Pizza Day
Terry placed the white paper napkin across his lap, careful not to touch the place on his left thigh where it still hurt.
“Cheese, cheese, cheese, please,“ he sang under his breath, imitating the jingle he’d heard on the commercial last night. He lifted the slice of French bread slathered with tomato sauce and partially congealed mozzarella and noticed a blackened shard of crust. He flicked it off, pretending it was a bird as it skid across the speckled Formica tabletop and onto the cracked gray linoleum.
“You think like your mother,” his father had told him this morning as Terry had stuffed his Spiderman wallet and math textbook into his backpack. “Don’t.”
Terry took a bite and savored the bread’s sweet doughy texture. The slice had cost him five quarters, most of his allowance money for the week, but he as he swallowed, his stomach started to feel better and he felt proud that he’d made the pangs go away all by himself.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do with you,” his mother had said three nights ago as she slid her arms through the sleeves of her red wool peacoat and retrieved her keys from the hook by the kitchen door. “Look what you made me do,” she’d said dispassionately, her rage now snuffed. Terry had glanced quickly at the coffee stain on his pant leg. The mug had broken into three large chunks and a few stray shards after it had hit the floor. “Look what you made me do.”
Now he took another bite and stared at the nubby cream walls decorated with the winning drawings from last week’s Thanksgiving art contest. His crayoned sketch of a turkey in a pilgrim hat saying, “If you can’t beat them join them!” had taken first runner-up. As he’d colored it on the old particleboard coffee table in the rec room, his father had proclaimed it “trying and weird”. But his mother had liked it and Terry smiled faintly at the construction paper blue ribbon affixed to its upper right corner.
He finished the remaining pizza and used his tongue to dislodge cheese shrapnel from the hole where his new molar was coming in. Then he crumpled the white ridged paper plate into a tight ball and tossed it into the heaping plastic-lined garbage can, where it banked against the side before landing on the vestiges of a tuna
fish sandwich.
He looked at the metal-encased clock on the opposite wall. Fifteen minutes of recess remained, then he had science with Mr. Sheffield and social studies with Mrs. Upchurch. His father had said to be on the front school steps this afternoon no later than 3:15. They were going to take a cab to Mount Adams Hospital and retrieve his mother’s car from the parking lot, where it remained after she tried to admit herself under her maiden name.
Terry untied his hoodie from around his waist, strode under the green neon exit sign and down the hall that lead to the playground. His zipper was broken and he had forgotten his gloves at home, but last week he had seen a special on Sir Edmund Hillary and decided to brave the cold.
As he opened the heavy wooden double doors, his stomach gurgled and a ripple of tomato sauce washed into his throat. Next week he would order pepperoni.
Litsa Dremousis’ work appears in The Believer, BlackBook, Bookmarks, Esquire, Filter, Hobart, McSweeney's, Monkeybicycle, MovieMaker, Nylon, Paper, Paste, Pindeldyboz, Poets and Writers, Seattle Sound, the Seattle Weekly, and on NPR.