Stupid Fast - By Geoff Herbach Page 0,7
away.
“What about Peter Yang?” he asked, now a block from the school.
“Something’s gone amiss,” I told him, a look of resignation on my face.
“At least Peter Yang has a driver’s license,” he said, nearing his turnoff.
“That’s true,” I agreed as he turned.
“We can Skype, dude,” he shouted, biking away.
“Chapter over,” I mumbled, heading toward home.
***
Bleak. Bleak. Bleak.
Summer. Summer. Summer.
CHAPTER 5: I MEAN, MAN! I USED TO LOVE SUMMER!
I have very fond memories actually.
Every summer before this summer, we’d go camping at least once. For example, the summer after freshman year, Jerri took me and Andrew camping at Wyalusing State Park, right where the Wisconsin River cuts the state and hits the Mississippi. Where there are really high bluffs and huge trees and watery sand bars and little streams that look like mountain streams on TV flowing down the bluffs and ravines that cut through the forest and hiking trails right through it all. We spent two full days exploring.
Even though I hadn’t hit my growth spurt and hadn’t become stupid fast, I was already a jumper. I’d leap across ravines and Jerri would shout “Felton’s a bobcat!” and Andrew, who apparently didn’t think athletic prowess was bad for a young man at that time, would ask me to do it again because I looked so cool in flight.
At night, Jerri made campfires, and we roasted marshmallows, and we sat around and sang while she played guitar. She sang me “You Are My Sunshine” like twenty times, which I really liked, and all three of us sang “Rocky Mountain High” and “Country Road.”
Jerri is a great singer. She sounds professional. “Love me some John Denver,” she’d say. She’s a good mom too. She’s really been a good mom. Really. She took us camping every summer before this summer. And I’ve loved summer.
CHAPTER 6: BUT THIS SUMMER?
It surely didn’t start out so well.
So, I was down at the nursing home the other day, minding my own business, when…That might be a good way to begin a comedy routine, but it’s total crap if it’s an actual description of what you do every morning. Oh, yeah. I know a thing or two about nursing homes.
For example, you know what isn’t pretty? Old ladies in their underwear. You know what I got to see lots of? Old ladies in their underwear.
In fact, this summer, I saw no fewer than ten thousand old ladies in their underwear. That’s because one of my big stops on Gus’s ridiculous paper route was a nursing home. Ridiculous. Lots of times when I ran through there, delivering the State Journal, the old ladies would shout “Get me out of here!” Oftentimes, the old ladies were wearing old lady robes or morning dresses or whatever, and the clothing wasn’t tied right or it had slid down wrong, and I got to see their Old Lady Underwear with an Old Lady in it, which made me very sad.
What also made me sad was the very fact that nursing homes even exist because they’re hot, stinky prisons for innocent old ladies who have lived too long (like that’s a crime).
Not that all of them were old. One lady was actually sort of young. Whenever she saw me, her eyeballs popped out of her head, and she screamed and waved her arms and freaked out, apparently for good reason (more on that later if I can stay awake).
Through email, Gus told me to never look the inmates in the eyes, which was easy for him because of his hair wad. Not for me. My hair is curly and can’t cover my eyes no matter how much I grow it and comb it down. (Boing—the sound of my hair springing upward.)
I biked so damn fast when I got out of that place. I would just want to run away and never go back but totally knew I’d be back the next day. Paper route! Jesus. Looked like a banner summer.
Poor Gus was unhappy too. He wrote that hanging with his grandma was like hanging at the nursing home all day, all summer long. Then he said it smelled like tacos in Caracas, but he hadn’t yet found any tacos to eat. I answered back that I was bored and hot and tired, and I couldn’t stop eating, and Jerri was being weird, and Andrew hadn’t taken a shower since school got out.
We’re losers was his reply. He also said, Tell Andrew he must clean himself.
CHAPTER 7: THEN SOMEONE MOVED INTO GUS'S HOUSE
Like ten days