Adam Levin - Hot Pink

I finished my grilled cheese — completely delicious, Gino used so much butter — and Franco, on his motorcycle, held out the bag like “Go ahead and have another,” but then when I reached for it, he pulled it back away and I felt even worse because I got no willpower and now I was reminded. I was supposed to be eating 2,000 calories a day. Before I went to Franco’s that day, I already ate 1,570, and then the grilled cheese, and then there’d be dinner, which was gonna be steak because my dad, who’s a pilot, was coming home from Asia.

Franco III clanged her chain around and barked. Franco lobbed her a grilled cheese. She caught it in her sloppy pink mouth and tore it up. I watched through the diamond-shaped spaces of the fence.

Franco said to me, “For real, now. Do this no-hands.” And I took a step back and he tossed up a grilled cheese medium-high for me to catch in my mouth. I missed it, though. I’m not good at catching. It bounced off my chin and landed in some gravel, but that was no big deal, even though I knew the three-second rule was bull, cause waxpaper blocks out dirt and germs. Before I was able to pick it back up, though, Franco jumped off his bike and ground it around under one of his Jordans, which completely tore the paper. I told him he ruined it. He said he had something to show me so whatever. He only ever had two things to show me. One of the things was the trick where someone goes, “I got something to show you,” and then they give you a charleyhorse. This thing was the other thing. He started the motorcycle up and revved it. The engine was loud like all the other times.

“You hear that?” Franco said.

“Yeah,” I said.

Around then’s when this fake-red-haired guy came out the gangway side of Franco’s house. No one ever went out the front door of Franco’s house. I don’t know why. This guy came out the gangway side like everyone else. He was probably sixty years old and was really skinny. He wore that light kind of shades you could kind of see eyes through, eyes that kind-of-seeing made you feel like… what? Like you got caught at something scuzzy.

The guy tapped a cigarette out of a softpack, turned into the alley, and walked right up to Franco. He said, “Got a light?”

Franco said, “No. Get the fuck away from us.”

The guy made a laughing noise and showed us his palms, then he kept on walking, out of the alley and onto the sidewalk. Before crossing the street, he raised his hands to the sides of his head and patted, like to make sure his pasted-down hair was still in place.

“Why’d you tell him you don’t got a light and fuck off?” I said.

“I don’t like him,” said Franco.

“Why not, though?” I said.

“I don’t know. Why? You think he’s alright?”

“No,” I said. “I think he’s a sleaze. But what was he doing in your house, though, the sleaze?”

“Who knows,” Franco said. “Probably screwing my mother. Fucken used-car salesman. Parakeet breeder.”

I thought “parakeet breeder” was a pretty funny way to say fag, but it didn’t make me laugh, cause I didn’t like him talking about his ma having sex, especially with a sleaze who colored his hair. I never even really officially met her — she barely left the house — but I saw her take the garbage out a couple of times and she looked used-up, like she belonged in a bathrobe 24-7 and it hurt her teeth to eat. It was a mean thing to say, I thought, what Franco said about her.

“That’s not nice to say that about your ma,” I said.

“To say what?” Franco said.

“That she’s screwing some guy.”

“My dad used to say it all the time,” he said. “All the time.”

Me and Franco became friends the day we saw his dad’s ghost. That was the first day of the fifty-four-day run of me and Franco hanging out together, which was also the first day we ever hung out together. At that time, Franco was just friends with Helio who was my friend. Helio had weird chromosomes or genes or whatever and was brown like a Mexican guy, but Italian like most of the rest of the neighborhood, and his stomach wasn’t just a six-pack but an eight-. We’d been friends since fourth grade, when he got kicked out of fifth and put in my reading class. Five out of six times, on average, he beat me up in a fight, but that wasn’t just because he was strong. About two out of three times, he’d fight me in front of people, which put me off guard because he was funny and girls liked him, too, and so they would cheer for him like he was the home team and I was the away team. Even if I’d been like the home team and him like the away team, though, I don’t think it would’ve changed our outcomes too much, cause it was just people watching that screwed me up. When it was just me and Helio fighting, I won one in two times. That’s about seventeen percent of fights won overall compared to fifty percent of fights-fought-in-private won, and considering that me and Helio used to fight, on average, three out of seven days a week for nearly three whole school years, my stats are reliable. Unless I mean significant. I get it confused sometimes, the difference between reliability and significance, and that’s one reason why even though I’m supposed to be the junk at math — it’s mostly my math skills that got me tracked into gifted — I think that, really, I’m just above-average good at it. Which doesn’t even make me feel a little bit bad cause those other guys in gifted are serious pussies. All I’m trying to say is it’s highly unlikely that my outcomes against Helio in public versus private fights can be accounted for by freak accident. I tried explaining that to Jenny Wansie once cause we were alone in the nurse’s office together and it seemed like she finally liked me to my face a little bit, but then after we were done having our temperatures taken and mine was high and hers was normal, which I think made her mad at me, she said that I was a freak accident, and then when I came back to school the next week from having the strept throat, all her girl friends started calling me “Freak Accident,” then they called me “FA,” like eff ay , and then the guys who were friends with the girls called me “Fa,” like fah . Some of these guys were on the basketball team, and I beat two of them up for saying Fa to me, but it doesn’t do anyone any good to beat basketball guys up because fighting isn’t why people like them. It’s basketball. And even if I had it in me to make it so they couldn’t play basketball anymore, by breaking their fingers or cutting important connective tissue in their legs, it wouldn’t do any good, cause it would make them pitiful and me this dickhead. I was in love with Jenny Wansie so hard. Still am. It really broke my heart. It breaks my heart. Sometimes I call her on the telephone and she talks to me about boys she likes. She sometimes calls me “So La Ti Do.” I told my ma because I didn’t understand. My ma said it was a term of endearment, but my ma thinks I’m the smartest and the handsomest and she thinks that everyone else thinks so, too.

But Helio used to steal cigarettes for Franco is why him and Franco were friends, and one time Franco asked him to steal a can of butane, too, and when we brought all that loot back to Franco in his garage, he offered for each of us to take a cigarette, which Helio did and I didn’t do, and that’s maybe when Franco and I started our friendship because, right as soon as I said no to the cigarette, Franco said to me that I was a smart kid. He said, “Smart kid.” But if that’s not when we became friends, it was a couple minutes later, after him and Helio were finished smoking.

We were all just sitting there on Franco’s brown couch in the garage, listening to Franco III yelp about her chain being too short, and Helio said, “Can I put the butane in your lighter?”