The Loser's Guide to Life and Love (12 page)

It's the kind of place you don't expect to find in the heart of downtown Salt Lake City. It's the kind of place where Sergio, lonely and homesick for the hot air of Brazil, would probably feel comfortable.

So I stand awhile in front of the shrine, just looking at all the pictures and the flowers and smelling the thick scent of burning white candles. Then I notice the under
shirt tucked between fistfuls of flowers. It's very small, with snaps on the side—the kind that brand-new babies in the hospital wear.

Suddenly I find myself wondering about who had left it and when and why, and before I know it I can see the whole thing like a movie in my head—a mom and a dad leaving the tiny undershirt at the tree, making all kinds of promises to God so that their baby will be okay.

Sadness burbles up inside of me. Probably it wasn't the parents' fault that the baby had problems. Probably that baby was born with some condition—like a hole in its heart, for example. That's what happened to my second-grade teacher's baby boy. It wasn't anybody's fault, she explained to us after. Sometimes stuff like that just happens in life.

ON THE OTHER HAND, there are certain things in life that are definitely a person's fault. I think of Ellie. Scout. Quark. Remember their faces. Feel my sadness turn to remorse.

Out of the blue it's like I hear Jesus-in-the-Tree doing a voice-over in my head.

You hurt them, Ed.

I bow my head a little—enough to be respectful but not enough to look like I've suddenly morphed into T. Monroe. I say a prayer.

I promise to make it up to Scout and Quark and Ellie. I promise to make them happy.

Surprise!

When I'm online this morning, Ellie IMs me.

ELLIE: Hey, it's me, Ellie.

Seeing her name pop up makes me feel all guilty, like I've been caught checking out Regency romances from the library by my AP English teacher. I cannot believe I let Ed kiss me. That I wanted him to kiss me. That I
still
want him to kiss me, even though I hate him with all my heart. WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME?

ME: Hey, Ellie, what's up?

ELLIE: Not much. Just wondering if you want to do something later. I finish my voice lesson at 5.

Ali's party is tonight. I don't think I'll go, though. I
can't avoid Ed for the rest of my life (sadly), but at least we don't have to bump into each other at the same social events.

ME: Sounds great!

Stupid Ed. He's ruined EVERYTHING. First my life. Now Ali's party.

ELLIE: What should we do?

Last year Ali hired Mazza restaurant to cater. I still think about the baba ghanoush and how great it was. No kidding. My mouth is watering right now. I love baba ghanoush. I LOVE ALI'S PARTY.

ME: Maybe we could go to the dollar movie.

The dollar movie? Now there's a brilliant idea—watching someone else have a life instead of having one of my own. Stupid Ed! Why should I miss out on baba ghanoush when he's the one who's been acting like an idiot?

ELLIE: Sounds fun. Which one? What time?

Maybe Ed won't go to the party. If he has any decency at all he'll stay home. And if he's there, I'll totally ignore him. Meanwhile, I can introduce Ellie to a few more people.

ME: How about this instead. There's a party at Ali's house tonight….

It's Thursday night—the night of Ali's Midsummer Eve's Costume Ball. Helena the Stalking Cat is sitting on my dresser, watching me get ready. Normally I would have tossed her out the window by now, but I don't want to alienate the very few friends I have left. Even the ones I'm allergic to.

“Thank you, Helena,” I say, “for loving me in spite of myself.”

She gives me a yellow-eyed, blissed-out purr.

I don't even know if Quark is still planning to go with me to the party. We haven't spoken since he decked me in the ear.

The phone rings as I pull on my Starship Enterprise
uniform, which I found “reduced for quick sale” at the the Costume Shoppe on Thirty-third South.

I fumble for the receiver. “Hello?”

It's Mr. O'Rourke. “Quentin wants me to tell you to be ready at nine p.m., Ed. He'll drive.”

“If you're calling, he must not be speaking to me yet,” I say.

“I don't know anything about that,” Mr. O'Rourke lies smoothly.

“Quark's a stand-up guy,” I say. Not everyone would go to a party with someone they weren't speaking to. Quark, however, would go out of a pure sense of duty. “Please let me talk to him.”

I hear Mr. O'Rourke say in muffled tones, “For Pete's sake, hold still! I'm almost done.” He gets back on the phone and says mysteriously, “Ed, Quentin can't talk right now….”

 

All is made clear when Quark honks out front and I join him. He's sitting in his car, wrapped in gauze bandages from head to toe. The only actual body parts I can see are his eyes and a little bit of his nose.

“You missed part of your left nostril,” I inform him.

“Mmmmmmmmmmmmm,” Quark says, which (no doubt) means “piss off” in ancient Egyptian.

I should have guessed that Quark would show up dressed like a mummy. He was always a mummy for
Halloween, whereas I was always a ninja.

