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Zits: Shredded
Copyright © 2014 by Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman
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Library of Congress catalog card number: 2013953797
ISBN 978-0-06-222853-6
EPUB Edition February 2014 ISBN 9780062228543
14 15 16 17 18 CG/RRDH 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FIRST EDITION
For the King Features folks, who go
the extra mile for us day after day after day:
Rocky Shepard, Keith McCloat, Brendan Burford,
Frank Caruso, Claudia Smith, John Killian, Richard
Heimlich, Jack Walsh, Dennis Danko, Lou Albert,
Mike Mancino, Robin Graham, John Perry,
and Evelyn Smith
CHAPTER 1
hat’s the trouble with milking french fries—slippery
elbows. Once you’ve been at it for a couple of hours,
T
you get a grease slick down your forearms that threatens
your stability. One careless bump from, say, your 230-pound
sumo-size best friend and you can go skidding forward across
the table, sending a giant cup of your morning’s work sliding
ahead of you. As in just now. We all freeze as the oily Big Slurp
teeters on the edge, and then dumps about seventeen fossil
fuel–free miles onto the floor and into the crisp cuffs of some
salesman’s khakis.
Ever since we had the van converted to run on veggie oil,
Hector, Pierce, and I have been scrounging stray fries and
orphan onion rings off abandoned fast-food trays and squeez-
ing the free mileage out of them. It’s annoyingly slow, and even
if we’re careful we can’t get more than a cup of grease out of
a small order of fries. There are sixteen cups in a gallon, and
the van has a ten-gallon tank. Do the math. There’s no way I’m
wasting this puddle of liquid freedom.
“Don’t just sit there,” I yell. “SCOOP!” Pierce dives for the
floor, and Hector grabs a spare cup while I try to surround the
pool of oil that’s spreading slowly across the table.
Before long, we salvage most of the spill, and I carefully
snap a plastic lid on the cup. Out of the corner of my eye, I see
the salesman guy flipping us off on his way out the door.
“What’s his problem?” I ask.
“No idea,” says Pierce. “Dude was slapping at me with the
comics section the whole time I was under his table. Talk
about anger issues!”
Hector scrolls through the apps on his phone, and then taps
the maps icon. He sits up really straight and gets this weird,
plastic look on his face.
“Contestants,” he rumbles in a deep, corny announcer
voice. “The category is Historic Cool Places We Should Visit.”
“Can we just have a normal conversation for once?” Pierce
moans. “As in, ‘If you were going to get a Renaissance painting
tattooed on the roof of your mouth, what would it be?’”
Ignoring him, Hector goes on. “This band famously
played a nineteen-hour jam at the Pioneer Inn in Nederland,
Colorado, that launched their career. You have five seconds.”
Then he starts to hum that Jeopardy tune. Hector’s game-show
host imitation always cracks me
up. I hate that buzzer of his,
though.
“Does anybody
have a guess?”
Hector prides
himself on
his obscure
air and raise my hand.
“Who is the String Cheese Incident? Duh. Does anybody
not know that?” Hector slumps back down to his normal pos-
ture and mumbles something in Spanish. He hates it when I
get these answers right.
“AARGH! I knew that one,” Pierce howls and then pops a
mutant onion ring in his mouth. A half
second later he remembers where
we found those onion rings.
“Dude! Keep your head in
the game! That’s free
fuel you’re wasting,” I
yell.
“Sorry . . . sorry,”
he mumbles as he
wipes his tongue
on his T-shirt,
then wrings his T-shirt into the cup. Then we all get back to
the business of milking french fries.
Converting the van to run on veggie oil has been kind of a
hassle, to tell you the truth. It all started when Sara came back
from an OSSWRAC (Overly Strident Students World Resource
Austerity Conference) in Columbus last fall. She was all hyped
up about stuff like eliminating fossil fuels and stopping global
warming. I was picking her up after band practice when out of
nowhere she gets this amazing idea:
Who knows what inspires these insights? At the time, it
seemed like an awesomely excellent suggestion, but let’s face
it, almost any suggestion is awesomely excellent when the
suggester is a hot girl wearing skinny jeans, boots, and a tight
tank top. I mentioned it to Hector, who mentioned it to Pierce,
who called his uncle, the motorcycle mechanic, who happened
to know everything there is to know about converting diesel
engines to run on veggie oil. He got his automotive training at
an ashram in Bhutan, so he’s a master of reincarnated engines.
