CRUDDY by Lynda Barry

hills I’d never walked before and around me the windows of the people’s houses were all jumping with the berserk light of the TV. I doubted that I had ESP because if I had ESP I do not think my life would have turned out the way it did. If I could have seen the unexpected before it got to me first.
    I was thinking of the Turtle. His arm around me. What did it mean? Was it meaningful? Vicky never said his name after she got his stash. What mattered was the stash and not the Turtle. I felt in Vicky’s purse. The stash was there. It was there. I could call the cops and say “I have drugs,” and get arrested if I wanted to.
    I was wondering was it meaningful, the Turtle’s arm around me, was it? And what was the deal on him? He was such a weird combination of skorkish clothes and vocabulary I didn’t know and then his teeth, which were small but very straight and white and had the little ridge across them that braces leave. He wasn’t from my side of Dunbar Avenue, that was for sure. Did it mean anything, his arm around me? He was interested in my story. He asked me questions. That one question. “Are you wanted?”
    I was thinking it would be not so bad to run into him and I did some ESP vibrations to him too but it felt fake. I came to Twenty-third Avenue. I knew where I was again. Now what. Now what.
    In Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe down at the piers along with the bone of the whale penis and the dried-out beef jerky man called Sylvester there were the shrunken heads. It was from the eyebrows and eyelashes you knew they were real. And little downy hairs on the faces. Their mouths and eyelids and nose holes were sewn shut. Someone stitched them like the mother said she was going to stitch me. She was going to sew me shut. It was during one of her furious screaming nights when anything goes. When Julie and I are just supposed to sit on the floor and take it. She wanted us on the floor. I don’t know why. Julie was the one who got her mad. She told the mother we were watching TV and the movie was the
Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb
and when the mummy walked out I said, “Look, Julie, it’s your dad.”
    You should never bring up Julie’s dad to the mother for any reason. She gets the most furious when she remembers all of the ways she’s been ripped off in life. The mother told me she was going to sew me shut for saying that and she got the needle, the right needle that came from the hospital, stainless steel and curved into a half circle with a blade point. It was already threaded. She crouched down and held it up to my face. She said, “This is what I’m going to use.”
    I suddenly felt so tired of trying to keep her off of me. I was thinking, I don’t care anymore. Get it over. Get it over with. I crossed Twenty-third and headed home.
    East Crawford doesn’t have streetlights. There’s some light that leaks onto the mud road from the lumberyard, and there are people’s porch lights but most are burned out. Ours is. The square front room window had the blue TV light behind the curtains and from a side gap, a shard of light from the mother’s lamp fell jagged on the wooden steps. She was home. The lamp was never on except when she was home. She was home.
    My hand was shaking when I put my key in the lock. I kept thinking, Get it over with, who cares, get it over, but the scream-whistle was starting in my ears anyway. I put my key in the lock and twisted it. I knew the mother heard it. I knew right then she was looking up, her posture getting instantly straight, she was waiting for my head to enter her world. But the door would not open.
    I pushed and twisted the lock and tried the doorknob and twisted the key again and freaked. She did something to the door. She did something to make sure there was no way I could just walk in. I was going to have to knock. She wanted to make sure she was ready for me. It took a long time to get my hand up. Knock-Knock.
    Her lamp switched off. There was a tiny sway to the curtains.