“Okay, Quark,” I say as we hurtle down the street, “I've got two very important things I want to say to you before you get us killed. The first is that I'm sorry I kissed your girlfriend. That was wrong of me to do. Wrong, wrong, wrong. I'm sorry for acting like such a jerk.”

“Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm,” says the mummy to my left.

“The second thing I want to say is that I am going to do everything in my power to bring you and Scout together. It's my new mission in life.” I pause for a minute to let my words sink through all those bandages. “Scout will be there tonight, by the way.”

Scout. Saying her name is like taking a knife to the heart.

I sink back in the passenger seat, hoping that nobility will feel really great.

Only it doesn't. Being noble pretty much sucks, actually. But you know how it is: A Klingon's gotta do what a Klingon's gotta do.

There are cars up and down the street when Ellie and I arrive at Ali's house. We drive around the block a few times and finally park around the corner. Neither one of us gets out of Ben's Mustang right away, however, because we've been having so much fun just talking.

Who knew a thing like that could happen? Just goes to show how deceiving first impressions can be.

“Look,” Ellie finally says, settling back against the bucket seat, “I want to tell you that I know all about ‘Sergio.'”

She makes little quotation marks with her fingers when she says the word “Sergio.”

I cover my face with my hands and groan with shame.
“I am so sorry I didn't tell you the truth.” I peek at her through my fingers and discover she's smiling. “How did you find out?”

Ellie tells me the story, and I groan again. Trust Ed to break the news to her in the parking lot. What do I see in this boy?

Ellie laughs. “It's okay, Scout. I promise. When he told me yesterday afternoon, I was so mad I just wanted to grab him and pull out all his hair and—oh, I don't know—punch him in the face over and over.”

“I don't blame you. Ed makes me feel that way too, sometimes.”

“After I cooled down last night, I had to admit I hadn't been completely honest with him either.”

I won't lie—I felt something like hope stir inside me. Hope. Can you believe it? In spite of everything?

“What do you mean?”

Ellie sighs. “I was distracting myself with Sergio in the hopes of forgetting somebody else.”

Then she tells me the true and terrible story about the college boy who broke her heart.

Even though the night air is warm, Ellie shivers and wraps her arms around herself like a cloak of flesh. “What is wrong with me, Scout? You'd think I'd learn.”

I feel completely sick inside. And, say what you will about Ed, if he heard Ellie's story, he'd feel sick inside too.

Fourth Avenue is clogged with cars. Clearly, half the population of Salt Lake City has shown up for Ali's stupid Midsummer Eve's Costume Ball. It's hard to believe no one has complained about this party to the cops over the years. Quark manages to squeeze into a space between T. Monroe's minivan and a rusted hunk of junk plastered with bumper stickers that say things like
MEAT IS MURDER
and
MY KARMA JUST RAN OVER YOUR DOGMA
.

Quark and I climb out of the car and start walking toward Ali's midnight blue, mosaic-covered house (which is straight across the street from the old Salt Lake Cemetery) when I make two equally terrible discoveries, thanks to a pair of very fine-looking girls who are cur
rently ringing Ali's doorbell.

First Terrible Discovery: THE GIRLS ARE NOT IN COSTUME. Neither are the people who greet the girls at the door. Suddenly I have a Midsummer Eve's epiphany.

DUH! THIS ISN'T A COSTUME PARTY!

I'm sure you've all had the experience of showing up some place wearing a suit, only to discover that everybody else is wearing jeans. Actually, you probably haven't. But I have. Mom made me wear a suit to my friend Jacob Kahn's bar mitzvah party.

Mom didn't know the first thing about bar mitzvah parties, okay? Probably because she grew up on a potato farm in southern Idaho, where there are just not a lot of bar mitzvah parties going on. The only thing Mom knew is that she wanted us to be respectful. So she made me wear the same suit I wore (respectfully) to my grandfather's funeral earlier that spring.

I'll never forget how I felt when I walked into Jacob's house and saw all those kids wearing T-shirts and Nike shorts, waiting for the party to start.

“Dude!” one of them shouted. “You're going bowling in a suit?”

I wanted to walk straight into the bathroom and stick my head down the toilet.

Anyway, I'm having SERIOUS déjà vu all over again in front of Ali's house. Hey!

How could I have gotten this so wrong? How could I have gotten everything so wrong?

I start to make little strangling sounds, while Quark becomes supremely agitated. He jumps up and down and flaps his bandage-swathed arms around like he's trying out for head cheerleader.

“Mmmmmmmmmm! Mmmmmmmmmm!” he says, which is how you express extreme agitation in Ancient Egyptian.

“Jeez! Stop bending my ear, why don't you, Quark!” I snap. “A Klingon can't hear himself think with you yakking all the time!”

