Chicken Nuggets and Worm Meat

I’m sitting outside Bunce Hall waiting for you to get out of class so we can head home. This is when my Volvo is in its dying days and it looks like it’s been driving on borrowed time anyway. I’ve been driving this damn thing since we were juniors in high school. I finally replaced the driver’s seatbelt a month or so ago. There are two bent rims in the trunk and one of them is my spare so I’m fucked if I get another flat. Every other panel is dented including the one from when you got jumped in the parking lot in high school and smashed Keith’s head into the hood. Worse of all, the car shakes something violent if it goes above forty-five which will eventually dislodge the engine enough to finally kill the car. I always thought it was invincible, but I guess everything eventually dies. The air-conditioning doesn’t work, but it’s October 15th, so the heat will cut through the cold autumn air without a problem.

My Shakespeare class ended early and so I’m waiting for you. You’re studying neurobiology or business; I can’t ever remember. On campus you’re always there when I do readings for the literary magazine or find myself at a regrettable party. I’m not studying creative writing yet, I’m still just an English and Education major. You always tell me that I should be writing books, not reading them. When I tell you that in order to be a better writer I need to read, you ask, “Then why aren’t you writing anything?”

The door slams and I’m picking a song to play for the drive home.

“Fuck this shit hole,” you say. “My professor has the audacity to keeps us there extra? As if we don’t have jobs or other classes to get to?”

“Yeah, where you working at?”

I know you’re not working with me. Whenever I complain about my job at the diner, you tell me how I should’ve stuck with soccer and gotten a scholarship.

Whenever I tell you if I’d stuck with soccer, I would have ended up like everyone else on the team; addicted to painkillers or worse, you shrug and say, “Yeah, but you wouldn’t be paying to go to college.”

You crack the window. “Mind if I smoke, bruh?”

Sure, you ask me but we both know it’s not really a question. I light an American Spirit and will have to throw it out the window before we get back home. Those fuckers last forever. When you found out I started smoking and saw I smoked American Spirits you said, “Fuck, who wants to stand outside that long?”

It was a few Black Fridays ago and we were waiting to get inside Wal-Mart. I said, “We’re outside anyway.” You were looking to get a deal on a TV so you could re-sell it. I was just there for the chaos of it all. We didn’t plan to run into each other, but ended up spending the night together. We went to Home Depot to get your dad yard tools and watched the sunrise together at Denny’s. It was like we were in high school again and nothing had ever changed.

On the way home, I keep changing what is playing. The Volvo still has a cassette player and no AUX cord, so I have my phone hooked up to this white wire sticking out of the dash. I keep flipping around from “Drink a Beer” by Luke Bryan to “Fire and Rain” by James Taylor, “Hate Me” by Blue October to “Who Knew” by P!nk, to “I’ll Be Missing You”—

“Can you just play something?” you fuss. We’ve never agreed on music and skipping around drives you crazy. You take a long rip from your cigarette as I toss my phone into a cup holder.

I can’t take 55 home because the Volvo will rattle the whole way. The scenic route means we pass two Taco Bells and an Arby’s at the start. “You hungry?” I ask.

“I could eat,” you say. “Nuggies?”

I pull into the McDonald’s drive-thru and we’re relaxing as the guy in front of us is taking forever.

“This muthafucker never been to a McDonald’s before?” you ask. You roll down the rest of your window and lean out it. “There’s twelve options. Order and move it along, shithead!”

The guy in front of us doesn’t seem to notice. He keeps talking to the speaker like he’s flirting with a waitress. There’s no need for that much head wobbling or finger guns in a drive-thru. I consider ramming his car out of the way. It’s not like the damage would show on my car, it might even improve it.

“How could someone take this long to order food at fucking McDonald’s?” I ask.

You laugh and take another drag from your cigarette. “How’s school going? What you learning about in Shakespeare 1? Does that mean there is a second Shakespeare? Was his name something that got passed down to writers or something?”

