Prankster, page 5
He shook his head and rubbed his eyes. “Whatever,” Joel said aloud.
He looked around. He was alone, so he once again started to return to his truck.
And again, he stopped. This time, his attention was caught by a disgusting sludge puddle by the plastic figure’s feet. What was that? It wasn’t mud. It wasn’t dog doo-doo. It was …
Joel bent over to see the sludge more clearly, and he immediately recoiled. The brownish lumpy mass looked like a dog had melted into a semiliquid ooze.
Joel took a step back and made a face. “That’s gross!”
Thoroughly creeped out, Joel rotated once more to see if anyone was watching him. He didn’t see a soul on the street, and all the houses either had pulled curtains or darkened windows.
Joel hurried back to his open driver’s door and jumped into the truck. Putting it in gear, he popped off the brake and drove away as fast as he could without squealing the tires. He didn’t want to make more sound than was necessary.
Why? Because it might wake the sleeping plastic kid?
Joel snorted at the thought. “Yeah, right,” he muttered. He turned on his radio to drown out the remaining heebie-jeebies that tickled the hairs at the back of his neck.
* * *
Joel’s mom was waiting for him when he pulled his pickup into the driveway. She stood on the covered, wraparound porch, hands buried in the pockets of her high-waisted mom jeans. Even from thirty feet away, Joel could see her furrowed brows and her compressed lips. She was obviously pissed about something. Great.
He was tempted to take off again, but he was still feeling weird because of the plastic kid-thing. He wanted to go up to his room and shut out the world.
To do that, he’d have to get past his mom.
Joel was an only child, and as such, he always figured he should be appropriately spoiled and coddled. His best friend, Wes, was also an only child, and Wes got whatever he wanted whenever he wanted it. Joel, however, had parents who were “committed” to making sure he wasn’t spoiled. Over the years he’d tried to manipulate them into getting him what he wanted, but he’d given up at some point.
“You have to work for what you get in life, Joel,” his parents were always telling him. “If we give you everything, you won’t know how to make your way in the world.”
“I’d figure it out,” he told them. “Why not give me a few easy years before I get to the hard ones?”
They didn’t find his reasoning persuasive or his humor amusing.
Unlike Wes’s parents, who told him it was okay when he made Cs and Ds in school, Joel’s parents not only lamented his poor grades, they punished him for them. His truck was a perfect example of that.
When Joel had gotten to high school, his dad told him that he’d buy Joel a new truck when Joel got his license, provided he got good grades. For every semester he got bad grades, the truck he received would be a year older. Joel tried to get good grades for a semester, but it was too much work. It cut into his music-playing and hanging-out time. So, he did the math and figured a five-year-old truck wasn’t such a bad thing; he gave up trying to get decent grades. When it came time for him to get his truck, his dad told Joel how disappointed he was in Joel’s school performance. Joel proudly told his dad his reasoning for being lazy, which turned out to be a bad move. His dad was so angry that he punished Joel for his “impertinence” by taking off another fifteen years from the new truck. That was how Joel ended up with a twenty-year-old truck.
“You should be glad your dad bought you a truck at all,” Joel’s mother had said when he complained about it to her.
She always took his dad’s side. “Your father is a wonderful man, a great father. He does his best for this family,” she’d said more times than Joel wanted to remember.
Now he could tell by his mother’s angry scowl that getting past her wasn’t going to be easy. He decided to try acting innocent and clueless and see what that got him.
He got out of his truck and waved at his mom casually. “Hey, Mom.”
“Don’t you hey, Mom me,” she snapped. “Your father called.”
Joel sighed and loped toward his mother. He made sure he kept his shoulders back, his head high, and his stroll in its usually confident swagger. Marianna, the prettiest girl in his class, lived across the street. Her bedroom window looked out over the road. She’d never given him the time of day, but he figured there was always hope. After all, he made jeans and black T-shirts look hot. All the other girls thought so. They didn’t seem to mind that he wasn’t romantic or gentlemanly or any of that crap. He got dates whenever he wanted them. Marianna, though, was one date he couldn’t get.
