked to her side at me from the list with a smirk. “You sure like challenging me, don’t you?”

“I—”

“Don’t answer that.” She folded the wrinkled page back up and tossed it to me over the counter. “So I guess this summer’s about that bucket list of yours.”

I fumbled with my hands, but caught the list before it hit the floor. “Now, I didn’t say—”

“You didn’t say you were not serious, Elise,” she argued, tossing the foil wrapping away behind her and grabbing her burrito from her plate. “That list will be done before you graduate.”