“No, it’s just the first of two Shakespeare classes I have to take. He’s super important to western literature after all.”

You laugh again. “So, you could be the next Shakespeare, yeah? I mean, I know you did plays and shit in high school, never knew you wrote them. What are you learning about right now.”

“Well, I was in musicals and I’m not a playwright. Anyway, we’re studying Romeo and Juliet.”

“Romeo and Juliet? Didn’t we learn that in Mr. McGonigle’s class?” Mr. McGonigle was our Freshman English teacher. Back then I didn’t read books. If there was a movie version, I would just watch that and get a good enough grade on tests and papers to get a passing grade. Any paper we wrote, you would find papers written about it online and forge together an essay for a passible grade. No one ever accused us of plagiarizing because we seemed too good to do anything wrong. That was the same year, you hacked into the school’s online grading system to make sure our parents wouldn’t know we didn’t turn in any of our schoolwork.

“Nah, the next year in Mrs. Marchese. We read A Midsummer Night’s Dream with McGonigle.”

You huff and say, “I still don’t think she likes us even if we threw her a surprise baby shower.”

Out of everything we did in high school, that was the strangest. Convincing Mrs. Marchese to go to the office for an angry parent phone call gave us a short period of time to set everything up. You bought diapers and decorations. All I had to do was convince everyone to not spill the beans. The other kids in class helped with buying a cake and refreshments, but you took care of the expensive parts. Called the cash flow part of the bennies of dealing.

“To be fair, you were always falling asleep in her class,” I say.

“I was fucked up then. I couldn’t help it. If they wanted me to stay awake they should’ve taught something more exciting.”

The guy in front of us moves on. I pull up and look at you. You have that same shit-eating grin you’ve had since we met in the third grade when my family moved in two doors down from you. You asked if I liked Pokémon and we spent every day that summer battling and trading our pocket monsters.  Not like you’re plotting to steal candy from a baby, but rather you’ve already snatched the mom’s wallet. I crack up knowing what I’ll order. “Hi, no thank you. Can I get an order of sixty McNuggets?”

“I’m sorry?” the woman responds over the speaker.

“Sixty McNuggets, please.”

“Six McNuggets. What would you like to drink with that?”

“No ma’am. Can I please get sixty McNuggets. Thank you.”

You laugh. I laugh. She asks again. “Sixty?”

It’s the same conversation as the last time we did this. When you convinced the boys to have an eating contest. Nobody won because everyone ended up puking in the front yard from overeating. Everyone except for you. You tapped out at ten and we made fun of you for quitting. While we all puked, you laughed. Even at me, your oblivious accomplice.

“Yes, ma’am. Sixty.”

“We don’t have sixty McNuggets.”

I laugh. “Can I get an order of ten then?”

“Yes. Anything else?”

“I’ll take two more orders of ten chicken nuggets, please.”

“Anything else?”

I order three more ten pieces of chicken nuggets.

“Anything else, sir?” the woman asks with more than a hint of annoyance. There’s a delay in her response as she probably realizes we’ve ordered sixty McNuggets total.

“Yes, can I get two sweet teas, please and thank you.”

She tells me to pull forward.

When I pull up, they hand me the teas first. I drop my phone in your lap and put the teas in the cup holders. The guy handing out orders tells me to pull up and they’ll bring the food out when it’s ready.

I lean back in my seat and say, “You don’t care about eating shit like this?”

You shrug. “Nah, eat what you like. Whatever makes you happy makes me happy.”

You’re the best cook me or anyone else knows. I think you got it from your mom, but you would never admit that. Like the one time you stole prime rib from the restaurant you were working at and made them into cheesesteaks. You played it off like anyone can make prime rib taste good, but those were the best goddamn cheesesteaks the boys and I ever had. There was something magical happening when you’re in the kitchen. We thought you’d get fired for snagging them, only for you to reveal how many bottles of booze you’d stolen from the bar. That was when you got me to start standing in line to collect a paycheck from your boss even though I didn’t work there. You said he wouldn’t notice and he never did.