“Your charm is like plastic wrap, Joel,” she’d said to him once.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” he’d asked.
“It’s thin, and because it’s see-through, it doesn’t cover up what a jerk you are.”
Joel flicked a glance at Marianna’s window as he walked toward his mother. If she was watching, the only two women he wanted to impress were seeing him at a low point. That sucked.
Joel stepped up onto the porch and looked in his mom’s dark eyes.
Joel loved his mother, but she could be intimidating. She was a tall woman with a sturdy body, and she always wore no-nonsense clothes—usually dark slacks or high-waisted jeans and bright-colored blouses (today’s was magenta). Her features were kind of large for her face. She actually could have passed for a man if she hadn’t worn her hair long. But she commanded attention. He couldn’t look away from her when she was mad.
“Dad was in a mood,” Joel tried.
“Cut it out, Joel. You know darn well you’ve pushed your dad beyond the limits any parent should have to endure. You show up late to work, do as little as possible while you’re there, and you leave early. He was going to let it slide until you went off to college, but then you announced that you weren’t going to college … not that you could get in with your grades. At that point, your dad figured you’d need the money, so he kept you on, in spite of the fact that you’re going to break his heart and go join a crazy rock band or whatever it is you plan to do. But even he has his breaking point.”
Joel looked at his feet. “I’m sorry, Mom.” He tilted his head and gave her the sideways glance that always used to make her melt.
She blew out air. “You’re a good-looking boy, Joel. I’ll give you that. But looks won’t get you everything. You need a little personality to go with them. And right now, yours needs a lot of work.”
Joel shrugged. “I’m going up to my room.”
His mom opened her mouth, then closed it and made a shooing motion with her hand. “Fine. Go.”
Joel brushed past her and stomped into his house. He heard her sigh behind him as he tracked dirt across the gray-tiled entryway. Served her right.
He was kind of hungry and wanted a snack, but more than that, he wanted to be alone. He ran up the wide staircase to the second floor, strode down the hall, and went into his room. Slamming the door, he started for the drumsticks but instead grabbed his acoustic guitar from its stand in the corner of the room. He flopped on the bed with it.
Curling his fingers over the frets, Joel concentrated on the latest set of chords he was trying to master. They were barre chords, which he’d always had trouble with. Getting the strength in his fingers necessary to hold down all the strings on the fret at once took hundreds of hours of practice, and even now, after years of playing, he struggled with some of the less common chords. He had to learn them, though. He didn’t want the music he was writing to be ordinary; he wasn’t going to use the usual, easy chords or the standard chord progressions. He wanted to create music that pushed boundaries.
Boundaries.
That was his whole problem. He was locked in by so many rules. They made him crazy, so crazy that he felt like he was a walking ball of anger all the time. He didn’t mean to be, but he couldn’t seem to help himself. He felt like a tiger trapped in a cage, a tiger so frustrated that it couldn’t help but roar at everyone.
Joel went through his new chords twice; then he started combining them with complex picking. The mix sounded supercool. Joel grinned as a new song, about breaking boundaries, began to form in his head.
But the fledgling melody was silenced when Joel’s mother threw open his bedroom door. Joel’s fingers froze on the guitar.
Joel’s mom walked over to his dresser and put clean socks in a drawer. “That sounded interesting,” she said.
Joel frowned. “Interesting” wasn’t what he was going for. But he wasn’t going to say anything. He never tried to explain his music to his parents. It wasn’t for them to understand. It was for him, and for the fans he’d eventually have when he was able to leave this town and play someplace where he’d be appreciated.
Joel’s mom flicked a look from Joel to the plush-backed stool that sat in the corner with his instruments. She put her hands on her hips. “Why did we bother getting you that stool if you’re going to slouch on your bed when you play your guitar?” She shook her head and left his room, muttering to herself.
