Kill All Happies, Page 2

  Sartorially, Mayor Jerry had gone all out to honor the occasion of the last Rancho Soldado High School graduating class under his jurisdiction. It was the first time I’d seen him not looking like a hobo. He usually dressed in dirty, baggy, holey pants and a loud Hawaiian shirt picturing palm trees or surfers or half-naked hula girls. But today, he wore a pair of beige chinos that were about an inch too short on his legs but actually fit around his waist—the pants may even have been new!—and a wrinkled pink-and-green-striped oxford shirt. The too-short pants’ length gave a good glimpse of his sockless ankles and open-toed man sandals. He might have looked fashionably faux preppy except for his ivory-colored, 1970s-style wide necktie that was loose around his neck and fell closer to his rib line than his stomach. His shoulder-length, mangy salt-and-pepper hair was not brushed—thank God, or I really would have worried about him—but it was pulled back in a ponytail, tied with what appeared to be red Christmas wrapping ribbon.

  Mayor Jerry held out his arms to us and smiled. “Ya made it!” he said, and the class cheered.

  Text blast from my sister, Lindsay: Ha-ha! Someone just asked Jon Z-K for an autograph!

  I turned around again to see Slick’s parents, Jon and Selena Zavala-Kim, sitting in the row ahead of my family. Someone’s grandma stood in the aisle, fanning herself with her hand, while Jon Z-K signed what appeared to be the graduation ceremony program handout. Slick’s head was also turned around to witness this abomination. Ugh, Slick texted me. Her father was a local celebrity, and it was impossible not to recognize him today. His weirdly handsome face (weird because he was a dad) loomed large over the occasion, prominently displayed on a large highway billboard in the distance behind the football field. Wearing a loud vintage bowling shirt, Jon Z-K was the advertising face of Tunics of Virility. Everyone suspected Mayor Jerry spent more on that billboard than he earned at the store in a year. (The mayor was probably the only independently wealthy trust fund baby in mostly working-class Rancho Soldado.)

  Mayor Jerry read his speech from his phone, but everyone knew the phone was really there just in case he got a text from Sheriff Cheryl, whose wife, Darlene, was due to go into labor any minute. Mayor Jerry was the sperm donor.

  Mayor Jerry said, “Today we’re here to celebrate our town’s latest graduating class, but also to confer an honorary degree on one of Rancho Soldado’s most distinguished and beloved townspeople. Her name has been synonymous with Rancho Soldado since her grandparents’ first highway pie stand so many years ago. It was that road stand’s famous RASmatazz pies that eventually gave birth to the Happies restaurant and then the sorely missed Happies theme park. A lot of you might not know that this high school where we’re celebrating today is actually the second incarnation of Rancho Soldado High School. The original building burned down during a particularly bad brush-fire season sixty years ago, and one of its students opted to go work at the family restaurant rather than wait for the new school to be built. She took her own damn time about it, as she would say, but a few months ago, I’m delighted to tell you that at the young age of seventy-five, Ms. Bev Happie passed her GED test.”

  More hoots and hollers from the audience. Go, Bev! Hell yeah, Bev! (Nothing honored Bev more than cursing.) Mayor Jerry continued, “Today we pay tribute to her and the proud legacy to Rancho Soldado that the Happies institution brought us all. Beverly Olivia Happie, could you please step forward now so I may confer on you your freaking high school degree!”

  This time there was no need for me to rally the audience. My classmates and everyone in the stands immediately rose to their feet, clapping and cheering, as Bev Happie walked from the dais to the podium, wearing a cap and gown with Happies insignias stitched around the collar. Mayor Jerry, grinning, moved the tassel on Bev’s mortarboard from the right to the left, and then handed her a diploma.

  Bev Happie was a member of our graduating class! Obviously, we were the greatest graduating class in the history of Rancho Soldado High School.

  It took a few minutes for the claps and cheers to die down and the crowd to return to its seats so Bev could address us.