“What’s taking them so long?” I ask.

“Romeo and Juliet, huh? In college. What are they possibly teaching you that Mrs. Marchese didn’t teach you?”

I always hate it when people ask what I’m studying in college. When they know I’m an English major they always make a joke about me being a well-read server or that I’ll be an over-qualified cashier at Barnes & Noble. There’s always a tone of condescension in how they ask, but never when you ask me.

“That Mercutio is the most important character in the play.”

“Who?”

“Romeo’s best friend. The whole play is a comedy until Mercutio dies. That’s when it becomes a tragedy. His death signifies the death of the comedic relief in the play. And so, the play goes from being a whacky will-they-won’t-they romance and turns into a story of woe.”

You tap your cigarette out the window. “He gets killed by Tiger Mask, right?”

I hate when you do shit like that. You’ve always been a jack of all trades, master of none. “Tybalt, the Prince of Cats. Yeah. He kills Mercutio.”

“That’s it. What is it Mercutio says when he dies?”

“A plague o’ both your houses. They have made worms’ meat of me.”

“If you know Shakespeare by heart, why you gotta study it?”

“So, I can be the next Shakespeare, right?”

“Yeah, man. Yeah.” You suck on your bogie. “You think they use worm meat instead of chicken in the McNuggets?”

“Don’t put that in my head, man.”

You laugh as they bring us the biggest McDonald’s bag we’ve ever seen. I pop open the back door and ask them to put it there.

“Can you buckle in that precious cargo?” you ask.

They don’t. They try to close the door, but it takes a special skill to close it. I get out and shoulder the door close after they give up. I keep pushing it in until there’s a click. It’s been that way ever since you convinced me my Volvo would be great for mudding. We ended up, not quite, wrapping it around a tree. Just enough damage to fuck up the door, but not shatter the window. Though, the window won’t go back up on its own if someone rolls it down. It’s an embarrassing story to tell people because they always end up asking as if they misheard me, “In a Volvo?”

The scenic route also takes us past the spot you got your tattoo at. “They any good?” I ask.

“You thinking of finally getting some more ink, punk?”

I’ve always had a dream to be covered head to toe in tattoos, but couldn’t figure out what I wanted on my skin for life. I decided to get the cover of my favorite book tattooed over my heart. It’s a dead canary which everyone says is morbid. When you saw it for the first and only time you said, “That? What the hell is that?”

It’s the cover of Lullaby by Chuck Palahniuk. It’s the book our senior year English teacher convinced me to read on my own, after he convinced me to read Fight Club. He got me to read Fight Club after he found out we were getting into fights at parties just for fun. When he asked where the bruises on our faces came from, we said, “We can’t talk about.” He looked at you, then looked at me, and told me to stay after class. That’s always how it was back then. You’d get away with any and everything. At least it seemed that way until you got busted selling k-pins our junior year. After that, every teacher saw you as a lost cause.

“It’s the cover of the book Messore gave me. Convinced me to be an English major.”

“So, it’s a tattoo to remind you to never read a book again?”

“Something like that.”

We always talked about getting matching tattoos of a royal flush. We figured each card would represent a member of our friend group. I’m glad we never got that tattoo though cause we all shuffled around, we fell out, and lost contact with each other; every single one of us.

In exactly a year I’ll get a butterfly tattoo on my ribs with a Jack of Hearts as it’s wing for you. It’ll hurt like hell the whole time, but I won’t go to your artist. When random ass people at the beach make fun of me for having a butterfly tattoo, they’ll feel guilty about it.

You used to talk about getting a tattoo on your back of your little brother’s favorite Sesame Street characters as Macy’s Day Parade balloons where you are the single person holding the ropes. Instead, you got a pair of hands holding on your ribs with text that reads, I am my brother’s keeper. It’s a nice black and grey tattoo.

“Like from the Bible?” I asked when I saw it for the first time.

