WATTYS LONG LIST. He's got three polyamorous, pole dancing moms and his world is the stuff of which teen boy fantasies are made. But when he falls for a feisty cancer patient who is about to die, he truly learns how to live.
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Okay, so to continue from where I left off, one of the office ladies came out from this little room behind the counter and shouted, "Lurleen, you got to quit this mess!"
And the big woman making all the racket turned and frowned and said, "Billie, don't you be talkin' to me like I'm a child!"
"I'll talk to you like a child long as you keep actin' like a child," this Billie said.
I knew Billie as Mrs. Doakes. No kid on campus was ever going to call her "Billie" like that. Most adults were afraid to, too.
She was a little black bulldog, that one. Honestly, she was short and stocky and had bulgy eyes, a pug nose, a frowny mouth and no neck. And she would come running to that counter in a heart beat if she sensed any kind of trouble brewing. Like those mean dogs that attack the fence every time somebody walks by.
She also ran the whole school. Even the principal and other admins obeyed her because she was another one like Williams who knew the school, the neighborhood and the district better than anybody else.
But she had one up on Williams. She was the keeper of secrets. Had been for something like 30 years. The shit she knew about that school and the whole damned district could've sent people to prison, probably. No, definitely.
I know this because she was the one who called "Downtown" when they were trying to social promote me to high school. That's a long story, but the Cliff Notes version is I'd been dropped in 7th grade for non-attendance and decided to go back three years later.
But they didn't have any records of my ever being enrolled. They'd totally ghosted me. Partly because being pretty much homeless, I didn't have a real address. So all the registered letters and whatnot bounced right back to the office.
And of course, we didn't have a phone, either. So after they'd made the obligatory number of attempts they just dropped my little truant ass.
Let me clarify this. I didn't just quit out of laziness or something. I sort of had to. I was trying to survive and keep my whole family alive—this is another story that'll have to wait. But trust me, I was under a lot of pressure.
So school was just sort of a nuisance at the time. Especially the one I'd gone to, which was very similar to DeGrazia in that it was obvious to most of us that a diploma wouldn't really represent anything much other than that we'd showed up enough to pass every year. One of the worst schools in the country, not just Tucson. Mississippi test scores. Scandalously low.
But I knew if I waited to go back there when I was 15 or 16, they'd send me straight to high school, because there's an age limit. It's true. They don't want some mannish boy chasing little middle school girls around. Giving the other boys even worse ideas. Middle school kids are batshit crazy to begin with.