  “Damn it,” she said, laughing. “You’re giving me a hell of a cry.” She cleared her throat and wiped tears from her cheeks. “Thank you, Mayor Jerry, and thank you, Rancho Soldado, for giving Happies its treasured home since my grandparents’ time.” She looked down at the graduating class. “And you kids,” she said fondly. “You little bastards. I love ya!” Many shouts of We love you too, Bev! “Generations of Rancho students have worked at Happies, and it’s been your youthful energy that kept it alive so long. Never had a family of my own. Didn’t need to. You were it. I’m sorry to say that, as you know, Happies closed for good last week. But its memory will live long in our hearts. And you will always be my family—loved, appreciated, occasionally cursed upon when you leave freezer doors open and the ice cream thaws. Thank you, Rancho Soldado. I couldn’t be prouder to be one of your high school’s graduates.”

  There was not a dry eye in the house. And it wasn’t mere choked-back sobs resounding across the football field. It was more like waves and waves of weeping wails.

  That’s when I knew. As Mayor Jerry hugged a sobbing Bev Happie, I realized she was at the perfect moment of vulnerability. It had been clear for a while that the Happies restaurant was going under and wouldn’t survive the year, and I, its former worst waitress, had relentlessly campaigned for Bev to allow the senior class to retire the restaurant in style, to no avail. Until now. I would beg her one last time to let me throw a senior class party at Happies.

  Now was the right moment to pounce. This time she’d say yes.

  “No,” said Bev. “Absofuckinglutely not.”

  After the ceremony, Bev was all but tackled on the football field. Tackled by love. Herds of graduates and their families couldn’t leave the festivities until they’d gotten one last hug and signature kiss on the cheek from Bev Happie. I was one of the stragglers at the end of the love parade. I’d waited till I knew Bev would be exhausted but also coasting on goodwill. Then, I’d made my move, going in for a hug, congratulating her, and on the down-low, saying, “Happies should have that one last party, don’t you think? Pretty fucking please, Bev?”

  I had to speak quietly, because the request was bold. And illegal. For years, Happies had hosted an annual graduation party for the town’s high school seniors. But Rancho people party hard, and in some cases too hard. The yearly grad party had been banned five years earlier after it got too rowdy and some “hooligans” (Town Council report’s word choice, not mine) took their after-party to the front yard of the home of their most reviled teacher, Annette Thrope. They TP’d her house; a predictably lame stunt which might have been no big deal—except that they also, in their drunken state, tried to dig a well to push her car into and, in the midst of this dumbass mission, they managed to rupture a sewer pipe in Thrope’s yard, leading to a very bad, very smelly sludge situation, and very costly damage. A few months later, Thrope pushed the Town Council into pressuring Bev Happie to end the annual party, or risk having Happies’ restaurant business operation permits revoked. End of a decades-old tradition. Moral of the story, drunken teens: Don’t mess with Thrope. Especially when your former teacher is also the chairwoman of the Town Council. Dumbfucks.

  After her adamant “No,” Bev placed a kiss on my cheek, and then she whispered into my ear, “Even if you were my favorite terrible waitress, you manipulative dear heart, a last senior class party is just a bad idea, and you and I both know it.” She kindly didn’t point out that my party idea potentially made me a dumber fuck than the well-diggers from that final Happies graduation party.

  An older gentleman who looked around Bev’s age approached us, wearing a sash across his chest that was adorned with Happies pins, patches, and rings. He looked like an elderly Boy Scout.

  “Incoming Happie,” I warned Bev, whose sight wasn’t that good. “Happies” was the nickname given by locals to overzealous fans who met each other a
t small conventions to trade old Happies memorabilia from its heyday, when it was the fun desert destination of choice on the route between Las Vegas and Southern California.

  To Bev, the man said, “Congratulations, Miss Happie. I’m an old fan from way back. Almost old enough to remember the pie stand!”

  Bev laughed and gave the man a kiss on the cheek. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart,” she said. She turned to me and asked, “Do you have a pen, doll?” I searched my purse, expecting, as Bev did, that the man had an old Happies theme park map or Happies restaurant kids’ coloring place mat for Bev to autograph. “What would you like me to sign?” Bev asked him.

  Instead of a pen, I first pulled a dollar bill from my purse and waved it at Bev, to remind her of how she could get rich. She shook her head at me. Bev never accepted money for her autograph from the Happies fanfolk at conventions—which was a shame, because if she did, the restaurant might not have gone under.