You looked at me defensively, “Yeah, except instead of asking God, I know I’m my brother’s keeper. I’ll always be there for him.”

I think about your brother. I remember when some kid tried to bully him on the bus. Your brother was minding his own business. We were too young for me to know he was on the autism spectrum. I just thought he was quirky. A kid shot him with a spit ball and so you broke the kid’s nose. You nearly broke your hand in the kid’s mouth. When we got off the bus, your knuckles were bleeding from rows of teeth marks. Your mom didn’t stop yelling at you because you wouldn’t tell her what had happened. She just kept yelling and yelling at you for getting into a fight. She never let you explain. You bottled it down like you did with everything else that bothered you. The next day at school you made jokes about it all to me and the boys like you did with everything like that. I still wonder if shit like that is why you started using.

I pull down our street and park at my house. Your house looks like there’s a party going on because the street is packed with trucks and cars. This morning there were cop cars and an ambulance in your driveway. I was running late to class but, I wondered what you had done now.

I get out of my car and walk two houses down to your house. I ring the doorbell even though I’ve never done that before in my life. My hands are empty because I left the McNuggets in my car. I got them because people always bring food to these type of things, but this is the first one. There will be more. A photo of our Under-14 championship soccer team will have more dead kids than living ones in a few years. That was the first year you played soccer and we won the championship. You took total credit for the season even if you never scored a goal. But now, standing here on your parent’s doorstep, it’s the first time.

Your mom opens the door and she doesn’t look like she could put the fear of god in anybody right now. Your brother is standing behind her. He asks, “When’s he coming home, mom?”

All of the boys are sitting at the kitchen table and none of them look at me. Your mom apologizes and I do too. I wait for you to walk in, but you’re not here. You’re gone.

You’ve been gone for years, longer than the stench of worm meat McNuggets will reign over the interior of my car, but at least you were down the street. Now I won’t see your bedroom light on when I get home late from work. I won’t wait at the stop sign at the end of our street when I see you turning hoping you’ll stop, roll down your window, and ask how thing have been going. I’ll stop going to Denny’s late at night hoping you walk in too. Maybe I should’ve gotten Denny’s instead. But now, you aren’t even down the street. Now, you’re just nowhere.

You mom walks me inside and your dad is finishing off a beer. He’s in the middle of a smile when he sees me and it’s gone. He drops the bottle and the shattering sends your dog running. He hugs me, and pulls a chair out, and offers me a drink.

“Yeah, that sounds good,” I say.

He brings me a Corona because that was always your favorite beer. “Sorry, we don’t have any limes.”

Having limes in October sounds dumb, but I can’t make a joke like you would. I finish it before putting it down. He already has a second one for me. “Thanks.”

“Yeah, it’s one of those kinds of days.”

The boys are peeling at the corners of their labels. We haven’t seen each other since high school. Since the time you and them tried to jump my brother at a party. They got paid in money and sex. You got paid in drugs. My brother forgave them, but I never did.

My parents show up in the middle of one of the boys stories about you. They’re talking about the time you fell asleep at the wheel on the way to pick up your Methadone. Your truck rolled eight times. You walked away from it without so much as a scratch.

“When the EMT was trying to get his vitals, he wouldn’t stop complaining that his Pop-Tarts broke.”

Everyone laughs as if this isn’t just another story about you being an addict. Whether it’s the punchline or a major-minor detail, you’re always on drugs in the stories. It’s an unavoidable detail.

Our parents hug behind me and then my parents hug your brother and sister. She’s a senior in high school and into theatre. She’s angry that you won’t be at her senior production of Grease. She doesn’t blame you, but I do.

My dad gets a beer from your dad and my mom pours herself and your mom a new glass of wine. Your grandma is drinking straight out of a bottle and your grandpa is filling up the kitchen with smoke from his cigarettes. Your mom has made enough food to feed all of us for months. Every time she goes to the fridge she stops to look at photos of you that are splattered across the fridge. One from the year we won the championship, one from our graduation, one of your family in Salem.

