Read Please Ignore Vera Dietz for Free Online Page A

me, too, not to take Linden Road or else I’ll die in a bad accident. I mean, I don’t know this for sure, but that’s what it feels like, so I do what he says just in case. Even in death, Charlie is frustrating as hell.
    In life, the minute he seemed like one thing, he’d change and become another. No matter what the fad—music, clothing, hairstyles, hobbies—Charlie remained this indefinable rebel. His number one priority was smoking his next cigarette. Always. Which is why he had so much detention last spring. And though he’d joined with me in dogging the school’s Detentionheads and Potheads since I could remember, his time in detention brought him closer to them, and further from me. Which was how I ended up hating Charlie.
    I think back to last April Fool’s Day, when Jenny Flick told Charlie that I talked about him behind his back. Which was where everything started to go wrong.
    “I heard you were talking about me,” he said. He was livid. Every muscle was tensed.
    We were at the pagoda, and I was flying paper airplanes. He reached for his cigarettes in his breast pocket. I said, aware he seemed angry but thinking he was just putting on an act for April Fool’s Day, “Oh yeah? What did I say?”
    “Are you saying you weren’t?”
    I looked at him and smirked. “You’re my best friend. I can’t even figure out what I’d say if I wanted to.”
    “Oh really?” When I realized he was genuinely pissed off, I got a little frightened. “So you weren’t the one passing around the whole school that my dad hits my mom?”
    “What?”
    “You’re acting surprised, but I know you know.”
    What could I say to this? I’d kept the Kahns’ secret for my whole life, against my own better judgment, and I’d never said a word.
    “Of course I know , Charlie. I’ve only been your best friend and neighbor for seventeen years. But I’ve never said a word about it to anyone. Ever. Like EVER .”
    “So how does the whole school know, then?”
    “Who says they do?”
    “Jenny.”
    With that, the shitstorm began.
    I had a hundred arguments that made sense. I had a hundred proofs. I had a hundred truths. Nothing worked. Charlie believed Jenny Flick.
    “But you even know she’s a mythomaniac!” I said.
    “Stop using those big words. You sound like a fucking geek.”
    “Maybe I am a fucking geek.”
    “Maybe you’re more than a geek.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “I don’t know. What goes around comes around, I guess.”
    I could hear our friendship dying right there. Hit by a truck so big, going so fast, there was nothing left. Not a shred of our childhood, not a splinter of our tree house, not a bit of our New Year’s Eve kiss. Nothing. Jenny Flick had managed to take from me the only person I ever let in and replace me with beer, sex, and pot.
    So now I had no mother and I had no best friend.
    But, I assured myself, one day Charlie would come to his senses. One day he would see how he’d been led to the dark side by a lying little creep. I actually thought that this conversation at the pagoda was the worst that would happen.
    I had no idea what was coming.
    I think of a quote in Dad’s bathroom Zen book. “The willow is green; flowers are red. The flower is not red; nor is the willow green.”
    Same went for Charlie.
    Charlie was my friend; he was very nice to me. Charlie was not my friend; nor was he very nice to me.

FRIDAY—FOUR TO CLOSE—LAST STOP
    Here’s me using mythomania in a sentence.
    Jenny Flick suffers so badly from mythomania, she believes her own lies. I could never understand what Charlie saw in her. I’ve known her since middle school, when I bumped into her at the bathroom mirror while she layered on eyeliner.
    “What’s your problem?” she said.
    “Sorry.”
    “Yeah, you are sorry,” she answered.
    She wore too much eyeliner then, at age thirteen, and now, at eighteen, she wears so much black under her eyes, she looks like a slutty linebacker raccoon.
    Jenny Flick