As soon as she closed the bedroom door, Joel threw a pillow at it. “Why did we bother?” he mimicked her.
Why did we bother? was one of his mom’s favorite lines. This line applied to anything she or Joel’s dad did that she thought Joel should appreciate more.
For instance, she loved to ask, “Why did we bother getting you nice clothes if you’re not going to take care of them?” and “Why did we bother getting you a tutor if you’re not going to show up for your lessons?”
He never answered her when she asked these questions, but if he had, he’d have said something like “Who asked for nice clothes? Jeans and T-shirts are fine.” And “When did I ask for a tutor?”
If he’d thought he could get away with it, he’d have the most to say in answer to her question about his room: “Why did we bother decorating your room if you were going to trash it?”
Well, did Joel ask her to bring in a professional decorator to coordinate just the right beige-and-blue-striped curtains to go with the dark blue walls in his room? Did he ask for the custom oak study center—desk and credenza attached to built-in filing cabinets and shelves—and the matching chest of drawers and nightstand and dresser? Did he care about the imported Turkish rug or the framed art prints of rare plants? Did he need a state-of-the-art brushed-steel ceiling fan and light? Did stuff like thread count and pillow shapes matter to him? Why did he need six decorative pillows anyway? When his room was straightened up the way his mom liked it—which only happened when either she or the housekeeper did it—the damn pillows took up most of his queen-size bed.
All Joel had ever wanted for his room was enough space for his drum set and guitars, a professional sound board, and soundproofing. Instead, he got a room full of hoity-toity men’s club–looking furniture and decorative crap, which forced him to cram his instruments—the only thing he did care about—into a corner. And the lack of soundproofing made it really hard to practice. His parents always were either making comments on music he wanted to keep to himself or they were yelling at him to keep it down.
The problem with Joel’s mom and dad was that they’d decided what was right for him, and they got mad at him for having a different idea. He never got to choose for himself. Over the years, this had made him so resentful that he could no longer appreciate even the rare things they did that he actually liked.
Joel gritted his teeth and started playing his guitar again. He sang softly along. “Boundaries stealing choice from me—shoving, forcing, making me be not me.” He stopped. That was lame.
Joel sighed and laid back on his pillows, cradling his silent guitar.
If only I could leave now, he thought.
His dad had told him that if he didn’t graduate from high school, Joel would never receive another penny from his dad—not now, not if he got in trouble, not even after his dad was dead. Joel believed him.
At the moment, he’d have been willing to give up any of that money just to get away, but he didn’t have enough saved to make the trip, or to get his own place. He needed to stay at home a little longer. And now he had to find a new job … unless he could find a way to make his dad forgive him. Maybe he could convince his dad to take him back.
Joel thought about that for a while. Which was worse? Groveling to his dad or going out and trying to find a different job? Both choices sucked, but he finally decided apologizing would be less time-consuming than job hunting.
By putting on what he thought was an award-worthy acting performance over a dinner of roast beef, red potatoes, and peas, Joel was able to persuade his dad to let him keep working until the end of the school year. Joel had been all “I’m really sorry I’ve been acting like a jerk.” And he’d thrown in a bunch of stuff like “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and I get that I need to make some changes,” and “I think I’ve been taking things for granted, and I’m not going to do that anymore.”
He thought his blah, blah, blah lies had gone well with the blah meal. Joel’s mom was into cooking “simple food.” She actually took classes on how to put together meals with the fewest ingredients possible. He wished she didn’t have time for classes like that—the food was terribly bland—but she only had a part-time, work-at-home hobby job writing knitting patterns and selling them online. This gave her too much time to “discover” new things like “cooking simply.”