She takes the one of you all in witch hats. “I knew this was going to be my favorite trip. I miss him.”

She cries over the photo and your dad hugs her. They tell us how you were clean for that trip. How you had been clean for three years. I feel like shit because I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that when you came over asking for money, you were clean. You asked, “Can I borrow some money?”

“For what?” Everyone knows you never give an addict money.

“I need stamps,” you said.

“Stamps?”

“Yeah, to send an application for the Navy. Want to ride with me to the post office? We can stop by the candy store, like the old days.”

I didn’t have anything else to do that day, so I said sure. We got half-way to the post office before we realized both tires on both our bikes were flat. We walked them the rest of the way.

You asked me, “If I put you down as a reference of character, would you take the call?”

“Sure, I guess.”

It’s a silent two mile walk except for the Pokémon cards in the stokes of our bikes. They’re just a Machop in mine and a Vulpix in yours. Nothing too rare.

At the candy store you grabbed me Monsters and Skittles; my favorites. You grabbed yourself food too. You pull out cash and pay for us both.

“So, you needed money huh?”

You crack your soda. “No, I just missed the old days.”

“Yeah, I do too. If you were ever clean, we could hangout.”

“I’m not—”

“Yeah, I know. You always chose drugs over our friendship.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did. That’s why we’re not friends anymore.”

We didn’t say anything to each other the rest of the walk home. The Navy never called me. I always wondered if you ever even sent your application. Sitting at your kitchen table, with the boys and our families, I realize that was the last thing I ever said to you.

That’s why we’re not friends anymore.

I do the math and realize you were clean for a year and a half at that point. I can’t lift my head up to look at anyone because I feel like I shouldn’t be there. I don’t deserve to be.

You dad pats my shoulder and asks, “How’s the literary magazine going?”

“What?” I ask.

He tells me how you would ask my dad how college is going for me. How you found out I was on the editorial board of a literary magazine. Your dad has both issues I’ve worked on. He tells me how you showed off the sonnet I’d wrote for it.

I walk to the garage to get myself a beer and consider leaving. You were keeping up with me and I didn’t even know you were sober. The garage door is open and I could walk home if I wanted to. I’m at the edge of the garage when your brother comes out and asks, “What are you doing?”

“Just getting a beer, buddy.”

He looks at an empty corner of the garage. “I don’t think he’s coming home.”

“No, he’s not.”

“Dad told me he died because his heart failed.”

I don’t know why, but this pisses me off. I walk back inside with your brother and hear your grandma saying she hopes it was heart failure. That you did too much damage to yourself and your heart finally gave out. Before I can say anything, the phone rings. Your mom takes the call in the living room. It’s the coroner’s office. We all hear her say it. “That’s what we thought. Thank you.”

She hangs up the phone and shrugs. Your dad admits there was a needle in your arm when he found you and threw it away. “I just didn’t want anyone to see him like that.”

I can’t be mad anymore. You overdosed just like everyone else does. You were clean, you relapsed, and now you’re dead. It’s a story I’ll get too used to hearing, but right now it feels unfair. This one feels unique and personal, but that’s only because it’s the first one. They’ll get less personal as more people in our team photo die, but it won’t stop feeling unfair.

Your grandma, the woman who made me say grace before even having snacks at her house, tells us there is no God. That if he let this happen to you, he can’t be real. Your mom is upset and says, “I just hope he made it to heaven.”

Your grandma says, “Why? There is no heaven if there is no God.”

This feels like a fight, but nobody is disagreeing.

The boys tell the story of you getting held at gun point in Camden because your dealer found out you were counterfeiting money. How you talked them out of killing you. How you could talk yourself out of anything. Everyone laughs like the story is about how smart you were, or how charming you were. Everyone just keeps telling stories like that as if they’re funny.

Your sister is the one to say it though. She smashes her wine glass and the cries of a party foul are drowned out by her yelling, more than asking, “Don’t you have any stories that don’t involve my brother using drugs?”