Time to think is exactly what I need, too. I have to formulate a quick plan because of the Second Terrible Discovery I have just made. You know those very fine-looking girls not wearing costumes who just walked into Ali's house?

Well, one of them for sure is Scout. Scout as in my-best-friend's-would-be-girlfriend-even-though-I-want-her-for-my-own-girlfriend Scout. I'm serious. I would recognize that amazing hair anywhere. And although I didn't see the other girl's face, I think it might be Ellie.

Ellie? Scout? Ellie and Scout together? When did
those two
get to be such good buddies?

“Look, Quark,” I say. “I am NOT going in there dressed like this, so let's just turn around and go home right now. Who cares if Ali fires me for missing his party?”

I'm assuming here, of course, that beneath all his bandages, Quark feels the exact same way I do at this moment, which is that I would rather do combat
mano a mano
with a rogue Romulan officer rather than have the Girl of our Mutual Dreams (that would be Scout) see us dressed up in our Dork Clothes.

I make a move to leave, but Quark stays rooted to the spot like a tree. An extremely stubborn, mummified, Ancient Egyptian tree.

“Quark!”

He ignores me because he's so very busy staring at the front door through which our MDG (Mutual Dream Girl) just walked.

I grab his arm, but Quark shrugs me off. Then he stomps stiffly toward Ali's house like he's Franken-freakin-stein.

“DUDE!” I shout after him as he clambers up Ali's front steps. “LIVE IN THE NOW! SCOUT DOES NOT WANT A BOYFRIEND WHO'S BEEN DEAD FOR FOUR THOUSAND YEARS!”

Quark ignores me. He doesn't even look back, which is hard for mummies to do under the best of circumstances because of all those neck bandages. And these are definitely NOT the best of circumstances.

The next thing I know, Quark enters the Secret Chambers of Ali (otherwise known as Ali's house) and disappears from view.

I spit out a Klingon swearword I found online: “guy'cha'” (which, for the record, is the stronger form of the more polite “ghay'cha'”).

And suddenly I find myself engulfed by an enormous tsunami of approaching guests, including this lady with a hairy little dog who tries to bite me even though she doesn't have any teeth left. (The dog. Not the lady.)

Against my will, I am swept along inside.

For obvious reasons, it doesn't take me long to spot Quark in Ali's living room, which looks completely amazing. There are candles and strands of colored motion lights and paper lanterns. The air is thick with the sound of steel drums and the scent of spices.

There are people EVERYWHERE.

In fact, I have never seen so many people at a party. Different kinds of people too. You know how it is at most high school parties—jocks go to jock parties, braniacs go to brainiac parties, Klingons go to Klingon parties.

But here in Ali's house it's different. There are kids and parents, young guys with dreds and old guys with no hair, women my mom's age wearing sweatsuits, skaters wearing jeans weighed down by heavy chains, men dressed like men and men dressed like women (okay, there's only one guy here in a skirt).

Ali's guests look like a collection of strangers standing together in a line at Disneyland, but here everyone is actually in a good mood—talking and sharing food and
laughing, too, in spite of the fact it's so crowded. Take this sweet little old lady standing next to me, for example. She's speaking Dutch to a guy with a boa constrictor (I'm not lying) wrapped around his big thick neck. And across the room I see T. Monroe (and his mother) chatting happily to a tall thin girl dressed in drapes of black velvet accessorized by jewel-encrusted crosses. She holds a single white lily and beams like the Virgin Mary at T. Monroe.

The doorbell rings. One of the “mom” ladies answers the door.

“Why it's the missionaries!” She squeals. “Come inside right this minute and I'll get you something to eat. My oldest son is serving in southern Belgium….”

About the only thing I DON'T see is another person dressed up like a Klingon. Everybody else (not counting me and the Mummy Quark) obviously came as himself or herself—no matter how different that self might be.

I blush with hot shame beneath my mask. I also sweat beneath my mask because guess what? THIS MASK IS FREAKING HOT! (Seriously, you know that guy who played Worf on
Star Trek: The Next Generation?
Well, he should have definitely received a special Oscar for having to endure so much alien sweatiness.)

Meanwhile, Mummy Quark keeps searching for Scout, in spite of the fact that his neck motion is compromised by all those bandages.

That's when it hits me. The answer to my prayer. I can fulfill my sacred vow by bringing Quark and Scout together.

Tonight.

I weave my way through the crowd until I am at Quark's side.

“Don't worry about anything,” I whisper into his left bicep. “I'm here for you.”

“Mmmmmmmmmmmm,” says Quark.

The doorbell rings again. Ali magically materializes and greets his new guests—
Senhor Rick
and Ellie's aunt Mary.

“It's the Governator!” I make gargling noises to express my EXTREME agitation in my native tongue, Klingon.

“Rick! I haven't seen you at the gym lately,” I hear Ali say as Quark and I scurry away….