And he knows his yaks, too.
There were a couple of problems to overcome right away,
like the fact that the van didn’t have a diesel engine and it
was going to cost way more than we could afford. But Pierce’s
mom stepped in and traded Pierce’s uncle the bail money he
still owed her for the cost of converting the van. We even got
to help with the conversion, which we all found educational.
After about a hundred trips to the junkyard and a month
of weekends, we actually got the van’s new used diesel engine
running on recycled veggie oil. And even though it can be
kind of a pain to scrounge for used grease, the van is more
awesome than ever because (1) it’s überly good for the planet
(the van’s old motor put enough CO2 in the atmosphere to melt
an iceberg),
(2) it’s a total chick magnet,
and (3) it always smells like french fries.
Combine that with the fact that the fuel is basically free
and available in any fast-food Dumpster or alley and you have
a win-win-win-win situation.
I squeegee another drop of oil into a fresh cup and catch a
glimpse of Hector tapping on his phone screen again. We’ve
been working out the route of our Epic Summer Road Trip
since we bought the van. The plan is to take off the day after
we graduate and spend the summer rolling down the highway
on good karma and fast-food squeezings. Yeah, okay, it’s still
a ways off, but a journey of this magnitude takes serious plan-
ning. Hector switches off his calculator app and announces,
“At twenty-five miles per gallon, the String Cheese detour to
Colorado would take just over forty-nine gallons of grease.”
“Totally agree,” I say. “Add it to the itinerary.” And then we
all groan as a big jock at the next table downs two huge fistfuls
of fries whose partially hydrogenated innards would have got-
ten us halfway to St. Louis.
“Let’s get back to Midwest destinations,” suggests Hector.
He holds his phone up for Pierce and me to see. “I think it’s
pretty clear that there’s nothing really interesting between
Moline, Illinois (the birthplace of three of the founding mem-
home of Bob Dylan), agreed?”
“Just Chicago,” shrugs Pierce.
“Right. So it only makes sense that we’d head west from
Hibbing and drive straight through to Jamestown, North
Dakota.”
“Correct,” says Hector. “And the next logical stop would
be . . . ?”
“Jerome, Arizona, home of the world’s best buffalo-wing
restaurant,” I answer, channeling his brain.
“I love it when a plan comes together,” Hector says, topping
off another cup of grease. Then something outside catches my
eye. Climbing over Hector and standing on the back of his
chair is the only way I can really see through the giant danc-
ing cheeseburger that’s covering most of the window. I’m no
advertising expert, but does this restaurant really believe that
an anthropomorphic sandwich with a top hat is going to make
me hungrier? Doubtful.
Anyway, by lining my head up just right to look through
the cheeseburger’s monocle I can see Sara’s tan 2005 Sensible
Boringmobile ease into a spot at the far end of the parking lot.
She says that she likes to park in the very last space because
there’s less chance of her car doors getting dented, but I think
it’s because her car is so incredibly bland that it’s the only way
she can find it later.
“Sara, D’ijon, and Autumn just pulled in,” I report, scram-
bling back over Hector’s shoulders.
“Are they coming in here?”
Pierce asks as we all
grab for our
phones.
After a quick look-check, we try to think of a way to seem
all casual and bored. It’s important that a guy never appear
eager or needy in front of females; they can smell pathetic a
mile away. So we all get ourselves arranged in our best fake
kick-back poses right as the girls roll in the door. Sara looks
around the restaurant, points at us, and then they all stroll
over to our totally relaxed corner. The element of cool is on
our side.
Okay . . . WAS on our side.
CHAPTER 2
umped. Yeah, not my favorite word. When I was in the
fifth grade, I was the only one out of the fifteen kids who
D
tried out for basketball that didn’t make the team. The offi-
cial reason was that they only had fourteen team uniforms,
but it felt more like being dumped. I think the whole thing
would have blown over fairly quickly if the coach hadn’t tried
to make it all better by naming me Head Male Cheerleader as
a consolation prize. Thanks for the popularity boost, Coach! I
spent the whole basketball season faking laryngitis and forg-
ing excuse notes from my mom. To this day I get queasy at the
sight of a pom-pom.