Everyone goes silent. Do we? The boys look around with the answer of no lingering in the air.

I raise my hand. “I have some.”

I first tell the story of us sneaking out to go sledding down the dirt hill that was made by the development down the road. The one that went abandoned for years because the developers went bankrupt.

Your mom laughs. “Why were you sledding on May 5th?”

The truth is it was a stupid plan to try and impress a girl. Instead, I say, “We just wanted more time together There was never enough hours in the day to spend with him.”

Everyone agrees. I guess it’s what we all wanted.

I say, “But you already knew that story. My favorite is when he stole flowers.”

The boys give me the dirtiest of looks because they’re part of this. They give me the, don’t say a word look. It’s one you always took as an invite to tell a story. So, I say, “He was dating a girl that was in the play with me. During the intermission, he realized he hadn’t gotten her any flowers. The flower shops were closed, so what did he do? He stole them.”

“Stole them?” your dad asks. “From who?”

I say, “So, he went across the street and stole some.”

“Across the street?” your grandma asks. “What’s across the street from the school?”

Your mom and dad collectively say, “No.”

The boys fess up and say, “A graveyard.”

Your sister says, “What?”

“Yeah,” I say. “He ran across the street. Found a grave with fresh flowers and stole this huge ass wreath from a grave. They were fresh because they were fake. So, when his girlfriend asked why are they fake he fessed up, immediately.”

Your mom laughs hard. Your dad looks proud. Your sister laughs too and thanks me.

“Then—”

“Then?” your grandma asks.

“Then he told her about how it’s good luck to steal an actress flowers from a graveyard. He said how it dates back to the days of Shakespeare when flowers were expensive so it became common practice to steal actresses flowers from graveyards. That eventually became superstition for good luck.”

Your sister looks at me like her wine tastes disgusting. “What? I’ve never heard that before.”

I laugh. “It’s because he made it up on the spot.”

That gets everyone to laugh. None of them deny you would do that. Your mom stands up and goes to brush her teeth. She does that when she’s nervous. It’s a habit she developed from you telling her that her breath stinks. It was always your go to move when you wanted to talk about something and not have her hear.

In the bathroom she yells out, “Oh my god, thank you.”

Everyone is confused. She tells everyone to come into the bathroom. There we see a toothbrush that is perfectly across two toothbrush cups. I look at everyone for some clue as to what we’re supposed to be looking at.

Your mom says, “He made it. He made his bridge.”

Everyone seems to celebrate. I can’t believe how dumb your mom sounds. How could that give her some peace? Obviously, this is nothing.

We sit back down at the dinner table and the night is filled with more stories of you. My parents head home and I stay up drinking with the boys and your family. Eventually, I finally head home. Your mom stops me before I leave.

“Can you speak at his funeral? He loved your writing. I just know you’ll give a great speech.” She has that look in her eyes like she’s scared I’ll say no.

“Yeah, sure,” I say. I think I haven’t talked to you in six years. That I don’t know anything about you. I think I’ll have nothing good to say.

“Maybe you could tell that story about the flowers?”

I agree and head home. She yells for me to lean to the left so that if I fall, at least I’ll fall into my yard. I stumble to my car and lean up against the back tire. I open the dented door and pull out the cold nuggets. They don’t taste anything like worms’ meat. I get through ten or so. I know why your dad hid the needle. I know why your mom will keep that toothbrush in a box with your baby teeth. It’s the same reason I bought these nuggets. You were invincible and now you’re gone, but that just doesn’t feel real yet.

I shove the door shut and it doesn’t click shut. I pop a nuggie and don’t have the strength to close it.

D.S. Davis is a YA writer originally from New Jersey now living in Truckee, California. He’s a former English teacher and currently the MFA program coordinator of the low-residency Creative Writing program at Sierra Nevada University, where he received his MFA focusing on writing for children and young adults. He has been published in Beyond Words, Dead Mule School for Southern Literature, and Fearsome Critters.