Read Brett McCarthy for Free Online Page A

cars or setting fires. But it
was
rude and you
do
need to offer a simple ‘I’m sorry.’ It’s not the end of the world.”
    How could I possibly explain to her that it was? At least the world I inhabited, where Bob Levesque was the sun and the rest of the kids at Mescataqua Junior High School fought and bit and clawed for positions as minor planets in his orbit. My friends and I were tiny moons in the outermost regions of popularity, like Charon circling Pluto. Which isn’t even a planet anymore.
    Circling Pluto may not be very cool, but obscurity has its good points. People don’t bother you if they don’t notice you. And people like Bob Levesque for sure didn’t notice me. Sure, in Girl Jock Universe I was a star. But step into the boy-girl world of going out, making out, weekend parties…and I was a dim bulb. They might be playing spin the bottle over at Bob’s house, but I spent Saturday nights baking brownies with my grandmother.
    I didn’t want to think about what I would have to face at school the next day.
    “You know, I think I’d like to go to my room, if that’s okay,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
    She pressed her lips together, nodded, breathed The Sigh, and I was dismissed. I scooped up my backpack and was just heading out the door when I remembered something.
    “What did you mean by ‘This is the last thing Marie needs right now’?” I asked.
    Mom waved her hand as if the question were a mosquito. She didn’t look at me. “Oh, nothing, really. We’ll talk about it later. She’s just under a lot of stress these days.”
    I wasn’t the only one in the kitchen who had something she couldn’t possibly explain.

dis•o•ri•ent•ed
    After a half hour in my room with Good Charlotte (I played the refrain “Don’t Want to Be Just Like You” six times at full volume), I was ready to make the first apology call. When I dialed, Mrs. Pelletier picked up.
    She wasted no time in letting me know it would be a cold day in Quito before she forgave me or let Diane associate with me. (Quito is the capital of Ecuador, located smack on the equator.) I told her I was sorry, and I even offered to pay for the lamp, but that seemed to piss her off even more.
    “You know, Brett,” she said, her voice icy, “throwing money at a problem doesn’t necessarily make it go away.”
    Frankly, I thought throwing money at a new lamp would go pretty far toward making the broken lamp go away. So when I finished apologizing, I asked to speak with Diane. That’s when she announced The Ban.
    “Diane is not allowed to use the phone for a week,” Mrs. Pelletier said. “And I don’t know when she’ll be allowed to see you.”
Click.
    I was in no hurry to call Mrs. Levesque after that. So I wandered over to the Gnome Home to see what Bazooka Nonna was up to.
    She was stacking the molded plastic chairs from the afternoon’s entertainment in her garage and already knew the whole story. Apparently Mom had been over, filling her in while I was blowing out my eardrums in the bedroom. I told her about my call to Mrs. Pelletier. Nonna shook her head and settled into the top chair of the stack. Like she was sitting on a little throne.
    “Well,” she sighed, “as usual, Marie Pelletier is overreacting like a real rhymes-with-witch. You’re just going to have to wait it out. But I’m proud of you for calling her. It’s not easy to apologize, especially to someone who has trouble forgiving.”
    That was the thing about Nonna. She never let you get away with anything, but she always let you know she was on your side.
    “I don’t understand why she’s
so
angry and why she won’t let me pay for the lamp,” I said.
    “Well, she’s got a lot on her mind right now,” Nonna said.
    “That’s just what Mom said!” I burst out. “What are you guys talking about?”
    Nonna looked at me, eyebrows raised.
    “Has Diane told you about how her family’s doing?” Nonna asked.
    Now it was my