“Dumped is a strong word,” I squeak, bracing myself for
the millionth discussion with Sara about us. She seems to eas-
ily surf the waves of relationship junk between us, while I get
caught in every boy-girl riptide and undertow there is. I guess
that putting up with these emotional slogathons every few
weeks is the price a horndog like me pays to keep my name
in the same sentence with a hot girl like Sara. But as I men-
tally line up my usual set of all-purpose apologies and peace
offerings, I realize something isn’t adding up. This was a mass
dumping? Did these three just get picked up by a roving band
of triplets in the parking lot?
“You’re right, I need a stronger word,” she says. “How about
rejected? Or burned?”
Then D’ijon jumps in to put a point on it.
For a few seconds Pierce, Hector, and I don’t say anything
while that image sets up camp in our brains. When the silence
lasts too long and
Sara can see that
our minds have
wandered, she
herds them
back to real-
ity with a little
clarification.
Oh. That. Whew.
For those who haven’t heard, or may be living in a cave
somewhere without Wi-Fi or a decent smartphone, Connor
Mattson throws the best party of the year, every year. Period.
The dude’s birthdays are epic for two reasons: his parents, who
are never there. We actually got to play a set at his last party,
back when we were still calling ourselves Chickenfist, and we
were happy to grovel for the chance. Mattson never respected
us, I could tell, but he was desperate because his usual band,
Lung Mustard, was breaking up over “creative differences.”
(The creative differences happened when their bass player’s
mom read the explicit version of the lyrics to his newest song,
“Exacerbation.” They say that she backed her minivan over
his amp and donated his guitar to the PTA’s Monkees cover
band. The poor guy is now playing clarinet in the marching
band and spending the rest of his time collecting socks for the
homeless.)
Mattson acted all grateful when we said yes and then air-
penciled us in for the party next month, but I always wondered
if he really meant it. Whatever. Goat Cheese Pizza remains
dumped and that causes a serious crapification of everyone’s
mood. Then Sara cheers us down even further by suddenly
changing the subject to college application deadlines. I swear,
this girl’s brain cells ping around like a handful of marbles in a
food processor. I don’t feel like talking about anything having
to do with school, so I grab her hand and climb over Hector.
“I need some air. Let’s drive.” Hector and Pierce grab the
three cups of french fry grease we’ve collected and we all head
for the van. I get there first, automatically making me the
driver. Pierce and Hector funnel the precious oil into the fuel
tank while I hold the doors open for the girls. Two minutes and
eleven conversations later, we’re
rolling.
As usual, everybody ignores me, so I do what I always do
and just free-style it. There’s nothing like driving, especially
when there are other people in the car. With the (obvious)
exception of my mom, I like to listen to people talk when I’m
behind the wheel and just get lost in the experience. Not lost
like Pierce-lost (the guy has an epically bad sense of direc-
tion), but just living in the moment.
“Hello? Can we get back to the college applications?” D’ijon
is pretty intense when it comes to her education, and a col-
lective groan circulates through the van when she asks, “Is
anybody besides me worried about this community service
project requirement?”
I make a right turn because right turns tend to make the
engine run a little better. Pierce says that he’s going to fig-
ure out why that happens, but it doesn’t really bother me too
much. I’m good at right turns, so maybe it’s just one of those
things that’s meant to be, you know?
D’ijon has everybody’s attention, so she keeps rolling.
“Okay, first of all? I do NOT think it’s fair that the rest of us
have to compete with people like Gilbert or Phoebe.” We all
mutter in agreement. “I mean, those people have been geek-
ing out on service and charity projects since they were in
elementary school. Their extracurricular activities résumés
would make Gandhi look like a slacker!
Does that sound like a level playing field to you?”
“Well, it—” starts Hector.
The thing you need to know about D’ijon is that when she
asks a question, she pretty much has the answer she wants
in her head already. Coming up with your own is not always a
great idea.
“The answer is no because the
rest of us have not had the oppor-
tunity to focus on others because
we have been busy creating the
selves we have become. Do I
hear an amen?”