“Do you know where you want to go to college?”
“Not really.” The wrong answer, I knew, because college was one thing Mr. Fisher was interested in talking about. The right kind of college, I mean.
And then we were silent again.
This was also familiar. That feeling of dread, of impending doom. The feeling that I was In Trouble. That we all were.
chaptertwenty-four
Milk shakes. Milk shakes were Mr. Fisher’s thing. When Mr. Fisher came to the summer house, there were milk shakes all the time. He’d buy a Neapolitan carton of ice cream. Steven and Conrad were chocolate, Jeremiah was strawberry, and I liked a vanilla-chocolate mix, like those Frosties at Wendy’s. But thick-thick. Mr. Fisher’s milk shakes were better than Wendy’s. He had a fancy blender he liked to use, that none of us kids were supposed to mess with. Not that he said so, exactly, but we knew not to. And we never did. Until Jeremiah had the idea for Kool-Aid Slurpees.
There were no 7-Elevens in Cousins, and even though we had milk shakes, we sometimes yearned for Slurpees. When it was especially hot outside, one of us would say, “Man, I want a Slurpee,” and then all of us would bethinking about it all day. So when Jeremiah had this idea for Kool-Aid Slurpees, it was, like, kismet. He was nine and I was eight, and at the time it sounded like the greatest idea in the world, ever.
We eyed the blender, way up high on the top shelf. We knew we’d have to use it—in fact welongedto use it. But there was that unspoken rule.
No one was home but the two of us. No one would have to know.
“What flavor do you want?” he asked me at last.
So it was decided. This was happening. I felt fear and also exhilaration that we were doing this forbidden thing. I rarely broke rules, but this seemed a good one to break.
“Black Cherry,” I said.
Jeremiah looked in the cabinet, but there was none. He asked, “What’s your second-best flavor?”
“Grape.”
Jeremiah said that grape Kool-Aid Slurpee sounded good to him, too. The more he said the words “Kool-Aid Slurpee,” the more I liked the sound of it.
Jeremiah got a stool and took the blender down from the top shelf. He poured the whole packet of grape into the blender and added two big plastic cups of sugar. He let me stir. Then he emptied half the ice dispenser into the blender, until it was full to the brim, and he snapped on the top the way we’d seen Mr. Fisher do it a million times.
“Pulse? Frappe?” he asked me.
I shrugged. I never paid close enough attention when Mr. Fisher used it. “Probably frappe,” I said, because I liked the sound of the word “frappe.”
So Jeremiah pushed frappe, and the blender started to chop and whir. But only the bottom part was getting mixed, so Jeremiah pushed liquefy. It kept at it for a minute, but then the blender started to smell like burning rubber, and I worried it was working too hard with all that ice.
“We’ve got to stir it up more,” I said. “Help it along.”
I got the big wooden spoon and took the top off the blender and stirred it all up. “See?” I said.
I put the top back on, but I guess I didn’t do it tight enough, because when Jeremiah pushed frappe, our grape Kool-Aid Slurpee went everywhere. All over us. All over the new white counters, all over the floor, all over Mr. Fisher’s brown leather briefcase.
We stared at each other in horror.
“Quick, get paper towels!” Jeremiah yelled, unplugging the blender. I dove for the briefcase, mopping it up with the bottom of my T-shirt. The leather was already staining, and it was sticky.
“Oh, man,” Jeremiah whispered. “He loves that briefcase.”
And he did. It had his initials engraved on the brass clasp. He truly loved it, maybe even more than his blender.
I felt terrible. Tears pricked my eyelids. It was all my fault. “I’m sorry,” I said.
Jeremiah was on the floor, on his hands and knees wiping. He looked up at me, grape Kool-Aid dripping down his forehead. “It’s not your fault.”
“Yeah, it is,” I said, rubbing at the leather. My T-shirt was starting to turn brown from rubbing at the briefcase so hard.
“Well, yeah, it kinda is,” Jeremiah agreed. Then he reached out and touched his finger to my cheek and licked off some of the sugar. “Tastes good, though.”
