Stealing The Show (Such Sweet Sorrow Trilogy, Book One)

3

WE PRETEND IT'S a normal Sunday. 

We sleep late. We eat cereal. We watch the Vikings game. 

It's turning to late fall so we talk about the weather. 

Paps says it looks like it might be a cold one. 

He tells us a story from when he was a kid, growing up in San Francisco. It snowed this huge blizzard, and back then they didn't know it was coming and weren't ready for it at all. So Paps was at school and they sent them all home, but the snow got so thick and awful that he couldn't make it. The only place he could see to go was this store. 

"Well, I thought it was a store," he says. "But it was a saloon. A bar, I guess you call it nowadays. Well, there I was, seven years old, covered in snow and almost frozen to death. I come tromping in thinking I'm going to be buying some candy and comic books, and all these old men turn and look at me. I didn't know where I was, of course. I thought maybe it was a restaurant or something, I don't know.  

"The bartender comes over and says, 'Hey, kid! You can't be in here.' 

"I say, 'I can't be out there, either!' Well, that got them laughing. By the end of the storm, I was standing on the counter, singing songs and telling jokes. They were all tipping me, too. I came home, all this money in my pockets, my parents worried to death that I'd died out in the snow. I tell you what." 

We eat hamburgers for dinner. 

We get quiet. They read. I do homework. 

Late, late, much too late for a ninety-three-year-old to be awake, Paps comes by my room. 

"Wanna work a little?" he asks.  

He means on the book we've been writing together for years. The never-ending book, because we don't want it to end.  

I was about to show Shoe the book when I learned about Paps' cancer--that moment comes back to me and it seems like it was ten years ago already. It seemed like such a big deal to prove to him that there is something I do besides watch people. I'm a writer, I was going to tell him. 

But that seems so stupid now. I just want to keep the book between me and Paps. Our secret. 

Paps and I have been writing it for three years. It's at about a thousand pages, so it's stupid long. It's an alternate universe kind of book, where instead of money, people trade hours of their life for things. But this kid figures out how to get hours back by making people laugh. He's the funniest person who was ever born, this kid. He just looks at you and you laugh. So he goes around giving people years of their life back just by being a little weirdo. And of course, the Administration wants him dead. 

It's stupid long. And it's kind of weird. There are talking animals--rabbits don't get any jokes, dolphins love puns, and the funniest animal of all is the hippopotamus.  

I know I'm biased, but the book is fucking hilarious.  

Anyway, I tell him I don't feel like working on it tonight. I just don't think I can be funny right now. He says okay. I instantly regret it. 

We go to bed. 

And I know I've spent a whole day where I was alive but didn't act like it.  

Every thing that happened didn't seem real. Because everything feels different knowing Paps is sick. 

I spent a whole day watching myself live. I was alive without living.  

And that means something totally different now. 

So at school on Monday morning, I'm a mess. I haven't slept much in two days, don't really remember what I did for my homework, haven't talked to anybody my age in about thirty-six hours.