For the last two years, nothing they ate had any flavor. Last Christmas, he’d tried to fix that by spending some of his own money to buy a spice rack filled with thirty spices for his mom. She’d ended up giving away all but a dozen of the spices. “What use do I have for ginger and coriander?” she’d said as she’d put them in a bag to donate to charity. And his parents wondered why he didn’t do stuff for them. What was the point? It was never right anyway.
Just two more months.
* * *
The next morning, feeling pretty pleased with himself for getting his job back, Joel slouched on one of the burgundy-velveteen-covered stools in front of the aircraft-carrier-size island in his mother’s restaurant-quality kitchen. For probably the 3,000th time, Joel looked from his bowl of cold cereal to the flashy stainless-steel appliances and the gleaming black granite countertops in his mother’s kitchen. How did these two things make sense? About ten years before, his dad had surprised his mom with this massive kitchen remodel (instead of building Joel the soundproof music studio he wanted). His dad had bought all state-of-the-art this and top-quality that, and Joel still got cold cereal six mornings a week. The only time he got a hot breakfast was on Sunday mornings, before church … and that was only because his dad was home.
Monday through Saturday, Joel’s dad left the house before dawn to get the garden center ready to open. Too often, Joel was expected to go in early with his dad. More than half the time he had the early shift, he overslept. What normal person wouldn’t? It wasn’t natural to wake up when it was still dark.
Joel ground his way through a second bowl of Fazbear Fazcrunch cereal, wishing the whole time it was something else—like curried eggs and bacon with hash browns. Maybe he should have gone over to Zach’s house. Zach’s mom always made what she called “farmhouse breakfasts.”
“Glaring at your cereal isn’t going to turn it into pancakes … or whatever you’re wishing it was,” Joel’s mom said as she tossed a knitting magazine on the counter next to him and sat down with her cup of coffee. As usual, she was already dressed (today’s slacks were black, and the blouse was emerald green) and had her hair braided and her makeup in place.
He tossed her a look. “I still don’t get why we can’t have eggs during the week.”
“Nothing’s stopping you from having eggs. You want eggs? Cook eggs.” Joel’s mom took a sip of her coffee and kept her gaze on her magazine.
“Just because you don’t eat breakfast doesn’t mean you shouldn’t feed your family breakfast,” Joel grumbled. “It’s not fair to make me eat cereal every day because you think coffee is all a person needs in the morning.”
Joel’s mom put down her magazine and turned to look at him. “You have an interesting perspective, Joel,” his mom said.
He frowned at her. “What’s that mean?”
“You’ve conveniently forgotten all the days you were little, when I got up early and fixed you eggs or pancakes or waffles or oatmeal only to have you run down the stairs, late as always, and yell, ‘I don’t have time, Momma! Just give me cereal.’ After dumping a few dozen breakfasts down the garbage disposal, I got the message.” She pointed at his cereal box. “That’s what you wanted. That’s what you get.”
“Yeah, well, it sucks, and I don’t think it’s fair to punish me for something I don’t even remember doing.”
His mom crossed her arms and raised an eyebrow at him. “What happened to ‘I get that I need to make some changes’?” She did a pretty good impression of his voice as she shoved the previous night’s sucking-up back in his face. She took a deep breath, then frowned and shook her head. “You didn’t bother to shower this morning, did you? As usual.”
Joel pressed his lips together. Again with the showering. His mother was obsessed with cleanliness.
“I didn’t have time,” he said.
“But you have time to sit here and grouse about the food you’re eating, which was provided to you free of charge, by the way.”
Joel wanted to say something snarky to that, but he knew anything he said would get back to his dad. When his dad had agreed to let him come back to work, it had come with a warning: “You’d better keep your nose clean. No slacking off. No backtalk.”
So Joel kept his mouth shut.
His mom wrinkled her nose and picked up her coffee and her magazine. “I think I’m going to take my coffee up to my office and read my magazine in peace.”
“Whatever,” Joel muttered.
His mother stood next to the island for a moment and stared at him. Then she sighed and left the kitchen.