  “No autograph,” said the man. “Got one from you a few years back at the Happies Midwest Regional. I’m honored you’d offer, but that’s not why I came here.” He reached into his pants pocket. “I have something for you.”

  His hand ventured too far into his crotch area. I was about to lunge at the might-be elderly pervert until he pulled out a chain necklace with a locket on it. “I wanted you to have this,” he told Bev.

  She took the locket, opened it, and fresh tears sprung to her eyes. “Is that a certified Baby Bev?” I asked, admiring the picture inside, a charcoal drawing of an infant with baby black hair and big black eyes rimmed with thick black eyelashes.

  “It is,” Bev sputtered, genuinely touched. She tried to hand the locket back to the man. “I can’t accept it. It’s worth too much. Only a dozen were made.”

  “I know,” said the man. “They were given as prizes to the first winners of Happies’ Drown a Clown contest on its inaugural day.”

  “Which was my—”

  “—first birthday,” they both said.

  The man took the locket from Bev’s hand and instead of returning it to his pocket, he clasped it around her neck. “Happy graduation,” he said. “From the Happies Society, Local Chapter Minneapolis, Minnesota. We’re mighty proud of you.” He bowed down to her, and walked away, his mission accomplished.

  Now was definitely the moment to ask one more time about the senior class party, but with what minor speck of dignity I had, I didn’t. The tender moment should not be interrupted by another shameless request for a party no one besides me cared about anymore. Even I knew that. So I grabbed Bev into another hug, because she looked like she was about to pass out from the afternoon desert heat and the emotion, and a fresh wave of bawling. She needed to lean on someone.

  “People can be so gawddamn wonderful sometimes,” she said. “Even those crazy Happies fans.”

  Seeing me in hug posture, my BFFs hovering nearby came forth to fortify the ranks. We’d been named the “Cuddle Huddle” by our kindergarten teacher, who’d randomly assigned me and Slick to be new student Fletch’s first school buddies. We’d taken it upon ourselves to immediately wrap the new student into a suffocating threesome hug, which we’d barely broken free from in the intervening years. I opened my arms so Slick and Fletch could join my hug with Bev. We didn’t usually let in outsiders to our Cuddle Huddle, but Bev was an exception.

  “We’re going to miss you so much,” Slick said to Bev, who was planning to retire to Florida.

  “You are Rancho Soldado,” Fletch said to Bev. “How can you leave it?”

  Bev kicked me in the shin. “This bimbo is Rancho Soldado.”

  I laughed. This bimbo was planning to escape Rancho Soldado even sooner than Bev. In a week, I’d be going to live with my sister, Lindsay, in San Francisco. I was hardly the emblem of Rancho Soldado that Bev was. I couldn’t escape it fast enough. Fog and cold breezes and sky-high rent, all wrapped in artisanal toasts and fair trade coffees that cost more than I used to make in Happies waitress tips in an hour? Awesome. Freedom. For-real adulthood. At last.

  A finger tapped my shoulder. “Can I get in on the Cuddle Huddle?” a grating female voice asked.

  I turned my head to see Evergrace Everdell, still wearing her cap and gown even though most everyone else had ditched theirs by now because of the heat. Technically, Evergrace was also a graduating senior, but she’d been homeschooled since moving to Rancho Soldado a few years earlier. Her parents, New York expats who’d retreated to our California desert town because it was cheap and so they could run an experimental-theater space in their backyard, thought Evergrace was too “sensitive” and “exceptional” for “fascist high school social hierarchies.” Despite removing her from our hallowed classrooms of learning, they insisted that Evergrace still be allowed to attend school functions like dances, and to join the Drama Club, the Hobbit Society, the Gay-Straight Alliance, Team LARP, and the Thrope-led Libertarian Young Guns Club. Evergrace’s parents threatened to sue the school board if anyone so much as suggested that their daughter should also be a matriculated student in order to participate in school programs.

  “No, you can’t,” I said. The Cuddle Huddle was my sacred tribe, and Evergrace didn’t belong in it. She was always whining about inclusiveness, so I figured she needed a reminder of exclusiveness.

  “We’re crying here,” said Fletch, refusing admittance to the outsider.

