Make Something Up by Chuck Palahniuk

yells, “We’ll take the fag…the four-eyes…and the spic—if you’ll take Cannibal.”
    Because Phys Ed is almost over, the Blue Team confers, squeaking the toes of their court shoes against the gym floor. Their captain yells back, “We’ll take the fag and the four-eyes, the spic, the Jew, the cripple, the gimp,
and
the retard—if you’ll take Cannibal.”
    Because when this school grades you on Participation they mean: Do you take your share of the social rejects? And when they grade you on Sportsmanship, they mean: Do you marginalize the differently abled? Because of that the captain of the Red Team shouts, “We’ll spot you a hundred points.”
    Hearing that the captain of the Blue Team shouts back, “We’ll spot you a million.”
    Cannibal, he thinks he’s such a stud because he’s just looking at his fingernails, smiling and just smelling his fingers, not even aware of how he’s holding everyone hostage. How this is the opposite of a slave auction. And everybody knows what he’s thinking. Because of what Marcia Sanders told everybody. Because Cannibal is thinking about a movie that’s chopped up in his head, some black-and-white movie he saw on cable TV where hard-boiled waitresses in olden times slung hash in some roadside diner. Because Cannibal’s thinking how they popped their chewing gum, these waitresses. They smacked their chewing gum while they yelled, “Gimme slaughter on the pan and let the blood follow the knife.” They yelled, “Gimme an order of first lady with a side of nervous pudding.”
    You knew it was olden times because in diner talk two poached eggs were “Adam and Eve on a raft.” And “first lady” meant an order of spare ribs because of something from the Bible. An order of just “Eve” meant apple pie because of the story about the snake. Because nowadays nobody except Pat Robertson knew anything about the Garden of Eden. Around here, when the captain of the baseball team talks about eating a fur burger he’s talking about chowing down on a muff pie, and he’s really bragging about his tongue lapping at a blue waffle.
    Because girls have their own food, too, like when they talked about Marcia Sanders having a bun in the oven, what they meant was she’d missed her red letter day.
    Otherwise most of what he knew about sex Cannibal learned from the Playboy Channel where ladies never rode the cotton pony so when kids whispered about gobbling a bearded clam or snacking on a meat muffin he knew it meant what the bunnies do to the playmates, the same way a rattlesnake flickers its tongue to smell something it plans to bite on Animal Planet.
    Because Cannibal had seen those centerfolds. You know the ones, of an old Miss America drinking from the furry cup. Those dirty pictures of her being a confirmed clam digger, because it was just those two ladies without a single tube steak or bald-headed yoghurt slinger standing there to make it a real marriage. Because that’s how girls do, sometimes, when their crotch cobbler needs gobbling.
    Because nobody ever explained otherwise, he was ready to go neck-deep in Marcia Sanders’s jelly hole. Because his dad, old Mr. Cannibal, only ever watched the Playboy Channel, and Mrs. Cannibal only liked the
700 Club,
so it wasn’t lost on their boy how sex stuff and Christian stuff both looked the same. Because when you turn on cable TV, it never fails. When you tune in and see an almost-beautiful girl almost acting on a set that looks almost realistic, Cannibal knows that her story will end by her being touched by an angel. Either that or she’ll get a heaping helping of hot baby gravy sliding down one side of her face.
    Because of that, Cannibal was already sporting a Spam javelin when Marcia Sanders looked at him in American Civics one day. No matter how he tries to hide it, his skin is polka dot with goose bumps, because he’d been remembering that hard-boiled diner talk yelled through a little window. The same way Catholics lined