  “I’m telling,” Evergrace said, like we were five-year-olds instead of newly minted high school graduates. She made a beeline toward Thrope.

  I placed my head back inside the Cuddle Huddle.

  I really wished I could get Thrope good one last time. It was a family tradition, kind of. My brother, Chester, had been on the crew of the well-digging disaster that had finally killed the Happies graduation party five years earlier. My sister, Lindsay, had helped transport the keg to keep the laborers inspired and refreshed. Of course, they’d participated in a moment of drunken impulse at the end of an epic Happies senior class party. Their instincts may have been right, but if they’d been more sober, maybe they would have settled for a predictable stunt, where the consequences wouldn’t have been so damning to future graduating classes of Rancho Soldado High School.

  If I couldn’t throw a party to dig at Thrope as my final hurrah, I vowed I’d find some other way before I left town. For now, I’d cry with my besties.

  “Congratulations, Jay,” Thrope said to my dad, her face stone cold with insincerity. Thrope did not shake Dad’s hand and he did not extend his own to her; indeed, he didn’t make eye contact with her, fully aware of her soul-sucking powers. They had a history of mutual contempt. Many people did with Thrope, but in my family’s case, the history was more personal.

  “Thanks,” Dad said, trying to maneuver us toward his car and out of Thrope’s life, for good.

  Thrope added, “You got all three graduated from high school. Nothing short of a miracle.” Certainly Thrope had given the Navarro kids enough unjustified detentions, tardies, and poor grades to make our graduations seem like divine intervention.

  Dad said, “Miracles had nothing to do with it.”

  My brother, Chester, snorted his stoner laugh. Heh. Heh heh. Lindsay and I had been decent enough students, but it really was a miracle Chester had managed to graduate high school.

  Chester took a drag on a cigarette.

  “This is a smoke-free school. I trust you’ll be quitting that nasty habit, right, Chester?” Thrope asked my brother.

  Why did her car have to be parked next to ours? Was this the longest parking lot walk ever?

  Chester shrugged. “Maybe,” he mumbled. Nobody ever just said “No” to Thrope.

  “Not maybe. Will,” Thrope said, and this time Lindsay laughed.

  Chester had totally set himself up for Thrope’s signature retort to any student or Town Council member who dared answer her unreasonable demands with a wishy-washy “Maybe.” Thrope then had the audacity to hand her business card to my dad.

  “It
’s a great time to list your house. Call me.” You’d think that being the mastermind and lead Realtor of the Happies land sale would have been enough commission for Rancho Soldado’s most annoying multitasker, but apparently not.

  Dad gave us kids a look like, Is she kidding? Lindsay, Chester, and I all shook our heads. Thrope wasn’t kidding. “No plans to sell,” said Dad. “Still.”

  A decade earlier, our mom had been insistent we needed a bigger house. Mom hated the desert and our tiny, old bungalow home with only one bathroom. She was convinced a ginormous cookie-cutter house with central AC in a new subdivision would make everything better. That’s how she met Thrope’s former fiancé. He was the Canadian transplant Realtor with a fancy French-y kind of accent that Mom hired to sell our house and find her a bigger one. It turned out what Mom needed was not so much a new house, but a new life.

  Our house was and is just the right size. In fact, it fit us all much better once Mom was gone. (We realized this after years of the family therapy that Dad made us go to.) Mom did finally find her big house—along with Thrope’s ex, in a bitter cold North Atlantic climate we southwest desert kids could never acclimate to. Not like we really tried.

  “Trying to kick us out of town, Ms. Thrope?” Lindsay said. “Subtle” is not a word that would ever be used to describe my sister.

  “Yes!” Thrope said cheerfully as she unlocked her Mercedes coupe. (And she would be the only teacher in the entire Rancho Soldado school system who could afford that level of swanky wheels. I guess it pays to not have your own kids but torture everyone else’s, and be a part-time Realtor.) But before stepping into her Mercedes, Thrope looked at me and purposefully cupped her hand in the shape of the letter C. That was the grade she’d given me in her economics class, and it was probably a good part of the reason why I didn’t get accepted to the Marshall School of Business at USC, my one and only college choice—and Thrope knew it.